Chapter Two- Peter
Sirius' apartment was unchanged from how he'd left it two weeks ago. It smelled stale and there was a thin layer of dust covering all surfaces, and his locks and all the clever detection spells he'd put in place to know when his home was entered were still unbroken.
On the desk and on his shelves were all the little false clues and red herrings he'd casually left to throw anyone looking off his scent. There was the detailed map of a piece of land in Patagonia he'd put on his desk, as if he'd packed hastily and left it forgotten. There was the survival handbook with the pages about mountainous areas ripped out, as if he'd thought those were the only pages relevant. He'd enjoyed laying a false trail. Peter had helped him.
"You should leave a 'Beginner's guide to pan flute playing' too, Padfoot." Pete had said, grinning. "To really hammer home the message you've gone for South America." They had laughed about it. They'd come up with increasingly ridiculous ideas to 'accidentally' give away a false location. It had felt like planning a prank.
The rat, a ratting rat.
His mind had sunk its teeth into those words and now refused to let them go. He'd always had that focus on a single idea, a single problem to solve that would return in his mind over and over until he'd found a solution. He'd wondered at times if not his father was the same, that somehow his mind had gotten stuck on "toujour pur" and never found its way out of it. He'd wondered what would have happened to him if James had not found him on that first train ride to Hogwarts and had chosen to adopt.
The rat, a ratting rat.
Peter had stood here in this room and helped him lay a false trail that he'd known would never be used. He'd stood here and made tea as he watched Sirius prepare for an unnecessary trip. Because Sirius had already given all the information he'd hoped to withhold from the Dark Lord to one of his followers. He'd already been milked dry.
The ratting rat.
James would snap his fingers at this point. "You're gone again." He'd say.
"I was thinking." Sirius said to the empty room.
"About Peter?" James would understand what was going through Sirius' mind. He would amplify it, sharpen it, add his own ideas and then invite Remus and Peter to join in.
"About Peter." Sirius said, the name a curse.
Or James would distract him, nudge Sirius' train of thought from the round track it was on and into something else. Present a different problem, out of the darkness, into the light.
There was no one who could change Sirius' mind as easily as James could.
But James was dead.
The rat, a ratting rat.
He found what he was looking for on the top of his bookcase. A cracked spine and a worn dustjacket, this edition of the Advanced Book of Spells had suffered from spending seven years in Sirius' schoolbag. He'd gotten it at the start of his first year alongside the Standard one, because he'd figured he'd soon be bored. It had been in the days before his home life had come crashing down, back when his father was still proud of his eldest son and heir that would soon attend Hogwarts, and granted him everything he wanted. Sirius had gotten rid of most of what his parents had given him in his early puberty, eager to declare his independence whenever he could. All that remained had been left when he'd fled the family house one summer when he'd found he could either break or leave. But not this book. This book he'd kept, because of the annotations he'd made during his school years. Now his fingers leafed through the yellowed pages until he'd found what he was looking for.
Peter's handwriting was on the page, right next to James' and Sirius had to steady his hand, close his eyes and then skip past either comment to read his own. This was back when they'd made the Marauders' map. There were spells here that could help with what he had to do. He found a useful comment by Remus first, and then found what he had been looking for.
It took him a moment to prepare. He'd never been the artist of the group and Remus had been the one to carefully draw the map. But he could sketch Britain in a rudimentary form and that was all he really needed for what he was about to do. He expected that he would not need to draw the world, but since nothing he'd known about Peter had turned out to be accurate, he'd left some space. He took out his wand and cast the spell he'd found and slowly but surely a tiny black dot appeared on the hastily drawn map, labeled Peter Pettigrew.
Sirius got up, searched his bookshelves for a while until he'd found his old battered version of London's A to Omega (which greatly resembled the muggle A to Z but included the wizarding streets). Carefully, Sirius nudged the dot on the hand drawn map over to the cover of the street guide with his wand, and there the labeled dot sank into the pages.
Sirius began turning them over until he'd found the dot once more. For a while he stared at it, watching the dot move down a street and into another. Then he closed the guide and put it in his pocket.
"Ready or not.." he mumbled into the empty apartment before he'd apparated away.
He blinked as he landed, not expecting such a crowded street. He'd expected to find Peter alone, like the lone dot on the map. Too used to the Marauder's map to tell him exactly who'd be there. A stupid mistake, a beginner's mistake. Dumbledore would frown at him when he found out.
There were Muggles everywhere making their way across the streets all heading places even on a sunday morning. Sirius should have known. Paddington station was nearby, of course there would be people.
So what did Peter think; that he could hide in the crowd?
Sirius was a dog, he'd sniff him out. He had the map. He had his wand. He had his teeth if need be. Unforgivable curses only work if you really mean them, but there was no doubt in Sirius' mind that his would work now. He felt his resolve like something hard inside him, he could feel it in his jaw, something hard and cold like steel.
The rat, a ratting rat.
He turned his head slowly, scanning the crowd and then he spotted the flash of mousy brown hair and the unathletic figure of a man. Peter had lost weight this past year, but not much of it.
Not enough to outrun Sirius, if it came to it.
Sirius started walking towards him, and the crowd, perhaps sensing something of the predator inside, parted ways to let him through.
His wand ready, Sirius followed Peter as the wizard cut through the muggle crowd. He waited for that moment that Pettigrew would turn and realize his time had come. He'd wait for Peter to get his wand, he'd give him that.
But he would not give him a chance.
Not for ratting on James.
Not ever.
" Peter." Sirius said.
Pettigrew turned.
"MURDERER!" Peter shouted, tears in his eyes, his finger accusingly pointed at Sirius.
Sirius took a step back.
What?
"LILY AND JAMES, SIRIUS!" Peter shouted, still crying. "HOW COULD YOU?!"
Some hope rose inside Sirius. Perhaps this was all a misunderstanding after all. Perhaps someone had been listening in on them, someone else, some way.
"No, wait. Peter…"
Muggles stopped and turned, watching the scene.
Peter was sobbing on the street.
"YOU BETRAYED YOUR BEST FRIENDS! THEY TRUSTED YOU!"
"Pete, no, I…" Sirius lowered his wand.
And then he spotted it, the small twitch at the edge of Peter's mouth. The hidden laugh Wormtail always showed when a prank had played out exactly how he wanted it to.
And suddenly the world turned to chaos. In one terrible second the street exploded, windows shattered, debris started falling from the house-fronts. People screamed and started running, but not all of them. Several Muggles had fallen down, there was blood on the ground, people trying to crawl away from the scene. One woman in red shoes lay on the floor with open unseeing eyes, a young man lay face flat on the pavement. Pettigrew grinned and cut off his own finger in the split second it took Sirius to shoot his spell. It hit nothing. Where Pettigrew had previously been standing was now only a pile of bloodied clothes. The sewers were laid bare by the explosion, there were pipes everywhere, and to add to the chaos, water started sprouting from one of them and drenched the street.
Sirius stood and stared. The steel resolve that had kept him going up till this point was gone. His wand had fallen out of his fingers.
In Sirius' mind there were only two things you could do, when you knew you'd been defeated.
You could either fall apart and let them kick you while you were down, or you could stand tall and laugh about it.
And so he threw his head back and laughed, laughed as hard as he could.
It wasn't happy.
It may not be sane.
But at least it kept him standing.
