Who: Remus, Peter, Sirius, & Lily What: The Marauders make a map of Hogsmeade and try to figure out how they can use it locate horcruxes, while enchanting items of their own. When: Saturday, 23 March Where: The Flat in Hogsmeade Warnings: None.
After the Welsh excursion and with what little energy and patience he had around the full moon, Remus was busy. From the notes on the Marauder's map, it was quick work to make a working but not entirely accurate map of Hogsmeade. The issue with Hogsmeade was scale and the not limited set of people who came and went. Too often names got merged or were missing all together. (Apparently, it might have something to do with wands.)
The testing phase, meant sending Peter or Sirius out to check who was where and then trying to fine tune the results. A lot of the same trial and error from school, but easier the second time around and with some more learning under their belt.
Remus was now waiting for their return after what he hoped to be their last confirmation run. Then they could get into more interesting ventures.
There was something glorious about having a project, to Sirius’s mind, even one so dire as this. Sure, they were attempting to track a presumed-dead man and the vessels that contained a dark wizard’s soul, but they were also doing something that no one had managed before, and that was exhilarating. He’d seen Hogsmeade a thousand times, of course, but walking around now with Peter to scope out who was there and see how well their nascent map was performing, it felt fresh. All of which was to say that he was in a great mood as the pair of them turned back toward the flat.
“It’s too bad,” he was saying as they climbed the stairs to the flat and he opened the door with a wave of his wand, “that no one wears name tags in this day and age. What d’you think the chances are that the last bloke tries to report us to the Ministry even though walking around asking people their names isn’t illegal in the least?”
“Come on,” Remus grinned, “between the two of you? What happened to the legendary charm? Surely at the very least you can get a witch or wizard’s name.” He had tracked their movements, taking notes. “But tuck in, let’s review where you went, who you think you saw and we’ll go from there. I think Lily is coming by later because James was volunteered as sprog watcher today. Then the real fun will begin.”
Peter raised an eyebrow at Remus’ comment. “I know you’re not talking to me, because I’ve never been known for having legendary charm. In fact, it’s possible that my presence just lowers Sirius’ enough that people get suspicious rather than intrigued.” He flopped down next to Remus allowing himself to snag some food.
Sirius walked around behind the couch so that Peter wouldn't notice him nodding and mouthing ‘He's right!’ No need to decimate his self-esteem with obvious agreement, after all. Aloud, his reply was, “eh, I think that last old codger was just mad, is all. Maybe he doesn't have a name and is overly sensitive about being asked. Ooh, maybe his name is Egbert. I'd be grumpy too if my name was Egbert. Poor old Egbert.”
“Or maybe he thought you were mad for shouting at him for his name…” Peter muttered under his breath. He looked around while he was chewing and his eyes caught on a bright coloured painting hanging above the table that he didn’t believe he’d noticed before. “What’s that from?”
Sirius sat down on the floor next to the coffee table to peer at their map prototype, pausing when Peter asked about the painting to give Remus an expectant look.
Remus glared at Sirius a beat. Although the half smile lessened the seriousness. “Wales. Like me.” He turned on the couch so he was leaning more on Peter, still within an arm’s reach of Sirius. Which was silly, the couch could fit three. “Don’t you recognize the resemblance? The dashing little boy and his mum? But yeah, my mum painted it, and we heroes thus rescued it from Llawddyn.”
Peter gave a good show of squinting to see the finer detail, but he was fairly certain there was no way to recognise actual people from it. Or he might just be terrible at art. “I can’t say I see that it’s you, but it’s very obviously a mum and a boy. It’s really nice.” He pressed his shoulder into Remus’ for a moment. “How uh -- so that trip went okay then?”
Remus hummed, reaching for another handful of grapes. It was still strange to see the painting here, but it was a nicer thing to focus on than the box tucked away in the closet in the spare his bedroom. “About as well as it could. Got everything I need from there now and I’m happy to set down new roots here.”
Sirius smiled down at the map, unaccountably pleased to hear Remus say that. Which was stupid. Remus had been crashing here most nights for the better part of the last several years. A painting on the wall and a very grim box in the closet didn't make much of a difference.
