[From Litha to Lammas]: Courage Is, gen, Peter Pettigrew and Harry, 4/6
Part Three.
Title: Courage Is (4/6)
Disclaimer: J. K. Rowling and associates own these characters. I am writing these characters for fun and not profit.
Content Notes: Massive AU, unreliable narrator, violence, Harry is raised by Peter Pettigrew, minor character deaths.
Rated: PG-13
Wordcount: This part 5200
Summary: AU. In the chaos after Sirius is taken to Azkaban, Peter Pettigrew tracks down Harry Potter and snatches the child from the Dursleys’ home. He tells himself that he’s raising Harry so that the Dark Lord may have the honor of killing him when he comes back. So he tells himself.
Author’s Notes: This is one of my Litha to Lammas fics for this year, a series of fics being posted between the summer solstice and the first of August. This is very AU, and will likely have three parts.
Thank you again for all the reviews! This fic will now have to stretch to six parts, since this part got longer than I thought.
Part Four
“I hate you, Peter fucking Pettigrew.”
“Language, Sirius.”
They were in Sirius’s hospital room. Peter was wearing his glamours, and Harry had his red hair and large scar charmed on. Harry sat in a chair halfway between Peter’s chair and Sirius’s bed, and beamed at both of them. He hadn’t hesitated at all to walk back into Sirius’s hospital room, even given the way he’d left the man and what he’d told him before he went.
Peter sighed a little. He had thought Harry a fit for Slytherin and Ravenclaw in the past, but given how Harry had managed to forgive him and had come to get him from the hag’s house and faced up to everything, Peter knew, now.
He had raised a bloody Gryffindor, through and through. And it was probably his own bloody fault.
“I hate you,” Sirius whispered, but his voice was already building up to a yell. “I hate you, I hate you, I HATE YOU-”
“Shut up,” Peter said calmly, and knew it was the calmness of his voice more than anything else that meant Sirius actually obeyed him. “Listen to me. Harry wants us both in his life, so that’s what we’re going to do.”
“But I don’t want to be with you. I hate you.”
“I know,” Peter said. “And you don’t have to forgive me the way Harry did. But you’re going to have to find some way to handle your rage so that we can make a good home for Harry and no one around us will find out the truth.”
Sirius stared at him, then at Harry. “But he probably didn’t explain everything to you, Harry,” he said in a soft, eager voice that Peter had never heard from him before. “You must know that he-”
“He betrayed my Mum and Dad. I know.” Harry swung his legs. “And he put you in prison. He told me all that. He thought I couldn’t forgive him. But I did.” He looked smug.
“You can’t.”
“Can.”
Sirius at least cut himself off before he got into the kind of argument that Peter had had with Harry yesterday. He turned a look of loathing on Peter. That was actually a calming, steadying thing, Peter thought. Harry had tipped him off-balance, maybe permanently, but he could rely on Sirius taking his past betrayals the way they should be taken.
“He has to pay,” Sirius said, his voice a low hiss that made him sound like the Parselmouth in the room.
“He did. He got you out of prison, and he took me away from the bad Muggles.” Harry turned in his chair to face Sirius, and Sirius blinked. Peter could imagine the kind of expression he was confronting now, since he’d had that from Harry himself last night. “You have to let him live with us and not try to kill him or hurt him. Or he’ll take me away, and we’ll just tell everyone that you’re still mad if you try to claim that Peter Pettigrew is still alive.”
“I can tell people under Veriatserum.”
“Veritaserum just makes you tell the truth as you understand it,” Peter said mildly. “It doesn’t mean your delusions are true, Sirius.”
Sirius clenched his hands in the sheets for a second as if he would spring up and grab Peter, But he was still too weak. With a tremendous sigh, he leaned back in the bed. “Where are we going to live?” he asked.
“Dover-by-the-Sea,” Harry said instantly. “You’ll like it, Sirius. It has lots of good people, and I have friends there, and we have a cottage. There’s even another bedroom, so that you can have your own. Then you and Uncle Peter don’t have to see each other all the time.” He gave the satisfied nod of someone who had solved all the world’s problems.
Sirius stared at Harry for a long time, and then turned and stared at Peter. Finally, he said, “Harry, will you go out of the room and give us a minute?”
Harry rolled his eyes. “Are you just going to yell at Uncle Peter?”
“I’m going to talk to him.”
