Love is the Child of an Endless War

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.

The guard wasn't the first person he'd had to kill. Murder was a necessary side effect of war. But even this bloodless death stained his soul guilt red, and he trembled on the cold ground for a few minutes trying to reconcile the sin. Heaven alone knew he was no mercenary soldier at heart. Every one else had probably forgotten about him.

Lying on the ground put him face to face with the teenager's mortal weapon. He couldn't escape the irony of his situation. Only Voldemort, that snake faced idiot, would have had the arrogant audacity to try taking on the entire Muggle world with a magic stick. The mightiest Avada Kedavra on earth couldn't wreak the same kind of destruction as a sub-machine gun. Wizards had been blown to bits before they could utter their first curse. Now both worlds were divided and filled with civil unrest. The size of the chasm would take centuries to bridge.

Lifting his head from the earth he was temporarily blinded by a bursting golden sunrise. Life, freedom, and his future lay within a day's walking. It was time to find out was left of his world. He stood up still shaking to take the first step.

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

After experiencing an incredible climax in her sleep Penny woke up with her first husband's name on her lips. Rolling over in bed with a guilty start she searched for her second husband to find his side of the bed empty. Relieved she slumped back into her pillows folding her hands across her empty, aching womb with a sigh. Percy had come back again. He haunted her body nocturnally. Penny didn't believe that climax was a coincidence. Percy's reaction to her distress the night before would have been to give her the kind of shattering orgasm that alleviated her physical and emotional pain, at least temporarily, and sent her spiraling into blissful unconsciousness. George's reaction had been to rub her back for a while before he slipped into deep slumber. Percy's ghost was relentless about pointing up the differences between them.

Not that intimacy was a problem between her and George. Although in the earliest stages of their intimate relationship sex with George hadn't been anything to get overly excited about. Penny felt a guilty surge for the disloyal remembering. It hadn't been George's fault; he was achingly desperate to please her. Undoubtedly it had been just because of the extremely awkward nature of their relationship. She had been closer to George than to any of Percy's other siblings. He and Fred lived right across the alley and they wound up spending a lot of time together, especially when Percy worked long hours or traveled, which was often. George was the first person to put his arms around her when Penny got the news that what remained of Percy fit inside a pencil case. George arrived at her cottage every morning, letting himself in to stand in her bedroom doorway, insisting that she get out of bed and get dressed. When she couldn't, he took care of Jasper for her. He got Jasper dressed. Took him to the shop and to the Burrow to visit. Made sure that he ate, gave him a bath and put him in bed at night.

Penny just wasted away. Grief made her so ill she couldn't focus. Not on caring for her demanding young son, not even on caring for herself. She was incapable of concentrating long enough to even read a newspaper article. For a woman who had consumed books her whole life as though they were the air that she breathed her transformation was bizarre enough to be freakish. The people around her were alarmed by the changes in her personality and her behavior, though none of them seemed to know how to help her. Eating became a terrible waste of precious energy when it was all she could do to lift her head from the pillow. Although she couldn't bring herself to get out of bed she rarely ever fell asleep. Penny's world was numb, gray and sorrowful. There was no justice in life, no fairness, no point in continuing to struggle with it every day when everything she'd worked for could be snatched away without warning, without reason, at any instant.

Discovering that she was pregnant might have made things a little better. It would have for some bereaved women, but it hadn't improved Penny's mood. She'd been depressed and ill during the early months of her pregnancy with Jasper. Depressed enough that she and Percy had fairly well decided that they would only have one child. Percy had always wanted a big family, but he told Penny he couldn't bear to see her suffer the way she had with Jasper. However, the Wizarding world was foolishly reticent when it came to discussing matters of a sexual nature. Many parts of the Muggle world had managed to overcome their sexual repression sufficiently to at least address crucial issues like birth control and family planning with their young people. The Wizarding world was reluctant to acknowledge the need for such open communication. Penny's Muggle mother was an invaluable resource for that sort of information, but Percy was suspicious of Muggle medicine and technology, a bit like his narrow-minded mother. To say nothing of how much he deeply distrusted Penny's mother's motives. Therefore Penny's second unexpected pregnancy had turned out to be no different from her first, with exception to the fact that Percy was no longer around to see her suffer.

