That morning, they were studying Magical Literature and Language.

The teacher, Professor Ayre, was a very serious and stuffy academian, and his particular way of torturing his students was by making them use tricky words or phrases in their prose. For this lesson, he picked on Ron Weasley first.

"Mr Weasley - please give me a sentence with the word 'centimetre' in it."

Ron looked around wildly for support. But, as he was yet to make a single friend, no-one caught his eye. Downhearted, Ron took a breath and closed his eyes.

"Um, okay," he mumbled. "How about - 'my Aunt Muriel was coming in from the country ... and I was sent-to-meet-her."

Harry laughed first, he couldn't help it. Hermione joined him a half-second later, and they quickly became so uncontrollably giggly that Hermione had to grab Harry to try and diffuse some of her mirth. Harry caught Ron's eye through a gap in Hermione's hair, and Ron's scowl soon transformed into a coy little grin as he realised his mistake and started to chuckle himself. Very soon the entire class was positively howling with laughter, and Professor Ayre lost any chance he ever had at controlling them. Dean Thomas was thumping Ron on the back, as Ron tried to dry his eyes, and Neville even opened a window to try and get a fresh breath.

All in all, it was a great way to start a school day.

That evening, the first-years had decided - en masse - to take over that bit of the Gryffindor Common Room in front of the fireplace. Harry had made the first move after he returned from Quidditch practice, commandeering one side of the battered old couch facing the hearth. As he hoped, Hermione quickly flopped down next to him, before cheekily kicking off her shoes and planting her feet firmly into Harry's lap.

She grinned at him and Harry didn't complain. After all, her feet made a handy rest for the sheets of parchment Oliver Wood had given him, containing all the Chasers moves and strategies from his personal play-book. Quite why he wanted Harry to memorise them was baffling, as he was a Seeker and not a Chaser, but Wood was very insistent, and Harry didn't want to add to his already high stress levels about the upcoming match.

What surprised Harry more was that when the other first-years piled in to claim the best spots left near the fire, not one of them commented on Hermione's feet being in Harry's lap, nor the fact that the two of them were taking up all three cushions on the couch. It was as if it were the most natural thing in the world, which was odd.

Harry thought it was really very comical the way everyone positioned themselves, with all the girls sat on one side of the fireplace and the boys on the other, with Harry and Hermione in the middle of them. He thought they were being rather silly about the whole thing. After all, being close to Hermione was easily Harry's favourite place to be, and she was a girl, wasn't she? He really didn't understand what everyone was making such a big fuss about.

The only one who wasn't there was Ron, who had been baited by Draco Malfoy during Potions earlier in the week, leading to them arranging to have a midnight duel. Ron stupidly went, not realising that it was a trap, and was caught by Professor Quirrell trying to get through the locked door to the off-limits third floor corridor. His punishment was three nights of detention with Hagrid, and Harry idly wondered if the Gamekeeper was getting Ron to collect some of the giant spider's webs, to add to the Halloween decorations going up in the Great Hall.

Ron would never misbehave again if that was the sort of punishment he could expect.

The Halloween celebrations were the talk of the school. An elaborate feast had been planned, to be followed by a disco in the evening. The students were expected to attend in fancy dress, and costume ideas dominated the chatter around the halls. Harry thought it was quite nice to have everyone talking about something other than him, and for once he could join in with the conversations without shouting at people for annoying him.

"My wings came this morning," Lavender Brown was telling them all. "But they're not as glittery as they looked in the catalogue, so I'm going to have to see if I can add my own to make them better."

"What are you going as?" Hermione asked.

"A pixie," Lavender replied. "I was going to go as Tinkerbell, but then I had a nightmare about Goyle going as Peter Pan and trying to get a kiss out of me all night. I had to have two showers when I woke up! Yuk!"

"What are you going as, Hermione?" Fay Dunbar queried, curling her hair around her wand.

"I'm going as Mz Dracula, and Harry's going as Frankenstein's Monster," Hermione replied chirpily. Quite why she felt the need to give his costume too was beyond Harry, but he reasoned that maybe this was just how girls talked to each other.

