lomonaaeren

Part Five.

Title: Courage Is (6/6)
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 6000
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.

Thank you again for all the reviews! This is the last part.

Part Six

“We have to go find her, Ron!”

Peter clung grimly to Harry’s shoulder as they ran away from the Halloween feast, crouching down and whipping his tail around Harry’s neck when they turned a tight corner. For once, Sasha wasn’t with them.

And of all the times that a venomous snake would be useful…

Peter had hoped that Harry and Ron would get closer to Hermione Granger, who was smart enough to not always be fooled by Harry’s wide eyes and faux-innocent air, and also reminded him of Lily. But he hadn’t anticipated that a wild run through the school to find the girl before the troll (the troll) found her would be the result.

“Hermione!”

They’d arrived at the door of what was evidently the right bathroom; Peter hadn’t listened much when Etienne had first told Harry the Gryffindor gossip. “Hermione?” Harry called, opening the door. “Are you in there?”

There was a loud sniffle, and Peter’s nose twitched as he picked up the scents of water and Hermione. “Yes,” she said, after a long moment. “Why did you come?” She opened a cubicle door and poked her head at, staring at Ron rather than Harry.

Ron flushed red with what Peter hoped was shame and stayed silent, but Harry shook his head a little. “Because we heard that you were crying in a bathroom, and that’s no way to spend Halloween,” he said. “Come on and come to the feast. You need to keep up your strength with some pumpkin pasties, don’t you?”

Hermione gave something that might have been a sniffle and might have been a giggle and came out of the cubicle. “My parents are dentists,” she said. “And I can’t imagine that magical sweets are much better for your teeth.”

Harry laughed and answered, but Peter’s attention had abruptly been distracted. An air current had carried a trace of a foul smell to him that he recognized at once, and he squeaked in alarm.

Mountain troll.

Harry couldn’t speak with rats the way he could with snakes, but he was familiar enough with their behavior to know what it meant when Peter started trembling next to his ear, and there was really only one thing in the school right now that would have caused Peter to do that. “Time to go!” he announced. “I think the troll’s coming.”

“The troll?”

Hermione sounded as if she was going to demand an explanation from them which might take a lot of time, but Ron just said quickly, “Yeah, a troll’s loose in the school, we came to save you and make sure you didn’t get caught by it, now come on!”

For once, Hermione listened to something that wasn’t a lecture. She ran towards them, and they came out of the bathroom and around the corner just in time for the troll to come around the other one, its steps making the walls shake, swinging a huge club.

Peter felt as if he was going to just fall off Harry’s shoulder, dead of fear. He was trembling, and knew that in some distant part of himself, but he also felt frozen. He stared at the troll, a bigger and more fearsome creature than the Marauders had ever taken on, and his vision flickered.

But Harry had drawn his wand, and so had Ron and Hermione, even though they also had wide eyes and hopeless faces. And despite the fact that Harry knew more spells than the average first-year, he didn’t know any that would harm the average troll. Peter should know.

He could only think of one plan. He whipped his tail back and forth against Harry’s neck, and when Harry jerked around to stare at him, Peter flipped his right forepaw up in the gesture for the spell they’d been studying in class that day, the Levitation Charm.

Harry, praise be, understood.

“Wingardium Leviosa!” he yelled, aiming his wand at Peter. Peter felt his paws leave Harry’s shoulder, and scrabbled at the air for a second in pure, instinctive reaction before he reminded himself that Harry had more control over his magic than most people.

“What are you doing, Harry?” Hermione yelled.

“Mate?” Ron edged a step closer as if he thought he could protect Harry from his own stupidity.

Harry was staring at Peter. Peter turned and looked at his target as hard as he could. Harry followed his line of sight and broke into a bright grin that Peter was going to punish him for—did the wretched child have no idea of when it was appropriate to do that and when it wasn’t?—before he flicked his wand and sent Peter hurtling towards his target.

Peter could feel the push of uncoordinated magic behind the spell and knew that he was lucky he was on the right path. But then he had no time to worry about that, because something far bigger and smellier than he had thought it would be was right in front of him. Peter clamped his teeth down and hung on.

