Chapter 41: Black Memories
A/N: Just a reminder that Severus Snape's birthday, Jan. 9, will be here soon. Be sure to celebrate with your favorite beverage or treat. For myself, I'm going to indulge in Dark chocolate (Mwah ha ha ha!).
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"They legilimized Sirius?" Harry asked. He was stunned.
"Sure," Anthony said. "Tracey said it wouldn't have been particularly difficult. They're Slytherins, after all. Known for cunning, and that sort of thing, right?"
"So what did they do?" Harry's eyes were open wide behind his glasses as he leaned forward across the table. "What did they find out?"
I suppose I'll have to tell him eventually, Anthony thought. I'll never get rid of him otherwise.
"Well, if you promise not to get mad at me," Anthony said hesitantly, "and if you promise not to blab it all over the place. Tracey says this sort of thing is known only to certain select Slytherin insiders, and I don't want to get in trouble with my band mates."
"Okay, no problem," Harry said, looking very serious. "I promise I won't get mad at you, and I won't tell anyone that I talked to you, or what you told me."
"Not even your best friends?"
Harry paused for a second. "No, not even them."
For a moment Anthony wondered if he could get an Unbreakable Vow from Harry, but was no third wizard to serve as the bonder, and you can't do that sort of thing in a muggle café anyway.
Anthony took a sip of his coffee, checked their muffliato spell, and settled back in his chair. "Well then, this is what Tracey told me," he said.
"Tracey says the senior Slytherins were dying to know what had happened. Snape was obviously unsettled and withdrawn, and the so-called Marauders were keeping to themselves, so they must have been involved. James and Sirius were doing detention with Dumbledore, and Snape was in detention with Sluggie.
"They all knew that Snape wouldn't talk, so Lucius Malfoy and some of the seniors got together and owl-ordered some Polyjuice potion from a shop in Knockturn Alley. Then they kept an eye on Peter Pettigrew until one of the guys managed to get some of his hair – picked it out of a sink in one of the bathrooms after the rat combed his mop. And one of them, Tracey thinks it was probably Mulciber, volunteered to do the dirty work and drink the stuff. He shadowed Sirius until he spotted the Gryffindor alone near the Quidditch pitch. Then he hid in the shrubbery, downed the potion, and suffered through the transformation."
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Not surprisingly, Fawkes knew more about the matter than most people. He'd been around at the time, and he first heard about it from an old barn owl called Barney (all barn owls are called Barney, of course). Barney had been trying to get some shut-eye on a cross-brace under the Quidditch stands when the two students woke him up, much to his great annoyance. He complained to Fawkes about it afterward.
"You've got to talk to that Dumbledore fellow about the students," Barney had griped. "It's getting so a poor owl can't get a good day's sleep around here anymore!
"I was dreaming that I was about to snatch up a fat juicy mouse," he continued, "when I heard this little ratty kid yell, 'Hey Sirius! Come on! I've got some fire whiskey. The others will be along soon, but we can get started without them.' It was so rude!" Barney huffed. "Kids today have no manners."
"Quite so," Fawkes agreed, nodding sagely. "So then what happened?" He was always up for a bit of gossip, even though he was not particularly fond of hanging out with owls.
"Well, Ratty and this big guy he called 'Sirius' plopped right down underneath me and Ratty uncorked a bottle. An orange flame burst out of it – the light hurt my eyes! And after it died down Ratty took a swig, but I think he was just pretending, and then he passed it to the Sirius guy, who took a big gulp. 'Wow! That stuff kicks like a hippogriff!' the guy said.
"I was so mad! I pooped on them then," Barney added, "and I think it hit the big guy, but he didn't seem to notice."
"That's too bad," Fawkes said, and the two of them chortled.
"Personally, I think Ratty must have put a double dose of Doofus potion in that whiskey or something, because it wasn't long before the big guy was higher than the moon," Barney said. "Ratty put the bottle to his mouth again, but I think he was faking it. Then he handed it back to the big guy, who took another gulp. Then the big guy twitched, groaned, and sprawled back against a post with little flames dancing on his breath.
"After that, things got really weird. The ratty one slipped his wand out of his robe and put one hand up to his face. 'Hey,' he said, 'I think I've got something in my eye. Would you take a look? You'll have to lean in close; it's pretty dark under here.' Then suddenly he cried out 'Legilimens!' and there was a lot of thrashing and moaning from both of them and I couldn't figure out what was going on at all. Eventually Ratty left but I couldn't get back to sleep because the big guy passed out and kept snorting."
"Well, there's no making sense wizards. Or witches. Or muggles. They do the darnedest things sometimes," Fawkes said.
"But you will complain to that Dumbledore chap won't you?" Barney asked. "This sort of thing has got to stop!"
"There are limits to what a phoenix can do," Fawkes told him. "Maybe you should find a more secluded place to sleep." He didn't want to admit that he had never been able to make the old wizard understand him.
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"So the Slytherins found out everything!" Harry gasped as Anthony continued his tale.
"Not everything," Anthony admitted, "but quite a lot. Dumbledore got to Mulciber, or whoever it was, and shut him up, but not before he had reported to Malfoy and the senior Slytherins."
Harry gulped. This was what he'd come for, but he knew he wasn't going to like it.
"Apparently Black's memories were chaotic," Anthony said, "and the Slytherin spy was kind of shook up from the experience. He said it was a pretty rough ride, and he had a lot of trouble finding the memories they wanted."
