Fic: Memory, Awake (Rating: R)
Almost done with the mini-rant/mini-rave thing (which isn't very rantish, to be honest)--I only have one more to do, on either Crowley/Aziraphale or Snupin.
In other news, my beta finished beta-ing. Thank you, quinby.
The story combines three challenges from hp_literotica--an unsympathetic character (July 2004), cold weather (December 2004) and unrequited love (February 2005). And it does contain all these elements: a roundly disliked character; winter; even love that isn't returned, though it's not romantic or sexual love by any stretch of the imagination. It fulfills all of the challenges without being in any way...well...erotic.
The title comes from an Emily Dickinson poem: "Remorse is memory, awake."
Disclaimer: This story is based on characters and situations created and owned by J.K. Rowling, various publishers including but not limited to Bloomsbury Books, Scholastic Books and Raincoast Books, and Warner Bros., Inc. No money is being made and no copyright or trademark infringement is intended.
***
Dumbledore would probably be surprised, but he hates his arms. He hates them for being like himself, thin and pale and above all, weak. He loathes the left one, emblazoned with the Morsmordre. Oh, God, so much more than a tattoo. He can feel the spell sometimes, biting deep into his muscles and blood and bone, can sense the taint devouring his mind as if the Dark Mark were a malignant tumour. There are times when he senses the stain spreading like cruel contagion across his soul.
If he even has a soul any more.
More than that, he hates his left arm for bearing the emblem of his deepest failure--his breaking.
The memories of that time have seeped into his bones. He cringes in psychosomatic pain when someone even mentions the Cruciatus Curse. Just the word is enough to trigger the response to the spell.
He knows how Crucio works; no Death Eater knows better. The spell stimulates the pain centre of the brain, telling it, 'Your bones are being crushed, your muscles ripped out, your skin flayed off, your nerve endings dipped in acid.'
Three minutes of this can drive a man into permanent, screaming insanity.
How many times? He doesn't know. His memories, mercifully, are blurred.
And Carna Corruptis. The Death Eaters had made a game of that, rotting off his arms and legs, healing them at the last possible moment so that they could start the game all over again.
And then there was Terratis, which had transformed him into a non-human monster that still bore a grotesque resemblance to himself.
Bellatrix, he recalls, liked that one. And used it. Repeatedly.
Solid illusions of the corpses of his friends. Then the real, twisted and bloody corpses of his sisters. The certainty that he would not be allowed the peace of death; that if he were left a cripple, a mindless vegetable, a grotesque freak, the Death Eaters would keep him alive for half-past forever. And the Dark Lord, clawing open his mind with black, rending talons of thought, ripping away knowledge, shredding memories, until oh there was nothing oh god stop but pain stop stop please and horror please stop I can't I can't please and a nightmare that never ended stop stop I'll do anything whatever you want only stop.
He had babbled his allegiance to the Dark Lord, thinking that he could surely control what he said about innocents and the Order. Lie, his mind had said, tell him what he wants to hear and then get out of here.
"Do you consent to serve me freely? Then be free no longer."
And then the world became pain. White, merciless pain. It burned and tore, like a red-hot icepick in the brain, and it was part of him and it was him and there was nothing anywhere that wasn't agony and part of this agony...
He never knew if he had passed out screaming.
When he awoke, there was an empty hollow in his will. He couldn't kill his new owner. He couldn't kill himself to escape. He could, and would, hunger for both forever.
He'd tested this, at least at the beginning. He might as well have saved himself the effort. Part of his will had been burned away.
He knows he shouldn't resent the fact that his friends--his former friends, he corrects himself--never realised he was missing. He's gathered, over the years, that some anonymous Death Eater had been Polyjuiced into his likeness. He's aware that Polyjuice re-shapes people--not only physically, but mentally, so that thoughts and behaviour become, in large part, the thoughts and behaviour of the person being magically mimicked. He knows it isn't really his friends' fault that they didn't notice differences that weren't there. He realises that that the Morsmordre provides its own special protection to the bearer, creating the illusion that nothing is wrong, that this person couldn't possibly be a Death Eater, that everything is normal and fine fine fine.
He knows that he can't blame anyone.
But he does, anyway.
He indulges himself with that small amount of self-pity. After all, whatever negligence others committed, he was guilty--is guilty--of far worse.
He doesn't know how many deaths he's been indirectly responsible for, or how many valiant and optimistic members of the Order were cursed into dust because of him. He tries not to think about it, to shove the ugly, writhing memories into iron-bound trunks and padlocked chests in a mental attic, lock them away, and then deliberately lose the key to the attic as well.
At night, though, the memories escape their daylight prisons and become ghosts. Not the pale, translucent, amiable ghosts of Hogwarts, either. No, these spectres are solid, meaty creatures, more alive (and, he suspects, more human) than he is at this point. They are well-armed with curses and cudgels and scalpel-like knives; and each night, they vivisect him in his dreams. Every night, he breaks again beneath the torture of the Death Eaters, and each time it is the first time. Each night, the vicious curses that he's afflicted others with rip and rend him until there is nothing left of him but bloody bones.
And every night he sees James's face turn white as he realises that the young man in front of him is the traitor. He sees himself lifting the Dark Lord's wand in response to a hissed order to torture James, break him, break his mind, steal his will with the Imperius Curse, make him kill that Mudblood bitch he calls his wife and that half-breed brat, have him join us and proclaim his loyalty throughout the land, it'll shatter them all, destroy the Order, they'll never know who to trust again, go ON, Wormtail...
Murder had seemed like a cleaner end for his friend than the one the Dark Lord had ordained.
Six syllables. Two words. Then it was over.
