Summary: Basically the story of the Marauder's Map, told from Remus's POV through a series of flashbacks as he looks at it after having confiscated it from Harry and Ron in the Third Book.
I look down at the blank piece of parchment sitting on my desk. It has been there for weeks, and I've not yet worked up the courage to access it, to access the souls of four lost boys it holds.
It had started out as a joke, James mentioning that I should have a map of Hogwarts to carry with me since I probably got lost walking across our own dorm room. Peter had seized onto the idea, and before we knew it we were spending all our free time working on it. It was shortly after that that Sirius made his first successful transformation, and James had his the next day. Three weeks later, Peter made it in time for the upcoming full moon and the map truly blossomed as we explored the grounds, the forest, and the village every month.
When the moon wasn't full, we experimented with the secret passages, exploring every nook and cranny of the castle by night under James's cloak, Peter always transforming for these excursions as Sirius sprouted up and it became tight for the four of us under there. But we didn't find out everything on our own. We also talked to anyone and everyone. It was our belief that, as many secrets as the castle held, every one was known by at least one student. And so we accumulated an unprecedented knowledge of the ins and outs of the Hogwarts castle, and recorded it all.
I'm not sure I want to unlock the memories that are stored inside such an ordinary-looking object. With a hand that trembles slightly, I reach for my wand. "I solemnly swear I am up to no good," I say hoarsely, my voice cracking.
We had come up with the idea of a failsafe, a access sentence, the day that Frank Longbottom almost caught us with it, when Sirius left it lying around. It was I that found the spell in a book somewhere, it was James that actually performed it, then Peter came up with a sentence to start the map's magic, and Sirius came up with one to wipe it blank lest everyone see the secrets. That had also been the day that we cast a second spell on the map, to protect it from one pair of prying eyes in particular. We hadn't even been sure that it had worked, as it showed no physical signs, and was a very difficult spell anyway. I had forgotten about it completely until I walked into Severus's office one day and had seen the results staring me in the face.
Sirius's familiar spidery handwriting spreads across the page, spelling out our nicknames.
There had never been any doubt that it would be Sirius who would write the map. His handwriting, while never particularly neat, especially when he was in a hurry, was nonetheless the smallest. And, when he wasn't in a hurry, he could forge almost anyone's handwriting.
He never even bothered to ask his parents to sign his Hogsmeade form, just went right ahead and forged his father's signature so well even McGonagall never questioned it. He could fool the sharp-eyed Madame Pince into letting us get a wide assortment of books on Animagity out of the restricted section with forms 'signed' by various teachers. If he wanted, Sirius could make his handwriting as small and as neat as possible, so he was the one elected to write out everything from our names to the little labels for all those moving dots.
Moony. In a way, the young, carefree boy who cruised through life living each day as his last who I had once been was as far gone as James and Peter. Moony. I remembered well the day that they christened me with my nickname.
What I don't remember is the revelation that they knew my secret. It definitely happened, sometime early in our Second Year. When they told me the look on my face must have given me away. I turned and ran, fighting tears. Just when I had finally found friends… well, I wouldn't blame them if they never spoke to me again.
I successfully managed to avoid talking to them at all for three days, waking up long before them, going to bed after they were already asleep, and spending all my waking hours in a back corner of the library. Finally, they caught up to me there, as I was working on my Transfiguration essay.
As soon as James sat down next to me, I stuffed my books in my bag and started to stand up. But then Sirius sat down on my other side, muttered something, and I found myself completely unable to move, as if there were invisible ropes binding me to the chair. Peter plunked down across from me. "If we have to hex you to get you to listen to us, then that's what we'll do," he stated calmly.
"Look," I said bitterly, "I know what you're going to say, and I've heard it all before. I understand perfectly well that I'm a murderer and a monster and that I don't deserve to live and that I should just go throw myself in the lake now and save the world a lot of trouble, so you don't have to inform me ––" Three identical looks of horror in hazel, blue, and grey eyes stopped me dead.
"Remus – " James started, "Well, I have no idea where you got the idea that we want you to throw yourself into the lake; actually we'd rather you didn't, because then we'd have no one to copy History of Magic notes from, and frankly we don't give a damn where you go off to every month, except that I think that it doesn't speak very highly of us that you felt you had to lie to us because you thought we would abandon a friend over something as trivial as his being a werewolf –– so you're stuck with us ."
I sat there for a long moment, completely stunned. The idea that they would just disregard something like that so casually, that they would not only not hate me but continue to being my friend –
"Hellooo, earth to Moony? Anyone there?" Sirius, who was infamously impatient, broke in after a few seconds.
"What did you call me?" I asked, struggling to find my voice through my shock.
"Moony. Head in the clouds, mind off somewhere, impossibly dreamy, yet you always manage to have the answer to whatever the teacher asks you, plus the whole moon thing…" He explained. We all stared at him for a second. He grinned, shrugging. James rolled his eyes.
