Disclaimer: Messrs. Moony, Wormtail, Padfoot, and Prongs belong to JK Rowling.
A/N: Another continuity error in the books: the date of the full moon seems to be "whenever it's convenient for the plot" with it being a rough average of once every two months.
Also, part of this chapter would have been much more exciting if Fudge were still alive, but we ended up killing him off during Book 2, so I had to improvise a bit.
Chapter 10: Trelawney
The Marauder's Map
Professor Trelawney had the next chapter, which was always an adventure, especially as Harry realised there was some harrowing stuff that was likely coming up soon. "Chapter Ten," she began, "The Marauder's Map."
Suddenly, Fred's and George's eyes grew wide, and there was a clatter as they leaned over the table toward Harry.
"Harry, is it really gonna talk about the Map?" asked Fred.
"If I'm remembering right, it was kind of important," Harry said.
"Are you sure you want them to tell everyone?" said George.
"Yeah, you can't let everyone know your secret," Fred insisted.
"And our secret," added George.
"Oi, you two are graduating in three months anyway," Hermione cut in.
"Well, we have to leave something to the next generation of pranksters, don't we?" Fred told her.
Harry grit his teeth as he wrestled with the question. The Map was personal to him. It was a family heirloom, after all, and letting it be publicly known could bring him some trouble. (It was almost certainly against the rules.) And for the other part…He'd never really thought about it. Would he leave it behind at Hogwarts for the next generation of pranksters like the Marauders had? He'd sort of assumed he would take it with him when he left the school. Would he even be able to leave it behind if the teachers knew about it. And meanwhile, he'd never even used it for pranking, himself.
But then again, how would Sirius and Remus feel about the secret being out, especially since this whole thing was for Sirius's benefit?
Well, he'd committed this far, he thought. And it was for Sirius. He and Remus would just have to suck it up. And, Harry realised with a start, it wasn't as secret as it used to be anyway.
"Look, it's not ideal, but we need to do it," Harry told the twins firmly. "I'm doing this for Sirius—you know, one of the Marauders? Besides, the whole DA already knows some of what I was doing when I was watching for Umbridge all the time."
They had to give him that last one. He hadn't much thought about it at the time, but he had needed to reveal some of the Marauder's Map's secrets to make the DA work at all.
Meanwhile, Trelawney had in fact begun reading the chapter. In the book, they heard, Harry wasn't only haunted by losing the match and his broomstick, but even more so by seeing the Grim again and by his reaction to the dementors. That he was still reacting worse—much worse—to the things than anyone else was wasn't doing any favours to his self-esteem.
"Was the Grim going to haunt him until he actually died? Was he going to spend the rest of his life looking over his shoulder for the beast? I have said that the knowledge of the future is a heavy burden," Professor Trelawney said airily. "I fear that Mr Potter may possess the most terrible aspect of the Sight—the knowledge of death."
"That will do, Sybill," Professor McGonagall cut her off. "I do not believe Mr Potter has ill omens following him. As I'm sure will be explained later, I happen to know that the animal following him that year was not a Grim."
Trelawney turned to stare at her through her bug-like glasses.
"I have met the animal in question, in fact, and while it is certainly a rascal—" Harry snorted at her words. "—it is no harbinger of doom."
Trelawney grumbled suspiciously, but turned back to the book and continued reading. It was soon made clear the rest of the school—those who hadn't figured it out immediately, that the screaming voice in the last chapter was Harry's mother, when Voldemort came to kill her. But that still didn't explain Harry's reaction to them.
"And then there were the dementors. Harry felt sick and humiliated every time he thought of them. Everyone said the dementors were horrible, but no one else collapsed every time they went near one. No one else heard echoes in their heads of their dying parents."
Tonks groaned. "Not many people's parents his age have died, though, much less in front of them. It shouldn't have been that surprising. If there's one mistake Remus made that year, he should have explained more about the dementors at the start of term."
