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For the most part, they avoided punishment.
Mcgonagall had been entirely—for lack of a better term—perplexed by the combination of pranksters that she had caught red-handed at two in the morning. Typically, she explained, in that sharp, Scottish tone of hers, when called out of bed on night duty on the basis of troublemakers perusing the corridors past curfew, she expected the Marauders. It was commonplace by then. At least two of them, perhaps three, perhaps all four (if she was entirely unlucky).
"But two Marauders," she said bitterly, giving them a glare that Piper was sure could have killed a small child, "and a Head Girl.... Well, this is unprecedented, I must say."
Of course, Piper immediately burst into apologetic mumbles, casting her wide eyes down to Mcgonagall's slipper-clad feet to properly express her embarrassment.
"Oh, it's alright, Piper," Sirius claimed, nudging her in the side. He was smiling at Mcgonagall in a challenging sort of way, his grey eyes somehow alight with the same intensity he always wore on his sleeve. He tipped his chin. "Minnie won't be too cross with us. She never is."
Before Piper could hiss the word Minnie in a horrified repetition of Sirius's nickname for their Head of House, she found a sense of warmth washing over her face as Mcgonagall's glowering face was cast unto Sirius, her thin lips twitching with impatience.
"It is one o'clock in the morning," she said sharply, as though the three of them had been unaware of the timeframe they found themselves out of bed within. "And, if I'm to presume correctly, you three aren't the only students out of bed."
"Well, probably," James admitted, shrugging rather innocently. "We don't exactly know whether they've actually gone on without us or were just calling our bluff."
"It's likely they were only calling our bluff," Sirius put in with a nod.
Mcgonagall didn't say anything for a moment, her lips pressed together in a straight line. Piper got the feeling Sirius's input on the matter was not helping their situation.
"Also," he said after the pause, clearly not picking up on the same feeling that Piper had, "it's a quarter 'til two. Not exactly one in the morning."
"One forty-six, now," James added, and rather seriously at that.
"If you three are still in my office when the clock behind me reads one forty-seven," said Mcgonagall, looking very much like her patience had run thin and she no longer had the energy to deal with James and Sirius's antics, "then I will be giving all of you a week's detentions. Go."
James and Sirius stared up at the witch as though she had hung the stars; their eyes lit up and they scrambled out of their seats without a second thought. Piper took a moment of nudging and tugging to get out of her chair, baffled into a trance, entirely lost by the fact that the Professor Mcgonagall had let off three students she caught out of bed past curfew. But James took her arm and pulled her out of the office, and the three of them went rushing down the hall.
