Yay! A third chapter!
A Marauder's Tale of Horror:
Or How I Survived My Years at Hogwarts
Chapter Three
Ahh…the first day of term. It has always held some sort of memory for me. Sirius, remind me again of our tradition for the first day?
Sirius: we get in trouble.
Say it with more gusto!
Sirius: we get in trouble!
Adding an exclamation point doesn't count.
Sirius: bossy.
Always…for some weird reason, we always seem to be in trouble on the first day of the year.
Remus: I think that one year we hadn't even done anything yet and McGonagall punished us anyway.
She was grouchy that year.
Emmablk1: can we please get back to the task at hand?
Oh, fine; if you insist.
Hogwarts Express
For the rest of the train ride, Sirius and James were locked together in the trolley lady's private compartment with the promise that there was much more than this to their punishment. They spent the entire time flinging the two rubber bands that Sirius had found in his pocket earlier.
"Why were these even in your pocket, anyway?" James asked as Sirius pulled on out and flung it across the room.
Sirius shrugged. "My younger brother shot them at me because he can't do magic yet." He laughed as the rubber band bounced off the seat cushion and then made a dent in the wall near Sirius' ear. He picked it up after it landed right next to him. "I guess he thought that it would punish me for going to Hogwarts instead of Durmstrang."
"Yeah, I have an older sister." James said, allowing his face to contort to show just how much he really loved her. "She's a sixth year this year and she acts like she knows everything just because she can do more advanced magic than I can." He fingered his rubber band, twirling it around in his hand. "But I'll show her; I'm going to be better than she is when I'm a sixth year."
Sirius grinned, staring out the window. "Yeah, but I can tell that underneath all that you really do love her."
James looked alarmed. "What! Are you crazy, mate? Why would I love a pompous know-it-all?" Sirius' grin vanished.
"Because I know what true hate is. I really, truly hate my brother. Regulus is…he's the perfect image of a death eater. Or, at least he will be when he gets up here to Hogwarts. He's only a year younger than me, you know." Sirius stuck his tongue out.
"You mean that your parents are going to allow him to go here?" James leaned forward.
"Well, they have to now, don't they?" James still seemed slightly confused, so Sirius went on. "I mean, they can't disgrace the family by allowing both their sons to go to two different schools?"
"Oh…" James leaned back again, joining Sirius' eyes at the window.
The two boys were quiet for a moment or two, a first for either. James sat thinking about Sirius' family for a while, mulling over everything that his parents had told him about the Black family. "Don't you go near that Black kid," his mother said, clicking her tongue. "They're all bad, the lot of them. I wouldn't be surprised if all of them had joined the side of You-Know-Who by now…"
James turned to look at Sirius, the immediately wished that he hadn't; Sirius had a devilish grin on his face that James was beginning to recognize. James narrowed his eyes.
"What do you think you're planning now?" he asked, half excited by the prospect of a new joke and half wary. As soon as Sirius opened his mouth, however, the wary part of him drifted away and he was left with the side of him that only wanted to prank.
A few minutes later the boys had picked the lock with a hairpin of Rachel's and were out in the hallway again, ready for action.
We're with the Trolley-lady now…
"That's the best thing on this train that I've seen in years…" she laughed, wiping off tears that had come out as soon as she went back to the back of the train after locking James and Sirius in her compartment. She was currently restocking the cart, laughing the entire time. In all the years that she had been the food lady for the Hogwarts Express, there had never been a student (or students for that matter…) who had done such a thing even before the term had started.
Imagine! The nerve of those two kids! If this is what they can do when they're first years, what on earth will they think of when they're second years! At once she stopped laughing. Those boys didn't just deserve the stupid punishment of being locked in the compartment together for the trip. They needed something more…hmmm…
Her thoughts were interrupted by a loud noise in the hallway. BAM! What on earth was going on!
Neglecting her trolley, she raced out into the hallway to find…absolutely nothing. Suddenly thinking that she was going crazy, she walked back into the little room and began to put chocolate frogs on the cart.
But, a few minutes later a loud CRASH came from the hallway again. The lady ran out to punish whoever was making the noise and once again found no one out in the hallway. With a suspicious look backwards, she once again walked back into the room and began to stock up.
When at last a third BOOM came, she was ready at the doorway and was in the hallway before whoever it was could escape. Of course, she thought, gazing down at the two boys she had now come to recognize. Who else?
Hallway a couple minutes before they were caught…
"You know third year spells already?" James stared at Sirius in amazement as he pulled out his wand to do sometime extremely dangerous.
Sirius nodded a little reluctantly. "Well…they're mostly things that are more than a little dangerous…you know…with my family and all…" James nodded, his stomach flip-flopping in anticipation.
"Just do it already!" James nearly shouted, holding in the urge to jump up and down. He swallowed a giggle that he caught in his throat. Sirius pulled away from him, afraid that he would try to grab the wand and try to do the spell himself.