Harry gave him a dubious glance, but hopped down from the chair. “Okay. But I can hear, and I’ll hear if you start yelling at him.” He turned and walked out of the room, and a second later, Peter heard him chattering to the mediwitch who’d been working in the room next door. He almost snorted. Harry made friends everywhere he went, which at least proved that Peter hadn’t damaged him too badly by keeping him isolated from the magical world for years.
Sirius stared at him. “Can you close the door?”
“He’ll still hear,” Peter warned as he drew his wand, and heard Sirius growl the way he had when Moony hit him too hard when they were playing in animal form. But he did use his wand to swing the door shut, although he didn’t lock it as Sirius obviously would have preferred.
“I hate you so much, “ Sirius whispered, shaking with it. “You have no idea. I want to destroy you.”
“That’s not an option open to you,” Peter said, with more courage than he’d known he had. Well, in the end, this was where he’d come, and Harry’s power was behind him-the power of Harry’s fame, and how much attention the papers would pay to this if Sirius did as he’d threatened. “If you kill me now, then you’ll go back to Azkaban, maybe not even after another trial. The Ministry already feels embarrassed that they were forced to free you. Do you want to take your chances with that embarrassment if you do commit murder?”
“You’re a Death Eater!”
“It would still be murder,” Peter said. “And I haven’t been tried and found guilty, and if I was, then the Ministry would imprison me or execute me, not you.” His guts were trembling with fear, but he forced his voice to be as calm as he could. “Tell me one thing.”
“What, Wormtail?”
“Do you hate me more than you love Harry?”
Sirius flinched back and lifted one hand as if to shield his face. Peter sat there and waited. He would try to make this work as hard as he could, for Harry’s sake, and because if he couldn’t make up for what he’d done, this was a thing he could do going forwards. But Sirius would have to act less like a homicidal maniac.
“You corrupted him,” Sirius whispered. “You made him love you, and that’s wrong.”
“And what about you?” Peter snapped, fastening onto what he remembered hearing in the immediate aftermath of Sirius’s attack on him. “Did you take one thought for Harry before you went tearing after me? Was revenge more important to you, even then, than he was? You sure seem to have chosen the dead father over the son pretty consistently so far. It’s not as though you made any effort to tell anyone the truth when it came out that Harry was missing, or break out of prison to find him.”
“It’s Azkaban.”
“They didn’t know you were an Animagus, Sirius. You could have broken out. You just thought mourning your own sorrows was more important than finding Harry.”
Sirius sat there, trembling. Peter assumed some of it was hatred and rage, and some of it was guilt. That was fine. He would exploit all the guilt he could if it meant that Sirius would go along with his plan, and Harry’s, instead of spoiling it with murder.
“You still corrupted him,” Sirius said.
“If you really believe that, I’ll take Harry and tell him this didn’t work, and we’ll go where no one can find us even if they do believe that you’re telling the truth. I won’t have you decide that he’s evil and terrible before he’s even eleven years old.”
Sirius looked at him with huge, wounded eyes. Peter stared back. Yeah, he’d played a large part in the wounding, and he was the reason Sirius hadn’t got to raise Harry. But Sirius had chosen to abandon Harry for revenge before he ever went to prison, and he hadn’t done a thing to clear himself of guilt in all the years that he could have and when the Dementors hadn’t affected him as badly, so Peter was pretty comfortable saying that some of this was just stupidity that had always been part of Sirius, long before he went to prison.
“I could still tell the truth.”
“And then Harry and I will be a united front in saying that it’s so sad you weren’t able to recover, and that we hope you’ll recover comfortably in the Janus Thickey Ward.”
Sirius’s face twisted with loathing. “You’re beyond terrible, Wormtail.”
Peter shrugged. “I’m the reason that Harry knows about the magical world and didn’t spend the last seven years being abused by Muggles who left him in a cupboard without changing his nappy.”
“They wouldn’t have been that bad.”
Peter laughed at him. “Come on, Sirius, you were at that wedding too. You know how much Petunia hated magic. Why would she have changed for no reason, except that you want to believe anyone would have been better than me? Or…” He let his voice trail off, a new thought creeping up on him. “Is this because you think it was probably Dumbledore who left Harry with the Dursleys, and you don’t want to think anything that would make your heroic leader’s reputation less than godly?”
Sirius flinched. Peter smiled. Direct hit.
“He didn’t know I wasn’t guilty.”