It took a moment for the message to penetrate to the troll’s brain that something was biting its genitals. Then it dropped its club and howled and tried to clap its hands to its groin area and crush the menace.

Peter dropped before then, trusting his small size to let him survive the fall without much more than a bruise and shaking, and ran for his life.

The children were running behind him. At one point a hand closed over Peter, and he nearly bit it before he realized it was Harry. He let himself be picked up and shoved into Harry’s pocket, and then they were around the corner and gone.

Peter spent a lot of the night, once they were free from the interrogation of the stunned professors, being petted by Harry and fed pumpkin pasties. But he spent a lot more frantically drinking water to try and get the moldy taste out of his mouth.

*

“I want to hear the story of you biting the troll’s cock again!”

Peter gave Sirius a long, steady stare. “Can you not use that word in front of Harry, please?” he hissed, and glanced at their kid, who was sprawled in the chair by the fire and chatting to Sasha in Parseltongue. He was surrounded by the remnants of patterned paper from over two dozen Christmas gifts, although in fairness to Peter and Sirius, they had only been responsible for about half of those.

“Harry knows that and lots of other words.” Sirius waved an expansive hand and grinned at Harry. “Don’t you?”

“Yes, I do, Uncle Sirius.” Harry just winked at Peter when Peter looked steadily at him, and sat up. “I can tell you all about it. First, Ron told Hermione that she was a nightmare.” Harry frowned a little. “He promised not to do that again, and he hasn’t, but they do argue a lot.”

“Not that! Get to the good part!”

Peter sighed and stood up, shaking his head. He would just go to the kitchen and get another plate of cheese, biscuits, and other treats, since someone had to keep an eye on them and he preferred it when Sirius had something to eat. Drinking Firewhisky on an empty stomach was a bad idea.

He was just placing the tray on the counter and reaching for the cabinet that held the cheese—in front of the interested gaze of several rats—when something brushed against the wards.

Sirius growled from the drawing room at the same moment. Peter leaned around the counter and saw that Sirius had transformed into a dog, still his instinctive response to danger. His head was up, eyebrows and nostrils both wrinkled.

“Uncle Peter? What is it?”

Peter came back out and put an arm around Harry’s shoulders. “It’s all right,” he said quietly. “Something brushed against the wards, but it isn’t trying to break through. That probably means that it’s an owl from someone who we have specific protections up against.”

“Is it a Death Eater?”

Harry glanced sideways at Peter’s left arm as he said it, and Peter held in his sigh. He wished Harry wouldn’t think it was his role to protect Peter from Death Eaters who would be angry about him betraying the Dark Lord, of all the fool things. They’d had a few conversations about that, concerning Malfoy.

“No, I don’t think so,” Peter said quietly. “The wards would respond a lot more strongly if it was.” He listened, but there wasn’t a continuing sense of any intruder. Perhaps the owl had left whatever it had brought and flown away. “Stay here.”

He stepped out of the house with his wand lifted, and Harry stayed where he was. At least he knew when to listen, although it might only be because he thought he would distract Peter when he needed to fight someone instead of because he actually valued his own safety.

A package was lying in the shallow slush where the wards ended. Peter cast all the detection spells he could think of on it, and then turned and called for Sirius. He could have transformed to scent the thing himself, but a dog’s nose was more sensitive than his. And the package was so slim and small that Peter really didn’t know what it could be.

Sirius trotted out of the house, growling, and came up to the package with his nose lowered, nostrils already flaring. Then he abruptly uttered an excited whine and circled the package with his tail wagging.

“Sirius?”

Sirius jumped and came down with his front paws on the package, tearing open the soft silvery wrapping. Peter hissed, but Sirius went on digging and tearing, and then something Peter had thought he would never see again spilled into the light from his wand.

Peter just stared. Yes, that soft fabric that was making some of the grass vanish was James’s Invisibility Cloak.

“Uncle Peter? Uncle Sirius?”

Overconfident as hell, Peter thought, spinning around and glaring at Harry. “Harry. Go back in the house. I told you to wait there!”

“But Sirius came running out here, so it was probably actually more dangerous in the house without anyone to protect me,” Harry said, widening big eyes.

“Except Sasha and the rats and your own wand. Back.”

