28 July, 1981 - Friend (III)

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It was a little over a week before Sirius managed to find Peter and talk to him alone, which was in no small part because Peter, like most everyone these days, stayed under the radar except on those rare occasions when he visited those people he wanted to spend time with. And that very short list of people did not include his former friends.

Much of the reason for that avoidance was guilt. And Peter had more than enough guilt without being reminded of his many failings by the sight of his old friends. These days, it was an effort to meet their eyes, an effort not to flinch when he saw them. An effort not to apologise for being small and weak.

But despite the guilt, he did nothing to make himself better. He knew what would happen if he betrayed the Death Eaters, after all. He had been with them too long and he was too valuable and it was too late. If he left... If he left they would hunt him down. They would do such awful things and he'd been given enough tastes of the kind of pain they could offer to never want their wands turned on him again. And of course, they would go after people he cared about. His mother, who was soft and sweet and didn't deserve to be hurt because of his failings, which she had always refused to see. And his friends. Or rather, friend. Singular. Because Vin... Vin was the only one who had been there as everything in his life fell apart. And the Death Eaters wanted her anyway, some of them with a fervor that struck terror deep in his soul. He couldn't risk adding to the fervor with which they would hunt and hurt her by failing in the tasks they set him.

Besides, if he left now, if he admitted what he had done, there would be no one in the world who could protect him. Dumbledore would surely cast him out, no matter what he'd said at the meeting all those months ago. The Order would demand it. And besides, their power was failing. They were losing. And the longer they tried to hold out, the steeper the cost was going to be. He had seen the toll it had been taking on all of them, had seen the rundown, war-weary exhaustion on Lavinia's face growing these past months. And they weren't going to win. Their resistance was only going to cost them.

But knowing that didn't prevent the guilt from seeping in. So he'd avoided his old friends, avoided the reminder of who, exactly he was betraying. All except Lavinia, who he knew wouldn't judge him, at least for his fears, who still smiled at him and made an effort for him. Who was perhaps the only person in the world who had ever seen him for who he was and loved him anyway. Including his mother, who had a habit of thinking her son whas more like the person she wanted him to be than who he really was. And that was even before Lavinia was left as the only on of his friends who still tried to help him when all the others were too busy to so much as spare him a glance. Which was the other reason he had been avoiding them.

For months and months and months, they had been too busy for him. For months he had seen them only at Order meetings and they had barely even greeted him. For months they had seemed to forget that they had been friends for ten years. Ten wonderful years. Gone like it meant nothing. And he had been lonely. So very very lonely. And in that loneliness, something bitter and vile had grown, something that made his stomach crawl and his chest ache when he looked at them and felt that sense of abandonment consume him. Something that sometimes felt like rage.

So he avoided them on principle and despite Sirius's searching, it was a little while before he actually found him, and even then it was only because Peter had been coming to look for Lavinia, to ask for a distraction he sorely needed. It was getting harder, so much harder, to give the Death Eaters bits of information that would be enough to keep him safe but not so much that deaths would fall on his conscience, not so much that he would cost people the chance to even fight for their lives. But with the Order now rarely launching assaults, the Death Eaters demanded more. The Dark Lord demanded more.

The first time Peter had seen the Dark Lord face to face, he had decided instantly that he never wanted to lay eyes on the man again. Not that that was particularly feasible. That meeting had done two things, actually. It had sealed his fate when the Dark Mark was inked onto his skin. And it had been the moment when he knew he couldn't hold out forever, no matter how hard he tried. Because the Dark Lord... Peter had thought he knew what pain felt like, what the Cruciatus Curse had felt like. But until that day, he had never realized that more powerful the wizard who cast it, the more painful the experience was. And there was no wizard more powerful than Lord Voldemort.

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