Not Alone After All

Chapter XXVIII

A/N:

WTF??? I JUST GOT LAURA POTTER FANART???? WOW THIS IS AMAZING!
PLEASE SEND MORE! I LOVE YOU GUYS SO MUCH♡♡♡♡♡♡

If anyone has any fanart they want to send me, please do! This is amazing.

ps: the artist asked me to not credit their account, but Sam, you know who you are! Thank you!

♧♧♧

Without thinking twice, Laura ran to the door, placing herself in the way. Snape immediately lowered his wand.

"Move, Potter," Snape snapped. 

"Professor Lupin had five years. He had five years to kill me when I was a child. And then again, this year, he had a hundred of opportunities to kill me. Or Harry. We spent coutless hours with him as he taught the two of us how to defend ourselves from the Dementors. If he was really a friend of Black's when why didn't take any of those chances?" She tried to reason with him. 

"The spirit of a werewolf is unfanthomable," was what Snape had to say. "Now get out of the way, Potter!"

"You're pitiful!" Harry suddenly yelled out. "Just because they were mean to you as children, you refuse to listen-"

"Silence!" Snape's voice boomed and silenced Harry. "I will not be spoken to in this tone!" he said, becoming more and more red with rage. "Like father, like son, Potter! I came here to save you from these monsters!" He suddenly snapped at the two. Laura watched with sadness as Remus flinched at the choice of words. "You should be on your knees thanking me! You'd be dead had I not been here! You'd be dead, just like your father, who was too arrogant to realise he was being decieved by Sirius Black! And now I am taking care of it, SO STEP AWAY, POTTER!"

He hadn't even had the chance to act before Laura had lifted her wand.

"Expelliarmus!" she yelled out. Except she was the one to do so. In a fraction of a second, Severus Snape had flown across the room, and fallen to the ground, unconscious. Laura turned around and saw that Harry, Hermione and Ron also had their wands out, and were all pointing to the same place. 

"You.." Sirius trailed off. "You shouldn't have done that," he said, watching mostly Laura. "You should have left him to me.." 

"We attacked a professor," Hermione mumbled. "We attacked a professor," she said over and over again, all the while staring at Snape's unconscious body on the ground. "We're gonna get into so much trouble."

"Like that's new," Laura said sarcastically, walking past Sirius to help Remus up. 

"Thank you," Remus said. "All of you." He tried to untie his wrists, and was unable until Sirius stepped in and helped him. 

"I still don't know if we should trust you," Harry told them. 

"You have got to be kidding," Laura spoke up.

"So it's time I show you some proof," Remus told him. He turned to Ron. "Give me Peter." Ron flinched and held the obviously guilty rat closer to his chest. 

"That's enough," he spoke, his voice weak. "You're telling me you escaped Azkaban to get to Scabbers? Let's say Pettigrew managed to escape and transform himself into a rat again. There are millions of rats! How do you know it's this one after twelve years in Azkaban?"

Sirius nodded, and dove his hand into his pocket, from where he retrieved a photo. It was the newspaper front page picture, the one with the Weasley family in the desert. Scabbers could be neatly seen on Ron's shoulder.

"How did you get that?" Lupin asked, stunned. 

"Fudge," Sirius explained to him. "When he came to inspect me last year, he gave me his newspaper. That's when I recognised Peter, on the front page... On this boy's shoulder.. I immediately knew it was him. How many times have we seen him transform with our own eyes? And the newspaper said that the young boys were going back to Hogwarts to continue their studies... And that's where Laura and Harry were..."

"Dear God," Lupin shook his head while his eyes went back and forth between real live Scabbers and the one in the picture. "His front paw..."

"What about his paw?" Ron asked nervously.

"He's missing a finger," Laura noticed as she watched the picture closely. "The only thing that was found of Peter Pettigrew was his finger."

"Scabbers probably fought some other rat in the street!" Ron tried to explain. He definitely did not want for his rat to be a grown man, a criminal. "He's been in the family for an eternity..."

"Twelve years," Remus said. "Have you not wondered how he's lived this long?"

"We... we take very good care of him," Ron tried. 

"He doesn't look very good, don't you think?" Remus remarked. "He must have lost some weight... ever since he found out Sirius Black had escaped..."

"It's that deranged cat that scares him!" Ron said, gesturing towards Hermione's cat, still purring on the bed. 

"Your rat has been loosing weight ever since you got back from Egypt, Ron," Laura told him. "That was before he met Crookshanks..."

"That cat is not at all deranged," Sirius defended. "He's actually probably the smartest cat I've ever met," he continued. "He immediately realised that Peter wasn't a real rat. And he also noticed that I wasn't a real dog. It took some time to make him trust me, but when I finally did it, he even tried to help me."

"What do you mean?" Hermione asked him in a breath.

"He tried to bring Peter to me," Sirius revealed. "But he wasn't able to. So he brought me the list of passwords into the Gryffindor tower... I think he took it from a student who had left it on the table. But Peter understood what I was trying to do and he ran away... This cat, Crookshanks, is it?" Hermione nodded. "He told me Peter had left blood traces on the bed. He must have bitten himself. He had already faked his death once..."

"Why would he fake his death?" Harry suddenly spoke out loud. "Because he knew you were here to kill us, the same way you killed our parents!"

"No... Harry," Remus tried. 

"Have you been listening at all?" his sister asked him, incredulously. Harry threw her a look. 

"And now you've decided to kill him," Harry continued, nodding towards the rat. 

"Yes, that," Sirius confirmed. 

"I should have let Snape take you, then," Harry told his own godfather.