[From Litha to Lammas]: Courage Is, gen, Peter Pettigrew and Harry, 1/5

[lomonaaeren]

Part One.

Title: Courage Is (2/5)
Disclaimer: J. K. Rowling and associates own these characters. I am writing these characters for fun and not profit.
Content Notes: Massive AU, unreliable narrator, violence, Harry is raised by Peter Pettigrew, minor character deaths.
Rated: PG-13
Wordcount: This part 5400
Summary: AU. In the chaos after Sirius is taken to Azkaban, Peter Pettigrew tracks down Harry Potter and snatches the child from the Dursleys’ home. He tells himself that he’s raising Harry so that the Dark Lord may have the honor of killing him when he comes back. So he tells himself.
Author’s Notes: This is one of my Litha to Lammas fics for this year, a series of fics being posted between the summer solstice and the first of August. This is very AU, and will likely have three parts.

Thanks for all the reviews! It seems highly likely that this fic will now have five parts rather than three.

Part Two

Dover housed a tiny magical community, Dover-by-the-Sea, one of the few other than Hogsmeade left in Britain. Not many people outside it even remembered that it existed, and that was the way its people liked it. Peter knew of it because it was where his mother had grown up.

Peter also knew that his mother had had a cousin who had left the village when he was fifteen and had never been heard from again. Later, after she’d married Percival Pettigrew, Elaine Durant had confessed to Peter that she’d found evidence that made her believe he was dead, but she could never be sure. And she’d told Peter stories about her cousin over and over again, because he had been Elaine’s favorite when she was growing up. She’d even named her son after him.

Peter adjusted the shape of his face with glamours and grew a slight, scraggly beard that would also make his chin look different. His eyes were the same color as vanished Cousin Peter’s, and his hair was probably a darker brown, but Peter doubted that would make much difference, not when Peter Durant had been gone for forty years. Likewise, his lack of a French accent could be attributed to the fact that he’d traveled among the English and lived there, too, probably, what a rebellious young man!

Best of all, it meant that he didn’t have to instruct Harry, who was too young to remember all the time, to call him by a different name.

Most of the people who had known Peter Durant were dead or moved away, but a few older witches and wizards welcomed him with delight, and his mother’s stories of her childhood stood him in good stead when they wanted to reminisce about the old days. Plus, since he was a pureblood, well, of course he wouldn’t have aged that much, and didn’t all wizards born in these recent years look young to the old, anyway?

Peter explained Harry’s presence easily enough by saying that he’d had friends he’d lost in the war, and had decided to raise their son as the best tribute he could make to them. Even here, there had been losses, and no one questioned him. And Harry raised smiles as he ran down the small street, scattering gulls and yelling to Sasha as she followed him.

That had been the one sticking point Peter had worried about. Harry certainly wasn’t going to give up either Sasha or Parseltongue, and he would have been stubborn about keeping them secrets now that they were finally living in a place where they didn’t have to keep their very presence a secret.

But one of Peter’s great-great-aunts stood up from her chair the first time there was a mutter about Harry’s hissing—a real undertaking, given how bent over she was—and said loudly that her mother had been a Parselmouth, thank you very much, during the days when the gifts were revered in France, which was the real country that many of these disgraceful young people had never seen, not that she was naming any names, be it understood, and they would leave the poor boy alone, yes?

And after that, they didn’t have any trouble.

Harry found other magical children to play with, although not many, given that Dover-by-the-Sea was such a small community, only thirty families. But there was a family with three young girls, and another with a boy Harry’s age, and one with twins only a few years older. They ran around shrieking and yelling, playing with Sasha and the rats and the other animals, and teaching Harry how to play Exploding Snap and chess, and climbing cliffs, and splashing in the sea, and having enough fun that part of Peter he hadn’t even realized was there—a part that had been uneasy with keeping Harry in such isolation—began to relax.

