Rather lengthy, but nevertheless obligatory AN: ::cringe:: please don't hate on me too hard. respitechristopher challenged me to write, and I quote: "Lily Evans, middle of 4th year, makes the mistake of inviting the Marauders over to her folks' house for a weekend during winter holiday. That Saturday afternoon, James figures out how to work the television, and the five of them watch a Three Stooges movie. How is the school affected by this upon their return?"
And then he told me to "bring the lulz."
As anyone who has ever read my writing knows, I rarely bring the lulz.
I guess that's why they call it the "I Never" Challenge.
And so, without further ado…
It was never supposed to turn into this, Lily thought miserably, sitting in the middle of the Transfiguration classroom, Professor McGonagall turning an unhealthy shade of purple, James, Sirius, and Peter at the front of the classroom look thrilled with themselves, Remus slightly to the left and looking as horrified as Lily felt.
It had started out as a perfectly normal and uneventful weekend during the holidays.
Her parents had made a perfectly normal and harmless statement: "Lily, darling, why don't you invite some of your friends from school down for a weekend?" her mother had said. Her father had agreed.
Lily didn't think it would be a problem. She was a popular girl at school. She'd owled a bunch of her girlfriends—all the girls from Gryffindor in her year, and a couple from Ravenclaw and Hufflepuff. She'd even owled Severus, but wasn't surprised when he refused. She knew his mother was a bit funny about Muggleborns, like herself.
To her surprise (and dismay), no one else could come either, for whatever reason. Most of her friends' families had decided to travel over the holidays. Others had parents who didn't think it prudent to spend the holidays away from family. When she told her parents, they looked so disappointed, Lily promised she'd find someone to come down.
And that was how, the weekend before Christmas, she'd ended up with a houseful of Marauders. It actually hadn't been that awful. Sure, James and Sirius were their obnoxious selves, and Peter had followed after them like he usually did, but for the most part, Lily couldn't complain, especially since she'd been bracing herself for something much, much worse.
Saturday afternoon found them in the sitting room, James and Sirius poking and prodding at the television set. Lily, foreseeing all kinds of issues, refused to tell them how to turn it on, and had forbidden Remus from doing so either. She should have known that when James and Sirius put their mind to something, they generally achieved it, or died trying.
And so it was, that as Petunia sneered at them from the kitchen, Lily sat on the couch reading, and James managed to figure out how to work the television set.
He leapt up with a triumphant shout, the picture flickering to life in front of him.
"Look, Sirius!" he'd yelled. "Look! It moves, just like our photos, but it talks, too! I've figured it out!"
Sirius and James (and Peter, by default) then spent the next hour sitting inches from the television, raptly watching the newscast that happened to be on.
Lily thanked her lucky stars that nothing worse had happened, but her thanks turned out to be premature, for after the newscast, the channel aired a Three Stooges Holiday Special.
Ordinarily, this wouldn't be a cause for alarm. In fact, Lily had been known to enjoy a lazy afternoon watching whatever happened to be on television. The problem was, James and Sirius were rather impressionable, and this was their first exposure to the television.
In hindsight, Lily reckons she ought to have changed the channel. Surely a harmless showing of Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer didn't have near the capacity for disaster this did. Regardless, Lily allowed the Marauders to watch The Three Stooges, and thus condemned herself to a hellish second half of her fourth year.
The trouble didn't start until after Lily returned to school. In fact, the remainder of the weekend went so smoothly, Lily was a bit nervous when she sent them off, only to spend the rest of the day and part of the next checking every inch of the house for whatever prank they'd managed to set up for her and her unsuspecting Muggle family.
To Lily's surprise, the worst she found was the permanent trail of cookie crumbs leading from the guest room to the kitchen. And the plastic wrap she found around the toilet was almost expected. After all, one can hardly expect James to behave himself once introduced to the many uses for plastic wrap. The boy had serious issues with self-control, clearly. Pleasantly pleased, Lily allowed herself to be lulled into a false sense of security, and she was able to enjoy the remainder of the holidays.
Her first clue that all was not well was when she boarded the Hogwarts Express and heard the unmistakable sound of someone doing their best impression of a Northern American accent. Lily frowned and, curious, stuck her head in the compartment.
And that is when Lily realized that allowing the Marauders to watch The Three Stooges over the holidays had much more serious consequences than she could have ever dreamed.
To the unsuspecting and untrained eye, James Potter merely sat in the midst of his admirers, impersonating what appeared to be a rather angry and vulgar American from the northern parts of the states.
Lily, however, saw James Potter sitting in the midst of young, corruptible minds, egged on by his constant shadow, Peter, and assisted by none other than Sirius Black, imitating the scariest thing Lily had seen to date.
Moe Howard.
With an anguished groan, Lily sat down right there in the corridor, burying her face in her hands and shaking her head slowly.
Hogwarts would never be the same ever again.
The next few weeks confirmed Lily's worst fears. The hallways were constantly plagued by the loud and boisterous antics of James and Sirius (who appeared to have taken on Moe Howard together), Peter (who fell easily into the role of the idiot, as Curly), and Remus, who, rather unreluctantly, contributed as Larry.
Things didn't get serious (figuratively speaking) until the act got carried into the classrooms. The Professors were constantly plagued by the Marauders taking what they said to the extreme literal and causing all sorts of shenanigans.
The Transfiguration incident, however, was by far the worst and (Lily begrudgingly admitted) most memorable incident yet.
They had been studying growth spells that day and, along with the suspected borderline inappropriate jokes on behalf of most of the fourteen-year-old boys, the lesson was plagued by James, Sirius, Peter, and Remus's constant literal interpretation of every word Professor McGonagall said.
Lily (loath as she was to admit it) admired the Marauders for being so insolent in McGonagall's class. McGonagall scared Lily, and she was a good student. Of course, James had different ideas about rules. He thought of them as more "suggestions" than actual guidelines, and James didn't discriminate when it came to breaking rules.
And so it was that Lily stared, with absolute abject horror, at their rather unfortunate classmate, George Gregory, a Hufflepuff, who had a run-in with James the Stooge, James's wand, and James's unfortunate adeptness at growth spells.
As McGonagall moved on to an unhealthy shade of puce, James merely shrugged and said: "Well, Professor, you said to help Gregory out… After watching him bumble his way through a conversation with Sandra Jones, I figured a little bit of…endowment wouldn't hurt."