– PoA: Chapter Seventeen –

Cat, Rat and Dog

“Scabbers!” Ron yelped, rushing out from underneath the Cloak of Invisibility and disappearing into the night after his rat.

Harry and Hermione shared a look before they, too, dove out from underneath the Cloak and began to run, Harry folding it up and stuffing it away underneath his robes as he leapt over tufts of grass, the ground going steeply downhill where the Forbidden Forest neared.

It was a dark, cloudy night and he did wonder if he or Hermione had run slightly off course, wary of the need to avoid Hagrid, Dumbledore, Fudge and the executioner from the Ministry, but the thought left Harry when he spotted two shapes moving in the grass in front. Gasping for breath, he yelled “this way!” to his side and upped his effort so much he might’ve been flying, his legs hurtling him forwards at a break-neck speed that meant he finally got close enough to identify the shapes in front of him. It was Crookshanks, hot on the heels of Scabbers.

No sign of Ron or Hermione, and he could not lose sight of the shapes to shout back that he’d found them, probably wouldn’t have had air in his lungs to do it anyway.

Crookshanks pounced magnificently and his front paws squashed the rat into the ground just as Harry reached them, going at such speed he flew past them and had to stop his descent by rolling over in the dewy grass. Back on his feet, a crick in his neck, he turned to see Crookshanks, his tail and the fur on his back standing on end, his little cat legs rigid, hissing and spitting at a man.

“Where did you come from?” Harry panted, moving towards them and unwilling to look too closely at man or cat, his eyes scanning the grass for the rat. The rat was nowhere to be seen.

The man was making odd noises, almost like he’d forgotten how to speak.

“Are you hurt?” Harry continued, the strangeness of the situation settling over him. He’d stopped scanning the ground. Crookshanks seemed to have forgotten all about the rat he’d been chasing for the past school year, so busy was he hissing and yowling at this man. The man seemed oddly arrested, his back and head bent, his hands in front of his chest with busy fingers, furiously tapping thin air. One of his fingers was missing, Harry saw. It struck him that it was around the same spot that Scabbers was missing a toe.

“Can you tell me your name?” Harry asked over the noise of the frothing cat. All else was quiet around them. Still no sign of Ron and Hermione.

“Harry,” the man said in a quivering voice, looking up and straight into Harry’s eyes. “I’m Peter. This was not how I thought we’d meet again.”

“When have we met?” Harry asked, looking into the man’s watery, pale blue eyes. He had straightened up now, but he was barely taller than Harry. He looked like he used to carry rather a lot of extra weight but had recently lost it to severe illness. He was wringing his hands, and his eyes darted this way and that in the dark, now to the cat, then back to Harry. He looked completely unfamiliar to Harry.

“I was a friend of your Mum and Dad’s,” the man whispered, not quite meeting Harry’s eyes and instead scanning the forest. “In many ways their best friend.”

Harry’s mind, which had been racing, short circuited at the words.

“It’s not safe for me here,” the man continued, turning physically to look around whilst the cat renewed it’s hissing.

“Were you at school with them? Do you know Professor Lupin, too? And does that mean you also know…?”

“He’s out to kill me,” the man, Peter, whispered, pausing this time to look Harry straight in the eye. “He’s tried it before, and when he didn’t succeed, he cursed me…” Peter looked around nervously, then placed a finger over his lips, his middle finger as his index was missing. “I can tell he’s near.”

“There’s people in the castle who can protect you,” Harry began, trying to step around Crookshanks to get to Peter and show the way, but Crookshanks yelled and stepped across his path, blocking him.

“No, I will be an easy target in the castle. Sirius Black is a powerful Dark wizard, and I can’t rule out that he’s got allies in the castle.”

“But Professor Dumbledore –” Harry swallowed the rest of what he’d been meaning to say when Peter shook his head vehemently. “You still haven’t told me how you ended up here? You said he’d cursed you, did you mean Black?”

“Yes, he turned me into a rat over a decade ago. Pretended he had managed to murder me so that nobody would go look for me. Not my mother, nor my friends…” Peter shivered and hugged himself, eyes doing yet another sweep of the Forbidden Forest. “I need to get out of here.”

