Pettigrew, Hagrid, and Voldemort's Wand (WAS: Spying Game)

[ssk7882]

No: HPFGUIDX 39785

Pip!squeak was troubled by Pettigrew in Hagrid's milk jug (although 
she soon got over her dismay by laying it at the feet of Well-Nigh-
Omnipotent!Dumbledore):

> Was hiding in Hagrid's hut Pettigrew's very own idea? Or did Hagrid 
> deliberately find him and keep him there? Why didn't Pettigrew slip 
> past the Dementors before the scene in the shack? If Sirius could 
> do it, so could he, and leaving Hogwarts wouldn't be half as 
> dangerous as staying (not with Black and a mad part-kneazel to 
> contend with). 

Eloise confessed herself similarly troubled:

> Now Pettigrew hiding in Hagrid's hut, I have to admit, I always 
> found pretty odd. He was so likely to have been *found* - as he was.

Mmmm.

You know, I have always found this an extremely troubling plot point 
as well. In fact (she says, smiling shyly and apologetically at 
Charis Julia), I seem to remember once making one hell of a mess on 
board the ELGINMARBLES barge just to try to account for it.  In that 
speculation, which was so horrifically silly that I was only able to 
bring myself to offer it up in a state of self-imposed exile over on 
OTChatter, I proposed that Peter had been waiting around Hagrid's hut 
all that time in the hopes of making contact with the Centaurs, who 
had been entrusted with the safekeeping of Voldemort's wand some 
thirteen years before.

But another possibility has just occurred to me.  

What if Peter *was* hanging around Hagrid's hut in the hopes of 
retrieving voldemort's wand -- not from the Centaurs, but from Hagrid 
himself?

No.  Seriously.  Just think about this for a minute.

Who was the first on the scene at Godric's Hollow after Voldemort was
reduced to vapor?

Well, many people have speculated that Peter himself was.  The 
underlying supposition here is that the nature of the Fidelius Charm 
necessitated that Peter show Voldemort to the Potters' hiding place 
in *person,* and that he therefore must have been present for their 
deaths and Voldemort's destruction.  He picked up the wand, so the 
theory goes, fled the scene, and then went and hid it somewhere safe 
before framing Sirius and disappearing into obscurity as a rat.  
After the events of PoA, he then went and retrieved it before he went 
off to Albania to look for Voldemort.

Well...okay.  Even if Peter was there first, though, Hagrid got there 
awfully *fast,*  didn't he?  Hagrid is the first person whom we 
*know* to have arrived on the scene after the Potters' deaths, and 
from his description in the first chapter of PS, it would seem 
that he arrived even before the bodies were cold.

In response to Dumbledore's asking him if there were any problems, 
Hagrid reports: 

"'No, sir -- house was almost destroyed but I got him out all right 
before the Muggles started swarmin' around.'"

In short, Hagrid got there even before the first of the rubberneckers 
arrived.  That's fast work.  Very fast work.  In fact, the phrasing 
makes it sound as if the house might even have still been in the 
process of collapsing when Hagrid showed up to rescue baby Harry from 
the ruins.

What else might he have done while he was there?  Is it possible, 
given what we know of Hagrid's character, that he might have picked 
up a spare wand that he noticed lying around in the rubble?

I think that this is not only possible, but quite likely.  Hagrid is 
both curious and child-like, just the sort of person who picks up 
strange objects without giving too much thought to their provenance.  
It has also been well-established that he is highly resistant to his 
status as a "de-wanded" wizard.  He may even resent it.  He 
constantly violates the restriction against expelled students 
practicing wandwork.  Even while on a mission for Dumbledore, he 
chooses to use magic that Dumbledore has not authorized him to use -- 
and then he asks an eleven year old boy to agree to keep his secret 
for him.  He hides the broken pieces of his snapped wand so that he 
can use them to perform illicit magic, and then lies (badly) when 
Ollivander asks him about it.  When it comes to his wandless status, 
Hagrid is not law-abiding, and he is not honest.

Hagrid can also be secretive -- again, often in remarkably child-like 
ways.  Both as a teenager and as an adult, he shows a marked and 
child-like tendency to try to hide away evidence of his wrong-
doings.  As a student, he smuggles Aragog into Hogwarts, keeps him 
hidden away, and then, when it seems that he might be called to task 
for it, smuggles him right back out again.  He follows precisely the 
same pattern of behavior as an adult with Norbert, whom he first 
hatches illegally on the Hogwarts campus, then keeps hidden away in 
his hut, and finally allows to be furtively smuggled away when 
circumstances threaten to expose the secret.  He keeps the evidence 
of his illicit wand use hidden away inside a pink umbrella.

