Marauders - Always - Part One

Summer 2015: but wait its also Summer 1993 and where the hell are we Declan?

"It will eventually," he answered.

"Alright." I didn't think it would. I looked over my shoulder at the magnolia bushes again, the barely visible form of the shaggy black dog showed through the bush, a shadow slightly darker than the true shadows. My heart tugged in my chest and I suddenly didn't care if I was being pranked somehow, if this was an elaborate trick of film and illusion. I was throwing myself into the emotion of it and it was the strangest thing.

I could almost feel the things that dog was feeling.

Or - no, not a dog, I reminded myself.

Sirius Black.

Declan's hand gently closed around my wrist. "C'mon," he whispered. "Show's about to start. Out the back, remember?"

"Show?" I stammered, too caught up in staring at the dog in the magnolias.

Declan pulled me after him, keeping on the neighbor's side of the hedge row, ducking below the line of the fence, keeping us from being seen from Number Four's windows or the backyard as we came into the back and peered through the cracks in the fence at the back sunroom/deck.

The entire family was sitting there. I couldn't see them too good, through the fencing  and also through the glass of the sunroom we were looking through, only forms of the three adults and two boys. I shifted and my breath caught in my throat when I saw him.

His hair was messier than Daniel Radcliff's had been, a bit longer, so it hung over his forehead he way mine sometimes did. But even from where we were, even through the tiny cracks between fence panels and the glass, even in the dark, I could still see the flash of his vibrant green eyes and I covered my mouth with my palm. He wore a too-large t-shirt that hung on him loose and was a cherry-tomato red and a pair of jeans that were torn at the knee from use, not for fashion's sake, and he had on a pair of Converse sneakers. Trainers, they called them in England, I reminded myself. His black wire frame glasses were circular - a detail too iconic to have gotten wrong in the films, I suppose - and he was looking down at his plate, not speaking or being spoken to... just trying to keep to himself, to be unnoticed, while simultaneously being the only one at that table that drew my attention.

Harry Potter.

I looked at Declan.

He smiled and the flush to his face... Was it pride? Admiration? I don't know. I couldn't tell.

I didn't know Declan well enough yet.

My attention had been drawn from Harry Potter (the Harry fucking Potter, guys), but it was long enough.

It happened just like I always imagined in the books.

I scrambled to get the pen out of my pony tail (that's where I always store my pens) and scribbled furiously in my notebook as I watched the scene unfold.

Suddenly, back door had burst open, spilling light across the yard in a sharp golden streak, but a strange shadow was cast in the middle. A very large, very round shadow... and it was growing by the second.

I gasped so loud, it's a wonder the Dursleys didn't hear me.

And I could see the flash of yellow eyes in the magnolias across the yard. Like us, Sirius Black had run around the house just in time to see as Aunt Marge made her aerial debut.

Sticking out of the door was a pair of extremely swelled up legs, which were attached to an even more swelled up body. The hippopotamus-sized woman was floating, inflating like a giant hot air balloon, wedged in the doorway, shrieking with panic as she waved her fat arms and kicked her fat legs and her blouse buttons were bursting, pinging about like tiny bits of shrapnel. Vernon Dursley stood in the doorway, desperately clutching the woman's hands.