"Arcanorum et Dolus"

Translation: "Secrets and Deceit"

A small squeak echoed in the room, it's sole non-bespectacled resident perched on the window sill, looking out at the grounds. Light sleeper though he was due to living with his prank-happy brothers, he had gradually become desensitized to the squeaks and scrabbling of his pet rat Scabbers. The rat in question stared balefully out the window at the grounds surrounding the delapidated and haphazardly thrown together "house" that was affectionately, as far as Scabbers could tell, called 'The Burrow'.

Scabbers brushed his whiskers across the cold glass, staring down at the rustling bushes that housed the pesky gnomes and other garden varieties of pests. In his youth, he would torment them like every other magical child. Now they tormented him, as they were roughly the same size, the blasted potatoes with legs. With a ratlike sigh, he glanced over his shoulder - or what passed for one - at the blanketed form across the room. After several moments of making sure the young squatchling was asleep, he slipped down through the bookshelves, scrabbling along the books and trinkets to the floorboards.

The rat tentatively found himself hopping and slinking his way across the floor avoiding the loose floorboards that would be akin to signaling an imminent ambush to any prank target for miles around. Which in this household was everybody - including himself. Reaching the door, he took a sharp left turn behind a bookshelf and out through a hole in the wall. Thank Merlin he didn't have to create this one himself. It was difficult enough as is to skirt the anti-vermin wards on the house. He was honestly surprised that they could afford to pay for such a ward. Well, had it not been for that curse-breaker son of theirs.

Scabbers shook himself and looked up and down the landing. Across the way was the twins room, but the rat could hear nothing but low breathing from inside. Below was the daughter's room, Jenny or Joan or something Wizardish - Peter was a fine half-blood name after all, none of this weird outlandish nonsense. Above the landing was everyone else in the house, but he had no need to go up there during this foray, at least not right now. This sleuthing business was hard work.

Almost hugging the wall, Wormtail as he referred to himself outside the tender love and care of the Weasley child, skittered down the stairs, barely avoiding injury on the splinters that rose like towering spikes to his beady watery eyes. The nails jutting out dangerously as he hurtled down the stairs, that gravitee thing he had heard mudbloods speaking of back in the days of Hogwarts pulling him faster and faster as he leapt to avoid wood and metal impalings alike.

It would not do to have his undercover (and frankly nauseating) mission to gather intel from the Blood Traitors - concerning the goings on of the Wizarding World - to come to a sudden and bloody end. The lack of finger was uncomfortable enough, as it happened. But it was a lot better than the alternative, Wormtail thought, no Dementors or bloody death, and the Order of Merlin was pretty classy too.

Dropping the last few steps to the ground, Wormtail paused, listening for the faint echoes of fat rat meets linoleum to stop reverberating off the walls. After a moment, he scrabbled his way into the kitchen, expertly clawing his way up a haphazardly thrown jumper and onto the tabletop. There he found the previous days' Daily Prophet, where it always lay every evening when the Weasley patriach would read it before traipsing upstairs to bed.

Wormtail carefully slid a paw over the parchment, sliding it back from it's folded position until it was stretched out and fully readable. Zeroing in on the sports section - which Wormtail had always hated - he did the classic rat on paper move and soiled the area. This was a precaution for if he got caught, also the blasted Weasley child that took care of him didn't particularly know what he was doing concerning the rodent body that Wormtail inhabited.

In any case, the International leaflet inside the Daily Prophet announced another few rumours of dark happenings in Wizarding communities around the world. It had been only a handful of years since the incident involving the Dark Lord's downfall to the accursed Potter boy, but Wormtail kept an eye out for his Master's accomplishments, whersoever they occured. Albania, ostensibly, had a few missing persons in the area, which Wormtail felt was something important to mull over. Judging by the foray raids into Europe when he was a Death Eater, they had been searching for something on the Dark Lord's ord-

A creaking staircase and shuffle alerted Wormtail to an approaching individual. Barely repressing a squeak of surprise, he leapt across the slippery varnished table and dropped to the floor a moment later, his landing muffled by the oncoming footsteps, barely. The shadowy figure entered the kitchen, the crescent moonlit night bathing their shadowy appearance in a pale brilliance, sending their features into stark comparison with the surrounding gloom.

From behind a table leg, Wormtail could see the lanky outline and freckled countenance of the young Weasley daughter Ginevra, who crossed to the door and opened it silently with practiced ease, reaching for the sideboard nearest the door for a keychain. Curiously, Wormtail skittered across the floor to watch the Weasley girl silently walk to the broom shed, and let herself in. Moments later, she exited clutching one of the family's brooms.

With an un-ratlike nod, Wormtail understood what was happening, but with no wish to be caught in the act of gathering information, he about faced and began the slow journey up the stairs to his resting place inside the bespectacled ignorant owner's room that deigned to keep he, a loyal Death Eater a captive. Though he may have been delusional, Wormtail vowed that one day he would recieve recompense for his purported imagined slights.

Even a traitorous rat needs to have it's dreams...