Chapter 7 – Halloween

"I can't believe I let you talk me into this," Remus said in dismay, slurring slightly due to the fact that Sirius had just shoved a set of false vampire teeth in his mouth.

James grinned and led the way into the classroom, his cape rippling behind him. About half of the Charms class had arrived before them and were already in their seats, unpacking their books and talking about the Halloween feast that night. Everyone looked around as the four of them walked in, which was unsurprising since they were the only people wearing costumes instead of school robes.

"I vant to suck your blood!" James and Sirius declared in unison, with Peter saying the words slightly delayed, like an echo. The three of them were all wearing capes and vampire teeth, though Sirius was the only one who'd cut off the high collar from some of his old dress robes and attached it to his cape. He'd also drizzled false blood down himself – and half of the dormitory in the process.

Remus shook his head, trying to suppress a smile, and sat down at his desk. He'd refused to wear a cape, but Sirius had made him promise to keep in the teeth at least until he was told to take them out, so he had to put up with their awkward shape in his mouth.

After pretending to bite other students on the neck, which made a few people laugh and just as many roll their eyes, the rest of them took their seats beside Remus.

Professor Flitwick arrived just as Sirius had managed, with some difficulty, to extract a textbook out of the inner pocket of his cape.

"Professor," he said as pleasantly as he could while wearing fake fangs, "I regret to inform you that your favourite student, Sirius Black, charming and handsome though he was, has been replaced by -" Sirius flared up the corners of his collar, framing his face as he reached a hand out dramatically and clasped James' shoulder, "Count Dracula!"

"I see," Flitwick said, mostly unsurprised by the antics as he climbed onto a stack of books at the front of the class. "Well as long as Count Dracula is able to practice non-verbal spells, I suppose he can stay. Along with his, er, fellow vampires."

"We'll try our best, Professor," James promised, "But the desire for blood may overwhelm us."

"Just stay in your seats," Flitwick replied wearily, "and try not to attack any of my students. Now, I trust you can all remember how to perform a basic levitation charm, which you learnt in your first year. I'm going to give you all a feather and I'd like you all to try that spell non-verbally. And no, saying the spell under your breath doesn't count."

Shrugging to himself, James grabbed four feathers from the pile at the front of the class and brought them back to the table for his friends. He'd already managed to pull off a few non-verbal spells last year, so he wasn't particularly concerned with the task.

"Vampires should not have to levitate things with their minds," Peter said solemnly as he pointed his want firmly at his feather. "They should be busy drinking the blood of the innocent."

"Right you are, Pete," Sirius nodded gravely. "See anyone around here who you'd like to drink?"

Peter glanced around curiously, as if genuinely considering the offer, before catching Flitwick's eye and returning his attention back to the immobile feather in front of him with a huff of disappointment.

"I can't concentrate," Remus said faintly from beside Sirius. He still had the vampire teeth in against his own better judgement, along with the splattering of blood on his chin that Sirius had accentually sprayed there earlier and completely 'forgotten' to mention. He pointed his wand at the feather and tried out the swish and flick motion that was now very familiar, but Peter was trying the exact same thing and their elbows clashed together. "Sorry, Wormtail," he said. "There's just no room to move. Maybe if I -" he got up from his stool and shuffled round to the other side of the desk, staring determinedly at his feather.

"Moony!" Sirius shouted suddenly. "Stop!"

But it was too late. Remus kept walking and Sirius quickly decided that he had no choice but to intervene. He threw himself over the desk between them with a cry, knocking Remus backwards into Flitwick's desk, which shuddered violently under the weight of the two boys.

"What the hell?" Remus asked, pulling himself away from Sirius as the class watched on with a mixture of horror and amusement. Books and trinkets from the desk had clattered to the floor around them, including an expensive looking crystal ball that had completely shattered.

"You were about to step into a patch of sunlight!" Sirius cried, gesturing to the square glow on the floor from the nearby window. "You'd have turned to dust in an instant!"

