Petunia sent Dudley to Reception come September when the children were five, but she kept Harry at home with her.

"I don't know why you're coddling the boy," Peter heard them arguing deep into the night. "He needs to toughen up and scrap with the lads."

"They won't understand him at school. What if he spends the day screaming? I'd be mortified," Petunia countered.

"Of course they won't understand him, he's a freak."

Peter could almost hear the way Petunia pursed her lips. "I thought you'd be pleased with us putting some distance between the boys. Dudley will make his own friends without Harry bothering him." Her arguments were sound, but her voice gave her away. It was too careful. Too pleading.

As usual it was Vernon who had the last word. "I don't want Dudley getting jealous. And people will talk, can't have that."

On October first, clutching his toy rat with its well-chewed tail in one hand and his aunt's dress in the other, Harry Potter entered the school system. Contrary to expectations, he did not spend the day wailing, though he did sit in the corner rocking back and forth, back and forth, back and forth until it was time to go home.

The special teachers came with November, consisting of someone saying, Look at me Harry , pay attention Harry, I need you to look at me Harry . Peter supervised from his hiding place in the corner, knowing they didn't stand a chance—the boy was entirely fascinated by the autumn leaves.

Besides those few supervisory sessions Peter would wait at home, gnawing on his fingernails or shredding tissues as it suited him. He fiddled with the broom and the duster and the kitchen sink, enchanting them to siphon magic off Harry and use it to help Petunia with the cleaning. It meant Harry had fewer accidents and Petunia was less exhausted, which helped them grow closer. And in turn, Peter watched the ward line grow outward again, easily identifiable by the way it kept those pesky kneazles away.

Meanwhile, every day after school, he would follow Petunia to pick the boys up, his nose twitching happily at Harry's shrieked "Ratty!" It was unerring how the boy could always find Wormtail crouching under the nearest hedgerow.

December brought Christmas decorations, which was lovely—and knitwear, which Harry was entirely unenthused about. The boy transfigured a sweater to straw by accident when Petunia ignored his insistent screaming, but she seemed to finally catch on after that.

Dudley brought home the cut-out snowflakes he'd made at school. Harry brought home fragmented tales about the falling rain and how they'd tried to explain the colours of the rainbow to him.

The connection between rain and rainbows didn't make sense, Harry told Peter earnestly, because clouds were grey and blue and black, nothing ROYGBIV about them. Peter sat in the comfort of their cupboard, listening intently to James and Lily's son as the boy coloured his homework exactly the way he thought things should be and not at all like the teachers would want. The fairy lights danced around them like so many twinkling stars.

At night Peter shaped them into his favourite constellations as he counted off their tales like bedtime stories: Canis major, forever chasing the rodent Lepus. Orion, who fell to pride. Lupus, impaled on the centaur's spear. Aries, sacrificed to the gods, bearing the golden fleece which saved the prince's life.

It delighted him to see Harry's eyes sparkle with interest before finally falling closed.

Peter's Mam had always said he'd been born under a lucky star, but none of the stars' tales ever struck him as being particularly lucky. Perhaps his fate was to make Harry's life better from the shadows.

After all, wasn't it better to be a nonentity? Someone relegated to the forgotten parts of the history books—someone small and inconspicuous, watching from the edges—like a rat.

Meanwhile, in the farthest corner of the cupboard under the stairs, three Hallows sat, waiting.

xoxox

Peter spent that Christmas just like the last, perched in Harry's baggy pockets and nibbling on Petunia's excellent baking. He renewed last year's enchantment that made the household toilets self-cleaning as an anonymous Christmas gift, and praised Harry for not having a single screaming fit all day.

The wards grew to cover half of Little Whinging.

January brought icy roads, slippery pavements and the firm insistence Harry must hold Petunia's hand and wear a hat to and from school. It had been two weeks, but the boy was still determined to scream at the injustice of it all. Dudley was pouting and Petunia looked like she was wishing for the ground to open up and swallow her whole.

Peter was the only one who saw it, everyone else was too enraptured by the delights of the latest Dursley family scandal. Time did not slow down, nor did it speed up. There was no moment of monumental importance. There was just the car in the wrong place at the wrong time, and Peter in the right place at the right time to step in front of it.

Harry screamed "Ratty! " while darting out of Petunia's reach. The car kept skidding.

Peter's last thought was, No, not Harry, please, not Harry.

There was something in the nothing that followed. It echoed oddly. YOU CAN GO BACK, IF YOU WANT, a voice said.

Peter wasn't thinking anymore, stuck in a loop of, Please, not Harry. Let me go back. I need to get to Harry.

VERY WELL.