Sirius transformed in a rush and whirl of color that looked like a reverse Portkey, and all but barked at Peter. “You know who this Cloak belongs to as well as I do, Squeakers! It’s his.” He turned around and swept the Cloak from the ground before Peter could do more than fume about the name, holding it out to Harry over his arms as though presenting a platter of food. “Here. This was the Cloak your father used when he sneaked around and played all the pranks Squeakers has told you about.”

Harry’s mouth dropped open a little, and he took the Cloak with shaking, reverent hands. Peter bit his lip. On the one hand, maybe he’d done a poor job raising Harry with enough mementoes of his parents, if he reacted like this to something Janes had once owned.

On the other hand, maybe he had told the stories about them well enough, because Harry looked both awed and overwhelmed.

“I’ll wear it with pride,” Harry whispered. Then he seemed to snap back into being the cunning Slytherin in the group, and looked around with narrowed eyes. “Where did it come from? Was there anything to say who sent it?”

“There was a card,” Sirius said, and looked around in the distracted kind of daze that was more normal for him than not, since Azkaban. Peter contained his own pity and impatience by stooping down and picking the card up from the ground. He cast detection spells as he did, but only two, because he would have felt anything on the card in the first set, when it had been lying on top of the package.

The card was made of white parchment, with lacy outlines of snowflakes cut into it. Peter shrugged and held it out to Harry, who opened it and murmured, “Your father loaned this to me. It is time that you had it again. A Merry Christmas to you.” He paused. “It’s not signed.”

“It doesn’t need to be,” Sirius said shortly. “I remember now. James told me that Dumbledore had wanted to borrow the Cloak to go on an Order mission that was especially dangerous. He wouldn’t have had a chance to return it before—”

His face turned ashen, and his eyes rested on Peter. Peter stared steadily back, but then dropped his gaze. They did such a good job of tolerating each other most of the time, it would be a shame to ruin it now, and on Christmas, of all days.

“Huh. I wonder why he didn’t write his name, then?”

Sirius shrugged and seemed to snap out of his mood. “He probably wanted to seem mysterious. I suppose there’s a chance that he thought I wouldn’t remember where it came from. Or he might not have known I knew, that James told me.”

“Like I would have used it if we couldn’t be sure of where it came from,” Harry muttered. He pulled the Invisibility Cloak over himself, vanishing except for his head floating in the air, and grinned maniacally.

Peter rolled his eyes. “Stop planning all the pranks on Malfoy that I can see you planning right now.”

“Uh-huh.”

He doesn’t even bother to try and deny it, Peter thought in exasperation. He was no longer sure why he had ever thought that Harry would be a good fit for Gryffindor, although using the Cloak for pranks was a Gryffindor thing to do.

He herded Harry and Sirius back into the house, although he noticed that Sirius was watching him again. But he didn’t bring up anything, and Peter was relieved. One uncomfortable conversation was enough for a lifetime.

*

It turned out Peter had spoken too soon.

“Come on, Peter. I’ve got to talk to you.”

It was Boxing Day, and Harry was at Etienne’s house visiting. Peter swallowed and put down the book on Charms that Great-Aunt Helene had given him. Sirius stood in the door of his bedroom, staring at him.

“About what?” Peter asked. It was rare that Sirius actually used his name. Most of the time now, he called Peter “Squeakers,” and for all that Peter disliked the name, he also knew that it gave Sirius some kind of distance from—well. From past events.

“You know very well what.” Sirius lounged against the doorway for a minute, and then prowled into the bedroom with restless energy and collapsed on the stool that Peter sat on when he took his boots off. “James and Lily.”

“I can’t bring them back.”

Sirius blinked at him. “What? Of course I know that. It’s not like any magic works to ressurect the dead, and if it did, it would be some Dark shit.”

Peter saw the way Sirius stared off at a wall, and snorted quietly to himself. Yes, it would be Dark, but he could see Sirius deciding that he had no choice but to delve into necromancy, if it worked to bring the dead back to life as they had been.

Sirius turned his head and stared at him a second later. “And you’re deflecting again. We have to talk about what you did.”

Peter set his hands flat on his knees. They were trembling, but he hoped he might be able to hide some of that by holding them like he was. “What do you want me to say, Sirius? I am sorry. And I’m fully committed to protecting Harry. You know that because of the vow I made.”