Well. Maybe the other two would think he was happy with the map. Which he was.
“We could put his name down as ‘Feck Off,’” he suggested, tapping the blank dot that signified the old man they'd been discussing. “Just for fun.”
Peter didn’t know for certain when Remus said ‘here’ if he meant a generalised here or a specific ‘in this flat’ here. He was beginning to think it was the latter, though, especially with the weird ways in which he had responded to Hairy Pupper, which he could really only imagine had something to do with him. It shouldn’t really matter though. Remus and Sirius had always been ‘Remus and Sirius’ and he shouldn’t be surprised or annoyed about it.
“If we used psychic paper then we could just bully our way into getting names rather than hoping for them to be forthcoming. ‘Head Auror, Order of Merlin, First Class’,” he gestured opening a badge with what was supposed to be a ‘hard’ look.
“Real convincing there, Pete.” Still Remus offered him a grape. “But I think we have a nearly working model, it tracks known entities, and we’re looking for known … things.”
The map really only need a few more adjustments. And the boys only needed a couple of sandwiches, no less than two bags of crisps, and a bar of chocolate - shared equally - until the infamous Lily Evans made her appearance for phase two.
They heard her before they saw her, voice growing louder as Lily climbed the stairs: "Well, I don't know, I haven't done this before either, have I? I swear to God, James, if you so much as think the words female intuition, I will personally--good. Good. Keep it that way. Hang on, I'm here."
And the door swung open on the infamous Lily Evans with wand in one hand, bag and coat over the other arm, phone wedged between cheek and shoulder. Fatigue shadowed her eyes, and her hair was hauled up into a knot with a biro stuck through it, but she smiled and waved--with her wand hand--at the lads as she stepped inside and kicked the door shut behind her. "Right," she said into the phone, "I'll tell them." And she dropped the phone from her shoulder, caught it alongside her wand, and ended the call. "James sends his love." Which was not at all what he'd said. "And Harry threw up on the cat."
There was a beat of silence as everyone absorbed that, and then Sirius burst into delighted laughter. “That's my godson,” he crowed, hopping to his feet so that he could take the coat of the illustrious creature who's given birth to said godson. She deserved it. “sit down, Lils, look at our map. D'you want a drink?”
Normally he wasn't anything like that solicitous, but the redhead seemed like she might be in a fiesty sort of mood. Better to head it off.
"Yes," Lily replied heavily, with a grateful smile, "but I'd better stick with tea. Remus, Peter, how are we all?" She gave them each a warm smile before she dropped her stuff beside a chair, already craning her neck to better see the laid-out map. People before spellwork, even fascinating spellwork like this.
And it was a masterwork, even if there was a set of footsteps going around town that despite his protest did read ‘Feck Off.’ Lily showed up just fine on it. That was a good sign. “I think we’re about ready to move on to phase two -- the animation of inanimate objects to reflect our own cheery dispositions.”
Peter still thought that trying to make their own pseudo-horcruxes was kind of creepy, but he’d rather have to do that than see the Dark Lord come back. If it was going to help stop him, then Peter would get on board. He held the small snowglobe he’d gotten from his mother when he was six up to the light, turning it around. “Are you guys sure this is gonna work and not make me braindead or something because I put all my personality into it by accident?”
Sirius blinked at Peter for a moment, then pulled a face. “Eurgh. Morbid, Wormtail. And no, we’re sure about nothing, but if all your personality does go into it we’ll know how to do it and can put it back in your body, right?”
Well, maybe. But chickening out was not an option he was prepared to let any of them take. He flicked his wand to start tea for Lily in the kitchen- the kettle was already set up- and then again to summon his own intended object: a remarkably ugly little figurine of a dog that James had gotten him as a joke the Christmas after they’d first transformed. He wanted something with a face, so maybe he was just as morbid as Peter in the end. Which made him think - “Hey. Talking portraits. How close d’you think their personalities are to the actual people, really?”
