Previously in the Darklyverse: Emmeline located and confronted Peter, who stole her wand and fled. Alice investigated missing funds that the Canadian Ministry gave to Britain to develop a Muggle Protection Taskforce that Runcorn buried from the public. Death Eaters killed Mary and tracked Emmeline to Mary's flat.

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June 2nd, 1982: Peter Pettigrew

Did you know there's actually a spell that will make you untraceable by owls? A few short years or even months ago, Peter never would have guessed it would exist—wouldn't even have imagined why there might be a need for it. He found it in a bookshop in Ireland (southern Ireland, specifically—he's avoiding the U.K. at all costs), skimming through Jinx Me: How to Become Invulnerable to Friends and Foes! while casting furtive looks over his shoulder every five seconds, as if somebody was going to pop out of the shelves any second to have him arrested or, worse, dragged off to face Sirius Black's wrath. It makes sense: if owls can trace you, then anyone can trace you, and the last thing Peter needs right now is somebody from the Order coming after him again.

Because he can't be traced by owl, he can't receive owl post of any kind—not even the newspaper. He'd tried taking out the Daily Prophet under a fake name, but when the first three papers he should have received never arrived, he wrote them back to cancel his subscription. That makes sense to Peter, too: if it were possible to receive mail under another name, anybody with access to the name you're using would be able to track you, wouldn't they? Best to cut yourself off from society and live in the ground.

Well, he hasn't literally been living in the ground, at least not anymore. Peter considers it sometimes—using the wand he stole from Emmeline to transform back into Wormtail and this time never come back. It would certainly be a lot safer, and he'd know better now than to try to change back without access to a wand.

But—being Scabbers for the Weasleys was boring. You'd think Peter would prioritize security over mental stimulation, but you try being stuck as a rat for months on end with nobody to talk to, trying to entertain yourself by listening to seven kids under the age of twelve squabbling with each other day in and day out, sustaining yourself on snatches of conversation from the adults about the Order that hates you by now. Maybe Peter isn't brave enough to really deserve the title of Gryffindor, but it doesn't even take that much courage to survive in hiding as a human rather than a rat, not now that he's got himself a wand and a way to stop owls from following him.

The only problem, of course, is that without access to mail, he doesn't have reliable access to British wizarding news—at least, not without some trickery. At first, he tried to learn to live without it, but the one good part of living with the Weasleys was being able to sneak the news after everybody had gone to sleep, even if it was a bitch trying to turn the pages of the Prophet with his paws. Without any way of knowing how the war was going, he'd found himself constantly worrying about his friends—his former friends, he reminds himself—and he hadn't known how much longer he could stand that kind of uncertainty.

So he'd gone back to the Weasleys, but not as Scabbers, and certainly not with their knowledge. It took some finagling, but he managed to set up shop a couple of kilometers away, building himself a ramshackle cabin to protect himself from the elements, and he protected it from the Weasleys or any other prying eyes by making the thing impenetrable—invisible, Unplottable, Undetectably Extended, and Muggle-Repellent. He'd impressed himself with it: it's not like Peter ever would have thought himself a good enough wizard to pull it off, but here he is, living off papers and food scraps he nicks from the Weasleys with nobody any the wiser.

The one thing he has to be careful of is his daily rummage through Weasleys' bins. He usually Disillusions himself and does it long after the sky has gone dark so that nobody will be awake to catch him, but, well, if anybody were having trouble sleeping and spotted the bins outside spewing out newspapers and what few leftovers from dinner the Weasleys don't waste, he'd be in trouble. He doesn't need much: he's fashioned himself an icebox with a Cooling Charm, and even the smallest of scraps are enough for him to duplicate and freeze to reheat throughout the following day.

Like usual, he nicks today's paper along with some entirely unappetizing leftover potato skins and carries the lot back to his cabin. Peter doesn't have much in the way of entertainment here—he misses his guitar, and he's not really a good enough wizard to conjure one up on his own—but he's been using the hours and hours of unfilled time every day practicing his magic. It's harder to do more complex spells using Emmeline's wand, which feels foreign and unfriendly in his hand: he may have taken the thing from her by force, but he clearly hasn't won its allegiance. It gets dull and frustrating trying to work the same spells over and over, but at least it passes the time: it's better than sitting there staring at the wall, rereading the same Prophets over and over, or, god forbid, venturing out into the world and risking exposure. Besides, it's a bit of a confidence booster in a way. A few short months ago, he never would have dreamed himself capable of building this cabin and protecting it all on his own. Peter can't be as terrible a wizard as he always thought if he managed to pull this off—and with somebody else's wand, no less—can he?