He doesn't remember what happened to the wand. Presumably the Dark Lord had wrenched it out of his hand, muttered a few poisonous imprecations at him, and then flown upstairs. He recalls James's hazel eyes dulling and going blank; he remembers a terrible roaring silence and then the dreadful, final thud of James's body hitting the floor; he recollects kneeling beside his friend's body, stunned and sick as if someone had struck him in the stomach with a sledgehammer. He remembers swearing at the Dark Lord's damned Legilimancy for snatching the secret of the Potters' whereabouts from his memory. He recalls a tsunami of self-hatred battering at him and washing everything else away. He recalls a tight throat, and burning eyes, and wishing desperately that there were enough humanity left in him so that he could cry.
He didn't weep for James, then or ever.
Some things matter too much for tears.
Despite the cruelty of these dreams, he shuns potions like Dreamless Sleep. He doesn't like his nightmares, but they're just, they're fair. He deserves far worse. And fleeing from the memories would be the first step to denying what's he's done and who he's been. The last thing he wants is to be Wormtail the Death Eater full-time.
He's done enough running--as a newly turned traitor fleeing discovery, as a rat fleeing into a broken sewer, as a fugitive fleeing to the Continent. It never seems to work, and only ever seems to bring more trouble down on his head.
He's heard much of the speculation from the Death Eaters--he can't think of them as "the other Death Eaters"--about why the Dark Lord keeps him close. He's probably heard more than the pureblood supporters could wish; they forget that the Muggleborn baker's boy from Birmingham isn't deaf. Or perhaps they feel that he is safe--it's not as if he can raise the issue of their coarse commentary without raising the issue of his own treachery. His actions cost the Dark Lord his body. And he himself fled. For thirteen years.
He's heard the snickering and the jests about why the Dark Lord trusts him, or even endures his presence. He's heard the jokes about friends of Head Boys and how snakes love eating rat.
He could tell them that they're overcomplicating the issue, but why bother? Anyone with a grain of sense can see what was going on. The Dark Lord detests him, blaming him for the spell that backfired--and no matter that he had had no idea that a powerful wizard could be defeated by a toddler. The Dark Lord despises him even more for cowering in hiding, and for his craven flight two years ago from Sirius and Remus, who loathe him more than they do the Dark Lord.
Some of the more ignorant Death Eaters have cited Trelawney's second prophecy--for walls have ears, even at Hogwarts--as proof of his choice to rejoin the right side. The servant shall return to his master. Oh, indeed, if returning meant flinging himself out of the frying pan and blundering into the fire. The Dark Lord and that accursed snake had discovered him in the Black Forest; he'd had no desire to meet either.
He'd stayed, hoping for a chance, any chance, to escape his hated master and that ever-watchful snake.
He never found one.
Story of his life.
During that year, he attempted small rebellions--begging for the lives of Bertha Jorkins and the old Muggle caretaker. It did no good, of course. Both died pointlessly and in pain. He's not even sure why he begged. He's known since he was nineteen years old that the Dark Lord is blind to anything so benevolent as mercy.
Which is why he's alive. Mercy and the favour of the Dark Lord have nothing to do with it. His survival is punishment--punishment for a rebellion that only the Dark Lord and he know about.
'I want Harry's blood for the resurrection potion.'
'M-my Lord, no…you have other enemies... '
'Like you, my cowardly rat?'
'M--m-master…'
'Stop whimpering, Wormtail. You are missing the point. Other enemies can supply me with their blood. But only Harry Potter can provide me with his blood and his death at the same time.'
'I don't--'
'On the night of the ritual, you will cut his throat. His blood will restore me. And as I am being reborn, he will die.'
He'd protested. It was impractical, dangerous, and fraught with risk. There was no point in taking a chance like this.
He'd said that, and yet they'd both known that he wasn't protesting for sensible, realistic-minion reasons. Part of it had been the bond between himself and Harry. Part of it--most of it--had been three years in Gryffindor as Scabbers, watching James's son grow up.
And, Merlin help him, he liked the boy.
He had no business liking Harry. None. Harry, he was sure, would be repulsed at the very thought.
But he remembered Harry as a baby, that was the thing. "Our Harry," Remus had called him, and "our Harry" he had been--the child of all of them, not just James and Lily. He recalled Sirius enchanting Harry's basket with Binding Charms so that the baby could ride on his flying motorcycle; Remus soothing a fretful and teething toddler; himself, carrying the child on his back as he searched for magical plants for the healing potions he was so good at. They'd all taken their turns feeding Harry, changing his nappies, reading him stories and sending him off to sleep, until Lily laughed and said that Harry seemed to have four fathers instead of one.
Clinging to these memories was stupid. Still loving the boy, fourteen years later, was even more stupid. Loving a child whose father he'd brutally murdered and whose mother he'd betrayed to her death was the most stupid, brainless thing of all.
Well, no one ever said he was smart.
And Sirius couldn't help. And Remus couldn't help. And James, thanks to him, was dead. So it was down to him.
A sorry champion for the potential saviour of the wizarding world to rely on.
His protests to the Dark Lord eventually bore fruit...of a sort. Though not of the kind desired.
'You seem determined to save Harry Potter, despite the fact that he is my enemy.' The Dark Lord turned to him, impaling him on that red-eyed gaze. 'Very well...you can save him. For a price.'
'...price, Lord?'
'Yes.' The Dark Lord--still in his "hideous baby" form--smiled; his face looked like the scaly, reddish-black skull of a snake baring gleaming fangs. 'You can spare the boy, if you wish. Take his blood from his arm or his leg--anything that won't kill him instantly. But if you do--well, you were raised Catholic, weren't you, Wormtail? You should know these words: "And if thy right hand offend thee, cut it off, and cast it from thee."