“I do believe that,” Peter said. He thought Dumbledore used other people a lot more than Sirius did, but it was totally against the old man’s character to leave someone innocent in prison. “But he still didn’t come for you. Who was the one who chose to take on the Ministry to have you freed? Me. For Harry. I could have lied to Harry, and told him you were guilty. I could have never told the Ministry anything, and they wouldn’t have figured anything out, either. They certainly didn’t realize the records of your trial were nonexistent. You would have stayed in prison for the rest of your life if it wasn’t for me.”
Sirius sat there, visibly seething, and also turning things around and around in his brain. Peter waited. Finally, Sirius looked directly at him, and then said, “What do you want, Wormtail?”
Peter smiled.
*
It certainly wasn’t easy, having Sirius in their cottage at Dover-by-the-Sea. For one thing, there was no concealing that this had been notorious supposed mass murderer Sirius Black, and that Harry was Harry Potter. No one seemed to think that Peter was a criminal for concealing Harry’s identity, or even his own-although they thought he had been lying about being Alfred Smith rather than lying about being Peter Durant-but he got a lot of questions about whether he was sure that Sirius was innocent.
Peter nodded and promised it. And Sirius had an extra pressure to behave like a sane human being. He certainly got a lecture from Great-Aunt Helene the first time he tried to taunt one of her retired nephews who had been Sorted into Slytherin in Hogwarts for being a “slimy snake.”
Peter disapproved of that. On the one hand, it did show that in lots of ways, Sirius’s maturity had frozen when he went to Azkaban, and that was Peter’s fault.
On the other hand, there were much better insults that you could fling at someone whose House was Slytherin.
Sirius also took up more space than just the bedroom he stayed in. His new clothes sprawled everywhere, always. It wasn’t a problem to buy them, given that now Harry had access to the Potter money, but it was a problem to make Sirius clean up after himself. And Sirius had the disconcerting tendency to transform into a big black dog in the middle of arguments and run away barking.
For the most part, he and Peter lived in a brittle peace. They avoided each other as much as possible, except for dinner, which Harry always insisted they eat together. They both taught Harry magic, and they tried to keep their arguments out of his earshot. Peter only stepped into Sirius’s interactions with Harry a few times, namely when Sirius tried to tell Harry stupid things about how bad being a Parselmouth was or tried to get him to learn the Animagus transformation.
Harry could already Apparate. That was all they needed, him learning to transform right now.
And Harry laughed, and learned magic from Sirius, and played with Padfoot, and continued to learn from Peter and hug him, and went back to sleeping in his own room, and their little house glowed with happiness.
*
At least, it did until Peter opened their door one April afternoon and found Albus Dumbledore standing on his doorstep, staring at him sadly.
“Ah. Mr. Alfred Smith, wasn’t it?”
Peter nodded, because of course assuming his real identity in front of Dumbledore wasn’t an option, and said, “Is it Headmaster Dumbledore?”
“Yes.” Dumbledore sighed sadly at him. “I learned that you were guardian of Harry Potter and also living with Sirius Black. Could I come in?”
Saying no wasn’t an option, either. Peter stepped out of the way and let Dumbledore walk past, his mind whirling furiously. Currently, Sirius was a dog, asleep upstairs. Harry was somewhere on the beach with his friends. Well, that at least gave Peter a little time to seek him out.
“Would you mind taking a seat, sir?” Peter asked. “Harry is out and I’ll have to bring him back. Sirius is asleep upstairs, but he might come down when he smells you.”
“Smells…ah, yes, he is an Animagus, isn’t he.” Dumbledore sat down in the overstuffed chair that Sirius usually claimed. “Yes, please, Mr. Smith, go and fetch young Harry. And don’t bother waking Sirius up. I can wait.”
Peter smiled at him as politely as he could and shut the door. Then he walked towards the beach, using a locator spell that he always cast on Harry’s clothes in the morning. They lit up like beacons in his mind, and he broke into a jog, while going over what he would have to do to preserve as much of their mask as possible.
Cast the glamours on Harry, of course. There had been too many pictures in the papers of him with the red hair and the large scar to let them get away with not carrying those physical features in front of Dumbledore. And coach Harry to call him Uncle Alfred instead of Uncle Peter. Peter wouldn’t bother with the glamours on himself, because Dumbledore had already seen his real face-well, the slightly-changed one he wore as Peter Durant, anyway-and there hadn’t been that many photos in the paper of him anyway. Everyone had wanted to focus on Harry and Sirius, understandably.
He found Harry throwing pebbles into the water with Adrienne and Aria, all of them apparently using magic to make the little stones go further. Peter crouched down next to Harry, who immediately focused on him.
“What’s wrong?” Harry demanded.