He blinked his eyes open. They had crusted shut, but he couldn't properly move his hands to wipe at them.

There was something inside his hand. Panic welled up inside him, hot and desperate—but it was like there was a wall between him and his emotions, and he couldn't feel it properly at all. He let it simmer, his mind drifting. Was this what occlumency felt like? It was kind of neat, and kind of terrifying.

He was lying on a scratchy bed with awful sheets in a room that was too bright. Someone had painted cheerful polka dots on the walls. The dots were drifting about like clouds, or sheep, so Peter propped himself up and started counting them. His earlier panic evaporated. He realised he was feeling rather dizzy, and also very small. Suddenly the walls stopped moving.

There was something tucked into bed beside him. It was a stuffed toy rat just like Harry's, albeit brand new and completely unchewed.

Peter's head hurt. The lights were too much, it was all too much. He started rocking quietly, his toy clutched to his chest. The motion made him feel inexplicably better.

Someone came in then. "Here, Harry, you must drink this," a voice said, pressing a potion vial to his lips, then another, then another. "See? All better."

He felt the magic of a diagnostic dancing over him, then a hand running through his hair. "Take care, Harry."

By the time Peter managed to turn his eyes all the way up to the mysterious healer, she was gone. Where was Harry? What had happened?

Muggles rushed in then: first muggle healers, followed by some of Harry's muggle teachers, and finally Harry's muggle aunt.

"Look at me, Harry," they said gently. "How are you feeling?"

"...as if he died and came back to life. It's a miracle," someone was muttering.

"Almost like magic," Petunia confirmed dryly. "Can I take Harry home now?"

They fluttered on about imaging and test results and observation, but Petunia was insistent. Nobody seemed to expect Peter to contribute anything. It was all very loud and bustling.

That night Peter Pettigrew sat in Harry's body in Harry's bed, watching fairy lights dance across his fingertips.

This hadn't been what he'd meant when he'd said he wanted to go back. He had needed to return to Harry to help him, to save him, who else would look after the boy and his special needs? There were no portraits here to explain to Petunia what Harry liked to eat and what he liked to wear, the proper way to arrange food on his plate and the way he needed things to be or else he'd scream, and wail, and cry.

Peter had been taking such good care of Harry, he'd been keeping his promise to protect him. He'd meant to die for Harry, he'd been ready to greet Death so long as Harry would live.

His mind whirled around the line he hadn't been meant to overhear in the hospital. It's like he died and came back to life.

He knew Harry had been killed by that car too, the certainty sounded in his head like a child at a drumset. Had Death stood before the child and asked him if he wanted to go back?

The boy must have been so scared and alone, nothing but a chewed toy rat to keep him company.

Emotions welled up in Peter, it felt like his organs were being crushed by his own scattered heart. He had failed.

He hugged himself and rocked, but it did nothing to stop the way he was falling apart.

What had he done, what had he done?

Harry was gone, nothing left of him but his body and his legacy.

What was the point? What was the point of any of this?

For the first night since Harry's second birthday, the Dursley household was kept up by a little boy's keening.

xoxox

The next days dragged by impossibly slowly. His body was completely healed, the potions had taken care of that. Whoever's magic had grafted him to Harry had done a good job, too. (Death, Peter's mind provided helpfully.It was Death's magic.) Peter moved through Harry's daily life with a kind of perverse familiarity, knowledgeable of his routines, his special teachers—he even found himself taking on Harry's idiosyncrasies entirely against his will.

It was inexplicably hard to meet people's eyes.

His foods had to be eaten in order and sorted by colour.

Suddenly he understood how easy it was to be distracted by rain, snow or falling leaves.

Every morning when he woke up to Petunia's knocking it felt like an alarm spell on snooze. He cycled through the day's preparations with half his mind convinced he was still asleep, nesting in warm blankets and shredded newspapers.

Then he'd be woken anew by the rap-rap-rap 'Are you up Harry?' —only to realise he'd gone a whole day without really waking at all.

Nobody seemed to expect much interaction or conversation from him, thankfully. They were all resigned to him rocking or crying or generally failing to hold himself together.

Peter was never more grateful for the cupboard than in those first weeks. He could sit safely in the dark while listening to Dudley watch the telly or Petunia bustle about the kitchen. And at night the Dursleys were far enough away not to hear him tossing, turning, and falling apart.

He thought it terribly astute that Petunia had figured all of this out back when Harry was barely a year old, when she hadn't known what he liked to eat or the way he hated the colour orange.

