AN: This is written for The Golden Snitch, Halloween Costume Contest, Dress-Up Challenge. The prompt is: Write from the perspective of someone other than Harry Potter cleaning out Grimmauld place. I'm in Hogwarts, Slytherin.
Fred and I got lucky, and were paired to clean the attic out of Sirius' childhood home, Grimmauld Place. I was actually genuinely shocked that they allowed us to have free reign of a whole room in this old infested house with no supervision.
It made sneaking off the stuff to experiment with our jokes that much easier. Looking around, there was a lot of stuff to go through, but we were grateful for this once in a lifetime chance and got to work.
First, we organized everything into three major piles. The first was obviously trash items; dead rats, moldy clothes, and the general items of the sort.
The second pile consisted of the boring junk. It held the family records, regular clothing, and even some old family wands.
The last pile was the literal jackpot. It held cursed items, potions ingredients, and dusty old tomes that probably hadn't been opened in centuries. We went through that pile first, just in case mum changed her mind and sent someone up to guard, I mean help us out. We shrunk all of the books, wrapped them up in some old fabric, and then put said items into a box for our pocket.
We then took a chance, hoping there was enough Magical signatures going around that the Ministry wouldn't detect our wands. And we used diagnostic spells to help sort out the cursed items. They mainly held instant death, or some nefarious torture methods, and we put those into a special pile. Later moving it into a magical bag to throw out.
The potions ingredients were the easiest to sort. We threw out all of the expired items, and Fred put the rest into his own shrunken rucksack. Finally, we reached what we were really looking forward too. It was an old locked trunk, that a simple alohamora would not unlock. When varying methods of opening the trunk did not work, we took a chance and shrunk it, before putting in our bag, to look at later.
We then put all of the trash near the door, and organized the attic, since if mum checked, she would trust us to clean out more on our own. We put the family history items in one corner, clothes in the other, and then just the house decorations were left to put in a third corner. I then used a spell to attract all of the dirt into one area, and then used magic to get it into one of the trash bags.
Hurrying up and bringing all of the trash down, we snuck off to our room to try to open the trunk. Trying everything from blasting spells and slashing hexes, which none of them worked.
Hearing a knock at the door, they threw a sheet over the trunk and announced they could come in. Seeing that it was only Sirius, they told him about the trunk and how they've tried everything to open it.
"Of course not, boys! Knowing my family, it probably requires a drop of Black blood on the lock to open it. Hold on," explained Sirius, before slicing his finger and placing it onto the trunk's lock.
Standing back, and healing his finger, we all watched as the trunk popped open, letting loose an extremely foul smell. Sirius then used his wand to full open the lid, and all three of us peeked inside.
There was nothing except a entombed House Elf Body, and a single book containing information on House Elf magic.
Letting out a sigh, I explained, "Well, we could still learn something from the book at least. Do you mind if we keep it?" With an affirmative from Sirius, he unknowingly led us to the creation of our patented day-dream charms, and in his memory, we created one centered on Animagi forms.