Dig a Little Deeper




He had laid down the signs- bared the marks for anyone who dug just a bit deeper. One question, and he would have cracked. One visit, and they would have known. But nobody looked, and nobody saw, and so it was all their fault when it came tumbling down.

He had always been bad at making up lies, stories, falsehoods. But all he had to do was to think back to first year, when Remus had been disappearing each month- the excuses hadn't worked for him, of course, and he was far better at lying than Peter could hope to be. But while they looked at Remus and saw lies, they never even glanced in Peter's direction. So it was all their fault.

He had told them he was visiting his grandmother for a day, at the last meeting. Never mind that he didn't have a grandmother. They had made jokes that he was the butt of, and then dismissed it, and when he came back shaking and twitching in leftover pain from the Cruciatus curse, and momentary sickness at what he had done, they hadn't even noticed.

One question, he reminded himself whenever he wanted out. If one of them asks, once, if I'm all right, why I've been lying, where I've been going, I'll tell them. I'll get out, they'll stay alive, if they ask even once I'll tell them the truth. But nobody asked, despite the hints he desperately dropped. He came so close, so close, to just telling- but the slightly feral look in Sirius's eyes when he talked about Death Eaters getting what was coming to them convinced him to wait, to wait, until they asked.

All they had to do was ask, and he would tell. All they had to do was see, and he would bare all. He once told Sirius that there was a traitor among them, that there had to be. He suspected Remus, of all people. He told Lily that he was sick when he obviously wasn't, a purposefully bumbling attempt to draw her attention. She told him to go home and rest. He called Voldemort the Dark Lord in an Order meeting, like a good Death Eater. They didn't hear.

They made him secret keeper despite the protests that they shouldn't- they should not, in any way, shape, or form. They laughed, and asked who would suspect poor, bumbling, Peter Pettigrew- always the idiot, the butt of the joke. If anyone had looked, they would have noticed, they would have known. If anyone had dared look a inch or so deeper, they would have seen.

He was crying when he told his master about his friends. It all seemed so unreal- surely this was a nightmare? Surely, surely, this wasn't real... He had been called a good pet,' and let go... He went to Remus's, and the werewolf had demanded, suspiciously, to know where he had been- and Peter had laughed, and lied, and then when the news came he burst into all too realistic tears.

Someone had asked, but it had been all too late... There was no turning back. Traitor on one side, traitor on the other- nobody looked, nobody saw, there was nothing to him now but a rat who slept all day. Nothing to see, nothing to do, nothing to think about. He was nothing, and there was nobody to watch. But if only, if only, somebody had seen.