He fixes dinner first: he peels off what bits of the inside of the potatoes that he can from the skins, multiplies them until he's got about a day's worth, and cooks through one serving of them with his wand. Bracing himself for a very boring day of potatoes ahead of him, he grazes on them with his hands and opens up the Prophet.

The front page is taken up by a scandal involving the Minister of Magic: Runcorn and his support staff have been diverting foreign aid from Canada into their own pockets. Alice Abbott's name is thrown out a few times in the article—apparently, she'd started the process of opening a formal inquiry into the missing funds, but word leaked out and somebody broke the story to the Prophet before the investigation really got underway. From the looks of it, two Ministry Treasurers have already been fired in the cover-up, and Peter imagines that Alice is probably lucky things went down the way they did if she didn't want to get sacked, too.

It feels weird seeing one of his former friends' names in the paper: Em is the only one of them who still seems real to Peter, and even she feels far away, now that he's conclusively burned that bridge. Alice wouldn't give a comment for the article, but the records she got from the Canadian Ministry leaked along with it—it looks like there's a whole Muggle Protection Taskforce that got discussed and subsequently embezzled and canned.

Not for the first time, Peter wonders how this whole war is going to wind up—whether there's an ending in sight that makes it possible for him to go back to his life. He can't imagine anyone in the Order letting him back into their lives, but if nothing else, it would be nice for the Death Eaters to get taken down, if only so that they'll stop the hunt that they've inevitably started for him. It would also be nice to at least return to civilization—do a few years in Azkaban, probably, but eventually get himself a low-key job somewhere and a couple of friends who'd listen to his side of the story without painting him as a monster.

Is Peter a monster? God, he can hardly remember spying because he was afraid for his friends' safety—he's too full of the resentment he built up around himself in order to justify his actions. In retrospect, he should have clung to the "Death Eaters were blackmailing his mates" defense: maybe that way, there would be a bigger chance of—if not forgiveness, then at least some kind of future where Peter's past doesn't define him.

By the time he flips to the second page, he's lost in his thoughts. The headline on the next page declares that two more witches are dead, but that's old hat, as far as he's concerned—at least, it is until he reads the first paragraph.

He chokes on a mouthful of old potatoes.

Peter's sure there's more to the story than what's reported here: as expected, there's nothing in the article about the Order of the Phoenix, and Em and Mary's involvement in the Order is obviously what got Death Eaters to target them. Peter knows from his stint living with the Weasleys that Mary has been back in the Order for a while now, so that makes sense, while Emmeline's death was probably Malfoy's retaliation for her getting free of the Imperius Curse—she told Peter that much the last time he saw her.

All he can think about is the last thing he said to Em—framing it like she was making him steal her wand and break her trust by not promising to protect him from Azkaban or the Order. He blamed her after she never did a damn thing to hurt him, and now he'll never get to make that up to her. Maybe she wouldn't have let him back into her life anyway, but at least before he'd thought that he could write to her when all of this was over and apologize. Now…

He loved her, and she's gone, and it might be his fault. Without Peter telling Carrow that Em and the others are in the Order, maybe—

Ever since Peter ran out of his flat and went on the run, he's thought that the guilt he had to live with was punishment enough for the years he spent funneling information to the Death Eaters. When Peter thinks about retribution, he doesn't think it's enough just to hurt somebody who wrongs you—it's only really satisfying if their understanding of just how badly they screwed up is part of their suffering. Setting aside all of his excuses, he knows he messed up with the Order and with Emmeline. He fucked it all up, and that's something he has to live with every minute of every day. He's never free of it, and isn't that the worst kind of freedom to lose?

But it doesn't feel fair that Peter is nice and cozy in this magically-insulated cabin while the woman he loves is in the ground. Em is gone, and Peter has a cool roof over his head, a consistent source of food, and his independence. How is that okay? How is any of this—?