The Marauders: Year One | #Wattys2016

Red, Green, and Blue Bottles

Red, Green, and Blue Bottles

Time seemed to fly by as the semester was coming to an end. The mandrake leaves were nearly ready to finally be spit out of their mouths. James kept checking the parchment they'd been marking days down on to keep track. As it neared the end of the thirty-days, the leaves seemed to be growing more and more bitter and soured up their stomachs with acidic burning. Poor little Peter couldn't stop belching around his mouthful of mandrake leaves and Sirius kept thumping his chest with his fist with irritation.

It was quite miraculous, Sirius thought, that they hadn't been caught with the mandrake leaves. They'd received a lot of strange looks from various students, and explained it away with excuses like toothaches and swollen tongues (they actually used the backfiring engorgement charm line Lily had fed them that first day on a couple of Ravenclaws). None of the faculty, however, had seemed to take notice. Except maybe McGonagall, who had given them looks a couple of times when Sirius had accidentally drooled a little down his chin while talking to answer a question and there was once that Flitwick had called on Peter and he'd muffed about trying to answer with his full mouth, but Flitwick hadn't seemed too suspicious - probably he'd just thought that Peter had snuck a snack into class.

In fact, the only people that seemed to have noticed the oddity of the mandrake leaves at all was Remus and Lily.

"I wish you lot would tell me what's going on," Remus said one day when James was lying about, groaning over his stomach ache.

"There's nothing going on," insisted Sirius.

Remus only sighed.

Lily, on the other hand, had refused to talk to them until they could clear their mouths, calling the practice of speaking with one's mouthful obscene. "I could say something obscene but you certainly wouldn't like that, now would you, love?" James had jeered and Lily had hit him with a bat-bogey hex in response.

All in all, by the thirtieth day, they were quite ready to spit the leaves out of their mouths and Sirius was up before the crack of dawn, shaking James's shoulder. "Get up," he said, "Get up." He ran about to Peter's bed, careful not to wake up Remus, and shook the round figure heartily. "Get up."

Once James had shoved his glasses on his face and Peter had shimmied into his slippers, they grabbed the invisibility cloak and hurried out the door through the common room. Bilius and Derek had fallen asleep sprawled over the couch, Derek with his textbook across his chest and Bilius drooling on the pillow, his wand clutched in his arm that hung over the sofa's edge. They'd been up all night revising for the N.E.W.T.s, by the look of it, and James did not envy them. He was already dreading the O.W.L. and the N.E.W.T. years, just by the frenzy of revising that had been going on in the common room as the exams drew nearer and nearer. The three second years snuck by and out the portrait hole, with only a snorting snore from Bilius.

They made it to the seventh floor and they could hear Mrs. Norris mewling in the distance down the corridor. James hurried to open the Secret Room and they ducked through before her lamplike eyes could find them, shutting it quickly behind them.

Sirius pulled the cloak off them and hung it 'round the knob of the door so they wouldn't forget it and they all three hurried to the stools 'round the counter where the potion stood, bubbling peacefully in the cauldron. Sirius stared in and nodded, "It looks right," he said. He reached into the cupboard up above, where they'd found some colorful bottles with corks and sealing wax. He pulled down three bottles - a green, a red, and a blue, and put them down on the table. Peter took the green, James the red, and Sirius the blue. "Alright," Sirius said, "I guess we just spit the leaves into the bottles and add the potion in." He was consulting the textbook they'd left propped on the counter.