Out of the Books

Chapter 7 - The Twisters

The ringing of the phone interrupted Jack in his story about Padfoot, the big, black dog of his best friend Sirius, and how he scared Sirius's superstitious cousin Narcissa senseless, because she thought it was an omen of death.

Somewhat irritated about the interruption, Jack picked up the phone - and went bright pink when he heard who had called.

"James, the children haven't come home yet. Have you seen them at school? They are never that late without telling me where they are..." came the concerned voice of his wife from the receiver.

"Oh, I'm so sorry, Lily," he exclaimed. "They are with me. They came to see me after class today." He winked at his children and mouthed, "It's Mum." He didn't notice the puzzled glance the twins exchanged.

"James!" she said angrily. "You could have called me. You don't know how worried I was!"

"Honestly, Lily. I'm very sorry. I didn't want you to worry, I just forgot," Jack admitted somewhat downcast, but then his face lit up boyishly. "Look," he said with a disarming smile on his face, which Liz could not see of course. "You should be really proud of me for taking some parental responsibilities seriously, shouldn't you?"

"The children didn't get into any trouble, did they?" she asked suspiciously. Jack threw an alarmed glance at his children. He knew better than to tell Liz of their little episode in the physics lesson, and especially how he had been handling it afterwards.

"Oh, er, everything is alright. I just decided that it was time for an important father-to-kids-talk."

"Uhuh," said Liz, obviously not really convinced. Then she sighed. "Why don't you three come home for dinner? It's already quite late."

Jack grinned at the phone when he answered. "What a brilliant idea. See you in twenty minutes. Love you."

While Jack packed his stuff in his bag and locked his office, the twins were already racing to the car. Amy was a bit faster and got to sit in the front seat.

Thinking about Liz's possibly not so happy reaction, if she had known how he had been dealing with the twins after their prank, Jack realized that she was probably right. He hadn't been handling this situation very maturely. He was not the marauder Prongs anymore, but a father and a teacher, who was supposed to act responsibly. As funny as his children's prank had been, he shouldn't have encouraged them to continue this kind of behavior openly. I probably didn't make many friends among my colleagues today, he sighed inwardly.

Determined to undo at least part of the damage he had caused, Jack turned around in the driver's seat to face Amy and Leo, before he started the car.

"There is something else about practical jokes you absolutely need to know," he began. "As funny and creative I found your prank today, as a teacher I cannot tolerate another one. If I or any of your other teachers find out about any more trouble making, you will have to bear the consequences, understood?"

"Yes, Dad," Amy and Leo answered in unison, but when their father turned his attention to the road, they shared a secretive grin.

After riding in silence for a few minutes, Leo leaned forward between the seats of his father and sister and asked, "Why did you call Mum Lily?"

Jack glanced quickly in the mirror to see that Leo was looking at him curiously. "Well, that was her nickname at school."

Jack had the feeling that he had not convinced his son and Amy was looking at him somewhat doubtfully as well. He was annoyed with himself about his slip of tongue. But to his relief, Leo did not ask about it any further.

Instead, Amy asked now, "Did Mum like your friends when you went to school?"

Jack looked a bit surprised for a second, but then he answered. "Well, I guess by the time she liked me, she was pretty much used to the others as well. Sometimes, when all four of us were together, we could quite get on her nerves, though," he smiled.

"But then why have your friends never visited us?" Amy wanted to know. Her Dad's friends really seemed like the sort of people who could teach her and her brother quite a lot of fun. And judging her brother's face, she was not the only one who would like to get to know them.

That's a fair question, isn't it? Jack thought, sighing. "Not all friendships last forever," he replied quietly and sadly. "One of my three friends, Peter, betrayed your mother and me and by doing so, he robbed me of my two other friends."

Not quite knowing how to respond to this, the twins remained silent for the rest of the way home.

***

"Don't you think Dad acted a bit odd today?" Amy was sitting on the upper part of the bunk bed, dangling her legs, as she watched her brother pack some books and folders he would need for tomorrow's lessons in his schoolbag.

Leo turned around to her. "Yeah, I was surprised that we didn't get into trouble for that stunt," he admitted.

"Well, that too," nodded Amy, "but that wasn't what I meant. He became so nervous when you asked him why he had called Mum 'Lily.'"

Leo put his bag aside and sat down on the desk, one of his feet on the chair, the other one hanging down freely. He furrowed his brow and nodded.

"That's strange. I've never heard him call Mum 'Lily' before," he mused.

Then he shrugged. "But maybe, if it's what she was called at school, he just did it because he had been talking about all his memories."