"Perhaps we all should have," Professor Sprout agreed. "Mr. Potter may have had it worse, but all of us were affected by the dementors that year, and some students took it quite poorly."
"I judged it best not to burden the younger students with more information than they needed," Dumbledore said. "Perhaps I was wrong."
Malfoy was back to his old tricks, of course. In addition to gloating over Gryffindor's defeat, he had been milking Harry's reaction to the dementors for two months by now, just like his nonexistent injury (although he'd finally dropped the injury): "Malfoy spent much of their next Potions class doing dementor imitations across the dungeon."
"Okay, that really was in poor taste, Malfoy," Daphne Greengrass told Draco at the Slytherin Table.
"Hey, I didn't know that's why Potter kept fainting," Malfoy said.
She scoffed at him. "Like you would've cared. Aren't you supposed to be the well-informed one? Besides, dementor impressions are in poor taste in general."
Luckily, Lupin was back to teaching by the next class. He took the revelation that Snape had been egging them on about werewolves in surprisingly good humour and promptly cancelled the homework Snape had given them.
"'Oh no,' said Hermione, looking very disappointed. 'I've already finished it.'"
People laughed at that, although Harry noted on reflection that that was a surprisingly normal reaction from Hermione under the circumstances. He would've been upset too if he'd done any more homework for Snape than he had to.
Luckily, Professor Lupin soon explained to Harry (and the audience) why the dementors affected him more than others—simply because, regardless of his strength of character, he had far worse memories for the dementors to bring to the surface.
"'Azkaban must be terrible,' Harry muttered. Lupin nodded grimly.
"'The fortress is set on a tiny island, way out to sea, but they don't need walls and water to keep the prisoners in, not when they're all trapped inside their own heads, incapable of a single cheerful thought. Most of them go mad within weeks.'" Even Trelawney didn't have anything to add to that, perhaps because there was nothing she could say to make it more ominous.
Hermione scowled at Lupin's words from the book. She'd had a growing sense over the course of the book that there was something deeply wrong about Azkaban, but this made it sound even worse.
Azkaban = cruel and unusual, she wrote in her notes. Short sentence (few months) as harsh as many years in muggle prison—disproportionate. Life-threatening?
Suicide rate coming out of Azkaban? In Azkaban? Does not eating count? Long-term effects?
Dementors should be abolished.
Lupin also explained that he had been the one to drive away the dementor on the train, and when Harry asked, he consented to teach him the Patronus Charm so that he wouldn't risk falling off his broom again—although he wouldn't be able to do it until next term.
On a more practical note, Hermione also wrote, Full moon had just passed, shouldn't have held up Lupin's Patronus lessons so long. Why?
In the book, the Ravenclaw-Hufflepuff Quidditch match resolved in a way that was favourable to Gryffindor—something that had Natalie scribbling numbers on a scrap of parchment to keep track of it. Harry was in better spirits after that, although he couldn't escape his lack of a permission form for the next Hogsmeade weekend, just before Christmas.
Except that Fred and George could help him escape it. When that Saturday morning dawned, they called Harry aside and gave him an "early Christmas present"—a map of the school that showed where everyone was in the building at all times, made by a certain Messrs. Moony, Wormtail, Padfoot, and Prongs.
McGonagall (and several of the other teachers) stared with slowly widening eyes as she heard the description of the map and what it did. This was truly new information even to her—although Dumbledore wore a slight, but knowing smile.
"A map of the school," McGonagall grumbled. "That explains so much of what those four boys got up to—and the Weasley Twins."
"What's this, now?" asked Professor Bragnam.
"You weren't here at the time. The Marauders—James Potter's little gang—" she said, to interested whispers from the students.
"Menaces to society," Snape growled.
"—They got up to even more trouble pulling pranks and sneaking around than the Weasleys have, if only because there were four of them," she concluded. "And the number of times they escaped being caught—we all wondered how they did it, but obviously, we never caught them red-handed to find out—not after they must have made that map, at least."