Peter sighed. He probably shouldn’t be so reassured that Harry could sense something like that. Harry wasn’t supposed to take charge of situations. He was a child.
Then again, his intuitions seemed to land better than Peter’s, given that he had thought Harry would be grateful to be left behind with Sirius.
“Professor Dumbledore has come to see us,” Peter explained quietly. He glanced at the twins, but they were old enough, at ten, to withdraw and stand on the other side of the large boulder nearby, for all that they obviously wanted to listen. “I think that he wants to apologize to Sirius, and also make sure that you’re all right with me and Sirius.”
“He’s dangerous?”
Harry spoke it as a question. Peter sighed. He had presented Dumbledore in the stories he told Harry about Hogwarts, but only where he would naturally come into them. Peter hadn’t attempted to talk about his time in the Order of the Phoenix, and had only lightly touched on his suspicions that Dumbledore was the one who had left Harry with the Dursleys.
“He’s dangerous because he’s powerful, and he could make things unpleasant for us if we disagreed with him.”
Harry narrowed his eyes. “How do we help Sirius? How do we make sure he doesn’t make things unpleasant for us?”
Gryffindor, through and fucking through, Peter decided, and patted Harry’s shoulder as he recast the illusions. The twins wouldn’t say anything about that, either, although they were certainly visible. Dover-by-the-Sea had closed ranks around the man they still thought was Peter Durant and decided that anything he had to do to hide Harry and protect him was justifiable.
“We’re going to have to distract him.”
*
Harry marched ahead of Peter into the cottage. Dumbledore turned around and smiled a little when he saw him. “Ah, Harry. My boy, I know you don’t remember me, but I have been so anxious over your safety since-”
“Were you the one who put me with the bad Muggles?”
Dumbledore blinked a little. Then he stared at Harry, and then at Peter. Peter shrugged a little and shut the door behind him. He thought that Dumbledore’s stare seemed inclined to linger on him, and after all, Dumbledore had known Peter Pettigrew well enough to see him behind Peter Durant’s glamours, but Harry reclaimed his attention.
“Did you? Did you know they would put me in a cupboard?”
Dumbledore turned to look at Harry again, and he seemed much older between one breath and the next. He sighed. “I did not, Harry. I am so sorry. I thought that your aunt would cherish the last link to her sister.”
“Well, she didn’t.” Harry folded his arms and glared at Dumbledore. “And you left Sirius in prison, too! You never came and asked him why he did it, if he really betrayed Mum and Dad. You’d want to know that, if you were his friend. Why didn’t you go and ask him?”
Dumbledore shook his head. “I did believe that he was guilty. I was-angry at the loss of your parents and the way that you yourself had become an orphan, Harry. I can only plead my own mistakes. I am sorry.”
“Say you’re sorry to Sirius, not me!”
Sirius had come down from above, wearing the cleanest robe he probably had right now and an apprehensive expression. Dumbledore turned to him, and his expression became much guiltier than it had when he’d looked at Harry. Peter narrowed his eyes.
Is that because he knew Sirius for longer and only saw Harry a few times as a baby? Or is it because he thinks that what he did to Sirius was less forgivable?
Neither possibility really made Peter all that inclined to trust the Headmaster. He moved a few steps closer to Harry and watched Sirius rub his unshaven jaw.
“I won’t say that I’m not disappointed,” Sirius finally said. He sounded as though he was picking his way across a field of slippery rocks. “I really hoped that someone would come visit me in prison and at least ask to hear my side of the story. You or Remus. But no one ever came.” He shot a hard glance at Dumbledore. “And I thought that you at least knew that we switched Secret-Keepers, Headmaster.”
Peter tensed. That was the risk to this situation that couldn’t be mitigated. If Sirius decided to throw Peter to the wolves, or rather, Dumbledore, then Peter would have to pull up stakes and run again.
But Sirius’s eyes went to him and then to Harry as if he’d heard that thought and knew what the consequences would be-namely, losing Harry. He gave a little shake of his head.
“I thought, when the news came that you were laughing and claiming it was your fault after the attack on Peter, that you had decided to switch back, or never made the switch at all, and kept the whole thing secret from me for the sake of security.” Dumbledore settled back into the couch and put a trembling hand on his beard. “Sirius, there are no words for the wrong I did you. I am so sorry.”
“And you never knew that I hadn’t had a trial?”
Dumbledore closed his eyes. “I thought, because you had freely admitted guilt, that one was not needed.”
