Previously in the Darklyverse: Peter left his hiding place at the Weasleys' when he got stuck in human form without a wand in order to open and forward a letter from Emmeline. After returning from her Horcrux Hunt with Dumbledore, Emmeline vowed to track down Peter and confront him.

xx

May 5th, 1982: Peter Pettigrew

The first thing Peter notices when he wakes is that he's still sore and tired and hungry—none of that has changed. It's not March anymore, thank god, so it's not too cold here on the ground under the bridge, but he still would give anything for a blanket—if not to cover up with, then at least to ball up and use as a pillow. He doesn't think he's ever going to get rid of the crick that's been in his neck for the last two months.

The second thing he notices is that somebody's shaking him. Hard. He blinks and opens his eyes to find gazing back at him someone that he never thought he'd see again.

"Em?"

She's wearing dirt-stained, shabby work robes; her scraggly hair looks like it hasn't been brushed in weeks, and she's clutching what looks like James's old Nimbus 1500 at her side. In the distance, Peter can see an owl soaring away in the still-dark sky. "Em?" he says again.

This has to be a dream: it's the only explanation for why Peter's ex-girlfriend could possibly have flown here on James Potter's broomstick to swoop him up out of a Muggle life of homelessness. But as he rubs the sleep out of his eyes and scoots into a sitting position, it turns out that he's only half right. He's not dreaming, and Emmeline really is here, but she isn't here to save him.

"How dare you, Peter Herbert Pettigrew. How fucking dare you."

It's too early in the morning for this—his muscles hurt too much for this—and he doesn't fight back, doesn't do anything but sit there and study her face, drinking it in hungrily. She stops shaking him, only to beat her surprisingly strong fists into his chest for a few moments. Her face crumples.

"Em," he says for a third time, and he raises his hand to her cheek, quickly, before she can start punching him again.

And then they're hugging, Emmeline sobbing into his shoulder. "I love you," says Peter. She doesn't say it back, just cries harder.

"You have to tell me everything," she says in a hoarse voice when she finally pulls back. "You owe me that much."

"Are you going to have me locked up after I do?" He hates himself for even asking, and it's not like he could escape this situation when she's got a wand and he hasn't, but he has to ask.

"Not—I don't know what I'm going to do. But I need an explanation, Peter."

"Okay," he says. "But—do you have any Muggle money on you? I haven't eaten in two days."

Something indecipherable passes through her eyes. "I haven't carried money of any kind on me in two months," she says, and his heart starts to sink, but then she adds, "but I Vanished some pot roast earlier that I can conjure up. You'll have to eat with your hands, I'm afraid—I haven't practiced conjuring silverware, and we forgot to Vanish any before we left."

"That isn't a problem," says Peter gratefully. "I'll take anything."

"I'll duplicate it so that you can have as much as you want, but you'll be eating alone. I never want to touch the stuff ever, ever again."

"Why not?" he asks, trying not to look too impatient to eat.

"It's all I've eaten for every meal for the last two months," she says.

There's that two month figure again. "What have you been doing all that time, anyway? Why are you eating pot roast and not carrying money around?"

"I've been…" But apparently she can't tell him, or won't, because she just pulls out her wand (Peter eyes it longingly) and swishes it to produce a large pot full of roast and vegetables.

A few minutes pass in silence, save for the occasional car driving on the bridge above them and the sound of Peter's ripping and chewing. He eats so fast, after not eating for so long, that he thinks he might throw up. Even though he's still hungry, he forces himself to stop after five or ten minutes but keeps watching the pot like it's going to disappear at any moment.

Em may look disheveled to Peter, but Peter's got to look pretty bad to Em, too, for all the same reasons—filthy robes, mussed and greasy hair—plus he's lost at least five or six kilograms since getting locked out of his Animagus form without a wand. He's not proud of how he's had to live—sleeping under a bridge, sitting at traffic intersections with a coffee cup and a cardboard sign, pissing on trees, eating out of trashcans while saving up for the occasional grocery run. But what more could he have done? He couldn't use magic without a wand, and he couldn't risk recognition by wizards after what he'd done if he'd tried to steal one. He didn't have any money, Muggle or otherwise, for food or shelter. And he had no one to ask for help.

"When did it start?" Emmeline asks softly.

Here it is: the conversation he needs to have with her, that he really doesn't want to have with her. But she's here, and she's listening, at least. She can't completely hate him if she's here and listening, can she?

"Alecto Carrow was my… I guess you can call her my liaison. I never had any contact with anybody else. She first approached me at the end of sixth year—threatened me—I refused to share anything with her, but she said I'd cave eventually. I did, obviously. She approached me in Diagon Alley and asked for a name of somebody in the Order, and when I didn't give her one, she burned Mary's mum's house down. Do you remember that from that summer? They thought it was a gas leak, but it was Carrow. The only reason Mary wasn't in the house was because Carrow warned me she was going to do it, so I was able to make plans with Mary and make sure she wouldn't be home…"

It probably only takes Peter about a quarter of an hour to tell her the whole sordid story—how Carrow endangered his friends, then tortured him, eking out more and more information until he was giving her everything he had, including, probably, what the Death Eaters needed to kill the slew of Order members they killed last year—Eddie and Benjy and Gideon and Fabian. (Dorcas died, too, of course, but Peter can safely say that her death wasn't on him, as she'd gone chasing after Voldemort to avenge Fabian.)

"Marlene?" Em asks.

Peter bows his head. "I… they knew from me that she was in the Order, and they knew from me that she'd be at a family gathering that evening. Carrow didn't tell me they planned on killing the McKinnons, but… but Carrow didn't tell me anything. I never knew what they were going to do with the information. I swear I didn't. And it's not like they killed everybody the second they found out they were in the Order or just because they were a known Auror or Hit Wizard. I never wanted Marlene dead. I never wanted anyone dead."