Before Remus could come up with a suitably sarcastic response, Professor Flitwick appeared at the side of them. "What have you done?" he demanded, looking from the boys on the floor, back to James and Peter, who were close by and grinning.

"He was just trying to protect our comrade," James tried to reason, while Peter nodded furiously behind him. "Preservation of the species is very important."

"Sorry Professor," Remus added quietly, as he finally managed to dislodge Sirius from on top of him and stand up. "We could fix your –

"No!" Flitwick interrupted, "I've had quite enough of vampires for today, thank you. The four of you can go to see Professor McGonagall about your new desire for bloodsucking and not-so-new habit of disrupting my class."

"Yes, Professor," Peter agreed, completely unperturbed by the opportunity to leave class early.

The four of them grabbed their things and headed out into the corridor. James glanced at his watch as the door shut behind them. "It's only quarter past nine," he said. "Have we ever been sent out of class that early before?"

"It's probably a new record," Peter said.

"One of our greatest moments." Sirius grinned and his vampire teeth nearly fell out. He pushed them back in and slung an arm around Remus' shoulders. "Cheer, up, Moony. It's Halloween, a day of costumes, good food and the sacrifices of virgins - all good things!"

"Human sacrifice is not actually on the list of my top ten favourite activities."

"Better than facing McGonagall," Peter said, pulling a face. "I bet she'll give us detention for a week."

"As long as it doesn't interrupt Quidditch practice, who cares, eh Padfoot?" They stopped outside McGonagall's office and James grabbed the door handle.

McGonagall was sat at her desk grading papers with a mug of warm tea in one hand and her quill in the other. She was probably glad to have the first period free, until she looked up and saw them.

Sirius watched in amusement as her eyes narrowed behind her glasses; she stood up from her desk and glanced between them as if she very well may be seeing things.

"I don't even want to ask," she said at length. "Disrupting class I presume?"

"If you can call our creative genius disruptive," James shrugged.

"Which would be downright soul-crushing," Sirius added, as both McGonagall and Remus sighed in unison.

"I can call it disruptive if it managed to irritate Professor Flitwick so much that he dismissed you within the first quarter of an hour."

"Pfft," Sirius said, wafting away McGonagall's statement easily, "details, details. It's not our fault that our craving for blood and the theatrical is under appreciated."

"Well unless you'd like to leave Hogwarts and start up a life in the theatre, I'm afraid you'll have to cope with me crushing your creativity. You can serve detention here at 8 o'clock tomorrow evening."

"But it's Halloween," James protested. "If you didn't expect us to be sent to your office at some point today, I'm personally offended that you don't seem to know us that well after all these years."

"I assure you I am completely unsurprised by your actions, Mr Potter, and I hope these costumes will be your only antics for the day. Please especially try not to blow up any pumpkins like last year. Now take off your costumes and perhaps you can overcome your dramatic tendencies by the time your second period classes start."

After reluctantly going to the rest of his lessons in regular school robes, James was happy to be back in his cloak and vampire fangs. A lot of other people had dressed up for the feast, mostly those who had at least one muggle parent and were familiar with muggle traditions. James thought it was a shame that people from wizard families didn't tend to dress up for Halloween – though he for one had embraced the tradition as soon as he'd heard about it from Remus – as it was an incredible sight to walk into the great hall and find the house tables filled with people in costume. There were first years who were adorably dressed as skeletons and ghosts, and older students who looked like mermaids, pirates, and several characters from muggle fiction; Remus explained that one girl was dressed as someone called Alice who had followed a rabbit down a hole for some reason.

There was even someone dressed as a werewolf, which James had frowned at and Sirius had desperately tried to stop Remus from noticing by setting his cloak on fire and exclaiming that vampires burnt like paper. But Remus had seen the costume anyway and had only smiled and pointed out that the snout was much too long before extinguishing Sirius and settling down at the table.

"I never understand why pumpkins and Halloween are linked," said Peter as they sat down. He gestured towards the food around them. "Pumpkin juice, pumpkin pasties, pumpkin pie. Why is that?"

