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Scabbers the rat had lived with the Weasley family for nine and three-quarter years when he had an unexpected attitude adjustment. Percy had been the one to find him, originally, one bleak December day, shaking like a mandrake leaf on the back stoop, and once he had recovered from the horrors of the outside world, he had spent the remaining years content to be held and fed. He had wanted for nothing, needed nothing, and had nothing expected of him.
Likewise, he had done nothing.
Of course, Scabbers the rat hadn’t always been Scabbers, or, indeed, a rat. He had once been a boy called Peter— though he supposed at some point between that and Scabbers, he might have also been a man.
One more day, Peter had told himself. Then he could go back out and fix his mistakes, make the world right again. But one more day had turned to next week, had turned to once I have a plan, and no plan had materialized. And now he sat, staring at a boy who should have still been a baby.
It was like seeing a ghost, at first. Same hair, same face, different glasses. It only took him a moment to catalogue all the things that weren’t as they should have been, to remember that James was dead and that Peter had had a hand in it.
He’d known it was September the first again, the most obvious of the holidays the Weasleys celebrated that wracked Peter with the kind of grief that hollowed out your bones and filled them with lead, that made even eating and sleeping the kind of chore that was better done without. But he’d lost track of the years, despite knowing that Ron would have been of the same age and having watched him grow to school-aged the way they all should have watched Harry.
Harry, who looked, quite frankly, a mess. The ambiguously happy life Peter might have imagined for him, if he’d given it any thought (and Peter was ashamed to say he hadn’t) obviously couldn’t have been further from the truth.
It showed in his appearance— too thin compared to his parents, with oversized clothes that hung off his body, glasses spellotaped together and sitting crookedly on his nose— but it was the manic excitement to be away from home fueling his every movement that reminded Peter of Sirius, or Remus in the later years.
Kinder than any of them had been at that age though, Peter realized, as Harry reassured Ron that there was nothing wrong with being poor.
“…this summer, and it’s filled with all of Dudley’s broken things, which aren’t mine at all even though they’re in my room. This is the first time I’ve ever had something that was just mine…”
For a moment, Peter entertained the thought that he was storytelling, that he’d made it all up for attention the way James might have, but Harry spoke sincerely and seemed, if not unbothered, then at least resigned to the world he lived in.
Of all the ghosts Peter had seen so far (and it was September first, so he’d been hearing the laughter of boys long gone since before the clocks changed over), this living, breathing ghost of the happy and protected baby Peter had last seen wrapped up in James’s arms was the worst.
And Peter had done this. Maybe not alone, not singlehandedly, but he’d thought he could fix it and had instead cocked it up so badly he’d made more of a mess than they’d started with.
Without Peter’s permission, his grief poured out in a shrill shriek.
“Woah, Scabbers!”
Clumsy children’s hands cupped tighter around his small frame, fingers stroking soothingly against the shivers that wracked him. If they knew— who he was, what he’d done, the pain he’d caused— but they didn’t.
“What’s wrong with him?”
“I dunno, I’ve never seen him like that.”
Peter heaved great breaths, searching futilely for the apathetic emptiness that had engulfed him for so long. The ache still sat deep within his chest, weighing down his very soul, but he had stumbled upon something repairable in the shattered remnants that had once been his life.
Nothing would bring Lily and James back, but Peter could be there for Harry when no one else would, closer than he had any right to be.
Someone needed to, and if no one else could, it would have to be him.