REUNION

TOUGH TASKS

Disclaimer: This is a non-profit tribute to the works of JK Rowling who created and, together with her publishers and licensees, owns the characters and settings elaborated herein.

Thanks to my reviewers and especially to my previewers, Bellegeste and Cecelle.

"I don't have anything to say to you." Ginny's mouth was a thin, straight line and her eyes burned.

""Yes, I quite get that." Hermione cast a swift upward glance at her friend, then resumed studying her fingernails. She'd expected this, but that didn't make it hurt any less. She gave a resolute swallow. "But it'll be a lot easier to tell your mum about Adam –"

"Percy!"

"About Adam if we decide beforehand exactly how we're going to start. Unless you want to go in there and just blurt it out?"

Ginny scowled and set down her cup with a thump. Some of her tea sloshed into the saucer.

Funny how it was always the women who got lumbered with the really tough tasks, Hermione thought. It hadn't taken long for the Weasley men to come to the conclusion that the obvious choice for family messenger to their mother should be their sister.

"You're the baby of the family," Bill had pointed out.

"And the one mum's most likely to listen to," Ron had agreed.

"She'd only think it was –"

"One of our tricks, if we tried," the twins had pointed out.

But it was Charlie who'd made the unanswerable argument.

"Of course, it has to be you, Gin," he'd said, pointing his biscuit at her. "You're the only one of us who's actually seen him with your own eyes and spoken to him since he died – since he disappeared. When she stops yell – er, when she calms down a bit, she'll have all sorts of questions and none of us can answer them."

Ginny had scowled at her brothers and even cast a look of entreaty at her husband, but he'd just shrugged his inability to rescue her. Besides, he thought his time was better spent at school interrogating Severus privately.

"Fine!" she'd snapped. "But I'm not going alone!"

And a very little further discussion had ended with Hermione being dragooned into going along as her reluctant associate. After all, she'd been in contact with their brother for several years and could answer all those other questions their mother was sure to ask about one new daughter-in-law and ten unknown grandchildren – and a son whose adult life was a mystery to the family he'd left behind. Severus could have done it too, if he hadn't taken his convenient absence before the meeting got this far.

She couldn't blame him for that, not reasonably, anyhow. He did have school business and some of it at least was going to be the necessary hosing-down of tensions in the school and in her old house when the teenage generation of Weasleys found out that his younger daughter's best friend was a child of the family outcast. Hermione wasn't feeling very reasonable just now. She tilted her chin at her best friend and sat up straighter.

"You've had six years to plan what to say," Ginny accused, staring at the opposite wall. "Haven't you thought of anything yet?"

"All I thought about was how to tell you. I never expected to have to tell your mother too," Hermione said.

Ginny hunched a shoulder.

"Maybe you should have. You might have thought twice about facing her with the news six years late."

"It wouldn't have made any difference." Hermione took a long breath and let it out slowly. "I don't blame you for being angry. I would be too in your shoes. But I couldn't have done any different. If you'd only listen –"

Ginny bounced up and glowered down at her.

"I don't want to talk to you. Let's just go and you can tell me and Mum together."

Hermione got up too and began clearing the table. After a moment's hesitation, Ginny joined in.

"I will, if you insist," Hermione said, gathering up the cups, "but I really think it would go better if you heard a bit more first. Don't you want to know about his life as a Muggle? Wouldn't you rather ask your questions without being out-shouted or overruled? All your questions, without interruptions."

Her friend scowled.

"I can't believe you've done that to me," she said, carrying a stack of plates to the kitchen. It would have been quicker to Leviosa them but it was easier to talk with hands and eyes occupied. "After all these years we've been friends. Didn't you think you owed me more than that?"

"I wish it was that simple." Hermione turned on the tap and rolled up her sleeves. "I wish it was only about what I owed you. If you could have seen him, Ginny!"

""If you'd given me the chance to see him, you mean!"

"I couldn't. He begged me not to tell. If I hadn't promised to keep his secret, he was going to up stakes and leave again – this time to some faraway corner of the world where you'd never find him." Hermione put the first cup into the drainer and started on another.

"Bollocks!" Ginny picked up a teatowel and began drying. "It takes time to move a family, even with magic – and you say he wasn't using any. He couldn't have run away before you told us. We'd have stopped him."

Hermione's busy hands stilled momentarily.

"Stopped him? How do you think you could have stopped him? Petrificus? It wasn't a snap decision, you know, when he left everything behind. He'd been preparing for eighteen months."