"No idea," James replied, helping himself to everything on the table, pumpkin flavoured or not. "Maybe they just happen to be the right shape and size to carve spooky faces onto them, and the tastiness is an added bonus."

Lily had been working on her costume for the better part of the term. Whenever she had a spare minute in between classes, homework, her friends, and her prefect duties that was. She loved Halloween. Ironically, when she was a little girl, both she and Petunia had, more often than not, dressed up as witches with long pointed fingers, wrinkly noses and black hats. Witch costumes didn't seem to exist in the costume shops of the wizarding world, so that tradition had been lost back when she was 11. Last year she'd dressed up as fairy along with the other girls in her dorm, but this year she had decided to make her own outfit.

A lot of the material had been left over from her mother's sewing supplies at Christmas, and since it was mostly red, Lily had decided to make a devil costume. She was proud of the red satin dress with spiked points around her knees, the elbow length gloves, the mask that wrapped around her ears, and especially the sparkly red devil horns that she'd managed to make with wire and sequins.

Not that she'd go around wearing it to her classes, no matter how proud she was. She wasn't a complete show off – not like certain people.

After perfecting her makeup and throwing on some black fishnet tights to complete her look, Lily headed down to the great hall with her friends, excited for the feast and festivities that would inevitably follow.

James had just begun eating when the Gryffindor girls from their year walked past. His eye was caught by the bright red of a girl's dress, and he gazed with admiration at where the material clung to her body and where it had been cut short to reveal her long legs. Her face was hidden behind a devil mask, but her dark red hair, only a shade different from her dress, was distinctive. "Is that Evans!?" he said through a mouthful of mashed potato, elbowing Sirius in the ribs.

Sirius looked up just as the girls sat down a few seats away. "Damn," he said. "I think it is. I never realised how completely out of your league she is, mate."

The boys watched as Lily and her friends crowded together a little way down the table, laughing and talking together as they reached for the nearest food and drink.

Lily poured herself some pumpkin juice and reached for a pasty. Honestly, the abundance of pumpkin flavoured treats at Hogwarts had initially been off-putting to her, but she had grown rather fond of them over the years.

"Potter's staring at you," Mary said from next to her, pointing not so discreetly down the Gryffindor table. Lily followed her gaze, rolling her eyes as she was met with the unabashed grin of James Potter. "I see you're in your costumes again," she said dryly. "Don't you know it's rude to stare?"

"Just appreciating the view," he replied cheerfully. "You look, er, devilishly good tonight."

Lily stared at James. "That was awful," she said unapologetically. "That was the worst pun I've ever heard in my life. And considering the lot of you seem to spew them out every other sentence that's saying something."

"The appropriate response was to tell me I look drop-dead gorgeous, but I'll let you off." James continued to grin, and beside him Sirius snorted and nearly choked on a mouthful of pie.

"Do you want to know a secret?" Lily asked, leaning across the table so she was slightly closer to James and inclining her head to one side. The mask on her face was making her a little too warm in the crowded hall, and she tugged it into a more comfortable position. "Considering vampires are the complete opposite of teenage boys, I'd have thought you'd have gone for something that didn't stop all your," he looked pointedly down towards James' lap, which was full of crumbs, "circulation."

She drew back, smirking as Remus laughed into his juice and James' wide eyes followed her. He opened and closed his mouth, obviously flustered.

Lily just raised an eyebrow at him behind her mask and shrugged innocently.

"I feel it is my duty to inform you on his behalf that my dear friend James Potter is currently having an internal meltdown," Sirius said, smirking, "But please wait and he will be able to respond shortly."

James elbowed him again and gave Lily what he hoped was a winning smile. "I see that costume is corrupting you, Evans," he said, "Which is possibly why you seem to be warming to me. Maybe enough to want to hang out later?"

"You wish, Potter," she said with a smirk. "But I appreciate your obviously conviction in my demonic possession." She winked once and turned back around to her friends, who immediately huddled into a tighter group, whispering and giggling as they ate.

James turned to Sirius, a slightly dazed expression on his face. "You're right," he said. "She is totally out of my league."