Sirius gave a dark laugh that made Harry press a little closer to Peter. “Even Bellatrix got a trial, and she freely admitted her bloody guilt, too! When she got to Azkaban and was in a cell next to mine for a while, she told me all about it. How she stood up and proclaimed her loyalty to her Dark Lord in front of half the wizarding world.” Sirius lowered his head and closed his eyes. “No one cared enough about me.”
Dumbledore didn’t say anything else. Perhaps he knew there was no excuse for it, or none that Sirius would accept. That actually surprised Peter a little, because he had thought until now that Sirius worshiped the Headmaster and would forgive him right away.
But seven years in Azkaban would change anyone.
“Where is Remus?” Sirius abruptly demanded, and Peter started. He had thought Sirius knew already, which was why he hadn’t bothered asking Peter. Not that Peter would have known.
Dumbledore sighed. “He spends most of his time out of the country now. Those like him in magical Britain have very rights, to the shame of our community.”
“But he must have heard by now that I’m innocent!”
“Yes. I wrote to him.”
“And?”
“He replied to me.” Dumbledore sneaked a glance at Sirius, and looked away again, as if he couldn’t bother to hold Sirius’s eyes. “He said that he was so ashamed to have thought you were guilty that he couldn’t face you. And he knew that you’re living with Harry now. He didn’t want to be around Harry when…well, when the consequences of his condition caught up with him.”
“Is that because he’s a werewolf?” Harry asked. “We could build him a special room that he could be in when he transformed. Or we could buy him Wolfsbane. I have lots of money now, I could do that.”
Dumbledore stared at Harry. Sirius did the same thing, but his eyes immediately turned to Peter accusingly. Peter just rolled his own eyes in response. No, of course he wasn’t going to keep Remus’s stupid secret, when it would have made half the stories he’d told Harry about their Hogwarts days nonsense.
“That’s a very brave stance to take, Mr. Potter,” Dumbledore said, after a moment of recovery. “But I don’t think that a werewolf who doesn’t have his condition under control should live with you.” His gaze returned to Peter, critical, searching. “In fact, I am far from convinced that your current living conditions are the best choice for you at all.”
“That’s because you left me with the bad Muggles! You think I should live with them!”
That successfully distracted Dumbledore again. He smiled sadly at Harry. “I didn’t mean to leave you with people who would abuse you, Harry. But there were blood wards on that house that would protect you because your mother’s blood lived there. There is no way of replicating those wards in another place. If you returned and I put spells in place that would let me know if they hurt you-”
“So you just want to take a child away from the man who loved and raised him,” Peter said, “because you think you know better. How fascinating, Headmaster Dumbledore.”
“I already apologized for my mistakes, young man.”
Peter shook his head in amazement. Wow. He had done worse things than Dumbledore, sure, but he also hadn’t been so stupid as to think that leaving someone he purported to trust in prison and leaving a child with an abusive house of Muggles were things that he could make up for with just an apology.
“You don’t have any legal right to Harry, Headmaster,” Sirius said suddenly. “I’m the one who does. And the Ministry has confirmed Mr. Smith’s rights to Harry, as well, since they both agreed to live with me, and the Ministry thought that it would be disastrous to remove Harry from an environment where he’s been thriving.”
“I found you here. Someone else could, as well. A Death Eater.”
Harry burst into abrupt giggles. Peter glared at him. Harry glanced up at him with his eyes sparkling, and Peter did find his lips twitching.
“Harry does belong with family,” Dumbledore said, as if it was an iron law.
“And only the family you were born with counts?” Peter asked. “Tell me, Headmaster, I’ve heard rumors that you don’t get along with your brother. Would you choose to live with him over someone that you trust?”
Dumbledore gave him a confused glance. Peter thought he would deny the rumors about his not getting along with Aberforth, but he didn’t. Instead, he just let the moment hang there, and hang.
Peter supposed he was meant to fall on the floor and apologize. But he didn’t. He wasn’t playing someone who was in awe of Albus Dumbledore, after all, the way he had when he was part of the Order of the Phoenix. He was playing the part of a man who had never gone to Hogwarts and didn’t much care about Dumbledore’s reputation. He stared, and Dumbledore looked away after a moment, to Sirius.
“You and Mr. Smith could visit on the weekends and holidays,” he said.
“That’s a stupid idea,” Harry said loudly. “I’m not going back to the bad Muggles. And they don’t want me, either. Did you ask them?”
