War of the Pranks
Part 1/1

Summary: After a prank war goes out of control, James, Sirius, Remus and Peter have to answer to McGonagall and Dumbledore.

Disclaimer: The characters don't belong to me. You all know that. You all know that they belong to the wonderful author that we all know and worship, J.K. Rowling.

Author's Note: Not beta'd so any mistake is entirely my own. I also apologize for the horribly unoriginal title. My mind went blank. If my mind ever becomes unblank, I'll change it. It probably won't, though. Or if any of you lovely readers have a better suggestion (and believe me, just about anything would be a better suggestion), please tell me.

Written for the lazymwppwriters Full Moonthly Challenge. Worth joining if you like any or all of the MWPP characters. The challenge is as follows:
Remus plans to dye Sirius's hair blue, and when he is successful, and all-our prank war begins between Moony, Wormtail, Padfoot, and Prongs. Tell us a tale of this prank war that resulted in a limp, a leopard-print mohawk, and purple underpants. Don't forget, you must use the words "lazy" and "full moon".

Also, I have Support Services. That means that, if you want, you can put me on Author Alert and receive notice when I post stories or parts of stories, even if you haven't paid yourself.

If you are receiving Author Alerts for my Harry Potter stories - are there any of you even left? - then you'll have missed Changes, which came out a month ago. If, however, you've finished this story and decided you want to read more of my work - thank you, by the way - then Changes probably isn't your best bet. It is one of my very few stories that has absolutely no humour. If that's your cup of tea, please read, but if not, you might want to try one of my others, such as In the Dark, Snuffles' First Adventures or Flying Lessons. Those ones are definitely humorous.

Posted: Wednesday, September 10, 2003

"Never have I seen such reckless and disruptive behaviour.  I can't believe the four of you."

Professor McGonagall had been going on like that for quite some time.  Sirius tuned her out again once he had confirmed she was still lecturing them.  He was getting good at tuning people out.  He almost had the hang of tuning out a Howler now, having had so much practice listening – or rather not listening – to his parents going on and on about this and that and how much of a disgrace he was to the Black name.  Instead, Sirius looked around the room.

Sirius, along with his co-conspirators, James, Peter and Remus, were all standing in a line, facing Professor Dumbledore and Professor McGonagall.  Dumbledore, who was standing a little ways behind McGonagall, was patiently waiting for her to stop yelling.  McGonagall herself showed no sign of stopping any time soon.  At least, Sirius mused, she was showing Gryffindor colours for once – her face was bright red with fury.

On either side of Sirius, Peter and Remus were competing to see who could look the most terrified.  Remus was ashen white.  He kept biting his lips and it looked more like he was expecting to be expelled than just being yelled at.  Peter looked too scared to be pale.  Like Remus, he refused to look above his feet.  He was noticeably quivering.

James was at the other end of the line, looking suitably chagrined at the dressing down, but otherwise not terribly upset.  At one point he tried to catch Sirius' eye.  Sirius had to quickly look down at his feet lest he burst out laughing, which was hardly an appropriate response considering . . . what had happened.

Okay, appropriate, yes.  A good idea when McGonagall was still yelling at them, no.

Finally, at a suitable break in McGonagall's screeches, Remus interjected, "It's all my fault."

"Really, Remus?" Dumbledore asked mildly.  "How so?"

"I started it.  None of this would have happened if I hadn't dyed Sirius' hair blue.  I pulled the first prank.  It's all my fault."  Remus spoke clearly, audible even though his head was so far down the others could only see the very top of his forehead.  There was dread in his voice, but he seemed willing to accept any and all punishments given to him.

Alarmed, Sirius allowed James to catch his eye this time.  James seemed just as worried that Remus was about to take the fall for all of them as Sirius was.  Silently, they came to an agreement.

"I see," Dumbledore said.  It was impossible to tell what the Headmaster made of that revelation.  "I'm sorry to hear that.  Well, Remus, I must – "

"I provoked him!"

"Black!  Don't interrupt."

Sirius ignored McGonagall's admonishment, staring Dumbledore straight in the eye instead.  "Remus never would have even thought about it if I hadn't been teasing him.  I kept saying he was too much of a teacher's pet to pull anything like this.  He proved me wrong.  Really, it's my fault."

"Nevertheless – " Dumbledore started.

"We continued it, too."  James paid no more attention to McGonagall's disapproving "Potter!" than Sirius had.  "All Remus did was dye Sirius' hair blue.  He deserved it, too.  Sirius was being a right – a, er, well he was being horrible to Remus."  Remembering the teachers' presence, James hastily bit off what he was originally going to say.  "You can't blame Remus for wanting to get back at Sirius.  He's insufferable, annoying, completely unbearable at times – "

"Gee, thanks, James," Sirius said sarcastically.

"Just telling it like it is, Sirius," James said innocuously.

"Boys!"  This time McGonagall's reprimand served to get them back on track.

"Anyway, all Remus did was dye Sirius," James continued.

"Which really isn't all that imaginative as far as pranks go in the first place," Sirius said.

"You've done it yourself," James reminded him.

"In September.  When I was eleven."  All in a tone that conveyed his certainty that everyone would recognize that such amateur pranks were beneath him now.

"You're still eleven, du – er, Sirius," James retorted with a quick, shifty glance at the professors.

"I'm almost twelve," protested Sirius.

"As pleasant as this diversion is," Dumbledore intruded, "I do believe you were trying to convince us that Remus was not to blame for tonight's troubling, if entertaining, incident."