After that fateful January morning, Petunia never dressed Harry in wool again.

xoxox

It didn't take long for Peter to grow to loathe Harry's special teachers. They were always going on about things that didn't interest him, like the names of colours or shapes, or how to read and count. He couldn't tell them he already knew all that, but anyway they were hardly expecting him to answer them.

Why, then, did they insist on annoying him with their questions? Besides, even if he wanted to read their stupid stories, the room was so…full. There were loud posters pinned on all the walls, writing on the chalkboard, dust clogging up the air. The only calm in the room was the peeling paint on the ceiling, and the only thing really interesting was the view through the window at the clouds twisting and curling outside.

So no, he did not want to look.

It was Thursday, which meant he had to see his special counselor after lunch. She usually wore her hair in a stern bun not unlike McGonagall's, except today it was lopsided. Peter already hated her worst of all, but the hair was truly unforgivable.

"Can you tell me what happened, Harry?" she was asking for the fiftieth time.

He looked at her. Forced himself to see not the hair, or the glasses, or the stain on her collar. Couldn't she afford to visit the dry cleaner's?

He looked her in the eyes. "Harry died." Slowly, lest he choke on it, Peter let out the breath all caught up in his chest. "Ratty died too."

"You knew that man? He was called Ratty?"

"Your hair," Peter told her, letting himself look away. "It's asymmetrical. You should fix it."

She made a small sound of surprise, but Peter had already moved on to examining the wallpaper.

"Do you know what that means Harry? A-sy-mmet-ric-al?"

Of course he knew what it meant, he'd just said it. Why wasn't she doing up her hair? He stared past her. Every Thursday he found more patterns in the bumpy wallpaper, familiar constellations in this strange, foreign life. One of them looked like Canis Major—he could see Lupus.

And there was Orion, shot to death and pinned up where he didn't belong.

When Petunia picked him up from school that day, they spoke to her about verbalising and progress. Peter wondered if they realised how dehumanising it was for them to talk about him as if he weren't right there.

He should really be used to it by now. First as Peter, then as Wormtail, and now as Harry. A part of him wondered if anybody would ever truly see him.

Look at me, he wanted to say, but he didn't.

At least the stupid woman had finally fixed her hair.

xoxox

"What can you tell me about Ratty?" the woman with the severe bun opened their next session.

As far as conversations went, Peter considered this an improvement. Usually they started with a bunch of boring questions like How are you feeling today? and Can you tell me what you learnt this week? which he'd answer with stubborn silence.

"Ratty died too," he repeated. It hadn't been anything like he'd expected his own end to happen. "I had thought dying would be different."

Should he be using subjunctives? Harry hadn't talked much, but Peter had always thought the boy exceptionally clever and perfectly able to keep up. He'd just never really wanted to say anything, and now that Peter was inside Harry he could see the appeal.

The teacher had finally caught herself, jaw closing with a resounding click. "Do you know Ratty's name, Harry? Look at me, it's important."

Peter stared past her, thinking. Should he tell her? Cassiopeia stared back at him from the wall. Had he really ever been important? The thought had him laughing. Peter was many things, but he'd never been vain.

The strange, grating sound of his laughter had startled the woman again. It was time, Peter decided, to put her out of her misery. "He's dead. His name doesn't matter now. None of it matters."

Peter wanted to take it back immediately, but on the other hand he couldn't really be bothered. It was an alien feeling to begin by saying one thing and end up spilling words that meant something else entirely. The only worse thing was that he knew he wasn't lying. "What's the point? I died. Harry's gone."

The truth of it crushed him like an anvil from one of Dudley's favourite cartoons. There was a smashed grand piano sitting on his chest and even if he opened his mouth it'd only be the sound of broken chords falling out.

Peter felt like he was in a tumble-dryer, spun dizzy and wrung out. He realised with a start that he'd died long before that January morning. Had the end started when he'd betrayed the Potters' Secret to the Dark Lord? Before that even, when he'd agreed to become their Secret Keeper despite knowing he'd end up letting them down? Had his death begun with the last day at Hogwarts, when three Gryffindors had gone off to live, uncaring that they were leaving him behind?

Dying to save Harry had been the one good thing he'd done in his life, and hadn't even managed to do that properly. Merlin, he was such a failure, had he ever really lived at all?

For a short moment Peter was aware enough of Harry's body to lean over and vomit before he was rocking again, back and forth, back and forth, all that movement going nowhere.

He could feel himself spinning, and spinning, like that time Petunia had put the plush Ratty in the washing machine.

Peter passed out.

xoxox

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I've churned out 30k words of Peter's story for NaNoWriMo (personally re-branded to International Fanfic Writing Month), and it is at once a great source of joy, and a very challenging story with many voices to juggle.