Dumbledore’s face grew pinched. “I haven’t been able to find their new house,” he admitted. “They left their old one after the publicity broke.” He glared at Peter for a moment, and then seemed to realize that trying to make Peter’s conscience troubled about that was a stupid idea, and faced Harry again. “But that only proves how much safer you would be with them, Mr. Potter. You would be in the Muggle world where no one could find you easily, not even me.”
“You just care about me being safe,” Harry said. “You don’t care if I’m happy.”
Peter felt his eyes widen. That was the crux of it, wasn’t it? Lily had said something once about out of the mouths of babes, and well, there it was.
Dumbledore sat back in his chair. “I-Harry, you must understand that, as the Boy-Who-Lived, and especially with the extra publicity from you freeing your godfather, you’ll be in much more danger than you were before-”
“I can Apparate, Mr. Dumbledore,” Harry said, his voice as stern as it had been the night he came to confront Peter about coming back. “I’ll Apparate away from a Death Eater that tries to grab me. And I’ll Apparate back to Uncle Alfred and Uncle Sirius if you take me away from them. I’ll just go. You can’t stop me.”
Peter didn’t laugh hysterically, but it was really close. He had seen Dumbledore angry, and interested, and guilty, and grieving, and happy, and stern, but he had never seen him flummoxed before.
“That shouldn’t be possible, at your age,” Dumbledore finally said.
Harry shrugged a little, patently not interested in that idea. “It is, though. So you have to leave me with Uncle Sirius and Uncle Alfred.”
“Do you really hate your relatives so much, Harry?” Dumbledore’s voice was soft and grieved.
Sirius had a complicated expression on his face. Peter eyed him sideways and thought he might know why Dumbledore was failing to convince Sirius. After all, Sirius had done exactly as Harry was threatening and run away from his abusive family.
“They put me in a cupboard. I don’t like them. If you want me to go back to them, I don’t like you.”
Dumbledore plainly didn’t know what to do about that. He glanced back and forth between all of them for a while, and then said, “But the blood wards around your family’s home would protect you as no other wards can.”
“That’s not true,” Sirius said, speaking in a hoarse voice that made Dumbledore jump. “There are other wards that would do that, if Alfred and I took oaths that were binding enough. Oaths to always put Harry first, and protect him. We shouldn’t have any trouble doing that. Not when Harry is our first priority all the time anyway.”
He stared at Peter challengingly. Peter stared back, his head buzzing.
An oath like that would set up wards that were binding, yes, and would make his primary allegiance to Harry. Which meant he could never again take up the mantle of a Death Eater. He could never return to the Dark Lord’s side, even if he had considered it.
Of course, Peter had known that since he’d realized that there was no excuse the Dark Lord would accept for Peter raising Harry instead of killing him.
But it was different to know that he would be so committed.
Sirius’s lips were turning up in a little smirk, and Peter knew that this was his delayed revenge. And Harry was looking up at Peter in a way that said he was all-too-pleased with the situation and didn’t see it as revenge at all.
But…
Everything was all settled already, Peter reminded himself. It wasn’t a trap. It was a chance to make sure that Dumbledore stopped trying to take Harry back to the Dursleys and a chance to protect Harry.
And to wipe that smug smirk off Sirius’s face.
Peter drew his wand, and Sirius’s jaw sagged slightly before he hastily grabbed for the ebony wand that they’d gone to purchase in Ollivander’s a few months before. He held it up and locked eyes with Peter.
“I don’t know the exact mechanism of making a binding oath like the one you mentioned,” Peter said. “Can you guide me through it, Sirius?”
“Sure,” Sirius said, visibly about to use his real name, and biting it back only just in time. He never looked away from Peter.
“Gentlemen, I’m not sure-”
Ignoring Dumbledore, Sirius lowered his wand and swept in a huge circle. Peter imitated his movements, and didn’t look away from his old friend.
“I swear on my honor, on my name, on the magic that flows through me, that my primary allegiance is with Harry Potter, with no swerving, no turning, and that I will protect him with body and breath and life and magic until all of these cease.”
Peter repeated what Sirius had said, words only a few beats behind, and felt the heavy magic shift in him until it fell like a cascade on his mind. He shuddered and only just kept from kneeling. This felt-
It felt like the moment the Dark Lord had bound him with the mark, except no visible sign of what he’d sworn to appeared on his skin.
It was worth it, to see Sirius staring at him as if he’d had some kind of revelation, and Dumbledore flummoxed again.
And Harry beaming at him as if he was the center of the kid’s entire universe.
Yeah, Peter thought as he tugged a strand of that currently bright red hair, I’m committed now.
Part Five.