'Or you can spare yourself. Cut off a toe, or another finger. But if you choose to do that, you must kill the boy.
'Either way, I shall reward you as you deserve.
'Which will it be, Wormtail?'
He'd realised, even then, what the Dark Lord was asking of him. This went beyond simple maiming. Every wand movement he knew was for a wand held in a wizard's right hand. Left-handed wand movements were very different, and rarely mirrored their right-handed counterparts.
The Dark Lord was demanding that he sacrifice not only his right hand, but also his ability to use magic. If he did this, the Dark Lord would explode in rage on an instant...and he would be powerless to defend himself. Or Harry. He'd be helpless before his enemies again. Not to mention, probably expiring of a massive haemorrhage. He'd be dead in a matter of moments, and for what? So that Dark Lord could slit the boy's throat afterwards?
And he could give the boy an easy death. It would be a cleaner death than any the Dark Lord would be likely to give. It would spare Harry hellish pain, as no one had spared him.
The notion filled his mouth and mind with bitterness and bile and bleak, black, bone-crushing despair.
By the night of the ritual, he still hadn't decided what to do. No one would be shocked if he chose the practical rather than the idealistic. No one who mattered thought he had any ideals left.
For some reason, that only made him more obdurate. Maybe it was the memory of his days as part of James's crowd, when any of them would have considered it a cardinal sin to do something so banal as what was expected. Or perhaps he was simply reluctant to live down to Death Eater expectations.
He remembers little of that night. He supposes the Dark Lord gave him orders. He vaguely remembers an older boy arriving with Harry--a boy, he's been told, that he killed. He doesn't know if he did or not. He doesn't think he did--all he remembers is disposing of the body--but if he had been trying to convince the Dark Lord that he would kill Harry...oh, yes, it's more than possible.
In his memory, however, no one was in the cemetery save Harry, the Dark Lord and himself. He knows the Death Eaters were there, be-robed and bronze-masked, but he cannot recall any of them; his mind has excised them all, as a scalpel removes cysts.
When he thinks back, he remembers a storm out of Lovecraft and Poe. He remembers black thunderheads boiling with blue-white lightning, a bloated, blood-tinged moon, and wind-whipped willows waving withered arms that were silhouetted against an eldritch sky. He remembers a gale shrieking amid the crumbling tombstones and mouldering mausoleums of the cemetery. He remembers, with hideous clarity, hearing the bones of the Dark Lord's Muggle father shriek.
And he remembers Harry's eyes. Harry's shocked, sickened, disbelieving eyes.
In the end, the practical choice had not mattered. Nor had grand and romantic ideals. It had come down to two words.
Our boy.
Our boy.
Harry was, in some way, the child of all the Marauders.
And he was here, and the other three were not.
And he knew as he knew that grass was green that he could not bear to see another black-haired, bespectacled boy named Potter lying dead at his feet.
He had pulled a long, thin silver dagger from inside his cloak.
"Flesh--of the servant--w-willingly given--you will--revive--your master.'
He allowed himself one brief moment to realise that the spell would go wrong. Would have to go wrong. His flesh was being given to protect another, and in direct opposition to his master's will.
And the Dark Lord would know it.
He took a deep breath. Then, almost blind with terror, he gripped the dagger firmly with his left hand, and stabbed at his right wrist.
For a fraction of a second, he felt nothing. Wretchedness filled him. Now he would have to maim himself while concentrating on what he was doing...and he wasn't certain that he could.
Then he saw the silver dagger, its blade tarnished with dark arterial blood. He watched as what looked like a red slit of a mouth slowly opening wider, wider, wider...
And then his hand fell with a deafening splash into the cauldron, and a tsunami of pain overwhelmed him.
He dimly remembers someone screaming at that point--undoubtedly him. Strange that the screams had resounded so loudly in his ears, and yet had seemed so far away.
He'd pulled himself together quickly. Once his hand had fallen in that cauldron...well, the Dark Lord was in the cauldron too, and knew, by now, what his not-so-faithful servant had done.
He had to work fast, before the Dark Lord cried out to the Death Eaters and revealed his treachery. He hadn't come so far to lose Harry now.
The boy had been staring at him, repulsed.
There hadn't been time to roll up the boy's sleeve, or to cut with surgical precision. Any overt attempt at preventing Harry from bleeding to death would surely have been noted by the Death Eaters--and then both their lives would have been forfeit. He just had to cut as swiftly and as accurately as he could through a robe and a shirt, and hope that his skill was adequate.
Oh, understand, Harry, his mind wailed as he sliced open the boy's arm. There's nothing I can do to keep him from returning, nothing. If I'd refused to participate, he'd simply have killed me and replaced me with someone who would have slit your throat. This way, he's alive...but so are you. I know it's not much, but it's something.
Harry gave no sign of having grasped the truth, and continued to glare at him in intermingled hatred and disgust.
Somehow, he staggered back to the cauldron, poured in Harry's blood and collapsed on the grass.
Much of the rest is lost in a red blur of pain. He does not recall seeing the Dark Lord rise. He does remember sobbing and trying to swallow the sobs, so as not to attract unwanted attention. He remembers a sonorous speech addressed to the Death Eaters. And then he remembers the Dark--no, Voldemort--speaking to him.
Voldemort and he might as well have been speaking in code. Surely no one but themselves understood what was really said that night.
'You returned to me, not out of loyalty, but out of fear of your old friends. You deserve this pain, Wormtail. You know that, don't you?'
That slippery definition of 'returned' again. It would have been more accurate to say that he'd been reclaimed.
