Chapter Text
It turned out not to be so much trouble, after all, to find the child. Peter only had to spend a few days lingering near the Leaky Cauldron in his rat form (the chips were delicious), and Hagrid came in. Sirius had shouted something about Hagrid and James’s son before he confronted Peter, which meant that he had some link. It might be a tenuous one, but Peter was good at following tenuous links.
Nose to the ground, as it were.
Hagrid got drunk and let secrets spill, as usual when he got drunk. However, the people listening to him looked more puzzled than anything. They wouldn’t know what “that horrible woman” and “those horrible Muggles” meant, because, indiscreet as Hagrid could be, he managed to keep from spilling the Potter name.
And, of course, Peter had attended James and Lily’s wedding, and he’d met the horrible Muggles Hagrid was talking about, and he remembered their names. Even their address, which the fat Muggle man had made a point of mentioning, as if he imagined that it was a much neater, cleaner place to live than Godric’s Hollow.
Number Four Privet Drive, Little Whinging, Surrey.
*
The house was bursting with smells, and Peter indulged himself, once he’d found his way in through an unattended hole in the walls, with sniffing for a few minutes, sitting up on his haunches. The most important smells when he were in his Animagus form were the ones that weren’t there—no scent of cat or dog.
Then again, from what he remembered of Petunia, Peter couldn’t believe that she would keep a dirty animal.
Finally he locked onto the important scent that was present, and followed it to a door under the stairs. Peter let his whiskers tremble with puzzlement. It was strange to him that the Muggles would put the Potter kid here when they seemed to have multiple rooms upstairs, but he had no idea how Muggles lived, not really.
There came a low whimper from behind the door.
Peter flattened himself and crawled underneath the thing. He recoiled when he made it. Before, the scent of some sort of strong cleaning product had kept him from smelling what he did now. The kid had a full nappy, and it hadn’t been changed. And his whimpering had the exhausted sound of a child who had been crying out, again and again, and no longer expected someone to come.
Disturbed, Peter sniffed his way along the boy’s body. The kid never looked at him, just huddled there in misery, sniffling now and then.
Peter edged back and transformed, though it was quite a squeeze to fit inside the cupboard. Immediately, the Dark Mark on his arm began to sting, and he grimaced. Some sort of protections on the house, probably. Not enough to stop him in his Animagus form, where the Mark didn’t really exist, but enough to hurt now.
“Hey, kid,” he said, voice rough and low. He hadn’t been doing a whole lot of talking in the last few days. His hand missing the little finger twinged, and he shifted his balance. He wasn’t used to that yet.
The boy rolled over and stared up at him. He still made no sound other than whimpers. Of course, he hadn’t really known Peter that well. Peter had only visited a few times after the Fidelius went up.
James had lain on the floor with his eyes wide and unseeing—
Peter didn’t want to think about that. So he didn’t.
Peter drew his wand. The stinging in his Mark had grown worse, and he wanted to leave before someone came to investigate. Of course he should kill the kid. That was what his Lord would have wanted.
Then something unexpected happened, especially considering that the boy was so young that he couldn’t really know Peter. At the sight of the wand, his whimpers grew louder, and he sat up and held out his arms to Peter.
Peter stared at him.
The boy leaned forwards and grabbed him. His whimpers trailed off, although the disgusting smell from his full nappy didn’t. And he leaned into Peter and held onto him as if he thought that Peter was going to take him back to his parents or something.
Peter sat there with his wand out and the Dark Mark on his arm and James’s son clinging to him, and made a different decision.
That was when James’s son and the Potter kid became Harry.
*
Peter left the house as quickly and quietly as he could. For one thing, his Dark Mark was stinging fiercely now, and he had never been good with pain. For another, he didn’t know much about Muggles, but he knew that they would probably scream if they found him there, and for all he knew, the screams might summon wizards as well as any Aurors the Muggles had.
And he took Harry with him.
Harry had fallen asleep almost the minute Peter had flicked his wand in the charm he remembered seeing Lily use once that would, sort of, change his nappy. It just vanished the fluid and the mess and made the thing dry, but that seemed to be all Harry wanted. He snuggled close and grabbed Peter and yawned and went to sleep.
