Mandrake Leaves
Peter woke to the feeling of a hand on his shoulder, shaking quite hard. He snorted as he gathered his bearings, looking about blearily in the dark. Sirius and James loomed over him, dimly illuminated by the pale moonlight coming in through the dormitory window. Sirius laid a finger over his lips, silencing Peter before he could speak and nodded toward the door. The floor was cold compared to the warmth beneath the duvets and Peter quickly stuck his feet in his slippers and tied his bathrobe 'round his waist as he followed James and Sirius out of the dorm and down the steps to the common room.
None of them spoke until they were all the way to the Secret Room, where James whispered the need to get into their secret place three times to make the door appear. They had gotten quite good at getting in since their first time visiting the room - especially James, who was best at it. Inside, once the door closed, Peter complained, "It's so late it's early again!"
"Yes, but that's true as soon as the clock strikes midnight isn't it?" Sirius pointed out.
"Besides, we didn't want Remus to wake up and see us putting these in our mouths, and wonder why we're eating mandrake leaves," said James, withdrawing the little curled up handful of Mandrake leaves. He put them down on the counter and they all scrambled to sit in the stools around it, looking down at the leaves on the table, still curling a bit from being in James's robe pocket all day since Herbology.
Peter picked one up and looked at it carefully. "What if they taste nasty?" he asked.
Sirius took one up, too, as did James, and Sirius brought the leaf tentatively to his mouth and stuck his tongue out and licked the back of it very slightly. He shrugged.
"What's it taste like?" asked Peter.
"Like nothing, I didn't really taste anything. 'Cept maybe dust. We should probably wash these before we put them in our mouth," Sirius pointed out, and he quickly took up his wand and sprayed each of the leaves with a stream of magic water.
James was looking at Releasing the Animagus Within. "Do we chew them or do they just sit in there all whole and leafy?" he asked.
Sirius looked over his shoulder at the book, as did Peter from the other side. "Dunno," Sirius said after a few minutes, "It doesn't really say, does it?"
James shook his head, "Not at all."
"It says it has to be a whole mandrake leaf here," Peter pointed to the line toward the top of the paragraph.
"But does it mean an entire mandrake leaf or that it must stay in one piece?" Sirius wondered.
Peter didn't know and so he didn't answer that question. Instead, he posed one of his own. "How are we going to talk?" he asked, turning the rather large mandrake leaf over in his hands.
James looked at Sirius. He hadn't thought of that, either.
Sirius shrugged. "Just... you know... around the leaf. It's only for one month. Nobody'll notice, really."
"Nobody will notice you being quiet? For a month?" Peter demanded.
James snorted.
Sirius looked offended, "I'm not that loud," he said. "James is louder than I am."
James looked up, "I am not."
"Are, too," Sirius said.
"You're usually loud together," Peter amended. "Maybe neither of you can hear how loud you're being over the sound of the other."
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.
"What's it taste like?" Peter asked again.
Sirius juggled his tongue about a moment, then said, with a bit of a muffled, full-mouth sound to his voice, "A bit bitter, but not too bad. Sort of like a weird lettuce." His T's sounded like D's.
James sighed, "What do we tell people when they ask why we sound funny?"
"Do I?" Sirius asked.
Peter nodded.
"Maybe we tell them we have allergies," Sirius suggested.
James folded up his leaf and stuck it in his mouth, pocketing it in the side of his cheeks behind his teeth. "You're right," he said, also sounding funny, "It is a bit bitter." He was talking out of the side of his mouth a little bit.
Peter looked at his leaf hesitantly. "My mouth is smaller than you lot's," he said, "What if I can't talk around mine?"
"Then you'll have to write notes," said Sirius with his D's.
Peter frowned. "What if I don't wanna do this anymore?" he asked.
"What about Remus?" asked James.
"Don't be a baby," Sirius added.
"But what if McGonagall finds out?" Peter questioned. "She's done this, she's going to know what it is! Then they'll figure out who stole the stuff from Slughorn's store room and we'll be in trouble! Probably double, even, since we lied to get off before."
Sirius looked at James. "Can you believe what a coward he is?"
