Chapter Text
He swims, swims, swims like the Devil is after him, swims like the Devil's inside him.
It's cold, but anything is warmer than Thereanything is better I'm sorry
I'm sorry James
I thoughtWater clings to his fur, clinging in chilly-boned fingers that want to drag him downdowndown
and he'd go too
but he has to get to shore. Has to get to Peterthe ratPettigrew.
Has to get Harry safe.
He thinks of a tiny boy, jet-black hair a wispy thatch over a cradle-capped scalphe won't know youand keeps going, has to keep going, has to keep going has to keep goinghastokeepgoinggogogogo-
A drenched, bone-thin dog washes up on the east coast of England. It lays there on the shelly shore, comatose, until even it cannot ignore the hunger pains now grown to terrible aching.
It chases a rabbit until the soft thing crunches under its teeth, blood matting into the fine furs of its muzzle. Now sustained, the dog can gogogo on.
He doesn't know where Harry lives. The thought does not stop him in his tracks. The night air presses down on him, solemn-sweet, and warms his sea-frigid fur.
If he just keeps gogogoing-
There's a throb deep in his muscles, pawpads dry and cracked from saltwater and stone-stepping. His claws are unkempt, cracking from malnutrition. A bleeding cut graces his flank with all the kindness of a distraction, a branch having whipped across him in the night.
He knew the stars onceI was a star oncewasbut they fade from a canine memory. The sky mirrors such a forgetting, lightening at the edges like a mirror burnished pink, rose-gold, dandelions in the spring. All the stars wink out, eyes closing.
He's so tired; if he could just restThere is no time to pause. The magic in his lacklustre veins lets him run fast, run far, run too far, run so far the sea is buried under rolling hills by the time he has to skid to a stop.
Plush grass rustles under his padfeet, and his ears snap up, swivelled towards a hum in front of him.
Magic.
It's been so long-
The dog presses its head into a ward it has found, eager for something it cannot quite recall. Magic means magicians, and magicians mean news. And there is something familiar about this particular magic, dusky and lightning-snapping even in the clear dawn, that beckons it.
Resistance meets its little pushes until finally something murmurs, mothlike: welcome in, blood of my lady's blood.
The dog does not much care about blood nonsense. All it wants to do is collapse in this soft grass, and hunt another rabbit later. It beaches itself upon the lawn like a whale.
In the later morning, a little blond boy will find it in the middle of his mother's garden, and pet a hand over its nose.
This is less auspicious than the dog was hoping, but it'll make the best of it. After all, isn't this what it wanted? To be useful even in the smallest of ways, to be a comfort?
It is rather bereft of its own comfort. It has a mission to accomplish.
The dog heaves a fluid-filled breath, and is dragged into sleep.