Chapter Text
“We release the basilisk,” Sirius says firmly, sitting back on his hands, legs splayed out in front of him as they sit around on a picnic blanket.
The funny thing -which isn’t particularly funny- is that they’ve been enjoying the quiet times more. Instead of filling their days with planning pranks or running around throwing an expelliarmus at any couples holding hands, it’s kind of like they’re just spending their last moments enjoying each other’s company.
“We should just not go,” James mutters, slumped against Sirius’ side, yanking out grass and tossing it into the wind to see it fly. “We skip and this time when Minnie comes after us, or old Albie, we tell them to go fuck themselves.”
“We have one and a half years here, we can’t be that blatant with Professor McGonagall or the Headmaster,” Remus muses, sitting cross-legged with James’ feet in his lap, hands around the boy’s ankles. “I mean, can we?”
“I think that’s fine, considering they hired a bloody sociopath to teach kids,” Sirius snaps. “And we found out Riddle and McGonagall were in the same year, plus Dumbledore seems to be taking his side a lot, they’re going to be of no help. I’m not letting you two back into that room – I’ll fucking tell my mother if I have to.”
“We focus on the school wards,” Remus plans. “We skip, all our classes if we have to, run away to the Forbidden Forest, whatever. We get the wards up and we’re safe.”
“What if he catches us before then?” James asks hesitantly. “He’s never chased us…but what if he does?”
“Then we elope,” Sirius declares. “Run off to go backpacking. Transfer to Durmstrang. Take on new identities. Murder him in his fucking sleep.”
James rubs his cheek against Sirius’ until Sirius lets out a huff and nuzzles back. “You know the worst part? I was kind of having fun before now.”
“It was fun until he started separating us,” Remus sighs.
Sirius glances off to the side and a snake head coasts above the grass. {What did he say?} Sirius hisses in heavily accented Parseltongue.
{Older Speaker says to continue my watch over the Little Troublemakers,} the snake responds, heading straight for James and his pats.
“Good girl,” James coos, lifting the snake up in his palms and holding it gently against his chest. “You’ve worked hard, Noodle.”
{How did he react when you said we were doing no magic in our spare time?} Sirius asks.
{He was smiling,} the snake reports. {And then he asked if I was told to say that.}
Sirius sneers. {Did he ask if one of us was a Parselmouth?}
The snake makes a wordless noise, like a hum. {Older Speaker did not ask, he already knew.}
“We can’t use the double spies anymore,” Sirius reports.
“He found out?” Remus asks idly. “Took him a while, didn’t it?”
Inside an inner courtyard with only one entrance, the brickwork and soil has been cleared all away to reveal the seven meter tall pulsing orange and slightly translucent ward stone, shaped like a pawn chess piece, the bottom connected straight to the ley line like a live wire to power itself.
The Hogwarts wards were made in a time where wizards and witches barely even had wands to cast with. It’s built on ancient rune chains that are inefficient and linear, thus can’t be adjusted easily. If they want to change anything, the entire wards come down, which means the moving stairs crash, the gargoyles and magical rooms power down and, probably, the whole castle just stops.
The Marauders have done this in three steps. The first is to create an outer shield with all the essentials such as the protective barrier, the magic power cache and basically what makes Hogwarts…Hogwarts.
They’ve also added the linker to their map and a few additional points like a protective net if students fall off the moving stairs, and an alert that goes to all the adults if someone is hurt to the point where their magic tries to self-heal – which is pretty much close to ‘losing an arm’ level.
Oh, and also an alert if someone is fucking around with the ward stone like they are, which is very crucial and kind of disturbing that apparently no one has thought to set that up.
Most importantly, they’ve added a facet where the wards will trigger if someone over the age of magical majority, which is twenty-five when your brain stops growing, feels any killing intent. It won’t yeet them out in a random direction like Sirius wanted but will place them outside and not let them back in until the headmaster does it manually.
The second step, once the first step’s outer shell is stable, is to tear down the original wards (the inner core) and reset them as a mirror of the ones they’ve made in step one.
The third step is to link the inner core to the outer shell and criss-cross it with branching paths so modifying any point or adding more protections won't bring the whole network down and is much easier for future headmasters (and the occasional ambitious student) to edit.
James and Sirius are flying around the giant ward stone on brooms, holding their wands like quills to carve in new runes while Remus stands on a little platform off to the side, holding a massive stack of parchment that they did the calculations on and he's writing the next runes that have to go up on a blackboard as a guide for the other two – basically playing control centre.
After tearing down five different glamour barriers they set up, Voldemort shows up.
Right after they get started, in fact, and they can’t stop a process like this. You can do rune chains in pieces with a couple of minutes in between but you can’t walk away for a quick snack without it quite literally blowing up – you have to commit.
So Voldemort conjures a seat at the entrance to the courtyard and just watches, looking smug like he’s the one doing all this.
It takes them seven hours straight to finish and James just lies splayed on the ward stone, feeling it pulsing under him with a slight warmth, feeling utterly exhausted because carving the runes took so much more power than they predicted.
Sirius is half collapsed near the base of the stone and Remus is sitting on his platform, feet dangling over the large drop and slumped a bit sideways.
“That was impressive,” Voldemort admits, but says it like he’s talking to a couple of five year olds who had managed to colour inside the lines.
“That sucked,” James corrects, squinting through crooked glasses.
Remus blinks slowly, looking half asleep. “If you somehow find a way around this, and you try to hurt James or Sirius, I will rip your fucking face off,” he says blandly.
Voldemort only hums, half-heartedly paying attention to them, because like the last seven hours, he has been distracted instead with planning a way around the wards. Voldemort doesn’t mind a challenge.