When he was a child, Peter Pettigrew had always longed for friends who were better, stronger, braver than he was, friends he could run to when he felt like the world was about to crash down about his shoulders, friends who would banish the spectres that haunted the gloomy corners of his room with a wave of a hand or a few choice words.
Ten years later, even though the world was slowly falling and every day's newspaper brought fresh horrors, even though jokes about the relief of not finding one's own obituary in them had become too sadly true to be amusing, even though he had friends who were closer to brothers, friends who would die for him, Peter had never wanted them less; he wanted nothing more, now, than to be free of his powerful, brilliant, flamboyant friends and free of the fear of death that came with them .
(His friends were hunted. And by extension, so was he.)
But here, in the middle of the darkness and the dying, caught in a swirling vortex of deaths and madness, they could still talk, and laugh by the fire, and get progressively and steadily more inebriated.
Peter hated it, hated the fact that they persistently refused to be serious, persistently behaved as though nothing mattered more to them than Puddlemere United (Padfoot), or some girl Padfoot fancied (Prongs), or the interesting way in which grown men were still capable of reverting to a mental age of six with scarce a moment's notice (Moony, exasperated).
Peter loved it, because they helped him forget the possibility that he might not live long enough to get up late on Monday morning, to drag himself to the Ministry office bleary-eyed, to greet his daily cup of coffee as though he had given it up for dead three years ago.
They helped him forget the fact that, above all, he was afraid. Afraid to stray down isolated roads for fear that he would be the next corpse found with eerie green sparks floating over his head, afraid to answer his door when he wasn't expecting a visitor. Afraid for his life, above all else.
(Oh, how he was afraid, afraid because there was no good in having friends who would die to save you if they died and you still needed saving.)
He wondered if James or Sirius or Remus felt the same way. Probably not, for James would far rather Lily live and he die than the other way round, and Sirius had loudly proclaimed that he did not care how or when he died as long as he managed to make a worthy exit, and take 'some of those Death Chompers with him', and Remus – well, one never knew with Remus. One never really knew what was going on behind his weary brown eyes and crooked smiles.
(Remus could betray them all, Remus could be plotting their deaths this moment, and Peter was sure that he, for one, would never know.)
-
He was roused rather abruptly from his reverie by James pressing another drink into his hand.
"What's the matter, Peter, mate? Voldemort been getting to you?"
Peter managed a forced smile.
"No. Nothing. I'm fine."
-
He did not like saying 'Voldemort'. He knew, in an intellectual way, that it was perfectly potty to be afraid of a made-up name, but somehow the name carried with it a veneer of death, of green light flickering underneath distant stars, a feeling of not being entirely human, and the people who said it (people like James, people like Sirius) had the unconscious air of being almost too brave, of walking proudly to certain destruction merely for the sake of taking as many of the enemy as possible down with them.
-
Across from him, Lily laughed in response to a comment of Sirius' about exactly what he would like to do to Voldemort, most of which involved green hair, pus, red rubber noses and excruciating torture; the glass of red wine in her hand appeared almost luminous, seeming to glow with clear red light. Little glints of gold caught themselves in her hair like so many little specks of stardust; next to her, James reached over and put his arm around her. Sirius surveyed them with raised eyebrows and the beginning of a grin; Remus was quiet and contemplative.
Peter wanted to laugh. Peter wanted to cry. Peter wanted to seize Sirius' skinny shoulders and shake him hard, shake some sense into him – you fool, he wanted to say, you thrice-damned fool, this is war, this could be the last dinner you ever have with any of us, and Voldemort isn't like that, it isn't like sneaking around school with an invisibility cloak being nasty to Slytherins, this is different, this could get all of us killed, you and me and Remus and James and Lily and everyone you care about, because that's what Voldemort will do, he won't stop to be nice to people, he won't stop because there are footsteps in the corridor and he knows Filch is approaching. He won't care.
-
The fire began slowly to die down, and the clock's hands swept inexorably towards morning; the shadows swept into the room like spectres, swallowing everything they touched; they extinguished the little lights in Lily's hair, they cast James' face sharply into blackness; they played across Sirius face, hollowing his eyes, and Peter thought he saw a fleeting glimpse of him years into the future, grim-faced and gaunt and sunken and tortured; Remus looked tired and pale – had he always been quite this ghost-like, quite this shabby and worn?
He looked at his right hand, lying somehow aimless on his lap; it was a ghostly grey, and it almost seemed to shimmer in the last dying embers of the softly-glowing fire.
Wind howled over a cold, empty plain, and not even the standing stones were left to stop its passage.
Perhaps he was a madman; perhaps he was a coward; perhaps he was the only one here with wisdom, the only one here who knew how the future would turn out.
He blinked, and he shivered, and the moment was gone.
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