Running Close to the Ground

Part I: The Beginning of a Beautiful End

Chapter One: Rat Dreams

I was thinking of a series of dreams,

Where nothing comes up to the top;

Everything stays down where it's wounded

And comes to a permanent stop...

Ottery St. Catchpole, 1991

The twins are sitting in the tree just outside the attic window, daring their younger brother to jump out. You have to catch hold of the right branch at just the right moment, or fall to the ground thirty feet below.

"Aww, is ickle Ronniekins afwaid the big bad twee won't catch him?" That's Fred, the loud, impulsive one. George is quieter, and a bit more cunning.

"I'm not afraid!" Ron yells, throwing one leg over the windowsill. "I'm just ... just getting ready, is all!"

"Come on, Ron," calls George. "You are a wizard, aren't you? Everybody knows wizards bounce."

"Most of the time," Fred puts in.

"Oh, pretty near all the time. He'll be all right," says George. And then, as if a new thought has suddenly struck him, he adds, "Unless he's a Squib like Mum's second cousin Dave. It does run in families sometimes, come to think of it."

"You don't feel Squibbish, do you, Ronniekins?" Fred asks with mock concern.

"Of course I'm not a Squib!" says Ron, with just a faint note of worry behind the indignation in his voice. He's been practicing spells all summer, and they never work. That's because most of them are fake spells the twins made up, and the rest of them are ones he found in Percy's textbooks and are far too advanced for an eleven-year-old, but he doesn't know this.

Ron's my favorite of all the family. I chose Percy when I first came to live here, because he seemed safe and reliable, but it's hard to like Percy. Ron is the one who makes me think of myself, growing up in the shadow of the others, always a little worried he won't measure up. Of course he isn't a Squib - I've seen him do accidental magic - and I've seen enough to know he's got brains and courage as well, even if the others haven't noticed yet.

I want to tell him everything's going to be fine, but then I think about how things turned out for me. Not so much, really.

Another red head appears at the top of the attic stairs. It's Ginny, the youngest of the family and the only girl, a deceptively fragile-looking little mite. Her brothers are very protective of her, but she doesn't need protecting. She'll sit there in the corner, quiet as anything, and then she'll say or do something that leaves everybody staring at her.

Like right now, for instance. Without warning, she leaps out of the window with a banshee yell and catches hold of the nearest branch, swinging by her slim brown arms.

"Would you look at that, Ron!" crows Fred. "Our baby sister can do it, and she's two whole years younger than you."

Neither of the younger children seems pleased. "Only a year and four months," says Ginny with dignity, settling into a crook of the tree.

"Suuure," says George. "You're nine and he's eleven, that makes you two years younger."

"Doesn't."

"Does."

"Anyway," calls the other twin, "are you going to let a little nine-year-old beat you or not?"

Don't do it, Ron, I think, beginning to panic. The ground is a long way down, and wizards don't always bounce. You don't have to do things just because other people tell you to. Have some real courage and do what you want to do.

But he is already poised on the edge of the windowsill, and in the next moment he jumps.

I curl into a tight little ball, screw my eyes shut, and try to ignore the sickening swoop in my stomach as we crash through the tree, and - thank Merlin - he catches hold of the branch, swings back and forth a few times, and everything is blessedly still. I poke my head out of his pocket and gulp the air, feeling profoundly thankful to be alive after all.

Ron lets out a whoop of laughter. "That was brilliant!"

No, it wasn't! You're lucky we didn't both break our necks! Never do that again!

But the boy is already beginning to clamber down the tree. "Let's do it again, Gin! Race you!"

Oh no, I think, burying my head in my front paws. See if I even try to turn yellow next time you practice spells on me, kid...

Godric's Hollow, 1972

But before Ron's feet touch the ground, the scene dissolves and the Weasley children give place to four other children in another tree ...

Two dark heads bob in and out of sight as my friends crash through the boughs beneath us, fencing with broken branches for swords.

"Prepare to eat thy breeches, thou scurvy scoundrel!"

"No one speaks like that to Sir James the Omnipotent! Have at thee now!"

"You're going to poke each other's eyes out," I warn them, but they don't give any sign they've heard.

There's a soft laugh from the branch next to me, where a thin brown-haired boy is sitting curled up like a cat. "You sound like you're turning into your mum."

"Yeah," I say. "Tomorrow I'm going to start wearing paisley robes and putting my hair up in rollers, and next week I take up dusting as a hobby."

He snickers appreciatively. "You'd look kind of cute in paisley robes."

I feel good about making him laugh. We have a secret way of talking to each other, a wordless language of private looks and wide eyes, and I can tell when he looks at me that he's in pain. That's why he doesn't join the game the others are playing. He's never really been well, but it's worse this summer; he seems to be outgrowing his strength.

He is my best friend, and I don't understand him at all.

"Why won't you tell anyone you don't feel well?" I ask. Mrs. Potter would let him lie on the couch and feed him ice cream if he did. She's nice.

"Because I don't want to," he says shortly, with a proud lift to his chin.

"What's the matter with you, anyway?"

His eyes drop to the moss-covered floor of the orchard, and I can no longer read his feelings. "Never you mind."

"At least tell me whether or not it's contagious," I say.

He looks up and rolls his eyes as if I've just asked the stupidest question in the world. "Do my mum and dad look ill? Do Sirius and James? Do you?"

"No."

"There you are, then." But he hasn't exactly answered the question, and he still won't meet my gaze.