James shook his head, "Utter coward."
"I'm not a coward," said Peter sulkily.
"Then do it," Sirius goaded him.
Peter sighed and looked at the leaf, then folded it up, "If we get caught," he muttered, "And we're sent to Azkaban and we rot away there the rest of our lives for this, I'm bloody blaming you."
"Alright," Sirius said, "If we're rotting away in Azkaban for becoming animagi, then yes, yes you can blame me all you like. But none of us are going to be rotting away in Azkaban for this, so stop worrying about it and put the bloody leaf in your mouth."
Peter hesitantly stuffed his mouth with the folded up mandrake leaf and, just as he had feared, it filled his mouth up a lot more than it did the other two and he could only just barely get it to fit beneath his tongue. "Iff tuhh buuuuhhh."
James looked at Sirius. "It's too big," he translated. Peter nodded.
"Just remember, Peter," said Sirius, seeing the frustration on Peter's face, "It's for a good cause."
Peter scowled. "Uhh hayy huu hiihs!"
James snickered, "We hate you, too, Peter." He slung an arm about Peter's shoulders.
Neither James nor Sirius was keen to admit it, but the mandrake leaves were rather more cumbersome than they'd expected. Peter gave up trying to talk at all before they'd even gotten back to the dormitory and went to bed pouty and sulky, turning his back to the other two. Sirius and James got into bed and as the moonlight moved across the wall, marking the passing of hours, Sirius laid awake, staring up at the ceiling, trying very hard not to wonder if one could choke to death on mandrake leaves in their sleep.
Next morning, they were all very tired and slept late. When Remus woke them up after returning from the breakfast they missed, they were all quite grumpy - especially Peter - and that cut back on the need for speech, as they got ready to head to their class. Lucky for them was that the class happened to be History of Magic and therefore would be no reason to talk during that, either, as Professor Binns never called on anybody, and the atmosphere was more sleepy than chatty among the students at their desks.
It couldn't last forever, though, because, as Peter had pointed out, James and Sirius were rather notoriously noisy - especially when paired together - and it was on the way down to the Great Hall for lunch that Remus looked at them in suspicion. "Why are you all so quiet?" he asked. He'd been talking animatedly about the Goblin king they'd just spent the morning learning about and hadn't realized until they were nearly to the Hall that none of the other three had interrupted him even once. That wouldn't have been unusual for Peter, but it certainly was for James and Sirius. Usually, they would've inserted some untrue and rather rude detail or simply changed the subject altogether - long before they reached the grand staircase to the entrance hall.
James looked at Sirius.
"Just tired, I s'pose," mumbled Sirius 'round his mandrake leaf.
Remus's eyebrows narrowed, "Why do you sound funny?" he asked.
"He always sounds funny," Lily injected, coming up behind him, "It's a side-effect of being Sirius Black." She smiled and elbowed Sirius playfully as she passed by.
"Yeah, I always sound funny," agreed Sirius.
She looked 'round at him, "You sound like an engorgement charm gone bad. Did you engorge your tongue somehow practicing for Flitwick's class?"
Sirius shook his head.
Lily looked at Remus and shrugged.
They took their seats at the Gryffindor table in the Great Hall. As James grabbed sandwiches from the platters before him on the table eagerly, a thought occurred to him and he leaned close to Sirius as Remus and Lily talked some more about the Goblin King, debating whether or not he could possibly have still ruled once his head had been turned to stone. "Uhh, mate?" murmured James around his leaf, "How are we supposed to eat?"
Sirius thought for a moment. "I s'pose you shift the leaf about a bit so you can chew."
"What if we swallow the leaf?" James asked.
Sirius shrugged, "Can't be poisonous, can they? They use them for potions all the time, yeah? And we'll end up swallowing them a month from now anyhow."
"Yeah." James looked at the sandwiches, which suddenly seemed like a far more ambiguous task than they had just a moment before.
"Wuhh buhh myyy?" Peter gurgled.
James looked over at Peter's heaping plate of food and reached to pat his round little belly. "Well mate, you needed to put off some of that weight anyhow."