Does he know how loved he is? Truly deeply fervently loved? By Cole yes, but by me as well. Quiet nights with him, at the bar, sitting there in silence but in the unspoken bond of ‘how do I know if I am truly myself anymore’ is more soothing to me than any hour of therapy or meditation. When he’s gone on missions or just... out being Lazarus I miss him more than I thought I would miss someone I’ve known so briefly. The list of people I would willingly sacrifice my mind and soul to allow what attempts to steal my body to protect is very small, but he and Rowan are firmly on it. I cannot breach that Shadow they were born from; but I will give everything to stop it from harming them.
❦ - Changing clothes facing away, showing off their back (Ty and Luca)
Luca was under no delusions about what the house he shared with Max and Dash was like. He’d seen enough American movies to know that aside from the incredibly ordered and neat corners of it that Max was responsible for the three of them lived in something akin to a frat house; which honestly was part of the reason Luca liked it so much. But it also gave him just a tiny twinge of… was that shame? Was he even capable of feeling shame? Every time Tybalt Weymouth slept over. While he’d never been invited to the Celestial Sanctuary it was the stuff of myth, a palace hidden inside a mountain befitting the magical royalty that tread its halls, and he was very much aware of how his very messy bedroom; with tarot cards, underwear, and various drugs/alcohol scattered around it, didn’t really stack up next to “living castle”. He’d been awoken by the sensation of Tybalt sliding out of his bed and rolled over, hand automatically going to the deck of worn cards on the windowsill, drawing a single one out and looking at it. He’d thought it subsonic, but apparently his mewl of discontent at being confronted with the High Priestess reversed had caught Tybalt’s ear.
“Not good?”
He turned just in time to see Tybalt slide the t-shirt he’d been wearing off, revealing a broad landscape of back muscles Luca hadn’t even known you could get that toned, and he lived with a professional athlete. Words escaped him for a moment as he felt himself flush and he was suddenly glad he still had the worn quilt that was on his bed covering himself from the stomach down. On a very fundamental level Luca knew he was hot as fuck. His customers told him that, random people on the street told him that, and he told himself that on a daily basis. But he knew for all his tattooed and muscular sex appeal he didn’t hold a candle to his… whatever the fuck Tybalt was. He found the words a suddenly-half-naked Ty had stripped away from him and delivered them with what he hoped was a characteristic level of disinterest.
“Just being yelled at by the Universe for being a bad person. So, you know. Nothing new. Or as you might say.” His voice took on a dramatically affected American accent, “Nothin’ new.”
Ty flipped him off as he slid a collared shirt on, tugging a pair of jeans over muscular legs that Luca was now having a hazy memory of commenting on.
“Did I tell you I wanted to wear your legs like a feather boa last night?”
“You did. Right before I rendered you speechless for awhile.”
Luca gave a little shiver as he looked at the upside down woman giving him a death glare from a small rectangle of cardstock. “I remember. Big fan of that, Weymouth. Big fan.” He could hear the wispy voice of Professor Trelawney in his head as he looked at the High Priestess. She means to tell you you’re not listening to your inner voice Lucas. She never had gotten his name right, When she’s reversed it’s a call to stop and breath and turn inward. What is your mind telling you, your heart telling you, that you’re trying to block out?
He slid the card back into the deck and looked up to see Ty looking down at the sweat-stained t-shirt in his hand, Trelawney still echoing in his head, “Uh I took a bunch of shit to the thrift shop the other day so there’s like… an empty drawer in the dresser if you don’t wanna like bring that to work with you or something.” It violated a pretty fundamental if unspoken tenet in their relationship; impermanence. They had existed in a neutral detente for months, a cycle of ghosting and late night hookups that they had staunchly refused to tie any sort of label too. Tybalt was well aware of what Luca did for work, and while it hadn’t come up in any sort of serious conversation Luca couldn’t image the Weymouth scion settling down in any capacity with a whore.
The look he received was inscrutable and Luca was reminded that he was looking at a man who had been a hair's breadth away from being called Lord. “You just happen to have an empty drawer? I know how Ava shops for you, Santos. I find that hard to believe. I’ll just shove it in my bag and wash it at home tonight. Thanks though.”
Propping himself up on one elbow to watch Tybalt put the shirt in his bag he could see the edge of the High Priestess poking out of the desk, one disapproving eye pinning him to his pillows. You have to listen, Lucas. You listen to the forces of the world very well, nobody in this class can read the cards like you can, but even you need the reminder to listen to yourself. Sometimes the most important messages don’t come from the deck, but from within.
