Love is the Child of an Endless War

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.

"You might think about looking into improving your security here, George," Percy offered his, as usual, unsolicited advice. "I walked right past your assistant out there in the outer office."

That's because Percy could be as silent as a damned cat. He'd always been that way, sneaking up on people, catching them playing with their fanged Frisbees in the corridor, or tossing fabulous no-heat, wet-start fireworks into Mum's stew-pot, or having sex with his wife; stupid Percy the Gryffindor Prefect.

"So, how did it go?" George inquired of his brother glumly.

Percy sat down uninvited. He wanted to be there about as much as George wanted him to be there, maybe even less. "I watched his practice today. Jasper is quite the little Keeper."

George arched a mocking brow. "I've often thought about sending him back."

Percy laughed. George was surprised, he'd never had that much of a sense of humor. "You know George, you're really a very funny man. If you weren't my brother, I might actually like you. Does Jasper give you difficulty? I won't tell you I'm sorry to hear it."

George scoffed, "Well, Percy, the only reason I do like you is because you are my brother. Every damned time I've ever had a dream where I corner you and bitch about Jasper until your ears bleed, you're always laughing at me. How did I know you would find this all so amusing?"

"Ironic, more like," Percy disagreed. "Jasper didn't have too much he wanted to say to me today. Told me to stay the hell away from his mum. He's got this crazy idea from his uncle George that it's not right to steal another bloke's girl."

"He's right," George asserted. "I don't much care for the fact that you've risen from the grave and begun snogging my wife."

"She was my wife," Percy stated quietly.

George sighed, rubbing his palms rapidly over his face to scrub away the traces of guilt he felt showing on it, even though he knew he really had done nothing wrong. There was nothing to be gained by not telling Percy the truth of what he'd learned that day. Handing over the square envelope to his brother, George bitterly admitted, "From what I've learned today, Percy, she is still your wife. Penelope Weasley is one of the few legitimately legal bigamists in the country."

"Bigamist?" Percy said, weighing the envelope in his palm. "What in hell is all of this?"

"She's married to the both of us," George explained. "I commissioned a team of magic and family law solicitors to investigate our circumstance and this is the results of their research. Penny is still married to you, because you are not dead. She is also still married to me because we were committed to one another in the good faith believing that you were dead when we married."

"Oh," was all Percy could say while he tried to soak everything in rather than have it rush over him, knocking him down with the intensity of a hurricane blast.

"Hey, George, I'm surprised you're still here." Fred interrupted his brothers' reflective silence by walking into George's office without knocking. He was peering intently at the report in his hand. It was a proposal from an American investor that wanted their ion transference spell bad enough to kick up the offer by funding a new development lab. "That chap from New York, you know the one? The stockbroker, he's turning up the heat on our foreign investors, I.... Geez! Oh, Bloody Freaking Hell! Percy! You're not dead!" And he slumped to the floor in a faint with a flutter of his investment analysis falling all around him.

"Is everyone who sees me going to do that?" Percy queried of George with a bemused expression aimed at Fred slumped under his chair.

"Unless you send out announcements, yes, I think that they will," George confirmed, relieved that Fred had joined the club of the shocked unto unconsciousness.

Rattling the packet of ominous news at George, Percy said, "Penny's married legally to the both of us, you say? I guess that means that one of us has to give her up."

"I'm forced to agree with that conclusion. I wonder how much alcohol I would need to consume before I no longer recognize who you even are?"

Percy shrugged, "I don't know. What say we go get drunk and find out?"

"Oh, look, Fred's stirring, shall we take him along?"

"My day certainly can't get any worse, let's."

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

Harry had just fallen asleep. Ginny was feeling miserable. She hardly slept a wink anymore, and that meant Harry wasn't sleeping much, either. There were only a few more weeks to go and she could get out of bed and deliver the baby anytime. Her pains were already starting though, not bad enough to do anything useful for her, but bad enough to drive her insane. He was ready to tell Malfoy to bring in a replacement instructor for DADA so he could stay at home with her before she gnashed her teeth into nothingness.

