Hey, all. Thunder Stag here.

Sorry for leaving this fic unattended for so long. I had a play, and work, and plain old laziness, and, well, basically real life interfered. So I'm sorry for that.

But, in return for the patience you've shown, I'm posting what is, at the moment, the longest thing I've ever submitted to Fanfiction. I hope you enjoy; if you do, leave a comment telling me why. If you don't, see my previous sentence. Enjoy!

Fred and George Weasley were covered head to foot in Muggle shaving cream. They stood in Argus Filch's office, a strange combination of terrified and elated with their most recent adventure. Nobody could prove it was them, of course — the twins had barely been at Hogwarts for a fortnight, and even at home they had never before pulled something as bold as this.

It all started with the two of them looking to get revenge on a Slytherin who had, in typical snake-like behavior, rather back-handedly insulted their family. They weren't entirely sure what he had even said, to be honest — but his smug look and the jeers of the other Slytherins was enough for them. They didn't waste a lot of time with the plan: the next person to leave the dungeons by the main exit would be doused in shaving cream and sparkles. It never occurred to them that their enemy might not be the next person to go upstairs. It was their rotten luck that the one who did in fact leave next was none other than Severus Snape.

Now, Fred and George were wholly inexperienced in the art of pranking, at least against someone they weren't related to. They made several key mistakes: first, of course, that their target would not be the one they hit. Second, that they should be somewhere else, doing something else, in the presence of people who could back up their story should it become necessary when the prank happened. And thirdly, that they should avoid being in the blast range of the shaving cream and sparkles when they erupted.

So it was fairly obvious that they were the culprits behind Snape's newly pleasant smell and sparkly hair. He had taken them without delay and hardly a word to his office, where he used sticking charms to anchor them to the floor by the bottoms of their shoes and called Filch through the Floo. They did try to take off their shoes to get out, but the spell apparently prevented that, too. Or Snape had a spell on his office that prevented people from removing shoes.

The caretaker was only too happy to grab them both by the arm — his grip was painfully tight and cold even through their robes — and drag them to his office, where he locked the door and (from the sound of it) ran off, cackling gleefully. He was probably going to go find his thumb screws and hot irons. Unfortunately, he had underestimated the capacity of the Weasley twins for getting into trouble, which they immediately did. Filch hadn't stuck them to the floor after all; the only thing he had done was to set his weird cat to watching them.

So Fred began their assault on Filch's office by opening the drawers in his desk. Random crap he had taken from kids over the year, a comb, two sandwiches (one looked to be some kind of experiment, as there was some pretty nasty mold growing on it) and a pamphlet for some kind of mail order magic class. Boring.

So they began to go through the office's file cabinets. Their mother would not have approved: two walls were covered in cabinets, and most of the drawers were unlabeled except for the occasional year. Only one was really interesting, actually - a drawer labeled simply 'Marauders'.

It was absolutely overflowing with reports, files labeled with names (mostly S.B. and J.P., but a fair number with R.L. and P.P.) and old prank items both muggle and magical that looked to be at least a decade old. There was a little paper canister with a string, which (when George pulled on it, as any eleven year old would) exploded with a bang and showered them with confetti. Sadly, there were no others of that kind in the cabinet.

Naturally, the twins raided the drawer. Old files they thought might be interesting, trinkets that might still work (and some that certainly wouldn't but looked cool), a few pieces of unidentifiable parchment. There was an old hat that might have once belonged to Sprout, so covered it was by patches and tears, and a bag of what looked like pineapple, hardened and covered in sugar.

And just as naturally as their decision to 'liberate' the items, Filch re-entered the room right then and flipped out, grabbing them by the arms and taking back his precious loot. By the time he was done, all that was left were a few pieces of parchment Fred had managed to sneak into an inside pocket of his robes. Filch told them to return that evening for detention, and sent them back to their classes.

It wasn't until almost midnight when they got back to the common room. A few upperclassmen, deeply engrossed in their studies, briefly looked up and proceeded to ignore the red-headed first years. The two of them, finally alone, pulled out what loot they had managed to keep from Filch's office. All in all, it consisted of two pages of a case report for someone referred to only as SB, a rubber ball that changed colors every time it hit the ground, and an old, blank piece of parchment. Of course, neither Fred nor George thought that it was just that. They had found a blank piece of parchment in Argus Filch's filing system. The parchment was at least a few years old, and young though the twins were, neither thought that a man as obsessed with cleanliness as Filch would leave a spare piece of parchment lying around.

So they set to work. Fred tried a lumos spell first — the twins had had a kind of ink that only showed up under the light of a lumos when they were younger, until it got lost in the jungle that was their room — but it didn't reveal anything. They tried holding a flame to the parchment, just close enough to make the Muggle invisible ink stuff their father had showed them once in his workshop show up, but it just burned the corner a little. None of their other attempts were any more fruitful.

A few days later, both of them were pretty much out of ideas. The parchment was stubbornly refusing to reveal what it hid, from secret messages to embarrassing photos, and George was sullenly tapping it with his wand. Fred, who was trying to master the Wingardium Leviosa spell Flitwick was having them practice for homework, missed his feather and hit a bottle of ink. To his surprise, it lifted up about six inches — just enough that when he dropped it, startled, a drop spilled. The drop landed on the paper.

And the paper came to life.