Marauders to the End: Year One, Chapter Four
TITLE: The Doors, Splediferous Treefrog Horns, and Fenris Push-Ups
FANDOM: Harry Potter
CHARACTERS: Sirius Black, Remus Lupin, James Potter, Peter Pettigrew, Lily Evans, Horace Slughorn, random OCs and other teachers
RATING: PG-13
WARNINGS: None
SUMMARY: The first week of school doesn't go so well.
AUTHOR COMMENTARY: This is the point where I first realized that the story was taking a turn for the silly. I couldn't just keep writing depressing background stories, so it was time to start writing sitcom comedy. I got over it in my short stories, but not in this, probably because the shorts were so serious (most of the time.) Also note that the word "said" does not appear anywhere in this chapter, due to the moderator on MNFF saying I used it too much. She didn't notice. Sorry the chapter's late today, I was actually working.
“This place is impossible to figure out!” James spat violently.
“Well you’d better figure it out quick or we’re going to miss breakfast!” Sirius retorted.
Their first day of classes had not started out well. When they were up and dressed, they had left the common room and headed in what they thought was the direction of the Great Hall. A passing sixth year had stopped them before they had gotten half way there and told the first years that they were headed in the completely wrong direction. The older student had helpfully given them instructions that would lead them in the right direction. Instead, the boys had found themselves at the bottom of the North Tower, which they knew must be miles from the Great Hall.
“I told you he had a smirk on his face when he gave us those directions,” Remus said. “Come on, let’s try doubling back. Maybe we won’t be late for class if we hurry.”
“If we hurry, maybe we won’t miss breakfast,” Sirius grumbled.
“Is your brain in your stomach?” Remus asked crossly.
“If you hadn’t eaten in over a month before last night, yours would be too,” Sirius snapped.
Remus refrained from comments and instead led the way back the way they had come.
“How do you know this is the right way?” Sirius inquired shrewdly.
“It stands to reason that if we follow the directions in reverse, and then proceed on the course we chose from the Common Room, we shall arrive in the Great Hall. Obviously, we had been perusing the correct direction when that Slytherin apprehended us.” Remus grinned. The other three boys looked completely confused.
“Um, do you speak English? I don’t understand Gobbledygook.” James was watching Remus quite nervously.
“That is English, O Brain of Britain.”
“No, it’s not. That’s Smart Person. I know, my sister is quite fluent in it, and it’s rather annoying,” Peter corrected.
“I don’t care. If it gets us to breakfast, I understand it perfectly,” Sirius quipped.
Following the instructions that Remus gave in Smart Person, which Sirius translated to Idiot, they made it to the Great Hall to find that breakfast was not over yet, although they were cutting it very fine.
They took the only four seats left, which happened to be next to Rosie, Ivy, and Lily, who were talking about their course schedules with great enthusiasm. When the boys sat down, Rosie passed them their schedules.
“What took you so long?” Ivy asked.
“Got lost,” Sirius mumbled, pulling every dish within reach towards him and starting to eat.
Lily rolled her eyes. “Did you actually fall for the instructions that sixth year gave you?” she asked, looking at James with her big, green eyes.
“How’d you know about that?” James replied, turning red.
“Well, I saw him stop you, and heard him give you that long list of passageways. I knew that couldn’t possibly be the way, and I thought people who seemed as intelligent as yourselves wouldn’t believe them.”
James didn’t answer, but stared into her eyes as if they were hypnotizing him until she looked away.
Rosie, who had been watching Sirius eat with a look of disgust on her face, turned to Remus. “Your friend has a healthy appetite,” she told him.
“Well… yeah.” Remus didn’t know what else he could say. “He… he was very upset when we got lost this morning.
Rosie nodded. “Still…”
“I don’t know,” Remus snapped shortly. He looked down at his schedule to find a way to change the subject. “We all have the same classes?” he asked.