Remus had been about to use one of the hand made mugs he had, but as soon as Sirius picked a dog figurine, he knew that he had to pick a canine figurine to match. He wouldn’t have the same emotional connection, but it seemed more thematically appropriate. And it amused him. “That’s a good question. I wonder if they are more like pensieves, or did someone like download a consciousness like that creepy muggle show.”
"Portraits were the first thing I thought of," Lily agreed, rummaging around in her bag until she could pull out a somewhat worn-looking blue knitted elephant. One of his eyes was wonky. "There's definitely a feeling of the person in the object, but it can be a bit flimsy. Sometimes not, though. I don't know if you lads ever had a chance to talk with the old headmaster portraits at Hogwarts." She was fairly sure they'd all been in the headmaster's office, though she was less sure they'd have had the liberty for chitchat. "Some of them can actually hold a conversation. They have--" She pressed her lips together for a moment, hunting for the right word. "Layers."
Peter’s nose scrunched up at the mention of portraits and the current goal -- finding horcruxes. “Does that mean when we find a horcrux it’s going to talk to us like You-Know-Who?” He could just imagine a snake figurine which the face of the Dark Lord trying to curse them into oblivion. Fuck, would it be able to recognise him? Surely not. “Well portraits would only have a memory up to the point when the portrait was made, right? They can’t keep gaining more of the person’s memories even if they’re still alive?”
“Theoretically, they could,” Sirius said, tapping a finger against his mouth, “but I can’t imagine how complicated that would be. To have it happen automatically, anyway. You could do it manually, like a pensieve, yeah, putting more memories in...it’d really just be combining the personality stuff with however you make a pensieve to begin with, yeah. We could do it. If we wanted. Take a while, though, making the two bits work together.”
“Yeah, yeah, you know all about working bits, Sirius.” Remus shook his head. “Benefits of rubbing them together, et al.” But time and place. The quips continued for a bit, really just background noise as they worked. Hardly anything groundbreaking, but still with that comfortable familiarity.
Sometime later, Remus flopped back on the couch, his little wolf figurine jumping up on the table chasing after the dog. Whether or not it was reflective of him as a person, it did seem quite interested in giving the dog chase.
Lily pulled her tea mug out of the way of the frolicking canines, in the process discovering there was still some left in there. She drained it, and winced; she may end up drinking more cold tea than hot tea since Harry arrived, but it was still pretty revolting every time. She put the now-empty mug aside and put her little blue elephant back on its feet. It took a single step, wobbled and fell over. Knitted legs weren't that good for walking on, it seemed. Good to know.
As the elephant kicked feebly once or twice, then lay still in resignation, Lily pulled the map itself toward her, the better to see whether and how things were showing up. The area of the flat was a little too dense with markers to really make out details. "Is there some way of zooming in?" She absent-mindedly reached with a hand, but stopped herself short of touching someone else's charmwork.
The lion inside of Peter’s snowglobe kept poking around, trying to escape the confines of its domed prison in interest of the other animals moving outside of it. An ironic metaphor for his life, really. Watching Remus and Sirius and also Lily and James orbiting each other while he was stuck in a fucking nightmare (of his own making). When the lion couldn’t seem to claw his way out he started to kick up the snow inside the globe defensively. It was really creepy to watch.
“Mmm, sort of,” Sirius said to Lily, though he was watching Peter watch his snowglobe. “If you focus on one part of the map, it’ll become sort of...clearer. Not zoomed, exactly, but everything sorts itself out a bit. It’s hard to explain, easy to understand if you see it. Wormy, d’you want me to break that thing so the lion can come out to play?”
The two canines were frolicking in circles around the snowglobe now, apparently having the time of their extremely nascent lives.
Peter’s hand flew out to snatch the snowglobe off the table instinctively. “No!” he said a little too loudly and then course-corrected. “No.” His mum had given it to him before he’d started Hogwarts in hopes that he would be a Gryffindor like his dad. It turned out his dad didn’t give two shits whether he was in Gryffindor or not, but he still liked it.
Their track disrupted the little canines finally caught each other. There were some wrestling before ultimately resting in a pile seemed just as good an option as any. “No one is breaking anything.” Remus nudged Sirius with his foot.
