The Marauders: Year Seven Part One

Give It a Go

Horace Slughorn awoke in the mid-morning on Christmas, a headache throbbing behind his temples. He squinted at the bright light reflecting off the new fallen snow and groaned as he sat up, scratching his bulbous belly, clad in bright green and yellow striped pyjamas. He shuffled about his living quarters, still squinting, searching for his slippers.

When he'd got the fuzzy things on, he opened his door and went just down the hall to his office, pushing open the door and going on to his private storeroom. He collected a bit of this and some of that, filling his arms with ingredients, emptied his arms into a cauldron, and carried it back to his desk, intent on making the potion to rid himself of hangover.

He was surprised when he came up to his desk to find that there was a box, wrapped in paper with little red and green birds and a big silver bow on top. A little card was attached to the top that read Read Me on the envelope.

Slughorn put the cauldron down on the edge of the desk and sat down, curiosity lighting his face as he pulled the card from the ribbon carefully. He opened it up and read,

Happy Christmas, Professor. May you have good fortune always, and the purest happiness. Watch carefully! Lily.

Slughorn smiled at the card, though his headache still throbbed profusely, and he reached for the box, lifting it up to find beneath it a bowl of water. On the surface of the water floated a perfect, white lily. He bent low to peer into the round bowl, which seemed to shimmer like crystal even in the darkness of the Potions room, as though sunlight had been forever captured in the water. The lily was softest pink in the center and bowed out to the purest white, with long rigid stamen and the tiniest brown freckling along the curve of the petals. Horace Slughorn was quite sure he had never seen a flower as mesmerizing. It seemed almost opalescent. He breathed carefully, afraid to disturb the water upon which the lily floated, slowly spinning rather hypnotically.

"My goodness," he whispered, "Positively beautiful..."

But even as he spoke, something happened. The flower seemed to fold in upon itself, closing up as though for the night until its sepals were fully exposed and it floated onto it's side before falling down through the water, slowly and gracefully, until it reached the very bottom and rested there.

Slughorn stared, leaning forward in his seat, his stubby fingers clutching the edge of the desk, mouth open in stunned silence as he watched.

The lily seemed to be glowing, he thought at first, but then he realized it wasn't a glow at all, but a slow fade from the pristine white to a deep yellow and then golden-orange, flashing, shimmering with sparks of magic... fins grew from the top and sides, long flowing things that wavered in the water, shivering like silk....

The transfiguration was so graceful, so perfect that the lily changed from flower to a beautiful goldfish before his very eyes - and without a single detail out of place. The fish's fins rippled as he began to swim about, as animated as any true fish.

Horace Slughorn sighed, his heart racing with the exhilaration of having watched such a beautiful display of magical ability, and he sat back in his chair, his eyes following the very-much-alive goldfish as it swam about the water in the bowl.

It was the most lovely thing that Horace Slughorn had ever been given in his entire life - a little friend.

Sirius and Remus sat playing wizard chess in the bed upstairs in the Shrieking Shack, waiting for it to be late enough to prepare for the full moon rising. Remus kept his briefcase by his side the entire time, and every now and again his fingers would absently trace the name Professor R. J. Lupin as though he were afraid it might disappear.