Previously in the Darklyverse: Peter fell in deeper with Death Eater Alecto Carrow. The Order made a number of captures and delivered them to the Ministry without revealing the Order members' identities. The Death Eaters interrupted Mary's wedding shower to overwhelm the Order with a number of simultaneous attacks; at one of them, Order member Hyatt Pertinger was killed, while Remus got hit and nearly died, too. Emmeline and Peter had sex.

xx

December 8th, 1978: Peter Pettigrew

"I told you already, I'm not doing it."

Alecto Carrow is smirking at him as if he's playing right into her hands, when the entire point of this conversation is that he's not going to—not any longer. "I think you'll find that you can be persuaded."

"No," says Peter. "Wasn't the whole point of this thing where I give you information to protect the people I care about from dying? Hyatt Pertinger is dead. Your people killed him, and the deal is off."

"Was Hyatt Pertinger really someone you cared that much about? You'll notice that our agents went for Dumbledore's people instead of yours—"

"Like they could even tell who they were going after when he had his mask on. Even if they could tell the difference, it's sick if you think that I think his life matters less than my friends' lives do."

"Doesn't it? You can't tell me you'd have had the same reaction if I'd killed—oh, let's say for the sake of argument, James Potter."

"You don't even know if James Potter is in the Order," spits Peter.

"Yes, we do. You wouldn't be in it if he weren't," Carrow sneers. "Not brave enough. Honestly, I couldn't tell you why you ended up in Gryffindor rather than Slytherin—"

"Is there a point to this? Anyway, you have to get out of here. Em is going to get home from work any minute, and if you don't want to blow my cover—"

"So you're not planning on giving yourself up to your little friends and admitting to working with us, then."

"I—you—that isn't the point! The point is, I'm done feeding you information. I already know you're not going to hunt down and kill the people I love because that means you'd lose your leverage, and you can't do that, now, can you?"

"And you can't pull out without making room for the very real possibility that we will blow your cover and everyone you love will exile you. Leverage works both ways, Pettigrew."

He glares at her, and she just grins in his face. He's managed to avoid her for the last month since Mary's disastrous wedding shower, but she must be tracking his and Emmeline's schedules or something because Carrow has shown up five minutes after Peter got home from the Ministry on a day that Scrivenshaft's is holding Em back late. "I'll give you a piece of information," Carrow says snidely. "All the captures your people made? Look them up. You'll find what you're looking for in tomorrow's Daily Prophet."

"Get out of here," Peter hisses.

She puts up her hands in mock surrender, then grabs her wand and turns on the spot. Good timing, too: Carrow has barely left the place when Em Apparates in. "What's up? You look freaked out."

Peter shakes his head. "I'm fine," he insists, when in reality he's anything but.

Emmeline just sighs at him. "If it's about Hyatt, you can tell me, you know. I know you took it especially hard, but we're all in the same storm here."

She's walking towards him now and stops so close he can make out her individual eyelashes. "Let's not talk about it," he says, and he kisses her.

Every time he touches her, it feels like the first time, back in sixth year when Peter had just figured out her parents were dead and she wanted to—thank him, or whatever. She kind of melts into it, and when she pulls back, she's breathing heavily. "Bedroom?"

"Bedroom," Peter agrees.

They've done this enough times by now that Peter's starting to get the hang of it, and he allows himself some blessed freedom from his thoughts for the hour that he's in there with her, as if he isn't a traitor and he can, in fact, have nice things. It all comes flooding back, of course, when they're lying in bed afterwards, Em's head on his chest and blankets everywhere. It always comes back, and so does Carrow, and so does Peter's pathetic inability to stand up for himself and do the right thing.

"You okay?" asks Emmeline.

He grins at her and raises his lips to her forehead. "I'm excellent. Truly magnificent."

She laughs. Peter has never thought of himself as a good liar, but this business with Carrow has him reevaluating all sorts of things he once thought about himself, it seems.

Because he can't get caught. If someone catches him in a lie and discovers the truth—but Peter just can't afford to think like that.

