AN: Wow, this chapter is really long. Well…longer than normal anyway. And 'Thank You!!!!!!' to everyone who's reviewed. 278!?!?!?! I never expected this story to get more than 30 or 40!
I'd like to give a great big thanks to whoever runs the Harry Potter Lexicon. Without it I wouldn't have known that you have to walk through the Entrance hall to get to the dungions or what the useful part of the 'wadiwasi' spell was. And I would also like to thank the inventor of coffee, because without it this chapter wouldn't have been written. I swear it's a muse food. Hope you enjoy this latest venture into madness!


"Prowling in the night
Hiding beneath my fright
Manipulate my sight
Thief
Whenever you steal
My punishment's real
You give me sorrow"

~ Enchanted, Delirium


James was even better at figuring out decrepit old spells than Sirius had given him credit for. They'd gotten a rough draft drawn and put the proper spells on it so that it showed everyone in the whole castle. They even found a way to make the plans of the castle itself move as rooms and staircases shifted around. And after about a week of tinkering with it, they decided to give the map it's first test run.

They were sitting in the middle of their room with spell books and extra parchment strewn across the floor around them. Peter was only half paying attention to their discussion because he was working on a Transfiguration essay that would be due the next morning. And Remus was half-asleep; pointing out things that James and Sirius had missed from his position curled up on the floor. And he didn't seem to notice that he was using Sirius' hand as a pillow.

"So where should we go to test it out?" Sirius asked, stretching lopsidedly because he really didn't want to bother Remus by moving his 'pillow.'

"The kitchens?" Peter suggested hopefully, looking up from his half done essay.

"We could try and find the Slytherin common room," Remus said as he sat up and yawned. He rubbed his cheek and looked down at Sirius' hand and then up to meet his eyes, raising an eyebrow in silent question. Sirius just shrugged and stood up.

"We could use it for what we originally made it for and pay a visit to the rare potions ingredients Professor Jigger keeps in his office," Sirius said as he picked up the map.

"Sound's good to me," James said. "And the kitchens aren't that far out of the way so we can stop there too Peter." Peter beamed at him and quickly put his parchment and quill away. Sirius offered Remus a hand to help him to his feet. Remus stared at it for a moment before sighing and getting up on his own power and giving Sirius a rather sad look out of the corner of his eye as he headed to the door. He opened it and paused looking back at Sirius like he was about to say something important.

"Is there anyone in the common room?" Sirius stared at him for a couple of seconds before mentally shaking himself and looking down at the map. That wasn't what he'd been expecting him to say.

"Nope, no one there," he replied. Remus nodded and lead the way down the stairs and out of Gryffindor Tower.

They paused at the portrait hole and checked the map again. No one was there so they crept quietly out, trying not to wake the fat lady and propped the portrait open with a pillow from the common room so they wouldn't have to tell her the password when they came back. They made it all they way to the entrance hall, checking the map at every corner, before they found out a flaw in the map.

"Oooh! Look at the ickle Gryffindors out after curfew!" All four of them jumped a good foot in the air as Peeves cackled madly behind them. "I could get you in so much trouble!"

"Peeves shut up!" Sirius hissed. But the poltergeist just continued to laugh and bounce around them.

"Be quiet, please!" Remus begged, but Peeves didn't listen. And when the ghost took a deep breath, like he was about to yell something, Remus lost his patience and pointed his wand at the annoyance.

"Phantasmawasi, " he muttered the spell and Peeves went sailing through the air and into the wall that separated the Entry Hall from the Great Hall. James, Peter and Sirius stared at him in shock.

"Stop gawking at me and come on, he'll be back in a few seconds," Remus said, grabbing Sirius by the sleeve and heading down the stairs to the dungeons. They stopped once they were sure they were far enough away, panting and out of breath from their mad dash down the halls.

"Wow, Moony, where did you learn that?" Sirius asked leaning against a wall to try and catch his breath.

"The same place you learn everything else, from a book," Remus relied. He suddenly tensed and started peering down the dark corridor. "Is there anything on the map?" he asked, still looking around nervously.

"No, nothing for a good half a dozen corridors," Sirius said after checking the map again. "Why, what's?" he started to ask, but a Peter's anxious voice cut him off.

"James, what are you doing?" the other two boys turned to see James squinting into a dark alcove there was a loud crack, like the sound of a whip, and Lily suddenly walked out of the shadows.

"Lily! What are you doing here?" James asked in shock.

"I hate you," she said calmly, fixing James with a contemptuous look that would make a Slytherin proud. He sputtered, his eyes wide in despair.

"Lily, what?" James said, his voice small and pleading.

"You really think I could like a scrawny, four eyes?" she continued on her tirade, but Sirius stopped listening and looked down at the map. He'd been sure that there was nobody anywhere near this hallway just a few minutes ago. He managed to find Lily Even's name on the map, but had to do a double take when he found it.