An irritating chirping sound interrupted the beginnings of a great dream that had something to do with Snitches, and he fell off of his broom. Landing hard into reality he reached over to grab the message out of Hedwig's beak. Fumbling blindly in the air availed him nothing. He was forced to open up his eyes and put on his glasses. Rapidly coming to the conclusion that Hedwig was still in the Owlery at Hogwarts and the chirping noise was coming from Ginny's mobile next to the bed.

"Somebody had better be dead," he grumbled, grabbing the phone off the nightstand before it woke her up, and barked into it roughly. "Hullo? Oh, Penny, is everything all right? What's that?" He got up hastily out of bed and tiptoed into the kitchen to have his conversation.

"No, don't worry about it. I know you wouldn't ring unless it was important, Jasper all right? It's not Jasper this time; it's George? Fred and George? No, they did not. Tell me they did not do that. Oh, for crying out loud. They're almost thirty-one years old! What do you mean all three of them? And he doesn't have any money? Yes, of course, I'll go down and get them out. Penny? I don't think that Fred and George are the only ones who have been indulging this evening. Have you been at the leftover wassail again? Percy Weasley is dead."

"Harry, what is the matter?" Ginny asked sleepily, rising onto her elbows and watching him hastily throwing on his clothes. "I have to go, Gin. Fred and George have been thrown into jail for drunken and disorderly conduct. And I'm really glad that you've no choice but to lay down when I tell you what else. Your brother, Percy, he's not dead."

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

"You could knock me over with a quill feather right about now," Harry said stunned, staring at Percy Weasley in the flesh. He absolutely was not dead. He was alive, and very much the same, although quite a lot different. There was no other word for it, really. Percy Weasley had become...cool. His bright red hair was longer than Harry had ever seen it. It fell in waves along the back of his neck, and drooped off of his brow. He was still lean, but seriously pumped-up, sporting muscles in places Harry had never actually considered muscles to be before. Eight years of hard labor in a foreign prison and living for a few months hand to mouth in the wilderness apparently could do that for a body.

"Hullo, Harry," Percy said with a smile, holding out his hand. "I knew I could count on you not to fall over when you saw me. It's not as if you've never seen a man return from the dead before. How is Sirius Black?"

"Er,..he's um,.. doing well, Percy," Harry said feeling the warmth of a dead man's hand. "He runs a breeding kennel in Scotland these days. I don't ask him too much about it, you know, considering the circumstances. But he pops into the fire now and again for a good chat." Glancing over into the corner of the now opened jail cell he observed the unconscious forms of his two friends. "Fred and George are still out of it, eh?"

"Oh, yeah," Percy told him tossing a grin over his shoulder at his dead to the world brothers. "Those little morons thought they could still drink me under the table."

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

Penny was furious with them. Fist clenching, teeth grinding, foot stomping furious. She whirled about her kitchen making coffee and tea for the two red headed morons moaning at her table without an ounce of sympathy for their very sore heads. Slamming the pot of coffee down between Fred and George she hissed a reproachful whisper in George's ear, "I can't believe how stupid and immature you've been acting."

George, wincing in agony, pleaded, "Gryffindor's bones, love, stop screaming at me. My brain is already dripping out of my head onto the back of my neck."

"I will second that," Fred groaned clasping his hands to the back of his head in physical confirmation of his twin's verbal implication.

Turning on Percy with lightning fast invective, Penny hissed some more, "And you! You...you...you..." He backed away from the table holding his hands up in the air; this was all so unfair! She wouldn't even let him explain anything to her! It hadn't been his idea to go out and get drunk. Well, all right, it had been, but Fred and George were grown men now! He wasn't responsible anymore for their stupidity. Percy didn't know whether to be relieved, or not, that his sweetheart couldn't seem to come up with anything suitably awful to say to him when she delivered a killing blow. "You used to be so responsible!"

Harry was disgusted with them as well. More than disgusted in fact, he was really feeling quite merciless when he popped into Penny and George's kitchen just after lunch. The trio of nitwits flinched noticeably at his sudden pop. "I Apparated here as fast as I could to tell you," he gasped. Annoyed beyond belief with them all. "Jasper's gone missing."

