The Marauders: Year Seven Part One

The Contract

"How many fucking times do we have to destroy this bloody thing?" Sirius asked, dramatically kicking the locket for about the sixteenth time into the stone wall in frustration. Remus took his wand away before he could follow up with another round of curses. "It's going to be the death of me!" Sirius growled.

"Or of me," Regulus spoke up, looking sour as he rubbed a smarting red mark on his arm where the locket had pelted him following Sirius's last bout of rage-induced reducto spells that hadn't done the trick any better than they'd done when they had attempted to destroy the locket at Fallengunder over summer.

"Stop whining," Sirius commanded rudely, "It barely glanced off you, you big baby."

"Oi!" Regulus shouted, firing up nearly as quickly as Sirius was prone to doing, "Look at my arm and say it barely touched me! Look at that gigantic welt you've left on me with it! It nearly took my arm clear off!" (James figured now was not the time to follow up the comment with "'tis only a scratch", though he wished that Frank Longbottom was there so that they could share a look of mutual amusement.) Regulus continued, "Could've killed me, you could."

"Oh. My gods." Marlene looked about at Emmaline, "There's two of them." Emmaline nodded, amused, and Lily smirked in response.

Remus muttered, "One was plenty, what were the fates thinking?"

Sirius turned about at Remus, glaring, then turned back to start to say something more to Regulus, but James could see the anger in Sirius's eyes and knew whatever it was about to be said would be something that -- well, he might not regret it, but he certainly shouldn't say it. "Alright," James's voice cut Sirius's off and he stepped between the two glowering brothers. "That's enough fighting. It isn't helping any trying to figure this out. We need to focus." He bent down and scooped the locket up into the remaining bits of the box that they'd destroyed to get the locket out. He stared down at it a moment, then sighed and looked 'round at the others. "Does anyone have any constructive ideas how to destroy this -- ones that don't involve a reducto?" He added this last bit looking directly at Sirius.

Sirius muttered something and sat down, backward in a chair, his chin on the high back and boots hung up on the rungs below.

They all looked at one another.

From the lake's shore, the whole lot of them - Marlene, Emmaline, Alice, Wendy, Lily, Peter, Remus, Sirius, James, and Regulus - had started up the path to the castle, running into Maryrose halfway back. She'd gone for help when Regulus and James had disappeared into the lake, just in case something went wrong with the bubblehead charms, or else they needed it, facing Voldemort, and she'd managed only to find Professor Frek, who had been most unhelpful, saying he was busy and couldn't be interrupted what he was doing - though, to Maryrose, it seemed that all he was doing was staring off into the woods... Maryrose had been in a right panic and was very relieved to see Regulus, dripping wet, trudging along with the whole herd of the others up the hill to Hogwarts.

It had been Sirius's idea to go to the room where they'd once held meetings of the Order of the Phoenix. It had been waiting for them just as it always was back in fifth year, equipped with loads of defensive magic books and cushions, chairs, and dummies to practice spells on. But it wasn't equipped with anything made for destroying hissing lockets that seemed quite determined to survive near to anything.

"Perhaps we could crush it?" Emmaline spoke up. They all looked at her, "Maybe... maybe whack it with a hammer?"

James looked about for something like a hammer to give it a go. They found a heavy mallet, held by a suit of armor like the ones outside of Minnie's office, which stood sentinel by the doorway out of the room. James extricated it from the knight's grasp carefully, and chucked the locket down to the ground. "Everyone use a shield this time, please? We don't need anymore injuries." Justified that he had an injury at this, Regulus looked pointedly at Sirius, who got up and grappled his wand back from Remus.