Her parents were frantic with worry. Her mother, Sophie, wanted to put Penny into inpatient care in a Muggle hospital, Richard, her father, insisted that all she needed was a powerful Cheering charm and some good chocolate. They'd discussed it heatedly over her bed one day, while she was still lying in it. George stopped by to take Jasper to the park that day. He returned from their outing, found Penny staring catatonically into space while her parents were having a row and politely escorted them out of her cottage. George knew Penny was in trouble but psychological treatment for depression, like sex, was something that was never discussed in the Wizarding world. He realized that Penny needed more than a Cheering charm. At the time she couldn't even stomach the smell of chocolate. But she didn't want to go to a healer and George was in no position to force her. His own mother was far too consumed with her own grief to help him deal with Penny's. Arthur, her husband, had been killed during the war. Now she'd lost a son to it as well. Molly Weasley moved through her life like a shadow. Which was infinitely better than Penny who scarcely moved at all. Molly, at least, perked up at the sight of Jasper. Penny seemed to look right through him.

As a very young man, barely twenty-three, George was no stranger to sadness. He'd lost his father, many good friends, and now his brother to the war. He understood that grief did strange things to people. Everyone reacted differently to loss, but he had never dealt with anything like what Penny was experiencing. He had never seen grief manifest itself in a small child, either. And dealing with Jasper was quite a challenge, one that Penny was hardly up to. Jasper was intelligent enough to understand that Percy was gone for good. What he couldn't figure out is where he had gone and why. He flooded his mother with questions she couldn't possibly answer. Half the time George was certain she never even heard him asking. When Penny couldn't respond, Jasper turned his questions onto George, or Molly, or Fred, on any grown-up person that should have been able to give him a reasonable answer. And when he didn't get the answers he wanted, he acted out his frustration in predictable childish fashion. He threw tantrums, hexed anyone and anything that annoyed him, and developed a chronic sleeping disorder.

Taking care of Percy's traumatized family was a tough job, but somebody had to do it. George consciously volunteered himself for the responsibility, and he found himself with scarce support to fulfill it. Harry was traveling most of the time. Charlie, Bill, and Ron all lived overseas. Molly was too overwhelmed by her own sadness to be of much assistance. Fred and Ginny lived close by, but Fred basically ran Weasley's Wizarding Wheezes single-handedly so that George could deal with Penny and Jasper. Ginny did what she could. She cleaned up Penny's cottage, stocked the cupboards with food, and occasionally took Jasper home with her for a few nights, but she was grieving too. Besides things were not going well between her and Harry, who was rarely ever at home.

On his most fateful day George's sky came crashing to earth when he returned from working at his shop, bringing Jasper back with him to Penny's cottage, to find her lying unconscious on the bathroom floor with an empty prescription bottle at her side. The absolute absurdity of the situation would have struck him as being humorous, if his heart hadn't been ripped out of his chest, hanging onto his rib cage by a thread. Penny was a magical person who'd overdosed on Muggle medicine. What should he do? Hermes had finally returned to her after an absence of several months. He flapped frantically around the tiny cottage, hooting wildly to be made useful. But George considered that by the time he wrote out an emergency message and sent it with Percy's owl Penny would probably be dead. He couldn't Apparate her out of the cottage. The three of them he, Jasper and Penny wouldn't all fit into the fireplace at once so he couldn't use Floo Powder. And due to the magical interference in Godric's Hollow, Penny and Percy had never installed a phone. George didn't even know the best place to take her. Should he try St. Mungo's? Would they know how to deal with the effects of a Muggle drug overdose? What about her, now obviously, deadly serious depression, and the welfare of the tiny baby growing in her belly?

In those sickening split seconds of indecision she might have expired, or lost the baby, and George swore in the moment to start carrying a mobile phone, among other things. The outrageous circumstances created by the segregation of magical peoples and Muggles struck him like a blow to the chest. The narrow-minded prejudice that had caused the war had also prevented Muggles and Wizards from sharing magic and technology with their fellow human beings for centuries. They were both so supremely self-righteously contained that they'd neglected to consider communication between the worlds might offer a beneficial exchange of ideas for both sides. Everyone was still paying the price for it, and Penny's life might be on the next bill of sale.