But no matter. The rest of it was true. He did deserve this. He deserved far worse.
'Yes, Master. Please, Master...please...'
He couldn't say it. Not out loud. Not with all the Death Eaters listening. They'd have known something was wrong. But the words he could not say were fixed firmly in his mind, and he knew that Voldemort heard them as clearly as if he'd shouted:
Kill me. I betrayed you. I saved your enemy. I'd do it again. So kill me. It's what I deserve.
Voldemort had watched him with chill dispassion for a while and then answered.
'Yet you helped me return to my body. Worthless and traitorous as you are, you helped me...and Lord Voldemort rewards his helpers...'
And Voldemort had raised his wand.
He'd braced himself for the shout of 'Avada Kedavra!'
It never arrived.
Instead, molten silver shot from the wand, landed on the stump of his right wrist and shaped itself into a gleaming silver hand.
He'd stopped sobbing, as if on cue. The pain hadn't lessened--if anything, it had increased exponentially at the touch of that molten metal--but after enduring Death Eater torture for months on end, he'd learned that if your torturers wanted you to ignore pain, you did so.
And then he'd seen--really seen--the silver hand at the end of his arm, and he'd stared at it in horror.
You couldn't live with a werewolf for seven years and not see silver as a weapon.
He tested it, trembling. It worked as a hand, but…it was more. An ordinary hand didn't crush wood and stone.
A weapon, then. A weapon against Remus, a weapon stronger than anything he could will or control.
And another friend would die at his hands. This was to be his punishment...
It had taken all his strength to whisper his thanks to Voldemort, all his ingenuity to scramble forward and kiss the hem of Voldemort's robes. Grovelling--well, what else could anyone expect from Wormtail?
'May your loyalty never waver again, Wormtail,' Voldemort said.
Voldemort has taken pains to see that it will not.
He still makes potions; he still, on occasion, walks among the Death Eaters. Wherever he is, however, Voldemort is never far distant, either physically or mentally. When he is doing neither of these things, he is held in a white room without windows, locked in the Full-Body Bind for hours or days or weeks at a time. His veins and nerves all but reverberate with Crucio these days. At times he forgets his name or his gender or even if he has ever known a world outside of this hell. All part of his punishment for betraying the Dark Lord. And as before, no one knows, and no one cares.
Until, perhaps, last night.
He dreamed he was walking in a winter wood. The air was sharp with the scent of oncoming snow, and he listened to the squabbles of crows and jays and cardinals as he walked, the crust of iced-over snow crunching under his feet. It was oddly peaceful. It had been a long time since he'd known peace.
After walking for what seemed like miles, he'd heard laughter coming toward him. Familiar laughter, though he couldn't have said why it was familiar, or why he didn't fear it. After all, laughter was cruel.
His heart almost stopped when he saw the young man who'd been laughing. Oddly, he seemed to be three beings at once--now a youth resembling Harry, now a stag, and now an antlered man straight out of the Wild Hunt.
He halted and stared. He didn't know why, but he felt as if he'd been waiting to see this man for time out of mind, and the sight of him was like air to oxygen-starved lungs.
The young man saw him then, and stared back.
'Peter?'
He frowned. Peter was a word, yes, and it meant something important, but he couldn't recall what.
Then, abruptly, he knew who the young man was, and, 'James?' he whispered, his voice shaking like an aspen in autumn.
The young man--James--didn't answer. He simply waited, as if expecting something.
And then he remembered. Everything he had done. Everything he'd failed to do.
'James,' he whispered again, feeling as if a dam was crumbling inside him.
The next moment, he was kneeling in the cold, wet snow as scalding tears rolled down his cheeks.
It had been so long since he'd wept for anything save guilt or pain. For the first time, he could grieve for his lost friends, and it was a blessed relief.
At last the tears spent themselves. He looked up to see James squatting in front of him, still regarding him with that expectant expression.
'I'm sorry,' he said softly, feeling like a fool. What a stupid, useless, brainless thing to say. It didn't give James and Lily back their lives. It didn't undo one scrap of the damage he'd done. What was the point?
But, 'I know,' was all James said, his voice quiet, his eyes accepting.
A long silence followed. At last he broke it. 'Can I stay?' he asked James, his tone a bit diffident, as if he didn't want to reveal how much he longed for the answer to be 'yes'.
James shook his head with evident regret.
Every muscle, every synapse screamed in protest. Why?
He choked down the automatic protest and bowed his head. 'I see,' he said, and the words were like ashes in his mouth.
'Not tonight, anyway,' James continued as if he hadn't spoken. 'Soon, though. If that's what you want.' He pushed his glasses up higher on his nose. 'Harry might need you, you know.'
'I've done what I can for Harry.' He glared at his right hand. 'Anyway, Harry and Remus are better off not being anywhere near that silver hand of mine.' He glanced at James imploringly, like an animal caught in the steel jaws of a bear-trap. 'Can't you...'
'No.' James's voice was filled with deep regret--and not a little frustration. He pressed his right hand against the air; the palm of his hand flattened as if it were meeting a solid barrier. 'Not yet. Next time you come here, yes. But not now.'
Next time. His heart started hammering at his chest in wild joy. James did not hate him. James would welcome him. He did not have to fear enduring for eternity the same Hell he has endured for twenty years or more. There would be an end to the torment, and it came with friendship and forgiveness, and that was all he'd ever wanted and more.
He does not remember now what else was said, or how he was drawn back to his prison once more.
But not for long. Only so long as it takes to find that winter wood again and get past the barrier that had kept James on one side and himself on the other.
Somehow, he knows he'll find his way to that wood soon.