Ty had one hand on the doorknob, and Luca could already hear the knob turning and the hinges creaking when it finally burst out of him, far louder than he had anticipated, loud enough where Dash was sure to bring it up later, but bursting out all at once like a ruptured dam.
“I fucking love you!”
The doorknob stopped in its rotation but Tybalt’s back remained turned, though, if Luca was reading posture correctly, slightly more rigid than it had been previously. There was no response, no indication other than the cessation of movement that Tybalt had heard him at all and Luca swept his legs out of the bed, planting them on cold hardwood and keeping the quilt over his lap.
“I… I love you, okay? I know. I know this breaks all the rules we never talked about but we both know are there but I love you. When I wake up and you’re not here it’s a shitty morning and when I lay down and I’m alone, or really even when I’m not alone but it’s not you I don’t sleep for shit. I know. I know what we are. I know what this is. What this isn’t. But… I fucking love you. Leave the fucking shirt. Leave a bunch of shirts. Leave shirts and boxers and sweatpants and a toothbrush in a stupid cup by the sink and the smell of you on my blankets and the heat of you on my pillows. Just…. Leave something.”
From behind him he could swear he heard the gentlest of laughter and the whisper of card against card as she slid back inside the deck but he was too focused on the stationary man in front of him to check to see. Ty’s hand drifted from the doorknob to his pocket and he leaned forward, resting his forehead against the door and breathing a quiet chuckle, “Is it part of your inherent divinatory magic where you just know exactly what’s going to throw me for a loop? I know you’re a gifted seer. Does this come with it?”
Now it was Luca’s turn to stay silent, head low staring at the floor between his feet. He could tell whatever the outcome this was a turning point for them. Either Tybalt was going to walk out the door for the last time or something bigger was going to happen between them, but whatever forces sometimes gave him a glimpse of a possible future were criminally silent in the moment. It wasn’t until he saw a pair of shoes step between his bare feet and felt a finger tilting his chin up that he felt the blush of hope in his heart.
“I love you too, Luca.”
He watched as Tybalt knelt so they were at eye level, leaning forward to brush a gentle kiss to Luca’s trembling lips, “Breathe. I can hear your heartbeat from here. I’ll leave the shirt. I’ll leave the shirt and the toothbrush and the me. I didn’t know you could say that many words in a row… but I love you too. Fuck the rules. You know how I feel about rules. What rules did to my brother, to me, to our fathers. I don’t give a single fuck what rules we had between us. We’ll write new ones. But the first one is this…” The kiss deepened and they both stood, Luca leaning into the feeling of Tybalt.
“We’re going to start saying stuff out loud. I fucking love you, you dumbass. I just can’t believe you said it first.”
[ text ]: I’m not responding to this because I have died. I’m dead. Dead people don’t answer texts. (Fenrir to Raleigh)
[F.G.] You understand the paradox you’re creating, right? By identifying yourself as dead in the response you have disproved your final thesis that dead people don’t answer texts. Since you are dead and also responding to my texts.
[F.G] Dead people also don’t get beef wellington, which is about to come out of the oven.
[F.G] So weigh your level of dead carefully.
☻- For details on the last time my character was sad.
Whenever he has to sit in the bathtub in his apartment so he can change. He knows he’s here for a reason, but he misses being able to swim in the ocean with his family. He misses the feeling of the waves pulling him to and fro, misses the taste of clean cold salt water, the good burn in his muscles after battling the tide. The last time he was truly sad was when he got the Christmas card from the clan and his face wasn’t on the picture and they all looked so happy. It heightened the feeling he has of having no place he truly belongs.
☯ - For one of my muse’s beliefs/ideals.
It might be shocking for someone as flippant as him, but Ferg is deeply religious. Coming from a very traditional clan, his belief in the Deep Tides is unshakeable, and his hope that one day he’ll get to swim in them with his ancestors colors much of what he does. If someone were to go to his apartment, not that he ever invites anyone over, they’d see the shrine in the corner of his bedroom. A wide geode bowl filled with ocean water, dried seaweed incense, and the fangs of his forbearers lining the rim. It’s a private portion of his life, but it’s a governing force behind much of what he does.
♨ - For something that relaxes my muse.
