The Marauders: Year One | #Wattys2016

To Alice

To Alice

Peter's fear that the classwork might be harder in second year than it had been before was certainly sound. The lessons were much more complicated and the homework doubled. Peter fretted all over the place, shutting himself up in the boys' dorms to study long before the other boys went to bed that first night. In Herbology, they were given a term-long assignment for caring for mandrakes, which were the strangest plants any of them had ever seen in all their lives. They were gnarly little things that screamed when pulled from the earth, whose cries could make the hearer go unconcious. Peter ended up knocked out for half the class when he dropped his mandrake and the earmuffs fell off as he bent to pick it up from the floor of the greenhouse. Then in Potions on Wednesday, he spilled his project all down the front of himself and the concoction hissed and sparked loudly as Professor Slughorn hastened to pull him off to Madam Pomfrey's. Add to it his black eye from a swinging telescope in Astronomy, the fact he forgot his wand in the second Charms class of the term, and that he was bit by his mandrake in the second Herbology on Friday... It was a very, unusually horrible first week of term for Peter.

"I'm doomed," he moaned from his bed on Friday night, after all the classes were mercifully over and he was safely in his pyjamas.

The others were working on an essay for Slughorn, huddled over Remus's desk as he wrote, making notes for good things to say by what Remus had done. James, who was sitting on Remus's desk beside the essay and had his own parchment on his knee, didn't even look up, "You aren't doomed."

"I am," Peter said heavily, "I am doomed, I'm going to fail every class this year and Dumbledore's going to expel me for being such a terrible student."

Sirius jotted down a note about Mertlap's healing qualities and said, "I don't think they can expel people for being bad at classes... You just might have to take the year over again." He pointed at one of the sentences Remus was writing with his quill tip. "What's that word there?"

"Sod off," Remus replied.

"Sod off?" Sirius said, squinting, "But that doesn't make sense... Mertlap's most important quality is sod off?"

Remus looked up, "You do realize your textbook is an excellent place from which to get this information, yeah?" He asked, glancing between James and Sirius. "It's got loads of details and facts about Mertlap."

Sirius stared at Remus.

"You do know how to use it, right?" Remus continued sarcastically, "You lift the lid, see, and there's words in there. You wouldn't believe it, mate, but if you read them, they tell you things. And, if you go to the section on Mertlap - get this - it'll tell you what the most important quality is."

Sirius grinned, "But, Remus, what fun is that? A textbook definition of Mertlap and it's qualities would hardly be as spiffing as you telling us. You tell it so good. Look at that sentence structure!" He waved his palm at the parchment.

"Yeah," said James, chiming in, "The way you describe it is scintillating."

Remus looked down at his paper, which was far from scintillating, and rolled his eyes, "If we get caught cheating because you copied off my paper I'm not defending either of you," he warned.

"Knocker," replied Sirius. "Now what's that word?"

Remus sighed, "It's plasma. The plasma is the liquid the Mertlap produces when you cut off one of it's vines. When diluted, the plasma can be used to heal cuts, burns, and other skin-level wounds until they can be properly seen by a medical witch or wizard."