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Prongs

After returning from the detention, James and Sirius had eaten their supper quickest of all the Gryffindor students and rushed off to the tower so that Sirius could reveal his surprise to James. When they reached the dormitory, Sirius pulled the snitch from his pocket with a flourish. James’s eyes widened with excitement. “A real snitch!” he cried, excitedly, and Sirius dropped the little golden ball into James’s hand, grinning. “Wow, it’s heavier than I imagined,” he said, running his fingers around the little ball and weighing it carefully with his palm. It felt comfortably at home. As he stared at it, the little ball unfurled its wings and fluttered against his fingers. “Where did you get this?” he asked, looking up.

“I found it in the locker rooms,” Sirius said, quite proud of himself.

“Isn’t that sort of stealing?” James questioned, nervously.

“They’ve got loads of snitches, I’m sure just one won’t be missed. Plus it’s not like I’ve really stolen it, have I? It’s still on school property.”

James nodded, eager to accept any excuse at all that would allow them to keep the little winged ball. He grinned up at Sirius. “By next term, when we can really try out we’re going to be practically bloody professionals!” he looked around and quickly backed across the room to be opposite of Sirius and tossed the little winged ball across to him.

Sirius reached up and snatched at it, but it zoomed off with its little wings humming, zipping about the dormitory. “Quick, get it!” Sirius laughed, jumping up onto his bed.

James jumped up onto his own, then across the gap to Remus’s, leaping onto Remus’s heavy trunk and waving his arms about over his head desperately as the snitch zoomed by. “Blimey, they’re faster than I imagined, too,” James commented.

“I got it!” Sirius cried – but he hadn’t. He landed with a heavy thump onto Peter Pettigrew’s bed and tumbled off the other side.

James laughed as Sirius’s legs kicked up over the side of the bed, “You could go pro with moves like that.”

“And so could you,” Sirius replied, rubbing his buttocks as he laughed back at James, who was straddling his and Remus’s beds, his arms flailing about in the air.

When Remus and Peter came back into the dormitory nearly an hour later, Remus frowned at the mess of jumbled pillows and paper airplanes that the boys had been chucking about trying to knock the snitch from the air.

“What have you two been up to?” he asked, jaw-dropped, “This mess!”

“Sirius got us a snitch,” James offered with a grunt as he hurtled himself off Remus’s bed and onto his own.

“James hasn’t caught it yet,” said Sirius from the bed. He’d given up some time ago and just let James jump from bed to bed trying to capture it himself.

“There’s obviously something wrong with it,” said James sourly, whose level of amusement at the snitch had been steadily dropping the longer it took to capture the thing as it zoomed about. “As though it’s repelled by us, or something.” He frowned. “Where’d it go now?” He looked around.

Peter Pettigrew held up his palm. He had the snitch, which was laying calmly in his hand, its wings barely fluttering, as though it had been tamed. All three of the other boys looked surprised. Sirius was sitting up, having flung a copy of James’s quidditch magazine aside. “How in the bloody hell did you do that?” he demanded of Peter.

Peter Pettigrew shrugged, “It flew over and I just sort of caught it. Wasn’t too hard, really, it was as though it wanted me to catch it.” He stared at the little gold ball in his palm. “Maybe it was tired.”

Sirius’s brows stitched together and he looked at James with concern.

James glowered, “Like I said, obviously there’s something wrong with it if Peter can catch it before I can.” He stormed out of the room, slamming the door behind him.

Remus stared at the door, then turned to look at little red-faced Peter and the still dumbfounded Sirius. “Sore loser, isn’t he?” Remus commented.

“I guess so,” Sirius said.

Peter locked the snitch into the drawer of his nightstand upon Sirius’s suggestion, though the snitch didn’t show even the slightest interest in attempting an escape. It lay serenely in Peter’s palm and seemed more agitated once it was in the drawer than it had at being held his captive.



James Potter wasn’t sure why he was so angry that Peter had caught the snitch before him, he just knew that it felt just as badly as if he’d been cut in the stomach. He walked quietly through the corridors of Hogwarts, taking deep breaths and staring up at the paintings that lined the walls. He felt badly that he’d been so nasty to Peter. It wasn’t Peter’s fault, after all, that the ball had proven harder to catch than James had expected snitches to be. He felt like a horrible person for having reacted the way that he had. He’d have to say sorry. But he wanted to cool off first.

Wandering through the castle was calming and he soon felt better. He paused in the corridor he stood in and looked around, hoping to spot some familiar painting or something, but this was a part of the castle he’d never visited before. He turned back and started walking on the way he’d come, but he’d been so deep in thought about snitches and Peter Pettigrew that he hadn’t paid attention to much of anything he had passed by on the way.

Sirius was right, he thought, a map of Hogwarts would come in very handy indeed.