Being near someone. Selkies are profoundly social creatures anyway, and coming from a big family Ferg is used to hustle and bustle. He likes feeling the energy of other people around him, probably one of the many reasons he loves spending time on the Packlands. He’s more than happy to babysit pups or help with projects around the village just because it means he gets to be near people again.
♕ - For something that makes my muse feel they’re on top of the world.
Any time he can make someone smile. Not just a little grin or a half smile, if he can make someone beam, or burst into a huge laugh it makes him feel like a million bucks. Seeing other people happy is one of the most genuine joys.
It wasn’t unusual that the middle of the night rolled around and found Mihali Paveros anywhere but in his own bed. They were a crepuscular species in general, and Mihali had always found himself better suited to productivity when the moon was high as opposed to under the harsh light of day. It was strange to him to be living in a home so large it seemed a small city unto itself. Magical humans, especially those as fabulously wealthy as Inanna Zabini, seemed to build homes that defied the laws of the world around them, fitting themselves into empty spaces that were far too small for the grandeur of the building. An interesting application for their magical talent but one that somewhat escaped the understanding of the young gorgon. The islands he had grown up in had almost no buildings on the surface, which conveniently hid a spacious underground village in the cave network beneath their shores. But the palatial opulence of The Gardens was something he had never experienced before.
It was a marvel to him that the whole household (well, most of it at least. The spymaster who’d visited the Cretan stronghold Mihali had called home never moved with the rest of the house) shifted what wing of the house it lived in depending on the season. It seemed a strange thing to pack up his few belongings and shift to another suite of rooms as Spring ebbed into Summer, but he hadn’t felt it worth mentioning to anyone else in the house. He was a guest, of a sort, and a diplomat, of an even more strange sort, and frankly he was happy to have a set of rooms that didn’t have one of 78 sisters barging into it at any given moment.
But sitting in the dim of the kitchen, worn sweatpants doing nothing to quell the chill of the marble countertop he sat on, it was easy to reflect on the strangeness of the whole situation as he ate some leftover pizza that Raleigh had cooked, feeding morsels of salted fish to the snakes of his hair that sleepily brushed his shoulders, “it’s a far cry from home, that’s for sure.” The pirate Kamon had brought salted sunfish back from one of his more recent voyages as a gift. Mihali hadn’t even known the “man” knew he’d been living in The Gardens, but the fact that he’d known exactly what was considered a delicacy by Gorgons meant that there was more to him than met the eye. This confirmed the thought that Mihali had that he was only wearing the shape of a man, but wasn’t one. He could smell something underneath the handsome face. Brine and age. Power. It made sense. He’d seen Kamon and Leonidas together, and he knew the handsome vampire only looked in his mid-20s. Raleigh had confided that Leo was one of Madame Zabini’s oldest friends, and was in reality millenia old.
One of the snakes in his hair nibbled his fingers in annoyance as he was too slow bringing another small piece of dried fish up to them. “If you’re assholes then nobody gets fish. Is that what you want? I’ll just sit here and eat this pizza and nobody gets sunfish. Don’t make me tell Captain Kamon that you’re all bad and don’t deserve more treats.” He heard the sound of a gentle laugh behind him and turned quickly, face flushing as he saw Inanna Zabini herself with a baby on each hip.
“I always wondered. Does your hair need to eat? Does it exist as a separate entity? Or is this just a strange piece of Gorgon culture I’ll never truly understand because my hair isn’t sentient snakes with the power to turn people to stone?”
He managed to keep the squeak inside, but there was still a quiet gasp as he slid down from the counter, bowing quickly at the waist, “Lady Zabini. Good evening.”
The snort he got in response was far from ladylike but still perfectly Inanna, “We’re far past evening, snakelet. I think we’re well and truly into morning now but these two have no sense of time yet.” She breezed past him into the kitchen, depositing a very unhappy looking Kalama into his arms, “Hold her for me while I heat their bottles. You also didn’t answer my question.” She looked at him over her shoulder as he held the infant, eyes wide and a look of horror sliding over his features at the tremendous burden placed in his hands, “You people don’t have babies? You won’t break her, Paveros. You can hold her. You’re not cold blooded are you? I see you don’t have a shirt on, is that going to be cold?”
“I’m warm to the touch, your ladyship.” It wasn’t the order in which she’d asked the questions but it was the first thing that sprang to his mind as he held her daughter close, resting her head in the crook of his neck.