Peter piped up, "I just had an idea! You know how McGonagall was talking about our eventually studying Animagi, and – "
Just then, Madam Pince had come over and kicked us all out for talking and using magic in the library.
It is painful to watch the next name appear. Wormtail. The less talented one. The one that was always one step behind the rest of us. He died a hero's death, showing more foolish courage than I would have thought him capable of. Wormtail.
James had been the one that had finally found the book. He had been reading it on his bed, occasionally finding something interesting and reading it aloud to us.
"Hey, guys, listen to this: whatever animal you turn into is determined by your personality. There's a whole chart here to help you determine what you will be beforehand."
"What! You watch, we're all going to end up being totally useless things, like worms or something," predicted Sirius gloomily.
"A little optimism never killed anyone," Peter said, straight-faced, "Personally, I think we would all make very nice worms."
But after that we jokingly referred to their work in the Animagi transformations as "the Worm Thing," especially when around other people. Later, when they actually got around to filling out all of the questions and casting the complex spells, it ceased to be "the worm thing." Now we knew that Sirius would be a dog, James a stag, and Peter a rat.
The long-awaited day when Peter first transformed finally came. He was the one who had had the most interesting things happen to him while attempting it, but finally, one day while we were sitting there in our dorm room, studying, (actually, I was the only one who was really getting any work done) there was a small pop, and where Peter had been was a large grey rat. We all turned and stared when Sirius started laughing hysterically.
"Peter has a worm tail!" he said.
The name stuck.
Padfoot. Padfoot was as dead as James and Peter, if not in such a physical sense. For the boy that had played with us, laughed with us, had done everything with us, never leaving James's side, had been muted out, leaving just Sirius Black behind. Besides, two of the only three people ever to call him that were dead, killed by his own hand. Padfoot.
Padfoot. An enormous black dog that haunted lonely Yorkshire roads. Supposedly the phantom would loom out of the mist and attack lone travelers. Like the legend, Sirius would appear out of nowhere, suddenly standing right beside you without a sound or a hint of his presence.I'm not sure who first compared him to a Padfoot, only that he loved the idea. When we came back from Christmas holiday in our fifth year, he was clutching a book called Death Omens: What to Do When You Know the Worst is Coming that had a picture on the cover of a Grim that could have been him. After that, he was always 'Padfoot' to us. Lily pointed out years later that the name suggested quiet, which Sirius wasn't, but we left it be.
The heading finished with one last name. Prongs. James, who had died protecting his wife and child, died knowing that he had been betrayed by his best friend. James, who had left behind a boy whose eyes looked too old for his face, who relived the day he was orphaned around dementors and believed himself to be weak because of it. Prongs.
Although we all made our contributions to the map, and we had all contributed to its drawing and writing, it was only fitting that the piece of parchment upon which it was drawn was James's. Though Sirius and I, and maybe Peter and I, might have become friends without his help, he was the one that had brought us together.
Peter had arrived on the platform knowing no spells and fearful that it was just as his parents had feared, and he was, in fact, a squib. He had left his parents for the first time uncertain and afraid. I had quietly stepped through the barrier overwhelmed by the mere fact that I was with so many people of my age for the first time in my life, and planning to keep my head and my voice down and be sure to be wallpaper to everyone else, lest any friends I might make discover my secret. Sirius sauntered onto the train with his elegant hair hiding the bruise on his cheek and his fake smile hiding his uncertainty and fear. He wasn't at all sure where his life was going at that point, what with his family whispering one thing in one ear as his conscience whispered something completely different in his other ear.
We had all sat in the same compartment, glad to have found people of our year. For the first fifteen minutes of the train ride, there was silence as I read a book, Peter stared at the floor, and Sirius gazed intently out of the window as if the meaning of life was flashing by out there on the boring British countryside.
Just then, the door opened, and in stepped James Potter. As much as we were set out to be unpopular, this kid was built for popularity. He was a rich, smart, athletic, confident, attractive, charismatic pureblood that was out to conquer the school one teacher at a time. After he sat down with us, he started a conversation and we truly started to become friends.
James was the one that held us together. When Sirius was being cruelly sarcastic to Peter, James was the one that got him cooled down. When I snapped and started yelling at Sirius, James was the one that got between us. I never realized just how much we took his quiet, powerful leadership for granted until his death tore us apart like there never was a Moony, Wormtail, Padfoot, or Prongs.
The first rough outline of the map began to appear, drawn by Peter in an elegant hand.
Peter was the artist among us. He could sit there for hours and draw anything . Once, when I looked over his notes, I found them utterly illegible. The margins were so filled with doodles the text was almost blocked out. But what was really strange was what some of the doodles were of. When I asked Peter about it, he explained to me with the air of someone trying to make a Kindergartener understand a simple concept that they were sketches of various objects from a rat's point of view.