Penny uttered a shriek and dropped the teapot from her nerveless fingers. Harry reached out a hand to steady her.

"He didn't come to my class this morning. Stubby Wood told me he was in the lavatory and not feeling well. I asked Stubby to take him up to the infirmary, but when he came back to class he said Jasper had already gone. They're searching the castle for him now, but the dog is gone, too. I'm afraid he's not there."

George stood up without even realizing it, his headache forgotten, and asked, "Where do you think he is, Harry?"

Harry looked uncomfortable, he felt even more so. "I don't know, but..." casting a glance at the three miscreants in front of him he told the ugly truth. "Stubby says that Jasper's father came back from the dead and visited with him after Quidditch practice last night. He said that Jasper was upset afterwards, more upset then he already was, I should say. He also told Stubby about your row in the Three Broomsticks."

Percy shifted in his chair. Penny bit her lip. George groaned out loud. Fred lifted his head out of his hands long enough to say, "Guilt fest is fun, kids, but it doesn't do us a speck of good finding Jasper. Where will he go if he's upset?"

Penny looked to Harry who said, "He's not at my house. I checked with Ginny before I came here."

The next of her glances went deliberately to George.

"He has never gone anywhere before now. When he's upset he mirrors George."

George grabbed at his pockets. "My mirror!" He cast a questing glance at Fred, who shrugged. Percy pulled the shiny disc out of his inner jacket pocket. "This mirror? My mirror? The Muggle constable took all of your possessions before he locked you up last night. I got them back for you this morning while Harry posted your fine." Tossing it onto the table he said to George, "Jasper has the other half of it, I presume?"

"Yes," said George, snatching his mirror off of the table. "Jasper has the other half. Bloody double damn it! I don't know if he tried contacting me or not last night!"

Penny covered her mouth with her hands.

Fred shook his head at George as if to say 'You are in big trouble now, bro.'

Percy caught Penny's eye, "He can't have gone too far, sweetie."

"You don't know Jasper, Percy," Fred offered up helpfully. "He might very well have opened up a time warp and transported himself back to the first Goblin Rebellion."

"I wanted to bring him home!" Penny bit out accusingly to George, who looked every bit as guilt ridden as he felt.

"Enough!" Harry snapped, holding up his hands. "Bickering with each other isn't accomplishing anything."

"Right, Harry," George inhaled a deep breath and started taking charge. "Fred, go into Wheezes, pull everybody off of everything and put them onto to looking for Jasper. Have them check all of the shops in the Alley, especially the bookshop, the pet shop, and Quality Quidditch Supplies. Oh, and don't forget Knockturn Alley. Although, if he's gone down there again..." He stopped his thought considering that he should see Jasper safely in one piece before thinking about killing him.

"I'm on to it," Fred said wearily rubbing his pounding skull as he Apparated out of the room.

"Harry, what in hell is the little git doing about this?" George asked.

"Malfoy's got prefects pulled to search the castle," Harry informed him. "He was going to owl you, but I offered to come myself."

"Well, I appreciate it," George told him sincerely. "But will you do me another favor? Go back to Hogwarts and drag Malfoy's arse into the Forbidden Forest to look? I don't think Jasper would go in there but..."

"I'll do it," Harry promised, "even if Malfoy won't go. Although it will be much more enjoyable for me if he does, he's such a cowardly little creep."

"Percy, check out The Burrow, will you?" George asked. "Also, Ottery St. Catchpole, and the Knight bus."

"Okay," Percy agreed. "What will you and Penny do?"

George glanced uncomfortably at Penny. Shaking like a leaf, she was torn between smacking George upside the head for his transgressions of the previous evening, and crying. "Penny, love, you can't Apparate right now. You'll wind up splinching yourself all over the place. Why don't you start ringing people, try your mother first. Sophie's probably the last person he'd go to right now, but it's a start."

With a considered sigh, George watched Percy and Penny disperse to follow orders and said to himself, "Me, I've just got to think like Jasper."

