Warnings for worse horror. And language, including some that was PC at the time. I tried to argue him into being more polite, I don't know, it's probably not all that surprising really. I mean, seven years in a dorm trying to keep up with Sirius 'Look, Ma, I can be more outrageous than this!' Black.
If you're squeamish, you may want to stop at 'not for people.' Or, if possible, skip to the last four or five paragraphs. I'll explain as delicately as possible in the chapter four notes, in case anyone needs that. I don't say just skip the chapter or even the end, because this is one of the characters I'd like you to meet from his own point of view. Before, well, this happens. Everyone looks different from the inside, is my point.
St. James' Park, London
If Pete was thinking anything as he left the British Museum, it was how lucky he was to be able to get outside for a bit on a May afternoon that wasn't grey or grizzling.
It had been a long day. Some utter twat had enchanted the floor in front of a statue of Tiberius Claudius Nero. It had been confunding anyone standing on it to believe the old emperor was speaking to them—in whatever language they thought in, not Latin, and quite filthily.
He was inclined to suspect the Prewett twins. Thankfully, it wasn't his job to make that sort of determination or go after them. Even if the Old Man wouldn't have had something to say about Order members getting each other into trouble, he was just as pleased to leave facing their very inventive wands to someone else.
It was, however, his job to argue with the curator until he let Peter take the bit of floor up, and then to replace it. At once. It had taken all day. The Museum was warded tighter than ol' Snivvy's footlocker (fond memories!). Getting through the wards was no problem, but he wished he'd had Paddy or Remus about to get them set up again, and Jamie to fix the floor. Making it look right again had been incredibly tedious, especially with the curator looming over him and fussing.
He hoped it hadn't been the Prewetts. The trouble he'd get into for letting them reap their own sowing was almost as bad as the trouble he'd get into for Interfering With the Evidence-Gathering Process. Dumbledore had this way of looking at you.
Yes, this had the potential to be a real problem, and Peter Pettigrew was not a man who liked problems in his life. Between his job and his friends, he had enough to deal with without actual problems. It was entirely gloom-making.
By the time he was let flee, the offending bit of floor carefully wrapped and shrunken in his pocket for examination back at the office, it was right on the line of being too late in the afternoon to be sent out on some other assignment. Since the park was right in front of him and the day was such a nice one that his mother would have sniffed and called it suspiciously and gaudily French, he decided to commune with nature for a bit on his way back.
Evidently, a lot of people had been thinking on the same lines. Pete liked that idea, that he and half of England had been on the same wavelength. It felt friendly, on a warm day like this. There were families all over the place, kids playing ball and shouting and all. He felt his shoulders fall a good three inches as the sounds of life settled around him, chased away the lofty chill of the museum's halls.
He ambled around the lake towards his favorite tree, greeting witches and wizards he knew and discreetly making balls just a tiny bit bouncier, kites just a tad sturdier and more streamlined. Once he passed close by a picnicking muggle couple whose tin of sardines his animagery-sensitized nose said would be a problem for them in a few hours. Not knowing how to actually fix that, he arranged for a bird to make it more obviously inedible.
There was a tiny little Oriental kid sitting in the old oak when he got there, staring morosely at the ducks through his bony knees. Pete gave him a smile. He didn't get one back, but the kid wasn't being rude. Rather, he didn't seem to notice Peter at all, just went on staring moodily off into forever. Pete shrugged to himself, and settled down against the trunk to soak in the dappled sunshine and the smells of loam and water.
After a while, a really vicious little rubber ball hit him in the leg. Angling his head up with a smile and tossing the ball back, he called, "Hey, be careful where you bounce that thing!"
The boy squawked, jerked, nearly fell out of the tree, and stared down, cementing Pete's suspicion that the kid hadn't even seen him until then. "Ah—sorry!" he stammered, with one of those light-as-air accents that the Chinese muggles developed, wearing out recordings of Churchill to help them practice English.
"You look awfully somber," Pete commented. "Everything OK up there?"
The kid looked like he didn't understand at least one of those words. After a second, he gave up trying and volunteered, "We are have picnic. But was sit."
His smile widened, and he sympathized, "Your picnic was sit, huh? That can be troublesome. Er, trouble."
"Father angry," the kid agreed with a wince, and held up a bag of rather squished bread, all over crumbs. "Mother say go, feed birds."
"Well, be careful," Pete advised, "Some of them bite."
"Bite, I throw!" the kid declared, holding up his rubber ball with a big grin. "Rar!" Pete grinned, too. Uncertain again, the boy added, "If are not hide."
"Well," he laughed, "if you rar too loudly, they will hide." He knew he would! "We'll have to be quiet and still. Do you think you can do that?"
The kid gave him a very puzzled look, full of scrunched-up button nose at the idea of being quiet and still. "Feed before, they are not quiet, not hide. They are GUA GUA," he quacked enthusiastically, "very noisy, and go to catch bread from air!"
"I'd like to see that," Pete admitted, grinning. "Why don't you show me how you do it?"
The boy made a thinking-about-it face, a little wicked at talking to strangers, and then agreeably clambered down from his branch. He took out a piece of bread and looked at it for a second, his face clouding. "First," he said quietly, "must give respect. Alive before. Now soon again part of life."