Rosie nodded again. “They’re scheduled by Houses. You notice they tell us the other House we learn with each lesson.”
“Right,” Remus muttered. “Do you know where any of these are?”
“No,” Rosie answered. “But it tells us the room number, and I’m smart enough not to take directions from sixth years.”
“Ok,” Remus said, his ears burning. “Mind if we follow you so we won’t get lost?”
“I wouldn’t mind, but Lily and Ivy might. If you hadn’t noticed, they don’t think that much of you.”
“How could they think anything of us?” Remus asked. “We’ve known them for all of twelve hours.”
“You’ve known them for all of twelve hours. Peter’s known Ivy and me for all of three months, and while he’s a wonderful performer, he’s…” she lowered her voice so Peter wouldn’t hear. “Ot-nay oo-tay ight-bray.”
“So?” Remus asked.
“Well, we were afraid he’d try to tag along with us here,” Rosie whispered. “And he can also get very annoying.”
“I’ll keep that in mind,” Remus told her. “Do you have an idea of where our classes are?”
“Well, the ground floor is double digit numbered classrooms that aren’t usually used, the first floor’s one hundred, the second floor’s two hundred, and so on and so forth. Of course, it also makes a difference where the staircases lead from day to day from what the older students told me.”
“Well, we did notice on our journey here that they liked to move.”
“Oh, yes,” she laughed. “But I think we’ll be able to find the way.”
Once breakfast was over, the first years headed off to their first day of class.
It soon became apparent that lessons at Hogwarts were ten times more demanding than at Muggle schools, mostly because Muggle classes stayed in one place. On the rare occasion when our protagonists found their classrooms, someone else would come in late, claiming they were lost. That was an easy excuse for the first years to use, but more often than not the teachers would question them very thoroughly to be absolutely sure.
It was difficult enough that the staircases moved, but if you tried to recognize to way to class by things like paintings, suits of armor, or statues, you could still get lost because everything moved around. The people in portraits kept walking in and out of their frames to talk to one another, and the suits of armor could walk.
More often than not first years couldn’t even tell where the doors were, since some would change into a solid wall and back. Some required a password, some required to be tickled in the exact place, and some only yielded to keys, spells, or ghosts, although several of the Muggle-born students found that if you sang anything by the Doors while trying to get into a room it helped.
The caretaker of the castle, Argus Filch, was as much of a pain as the staircases and locked doors. He hated the students, they hated him, and there was nothing they could do about it. Filch had only been there one year, but he had already established a reign of terror over the students. If he caught you late for class or trying to get into a door you weren’t supposed to or breaking any other rules, he threaten to use whips and thumbscrews and the like until someone else had the courage to intervene. Our heroes found this out very quickly. They got lost frequently and were usually yelled at for hours on end, or so it seemed. In fact, the first time they were late for class was because Filch was bitching at them.
Then there was Peeves the Poltergeist. He was as bad as Filch if he caught you late. He’d pull up the carpets or throw things or grab you from behind. It was impossible to escape him once he found you, even if you got into class.
And then came the actual lessons.
Our heroes quickly discovered that magic was much more complicated then it had seemed at first glance. For one thing, they couldn’t cast many of the spells right, although James and Sirius caught on quickly and Remus was clever enough to figure it out eventually. Peter truly struggled with every task put before him. That is, he did, until they reached Potions on Friday.
It became very plain that Professor Slughorn, the potions master, favored clever, charming, and otherwise beneficial students. But no one really cared about that in the class that afternoon. All the students cared about was the fact that they all hated each other. Gryffindor and Slytherin traditionally had potions together, despite the fact it was very easy to “accidentally” injure someone in a potions class and there was a very strong House rivalry.
As soon as class began, it was simple to figure out who was going to graduate with top honors in Potions, and who was going to drop the class by the time they were sixteen.
When they started work, the only people who could follow the instructions and come out with decent potions were Lily Evans, Severus Snape, and Peter.