Peter walked rapidly through the night, away from the house, searching for a place he could safely Apparate. All the time, his mind raced.
He would have to have a good story for why he’d taken the kid. The Dark Lord despised weakness. And Peter had no doubt he would return. The strange way he’d vanished wasn’t like he’d died. His wand had been left behind, and it had felt like a waiting predator when Peter gathered it to hide it. Peter didn’t think any wand would do that if its owner had been destroyed completely.
So what was he going to tell him about Harry?
Peter looked down at the kid, who was breathing softly. His cheeks had a flush of pink when they walked under Muggle street lights. His lips were parted as if he was about to say something, and his hair was mussed in a way that reminded Peter of James’s.
He didn’t think of that.
But then Peter remembered how desperately his Lord had wanted to kill Harry, and he nearly sagged with relief. That was it, of course. The Dark Lord would probably be enraged if he came back and found that someone else had taken his kill away from him. He had claimed prominent Aurors and the like as his kills, and Peter knew that Dumbledore was always going to be his, if the Dark Lord managed to overcome him when they met on the battlefield.
Peter would just raise Harry until his Lord came back, and then he could give him a safely neutralized kid, who wouldn’t have learned any of the things that Dumbledore might have gone back to the Muggle house to teach him.
And in the meantime, he could give Harry a pretty good childhood. Better than the childhood people who would shove him in a cupboard with a full nappy and ignore his crying would give him, anyway. Probably, when the Dark Lord came back, he would use the Killing Curse on Harry, and that was a pretty painless death as far as Peter knew. Not that he ever planned to experience it himself.
Peter nodded, and reached the place he had been searching for—a small gap between two tall houses where no light reached—and spun on his heel, bearing Harry away with him.
*
“Hungry!”
Kids could be loud when they were hungry, Peter had learned.
He sighed and got up to go to the cupboards in the abandoned Muggle house he had found. Well, abandoned now. He had Confounded the owners into thinking they had sold it to him, and they’d taken a long holiday to India with what was left of their money. Maybe they would come back, maybe not, but in any case, Peter and Harry would have moved on by then.
As he got out the applesauce, he glanced over his shoulder and shook his head at the intent way Harry was staring at him. Harry hadn’t asked any questions about his mum or dad after the first few days they’d spent together, and he certainly hadn’t mentioned his awful relatives at all. He looked at Peter with those eyes like—
He didn’t think of that.
Peter put the applesauce on the table, and Harry stood up and ran determinedly over to him. He still needed help to get up to the table on a regular chair, but he could clamber easily onto the small stool Peter had found two houses ago and carried with them, and then Peter would Levitate the stool until it was level with the table. Harry seized the spoon Peter gave him in one chubby fist and started shoveling food into his mouth.
“Slow bites,” Peter said automatically.
“You.”
That meant Peter didn’t take slow bites. Peter rolled his eyes. He did so. Sure, sometimes they were large ones, but he always ate the Muggle food in such a way that he didn’t have to choke. And anyway, he had a throat and a stomach a lot larger than Harry’s.
“Slow bites, or I take it away.”
Harry huddled protectively over his bowl of applesauce. Peter still wasn’t sure what the Muggles had done to Harry other than leave him in a cupboard with a full nappy, but whatever it was, it had probably involved not feeding him, because he was as protective of his food as a Gryffindor first-year with older siblings.
Peter sat back and waited for Harry to finish, his gaze wandering around. The Muggle house wasn’t overly large, but was a nice enough size, with two bedrooms upstairs and a kitchen large enough that they’d probably been dedicated cooks. There was a large refrigerator, well-kept cupboards that stayed that way with the application of some Cleaning Charms, and shiny baseboards—
With a hole in the nearest one.
As Peter narrowed his eyes, a rat popped its head out and stared at him.
Peter sighed. He had no idea why rats were drawn to him and Harry wherever they went. It certainly wasn’t something that had happened to him at Hogwarts, or when he was serving the Dark Lord, or during the summers at home after he had learned the Animagus transformation. He almost wondered whether transforming in the Dursley house had something to do with it, but he didn’t see how it could.
And if these rats were spies from Dumbledore, then Peter and Harry would have been found already. Instead, during the weekly trips Peter made to Diagon Alley to gather copies of the Daily Prophet, there wasn’t a peep that the Boy-Who-Lived was missing.
