Previously in the Darklyverse: Reginald Cattermole proposed to Mary. Alecto Carrow blackmailed Peter into spying on the Order for the Death Eaters. The Gryffindors began to worry about their futures outside of Hogwarts. Emmeline attempted suicide.

Revised version uploaded 31 January 2022.

xx

April 19th, 1978: Peter Pettigrew

Word that Mary has gotten engaged to Reginald Cattermole spreads across the school so fast that Peter hears about it from Davy Gudgeon in Herbology class before Mary herself actually tells him. She's standing there one workbench over, standing next to Cattermole as she extracts pods from her Snargaluffs with a look of concentration on her face, while Gudgeon says, "You haven't heard? They talked about it last week, but Mary just told Reg yes last night. He immediately told the other Hufflepuff seventh years, of course—I'd have thought that Mary would have done the same with the Gryffindors."

"I mean, she only agreed last night?" says Peter. "That's not a lot of time. What's she going to do—get everyone into a conference room and call a formal meeting?"

"Hey, Mary!" James calls, and Mary looks up at him. "Congratulations!"

"Thanks!" she calls back. She breaks open a Snargaluff pod and accidentally spews green tubers all over her face.

James sniggers. "You, too, Cattermole," says Peter over James's laughter, and Cattermole inclines his head to Peter before casting a Scourgify on Mary that clears off the majority of the pod contents from her body.

Under the pretense of going to an Order meeting with Dorcas, Peter gathers the other Gryffindor seventh years that night in the usual spot behind the mirror. "So everybody here knows that Mary's gotten engaged, right?"

"Oh, so she said yes, then?" says Marlene, while Sirius says, "Wait, Mary got what?"

"Engaged. To Cattermole. She just said yes to him last night, apparently," says Peter.

"That's amazing!" says Alice, while James whistles and Lily claps her hands together.

"Anyway, I think we should do something for her. For them. It's been a really stressful year for all of us, and it can't have been easy on Mary leaving the Order and then watching us all keep up with it behind her back, and I just… well, I want to put something together to celebrate."

"Like what?" asks Lily.

"Like an engagement party. We can ask to co-opt the Great Hall for it and see if we can get the house-elves to bake a big cake for us to bring. I was thinking this Friday night?"

James says, "But that's in two days."

"No time like the present," says Peter, shrugging.

Having a party to prepare on that short of a deadline gives Peter something to focus on, which is good because he's focusing way too much on the hold Alecto Carrow has over him. She hasn't exactly asked for anything new in a while, but she's taken to giving him significant looks and making comments and pinning him against walls whenever she passes him in the corridors, which only serves to remind him that his life is not his own anymore—that he's betrayed the Order already and will do so again. He tells himself that this is better than the alternative—that Carrow has demonstrated that she can do real damage to other friends and members of the Order if Peter doesn't comply with her demands—but it feels like a flimsy excuse, one that he knows wouldn't hold up if word were to get out to the other Gryffindor seventh years what Peter's done.

He gets McGonagall's permission to use the Great Hall, and after dinner wraps up on Friday, he hauls down James's WWN to set up some music, then pops down to the kitchens to pick up the cake and pastries he talked to the house-elves about. He picks up the sweets and butterbeers he grabbed from Hogsmeade the night before and sets everything up just in time for guests to start arriving around half past eight.

Mary and Cattermole get there at a quarter to nine. Mary doesn't look particularly happy walking in—not as happy as Peter would have expected or hoped, given that she's just gotten engaged—but she beams at Peter when she sees the decorations, and she tugs on Cattermole's hand while running up to meet Peter.

"What—what is all this?"

"Happy engagement."

"But—this must have taken ages to get ready, and we only just on Wednesday decided to get engaged, and—"

"You're welcome," says Peter, smiling.

Mary flings her arms around him and plants a kiss on his cheek. "Thanks, Pete. Seriously, thank you."

"Go ahead and have fun, you crazy kids. I'll be right back," Peter says—his eyes have just lit upon Marlene, who's standing in the doorway looking lost.

He rushes up to her before she can turn around and leave again like she looks like she might want to. "I wasn't sure you'd come tonight," says Peter.

"I wasn't, either," says Marlene. "I almost didn't. But, well, you only get engaged once, right? Hopefully just the once, anyway. I didn't want to miss that for her."

"I'm sure it'll mean a lot to her that you came," says Peter. "Come on, let's get you some food."

The Great Hall is full of mostly Gryffindors and Hufflepuffs—Peter hadn't been sure who exactly in Hufflepuff were Cattermole's friends, besides the ones who also talk to Mary, so he just went out on a limb and invited all of them from the upper years. It was a bitch trying to keep the invitations and the planning a surprise from Mary, but he thinks the effort paid off. Mary looks a lot cheerier now that she knows what's going on, laughing loudly at something Eddie Bones said as she and Cattermole stand there with him and Meghan McCormack and a couple of Hufflepuffs that Peter doesn't personally know. Cattermole is standing sort of behind her with his arms wrapped around her waist, and they both seem happy, and Peter hopes that nothing ever takes that away from them.

"I'm going in," says Marlene eventually, once she's had her fill of butterbeer and cake and she can't keep using the food as an excuse to avoid Mary. "Be my backup?"

"Of course," Peter says. "Come on, you've got this."

They walk up to Mary, who's now hanging out with Greta Catchlove and Veronica Smethley from Hufflepuff. "Hey, Mare," says Marlene quietly.

Mary's laughing at something Smethley said, but her laughter dies in her throat when she turns to see Marlene standing there. "Hi, Lene," she says equally quietly.

"I just—um. Congratulations. On your engagement. That's a huge deal."

