Love is the Child of an Endless War

"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.

"Jasper, please feel free to move about the room," Harry suggested. "I can't concentrate and you, obviously, are incapable of sitting still." So Jasper did what he was asked and wandered around his uncle's office. It was a funny thing to be related to some of the most famous Wizards who had ever gone to Hogwarts. Uncle Harry had defeated Lord Thingy. Jasper had seen pictures of Lord Thingy and thought that he looked like a ghastly, great, girly man wearing an ill-fitting snake suit. Uncle Harry assured him that Lord Thingy was much more terrifying in person. Jasper took his word for it.

Uncle Fred and Uncle George had a piece of swampland in the third floor corridor named after them. It was the scene of the annual Hogwarts Spring Frolic Festival. Jasper really didn't understand the whole significance of the festival, but it involved attaching lengths of chain to broomsticks and riding up and the down the corridor while Peeves saluted everyone. Hogwarts' current caretaker Helga Tripe wanted to fill the swamp in and grow a butterfly garden in its place. The indoor mosquitoes had grown to be the size of dragonflies and had been known to suck the occasional unlucky student to death. Jasper wore a lot of insect repellent in that corridor, Mummy insisted on it. And he'd overheard her telling Uncle George that if a mosquito sucked Jasper dry she'd have his heads on a platter, both of them. Jasper presumed she must have meant 'their heads' on a platter, meaning Fred's and George's.

Headmaster Malfoy would have liked little better than to rid the school of the swamp, not that the mosquitoes bothered him. He was a sick, twisted, bloodless git. Malfoy would be rid of it simply to be able to take down the sign that read Weasley's Wonderful Waterworks Park, Sit Here and Park Yours. Unfortunately nobody could figure out how to undo it. It had been there for so long it was like the front doors in the Great Hall, or the portraits on the wall. The swamp had taken on a magical life of its' own. Uncle George told Jasper quite sincerely that he and Fred really couldn't undo the swamp now, even if they wanted to.

Uncle Harry had some pretty neat things. Jasper liked his map the best. Uncle George wouldn't tell him the maps secrets, or what they'd done with it when they'd had it here at Hogwarts. So Jasper knew it had to be good. Now he knew just how amazing a map it was, and it had almost been worth the stealing of it to find out. If Mummy had come up to Hogwarts to spank him for stealing it and lying about it, it might have been somewhat less worth the trouble. She really could get quite brutal with the wooden kitchen spoon.

Harry hadn't even yelled at him. Jasper hadn't expected him to. Harry was one of those teachers that rarely came down on students, and when he did they didn't even realize it until he'd walked away and they were inexplicably sinking through the floor. He'd never come down on Jasper, even though Jasper was sure he knew he'd been breaking into his office and borrowing his dark creatures to create mayhem for Malfoy.

Jasper cruised the room, picking up a poisoned dart here, a hippogriff tooth there. He strolled around the skull of the giant snake that was so large Harry had put a big pillow inside of its hollow mouth and sometimes took a nap in there. He petted Harry's snowy owl, feeling sad because his own owl, Hermes, was dead now. It had belonged to his father, his real father, not the Uncle George kind.

Standing in front of Harry's big foe glass Jasper studied his own reflection. It was the only thing he saw in the mirror. He saw a tall boy, only eleven, but tall enough to be almost thirteen. Skinny, freckled face, high forehead, topped with a mop of tangled black curls that drooped down to feather his brow; he believed those particular curls were the primary reason that some girls wanted to kiss him. He was lean, and light, graceful on his feet and on a broomstick in the air. His eyes were bluest blue, and framed with thick curly eyelashes. Girls seemed to like those too. Jasper made a face at himself, and then turned to Harry asking, "Uncle Harry, what does it mean if the only person I see in the foe glass is me?"

"It means you are your own worst enemy, Jasper," Harry muttered, not joking.

"Oh," Jasper replied nonplussed.

"Jasper, come here. I want you to explain something to me." Harry called him over to the desk. He'd rolled up all the maps but one, which lay spread out on his desk. He tapped it with his wand and said, "I solemnly swear I am up to no good." Lines began stretching out on the parchment. Filling it with delicate rivers and streams of magic ink. Little dots began popping up all over it; so tiny it was almost impossible to read the names written above each. Jasper grinned with proud joy. He'd made this map, and it was perfect.

"Jasper, how did you enchant the map to locate people here at Hogwarts?" Harry inquired.

"Locator spell, blood-recognition hex, that one was tough, Uncle Harry, I had to get a drop of blood from everyone in the school. Compass-minder curse...I don't know. I tried a bunch of different things to see which would do what I wanted."