“You’ve been Scabbers the rat for all this time?” Harry asked, flabbergasted, eyes fixed on the missing finger in Peter’s hand. He remembered clear as day Fudge and Madame Rosmerta and the rest, reminiscing about the awful event of Peter Pettigrew’s death. The biggest piece of him found after the explosion was a finger.

“Horrible curse,” Peter muttered, he was trying to get past the cat, but Crookshanks hit him across the ankle with a well-aimed paw. “He always knew Dark magic. We should have known. Your parents would still be alive if only we’d realized sooner we couldn’t trust him.”

“They made him their Secret Keeper,” Harry mumbled. It must’ve been unfathomable to them that the person they thought was their best friend would betray them. And here stood Harry before the person who had actually been their best friend. Someone who, from the sound of it, had paid a dear price for confronting Black. “Is there anything I can do to help you? I reckon we need to tell someone. How about Professor Lupin?”

“Can’t stay out here,” Peter said, “I don’t think… well, maybe… Would Remus be sympathetic?” Peter looked at Harry as though he was sitting on the answer.

“Professor Lupin is a fair man, I’m sure of it. Why wouldn’t he be on your side? Everyone will be, you know, once you tell them you were cursed by Voldemort’s spy, his right-hand man. Nobody can blame you for disappearing.”

Peter, who had shuddered and stepped backwards at the mention of Voldemort’s name, seemed to consider what Harry had said. It was an odd thing, Harry thought, because surely anyone could see Peter was the victim in all of this? Yet he was starting to wonder if there was something Peter had omitted from the story.

“Did you befriend my parents here? At Hogwarts?”

“Oh yes,” Peter said, glancing around yet again, “yes, the times we had in school… in these grounds… I met James on the first night, we shared a dormitory. We went on a little adventure that first night, four boys away from home for the first time in our lives…” Peter sniffed. “We never looked back.”

The yearning in those words was tangible, similar to the yearning Harry always felt when he thought of his parents. Their lives had been real, they had moved around this castle, been flesh and blood, made friends and enemies within these walls and gone on adventures in the grounds. And this sad and scared-looking man in front of him had been there for it.

“I can tell you more about your parents,” Peter continued, something shrewd in his eyes now and Harry became aware that he had been watching him. “But we can’t stay out in the open. This way.”

Successfully swerving Crookshanks, Peter began walking back towards Hagrid’s Hut. Rather than following him, Crookshanks streaked off in the direction of the Whomping Willow. Final wave of his bottlebrush tail and he was gone. Harry took off after Peter, but it wasn’t without hesitation. He was listening closely, trying to hear Ron and Hermione. Had they given up and gone back into the castle, or were they still out here in the dark, looking for Harry and Scabbers? Harry couldn’t even imagine their reactions when they found out who Scabbers was. Who he had been for all these years. It was unbelievable. It also showed the awful Dark magic they were up against. If Peter was to be believed, Black had not been able to kill him and therefore forced him to spend the rest of his life cursed as a rat.

Before Hagrid’s Hut, they hit upon an oak tree with what Harry thought might be a root cellar underneath it. The tree grew from a small mound of grass with a door in it. Peter pulled confidently on said door and Harry looked interestedly over his shoulder. There was a large, earthy pile of parsnips inside.

Harry watched as Peter reached inside the space and fumbled with something on the low ceiling. Suddenly, a hatch door swung down and a rustic rope ladder fell out, grazing the top of the parsnips.

“Wow,” Harry muttered, looking from the hatch in the root cellar ceiling to the grass covering its roof. There did not appear to be any space for a secret room, unless it was inside the tree above? Harry patted a few of the roots that were sticking out near him.

“After you,” Peter said, moving aside.

Harry looked behind him one more time, but the grounds appeared deserted. Steeling himself, unsure if it was foreboding or adventure settling with the dew around him, he gave the rope ladder a good pull before beginning to climb it.

It was pitch black inside what he realized must be the trunk of the great oak tree. The ropes were coarse on his hands and the ladder swung alarmingly time and again until his legs felt like jelly. Eventually, his head and shoulders emerged into a bigger space.