Sirius winced and shut his eyes. “We have to—I can’t get over this anger with you if we don’t talk about it.”

“But what is there to talk about?” Peter heard the pleading note enter his voice. He hated it, but he was willing to cling to any spar that would get him out of this conversation. “Please, Sirius. Come on. I betrayed James and Lily. I willingly became a Death Eater. You can’t take the Dark Mark unless you’re willing. I’m a piece of shit. You hate me.”

“That last one, you’re wrong about.”

Peter stared at him. Sirius still had his eyes closed, and it occurred, belatedly, to Peter that he wasn’t the only one hiding here. But Sirius was still talking about it. It was baffling.

“But you have to hate me,” Peter said. It sounded entirely reasonable to him. “Of course you do. You hated anyone who attacked James in our schooldays. And that extended to Lily after they got married. Besides, I know that you were closest to James, and then Moony, and then me. That’s the way it worked.”

Sirius gave a shudder that seemed to go all the way to his bones. “But James and Lily aren’t here anymore,” he whispered hoarsely. “And Moony chose not to be here.”

He opened his eyes and stared bleakly at Peter. Peter froze, feeling as though he was caught in the gaze of a predator, and had to fight hard to keep from changing into a rat and fleeing.

“I have to live with things the way they are. That’s what the Healers told me.”

“You said you weren’t going back to that Mind-Healer.”

“I haven’t. I’ve exchanged letters with her sometimes, though, and without you and Harry here, I’ve had a lot of time to think.” Sirius drew a deep and painful breath. “The problem, Peter, is that I don’t know what to do with you. I could go on hating you, sure, but that doesn’t do anything.”

“It makes us both very comfortable,” Peter pointed out. “I wouldn’t count that as nothing.”

“It doesn’t make Harry comfortable.”

Peter flinched.

“And he asked me if I hated you, and said if I did, I should punch you and never be around you again, because that’s what he’d like to do with people he hates.” A flicker of a smile chased itself across Sirius’s lips. “I told him I couldn’t do that, and he asked me why. I said that I hated you, but I couldn’t do it. And he said that it didn’t sound like I hated you, it just sounded like I didn’t want to talk to you.”

Peter shook his head. Frantic fear nibbled at the edges of his consciousness like he was trapped in a cage. “You can’t forgive me, Sirius.”

“It isn’t forgiveness,” Sirius said. “It’s living with things the way they are. And the thing is, I think you’d do anything to save yourself, Peter, but you’d also do anything to save Harry. Sometime in the past ten years, you grew a conscience. And that means you have changed. You’re—” He blew out his breath. “I can’t forgive the man who betrayed James and Lily, but you’re not that man anymore. And if the past version of you is dead, then I can let that go.”

“You’ll never stop mourning James and Lily. You’ll never get over being in Azkaban for seven years.”

Sirius stared at him with a look Peter couldn’t read. “No. But James and Lily aren’t coming back, either, as we’ve already discussed. And they wouldn’t want me to do anything to make Harry unhappy, which he’ll be if I continue placing the dead above the living.

“As for Azkaban…I’m never going back there.” The way Sirius said it, with the heavy, final ring of an iron door shutting, told Peter that Sirius had plans of his own if something ever happened that came close to putting him back in prison. “And I don’t even have nightmares very often anymore, thanks to Harry. And being a dog for so many years there, and being able to change into a dog now when I have to. And you.”

“Sirius—”

“You put me in Azkaban. And you got me out of it.” Sirius tilted his head forwards so that his fringe fell over his eyes. “I can’t reconcile that contradiction, so maybe the best thing to do is stop trying. And live with it.”

“Sirius—”

“And you have to live with being accepted, Peter. I like that word better than forgiven.”

Peter just stared at him. Sirius flipped his head up so that his fringe fell out of his eyes again. He looked tense, but he wasn’t right on the verge of metamorphosis again, the way he had been for so long whenever he’d argued with Peter. Or Harry. He wasn’t turning into a dog to escape being human right now.

He wasn’t running away.

Peter shut his eyes tightly, while blood beat in his ears until he thought it might burst his eardrums.