Ultimately, George had picked her up, tossed her and Jasper into the new Volvo her Muggle mother had given her for a twenty-fifth birthday gift, and recklessly drove it out of the hollow to the nearest Muggle hospital. Even though he didn't have an operator's license, or any experience negotiating a few ton vehicle through traffic. He vowed also that day to learn how to drive a car that couldn't be flown.

He managed to send a message to Ginny via a complicated combination of telephone calls to Muggles who knew Wizards who sent owls. She found the hospital and took Jasper home with her. George never left Penny's side. She wouldn't forget, for as long as she lived, waking up in the hospital with tubes coming out of her nose and her arms, to see him in the chair next to her bed with his red head pillowed on the bedclothes at her hip.

At first she'd tried to tell him that ingesting the pills had been an accident and she was ready to go home. He refused to take her. So did her parents. That made her angry and she was angry with everyone. Every doctor, every therapist, every person who walked in the door of her room got a dose of her temper, especially George. Her outbursts were tolerated with patience and good will until about three weeks into her treatment when he lost his temper too, and he let her have it. Shouting at her furiously, without allowing her to get a word in edgewise, for his entire hour visit. Accusing her of cowardice, he told her that Jasper thought she had died too, and that harming her children was betraying Percy's memory. She was cringing well before his tirade was finished and when he'd stormed out of the room she thought for certain he would never return, never speak to her again.

George's unexpected outburst shocked Penny into an outpouring of tears the likes of which she'd been unable to experience before. All the numb veiled layers she'd been hiding behind fell apart under his attack. Every raw nerve became exposed, every suppressed emotion overflowed. Guilt stricken about what she had done, and the harm it might have caused her son, she was terrified that if she didn't get better she'd never see Jasper again, either. She started cooperating with the doctors and the therapists, realizing that they held the key to getting her life back. George didn't return and she didn't know how to contact him. Asking the hospital staff for access to a mail owl hadn't seemed like the sanest request to make under the circumstances. Every visitor's day she waited anxiously for him to arrive. Fred sometimes came in his stead, but refused to play messenger. One day Ginny came and told Penny that George was in a bad way. He was angry and didn't want to upset her. Molly even showed once, making it clear that she thought Penny was weak and needed to straighten herself out. She had lost a husband too, and as anyone could see she wasn't falling apart at the seams. Life went on, and the brave went on with it.

Penny had a few moments after those visits where she speculated that with in-laws like the Weasleys it was a wonder she hadn't tried to kill herself sooner. Between Molly's arrogant self-righteousness and Sophie's lectures that she always knew things with Percy would turn out badly, Penny was tempted to refuse visitors altogether. The only person she wanted to see was George. She wanted to apologize to him and she wanted him to know that she was going to take care of Jasper. After refusing to come for two weeks he finally showed up and she got angry with him all over again for staying away so long. He seemed to be equally stunned by the anger and invective he'd felt towards her. It was a very awkward visit that left her in tears, and him very nearly so. He'd told her that he'd never been so angry in his whole life with anyone as he was with her for trying to hurt herself and he wouldn't apologize for the things he'd said. He'd meant every word of it. But he did tell her that he wanted her to get better and come back home to him and Jasper. She told him that was what she wanted, too.

By the time Penny was released from the psychiatric ward he had already moved his stuff into her cottage in Godric's Hollow. He slept on her old sofa at night and took her and Jasper to work with him during the days so that he could keep a close watch on her. He went with her to her grief counselor appointments, which he discovered then was the way that some Muggles handled extreme sorrow and stress. And it seemed to George an eminently more logical approach to sadness than a Cheering charm. Cheering charms worked quickly, but the effects faded. Leaving the charmed as miserable as they had been without magic. The counseling was slow, painful and laborious, but it left Penny feeling a little bit better.

Every pocket in his jacket had a sticky film of residue from the Sugar Quills he always kept there to quell Penny's nausea. Watching her belly grow to an overwhelming size he found himself feeling more grateful every day that he'd gotten to her in time to save his new niece or nephew. He stayed with her while she was in labor with Phillipa, trading jokes with the maternity witch that had them both laughing hysterically without the aid of a charm. Until Penny threatened to rise from her childbed and murder him if he didn't shut up, he understood that giving birth made her fractious and unreasonable.