He stepped off the ladder and into a small room. The floor was made from wooden planks, as were some of the walls and ceiling. In part they appeared to be just branches and oak leaves.

Wheezing, Peter appeared on the dangerously swaying ladder that was attached to a particularly thick branch in the ceiling, and he stumbled gracelessly into the room.

“Can I borrow your wand, Harry?” Peter gasped, holding out the hand with the missing finger.

Harry dug into his pockets, then he paused. A soothing gust of wind came and jostled the leaves all around them. It was like a snippet of a long-lost melody came back to life, just for them.

Peter was looking at him. The same shrewdness he had spotted outside lingered in his eyes. Harry handed Peter his wand.

“Lumos,” Peter muttered. Rather than the wandtip igniting, a sphere of warm, golden light ascended from it, splitting into dozens of smaller spheres and leisurely making their way to what Harry saw were small brass lanterns that hung from branches inside the room.

It was like a fantastical tree house built by a brilliant magical child. Harry turned on the spot, taking it all in. The crisp green leaves and the cozy lanterns, the scribbles and carvings covering the planks on the floor and walls, the old gingham cloth and worn pillows like a den in the corner. Harry saw some ancient-looking butterbeer bottles and magical sweet wrappers and a pile of old muggle music magazines.

“We stayed up all night after our sorting ceremony,” Peter said, looking intently at Harry. “We wanted to get out; it was a beautiful September evening. Warm like a summer’s night. Your father found this place, and we stayed up here, talking, until the sun had risen again.”

Harry bent down to read the nearest scribbles on the wall. His eyes had grown uncomfortably misty behind his glasses, and he had trouble taking it in. He had no idea what his father’s handwriting looked like, but tonight he would find out. He touched a painstakingly carved heart on the wall with the name Lily inside. Had the last hand that touched this spot been his father’s?

“I hear the Dark Lord disappeared after the failed murder of you,” Peter said quietly.

Harry, who was feeling too much already, only grunted. His thumb caressed the first L in his mother’s name over and over.

“Have you heard anything more about Him? Does Dumbledore believe He is gone for good, or is there a chance He will be back?”

“Dumbledore thinks he will be back,” Harry said thickly, without turning around. “He believes Voldemort’s too weak to do anything right now, but that he’ll keep trying.”

“And is Dumbledore any closer to figuring out how to kill Him?”

“Dunno. If you want to ask him, we can go back to the castle. I’ll take you to Professor Dumbledore.”

“Not just yet,” Peter said quickly. “See, I thought you wanted to know a bit more about your Dad.”

“I do!” Harry said immediately and straightened up. What a joyous occasion this should’ve been. Here Harry finally had someone who had not only known his parents, but who seemed willing to talk about them. Really talk about them. He just didn’t know how to even begin asking.

“You look just like him,” Peter said, fiddling nervously with a loose thread on his robes. “I saw him every day for seven years, and then we both fought He Who Must Not Be Named for the next part of our lives. We all fought against Him, or so we thought. James and Lily, me and Remus; that’s your Professor Lupin. And Sirius Black.”

A shudder went through the room.

“We knew there was a spy, but nobody knew who it was. We were a big organization, but towards the end of the war there were fewer and fewer of us. Some died in battle; others were killed in their own homes.” Peter’s small, watery eyes widened with fear, and Harry didn’t dare speak. “Any one of us could’ve been next… we knew it would never stop. But it had to stop… Your Mum and Dad were some of the best fighters we had. But after they had you, they couldn’t keep going like they had. They needed shelter. And that was when Dumbledore hit upon the idea of Secret Keepers. Told them to choose the person they trusted most to keep them a secret… keep them safe.”

Something ugly was fighting to get through behind all the terror and anguish in Peter’s face.

“Of course they picked Sirius. Your Dad was a brilliant man, but he was stupid in this one particular way. He never saw what an awful man Sirius Black was.”

Harry held his breath and waited. The simmering rage he had felt all year for Black was surfacing. Seeing Peter’s distress, his misery. Hearing that he had known, or at least guessed, all along. But Dumbledore and Professor Lupin had both insinuated that this had been his father’s downfall. James Potter had been loyal to a fault.

