4.
There's no day like snow day
The snow had been falling richly on the grounds of the castle for some time now, covering everything in a great big sheet of rolling white power hills. When a particularly large snowfall covered everything in an even thicker sheet of talc, a generous Headmaster Dumbledore allowed the school the day off to enjoy the winter weather. So, bedecked in cloaks, gloves and scarves, a colourful menagerie converged on the grounds or the library or the Great Hall. Meanwhile the lists were being sent around to see who would be staying over Christmas. So though the grounds were choked with snow, four mischievous first-years saw before them a glittering gold mine with a neon sign saying 'major mischief mayhem'.
Now more accustomed than anything to making mischief, James, Sirius, Peter and Remus were becoming known as the Marauders. They had taken a liking to planning elaborate schemes (the most elaborate and improbable of all tended to belong to Sirius) that had the capability of getting them into some serious trouble if they were caught. They never were. Truth be told, it was the event that night at the Quidditch pitch that had instilled in them the love of 'maraudering'.
Now, standing on the bottom stone step on the verge of a great white playground, Sirius launched himself unexpectedly at James and crash-tackled him into the snow. They rolled a fair way, the downgrade of the snowy slope carrying them pretty far. Snow flew. James wore it, his glasses askew, and tossed an unpacked handful Sirius' own face. They were so caught up in their own games that neither of them saw two balls come flying — until they connected with each head. A quick investigation revealed that the perpetrators were Remus and Peter, standing above them behind a wall of snow they'd piled up while the two black-haired boys were having it out in a snow-bound wrestle. Two balls were returned, but they ducked behind the snow wall and were missed.
"Mwahahaha!" Sirius bellowed, running full pelt at the wall and bringing it down on top of his two friends. Peter sprang up, a rather large ball of snow in his hands.
"Snow war!"
That was it. The ball got thrown, missed, and connected with the head of a retreating Hufflepuff. The boy, who was in their year, fell face flat in the snow before clambering out, glaring at them. Theodore Dwyer bent and scooped up his own fistful and pegged it ruthlessly at Sirius, who he thought was responsible. Remus sprang to his feet and kicked snow in a massive spray at the yellow and black-scarved boy, who ran off in reply. But Sirius was on his feet, the most mischievous grin on his face.
"Sirius has an idea," Remus sighed, throwing another ball to save face at James. Sirius had lifted the hems of his robes and was piling snow into them. Soon, the entire front of his robes was up and filed with the biggest, loosest snowball ever. Whoever wore that would be pulling snow out of places they didn't know they had for ages. Then Peter sat up from the snow angel he was making in the snow.
"Is that Rubelt?"
"Uh-oh," James and Remus sprang forward and grabbed Sirius around the legs as he took some uneven steps towards the Ravenclaw Seeker that he had so much tribulation with. The black-haired boy fell flat in the snow, losing his snowball in the process. He was just about to protest very loudly and attract Rubelt by another means, when suddenly a blonde Slytherin girl with a pretty face came racing over to the Seeker.
"Oh Marcellius! Wait for me!"
"Marcellius!" Sirius cried with utter euphoria. Both the Slytherin and the Ravenclaw looked and stared. James and Remus were staring and Peter was beginning to chuckle.
"Do you have a problem with that, brat?"
"What a girly name!" Peter laughed, falling backwards in the snow laughing.
"Oh Marcellius, Marcellius would you like me to do your nails for you daaaahling?" Sirius rolled over onto his back and fixed Rubelt with his glittering brown eyes. Rubelt's blue ones gleamed with unspeakable fury.
"Do you know those boys?" the Slytherin asked him. Rubelt frowned menacingly at them and turned to her.
"They're just some first-years trying to look good. Don't you worry about them, Francesca."
"Yes, don't mind us, Francesca dahling," Sirius chortled. James and Remus now made absolutely no effort to silence him. His horridly fake Yorkshire accent was more than amusing. The blonde Slytherin stared down her nose at him. She turned to Rubelt.
"He's cute. That's probably the only thing he's got between me and belting his mouth closed."
"Oh don't say that," Remus rolled his eyes and trailed off. James finally got around to fixing his glasses and laughed quite loudly.
"Isn't it unfortunate that you have to put down the first-years? Tch, tch, tch… of course, if you hadn't lost Ravenclaw 150 points a few weeks ago… can't say it would've done much for your ego. Or maybe you're still sore about that little Quidditch incident."
