No One Knows

No One Knows

By Tanzy

I find it kind of funny how it all started. The summer before my 2nd year I went on a vacation with the family to see Cwm Rhaiadr up in Carmarthenshire. We were supposed to be camping but our tent wouldn't open up properly. As my parents tried to sort the blasted thing out, so the rooms inside were all were they were supposed to be, I wandered off into the forest to look around. Wand in hand, I was hoping to spot some of the magical creatures we'd learned about at school my first year. I wandered through the edge of forest for a while, slowing going deeper inside as I didn't spot anything. I didn't even realize I was lost until I spotted the house.

Just by looking at it, you'd think someone with a sense of dismal aesthetics had decorated the place. The place was dreary. Situated next to a stream that cascaded down the side of a hill and around the edge of the clearing, the house seemed out of context. The thought that it was the abode of one of the more powerful people I'd ever meet didn't cross my mind at the time. Everyone of course had heard of Voldemort and his following of Death Eaters by that point. Whisperings of the leader of the anti-muggle movement were endless. But they were all just that, rumors, conjecture. No one had seen Voldemort, he was just the name to a faceless figure. Augustus Rookwood was sitting on the porch smoking from an elongated pipe when I stumbled upon the place. The middle-aged man didn't seem all that surprised to see me standing there, clutching my wand with fright. He'd asked me what I was doing out here in a place like this all by myself.

He had laughed when I told him I was lost. I remember his laughter, the sound was full of life and some how somber at the same time. As if a great weight was wearing down upon his soul. Augustus Rookwood wasn't the kind of man to let life drag him down, but that day alone in the forest, I wonder if he didn't lose part of himself talking to me. We talked for some time before he sent me back to find my parents with the help of a direction charm.

I was back the next day, eager to talk to my new friend. We sat around on his porch and talked for what seemed like hours. He was interested in my first year at Hogwarts and we spent most of our time talking about the antics that I had gotten up to with James, Sirius and Remus in the previous year. When I crept back to the house the third day, I couldn't find it. I remember searching through the red and gold forest every day for the rest of the time we were there. When I think about it now, I wonder if even then, he'd been milking me for information about one of Voldemort's key targets.

Later that year while I was at school, I got a letter from Augustus. Our correspondence became more frequent as the year progressed. When I started feeling rejected and overlooked it was to Augustus that I turned for comfort. Unlike my friends, when I complained to them, Augustus never told me I was being silly and seemed to give my repressed anger the seriousness I thought it deserved. Augustus was the only person who cared that I was upset that James and Lily had started dating, despite the fact that I had liked Lily first. Everyone else thought they were prefect for each other, myself included at first. I mean, who was I to compete with my closest and greatest friend James Potter? But the inclusion of Lily into what had been our previously unbreakable group of four left me feeling even more rejected than before. Our times together were frequently turning into James and Lily, Sirius and Remus, with me sitting dejectedly between the two pairs. It wasn't that we didn't all hang out and spend time together, it was just the way they seemed to orbit around each other just made it clear that my place in the group had been filled by someone else when I was struggling to catch up with the rest of them.

It used to make me so angry that I'd sneak into the dorms as a rat and chew up student's clothes. I blamed myself for falling behind and not being good enough as the rest of them. I blamed Lily for intruding in on our previously sacred group. It was a passing comment in one of many letters to Rookwood that was my undoing. In a moment of frenzied hatred I swore at Lily's muggle heritage and blamed it for her choosing James over me. In his next letter, Augustus sympathized with me about the idiocy of muggles, mentioning how frequently he had to deal with it at his job in the Ministry. Later that month he wrote and suggested I come visit him in Cwm Rhaiadr again that summer.

Augustus told me more about his job at the ministry when I went to visit him over the summer. How it was his job to gather information about Voldemort and others for the Ministry. He asked me if I wanted to help him keep an eye on Hogwarts by sending him regular information that the things going on. Let him know if people started acting suspiciously and the like. His seeming trust in me was so damn wonderful after feeling so rejected by my friends at school. Someone who gave a shit about how I was doing and what I thought on the latest developments in the Daily Prophet.

I still cared for my friends at school, Moony, Padfoot and Prongs, make no mistake about that. I'd probably have followed them to the gates of hell if they'd asked me to. But somehow, I wonder if they would have ever asked. But at the same time I felt a growing sense of resentment towards them. At how easily success came to them, how they all seemed to find love, their popularity with all the other students. Despite us being a supposedly cohesive group, none of those things every seemed to transfer over to me. I was just always the tag along. The damn reject.

If Sirius hadn't almost literally drug me over to sit with them on our first train ride to Hogwarts I wonder if I'd have ever gotten to know any of them. Sitting on one of the hard leather seats trying to work up the courage to talk to someone else. Sirius noticed me, sitting quietly in the corner trying so desperately to be noticed. One bright blue eye winked at me as he motioned for me to come over and join him.

James and Lily's wedding was such a horrid affair. Everyone else of course was so happy. Watching your first unrequited love marry your best friend can't be very high on the list of fun things to do in life. To add insult to injury, I was the only one of the group not asked to be in the wedding. At the reception, I got to sit at the table with some old biddy from James's family while the other four of them sat at the head table and laughed the night away. I went home and tried to drink myself to death instead of thinking about it.

With the kind of clarity of thought that can only occur when truly drunk, I realized what the pit of my stomach had been trying to tell me for years. There would be no sudden change of luck where I became the dashing hero of the story. I was destined to be a nobody who followed greatness around hoping it would rub off. I fell into a depression that no one seemed to notice. But who could blame them, James and Lily were having a kid, Sirius and Remus were going to be traveling together, everyone was getting on with their lives. Except for me.

When Augustus wrote me again, inviting me back to his house in Carmarthenshire to meet some of his friends about a possible job, I was so glad to go. To say I was utterly surprised to see other Death Eaters at Rookwood's house would be a lie. By that time Augustus had hinted at his involvement with other things to me. While the rumored atrocities the Death Eaters were said to have committed scared the piss out of me, my general anger at the world was becoming almost overwhelming. A weekend with the lot of them and I was sold. I was convinced Voldemort was going to win, I'd been fed all the glorious ideals and things the Death Eaters preached. Like a gullible little fool I believed them all.

My work of spying for the other side began in earnest. Whereas I'd been inadvertently spying for them for years, now I was actively looking for information and passing it on. I spent more time with my old friends from school, reminding myself it was all part of our Lord's grand plan.

The day Sirius told me he wanted me to be the secret keeper for Lily and James I began to have second thoughts. Here I was, posed to betray my childhood friends with the information I was constantly collecting from them, and Sirius was offering me the utmost trust without the slightest hint of doubt. It still makes my stomach knot up if I think about it for too long. Whereas all my previous betrayals had been impersonal and distant, this was the point of no return. With this I could directly hurt them, something I wasn't sure I was ready to do. In that moment of utter trust I almost told him what I'd been doing. Shame, loathing, anger at myself, things I felt in that moment when I realized how much they all trusted me. But fear of the anger that'd appear in Sirius's eyes when I told him the truth kept my mouth shut. In the end I was more afraid of their rejection.

"'Cmon, Wormtail, I'd feel safer if you were the keeper and not me," Sirius said to me. "Everyone expects it to be me, no one would think we'd make you the keeper." I wonder if he has any idea how angry that made me. I said yes, of course, since no one would expect me of all people to be trustworthy of the information. In that moment my course cemented itself as the words hung in the night air.

I remember how much the dark mark burned on the inside of my arm all through the ceremony to make me the secret keeper. I wonder what anyone would have said, had they known. But no one knows.