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

Penny had the house to herself. She'd been longing for a moment of peace and quiet since the second she'd realized Percy wasn't dead. It was quiet all right, but she was as far away from peaceful as any mother ever gets. Now that she'd done everything but alert the media, which she planned to do shortly if Jasper wasn't found in the next hour, she had some time to think.

The school was to blame for this; that run down, ruinous liability of a school. That miserable excuse for an educational institution that allowed giant vipers to slither about its halls, petrifying teenage prefects and their small charges, leaving them stone cold and slab still for months feeling as though they were dead. Waking them up on a cold spring night at the end of the term to send them off home to their families as though no lasting harm had been done. No harm at all, unless you considered the screaming night horrors Penny experienced for years after the incident. Percy acquired the habit of sleeping on the common room floor of Ravenclaw Tower some nights up at school because her dreams were so terrible and she woke up from them so frightened.

Hogwarts. Penny had more than half hoped that her children wouldn't have any magic ability and she need never worry about sending them there. Then the letter came, and right on its heels, quarrels with George. With Percy Penny would have expected quarrels about Hogwarts. He'd been a prefect and head boy there at one time. He had been very admiring of its old headmaster Albus Dumbledore, once. His feelings had altered somewhat over the course of the war, what with the results of some of Dumbledore's dotty decisions, but going to Hogwarts had always been a Weasley family tradition. Percy would have been in favor of Jasper attending there for that reason alone. She hadn't expected a hassle from George, though. But when that letter came she'd rarely seen him so adamant about anything as that Jasper ought to go. So he had. And look where it had brought them.

Her sweet, curly haired baby at the mercy of that vindictive cretin Malfoy who had a Weasley vendetta, getting himself into untold amounts of trouble under the watchful eyes of irresponsible prefects who were ignoring their charges in favor of sex and money. Penny just couldn't assimilate all of the bad memories she had about Hogwarts. Harry and her cousin Cedric Diggory disappeared right out of the middle of the Quiddtich field during a Wizard's tournament that was being held in front of several hundred witnesses and landed smack dab into Voldemort's clutches; real secure place that Hogwarts. There had been a constant failure on the part of any given Hogwart's administration to perform the most basic of decent, thorough back ground checks on it's employees, which resulted in the continual hiring of psychopaths to instruct and associate with the children. Fred and George looked closer at their candy counter workers than Dumbledore had at some of his teaching staff. The place was a travesty.

Then there was the farce that meant to be a magic centered curriculum. Penny tried not to be the intellectual snob that her parents were, but it wasn't easy to do when she was so smart. Hogwarts took children as young as eleven and didn't teach them anything but magic. No languages or literature, no art, it didn't require the study of basic human biology, geography or Muggle human history. Percy hadn't ever read Shakespeare until he'd spent a week with her at her parent's house, got bored whenever she didn't want to make love, and started scavenging her parent's library. He'd liked reading Shakespeare and some of those other obscure Muggle authors, he'd told Penny, very interesting stories, but why didn't the books speak, or move about?

That damned magic school was every decent parent's worst nightmare. Penny didn't understand how it had remained solvent all of these years. What was the attraction? What did it matter if generations of Weasleys had gone there? So what? What was so all damned important about it to these old Wizarding families? Her own father had insisted that she attend Hogwarts. So far as Penny could remember it was the only thing he'd ever insisted on in his entire life. She just never understood why. She wasn't sorry she'd gone there, it wasn't as though she had never learned anything. She had learned some things, improved her magic no doubt, and she'd met her husbands there, so it wasn't a total wash. Still, she could have done without the snake incident. And her missing son, she could do without that, too.

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

Jasper actually enjoyed attending Hogwarts. He believed he didn't require the education, but the experience was pretty good. Mostly he stayed there for Quidditch and Millicent, but he liked learning about magic. He liked staying at home with his parents and his sister, too. He was actually quite frequently homesick. It didn't do to admit it, especially to people like his friend Stubby who preferred staying at Hogwarts to holidays spent with his mum and her latest boyfriend. His father was almost always too busy to have him.