"I would insist that you were blushing, master Rubelt," Remus barely smirked, "But for the fact that your face still seems a little blue to me."
Rather than blue, Rubelt's face had gone white.
"I think he heard you, Remus," Peter laughed. "Hard, considering I think he may still have a bit of hair in his ears."
"Mmm," James raised a hand to his nose and waved the other in front of his face. "Seems he still has some in his nose as well."
"Marcellius, what're they talking about?" Francesca asked. The Seeker stumbled on his tongue.
"N… nothing. Come on, let's go."
"Oh so she doesn't know?" Peter laughed harder. "Was that the Curse of the Bogies, Rubelt? My commendations. It's a hard one I hear."
"Curse of the what?"
"Oh, the Curse of the Bogies, you know, where it curses you with a dirty great load of BOGIES!" Sirius enlightened her. "But I believe a Confundus hex was in good measure in reply, no Rubelt?"
"Shut… up," he snarled under his breath.
"We could go into more detail," James replied. "Would that ruin you, Marcellius?"
"Not as much as it could ruin your faces," he grated out. James waved a finger at him, clucking his tongue
"Now, now. Why don't we come to an agreement here? How about… five Galleons and we forget the whole thing happened?"
"No, four," Peter cut in. "Otherwise we wouldn't be able to split it."
"Like I really have four Galleons," Rubelt sneered in reply. Obviously Sirius didn't believe him.
"Five now, and I'll use the extra one to buy a… errrr… certain person a really good Christmas present."
"I don't have five Galleons."
"Don't pay up now and we'll make it either double or tell," Remus taunted, an out of character note in his voice. Obviously the thought of wheedling money from someone they all agreed they didn't like was a tempting prospect even to him. Francesca had fixed Rubelt with quite a strange look, and, seeing it, he reached inside his robes and pulled out a pouch.
"Look. Here's six. Buy her something nice," he pushed the six golden coins into Sirius' hands. Francesca's look melted away at the expression of sheer ecstasy on the four boy's faces. It seemed she was going to forget all about their taunts because her friend had seemingly done something wonderful for four little first-years. Rubelt on the other hand, managed to glare through his fading look of urgency.
"Stay out of my way. This won't happen again," he hissed. They all laughed and waved goodbye as he walked away. Sirius stared at the gold in his gloved hands. James, Remus and Peter leaned over his shoulders, ogling at it. He eventually sat up, cradling the coins like they were fragile china.
"Okay, one each, right?"
"Right," James agreed, taking one and flipping it in his hands, looking at the shiny dragon minted onto the metal. Remus and Peter took their coins too, looking down at the three left in Sirius' hands.
"Well, that's one for me," he murmured, pocketing one of the three coins. Then he looked long and hard at the remaining two. Remus leaned on him.
"So who's this certain someone you want to buy a nice present for?"
"Don't you know?" James smirked. "Sirius has a crush on —"
"If you know don't say it!" Sirius squealed, clamping a hand over his mouth. James responded by pushing his hand away.
"If I didn't want to see you try and impress her, I'd con you out of one of those coins. And I do love your infallible tact, Sirius. Pretending to be interested in just about every other girl in the year is so the way to get her to like you," James rolled his eyes sarcastically. "But just to be sure that you're not hoodwinking us, I think we should keep those two coins somewhere where we can all check on them from time to time."
"Fair enough," Sirius agreed. "We'll put a thief's curse on it. Remus knows how to do that, don't you Remus?"
"Yeah, kinda," he replied. Then he stood up, a lump of snow in his mittened hand. "But for now, put those away. Let's go throw some snowballs at Theodore Dwyer. He's over there talking to Marc."
"Whooooooo!" Sirius sprang to his feet and picked up two snowballs, one for each hand, and ran like a rabbit over to the Hufflepuff, slamming the two balls right into his hair. Peter, meanwhile, was making eyes for his snow angel using the perfect circle of his glittery coin.
"Who?" Remus asked James, now that Sirius had run away to torment Theodore and Marcus.
"I swore I wouldn't say."
"Oh come on, do we keep secrets?"
"I wouldn't have known if I hadn't seen it scribbled in the back of his diary, which he stupidly left open the other day while he was out stealing éclairs from Professor Dabble-gin's office."
