“Come on Remus!” James said, his voice full of anxiety, “We have to hurry!” Sirius followed James and Peter to the common room. James had his invisibility cloak in his arms.
Remus quickly grabbed his smoking bottle of potion and popped open the cork.
“Who’s down there?” a voice asked. James heard someone run down the staircase, light illuminating the way. Remus dropped the bottle in surprise. It crashed and broke on the floor, spilling all its contents.
James covered all four Marauders with his cloak and they stood silently behind the couch.
~
Lily arrived at the bottom of the staircase, swinging her wand-light around, searching for the speaker.
“Who’s there?” she repeated. “Come on, this is not a game!”
She wandered forward and her bare feet stepped on cracked glass.
Lily screamed quietly and grabbed the wall with one hand. She examined her foot with the other. Her wand light showed a small hole on the bottom of her foot.
“What kind of idiot would leave broken glass pieces lying about?” She looked around as if looking for someone and then whispered, “Reparo.” The glass bottle pieces flew back together and formed the bottle again. But the smoking liquid still lay on the floor. Lily grabbed the bottle out of the air and inspected it, curiously. Suddenly, she looked from the potion on the floor, to the bottle in her hands.
She remembered this bottle… but where? Which student had this bottle today?
“Remus…” she realized. She recognized Remus’ bottle. She had asked about it at during breakfast.
Remus was here… that meant the so were the other Marauders… but they hadn’t left yet. She still had time.
“Lupin! Black! Pettigrew! Potter! Don’t you DARE leave this common room!” She ran to the portrait and stood in front of it, blocking it. “You are NOT going to sneak out on your first week back! Not even you, Potter!”
~
“Wow,” James murmured. “She’s good at guessing.”
“What do we do now?” Peter whispered.
“We go anyway.”
~
Suddenly, James appeared from behind the couch and held his hand up. Sirius, Peter, and Lupin followed suit, all the hands up in surrender. Lily stared at them. Since when did the Marauders surrender? They usually fight even if the battle is over.
“Potter! You should know better than to sneak out!”
“I’m sorry, Evans, but we REALLY have to go to the bathroom!” James cried.
“You have a bathroom upstairs,” she replied coolly.
“It’s clogged!” Sirius whined, a pained expression on his face.
“And I have to go really, REALLY badly!” Remus said.
“Me too!” Peter exclaimed, clutching the part where his legs meet. Lily looked somewhere other then Peter for a moment, but then agreed. After all, Peter couldn’t act or lie properly and Lily though he was in a rather awkward position.
“Alright,” she sighed, “But I’m coming with you.”
~
James paced up and down the boy’s bathroom with his hand to his head.
“What do we do?”
“Well, we already stuffed Remus through the extra small window so he could get a head start to the Whomping Willow.”
“Yes! But we have to make sure he gets there!” James knelt over the sink, pondering furiously.
“How?” Peter asked stupidly. “Lily’s outside and we can’t distract her or anything. And I certainly am not going through that high window, rat or not!”
Then Sirius stood up from his position on the toilet seat. “Yes, we can distract her!”
“How?” James looked up from the sink.
“Well, I’ll just take her wand away from her! And she won’t even know it was me.” Sirius smiled at his own idea.
“How-” James began, but was stopped by Sirius transforming into a great, black dog.
James bit his lip, but reluctantly agreed. “O.K. Just don’t hurt her, Padfoot.” Then he opened the door for Padfoot to leave.
~
Lily was leaning against the wall thinking. What could those boys possibly be doing in there that was taking so long?
She barely had time to think when suddenly, a huge, black dog jumped out of nowhere and knocked her to the floor. She landed on her knees and scraped them.
“Hey!” She pulled her wand out of her pocket to see exactly what attacked her when the dog came back again tore the wand from her fingers. It then bounded down the hallway.
“Oh no.” Lily groaned, kicked the wall, and her eyes followed the dog until it disappeared into the darkness. She looked around desperately and grabbed a flaming torch from its handle on the wall and chased after the dog.
“Stupid dog,” she grumbled underneath her breath. As she ran, she thought in her head. The dog had come from the boys’ bathroom. Lily frowned as she decided that James’ must have transformed a toilet into a dog and set it after her.
She was about to turn the corner and grab the scruffy dog by the tail when it came bolting back at her and knocked her over again. The torch clattered on the floor and extinguished. Lily coughed on the smoke and she almost choked when she heard a voice say, “Who’s there?”
The wand-less girl scrambled to her feet and hid behind a knight of shining armor. She held her breath as a light traveled around the corner and illuminated her hallway.
She could not see the owner of the wand’s face but she could see the silhouette of him, and several others. She could only recognize the silver and green shine of their Slytherin badges.
Seems like the Marauders aren’t the only ones taking a night walk, Lily thought.
“I’m telling you, Malfoy,” came the voice of Bellatrix Black, “There’s no one here except that stray dog that ran into us.”
A chill went up Lily’s spine and realized that she was in serious trouble, head girl or not.
Malfoy lowered his wand a few inches, but raised it back up again. “No,” he whispered, “There’s someone else wandering the corridors at this time of night. Find that person. No one must know we were here.”
~
“Peter! Why do you have to be slow now, of all times?” James was speeding down the hallway in the opposite direction of Lily. Peter was tripping over his shoelaces, meters behind him.
“Wait up for me!” Peter moaned at James while tying his left shoelace for the third time.
“No! You catch up later!” James burst of the front doors and tumbled down the stairs. He got up and heard Peter rolling down the staircase behind him, grunting with every step he smashed against.
James hid behind the bushes and waited a minute, just in case anyone was following him (except for Peter) and changed into his illegal animal form: a stag.
Prongs got up and glared at Peter who had unwisely turned into a rat where anyone peering from the window could see him. Prongs snorted. At least he had no shoelaces to trip over.
Wormtail attached himself to Prong’s ankle and the stag galloped to the Whomping Willow.
I hope Sirius doesn’t take too long, he thought. Wormtail pressed the knot on the root of the wild tree and James and Peter hurried down the secret tunnel leading to the Shrieking Shack.