After they've rested for a while, Em grabs her novel from her bedside table, and Peter fetches his guitar. They end up sitting together in bed with Em's head in Peter's lap, down by his knees, so that he has room to play. "You're really getting better at that," she remarks about ten minutes later as she flips a page.

"Thanks."

"Are there words to that song? Have you ever practiced singing much?"

"There are, and I haven't."

"Go on, then. You never know until you try, right?"

"I'm probably going to be terrible," Peter argues.

"I don't mind."

She puts down her book, sits up, and scoots around so that she's sitting at his side with her body facing his at an angle. "Here goes nothing," mutters Peter, and he starts to play.

"Oh, the sun is surely sinking down, but the moon is slowly rising, so this old world must still be spinning 'round, and I still love you. So close your eyes—you can close your eyes, it's all right. I don't know no love songs, and I can't sing the blues anymore, oh, but I can sing this song, and you can sing this song when I'm gone."

He strums through the end of the chorus and then taps his hand over the strings covering the sound hole to quiet them. "That's it?" asks Emmeline, sounding—disappointed?

"There's another verse and chorus, but that's all you're getting," scowls Peter.

She leans forward and engulfs him in an embrace. "That was beautiful."

"I suck."

"You do not suck. What song was that?"

"It's by James Taylor; have I ever mentioned his music? I'm on a bit of a streak."

"Is that a Muggle?"

"Yeah, he's a Muggle, but he's just as good."

"I never said he wasn't," says Emmeline. "My best friend the musician. Fancy that."

Peter doesn't know if he counts as more than just Em's best friend now—they haven't really discussed labels—but who the hell else is either of them going to sleep with? "Em, am I your boyfriend?" he asks quietly.

She settles her head comfortably against his shoulder. "Do you want to be my boyfriend?"

"I don't know. It's weird to think of you as anything other than my best friend, but I suppose we could be both things."

"If we're going to put a name to it," says Em, "it should be because that name fits us, not because we're trying to use words that make sense to people outside of us. So I guess that's the question: do we call it dating because that's what we're doing, or do we not call it dating because that's just what it looks like to everybody else?"

Peter shrugs. "I just don't want to end up like Sirius and Marlene used to be in fifth year, you know, where they're both getting hurt because they aren't calling themselves boyfriend and girlfriend."

"Do you really think what we're doing is like what they were doing?"

"No," he admits, "but I… I mean, I don't want to be with anybody but you, and I don't want to be anything but up front about that."

She smiles. "I don't want to be with anybody but you, either."

"So—I guess that means we could try those words out and see if they fit? 'Boyfriend' and 'girlfriend,' I mean."

"My boyfriend, Peter Pettigrew. Sounds about right to me."

He grins and leans in to kiss her again, and she says, "Now let go of me. Don't let me get in the way of your playing."

xx

He's in bed with Emmeline that night when they come for him. He wakes up when he hears a crack in the living room, but it happens so fast, and is followed by such quiet, that he thinks he must have imagined it. He's drifting back off to sleep by the time his bedroom door opens and a hand claps over Peter's mouth.

"Mmh—" He tries to kick out to get Emmeline up, so that she'll wake up and see what's happening and get herself to safety before they grab her, too, but nobody grabs her—instead, there's another crack, and Peter feels himself being Side-Along Apparated away. He doesn't recognize the room they materialize into: it's got blank walls, no furniture, a fireplace along the far wall, and a hardwood floor that creaks underneath their weight.

The person who brought him here is wearing a mask, but he can already tell it's Carrow underneath of it. "You can come out from under that," he spits. He tries to Disapparate, but he hasn't got his wand on him. He's wearing a pair of briefs and nothing else, but his heart is racing too hard for him to bother feeling too embarrassed.

She pulls the mask off, shaking out her long black hair. He tries to make a grab for her wand, but she ducks out of reach and, waving it once, binds him in ropes from head to toe.