Pete had heard about hunters thanking meat before eating, but he thought thanking wheat and yeast was over the top. Still, you didn't argue with nice instincts. Unless you were Sirius, obviously.
The kid held out a nearly whole slice to a likely-looking bird, and sighed when all the rest came swarming in to fight over it. Evidently giving up on decorum, he shrugged and held the bag open to Pete, excitedly directing, "Make to jump!"
"Yes, sir!" Pete laughed, and started tossing chunks high enough in the air that the ducks had to snap at them.
They fed the birds in comfortable silence for a few minutes. The smell of good bread (it wasn't stale at all, which only seemed odd until he remembered that the kid was only doing this because his mother had needed him out of the way) started teasing his stomach. He'd been at the museum all day, after all, and it was past time for his tea. He surreptitiously snuck a slice or two himself, taking the edge off.
The kid caught him at it, and he gave a sheepish little smile. For a moment the expression on the little face was quite strange: blank, wide eyes, tight-throated. "Sorry," he told him. "Figured if it was good enough for the ducks… I hadn't eaten yet," he explained. "I'll save the rest for them."
"Not for people," the kid whispered, then cleared his throat and finished in a more normal tone, with an apologetic expression, "was sit." After a few more slices, he asked, with a hint of morbid curiosity, "Good?"
"It's just fine," Pete assured him.
The kid laughed with a weird, almost hysterical note, and ceremoniously handed him the last piece.
"I think that one's the scrappiest," Pete mused, pointing at a large hen goose. "Let's give it to her." He held it out, shooing the others away with his free hand. She snatched the piece away from him
and then
Pete had lived for seven years in Transfiguration Swottery Central
he knew an insufficiently permanent transfiguration falling apart when it happened in his fingers
the duck
in her beak
it was
it
an
it was
she swallowed it with a flip of her head and it was
he'd eaten some and it was
it was an
The boy had screamed and jumped backwards, right into Pete's leg
he was trembling all over, they both were
because it was
Pete breathed heavily, his hands falling protectively on the kid's shoulders. He said, very carefully, "That looked like an ear. A person's ear. But it couldn't have been. You didn't give me an ear."
"It did!" the boy agreed, shaking hard. His back heaved with hard breaths, and after a moment he burst out, "I said it wasn't food for people!"
Pete's throat closed right up. He removed his hands. He backed up a step. He looked down at the kid, looked hard. Putting his hand on his wand, he asked, just as carefully, "What happened to your accent?"
The boy looked back at him, equally frozen, looking just as sickened, just as green as Pete felt. After a moment, looking far too old for his bit of a face, he sighed, "Well, sod," and punched Pete with unavoidable speed and more oomph than someone his size should have been able to manage. Right in the fork.
When the world held anything more than pain, the boy was gone, and his ball and the empty bag, too. There was no trace of him, in fact, except for the floating flesh and feathers on the water.
Pete had made himself throw up (and scourgified it, and himself) quite a few times before the Aurors got there, until he'd several times brought up only bile. By the time the first duck bulged improbably and exploded around a foot, his stomach was well and truly purged. They told him over and over that there was nothing he could have done, he'd done nothing wrong, go home, take the hottest bath he could manage, get drunk, count his blessings, forget about it. Magically, if necessary. Dumbledore, when Peter reported in, said more or less the same, with added cocoa.
But he never felt clean again on two legs. And afterwards, more and more, he started to notice, or perhaps imagine, eyes on him. Scornful, evaluating, assessing. After a while, they began to feel almost inviting.
He could never bear to tell his friends. Moony would have understood, but he would have made Pete share with the other two, so he could be comforted. Moony was an incurable optimist. Probably he had to be to not run mad with his body turned against him, lying to the world every day. But Moony was an optimist. It wouldn't happen like that.
Sirius wouldn't understand his horror. Not Sirius, who'd grown up with elf heads in the hall. He'd understand why Pete was ashamed to have been fooled and used, but not what it felt like to be ruined. Not Sirius, who had clawed himself out of the dark by sheer force of will, even though it meant walking away from everything he'd ever had a right to.
And Lily and James would never have looked at him the same way again. They would have just been repelled, the way he was himself. He would never have the chance to hold the baby when it was born, in case the corruption he'd taken in was contagious somehow. They were like that, James and especially Lily, so upright and pure nothing dirty could touch them. They wouldn't let it.
He knew he'd never be nearly one person with his friends again. He could never be open with them again, never let them know he'd been forced outside their enchanted circle of perfect light. If they ever knew, they'd never see him as anything more than scum commendably but pathetically trying to be human, fumbling smelly streaks onto the skirts of their robes. They were like that. Always been that way. Look at poor old Snape.
Credits:
Everything Chinese-language related, including the grammar, is indirectly credited to my favorite (and long-suffering) Mandarin teacher, who will remain anonymous so that he never finds out how his teachings are being perverted. 不客气, _-老师 [You're welcome, Mr. W].
This chapter is the one around which the story was written. It was originally a scene in an LJ game, the Hex Files, played out between myself and the inimitable Katilara, who's the only person ever who made me LIKE this guy, or see how a reasonably normal person could have ended up where he did. But bear with me here: not all dark forces are sorcerous.
