InsaneJournal

Who: Peter and Sirius
What: Sirius is nice and drunk
When: A couple of days before the full moon.
Warnings: Maybe!

In his dream, Peter was a rat. He was staring up at Sirius and Remus, who seemed miles high. From one moment to the next, they seemed to move from canine to human and back, not quite shedding the look of either. "I don't know why you had sex with him," said Remus. "He's Peter. Who'd want him?"

"Why not? He was there," said Sirius, his hair transforming to fur and back again.

"You know what he would do. You shouldn't have taken pity on him in the first place." His voice was a low, almost feral growl, contrasting sharply against his calm, erudite inflections.

"He was there," Sirius repeated. "We weren't to know he'd be a murderer."

Peter tried to object, but his voice came out only as a squeak. He wanted to transform, to stand up for himself, but instead he ran away as fast as his four legs could carry him.

"You always run away, don't you?" said a new voice. Elizabeth picked him up by the tail and looked at him dispassionately. "Not much for standing up for yourself, are you? Do you know how afraid of the world I am? Do you know what it's like to be forced to become prey every time the full moon decides it's tired of my humanity, to know that I could wind up on someone's dinner table at any time and still be braver than you?" Suddenly he was in her beak, and they were dozens of meters above the ground, but she was still talking. "You think I love you? You don't even like you."

She let him go, and Peter seemed to fall forever. Suddenly he stopped and he was standing in the Forbidden Forest. In front of him, a deer was leaning down to nudge him out of the dirt. "You'll be all right, mate. Let's go find the others." James smiled somehow, and Peter's fears began to drain away. Then he heard the hissing.

Peter's eyes fell on a snake, wrapping its body around James' leg and climbing. No! Peter tried to scream. He tried to transform. He tried to run to the snake and fight it. He couldn't. The snake's teeth sank into James' leg, and James fell to the ground. Only then could Peter feel the familiar rush of air on his skin that came with transformation. "Prongs, no..." he whispered.

"How could you let this happen?" asked Harry, who Peter realized had been there the whole time.

"I didn't... I couldn't..." Somewhere there were funeral bells ringing.

"Your best friend. Why did you?"

"I tried, I tried, I couldn't..." Tears were running down his face, and the bells were becoming louder. Suddenly they segued into... drums?

"You killed my father." The drums got even louder.

Suddenly Sirius' voice punched through the fog of his dream. "Huh?" Peter said stupidly, as he sat up in bed. "Oh, God." He let Sirius keep pounding for a moment, willing the dream to fade out of his memory. "I'm coming!" he said finally. Peter stumbled through his house, letting the chill of exposing the cold sweat on his bare skin to the winter air distract him from his nightmare. He opened the door. "'Evening."