Peter Pettigrew. Peter Pettigrew.

I was Peter Pettigrew.

I had no idea what I'd done in my past life to earn this.

I stared at the walls for a long moment, thinking about the many faults of Peter Pettigrew.

No. I didn't care if I threw the whole universe into jeopardy. I wasn't going to act like a spineless worm. I might be Peter in this life, but this life sure as hell wasn't just a book series anymore. Not to me, it wasn't.

I'd come too far in my past life to let something like reincarnation hold me down.

I flexed my chubby three-year-old fingers.

... I hoped I wasn't movie Pettigrew. I really, really hope that I wasn't movie Peter.

May the lord have mercy on me.

I'd lived in this strange world for five years now. I learned more about Peter too.

It was horrifying to learn what Peter had to go through as a kid. I couldn't have ever imagined that this was the verbal abuse that he had to suffer through as a kid.

The sheer amount of neglect was despicable. It made my blood boil at the mere thought.

Peter's father, to put it simply, was a bloody, worthless, arsehole. He wasn't fit to be a father. No, he wasn't fit to be a human being. He didn't deserve to be human.

The only thing I could say was that he didn't hit me.

No. Well.

Once. Just once. And yet, once was too much.

Pettigrew Senior wasn't all there, and Enid, Peter's mother, just took it. She'd just let him yell and yell at her. I wasn't sure if she was just weak-willed, or if she also wasn't right in the head. She didn't speak at all.

I couldn't understand. Enid loved him. But how could loving someone mean being destroyed?

It was infuriating and surreal and heartbreaking.

She would just look at him like she couldn't understand, like she didn't know how to make it better and that it was all her fault.

I couldn't understand why. How could she love such an abusive man?

I didn't know if he was always like that, but she had no spine at all. She never even talked to me.

I remember as a toddler, just once, trying to distract him from her, and he'd just backhanded me into the wall. I remembered being terrified. I was just a kid. If he turned on me and went at me like he did Enid, I wouldn't survive.

And Enid just watched him do it. Didn't say a single thing.

I think I was lucky that he just turned back to her.

I was so very lucky that I bounced right off the wall. Accidental magic, I think.

He liked to hurt others when he was angry. If he didn't get a reaction, then he'd get even more upset.

But despite that these two were terrible people, weak-willed and petty, people who shouldn't matter at all, it still hurt.

I only had one mother and father here after all.