Sickening
That evening it started to rain once more. The pink van splashed over the muddy country roads, blaring children's songs from its cassette player. Harry giggled. He especially liked a song about a happy dog that Black, for some reason, could sing along to by heart. Not very well though. In fact, it was so bad that Severus considered casting a muffliato on himself to shut the horrid sound out. How awfully long could a song be? And how often could Potter dare to repeat the thing?
At least Lupin and Pettigrew seemed just as unhappy with Lily’s driving style and the van as Severus. Peter was quite green around his stubby nose and Lupin’s fingers dug into the armrests next to his seat in the last row of the van. He glanced past Severus and Harry into the front of the pink beast. “Lily! Lily, are you really driving 150 km/h right now. Please tell me you aren’t. Please, please slow down. This car is old. You are going to get us all killed!”, the werewolf whined. Lily shook her red head. “Oh Remus, the old lady can take it. She’s like a tank, when it come to that. Nothing can take her down!”, she cheered.
Severus’s eyebrows rose into his hairline. “Didn’t the mirror fall off earlier?”, he asked, prying Harry’s grabby little hands off his hair, while Harry tried to stuff it into his mouth once more. Pettigrew's voice from Lupin’s right-side squeaked something incomprehensible. “Don’t you dare! You are sitting behind me, not Sniv!”, Black ordered. Behind Black, the shortest marauder gaged. “Don’t you dare, Wormy!”, Black screeched, panic lacing his voice. Severus, by now very aware of what was going to happen, pulled Harry aside and squeezed into the fluffy, pink sliding door. Pettigrew gaged again. Black tried to struggle out of the seatbelt, Harry started to cry and Pettigrew threw up all over Black’s seat.
Lupin screamed at his friend Black howled about his hair being dirty, Lily made the van sway, because she tried to roll down a window and Potter ripped the van’s door open and puked onto the road. “Stop! Drive to the side! It reeks! Drive to the side Lily, please! I need a shower!”, Black cried. Severus pressed his nose into the weird pink fur, Miranda’s inside was lined with, preferring the incense stick stench to the puke smell. Harry grabbed Severus’s sleeve and tugged, screaming on the top of his little lungs. “EVERYBODY SHUT UP!”, Lily yelled as the van swayed onto the parking lot of a ratty motel.
“Sirius, Peter: go get a shower, I bet Sirius can pay for it. James, help me clean the van. Remus, Severus: calm Harry down and by god, merlin and the monster that lives under the bed and grabs your feet if they stick out under the blanket, GET OUT OF MIRANDA!”, the witch ordered while jumping out of the driver’s seat. Noone dared to oppose her and the pink beast was cleared out in record time.
While the Potters carefully cleaned Pettigrew’s vomit out of Miranda’s sticky, stinky fur Lupin spun little Harry around to cheer him up. Severus glared at al muggles, who seemed a bit too suspicious of the situation and tried to look as intimidating as it was possible, when one wore a jacket with a smiling sun and the words “lighten up, sunshine” on it. Pettigrew returned after not even ten minutes, but it seemed to take Black ages to shower. Once he returned, he smelled even more intense than Miranda which earned him a “Padfoot! Did you fuck a mango in there or something?” from Potter and an eye role from Lupin.
“Finally! Everybody: Back in the car. And if my driving is this bad, then Sev is driving this time!”, Lily hissed. “Not happening!”, Severus complained. He did not have a license. The fact that he did know how to drive, because he had to drive his dad around, when the old muggle-bastard had passed out drunk in some bar again, did not change that. “I could drive”, Black suggested cheerfully. “No, you can’t. Miranda is a van. A work of art! Not some motorbike”, Lily snapped back, “Sev, you drive. You have no choice. And Peter, I dare you to puke onto my baby again!”
Potter seemed shocked. “He hit Harry?”, he yelped. “NO. The van, Jamie, he hit my beautiful, poor van!”, Lily replied while Severus climbed onto the driver’s seat and adjusted the mirrors, full of dusty, pink dreamcatchers. Still complaining the marauders climbed into the back of the van, while Lily claimed the passenger seat. With a swift movement of the key Miranda began to roar once more.
And then the death eaters apperated onto the parking lot. Severus kicked the speed paddle down to the ground. The screeching of the pink beast’s tires overpowered Bellatrix’s high-pitched orders. “How did they find us?”, Potter bellowed, as they shot onto a dark country road.