Chapter Text
The air in the ruins of Godric’s Hollow tasted of ozone, charred wood, and a metallic tang that Peter knew, instinctively, was blood. He hated the taste already, more so when he knew what it meant. What the dust motes dancing in the moonlight meant as they settled around the wreckage of what had once been a sitting room.
James’s body lay broken on the stairs. James. Twenty-one.
Brave, reckless, foolish to the last.
Peter looked away, his breath coming in shallow, ragged gasps. He tried very hard not to look at the staircase, where the broken body of his best friend, who’d laughed just weeks ago when he had complained that turning twenty-two was old.
He had expected to die tonight, some three weeks after his birthday.
That had been the calculation. The unspoken, unwritten clause in a contract signed in terror after a year of pressure, torture, and near accidents, and he still didn’t know how they’d worked out it was him. Yet, they had, and he’d given over the Secret just a week ago, and in doing so, he’d delivered the Potters to the Dark Lord’s waiting hands. He had known - known - that once it was done, once the Dark Lord had triumphed, Peter Pettigrew would be useful for a handful of hours at best.
Then, expendable. Just a rat to be exterminated.
Likely some ‘entertainment’ for the true Inner Circle. The Lestranges. Nott. Malfoy. The Carrows, if he was unlucky.
Instead, the Mark had burned white-hot, searing his flesh, and then... gone cold, and the house had exploded.
The Dark Lord had fallen, and Peter was still alive.
A thin, high wail cut through the ringing static in his ears and his head snapped up, eyes widening slightly. The nursery. Harry. He swallowed hard, the movement painful in his dry throat.
He could leave.
The thought came first. Urgent and frantic and practical like finding a crack in the floorboard as a rat. He could turn on his heel, Disapparate, and let the Ministry find the wreckage. Let Dumbledore sweep in with his twinkling eyes and tidy the mess. Let the story write itself without him in it.
But footsteps would come. Sirius would come. Sirius would look at the blasted roof, at the lack of the Dark Mark in the sky, and he would start asking questions.
Peter’s mind ran ahead of itself, too fast and too clear.
They would question the Fidelius.
They – Sirius – would realise it had been him. Moony would suspect them both, but Moony followed Sirius, trusted his judgement over Peter’s.
Peter knew he would not survive that realisation. Sirius would tear him apart with his bare hands, assuming Moony didn’t find him first.
Not a fate he wanted.
He should leave. Yet the crying continued. A desperate, shuddering sound that demanded attention and Peter moved. His boots crunched over shattered floorboards, then up the stairs as he took them two at a time. He didn’t have much time, minutes, if that; not with the noise weirdly loud in the oppressive silence.
The nursery door hung half-off its hinges, splintered and sad, while the cot was fractured along one side, the wall above it blackened in a jagged, violent pattern that looked like a scorch mark left by lightning.
And in the middle of it -
A toddler.
Sitting up.
Alive.
Green eyes wide and confused, so painfully like Lily’s it made Peter’s chest ache even as he ignored her shattered form on the floor. The toddler – Harry’s – tear-streaked cheeks were flushed red from crying, and a thin line of blood ran down his forehead from a cut that shaped itself in a sharp, angry lightning crack.
Peter stared.
“You should be dead,” he whispered into the stifling quiet, because that was the absolute, horrific truth of it. He’d betrayed them, knowing even Harry - an innocent toddler - would die.
The toddler hiccupped and reached a small, grasping hand toward him, and something inside Peter’s chest twisted so violently he had to brace a hand against the doorframe to keep from falling.
He had killed James. James, who had laughed too loudly, and clapped him on the shoulder just yesterday.
He had killed Lily. Lily, who was also only twenty-one and had smiled at him when he’d complained about ageing.
He had handed them over, knowing exactly what would happen to them and why, because what else was he supposed to do? Die for a lost cause?
(The least he could do was die after them, but he wasn’t even granted that, now, was he?)
They were dead, their son was alive, and the Dark Lord was gone.
And he was still alive.
Peter’s world had collapsed into a mundanity that felt entirely off-kilter and utterly unrecognisable. With a shaken breath, he stepped forward slowly, as if approaching a wild, unpredictable creature.
This toddler had killed his Master. He should kill him. But revenge wouldn’t bring the Dark Lord back, and if it did, Peter knew, knew, that he would die shortly after.
“Harry,” he said, and the name felt wrong in his mouth now. Heavy and thick with guilt, yet Harry blinked at him. Another hiccup and the crying tapered into shuddering, wet breaths as the toddler recognised him.
Peter sighed as he stared down at the toddler. He didn’t want to touch him. Touching him made this real. Touching him meant accepting the weight of what lay in the cot.
But leaving him would be worse.
With another sigh – and mental question of what he was even doing; this was suicide, and he needed to leave – he reached down with trembling hands and lifted the toddler. Harry was warm. Solid. Real. He smelled like smoke and milk and the faint, coppery scent of the blood at his hairline.
Harry grabbed fistfuls of Peter’s travel robes and clung.
Clung.
Peter’s breath hitched, catching sharply in his throat.
No one had ever clung to him like that.
Not James - James had dragged him along as an afterthought, laughed too loud, taken up all the air in the room like an only child who’d never had to share his mother’s attention.
Not Sirius - Sirius had smirked and outshone and assumed like any Black before him.
Not Remus - Remus had just watched from the edges like he was afraid to get too close to them, even after they knew he was a werewolf.
But this toddler - this toddler pressed his face into Peter’s chest and held on as if Peter were the only solid, safe thing left in a shattered world.
Peter looked over Harry’s messy dark head at the blackened wall, eyes distant as he thought about what to do. If he stayed, he would die. If he ran alone, he would be hunted to the ends of the earth by Sirius and Remus. If he ran with the toddler -
If he ran with the toddler...
Peter’s mind shifted tracks, the gears grinding into a new, terrifying alignment. If he ran with the toddler, the narrative changed. The Boy-Who-Lived - because that’s what they’d call him. Peter knew the wizarding world’s flair for dramatic nonsense - would not be available for Ministry parades. Sirius would not find him. Remus would not find him.
Britain would scramble.
And Peter... Peter smiled as the start of a mad, desperate plan crossed his mind. It was stupid. It was asking to be tracked and hunted. It was brilliant. He would not be where they expected.
He could leave Britain.
The idea was mad. Absolute lunacy, yet it was also perfect, and he clutched Harry tight against him.
“I can’t stay,” he whispered into the toddler’s hair, and Harry made a small, confused sound as he tugged at Peter’s robes with a sniffle. “I can’t.”
Peter forced himself to move – he was out of time, he was certain of it. He drew his wand and conjured a bag with shaking hands. It was a sturdy, worn-looking leather, the sort of thing a tired, ordinary Muggle father might carry, and with another flick of his wand, he stuffed it with nappies from the surviving nursery drawers, baby clothes and a soft yellow blanket with ducks on it. He paused only once to snatch two toys: one a small wooden toy from the floor. It was a battered, painted hippogriff that James had enchanted to flap its wings known as Giff – and the other a worn and scruffy black dog known as Pa’foo.
Harry liked them both the most, and having them would keep the toddler happy. That was all it was, and Peter did not let himself look at anything else. Not the stairs. Not the hallway. Nothing.
Certainly not the dead bodies of his friends. Former friends.
“Let’s go.” He Disapparated with a crack that sounded far too loud in the dead of night.