The rat had escaped.

Wormtail. No. Pettigrew. How could Sirius possibly call him by one of the old school nicknames they'd used, after today? The filth had just transformed and scuttled into the sewer, the mangy little coward.

Padfoot couldn't even form coherent thoughts to show just how much Pettigrew had betrayed his brothers. He'd cut them all deep, scarred them for life; the churning waves of hate and regret and sorrow smashing together in the pit of Sirius' stomach made him want to puke, kill himself and scream in agony at the same time. Instead, all he could do was curl up in the corner of his Azkaban cell, shaking, his head buried in his knees.

James… Lily… Harry…

Memories of the tiny one-year-old swam into the man's messy thoughts, causing him to grit his teeth in anguish, shaking even more violently than before.

Harry James Potter. His godson. What was going to happen now? Hagrid had said something about an aunt and uncle; Sirius had never heard of any aunt and uncle. Only some weird estranged sister of Lily's… was Harry going there? What if he wasn't happy? What if they didn't treat him right? What if he wasn't the bouncing, happy child that he was supposed to grow up into?

For the first time in a long while, Sirius spoke.

"DAMMIT, PETER!"

His outburst was met by nothing but the usual gasping of Dementors across the bars of his cell. The other prisoners, driven to madness or glaring at the other inmates, did not respond. The subtle mutterings and scrapings of the other wizards and witches continued, unbroken.

Lily and James… dead. They'd just been lying there… lifeless, heavy corpses. Not breathing, not blinking. It was horrifying to see two people who had been so alive sprawled across the floor, utterly dead. Their eyes dark and cold. Their skin pale. Their bodies not moving a single nanometre.

Pettigrew would pay. Oh, Pettigrew would definitely pay. Whether it would take days, months, years, decades… Pettigrew would pay. Sirius' limbs burned to tear the liar into shreds, to torture him into insanity, to inflict upon him the most prolonged, twisted death he could think of…

And Remus? What of Moony? What must he be thinking? He forced himself to think of that confrontation with Pettigrew in the street… the explosion that he had not been expecting… the tail of a rat disappearing down the crater that had been blasted through the ground… the dead bodies of the Muggles that he had mercilessly killed, just like he'd mercilessly killed his supposed best friend…

And Sirius had been blamed. Framed. Accused. That was why he was in this dingy, cold cell on an island somewhere, trapped by soul-sucking guards and imprisoned thousands of miles away from the vengeance and redemption…

Remus would know better. He'd know that it hadn't been Sirius… but then again, Sirius himself had only recently been suspicious of Moony. He'd thought that Remus' condition may have forced him to bear a grudge against the main race of wizards due to their prejudices, despite the fact that the three people who had helped him most were in the organization he was betraying. Oh, how stupid Sirius had been. How stupid.

There had been a traitor within the Order, that much had been clear. Confusion and suspicion had been rife in the days leading up to the Potters' murder. Everyone had eyed everyone else, watched them as they ate their meals, analysed them for odd behaviour. It had been madness. Paranoid madness. But, of course, nobody would even think of Pettigrew, the timid little man who would never have the guts to pull off anything that huge, the Secret Keeper of all people… Sirius wanted to vomit at the thought of Pettigrew hunched at Voldemort's feet, praising him, spewing to him everything he knew about the Order, details about his brothers, his fellow Marauders, the whereabouts of Lily and James and baby Harry…

The first of many meals that Sirius would not eat was pushed into his cell. He barely gave the sparse tray a glance, noting a jug presumably filled with water and a plate bearing some sort of grey mass.

Instead of crawling towards the tray, he just stared at the stone walls of his cell, counting.

Yes, Pettigrew would pay. Sirius Black would find Peter Pettigrew and kill that foul, betraying bastard. That was a promise.