Very soon.
Maybe tonight.
And then...James.
Forgiveness.
Home.
In other news, my beta finished beta-ing. Thank you, quinby.
The story combines three challenges from hp_literotica--an unsympathetic character (July 2004), cold weather (December 2004) and unrequited love (February 2005). And it does contain all these elements: a roundly disliked character; winter; even love that isn't returned, though it's not romantic or sexual love by any stretch of the imagination. It fulfills all of the challenges without being in any way...well...erotic.
The title comes from an Emily Dickinson poem: "Remorse is memory, awake."
Disclaimer: This story is based on characters and situations created and owned by J.K. Rowling, various publishers including but not limited to Bloomsbury Books, Scholastic Books and Raincoast Books, and Warner Bros., Inc. No money is being made and no copyright or trademark infringement is intended.
***
Dumbledore would probably be surprised, but he hates his arms. He hates them for being like himself, thin and pale and above all, weak. He loathes the left one, emblazoned with the Morsmordre. Oh, God, so much more than a tattoo. He can feel the spell sometimes, biting deep into his muscles and blood and bone, can sense the taint devouring his mind as if the Dark Mark were a malignant tumour. There are times when he senses the stain spreading like cruel contagion across his soul.
If he even has a soul any more.
More than that, he hates his left arm for bearing the emblem of his deepest failure--his breaking.
The memories of that time have seeped into his bones. He cringes in psychosomatic pain when someone even mentions the Cruciatus Curse. Just the word is enough to trigger the response to the spell.
He knows how Crucio works; no Death Eater knows better. The spell stimulates the pain centre of the brain, telling it, 'Your bones are being crushed, your muscles ripped out, your skin flayed off, your nerve endings dipped in acid.'
Three minutes of this can drive a man into permanent, screaming insanity.
How many times? He doesn't know. His memories, mercifully, are blurred.
And Carna Corruptis. The Death Eaters had made a game of that, rotting off his arms and legs, healing them at the last possible moment so that they could start the game all over again.
And then there was Terratis, which had transformed him into a non-human monster that still bore a grotesque resemblance to himself.
Bellatrix, he recalls, liked that one. And used it. Repeatedly.
Solid illusions of the corpses of his friends. Then the real, twisted and bloody corpses of his sisters. The certainty that he would not be allowed the peace of death; that if he were left a cripple, a mindless vegetable, a grotesque freak, the Death Eaters would keep him alive for half-past forever. And the Dark Lord, clawing open his mind with black, rending talons of thought, ripping away knowledge, shredding memories, until oh there was nothing oh god stop but pain stop stop please and horror please stop I can't I can't please and a nightmare that never ended stop stop I'll do anything whatever you want only stop.
He had babbled his allegiance to the Dark Lord, thinking that he could surely control what he said about innocents and the Order. Lie, his mind had said, tell him what he wants to hear and then get out of here.
"Do you consent to serve me freely? Then be free no longer."
And then the world became pain. White, merciless pain. It burned and tore, like a red-hot icepick in the brain, and it was part of him and it was him and there was nothing anywhere that wasn't agony and part of this agony...
He never knew if he had passed out screaming.
When he awoke, there was an empty hollow in his will. He couldn't kill his new owner. He couldn't kill himself to escape. He could, and would, hunger for both forever.
He'd tested this, at least at the beginning. He might as well have saved himself the effort. Part of his will had been burned away.
He knows he shouldn't resent the fact that his friends--his former friends, he corrects himself--never realised he was missing. He's gathered, over the years, that some anonymous Death Eater had been Polyjuiced into his likeness. He's aware that Polyjuice re-shapes people--not only physically, but mentally, so that thoughts and behaviour become, in large part, the thoughts and behaviour of the person being magically mimicked. He knows it isn't really his friends' fault that they didn't notice differences that weren't there. He realises that that the Morsmordre provides its own special protection to the bearer, creating the illusion that nothing is wrong, that this person couldn't possibly be a Death Eater, that everything is normal and fine fine fine.
He knows that he can't blame anyone.
But he does, anyway.
He indulges himself with that small amount of self-pity. After all, whatever negligence others committed, he was guilty--is guilty--of far worse.
He doesn't know how many deaths he's been indirectly responsible for, or how many valiant and optimistic members of the Order were cursed into dust because of him. He tries not to think about it, to shove the ugly, writhing memories into iron-bound trunks and padlocked chests in a mental attic, lock them away, and then deliberately lose the key to the attic as well.
At night, though, the memories escape their daylight prisons and become ghosts. Not the pale, translucent, amiable ghosts of Hogwarts, either. No, these spectres are solid, meaty creatures, more alive (and, he suspects, more human) than he is at this point. They are well-armed with curses and cudgels and scalpel-like knives; and each night, they vivisect him in his dreams. Every night, he breaks again beneath the torture of the Death Eaters, and each time it is the first time. Each night, the vicious curses that he's afflicted others with rip and rend him until there is nothing left of him but bloody bones.
And every night he sees James's face turn white as he realises that the young man in front of him is the traitor. He sees himself lifting the Dark Lord's wand in response to a hissed order to torture James, break him, break his mind, steal his will with the Imperius Curse, make him kill that Mudblood bitch he calls his wife and that half-breed brat, have him join us and proclaim his loyalty throughout the land, it'll shatter them all, destroy the Order, they'll never know who to trust again, go ON, Wormtail...
Murder had seemed like a cleaner end for his friend than the one the Dark Lord had ordained.
Six syllables. Two words. Then it was over.
