Peter Apparates into the alley behind a building two blocks from Caroline's, not sure how unkindly she and Dick would take to hearing the bang of his arrival any closer than that or, god forbid, watching him show up in the middle of Caroline's flat without so much as a knock on the door. Honestly, he doesn't know if his two older siblings even know about magic. He doesn't know how they feel about most things, given that Peter and his twin brother were born a good three decades after Caroline, and almost as long after Dick. They weren't in the house with him growing up before he turned eleven and went away to Hogwarts, and they didn't even come round for tea occasionally they way you'd think grown children would do for their folks.
He casts a furtive look around, but nobody seems to be there in the alley or peeking through their windows to have spotted his arrival, so he straightens up and breaks into a brisk walk. He feels nervous most of the time these days—not that he wasn't also a nervous kid, because he totally was, but it's even worse now that You-Know-Who is gaining on them and it feels like it's all Peter's fault. He knows that's not right: he jumped ship because the Death Eaters are winning; he didn't make that happen all by himself. Still, he's a piece of shit, and he knows it, and he keeps waiting for everybody else to find out and hate him for it. He wonders if he's going to get thrown in Azkaban when he gets caught. Threatening, but even that would be better than getting murdered by pureblood nutters for having been part of the resistance when this is all over.
Caroline's flat is on the third and top story of a building with cobwebs lining the firehouse-red bricks and white cement steps of its exterior. Peter has never been here before, and he keeps comparing door numbers to the number he scrawled on the palm of his hand when Caroline called last night to invite him to this. It almost scrubbed off in the shower this morning, and he keeps squinting at it like he doesn't believe what it's telling him, his gaze tilting back and forth between his hand and the door when he finally reaches what he thinks is the correct apartment.
He's the only wizard he knows to own a phone. It was probably silly of him to think that enough people from his old life would even want to call him up some of the time to warrant buying the thing, but, hey, Caroline obviously cared enough to get Peter's number from Dad and invite him to this thing, didn't she? Maybe she and Dick want to make Peter a meaningful part of their lives now that he's an adult and not hidden away at Hogwarts out of their reach. Or maybe they just want somebody else in the room to agree with them as they're bashing Dad.
Dick is the one who answers the door, a beer in one hand and the other on the black doorframe. "Hey, man, thanks for coming. Get in here so we can look at you properly."
Peter follows him in, feeling thoroughly objectified. "Wow, you got old," Caroline calls from the sofa where she's twisted her upper body so she can look at him.
"I'm sorry?"
"No, it's a good thing. Means you don't have to take anybody's shit anymore." But Caroline doesn't know to whom Peter is reporting the Order's every move.
Caroline and Dick are both about fifty years old, and they both look like older versions of Peter, short and squat and pasty-faced. Neither of them takes after their mom, who is long and lean with a sloping nose and thin lips, according to the one picture of her that Peter found in with Dad's old things when he was snooping at age seven. Just looking at them, you'd almost think that they and Peter share two parents instead of one, like Peter and his brother Jasper aren't Dad's way of making a new family with a new wife and fixing the mistake he made having children the first time around. As sorry as Peter feels for himself sometimes, he thinks Caroline and Dick's mum got the rawest deal: she gets cancer, and he not only goes ahead with the summer tour he'd been planning but serves her with divorce papers the minute he gets home.
Of course, that was when Dad was deep in his heroin addiction, and one could argue that Dad wasn't capable back then of caring about anything other than the drugs. On the other hand, if he was able to care enough about his music to maintain a busy, taxing, and successful career, he should have been able to care about his wife and children.
It occurs to Peter not infrequently that, if Dad had stayed with his first wife when she'd gotten sick and asked him to cut back on his job to be with family, Peter wouldn't ever have been born. The thought should chill him, but really, he thinks that would have been a better way.
"Listen, listen, I think it's starting," says Caroline, and Peter and Dick retreat further into the living room to where Caroline is turning up the volume on her color TV. Onscreen, the lights have all gone out, and the cheering seems to be intensifying.