I shade my eyes and look out over the green, green landscape below us. James, who grew up here, takes Godric's Hollow for granted, but the rest of us are city boys, and for us it is little short of Eden: the orchard heavy with early apples, the river where we skipped stones and splashed in the muddy shallows yesterday afternoon, and under the fir trees, the dark little churchyard with its ancient gravestones.

Sirius and Remus spent most of the morning hunting up eccentric epitaphs and poking fun at them.

Here lie the feet of Patrick Breen

Who was eaten by a Common Welsh Green.

The upper parts of this Irish wizard

Are resting in peace in the dragon's gizzard.

"I don't think that's funny at all," I protested when they found that one. "That poor man, coming all the way from Ireland where they don't even have snakes, and getting eaten by a dragon when he'd probably never had to look out for them before. What if he was on holiday? What if his children were watching?"

"The trouble with you, Pete," said James, laughing, "is that you have entirely too much imagination."

I remember the way he was lying on his back in the tall grass among the gravestones of fifteen generations of Potters and shiver for no good reason. I feel like there's something wrong with me, sometimes. Like I see things differently from the rest of them.

"Oy, you there!" calls Sirius from the lowest crook in the tree. "Help us eat some of these apples, will you? We're getting stomachaches down here." And James sends a well-aimed apple hurtling through the branches, almost hitting me on the nose before I catch it.

I take a bite out of the apple, and then look at my friend's white face and trembling limbs. I remember he barely picked at his food at lunch. "Here. You need to eat something, OK?"

He gives me a weak smile. "Thanks, Peter."

His small, sharp teeth bite into the apple...

Hogwarts, 1993

Another set of pointed canines snaps shut a fraction of an inch from my tail, and powerful claws swipe at my head.

"CATCH THAT CAT!" hollers Ron, and George lunges forward. But the cat is too fast for him: a ginger streak shoots across the common room just behind me as I run for my life, my feet skidding on the floor.

I dart under a chest of drawers and lie there panting, peeking around the enormous bulk of the cat at the Gryffindor common room. It was a safe and familiar place once, almost a second home. Now I am an alien here, an intruder. The kids haven't caught on yet, but the cat knows. The uncannily intelligent look in his yellow eyes scares me more than his teeth or claws.

Hermione grabs the cat and hauls him away, while Ron tries to coax me out from under the chest. "Come on out, Scabbers old fella, there's a good rat. I won't let him hurt you." I struggle to get a grip on the floorboards with my paws, but he keeps tugging on my tail. Ow! Why can't people who aren't Animagi understand about tails?

I want to trust the boy, I want to obey him, but my legs are shaking too much to walk and I don't feel like he can protect me any more. If Crookshanks doesn't get me, Sirius Black will. I've come to the end of my twelve years in the shelter of warm pockets and sleep, a shelter that is no longer mine.

I flatten myself against the floor, terrified of the cat, terrified of the room full of stomping boots and careless children, terrified of being dragged out into the light.

* * *

I wake with a start, heart pounding, until I remember where I am and how I got here. I feel relieved for a moment that there are no cats, ex-convicts, or death-defying plunges in sight, but then I have to struggle to forget James lying with his ancestors in the Godric's Hollow churchyard and little Ron looking at me as if I were the filthiest creature who ever crawled across the earth.

I transform back into a man and sit on the floor of our room at the inn, nursing my cramped limbs. I've been dreaming the day away in a snug little hole in the wall because the only way I can get a few solid hours of sleep these days is in my Animagus form. Liquor helps too, but it wears off too quickly and leaves me with a raging hangover and surreal nightmares.

I still have bad dreams sometimes when I'm a rat, but the saving grace of being an animal is that you don't have any imagination. (James was right, imagination's always been my weakness. Imagination and nerves.) The thousand faces of death don't run through your head, or what Padfoot and Prongs are going to do to you on the other side. You only dream of things that have already happened. Not that the worst scenes I've witnessed aren't bad enough. I can't count the times I've woken up at three or four in the morning with the screams of twelve Muggles and Bertha Jorkins echoing in my ears.

Things weren't supposed to go down that way. I never meant for any of them to die. I threw a curse that went wide of its mark and hit a gas main, and next thing I knew I'd blown up a whole street. They were just like me, in the wrong people's way at the wrong time.

And lately, ever since my master told me old Pads was dead, I've been hearing the others too, the ones I never felt guilty about before. James, Lily, Sirius - the best and brightest in our year. And the grey-eyed handsome boy whose name I never knew, the one who was Tri-Wizard champion one minute, and in the next only "the spare." I told myself it was no great sin to kill the brave and beautiful and brilliant; I was only evening the score a bit. Why should some people be given everything else on a silver plate and enjoy a long, happy life?

For fifteen years I tended the flames of resentment, and then I woke one morning to find they'd burnt themselves out and I had nothing left to do but sweep out the ashes. You can't go on hating the dead, so there isn't anybody left to hate except myself.

I open my eyes and count the cracks in the ceiling and the drops of rain on the windows. A cockroach scuttles down the center of the room. This is the worst inn in England; Avery and I chose it for its obscurity. We have to keep a low profile because we're on a mission for the Dark Lord. I'd tell you more, but then I'd have to kill you.

You think that's a joke? It isn't. Let's leave it at that.

On the other side of the room, a lump stirs in a rusty iron bed: Bardolph Avery, my partner, my role model, my hero. Avery's the closest thing you'll find to an honest man in this organization, the one Death Eater who really is as slow-witted and hapless as most of the rank and file pretends to be. He's never noticed the rest of us copying his behavior and mannerisms.

I guess Avery's also my best friend these days. Last time I saw Remus, he made it pretty clear the position was wide open as far as he was concerned.