Meritorious Service of an Extraordinary Nature

Meritorious Service of an Extraordinary Nature

Part Two: Answers, of a Sort

It's gratifying to know the entry is still there, anyway. Like everything else in the Archives, the Record Book of the Order of Merlin contains its fair share of half-truths and out-and-out lies, and I should not be surprised at all to discover that my service was neither meritorious nor extraordinary. But every now and then a prior entry becomes so embarrassing that they are forced to expunge it. The pages are charmed so the record in question disappears without a trace. The usual procedure in these cases is to send an Auror around to the hapless recipient's house to collect the medal, but since I'm chronically forgetful and I live in a family of Aurors who seem bent on protecting me against my will, one of them could easily slip the box on my dressing table into their pocket and I would be none the wiser.

I'm joking, of course. I haven't done anything particularly scandalous, unless you count having fur and a tail three nights a month. A few of the committee members did balk when they found out about that, but Minerva settled them by pointing out that she has fur and a tail whenever she jolly well feels like it, and nobody thinks of taking hers away. And then she threatened to go tabby on a permanent basis unless the others came to their senses. Dear Minerva. So I got my two lines in the Record Book, and they're unlikely to vanish unless I am exposed as an outright fraud. Like Gilderoy Lockhart, for example. Or - But I have never looked at that one.

I don't know what prompts me to flip back to the year 1981, something I have always carefully avoided doing. My hands start to shake as I hold the book open and stare at eight little words that should not be there any more.

Pettigrew, Peter M. Order of Merlin, First Class...

The natural explanation, the sensible, rational one that doesn't crumble one's most cherished beliefs into dust, is that nobody has ever thought to do anything about that entry. But Minerva, of all people, wouldn't have let that slide. And the rest of the line clinches the matter:

... for meritorious service of an extraordinary nature. But everybody knew what Peter did - or was supposed to have done.

Well, my most cherished beliefs seem to have a habit of crumbling into dust every ten years or so; it's one of the handful of things I've come to depend on. I have no doubt what that entry means. Somewhere in the back of my mind, I have always known.

He earned that Order of Merlin. However belatedly - and however lunatic and improbable it seems - he did something, somehow, to win it back.

And I killed him anyway. I don't remember striking the blow; I don't have a clue what happened before or after that; and I cannot tell whether I did it from error or revenge or madness or lycanthropy. But I'm dead certain I killed him.

This is the knowledge from which someone has been shielding me. I'm also certain - now - that this person is a member of my own household.

Peter means rock. Something clicks into place, and I stand in the middle of the stacks giggling like an idiot. Crystal. Sapphire. Roxanne. The subconscious comes up with the most appalling puns sometimes.

* * *

I'm a fair cook when I remember to take things out of the oven, which is usually about ten minutes later than I should have done. "Tonks, could you make sure that lasagna doesn't burn?" I call from the bedroom. (She still won't let me call her Nymphadora, which means "My fool of a mother consulted the horoscope column in Witch Weekly instead of buying a proper baby name book." At least, that's what she said when I asked her.)

"Blast!" she yells a moment later. She must have burnt her fingers and dropped it again. I come running just in time to see Harry levitate the pan of slightly blackened lasagna before it hits the floor and send it flying onto the table. He's got first-class reflexes. Always good to have a Quidditch player in the family.

Hedwig, who has grown cranky in her old age and resents anything that flies faster than she can, tries to attack the lasagna, but I catch her just in time.

Our household resembles nothing so much as a remedial home economics class for domestically declined students, but we do manage to get dinner on the table most nights.

Irene is observing the scene with a distinct smirk on her lovely little face. "You had better make yourself useful and set the table," I inform her. "Or do I have to remind you what happens to little cubs who make fun of their elders?"

"What, Dad?" She looks up at me with mock innocence.

"They get tickled," I answer solemnly, and we spend the next few minutes crashing around the living room. Abruptly, she pulls away from me and runs off to set the table, still giggling. She can sense when I'm beginning to get tired, sometimes before I realize it myself.

Irene is an absolute sweetheart, but I really don't need a five-year-old to look after me.

I open a bottle of wine and Tonks produces something that resembles a salad, only with peanuts and bananas in it. It's a very normal evening, or as normal as things get with us, and I think long and hard before shattering my family's peace.