James and Sirius didn’t do too badly, although they were a bit disgusted with what they came out with. Remus, to put it in mild terms, decided his aptitude was definitely not Potions. That is to say, everyone was rather surprised he made it out of the dungeon in one piece, no injuries.
“Buck up, mate,” James reassured him as they left the dungeon. “You’re doing well in everything else.”
Remus grunted, still musing over what had gone wrong with his potion.
“I think,” Peter squeaked tentatively. “I think you had one too many splendiferous tree frog horn.”
“Well that’s good to know,” Remus snarled. “I should just count out every little ingredient and memorize what each one does to a potion.”
“Sorry,” Peter apologized. “It’s just I counted as you added them. The book said fifty-seven. You put in fifty-eight.”
James and Sirius didn’t stop laughing until they got to the Defense Against the Dark Arts classroom.
The moment the entire class had entered, Professor Fenris looked them over.
“First years,” he began. “Have no idea of what to expect in this classroom.”
He paused, smiling unpleasantly, then added as an afterthought, “And neither do the older students. They have not learned about pain. They have not learned about fear. And they have not learned about good, solid, work.”
He looked up suddenly. “Potter!” he shouted. “Stand up!”
James got to his feet, unconcerned.
“Down and give me twenty!”
“Twenty what?” James asked. “Galleons? Chocolate frogs? School papers? Splendiferous tree frog horns? Muffins?”
“Push-ups!”
James raised his eyebrow inquisitively. “Push ups?” he repeated.
“Down on your hands and knees!”
James obeyed.
“Knees off the floor!”
James immediately flipped over into a handstand. Sirius was shaking with silent laughter, and Remus and Peter were barely concealing their own smiles.
Professor Fenris wasn’t pleased. “Feet on the floor, Potter!”
James grinned and got down into the proper position.
“Bend your arms at a ninety degree angle.”
James did so.
“Now straighten your arms.”
James did.
“That is one push-up. You may go back to your seat, Potter.”
James went back to his desk, where Sirius slapped him a high-five.
“Black!” Fenris barked. “Get up here and finish Potter’s twenty.”
Sirius got up and did exactly as James had, complete with the handstand, nineteen times.
“Now, that is how most Muggles do push-ups. Except they do not do handstands in the middle of them.”
James and Sirius grinned.
“Lupin!” Fenris yelled. “Come here!”
Remus got up, looking apprehensive.
“Down into position!”
Remus did as he was told without the handstand.
“Now, bend your arms at a ninety degree angle.”
Remus did so.
“Now move yourself to the left.”
Remus did, looking confused.
“Now to the right!”
Remus obeyed.
“Back to the center.”
Remus did.
“Up!”
Remus did.
“That is a Fenris push-up. Sit down, Lupin.”
Remus went back to his seat.
“We do Fenris push-ups in this classroom. They are done at the beginning of class, at the end of class, whenever anyone misbehaves, or when I’m generally annoyed at the entire student body. Now, everyone get down and do five Fenris push-ups.”
Half an hour later, the four boys were walking down the hall, all feeling very sore.
“I swear,” Peter sniffed. “That class is going to drive me crazy.”
“I think it’s fun!” Sirius grinned. “He’s not shooting curses at me.”
“Yeah, fun,” Peter mumbled. “He’ll have me down to eighty-nine pounds by the end of the year.”
“And that’s a bad thing?” a voice behind them asked. They turned. Ivy, Lily, and Rosie were walking just behind them.
Peter rolled his eyes. “Just because you’re under a hundred pounds doesn’t mean we all are, Ivy.”
Ivy shook her head. “You’re pathetic,” she told Peter.
They all turned a corner to go to the common room and found themselves facing a locked door.
“Oh, god,” James groaned, trying to open the door. “Doesn’t this place ever hold still?”
“Oh, that door’s easy,” Lily said. “All you have to do is sing ‘Light My Fire’”
The boys looked at each other, and decided to take a different route.
