Home

He was in his late thirties, and still he longed for the comforts of home.

It had been over fourteen years since his "death" and every year, around his birthday, Peter transformed into a rat, sneaked out of the old cottage on Spinners' End and scurried to the little house at the end of Wildberry Lane, just before the town cemetery and just after the old Windsor place that had been deserted for years. He would maneuver himself through a large crack just beneath an air vent on the backside of the house, scurry over nails, underneath paneling and through pinkly-insulated pathways until he managed to poke his head through a knothole directly above the house's fireplace, next to the old family portraits that lined the mantle.

This is where he would take up residence for several hours each year, and each year the scene was the same.

As the cuckoo clock on the wall chirped eight o'clock (Damn, but he'd been scared of the clock as a kid; the bird always seemed to be looking at him with a condescending eye) Elizabeth Pettigrew would shuffle into the room, pull a blue leather book from the shelf and make herself comfortable in her favorite chair (tartan plaid, a present from Peter the year he'd "died"), turn the pages and cry herself to sleep.

Oh, Peter knew what that blue leather book contained: it was a pictorial history of his life, from the day the mediwitch placed him at his mother's breast to a snapshot taken days before his death, at a Halloween party given by the Bones family. He had been pale, then, and thinner than he'd been in his whole life, despite the long evenings filled with more drinking than he was comfortable admitting, but his mother had insisted and so he'd posed for her in his Merchant of Venice costume and favored her with a smile.

There were pictures of him on the day of his baptism, bundled in a christening gown of white satin (No son of mine ought to be wearing a dress, he recalled his father commenting years later), straw-colored curls framing a chubby cheeked face and baby-blue eyes; pictures of him clean and tidy on his first day of grammar school (before a young Bellatrix Black had intentionally tripped him, sending him sprawling into a mud puddle he could have sworn wasn't there seconds before); pictures of his First Communion, the first day of band (he played tuba for two weeks before his father, tired of the groaning and moaning of the brass instrument had tossed it out the front door in a fit of rage, therefore ending Peter's possible music career).

Later on, there were pictures of school dances, the first day of Hogwarts, Leaver's feasts and later, pictures of him as a groomsman at James and Lily's wedding. Those last pictures were the ones that made his mother cry. It was so close to his death, and Peter understood why she skimmed over those pictures, but it broke his heart.

No more would she be there, camera in hand, ready to capture the best and worst moments of his life. She would meander around her house, sometimes calm, oftentimes morose, always sorrowful that she was alone now, with no son to take care of her when the time finally came when dementia and old age would claim her to the Home on the hill, where people entered alive but came back out in a hearse. No more would she be there when he was depressed and fat and unpopular, to cheer him up with pep talks, gingerbread and late night cuddles (she'd done that until he was twenty, but he hadn't minded). Sometimes when he stood in the Death Eater's Circle before the Dark Lord, scared and wishing he could be anywhere else, he thought of her kind arms around him, the softness of her breasts beneath his head and wished for the thousandth time that he had been the Gryffindor the hat had claimed he was.

And when his mother fell asleep in that chair, the book falling to the floor beside her, mouth slack with fatigue, only then would Peter make his way nimbly to the floor, transform into the "man" he was, and kiss her cheek, always quick to transform back into a rat, should she awaken.

He had done this for years, and despite the rodent problems they'd had for years, she'd never set a rat trap.