The Good Master

The Good Master

I have always been funny about pets. My first pet was a fox kit that my sister and I found when I was six. He had been hurt, and I was so determined to take care of him myself I make Ginny promise not to tell anyone. I stole a box and some rags to make a little nest for him. At every meal I would smuggle scraps into my napkin to feed him later. But he was young and badly injured and I was young and inexperienced and, despite my best efforts, he died. I buried him underneath a tree in our yard and cried.

I remember when Percy gave me Scabbers. Percy had just been made a Prefect and our parents had given him a new owl to show how proud they were. The owl was young, but not too young, and had glossy feathers, bright eyes and a haughty manner.

Scabbers was a fat ancient rat with dull fur, rheumy eyes and a missing toe. He had been Percy's pet at that point for nearly all of the eleven years of my life, but now he was passed down to me.

I was thrilled to have a special furry friend to take care of and confide in, but at the same time I was angry. How could Percy do that to Scabbers? Sure, it was a family tradition for my older brothers to saddle Ginny and me as the youngest with all the rubbish they no longer wanted, but Scabbers wasn't a jumper grown too small to fit or some partially eaten piece of sweets no one else liked the taste of. Scabbers was a person and he had feelings too. As I held him as my pet for the first time I vowed that I would never abandon him as Percy had done; I would be a good friend.

For the rest of the summer until school started I was determined to make sure Scabbers did not feel abandoned. I took him everywhere; carried him in my front pocket or let him ride on my shoulder. He sat on my lap at meals until mum yelled at me. Then he sat there concealed by my napkin. I enlisted Ginny to help me figure out which sweets he liked best, and after a week of experimenting he was fatter than ever. He liked chocolate best.

I had heard somewhere though that friendship was about sharing, not just time and candy, but secrets. And so it was that I told Scabbers everything; whispered it to him across the shared pillow. I told him how guilty I felt about having to leave Ginny by herself for a year just because she was younger. I confided my fears that everyone would laugh at my second-hand everything, that no one would want to be my friend and that I would be rubbish at magic. Scabbers listened intently while I spoke aloud for the first time my worry that, not being as handsome as Bill, as athletic as Charlie, as perfect as Percy or as funny as the twins, I would never be good enough. I tearfully confessed that I sometimes wished I were an only child so I wasn't always stuck with their hand-me-down expectations. I even told him about my fox.

At school I made friends...great friends. I didn't forget about Scabbers though just because I now had friends who were my sized and talked. No, I maintained our relationship. He still slept nights next to my head on the pillow. I still brought him his favorite sweets, carried him everywhere it was for him safe to go and made sure he never missed a Quidditch match. I still confided in him too. Harry's the best mate a boy could have, but there are just some things that he'd just never understand. I always knew Scabbers could sympathize though. After all, he may not have had red hair or freckles, but he had been a Weasley for as long as Ginny.

Our friendship continued much as it had been until we returned from Egypt at the start of my third year. Scabbers had seemed to thrive in the desert, warming his old bones and enjoying the company of Egyptian lady rats, but upon returning to our colder, damper climate his health suddenly took a turn for the worst. He began to shed weight and fur in frightening amounts and started at the slightest thing. It was my fox all over again and I was terrified of my own inability to make him better. When the lady at the pet shop casually pronounced Scabbers a lost cause and offered me something new and shiny, I decided I was going to do everything in my admittedly limited power to make sure he recovered. I'd be damned if I just gave up on him as a lost cause like Percy had.

So I bought him is rat tonic and hoped things would be better when we got to school. But they weren't better. In fact, it was infinitely worse. Dementors were casually strolling about, Hermione seemed bound and determined to study her way to a nervous break down and my two oldest friends were being stalked by relentless, psychotic killers. The school was on high alert to protect Harry. Soul sucking guards on the perimeter, teachers protectively lurking in every corner and Hermione fretting over him like a mother hen with her chick. With so many people looking out for his physical well being, I did my best to look after him in other ways. With Black on the loose and Professor Trelawney's dire predictions I knew what Harry really needed was a distraction, and I worked to provide one with cards and chess and bad jokes.

Scabbers was another story. If the nearly the whole of the wizarding world was out to protect Harry, I was my pet's first and only line of defense against Hermione's newly acquired demon cat. There was no doubt about its intentions. From the moment that Crookshanks had attacked us in the pet store I knew it was trouble. Yet no one else acknowledge the threat. To Hermione, he was a gorgeous feline charity case and if he went after Scabbers it was only because that was something all cats did. She ignored the murderous glint in his eyes and the uncanny intelligence that gleamed there as well in favor of the soft ginger of his fluffy coat.

And then he was dead, ripped apart and devoured by Hermione's cat on my bed, and I was filled with emotion. I was, of course, full of grief for the loss of my oldest friend and overwhelmed with guilt. Scabbers' safety was my responsibility and, while he had been fighting for his life, I was ogling a stupid broom. And there was anger...lots of anger, mostly that no one was taking any of it seriously. The twins treated it like it was a big joke and even Percy couldn't care less, and Scabbers had been his rat. The worst was Hermione. Her cat had murdered my friend and she couldn't even bring herself to apologize, just coldly rationalize like it was any cure for white-hot grief. She didn't care about Scabbers and I could accept that, after all he had been my friend not her's, but Hermione's lack of apology meant that she evidently didn't care about me and that hurt almost as much as losing Scabbers in the first place.

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And now it is months later and here he is alive and in my hands, but elation at his return is still a long time coming for I have a decision to make. I'd die rather than let Black touch Harry, and I don't feel my broken leg is too steep a price to save Scabbers from what I thought was a hungry dog, but these two lunatics aren't after Harry, they aren't even really after Scabbers, just some bloke named Pettigrew. Lupin swears the spell wont hurt my rat, but I don't know how to trust him. After all, he just confessed not only to being a werewolf but to hiding from Dumbledor the secrets of his friends' transformations, the map and possibly even the secret tunnels Black had used those time to get into the castle. On the other hand, Black is salivating like a rabid dog for Scabbers' blood and he is sure to simply kill him if I don't let this test prove him innocent. So I slowly hold out my rat, my oldest friend, in my scratched and bleeding hands as the only way I have left to save him.

When the spell hits him he begins to grow sprouting limbs and human features and lies and horrified realizations and the end of my hope. The world has just shifted in some previously unheard of direction. The convict Black is an innocent man made thin and crazed by years of undue hardship. The lying werewolf Lupin is right and strangely calm. The most mind blowing of all is the short, balding man my rat has become. The painfully honesty of the secrets I shared, the worry over his safety, the grief and rage over his supposed death and the relief at his miraculous resurrection are all swept aside in the face of this horrible truth. Our entire relationship was built on a lie and, as I watch him beg his old friends for his life, all I feel is numb.

They have refused him and he swings on his knees to plead his case with me. "Ron, haven't I been a good friend?" This groveling man asks of me.

Scabbers was a good friend, but the grubby little man before me is some stranger named Peter. Peter, who used us, used my family, used me to hide from his sins. The leg I broke trying to save him screams at my slightest movement and I feel so stupid. He begs with his squeaky voice and reaches for me with his sweaty, entreating hands missing the same finger as my rat. I recall all the times I touched him, every time he nestled in my lap, every single second I held him next to my heart, and I feel so dirty, like I'll never be clean again. I wonder if my sister felt like this when she found out who she was writing to. This violated. "I let you sleep in my bed!" I whisper.

He tries again, crawling towards me on his knees. "Kind boy, kind master," he whimpers. A kind Master! I think about the last person he called that while on bended knee. Was that all I was to him? I had thought I had been a good friend.