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Peter is twenty years old when he decides that there is only so much pain a person can take.
They come every night now, their eyes bright with excited malice and their voices hushed behind their Death Eater masks.
‘Is tonight the night you’ll break?’ they hiss- disarming him the same as every other night.
They hold him in place with Petrificus Totalus and silencing spells, and torture him throughout the night.
Every once in a while they remove the silencing spell- and ask him questions. Questions about the Order, about its members and its headquarters. They ask about James and Lily. About Sirius and Remus and every night, Peter chokes back sobs and cries of pain and doesn’t say a word.
At first, it was small jinxes; unpleasant charms that made his whole body itch or his ears fall off. Soon they got more inventive; curses that boiled his blood and blinded him, hexes that caused his bones to splinter and his lungs to squeeze until he couldn’t breathe.
It’s the same two men, night after night, and they seem to find it fun to think of new ways to hurt him- but they quickly grow tired of it as night after night he remains stubbornly mute.
He knows he should tell the Order- he should tell his friends that Voldemort seems to have taken a special interest in him. But there was a voice in the back of his head that whispered to him every day as he cast more protective spells around his house, telling him that the only reason they came for him was because he was the weakest link. That the Order would remove him from missions and send him into hiding if they knew. That his friends wouldn’t respect him if they knew how easily his defences snapped and he was disarmed every night.
He wasn’t meant to be a fighter; he’d never wanted to join the Order. But they left Hogwarts and he couldn’t find a job anywhere, the Wizarding World was in chaos and at war and it looked like fighting was his only option. So he joined up and Sirius clapped him on the back and said he’d known all along that Peter would come around. He pretended to be happy with his decision- he stood for the picture Dumbledore insisted on, a smile plastered on his face and trying not to feel as if he’d made a horrible mistake as he stood shoulder to shoulder with his fellow soldiers.
Cynthia said she understood, but it didn’t stop her from leaving. She’d been in hiding for nearly a year with Mary and Reg.
Sometimes at Order meetings, Marlene would press scraps of parchment into his hands. Notes from Cynthia tell him she was proud of him, that she loved him, and that one day they would be together again.
He lives for every single one of those scraps.
He memorises the words on each note and every night, as the Death Eaters Crucio him and demand information, he recites them to himself in his head. He might scream in agony and writhe and cry but he’ll be damned if he’s going to give Voldemort a thing.
He looks at James, Lily and baby Harry and he swears to himself that he’s going to survive this war for Cynthia. That one day they’ll be just like the Potters- married and happy with children of their own.
If he survives this, no one will ever think of him as the weak link again.
***
Peter is twenty-one years old when he finds out that there are things much worse than pain.
He’d heard the term ‘heartbreak’ his whole life, but he truly didn’t understand the definition until the day Dumbledore stood up in an Order meeting and announced that the whole McKinnon family had been murdered.
He’d always imagined heartbreak as a clean split in two. Instead, it felt as though every one of his organs had been flash frozen and then shattered. Shattered into a million tiny fragments that could, and would never be put back together. The room was somehow too hot and too cold and he couldn’t breathe, his vision blurred, his legs weren’t supporting him anymore and he just - crumpled.
He wasn’t the only one. He dimly recognised Lily’s scream- somehow both anguished and angry, and Dorcas’ white-hot rage as they both stepped backwards, away from Dumbledore as if they could run away from the fact that they’d lost another friend. A friend who wasn’t even fighting in this forsaken war.
He hears as if from a great distance Dumbledore explain that Cynthia had moved into hiding with her parents, leaving Mary and Reg behind. Marlene had gone to visit despite being told it was too dangerous.
She’d lead the Death Eaters right to their door.
Marlene had been the one they wanted, Dumbledore says sadly; the rest of the McKinnons were just in their way.
In his heart, Peter knows that’s not true. If all they had wanted was Marlene, then they could have killed her any time if they were following her.
They went after Cynthia because of him. Because he wouldn’t do what Voldemort wanted.
James was there- trying to pick him up off of the floor and murmuring to him through his own tears;
‘We’ll get them Peter’ he said, ‘We’ll make them pay for this’.
But what hollow fucking words those were. James was standing there with his wife by his side- their baby safely tucked away in one of the rooms upstairs in headquarters, sleeping soundly next to the Longbottom boy.
James didn’t know a damn thing about loss like this.
They’re all so understanding for the following weeks. They tell him that it’s not his fault, that it’s not anyone’s fault- and he isn’t brave enough to tell them that they’re wrong. He lets them believe that Cynthia had been in the wrong place at the wrong time because he’s too much of a coward to admit to them that he got his girlfriend killed. He withdraws from them all, even as they write him letters and invite him to dinners and tell him that he’s not alone.
But it’s a lie, and eventually, they all stop coming.
Sirius and Remus go home together every night- they think that the others don’t notice, as if they haven’t been dancing around each other since Remus and Benjy broke up in sixth year. James and Lily are so wrapped up in marital bliss and new parenthood that neither of them notices the shadows under his eyes, or the new angle of his nose after it’s most recent breaking. No one else in the Order has much time for him either; they have their own friends and family to worry about.
The picture Dumbledore had them take becomes a grim obituary; Marlene wasn’t the first, and she wasn’t the last. Caradoc disappeared a few months later, the Prewetts are found dead in August, Dorcas is murdered by Voldemort himself in September, Benjy Fenwick is found in pieces, and on and on and on the war goes without any end in sight.
One night when the Death Eaters come, he doesn't even bother to pick up his wand.
One day, years from now, they’ll say that he gave in to Voldemort because he was afraid. By that time there isn’t anyone alive who knows that wasn’t the reason at all. He might have been afraid to die, but he also didn’t have a damn thing worth living for.
After all, there was only so much pain a person could take.