So much for protection in obscurity, Peter thought smugly.
“Unca Peter!”
Peter’s gaze snapped back to Harry. It wasn’t often that Harry called him that. Harry was pointing one finger at the rat, which had come out fully into the open and sat grooming its whiskers. The rodents never showed any fear of either him or Harry unless they deliberately made an aggressive move, which Peter had stopped doing when it hadn’t worked.
“Play with the pet!”
“They’re not pets,” Peter muttered, but he held out his wand and Summoned the rat with a little swirling motion. The rat squeaked for a moment as it flew into the air and towards the table, but it relaxed the instant it landed in Peter’s cupped hands. It rose on its haunches and nuzzled his face. This close, Peter’s senses, always in a sharpened state since the first transformation, could tell that it was a female.
“Play!” Harry demanded.
Peter floated the rat towards Harry. He wasn’t going to let one on the table, no matter how much he told himself it probably wouldn’t matter. He had magic to clean up any mess a rat left behind, after all. But there were such things as standards.
And he couldn’t have Harry die of some easily treatable illness before the Dark Lord got to kill him.
It’s going to be a shame when that happens, Peter thought, leaning back in his chair and smiling as he watched the rat leap from Harry’s hand to his shoulder and then down his arm, making Harry giggle and clap. I just hope the Killing Curse really is as painless as everyone talks about.
*
“I want an owl.”
Peter sighed and laid his quill down. He and Harry were in their third Muggle house of the year, and Harry, who was five now, had turned into a stubborn little shit sometime in the last few months. He stood in front of Peter with his arms crossed and his nose wrinkled and his robes fluffed up around his feet from stomping on them. Peter remembered that exact stance when James hadn’t got—
He wasn’t going to think of that.
“I’ve explained to you why we can’t have an owl, Harry.” Peter glanced around the large study of the house they’d taken over. Just from that swift scan, his eyes had found three holes. “It’ll kill the rats.”
“I’ll train her not to kill the rats.”
“You want a female owl?”
Harry’s head nodded fervently. “Then she can have babies!”
Peter had to smile a little. Harry got that oddest little obsessions and whims from nowhere, as far as Peter could tell. He bought magical children’s books for Harry to read and sometimes sneaked him into the Muggle world to watch a telly since any in the Muggle homes stopped working around their magic, but those didn’t account for half the ideas Harry came up with. “Sorry, the answer’s still no. Post-owls are highly-trained, but you can’t train the hunting instinct out of them.”
Harry stomped his foot in the way that had stopped being adorable a year ago. “Why not? I trained the snake not to hunt the rats.”
Peter felt his eyes widen. “What snake?”
“Her name’s Sasha!” When Peter just kept staring at him, Harry spun around and called out the study door in the high, hissing voice that Peter had last heard—
From the Dark Lord. Peter felt faint as he watched a large adder slither into the room. He’s a Parselmouth. Holy Merlin.
Peter kept blinking as he watched Harry kneel down and hug the highly venomous snake, who just flickered her tongue out and looked the way some of the rats did when Harry hugged them too long.
“Sasha does what I want her to,” Harry said. Under Peter’s ongoing stare, he wilted a bit. “Not everything. We have to talk about it a lot. But most of the things! She goes out of the house to hunt. She doesn’t kill the rats. I can train an owl not to kill the rats, either!”
Peter shook his head slowly. He was reeling, but he couldn’t show that. There were too many things Harry didn’t know yet, things he wasn’t old enough to understand. Peter wanted to keep him in the dark a little while longer so he could think of the best way to explain them.
Among those things was the real reason Peter didn’t want a post-owl. It could be easily traced back to them if someone knew what they were doing, and there was no way to explain either Harry’s presence or his own aliveness if someone magical stumbled across them.
“Well, Harry, you have to keep in mind that you can talk to Sasha,” Peter said as calmly as he could. “You can’t talk to owls the same way. Did you really train Sasha, or did you argue her into doing what you wanted?”
“We had a conversation,” Harry said, relishing the sound of the word that he’d only learned last week. “It wasn’t an argument.”
“But it only happened because you could talk to her, right?”