"Eighteen months!" There was a long pause as Ginny counted back eighteen months from her brother's supposed death and saw in her mind's eye horn-rimmed glasses dripping mashed parsnip. She swallowed. "I don't believe you! He was the Ministry's poster-child!"

"Eighteen months," Hermione repeated firmly. "He'd been visiting your Mum's accountant cousin for a year and a half, so he could practise living in the Muggle world. He'd prepared a false identity, with certificates and qualifications, bank account, credit card, even a job to walk into, and he'd researched a dozen different ways of faking his death."

Ginny chewed on the inside of her cheek.

"But if we'd told him – that we didn't want him to go –"

"Is that what you'd have told him? Because it's not what you told us just now. Not one of you said how much you'd missed him or how sorry you were for having driven him away. You were angry with him, not with yourselves."

"He hurt us. How could he think we wouldn't care if he died, how could he?" Ginny's hands tightened on the cup she was drying. She put it down with cautious exactitude and stared at it as if it might suddenly fly across the room without a whisper of a spell.

Hermione gave her a sidelong glance and placed another dripping cup upside-down to drain. If only there was a way to soften what she had to say. Truth hurt – both the teller and the listener.

"Perhaps you should ask yourselves that question before you ask him. Because I promise you that that is what he thought. He told me that none of you wanted him; that you'd never wanted him. And when I looked back and remembered what I'd seen of your family – I could see why he thought so."

"Of course we wanted him! He might be the world's biggest prat, but he's still our brother!"

"You'll have to find a more convincing way of telling him than that, Gin," Hermione said gently. "That's exactly what you told him this afternoon. He didn't seem too impressed with it, did he?"

Ginny knuckled her eyes with an angry swipe.

"How dare you sit in judgement on my family? After all we've done for you!"

"That's the last thing I'd want to do. I'm only trying to make sure you get it right this time. Because there's nothing I want more than for your family to be healed. And I really think there's nothing he wants more either."

Brown eyes met brown. Ginny's mouth trembled.

"Do you think so? He told me he wasn't my brother. He said it over and over again. And that he had nothing to say to me, now or ever."

"I thought that was rather a hopeful sign, actually, because he forgot to call you Mrs Longbottom. Did he used to call you Ginevra Molly Weasley when you were kids and he was mad at you?"

"Not really. It was mainly Mum who called me that." Ginny shook her head and her mouth twisted. "Mum. How could he do that to her? He must have known she still cared. She still sent him presents for birthdays and holidays and he sent them back."

"That quarrel he had with your dad hurt him much more than any of you ever guessed. And when she took your dad's side – I can't say any more without breaking confidences. But, Ginny, I really think you should leave that between them. You have enough hurdles on your own account without borrowing the rest of the family's."

Silence stretched too far and broke. Ginny's eyes narrowed to an accusing glare.

"You're very clever, aren't you? Every time I try to talk about how you've betrayed us, you keep changing the subject."

"I'm not trying to change the subject – Well, maybe I am. It isn't easy saying nothing while you call me all the names I've been calling myself over this for six years. I hate that I couldn't tell you sooner, but it wasn't my secret to tell."

"If you were really my friend –"

Hermione lifted a cup out of the water and watched the drops roll down its gleaming sides. She plunged it back in and scrubbed needlessly.

"That's what he said," she murmured. "'Please, Hermione, if you ever had any feelings of friendship for me at all…' I couldn't refuse him the only thing he's ever asked me."

"When did you ever have any feelings of friendship for him? You were always Ron's friend and then you were mine."

"Not always." She stacked the last plate in the drainer and pulled out the plug, adding as she watched the water gurgle down the sink, "When I started at Hogwarts, everyone hated me, especially Ron and Harry. It was almost an accident that we ever became friends. They saved me from a troll and I saved them from getting in trouble about it. If not for Percy, I think I'd have run away by then. He always found time to say something nice whenever he saw me. I owe him, Ginny."

"He was a Prefect then. It was his duty to be nice to firsties. And you know how devoted he always was to duty." And how much he harassed his younger siblings for being less so.

"Don't sneer at him for that. I know it's not much appreciated in your family – you like the twins' way better - but it's a good characteristic, not a bad one. He's reliable and responsible and kind. I wish you could have appreciated that in him the way you do in Neville."

"Neville's never obnoxious about it like Percy was."

That was because Neville was only a Weasley by marriage, not temperament. Hermione knew better than to point this out, however.

