Dumbledore arrived first.
Not by Floo, not by apparition - he came up the lane on foot, which should have been impossible given how quickly he arrived but which was somehow entirely in keeping with how Dumbledore moved through the world. He came through the gate with the unhurried certainty of a man who had been summoned to serious situations before and understood that arriving with urgency was less useful than arriving with clarity.
He looked at the trunk, still under his father's containment charm.
He looked at Arthur.
He looked at Molly.
He looked, very briefly, at him.
He said nothing, and stood with them in the garden, and waited.
The Aurors arrived nine minutes later — three of them, in the distinctive robes, moving with the organized efficiency of people who had been told by Amelia Bones personally that this was important. The one in front was a witch in her late thirties who carried herself with the specific authority of someone who had been doing difficult work competently for long enough that it had become entirely natural.
She looked at the trunk. Looked at his father. Looked at Dumbledore, who gave the smallest nod.
"Tell me what the ward registered," she said to his father.
His father told her, precisely and without embellishment, in the manner of a Department of Magical Law Enforcement senior official giving a professional account: the ward type, the detection trigger, the confirmation from the diagnostic spells. The Auror listened with the attention of someone building a case in real time.
"We'll need to confirm the form before we can proceed," she said.
"Understood," his father said.
The senior Auror drew her wand and cast a series of spells at the trunk — detection charms layered in sequence, each one probing the magical signature of the contained animal with increasing specificity. He watched the spells' effects with the attention of someone who was learning field magic in real time, the way each charm built on the last, the way the Auror's wand movements had the economy of long practice.
The final charm produced a faint golden glow around the trunk.
"Confirmed," the Auror said. "Unregistered Animagus. Long-term form maintenance — years, not weeks." She looked at his father. "I'm going to perform a controlled reversal. I need everyone at least ten feet back."
They moved back.
The controlled Rennervate that followed was not the standard version — it was modified, calibrated with the care of someone who understood that a stunned Animagus in a confined space had limited options and that limited options produced desperate behavior. Enough to restore consciousness. Not enough to restore full coordination.
The trunk shuddered.
Then it shuddered again, differently — the specific movement of something changing shape inside a confined space, the wrong kind of movement, the movement of a transformation happening not by choice but by the body's instinct to become what it actually was under sufficient stress.
The trunk lid flew open.
What came out was wrong in the specific way that mid-transformation things were always wrong — caught between rat and human, neither thing completely, resolving with the horrible organic inevitability of a process that once begun couldn't be stopped. He had known, intellectually, that forced transformations looked like this. Knowing it and watching it were different experiences and he found himself very still, watching, with the specific quality of attention that came from seeing something he would not forget.
Peter Pettigrew resolved onto the garden path of the Burrow in a heap, gasping, and was hit by all three Auror stunning spells before he'd finished being human.
The silence that followed was the silence of ten people processing something that had just entirely restructured their understanding of the last twelve years.
He looked at Pettigrew — small, balding, watery-eyed even unconscious, wearing the specific air of someone who had been hiding for so long that hiding had become their entire personality — and felt something cold and clear and entirely his own.
Twelve years. This man had been in their house for twelve years, sleeping in Percy's room and then in his room, carried by his brothers, fed by his mother, present at Christmas dinners and birthday celebrations and the ordinary days that made up a family's life. Twelve years in a cage and twelve years free before that, and in between: the Potters dead and Sirius Black in Azkaban for a crime this man had committed.
He looked at him for a long moment.
Then he looked at his mother.
His mother was looking at Pettigrew with an expression he had never seen on her face before — not anger, not grief, not the complicated fury he might have expected. Something colder than all of those. The expression of a woman who had let something into her home and her family and who was in the process of calculating what that meant and arriving at a conclusion that was very quiet and very complete.
His father's expression was different — the professional face, the face he wore when he was being what he was at work rather than who he was at home, but underneath it something that was also very quiet and very complete.
Dumbledore was looking at Pettigrew with the specific expression of a man recalculating the events of twelve years through a new and unwelcome lens.
"Dad," he said.
His father looked at him.
"That's Peter Pettigrew right" he said. He said it the way you said something you needed to hear out loud before you could fully believe it — slowly, with the specific quality of someone arriving at a fact through visible reasoning. He remembered Ron hearing stories about the war from his parents. "He was at Hogwarts with Sirius Black. He was friends with — he was a friend of the Potters."
His father was very still.
"If he's alive," he said, and he let the reasoning move through him visibly, the way it would have moved through a thirteen-year-old genuinely processing something for the first time, "then Sirius Black couldn't have killed him. And if Sirius Black didn't kill him —" He stopped. "Sirius Black didn't do it."
The senior Auror, who had been close enough to hear every word, turned and looked at him with a different quality of attention than she'd given him before. The assessment of someone who had noted a sharp mind working in a young person and was deciding what to do with that observation.
"The investigation will determine what happened," she said.
"Of course," he said. He looked back at Pettigrew. "I'm sorry. I'm just — twelve years. He's been here for twelve years. And all that time —" He didn't finish that sentence. He didn't need to.
His mother made a sound that was not quite a word.
His father put his hand on her shoulder, briefly, and she covered it with hers, and neither of them said anything.
Dumbledore looked at him with the full weight of his attention — not the gentle, warm quality he usually projected but the other thing, the deeper thing, the attention of someone who had been doing this for a very long time and saw more than he announced.
He met it steadily and let it be what it was.