Of course, there came the inevitable question about whether Harry was related to Harry Potter in some way, but all Peter had to do was look quiet and sad. “Harry was named after the Potters’ Harry,” he murmured. “His parents knew the Potters, in Hogwarts, I believe. And I certainly didn’t want to change his name after his parents died, even though I almost wondered if I should, in the wake of the notoriety his namesake was going to have…”

“Of course not!” said the great-great-aunt he was talking to, the same one who had defended Harry for being a Parselmouth, although of course she thought she was only Peter’s great-aunt. She banged her cup of tea on the table. Peter cast a spell to move the tea that had slopped onto the saucer back into the cup, and she nodded at him. “Bunch of nonsense, anyway. A child defeated the Darkest Lord of all time? Nonsense, yes?”

Peter nodded and smiled and agreed, although he couldn’t help glancing towards his quiet left arm from the corner of his eye. He never went about with short sleeves, and when he had mentioned scars from the war, everyone had accepted that.

They were very accepting, in Dover-by-the-Sea.

But as Peter’s glance lingered on Harry, where he was sleeping one night in bed after his eighth birthday, he became aware of a stirring in himself. A subtle conviction that just telling Harry stories of Sirius and James and Remus, and Lily where she came into them, wasn’t enough. That he would have to tell Harry the truth.

And what happens then? When he rejects me and yells to everyone as loudly as he can that his parents’ murderer kidnapped him?

Peter paused and leaned back in his chair, watching as Pearl, who was old now, with grey around her whiskers, slept on Harry’s pillow. There was an unexpected benefit to the idea. He would no longer have to make the decision as to whether Harry lived or died when the Dark Lord came back.

Of course, he would have to find Harry a suitable guardian.

Which probably meant that, yes, he would have to see Sirius freed from Azkaban.

*

“I don’t understand what you’re saying, Uncle Peter.”

Peter shifted his balance, and took a deep breath. He and Harry were in one of the small sheltered coves near the edge of Dover-by-the-Sea, really just a small patch of sand and pebbles with two larger rocks standing on it. Everything glowed grey and green around them, the water swirling at their feet. It was high tide, and Harry was frowning down into it as though he thought he would prefer to go swimming rather than listen to Peter’s words.

But Peter had already told Harry that he had to listen. It was important.

“You’ve never asked me much about what happened to your parents,” Peter began slowly.

“You said Mum and Dad were dead.”

“They are. But you didn’t ask how.” Peter swung a leg back so that his foot struck the rock, and stared at Harry.

Harry looked at him with eyes that seemed deep and haunted and almost angry. “I didn’t think it mattered that much. I thought you would tell me if it was important.”

“Well. I’m telling you now.” Peter flattened his hands on his legs. “You know about the Dark Lord and the war. You’ve heard people talk about that now?”

Harry gave a tight nod, after a moment so long that Peter wouldn’t have been surprised if he’d got down from the rock and run back to the village.

“The Dark Lord was hunting your parents especially,” Peter said quietly. “They fought him many times, but they ran away from him, too, because you were new and young, and they wanted to protect their baby.” Harry’s shoulders hunched, and Peter went on, a little faster. “In time, they decided that the safest place for them to hide would under the Fidelius Charm. Do you know what that is?” It wasn’t impossible. Harry, like the other village children, went to “primary school” three mornings a week to work on things like reading and writing and simple maths, but magical education mostly came through listening to stories and idle lessons tossed out by any adult with a little time.

“Yes,” Harry said. “I mean—I know that it’s a charm that’s supposed to protect someone. It keeps them secret, and it makes it impossible to tell anyone where they are, right?”

“Not exactly,” Peter said, as gently as he could. “One person knows the secret, called the Secret-Keeper—”

“I could have figured that out, Uncle Peter.”

Harry’s eyes looked like Lily’s in color, yes, but they had a piercing shine that was all his own when he was upset. Peter took a deep breath. “Well, I’m trying to explain to you how it works, Harry. Most people forget about the location under the Fidelius when the charm goes up. The Secret-Keeper can bring other people into the secret by telling them, though. But it has to be willing on the Secret-Keeper’s part.”