Penny had a rough time of it bringing Phillipa into the world in the big four-poster bed she'd shared with Percy. George saw her through the worst of it and then some. When it was over, she told the palely relieved visages of Percy's near-by, assembled family, George, Molly, Ginny and Fred, all standing around her bed, that she'd experienced a catharsis. George, assisting Ginny to prop Penny up with pillows in bed so that she could nurse her new baby without falling over, had resolved to look catharsis up in the dictionary so soon as he had slept for twenty-four hours straight. He thought that if it meant having your heart repeatedly yanked up out of your chest through your throat and then held up before your terrified eyes so that you could see just how very much it meant to you before being forced to swallow it again, why, then he'd had one too.

Phillipa slept next to Penny's bed in the heirloom Weasley family magical cradle that had rocked generations of tiny baby Weasleys to sleep without ever once needing to be pushed, or ever unexpectedly tossing a little Weasley to its untimely death onto the floor. As Penny's mother Sophie predicted it would. Sophie harbored deep suspicion of magical objects.

With the birth of a new baby Penny's tiny cottage became crowded. So George bought them a bigger house. A nice old manor house in a bucolic country setting with a slate tile roof, original mullioned windows, a picturesque barn and an enormous back garden large enough for several children and a big dog to play in. He started restoring it for them. It was all very strange. They weren't lovers. They'd never gone out on a single date. Never shared so much as a romantic kiss. Yet, they'd been through terrible trouble together and cohabited in absolute harmony. George took turns with Penny walking the floors with Phillipa at night as though she were his own child. He read bedtime stories to Jasper. Learned how to cook macaroni and cheese. Owled Penny from the shop before leaving to see if there was anything he could pick up on his way home. There was not a thing in the world he wouldn't do for them. He simply melded into their lives as though he had always belonged there.

After Phil was born, George started trusting that Penny wasn't going to hurt herself again. She got some color back into her cheeks, and a little spring in the step that might have once been described as positively bouncy. She finished reading a book, took good care of her children and smiled at George every day. He showed her the house that he was fixing for her, a mansion to be more exact, and asked her opinion on every little detail. Would she like cherry wood cabinets in the kitchen, or maple? What about the flooring, tile or hardwood? Sitting next to him on the old sofa in the cottage, holding the nursing baby to her breast with one hand, while picking out lavatory geysers from a catalog with the other hand she'd turned to George and asked, "What the hell are we doing?" He shrugged at her noncommittally, but not pretending he didn't understand the implication of her question offered her his familiar freckled grin and a cryptic, "Moving on?"

Right. So Penny had more than just a sneaking suspicion at that point that George was desperately in love with her. Of course, he had never told her so. He made the very scarcest physical contact with her. When she was feeling low he'd occasionally give her a brief one-armed hug. Sometimes, in the middle of the night, she'd wake up crying and he'd come to sit next to the bed until she fell back asleep. Once in a rare while he'd give her the faintest peck on the cheek if he left to go into work without her. On a banner day, as they were walking under the scaffolding surrounding the mansion he was restoring for her, he actually took her hand and held onto it for a good long time. He also did that for her when she was screaming her head off while pushing Phillipa out of her body.

They became something of a joke at Weasley family gatherings. All right, they were an incredible joke at Weasley family gatherings. Only nobody laughed until after they'd left because, really, their relationship wasn't very funny. It was just incredibly odd, a little bit creepy, and incredibly odd. Fred had a bet going with Charlie that George and Penny had never done it together. Charlie, who had been doing it with somebody at least once a day since the age of fourteen, remained unconvinced. He should have known well enough by then to believe that Fred knew almost everything about his twin, but it seemed inconceivable to him that George had devoted his pure heart to Percy's poor widow and her children without getting any action on the side.

But that was exactly what George had done. Before Percy's death he had been casually dating a vendor he'd met at a magical confections conference in Philadelphia. When Penny tried to kill herself he'd dropped that girl like a rock. Sitting in the hospital beside her, thinking that Penny wanted to die without Percy, made him angrier and feeling more passionate about his own life than he had ever felt before. He absolutely wanted nothing more than to spend the rest of it with her, and with Jasper. And he meant to make her feel the same way about him, or leave his life trying.