"This is an incredible feat of magic, Jasper," Harry said thoughtfully. Jasper should have been happy, but it hadn't sounded like a compliment. "Tell me, how did you teach it to communicate?" Jasper talked, and he talked, and he talked. He told Harry everything, but the more he talked the less sense he made. Harry was asking him questions he couldn't answer. He kept offering to show him instead, but Harry insisted that he explain it first, and Jasper just couldn't do that. Finally, his head hurt, his eyes crossed from staring at the bitty details of those maps, but Harry was relentlessly poking him for information. Jasper was tired, and he was hungry, it was already dark outdoors.

"I don't know, Uncle Harry," he repeated for the umpteenth time. "What is the problem? It works, doesn't it?"

"What if it didn't work?" Harry asked him sharply. "What if the locator spell didn't blend well with the mumbly-jumbly thing you did to make it think for itself? What would you do then, Jasper?"

"Bin it?" Jasper offered a tad bit cheekily, which he would soon find had been a big mistake.

"Bin it? You would take a powerfully enchanted object and toss it into the rubbish? What if some other student found it? Somebody who didn't know what it was, and they enchanted it as well? Do you realize how dangerous this could be? You've made something that can think for itself and you don't even know how you did it. What if you did something to it that you aren't even aware of? What if it did something to you?"

It was all becoming quite clear to Jasper. He was in big trouble. It took him hours to scrape those parchments clean of magic. The Hex-Away spell he had to use on them stunk like sulfur, and made him want to heave. Then he had to take the tiniest little razor and scratch off every single fleck of magic ink. He doused them all in a big vat of something that smelled like boiled bat. Harry said it would cleanse the blood magic.

Jasper drooped on the edge of his chair, far too weary to torment the Grindylow further. His forehead was dripping with sweat beneath his curls, and he had shadows under his eyes that were moving rapidly south towards his nose. Harry took small pity on him. Clapping him on the shoulder he said heartily, "And now the fun really begins! I'm taking you home with me tonight so that you can explain to your aunt Ginny how you blasted her Blistered Fingers hex on our safe. If you live through the telling of it, I'll buy you pizza and a butter beer."

* * * * * * * * * * * *

Ginny Weasley lay on her side. Tossed onto her back, then over to her other side and back to the first side once more. Her life had become one long bed ridden torment. She was allowed to use the lavatory, and take a quick shower every day. Other than that it was rest, and more rest, and when she was done, a tad bit of rest to break the monotony. She'd never imagined with some of the things that she'd seen in her life, some of the exciting adventures she'd had, that one day Harry would come home to ask her, "So what's exciting and new?" And she would tell him, "Oh, I got up twenty times to pee."

Peeing had become her only adventure. She told herself daily, sometimes by the minute, that it would be worth it all to have a baby. A full term, healthy baby, because those beat the other kind every time. When she was tempted to disregard the maternity witch's orders that thought stopped her cold. She'd had enough of dead babies to last her several lifetimes, and unlike Voldemort she only planned on having the one. One lifetime to spend with Harry, and one baby in it they'd made together. Because heaven help her, she was never going to go through this again.

Tossing impatiently she noticed something unusual out of the corner of her eye. A little elfin face popped around the edge of her bedroom door, and disappeared again. Jasper. She should have smelled the trouble on him when he walked in. She smelled something that was a lot like brimstone anyway. Jasper Weasley, her brother Percy's son, he reminded her of Percy in so many ways. He looked like him most of all.

She thought about the elfin tribes she'd met with working the diplomatic front in Norway during the war. Warrior elves, from the great Nordic Tribes that had been hiding themselves from humans since Vikings ruled the northern hemisphere, not the pathetic, scrawny, wrinkly, bat eared creatures that were enamored of domestic work and servitude here in Great Britain. House-elves were perhaps some distant cousins to the Nordic Tribes. Extremely distant, ugly cousins, or they had been mutated in some way by their close association with humans.

These mighty elf warriors she recollected so fervently all topped out at six feet something, even their women. The only dwarf in sight had been Ginny. They were lean and graceful, quick on their feet and twice as quick with their wits. She quite fondly recalled languid looking, long muscled elf men with fine, handsome features, high foreheads, curved brows, heads of thick wavy hair, delicate light golden skin, and long fingered hands that knew how to flex a bow. They flexed a few other things too; Ginny had been fortunate enough to find that out up close and personal.

Incredibly, unbelievably, attractive every one of them, it had been like dying and going to paradise. They fought only out of necessity, and self-defense, because by nature they were great thinkers and fabulous lovers, not fighters. They'd proved to be beneficial allies during the war anyway. Due to their compassionate natures they were always willing to help other creatures in need despite their fierce demeanors.