The way I am.

Peter shuddered, and wrapped his arms around himself. Sirius stood up, and Peter relaxed a little, a very little. He probably meant to go away and leave Peter to deal with this on his own, which was honestly the way Peter preferred it.

And then Sirius did something that he’d never done since he came home more than three years before. He stepped across the distance between them and put his hand on Peter’s shoulder.

Peter stared at him. Sirius gave him the ghost of a smile, and said, “We’re still alive. We’re still Marauders.”

And he turned and walked away, and left Peter to deal with…all of that.

*

The easiest way to deal with it was to go away and leave Sirius at the house after the Christmas holiday ended and Harry and “Squeakers” returned to school. So that was what Peter did.

And anyway, Sirius never brought it up again, although sometimes he looked at Peter sidelong and nodded as if he was thinking about it. Peter was the one who had the whole stupid thing whirling in his brain.

It went on whirling there, during the nights when he lay quietly curled up on the pillow next to Harry’s head or roamed through the corridors of Hogwarts, smelling out any dangers that might be there, listening to more than one conversation people thought they were having in private. It went on whirling while Peter groomed Coal, who groomed him, and while he sat in Harry’s pocket during Potions class and watched a tight-lipped Snape who avoided Harry’s eyes.

(He still had a bit of a yellow tint to his skin).

Peter wasn’t a good person. He knew that. But somehow, good people had come to love him—in Harry’s case—and to want to stay with him—in Sirius’s.

Well, in Harry’s case, that was easy enough. Peter had raised him. He didn’t know any better. Of course he loved Peter, because by the time he learned the truth about Peter’s crimes, he was emotionally invested in him and had got used to the idea that his mum and dad were dead. It was perfectly normal emotional dissociation.

Sirius was more difficult, but Peter felt like biting his own whiskers off when he realized it. Sirius had been emotionally compromised by the Dementors. Of course he wasn’t going to react normally in any way at all. He had probably ceased to remember Lily and James’s corpses so vividly when he was no longer around the wretched soul-sucking creatures, and that meant his mind had to find a new obsession, which was Harry. And he would do anything for Harry.

Like he said, he hadn’t forgiven Peter. He had learned to tolerate him.

It had nothing to do with forgiving Peter, or with Peter being a good person. He had a Mark on his arm, and would all his life, that said he wasn’t a good person. That was the way it was.

Peter felt more at peace once he realized this, and if it wasn’t for Harry using the Invisibility Cloak to terrorize half of Slytherin (including blackmailing some older students he’d found snogging in hidden corners) and the unsettling reek of decomposition that Peter sometimes smelled on his wanderings and which seemed to have no source, he would have been entirely at peace.

*

It came down entirely to chance, really. Peter would have liked to claim he was a better strategist, but he would have had only Sirius and Harry to tell, and they would have known he was full of it.

He bounded swiftly along in the shadow of a wall one night, on his way back to the Slytherin common room. He had been to the kitchens, and that was always rewarding. The house-elves were as happy to feed students’ pets as they were the students themselves. Peter’s stomach bulged with cheese and bacon rind.

He paused abruptly, his ears flattening. There was the reek of decomposition again, and it was close.

Coming from under the door in front of him, in fact. Which happened to be the door to the Defense Against the Dark Arts classroom.

Peter felt his fur shiver. Normally, he could never smell something like that in the Defense classroom, but that was because the only thing one could smell in there was garlic. For the first time, he wondered if that might have been deliberate.

And a teacher had to have been the one who’d let the troll into the school at Halloween. A student wouldn’t have that kind of access to the wards, and wouldn’t have managed to herd the creature successfully in any case.

Peter crept to the edge of the door and flattened himself there, staring underneath it. He didn’t want to go inside when he didn’t know what was going on, but a quick look wouldn’t hurt.

Quirrell was sitting on a stool in the middle of the room, his face in his hands, weeping. The turban that he normally wore all the time was unraveled at his feet in a pile of purple cloth. Peter couldn’t see the back of his head, which was facing the other way, but it stank. Like an open wound.