“So suddenly other people would remember where the house or whatever was?” Harry asked. He sounded fascinated, but Peter had known he probably would be. The thing Harry seemed most interested in was the theoretical aspect of magic.

Peter nodded. “That’s the way it would work.” He cleared his throat, and it felt as though a coating of sand had blown into it. He coughed.

“Are you okay, Uncle Peter?”

Peter had thought it would work. The quiet cove, with no one else around to hear them (and charms and wards raised, invisibly, to keep anyone else from sneaking near and overhearing, even the rats or Sasha or Harry’s twin friends Adrienne and Aria). But now that the moment had come, he couldn’t make himself say it.

He croaked, and then got back on track. “Someone betrayed your parents, Harry. The Secret-Keeper for both of them. They told—they told the Dark Lord. The Dark Lord came and killed them.”

Harry’s eyes were so wide that Peter wouldn’t have been surprised to find they contained infinite reflections, like a hall of mirrors. He swung his own foot and took a deep breath and blurted, “I’m Harry Potter?”

All those years of never speaking Harry’s name in front of him. But it was smart of him to guess, Peter thought, with oddly-blended pride and despair. Harry was going to be so smart at Hogwarts. He was probably going to Ravenclaw.

“Yes,” Peter whispered. “Do you understand why you can’t tell anyone, Harry? The people who are searching for you would take you away from me, and they might not take you to the Muggles, but—”

“I don’t want to go anywhere!” Harry hurled himself across the gap between their rocks and grabbed Peter around the waist, snuggling up to him and burying his face in Peter’s robes in the way that he rarely did anymore. “I want to stay with you!”

Peter wrapped his arms around Harry, and damned himself for a coward.

On the other hand, he had known that already.

“But I won’t tell anyone.” Harry turned his appealing face up to Peter, biting his lip and widening his eyes in a way that would have been a perfect manipulation if he’d done it on purpose. “I promise, Uncle Peter! I won’t ever say!”

“At least until you go to Hogwarts,” Peter said softly, reaching down to pull on one strand of Harry’s unruly hair and make him smile. “You’ll have to go under the Potter name and reveal yourself, then.”

“Can’t I just call myself Pettigrew?” Harry muttered, snuggling closer.

Peter sighed. Well, all right, he wasn’t going to tell Harry the reasons why that wasn’t possible today, but he did have other, important matters to convey to him. “You should know that someone was blamed for betraying your parents even though he really didn’t. Remember Sirius that I told you about?”

Harry nodded and then sat bolt upright. “People thought he betrayed them? One of my dad’s best friends?”

“They thought he did,” Peter said gravely. “I could have corrected them, but then I would have to had come forwards and say that I’d taken you from those Muggles.” And shown that I was still alive. “I learned a little more by hiding as a rat and listening to people who wouldn’t have spoken so freely if they’d known I was there, and I can see, absolutely, that Sirius is innocent. So that means we should find a way to free him from prison.”

“Yes! Yes, of course we should!”

And when we do, Peter thought, pulling on a strand of Harry’s hair again, then you’ll have someone who can take care of you, and I can leave you and run as fast as I can and never look over my shoulder. Maybe hide in my rat form for the rest of my life.

He felt a pang when he thought of that. Of course he did. But it was really for the best.

*

“Of course, if there is injustice done, then you need to address it, Peter. But how are you going to do that?”

Great-Aunt Helene’s—well, really she was his grandmother, but she didn’t know it—advice was sound. Peter couldn’t walk up to the Ministry and declare that they should free Sirius and he knew that because he’d been the traitor who had revealed the Potters to the Dark Lord. He had to devise a subtler system.

And it had to be one that wouldn’t end with Sirius murdering him the moment he was out of Azkaban, too. Couldn’t forget that stage of the process.

