Spies, Lies and Self fullfilling prophecies

[pippin_999]

No: HPFGUIDX 146493


> Pippin:
> > Can you imagine Snape, who's always putting two and two together,
> *not* thinking it's all related and Sirius was the reason that Order
> members were getting picked off?
> 
> Carol:
> I answered that question earlier. Yes, he thinks that Sirius was
> offering information that led to the Order members being picked off
> one by one (though he himself was not an Order member at the time, I
> think he and Dumbledore had some sort of understanding and Snape knew
> that the murders the DEs were committing were of people close to
> Dumbledore). But as I said, I think that Snape would see it as aiding
> Voldemort rather than aiding the Death Eaters, who were only (or
> primarily) Voldie's agents.

Pippin:
I guess we'll just have to agree to disagree on that. The point I was
trying to make by saying "Death Eaters" instead of "Voldemort" is that
by the time of James and Lily's deaths everyone in the Order knew
that Voldemort was a killer and head of a terrorist gang. But
not even Order members could tell who was  a Death Eater and 
who wasn't. While it's inconceivable to me that an Order member could 
be as naive about Voldemort as Regulus was, it's not inconceivable 
that an Order member could mistakenly put their trust in a Death Eater. 

I also tried  to show was that it's canon that Snape and Sirius 
both thought that Lupin was capable of cooperating  with a murderer, 
and however they came to that conclusion *they're  not wrong*. 
We saw Lupin about to help Sirius murder Pettigrew. 

When the time comes and ESE!Lupin confesses (if it ever does)
that will be a clue. Like Draco telling Harry that he'd got himself 
a girlfriend in CoS, it wasn't exactly true at the time, but it
was an anvil-sized hint of what was coming. 

You seem to agree with me that Lupin must have become
estranged from his old friends. But what would he do then,
this man who wants so much for people to like him? Where
else would he turn? He wasn't naive about Voldemort. But
he was, he admits, naive about other werewolves. It was 
a dangerous time to go looking for new friends, or so 
Hagrid told us in PS/SS. 

> Carol:
> I'm not so sure. Peter shows himself capable of some pretty
> complicated potion making combined with spell-casting in GoF, not to
> mention capable of completing the potion after he's cut off his own
> hand. We see him capable of ruthlessness in his treatment of Harry and
> his murder of Cedric as well. And he found Voldemort and even
> kidnapped Bertha Jorkins. 

Pippin:
When dealing with a magician like JKR, you have to be suspicious of 
anything Harry deduces or Voldemort reports. We know that Harry
jumps to conclusions, and Voldemort lies  even  in his villain tells 
all speeches. 

Peter "does" all of this offstage, except for dropping the last three ingredients
and Voldemort's body into the brew. Even Neville could do that much. 
We've seen that potion-making can be done by  inexpert wizards
*if*  there's someone else around to make sure they follow instructions
exactly. 

The murder of Cedric is ambiguous. Harry thinks Voldemort did it.
 JKR said that "Wormtail" killed Cedric. 

But Wormtail is an *alias*.  Like Discworld's Commander Vimes, I want to 
throw my hands in the air at this point, and shout, "You recognized
him by his MASK?" The whole point of a mask is that *anyone* can
hide behind it. The whole point of an *alias* is that you don't know
who it is.  I don't think we can be too sure she meant Peter. Especially
since, as loyal DDM!Snape supporters, we must believe that JKR is
highly, er, selective, about what she tells us.

Carol:
 I think he feigned friendship for a whole year without a qualm, all the 
while passing information on Order members (starting, maybe, with 
those he cared least about but working steadily toward the Potters. 

Pippin:
This is a very different Peter, then, from the one we see in the
graveyard, who can't look Harry in the eye, or the one in the
Shrieking Shack whose stammering and haunted looks betray him
long before his confession does. If Peter had been able to
look Harry in the eye and answer Sirius's accusations in complete
sentences, his story would have held up. "Everyone
knows Sirius was the secret-keeper. It's absurd to think that I was 
the spy. I adored James, I never would have betrayed him. I went into
hiding because I was afraid that the Death Eaters would want
revenge -- because I'd put the *real* spy in Azkaban!" 

Peter's clever enough to think of it, but he can't bring it off, because
unlike whoever the spy really is, he's a lousy liar and obviously
not an occlumens. When have we actually *seen* him lie successfully?
He didn't even do a very good job of pretending to be a an
ordinary rat...biting Goyle and then falling asleep again? Didn't you
think that was rather odd? Hanging around with the Weasleys for
far longer than an ordinary rat's life span? Wouldn't he have been
wiser to find another wizarding family every few years? 

He *was* the secret keeper and he was forced to betray the Potters. 
He's too racked with guilt to successfully pretend that he didn't.

 But how could he be the spy? Good Heavens, he can't manage to spy on 
Snape and co for five minutes, he can't be questioned without
breaking into a sweat, and you think he was spying on the 
Order of the Phoenix for a year while everyone around him
was hunting for the spy? "Peter, you haven't seen anything suspicious,
have you? "And Peter answers,"Well, I saw Sirius listening at a keyhole
the other day"  and neither Lupin, who seems to be a legilimens, nor
Albus Dumbledore, who definitely is one, notices anything wrong?
Good Grief!

Pippin