FANDOM: Harry Potter
CHARACTERS: Sirius Black, Remus Lupin, James Potter, Peter Pettigrew, Lily Evans, Horace Slughorn, random OCs and other teachers
RATING: PG-13
WARNINGS: None
SUMMARY: The first week of school doesn't go so well.
AUTHOR COMMENTARY: This is the point where I first realized that the story was taking a turn for the silly. I couldn't just keep writing depressing background stories, so it was time to start writing sitcom comedy. I got over it in my short stories, but not in this, probably because the shorts were so serious (most of the time.) Also note that the word "said" does not appear anywhere in this chapter, due to the moderator on MNFF saying I used it too much. She didn't notice. Sorry the chapter's late today, I was actually working.
“This place is impossible to figure out!” James spat violently.
“Well you’d better figure it out quick or we’re going to miss breakfast!” Sirius retorted.
Their first day of classes had not started out well. When they were up and dressed, they had left the common room and headed in what they thought was the direction of the Great Hall. A passing sixth year had stopped them before they had gotten half way there and told the first years that they were headed in the completely wrong direction. The older student had helpfully given them instructions that would lead them in the right direction. Instead, the boys had found themselves at the bottom of the North Tower, which they knew must be miles from the Great Hall.
“I told you he had a smirk on his face when he gave us those directions,” Remus said. “Come on, let’s try doubling back. Maybe we won’t be late for class if we hurry.”
“If we hurry, maybe we won’t miss breakfast,” Sirius grumbled.
“Is your brain in your stomach?” Remus asked crossly.
“If you hadn’t eaten in over a month before last night, yours would be too,” Sirius snapped.
Remus refrained from comments and instead led the way back the way they had come.
“How do you know this is the right way?” Sirius inquired shrewdly.
“It stands to reason that if we follow the directions in reverse, and then proceed on the course we chose from the Common Room, we shall arrive in the Great Hall. Obviously, we had been perusing the correct direction when that Slytherin apprehended us.” Remus grinned. The other three boys looked completely confused.
“Um, do you speak English? I don’t understand Gobbledygook.” James was watching Remus quite nervously.
“That is English, O Brain of Britain.”
“No, it’s not. That’s Smart Person. I know, my sister is quite fluent in it, and it’s rather annoying,” Peter corrected.
“I don’t care. If it gets us to breakfast, I understand it perfectly,” Sirius quipped.
Following the instructions that Remus gave in Smart Person, which Sirius translated to Idiot, they made it to the Great Hall to find that breakfast was not over yet, although they were cutting it very fine.
They took the only four seats left, which happened to be next to Rosie, Ivy, and Lily, who were talking about their course schedules with great enthusiasm. When the boys sat down, Rosie passed them their schedules.
“What took you so long?” Ivy asked.
“Got lost,” Sirius mumbled, pulling every dish within reach towards him and starting to eat.
Lily rolled her eyes. “Did you actually fall for the instructions that sixth year gave you?” she asked, looking at James with her big, green eyes.
“How’d you know about that?” James replied, turning red.
“Well, I saw him stop you, and heard him give you that long list of passageways. I knew that couldn’t possibly be the way, and I thought people who seemed as intelligent as yourselves wouldn’t believe them.”
James didn’t answer, but stared into her eyes as if they were hypnotizing him until she looked away.
Rosie, who had been watching Sirius eat with a look of disgust on her face, turned to Remus. “Your friend has a healthy appetite,” she told him.
“Well… yeah.” Remus didn’t know what else he could say. “He… he was very upset when we got lost this morning.
Rosie nodded. “Still…”
“I don’t know,” Remus snapped shortly. He looked down at his schedule to find a way to change the subject. “We all have the same classes?” he asked.
Rosie nodded again. “They’re scheduled by Houses. You notice they tell us the other House we learn with each lesson.”