After considering and discarding several plans, including one that involved simply breaking Sirius out of prison and going on the run with him, and one that included revealing Sirius was an Animagus and trying to force a trial for that in the hopes that it would also result in the trial he’d supposedly had but never actually received, Peter hit on what was really the only plan. He wouldn’t even have tried this one, but magical Britain practically worshipped their child savior. It was the only way.

He told Harry about it, and Harry sat there for a long time munching carrots and thinking about it. Then he discussed it with Sasha, in a series of hisses that still unnerved Peter, but that he forced himself to sit patiently through. Finally, Harry looked up at him and nodded.

“Sasha thinks it’s a good idea.”

And finally, all that remained was for Peter to get really good at glamours, and at creating Portkeys.

*

Peter and Harry Flooed into the Atrium of the Ministry on a Wednesday morning in October. Peter had debated coming on Halloween itself, but that might seem too on-point and calculated. This had to look like he’d wanted to keep Harry away, but his caution had finally been worn down in pursuit of justice.

No one noticed at first, partially because Peter had worked until his illusions changing the color of Harry’s hair to red were impenetrable and layered, and of course no one expected Harry Potter to be red-haired. But it wasn’t impossible, given his mother—

Peter wasn’t thinking of Lily, and Harry didn’t remember her. But it would seem natural enough to other people who did think of or remember her.

They walked up to the wizard whose job it was to check wands. He gave them a bored glance and extended his hand for Peter’s wand. “Name and business,” he said.

This was a tricky part of the plan, since Peter had no intention of allowing them to check his wand; it would match up with previous times they’d done so too easily, and it would strain believability that he just happened to be using Peter Pettigrew’s wand. But he made sure to keep his voice calm and his hand on Harry’s shoulder as he said, “Alfred Smith and Harry Potter.”

It worked the way he’d hoped. The Ministry check wizard promptly and immediately lost any interest in Peter as he gaped at Harry. Harry smiled up at him winsomely and pulled his fringe back, revealing the scar. More illusions Peter had practiced exaggerated the mark until it spread down to the bridge of Harry’s nose.

“Potter,” the check wizard whispered.

Some other people waiting in line behind them or who had come through just ahead of them turned around to gape, and in seconds the name “Potter” was running wildly around the Atrium.

Harry flinched under Peter’s hand. He’d never had so many people looking at him before. But he took a deep breath and said, “I want to tell people that I remember Sirius Black not being the Secret-Keeper. He wasn’t there. Only my parents were there. And You-Know-Who.”

That got them taken up to the Department of Magical Law Enforcement, quickly.

Harry looked at the Auror assigned to deal with them with big, innocent eyes, and explained that he needed to see Rufus Scrimgeour because he was the Head Auror, and this was really important. That likewise got them passed up the chain. Peter couldn’t help his tension when they were ushered into Scrimgeour’s office, because Scrimgeour was said to be able to ferret out lies.

But Scrimgeour didn’t pay any more attention to Peter than anyone else had. His attention was all on Harry as he leaned forwards over his desk. “Mr. Potter, are you sure that you remember someone else being the Secret-Keeper?”

Harry nodded with his eyes filling with tears. They’d practiced this, too, and Harry was quite proud of his newfound skill that made people in Dover-by-the-Sea give him whatever he wanted. He was probably going to go straight to Slytherin when the Hat sat on his head. “Yes. I’m sure. I remember sitting up when the door banged open and I heard my daddy shouting…”

And on he went, giving details that sounded utterly plausible, because of course they were. Because of course they came from Peter’s memories, although Peter had told Harry he’d learned it by casting a spell on the Godric’s Hollow cottage and reading the memories of the walls.

Peter sat back in his chair, trying to look supportive and strained at the same time when Scrimgeour glanced quickly at him. He knew there would be questions later, specifically about how he’d ended up with Harry. But he had a blend of truth and lies readied for that, as well, and it was the rats who had given him the idea.

“That’s a stunning story, Mr. Potter,” Scrimgeour whispered as he came to the end of it. “And you’re sure that you don’t remember anything after the Killing Curse hit you?”

