Disclaimers, Ratings, Archive, Etc.: See Chapter One.

Chapter Summary: With two of their number down, the Gundam pilots suddenly appear at 12 Grimmauld Place, Harry and Ginny meet their teenaged terrorist son, and Sally Po meets Madame Pomfrey.

Note for Weasley bashers: This chapter contains no Weasley bashing, lots of Ginny and Harry, and scenes of near-death experience.

Chapter Five: Signs of Life

Number 12 Grimmauld Place, London, June 12th, AC 195

As she did most every morning, Ginny Potter woke up in a good mood. She rolled onto her back and stretched, feeling every one of her vertebrae pop back into place, then kicked off the blankets and hopped out of bed. She went about her morning routine of a shower, using a charm to remove any stubble from her legs, and brushing her teeth, then quickly dried off, got dressed, and went downstairs.

Her husband, Harry, was already out of bed; he'd been up for a couple of hours now, probably reading the Daily Prophet or the Guardian, and was now fixing breakfast in the kitchen. Their three children, James Sirius, Albus Severus and Lily Luna, were downstairs with their father, letting their mother sleep in for a change. Her brother Ron, his wife Hermione, their children Rose and Hugo, and Harry's godson Teddy would be stopping by as they did every Sunday. The plan was for them to have a nice family day together, including a good dinner of Irish stew with herbed dumplings.

The morning meal was a noisy, cheerful affair, with the children relaying what their father had read to them from both the Daily Prophet and the Guardian to their mother. The Guardian had published an article about the capture of the two remaining Gundam pilots, as well as the pending execution of the five, all of whom were around 14 or 15, the same age Triton would be.

It saddened Harry and Ginny that anyone would force children to fight a war started by adults years before any of them were born, but they'd had experience with that, too.

Ginny's older brother, Ron Weasley, his wife Hermione and their kids arrived shortly after the Potters finished breakfast, and the five children ran out to the backyard to play. Harry had Auror business to discuss with the Weasleys, so the three left for his study. Ginny started to clear the table, and as she did, a sound like a crash of thunder after a lightning strike shook Grimmauld Place to its foundations, and she raced into the living room to investigate.

Lying on the living room floor were five teenaged boys. They all looked to be about 14 or 15 years old, two of them seemingly unconscious and the other three were gasping for air. All of them had their wrists shackled in front of them, and three of them looked as though they'd recently endured a bad beating.

The first boy was Asian, most likely of Chinese descent. His straight hair was the same shade of black as Harry's, which he kept slicked back into a neat ponytail at the base of his skull. He wore a dark blue "wife beater" and a pair of loose-fitting pants made of heavy white cotton that were banded at the ankles.

The second boy was very distinctive looking; he was a Caucasian youth who had a meter-long braid of chestnut brown hair and wore black jodhpurs, a black notch-collared shirt with a thin white turtleneck sweater under it. The boy's clothes almost reminded her of a Catholic priest's garb.

The third one, also Asian, had tousled dark chocolate-brown hair and bruises covering nearly every inch of exposed, lightly tanned skin. He wore a pair of tan-gray surgical scrubs with a number stamped on the left side of the chest. To Ginny, they looked like the same uniform inmates locked up in Azkaban Prison now wore, only with the letters "OZ" inscribed above the inmate number.

The fourth youth was also Caucasian; a painfully thin and badly bruised boy with shaggy waves of hair the pale gold color of sunlight. His features were nearly as pretty as a girl's, and what skin that could be seen under all the black and blue looked as fine and fair as Irish porcelain. He, too, was dressed like an OZ prisoner.

The fifth youth was another Caucasian, and also wore the garb of a captive of OZ. He was a couple of inches taller than the other four, and had straight, cinnamon-colored hair with long bangs that covered nearly half of his own bruised and battered face. The bangs reminded her of an overgrown, full-frontal cowlick, and there were several splits and bloody teeth marks decorating his lower lip.

Except for the length and darker color of his hair, the lack of freckles and, of course, the bruises, he looked almost exactly as she did at fourteen years old, but was as tall and lanky as her brother Bill had been at that age. He was the one Ginny stared at the most intently, as if she knew him from somewhere.

Ginny screamed "HARRY!" at the sight before her.

"Ginny? What's wrong?" Harry asked as he came out of the study, followed closely by Ron and Hermione. It was almost enough for Harry to flash back to some of the beatings he'd received from his late, unlamented uncle. "Oh, Merlin..."