“Right,” Remus muttered. “Do you know where any of these are?”
“No,” Rosie answered. “But it tells us the room number, and I’m smart enough not to take directions from sixth years.”
“Ok,” Remus said, his ears burning. “Mind if we follow you so we won’t get lost?”
“I wouldn’t mind, but Lily and Ivy might. If you hadn’t noticed, they don’t think that much of you.”
“How could they think anything of us?” Remus asked. “We’ve known them for all of twelve hours.”
“You’ve known them for all of twelve hours. Peter’s known Ivy and me for all of three months, and while he’s a wonderful performer, he’s…” she lowered her voice so Peter wouldn’t hear. “Ot-nay oo-tay ight-bray.”
“So?” Remus asked.
“Well, we were afraid he’d try to tag along with us here,” Rosie whispered. “And he can also get very annoying.”
“I’ll keep that in mind,” Remus told her. “Do you have an idea of where our classes are?”
“Well, the ground floor is double digit numbered classrooms that aren’t usually used, the first floor’s one hundred, the second floor’s two hundred, and so on and so forth. Of course, it also makes a difference where the staircases lead from day to day from what the older students told me.”
“Well, we did notice on our journey here that they liked to move.”
“Oh, yes,” she laughed. “But I think we’ll be able to find the way.”
Once breakfast was over, the first years headed off to their first day of class.
It soon became apparent that lessons at Hogwarts were ten times more demanding than at Muggle schools, mostly because Muggle classes stayed in one place. On the rare occasion when our protagonists found their classrooms, someone else would come in late, claiming they were lost. That was an easy excuse for the first years to use, but more often than not the teachers would question them very thoroughly to be absolutely sure.
It was difficult enough that the staircases moved, but if you tried to recognize to way to class by things like paintings, suits of armor, or statues, you could still get lost because everything moved around. The people in portraits kept walking in and out of their frames to talk to one another, and the suits of armor could walk.
More often than not first years couldn’t even tell where the doors were, since some would change into a solid wall and back. Some required a password, some required to be tickled in the exact place, and some only yielded to keys, spells, or ghosts, although several of the Muggle-born students found that if you sang anything by the Doors while trying to get into a room it helped.
The caretaker of the castle, Argus Filch, was as much of a pain as the staircases and locked doors. He hated the students, they hated him, and there was nothing they could do about it. Filch had only been there one year, but he had already established a reign of terror over the students. If he caught you late for class or trying to get into a door you weren’t supposed to or breaking any other rules, he threaten to use whips and thumbscrews and the like until someone else had the courage to intervene. Our heroes found this out very quickly. They got lost frequently and were usually yelled at for hours on end, or so it seemed. In fact, the first time they were late for class was because Filch was bitching at them.
Then there was Peeves the Poltergeist. He was as bad as Filch if he caught you late. He’d pull up the carpets or throw things or grab you from behind. It was impossible to escape him once he found you, even if you got into class.
And then came the actual lessons.
Our heroes quickly discovered that magic was much more complicated then it had seemed at first glance. For one thing, they couldn’t cast many of the spells right, although James and Sirius caught on quickly and Remus was clever enough to figure it out eventually. Peter truly struggled with every task put before him. That is, he did, until they reached Potions on Friday.
It became very plain that Professor Slughorn, the potions master, favored clever, charming, and otherwise beneficial students. But no one really cared about that in the class that afternoon. All the students cared about was the fact that they all hated each other. Gryffindor and Slytherin traditionally had potions together, despite the fact it was very easy to “accidentally” injure someone in a potions class and there was a very strong House rivalry.
As soon as class began, it was simple to figure out who was going to graduate with top honors in Potions, and who was going to drop the class by the time they were sixteen.
When they started work, the only people who could follow the instructions and come out with decent potions were Lily Evans, Severus Snape, and Peter.