According to the map, she was somewhere on the fourth floor. Sirius looked back to find James staring at the girl of his dreams with a horror-stricken look on his face. Wasn't there a dark creature that fed off of fear? And could change itself into peoples worst nightmares? Sirius turned to ask Remus but the other boy cut him off, answering his question at the same time.

"That's a boggart," he said simply before raising his wand.

"James don't listen to her, that's not Lily," Sirius said at the same time Remus shouted a spell. There was a loud crack and then it really wasn't Lily standing there. Instead it was Lucius Malfoy, wearing a bright red wig and a nightgown. They all stared in shock for a moment before they all began to laugh hysterically. The boggart looked confused and backed away back into the shadows.

There was another whip-crack and then a menacing growl rumbled out from the darkness. And as a creature from only the darkest of nightmares stepped from out of the concealing alcove they all quickly stopped laughing.

Six feet tall at the shoulder, gray-brown fur matted with blood and gore, it stalked towards them on crimson stained paws with claws the size of knives, blood and saliva dripping down its razor sharp teeth to mat the fur of its muzzle and neck.

The gigantic wolf turned to Remus, pinning the shaking boy with an identical gold gaze before turning its attention to Sirius. And in one swift motion it leapt forward, pushing Remus aside and charging towards Sirius. Time seemed to slow as Sirius tried to think of what to do. It wasn't really a werewolf, it was a boggart. 'What was the spell Remus had used? Riddles? No...ridicule?! No?'

"Riddikulus!" Sirius shouted as the boggart-wolf crashed into him, it's teeth snapping shut an inch from his face. He felt claws rip through his robes as the creature reared back and another loud crack echoed threw the hallway. Sirius looked up from where he was sprawled on the floor and saw a miniscule version of his attacker, with purple and pink polka-dotted fur, chasing its own tail in circles. He would have laughed if it hadn't been for the sound that penetrated through the sound of his own blood pounding in his ears.

The haunting, screaming wail began as less than a whisper but soon built to echo against the stone walls loud enough to be painful. Sirius looked around wildly, thinking that the boggart must have turned itself into a banshee. But no, the sound shifted from a scream to a desperate howl as Sirius' eyes landed on its source.

Remus had collapsed to his knees in the middle of the corridor, his head thrown back and his throat working as he voiced his terror and despair in an ear splitting, heart rending, inhuman scream.

A bright flash of light hit the crouching boy and suddenly the sound stopped and Sirius' ears rang with the silence even though he could see that Remus had yet to stop howling.

"Bloody hell but that little monster was making a racket. I'd be surprised if my entire house isn't awake by now." Groused a voice from behind him. Sirius whirled around and found Professor Jigger, head of Slytherin house and teacher of Potions, stood in the middle of the hallway, arms crossed and scowling down at the four of them. A strange sort of dust whirled around his feet and Sirius guessed that it must have been the remains of the boggart because the creature was nowhere to be found.

Professor Jigger asked them something, but Sirius didn't bother to reply, instead he turned back to look at Remus. He'd stopped howling and his head now hung down, his chin pressed to his chest, his whole body shivering convulsively.

Sirius reached towards him but was stopped by the professor's loud voice.

"Don't touch him, he'll attack you!" Sirius didn't even look over his shoulder as he replied "Sod off!" before slowly and gently laying a hand on Remus' shoulder. The other boy's head snapped up and he stared at Sirius with feral molten gold eyes, his lips pulling back in a silent snarl.

"Shhh, Remus, it's me...shhhh...it's okay," Sirius whispered as he held his hand out to him. He sniffed at it before nuzzling against the warm palm, and as Sirius gently ran his fingers down the side of his face. The feral light in Remus' eyes dimmed and he blinked at Sirius in confusion. "It's okay Remus, I won't let anything hurt you," he whispered softly his hand still cupping Remus' cheek.

Remus tried to say something but no sound came out so instead he leaned forward and buried his face against the fabric of Sirius' robe, silent sobs wracking his body as Sirius wrapped his arms around the him and held him close. But Sirius was soon broken from his little world that consisted of solely of comforting Remus by Professor McGonagall's shrill voice.

"What is going on here?" she asked. Sirius looked over his shoulder to see what was going on. James and Peter stood between the two professors and where he and Remus knelt on the floor and they were both talking rapidly, trying to distract the teachers from the scene behind them.

"Yes, yes, I understand that. A boggart, yes," Professor McGonagall was saying in exasperation. "But what were you four doing down here in the middle of the night?" she finally managed to ask through their babbling. They both fell silent and looked at each other helplessly, not sure what to say.

"They were probably going to play some sort of prank, maybe they even let the boggart in and got caught in their own trap?" Professor Jigger suggested as he glared down at them. Professor McGonagall walked around the other two boys to stand over Sirius and Remus.