“Yes. So Besmertnaya tells the Pack.”
It was only the fact that he had a baby in his arms that kept him from bolting from the kitchen in embarrassment, “Well…. He would know.”
It was edifying to get an actual laugh out of Inanna, “I’m so proud you didn’t just hem and haw around that. No shame in bedding someone as handsome as him.”
It only occurred to Mihali after he’d already answered the question that it might have been a trick to get him to admit to the liaison, but it didn’t seem like there was any threat or danger from the admission, and so he padded quietly across the stone floor to stand next to Inanna at the stove, “It’s not the hair.”
She turned to look at him, pressing a small kiss to Blaise’s head as he squalled at the movement, but didn’t speak, her cool gaze unreadable, but seeming to allow him the space to finish answering her questions.
“It’s the eyes. The snakes that are hair, well at least in female Gorgons, have a powerful paralytic venom, but it won’t turn you to stone.” He bounced slightly as Kala nuzzled against his neck, “Adult gorgons have a structure within the cornea that allows the casting of the transfiguration to stone. Well adult female Gorgons. My snakes have no venom and I can’t turn people to stone. I just have venom in my personal fangs. Also no we’re not cold-blooded. The snakes don’t need to eat, but they like eating. It’s all caloric intake that goes into my body as a whole. They just have their own personal preferences.”
“I wasn’t concerned you were going to turn us all into stone, dearest. You did say adult and you’re still very much not.”
With an exaggerated sniff he stuck his nose up a little, “I’m older than you! I assume. I’m not going to ask your age, that would be wildly inappropriate, however I will say I’m turning 36 next month and am beyond reasonably sure that’s older than you.”
It was a testament to her non-verbal communication skills that all it took for her to get an entire paragraph’s worth of speech across was one single look through long lashes.
“We age much more slowly than humans. We’re not eternals by any means, not like Captain Kamon and Sir Leonidas. But I’m coming up on forty and I’m still considered…” He did some quick mental math as he bobbed up and down, rubbing gentle circles on Kalama’s back, “a very early teenager by our standards.”
“So they sent me a child as an envoy.” Her arch tone was mimicked in her facial expression as she passed him one bottle, keeping the other for herself as a disgruntled Blaise made it known he was not a fan of being woken up for midnight feedings.
“They sent you an expendable resource.” He carefully shifted Kala so she was cradled in one of his arms, offering her the bottle as he rocked her, “I’m young and a boy. Two things they can afford to lose if this turns out to be a trap. The Matriarchs are old and they are cunning. They fully don’t trust you yet, and they especially did not trust Spymaster Pettigrew.” The snakes on his head hiss softly in time with his rocking, weaving a soothing if sibilant lullaby for Kala to take her bottle to. “So if this is just a trick humans are using to lure us out in the open for hunting you’ll just kill me, no great trophy, and the tribe stays safe in our stronghold.”
“They sent me a child as a sacrifice?”
Kala finished the bottle and Mihali grabbed a clean towel from the cupboard, turning her to press against his chest as he burped her gently. Her little fingers ran over the thin lines of scales that ran up his neck when they weren’t hidden by his glamour “ow ow ow with the grain of the scales, Mistress Zabini, not against.” She giggled, almost as if she could understand him, and settled against his chest with a small sigh, “Not as a sacrifice. But as an acceptable casualty. They weighed risk and reward. The reward was the potential for an alliance with more of the inhuman magical races. The risk was it was a trap. We’ve functioned pretty well as a species without such an alliance before so, the Matriarchs weren’t willing to risk much. The runt from the last clutch was about as much as they were send off into the world. They wouldn’t send you one of my many sisters. Not until they were sure you were serious. So you got me.”
Momentarily distracted by the cooing baby on his shoulder Mihali missed the look on Inanna’s face until he turned in his soft rocking to see her staring at him cooly, “You are not an acceptable loss in this household, Paveros. They may undervalue your worth but we do not. Besides. Nobody who is as good with my daughter as you are is anything other than immensely valuable. I do hope you’ll still be around when they grow old enough to appreciate you.”
Blushing Mihali ducked his head to nuzzle Kala softly, the snakes caressing her, “I’ll be around as long as you have need of me, your ladyship.”
Inanna laughed and nodded her head towards the door, ‘Come help me put these two back to bed and you can return to your pizza and whatever strange salted fish my Pirate King brought your hair. We’ll have to cure you of this ‘your ladyship’ nonsense as well. At least when it’s just the two of us. You’re part of the family now.”
