The Marauders: Year One | #Wattys2016

Mandrake Leaves

James made an agreeable face, "Likely, I s'pose."

"You're still louder than I am," Sirius murmured.

Peter waved his mandrake leaf. "So how do we do this?" he asked.

James turned back to the book and ran his finger along until he got to the section about the mandrake leaves. "We have to cast a spell on the leaf and then hold it in our mouths for thirty days. Not twenty-nine, not thirty-one. Thirty days. Exactly." He read on. "This is what makes it so we can turn back into ourselves at will, apparently. The mandrake leaf absorbs a part of us as we carry it about. That's interesting."

"Then what, after the thirty days?" Peter questioned.

"Then we spit it out and add it to the potion we'll have divided out into three parts," Sirius said. Each bottle is our own and we can't get them mixed up unless you want to end up looking like me."

"Careful, he might," James said, nudging Peter in the side with a wink to Sirius.

"Well I'd like to stay looking like me," Sirius said.

"And then what?" Peter asked, wanting to know the full process.

"Well, dummy, then we take the potion and we're animagi," James said. "We just gotta figure out how and where we can do the whole ceremony."

"There's a ceremony?" Peter grappled for the book and quickly flipped ahead a couple pages.

Sirius pointed, "See? We gotta drink it under the full moon, after we've said a certain spell and done certain stuff, then we'll be animagi."

Peter shivered, "How are we going to drink it under the full moon?"

"We're going to go camping," said Sirius, sudden inspiration striking. He grinned. "Yeah! We go camping and we go out to the woods and that's where we do our animagi ceremony. It's brilliant."

James nodded eagerly, "Yeah, yeah. Brilliant."

Peter looked less enthusiastic. "My mum would never let me go camping alone with you lot."

"Well the brilliance of it is I go camping out all the time," James said. "So you just come to my place for a couple days and that's all your mum needs to know, then we'll go out behind my house. We have a big field back there where my dad and I play quidditch sometimes and there's loads of trees and woods around it. Mum and Dad won't even think it's weird because we do it all the time." He couldn't believe he hadn't thought of this before, when him and Sirius were sitting 'round the Secret Room discussing it.

Peter still looked nervous, but he didn't say anything further to discourage the idea.

"Alright," Sirius said, holding up his mandrake leaf, "Enough talking. I'm tired and we've got classes to get to in the morning. I need some sleep. Let's get this thing in our mouths."

"Where did we land on chewing it down?" James asked.

"I wouldn't," Sirius said, "The only mention of it calls it a whole leaf so I'm guessing it needs to stay whole."

"Alright," James nodded in agreement.

All three of them held their leaves in front of them for a moment, staring at them. "What's the spell?" Peter asked.

"Noli oblivisci," said Sirius, tapping the leaf with his wand.

James and Peter each repeated the action, "Noli oblivisci," they recited.

Sirius took a deep breath. "Well," he said, "Here does nothing..." he rolled the leaf up as small as he could and then he stuck it into his mouth, carefully shifting it about until it sat in the hollow space beneath his tongue.