Molly was convinced that Penny was on the rebound or going after George because he had a lot of money. She interrogated George whenever he came alone to see her, which was almost never. He always had Jasper in tow, usually Phil and Penny too. "Are you going to ask her to marry you?" "Is she in love with you?" "George, what in the hell are you doing?"

"I might ask the same thing of you, Mum." He would reply devilishly deflecting her questions, because Arthur's death, and now Percy's, had wrought a tremendous transformation in her. Grief melted away accumulated decades of excess weight. The weight loss took a decade off of her appearance. A new haircut, an improved wardrobe, a fixed up Burrow, and an ill concealed sexual liaison with Remus Lupin, an old werewolf friend of the family who was twelve years her junior, put Molly in the untenable position of being unable to demand any explanations from her son regarding his love life.

One late afternoon in early autumn when the new house was nearly finished and ready to be moved into George and Penny stood together in the middle of the empty master bedroom. They were grinning at one another because Jasper had discovered a brand new Muggle video game player in the completed recreation room and his giddy, ecstatic shouts of joy could be heard clearly all the way upstairs. George was jostling little Phil, who at four months was sprouting fire red curls and copiously drooling, on his shoulder. Penny's gaze traveled slowly across his face. From his laughing hazel eyes to his engaging smile, and back again, before asking him almost inconsequentially, "Am I going to sleep in here with you?" Because in a twenty-room house, there were a few other options, neither one of them needed to sleep on the sofa.

George, blushing as furiously as a fifteen-year-old school boy about to ask for his first date, scuffed the three inch pile of his brand new peach colored carpeting in his renovated master bedroom with his million galleon-making feet before meeting her gaze and questioning amiably, "Would you like to sleep in here with me?" Penny, tilting her head inquisitively, had persisted, "Will we have sex?" To which George had replied with a furrowed red eyebrow, "Is that a trick question?"

George Weasley had gone as far as sheer nerve and cold hard cash would take him. At that juncture in their relationship he might have convinced most people, although not Fred, or Penny, probably not his mother, that he'd done so much for her and her children out of family loyalty and in his dead brother's memory. But if Percy had a grave, he'd be writhing in it as soon as George started making love to his wife. Clearly, George had declared himself at the end of the line. If Penny wanted him to step over it, she needed to tell him so. She saw it in the set of his newly broadened shoulders, and the proud tilt of his chin. He loved her with his eyes; his actions spoke louder even than that, but those words were not going to come out of his mouth. He wasn't going to kiss her, or touch her, without a big push in that direction.

Which put Penny in a difficult position. She loved George like a brother, and as a good friend. She'd never allowed herself to think about him any other way in the eleven years they'd known one another. Although the occasional thought had wormed its way into her head without her permission. He deserved better than that, though, from a woman he'd devoted himself to so completely. Penny didn't think she had it in her to give it to him. Desire for Percy had come easily to her, instinctually even. She longed for Percy they way she longed for air. And there was never any doubt about Percy's desires because he wasn't ever afraid to tell anyone what it was he wanted them to do. Percy would have set the baby down by then and had her on the carpet beneath him. He would have made her come crying into his ear that she couldn't sleep without him. Couldn't live without him. Though he probably never even guessed in life how true those words actually would have been. George wasn't nearly that confident. He'd gambled his time, his money, and years of silent feelings on her heart, but he wasn't willing to lose more than that. To speak now was to irrevocably change their relationship forever, in one way or another.

Penny hadn't really known what to do, or what to say to George. She'd never dealt with any situation like it. She and Percy had been lovers since she was sixteen years old. He was the only man she'd ever been with, had ever wanted. She didn't know how to push George without seeming to be pushy. She didn't know for certain what sort of relationship it was that he wanted, or, if her suspicions were correct, that what he wanted was what she wanted. They'd gone back to her little cottage that night. In a fortnight's time the cottage would be occupied by an older witch who kept cats, because George had arranged for it to be let. Within days they would move into a new home together and their relationship was every bit as shadowy and undefined as it had been since the day Percy died.

