#he always felt inferior and unloved while loving and looking up to his family members he's unable to properly express his love for those

[tsui-no-sora]

Nooo :(( why do people dislike Jiang Cheng he's literally just a little guy full of problems he and his siblings were born on a sewer underneath a bridge all on their own one lonely night full of storms he's like an injured cat you find on the side of the road he's never done anything wrong

[ambiidexter]

On Peter’s relationship with the Marauders and his consequent betrayal

headcanon time! I’ve been thinking long and hard on Peter’s friendship with James, Sirius and Remus and the reasons it all went awry. It’s not a secret by now that I’m dead sure that the Marauders were awful friends and people (when they were young), but here I will only focus on them being awful friends to Peter.

So what we know (or hear most of all): they were like brothers, they loved him as a brother, he threw it all in their faces when there was a chance to betray them. But what do we get of their actual, real relationship in the flashbacks Harry sees in the 5th book? 

The Order of the Phoenix, Chapter 28:

“Wormtail looked anxious; he was chewing his fingernails, staring down at his paper, scuffing the ground with his toes. Every now and then he glanced hopefully at his neighbor’s paper.”

“Wormtail was the only one who didn’t laugh. “I got the snout shape, the pupils of the eyes, and the tufted tail,” he said anxiously, “but I couldn’t think what else —”

“How thick are you, Wormtail?” said James impatiently. “You run round with a werewolf once a month —”

Here’s where all comparison between Wormtail and Neville should end. You’d never see the Golden Trio treat Neville like that. The Marauders knew about Peter’s problem with studying, and yet they not only offered no support, they mocked him, they insulted him. They made the friend with anxiety  and inferiority complex feel even weaker, they were beating him down, because he wouldn’t, he didn’t resist.

“James was still playing with the Snitch, letting it zoom farther and farther away, almost escaping but always grabbed at the last second. Wormtail was watching him with his mouth open. Every time James made a particularly difficult catch, Wormtail gasped and applauded. After five minutes of this, Harry wondered why James didn’t tell Wormtail to get a grip on himself, but James seemed to be enjoying the attention. Harry noticed his father had a habit of rumpling up his hair as though to make sure it did not get too tidy, and also that he kept looking over at the girls by the water’s edge.

“Put that away, will you?” said Sirius finally, as James made a fine catch and Wormtail let out a cheer. “Before Wormtail wets himself from excitement.”

Wormtail turned slightly pink but James grinned.”

Peter was head over heels in love with the Marauders, interpret that as you wish, but the fact of his deep affection remains. A small, ugly, fat boy with “no talent”, overtaken by anxiety, found a group where he’d be “accepted”. Of course he’d join on any terms. He’d tolerate the quips, he’d tolerate the unequal treatment, because he was just so enraptured – they weren’t just any group, they were the coolest kids in Hogwarts. A fifteen-year-old cheering like a child for your every move and taking your kicks as part of the deal – what arrogant teenager wouldn’t want someone like that around? James and Sirius sure did.

And they treated that love as a third-grade fun fair prize, right in Peter’s face.

Now, to Wormtail’s participation in bullying Snape. Here I’ll risk looking like a total weeb and reference an anime I don’t even like. Elfen Lied, which also deals with the issue of bullying and its consequences, makes a very good point: “When you’re miserable, you need someone even more miserable than yourself.”

“You’d want to be quite sure he was the biggest bully in the playground before you went back to him, wouldn’t you?” Says Sirius in the Prisoner of Azkaban, and he’s right. Before Voldemort, the Marauders were the biggest bullies in the playground.

Wormtail, with his perfect ability to sense where the wind blows, understood that he could be in Snape’s place if he didn’t go along with the Marauders’ whims. He did not feel nearly powerful enough to confront them, and here we are talking about very regular power of human spirit. He felt, even if subconsciously, that he did not have the same rights and social power as the flagships of the gang, James and Sirius. And he didn’t even need to compromise with his conscience: his moral compass followed James and Sirius. He adored them like a puppy dog adores its masters (which is why I referred to them as Peter’s masters in my previous meta). When you’ve got a personality as weak as Wormtail’s, you absorb the values and opinions of your group like a sponge, all to feel like you belong. That’s how people end up becoming cult members, and Peter’s cult was the Marauders.

Here’s to think on what made Peter seek acceptance and protection so desperately, what made him blind to every single flaw in his “friends” and “benefactors”? What broke him into the cowardly mess we see in throughout the story? This can only be a headcanon, but I suspect child abuse, in or outside the family.

Now, to Peter’s becoming the Secret Keeper.

The Prisoner of Azkaban, Chapter 19:

“Lily and James only made you Secret-Keeper because I suggested it,” Black hissed, so venomously that Pettigrew took a step backward. “I thought it was the perfect plan . . . a bluff. . . . Voldemort would be sure to come after me, would never dream they’d use a weak, talentless thing like you. . . . It must have been the finest moment of your miserable life, telling Voldemort you could hand him the Potters.”

Let’s now put aside Sirius’ strategy of being oblivious to enemies usually going for the most weak-spirited (some of the Death Eaters were in the same year as the Marauders, they had to know their personalities) and look closer at what he actually thought, even back then, about Peter. A weak, talentless thing. Pardon me referencing my old essay on Peter’s power here, but I’m doing it. So, granted you agree with that one, what do we get? The Marauders, Sirius in particular, cared so little about the man that after spending about 10 years by his side they had no clear sense of what he was capable of as a wizard? Not in some separate field of knowledge only academicians could discern, but in a field of everyday practice? Is that what can be called a close friendship?

On to the next point, they’d planned this bluff while still trusting Peter, meaning, they deemed the man so desperately attached, so wholeheartedly loyal, took him for granted so much, that they didn’t for one second think that he was capable of making an autonomous decision, that he, if captured, could put himself above them, even after all he’d been subjected to in this relationship. That isn’t what you think of separate human beings who are concerned about themselves. They denied Peter even the possibility of that.

According to Pottermore, using Cruciatus on Secret Keepers was common practice. Many people get confused about how Fidelius Charm works. Yes, one cannot divulge the information while subjected to any spell, one has to do it willingly. But the strategy of torture is always: a session of excruciating pain, then some time for the Secret Keeper to decide whether they preferred to spill or whether they preferred another session. We don’t know how many sessions Peter had endured to become a Death Eater and later to divulge the Secret, but it had been a year before he was made the Secret Keeper and a week before the Secret was uttered. Remember, Voldemort’s favourite form of torture wasn’t Cruciatus, it was mind magic. Now think what he’d go for first, when it came to Peter.

And when Peter did face that choice, after his mind had been searched and gutted by Voldemort, after his every hidden sore was pried open and pierced, after he’d had a lesson in his friends’ true feelings, how could he choose anything but what he had chosen? Alone and unloved, worthless in every sense of the word except that one very special thing Voldemort craved, with nothing but his and his mother’s life at stake, what could he have chosen?

And then, after Voldemort’s downfall, he found an illusion of home, an illusion of acceptance as something other, lesser than his own self, he was finally loved, still inferior, but loved, as a small animal in a child’s hands. After almost 13 years, even that was ripped away, and all at once those who called themselves his friends decades ago, those he had let down so much, were after him, and the one person who’d mourned his death minutes ago, was now hating him with burning passion. So Peter returned to Voldemort.

“At the hotel we had separate rooms, but in the middle of the night she came sobbing into mine, and we made it up very gently. You see, she had absolutely nowhere else to go.” – V. Nabokov, Lolita