AN- It's back! AND BETTER THAN EVER! I'm sorry this took so long, but I had all of my chapters erased after several virises. It's difficult to re-write something you already wrote, but I now have this and the three chapters following it done, and I'll continue to work for reviews. Again, if you have any suggestions or corrective criticism, (or you just feel like being nice and telling me that I did a good job) please feel free to drop a review, but bad flames aren't appreciated or welcome. You of course are allowed to have your own opinions, but please think before you share them with me. Flames are cruel, pointless, and a waste of time, and they hurt people. (Like ME!) so don't send me flames. Thanks
Disclaimer- I don't own it, but this chapter alone took as long for me to get out as one of Rowling's books. How does she do it? Oh, yeah! It's her job. I've got school, cheerleading, SADD, friends and boys to worry about. Sigh. I can't wait to write for a job.
For the first time in his life, Harry felt homesick.
It wasn't that he hadn't missed Hogwarts when he had spent the summer away, but usually he was busy resenting the Dursleys or solving some sort of mystery. In this time period, there wasn't all that much to do.
Sure, there was still Quidditch, and the Marauders kept him busy and involved in all of their pranks, but there just wasn't the never-ending problem to solve or mystery to crack that there had always been in his time.
And his homesickness didn't really even make sense. He was in Hogwarts, the only place he had ever considered home, and was surrounded by people he'd always wanted to have a chance to meet, people who, for the most part, cared about him as much as he cared about them.
But there was no Ron to laugh with. There was no Hermione to complain to. Without his two best friends, life just seemed…bleaker.
His homesickness was even worse that day, because it was Halloween. The day that, several years before…wait, several years later…well, the day his parents had died. Before, it hadn't held nearly as much significance as it now did. Now, he knew them enough to miss not only the idea of having parents but the idea of having them for parents. Lily would've made an excellent mum, and James seemed like he would've been a fun father. Sirius even would have been a wonderful father figure to grow up with, and the temptation to change the future was only growing stronger. Just a long talk with some of the Marauders and he could create a parallel universe and save his parents' lives, or at least keep Sirius out of Azkaban.
"You all right, Harry?" Lily asked, snapping Harry out of his thoughts and back to his dinner. Looking up, he realized that Sirius, Remus and Lily were all directing concerned looks at him. (Peter was too busy eating to notice anything wrong with Harry, and James was too busy staring and Lily to notice anything at all.)
"Um…yeah. I'm just not very hungry. Saving some room for the feast later on, right?" Sirius seemed to buy this excuse, and turned back to his meal, but both Lily and Remus made it quite clear that they didn't believe him before they directed their attention away from him.
"Anyways, like I was saying, in the muggle world, Halloween's totally different. Everyone dresses up, and people tell scary stories to each other that night, and…well, I guess Hogwarts has the candy, but in the muggle world, the children go to their neighbors houses and get candy from them." Lily was trying, (unsuccessfully,) to explain the muggle traditions of Halloween to James and Sirius, both of whom were pureblood and didn't understand most of it.
"But…why would the neighbor give away their candy like that?" James asked, his expression puzzled.
"Because…because that's just what you're supposed to do. The kids get the candy, and the adults give the candy out. That way, you get a bunch of different kinds of candy." Harry bit on his lower lip to keep from laughing as he watched Lily confuse Sirius and James even more.
"But…why wouldn't you just buy lots of different kinds of candy, and keep all of it. That way, you don't have to go to other people's houses." James argued, honestly and completely lost.
Lily, losing patience with them, said, "Because that's not how you trick-or-treat!"
James's intelligent "Huh?" And Sirius's "What's trick-or-treating?" was all Harry could take before he started chuckling, then trying to ignore the murderous look Lily directed at him. To get himself back in her good books, (from what he now knew about his mother, he knew he didn't want to be in her bad books,) Harry attempted to explain things a little better.
"Muggles dress up at Halloween to scare people. To them, witches have big noses and warts, and wizards all look like Dumbledore, and ghosts are figments of the imagination. It's the one night of the year that they don't mind getting scared. People actually go to haunted houses for entertainment." Sirius and James now seemed excited at the idea of a muggle Halloween.
"What else?"
"Well, um…we watch scary movies, we try to scare each other-"
"You mean you try to prank each other, and it's okay because it's Halloween?" James's excitement was contagious, and Sirius had already caught it.