“I think we have enough of a success to take these guys out into the town and see if they show up.” Even with the zooming feature, it was too difficult to discern if there were doubles on this spot or not. “Might also be a good excuse for another food run.”
"We need excuses now?" Lily asked absently, even as she picked up her blue elephant. It waved her legs, with her holding it under its knitted tummy, and she frowned. "Are we just going to, what? Leave these guys somewhere? They're so helpless." She blinked, and looked up. "Wow, my hormones are still a mess."
It was still weird hearing Lily talk about hormones. Peter shifted uncomfortably on the couch next to Remus and stared at the lion in his snowglobe. “Well at least mine won’t be hard to find since he can’t run off. Though it looks like Lily’s wouldn’t get very far either.”
“If we lose ours,” Sirius said, shrugging, “we lose them. They’ll just become another Hogsmeade attraction, the mysterious little dogs that kids spot out of the corners of their eyes and the grown-ups don’t believe in. It’ll be great.”
He reached to scoop up the apparently-snoozing pair and then got to his feet. “Who’s coming with and who’s staying to see if they can tell where we release these guys?” Not that he’d complain if everyone wanted to come. They’d just be able to carry more food back.
“Hardly the worst things we’ve left behind.” Remus shrugged. “I’ll stay here with the map. Otherwise, maybe you lot should switch things up? To avoid the doubling issue.” He didn’t mind hanging back, he might have preferred it, especially when Peter and Sirius could get around much quicker and in other forms to avoid being noticed.
Lily had so few chances to just sit and have a rest these days, but she pushed herself up to her feet anyway, tucking her blue elephant into her bag and slinging it over her shoulder. If she stayed, she'd just get the fidgets, thinking of half a dozen things that she should be doing instead of sitting around. Plus... "I'm going, if only to make sure the food includes actual, y'know, food." Though to be fair, the lads were doing much better these days about acknowledging that the five food groups weren't actually chocolate, jelly snakes, fried stuff, lager and crisps. "Peter?" Lily held out a hand with a smile, either for Peter's snowglobe or to help him up from the couch.
“There’s always food, just maybe not anything sustainable,” Peter replied as he stood and handed his snowglobe off to Lily. “Sirius, I can take your dog if you take Lily’s elephant, that way Remus knows who each pair is on the map if they show up properly?” He didn’t know if this would work, but it was a better test than any other, he supposed.
Sirius peered at his dog for a moment, oddly reluctant to tear it away from its snuggle with Remus’s. Which was just silly. Right.
“Sure, good idea Wormtail,” he said, nodding toward the pair of figures. Let Peter be the one to separate them. Or- “Take Remus’s, too, yeah?”
He turned to get the elephant from Lily, cradling it carefully as they headed out. They weren’t alive, no, but no reason to handle them roughly.
Once outside, Sirius turned to the other two with a smirk. “Okay, I'm going to the pub to grab us some ale. You two can fight over who has to pick up the takeaway.”
As he headed off, away from the flat and the other two, the little blue elephant in his arms started fidgeting- twitching, almost- and then slowly started to fall still.
Peter looked down at the two canines in his hand with a small scowl before nodding at Lily. “I’ll grab the takeaway. See you in a bit.” He waved and headed in a different direction than Sirius, the two figurines clutched loosely in his hand as he walked. Turning down a side street, he felt more movement in his hand and lifted it to see what was happening.
The wolf Remus had charmed was acting weirdly erratic, pacing back and forth in his hand while Sirius’ dog watch anxiously. After a moment the wolf seemed to just keel over on its side and stopped moving altogether. Peter watched abject horror and poked at the animal with his finger, but it didn’t seem to budge. The dog nudged at it a few times with its nose before grabbing the wolf’s tail in its mouth and tugging a couple of times. Nothing happened; it remained perfectly still.
Then suddenly the dog had a mouthful of the wolf’s fur and jumped out of Peter’s hand. “Hey, wait!” he called after it but it was already difficult to see where it had gone in the low light of the alley. He traced it a few feet and then lost it behind a rubbish bin.
