Work Text:
November 1, 1991
It’s an ordinary mirror, no enchantments. Peter checked.
More specifically, he had thrown a discarded towel over the mirror from just outside of where the mirror could have seen him (if it were enchanted, which again, Peter has confirmed that it is not) and run it through nearly every spell he could think of, ensuring that it could no more recognize him than it could shout for help at the sight of a long dead man. It is absolutely, unquestionably, ordinary.
(This is actually slightly unexpected for Peter, who is far more familar with the mirror in the bathroom attached to the dorm currently inhabited by the Weasley twins and which had, long ago, laughed at a different pack of boys’ jokes. Apparently, the generations that had previously lived in Harry’s dorm were rather less funny. Or perhaps better behaved.)
But if the mirror in front of him is not enchanted, then what it shows is true. And Peter… Peter doesn’t recognize the man who looks back at him. His hair, still the same limp, colourless shade, masked whether any grey had come in, but it had thinned considerably, leaving more scalp than strand. He’s put on weight that hangs haggardly from his face. The eyes that look back at him are sunken, red and watery and bruised which five minutes of holding back sobs in a broom closet on the fourth floor could not be blamed for.
And most damning of all, there are little lines between his brows, at the corners of his eyes, along the bridge of his nose. Wrinkles.
He hasn’t looked at himself, hasn’t been human for so long, he’s developed wrinkles along the lines of muscle that move when he sniffs or squints as a rat.
James would never have let him live that down.
James isn’t here.
James is dead, and Peter lets himself feel that grief fully for the first time in ten years, watches his own face crumple under the weight. He gives himself one minute, two, three, and watches himself cry with an air of detachment; acclimatizes himself to his own face while he mourns friends long gone and a decade of himself with it.
He’s an ugly crier. He was as a child, too, but the man in the mirror is dead eyed and gasping, face scrunched up like a grotesque. He wants to cry out, make a noise other than the pathetic wheeze that pulls cold air through gritted teeth, but his body doesn’t obey him.
James and Lily, he knew, had died ten years ago exactly, and kicked off the hell that had followed. They hadn’t heard from Remus in quite a while prior to that, and given he’s heard no mention in the two months he’s spent listening to Harry and Ron talk, Peter’s inclined to believe he’s been dead for just as long.
The reflection’s teeth are chipped, an incisor missing. The gap whistles.
And Sirius—
No one survives ten years in Azkaban unscathed. If he still lives, there could be nothing left of the boy Peter had known, had loved.
Peter is no less recognizable than any of them, and he mourns them all. And then he picks himself up from the bathroom floor, wipes away his tears, and returns to Harry’s side.
... As a rat, that is. No one ever needed to see this disgusting face again, least of all Harry.