Previously in the Darklyverse: Lucius Malfoy put Emmeline under the Imperius Curse; she managed to write a letter to send to Peter asking for help. Molly and Arthur Weasley, among others, joined the Order.

xx

March 10th, 1982: Wormtail

When he sees it, he's shocked that the letter reached him at all. Owls are smart that way, he supposes—not like the common rats Wormtail communed with in the sewers in the weeks before he found the redheads. How the thing found him, though—smart as owls may be, this one shouldn't have been able to find him. It worries him a little that it did. If people keep writing letters to him, and they keep arriving to the right place, one of Wormtail's former friends could figure out how to track the owls down to his location. Even if they don't, the Weasleys might get suspicious if letters addressed to somebody named Peter keep showing up at their door.

Still, a tiny but vocal part of him gets caught up in the excitement of seeing a letter addressed to him. Life as a rat may be safe, but it's boring. He can't do any magic, and he can't play the guitar or read the news or say a word to anyone who might consider him a friend. Wormtail misses conversation. He even misses listening to Remus and Sirius bitch about each other, listening to James putting both of them before Wormtail.

"Peter?" says the mum, Molly, taking the letter off the leg of what Wormtail recognizes as Alice's owl, Tippy. "Who's Peter?"

The dad, Arthur, has got baby Ginny screaming in his arms and the two-year-old Ron tugging on his arm. "Isn't Peter the name of the wizard who defected from the Order?—what is it, Ronnie?"

But Wormtail's mind isn't anywhere near Ron's squeals of "Frog! Frog! Frog!" His beady little rat eyes are fixed squarely on Molly, who's saying, "Not in front of the children, Arthur!"

Wormtail figured out weeks ago that Molly and Arthur had joined the Order of the Phoenix. He hasn't seen either of them sneak out for any raids (which figures, given that they've got seven small children at home), but they keep calling their babysitter to leave suspiciously on Saturday nights, and he overheard them just last week talking about Arthur's attempts to scope out potential recruits at the Ministry.

The wizard who defected from the Order—that's an interesting way of putting it. Wormtail didn't so much defect as just… fall out. It was about being blackmailed, at first, but then self-preservation turned into resentment and he sort of—lost track of why he was doing it. There was a sick, vindictive pleasure in it—playing the part of the good soldier, turning around and leaking everything to Carrow, even feeding into Sirius's fears that the spy was Remus.

He wasn't a defector: it was never about a change in ideals. (How could it be? Wormtail comes from a family of Muggles.) No—it was always personal.

Arthur's phrasing makes Wormtail wonder—with whom have Sirius and Emmeline shared the full story? Do Wormtail's old friends know? Does the rest of the Order?

"You can send this back," Molly tells Tippy, reattaching the letter to him. "There isn't any Peter here."

Tippy hoots and hops and remains exactly where he is.

Molly sighs. "Go! Go on!"

But the owl does not go on.

Wormtail feels a rush of relief: it could be dangerous for him that someone's trying to get in contact with him, but at the same time, it's the most interesting thing that's happened to him in months. Following Percy around as he complains incessantly to Arthur and Molly about his siblings is getting very, very old.

"Suit yourself," Molly mutters, turning back to her cooking.

Arthur leaves to go reclaim Ron's Chocolate Frogs from the twins, but Molly stays in the kitchen as Tippy gets situated on the countertop. As the Weasleys clamber inside for dinner, and Percy reclaims Wormtail to keep him company after the meal, the evening seems to go on and on and on. It reminds Wormtail of what it was like in his first weeks here: every day dragging, the boredom overcoming him. It's been horrible to stay a rat for months on end, don't get him wrong, but over time, it's made his mind—simpler, maybe. He still has human thoughts, but it's a little easier to slip into the mindset of a rat and let the hours wash over him now that he's gotten used to it.

But tonight, Wormtail feels like he's jumping out of his skin. Finally, finally, it's night, and Percy curls up with Wormtail in bed to sleep. Wormtail gives it half an hour before scurrying out of the room—or he thinks he gives it half an hour, anyway; it's incredibly hard to tell time in Animagus form.