Dean was thoroughly impressed by the magic. "Whoa, that map the thing you kept using to tell us when it was safe to leave the—" Hermione coughed. "—er, the you-know-what?" he asked.
"Yeah, that was it," said Harry. "Came in really handy to stay out of Umbridge's way."
But it wasn't just the map, as Fred and George also revealed the castle's secret passageways—although there was only one of them that was still usable.
"So Mr. Filch didn't know all of the secret passages leading from the castle," Professor McGonagall said. "In fact, I don't believe I knew about the passage behind that statue."
"Pride goeth before the fall, Minerva," Trelawney said. McGonagall rolled her eyes.
"What I want to know," said Snape, "is why a closer watch wasn't kept on the passage under the Whomping Willow—Albus? We knew that Black knew about it—I knew that personally—even if we didn't know he was using it."
That was news to the school. It had never been publicly acknowledged how Black had got into the school.
"Well, what about you?" Tonks demanded. "If you knew about it?"
But before Snape could defend himself, Dumbledore answered his original question. "We did not know, however, that he could get past the Whomping Willow unassisted—with no wand and no other tricks that we knew of that would help him."
But Harry thought about this for a moment and realised something: "It's not that hard to get out from under the tree, though," he whispered to his friends. "You just reach up and press the knot. Sirius could've got into the school without changing. He just couldn't get out again."
"Bloody hell!" said Ron. "Was it a trap? Like in first year?"
Harry considered it, but… "No, even Dumbledore's not that crazy. If he tried something like that, he'd've led Sirius to some out-of-the-way corner away from the students like he did with Quirrell."
"That could've been really bad, though," said Hermione. "What if Sirius really were after you, and he didn't care about getting out alive?" No one had an answer to that one. "Something else for the security system," she mumbled, making a note.
But even so, the Harry in the book was a little suspicious of the Map, not that it ultimately stopped him.
"But even as he stood there, flooded with excitement, something Harry had once heard Mr Weasley say came floating out of his memory.
"Never trust anything that can think for itself, if you can't see where it keeps its brain. Indeed, this Marauder's Map is sure to lead him astray," Trelawney said.
"I don't believe Potter need the Map to speak to him to get himself in trouble, Sibyll," McGonagall said, "although I shouldn't need to say how irresponsible it was for him to sneak out of the school when we were trying to protect him personally from a criminal." She stared down at Harry at the Gryffindor Table as she said this last. Harry didn't have anything to say to that, though, since Remus already gave him that same speech that year.
In the book, however, Harry followed the secret passageway behind the One-Eyed Witch to reach Honeydukes' basement in order to finally be able to visit the village, if still stuck under his invisibility cloak.
"Hundreds of steps up and down?" asked Dean. "Wouldn't that put the passage, like, hundreds of feet under Hogsmeade?"
"I didn't build it," Harry said. "I just know it was a long way."
Upon emerging from the passageway, Harry was mesmerized by the selection of sweets in Honeydukes: "…along yet another wall were 'Special Effects' sweets: Drooble's Best Blowing Gum (which filled a room with bluebell-coloured bubbles that refused to pop for days), splintery Toothflossing Stringmints, tiny black Pepper Imps ('breath fire for your friends!'), Ice Mice ('hear your teeth chatter and squeak!'), peppermint creams shaped like toads ('hop realistically in the stomach!'), fragile sugar-spun quills, and exploding bonbons."
"Okay, I'll say it again," Natalie said with a huff. "What is wrong with you people? C'mon, muggle-borns, back me up here. Why would you want sweets like that."
"But it's magic, Natalie," Dennis Creevey insisted. "It's amazing what wizards can do."
"Ugh, not you too!" she griped. "Dean?"
Dean shrugged awkwardly: "Being able to breathe fire is pretty cool."
Natalie humphed and crossed her arms. Then she thought a bit longer and added, "And I've never tried Drooble's. Do the bubbles really stay like that? I never see a mess of bubblegum bubbles around here."