"Exactly." For a moment, Harry was pleased with how well they had caught on. Then, he noticed the manic gleam that lit the eyes of the two most dangerous and juvenile Marauders and Lily sitting at the table to his left, shaking her head as she massaged her temples.
"And they were doing so good, too. The pranks had almost all gone away…" The situation was too exciting and funny for Harry to feel too much pity for Lily. Sure, she'd probably have some sort of mess to clean up tonight, but the idea of planning another elaborate prank made all sympathy he had for her disappear.
Later on, Harry was still trying to explain muggle traditions to Sirius and James, this time with Remus's help. The four of them were carving jack-o-lanterns, while Peter was removing the guts.
"I guess it's the night you get to pretend that you're someone you're not." Harry said irritably. He was getting tired of trying to explain why muggles dressed up for Halloween. Then, when he thought back on his comment, he realized that he'd been doing a lot of that lately. Pretending to be some he wasn't.
He left his pumpkin for Peter to carve and took a walk around the lake, his hands buried into his pockets to ward off the brisk October air. As it began to grow dark, Lily joined him, walking silently by his side for a while.
"What's wrong?" She asked finally, her quiet voice echoing and ending their mutual silence.
"Nothing…" Harry replied out of habit, his voice quiet.
"No, something's wrong." Lily argued, stopping to meet his eyes.
Harry smiled at his mother's determination to figure out what was wrong and find some way to fix it. She knew him too well, like Hermione. She always knew when something was wrong, and this time she wasn't there to fix it, so Harry didn't know what to do.
"I guess I'm just a little homesick." Lily gave him a look that told him that she knew that his problem was a lot bigger, and he was surprised when she went back to walking next to him in silence.
After a while of this unexpected silence, Harry asked, "So you aren't going to push me for more?"
"We all have secrets, Harry, and we all know that you have secrets." At Harry's panicked expression, she quickly tried to calm him down. "We don't know your secrets, just that you have them. You came out of nowhere, you don't talk very much about your life before you showed up here, and most of the time you have this look on your face that just…" When he gave her a look that urged her to continue, Lily found she couldn't. There was no way to describe the look that everyone had seen at least once.
"You just seem so much…older. I don't know, I just feel like there's a lot more to you than you're telling us-" She spoke over him to finish her sentence, as he hurried to defend his secrets. "But that's okay, because we all trust you. There your secrets, and I don't think you like thinking about most of them. I don't think I want to know them."
This surprised Harry. Hermione constantly craved knowledge, but Lily didn't seem to need it like Hermione did. Worse, Harry missed Hermione's determination to find out whatever it was that he was hiding. It was like a game that he always lost but loved to play anyways.
Still, he was grateful for Lily's calm acceptance of his secrets and his moods. Somehow, knowing that she didn't need to know all about him was reassuring. She trusted him and cared about him, and that was more than enough.
"Come on. James and his crew have locked themselves up in their dorms, muttering something about pumpkins and candy, and the feast is starting soon. Whatever their planning's bound to happen then." Lily guided Harry back to the school and out of the cool October air.
Lily was right. In the middle of the feast, all of the food disappeared like always. Normally, however, the dishes of dinner were replaced by candy and desserts. This time, the platters were empty.
Floating above each table suddenly appeared a giant jack-o-lantern. Each pumpkin had a different face carved on it for a different house. Suddenly, the jack-o-lantern grew and blew up, covering the tables with more candy than would normally have appeared. Sirius and James had apparently gone all-out, and had probably gone to Honeydukes at some point and bought some of the items that the school didn't normally have.
Harry noted, with no small amount of amusement, that the Slytherin's pumpkin had been filled not with candy, but with the guts of the pumpkin.
"Whoops." Sirius snickered and muttered to Harry, "Must've forgotten to clean it out." Despite Lily's glare, Harry couldn't help but laugh as he watched Snape pick the pumpkin guts and seeds out of his hair with a look of disgust on his face.
And as he munched on his candy and traded spooky stories with Lily, Harry reflected that this might just be his best Halloween yet. Sure, he hadn't battled a troll, attended a death-day party, or saved the world…but there was always next year. This year, he wanted to enjoy the time he had with his family. It didn't matter what had happened the previous Halloweens…well, really, what would happen in future Halloweens…that Halloween was one he spent with his family. So no, Harry didn't save the world that Halloween. But it was still one he'd never forget.
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