"Hold on a second!" he laughed, twirling his wand around in his fingers. "We have to have a back-up plan in case we get caught,"
James merely shrugged his shoulders and pulled something silver out of his pocket. "That's taken care of." He said, fingering the small silver square and smiling a little.
"What the heck is that?" Sirius asked.
James laughed a bit, eager to show his new friend something only he knew about. "This, my uneducated friend," Sirius sniffed a little at that remark, "Is an invisibility cloak." James enjoyed the now astonished look on Sirius face as he took the square that had been neatly folded and shook out the cloak fully.
"Shiny…" Sirius said absentmindedly. Then he snapped back to his usual self as James began to talk more in depth about the cloak.
"It was given to my dad by my granddad, who had gotten it from his dad, and his dad, and his dad, and-" Sirius put his hand over James' mouth to shut him up.
"That's ok. I don't need the life story of the cloak." James sighed into Sirius' hand and gave him the cloak. Sirius brushed it out as if it had wrinkles. It didn't, of course.
"Now watch this," Sirius warned him, standing in a stance that reeked of trouble. Wand out, he muttered something under his breath.
Suddenly the entire hallway was filled with a fantastic light and James could hear the locking of every door in the corridor all at once, making a sort of BAM sound as some of the doors shut at once to lock themselves.
James stifled an uproarious laughter welling inside him when he heard someone coming to check out what was going on at the other end of the hall. Quickly, he buried himself and Sirius under the cloak and tried to stop himself from breathing. Watching from beneath the cloak, the two boys saw the trolley cart lady and Sirius almost cursed. James elbowed him in the ribs.
The woman went back into the back of the train and the two pulled the cloak off immediately.
"That wasn't all that dangerous." James complained, hoping that it would stimulate Sirius into doing something more. "I could have done that, you know." Sirius gave him a look that made him reconsider. "Well, not the locking the door part, but the slamming I could have done."
Sirius turned away from him, a 'yeah, right,' expression on his face. Then he turned back, the expression gone. "I'll have you know that that's not all that's supposed to happen."
James raised his eyebrows. "What happens next, mister-I-can-do-it-all?"
Sirius said nothing, but just gestured toward the nearest compartment. Within a few seconds there came a CRASH from each compartment simultaneously. Through the window they could see all the luggage falling from the racks and every chocolate frog in the room jumping up and down.
James hurriedly looked down the hall to where the trolley-lady was and pulled the cloak over the both of them again. He was right, and a few seconds later the woman was out in the hallway, searching for what the trouble was. Fortunately no one was screaming too loudly yet.
She disappeared back into her little door yet again. Sirius and James sighed in relief in unison.
"Still," James said, a little shaken, but throwing it off as he pulled the cloak away from him, "That was nothing extremely dangerous as you claimed. I doubt you could even do anything-"
James was cut off as a BOOM shook the hallway. He watched helplessly as the frogs inside the compartments breathed out a certain flame.
"They breathe fire!" James asked, astonished. He shook hands with Sirius, who had a smirk written all over his face. "Great job! But, from now on, I'm the leader, ok?"
Sirius pulled away a little agitated. "How about you be the leader and I'll be the co-leader?"
"So…we're like…partners?" James asked, scratching his head.
"Partners in crime." A voice from above them stated. "How fitting." James and Sirius slapped their foreheads unanimously.
"Don't look at me," Sirius said, shaking his head at James. "You're the one who forgot to use the cloak!"
"This whole thing was your idea!" James retaliated.
The two boys argued all the way back to their old prison cell, AKA the trolley-lady's compartment. They were still arguing until she told them to shut up and they caught their first sight of the castle.
"Do we really get to swim in the lake?"
"Are there secret passages?"
"If we jumped off that tower, would we fly?"
The lady gave them a stern look and they shut up for the rest of the ride.
James: Didn't you actually try to jump off the tower, Padfoot?
Sirius: Well, that depends on what you mean by 'jump.'
Remus: As I recall, you actually fell off.
Sirius: Now that was a vicious rumor.
James, Remus, Emmablk1, and Peter: Right…
Sirius: Do you remember what our first punishment was, James?
James: How could I forget? It was never implemented again after it was used on us.
Peter: It was that bad?
Sirius: No, it was that stupid.
Emmablk1: Hey, you guys actually meet Remus and Peter in the next chapter!
Remus: I would rather not remember how I met them, thank you. Especially Peter. I'm quite happy the way I am now.
James: It really wasn't that bad.
Sirius: Yeah, you only embarrassed yourself in front of everyone in the dining hall.
Remus: didn't I just say I would rather not be reminded?
Peter: What are we talking about?
Emmablk1: Never mind…Let's just end this, shall we?
Sirius: I was getting bored anyway.
yay! i finished it...hope you enjoyed it...
emmablk1