“No. I’m sorry.” Harry looked down and sniffled a little.

“That’s all right, Mr. Potter. Quite all right.” Scrimgeour turned to Peter with a stiff smile. “We do have some questions for your guardian. Mr. Smith, wasn’t it?”

Peter sighed and said, “Yes, well, I suppose I don’t have much right to bear the name, being a bastard son and all. I usually call myself Alfred Shell so as not to embarrass the family. But I knew I would have to tell the truth when I brought Harry in.”

“And how exactly did you come to have custody of Mr. Potter, Mr. Smith?” The door opened behind them, and Peter glanced back to see another pair of Aurors coming in. “Ah, Mr. Potter, Aurors Dawlish and Brown will escort you to talk to the Minister, and explain in more detail about what you remember, while we question Mr. Smith more in depth.”

As they’d also drilled, Harry burst into hysterical tears and flung himself at Peter, almost the way he had the day Peter had told him the half-truth of his parents’ deaths. He grabbed his waist and howled, “You’re going to take Uncle Alfred away like the bad man took my parents!”

Scrimgeour looked utterly unprepared to deal with this, which was what Peter had hoped for. He folded his arms together over Harry’s shoulders, hoping he looked strong and unsure at the same time. “It’s all right, Harry. They aren’t going to take you anywhere. They’ll just ask me some questions, okay?”

“No! They’ll take me away and put me back with the bad Muggles!”

Good boy, Peter thought, while he bent down and said, “No, Harry, I promise. They’re just going to—”

“What bad Muggles?” demanded Auror Dawlish.

“The bad Muggles Uncle Alfred rescued me from!” Harry wailed, and held onto Peter so hard that he might be using accidental magic.

“I thought he was too young to remember that,” said Dawlish in a hushed voice.

Peter sighed a little and stroked Harry’s forehead. “He doesn’t remember much,” he said quietly. “Just an overwhelming impression of darkness and discomfort and cold. But I still won’t let anyone take him back there.” He looked up, and it was only because he was pretending that he could stare at the Aurors as coolly as he did, but he managed. “I trust that you won’t be taking him back on the advice of whoever put him there?”

“No, of course not,” Scrimgeour said briskly before either of the Aurors could answer. “The Muggles aren’t suitable guardians, we all know that. Well. If Mr. Potter doesn’t want to leave the room, perhaps we could question you under a Privacy Charm, Mr. Smith?”

“That’s all right with me.” Peter glanced at Harry. “What do you think, Harry?”

“I want to stay right here!”

“It’s fine, you can. A Privacy Charm is just like the Muggle-Repelling spell that I showed you the other day, remember? The one that put wards up but didn’t push you out of the room?”

Harry paused, sniffling outrageously, and then nodded. “All right, but I wanna stay.”

“Of course,” Peter said gently, and managed to get Harry out of his lap and to move a bit before he turned to Scrimgeour. “If you can put up a Privacy Charm to exclude Harry from listening but that doesn’t affect him seeing me, we’re ready.”

That was what they did, and they questioned him thoroughly, Peter would give them that. It was just that he had a thorough story.

Peter claimed that he was a bastard son of the Smith family, as he’d already told them, and that his mother was a Muggleborn. She’d gone into deep hiding with him during the war because she was afraid of being targeted by Death Eaters, but in the end, they had got her anyway. Peter had carefully chosen the site and name of a massacre that had killed at least seventeen Muggleborns in such conditions that their bodies could never be conclusively identified.

Peter then described his own flight to France, his grief, his cautious return to Britain when he heard the news of Voldemort’s downfall. And here he swallowed and dropped his eyes and let some real emotion creep into his voice.

“Before Mother and I went into hiding, I got rescued from a Death Eater attack by a half-mad Auror trainee,” he whispered. “A pair of them, really. I didn’t know their names until I saw their pictures in the paper a little later, but…”

“Their names?” Scrimgeour leaned forwards. He had both an enchanted quill and Dawlish taking notes. Dawlish looked sour about it, but that wasn’t Peter’s problem.