The man in question was, at that moment, sitting down in the headmistress's office between the Heads of Slytherin and Gryffindor house. He shifted slightly, to get his wooden leg in a more comfortable position. It was twenty years since he'd lost it in the final battle to a Dark-twisted variation of the Jellylegs Jinx that lived up to its name. Luckily it had only hit one knee and missed the rest of him as St Mungo's had been quite baffled.

Minerva's jaw had just dropped open.

"You mean that little friend of Cammie's is Percy Weasley's – Percy's daughter? How could she be?"

A grim smile curled Severus's mouth.

"Perhaps he was more like his brothers than anyone suspected," he said. "He faked his death so efficiently that no one ever questioned it."

"Percy? Prim and proper Percy break the law to –"

"There was no law-breaking, Minerva. He followed all the correct procedures for renouncing wizardry and filed all the papers in the appropriate places under a confidentiality charm. If anybody had thought of looking, they'd have found him. But he knew no one would."

Neville winced. Had Percy been waiting twenty years to see if his family would bother looking? No doubt he blamed their disinterest rather than his own competence for their failure to do so.

"I gather you've known about this for some time," said Minerva's husband, Amory, from Neville's other side.

"A little over six and a half years. Long enough to think of him more as Adam Wales than a Weasley."

"Miss Wales looks nothing like him, of course, but now that you mention this I do see a resemblance," Minerva said slowly. "Something about her air and seriousness. He was always a very old child."

"The very natural resemblance shared by most older children of large families with closely-spaced younger siblings," Severus said. "Alison was a toddler when her next siblings were born, just as he was. Twins too, by the way, though thankfully nothing like their twin uncles. By the time she started infants school, she had five little sisters and there are another four since."

"But why send her here? Did he want to be found?" Minerva asked.

"Circumstance. He hoped the question of a magical education would never arise. Then, when it all too evidently did, he hoped they would go through school unnoticed. After all, wizard parents and Muggle parents rarely meet each other."

"True wishes overriding conscious desires, perhaps?" Amory suggested.

Severus shrugged.

"I don't claim to speak for Adam's subconscious mind. However, he's asked me to speak for him in all matters involving Hogwarts and the magical world."

"In that case, it's for you to tell us how to proceed," Minerva said.

"Indeed. Hermione and I have given much thought to this matter." One corner of his mouth twitched. "Our conversations this year had become rather tediously repetitive," he admitted to his three close friends. "It will be a relief to start a new subject."

They smiled back.

"And what have you decided?" Neville asked.

"Hermione thought we should react quietly, but pre-emptively. The staff must know, but there should be no general announcements to the children. No doubt the news will escape, but we need not speed its publication. Adam has agreed that it's useless to try to keep his daughters from knowing their cousins, so Hermione has suggested a family meeting of all those currently at Hogwarts, under Amory's supervision. Perhaps Alison's next two sisters also, since they'll be starting here next year."

"Agreed," Amory said.

"You should be present too, Severus. They'll have questions and we can't expect a twelve year old to know all the answers, no matter how mature she is for her age," Neville added.

Minerva nodded.

"An excellent idea," she said crisply. "I'll leave it to the three of you then, Amory as Head of House, Severus as Adam's representative and, Neville, you, of course, representing his siblings and Molly. That should satisfy everyone. Shall we say the last day of Easter break? We can bring any absent children back to school one day early."

As they left Minerva's office, Neville gave a choke of laughter, hastily suppressed. Severus turned a raised eyebrow in his direction and he shrugged a little and dipped his head.

"Sorry, you may not think it very funny. I just suddenly remembered how much you disliked Gryffindors in my school days – And here you are, yet another of your friends turns out to be one. You're surrounded by us!"

"I am unhappily well aware of it." The Head of Slytherin pursed his lips and shook his head sourly. "All my hopes are on Callie."

Hermione and Ginny were, at that moment, knocking on the Burrow door. They did not have long to wait.

"Ginny! And Hermione dear, what a pleasant surprise! I was just about to make dinner. Shouldn't you be cooking for your own children right about now?" Molly said as she saw them. She stepped aside and waved them through the door, smoothing the embroidered apron that had been a birthday present from Bill's oldest ten years ago.

Hermione and Ginny answered together.

"I sent mine to Hogwarts for dinner today –"

"Mine were planning to send out for pizza when I spoke to them –"

"Pizza? Really, Ginny dear, why don't you feed them something a bit more healthy than that? I'd be happy to –"

"Something's come up, Mum," Ginny cut in. "Something important that we need to speak to you about."

Molly paled and took two steps back, her hands uplifted defensively.

"Important?" Her eyes darted between the two serious faces. "An accident? Who is it? They're not – not badly injured?"