Lily, in turn, wandered thoughtfully down to the centre of Hogsmeade, stopping just off the still cheerfully bustling little main street. Probably somewhere not too busy would make it easier to spot the marker on the map, right? And probably somewhere where a passerby would be less likely to get curious; Lily would feel terrible if someone made off with Peter's keepsake.
She pulled the snowglobe out of her bag, and held it up. The lion was lying down now, and yawned at her hugely, a wide spread of sharp teeth. "Sorry," Lily said, as she went up on tiptoe to wedge the globe into the fork of a tree. "This is in furtherance of the sum of human knowledge."
From the ground, she couldn't see the snowglobe at all, which probably kept it safe from being pinched. But still Lily hesitated, biting absently at her bottom lip. It just felt wrong to walk away and leave it. What if something happened? What if it felt abandoned?
...what if a bloody snowglobe felt abandoned? Listen to yourself, Lily Evans.
She huffed a breath, and marched down to the main street, where she got momentarily distracted by the closing-time specials being shouted from the grocer, and resumed her trip back to the flat carrying a bag of apples. If the boys didn't want them she could stew them for Harry.
By the time that Sirius had reached the Broomsticks, Lily’s elephant had given up all semblance of life. Which left him looking like a madman as he walked inside poking with one hand at the stuffed toy in the other, murmuring to it in some concern, even though he knew that it was ridiculous. Fortunately, all of the regulars in the pub were well-acquainted with him and his frequent peculiarities, and Madame Rosmerta was the most familiar of all. He got some arched brows, but no one actually asked what he was doing as he stowed the elephant behind the counter with some reluctance and then purchased the beer before heading back home. Remus would guess where he’d been from that and therefore where the toy was, of course, but the point was whether or not it showed up on the map.
He kind of got the feeling it wouldn’t.
Oh well. Homeward bound.
Remus took his duty as map watcher quiet solemnly. Okay, mostly solemnly, there was a few little doodles in his journal along side the notes. But there were notes. Hearing the door opened, Remus looked up. “Oh good, you’re not dead, but that probably means our little totems didn’t fare so well.” He stood up, to usher the lot back into the flat.
“I’m pretty sure yours died, Remus,” Peter said, though he wasn’t sure if he was supposed to sound sad about it or not, so it was mostly matter-of-fact. “Or something like it. Sirius’ dog drug him off somewhere and I lost sight of them. The dog seemed fine?” he offered lamely.
Remus made a face. He hadn’t really expected for a joke to be so … true. “Yeah, well, let’s get some food in us and we can figure out what happened.” Once they were settled again, this time around the table, and his mouth not entirely full of food he continued. “I think I got a few blips of double Padfoot, but not much else. The dog may still live.”
That news gave Sirius pause. On the one hand, ha! His totem was presumably going strong. That was a triumph and no mistake.
On the other, the mental image of the little dog dragging his frozen friend off rather than abandon him was...uncomfortable at best.
“Lily's was sort of...uh. Done, too,” he admitted, sheepish for no reason. “Sorry, Lils. I can get it back, though, easy, if you want to try again?”
"Poor Mr Puggles," Lily said philosophically, reaching for a beer. "Not a complete and utter failure, then, if Sirius's worked a little bit. But if we're going through all that for just a blip, are we doing this wrong? Or do we just do more?" It had felt like they'd been pretty thorough this time, but they were looking to emulate actually, well, breaking off a piece of your soul and traumatically fusing it with an object, so perhaps it was just a matter of more. Lily pulled a face--both at that thought, and at the bitter taste of the beer--but took another swig and said, "Either way, Sirius, yes please on getting him back. No rush. He was my favourite but Harry hasn't been that keen."
Remus considered, glancing back at the map, which he swore he saw another double Sirius. “It’s hard to know if it’s a map issue or an object issue. We’re working on a bigger scale than school and we’re enchanting objects not exactly shoving bits of our souls into them for the sake of immortality.” Which yes, sounded exactly as horrible as it probably was.
“We might want to see if we can get some other minds on this - James for one. Maybe the Prewetts. And probably end up with half a dozen odd creations in the process.” At school boys they had performed magic and created items well past their training, now grown, well, just about anything was possible. At least they would mostly use their powers for good.