Marauders - Always - Part One

(112715): Housekeeping! Or, the first time I saw Sirius and Remus face to face

November 27, 2015

It was Black Friday and I was standing in a line outside of Target, of all places, freezing and bundled up, waiting for a super great deal on a pair of headphones I'd been covering for some time. Like, they were hot pink and the sound was supposedly amazing but they were also usually like $250 and the door buster that night was bringing them down to a nearly-justifiably $96 and I could actually pinch that out of my check that week, thanks to the mountains of leftovers Thanksgiving had provided, meaning I was saving on groceries and -- It was cold, and I wished I had a cup of coffee as I stood there, watching my breath rise up in front of me and checking my phone for the time and to see if there were any notifications on the latest chapter of The Marauders on Wattpad.

It had been about four months since Declan Alectric had dropped me off at work in East Nashville with a handful of vials full of iridescent liquid.

"These are their memories," he'd said.

Sometimes, I still thought I had lost my mind when I sat in my bedroom, poured a vial into a large orange salad bowl I'd bought at TJ Maxx for like seven dollars, and stuck my face into the liquid to see the memories. The first year of the Marauders had been quite the roller coaster of scenes to watch, and I'd been hard at work, dutifully transcribing what I saw with as much love and care as I could. A lot of it had been quite surprising to me... and I'd started posting it early on in the Fall, beginning in early September, describing their first time on the Hogwarts Express and such. I was completely shocked by the amount of readers I had - there were like twenty people actually actively leaving comments and coming back each time I posted - and I was addicted to refreshing the app on my phone after posting a chapter to see what they had to say, if they had the same reactions I did to the scenes I'd shared.

That night before leaving to go to the midnight sale at Target, I'd posted a scene of Severus Snape and Sirius Black having a detention. They'd been doing maintenance trimming the twigs on the broomsticks in the Quidditch lockers - something I wasn't sure I understood the need for. I had a list of questions for Declan next time he showed up. Like, did the brooms keep growing? Why would they need to trim the twigs? Were broomsticks alive? 

I also wanted to know what was so horrible about Snape? It seemed like James and Sirius were arrogant little pricks (even in their own memories!) being unnecessarily mean to the poor kid. It really upset me. I'd been bullied as a kid, after all, and I knew all too well what it was like to be in Snape's shoes, picked on for no apparent reason except the other kid was an asshole. I'd had a bully once pull me down a flight of stairs by the back of my romper. The teacher hadn't even yelled at her and when my mum escalated it to the principal after I'd come home with nasty bruises and what, looking back, was likely a mild concussion, the principal had said "that's what kids do" and told her that I needed to work it out with the bully myself. Seeing James and Sirius be little bullies themselves made me feel really angry with them and really bad for Severus Snape.

Anyway, that's what I was thinking about as I was standing there, waiting to get into Target for my headphones when suddenly Declan Alectric himself stepped up beside me as naturally as though he'd been standing there all along.

He was holding a cup of coffee, the cup as blue as his hair and branded from a place called Caffe Nero. Still steaming. He held the cup out to me and I gladly took it, looking at the logo on the side. "Here," he said.

"Caffe Nero?" I asked, having never heard of it.

"You've called it British Starbucks," Declan explained, taking a sip from his cup. 

"Interesting," I said.

I wasn't about to turn down coffee even if it was gas station swill at that point and I took a sip, pleasantly surprised to find not only was Caffe Nero good, but he'd also remembered to put a bit of vanilla in it for me, which even my own sister, who got coffee with me every single day, never remembered to do.