“James Potter and Sirius Black.”

Scrimgeour whistled softly, and Dawlish and Brown both stared at him. “That would mean you owed them both a Life-Debt.”

Peter nodded fervently. He had owed them that in truth, and more than that, really. But he didn’t see the point in thinking about that now, as he wouldn’t be able to continue with a convincing lie otherwise.

“And that was why I found it so hard to believe that Black betrayed the Potters.” Peter shook his head. “But it was in all the papers, and what was I to think? And I knew I was too late to repay the Life-Debt I owed to James Potter. But I thought I might at least look in on his son and see how he was doing.”

“Lots of wizards and witches wanted to do that in the immediate aftermath of the war,” Auror Brown interjected, his voice largely neutral. “Why were you the lucky one to find him?”

“I had a Muggleborn mother,” Peter said with a thin smile. “And that means that I thought to look in the Muggle world, in the first place, and I looked up the marriage certificate the Potters had filed with the Ministry. I discovered that Lily Potter’s maiden name was Evans. And when I knew that, I could find the name and marriage certificate of her Muggle sister in their world.”

Scrimgeour and the Aurors exchanged disgusted glances. They probably hadn’t thought of that, and were upset to realize how much of Harry’s “security” had hinged on luck, Peter thought complacently.

Well, really, that kind of luck had been the only sort that had protected the Order of the Phoenix, either. None of them had ever thought to check members’ arms for the Dark Mark.

Peter shoved the thought so far away so fast that he actually hurt his brain as Scrimgeour focused on him once more. “And you found the house? Under wards?”

“I’m actually a Transfiguration master,” Peter “admitted.” “I can create models of animals and send them out to spy through their eyes. I did that with a model of a rat when I realized that the house was under wards but I was also picking up a surge of distinct unhappiness from them. One of my Transfigured rats crept under the door of the cupboard and found Harry with a full nappy.”

“The cupboard?”

But Peter could see, despite the deliberately widened eyes and disbelieving tone, that they did believe him. That was probably the sort of detail they’d discovered when they were investigating the Dursleys and thought no one could know unless they’d actually been to Number Four.

Peter nodded, biting his lip. “I couldn’t leave the poor child there. It was inhumane, what they were doing to him. But I also knew that no one could find out I had Harry, or they would try to take him away from me, probably to return him to those awful Muggles. I couldn’t trust the Ministry, or their custody arrangements—”

“The Ministry had nothing to do with those custody arrangements,” Scrimgeour said stiffly. “Neither would we have returned him to his aunt and uncle.”

Peter raised his hands in a gesture of surrender. “I didn’t know that, and I didn’t know who had authorized leaving him there in the first place. But I took Harry, yes, and we’ve been living in the Muggle world since. I thought that was a good compromise on safety, since whoever did leave Harry with the Dursleys had obviously thought the Muggle world was safer for him.

“But then Harry began to recall those memories about You-Know-Who’s death, and…” Peter shuddered. “He told me so insistently that his mother and father and You-Know-Who had been the only people in the house that I began to doubt Sirius Black’s guilt. And then when I went and dug back into old papers, I realized there was no record of a trial for him, or a story about a trial. So. I brought Harry to the Ministry.”

Scrimgeour sat up straight behind his desk. “There was a trial. There must have been a trial.” He glanced at Aurors Brown and Dawlish.

“They’re searching the archives now,” Brown said in response to the look. “I let them know to bring up the records right away when they found something. But they must not have yet.”

Scrimgeour’s jaw tightened, and a tic began working near his right eye. He knew as well as the Aurors did—as well as Peter did—that it shouldn’t have been hard to find the records of a trial in the archives, had one taken place. It would have been near the records of every other trial for the Death Eaters.

“Please wait here, Mr. Smith,” he said flatly, and stood up.