Would it not be perfectly in keeping for Hagrid to have picked up 
Voldemort's wand, perhaps planning to keep it for his own use, and 
then, when he realized whose it actually was, to become frightened, 
hide it away somewhere in his hut, and try to put it out of his mind, 
rather than owning up to Dumbledore that he had such an item in his 
possession?

Yes.  I think that this would be perfectly consistent with everything 
that we have seen of Hagrid's character so far.

Now what of Peter?  If Peter really was still on the scene when 
Hagrid arrived, then he must hidden himself away.  He would not have 
wanted to be seen, and indeed, he was *not* seen, either by Hagrid or 
by Sirius.

What if he saw Hagrid pick up Voldemort's wand and leave with it?

This would explain what Peter was doing in Hagrid's hut.  He was 
looking for Voldemort's wand, on the off-chance that Hagrid still had 
it secreted away somewhere in his hovel. To remain at Hogwarts for so 
long looking for Voldemort's wand was certainly a risk, but it is one 
that I believe that Peter would have been willing to take, for the 
simple reason that Peter is absolutely *terrified* of Voldemort.  He 
has resolved to go crawling off to Albania to look for him, but only 
because he genuinely believes that only Voldemort's protection can 
possibly suffice to protect him from Sirius, Remus, and the entire 
Ministry of Magic, all of whom he thinks are going to be hunting for 
him.  Had Sirius never escaped from Azkaban, Peter would have died of 
old age (or perhaps of emphysema) as the Weasley family's amazingly 
long-lived and decrepit pet rat.

Peter is willing to risk seeking out Voldemort because he thinks that 
it the only way to save his own life, but he is terrified.  He needs 
something to produce as an offering, doesn't he?  Especially after so 
many years have passed?  Some proof of his devotion, some proof of 
his loyalty?  At the very least some proof of his *usefulness?*  It 
is how submissive little sycophants like Peter think.  Just look at 
how he behaves with Bertha Jorkins: he offers her up to Voldemort not 
even knowing whether or not she will prove useful, but instead as a 
kind of token sacrifice.  He's like some frightened little acolyte, 
Peter is, making desperate random offerings to his mad, cruel, and 
unpredictable god.

I think that Peter did find Voldemort's wand in Hagrid's hut.  I 
think that when Hermione caught him, he was just waiting for Hagrid 
to leave the building so that he would have the opportunity to steal 
it.  This would explain why he was so very *poorly* hidden -- he had 
picked a hiding place from which he could easily see and hear when 
Hagrid had left the building, and also from which it would take no 
time at all to jump down onto the floor and then transform.  

This would also explain why he reacted with such extraordinary panic 
when Ron took him in hand and would not let him go.  Yes, his cover 
had been blown.  But all the same, surely he never thought that 
Sirius would really believe that "I've been killed, honest!" story a 
*second* time, did he?  The story was for the benefit of the children
and for the vicious Crookshanks, never for Sirius himself.  Sirius is 
nowhere in sight when Peter first starts writhing and struggling and 
biting at Ron's hand.  He is so very desperate to escape there, I 
think, because after weeks and weeks of searching Hogwarts in a very 
high state of anxiety, he was finally on the verge of being finally 
able to escape for *good,* with Voldemort's wand in tow, and that was 
when the kids showed up to interfere with his plan -- at the worst 
and most *frustrating* possible moment.

If this theory holds true, then it also explains how Peter can have 
been the one to restore Voldemort's wand to him and yet not have had 
it in his possession in the Shrieking Shack, without begging the 
question of precisely where Peter could have hidden such a item and 
still been certain that it would be there over a decade later.  No 
special hiding places are necessary.  After his escape at the end of 
_PoA,_ Peter simply would have needed to return to Hagrid's hut 
(hardly the most secure place in all Hogwarts), stolen the wand, and 
then set out on his long trek to Albania.


Thoughts?


-- Elkins 

(who is afraid that she just can't quite stomach LeCarre!Rowling,  
but who *has* noted with profound approval that Pip!Squeak is named 
after a character from an Agatha Christie novel in which [SPOILER 
ALERT] the author consciously manipulates the fact that many of her 
readers are likely to assume one of the book's major clues to be 
"just a typo.")