He doesn't remember what happened to the wand. Presumably the Dark Lord had wrenched it out of his hand, muttered a few poisonous imprecations at him, and then flown upstairs. He recalls James's hazel eyes dulling and going blank; he remembers a terrible roaring silence and then the dreadful, final thud of James's body hitting the floor; he recollects kneeling beside his friend's body, stunned and sick as if someone had struck him in the stomach with a sledgehammer. He remembers swearing at the Dark Lord's damned Legilimancy for snatching the secret of the Potters' whereabouts from his memory. He recalls a tsunami of self-hatred battering at him and washing everything else away. He recalls a tight throat, and burning eyes, and wishing desperately that there were enough humanity left in him so that he could cry.
He didn't weep for James, then or ever.
Some things matter too much for tears.
Despite the cruelty of these dreams, he shuns potions like Dreamless Sleep. He doesn't like his nightmares, but they're just, they're fair. He deserves far worse. And fleeing from the memories would be the first step to denying what's he's done and who he's been. The last thing he wants is to be Wormtail the Death Eater full-time.
He's done enough running--as a newly turned traitor fleeing discovery, as a rat fleeing into a broken sewer, as a fugitive fleeing to the Continent. It never seems to work, and only ever seems to bring more trouble down on his head.
He's heard much of the speculation from the Death Eaters--he can't think of them as "the other Death Eaters"--about why the Dark Lord keeps him close. He's probably heard more than the pureblood supporters could wish; they forget that the Muggleborn baker's boy from Birmingham isn't deaf. Or perhaps they feel that he is safe--it's not as if he can raise the issue of their coarse commentary without raising the issue of his own treachery. His actions cost the Dark Lord his body. And he himself fled. For thirteen years.
He's heard the snickering and the jests about why the Dark Lord trusts him, or even endures his presence. He's heard the jokes about friends of Head Boys and how snakes love eating rat.
He could tell them that they're overcomplicating the issue, but why bother? Anyone with a grain of sense can see what was going on. The Dark Lord detests him, blaming him for the spell that backfired--and no matter that he had had no idea that a powerful wizard could be defeated by a toddler. The Dark Lord despises him even more for cowering in hiding, and for his craven flight two years ago from Sirius and Remus, who loathe him more than they do the Dark Lord.
Some of the more ignorant Death Eaters have cited Trelawney's second prophecy--for walls have ears, even at Hogwarts--as proof of his choice to rejoin the right side. The servant shall return to his master. Oh, indeed, if returning meant flinging himself out of the frying pan and blundering into the fire. The Dark Lord and that accursed snake had discovered him in the Black Forest; he'd had no desire to meet either.
He'd stayed, hoping for a chance, any chance, to escape his hated master and that ever-watchful snake.
He never found one.
Story of his life.
During that year, he attempted small rebellions--begging for the lives of Bertha Jorkins and the old Muggle caretaker. It did no good, of course. Both died pointlessly and in pain. He's not even sure why he begged. He's known since he was nineteen years old that the Dark Lord is blind to anything so benevolent as mercy.
Which is why he's alive. Mercy and the favour of the Dark Lord have nothing to do with it. His survival is punishment--punishment for a rebellion that only the Dark Lord and he know about.
'I want Harry's blood for the resurrection potion.'
'M-my Lord, no…you have other enemies... '
'Like you, my cowardly rat?'
'M--m-master…'
'Stop whimpering, Wormtail. You are missing the point. Other enemies can supply me with their blood. But only Harry Potter can provide me with his blood and his death at the same time.'
'I don't--'
'On the night of the ritual, you will cut his throat. His blood will restore me. And as I am being reborn, he will die.'
He'd protested. It was impractical, dangerous, and fraught with risk. There was no point in taking a chance like this.
He'd said that, and yet they'd both known that he wasn't protesting for sensible, realistic-minion reasons. Part of it had been the bond between himself and Harry. Part of it--most of it--had been three years in Gryffindor as Scabbers, watching James's son grow up.
And, Merlin help him, he liked the boy.
He had no business liking Harry. None. Harry, he was sure, would be repulsed at the very thought.
But he remembered Harry as a baby, that was the thing. "Our Harry," Remus had called him, and "our Harry" he had been--the child of all of them, not just James and Lily. He recalled Sirius enchanting Harry's basket with Binding Charms so that the baby could ride on his flying motorcycle; Remus soothing a fretful and teething toddler; himself, carrying the child on his back as he searched for magical plants for the healing potions he was so good at. They'd all taken their turns feeding Harry, changing his nappies, reading him stories and sending him off to sleep, until Lily laughed and said that Harry seemed to have four fathers instead of one.
Clinging to these memories was stupid. Still loving the boy, fourteen years later, was even more stupid. Loving a child whose father he'd brutally murdered and whose mother he'd betrayed to her death was the most stupid, brainless thing of all.
Well, no one ever said he was smart.
And Sirius couldn't help. And Remus couldn't help. And James, thanks to him, was dead. So it was down to him.
A sorry champion for the potential saviour of the wizarding world to rely on.
His protests to the Dark Lord eventually bore fruit...of a sort. Though not of the kind desired.
'You seem determined to save Harry Potter, despite the fact that he is my enemy.' The Dark Lord turned to him, impaling him on that red-eyed gaze. 'Very well...you can save him. For a price.'
'...price, Lord?'
'Yes.' The Dark Lord--still in his "hideous baby" form--smiled; his face looked like the scaly, reddish-black skull of a snake baring gleaming fangs. 'You can spare the boy, if you wish. Take his blood from his arm or his leg--anything that won't kill him instantly. But if you do--well, you were raised Catholic, weren't you, Wormtail? You should know these words: "And if thy right hand offend thee, cut it off, and cast it from thee."