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Fawkes had learned for himself just what that experience had been like when Dumbledore interrogated Mulciber. Somehow the old wizard had found out what the Slytherins had done and he summoned Mulciber to his office. It was against the rules to use legilimens on students, so Dumbledore would make them take out their memories and put them in his pensieve where he could examine them without breaking the rules.
Fawkes was bored and his curiosity quickly got the better of him. While the Headmaster was berating the young Slytherin, threatening him with expulsion and administering some sort of Spell of Silence, Fawkes glided over and quietly stuck his head into the mist of memories. Suddenly he was swamped with one chaotic scene after another. Maybe this wasn't such a good idea, he realized.
Black's mind was probably a pretty messy place on the best of days, but now, thanks to the firewhiskey and the potion, it was completely out of control. It was like some madman had the remote control for a muggle TV and was frantically clicking through the channels.
A Quidditch scene flashed by; Sirius nailed a Ravenclaw with a bludger and she lost control and crashed into the stands. Then toddler Sirius was having a tantrum and throwing his pumpkin juice at a house elf. Suddenly James Potter was making a crude joke about Snape in the Gryffindor common room and everyone was laughing. Orion Black was telling Sirius that he was a disgrace to the Black family and they were going to disinherit him. Minerva was scolding Sirius for transforming Snape's tie into a flobberworm; she gave Snape detention for striking back with a stinging hex.
There's Snape! the Slytherin realized.
He struggled to latch onto the memory but it slipped away, and then Sirius was buying a magic motorcycle with money he'd borrowed from James. Toddler Sirius was crying after his cousin Bellatrix hexed him. James and Sirius were in detention, cleaning cauldrons for tossing a dung-bomb in the potions lab. Sirius whimpered in pain as Madame Pomfrey extracted a bronze knut from his shoulder. Peter and Lupin tagged along with Sirius and James on a trip to Hogsmeade.
Mulciber wasn't sure if he could take much more of this, and neither was Fawkes. It was so much more than anyone had ever wanted to know about Sirius Black.
Then Snape appeared again. The Marauders had cornered him at a bend in a hallway. There were a few other students around, but it was obvious that they weren't going to interfere.
Uh oh, thought Fawkes.
Again Mulciber tried hang on to the memory, and this time he succeeded.
"Want to see me make Snivelly dance?" Sirius asked, pointing his wand at Snape's feet.
"Sure. I'll even help you!" James replied, smiling. Peter sniggered and Lupin, who was hanging back a bit, said nothing.
Snape eyed them coldly. With one hand, he had his wand pointed at them, and he furtively fished something out of a pocket with the other.
As James lowered his wand toward Snape's feet, Snape threw some coins in an arc and shouted "Volare!" There was a flash and the coins flew at his surprised tormentors, tumbling end over end. The boys yelped in pain as the coins struck, and Snape took the opportunity to flee down the hall.
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"Do you think that really happened?" Harry asked after Anthony told him the Slytherins' version of that scene.
"Probably," Anthony said. "It's a matter of record that Snape spent time in detention for 'injuring other students' on more than one occasion."
"If he'd thrown those coins a bit higher, someone might have lost an eye," Harry said angrily, "and if he'd spelled them to fly harder, someone might have been killed."
"True," Anthony said, "but you have to admit it was a cool way to take out four enemies at once." Then he winked and added, "And if he'd thrown them a bit lower, you might not be here."
Harry didn't know what to say to that.
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As Fawkes watched, Mulciber laughed and the memory escaped. There was a glimpse of Sirius and James, arm in arm, weaving drunkenly down a street and singing a dirty song. Sirius and James were hanging out in the Gryffindor common room together. Sirius and James were …
Mulciber shook the semi-conscious Gryffindor by the shoulders. "Enough of this palsy-walsy 'Sirius and James' rot! Show me what you did to Snape!" he demanded.
A new memory formed, and Mulciber and Fawkes saw a big black dog with a rat clinging to its back, running down a street in the moonlight with a stag and a wolf-like creature.
What? Fawkes wondered. Where's Sirius, and is that a werewolf? What's going on?
Mulciber managed to catch hold of the memory and follow it. The stag tossed a screaming woman aside while the dog herded the werewolf away from her, and they continued their wild romp until dawn approached. Then they turned toward Hogwarts and stopped before the Whomping Willow.
The rat jumped to the ground, scurried under the willow's thrashing branches, and pressed a knot on a root. The tree became quiet. Then the dog herded the werewolf into a tunnel beneath its roots while the stag and the rat waited outside.
Mulciber lost hold of the memory, and as it swirled away the stag turned into James Potter and the rat turned into Peter Pettigrew.
"They're animagi!" the Slytherin realized. "Sirius must be the dog, and Remus Lupin is a werewolf! I've gotta tell Malfoy!"
Fawkes felt something tap him on the back and he pulled his head out of the pensieve.
"Naughty bird!" said Dumbledore, who'd finally noticed what the phoenix was up to. "Bad! That is NOT a birdbath."
Werewolf! Animagi! Danger! Fawkes shrieked Do something!
"Be quiet and go back to your perch!" Albus scolded.
Fawkes took off and pooped as he passed over Albus's desk. The old wizard assumed it was an accident.
Next Chapter: Back to the Birdbath! Coming soon (probably).