"Thank you," says Mary, and then Cattermole obliviously starts asking Marlene about the homework from Potions earlier today.

xx

Full moons without transforming into Wormtail are always weird to Peter, even now that Remus has been on the Wolfsbane Potion in the hospital for almost the whole school year. On Sunday night, Peter walks Remus to the Hospital Wing and then turns back toward the common room, his brain full of Remus and wolves and Animagi.

James and Sirius are in there studying with Lily and Alice; they wave him over, and James claps a hand on Peter's back. "Hey, mate. Grab your books and pull up a chair, yeah? N.E.W.T.s are under two months away, and we're all going to fail spectacularly."

"Hey, now, some of us have been studying diligently all year," Alice chides him.

"I'd hazard a guess that all of us have been studying diligently all year. It's just that not all of us have been succeeding in our studies. We can't all be class valedictorian."

Peter is a little surprised to see Lily and Alice hanging out together—isn't Alice supposed to be super jealous of Lily getting the Head Girl position? She's certainly been hanging out with the Ravenclaws enough to suggest that something is up, that she has some reason to want to avoid everybody in Gryffindor.

Then again, that was months ago—maybe Alice has moved on. Besides, she and Cresswell did just break up, even if she still has the same mutual Ravenclaw friends with him as she used to.

"We don't know when the next meeting with Dorcas is going to be, do we?" says Peter as he settles himself in an armchair and starts rifling through the school books in his bag.

"Not a word," says James. "I'm starting to think they're just waiting for us to graduate so that they can give us actual, real stuff to do. I can't wait for it."

"That makes one of us," says Sirius. "Adulthood means finding some source of income to pay rent with. My inheritance from my uncle isn't going to stretch that much farther, and I'll bet you anything that my relatives in the Ministry are going to blackball me so I can't get a job. Remus is worried about employment, too, for obvious reasons—he had to register as a werewolf—" he lowers his voice "—now that he's an adult, and that's public record."

"Mate, my parents just left me a fortune," James says. "Not even a small fortune—a very, very large one. I can take care of you and Remus indefinitely and hardly make a dent in the thing, if you end up having that many problems finding work. Personally, I'm looking forward to being a full-time Order fighter. I can't wait to ditch this place and actually make a difference."

Peter hasn't given much thought yet to what he's going to do after he graduates. His head has been so full of Carrow's demands and mind games that he hasn't even thought about what fresh ways she's going to torment him after he leaves Hogwarts behind. Somehow, he doesn't suspect that he's going to get away from her and the things she makes him do just because they're no longer staying in the same castle.

"You okay?" says Sirius. When Peter looks up at him, Sirius is frowning.

"What?"

"You look a little out of it, that's all—like something's wrong."

"No," says Peter, too quickly. "Nothing's wrong. All good."

Sirius doesn't look convinced. Peter wonders for the millionth time whether he's doing the right thing, whether he's going to regret not finding someone and just telling them what he's gotten himself mixed up in.

"I should go," he says quickly. "I promised Emmeline we'd hang out just the two of us for a while tonight." He promised Emmeline nothing of the sort, but the way Sirius keeps looking at him is making Peter feel nervous enough not to want to hang around.

He's not actually sure where Emmeline is, so he fishes the Marauder's Map out of James's trunk upstairs so as to locate her. She's alone out on the grounds, and he makes short work of tracking her down. "Got room for one more?" Peter asks, smiling, as he comes up to her.

"Sure, but—I thought you were sticking with James and Sirius tonight."

"Wanted to see my best girl," says Peter with a shrug. "How are you holding up, anyway?"

"I'm okay." He raises his eyebrows. "Really. I'm—better, at least. And—I owe you an apology."

"What? No, you don't. It's not your fault you have depression."

"No, but it is my fault that I tried to kill myself, and—"

"That wasn't about me," says Peter quickly. "I hate it when people make other people's suicide attempts all about how it affected them."

"Okay, but that doesn't mean it didn't affect you. You've been doing all the work in this friendship for way too long."

Peter's shaking his head back and forth, hard. "No. I have to be there for you. If I'm not—when I wasn't—"

"What do you mean, when you weren't? Peter, what are you talking about?"

He pales. "No. I'm not supposed to be talking to you about it. The last thing you need is to feel like you're burdening me."

"Well, considering I already feel like I'm burdening you, I don't think you have to worry about that."

She's smiling, but Peter isn't. "It was my dad," he mutters. "It happened when I was eight. My mum was at work, and my sisters were old enough by then that they weren't living at home anymore. Dad worked part-time in the mornings so that he'd be home by the time I got back from school every day, but when I got home that day…"

Em's eyes are as round as saucers. "Peter, did you dad—? But he can't have committed suicide when you were a kid. He picks you up every holiday at King's Cross."

"Well, he wasn't successful," he says with a thin smile, "but he tried. There was—there was a pool of blood coming from the bathroom. I called out for him, but he didn't answer. When I tried the door, it was locked, but I manage to bust it open somehow—I think that was the first time I ever did accidental magic."

"Peter," says Emmeline frantically, "I'm sorry that happened to you, but I need you to understand it wasn't your fault. It was his job to take care of you, and just because he didn't know how doesn't mean that there's any responsibility on you for what he did—or what I did. You understand that, right?"

And she clearly doesn't get it—because if she did, she'd realize that everything is Peter's fault. If the people around him, the people he's supposed to be there for, feel so alone in their heads that they try to leave this world—he's failed them, just like he failed Mary when Carrow burned down her mum's house. Remus when she poisoned him. Gideon when Peter gave her his name—

"I do. I understand," he says, and Emmeline reaches forward and squeezes his hands.