Peter shuddered. He thought about going closer, and then decided that he didn’t want to. There was no telling what kind of curse Quirrell was bearing, and no reason Peter could think of that he hadn’t gone to Dumbledore about it, unless the curse or the means he was using to combat it was Dark Arts.

Peter would have to keep a closer eye on him in the future, in case Quirrell hurt Harry, but he didn’t have to become involved now.

He turned to scamper away, and heard the soft, cold, sibilant voice that spoke from the back of Quirrell’s head.

A voice he knew.

Peter bolted.

*

He was halfway to the edge of the grounds before he recovered himself. He crouched and clung to the ground in the shelter of a large stone near the lake. His body throbbed with the rhythm of his heart, blazed with the need to run, and keep running, and keep going.

He’s not dead. I never should have thought he was dead. The wand was too alive and hungry.

Peter closed his eyes and gripped the earth with his claws.

Yes, the Dark Lord was alive. And he was a threat to Harry.

Peter couldn’t go away and leave Harry by himself.

Peter lay there and shook. He wanted to go. Leap and fly—he regretted bitterly for the first time in years that his Animagus form didn’t have wings—and depart and leave and be safe. The Dark Lord would kill him if he had any idea Peter was here. He would kill for knowledge of his wand. He would kill him because Peter had been the one to help Sirius, and Harry. He would kill him because Peter had been the one to come to Godric’s Hollow with him, and the Dark Lord would probably assume Peter had somehow known about the way things would work out and laid a trap.

He had to leave.

He had to stay.

He lay there, and clashing fears swung back and forth in him and raged and battled, until Peter thought his heart would probably just stop beating. That was one way out of the whole mess, anyway. One way to go.

But that would leave Harry alone.

This time, he was halfway back to the school before he was even aware that he’d made a decision.

*

Although it was difficult, Peter didn’t tell Harry. The idiot child would try to confront Quirrell, or spy on him with his Invisibility Cloak. Or, hell, walk into the Defense office after class was done and ask to see Quirrell’s Dark Mark.

(Peter was fairly sure Quirrell didn’t have one, since the man would have been a Hogwarts student during the war, but would that stop Harry from asking? No).

He told Sirius, and Sirius swore for half an hour, proposed murder plans that Peter rejected, proposed capture plans that Peter rejected with prejudice, and proposed telling Dumbledore. Peter asked how they were to reveal the information to Dumbledore when they couldn’t tell him that Squeakers was Peter, and Sirius grinned at him.

“Leave that to me,” he said, the way that Peter had when they were discussing punishing Snape. And, amazingly, Peter trusted him enough to do so.

Sirius came sauntering into the Great Hall as a dog not a week later. Harry leaped up from the Slytherin table, screaming, “Padfoot!”, and ran towards him. Sasha hissed in what sounded like displeasure on his shoulders.

Peter, with more sense than all of them, leaped out of Harry’s pocket and landed on the bench near Malfoy, startling him. But a second later, they were both too intent on watching Harry and Padfoot’s antics to care.

Sirius barked and wagged his tail, and took off in a straight line towards the professors’ table. Harry chased him, whooping with laughter. Sirius stopped, and for a minute Peter thought he was going to let Harry catch him.

He didn’t. Instead, he sprang off the floor and ran down the middle of the table, panting wildly, barking up a storm, scattering dishes in every direction with claps of his enormous paws, and generally enjoying himself in a way Peter thought he hadn’t done since Azkaban. Harry was lying on the floor in front of the table, laughing too hard to speak. Sasha was coiled on the floor in startled offense.

Sirius stopped to wag his tail at a stunned Professor McGonagall, growled at Snape, dodged the Binding Charm that Flitwick fired at him, and then sprang into Quirrell’s lap and shoved him backwards, licking his face nonstop. His scrabbling paws rose and fell, and tore the turban from Quirrell’s head.

Quirrell screamed, a long, low, seemingly endless sound that turned into a moan.

Sirius sprang backwards, mouth wrinkled in a snarl, and a second later, the reek of decay hit Peter’s nostrils. From the expressions on the faces of the other people at the table, they smelled it, too.

“I told you, Albus,” Snape hissed, his hand clenching on the edge of the table.

“What is that?” Professor McGonagall sounded on the verge of transforming herself.

