Your Choice : 7spells [PG: Peter Pettigrew]
Title: Your Choice
Character(s): Peter Pettigrew, Remus Lupin
Prompt: if you wanted honesty
Rating: PG
Word Count: 479
Summary: Remus corners Peter and demands an answer.
Author's Notes: N/A
“Tell me why...”
“You know why, Remus. If you just think hard enough,” Peter said, for once, not phased by the wand shoved in his face.
Four years of begging and scraping and serving, and he had lost what will he had had left to live. Even with the instrument of Remus’s possible destruction clenched at his side, he had no urge to use it or even threaten to use it in order to get away. He didn’t care anymore. “Just kill me, Remus. That’s what you want to do, after all.”
“No, Peter, I don’t... Or maybe I do. I don’t know... If I could fathom any reason...anything that might have made you betray three people who cared so deeply about you... To abandon me...”
“Abandon?!” Peter laughed, the sound ringing through the abandoned landscape. The majority of the battle had followed Harry. They were down on the beach by now, leaving the two former friends huddled at the entrance of the wide mouthed cave. “You really are a pathetic self-loathing creature, Moony.”
“Hello, pot, my name is kettle,” Remus muttered.
“I didn’t abandoned you, Remus...” Peter growled. “But I couldn’t very well hang around your house like a rat, could I? I did remember what happened last time I was with you during transformation without Sirius and James.”
“I said I was sorry about that...”
“I know, Remus. But I barely recovered. I couldn’t risk it happening again.”
“But why disappear? Nobody was going to believe Sirius...” Remus said, scowling. “Not even me...”
Peter laughed, “So naive... Aren’t you?”
“What?”
“You think that just because the one person that was the greatest threat was out of the way, I just could have gone on living as I always had. The marks faded, yes. Damn well disappeared after the Dark Lord’s downfall, but... People knew, Remus...”
“Knew...what?”
“And you were suppose to be the brains of the operation... The Dark Lord had fallen in a place that I had sent him to, Remus. Me, someone who was well known in the Death Eater circles as a ‘double agent’. I sent him to James and Lily...not exactly willingly, but I did. And he didn’t come back. Just think about it, Remus. Put that so called brain of yours to work.”
“They thought it was a trap...” Remus said softly after a long pause.
“Exactly.”
“But it wasn’t,” Remus growled, shoving his wand under Peter’s throat, baring his teeth slightly.
“I had my reasons, Remus...”
“Damned if I know what they could be...”
“You know... You just don’t want to admit it,” Peter said, eyeing Remus. “You know how they treated me...”
“Like the Death Eaters treated you any better!”
“True. All too true... But that wasn’t my original concern, Remus. In all honesty, you lot were the reason.”
“No. It was your choice, Peter. Not ours.”