"Shouldn't you be going as - I don't know - Morticia and Gomez, or something?" Parvati Patil asked, looking surprised.

"Um ... why?" Hermione asked.

"Well ... because you're, you know," Lavender answered for Parvati.

"I don't know," Hermione frowned. "I'm what?"

"I didn't mean you, I meant you and Harry," Lavender clarified.

"What about us?"

"Well, Harry is your boyfriend, isn't he, so I assumed you'd have costumes that went together," Lavender replied.

"I am?" Harry asked, perplexed. It was news to him, and it made him a bit jittery all of a sudden. Had he missed something?

"No, you're not," Hermione reassured him, cottoning on to his anxious expression. Harry couldn't help but feel a tinge of disappointment. It had been a nice relationship ... for all of the five seconds it had lasted.

"What do you mean he's not?" Parvati cried. "You're together all the time!"

"Which means nothing, other than that we are friends," Hermione replied sniffily. "Cant a boy and a girl be friends without anything else going on?"

"No!" Parvati and Lavender chorused together.

"At least not like you two are," Fay added.

"Of course they can, don't be absurd," Hermione returned loftily, but Harry noticed she was determinedly not looking at him.

Then he felt a twinge of something worrying in his chest. Did Hermione not like the idea of Harry being her boyfriend? And why did it suddenly matter? In any case, Harry had no idea how he'd be a boyfriend, to anyone. Or if he'd even be any good as one. What was the difference between being a friend and a boyfriend anyway? What did you do differently? Perhaps it was best that he wasn't one, because it sounded very complicated. And he was pretty sure he was a good friend to Hermione, and she might not think so if he was her boyfriend, and if that happened she might not want to see him anymore.

And the idea of Hermione not wanting to be around him almost hurt, so he didn't want to think about that too much.

"I always thought Frankenstein was the name of the monster?" Dean Thomas commented, dragging the conversation back around to Halloween. He was peeling the backs from stickers to put in an album of his favourite football team, West Ham. Seamus Finnigan was sat next to him, prodding the little footballers with his wand, trying to get them to move.

"It's a common mistake," Hermione replied haughtily. "Usually by people who are too lazy to read the book."

"Ron Weasley told me about it," Dean replied, which Harry thought sounded about right. "I'll have to tell him he's wrong."

"Can I?" Seamus begged. "You told him he was wrong about the way he was pronouncing leviosa in Charms the other day. His face when Flitwick told him he was saying it wrong ... it was a picture! It's my turn to point out his latest flaw."

"That's not very nice," Harry observed. "Funny, and necessary, but not very nice."

"He brings it on himself," Neville piped up. "It's just the way he is about everything. Like he knows it all. It's not our fault that he actually knows practically nothing, including how to talk to people. He must have noticed that he's got no friends."

"What's he going to the disco as?" asked Fay, whose hair was now a mass of little ringlets.

"Some sort of ghost, I think," Dean replied. "I saw him messing around with some old bedsheets the other day, throwing them over his head and stuff. Either that, or he's going as a member of the Klan, in which case I'll be following Harry's example and threatening to push him off the parapet of the Astronomy Tower!"

"Excuse me, I only threatened to push him out of a window!" Harry cried in mock admonishment. "I didn't give him a specific location. I think I'd quite like it to be a surprise when it happens."

"So you did threaten him with that?" asked Lavender. "I heard him moaning about it to his brother, but I thought he was just exaggerating."

"No, that one was true," Harry admitted with a coy grin. He hadn't noticed he was doing it, but he was idly picking lint bobbles from the end of Hermione's pink socks.

"You actually said you'd push him out of a window?" Parvati jumped in. "Did he, Nev?"

"Yeah," Neville nodded with a grin at Harry. "And all for insulting his girl-who's-a-friend but not a girlfriend!"

Parvati and Lavender simply swooned at each other, then at Hermione, who had blushed a deeper shade of scarlet than Harry's Quidditch robe, which her besocked feet were still cosily tangled up in on his lap.