Peter had made these outlines before we even knew that this was going to be anything beyond an ordinary Muggle map of the castle. It turned out that he had a natural talent for cartography, as such the map turned out very accurate and well-proportioned. Many an afternoon was spent with me reading, Sirius talking to whoever would listen, James flirting with Lily (or any other girl who was at least passably attractive and standing in his general vicinity, for that matter) and Peter up to his elbows in ink and parchment, setting down the castle in two dimensions with laborious detail.
Next were the details of all the rooms in the castle, flourishing across the paper in midnight ink – with a few exceptions.
There were a small handful of blind spots on the map. We had never gotten around to drawing the inside of Hagrid's house, having only been in there once, and there were certain parts of the dungeons, especially near the Slytherin common room, that had been made unplottable. And then there were the spots where we weren't quite sure what to draw. Thanks to James's spell, we could show moving staircases and changing doors however they were at the time.
But we hit a major roadblock at the Room of Requirement. How were we to show a room that, depending on who was using it, was as small as a cramped, stuffy broom cupboard or as massive as the Storage Room, as we referred to the place where we had once temporarily hidden James's cloak? It was a source of heated debate, but we had finally left it off altogether. There were also places that were off the edge of the map. We had never considered trying to map Hogsmeade or the forest, but we'd had vague plans of extending it a little, at least to include the forest as deep in as the first few clearings and the Shrieking Shack, but had never gotten around to it.
Now the people had started to appear. The tiny, moving dots were drawn with my quill and labeled in Sirius's hand, living in a world sketched by Peter, but it was James who had brought them to life.
He had not, in fact, found the spell in a book. He had made it up himself. The original spellwork had simply allowed us to fit seven main floors with many sprawling wings, four subbasement floors of dungeons, and many towers with more floors than I cared to think about on one normal-sized piece of parchment. The floor that you were looking at was usually the only one you could see in any detail, the other ones fading but still remaining visible. Also, certain areas magnified slightly depending on how hard the user was focusing on them.
The next layer of spells prevented overcrowding. Depending on the intentions of the user, the map didn't show certain areas like the common rooms and the Great Hall if they were full of people, but if you scanned the map quickly looking for a certain person, then their name will quickly jump into focus if they were anywhere on the map at all, including aforementioned areas.
The next layer was the one that made the people move, and one of the more amazing ones was the spell that gave the mischief-maker holding the map instructions on how to access some of the areas and tips on certain spells. (i.e. "Waddiwasi," which appeared in minute print whenever the user encountered Peeves, a spell that I myself had invented.)
The spell that I came up with was one that made sure that the map showed your true name and form, despite however you may have disguised yourself on at the time in reality. When we were transformed, it still showed us as being human, and the invisibility cloak, while it showed on the map that we were under it, we still showed up as loud and clear as ever.
The final spells were the ones that made the map able to update itself, instantly recognizing and labeling anyone new the first time they entered its boundaries, and what was responsible for the fact that my office now read was now labeled with my name, not the name of our seventh-year Defense Against the Dark Arts teacher.
I scanned the map, a small, reminiscent smile on my lips. I hadn't seen the map in almost sixteen years, since our seventh year at Hogwarts.
We come to an important decision two weeks before our graduation. The map would be of no use to us once we left Hogwarts, and it would be selfish to just keep it. We decided to pass it on to a future generation of Hogwarts students. So, the day after our N.E.W.Ts ended, we took out the map with a great deal of ceremony and all placed our wand tips on it. "We solemnly swear we are up to no good," we all whispered together.
We left a note on the back of it, which only appeared when someone managed to make the rest of the map appear for the first time.
To Whom It May Concern:
Congratulations on finding the Marauder's Map. We do hope that this comes in useful for you and is a valuable aid in all mischief-making activities. If ever you find you have no more need for this map, or if you know of another up-and-coming rule-breaker in need of our assistance, kindly pass this map on to said parties, as we have done for you. Good luck in not getting caught!
Your Fellow Mischief-Makers,
Messrs. Moony, Wormtail, Padfoot, and Prongs
We said a ceremonial good-bye to the project of our youth, and searched out Filch. We positioned ourselves in a place where he couldn't help but pass us, and all bent our heads over it, whispering conspiratorially. When we could hear him coming up behind us, James pulled out his wand.
"Mischief managed, ol' friend, mischief well and truly managed. Good-bye," he whispered as we watched the ink fade one last time. Filch, seeing the four students who held the record for most detentions in seven years in Hogwarts history all bending over an object together, hurried over to us.
"Black. Potter. What's that you've got there?" he demanded.
"Nothing, Mr. Filch, just a bit of parchment," said Sirius, looking as innocent as a puppy while the rest of us made a show of trying to hide the paper from sight.
