The Marauders: Year Six Part 2 #Wattys2017

Jamesishness

Jamesishness

There was a persistent rapping on the door.

It opened marginally and Peter squashed his wide, twitchy face to the two-inch gap he'd created to peer out into the darkness of the corridor beyond, squinting into the night at the form of Lily Evans. He stared at her a moment, then backed up, letting the dormitory door open with him, allowing her space to come through. Lily slipped inside and Peter hurried to shut the door behind her.

Her eyes did a quick appraisal of the room.

"Where is everyone?" she asked.

Peter sighed, "James is in the hospital wing still, of course, and Sirius won't leave 'til James does, and Remus was feeling ill with the moonlight on him so he went to hide out in the Trophy Room Passageway."

Lily had sat down on the edge of James's bed and bent to lift up his Quidditch jumper, still hanging over the footboard. There was a tear in the elbow and the jumper was dirty. She shook her head at the messiness of boys, at the messiness of James, and she was renewed with appreciation that he would be back in this dormitory again very soon, able to make newer, fresher messes...

"How are you, Peter?" she asked as Peter scrambled back onto his own bed, crossing his legs and scooping up the stones that he had spread across the spread. He was slipping them quietly back into a velvet bag.

"Alright, I s'pose," Peter replied.

Lily put the jumper down and pulled her hair over her shoulder, absentmindedly braiding it as she sat there, biting her lower lip. "Peter, what were you doing in Durmstrang? You were there already when we got there... all by yourself...?"

He motioned to the bag of stones laying by his knee. "I saw James was in trouble." Lily stared at him, waiting for more, so Peter drew a deep breath, "I tried to tell Professor McGonagall, but she was busy, and I - I couldn't just leave him there. Not James. James would never just leave any one of us anywhere... not even me..." he paused, and took up one of the gold strings that drew the bag closed, running it through his fingers. "I only did what James would've done for me."

Lily said, "You were very brave."

"I was very stupid," Peter corrected. He lifted the bag up and put it in his nightstand drawer. "I should've got you and Sirius and Remus. I'm not any good at... at defensive magic. All I did was get myself into trouble." He closed the drawer rather hard and it made the nightstand shiver and knocked over a photo of the Pettigrew family - taken long ago, when Maggie was still young and sweet and smiling and full of hope, when Peter was eleven and his mum and dad were still happy. He left the photo face-down. It was easier not to look at it anyway.

"You helped us to escape," Lily said.

Peter shrugged. "I didn't really do anything."

Lily couldn't honestly remember much of the escape, other than running alongside Severus Snape, other than looking at James Potter's pale face and wanting so much for him to know that it was okay - that everything would be okay...

Peter sank back into his pillows. "Do you reckon James will be alright?" he asked suddenly, "Do you reckon he'll be the same as he was before now that the Dark Lord's... done things to him?"

Lily instinctively picked up the Quiddtch jumper again, hugging it to her chest. "Of course he will," she said, desperate to believe it to be true. "Of course. He's - he's James Potter, he has to be... We got him out of there, Peter, he has to be okay."