George was unusually quiet and withdrawn that night. Penny couldn't break his silence. They spent the evening in, as was their custom, eating take-out and listening to the Wizarding wireless. After putting an over excited Jasper to bed, Penny settled down on the sofa next to George to nurse the baby to sleep. Induced into a soporific nursing slumber she'd dozed onto his shoulder. Waking up with a start sometime later. George had fallen asleep too. She was occupying his bed after all. She'd wondered even if he might leave that night, but he was still there for her, the way he always had been. He'd leaned his head onto the back of the old sofa, stretched his long legs out in front, and rested his arm around her so she didn't fall over. Phil was sound asleep, too, cradled between them. Penny watched him sleeping for a moment, thinking to herself that there was only one way to find out if she could love him the way he deserved to be loved. So she nudged him gently awake and asked quietly, "George, are you coming to bed?"

He didn't follow her immediately. He sat on the sofa rubbing his eyes, and tousling his already tousled red hair. Penny didn't wait for him. Tucking Phil into her cradle she wondered if she'd made a mistake. After putting on her pajamas and climbing into bed he still hadn't come. She imagined him wrestling with his brother's ghost on the sofa, thought she just didn't have the strength to help him battle it out. Then he was standing in the doorway watching her uncertainly. Penny had held out her hands to him saying, "It's all right. Come touch me. I won't disappear."

Thinking about touching her made him nervous enough to tremble. He was so nervous that he didn't even think about kissing her for the very first time until he was already a part of her. Moving deep inside of her, making love to her in the bed she'd shared with Percy. Too shy with her to be sentimental, George had some trouble conveying the intensity of his feelings. Even after they made love he was hesitant to touch her romantically or possessively. Almost as though he couldn't quite believe she'd given him the right. His circumspection forced Penny into the role of the aggressor. Not a wholly unwelcome change, but definitely a challenge after being with Percy.

George stayed the night in her bed because she asked him to. Jasper woke up in the morning to jump on them together in it. While cuddling that morning with George and the children she'd had with Percy it seemed to Penny that in some ways she and George had already been a couple for a very long time. If making love with him wasn't entirely the most natural thing in the world to her, waking up with him every day surely was. Jasper never did seem to think it was strange that his uncle had started sleeping with his mother. He simply wondered why George hadn't done it sooner. If given the choice he picked sleeping with his mother every time over going to his own bed alone. Penny, however, still felt foggy about her life. As though she'd been transported into a dream, familiar but unreal. In a little over a years time she'd lost her beloved young husband to tragic misfortune, given birth to his second child, and started an affair with his younger brother. Having a romantic relationship with George sent her whole world tilting. It was different and unsettling, although never frightening or uncomfortable.

Penny moved herself and her two small children into George's big house. She slept with him every night in his new bed learning the Cinnamon Imp taste of his mouth. Becoming accustomed to the touch of his hands on her body and the way he felt moving inside her. Sex with George was pleasant, and comfortable, but never earth shattering or soul shaking, and Penny grew content. Making love with Percy had been like being consumed by a roaring blaze, reduced to ashes and left to rise again. Making love with George was like being toasted gently over glowing coals.

For Christmas holiday that year they'd taken the children on a South Seas cruise and returned from it as husband and wife. No one was laughing at the next family gathering. Six years later George and Penny simply were, just as Penny and Percy had been for so long. In the over all day-to-day living scheme of things it stopped mattering that George had been Percy's brother and Penny his wife. Penny's alternate universe had become her reality. And she'd learned over the years to crave George's touch with a lover's intensity, but she never stopped dreaming about Percy.

Sitting up in bed now she gazed out the window at the predawn gray autumn morning wondering where George had gone. It was early on a Saturday morning. He preferred to lounge around in bed on the weekends, just like she did. Unexpected weekend visitors were accustomed to dropping in on the whole family still wearing their pajamas even at noon. Oftentimes they were all still cuddled up together in George and Penny's massive sleigh bed.

Penny got up, slipping her arms into the sleeves of the red silk robe that matched her pajamas. She padded barefooted silently down the corridor to check on the children. Phil was soundly asleep, sprawled sideways in the middle of her violet satin canopy bed dressed in her favorite Scottie dog pajamas. A riot of red curls spilled out over her satiny linens, her pale white skin gleamed against the shiny fabric. Penny thought she was the most beautiful child she'd ever seen. She would have brushed off her own opinion as being prejudicial if it hadn't been so frequently echoed by every person who ever saw Phillipa. Their daughter was breathtakingly perfect and Penny mourned every day the fact that Percy never got to see her.