"Are you alright Mr. Lupin?" she asked, some of her anger leeching from her tone. Remus extracted himself from Sirius embrace and tried to say something, but again no sound came out.

"Finite Incantium. I put a mute curse on him when he was wailing like a banshee," Professor Jigger said from farther down the hall. "I trust you can handle it from here Minerva?" he asked. Not waiting for an answer before he turned and headed back down the corridor. Sirius opened his mouth to try and give an explanation but Professor McGonagall cut him off.

"Don't try and explain Black, I don't want to hear it," she said in a clipped voice. "I'm sure you have some wonderfully clever lie to explain why you and your friends where marauding around the castle in the middle of the night. But there is no valid reason for you to be out of your beds, let alone out of your common room at this late hour." She led them back to Gryffindor tower and probably would have let them off rather easily...if they hadn't left the portrait propped open, revealing the 'secret' entrance to the common room for all the world to see. She was so angry she couldn't even keep her usually composed and steely voice from quivering in rage.

"Twenty, no thirty, no fifty points from Gryffindor! Each! And you all have detention for a week!" They were all too shaken to protest and quickly escaped to the safety of their dorm.

As soon as they were there, Remus curled up on his bed and pulled his covers around him looking frightened and shell shocked. Sirius was forced to sit down beside him, even if he hadn't wanted to, because Remus hadn't let go of him arm for the entire trip back from the dungeons.

"Moony, you okay?" James asked his friend worriedly, even though he didn't look that much better himself. Remus just shook his head, looking off into space.

"I've never done that before," Remus said softly, hugging Sirius' arm closer to his chest. "I was so scared, I thought it was going to eat you and I just...retreated." He shivered and looked at Sirius and it took a while for Sirius to realize that had been terrified more by his reaction than by the boggart itself. "And the only thing there to take my place was the wolf… that's never happened before outside of the night of the full moon." They all fell silent, letting the events of the night sink in. But Sirius soon found it uncomfortable and racked his brain for something to say that would ease the tension. Something that would make Remus stop staring into space like he was looking into a nightmare.

"What do you call a person who 'goes marauding'?" he asked suddenly.

"A marauder, why?" Remus said, his eyes losing a bit of their glazed look as he looked at Sirius curiously.

"I was just thinking that once we work out all the kinks that we're going to need a name for the map. It'd be boring just to call it 'the map.'" Sirius said. He really hoped he didn't sound like he was babbling, cause it felt like he was.

"So what, you want to call it 'the marauding map'?" James asked skeptically.

"I was thinking more 'The Marauder's Map' actually," Sirius said smugly. He thought it was a good name, even if the others didn't.

"Where did you get that anyway?" Peter asked. Sirius just shrugged.

"When Professor McGonagall was yelling at us, she said something about 'marauding about the castle in the dead of night.'" Apparently there was something wrong with his statement because Peter suddenly went very pale.

"Oh, no!" the tiny boy wailed. "Do you guys remember how many house points she took off?" he asked frantically. James' eyes suddenly went wide before he put his face in his hands.

"Everyone's going to kill us!"

"I thought it was only fifty," Sirius said, confused. "We've lost that much before."

"Do you ever listen when teachers are talking? She said fifty each!" James asked in exasperation.

"We've lost almost that many house points before," Sirius pointed out. "Remember that time we..." but he trailed off and looked suddenly guilty.

"The last time I remember you guys losing that many house points," Remus said, fixing Sirius with a piercing gaze that was not, quite, a glare. "Was when you and James picked me up and threw me into the lake with the giant squid. After I told you I couldn't swim." Sirius cringed.

"I am still very sorry about that. We really did think you were joking. We had no idea you'd just sink to the bottom like that," he said pleadingly. Thinking back on all that now, he had the rather strong urge to beat himself up for ever being that mean to Remus.

"Werewolves have a higher bone mass, it make it harder to float," Remus said matter-of-factly. "If Hagrid hadn't fished me out I probably would have taken up permanent residence with the mermaids."

"I really am sorry about that," Sirius said, searching Remus' expression for any trace of anger or resentment and sighed in relief as the other boy gave him a slight smile.

"I forgive you," Remus said quietly.

"We should really get some sleep," James said. "We're going to need to be rested so we can out run the angry mob tomorrow." The other three boys groaned and quickly followed James advice. Sirius attempted to stand but found he couldn't because Remus still had a death grip on his arm.

"Stay. Please," Sirius' heart started beating triple time but he forced himself to act calm as he lay down beside Remus. "I know I'm going to have nightmares and I just..."

"It's okay. I don't mind," Sirius said as he ran his free hand down Remus' cheek. Remus smiled at him and closed his eyes, within minutes he was asleep. Sirius stayed awake watching him for some time before the events of the day caught up with him and he too fell asleep.