He knows it's pointless to struggle, but he struggles anyway. Carrow cackles and drums her fingers against her wand. "Here's how this is going to work," she says gleefully. "I'm giving you thirty seconds to talk before I start to lop off your toes one by one. Clock starts now, Petey-boy. One… two… three…"

To Peter's credit, he actually makes it all the way to thirty. But then Carrow slashes her wand, and some of the worst pain he's ever known sears through his left foot, and it's all over.

The whole exchange only takes a couple of minutes. All in all, he wasn't missing his big toe long enough that Carrow can't reattach it, and she does so after he's told her all he can. She ducks out for a moment and then reappears carrying a pot of Floo powder. "See you next week," she says with a gleam in her eyes as she passes him a handful.

When he stumbles back into his bedroom back at home, he doesn't think he'll ever stop shaking. Emmeline stirs and looks up, blinking wildly. "What's the matter?" she slurs.

"Nothing. Just needed the loo," Peter says with an unconvincing smile.

But Emmeline is still halfway asleep and doesn't seem lucid enough to spot the lie. She rolls over onto her other side and has started snoring by the time Peter crawls in behind her. His arms tremble as he wraps them around her.

In the morning, she doesn't seem to remember anything, kissing Peter good morning and smiling broadly at him. "Stay right there," she says. "I'll fetch us some breakfast."

He feels like a sack of shit. It occurs to him with a sharp pain that Carrow managed to weasel information out of Peter no longer by threatening his friends but instead by threatening him. He wonders what it says about him that that he could be so self-serving.

James wouldn't have caved in, he tells himself. Remus would have let them lop both his whole legs off and still wouldn't have talked. Sirius never would have gotten himself into this situation in the first place…

There's another crack in the living room, and it startles Peter so badly that he thinks he's right back there last night with Carrow Apparating into his flat. He's cowering in bed with the blankets pulled over him when the bedroom door swings open.

"Peter? You okay under there?" says a voice. Alice's.

Sheepishly, he peels back the covers and reemerges. "Oh, hey, Alice. What's up?"

"Have you seen the Prophet this morning?"

He shakes his head. He and Em have a subscription, but it's always a crapshoot to see if you're at the beginning of the Prophet's delivery queue or the end of it. He distantly remembers Carrow telling him something yesterday evening about watching out for the paper this morning, and he braces himself for the worst. She's not going to out Peter or something, is she?

Alice extends a hand, and Peter takes the paper and scans the headline. All Charges Cleared for Wizards under Imperius Curse. Oh, no.

Oh, no, no, no.

"'In a landmark move, the Wizengamot has cleared all charges for no fewer than fifty-three wizards captured in the past several months on apprehension of being among the ranks of the Death Eaters—followers of You-Know-Who who primarily operate by torturing and killing Muggles and Muggle-born wizards. Most of the arrests were made after the interference of renegade wizards who intercepted the perceived Death Eaters during attacks on Muggles and Muggle-borns.' Is this for real? All those captures we made—all those Muggles we saved—and we haven't even been stopping the right people?"

"I know," says Alice. "It's like they're… I don't know, baiting us. It's like they're messing with us just to wind us up and remind us that they have all the power."

"I can't," says Emmeline, popping out of the kitchen and back into the bedroom doorway. "I mean, it counts for something that we stopped all those innocent people from being tortured, doesn't it? I mean, even if the Imperiused wizards weren't aiming to kill them…"

"We're going to have to reevaluate our whole strategy," Alice says, taking the Prophet back from Peter. "Dumbledore wants to start us working on a spell to identify at a glance whether someone is under the Imperius Curse or not. We'll start there."

"We should have known," Peter sighs. "All those captures we made. They were too easy—we got too lucky. It was too good to be true, and we should have known that."

Alice shakes her head, her lips pursed. "Can I tell Dorcas that either of you will work on the spell? So far it's me and Sirius and Fabian."

"I'll help," says Em, but Peter shakes his head. He felt like he was useless trying to contribute to the Sectumsempra countercurse earlier this fall; he's never been the best at magic, and he doesn't want to put him in a position to just feel like he's in the way.

Fifty-three witches and wizards. Peter thinks he's going to be sick.