"Bloody Hell," Ron croaked as he felt his eyes bugging out. "Where'd they come from?"

"I don't know! They just Apparated in!" Ginny exclaimed as she knelt down next to one of the boys. "Harry, this boy here... he looks like Triton!"

"Ginny," Hermione said, placing her hand on her sister-in-law's shoulder, "it's been almost fifteen years! Are you...?"

"You know as well as I do that only family or those we invite can get past the house wards, and I think I'd know my own son when I see him! For Heaven's sake, Hermione, you used your cell phone to take a video of Triton peeing on Harry when he was only three hours old!"

Harry turned crimson from the neck up as Ron sputtered and Hermione tittered, trying not to laugh at that memory. Madame Pomfrey was showing Harry the proper way to change a baby boy's nappie one moment, and the next he was all wet and smelling of pee. Worse, Harry could have sworn his three-hour-old son was giggling at his soggy, urine-soaked father.

Harry pulled his wand out of its wrist sheath and made to cast a simple charm when Ron stepped in.

"Harry," he said, "even if this boy is Triton, for all we know the rest of them might be Muggles. We can't take the chance...!"

"Ron, what we can't do is worry about the bloody Secrecy statute now. They're hurt, and those shackles need to come off, so... Removere sua constrictionem," Harry said with a flick of his wand. A split-second later, the shackles unlocked themselves and fell off the wrists of all five boys with a soft clank of metal landing on the wood floor. Moments later, the confused and very blue-eyed Japanese boy woke up, sat up and looked around.

"Huh? Where are we? We're no longer on the Lunar Base," he said. "02, 03, 04 and 05, what's your status?"

"My status is that I feel like crap and I think I'm gonna puke," the plait-haired boy, an American from his accent, grumbled sourly as he started to sit up. "Aw, man... what the Hell did 03 do? Now I know how a chocolate shake feels when it's sucked through a straw."

"I don't know what he did, either, but I'm glad we're out of that death chamber," the Chinese boy said, also in a grumble. "My status is also breathing and queasy. How about you, 01?"

"Same here. Zero Three and Zero Four, what's your status? Trowa!?" the Japanese boy said to the cinnamon-haired youth. He held the taller boy's shoulders and shook him gently, but he didn't get a response. A finger placed first at the base of his throat then under his nose confirmed the worst.

"Dammit, he's not breathing and there's no pulse! Duo, check on Quatre! Wu Fei, start chest compressions! I'll start giving Trowa mouth-to-mouth!" "01" exclaimed, and when "Wu Fei" looked at him oddly, he added "You have to do it! I'll break his ribs if I try!"

"Right, Hiiro," "Duo" replied as he checked "Quatre" for a pulse while "Wu Fei" and "Hiiro" worked on "Trowa," trying to revive him. A moment later, he added "Damn! Nothing! C'mon, Cat, don't do this to us! 'Snot your time! Shinigami doesn't want your skinny ass yet!"

Duo started giving Quatre CPR and mouth-to-mouth just as Hiiro and Wu Fei started trying to revive Trowa. By some odd coincidence, the two started breathing again at the same time, but while Trowa's eyes flew open as he gasped and sat up, Quatre was just as unresponsive as he'd been in their cell on the Moon Base.

Trowa was dizzy, his head still foggy from the blows he'd received on the colony and moon base, the bone-deep exhaustion caused by the lack of oxygen and whatever he did to get them off the Moon. All he wanted was to curl up on something soft and sleep for a week, but he couldn't, not until he knew Quatre was all right.

Harry looked over the sunlight-haired youth and knew what was wrong with him. He'd heard of several "former" Death Eaters, one named Tsuberov in particular, joining OZ to escape from the Aurors. They had created a particularly nasty curse they called the Tabula Rasa, or Blank Slate curse, which they used to literally reduce the mind of their victim back to its infancy. Then the caster could "rewrite" the victim's memories, making them blindly loyal to OZ and the Romefeller Foundation.

"Anyone who would use that curse on a child should get hit with the damned thing themselves. Maybe then they could be reprogrammed into decent human beings. Fortunately, I know the countercurse for this. Here goes..." Harry gently cupped the blond-haired boy's chin, tilted his face up and said "Hanc puer animum leniter a abyssi."

