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Peter woke to the mid-November sun dipping below the horizon. He wasn’t sure how long he’d slept for, but he was fairly certain it had just been early morning.
It didn’t take long to determine the reason for his waking— the second year boys’ dormitory was empty except for a soft sniffling. Peter scrabbled gently at the windowsill he’d been napping on to draw Harry’s attention and put on the most disapproving face he could manage as a rat.
“I know, I know,” Harry mumbled, wiping at his cheeks, “boys don’t cry.” He said something after that sounded like ‘unless you’re mumbly’.
Peter glanced around the room quickly before climbing over the mess of two twelve year olds and onto Harry’s bed, nodding his head for Harry to close the curtains. Once he was certain they were alone, he changed back to a man and cast a muffling charm around them.
“First of all,” he said as he settled awkwardly into a cross-legged position, (Merlin, that wasn’t as easy as it used to be). “Boys absolutely cry. I certainly did, and I have it on good authority your dad did at least a few times.”
(They didn’t talk much about the other two members of their party, though Peter was sure they had cried more than he and James had in their entire lives by the time they were eleven.)
“… he did?”
“Oh, loads. Let me see what I can remember— there was the first time your mum went on a date with someone else, the time he won the Quidditch Cup, the time he won the Quidditch Cup as Captain, the time he lost the Quidditch Cup, the time his cat went missing but it turned out she’d just had kittens…”
Harry gave a wet sort of chuckle and Peter sighed in relief.
“And of course, pretty much anything to do with you. He cried on his wedding day, and the day he found out they were expecting you, and when you were born. I used to get all sorts of letters. ‘Dear Wormy’ he’d write, or maybe ‘My good friend Peter T Wormington the fifteenth’—” another giggle, which only served to encourage Peter’s ridiculous performance— “‘our new friend Harry James, esquire, has just performed the most astounding feat! He managed a record three and a half steps before promptly falling on his face, and without tears even! He’s to be a Gryffindor for sure. I cried, of course, and Lily laughed at me. Love, your dear friend, James.’”
The giggles didn't last long. Harry fiddled with a loose thread on his blanket.
"Did... Did he really think I'd be a Gryffindor?"
"Oh sure, always going on about how brave you were, even when the scariest thing you were aware of was his owl." He didn't add that Harry likely had every reason to be afraid of that owl, who had been a mean thing, and had clipped Harry several times in Peter's presence alone.
"What if—" Harry paused so long, Peter nearly changed the subject just to make sure he could respond. "What if... I wasn't Gryffindor?"
Oh. Well, that was a very different conversation.
“Is this about that Heir of Slytherin s—” Peter caught himself with a cough— “stuff?”
Harry nodded.
When he had first met Harry last year, he had thought he’d been left alive to look over him from afar, protect him from the far reaching hand of Dumbledore or perhaps schoolboy bullies, in lieu of anyone else to do it. But even after a summer spent together, this… this felt like parenting, and Peter wasn’t sure he had that right.
“Right,” said Peter. “Well… it is true that James had no lost love for Slytherins,”— Harry wilted further, and Peter hurriedly changed tactics— “but the situation then was very different from now. For one, I don’t see you going around bragging about your connection to some famous, powerful wizard, do you?”
This did not seem to be the right course of action either. Harry flung himself sideways into a pillow and said something completely unintelligible.
“Sorry, what was that?” Peter asked.
Harry lifted his head just enough to mumble, “People think I’m the famous powerful wizard.”
That was, unfortunately, true, even outside of Hogwarts, if the rumours were to be believed. Peter did not tell Harry that either.
Well," said Peter carefully, feeling as though he'd already mucked things up. He nearly started several sentences, then abandoned them before he even opened his mouth. This required delicacy. A personal touch.
"Have I ever told you about my own sorting?"
Harry shook his head morosely.
"I was a hatstall. A tricky thing, the hat told me. They— James used to joke that it was trying to decide if it should give up and send me home instead. But the truth was, I didn't quite fit anywhere. No ambition, no bravery, no work ethic. I'm ashamed to say you probably would not have been very impressed with eleven year old me. But the hat only looks at us at that singular moment. Being in Gryffindor means that everything around you is going to tell you to be brave, that you can be brave. I don't think that's a bad thing, but that doesn't mean you can't also be clever and cunning and careful. In fact, that rather seems the recipe for staying alive."
The last sentence spilled out of Peter's mouth before he could rein it back. He froze, one heartbeat, two, unsure of how Harry would take it— unsure of how he, himself, was taking it. With James and Lily dead, Remus the same or on the run, Sirius worse than, and everyone else he had known long gone, it certainly did seem to be the recipe for staying alive. That, or a few other uncharitable parallels between Peter and Snape, which he would rather not think about.
Harry had turned onto his side, half laying on the pillow, half propped up to face Peter. "So, you don't think Slytherin is... evil, or anything?"
"Oh Harry," said Peter, struck with an unfamiliar urge to be in his rat form, where it was much easier to give and receive comfort. "Being evil is not a thing one is, it's a thing one does. It's a choice you make, and it shows through your actions."
"But... I killed someone, didn't I? Last year, Professor Quirrell."
Peter sighed. Once more, he cursed the very name of Albus Dumbledore. "Sometimes... Sometimes we're placed in impossible situations. Ones where it's our life, or theirs, or where we cannot simply stand by and allow something to happen without at least trying. And sometimes those situations leave us with consequences that stay with us. You were facing down someone who wanted to kill you, and you were very, very brave for going down there in the first place.”
“But—”
“But,” continued Peter, “You only went down there because the adults you asked for help failed you.”
Flash, bang, rubble falling—
“You were in hiding!” Harry sat up abruptly. “You thought it was safer we didn’t know who you were!”
“And I also did not show myself because I was afraid. Regardless,” Peter continued, before he could sink into his own guilt, ever below the surface, or Harry could interrupt him. “He died because he gave you no other choice, and because he refused more reasonable methods of problem solving.”
“It was you, you, you, you—”
Harry scoffed. “Don’t think Voldemort settles for more reasonable methods of problem solving.”
Peter didn’t flinch. “No. He does not. But most people are more easily convinced, even if they don’t think they are.”
“What have you done, Sirius?”
Shock, disbelief, anger, shot across a handsome face.
The smell of blood and the memory of wine on his tongue.
Peter’s hand clutched tightly around his wand.
“Never forget, Harry, that nearly anyone can be convinced.”