"They do if you let 'em," Seamus told her. "Me da' always gets annoyed if I leave 'em around. But I expect the house elves clean 'em up quick here."
In the book, Harry's appearance naturally shocked Ron and Hermione, and there was some concern that Sirius might be able to get in through that passageway, but they assumed he wouldn't know about it, and Ron pointed out that he would have to get past the dementors patrolling the village.
"Hermione bit her lip, looking extremely worried.
"'Are you going to report me?' Harry asked her, grinning.
"'Oh—of course not—but honestly, Harry—'"
"Ha!" cried Fred. "We'll make a delinquent out of you yet, Hermione."
But Hermione ignored him. In her notes, she wrote, Dementors patrolling Hogsmeade. De facto curfew. Serious restriction, dangerous to residents.
In the story, Ron was extolling the virtues of the various products in the store.
"And the Acid Pops? Fred gave me one of those when I was seven—it burnt a hole right through my tongue."
"It what?!" Natalie squeaked, loudly even for the teachers to notice. Luckily, she only got a stern look from Professor Sinistra, and Trelawney continued.
"I'd rather my sweets not try to kill me," Natalie whispered to the Gryffindor table. "How is that even allowed? And how do you fix it if that happens every time."
"Well, it did say special effects," suggested Ginny.
"Special effects should not include trying to kill you."
"It doesn't happen every time," Fred protested. "It's like spicy stuff. You've gotta work up to it."
"But isn't acid that strong bad for your teeth or something, too?"
"To muggles, very if it doesn't just kill you," Hermione said. "But they can fix teeth annoyingly easily here."
Harry chuckled. "I'm not sure I'd call never having to go to the dentist annoying, Hermione."
"Well, my parents would," she said.
In the story, Harry, Ron and Hermione went to the Three Broomsticks for some Butterbeers, but they had just barely finished when some familiar faces walked in, namely McGonagall, Flitwick, Hagrid, and Cornelius Fudge himself. A hush fell over the Great Hall. After Fudge was killed last week, hearing more about his doings as Minister felt…tense in a way that was hard to explain.
And then, prompted by Madam Rosmerta, their conversation immediately turned to Sirius Black, what he had done, and just how, precisely, it related to Harry Potter, and everyone was focusing on the story with rapt attention.
Everyone except for Harry himself, that is, who was digging his fingernails into his palms, both because he had already heard it and remembered his reaction to it, and because he now knew that so much of it was wrong.
But the rest of the school gasped at many of the revelations. They knew that Sirius had supposedly tried to take over the Death Eaters after Voldemort's fall, starting with the attack on Peter Pettigrew—maybe even that he had been Voldemort's second-in-command beforehand. Although…where did people get that idea? Wormtail certainly hadn't been that high. That might be worth asking.
However, many people of them were surprised by other parts. They gasped when they learnt that Sirius had been James Potter's best friend—revealed in the text in suitably dramatic fashion—and was after Harry for personal reasons and not just out of loyalty as a supposed Death Eater. Even more shocking was that Sirius had been Harry's godfather, yet had still betrayed them. This was something that wasn't in the standard stories. In fact, Harry wondered, how much did people know about the whole thing? It wasn't widely known that the Potters were involved with the Order of the Phoenix—well, the existence of the Order wasn't widely known. But surely, it must have been known that non-Ministry people in Dumbledore's orbit were getting in fights with Death Eaters more than average. And the Potters were well-known and liked in the community for other reasons, and people must have noticed when they stopped appearing in public. But Harry supposed it wasn't widely known that Voldemort was after them personally—at least up to the point where Voldemort himself had said it in the first book. And Sirius was known to be his father's friend before being a supposed Death Eater, but most people wouldn't have known enough to know that he had actively betrayed him.