On Halloween morning the castle was filled with the delicious smell of baking pumpkin wafting though the corridors. Harry and Hermione spent breakfast speculating about who actually did the cooking in Hogwarts, for neither of them could ever remember seeing a chef anywhere, while they watched Hagrid roll in twelve giant pumpkins for the party that night. Hermione had chosen to only have one piece of fruit for breakfast - as she wanted to make sure she would still fit into her dress later - but that didn't stop her pinching mushrooms from Harry's plate whenever she thought he wasn't looking.

"I'm still not sure if we should use a spell or an adhesive for your nuts, Harry," Hermione pondered as Harry buttered himself another muffin. "We don't want them falling off."

Harry dribbled out half of his mouthful of orange juice. "Excuse me! W-what?"

"Your nuts, Harry. We don't want them falling off."

"That's not something any boy wants!" Neville quirked as he joined them at the table. "Something you want to tell us, Harry!?"

"I meant the ones for his costume!" Hermione frowned sniffily, though there was a giggle hiding behind her eyes. "They're in my bag upstairs. We were just talking about how to keep them on."

"Oh, right!" Harry cried in relief.

"I wouldn't go around broadcasting that Harry's nuts are in your handbag, Hermione," Neville quipped. "It wont do anything to stop these rumours that you both love so much!"

"Ho ho," Hermione replied in a bored drawl. "So, how's your costume coming along?"

"Pretty good," Neville returned, pulling the rack of toast towards himself. Hermione watched him eat with deep jealousy. "I was up all night sewing a big, gold 'G' and 'L' onto the robes I dyed. They came out puce rather than lilac, but it's close enough."

"Who are you going as again?"

"Gilderoy Lockhart, in the costume he wore on the cover of Travelling with Trolls," Neville reminded them. "I've even got a cardboard scythe, like the one he carried with him. He's a hero of mine. I wish I was just half as brave as him."

"He certainly has had a lot of adventures," Harry agreed. "But he's way too smug for me. He has the kind of face I'd never get tired of punching."

"Harry! That's an awful thing to say!" Hermione told him off crossly.

"You obviously haven't see him, then!" Harry laughed back. "Or you would totally agree with me."

"I would never advocate violence just because of how someone looks," Hermione retorted.

"Wait a minute," Neville quirked at her. "Didn't I hear you say that you hoped Sally-Anne Perks would fall and break her pretty little head when she was playing Broom-Tag against Harry during Flying on Tuesday morning?"

"That was different," Hermione insisted placidly, her cheeks colouring a little.

"How?" Neville asked incredulously.

"I don't like her, that's how," Hermione replied with a dismissive scowl, ending the conversation at a stroke.

That night, the Great Hall was resplendent in its decorations, with bursts of orange and black and purple leaping out from all parts of the walls and cobweb-covered corners of the ceiling. The huge pumpkins were so massive that they were big enough for two students to sit in comfortably, so they too had been decorated and people were having their photos taken inside in their costumes. Hermione pulled Harry to the nearest one almost as soon as they re-entered the Hall after the feast, and she insisted on having at least four photos taken, so they could both have one each, as well as sending one home to their respective sets of parents.

Then the disco started. For a while no-one was dancing, until the Weasley twins went and put some very loud Weird Sisters songs on the magical jukebox, and Harry made the mistake of telling Hermione how much he liked the band. The next thing he knew was that she had grabbed his hand and was dragging him to the dancefloor, where they started doing a sort of manic, but nervous, jig together. They started a trend, though, and soon the Weasley twins were jumping crazily all around them, followed by about half the student population piling in to join the melee.

The pumpkin juice was flowing with the mirth - flowing right through Hermione it would seem - as she had just left Harry for the third time to use the loo, when Ron Weasley suddenly came skidding into the Hall. He was flushed and out of breath, but looked very pleased with himself as he came to a screeching halt near the teacher's table.

"There's a t-troll," Ron panted. "I don't know how it got in."