Keeping my voice as light and casual as possible, I say, "I know about Peter." (Meaning, of course, that I don't know anything about Peter, but at least I'm aware now that I don't.) I watch their faces. Tonks looks startled, but it's Harry who is clearly shaken to the core.

I refill the glass he has just knocked over and ask, "You were the one who Memory Charmed me, weren't you?"

"Yes," he admits.

"I consented," Tonks adds quickly. "And Mad-Eye Moody agreed, and so did McGonagall and just about everybody else who saw you. We would have asked your permission, but you weren't in any condition to give it."

"That bad?"

"Yes," she says without hesitation.

I hadn't expected this, although I should have. Of course they wouldn't have done it if it hadn't been necessary. For a minute, I'm not sure how much more I want to know, but I have committed myself.

"Could I talk to you about it later, Harry? Ask you a few things?"

"How about right now?" he asks.

"All right." It's not as if either of us will be eating any more, although we do take our wine glasses and a second bottle with us. I walk out the back door, followed by the young man I have come to think of as my son.

Harry is a diminutive of Harold, which means "army leader," or of Henry, which means "ruler of the home," but our young army leader shows no particular inclination to rule a home of his own. I have asked him whether he wouldn't prefer to share a flat with some friends, or at least travel for a while, but he seems reluctant to leave the shelter of the closest thing to a proper family he's ever had. I accept that he's a bit damaged, more so than I was at his age, and he needs to be somewhere warm and domestic and secure.

Protection can be mutual, I realize suddenly. It's what families do for one another.

We sit down in a couple of lawn chairs, and Harry opens the second bottle of wine, and I look out over the garden where the first crocuses are beginning to push their way through the damp earth. We are silent for a minute or two. "Tell me how he died," I say at last.

"I don't know. I didn't witness it - you were the only one on our side who was there, unless you count him. I only know what you told the rest of us."

"What did I say?"

He takes a sip of wine and looks away. "You weren't making much sense at first. You burst into headquarters just after it was over and we were beginning to celebrate, and you were shaking all over and staring as if you weren't really seeing any of us, and you kept saying, 'I killed my best friend. I killed my brother.' And then I made you sit down because you looked like you were about to collapse, and Moody gave you a shot of Scotch, and - well, you still weren't making a lot of sense, if you want to know the truth, but it came out in bits and pieces. You said he had a clear shot at you and didn't take it, and then you struck - and you told us you thought he'd been playing a very deep game of his own for some time - bungling things, but never too obviously, and feeding Voldemort false information. And Moody tried to tell you it was nonsense, he wouldn't have survived for five minutes if he couldn't do Occlumency, and you said he could, at least a little."

I remember a pair of blue eyes meeting mine. I have some slight, wildly untrained, natural skill at Legilimency - which meant Peter had a fair amount of experience trying to block it, because he was usually the only one I could browbeat into practicing with me. James and Sirius thought we were both out of our minds.

"Was I positive he was playing for our side," I ask him, "or was it a guess?"

"You sounded very sure. You said he told you, but you didn't understand in time. Did you have a code word or private joke he might have tried to use to signal you, and maybe you didn't figure out what it meant until it was too late?"

I shake my head, feeling very old and tired suddenly. "No, we didn't have a code word or private joke. We had hundreds."

"I thought it might be that way. I didn't realize until that night how close the two of you had been."

"No; I wouldn't have told you." I have been almost silent about Peter for ten years.

So it wasn't vengeance, then, just one of those stupid bloody accidents that happen in the fog of battle. He had a way of getting entangled in stupid bloody accidents. The damn fool probably never meant to kill all those Muggles either, come to think of it. I curse him one last time - silently as always, but not so bitterly as before.

"Tell me more. How badly did I take it?"

Harry hesitates for a moment. "You seemed to think you were back at school half the time - you kept calling me Prongs - and the rest of the time you just said over and over that he was dead, and you didn't deserve to be the one left alive."

"You don't think I would have come out of it in time?"

"We didn't have time. We were afraid you might ..." His voice trails off.

"It was hide-the-kitchen-knives time?" I ask with a weak attempt at lightheartedness.

I try not to show how shaken I am when he nods. This isn't possible. It doesn't sound like the sort of person I believe I am.

