Who: Peter, Evan When: The night of Peter's arrival Where: On the sandy beach north of the village What: Evan has to rescue Pete cos he's a hopeless case when there's no sewer to hide in.
For Wormtail, it had not been the best couple of weeks. It had quite possibly been the worst couple of weeks, and that was putting it lightly, and now...
Now. He'd been in his nice warm sewer one minute, chewing absent-mindedly on a bit of newspaper he'd stolen out of a bin and just finished reading (they were going to give him an Order of Merlin. He might be dead, but at least he seemed to have angled it so that he got remembered as a hero, sewer or no sewer) and the next moment he'd been paw-deep in sand, with no sound but the lapping of the waves in the distance. And then a bloody book had almost squashed him when it fell out of the air. Expecting an attack, he'd run and hid in the nearest sand grass he could find, waited about an hour until he was sure no one was around, and then taken back his human form.
Peter the man was not in great shape, and it had only been a few days. His clothes were a matted mess of torn fabric, only his coat was in next to reasonable shape. He'd never spent so long as a rat before, and he hadn't known quite what to expect. He stank as well, the stench of the sewer sticking to his skin just as it had to his fur, only worse because his human nose, while less powerful, was also much more sensitive to the odour of... well. Muck. That was a nice way of putting it.
His hand ached. It hadn't been so bad as a rat. Rats could lose claws, tails, even paws, and deal with it, it might sting for a while but it was a part of life, and if you didn't keep moving, you died. As a human, the half-healed wound felt like someone was agitating it with a red hot poker. He'd risked a transformation a day after the cut, to try and heal it, but his healing magic was worse than his skill with Potions, and that was saying something. All he'd done was stop the bleeding, only that seemed to have started again now, the wound stretched and broken by the transformation.
All this he'd had to put to one side as he grabbed the book and read the message. He felt a chill go down his spine as he tried to make sense of it. Well at least one person knew he was here. That was bad. But he didn't know what to do, what could he do when he didn't even know where here was? He'd never heard of Fred or George Weasley - cousins of the Weasleys he knew, perhaps... still, he couldn't just go wandering off as himself. And he couldn't carry the book, as a rat. There were only certain things that worked like that, like clothes, or wands. He'd never understood why.
So, resorting to desperate measures, he scribbled the Death Eater code for 'help', using his wand as a quill, and waited anxiously. It was a big risk. Any followers who might be out there would almost certainly be out for his blood almost as much as Sirius had been. Brilliant move there, Pettigrew, you managed to ostracise both sides at once. You're a fucking miracle worker. But it was a risk he had to take. He didn't even know if the code was current, he hadn't had to use it for some time.
Now he waited on the beach, back in rat form in his little grassy bush, the book tucked away under some driftwood, thinking about what he had read as he waited for Evan. At least one person didn't seem to want to kill him. And Evan was a friend, at least as much as he could call any Death Eater a friend. He was pretty sure Evan had taught him that blasting curse that had saved his life not so long ago. He just had to hope that Evan didn't blame him for getting the Master... killed? Evaporated? No one was even sure what the bloody hell had happened and the only witness was unlikely to remember once he was old enough to be questioned... Still, at least the man couldn't tell him off for faking his own death, since he seemed to have done the same.