Morph him a pair of pointy ears and Percy could have been one of them. He would have blended into an elf tribe in an instant, if he'd had any skill as an archer. Ron could probably pull it off, too, if he kept his mouth shut. Bill probably had. He hadn't wanted to take the mission to Norway, so Ginny opted for it instead. It turned out to be one of the most amazing adventures of her life. Bill was probably nervous he'd impregnated some elfin princess in his travels and her tribesmen would be out to get him. He was probably right. Ginny fell head over heels in love with one of them; Harry had almost lost her for good that time. She thought he didn't realize how close he had come, he had. Word reached him in Bulgaria that Ginny was just about to be crowned an elf princess, and had been ensconced in a flowery bower to celebrate her impending nuptials before they'd even started. He'd flown amazingly fast straight into a polar ice cap on his way to finding her, but that was another story.

Which left her now with Jasper, who was cute as could be. He was simply adorable at eleven, but in a few years girls at Hogwarts would be swooning at his feet. The way they had at Percy's. Only he'd been too busy stepping over them in his pursuit of Penelope Clearwater, or the latest honor he wanted to win at Hogwarts, to notice. Jasper was the perfect picture of a beautifully handsome, delicate, elf child. And as possessed of evil as the day was long.

"Come on in, Jasper, " she called invitingly. "I'm not asleep. I sleep too much to ever sleep." Jasper poked his curly head around the corner, and followed it with a mischievous grin. "Come on, I won't bite you," she promised, patting the bed at her side. Jasper took the bait, and hopped onto the bed next to her.

"I thought you might not be glad to see me," he confessed.

"Oh, I am always glad to see you, darling." Ginny told him, patting his sweet curly head. "I just can't invite you to any more parties because I'm not able to supervise you every single second and you creep about my house with dishonest intentions stealing things from the aunt and uncle who have never been anything but good to you."

Ouch. Jasper closed his eyes and announced, "Ambush."

"You'd better believe it you little monster," she said, proceeding to give him a tongue lashing that left him quivering. Between Harry's rotten subterfuge and his aunt's silent approach turned deadly attack Jasper thought a spanking might have been suffered through easier. No, on second thought, Mummy and the kitchen spoon were probably always best left apart.

"I'm sorry, Aunt Ginny," Jasper muttered, truly contrite. "I'll tell Uncle Harry I need to go back to Hogwarts tonight. I don't blame you for not trusting me. And if you don't want me to stay here anymore, I'll understand."

"Don't be ridiculous, Jasper! I didn't say I don't want you here anymore. You have to stay here with me," she relented. "Who else will play 'Troll Invasion: Stomp through the Muck', with me, tonight? But if you ever steal from Harry, or me, ever again I'm going to throttle you with your game controller."

Harry unlatched the door with one hand, balancing pizza boxes and containers of butter beer with the other. Expecting to walk into a funeral atmosphere of pain, suffering, and agonizing remorse. He was surprised to hear shouts and shrieks of laughter coming from the big bedroom where Ginny spent every single second of her life. Not a lot of laughing going on in there lately.

He dropped the food on the table, made his way through the kitchen to the back of the house and found Ginny and Jasper rolling on the bed. Battling their way through level two of Troll Invasion.

"I've just collected two shrunken heads!" Jasper roared. "I am bowling for gnomes now!"

"Oh, no you don't!" Ginny gasped, actually panting from the effort of manipulating her game controller stick with the same speed and dexterity as an eleven-year-old. "Don't you dare pick up that bag of hag bones, it's mine!"

Harry mused silently that the melding of Muggle video game technology with Wizard characters from a magical world had been an incredibly brilliant idea, and probably earned loads of cash for the lucky bloke who had thought of it first. He'd purchased all sorts of things besides a Muggle video game player to keep Ginny occupied. She even had a television set that actually received good reception because they lived in a mostly non-magic part of town. Harry liked the neighborhood; it was very diverse. Not Muggle-drenched like Privet Drive, but a nice blend of magic and non-magic peoples. Living here had made him feel so much less schizophrenic than he used to do.

His best gift yet had been the video game player, though. She'd been confined to bed since the end of the previous summer and had spent a good deal of time since challenging Jasper to match after match. Harry was astonished by how often she won. Of course, she had time to practice while Jasper was in school, and Penny insisted that he not be allowed to play it every day. Still, it had been a great diversion for him to come and play with his aunt for a few days after being utterly disgraced at home over the Jaguar incident. More to the point it had been a great diversion for Ginny who was bored to tears, which had made Harry miserable beyond the telling of it. She even played the games written about them, except she said the graphics never did any of her family justice. Especially to Percy and the twins, who were far better looking than the animation portrayed. Harry, she felt, was mostly done justice in the game, although the kid in the Muggle movie was far better looking. Harry took it with a grain of salt; she'd almost been wed once to an elf prince, and had ever since held very high standards of beauty.