Saturday, Sept. 14

Peter Pettigrew was a sad, pathetic man.

He was a coward. A traitor. And undoubtedly, he deserved to burn in the deepest depths of hell.

Two things he wasn’t, however, were incompetent, and remorseful. For, you see, while Peter Pettigrew was unarguably the lowest form of scum, he was also a skilled and crafty wizard who was capable of the sort of casual acts of cruelty that would make many Nazis green with horror.

No one had ever realised this, of course. Not really. Not until he wanted them to. It was how he had gotten away with the seven years he spent in Hogwarts torturing his schoolmate’s pets to death, and talking The Marauders into committing their worst offenses, while, as always, making James and Sirius think it was all their ideas.

No, no one had ever realized just what Peter was capable of, what he could do; because there was no one who did not underestimate him. And fortunately for Peter, he had realized, from a very young age, that the less people thought of you, the more you could get away with.

And he had gotten away with plenty, hadn’t he? Turning on the Potters, escaping Sirius, and even fooling an entire magical family for ten years, simply by pretending to be a rat.

Honestly sometimes it was almost like things just couldn’t go wrong for him.

...

Well, not true. As he’d realised just today when, for the first time in ten years, his Dark Mark had burned.

Peter had considered ignoring it. In fact, he would have ignored it, if not for one very simple thing; the location that he was being summoned to, was in Hogwarts.

The Dark Lord was back, and he had somehow made his way into Hogwarts undetected.

*****

The moment that Peter had decided to go turncoat during the war, was the first time he saw Voldemort fight.

The dark wizard had terrified him, and Peter had realised in that moment that he had two choices; leave Magical Britain and avoid the inevitable defeat on the horizon, or sign up with the winning team now, and build goodwill for himself while he had the chance.

He’d chosen the latter.

Fast forward to now, ten years, and a resounding defeat at the hands of a child later, and when Peter met Voldemort again, he was terrified, sure, but it was nothing like before.

The Dark Lord was lacking something. Well, obviously the dark wizard was lacking a lot of things, a body chief among them, but there was something else... a presence, an aura, if you will, that was missing, and it took Peter a few moments to realize what it was; Voldemort’s aura of invincibility was broken.

The Dark Lord had gone from being the most feared dark wizard in all of the British Isles, to a repulsive face on the back of a no-name wizard’s head. And, all of it, because he lost to a child.

Of course, Peter said none of this, and he bowed and trembled appropriately before his Lord. And when the dark wizard commanded him to set up a disaster in Hogsmeade to pull Dumbledore away so he could get the stone unchallenged, Peter rushed to obey, even going so far as to shoot up the Dark Mark, since, being a spy, he’d never had the opportunity to before.

But when that was done, and he was supposed to return to the castle to assist his Lord in whatever way he commanded next, Peter stayed outside and watched instead.

Watched as Harry Potter and his muggleborn girlfriend (or whatever their relationship actually was) made their desperate escape from The Gryffindor Tower with their owl; watched as they were struck down by Voldemort; watched as an eleven-year-old girl broke out of the dark wizard’s Imperius Curse; and watched as The Dark Lord Voldemort lost once again to children.

Finally, using a Supersensory Charm, Peter heard their final conversation:

“Look at you,” Harry said. “You’re pathetic.”

“I’ll... be back,” Voldemort gasped.

“No, you won’t,” Harry replied.

“We won’t let you,” Hermione said.

Voldemort had been terrifying and terrifyingly powerful once. He had seemed invincible to Peter.

He didn’t anymore.

So when the weak, wounded piece of Voldemort’s soul had somehow located Peter where he hid, and rushed into the wizard’s body looking for another life force to leech off of, he found resistance that he had not expected and wasn’t ready for.

In a fitting reversal of what he’d done to Quirinus, The Dark Lord’s soul was drained of what little vitality it had left, until it was nothing but a mere husk clinging to an idea of life because his many horcruxes would not let him pass on.

It changed little though, because for all intents and purposes, that piece of The Dark Lord was dead.

Peter Pettigrew, on the other hand, had never felt more alive.