Harry obviously knew where this was going, because he scowled. “Yes.”
“Can you talk to owls?” Honestly, Peter wouldn’t be surprised at this point, even though he’d never heard of any other wizard who wasn’t an owl Animagus doing that. Harry had no reason to be a Parselmouth, either.
“No.”
The scowl deepened. Peter shook his head. “I think Sasha is enough pet for right now. Maybe later we can see about an owl, if we find one that we can put spells on so it doesn’t upset the rats.”
Honestly, he thought as he watched Harry hiss something to Sasha and run out of the room with her slithering after him, the boy had done a good job. The rats hadn’t retreated, which meant they could put up with the snake’s presence somehow.
Or maybe that the rats were just insanely determined little creatures. Peter still hadn’t figured out why so many of them were around all the time.
One was leaning against his leg right now, as a matter of fact. Peter picked him up, put the rat on his shoulder, and went on with his list of notes on the Potions book he’d managed to borrow from a shop while he was under a glamour and would have to return tomorrow, with a sad headshake about how he couldn’t afford to purchase it after all.
The thought of Harry and Sasha had gone on working away in the back of his head, though, and by the time he went down to dinner, he was almost decided. Maybe the Dark Lord wouldn’t want to kill the kid after all. Another Parselmouth, when as far as Peter knew there had never been one in Britain except the Dark Lord? Surely he’d want to examine Harry and figure out how it had happened.
Harry might live.
It probably shouldn’t have cheered Peter up so much, but he’d learned to take happiness where he found it.
*
“Can I have a story before I go to bed, Uncle Peter?”
Peter smoothed Harry’s hair back from his forehead. His scar never seemed to get any less pink with the passing of the years, but Peter was wise enough not to meddle with things he didn’t understand.
He gave Harry a smile he knew was distracted. “What kind of story do you want, Harry? One about Hogwarts and your dad?”
“Yes! And the Marauders!”
Harry bounced up and down in the bed that had been decorated with covers showing Muggle football before Peter had Confounded the young family into giving up their house to him and Harry. Now, the covers had a large snake that Peter had enchanted into them. Sasha was looped around Harry’s head on the pillow, watching Harry and darting out her tongue now and then.
“All right,” Peter said. “Did I tell you about the time that we enchanted the Marauders’ Map?”
“Whass the Marauders’ Map?”
Despite himself, Harry’s voice was slurring. Peter smiled a little. Harry had done his first accidental magic today, Levitating Sasha up into a tree where a bird was singing. Apparently, according to Sasha, the bird was annoying and would make a good meal. And Harry would do almost anything to help his friend.
Peter hoped it was a sign that Harry would do well in Slytherin, his determination and his talent. He would be safest there as a Parselmouth, Merlin knew. Peter shuddered to imagine what Gryffindor House would say about a Parselmouth, how they would turn on him.
And perhaps it would all be moot if the Dark Lord returned before Harry was old enough to start Hogwarts. But Peter saw no reason for Harry to be unhappy until then, especially if the Dark Lord’s absence went on for a long time.
(Privately, Peter hoped it would. His Mark had faded to a dull grey).
“The Marauders’ Map was a map that we created to show us where everyone was in the school,” Peter murmured. “James came up with it, you know. Your dad. He decided that we were getting caught too often at pranks. In our third year, we had eighty-four detentions between us.”
“Thass a lot.”
“I agree.” Peter stroked Harry’s hair again. “But Sirius was the one who came up with the initial enchantments, and Remus was the one who decided that it should be a map instead of just a list of names showing us where people were. And I was the one who scouted out all the corners of the school the others couldn’t reach to see what the rooms should look like.”
It burned his mind like the Mark had once burned his flesh, to think about Sirius and Remus. So Peter didn’t.
“Were you a rat then? Is that how you got into the rooms? You sneaked under the door?”
Those sentences made it sound like Harry was about to wake up, but his head lolled to the side, and his breathing was already slowing. Peter doubted he would make it to the end of the story, but he murmured, “No. None of us finished our Animagus transformations until later. But I was good at enchanting things like buttons and teapots into rats and mice. So I could send them underneath doors to get a good look at the contents of a room, and I could watch through their eyes, as long as I’d linked my magic to them.”
