The Marauders: Year Four

The Future

The Future

Lily Evans ran through the castle. People looked at her like she was mental as she went by, her red hair flying out behind her as she went. "Miss. Evans! There will be no running in the corridors!" came McGonagall's sharp voice after her at one point, but she didn't slow and McGonagall couldn't very well go after her, carrying the little goat with the Hufflepuff tie still knotted about it's little neck...

James Potter seemed to have disappeared. She'd looked everywhere - in the common room, the Great Hall, the Trophy Room Passageway, the courtyards, the owlery, the little cove where the boats were docked... every single place she could think of. Finally, frustrated, she sat down on the steps and held her head, thinking. There had to be some place in the castle she hadn't looked...

If only there was a way she could see exactly where people were in the castle.

She sat up. "Of course. Bloody hell. Of course." She got up and ran for the common room. "GIANT SQUID!" she shouted at the Fat Lady, who swung open for her, and Lily bolted across the room to the stairs to the boys dormitory, rushing up them.

"Oi, you know this is the boys dorm side?" Jackson Maw demanded as Lily shoved by him on the stairs.

"Is that why it smells like gym socks?" Lily retorted, rolling her eyes, not slowing down to engage with Jackson.

She'd been wondering how she would figure out which door was the one that housed the Marauders, but she had no problem with it. The door had been etched with lettering in the same messy way that the compartment on the Hogwarts Express had been. The Marauders of Hogwarts: Key Purveyors in Magical Mischief Making (by appointment only please), the lettering said. She shook her head - how could they be so bloody destructive? That door was probably a hundred years old, and there it was, all graffitied upon - or into, rather, carved like a tree.

She shoved the door opened.

The dormitory was an absolute mess. She cringed at a pair of boy shorts laying on the floor and all the dirty clothes spilling over their desk chairs and trunks. Only one corner of the room was neat - and she guessed it was Remus's as the messiest thing there was a stack of books. "Bloody hell," she gasped as she gingerly stepped her way over the mess of things to the desks, where they'd left papers laying about, sketches and notes and all sorts of things...

"If I was one of the messiest boys in the world," Lily murmured, "Where would I keep a map?" she shifted papers on the desks aside, sifting, searching... Then she saw something quite curious and paused in her searching to lift up the parchment.

It was one of Remus's drawings. It was of the castle, from across the Black Lake, the sun rising up over the trees... the detail in the castle itself was incredible - right down to the grain of the stones that made up the castle walls, little windows, some colored in dark and others in soft yellow pencil. But the curious part of it was the foreground. For on the edge of the Black Lake, the subjects of the drawing was Remus himself from behind, and three other figures. Animal figures. It was like looking at a scene out of Snow White, Lily thought, her eyes moving over the animals that surrounded Remus in his drawing... a rat sat on his shoulder with a long, curling tail... and a shaggy black dog at his hip, upon which his hand rested in the fur, and beside him, standing tall, with large antlers that stretched into the sky, was a stag.

Suddenly there was a loud THUMP! beside her and Lily jumped, dropping the parchment onto the desk. A broken chair leg had just fallen from the ceiling and landed on the floor beside her. Lily clutched her heart, "The bleedin' idiots!" she gasped, looking up at the now empty ceiling.