A Marauder's Guide to Falling Together

Chapter Thirty

He refused to say anything further until they had reached the kitchen. The loud music and chatter emanating from the Great Hall was still prominent as they descended down towards the kitchen, but Marlene could only concentrate on her building curiosity. He tickled the familiar pear and the portrait opened up to reveal the house elves continuing to work on serving the feast above.

"I know it's not really much," he said while pulling out a chair for her at the table in the back of the room. "But we can't really leave the castle and it's much too cold out to head up the Astronomy tower."

"Anytime alone with you is perfect," she smiled and took her seat.

"Mister Black," Olli the house elf had rushed over. "It's always nice to see you back sir, and you brought the Miss with you again!"

"Olli you remember Marlene?"

"Hello Olli," Marlene smiled and the house elf bowed so low that his nose swept the ground.

"Of course Miss, Olli always remembers Mister Black's friends."

"Do you think we could grab a couple of leftovers from upstairs?" Sirius asked politely. Olli hurried away to grab a few different things. "I'm not overly hungry but I bet you're probably starving."

"A little," Marlene admitted. She had skipped dinner to help the girls get ready for the dance.

"So the date is really more of a gift than anything," Sirius continued as Olli piled up their small table with different cakes, pies and pastries. Marlene reached forward to grab a tart and shoved it into her mouth as she listened. "I'm going to let you ask me any three questions about the Marauder's and I will answer truthfully."

"Three things?" Marlene wondered out loud. "What do you mean?"

"Three secrets then," he looked at her as though it had been obvious. "You're always bugging me about Marauder secrets. Now it's your chance to ask. Three things, McKinnon. Don't waste them."

Marlene could barely believe her ears. Sirius had always been so secretive about certain things and now suddenly he was prepared to be an open book for her to read. She blinked a couple of times before settling on the notion that she hadn't misheard him. "Hmm, let me think."

"There's a time limit on this, you know," his eyes were twinkling. "I thought a bit more of your Cinder-thingy and you only have until midnight to ask. Clock's ticking."

"So what is it that you do when the four of you sneak out late at night?"

"I already told you the answer to that one," he looked almost disappointed. "We explore the castle."

"No, that was the short version as you called it. I want to know the long version."

Sirius seemed to contemplate her for a moment before his face broke out into a grin. "Well ever since second year Prongs and I were busy getting ourselves into great mischief. Somewhere we devised the idea of breaking the detention record. We ended up spending a lot of time in that room. I'm not really sure how we found the passage but once we did we knew that there were more like it. We've sort of spent the majority of our time at Hogwarts trying to piece together all its secrets. That's when the idea for the map came up. It was Peter, actually, who thought of it. Who would have guessed that?"

"We've been working on the map since end of third year. It's taken a lot of tweaking over the years but I'll dare say that it's been worth it. Sure there were a couple of pranks here and there, mostly in our younger years. Since finding out about Remus and our, shall we call them extracurricular monthly activities, we've devoted most of our time to the development of the map."