"Yeah, maybe." Amy didn't really sound convinced. "But I'm sure there is something he is not telling us," she considered. "Come to think of it, he has been a bit secretive ever since last summer, locking himself in his study for hours on end. I wonder what he has been doing there."

"Do you really think one thing has to do with the other?" Leo asked a bit doubtfully.

Amy shrugged and crawled over to the window to open it for the night, then she turned around halfway. "We could try to find out," she said non-commitedly.

Leo nodded enthusiastically. "That is exactly what the Marauders would have done, isn't it?" He threw his blanket on his sister's bed and joined her, as it was now getting quite cold in the room.

"I know what we can do," he said with sparkling eyes. "We continue the noble work of the Marauders; we do everything in our power to make school more interesting by playing pranks and we uncover secrets, experience adventures, and maybe we can even meet the rest of the real Marauders one day," he ranted on.

Laughing openly about her brother's antics, Amy replied, "Well, let's do first things first. If we want to be worthy successors of the Marauders, we need to come up with a good plan." She pretended to lecture him seriously about that, but her laughing eyes betrayed her. "Oh, and we need to come up with a name as well," she added.

They grinned at each other, each in their own fantasies, how much fun the Marauders must have had when they were their age, and how much fun they could have themselves.

Suddenly, Leo jumped from his cross-legged sitting position to his knees. "I have an idea!" he exclaimed. "Do you think that Dad would talk with Mum about his school memories today? I mean, he was really engaged in his memories today and he and Mum probably share some of the same memories, so he would probably talk to her about it, wouldn't he?"

Amy chewed on her lower lip, as she thought about that. "So you suggest that we eavesdrop on them?" she asked slowly and with notable reluctance.

"Well, we could at least try. If they are talking about something else, we can leave them alone," he tried to convince not only his sister, but also a little voice in his own head which reminded him that it was not exactly nice to listen in to other people's talking.

"Or we could just ask them when they come and say goodnight," Amy suggested.

"Yeah, as if they would tell us anything," Leo rolled his eyes. "Didn't you see how uncomfortable Dad was with the topic?"

Amy threw him a nasty look and Leo threw up his arms defensively. "Okay, let's listen to them first, and then we can still ask them, can't we?"

Inside Amy, her curiosity was struggling with her conscience, but finally she nodded. "Okay, let's go then." Gracefully, she jumped down from the bed.

The bare feet of the twins made funny noises on the polished wooden floor in the corridor of the Pearsons' house. They sneaked to the closed door of the living room, behind which they could hear the muffled voices of their parents.

"Who was it?" they heard their mother say.

Obviously, Jack had just finished a phone call. "Oh, it was Jonathan," he answered. "He's feeling better and will come back to teach tomorrow."

"You taught his class today, the one the children are in, didn't you? How was it?" she asked curiously.

Jack sighed and let himself fall backwards on the sofa, next to his wife.

Liz chuckled and put her arms around his shoulder. "That bad, huh?"

Jack pulled back slightly to look her in the eyes, then he smiled and admitted, "Well, actually it was quite funny. The only problem was that I was on the receiving end of a practical joke of the children."

"So, that's why they stayed with you in your office after school. Did they serve detention with you?"

Trying to avoid the topic, without actually lying to his wife, Jack stuttered, "Er - well - I - I warned them - and told them, next time it would be detention..."

Liz looked at him expectantly, not missing a beat. "And what was it this time?" she prompted finally, after he didn't say anything for a while.

Knowing how Liz would react to the answer of this question, Jack braced himself. "I told them about the Marauders."

"James, you didn't!" she exclaimed.

Jack slumped deeper into the sofa. "I know," he snapped a bit huffily. "I'm sorry, I didn't quite feel like myself today," he said more placably. "It's just, they reminded me so much of how Sirius and Remus and I were at school...after that, I already realized that I should have acted more like a teacher than like Prongs," he ranted.

"James, I understand," Liz said quietly and leaned on him. "And actually, I'm not so much concerned about that. I mean, you turned out right, after all of your pranks at school, didn't you?"

Jack was totally taken by surprise. He had expected any reaction from Liz, but not that.

"But we have to be careful what to tell the children," Liz continued. "Most of what you did at school is hard to explain by a natural way."

"Well, I only told them about our more harmless pranks, but you are right. We do have to be careful. They asked me already why I called you 'Lily' on the phone today," he informed her.

"They are quite bright and observant for their age; they do have some Marauder traits, haven't they?" she smiled proudly, then she stood up. "Let's go, say good night to them. It's already quite late."

On the other side of the door, Amy and Leo shared a startled look, before they turned around simultanously and darted along the corridor to their room. Leaving their door open in order to make no suspicious noises, they just managed to climb into their beds and grab a book each, before Liz and Jack entered the room.