“I want to do it with Sasha.”
Peter shook his head. “I never did it with a living animal.” But then he paused, realizing that Harry was asleep. He sighed and sat back.
Two large grey-and-white rats crept up the side of the bed. One came to sit on Peter’s knee, and one took the side of the pillow opposite Sasha, fur bristling all over as if about to flee. Peter thought he could smell her fear. But the rat didn’t run, and Sasha didn’t lunge for her. Peter shrugged. Maybe they had come to some sort of truce.
“Sweet dreams, Harry,” he whispered, and stood up to leave the room. The rat who had been sitting with him scampered after him.
*
HARRY POTTER MISSING!
Peter’s eyes widened as he caught sight of the Daily Prophet’s headline, on the front page of a paper clutched in the hands of an old witch in the Leaky Cauldron. He had intended to walk through the pub and into Diagon Alley immediately. He and Harry needed food, and his glamour wouldn’t hold up forever, even though he’d become more adept at casting them.
But now he had another errand. He ambled up to the front of the pub, where Tom the barkeep was in a conversation with someone else that seemed to consist mostly of headshaking. Peter did hear mutters about “Potter,” but he forced his face to relax into a smile as Tom glanced at him.
“Excuse me,” Peter said. “I’m not a regular subscriber to the Prophet, but there seems to be exciting news around today. I was wondering if you could tell me what’s going on?”
Tom was more than happy to do so, even though the old man he’d been talking with seemed disgruntled to be abandoned. “Turns out Harry Potter’s been missing from the Muggle house where he was placed, maybe for years.” Headshake. “Apparently the Muggles couldn’t keep him from wandering off.” Another headshake. “Always knew they were careless, Muggles.” A third headshake.
“Wow,” Peter said, and tried to make his face appear concerned instead of terrified. “Do you know how they found out? I thought no one was supposed to know where the Potter boy was.”
“Apparently there was some kind of protection on the Muggle house he was staying in, and it broke.” Headshake. “Whoever was in charge of maintaining the protection felt that, and came at a run. And then they couldn’t find the boy. There was no sign that he’d been there. No sign that he’d been there for years.” A sigh, for variety. “The Muggles said that they’d only had him for a few days, and they had no idea where he’d disappeared to.” Headshake.
Peter relaxed, but only a little. At least the Muggles weren’t going to give anyone a clue as to who had come and taken Harry, since they didn’t know themselves. But he didn’t know if he might have left something behind in the wards that could be used to track him, a trace of his magical signature, perhaps. And he knew that now the hunt for Harry would spread out across magical Britain.
Did we cover our tracks well enough? Staying among Muggles most of the time will have helped, but maybe not enough…
“You okay, mister? You look pretty distressed.”
Peter started and looked up to meet Tom’s eyes. “I have a boy around that age,” he said with complete honesty. “I’m just imagining what I’d feel if he disappeared without a trace one day.” He managed a snort he hoped was convincing. “I’d tell the Aurors right away. Not wait around for years like those Muggles.”
He tried for a headshake of his own, since that seemed to be the natural language. It got Tom’s eyes off him, at least, and he went back to trading headshakes and conversation with the old man.
Peter walked off into Diagon Alley, keeping his head half-bowed as if considering the news. He watched people from the corners of his eyes and saw the way they whispered behind their hands and watched their neighbors closely and drew their wands at the slightest noise.
Yes. He and Harry would have to be much more careful than they’d been up until this point.
Peter wished that he had ever learned the French that his mother spoke so well. But he hadn’t, and he didn’t know any other languages, either. Or the customs of different magical communities, for that matter. That cut off what would probably have been the best option, going to another country.
Well, at least no one had decided that Peter Pettigrew was alive yet. He would double his caution and see if that helped.
*
“But you said we could go back and play with Lucia today!”
“I’m sorry, Harry. Things have changed.” Peter didn’t look up from where he was sweeping shrunken food packages into a sack. He’d paid more than he could really afford from their store of stolen Galleons to buy it, but it was worth the price. It would hold everything they put into it with close to infinite space, and no one would manage to reach the bottom with a spell, either.
“I want to, I want to, I want to!”
