Note: Once again there are spoilers for Without a Trace in this chapter.
I am considering a NAME CHANGE. Despite being very fond of my current pen name that I have been using for various Internet-related things for near on a decade, I have decided, for reasons that I will not bore you with, that I might need a new name. If anybody finds this rather traumatic news and wants to make sure they can still get hold of me on , please feel free to PM me and I will make sure to let you know what the new name is, if and when I choose it. I would also like to know of any suggestions for a new name, as I myself am not terribly creative when it comes to such things! Come on people, let's hear some suggestions!
Disclaimer: I do not own Harry Potter, nor am I making any profit from this piece of writing.
2: A Bit of Harmful Fun
"This," Chester announced as he flicked through the pages of the Marauders' Handbook yet again as he sat beside Teddy upon the metamorphmagus' four poster bed, "is going to be the coolest thing ever!"
As he reached to snatch the book from his best friend's grasp, Teddy could not help but grin rather smugly. As he began to examine a page at random, frowning at the sight of bizarre diagrams of...well he wasn't sure what, and scribbled words that he had to squint to make out, he leant back against his pillows with a frown.
"I figured it was some sort of diary," he told Chester, who scooted up next to him to peer at the pages. "But I dunno...it's just a load of notes about stuff..."
"It's bound to be cool stuff though," Chester insisted as the two of them studied a strange squiggly line that had been carefully drawn upon the page, one end labeled start and the other finish. "I mean the Marauders' Map's just a scrappy old piece of parchment...except it isn't, it's actually totally wicked! This is bound to be the same."
Teddy turned a page and found himself looking at another squiggly line that looked rather like a tick. Still clueless, he squinted at the words below, all accompanied by a large X, save for the last that had been circled in red ink.
"Wadda Wassa, Woddi Wozzi..."
"What on earth are you babbling about?" Chester interrupted, but Teddy ignored him and continued to read aloud.
"Waddi Wossi...Waddiwasi!" Abruptly, Teddy sat bolt upright, a look of sheer triumph upon his face. "Ches, that's it!" he cried excitedly, scrambling to snatch up his wand from his bedside table. "Look, that's a diagram of a wand movement, start here..." he held his wand out in demonstration, "and there...flick!" His demonstration was so enthusiastic that he managed to catapult his wand off in the direction of his trunk, but he made no move to retrieve it. "And look! These are incantations they tried out, until this last one, the one that works, I know that spell, my Dad made it up when he was at school! Look, there!" He thrust the book towards Chester and jabbed a finger at the bottom of the page. Elaborately written as if it were some sort of autograph was written: MOONY.
"So..." Chester said slowly, eyes gradually widening as he stared at the signature. "This is...this is like...a handwritten spell book that your Dad and his mates wrote when they were at school...?"
Teddy's sudden excited laughter as he bounced up and down upon the bed was confirmation enough. Chester sucked in a deep breath.
"Bloody hell..." he breathed, cracking a grin.
The two boys waited until the rest of the Gryffindors had gone to bed, before creeping down into the darkened common room with the little book, sitting down upon a sofa by the fire with matching grins and barely contained excitement.
"So..." Chester said, hands fidgeting in his lap as he watched Teddy open the book at a random page. "Which one shall we try first?"
It had not taken the two boys long to conclude that sleep would be beyond them that night, at least until they had tried out a spell or two. Or three...four...
"I dunno..." Teddy mused, frowning down at a particularly complicated looking diagram. "Maybe...maybe we should start near the front? I mean...maybe those will be the easiest ones, if they came up with them first."
"Good idea," Chester agreed, and he shuffled closer so that he could look over Teddy's shoulder. Teddy turned to the first page after the title.
"How to grow Wormtail a sense of humour...signed by Prongs, Padfoot and Moony. We laugh in the face of a normal tickling jinx!" the Marauder's son read aloud, squinting through the dim light of the darkening room. "Okay...so...start here..." Holding the book carefully in one hand he raised his wand. "Then...you sort of...wave it back and forward like this..."
"I'll be Wormtail!" Chester offered enthusiastically, jumping to his feet. He stood before Teddy, grinning in what Teddy supposed was a rather foolish manner, but he was too consumed by anticipation to give what they were doing much thought.
Besides, Teddy thought as he cleared his throat, ready to read the incantation, it's not exactly dangerous. It's just a bunch of spells created by some students, it's just a bit of fun, it won't do any harm...
"Haharmora!" Teddy said clearly, aiming at Chester's stomach and giving his wand a definite wave back and forth.
He halted abruptly when Chester clamped his arms across his belly and gave a loud shout of laughter.
"That TICKLES!" the boy shrieked, falling to his knees and then onto his side, rolling about in absolute hysterics.