He wasn’t sure he’d ever been given a greater honor.
The Idiot: We could just go. Hide out in some little bungalow on Takodana. Somewhere we could actually have time for once. No rebellion. No empire. No subterfuge and hidden identities and covering our tracks.
The Idiot: I’d leave it all behind if you asked me to.
Send ❤ for a lusty/loving/affectionate message
The Idiot: Next trip take the long way round.
The Idiot: I figured out a way to tweak the dampeners. We can stay in hyperspace for a little longer.
The Idiot: It’ll give us more time together. I need it.
The Idiot: I need you.
Send ♣ for a drunk message
The Idiot: This definitely isn’t the elevator to the penthouse
The Idiot: I think I’m in a boiler room?
The Idiot: Or something gross like that.
The Idiot: Send help.
In one way or another, it seemed that Peter Pettigrew‘s life was always complicated. At school, at home, and now even after the war, at least that the world saw, had calmed down his own life still remained a tangled tapestry of the threads of those around him. He had taken well to the mantle of spy master when it was offered to him because the kernel of truth at the center of that role was the same as the kernel of truth that lived at the center of his life, mainly one unbreakable ironclad tenet; be ever false. Peter lived most comfortably in lies. Lies to the world, lies to his friends, even lies to himself that he knew were false and still told himself every morning in the mirror because false as they may be they were the rivets that held armor together. The vaulted halls of the cathedral that lived housed in his soul were buttressed not with wood not with marble not even with unyielding iron but instead with falsehood, insecurity, and fear. They were the locks on a vault that he feared was empty but still maintained the illusion of richness because that allowed him a seat at a table he never truly felt he belonged. He was small, he was human, he was half blooded, and despite all of that the masks and lies he robed himself in each day presented a convincing enough illusion that his bearing and status said to the world at large ‘I am not to be ignored. Do so at your own peril.’
But every armor has its weakness, and every lock can be picked, and while it was the very complications he was always surrounded by that allowed him to fly so under-the-radar, they were also the things most conveniently placed to bring the whole house of cards crashing down around his ears; and that’s what seemed about to happen at any given moment.
Mary was back.
This in and of itself was a source of tremendous and sincere joy for Peter. They had only ever spoken infrequently; but Peter had always cherished every moment of silence with her. In a life built so firmly upon falsehood the moments he didn’t have to lie, the times they just sat in the library together, not even together just at the same time were glorious reprieves. Long hours on the roof looking down at the traffic together were sanctuaries that he lived in and loved. That he could once again catch the scent of sage and sea salt in the halls brought him peace, and no small number of tears of happiness had been shed when she had turned up with Inanna at The Gardens one day.
But like everything in his life it was complicated; especially when it came to his current living arrangement. It was no great secret that the absolute love of Sirius’ life was Mary Macdonald. That she was back again would only do good things for Sirius’ transition, slow as it was, from emotionally shattered former prisoner to relatively stable person again. But the fly in the ointment of it all was the fact that he and Peter had been sharing a room, and a bed, for months. There were a slew of different options as to how this could be approached; a vast array of choices for dealing with every possible emotional and intellectual response.
But since Peter was Peter he chose to deal with it in the most Peter way, by doing things when nobody was around to see or talk about it and then immediately going into hiding.
It was a simple enough process to empty out their room. Sirius and Mary were off somewhere, probably the Pack Lands, reconnecting. Which Peter was sure involved far too few words and far too much emphatic eyebrows and eye contact but he of all people wasn’t in any position to critique how other people shared their emotions, having spent a significant portion of his adult life attempting to eradicate his own. Sirius didn’t have many belongings and Peter had always lived relatively sparingly, so gutting the room was the work of less than an hour. He left it as pristine and sterile as it had been before he and Sirius had moved into it, like much of Inanna’s estate a glittering and cold monument to opulence and status. A simple note on the door was the only sign that people had lived there at all.
Pad,
North Wing. Suite of rooms with the statues of Artemis and Apollo outside the doors. You two need a space of your own far from the rest of this madding crowd. Ashworth knows where to send your morning coffee.
