Love is the Child of an Endless War

Dyeing his hair is what saved his life. To be sure it was a heinous undertaking done without the aide of magic. He’d been without his wand for so long it was entirely possible he couldn’t have managed to do it with magic, anyway. Impossible to fathom, though, that Muggle women did this to themselves intentionally, and without benefit of pain medication.

Penny Weasley sat studying quietly at her kitchen table. She had her own office, a sitting room attached to the master bedroom, George’s office, or the computer desk in the recreation room to work from, but she preferred the kitchen. Studying in the kitchen was a habit she’d acquired in the early days of her relationship with Percy, when they’d shared a two room flat in Diagon Alley situated across the alley and around the curve from Weasley’s Wizarding Wheezes.

“Do stop fidgeting Jasper, you’re agitating my Grindylow,” Harry requested absently, while he poured over Jasper’s manufactured maps with a magnifying lens. Jasper pulled a face at the Grindylow. It stuck a webbed thumb up its nose at him. He clunked his feet on the chair rail.

“Yes, yes! My troll has bludgeoned your troll to death, and eaten all of the villagers! I win!” Jasper hurled his game controller onto the rug, jumping up to do a victory jig.

Unfortunately he had to strangle the border guard to death with his bare hands. It was quite an unpleasant action to have to take, but not an entirely unplanned-for complication. He’d approached the solitary outpost on the edge of what was left of civilization in that part of the continent near dawn, already exhausted from having had little sleep and even less to eat over the last three days. Power born out of sheer desperation surged through his rip-corded arms long enough to throttle the threadbare, half starved, teenaged guard, armed with an AK-47, to his untimely demise. Then he dropped to the dust, his empty guts heaving.

“I don’t wish to go to school today,” Phillipa announced, flopping into her seat at the table across from George, who was studying the London Exchange in the paper at breakfast. “I would prefer to stay at home and play with my Snorkack.”

The cheer of Christmas pervaded Weasleys' Wizarding Wheezes. Its young owners hearts filled fairly to bursting with the joy of the yuletide season. Business was booming, as always, but this particular year’s sales had been especially profitable. Fred and George were beginning to divest their massive earnings into some speculative ventures. They’d made a killing on the patented “Silent Pop”, which was the trick to Apparating making only the faintest audible noise.

“Molly! Molly Weasley! Yoo-hoo!” Molly looked up from her garden where she was harvesting magical winter strawberries for breakfast. They were Remus’ favorite, and she’d perfected the technique for growing them in frozen solid, frost-hardened ground. She was planning on authoring a book on the subject of growing your own fresh freezing fruit but hadn’t gotten around to starting it, yet.

George, sitting at his desk, pretended to be working. He wasn’t sure for whom he was pretending exactly; he owned the freaking company and he’d work when he felt like it. He did not feel like working just now, neither did he feel like going home to his wife. A large, square, brown parchment envelope loomed importantly on his desk, and he wanted nothing more than to reduce it to cinders, “Raparo!” it, and reduce it to cinders again, and again, and again. With these destructive thoughts on his mind, and several more of an even more personal and violent nature forming on the horizons of his imagination, he glanced up from his desk to see a visitor standing there.

Penny, feeling the walls closing in around her, recalled with profound intensity the reason she hated hospitals. They were filled with too many hurt people who could not be fixed. Jasper, thank George, was not going to be one of those people. Her precious curly-haired baby would be fine, if he came out all right of the anesthesia.

Penny wasn’t accustomed to paying her mother’s advice any attention. She’d been advised very strongly by her not to become involved with Percy. Sophie wasn’t completely wrong all of the time, Penny credited. She just had a very different idea about what Penny’s life was supposed to look like than Penny herself did. Sophie had been grimly tolerant of her relationship with Percy until the day Penny announced she was giving up her Healer’s training because the strain of her schoolwork and the long hours working at the hospital were taking too much of a toll on her since she’d been made pregnant.

George knew that he was not the wisest Weasley brother. That honor went to Ron. As fate often has it the youngest of the bunch understands life’s difficult situations the best because he has seen so many others go through them before him. George was not possessed of the greatest Weasley intellect, either. Now that Percy was no longer dead, he scored on that account all over again. Charlie had the charm, Bill the best looks. Fred was the funniest by a narrow margin. George had something better than all of those combined. He knew how to compromise.

Phillipa tore down the corridor, zipped through the doorway, and flung herself face first onto Jasper’s bed. Wincing painfully, he threw her a very dark look. “Oh, I’m sorry, Jasper. Have I jolted your incisors?”

Penny definitely knew of what she spoke when she’d told George that so soon as she’d stopped feeling ill she would begin to swell like one of those freak magically enlarged pumpkins they used to have at Hogwarts every Halloween. What she hadn’t known was that she would start to swell much sooner than she expected, and grow quite a bit larger as well. When the sunshine began overwhelming the snow clouds, and bright green sprigs of grass poked up out of the cold earth, they found out that she was pregnant with two of George’s babies. Double the sleeplessness and the hours spent nursing, the terrible-toddlers timed two

Percy had precious little time to spend thinking about the implications of George’s shrewd question. He had precious little time to think at all. Moments of quiet contemplation had become as rare and unobtainable as a Philosopher’s Stone.

Percy uttered a savage and utterly un-ex-prefect/head-boy like curse. Several lousy, literally lousy, rat-infested torturous years spent in a magic-forsaken foreign hellhole, imprisoned illegally, unjustly, and down right not nicely, had the knack of adjusting a person’s character and vocabulary to reflect the experience. Percy was no exception to that generalization. No length of heinous years imprisoned might have prepared him for dealing with Jasper, though. The child was a visitation on his soul.

Jasper had some time to analyze the events of the day at his Gran’s house. He arrived at a few conclusions. Most of which were quite disturbing. He determined that dead Narcissa Malfoy smelled exactly like roasting cow. He recognized it right way because his Gran was fixing a pot roast for supper.