"We agreed that the best thing to do was Memory Charm you and keep everything quiet, and McGonagall said she'd find some way to fix things so you got your Order of Merlin and he kept his, without making it too obvious to anyone what happened. Tonks wanted to do it herself, but - well, she's your wife, and we were worried you might not forgive the person who did it if you ever found out. So I did. I did it for Irene. She needed a father who was alive and sane."

He is looking at me as if he is still afraid I may not forgive him - which is absurd. He has done nothing that requires forgiveness. "Thank you, Harry."

"Are you going to be - all right?" His voice is, I think, much too calm and soothing for comfort. I don't want them to go around talking to me that way for the rest of my life.

"I'm not about to go off my head again, if that's what you're asking." I realize how snippy this sounds almost as soon as I've said, and one look at his face tells me it wasn't what he was asking at all. "Sorry. Yes, I will be all right. In time. Where is he buried?"

"The same place he was supposed to be, only seventeen years later. Do you know where that is?"

"Yes." I carried flowers and firewhiskey to that grave a hundred times, back when it held nothing but a heap of bloodstained robes and a severed finger. In my vague, amnesiac way, I must have been trying to do it again last November. It would, I realize, have been the anniversary of his supposed death. "Have you ever gone there?" I ask Harry.

He stares at me. "He sold my parents. And he murdered Cedric. Nothing's going to change that."

He's right, of course. It occurs to me, for the first time, that if I had somehow managed to bring Peter out alive, they would surely have thrown him to the dementors anyway. Known traitors do not get acquitted on the strength of their own word and that of a werewolf. A swift stroke of oblivion may have been the most merciful gift I could have given my friend, or that he could have taken at my hand.

"Would you mind very much if I went there someday?" I ask.

"Of course not." After a moment he adds, "I'll go with you if you like."

"Thank you, Harry, but I'm used to going places alone."

"That's why I'd like to go with you."

Darkness has been gathering as we speak. I can see almost nothing of Harry except the silhouette of a slight figure in the chair opposite me. I know how much the offer has cost him, and I struggle to find the right words. I want to thank him, and at the same time tell him he doesn't have to; I'm not sure myself whether I will ever visit that grave again. Too much has happened, and I know too little about why he betrayed us in the first place, and why he turned back. He will never answer those questions now.

The back door opens and a square of light falls across the lawn chairs. "So, are you guys going to drink all that wine yourselves, or what?" Tonks asks.

"Help yourself." I draw up my legs to make room for her, and she sits down at the end of my chair and watches me for a long moment.

"Not too angry at us?" she says softly.

"Not at all. Harry says he did it so Irene could have a proper father, and that's worth almost anything, isn't it?"

She slides closer and covers my hand with hers. "I'd better tell you up front that my reasons were more selfish. I agreed to it because I cared for you, a hell of a lot, and I wanted to keep you. You don't feel too - damaged by it, do you? Because you don't seem that way to us. You're still yourself."

I shake my head. "Not really. It's a bit of a nuisance being so scatty, and I would have liked more children, but that hardly seems important. Not compared to being sane and being here."

Harry sets his glass down heavily. "What does being Memory Charmed have to do with having children?" he demands.

"Nothing - unless you happen to be a werewolf who's too scatterbrained to remember when to take his potion. Of course I'm glad we already had Irene, but I didn't want to risk any more."

"Oh." He sounds like he's breathing more easily. "For a minute, I thought you were saying it had some sort of effect on, er..."

"Potency?" Tonks asks brightly. "Oh no. I wouldn't have forgiven you if that were the case."

We all laugh; I'm blushing hectically, of course, but fortunately the darkness covers it. It occurs to me, not for the first time, that the woman who chose me is an absolute winner - smart, down-to-earth, and able to find humor in the toughest of situations. And broadly tolerant. She demonstrates this once again when she clinks her glass against mine. "To Peter."

Harry starts, and makes a slight noise of protest.

"Wait," I say. "He sent your cousin to Azkaban for twelve years. Doesn't that still matter?"

"And he also gave his life for yours," she says firmly. "That matters too - especially from my perspective."

"Well," I tell her, "I'm still not sure I feel like toasting Peter. It's all very new. Give me some time to think about it."

"To the act and not the man, then," she says. "To meritorious service of an extraordinary nature."

Harry and I raise our glasses and echo, "Meritorious service of an extraordinary nature."