A New Beginning (James Potter/Marauders Era)

Sluggie is Peeved

Chapter 16

James

It seemed after that awful display by the Twins' mother, that they weren't in a good mood. The rest of the Marauders and myself were beyond furious. How could anyone express something like that to their children? Of course, Sirius understood better than any of us a family situation like that. I just didn't understand why people were like that. 

Unfortunately, the day wasn't going to get too much better because we had detention with Slughorn at 7 pm, an event that Remus begrudgingly reminded us of after we started walking back to the common room. Realising that it was nearly 6 pm, as we had been comforting the Twins for much longer than we expected, we turned heel and bid Lily, Remus and Peter 'goodbye' and headed to the dungeons and showed Liam and Raven the kitchens on the way to detention. We needed to eat, after all, none of us had eaten anything since last night, we were starving. 

Slughorn was already in his classroom when we entered, standing next to a week's worth of dirty cauldrons, scoops, vials and other utensils needed to brew potions. With a triumphant smile on his pudgy cheeks, he left us without our wands and said that he'd be back at 9 pm as we got to work on his punishment. Soon enough, we all got bored, so we discussed the prank that we were planning for the bet, however, even that got tedious, so we reverted back to silence. 

By 7:30, we had developed a pattern, any clean materials got put away by Liam and Sirius, who were cleaning the stirrers, spoons and other utensils, so to get them done as quickly as possible to help Raven and me with the cauldrons that were far too dirty for the belief of appropriate use to occur, bloody first-years. "Slughorn needs to teach firsties to use their cauldrons properly," I muttered. Raven, the only person close enough to hear, laughed. 

By 8:30, our routine was solid and the utensils were cleaned and put away. With the help of Liam and Sirius on the cauldrons, we only had four more left to clean.

And by 9:00, we expected Slughorn to walk through the door and chastise us for doing something wrong. However, the door remained closed. In fact, no footsteps were heard in the outside corridors either. "HA HA HA HE HE HE HE," Peeves, "NOT SO SMUG NOW ARE WE FATTY SLUGGIE, WEHEHEHEHEHEE!!"

"What on Earth?" Liam and Raven scrambled outside in confusion. Padfoot and I looked at each other and followed. To our amusement, like usual with Peeves, we found Slughorn stuck to the wall of the corridor with chewing gum littering his hair, well what little of it there was left. "A poltergeist!" Raven exclaimed to us. "This is brilliant!" Padfoot and I gave her a strange look, but Liam seemed to nod in agreement. "He can help us! Anything to cause mischief." She continued as Peeves spotted us. 

"AHHHH, POTTY AND DOGGY!" Raven and Liam started laughing. We smirked, "Hey Peeves, wandering a bit close to the Baron's territory. Don't you think?" He stopped, his smile flickering to nerves for a second. "Think you can let him down before the Baron comes back from whatever you've done to distract him? We need our wands back, and Slughorn's got 'em" I said calmly. He blew a raspberry at us and dropped Slughorn, who, after threatening us to never tell a soul, disgruntledly gave us our wands and sent us away. 

Of course, we promptly told Moony and Wormtail all about it as soon as we stepped foot in the Gryffindor common room. 

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