He’d been wandering for some time when he heard the echo of footsteps along the hall before him and the sound of Mr. Filch speaking in a low, coddling voice to his cat, Mrs. Norris. “Yes, my love, I hear the little sneaks,” sing-songed Filch. “It’ll be detention for ‘em if I catch ‘em…” He cackled.

James didn’t want detention. He glanced around and spotted a door and, expecting it to be an empty classroom, flung himself inside it, pulling it closed silently behind him. When he turned around, he found not a classroom, as he had expected, but another long corridor. Afraid that Filch would look in here, he pelted down the corridor and took a left because that was the direction he’d been going before, and rushed along past large suits of armor that turned their heads to watch him go before returning to their original positions.

At the end of that corridor, James was panting to catch his breath, but fairly confident that Mr. Filch would no longer be a threat, and he slowed down, putting his hands to his knees to breathe deeply for a moment and regain his bearings. He knew he’d run up at least one flight of steps since he had fled from filch, and he was pretty sure he’d been on the fifth floor before, so that would put him on the sixth now… But in what part of the castle? Maybe, he thought, it would have been easier if he’d just let Filch catch him. At least then he could’ve been shown how to get back to Gryffindor tower.

He heard voices in the hall behind him and, afraid that it was Filch again, he ducked through another door, which really was a classroom this time, and he pulled the door just to close so he could hear when the bearers of the voices had passed by. As they neared, he recognized Professor Tutman and the headmaster, Dumbledore, just outside in the hallway.

“If only the dark detectors could tell us where in the castle --“ Tutman sighed with frustration.

“I do not think that Tom would be so foolish as to attempt to physically enter the castle so long as I am here,” Dumbledore was saying lowly, “I have managed to instill some level of fear over the years... Or so I am told.”

Tutman asked, “Perhaps we should monitor the Floo network?”

Dumbledore’s voice was fading down the corridor as they passed and walked on, “Perhaps that would be wise, indeed, Professor Tutman.”

James waited until he couldn’t hear them at all any longer, and snuck into the corridor and rushed back the opposite direction from where they’d gone. They must’ve been coming from Tutman’s office because it took James only a few moments later to discover he was in the corridor that the Defense Against the Dark Arts classroom was in, and he knew his way back to the Gryffindor dormitories from there. He scurried through the castle, listening carefully for Filch, Mrs. Norris, or any other members of staff that might be in the halls until he finally found the portrait of the Fat Lady.

“Gillyweed,” he called to her quietly and she swung open without comment, giving a wide yawn as she stretched her limbs and shifted in her painted chair.

“There you are,” Sirius was the only one still awake. He was laying on the rug by the fire in the common room, a piece of parchment in front of him, chewing on the end of a sugar quill as he stared at the stuff he’d written. “Thought you might’ve been caught by Filch,” Sirius explained.

“Nearly was,” replied James. He dropped down to the rug beside Sirius. “Your idea for a map is a brilliant one, by the way.”

Sirius grinned. “Yeah?”

“I think we should work on it. All of us. We’ll make a million galleons from the first years every year if we market it!” James laughed, “I would’ve gladly paid my entire years’ allowance on one while I was down in the Dark Arts corridor.”

“Bloody hell, you did go for a jaunt didn’t you?” Sirius laughed.

James nodded. “Oh and I heard Dumbledore and Tutman talking, too,” he added, and he told Sirius about the bit of conversation that he’d overheard from the two Professors while he was hiding. Sirius’s eyebrows had shot up onto his forehead.

“So they think there’s some dark wizard trying to break into the school?” he asked, awed.

“Apparently so,” James said.

“You know, I do remember at the platform at King’s Cross, Mother said something to my Father about how she wished she’d signed me and Regulus up for Durmstrang instead of Hogwarts. Durmstrang’s the one in Bulgaria, you know, and they’re known for their Dark Arts teaching, which my parents are all for, of course, being Blacks, and my Father said that no, the Dark Lord had plans for Hogwarts. I wonder if that’s what’s happening?”

James looked worried. “Maybe,” he breathed. “Whoa.” He bit on his lower lip nervously, “Sirius, do you think we ought to tell Dumbledore what your father’s said about the Dark Lord?”

“Maybe.” Sirius rubbed his chin, “But it’s really not a lot to tell him about right now. Maybe on the holidays I can try and find out more about it and then we can tell him when we get back. That way when we tell him it’s really something substantial, you know?”

James nodded, “Good idea.”

“Besides, for now it sounds like Tutman’s got it under control,” Sirius pointed out. “And you said Dumbledore said that whoever it is won’t be barging in so long as he’s here, and Dumbledore’s not going anywhere. Don’t reckon the headmaster’s going to take a vacation during term, do you?”

James shook his head.

“And we have way more pressing matters to attend to,” Sirius added eagerly, flipping over the parchment he’d been writing on. “Our map!”