OVERANALYZING THE TEXT

Marina wrote:

(snipping musings on why Peter didn't throw himself on Sirius' mercy after the Potters were killed)

I don't think we can dismiss out of hand the possibility that Peter just didn't think of it, just as Sirius, freshly out of Azkaban, didn't think of owling Dumbledore to tell him what really happened.

Neither do I, actually. It does seem a little odd to me, though, because it strikes me as the sort of strategy that would leap immediately to the mind of the Peter we see these days—a Peter who seems to consider the manipulative possibilities of tears and deceit first (they're his default response), and only seems to move on to consider other options after rejecting Tears-and-Deceit as unworkable.

Although...hmmm. Actually, perhaps that's just not true. Now that I think about it, perhaps flight is really his default response. It's how he tries to deal with Sirius Black in PoA. (For that matter, it's how he eventually succeeds in dealing with Sirius Black in PoA.) And all through the Shrieking Shack scene, he keeps glancing around, looking to the boarded-up windows and the door... He goes for the Tears-and-Deceit only because he can't just cut and run, but that's what he really wants to be doing, and that's what his first instinct is to look for a way to do.

And Voldemort accuses him of planning to scarper at the very beginning of GoF, doesn't he? Astute of him, really.

So...yeah. Okay then. Never mind.

So it's possible that if someone said to Pete, "hey, why didn't you just tell Sirius you were tortured into revealing the Potters' location," it's possible he would've slapped himself on the forehead and exclaimed, "D'oh! Can't believe I didn't think of that! Boy, is my face red!"

Oh, I'm sure he thought of it eventually. I'm sure he thought a lot about it during all those years he spent as Scabbers. No wonder he was such a depressed-seeming rat. ("...eat chocolate...take nap...eat more chocolate...take nap...")

Also, even if Peter did think that Sirius would summarily blast him no matter what excuse he gave, that doesn't mean Peter was right.

Well, I don't really think that Sirius would have, unless Peter had really botched his tale-telling. But Cindy thought that he would have, and she wholeheartedly approves of such irrational and bloody-minded behavior (I understand that she likes ambushes too), so I was teasing her.

The combination of extreme terror he must've been feeling and knowledge of his own guilt may have made it impossible for him to believe that any of James' friends might show him mercy or compassion.

That wouldn't surprise me either. Also, I suspect that he'd been expending quite a bit of mental energy up to that point in time convincing himself that they were really hateful people, monstrous people, people who had never treated him well, people who had in fact treated him very very badly, people who had injured him, people who richly deserved to be betrayed...

It would be rather difficult, I think, to go from there to: "This situation can be salvaged. I'll just tell them it was forced from me. They'll believe me, and since they can't really hold something like that against me, I'll be just fine."

—Elkins