A/N: I own nothing. Lyrics belong to Kate Nash.
mary macdonald & peter pettigrew
"…Do you know what he tried to do to Mary Macdonald the other day?"
Yeah, you make me merry
You make me very, very, very happy
But obviously you didn't want to stick around
So I learnt from you
They weren't in love (Mary didn't know if she believed in love, anyway). But they understood each other. And in these times, that mattered (Hell, it had always mattered to her). She didn't know if the others knew what they did together when everyone else was at Quidditch games (and to be perfectly honest she didn't much care), and she just kept pretending like they were friends (Because they were just friends).
She stood up for him, sometimes, when the boys got too caught up in making fun of him (because they made fun of everyone, and even Lily wasn't exempt from that), and he sent her a grateful look that said Thanks, even though I wish you didn't have to do that. He was brave, Peter, even if he didn't look it. Marlene laughed at Mary, and asked her what she saw in him and even though Mary laughed along, really she thought the others were blind (but they were just friends anyway).
It was him that found her when Mulciber and his cronies ganged up on her (and she doesn't want to think about that day again, thanks), and he held her all the way back to the Common Room. It was Peter who yelled at Lily about the sort of company she kept, even though Mary knew it wasn't Lily's fault (but it felt nice for someone to stick up for her, and besides, someone had to tell Lily what they were all thinking).
Mary hated Peter's nickname, and she didn't understand why he put up with it, but he gave her a look that said There a lot of things you don't understand about me, and she wondered now if that was when she'd first started losing him. Peter had never had walls, not like Remus, and not like Black, and she liked that about him (that was why they were friends, because it was easy and nice, and she felt happy with him). But slowly, he built them up, and they never did their homework together anymore, and he sat with Remus at breakfast, and she waited for him to owl all holidays (but he never did), and she wasn't stupid so she didn't think he was just going to change back again one day (and she wished that she could say she didn't mind).
She had other friends, but no one was quite as curious as Peter, or quite as willing to forgive her dreadful jokes, and no one hugged her quite as tightly as he did. (They were just friends, even if they had done things friends didn't do, and she couldn't make herself hate him for that).
Still, they had years and years ahead of them, and she wasn't silly enough to get upset because he wanted to hang around with different people (even if said people were loud and brash, and not her sort of people at all).
They had never been in love, they were just friends (even if no one commented when they stopped sitting in the Common Room together).