-Peter
His own meager belongings moved back to the first set of rooms he’d had when he moved into The Garden; a secret suite hidden behind the shelves of the Grand Library. It was something of a comfort to be back in his own spot, layered in enchantment and spell, truly hidden and able to let his guard down. But he did have to admit he’d miss the sound of another person in his rooms. There was just one last box to move, a miscellany of notebooks and pens and the few framed pictures he kept on his desk and he was done. Every wing of the house connected to the Reception Hall where Inanna held court and Peter was keen to avoid the gazes and questions of the people who’d be there, so he cut through one of the secret passageways instead, exiting into the western greenhouse.
The air was so thick and redolent with the smell of blossoms that for a moment it overrode his other senses, including the one that would have allowed him to hear the record player and perhaps escape before he was noticed. But, the Mistress of The Garden saw all, and saw her spymaster appear in her greenhouse.
“Peter?” He looked over to see her, flawlessly put together as always, silver shears in her hand as she pruned anything less than perfection from one of her many orchids. He could watch in real time as her gaze went from his face, to the box under his arm, and then saw her mind put several pieces together. “Oh. I see.” She set the shears down and pulled off gardening gloves that were somehow still flawlessly clean, “Come dance with me, Peter. Please?”
The fact that there was a please, that it was phrased truly as a request and not an order, made it all the more impossible to refuse. He set the box down and made sure his hands were clean before he took hers, one hand on her back and the other clasping hers tightly.
Stars shining bright above you, night breezes seem to whisper I love you, birds singing in the sycamore tree; dream a little dream of me
Inanna’s sigh was almost more judgmental than any chiding words she could have said, “Why do you insist on only giving your heart to people who can never truly cherish it the way it should be.”
Peters laugh bounced off the glass of the greenhouse, nearly as brittle as those thin crystalline panes “at least this way I know I will always get it back again”
“But you never get it back whole, Peter. It is too precious a treasure to be so mistreated.”
There was a long moment of silence as they swayed and spun through the plants, gentle music cushioning them from the rest of the world and allowing a moment where they were just two old friends from school, not a Queen and a Spymaster.
Sweet dreams til sunbeams find you, sweet dreams that leave your worries far behind you. But in your dreams whatever they be, dream a little dream of me.
“Do you want me to have him killed? I could do that for you. We can get you another pet. More handsome, kinder, less broken.”
He couldn’t help but laugh as he held her close, remembering a Yule ball, what seemed like several lifetimes ago, when they’d danced as much more carefree children.
But in your dreams whatever they be… dream a little dream of me
“I don’t need you to kill him. Tell Ashworth to stand down. His knives are much better suited for other things than punishing someone for my bad decisions. I don’t need a pet, Inanna.”
“And will you still bejewel your hair the same when you walk the Pack Lands, now that you will have to braid it yourself again?” The comment had some of the familiar bite of Inanna’s that he cherished, a touchstone that things were normal, things were regular. It was a constant he could set his sights on.
Though the song had long ended they continued to twist through the greenhouse in the same rhythm, twirling between plants and planters, “The Aegean Matriarchs reached out to Mihali. They want a sit down. Whatever I wear in the Pack Lands will have to wait, I leave in the morning.”
This caused the dance to stop as Inanna pinned him to the spot with a stare, not needing to raise her voice to be heard over the hissing record player in the corner, “This was your home first, Peter.”
“And it remains my home still. I am simply doing my job.”
It was a decidedly unladylike laugh that split the quiet of the moment, “You are doing the portion of your job that conveniently indulges your penchant for escapism, Spymaster.”
He spun Inanna out of his arms and bowed at the waist, too grandiose for the scene but not for the setting, “It is my penchant for escapism, for making minimal impressions, for being never truly any one place that makes me so good at being your Spymaster, Lady Zabini.”
A slender finger under his chin brought his eyes up to meet her gaze, “You are more to me than a spy master, Peter. Have your meeting, bind them more firmly to our side, but come back to me. The Garden needs your smile.”
He brought her hand to his lips and kissed it softly, “As my queen commands.” As he stood and gathered the box she pressed a cool kiss to his cheek.
“As your friend asks. Thank you for the dance, Peter.”
The bookcase slid back silently, after Peter had pulled the right combination of six books to unlock it, and as it closed again, shutting him in the dim silence of his sanctuary he sat on the edge of the small bed and sighed, fingers running through his hair as he hummed the song they’d danced to under his breath. Maybe he never did get it back whole again, but letting someone else have it was at least confirmation that somewhere, under the armor and scar tissue, Peter Pettigrew still had a heart.