'Or you can spare yourself. Cut off a toe, or another finger. But if you choose to do that, you must kill the boy.
'Either way, I shall reward you as you deserve.
'Which will it be, Wormtail?'
He'd realised, even then, what the Dark Lord was asking of him. This went beyond simple maiming. Every wand movement he knew was for a wand held in a wizard's right hand. Left-handed wand movements were very different, and rarely mirrored their right-handed counterparts.
The Dark Lord was demanding that he sacrifice not only his right hand, but also his ability to use magic. If he did this, the Dark Lord would explode in rage on an instant...and he would be powerless to defend himself. Or Harry. He'd be helpless before his enemies again. Not to mention, probably expiring of a massive haemorrhage. He'd be dead in a matter of moments, and for what? So that Dark Lord could slit the boy's throat afterwards?
And he could give the boy an easy death. It would be a cleaner death than any the Dark Lord would be likely to give. It would spare Harry hellish pain, as no one had spared him.
The notion filled his mouth and mind with bitterness and bile and bleak, black, bone-crushing despair.
By the night of the ritual, he still hadn't decided what to do. No one would be shocked if he chose the practical rather than the idealistic. No one who mattered thought he had any ideals left.
For some reason, that only made him more obdurate. Maybe it was the memory of his days as part of James's crowd, when any of them would have considered it a cardinal sin to do something so banal as what was expected. Or perhaps he was simply reluctant to live down to Death Eater expectations.
He remembers little of that night. He supposes the Dark Lord gave him orders. He vaguely remembers an older boy arriving with Harry--a boy, he's been told, that he killed. He doesn't know if he did or not. He doesn't think he did--all he remembers is disposing of the body--but if he had been trying to convince the Dark Lord that he would kill Harry...oh, yes, it's more than possible.
In his memory, however, no one was in the cemetery save Harry, the Dark Lord and himself. He knows the Death Eaters were there, be-robed and bronze-masked, but he cannot recall any of them; his mind has excised them all, as a scalpel removes cysts.
When he thinks back, he remembers a storm out of Lovecraft and Poe. He remembers black thunderheads boiling with blue-white lightning, a bloated, blood-tinged moon, and wind-whipped willows waving withered arms that were silhouetted against an eldritch sky. He remembers a gale shrieking amid the crumbling tombstones and mouldering mausoleums of the cemetery. He remembers, with hideous clarity, hearing the bones of the Dark Lord's Muggle father shriek.
And he remembers Harry's eyes. Harry's shocked, sickened, disbelieving eyes.
In the end, the practical choice had not mattered. Nor had grand and romantic ideals. It had come down to two words.
Our boy.
Our boy.
Harry was, in some way, the child of all the Marauders.
And he was here, and the other three were not.
And he knew as he knew that grass was green that he could not bear to see another black-haired, bespectacled boy named Potter lying dead at his feet.
He had pulled a long, thin silver dagger from inside his cloak.
"Flesh--of the servant--w-willingly given--you will--revive--your master.'
He allowed himself one brief moment to realise that the spell would go wrong. Would have to go wrong. His flesh was being given to protect another, and in direct opposition to his master's will.
And the Dark Lord would know it.
He took a deep breath. Then, almost blind with terror, he gripped the dagger firmly with his left hand, and stabbed at his right wrist.
For a fraction of a second, he felt nothing. Wretchedness filled him. Now he would have to maim himself while concentrating on what he was doing...and he wasn't certain that he could.
Then he saw the silver dagger, its blade tarnished with dark arterial blood. He watched as what looked like a red slit of a mouth slowly opening wider, wider, wider...
And then his hand fell with a deafening splash into the cauldron, and a tsunami of pain overwhelmed him.
He dimly remembers someone screaming at that point--undoubtedly him. Strange that the screams had resounded so loudly in his ears, and yet had seemed so far away.
He'd pulled himself together quickly. Once his hand had fallen in that cauldron...well, the Dark Lord was in the cauldron too, and knew, by now, what his not-so-faithful servant had done.
He had to work fast, before the Dark Lord cried out to the Death Eaters and revealed his treachery. He hadn't come so far to lose Harry now.
The boy had been staring at him, repulsed.
There hadn't been time to roll up the boy's sleeve, or to cut with surgical precision. Any overt attempt at preventing Harry from bleeding to death would surely have been noted by the Death Eaters--and then both their lives would have been forfeit. He just had to cut as swiftly and as accurately as he could through a robe and a shirt, and hope that his skill was adequate.
Oh, understand, Harry, his mind wailed as he sliced open the boy's arm. There's nothing I can do to keep him from returning, nothing. If I'd refused to participate, he'd simply have killed me and replaced me with someone who would have slit your throat. This way, he's alive...but so are you. I know it's not much, but it's something.
Harry gave no sign of having grasped the truth, and continued to glare at him in intermingled hatred and disgust.
Somehow, he staggered back to the cauldron, poured in Harry's blood and collapsed on the grass.
Much of the rest is lost in a red blur of pain. He does not recall seeing the Dark Lord rise. He does remember sobbing and trying to swallow the sobs, so as not to attract unwanted attention. He remembers a sonorous speech addressed to the Death Eaters. And then he remembers the Dark--no, Voldemort--speaking to him.
Voldemort and he might as well have been speaking in code. Surely no one but themselves understood what was really said that night.
'You returned to me, not out of loyalty, but out of fear of your old friends. You deserve this pain, Wormtail. You know that, don't you?'
That slippery definition of 'returned' again. It would have been more accurate to say that he'd been reclaimed.
But no matter. The rest of it was true. He did deserve this. He deserved far worse.