"A troll!" Hagrid cried, which was unfortunate as his voice carried all across the Hall and triggered immediate mass panic, which was only brought under control when Professor Dumbledore fired three enormous crackers from his wand and called for order. Then he turned to Ron.

"There is a troll inside the school?" he asked calmly. Ron nodded the affirmative. Dumbledore flicked a loaded look at Professor Snape, who immediately stood up and swept away with some purpose. Dumbledore waited until he was gone before addressing Ron again. "And where did you see this troll?"

"Girls toilet, on the second floor," Ron heaved out. "It's okay though, I saved the day!"

"You did?" asked Professor McGonagall suspiciously. "What did you do?"

"I locked it in," Ron beamed proudly.

"And did you check inside first?" asked Professor McGonagall. "You do realise that the second floor toilet is the one the girls have had to use this evening? Ever since one of your idiotic brothers thought it would be a fine idea to cast a spell on the toilet water down here, to magically magnify the sounds being made by whatever was falling into it. Needless to say, the girls of Hogwarts are not keen on having their private business boomed out to the rest of the castle."

"Er .. no, I ... I didn't check," Ron muttered guiltily.

Then the bottom felt like it had fallen from Harry's stomach. He could feel the colour leave his face, and Professor McGonagall saw it too.

"Harry?" she queried sternly. "What is it?"

"Hermione! She just went to use the loo ... and she doesn't know!"

And he was running before he knew his legs had started moving. Somewhere in the background calls for him to stop burst out, but each one just sailed over his head. Harry wrenched open the doors to the Hall, his heart pounding as fast as his racing breaths. He took the stairs two at a time, sprinting down the second floor corridor towards the unholy stench that could only have been the stagnant skin of the troll.

That's when he heard it. An almighty crash ... followed by a shrill, high-pitched scream of such utter terror that Harry felt something break inside his heart. Hermione shouldn't be making sounds like that, it was abhorrent and unnatural. There was no better definition of wrong in Harry's world just then. He dived forwards and grabbed the key, that Ron had still left in the lock, turning it and barging into the room.

And the sight turned him cold. Harry had never really believed in the idea of losing your mind in a moment of fear. It was impossible, an over-the-top reaction. But that was exactly what happened to him. For he saw Hermione, flat against the wall by the sinks, her eyes wide in her fright. The troll, all twelve feet of him, was lumbering towards her, smashing the cubicles with his club as he went. Hermione was literally moments from being smashed herself.

"Harry! Run away!" Hermione shrieked as she finally saw him. "I couldn't bear to see you get hurt!"

Hermione's voice jolted Harry back to the moment. In an act that was as brave as it was stupid, he did the only thing that came to mind, racing forward and locking his arms around the troll's neck. Harry was tiny, no more than an irritant to the giant beast. But one of the costume bolts on his neck had gone right into the troll's eye when Harry leapt up onto his back.

And that was enough to hurt anything.

The troll roared, flailing his fist and swinging his club wildly. Twice, the rough edges scraped against Harry's body, tearing his costume along his right side and drawing blood from a deep gash. The sight seemed to ignite something in Hermione, for she jumped up and drew her wand, just as the troll lifted his club high over his head.

"Wingardium Leviosa!" Hermione cried, brandishing her wand expertly with a swish and a flick.

The club shot out of the troll's grip, rose high into the air, then came crashing down onto his head with a sickening crack. The troll fell backwards to the ground, knocked out cold, and Harry had the good sense to roll away before he was crushed under the weight. But it was pretty much all the sense he had, for his vision was fuzzy and his brain felt very floaty. He had lost a lot of blood.

"Harry!" Hermione cried again, racing to his limp form. She was white with anxiety and pawed helplessly at Harry's torn and ragged clothes. "I don't know what to do! Help! Please, somebody help!"

Never let it be said that help is not given to those who ask for it at Hogwarts. For barely a second after Hermione's heart-aching plea echoed in the quiet of the lavatory, Professor Dumbledore was there, gently easing her aside and sealing Harry's wounds with his wand, before lifting him from the floor as if his weight was nothing. But that was the last thing Harry remembered, as he passed out from the pain and blood loss.