"Oh dear," Remus sighed. "I don't know what would've been worse. The repercussions of stealing or the sugar rush that would surely have followed."
"I'd wager on the sugar," Peter sighed. "Only the sugar could possibly account for what he did to Midgeon and Figwelda."
"Where was I at this point in time, and why haven't I heard this yet?" Remus asked, confused. James laughed his reply.
"You were outside the staffroom, talking to Professor Dabble-gin about standard hexes. And then I believe you were in the library, looking up standard hexes. And if what I understand is correct, after that you were hiding behind a tapestry on the fourth floor, experimenting with those standard hexes."
Remus smirked. "What can I say? I learned a lot."
"What can I say? You missed a lot."
A snowball came flying out of nowhere and connected with James' head. Looking up, he saw Sirius had teamed up with Marcus and Theodore, and all three of them had armfuls of snowballs. One was being bounced in Marcus' gloved hand, an intensely evil expression on his face.
"You traitor!" James bellowed at Sirius, who had thrown the ball. "Get back over here you side-switching prat!"
The answer was another snowball.
"NEV-AIR!" he cried in a horrible French accent, again running the stretch between them and the other two boys, wasting all his snowballs on James alone as he emptied his entire armful onto him. Remus laughed mildly and tipped a handful of snow into Sirius' sleek, snow-spotted hair. He looked up quite suddenly.
"Did you just put snow in my hair?"
"Yeah."
"NOOOOOOOOOO!" he raised his hands to his head and wheeled around on the spot before dropping into an imitation of a dead faint in the powder, faking death. Marcus had wandered over, Theodore tagging along behind.
"He needs his shots," the Gryffindor boy told them. "I think he may be rabid."
"Or some really intense counselling," Theodore added. Marcus shook his head.
"Nah. I put my money on rabid."
"Did I hear money?" Sirius suddenly came back to life, but James kicked snow over him.
"Stay dead. You've scabbed enough money off people today."
He stayed dead still on his back for a while, watching the rest of the grounds upside down while his other friends had a chat over the top of him. Marcus looked over their shoulders at Peter, who was now detailing his snow angel's face.
"Hey Pettigrew, play in the snow like a real man," he brought up one of his snowballs and threw it at him, but missed. Peter turned back to his snow angel. "Sissy," Marcus snorted. "Should'a been in Hufflepuff. Oh, no offence intended, Theo."
The Hufflepuff boy had begun to glare, but it faded. Marcus sniggered and turned to the Marauders again.
"That prank in the common room last week was a classic. How do you think up these things?"
"He usually does," James replied, giving the suddenly rather comatose Sirius a nudge with his foot. "He's the mad one, you see. But I'm not going to spill the dynamics of this team, sorry Marc."
"A good entertainer never reveals his secrets."
"Exactly."
"What on earth was Sirius on when he pulled it, though?" Marcus was curious. Remus sniggered.
"Éclairs, or so I hear…"
"What's wrong with him?" Theodore asked suddenly, looking down at Sirius' snow-covered, prostrate form lying in the middle of the close circle they had made. "Is he suddenly… sick?"
"No," Peter sighed, from where he was sitting making a snow wall around him. They could only see the top of his blonde head. "He finished off the éclairs this morning. I think he's coming down off his sugar high."
"That sure does explain a fair bit," Theodore murmured. Suddenly though, as if triggered by Theodore's words, Sirius rolled over and sprang to his feet, sprinting away across the grounds. "And where's he going?"
"Oh," Remus squinted to see what Sirius was doing over the other side of the white lawn. "Of course."
"What?" James peered over. "Oh. Girls."
"Not just any girls," Marcus sniggered, "Our girls."
"Oh leave him alone, at least he's tormenting something else," Peter laughed from behind his snow wall. Remus looked at him.
"What are you doing, Peter?"
A snowball flew and smacked Marcus in the head.
"Playing in the snow like a real man!" he cried and jumped up, pelting them with snowballs.
(Who's this certain someone Sirius speaks of?
What will our boys do over the Christmas break?
Will Professor Dabble-gin *ever* be able to eat éclairs in peace?
And where *is* that Severus Snape? All this and more in
Chapter 5: The Owl, the Slytherin and the Invisibility Cloak)