"You say you started all this to protect us," says Emmeline heavily, "but you have to have realized at some point that they were using you to hurt us."

"I… well, yeah. I'm not defending it," he says quickly. "I'm not saying I was a victim in all this, because—maybe I was at first, maybe I only handled it all wrong because I was scared, but eventually, I—I can't say I didn't justify to myself what I was doing. I told myself my friends weren't really my friends, that James and Remus and Sirius always ranked me last, that—"

"That Marlene deserved to die?" she spits. "That if they'd come after me, I would have deserved that, too?"

"Of course she didn't deserve to die," says Peter. "Of course I never doubted you—never wanted anything to happen to you. How could you even think that I could do that to you?"

"How could you get Marlene killed?" Em fires back. "How could you see them do that to her—to anyone who died on your intel—and not walk away? How could you blame the other boys? If you could warp that so badly in your head, who's to say you didn't warp your feelings about me?"

"I was desperate," he pleads. "You-Know-Who is going to win. He's going to win, Em! My reasons were different in the beginning—better than what they became—but I knew that none of you would ever forgive me if you knew how deep in it I was, and if I came clean, I didn't have a future. He's going to win, and I thought, well, at least when he did, maybe I'd be the one Mudblood who got a free pass. I didn't want to help him, but if I was trapped—"

"You weren't trapped. You were never trapped. You could have stopped this at any time. You have to have known that if you managed to get away when Lily and James's lives were in your hands. If you were still with the Death Eaters, you wouldn't be begging for scraps on a highway and sleeping on concrete, would you?"

"Look, I stopped too late. I know I stopped too late. You don't need to forgive me, but I need you to understand. I thought you knew me well enough—loved me enough—that you'd try to understand—"

"Don't you ever," Emmeline snarls, "ever tell me that I don't love you enough—that I don't understand you. You left me. You dumped this in my lap and left me to second guess every facet of our relationship. I'm not the one who lied, Peter!"

"Don't you understand? I lied to you because I didn't want to lose you! I was trying to have everything, and I know I shouldn't have played both sides, but I was trying to keep Carrow from killing me if I stopped making myself useful to her, and I was trying to keep you from hating me if you found out—"

"I could never hate you," she breathes. "If I hated you, this wouldn't be so hard. If I hated you, I wouldn't have to hate myself for still being in love with you."

"You're… you're not going to take me back, are you? You're not going to protect me."

It's a stupid question: he already knows she won't—he's known that the whole time she's been under the bridge with him. But he wants to hear it from her. He needs to know that he's out of options before he does the thing he thinks he needs to do—before he betrays her trust again like that.

Instead of answering, she asks softly, "Did you give the Death Eaters my name?" He doesn't respond, either. "Did you give them my name, Peter?"

"There… was no way of hiding it," he admits eventually. "They knew everyone in our house and year at Hogwarts was involved—even Mary, at first."

Em's eyes flash. "Peter—what is it that you think I can do for you? I'm on the run, too, okay? Malfoy put me under the Imperius Curse, and now that I'm free of it, I have to keep moving so they can't get to me again."

This was not what Peter was expecting to hear, though he guesses it makes sense in retrospect—the weird letter, her scroungy appearance. All it really does is make things that much harder. He knows it's a long shot, but—"If we're both running, then can't we run together? I know you're still in contact with the Order, and I can't be, but—"

"This only ends one of two ways, Peter," says Emmeline, and her mouth is a thin line. "Either I kill Voldemort, or I die trying. The only way you redeem yourself is if you join me in that, and I don't even know if I can let you try. You and I… I will always have love for you, but I don't know if we can ever have a future."

"I was hoping you wouldn't say that," says Peter, and honestly, he feels worse about what he's just said than he does about what he's about to do—because betraying Em's trust and screwing her over is one thing, but framing it to her like it's her own damn fault, like he deserves for her to give him a chance, is quite another.

He screws up all his courage and makes a grab for her wand.

It all happens so fast. Her wand is on the ground next to her, and she doesn't seem to realize what's happening at first, but catches on and shouts his name and reaches out just as he's closing his hand on it. There's a skirmish—she tries to pin his hand to the ground with one hand and reaches for the tip of her wand with the other—he launches his body forward and uses his free hand to push Em hard in the chest.

She doesn't drop to the ground, but it's enough to loosen her grip on his other hand. He snatches the wand, raises it as best he can at this strange angle, and Disapparates.

Only—it's all gone down so quickly that he doesn't really have a destination in mind. At first, he's not sure where, exactly, he's landed, because all he can think about is the white-hot searing pain in his abdomen. He can't help himself—he screams. He's been screaming, clutching at his stomach, for what feels like forever before he starts to actually take in his surroundings: he's Splinched himself in the middle of Diagon Alley.

It's still the middle of the night, at least, and Diagon Alley isn't a residential village like Hogsmeade, so there's no one around to turn Peter in to the Ministry or the Order or the Death Eaters. (God, he's accrued quite the list of people who are probably gunning for him.) He has to get off of the street. He could try to break into the Apothecary and find some dittany, but Peter probably can't even sit up, let alone walk halfway down the alley, like this. The only Healing spell he knows is Episkey, and when he fumbles for Emmeline's wand, aims it at his midriff, and says the magic word, the pain only barely lets up.

As far as he can tell, he's got two choices: wait here in the middle of the street for someone to find him and his life to be over (assuming he doesn't bleed out first), or suck it up.

He sucks it up.