“Your Dad always picked Sirius first,” Peter continued bitterly. “He did some horrible things at school, but your Dad always said it was because of his upbringing… Anyway, there were plausible excuses up until the point Sirius sold out your father and mother to the Dark Lord.”

Harry didn’t know what to do with his hands and so he hugged himself. It provided little comfort.

“You probably won’t remember this, but I came to check on your family just after the murders.” Peter didn’t meet Harry’s gaze as he said it, instead he pulled an oak leaf off its branch and began shredding it.

“Did you see Hagrid?” Harry couldn’t stop himself from asking.

“Er, yeah… Yeah, I saw Hagrid. I left when he came to pick you up.”

Harry frowned, thinking back to what he had heard Hagrid say when retelling this story. Hagrid had only mentioned Sirius Black and his motorbike.

“I – er, I had to chase after Sirius. Had to try and stop him, even though I knew all along he’d know Dark magic that I could only dream of…” Peter shivered. “But I had to, didn’t I?”

“Yeah,” Harry agreed slowly. He could see it in front of him: the small, chubby wizard with the wet, pale-blue eyes chasing after an unknown, dark entity. Sirius Black was tall and perpetually in shadow in Harry’s mind.

“I caught up with him in the middle of a crowded muggle street. And he tried to kill me, but we duelled, and then he ended up cursing me instead. I became a rat with no idea of anything else.”

At the word “rat” Harry’s eyes hit upon another etching in the wall. It showed a rat flanked by a large deer and two animals that might’ve been wolves. Whoever carved it had spent a lot of time on it.

Harry looked back at Peter, and if he wasn’t mistaken, Peter had also been looking at the animal carving on the wall. Now he met Harry’s gaze, and the calculating look was back.

“Sirius Black killed your parents like it was the easiest thing in the world. He would have liked to see you killed, too. Even though James had been stupid enough to make him your godfather.”

Harry looked away. He could feel the prickling of embarrassment, moving over his neck and cheeks. An embarrassment that shouldn’t have been his to bear. Nobody had ever called his father stupid before, unless you counted Snape.

“The first time I saw what a despicable person Sirius Black was, was when he stole sweets from a poor Hufflepuff student. He threatened to use his connections to get him expelled unless he gave Sirius all the chocolate frogs he had. After, Sirius pretended it was for a laugh. James, your dad, bought the other kid some new chocolate frogs when he heard what’d happened, but I’ve known since then Sirius Black is not a good man. Unlike your dad, Harry.”

Harry could see it vividly in front of him, perhaps because he had experienced something not dissimilar. He glanced over Peter, who looked like he must’ve had a sweet tooth back in the day, and thought of Scabbers the rat who’d heroically bitten Goyle’s finger when Malfoy and his gang tried to steal sweets from Harry. He wondered if Malfoy had someone in Slytherin who ever admonished him for what he did.

“He was a rotten child, and both James and Remus turned a blind eye to it. Your Mum saw him for what he was, though.”

“Why did she agree that Black be their Secret Keeper then? And why did she agree he become my godfather?” Harry’s voice broke on the last word, the horror of it all washing over him. To be eternally bonded to the person who was responsible for his parents’ death… Who’d wanted Voldemort to kill him.

“I think she thought he’d turned a new leaf,” Peter said finally, although he looked uncomfortable when faced with this question. “He was very charismatic. You mustn’t blame your parents; they were hoodwinked by the greatest spy there was.”

Harry, who hadn’t been blaming his parents, just felt more confused.

“What to do next,” Peter mumbled, and this time Harry was absolutely certain he saw him look at the etching of the four animals on the wall, like he was posing the question to them.

“You should tell your story to Professor Dumbledore,” Harry said without hesitation.

“I will,” Peter decided out loud before holding up a hand. “But there is one thing I need to do first. For my own safety. He needs to… yes, both of them will have to go. I just need to think how to… there’s the dementor’s kiss, of course… and nobody should be able to find us here for the time being.”

“It’s funny, this tree house is called the turnip refuge on the Marauder’s Map, isn’t it?” Harry said dully and looked around. “Never thought to come here to check out what it meant. Wonder who else knows of it.”

“You have the Marauder’s Map?” Peter asked surprisedly.

