Marauders - Always - Part One

CXLIV: Quatre Champions!

Halloween night had always been a strange night for Harry.

Ron was excited and babbling on about the Goblet of Fire and whose name would be selected for Champions. He had decided that Krum was a given - anyone else from the Durmstrang lot would be shocking - but was torn between a tall girl named Dominique and a heavy set lad called Leonardo that were rumored to be the top picks of Beauxbatons. The Hogwarts champion had him flummoxed, though. 

"I mean, I know I want Angelina to be picked, she'd be brilliant. But Warrington and Diggory both put their names in as well. It can't be a Slytherin we have for champion, it just can't! Who else do we know put their names in?" Ron was saying excitedly in the dormitory.

"I heard Roger Davies was thinkin' on it, but dunno if he actually's done it," Seamus answered from his desk, where he sat, distracted from writing his paper for History of Magic. He rubbed his chin with his quill. "Dunno who else has put their names forth."

"It's got to be Johnson," said Ron, "It just has to be!"

"Diggory wouldn't be horrible to have as ours," spoke up Neville Longbottom, who was watering a row of plants he'd dug up from the grounds and put into an extra pot he'd gotten from Professor Sprout at one of their last lessons.  "He's at least nice and if it can't be Angelina, then I hope it's him."

"Certainly over Warrington any day," Dean Thomas said, "Harry, what do you think?"

"Harry?" Ron asked, when Harry didn't answer Dean.

But Harry was laying on his back, staring up at the canopy of his four poster, absently running his fingers over a spot where someone had carved into the wood of the bed frame.

"Harry?" Ron tried again.

"Sorry?" Harry said, stirring from the thoughts stirring about in his mind.

"Angelina or Cedric? Who d'you reckon?"

"Angelina," Harry said automatically, since he knew her well from Quidditch.

"Well that settles it, then," Seamus said, "It ought to be Angelina!"

Harry tried to pay attention to the rest of the conversation as Ron, Dean, Seamus, and Neville went on, listing off reasons why Angelina was better than Diggory, Warrington, or Davies (if he'd ended up entering), but Harry had a hard go of it. 

After all, it was the anniversary of when his parents had died.

Halloween night had always been a strange night for Harry. Even when he was small it had been a night of mixed frustration and excitement. He would go trick-or-treating 'round Privet Drive and the other roads 'round Magnolia Crescent each year, carrying a plastic pumpkin alongside Dudley Dursley. Harry rarely had ever had anything better for a costume than an old pillowcase he cut holes into make himself a ghost unless Dudley needed him to play the part of a side kick to his own costume.  Then whenever they got home, Dudley got to go through both pumpkins and take out the candies he wanted and sort the ones he didn't into Harry's bucket so that Harry ended up mostly with packs of sour love hearts, everton mints, flying saucers, fried egg gummies, and any other candies Dudley deemed unworthy. Harry was grateful even for those sorts of candies during times when Aunt Petunia had chosen to put Dudley on a diet of some sort or another, however, like in Summer when they'd gone through ages of nothing but the grapefruit that Harry had turned out to be allergic to...

Before his eleventh birthday, he hadn't been sure why Halloween felt heavy and dark to him.

It wasn't until after - after he had found out his parents hadn't died in a car crash but that they'd been murdered on Halloween - that the depression he felt on Halloween made sense. He'd never had a date before Hagrid told him the whole story. But he'd somehow known - as though the memory of his parents' death had solidified itself in Harry so many years ago, and he'd felt the loss of them even before it had been realized.