"Shhh!" Teddy cried, dropping down beside him and reaching to clamp a hand over his best friend's mouth. "You want to wake the whole castle?"
Chester took some time to suppress his sudden fit of magic-induced giggles, only for the look of amusement upon Teddy's face to set the both of them off, laughing like a pair of loons.
"Another one!" Chester cried, sitting up and making a lunge for the sofa where Teddy had dropped the book. "Do another one!"
Teddy hurriedly snatch up the book and turned the the next page.
"How to cure Prongs of Lily-induced moping, signed by Padfoot and Wormtail. Notes: This is going to freak Moony out when he gets back from visiting his mother. He needs it more than Prongs does..."
The cure for Lily-induced moping, Teddy and Chester discovered, was a truly freaky jinx that forced one's mouth to curve into an unnaturally large and overall quite alarming grin. It took some while for Teddy to manage the counter-jinx that had been scrawled on the edge of the page, as if it were a mere after thought. Despite his throbbing jaw, Chester was keen to try a third spell. Teddy offered him the book and took his friend's place as the test dummy, decidedly a little more apprehensive that Chester had been.
"How to wake up Moony," Chester read keenly as he sat down upon the sofa, "signed by Padfoot, Prongs and Wormtail. Notes: Because you sleep way too much and we refuse to skip breakfast yet again in order to drag you out of bed. Flooing to your mother's and back in one day is not an excuse for being a lazy prat."
As Teddy felt an odd mixture of amusement and sadness at this comment, Chester raised his wand and cleared his throat.
A split second later Teddy felt a blast of cold water strike him directly in the face, he stumbled backwards with a gasp and reached to clamp his hands over his eyes. When he finally thought it safe to lower them a a moment later, water dripping down his face as he blinked at Chester, bewildered, his friend suddenly pointed a finger at his face and burst out laughing.
"What?" Teddy cried, reaching to run his hands over his face self-consciously. "What is it?"
Chester closed the book with a snap and, words seemingly beyond him as he continued to chuckle, he grabbed Teddy by the arm and dragged him back towards their dormitory. He proceeded to lead Teddy over to a dresser and point at the mirror, still struggling not to laugh as he tried not to wake up their fellow third years.
Holding his breath in anticipation, Teddy shuffled up to the mirror and squinted at his reflexion. Upon his forehead, he discovered, were clustered numerous droplets of water, arranged neatly into letters. They read: PRAT.
"Wow!" he breathed, impressed by the spell. Chester still sniggered, however, as he reached to try and wipe the droplets away. As soon as they had been displaced, however, the droplets rematerialized.
"There isn't a spell to get rid of it." Chester announced, and Teddy rounded on him, heart beginning to race.
"What?" he hissed, feeling his hair tinge orange.
"I said there isn't a spell to get rid of it."
"Liar! Give me the book!" Teddy lunged forwards, only for Chester to jump away from him. With a laugh that sounded more like a high pitched squeal, Chester made a run for the staircase, Teddy hot on his heels.
"Give it back, Ches!"
"Nope!"
"Give it back, it's mine!"
"Actually I think you'll find it belongs to your Dad..."
"Ches-ter!"
"Oh just you wait! The look on his face when you walk into Defense tomorrow with PRAT written across your forehead..." At that moment Teddy caught up with Chester, barging into him and knocking the pair of them to the floor. They began a desperate struggle over the book and it was not for several minutes that Chester managed to send it skidding across the floor and under an arm chair, leaving both boys to pause and stare after it.
Chester yawned.
"Actually it says it wears off after about ten minutes. I reckon we should call it a night." he murmured as Teddy got to his hands and knees and crawled over the the arm chair. "I'm knackered, and we've got Quidditch practice tomorrow."
Muttering irritably about their Quidditch captain, Cassandra Wood, who would never be satisfied until her team shunned all manner of free time in order to practice for their upcoming match, Teddy retrieved the book and the two boys headed to bed. Teddy hoped Chester had not been lying about the spell wearing off.
Sleep, Teddy discovered the next morning as he sat at the Gryffindor table, sleepily studying the front page of the new Daily Prophet, had done nothing to dull Chester's enthusiasm for Marauder spells.
"I can't wait for lessons to finish!" the muggle-born announced as he slopped a generous amount of jam upon his toast. "It's gonna be so much fun!"
Teddy shot him a grin as he examined a small article in one corner of the paper, praising the Ministry's rapid response to a bright green fire that had broken out at a large family wedding, much to the horror the the wedding guests, not to mention the large crowd of muggles who had caught sight of the event. He was just about to find out what had started the fire, when he heard footsteps come to a halt behind him and a voice asked:
"Have you finished reading that?"
