Title: Fight, Flight & Freeze

Characters: Peter Pettigrew, James Potter, Sirius Black and Remus Lupin.

Prompts: Necrophobia – The fear of death.

AN: Written for the Phobias Challenge/ Competition held by DolbyDigital at Harry Potter Fanfiction Challenges. Minimum 900 words, maximum 3, 000.

Peter is slightly AU in this one as always. I know that not everyone has heard of freeze. It wasn't there to begin with but it was added later on. It's pretty much like playing dead.

Warning: Mention of death, more specifically the fear of dying.

Word Count: 965

Fight, flight and freeze. It is a term referring to the body's reactions to danger. It's the physical reactions, the beating of the heart and the rush of adrenaline, the quickened breathing and the blood rushing to your legs, arms and your heart; it's the psychological reactions, the way that the mind works to find the threat and then determine what you should do about it.

These reactions mimic those of animals. Every animal, every individual, acts in a certain way depending on their abilities. Some have size, strength, claws and fangs which allow them to fight back. Some have the speed to run away. While others realise that they are not strong or fast; hence, they do what they can to protect themselves. In the animal kingdom you often use one. It would have been good if that could be applied to humans. Sadly, using a coping mechanism often was not the same as using it all the time.

James Potter, at the age of sixteen, used mostly the fight response when he felt threatened. Peter had seen him stand face to face with some mean Slytherin more than once and knew what James looked like when that happened. His raven-coloured, constantly messy hair, made him look defiant and his hazel eyes would be duller from displeasure of listening to whomever it was trying to get under his skin. He was a muscular guy from all the hours of playing quidditch and knew that he could take most people at school if needed to.

Sirius Black, at the age of seventeen, while being argumentative disliked fighting. But he didn't flee in the traditional sense of the word either. Peter had never seen his best friend turn away from a fight to run from the scene. No, he would be looking at the person in front of him as if that person was beneath him. It was, almost always, pureblood fanatics picking fights with him so Peter understood why he would do that. His brown hair, most of the time, hung gracefully around his neck. His shirt was pulled halfway up and revealed his skinny arms. He wasn't as muscular as James; naturally, since he didn't spend hours upon hours playing quidditch. While James went straight forward; Sirius stood back and taunted whomever his mind had identified as a potential threat. He didn't need to actually fight anyone.

Remus Lupin fled. He would almost always be, or end up, a few steps behind Sirius and James with Peter standing next to him. Due to their close proximity Peter saw every facial expression on the sixteen-year olds face. His sandy-blond hair was not like James', always messy, or Sirius, always perfect. His green eyes went back and forth between concern for his friends and anger for being in that position. And the closer you got to the full moon, the more defensive the teenager began looking. But he rarely did anything other than allow the other two boys to handle the issue at hand. Peter remember asking him why and hearing Remus say that he liked feeling in control. Peter didn't feel any need to ask his friend to develop that answer further.

Then there was Peter. What separated him from the other three were that they went back and forth between the different coping mechanisms. If needed, they could all fight whatever threat they faced. Peter, on the other hand, couldn't fight anything.

The young boy with the brown hair cut in various different lengths either froze or fled. He was never strong enough to fight anyone, neither in his human form or animagus, and even though he wasn't fast enough to run away from someone in his human form that didn't stop Peter from trying if he needed to. He was much smaller than his friends and had the nervous habit of biting his nails when he was stressed. People telling him that his nails looked ugly or that it was a terrible habit to have didn't make him want to stop or even try to stop. The only ones who never said anything about it were his friends. James, Sirius and Remus never commented on his habit; possibly because they rarely saw it in action. Peter could count on one hand how many times he had been afraid with them around him. Not counting during the nights and he believed that it would be unfair to do so.

His fingers, or nails more exactly, always seemed to find their way to his mouth during the night when he was surrounded by his best friends and the biggest threat that Peter's mind could identify. The teenager didn't understand how his mind could find that particular threat but it did and for some reason Peter would often lay awake fearing death.

Consciously he would try to snap out of it and tell himself that there was no reason to be afraid. He shouldn't think about things that he couldn't control. But that rarely stopped his mind from worrying and wondering about what was going to happen; when was it going to happen? He would lay awake, listening to his friends as they laid unknowingly in their beds, and feel a paralysing fear about not waking up the next day or about the fact that he would one day close his eyes and lose consciousness for the last time. Sometimes he froze; he would just lay still and wait for it to be over. Sometimes he fled; he got up from bed and shakily left the room.

Fight, flight and freeze. Three ways of defending ourselves against danger. They were supposed to work against any danger identified but Peter realised that they didn't always work. No coping mechanism could defend him from the fear of dying.

The end