“Not anymore, Professor Lupin confiscated it when – hang on, how do you know what it is?”

Peter’s eyes moved shiftily over Harry’s face and to the patch of wall where the carving of the animals rested.

“This changes everything.” Peter shook his head and moved close to a wall and lifted a solid-looking branch so that he could look out over the grounds. “I think we have been compromised.”

“Who is coming?” Harry asked, his mind racing.

“It is as I feared. Sirius Black is coming for me, maybe for both of us. And he’s brought his accomplice.”

“Who is that?” Harry breathed and began rooting through his pockets. The rope ladder had just begun to swing violently.

“It’s your Professor Lupin,” Peter said, his eyes unhappy as he turned around to look at Harry.

“Professor Lupin! But how? I can’t believe it.”

“He was always under Sirius’s thumb,” Peter muttered to himself.

“Can I have my wand back?” Harry asked, pulling his empty hands out of his pockets. The other wizard was still holding his wand.

“That rather depends,” Peter said calmly, though he was beginning to look terrified. “Do you have it in you to kill them?”

It was rather like time stood still. Harry could only look at the swinging rope ladder. The rage he had been carrying all year he could feel all the way to his fingertips. But how do you use it to kill a man?

“Thought not,” Peter muttered and pointed Harry’s wand at the rope ladder. A blazing fire streaked down the ropes and there were roars of fright from inside the tree trunk.

Peter had done it a little too late, though, because next second two men heaved themselves out either side of the smoking hole, the ropes breaking apart from the fire and the ladder falling out of sight into the hole.

One of the men was Professor Lupin, wand ready and immediately beginning to duel Peter. The other was the figure from Harry’s second worst nightmare. Sirius Black was tall and gaunt, not unlike a skeleton in robes. On his shoulder Crookshanks the cat perched, tail flicking annoyedly and whiskers looking a little singed from the fire.

With a roar of rage, Harry leapt onto him and tried to push him down into the hole.

“Harry, no!” Black grunted and wrestled him back while Crookshanks hit Harry repeatedly over the head with his paw. Black was stronger than he looked, but Harry did his everything, his hands closing over the former convict’s wasted wrists to force his arms back, to force all of him backwards, anything to make him retreat, stumble, fall. The knee he kicked into Black’s belly made him howl like an animal and Crookshank’s claws slashed the side of Harry’s face as payback.

“He’s been lying to you, Harry! Peter’s the true reason your parents are dead and that Voldemort tried to kill you!”

Spells whizzed past them and Harry had to duck. Oddly enough, Sirius Black stepped in between Harry and the two duellists, like he was shielding him.

“Incendio!” Peter roared just as Black tackled him to the ground, Crookshanks flying and bouncing off the wall, the fire from the spell erupting like a volcano and blasting away several branches and a multitude of leaves from the ceiling.

Their party was suddenly bathing in cool light; the moon having finally taken centre stage after the overcast evening.

Several groans sounded, then the clatter of a wand. Harry lunged for it; it was Professor Lupin’s. He rose again, pointing it at Black, who was beating Peter in the head.

“Hands up, Black!” Harry shouted over a growl that made him jump and look behind himself.

Professor Lupin was no longer. In his place, a wild, wolf-like creature was getting up from the floor, shaking off the torn pieces of a professor’s robe and sniffing the air like there was a feast in front of it.

 

Spoiler

PoA's my favorite so seeing this immediately made me biased towards it.

Seeing Peter steering things from the start, manipulating Harry, the whole sequence kept me tense throughout. The dramatic irony works well; we already sense what Peter is, so watching Harry catch the small tells felt great.

The tree-house was a nice addition but I feel uncertain about it. I understand why it's there; it carries most of the quiet clues, and we need a place or something for it, but it being a distance away by Hagrid's hut, out where students pass all the time (or maybe not? Maybe I mis-imagined its position?) felt a little convenient, almost placed for the reader. A line on why no one's stumbled on it might help.

Peter also feels smoother than the sniveling version I picture from canon, which made Harry handing over his wand easier than I quite believed. And it ends right as Lupin transforms, so it felt like the first half of something. Still, it fits the prompt nicely, and I enjoyed it.