"Near enough." Teddy said, twisting in his seat so that he could hold the paper out for his father to take.
"Great," Remus said, accepting the paper with a smile of thanks. He did not get the chance to say another word, however, for somebody further up the table had called his name. He turned and strode off towards the source of the noise.
"C'mon," Teddy said, reaching to snatch up Chester's last piece of toast. "Let's get out of here before Cassandra catches sight of us. She might want to try and cram in half an hour's practice before lessons start."
Thankfully, lessons started before Cassandra Wood could track the two Gryffindor beaters down. Less pleasing was the fact that each lesson the two boys found themselves in that day seemed determined to drag on for even longer than the one beforehand. By the time they reached Herbology, their last lesson of the day, Teddy was beginning to think that the evening would never come and Chester was terribly fidgety and irritable. When it finally was time for dinner, they practically sprinted to the Great Hall and shoveled their dinner down their throats in record time, unconcerned when it burnt their tongues and made their stomachs clench in protest. Teddy was just guzzling some pumpkin juice when Chester hastily snatched the goblet away from his lips, splashing juice all over his robes.
"Quick!" Chester hissed before Teddy could voice his annoyance. "It's Cassandra!"
Teddy instantly abandoned his fork, and the two of them got hastily to their feet before making a dash for the double doors.
"Hold it, Burton!" a commanding voice demanded just as they were about to escape into the Entrance Hall. As they came to a halt, Chester audibly groaning, Teddy spun round to face their Quidditch Captain with a forced smile.
"Hi Cass!" he greeted cheerily, voice the model of innocence.
Apparently Cassandra Wood was not fooled in the slightest.
"Are you both avoiding me, Ted?" she asked, armed folded firmly across her chest in a manner that made Teddy wonder why she was bothering to ask; she had clearly already deduced that they was doing exactly that.
"Of course not!" The denial left his lips before he could give his reply much thought, and Teddy knew it was a waste of a breath.
"Don't you want Gryffindor to win?" she continued, stamping her foot in furious emphasis. "Do you realize just how lucky we are to have the pitch booked so often?"
"Yeah, it's fantastic." Chester announced, and Teddy cringed at just how poorly hidden his sarcasm was. When they finally escaped Cassandra's clutches some five minutes later, both boys were feeling less than cheery.
"I want to kill your dad." Chester muttered as they climbed the stairs to Gryffindor Tower. "This is all his fault."
Teddy gave a half-hearted chuckle. He had become far from fond of any jokes regarding his father's death over the past few weeks, after Remus' near fatal run in with a group of former Death Eaters and a bottle of poison. It was difficult to laugh about such matters having watched your father lie motionlessly in a hospital bed, knowing that his lungs, choked by poison, could give up on him at any moment. The werewolf had seemingly made a reasonable recovery, but he did seem prone to coughing and it did not escape Teddy's notice that the energetic chaos and madness of Saturday morning Dueling Club often left his father gasping for breath.
That evening, Teddy and Chester discovered how to ruin Padfoot's hair with a spurt of foul smelling gunge, how to show Gryffindor pride by conjuring a sparkling gold lion that floated around the room, and how to add a Slytherin snake to the display and watch the lion chase it around the room.
As the snake was finally trapped in the lion's shimmering jaws, causing them both to explode in a shower of sparks, Chester snatched up the Marauder's Handbook and opened it to the last entry, some three quarters of the way through the book.
"Let's do this one!" he exclaimed excitedly, as Teddy leant over the back of his chair to peer at the page.
"What's it called?" Teddy asked, squinting at the complicated wand movement.
"I dunno," Chester told him, "it doesn't have a title. But...it's signed by Moony."
"What does it do?"
"No idea."
Teddy pursed his lips together thoughtfully.
"I'm not sure, Ches," he admitted, reaching to scratch his head. "Dad always says you shouldn't try out spells if you don't know what they're supposed to do..."
"Don't be silly, Teddy!" Chester cried excitedly, jumping to his feet. "Your Dad wouldn't make up anything dangerous, would he?"
Teddy frowned.
"Well...no...I guess not..."
At his friend's uncertainty, Chester rolled his eyes.
"Tell you what," he said, holding the book out for Teddy to take. "Let's just aim at an object, like a chair or something. That way if it is a bit dodgy, it won't hurt anybody."
This suggestion made Teddy feel a little more confident.
"Well...alright then." he decided, reaching to pull the wand from his pocket. He took a few moments to memorize the wand movement, a strange rather jagged lines, before clearing his throat loudly and aiming at a chair beside the dormitory staircase. Chester watching keenly from his side, the boy drew in a deep breath and declared:
"Inferliticas!"
And with that, to the complete and utter horror of both boys, the Gryffindor common room burst into flames.