He did lower the Privacy Charm, and Peter held his arms out to Harry, who ran to him right away from the corner where he’d been standing near Dawlish. “Could I get some food for Harry? Since it seems like we’ll be here for a while.”

“Of course. Dawlish, see to it.”

*

After that, although they had to stay in the Ministry for several more hours and answer loads of questions, the machine of bureaucracy largely took over. Scrimgeour did discover that there’d never been a trial for Sirius, and came to tell them so (and Harry learned some interesting new words). Messages were sent to Azkaban. More trial records were found to be lacking. Scrimgeour swore some more, and stirred up a hornet’s nest that, by the time they stood to leave, was involving Bartemius Crouch, Millicent Bagnold, and a number of officials who had been in charge of conducting the Death Eater trials, as well as the Aurors who’d arrested Sirius Black.

The only hitch came when Scrimgeour tried to insist that Peter tell them where he and Harry were staying in the Muggle world.

“No, I’m afraid not,” Peter said, his smile becoming thinner and harder. “The last time I trusted the Ministry to handle Harry’s custody arrangements, look what happened. I prefer to hand him over only to his godfather, who has a right to him if he’s innocent.”

“Mr. Smith, I assure you that we don’t want to take him back to the Dursleys.”

“I believe you,” Peter said, because it was hard not to when Scrimgeour’s eyes shone with that much sincerity. “But he might still be taken to another unsuitable guardian by someone who thinks they know better. Or he might be attacked by Death Eaters. No, thank you, I’m going to keep him safe.”

Scrimgeour made some noises about arresting Peter for kidnapping, which made Peter’s heart beat faster than a rat’s. But Harry wailed so loudly at the mere mention, and cracked Scrimgeour’s desk with so much accidental magic, that Scrimgeour had to back down. He was obviously not in favor of the bad publicity that would come to him if he contradicted the child savior.

So Peter and Harry left the Ministry building hand-in-hand, and once they were out of a Floo and in a Muggle alley, Peter handily destroyed all the Tracking Charms that had affixed themselves “innocently” to Harry’s clothing and his. Then he removed the illusions on Harry’s hair and scar. Even if someone tried to find them now, they’d be looking for a red-haired child with a much larger scar than Harry actually had, one that couldn’t hide under his fringe.

And they were spending the night in the Muggle world. Peter had spread a story around Dover-by-the-Sea about a sick friend he had to go and see, and as tended to happen there, his relatives had accepted it without question.

He scooped Harry into his arms and Apparated to the Muggle home that he’d already scouted, its owners gone on holiday. He put Harry down in the kitchen, and Harry scowled at him and said, “Take off the glamours, Uncle Peter.”

Chuckling, Peter did so. He didn’t look all that much different from his usual self as “Alfred Smith,” mostly with a rounder face and lighter hair. But Harry smiled at him in relief after they were gone.

“And we should be seeing Sirius!” Harry said, bouncing back and forth as Peter went over to the box he’d charmed to contain cold food.

“Yes,” Peter said, and focused on the food in front of him. He hadn’t told Harry that he planned to leave him with Sirius.

But really, that was the best thing. Sirius was Harry’s legal guardian, and certainly wouldn’t be compelled to hand Harry over to the Dark Lord. Harry could live. That had become, imperceptibly, a matter of importance to Peter.

And Sirius would certainly recognize Peter at once. If not under the glamours, the first time Harry mentioned his real name. Peter would have to leave in any case, once Sirius had explained to Harry who had really betrayed his parents.

It wasn’t something he liked to think about. But he had thought about it when he planned this, and he knew that Harry would have a much better life with Sirius than he could ever have with a traitor and a fugitive Death Eater.

“What are we having for dinner tonight, Uncle Peter?”

“I thought spaghetti would be a good idea,” Peter said, getting out the cheese and smiling as he watched Harry laugh.

Yes, he would miss this. But in the end, he would have the satisfaction of knowing he had done the right thing for both Harry and Sirius.