The Losing One || Sirius Black

54. In the Dark: Encyclopedia

Sirius Black

Saturday, 24th March 1973.

Hogwarts

Last night was another map mission. Since it was Friday, the Marauders spent almost the whole night mapping out the castle and searching its corridors for secret passageways and alcoves. It really became a routine. All of them knew that every Friday and Saturday night were reserved for mapping the castle. They even managed to do one or two short missions during the workdays.

But the map still wasn't finished.

Sirius could say that they were approximately third of the way done which wasn't that great because the term will end in three months. Since the walls of their dorm were now mostly filled with drawings of corridors, paintings and armors, there was this concern of how to move all that parchment to the Potter Manor when the term ends without messing the order of it and ruining the whole thing.

Sirius didn't even want to think about all the taped notes with corrected spelling of portrait names and arrows which indicated the wrong orientations of some tapestries, armors and other ancient decoration. Not to mention the different moving staircase drawings with marked rotations and sinking steps.

In conclusion, moving the map to the Potter Manor seemed impossible.

Yesterday, or more so very early today, when the Marauders came back from the map mission with another stack of parchment, it became quite clear that the solution will have to be found.

That was the main reason why they found themselves in the Hogwarts Library on the Saturday morning. Remus and Peter were already there for about an hour before Sirius and James arrived. The latter had an early Quidditch practice and, since Anthony was ninety-nine percent sure that the Gryffindor team will play in the finals, there was no skipping practices.

Sirius threw his half-empty bag on the desk occupied with numerous books about maps, shrinking charms, compact charms, moving spells, teleporting spells and duplicating. Needless to say, Remus and Peter looked a mess.

"Any luck?", James asked the two as he mirrored Sirius' action of placing his bag on the desk and throwing himself on one of the chairs.

Remus and Peter just gave them miserable looks, "I see.", James said awkwardly as he reached for one of the untouched books.

Sirius sighed dramatically before doing the same. He was their technician since he researched the art of map making back at the 12th Grimmauld Place during last summer. If he was being honest, that title didn't bring him any good. There was a separate stack of books only about maps waiting for him while others tried finding different approaches to the current problem.

It all seemed so easy to him back in summer. Granted, the final step really was easy, once all the pieces are assembled all you had to do was combine them with a spell. But Sirius didn't count on not having all pieces. All he knew was that it was possible to add small details to your map like a secret corridor or a passageway, but, apparently, it was impossible to add a whole new floor.

His current job was to find some temporary map-combination charm that could easily be reversed. But, like expected, not everyone really needed to unassemble their map once it was assembled. Quite the opposite, all the books concentrated on very permeant combination charms.

The time passed as slowly as possible. Sirius hadn't even been reading for an hour and his mind already started to wonder to other tasks they needed to do. Like...

"So, what are we doing for your guys' birthdays?", he asked in an attempt to distract everyone from their current research.

"You mean what are we doing for James' birthday?", Remus retorted. He didn't even lift his head to look at Sirius. His eyes were glued to the pages of the book in front of him.