Author's Note:
Tequila: weeeell… --nervous chuckle--
Justin: Long time no see, huh?
Tequila and Justin: --are embarrassed by how long it's been since they've posted--
Tequila: We were reading "End of the Line," by shewhoguards, and its amazing characterization of Peter… well… it just made us want to try our "hand" at him ;)
Disclaimer: pfft. As if we would want Peter!! Regardless, we don't own…
Thirty Pieces
It's a nice hand. Peter ponders it endlessly, stuck here in this scrubby house in Muggle Manchester, behind decaying walls. There's not much to look at, and the metal is a nice contrast to mold and peeling plaster and Snivellus's face. He doesn't mind the new hand. It's bright, it's shiny, and it's silver. Not gold, but one cannot have anything, and gold is overrated, anyway. Gryffindor color, though. And although silver is certainly perfectly nice, it goes a little too well with green for Peter's liking, sometimes. It works—wonderfully well, almost a faster reaction time than his… old hand.
Peter tries not to spend too much time rememberinghis… old hand.
He'd rather liked that hand.
It wasn't much—no Adonis, he—but it had been, well, his hand. You didn't think about it often, you rather took it for granted. Peter laughed, and there was no humor in the sound. Rather like him, in fact. Useful. Not too elegant, not too dainty or graceful or sodding idealistic… just… utilitarian.
Very utilitarian.
Pathetically utilitarian.
Peter cannot always avoid the thoughts, though he tries. He can only keep them at bay so long by pondering hands and staring at walls and counting things.
He wondered, sometimes, at night—only ever at night, he wasn't stupid—whether they'd ever cared for him, whether he'd ever been anything other than tagalong little Peter Pettigrew.
And he really wasn't sure which would be worse. Worse that he had just been too dim to notice their hatred, their subtle condescension and disgust, or that all they had ever felt was pity and cloying sympathy for poor, helpless, weak, Wormtail.
Snivellus still called him Wormtail. Everyone called him Wormtail, and he didn't know whether to laugh or to cry when they did. Ironic, wasn't it? That Wormtail, out of all of the labels and insults and nicknames, was the one that had stuck. He was the one who'd survived, so what the hell did it matter what name it was under, but spending a decade as a rat wrecked havoc with your self-image. Scabbers. Wormtail. Pettigrew. Peter. Pete.
His mouth twisted in something that was hardly a smile when he recalled the little phrase James had taught him, to say whenever anyone made fun of his name: "call me whatever you like, so long as you don't call me late to supper." So sweet. So cute. So nice.
Such a shame nice never got anybody anywhere.
Because in the end, what mattered wasn't who was nice or mean or right or wrong or morally justified or a sick son of a bitch, but who won.
And who lost.
Peter isn't about to lose. He's done far too much of that already.
So he sits in a dark room behind thick walls that drip with dust, and stares at his new hand, and makes plans.
The Dark Lord will win, because there were never any other options—Peter's sure of that—but how He does will matter. Peter's been loyal, extremely loyal, almost to bloody Hufflepuffian proportions, but so have others, and loyalty seems to be most of what Peter has going for him now. Loyalty and his Animagus form… although a rat with a silver paw looks odd enough that it's not as subtle as it used to be. His mark of Cain.
He glances down at his hand again, turns it casually around and peers at the back of it. I know it like the back of my hand. How well does he know the back of his new hand? Not well, actually. Well, it's a hand, and there aren't too many variations on the theme, but… he'd known the back of his old hand like… well… the back of his hand. The little scar from the fight he and Sirius had gotten into in third year, the weird birthmark behind his knuckle… his new hand was perfect. Shiny and perfect and inhuman in every way.
He wonders if there's supposed to be some kind of moral in that.
Peter has outgrown, mostly, that age of idealism between fourteen and twenty when one is sure that everything has a moral, everything is predestined and fated and somehow, in some very grand scheme of things, right. That everything will turn out well if you are loyal and good and virtuous. That everything has its place and its symbolism and its moment to occur. That traditions are something grand and important and timeless.
Sometimes he wishes he hadn't outgrown it.
Sometimes he isn't sure he's outgrown anything.
Peter supposes that, in the end, it's rather appropriate that his hand is silver.
That is what Judas was paid in, after all.
And it's important to keep up traditions.