Molly and Arthur, of course, are up much later than the kids. Arthur is out in the woodshed doing god knows what—tinkering with Muggle artifacts, Wormtail is sure—but Molly busies herself cleaning the whole kitchen of grease and then reading in the living room. Even with her in the other room, he doesn't dare try to read the letter here. He can't exactly untie it from Tippy's leg without transforming, and there's absolutely no way that he's transforming yet.

He dashes to the floor just beneath the countertop and looks up into Tippy's face. The owl hoots at him, fluttering down to the floor and extending his leg. Wormtail looks across through the arch leading into the living room—Molly is absorbed in her Prophet, not looking up for anything.

The door is shut tight, and so are all the windows, he's pretty sure. If he transforms indoors, he can slip out the door before anybody reaches him. But he'll have to wait until Arthur is back in the house, so that he doesn't spot him leaving the house through his view from the shed, and until he and Molly are upstairs, where they won't be able to look across and see him before he goes.

Of course, Wormtail wasn't exactly able to carry his wand with him out of his flat and into the sewers when he bailed on Sirius and Emmeline. He managed to break into Ollivander's under cover of nightfall so he could transform with enough time to write to Emmeline (apologizing) and his boss (quitting), but nowadays, he's living with the Weasleys, not hiding in a wand shop. Arthur and Molly both sleep with their wands in their bedroom. Even if there's enough space under their bedroom door for him to dart in and get his paws on a wand—and that's a big if—how can he carry the thing back downstairs where he can use it to transform?

In theory, he doesn't need a wand to turn back into human form. James and Sirius both mastered it years ago, but Wormtail was never as good a wizard as either of them was, and he hasn't practiced much in an exceptionally long time. Sure, he became an Animagus back in fifth year, but he only really ever used his rat form on full moons with Moony. Once Belby finalized the Wolfsbane Potion, Madam Pomfrey started keeping Remus in the Hospital Wing during his transformations, where Wormtail couldn't really sneak in. When they all graduated from Hogwarts, the Marauders frequently kept Moony company indoors as humans, not as Animagi.

Can he manage to do it without a wand? He knows he should be able to by concentrating hard enough on his human form, but without being able to put a paw on a wand and feel the magic flow through it…

It feels like forever before Arthur reemerges. Wormtail listens with annoyance to his conversation with Molly about last night's Minister of Magic election. Who cares what it means that Runcorn won? So what if he's power-hungry? So is Malfoy. So is Crouch. Wormtail still can't figure out for the life of him why the Order threw their support behind him. No matter who's in office, the Death Eaters are just going to keep picking them off one by one.

Wormtail heard Arthur and Molly talking about Caradoc Dearborn's disappearance, but they haven't said a word about losing anyone else, and they would have. Wouldn't they? He would know, wouldn't he, if the Death Eaters got any of his former friends—if they got Emmeline—?

Finally, the Weasleys are gone, and Wormtail is alone with Tippy. He concentrates as hard as he can on his human form.

Nothing happens.

Part of the problem is that Wormtail hasn't looked at himself in a mirror since last October. It's not like he's forgotten what he looks like, but surely when he transforms back, he'll look different in a way that he can't strictly picture—older, with longer hair. Won't he? Or do Animagi turning back into themselves revert back to the exact form they had before the transformation? He knows he gets to keep his clothes, at least, so maybe. It's not like he or James or Sirius ever stayed Animagi long enough to be able to tell the difference.

He scrunches his eyes closed and thinks as hard as he can about the mirror image he remembers himself having. Nothing happens. So he changes tack, trying to remember the way it felt to have hands, to stand up straight, to feel the wind on his bare arms.

…And still, nothing happens. He tries and tries and growls in frustration, wondering how many minutes are ticking by, whether they've turned into hours.

Finally, when Wormtail thinks he can no longer stand it, he feels a sudden warmth run through him, and pain shoots through his body as his bones crack and lengthen and rearrange. He feels himself being stretched out like putty, lengthening, fur receding into his skin, his tail shrinking to a nub that soon disappears.