James blinked at Dumbledore's use of 'entertaining'.  "Right," he said at last.  "As I was saying, Remus may have had a ingenious twist on an old prank – after all, it took Sirius two days to get his hair back to the right colour – but what happened next was our fault – mine and Sirius'."

Sirius took up the story.  "I had to get him back, you see.  So I went to James and together we brainstormed.  He vetoed a bunch of my ideas."

"The more dangerous ones," James said.

McGonagall looked for a moment as if she wanted to ask what could possible be more dangerous than the ones not vetoed, but on second thought realized she probably didn't want to know.

"Finally, we decided to shrink their robes while they were wearing them," said Sirius.  "Worked well, too.  Didn't even notice until their robes were so tight they couldn't breathe."

The narrative was passed back to James.  "Even then, things might have gone back to normal if Sirius didn't decide to pull one of the vetoed ideas on my."

"It was a brilliant idea," Sirius argued.  

"It was vetoed for a reason," James said.

"Yeah, so you wouldn't expect me to do it to you."

"This is when James ended up in the hospital wing with swelling all over, correct?" Dumbledore asked.

"Yes," James confirmed.  

"It wasn't supposed to work like that," Sirius interjected.

"Again, why it was on the veto list.  Too much could have gone wrong – and did go wrong."

"I apologized, didn't I?"

"You did.  That doesn't mean you should have done it in the first place."  To the others, James added, "Of course I had to get him back."

"Only James here missed me and got Remus and Peter instead," Sirius said.

"It's not my fault!  You said you'd meet me in front of the painting of Cassandra Vlonsky," James protested.

"It's hardly my fault you were too lazy to check that I was actually there.  I also said I was going to go looking for werewolves on the full moon, if you remember," Sirius said loftily.

Neither boy noticed the sharp look McGonagall sent them, nor the fact that Remus was managing to look down ever more at his feet.  The nape of his neck was where his eyes ought to have been.

"But it wasn't a full moon!"  It was James' much-argued claim.  They had been over this before.  Many times.

"So I was off by a couple days!"

"Have you learned nothing in Astronomy?"

Meanwhile, Peter was completely ignoring their sniping, trying for the last five minutes to work up the courage to say something himself.  "It's not just James and Sirius' fault.  Remus and I got involved, too."  All eyes turned to Peter, who looked like he regretted speaking already.  His courage seemed to fail him, but he kept talking nervously anyway.  "I mean what happened.  James accidentally enchanted me and Remus' voices so that we were talking backwards and couldn't get rid of it ourselves because everything we said was backwards and we couldn't say any spells, and Sirius sorta said we couldn't just sit back and let him do that to us even though he was really trying to do it to Sirius, so we decided to get back at James and, well, you know what happened."  By the end, everyone had to strain to understand Peter though his mumbling.

"So you see, it's not Remus' fault," Sirius concluded.

"Well, not just Remus' fault," James amended.

"So if you're going to punish anyone, you've got to punish us all."

"Oh, believe me, I plan to punish you all," McGonagall said coldly.  "That is not the issue here."

Even James and Sirius were subdued – at least for a minute – at those words.

"Let me get this straight," she said, folding her hands neatly in front of her.  "This all started because you, Lupin, were attempting to prove to Black that you were capable of breaking the rules."

Miserably, Remus nodded.

"However, in Black and Potter's hands, it quickly escalated in an all-out prank war between the four of you."

This time they all nodded.

"All of this resulted in the – " she paused, searching for the right word, "incident in the Great Hall during supper.  Seven students were badly cursed with eleven more in the hospital wing with lesser injuries; another fifty-two were inflicted with minor curses, luckily nothing that a teacher or prefect couldn't fix.  All of this is as a result of the confusion you created with your little 'prank war'.  Further," her voice rose slightly, becoming more shrill, "as a direct result of your pranks, twenty-four students are walking around, unable to talk in anything but verse, eighty-three have had their clothes spontaneously change colour – some of them are still changing colour; luckily only four lost their robes entirely; and fully one-quarter of the school is currently sporting a new hair-style they can't seem to undo."

"That's the beauty of it," Sirius quipped with no care about angering the teachers further.  "If it took me two day two days to figure out how to get my hair back to normal, just imagine how long it'll take everyone else!"

"I thought changing hair was too amateur for you," James said.

"Dyeing is, but this was more than dyeing.  Besides, I used a modification of Remus' modified charm.  Don't tell me that's amateur."

"I'll admit that much," James said, "But couldn't you have at least tried to get Snape?  If anyone is in need of a hair change, it's Snivellus." James had all but forgotten the teachers in front of him.  "Maybe you could have got rid of those greasy, slimy locks."

"Potter!  Black!  You are already in enough trouble as it is.  If I were you, I would keep quiet to avoid compounding it."

"Yes ma'am," James said smartly.  He was mocking McGonagall, and she knew it, but still his voice and manner was such that she couldn't rightly call him on it.  She settled with just scowling at him.

"Before I decide on a punishment, do you have anything you'd like to say, Professor Dumbledore?"

"Yes, I do."  Up until this point, Dumbledore had seemed content to let McGonagall lead, asking on the occasional question, and everyone turned to see what he would do now.  Would he yell?  Take points?  Give them a detention more horrible than anything McGonagall could think up?  Let them go?

"While I do thank you for the change in my undergarments – they are now the most marvelous shade of purple.  But – " Dumbledore seemed to be taking it all in stride, but his voice did become slightly more wistful and everyone wondered what he was going to say next.  

"Is there nothing you can do about this?"  He indicated his hair – or rather the now-limp leopard print Mohawk he now sported.

The End