Prank and various responsibilities WAS: Re: Marietta

[pippin_999]

No: HPFGUIDX 169762

 Alla:
> 
> I am just responding to this, because to me it is a very good 
> example of how JKR cleverly put blanks in the prank night.
> 
> Sure, Sirius says that, but there are ellipses "..." just everywhere 
> in those two paragraphs where it matters IMO.
<snip canon example>

Pippin:
But why would Sirius and Lupin be hesitating to cover up motives
that they don't know about? Their *own* motives, now, that's 
fertile ground and I thank you for drawing my attention to it.

The Marauders were watching Snape as carefully as he was
watching them, and if they didn't think he had arrived
at Lupin's secret, then he probably hadn't.

As PoA shows us, you can't do it relying on the calendar alone. 
If  the PoA dates of Lupin's absences are accurate at all, then 
he arranged to be absent at other times besides the full moon 
and some of his full moon absences weren't noticeable because 
they coincided with evenings, weekends, holidays and so forth. 

Without an additional clue to look for a correllation between
Lupin's absences and the full moon, as Hermione did,
Snape couldn't have deduced the connection just by looking at 
the dates. He got as far as noticing Lupin was gone
every month, but wouldn't have enough data to see that Lupin
was *always* gone on the full moon. 

But then Snape saw Madame Pomfrey taking Lupin to the
willow, and conditions changed. Now Snape could track a
presence instead of an absence, and the correlation between
Lupin's visits to the willow with Madame Pomfrey and the
full moon would become clear. 

And *that*,  my dears, explains why Sirius  didn't care
that  the prank would have outed Lupin. Snape was going to find 
out anyway, you see, and just like Viktor Krum, Sirius  decided
to end the game on his terms. He knew Lupin would understand.
Of course if Lupin was in on it, he'd understand even better :)


Pippin