The walls of Hogwarts breathed down his neck with pure hatred. The new generation of students, if they ever caught a glimpse of a small fat man with the face of a rat whisking from one corner to another, paid him no more attention than a tiny mute ghost â and he was, in a sense, but the castle remembered it all. Peeves found a new source of entertainment in the sound butterbeer cans made when they collided with Pettigrewâs forehead, and some of the portraits expressed displeasure with their inability to send a load of their spit in his general direction. Only Nearly Headless Nick displayed true aristocracy by pretending he had no idea who Wormtail was. None of this mattered. Ron had disappeared at the end of his sixth year. After this Hogwarts couldâve burned down to the ground and Wormtail wouldnât give a single hair off Merlinâs beard about it. To hell with the Lion, to hell with the Basilisk.
Ever since the external student of distant relation to the Greengrasses replaced Pettigrew in the Malfoy Manorâs dungeons, Snape chose to exercise his vengeful spite on him within the walls of the Headmasterâs office. Filch with his overly long nose and an almost as long tongue when Gryffindors bribed him with firewhiskey, was banished from the office for the foreseeable future, and Pettigrew was entrusted with the honourable duty of keeping the carpets and Snapeâs shoes and robes clean. He preferred not to tempt the portraits of previous Headmasters to demonstrate the wide range of their vocabulary to him, and spent most of the time at the steps, guarding the entrance along with the Stairwell Gargoyle, brushing the new Headmasterâs shoes or tinkering a particularly fragile object vandalized by the pixies that had escaped the Dark Arts classroom. For all the world he was an overgrown house elf, if only his clothes were slightly more dignified than an old pillowcase. Heâd bet Snape would gladly demote him to that, though, if it wasnât for the risk of baring the source of his disdain.
Tonight, however, without Snapeâs supervision, he was indulging in a generous amount of comfort booze with no snack to alleviate the effects. Slumped against the stone walls, he latched onto the bottle like a baby on a tit and felt just as compelled to scream and thrash and cry, but Mrs Pettigrew was lying cold in her grave, and couldnât hold him to her chest.
He knew from the lightness of approaching shuffle that it was only a student â not a Carrow, thank Merlin â and only bothered to raise his head when a couple of boots before his nose suggested that he was the object of interest here.
Blinking his rheumy eyes, Pettigrew half-sobbed, half-whispered: âThe Headmaster is currently away on duty, Mr Trabocchi. He should be back in  two days.â