"Not an accident, Mum!" Ginny cut in, horrified by her own ineptness. "Everyone's all right, I promise! In fact, even people you didn't know were all right are all right. Um –"

"Whatever do you mean by that?" Molly wondered, inviting them towards the kitchen and falling into step behind them. She gave a shaky laugh. "Goodness, Ginny, don't frighten me like that again. Sit down, both of you. Cup of tea? I've a fresh batch of cauldron cakes just baked." She put the kettle on as she spoke and opened the pantry door.

The two younger women sat down at the table, Ginny giving Hermione a rather helpless look. It wasn't often that she found herself at a loss, but then again, it wasn't often that you had to tell your mother she'd been mourning her favourite son twenty years for nothing.

Hermione tried to stop "I told you so" from flashing across her face. She pulled out a small photo album.

"You didn't tell me you had photos," Ginny grumbled.

"You wouldn't let me," Hermione whispered, then raised her voice to a normal tone. "We've just had tea at my house, thanks. Won't you sit down with us for a minute? There's been a rather surprising bit of news, but it's easier to show you than to tell you."

"Are you sure you won't have anything? An omelette? A glass of pumpkin juice?"

They shook their heads and she came rather reluctantly to the table and sat down between them.

"Oh!" she said, as Hermione opened the book. "They're frozen!"

"They're Muggle photos," Hermione explained. "That's why they don't move."

"Muggle photos! How interested Arthur would have been." Molly sighed wistfully. She'd been almost eight years a widow and still sometimes found herself listening for the sound of his footsteps, especially when she was too tired or busy to remember.

Ginny's hands clenched and her jaw set. Interested? He'd have been interested all right. She closed her eyes. Her father would never have the chance to sort things out with her brother now.

Hermione pointed to the first picture, the girls on their last day at primary school. The two dark heads leaned towards each other in grinning confederacy.

"Here's my daughter, Cammie, with her best friend, Alison."

"Lovely dear, but I don't understand why you're showing me. Is that the jumper I helped you knit for Callie when she was ten?"

"Yes, I believe it was," Hermione said, a little startled. She'd known how to knit since school, but she'd never been very good at it till she'd asked Molly for some lessons after Callie had complained that her mum's knitted hats looked just like the ones Dobby wore, only newer. "I'd forgotten that. But it's not the jumper that's important."

"No, dear? What is it then?"

Hermione turned the page.

"Here's Alison with some of her sisters. She's the oldest of ten girls."

Molly's eyes roamed rapidly over that one and the similar one on the facing page. Ginny' hands twisted together and she bit her lip.

"Yes, they're all very pretty, but what does it have to do with me?" Molly asked.

Hermione turned another page.

"Look at this next one. It's Alison with her father."

Molly glanced at it. Then her eyes grew wide and her face paled. Still she stared as the silence in the room grew louder and louder. Ginny slipped her hand over her mother's limp one and squeezed gently.

"He hasn't changed very much in twenty years, has he?" Hermione said at last.

"He looks – He looks just like Percy. I don't understand."

"He is Percy," Ginny said, a little too loudly.

"He's known as Adam Wales now," Hermione said. "He's been living as a Muggle all this time."

Molly's finger reached out and traced slowly over the familiar face. She gave a half-laugh.

"As a Muggle! How Arthur would have loved to hear about it! I don't suppose he knows how aeroplanes stay up. That was Arthur's dearest wish, remember Ginny?"

Ginny nodded. She couldn't speak. Hermione gulped.

"He does, actually. He's the second-in-charge at a firm of aeronautical engineers – that's people who design and build aeroplanes – and he can talk at tedious length about every aspect of their operation."

"Oh no, not tedious," Molly quavered as her eyes filled. "Arthur would never have found that tedious." She sniffed and rummaged for a handkerchief. "Have you told him yet? Does he know?"

"Arthur?" asked Hermione, rather puzzled. "You mean does Arthur know?" She exchanged a wild glance with an equally bewildered Ginny.

"No dear, Percy. Does he know who he really is? How did he come to lose his memory like that? And how excited he must be to find out he's part of such a large, happy family." Her mouth curved up between damp rosy cheeks. "He must be so happy."

A/N Neville's wooden leg and Arthur's death are mentioned in earlier chapters of my "Everything" universe.

Confidentiality charms are non-canon.

The concept of Percy being Hermione's only student supporter those first few months is not completely canon, but is inspired by the patient way he answered all her questions at the Sorting Feast plus the times she subsequently defended him to Ron.