October 31st, 1981: Peter Pettigrew
Interlude

Peter can explain away most of the things he does for the Dark Lord. When he gives the names of Order members going on certain missions, or when he shares the locations of unprotected Muggles and Muggle-borns, or when he divulges that someone formerly under the Imperius Curse has been rescued—when all of those things happen, it's reaction, not action: it's information that the Dark Lord asked of him, and Peter knows that if he doesn't give it, he's looking at getting himself and all of his loved ones killed for being insubordinate faster than you can say "Death Eater."

But this thing Peter is sitting on—if he shares this with the Dark Lord, unasked, he can no longer plead reaction, and he can't claim to be protecting the lives of the ones he loves, either.

Not if he reveals that he's the Potters' new Secret-Keeper and gives away the place where they've gone into hiding.

It's amazing, some of the mental contortions Peter goes to in order to save himself from feeling guilty about his role as a double agent. He tells himself he's doing it because otherwise the Dark Lord will slay everyone Peter cares about in the Order, but if he gives up Lily and James, he's guaranteeing certain death for both of them. So why, why is he considering actually giving their secret away?

A part of him wishes that an act of loyalty like giving up the Potters would get him in good enough graces to be able to get out of the Death Eaters altogether. But he knows better than to think that getting out is ever, ever going to be a possibility.

No: if he's being honest with himself (and Peter doesn't do much of that these days), he's considering giving up James and Lily because he's been a spy for the Death Eaters for so long that he's managed to talk himself into believing that his friends are really his enemies.

It's not like, even if Peter did manage to get out from under the Dark Lord's thumb, his friends would forgive him for the countless bits of information and lives lost because of his duplicity. That's assuming that Peter could break free at all. The more likely scenario is that he'd have to tell the Order what's been going on while still playing double agent for the Death Eaters, and he'd have to hope against hope that they'd be willing to protect him even while knowing that Peter switching sides again means all of them will probably end up dead within the month, without Peter's last bit of leverage keeping his core eight best friends safe.

Who is he kidding? He can't come clean. There's no way he can come clean without getting himself murdered by his friends or his friends murdered by Death Eaters. And if he's in this deep—well—it doesn't hurt so much if he tells himself he's—

—not doing the right thing, because working with the Death Eaters can't possibly be the right thing to do, but he tells himself that his actions are justified. Tells himself that things were fated to go this way the second Alecto Carrow laid eyes on him at the end of sixth year at Hogwarts. That James and Sirius were always best friends, that they coupled themselves off with Lily and Remus, so that Peter was always the odd one out. That he was always the least talented and least favored of the Marauders, and he's sick of it.

Never mind whether his memory is accurate. If it wasn't true before, it's become true now, at any rate. (He tries not to think about how, if anything, it's a self-fulfilling prophecy he brought upon himself.)

He allows himself a brief fantasy of confessing everything to Dumbledore and the Order, of all of them going into protection somewhere until they had the upper hand again against the Death Eaters. For one shining moment, he imagines a world where Alecto Carrow never came calling and the Dark Lord didn't know his name.

He imagines it, and then he sets his jaw and Disapparates.

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END OF BOOK TWO

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A/N: If you want to see more drama with more of a focus on the war, keep reading!