But the Great Hall continued listening as Fudge explained how Sirius had supposedly been the Potter's Secret Keeper and then betrayed them to Voldemort and blew up Peter Pettigrew into tiny pieces. Dumbledore had suspected there was a spy in their midst, but no one had suspected him in particular, he had supposedly hid so well. They shuddered at the idea that he could somehow resist the horrors of Azkaban—that fact seemed to make him an even bigger monster. Once again, even Trelawney didn't have anything to add to make it scarier, although her dramatic reading style was having quite the effect, as some of the younger students were shaking in their seats.
"Bloody hell. That's what everyone was trying to keep from you, Harry?" Dean said.
"Yeah, it was pretty crazy," he said.
"He freaked out pretty bad, to be honest," Ron agreed.
"It was good that Mr. Weasley talked to him because he really did want to go after him after that."
Harry glared at his friends, but there was no venom in it.
"'But what do you think he's broken out to do?' said Madam Rosmerta. 'Good gracious, Minister, he isn't trying to rejoin You-Know-Who, is he?'
"'I daresay that is his—er—eventual plan,' said Fudge evasively—" And suddenly, Harry snapped to attention with wide eyes. "'—But we hope to catch Black long before that. I must say, You-Know-Who alone and friendless is one thing…" Harry jerked again at that bit."—but give him back his most devoted servant, and I shudder to think how quickly he'll rise again…'"
Harry was about to speak up, but Tonks was faster: "Hold up! Fudge actually believed You-Know-Who was alive and might come back?"
Harry agreed. That would have been good information to have remembered two weeks ago.
The teachers all looked at each other. None of them were sure what to say. Finally, Percy Weasley said hesitantly, "Er…I suppose…I mean to say, I think Fudge was still relying on Professor Dumbledore's advice at the time, and Dumbledore, you've always said You-Know-Who would come back. It's only, when it actually happened, he got too scared, er, personally and politically to accept it."
"Still, it's freaky, hearing it now," said Tonks. "It's like Fudge was actually doing a good job that year."
"He had an incentive to," Kingsley said, "and very little incentive to deny it or go after an easier target."
The chapter ended soon after with the Harry in the book in shock, and Ron and Hermione not much better. "Oh, yes, I sense great hardships coming for Harry Potter," Trelawney said when it ended. She made to hand the book to Professor Burbage—a bit reluctantly, or so it seemed, when Professor Bragnam interrupted them.
"Just a moment, Professor Burbage," Bragnam cut in. "That whole scene was…very odd. It seems awfully lucky that Potter happened to be sitting right there to overhear them—or unlucky, as it were. Are you sure there was nothing more to it?"
"Not quite as odd as you might think," Kingsley said. "We had all hands on deck for the Hogsmeade weekends that year to protect the students, even if we weren't conspicuous about it. Fudge said he wanted to see to the security personally after the Halloween break-in. It isn't so surprising that he stopped by the Three Broomsticks on that particular day."
"We teachers felt the same," McGonagall agreed. "We always have some chaperones at Hogsmeade or simply want to go out for a day on the town ourselves, but we were keeping a larger presence that year."
"But still, to be there at the same hour, and for Potter to be seated close enough to overhear that conversation, where you were discussing confidential information about him? Whereas he probably would have been seen and not spoken in front of if he'd been there with permission?"
"It's a coincidence, yes, but stranger things have happened," said Kingsley. "And none of that information in that conversation was truly secret—even Fudge wasn't that stupid. It was just not widely known, as he said—that is, not widely known outside of those who knew James and Lily personally."
That…did make some more sense. However, Hermione made a note of something that probably should have been looked into right away: Remains of Pettigrew not what would be expected for such a large explosion. Was it properly investigated at the time? (By Fudge?)
After a moment's more thought she added. Fudge described multiple fragments. Did he cut off more bits of himself?
Harry, meanwhile, jotted down a note of his own. Something had twigged his memory in how Fudge had described Voldemort: "alone and friendless." He'd later heard those exact words again, in Trelawney's prophecy. Could they be connected somehow?