She crossed the corridor, opened the door to Jasper's room expecting the familiar maternal glow she got whenever she observed his curly black head resting at home where it belonged, but Jasper's bed was empty. His bed was neatly made. There wasn't a stray sock, or a speck of lint on his dark blue carpet. He'd neatly folded his pajamas on the seat of the chair next to his bed, and laid his slippers at precisely right angles underneath it. Compulsive little neat freak, Penny thought fondly. Jasper was obsessively organized just like his father had been. Seeing Jasper's vacant bed gave Penny good idea as to George's whereabouts. Jasper slept poorly. George had probably gotten up with him in the pre-dawn hours. She'd find them in the recreation room fighting out a rematch of 'Troll Invasion'.

But the downstairs was empty too; 'Troll Invasion' was still sitting in the box waiting to be experienced again. Jasper and George were nowhere to be found in the house. Penny glanced outside the mullioned windows in her renovated kitchen and noticed that her old Volvo was missing. They'd taken the car. That itself portended something strange, although George had developed a remarkable fondness for automobiles and the art of driving the machine. Every bit as fun as a broomstick, he swore, even if it wasn't any good for the environment. He'd wanted to replace Penny's Jag, but she'd told him to wait until the sight of one didn't make her want to blister Jasper's behind all over again. She acknowledged the fact that the day might never come when the sight of a shiny new Jaguar convertible didn't make her want to murder her only son. She was struggling to come to terms with it.

"Good morning, Mistress Penny," Aloysious wheezed, scrambling to tie his spotless red and white striped apron over his rotund gray belly. "What will you have for your breakfast today?"

"Pancakes, please," Penny requested her favorite, "extra apples, and make me a pot of French pressed coffee, too, I have a feeling this day will require a boost."

"Ahh, yes, young Master Jasper is home for a visit. I think I'll make myself a pot as well."

Phil came down to breakfast, cranky as usual. She was not a morning person, no matter how early Penny put her to bed she woke up cross and irritable. This was not a good morning because Jasper had gotten to stay up late, and she didn't give a good damn that he was five years older than she was. It just wasn't fair.

"I don't care for pancakes." She turned up her nose at breakfast with a disdainful sniff. "I want Crunchy O's."

"House Elves do not make Crunchy O's, Miss Phil," Aloysious refused her. It was a daily ritual they engaged in, over whose will was more indomitable, Phil's or the servant's. Penny ignored them in favor of reading The Daily Prophet.

Like all newspapers that wanted to stay in business, The Daily Prophet had started combining Wizard and Muggle news in its print. Penny perused the international section for information on the recovery efforts going on in the continent. Southeastern European nations had been hit the hardest during the war years. They had the greatest per capita number of iniquitous creatures that needed to be assimilated, or summarily dealt with, vampires, mountain trolls, succubus, dark witches, etc...some of the stories coming back from people who visited the region and got out of it alive were almost unbelievable. If Penny hadn't seen Charlie's neck for herself, and been awakened by his shrieking night terrors, she wouldn't have believed them.

The winter previous Penny, George, Charlie, and his wife Mo, had rented a house in Versailles together and taken the children on holiday. Penny had met Mo for the first time when Charlie brought her home to introduce her to his family unexpectedly one year at Christmas. It was the year Jasper was born; Penny had been bursting at the seams with him. Charlie's surprising news and the excitement created by Fred and George's holiday firework's display exploding all on their own in the Burrow's kitchen before dinner had started her labor.

Mo was only seventeen at the time; Charlie had been twenty-three. When he introduced her as his wife no one actually thought he was telling the truth. He'd never managed to stay faithful to one woman, yet, so it seemed unlikely that their union would last. Mo was rather unusual, though, not magical born, but no ordinary Muggle either. Penny would have staked her life on it. For one thing she was a fraction of Penny's size, and five times as strong. Percy told Penny he thought she was imagining things, but Penny swore up and down that she'd seen Mo play sparring with Charlie in the barn and she'd knocked him flat, repeatedly. Considering Mo didn't even reach Charlie's shoulder, and had never weighed more than one hundred pounds in her life, Penny admitted what she'd seen was somewhat fantastic.

