A Secret Kept

"Crucio," he said again.

In the first second of Voldemort's torture, the pain reminded me of when one of the bludgers in a Quidditch match first year had hit me as I stood cheering in the stands. The bludger caused a sickening crunch, a desocketed right shoulder blade, and a mess of bruises and blood. You remember, Sirius.

After the first second, I realized that Crucio was so much worse, that compared to it, the worst physical pain I had ever felt before in my life was akin to the tickling of a fly's legs when it walks across someone's arm.

Why did they have to do it? Why did they have to make me secret keeper, knowing that my secret wasn't protected?

This didn't even occur to them, that Crucio was worse than Avada Kadavra...far, far, worse. James and Lily had never been tortured in their lives, but for fear of simple death, they let me, and then you, die in excruciating, excruciating pain.

Voldemort almost tipped the balance. There is something so completely amoral about him that you cannot be angry with him. He tortures you, and it is like a shark's bite or the sinking of a cobra's fangs–animalistic and inevitable. There's no point in becoming angry at the grizzly bear about to tear you open like a fish...you get away from it if you can. But if a human can be so monstrous, maybe there's something of that in all humans. Lions are more violent than valiant. And the whole time the Snake Lord tortured me, he would not stop his insinuations...raising his questions about my friendship with just a touch too much cynical truth.

He might have tipped the balance, too. He might have got the secret, except that when I was shaking, panting in the brief reprieve I got, so that he might again demand the location, I forced my eyes to focus. I looked ahead of me into the eyes of a young woman, still writhing under the spell. Her teeth were gritted, and her eyes would have been "mad", except for some secret thought hidden within them. And that was how I knew that all human beings are not smaller versions of the Snake–that it is worthwhile being different. I knew she was relishing the control she had...the power over him she had in her ability to die.

The body goes through tremendous physical stress under Crucio. But who knows that better than you, old pal? The heartrate becomes erratic. The mind withdraws in shock. All the limbs grow cold. If you are young and healthy..even if you're a bit overweight as I was...the caster will think you can survive another bout...another...another. He doesn't take into account that possibly you'll stop trying, and that when you feel your heartrate falter, you'll let it stop altogether.

I'm surprised they didn't ask Remus to do it after we had died. How long does it take a person to catch on that in protecting his family, he's setting his best friends up to be tortured? He had the nerve to ask you to do it after seeing my body. He didn't know I could see him, as he saw me, laid out dead. I was hiding under a chair in the front row of my own memorial service–the ghost of a rat. And he was looking at me, dead, the same way he looked at me living...as if he was shaking his head, thinking "So weak to have died of Crucio. Poor Peter Pettigrew, always so weak."

Isn't it funny how he's still in the land of the living? There's Lily, still beautiful at 40, successful with a job at the Ministry. There's James, who realized, finally, that the prophecy was nothing more that an excuse to avoid what everyone was afraid of...actually making a plan to attack the monster and take him down.

So the hero James Potter did it. The mighty Auror Potter led the others into battle, and in the end, there was a great mess of blood everywhere, but some of it was the damned Snake Lord's, and he was finally dead.

Harry is in his seventh year at Hogwarts now. Griffindor, Quidditch captain, Head Boy, apple of his father's eye.

And yet we'll never have children at Hogwarts, Sirius. You and I are shadows that move in the night.