The first notes they hear are Dad's signature guitar picking. "You ever notice how the guitar on all his songs sounds the same?" says Dick. When the drums kick in, Dad walks out from behind the curtain. Caroline flings a handful of popcorn at the television; it rains down Dad's smiling face and falls to the floor as he starts to sing.
"So you've done this before?" Peter asks.
"Every time he's on television," says Dick.
"Or radio," Caroline adds.
"Caroline derives some sort of sick pleasure out of feeling like she's been connected to Dad in any kind of meaningful way since she was fourteen."
"It's not sick, and I'm not doing it to feel close to him."
"Oh, really? Why do you do it, then?"
"Why do you do it?"
Peter doesn't really care—isn't really curious—just hopes that neither of them starts asking him why he accepted Caroline's invitation to come here today. If he were being truly honest with himself, he'd admit that he's trying to find somewhere he belongs. Let's face it: his parents and twin haven't known how to handle themselves around him since he got his Hogwarts letter, and the Marauders—Peter's ruined everything with them, even if they don't know it yet.
But Peter isn't honest with himself, not ever, not anymore, so he shoves the thought down and laughs as Caroline tosses more popcorn Dick's way.
It gets worse about thirty seconds into the song, when Jasper and the other backup singers emerge onstage, and Peter is reminded just how much Jasper is Dad's favorite son. Jasper was the good boy who taught himself violin and vocals from a young age, went to a proper Muggle school with math and science and writing, and got picked to join Dad on tour, where Dad could show him off as the favorite son, the model child. Dad had no time or love for Peter from the moment he came home from his first year at Hogwarts, up to his eyes in magic that he couldn't even do without cheating off of Remus. It seems that when you're famous, you can't have your wizard child and his sketchy educational background in the public eye, so Dad stopped talking about Peter in public and dodged any questions to his whereabouts without giving a name to his school.
Peter had never had any talent at singing, but he'd been pretty good at piano for an eleven-year-old before he got whisked away to magic school, where there wasn't a keyboard in sight. By the time he got back home the following June, he was almost ten months out of practice and didn't have enough time to get it back before it was time to leave again. And so on.
He wonders what Mom thinks about all this—about who Dad used to be when he wasn't even bothering to be a dad to Dick or Caroline, when his only loves were heroin and performing for a crowd. Dad's wife had to beat cancer alone, and his second wife got Dad clean only for Dad to dump her, too. Sometimes Peter feels like he's just waiting for Dad to leave Mom, wife number three, too—that he's going to try to come back home to visit one day only for Mom to be gone, discarded like her predecessors.
Then again, who is he kidding? Peter hasn't visited home since he was seventeen years old the summer before his last year at Hogwarts. He was still in school when he lined himself up a flat so that he could go straight from the castle to his own place without nary a look back at the mansion in Abergavenny where he grew up.
By now, Jasper has started to sing, too. Caroline and Dick are talking animatedly over the sound. Popcorn litters the floor.
And Peter asks himself again: what is he doing here? He doesn't belong with these people. They share his last name and nothing else. Peter grew up with Dad's love and affection right up until he became a wizard and traded in his piano for a wand and a castle where Dad's disappointment couldn't reach him. He's never had to compete with a drug addiction or choose between warring parents. Dad never had contempt for Peter the way Caroline and Dick say he resented them for holding back his career: the moment Peter disappointed him, he went away to school and never came back, not really.
He doesn't fit in with Dick and Caroline any more than he fits in with Mom, Dad, Jasper—hell, even his friends from the Order. When they find out what he's done—
He wonders whether his loyalty to the Death Eaters will be enough for You-Know-Who to spare Peter's family when the new world order comes. Maybe Peter should be snatching away the popcorn and warning them, telling him he loves them, telling them to tell Dad they love him—anything, because right now they're sitting ducks and he can hardly stand the sight of them. But what good would it do to tell them about You-Know-Who? They can't defend themselves, and Peter isn't a good enough wizard to defend them, either. It seems cruel to Peter to make them suffer knowledge for nothing.
"He's not a bad person," Peter eventually says. Dick and Caroline both look at him. "Dad's not a bad person. I know bad people, and he's not one of them."
Dad isn't, but Peter might be, and that's just something he's going to have to live with.