James and Sirius didn’t do too badly, although they were a bit disgusted with what they came out with. Remus, to put it in mild terms, decided his aptitude was definitely not Potions. That is to say, everyone was rather surprised he made it out of the dungeon in one piece, no injuries.
“Buck up, mate,” James reassured him as they left the dungeon. “You’re doing well in everything else.”
Remus grunted, still musing over what had gone wrong with his potion.
“I think,” Peter squeaked tentatively. “I think you had one too many splendiferous tree frog horn.”
“Well that’s good to know,” Remus snarled. “I should just count out every little ingredient and memorize what each one does to a potion.”
“Sorry,” Peter apologized. “It’s just I counted as you added them. The book said fifty-seven. You put in fifty-eight.”
James and Sirius didn’t stop laughing until they got to the Defense Against the Dark Arts classroom.
The moment the entire class had entered, Professor Fenris looked them over.
“First years,” he began. “Have no idea of what to expect in this classroom.”
He paused, smiling unpleasantly, then added as an afterthought, “And neither do the older students. They have not learned about pain. They have not learned about fear. And they have not learned about good, solid, work.”
He looked up suddenly. “Potter!” he shouted. “Stand up!”
James got to his feet, unconcerned.
“Down and give me twenty!”
“Twenty what?” James asked. “Galleons? Chocolate frogs? School papers? Splendiferous tree frog horns? Muffins?”
“Push-ups!”
James raised his eyebrow inquisitively. “Push ups?” he repeated.
“Down on your hands and knees!”
James obeyed.
“Knees off the floor!”
James immediately flipped over into a handstand. Sirius was shaking with silent laughter, and Remus and Peter were barely concealing their own smiles.
Professor Fenris wasn’t pleased. “Feet on the floor, Potter!”
James grinned and got down into the proper position.
“Bend your arms at a ninety degree angle.”
James did so.
“Now straighten your arms.”
James did.
“That is one push-up. You may go back to your seat, Potter.”
James went back to his desk, where Sirius slapped him a high-five.
“Black!” Fenris barked. “Get up here and finish Potter’s twenty.”
Sirius got up and did exactly as James had, complete with the handstand, nineteen times.
“Now, that is how most Muggles do push-ups. Except they do not do handstands in the middle of them.”
James and Sirius grinned.
“Lupin!” Fenris yelled. “Come here!”
Remus got up, looking apprehensive.
“Down into position!”
Remus did as he was told without the handstand.
“Now, bend your arms at a ninety degree angle.”
Remus did so.
“Now move yourself to the left.”
Remus did, looking confused.
“Now to the right!”
Remus obeyed.
“Back to the center.”
Remus did.
“Up!”
Remus did.
“That is a Fenris push-up. Sit down, Lupin.”
Remus went back to his seat.
“We do Fenris push-ups in this classroom. They are done at the beginning of class, at the end of class, whenever anyone misbehaves, or when I’m generally annoyed at the entire student body. Now, everyone get down and do five Fenris push-ups.”
Half an hour later, the four boys were walking down the hall, all feeling very sore.
“I swear,” Peter sniffed. “That class is going to drive me crazy.”
“I think it’s fun!” Sirius grinned. “He’s not shooting curses at me.”
“Yeah, fun,” Peter mumbled. “He’ll have me down to eighty-nine pounds by the end of the year.”
“And that’s a bad thing?” a voice behind them asked. They turned. Ivy, Lily, and Rosie were walking just behind them.
Peter rolled his eyes. “Just because you’re under a hundred pounds doesn’t mean we all are, Ivy.”
Ivy shook her head. “You’re pathetic,” she told Peter.
They all turned a corner to go to the common room and found themselves facing a locked door.
“Oh, god,” James groaned, trying to open the door. “Doesn’t this place ever hold still?”
“Oh, that door’s easy,” Lily said. “All you have to do is sing ‘Light My Fire’”
The boys looked at each other, and decided to take a different route.