There were other students at Hogwarts that got homesick, Jasper knew, but nobody talked about it. Unless it was in a desperate late night confession made to a prefect who was sworn to secrecy. That was a prefect's job, to take care of the younger students, to act in the stead of an older sibling. They made a great show of being bossy; wielding their power to enforce rules or hand out punishments, but the truth was they spent very little time actually doing that. Or at least the good ones spent very little time doing that.

Prefects were supposed to show the younger students how to get to class, where to go in order to find what they needed, help them with their homework, give them advice about what classes to take, and how to deal with difficult professors, break up quarrels and settle domestic disputes in the dormitories, comfort the homesick and depressed, and take them to the infirmary in the middle of the night when they woke up with a stomachache, or a fever, or an earache. Jasper knew that's what they were supposed to do because his mother and his father had both been prefects at Hogwarts. Mummy had told him all about it, and Jasper thought that he might like to be a prefect someday. If only Malfoy wasn't always the one who appointed them, he might actually get to be.

Tobias Redman was the prefect in Jasper's tower. Jasper referred to him as the "pinhead" behind his back. That was because Toby was Millicent's boyfriend, though, not because he was a terrible prefect. Although Mummy had said that he was a terrible prefect and had written a scathing letter to Headmaster Malfoy about him. Toby hadn't held that letter against Jasper, and for that Jasper was grateful. Toby kept his prefect job because his family was an old Wizarding one with connections to the Malfoy's that went back a few generations. Jasper didn't know all of the details; it was all ancient history to him. He did know that Toby was not evil, a little pompous and arrogant sometimes, kind of bossy now and again, but not evil. If he hadn't been Milli's boyfriend, Jasper might have even liked him.

Jasper had been having bad stomachaches for a while. They came and they went, but he'd had a really bad one ever since he couldn't stop throwing up in the Three Broomsticks. Uncle George let him stay at Hogwarts so he wouldn't miss any more Quidditch practices. That was a good thing; they had the big Slytherin match coming up in a month and the Slytherins were adamant about winning because they'd screwed up the before Christmas holiday sudden death match on ice so badly. Then last night He had shown up to watch practice. The undead father, returned from the grave to turn Jasper's happy home life onto its head. Jasper had been glad to see him not dead; he'd almost given him a hug. Then he'd remembered the fact that the undead father snogged his mother. That was not right. His stomach got much worse after the visit from Father.

So today Jasper's stomach felt badly enough that he seemed to have swallowed an entire goblet full of poisonous doxies, and they were playing Quidditch in his gut using shards of glass for beaters. When he didn't eat any breakfast, after not eating lunch or dinner the previous day, Toby wanted to take him to the infirmary, but Jasper didn't want to go to the infirmary so he lied and told Toby he felt better.

Really, he just wanted to go home. He'd gotten out of bed late last night to mirror Uncle George, who would have come to get him right away, if he'd ever answered it. But he didn't. Jasper's stomachache got a little bit worse. He meant to go to classes, and then ask Uncle Harry if he would owl Uncle George for him, but he didn't make it. He wound up in the lavatory with Stubby hanging over him bugging him about why he was always throwing up and looking so pale. Stubby told Jasper that he was going to fetch his uncle Harry and tell him that Jasper wasn't feeling well. But Jasper didn't want to talk to Harry, he didn't want to go to the infirmary where Madame Pomfrey would cluck and poke at him. He wanted to lie down in his own bed at home, and he wanted his mother to bring him the potion she made that settled his upset stomach, and he wanted to talk to his uncle George. By the time Harry sent an owl and Madame Pomfrey was done with her prodding and her clucking Jasper figured he could already be at home. So he put Rufus on a leash, snuck out of the humpbacked witch into the tunnel that led to Hogsmeade and made his way into town.

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

Harry popped in on Penny again, looking as though he'd been Apparating himself out of breath all over the place. He was starting to take on a distinctly fuzzy appearance. "George has found him, Penny," he gasped bending over, trying to suck in some air. Penny didn't even have time to be relieved before he added, "He was unconscious beneath a bench on the underground. Rufus was harassing the local authorities for help and George recognized him. Jasper really is ill, George has taken him into the hospital."