He only has seconds, and he scrambles to find a quill and inkpot. The transformation was loud—even more so now that he's out of practice—and if Molly or Arthur checks downstairs for a disturbance…

Wormtail's hands shake as he finds what he wants. There's no blank parchment around, but that's fine; he'll write on the back of the letter, underneath his name, if he must. He snatches Tippy by the body in his other hand and dashes out the door.

He retreats to the woodshed, his heart thumping in his chest, and he can't tell whether it's because he's afraid or because he feels alive—truly like himself—for the first time in so many months. He rips the letter off Tippy's leg and squints to read the messy writing.

You should be here. Everything feels so good and I'm so afraid I'm going to ruin it. There's Something telling me to act worried, but I'm not worried, and it's making everyone around me worry. I feel better than I have in a long, long time, and I'm going to ruin it. You would understand. You always understood. Don't you understand?

You pretended with all of us, even me. You know how to pretend. I need your help learning to pretend.

There's no signature, but it's from Emmeline: Wormtail recognizes the handwriting. What she's saying doesn't make any sense, but at the same time, what she's written—that he always understands, that he knows how to pretend—

Is that what Em thinks of him? That, the whole time he was spying for the Death Eaters, he was just pretending care about her? Or is she just talking about the lies he had to tell to keep his worlds apart?

He can't write back to her, as much as he longs to, as much as he misses her: the only logical response would be to ask her what the hell she's on about, and that would mean that she'd send another letter back to him, assuming she replied at all. It would solve nothing. But if Wormtail writes to someone else—

—But whom? Sirius has got to still be livid with him. Remus surely knows by now about Wormtail subtly encouraging Sirius to suspect him, so he's out, too. But—Wormtail could have become Secret-Keeper, and he didn't. He could have gotten James killed, but he didn't.

Wormtail's already pulled the quill and ink out before it occurs to him that they've probably redone the Fidelius Charm to exclude him, knowing what he is now, and he wouldn't be able to get anything to James (or to Lily, for that matter). Marlene is dead—the ache in his chest is a dull throb now—and that just leaves Mary or Alice.

Of course, Em sent the letter along with Alice's owl. Does that mean that, whatever's wrong, Alice is in on it, too? Best to write to Mary, then. As far as Wormtail knows, she's been out of the Order this whole time—maybe she'll have a bit of sympathy for Wormtail leaving the organization, too.

Mary, he writes, I got this letter from Emmeline and I don't know what it means. I think she's in trouble. I think you need to help her. Tell her to stop writing to me, and don't write back. Peter.

He crosses out his own name where Em's written it on the outside of the letter and replaces it with Mary's; he has to remind himself, as always, that her last name is Cattermole now and not Macdonald. "Don't ever come back here," he tells Tippy, and he strokes Tippy's fur for a moment before reattaching the letter to his leg.

He pictures his rat form, closes his eyes again—and nothing happens.

Wormtail doesn't panic. This same thing happened minutes (hours?) ago when he needed to become human again, and he got there in the end, didn't he?

But it seems that Wormtail's luck has run out. He sits down, his eyes still shut, and thinks as hard as he can about the rat—and the next thing he knows, there's a crick in his very human neck, and the sun is streaming through the clouds.

It's morning—he must have fallen asleep trying to transform. It's morning, and Arthur Weasley is going to lay eyes on him any moment if he doesn't get out of here.

Could he overpower Arthur or Molly to get a hold of one of their wands? They'd see him become their Scabbers again, and he'd have to leave this place—but, of course, he'll have to leave this place anyway to find another wand if that doesn't work. He doubts the Order is looking for him—they must know that he can't go back to the Death Eaters, since he'll have outlived his usefulness and Carrow surely won't forgive him for turning his back on keeping the secret that would solve all of You-Know-Who's Potter problems, and knowing how lost and purposeless he's got to be here on the outside, they have no reason to go after him. But Wizarding Britain could know by now that Wormtail is missing, maybe even presumed dead. If anybody spots him, they'll gossip about it, and word will get back to the Order, and Wormtail—

—can't afford to think like that. So going to Ollivander's and asking for a new wand is obviously out, and barging into Diagon Alley or Hogsmeade and trying to sneak somebody's wand away is out, too. Alone on the street without magic or money, what is he going to do?

What is Wormtail going to do?