"Let me see that," he snarled, swiping the map out of James's hands. He folded it roughly and stuffed it in his pocket.
As he turned to go, Peter turned to me. "Hope he blows himself up with that. Probably thinks that it's just a piece of paper," he whispered, loud enough that he knew Filch would hear.
Filch flinched visibly and hurried away a little faster, ducking into a secret passageway. "That was brilliant, Peter!" I laughed, "He's probably going to treat it like a bomb now."
The next day, Sirius purposely tracked mud on the Great Hall floor just as Filch was walking in. He got dragged down to Filch's office, exactly what he had been intending. James dropped a bunch of dungbombs directly over his head. While Filch was distracted, Sirius searched his office. He emerged looking triumphant. "He's got it in the 'Confiscated and Highly Dangerous' drawer," he said proudly.
"Excellent!" James grinned. We made it a point to go though the contents of this drawer whenever we could, because some...interesting... stuff had been found there. "He should really put the stuff that is highly dangerous in a drawer with a less enticing name. Someone's bound to find it there!"
I abruptly stopped reminiscing, and searched the map for Harry, Ron, and Hermione. There they were, walking closely together under James's cloak.
James had gotten that cloak from his father, in his first year. Under it, we had explored the ins and outs of the castle in complete safety. We had been able to "check out" whatever books we wanted from the Restricted Section in order to use to find out about Animagi when even Madame Pince was getting suspicious of the number of permission forms Sirius had to forge.
After we had given up the map, James had sat us all down and asked us if we really thought we needed the cloak anymore, now that we were leaving school. After a lot of debate, (Sirius was all for keeping it just in case) we took it up to Dumbledore's office.
He had looked surprised when we had come in, seeing as the last time we were there had been after Sirius's little "prank" on Snape. "Come in," he had said in that same calm voice with which he said everything.
"Professor, I think you know that I have an invisibility cloak, and, seeing as I won't need it much anymore after I leave school," James began slowly.
"Ah, yes, you won't need it after there is no more need to sneak past Mr. Filch at night," Dumbledore responded, smiling. The teachers always had favored us, as we were four of the brightest boys in the school, despite our reputation.
"I was wondering if, maybe, someday, when my son or daughter comes here, if you could let me have it back, so that I could give it to them before their first day at Hogwarts." James placed the cloak on Dumbledore's desk.
"Of course, I'm perfectly willing, Mr. Potter, but I really think you'll be needing it in the upcoming years," Dumbledore said, his blue eyes twinkling mysteriously. "Rest assured, in the unlikely event that you are unable to give it to your child yourself, I will be sure to do so." Dumbledore smiled and pushed the cloak back to James, who accepted it silently.
We all wandered back out of his office once more, to go get ready to graduate, and the first day of the rest of our lives.
As I watched, they went into Hagrid's cabin and disappeared from sight. I waited a few minutes, holding my breath as the minister, Dumbledore, and the executioner drew closer and closer to his house and still the children had not emerged. They hurried out his back door suddenly, and I blinked. There were four names huddled together under the cloak now, Harry Potter, Ronald Weasley, Hermione Granger, and Peter Pettigrew!
We had considered labeling the dots that indicated each of us with our nicknames, since it was our map, but Sirius had shot down the idea.
"If, Merlin forbid, someone were to pick up the map and see the names at the top, how long would it take someone to figure out who the dots with our names on them corresponded with, and figure out that the map was ours? We want this to be as anonymous as possible. To an outsider, our names should look no different than anyone else's." he argued.
"Yeah, I guess so," Peter, who had suggested it, reluctantly agreed.
For this same reason, we didn't include the Shrieking Shack on the map, and made no special marks on the passageway leading to it. Our closest friends (besides each other, of course) could have used the map for years and never figured out who Messrs. Moony, Wormtail, Padfoot, and Prongs were.
I remembered Ron mentioning that he had a pet rat, but I had never imagined… The children carried Peter up to the castle. He was struggling the whole way. As I stared, transfixed, he broke away form Ron and bolted into the night. I quickly saw the reason why. There were two more dots, both flying toward him, labeled "Crookshanks" and ––– "Sirius Black."
Sirius grabbed Ron, now holding Peter, and dragged him under the still-thrashing Whomping Willow. Wise, I thought. That way Harry and Hermione couldn't follow as quickly, but then Crookshanks froze the Willow and the other two dashed after their friend.
I had to get to Sirius, before either he or Harry did something stupid. As I sprinted through the castle, almost knocking Professor McGonagall over, the irony of the situation occurred to me: I had opened the map with every intention of protecting Harry Potter from Sirius Black, and now I was rushing off to protect Sirius Black from Harry Potter. I took a deep breath and ran out onto the grounds, praying that the moon had not yet risen.