“Quirinus,” Dumbledore said, rising to his feet. The expression on his face wasn’t flummoxed, but stirring towards anger, the way Peter had seen him direct towards Snape when Harry asked about the love potion. “What have you done?”

Sirius jumped to the floor, and went over to lick Harry’s face.

*

Everything moved fast after that, but it didn’t actually involve any of the three of them (or, for that matter, Sasha or Hedwig or the other rats), so Peter didn’t feel obliged to care about it.

Quirrell was Stunned by the other professors and confined. Dumbledore later told Sirius and Peter, who had transformed back to human, Apparated to the cottage, and put on his glamours as Peter Durant, that it had indeed been the Dark Lord on the back of Quirrell’s head.

“It appears Voldemort was a spirit, and Quirinus consented to possession in return for wealth and power.” Dumbledore slumped over his hearth as they spoke through the Floo, his expression old and sad, and didn’t look up at Peter’s flinch. “We attempted to capture the spirit, but it escaped.” He swallowed. “I am afraid someone will have to tell Harry.”

“We’ll do that, sir,” Sirius said, sitting bolt upright in his chair and smiling helpfully. “Since I was the one who exposed him, after all.”

“Why did you come to Hogwarts that day, Sirius? Indulge an old man’s curiosity.”

“Harry missed me and asked me to come,” Sirius said, and his smile deepened. “And honestly, I missed Hogwarts, myself. I thought I would say hello to my old professors and make myself known to the new ones.”

Dumbledore stared at him hard, but he seemed to know Sirius well enough to realize that was all he would get.

He never even thought of asking me, of course, Peter thought, as they watched the green flames for the Floo dim and vanish. I’m not a former Gryffindor or a former Order member or someone who has more than a coincidental connection to Harry, as far as he knows. I’m nobody.

Peter found himself deeply, and profoundly, grateful.

*

They told Harry at the end of the year, after he had studied for exams with Hermione’s help, learned to become a brilliant chess player with Ron’s help, spent time becoming better at Charms with Etienne’s help, and relaxed by playing an invisible ghost with Malfoy’s help.

Harry listened to the whole story, and nodded slowly. Then he said, “So Voldemort could come back any time?”

“We know he’s out there, but he’s difficult to track as a spirit.” Sirius seemed to be afraid that Harry would be upset, kneeling in front of the Apparition point at the edge of Dover-by-the-Sea and speaking to him softly. They’d told him practically the moment they Apparated back from King’s Cross. Peter stood quietly in the background and listened. “But I promise you, we’re going to do everything we can to track him down and bring him to justice. Don’t be afraid.”

Harry blinked at him. “Oh, I’m not.”

Sirius frowned. “What?”

“I have you and Uncle Peter to protect me. And he was near me all school year and didn’t manage to do anything to me. I know he was probably the one who let the troll into the school,” Harry added, because he apparently knew what Sirius was opening his mouth to say. “But he still didn’t manage to do anything. Because Uncle Peter was there.”

He beamed up at Peter, and Peter felt a brief sensation like a wind sweep through him.

Harry—acted like a normal, loved child. A child who knew things couldn’t go wrong, because adults were watching out for him.

He wouldn’t have done that if Peter had left him with the Dursleys. They would probably have turned him into a wary, cautious boy who didn’t trust adults, and who, if he’d discovered something about the Dark Lord, would have tried to handle the whole thing himself, or at least only with the help of his friends.

But he was this way instead. Because Peter had been there.

Peter held out his arms, and Harry ran into them the way he’d run into Sirius’s on the train platform. He leaned against Peter and hugged him the way he’d hugged him so many times over the years, and held on.

Peter met Sirius’s frustrated eyes, and shook his head a little. Of course they would have to make Harry see the extent of the threat. He was going to be You-Know-Who’s primary target. He would have to learn more than he did now, and he would have to be more careful, and he would have to hold back instead of running into things.

But for now, they could let him be a child.

“Besides,” Harry muttered, “I can Apparate. I can get away from him if he tries to corner me.”

Peter laughed aloud, because he couldn’t help it, and hugged Harry back.

And then all three of them—or five if you counted Sasha and Hedwig, or ten if you counted the other rats in Harry’s robe pockets—went home.

The End.