But Penny knew what she saw, even if Charlie changed the subject every time she asked him about it. And then there was the indisputable evidence that when the whole family had thought Charlie lost to them for good, Mo hiked into the Carpathian Mountains alone, and rescued him from the vampires that were holding him hostage. None of them could figure out how she did it. The vampires had vanished like dust in the wind; Charlie and Mo never mentioned it.

After that Charlie had miraculously acquired fidelity, and Penny told George it was because he knew that Mo would kill him if he cheated on her. However, Penny did pity poor Charlie who still woke up screaming in the middle of the night, and had absolutely terrified Jasper into a wretched bout of insomnia in Versailles. He'd refused to go to bed alone, and only slept at night if he was wadded securely between George and Penny in their bed. Great vacation, as George had so astutely pointed out, Jasper was quality birth control.

Penny mused fitfully while reading the paper, absorbed in the story of a blown apart prison in some remote Slavic region where hundreds of prisoners had taken advantage of the chaos and escaped into the dark magic wilderness. Authorities claimed to be trying to recapture them, but Penny snorted disbelievingly while reading that statement, recalling in vivid detail the Ministry of Magic's inability to recover a handful of Death Eaters loose out of Azkaban. Harry had more to do with re-incarcerating them than the entire staff available to the late, unlamented, Cornelius Fudge. Likely these newly escaped prisoners were free for good, more likely half of them had never deserved to be in prison to begin with. Penny wished them good fortune, most of them.

"Mummy!" Phil, shrieking with outrage, startled Penny out of her comfortable, intellectual, reverie and brought her crashing painfully back into motherhood. "Uncle George has gotten Jasper a dog! It's not fair! I want a dog, too!"

Penny stood outside on the terrace sipping her second cup of French pressed coffee, seriously debating the necessity of a third cup, even though she'd been warned to limit her caffeine intake if she was trying to become pregnant. Jasper and a new puppy were going to wear her out by noon if she didn't indulge. "George, what have you done?" She hissed at him as he climbed the terraced steps out of the garden to join her.

Raking his hand through late autumn wind-blown hair, George hunched his shoulders under his lurid green, dragon-hide jacket and grinned, "It's a puppy!"

"I can see that it's a puppy!" Penny snapped. "If a dog the size of a small horse can ever be considered a puppy! It's bigger than he is! What are you thinking?"

George took the mug out of coffee out of her hand, knocked back a swig of it, and eyeing her appreciatively said, "I'm thinking I can see your nipples standing up through that robe. You'd better go inside and get dressed so we can play with Jasper's new puppy."

Penny wrapped her arms securely across her chest, blocking his view to focus him, and asked, "Where on earth did you find that enormous wolfhound?"

"One of our customers breeds them. She told me the other day she had the runt of the litter available. He's a pet quality dog, only. I've been assured that he'll get no bigger than a mid-sized unicorn."

Penny watched Jasper get pummeled into the frosty earth by massive baby paws the size of his face, and he was giggling so hysterically she had to smile. "You're spoiling him, he's been just terrible lately, and what do you do but reward his bad behavior by getting him a dog."

George shrugged. "He'll take good care of it. And I think he needs something up at school to calm him down at night. Rufus is the sort of security blanket nobody would dare ridicule him for having."

"Rufus?"

"Talk to Jasper, I didn't name him."

"Well, George, so far as I can tell you've only created two insurmountable problems this morning. Jasper's heart will be broken when he has to leave that dog at home because children at Hogwarts aren't allowed dogs, and...."

"He'll be allowed it," George interrupted her confidently. "Malfoy's been after Fred and me forever to donate money to rebuild Snape's moldy old dungeon. Jasper will keep his dog, and Malfoy will get a new potion's lab named after him, The Draco Malfoy Hall of Potions. Has a Slytherin sort of ring to it, doesn't it? So, what's the second problem?"

"Phillipa is no longer speaking to you because you've bought Jasper a dog, and she doesn't have one."

"That's not a problem, either, " George said with his easy smile. "I'll go upstairs right now and tell Phillipa she's got a Crumple Horned Snorkack coming tomorrow."

Penny, who had recovered her coffee from his wind-reddened hands, choked on her last warm swallow, and George thumped her between the shoulder blades, "Not to worry, love, I've been promised the Snorkack won't get nearly so large as the dog."