Amy kept her face hidden behind the pages while Leo looked up, seemingly surprised when their parents entered the room.

"Oh, Mum, Dad, can I finish just this chapter before we turn off the light?"

Liz looked suspiciously at her son for a few seconds, but as he managed to keep the expression of an innocent question on his face, she just nodded. Then she sat down on his bed, tried to look on the cover of the book.

"What are you reading, Leo?" she asked curiously.

Leo turned the cover so that she could see it. "It's 'The Neverending Story,'" he replied enthusiastically. "Wouldn't it be cool, if you could just go into the world of a book, meet all your favourite characters and have adventures with them?"

Liz smiled at him, "Yes, I think that would really be fun," she agreed with her son. She stroked his hair and stood up to say good night to her daughter as well.

Amy put the book she had pretended to read down in her lap when she looked up. "Mum," she asked, while she threw a quick glance at Jack who was standing in the open door, leaning against the frame. "Does the broken friendship with the Marauders and the changing of your names have anything to do with each other?"

Liz looked at both of her children, who were looking at her with curiosity. Then she turned to Jack, asking him for help with her eyes, as she didn't exactly know what he had already told them today.

Jack sighed, stepped into the room and leaned backwards against the desk. "Yes, we changed our names, after our friend Peter betrayed us. But why we did it is a very complicated story."

"But when only Peter betrayed you, why don't you have contact to Sirius and Remus anymore?" asked Leo.

"As I said, it's a very complicated story. Fact is that we are too far away from our friends now to be together with them," Jack answered quietly, but his tone of voice suggested that the topic was closed for him.

Amy and Leo looked somewhat disappointed by this answer and turned to their mother in hope that she would give some more information. But she only shook her head and said quietly, "Believe us, we really do miss Sirius and Remus and if there was a way to get back together, we would do it. But right now it seems that we just have to accept that we will not see them anytime soon."

Jack, who still looked a bit lost in his own thoughts, kissed Amy and Leo good night and turned off the light in the children's bedroom.

As soon as the door was closed behind their parents, Amy hung her head out of her bed again to look at her brother.

"Well, what do you think?" she whispered

"About their conversation in the living room?"

"No, about the weather!" she said exasperatedly. "Of course I'm talking about their conversation in the living room."

"They are definitely hiding something from us," he stated the obvious. "I mean, they even said that they have to be more careful about what they are saying around us."

"Yes, and as we guessed, it has something to do with Mum being called 'Lily'. He even told her that we asked him about it! And she called Dad 'James' on one occasion, didn't she?" Amy remembered.

And now we know that they changed their names right after they had been betrayed. So there has to be something to it," Leo was convinced. "But what did she mean when she said that the pranks the Marauders did at school had no natural explanation?" he added.

"I have no idea," Amy admitted. "It does sound strange."

She closed her eyes for some moments to let the conversation she and her brother had witnessed pass her mind again.

"You know what," she said, when she opened them again. "We need to write down what we know already." She jumped down from her bed again and turned on the light. Then she went to the desk and got some paper and a pencil, before she sat on the bed of her brother.

"Okay...what do we have?" Amy muttered while she chewed on the end of the pencil.

"The different names, the betrayal, that Sirius and Remus are somewhere, that they can't be reached, that the Marauders played some pranks which can't be explained in a natural way, that Sirius had a dog called Padfoot, that the favourite victim of the Marauders was some slimy git called Severus Snape..."

"Stop, stop," said Amy, who had feverishly written down everything her brother had said. "Do you really think those last parts of information are important?"

Leo grinned. "Well, you never know, do you?"

Amy looked down at the paper. "Well, I guess we have quite a lot already. We only have to figure out what it all means."

Leo nodded, then he sat up straight and said in a dramatical voice,"To find out, why they have those names and why the pranks couldn't be explained in a natural way, that is going to be our first mission as the new Marauders!"

Amy grimaced. "Well, the mission sounds good, but we definitely need a name," she decided, while she folded the paper neatly and put it into Leo's book of "The Neverending Story" and turned off the light again, before returning to her own bed.

Leo nodded and for a few moments they were both silent to think about a name that would fit them.

"Twins...twins...it has to be something with twins," Leo muttered.

"Hmm, how about Twisters," Amy suggested.

"Twisters...," Leo savoured the sound of the name. Then he nodded his agreement. "Twisters sounds good."

"Great!" Amy exclaimed. Startled about her own loud voice she put her hand in front of her mouth.

"Great," she repeated a bit quiter, then she extended her hand down to Leo, who took it.

"The first mission of the Twisters will be to find out the secrets about Prongs, the Marauder, and his Marauder bride!"