The kitchen counter abruptly split down the center with a lightning-like crack. Peter leaped back from it, drawing his wand before he realized that it wasn’t the first sign that Aurors had found them. It was just Harry’s accidental magic, which had grown stronger and more focused in the days since he had first Levitated Sasha.
Peter spun around. Harry was staring at him with a tear-streaked face, and the adder coiled in front of him, hissing a warning.
“Listen to me, Harry.” Peter knelt down. “I wish that I could take you back to play with Lucia in that park, but I can’t.” That had seemed an innocent enough pastime when Harry was under a glamour, and even though Lucia had obviously been a magical child—one of the few Harry had met—Peter hadn’t worried that she would somehow discover who Harry was. Harry believed his last name to be Pettigrew. But now, the risk was too great. “People are hunting for us. People who want to take you away from me. They might take you back to the bad Muggles I got you from.”
Peter didn’t believe that last bit—although he supposed it was possible Dumbledore might suggest the Dursleys as an option for Harry’s housing and the Ministry might listen to him—but Harry’s eyes widened in fear. “I don’t want to go back to them!”
“I know.” Peter softened his voice and his expression as much as he could when fear pounded in his veins, urging him to run, run, run. “But we might not be able to convince the bad people that you don’t.”
“I want to stay with you!” Harry ran past Sasha and flung his arms around Peter. Peter hugged him and sighed. At least this proved that Harry hadn’t committed to hurting him with accidental magic.
“I know,” Peter whispered into his ear. “And I’m going to fight hard for that to happen. But for it to happen, we have to go, now. No one can know where we are. Not even Lucia.”
“What about Sasha?”
“She can come with us. She’ll be safe. And the rats. But no one human can know where we’re going. Do you understand?”
“Because the Muggles will try and take me back?”
“Yes.” Peter gently patted Harry’s back. “I don’t want to let you go any more than you want to back to them. So let’s pack up and you tell me what you especially want to take, and we’ll go and find another place to live, okay?”
Harry sniffled a little, but then asked, “Can we live near the sea? I always wanted to be by the sea.”
Peter sighed as a plan that he didn’t even have to consider for long popped up in his head like a soap bubble. “Sure, sure, we can do that.” He wrapped his arms around Harry’s body and lifted him up so that he could nestle against his hip. Harry, at six, was getting pretty big for that, but now he clung and buried his head in Peter’s shoulder. “Can you tell Sasha that she has to crawl into my bag?”
“She won’t like it. She won’t fit.”
“The bag is infinite space.” Peter opened the bag so that Harry could stare down into it and realize there was no trace of the food and Harry’s snake blanket and other things that Peter had been packing away in it. “She’ll fit.”
“Wow! Can you carry me in there, too?”
“I’m going to carry you out of the bag,” Peter said firmly. And it was true. He had to make sure that Harry was all right—until the Dark Lord returned.
The thought seared his mind, but he tucked it firmly away. So what? The Dark Lord hadn’t returned yet. Peter would deal with it when he did, and until then, he would give James’s boy the best life possible.
“Okay.” Harry beamed up at Peter, and then hissed what sounded like a long string of complicated nonsense syllables to Sasha. He had to argue with her, or at least Peter thought that was what he was doing, until she crawled into the bag, but ultimately, she did it, and Peter was able to close the bag and sling it from his belt.
Then he wrapped a firm arm around Harry and walked towards the door from the Muggle house. At least the next place they lived would be magical, and even somewhere that Peter already knew how to navigate.
“Uncle Peter? What about the rats?”
Peter shook his head. “They’ll find us, Harry. They always do.” Most of the time, when they moved, new rats would just show up, but some of them were amazingly persistent. The grey-and-white ones, for example, which Harry had taken to calling Pearl and Cloud, had traveled with them between two houses now, no matter how long it took them to get there.
“Can we take Pearl and Cloud with us?”
Peter was about to say that he didn’t know where they were, but the two rats abruptly scampered into the kitchen and sat up, wrinkling their noses at him. Peter sighed and bent down so that they could climb up to his shoulders. It wouldn’t be his fault if they got lost in the Apparition, he thought grumpily.
They clung with all four paws when Peter Apparated to Dover, and he supposed that was an answer of sorts.