'Yes, Master. Please, Master...please...'
He couldn't say it. Not out loud. Not with all the Death Eaters listening. They'd have known something was wrong. But the words he could not say were fixed firmly in his mind, and he knew that Voldemort heard them as clearly as if he'd shouted:
Kill me. I betrayed you. I saved your enemy. I'd do it again. So kill me. It's what I deserve.
Voldemort had watched him with chill dispassion for a while and then answered.
'Yet you helped me return to my body. Worthless and traitorous as you are, you helped me...and Lord Voldemort rewards his helpers...'
And Voldemort had raised his wand.
He'd braced himself for the shout of 'Avada Kedavra!'
It never arrived.
Instead, molten silver shot from the wand, landed on the stump of his right wrist and shaped itself into a gleaming silver hand.
He'd stopped sobbing, as if on cue. The pain hadn't lessened--if anything, it had increased exponentially at the touch of that molten metal--but after enduring Death Eater torture for months on end, he'd learned that if your torturers wanted you to ignore pain, you did so.
And then he'd seen--really seen--the silver hand at the end of his arm, and he'd stared at it in horror.
You couldn't live with a werewolf for seven years and not see silver as a weapon.
He tested it, trembling. It worked as a hand, but…it was more. An ordinary hand didn't crush wood and stone.
A weapon, then. A weapon against Remus, a weapon stronger than anything he could will or control.
And another friend would die at his hands. This was to be his punishment...
It had taken all his strength to whisper his thanks to Voldemort, all his ingenuity to scramble forward and kiss the hem of Voldemort's robes. Grovelling--well, what else could anyone expect from Wormtail?
'May your loyalty never waver again, Wormtail,' Voldemort said.
Voldemort has taken pains to see that it will not.
He still makes potions; he still, on occasion, walks among the Death Eaters. Wherever he is, however, Voldemort is never far distant, either physically or mentally. When he is doing neither of these things, he is held in a white room without windows, locked in the Full-Body Bind for hours or days or weeks at a time. His veins and nerves all but reverberate with Crucio these days. At times he forgets his name or his gender or even if he has ever known a world outside of this hell. All part of his punishment for betraying the Dark Lord. And as before, no one knows, and no one cares.
Until, perhaps, last night.
He dreamed he was walking in a winter wood. The air was sharp with the scent of oncoming snow, and he listened to the squabbles of crows and jays and cardinals as he walked, the crust of iced-over snow crunching under his feet. It was oddly peaceful. It had been a long time since he'd known peace.
After walking for what seemed like miles, he'd heard laughter coming toward him. Familiar laughter, though he couldn't have said why it was familiar, or why he didn't fear it. After all, laughter was cruel.
His heart almost stopped when he saw the young man who'd been laughing. Oddly, he seemed to be three beings at once--now a youth resembling Harry, now a stag, and now an antlered man straight out of the Wild Hunt.
He halted and stared. He didn't know why, but he felt as if he'd been waiting to see this man for time out of mind, and the sight of him was like air to oxygen-starved lungs.
The young man saw him then, and stared back.
'Peter?'
He frowned. Peter was a word, yes, and it meant something important, but he couldn't recall what.
Then, abruptly, he knew who the young man was, and, 'James?' he whispered, his voice shaking like an aspen in autumn.
The young man--James--didn't answer. He simply waited, as if expecting something.
And then he remembered. Everything he had done. Everything he'd failed to do.
'James,' he whispered again, feeling as if a dam was crumbling inside him.
The next moment, he was kneeling in the cold, wet snow as scalding tears rolled down his cheeks.
It had been so long since he'd wept for anything save guilt or pain. For the first time, he could grieve for his lost friends, and it was a blessed relief.
At last the tears spent themselves. He looked up to see James squatting in front of him, still regarding him with that expectant expression.
'I'm sorry,' he said softly, feeling like a fool. What a stupid, useless, brainless thing to say. It didn't give James and Lily back their lives. It didn't undo one scrap of the damage he'd done. What was the point?
But, 'I know,' was all James said, his voice quiet, his eyes accepting.
A long silence followed. At last he broke it. 'Can I stay?' he asked James, his tone a bit diffident, as if he didn't want to reveal how much he longed for the answer to be 'yes'.
James shook his head with evident regret.
Every muscle, every synapse screamed in protest. Why?
He choked down the automatic protest and bowed his head. 'I see,' he said, and the words were like ashes in his mouth.
'Not tonight, anyway,' James continued as if he hadn't spoken. 'Soon, though. If that's what you want.' He pushed his glasses up higher on his nose. 'Harry might need you, you know.'
'I've done what I can for Harry.' He glared at his right hand. 'Anyway, Harry and Remus are better off not being anywhere near that silver hand of mine.' He glanced at James imploringly, like an animal caught in the steel jaws of a bear-trap. 'Can't you...'
'No.' James's voice was filled with deep regret--and not a little frustration. He pressed his right hand against the air; the palm of his hand flattened as if it were meeting a solid barrier. 'Not yet. Next time you come here, yes. But not now.'
Next time. His heart started hammering at his chest in wild joy. James did not hate him. James would welcome him. He did not have to fear enduring for eternity the same Hell he has endured for twenty years or more. There would be an end to the torment, and it came with friendship and forgiveness, and that was all he'd ever wanted and more.
He does not remember now what else was said, or how he was drawn back to his prison once more.
But not for long. Only so long as it takes to find that winter wood again and get past the barrier that had kept James on one side and himself on the other.
Somehow, he knows he'll find his way to that wood soon.
Very soon.
Maybe tonight.
And then...James.
Forgiveness.
Home.