Over the next week, all of the fifth years noticed that something was up with the Marauders. Sirius didn't make jokes or mess around in class any more and the others hadn't been seen to talk to him at all. In fact, the lot of them seemed rather down. No one knew what had happened and the four of them weren't talking.
Many of those who shared classes with them had tried to find out what had happened, but none had had any success. All they would say was that they didn't want to talk about it, but their classmates could tell that Sirius had done something major. They had fallen out before, but it was never anything like this. In the past, they had always made up again within a few days if it even lasted that long. But this, this was different.
Those who had talked to him agreed that they thought that this whole situation was Sirius' fault and he knew it. Although the others refused to talk about it, Sirius had all but admitted that it was his fault, but what made this strange was that he didn't seem to resent the others at all for not speaking to him.
The other students had never seen anything like it. It was the main topic of discussion at mealtimes along with an article that had recently appeared in the Daily Prophet.
Three days ago, they had had news that a family – a pureblood wizard, his muggleborn wife and their two young children – had been murdered. Stories like this had been appearing now and then for the last few years, but what made this one different was the symbol left in the air at the scene. Aurors arriving there to investigate had determined that the spell used was powerful Dark magic, indicating a level of power in a Dark wizard that had not been seen since the days of Grindelwald. The public weren't supposed to know about this yet, but one of the Ministry office workers who had handled the paperwork had gone to the press. Everyone was anticipating another attack.
At the end of the month, the whole school bar one made their way down to the Great Hall for the Halloween feast. Sirius was currently serving a detention with Filch. He had found out about this the day before, the Headmaster probably suspected that he would make good use of James' invisibility cloak whilst everyone else was occupied in the Hall, but he had obviously underestimated how the others felt about him still.
The students gathered in the Hall made their way to the House tables. The Halloween feast was an eagerly anticipated event each year and had become even more so since the Marauders had started at Hogwarts and had used the opportunity to pull a school-wide prank each year, livening up the school day as the holidays seemed so far away.
But as the evening wore on and nothing happened, the students knew that something was wrong and looking around, they couldn't see Sirius anywhere. At that point, many of them thought only that he had gone elsewhere to set up the prank or to get up to something else while everyone was at the feast. But then the students began to talk to the other years and what the fifth years had noticed over the past week quickly spread throughout the rest of the school. Soon everyone knew that something had happened between them, but luckily no one knew just what that was... yet.