The Marauders - Order of the Phoenix - Part One

Thurisaz. Raidho. Hagalaz.

Wormtail shivered and pressed his little rat body closer to the wall, squeezing his beady eyes shut as tight as possible. Every time the trains raced by, he felt like gelatin afterward - all wobbly and weak. His nose twitched, and he pressed all the harder into the wall, trembling with fear. As a rat, he was too small to be caught up by the passing trains as they streaked past through the dark, but the sound of scraping metal wheels over the rails and the rush of the humid, dust-filled air that blasted so hard it nearly knocked him over was enough to fear.

Scrambling up a narrow stairwell inset into the wall, he ran down the length of a small metal walk way, created for the service crews who might need to access the deep parts of the tunnels. He scampered carefully, peering into the blurriness ahead of him. Finally, he found the turn off he'd been searching for - a small cleft in the tiled walls of the Underground where there was an itty bitty space, a ladder stretching up to a manhole cover, where just a small round hole of sunlight filtered through the grime.

That manhole cover opened up on an alley a few blocks from the university where Peter was studying his divination, and it was here - in the small space below it, where the heat of the Underground promised comfort from inclement weather - that Peter Pettigrew had been staying for the past several weeks. Whenever he wasn't at the flat in East London, in fact, he'd been there, tucked away and alone in the dark.

It wasn't an entirely terrible situation, really. After all, there was warmth and privacy. As a rat, he had built a nice nest in a little box that he had brought down with him and filled with cotton stuffing. His school books were in his ruck sack, along with a couple changes of clothes, tucked in a dark corner where any workers would overlook it should they come into the tunnel - though he had yet to see anyone else there. Other rats, of course, but they mostly stayed clear of him, sensing he was different than they were. Up above on the street level, there was a pub, a cafe, and a fast food restaurant where he could collect loads of morsels to eat from the rubbish in his rat form. Honestly, it was a rather good situation - for a rat - and a moderately "OK" one for a young man who didn't want to go home.

He transformed into his own form, though it was cramped and a bit uncomfortable in the tiny room at the foot of the ladder, sometimes it was just nice to be himself, rather than a rat.

Peter pressed his back to the wall and hugged his knees to his chest as best he could considering his round little belly, and he rummaged in his rucksack for a moment or two until he'd pulled out the small velvet bag that held his divination tools. He fished about in the bag and with drew his casting stones, letting the cool crystals roll over his palms. A funny feeling was nagging at him, though he couldn't quite place what it was. He absent-mindedly let the stones tumble, thinking about the vague feeling that he ought to be somewhere, ought to be doing something, as though he'd been told of a chore he'd forgotten to do. He closed his eyes.

It struck him suddenly that, aside from that one train that had passed him in the tunnel some time ago, there hadn't been any trains going by since. 

Peter paused in tumbling the stones, dropping them onto the ground beside him, and reached into his velvet bag, pulling out his watch to check the time. It wasn't right, he thought, it was after the time that all of the commuter trains ought to be passing by - there ought to be thousands of people going to work about now, crammed into those cars like sardines. But the rails were silent.

He reached for the stones he'd been holding, about to scoop them up, when he paused and looked at the way they'd been cast, at the runes etched into the sides that were face up. His hand shook slightly. 

Thurisaz, reversed. Raidho, half-reversed. Hagalaz.

Evil. Destruction. Defenselessness. Change - change of heart, change of perspective. An evolution. Uncontrolled forces from within. Pain. Loss. Suffering. Betrayal.