How We Came to Be

By: Prongs

After an incredibly boring ride on the Hogwarts Express, stuck in a compartment with my cousin, Veronica, in fifth year and her gormless git of a boyfriend (the only people I knew at Hogwarts), I finally got out of there and away from their incessant snogging.

Once there, a giant of a man called Hagrid, ushered all us first years over to the side and sent us off across the lake in enchanted rowboats to the giant castle in front of us. I was in a boat with three very pretty girls, the prettiest of which had long red hair and dazzling green eyes, and as I later found out a fiery temperament, but more on her later.

After the trip across the lake came the Sorting. I was sorted into Gryffindor (no surprises there as both my parents were in Gryffindor), as was the pretty red-haired witch, whose name I learned was Lily Evans.

I made conversation with the boy across from me, but when I learned his name, I was taken aback, all of his family were in Slytherin, and were a well known Pure-Blood family who were all for the "purification of the wizarding race", yet here he was sitting at the Gryffindor table. After talking to him for a while longer, I learned he was nothing like the rest of his family, and we hit it off immediately after discovering a common love of food, pranks, attention and girls.

That night, all the first years were assigned dormitories of three to six people. The Gryffindor First Year Boys' Dormitory contained four boys in total: me, the boy from dinner (hereafter known as Padfoot as to not disclose his name), and two other boys (hereafter known as Moony and Wormtail for the same reason). We bonded quickly and founded a tight-knit group of mischief makers.

Then came the name. We had trouble thinking of a name at first, and the answer presented itself in a most unusual way: Minerva McGonagall. After one of our very first midnight wanderings with the Invisibility Cloak my father had given to me, we were inexperienced and made too much noise, and were caught by Professor McGonagall. She lectured us on how inappropriate it was to be "marauding about the castle at night". That night we held a vote and we decided on the name, we dubbed ourselves the Marauders.