Quatre's reaction to the countercurse was immediate; he gasped as every one of his memories came flooding back, and then promptly passed out with a soft groan of sheer exhaustion. The strain of everything he'd been through the past few weeks had finally caught up with him. Hiiro, Duo and Wu Fei were all speechless over the change, but Trowa wasn't.

"Quatre?! QUATRE!" the cinnamon-haired youth exclaimed, a sudden surge of adrenaline clearing his head for the moment and giving him enough strength to crawl over to his partner and push Harry aside.

"It's all right, son; he's just passed out," Harry replied calmly as he collected himself. "He'll wake up again in a little while, and so will you... somnum fili mi."

With those words and a flick of Harry's wand, Trowa stopped fighting the exhaustion he'd been trying to ignore since being revived and fell into a deep sleep. Harry then picked the taller boy up while Ron scooped up the unconscious Quatre to carry upstairs, but the two wizards found themselves being blocked by three very irate boys.

"Where are you taking them?" Hiiro demanded, wishing he has a pistol on him.

Ron chuckled at the young man's ferocity, and Harry replied with "Upstairs to one of the spare bedrooms. All of you need to rest and recover from... what's happened to you."

"Who are you, where are we, and what the Hell's going on here?" an alarmed Duo asked.

"Could ask you the same things," Ron countered.

"My friend asked you first," Wu Fei retorted with a huff.

It took the four wizards a moment, but they realized the boy looked vaguely familiar. Cho Chang once mentioned a cousin who lived on a colony in the L5 cluster with their family... could this boy be her cousin's son?

"The name is Harry Potter, this is my wife Ginny, my brother-in-law, Ron Weasley, his wife Hermione, and you're in my home," Harry answered. "How you got here is anyone's guess, but if you are who I think you are, you're more than welcome to stay a while, at least until OZ stops looking for you. We've got plenty of room."

As the three conscious Gundam pilots followed their comrades and hosts up to the third floor, Hiiro, Duo and Wu Fei noticed a group of five children peeking around the corner, gawking at them. If Duo had to hazard a guess, he figured the eldest boy to be eight, the middle boy and eldest girl to be seven, and the youngest two, one girl and one boy, to be around five. They were mostly red-headed, with one brunette and one with black hair, and all of them were adorable.

When the three teens were out of earshot, Hermione summoned the house elf, Kreacher, and asked him to bring Madam Pomfrey and someone from Gringotts to perform a test. The ancient house elf complied, vanishing into thin air.

"Mummy, who's that tall boy?" a frightened Lily asked Ginny. Her brothers, James and Albus, and her cousins Rose and Hugo, were standing behind her, just as curious and as scared as she. None of the Potter children knew they had an older brother yet, and Ginny didn't know what to tell them.

Ginny knelt down to her daughter's level, tucked her into her arms and replied with "Daddy and I are going to find out, sweetheart."

-== 0000 ==-

When Trowa woke up again, he found himself lying on a strange bed in a strange room with an unconscious Quatre lying beside him. As he managed to get into a half sitting, half lying position, he could see that both of them were being fussed over by a kind-looking woman with graying blonde hair, and standing next to her was an attractive young woman with light brown braids and silvery blue eyes.

He didn't recognize either woman by sight, but recognized the dulcet contralto voice of the younger one. It belonged to Doctor Sally Po, a major with the former United Earth Sphere Alliance, current anti-OZ freedom fighter and the woman Wu Fei couldn't stop talking about. Seeing that Sally wanted to talk, the older woman left the room to give them some privacy.

"Hi there, cutie pie," Sally said with a dose of good humor as she finger combed Trowa's hair from his eyes. In her opinion, he had a nice face and it was a shame to cover half of it up.

"Nice to finally be able to put a face to the voice," he replied softly, a slight smile on his face though he was still rather tired. "Does Wu Fei know you call every guy you meet cutie pie?"

Sally chuckled at Trowa's joke; he wasn't nearly as stoic or as humorless as people thought he was. At that point, the older woman came back in and started examining Quatre, who was still out like a light.

"Hello, my name is Madam Pomfrey. How are you feeling?" She finally asked Trowa.

"I'm fine, but I'm very, very tired. What about...?"

"Your friends? They're a bit stressed out from everything that's happened, but they're fine. They're just down the hall."

"And Quatre?" Trowa asked, concerned.

"Sleeping the sleep of a child who's magically exhausted himself, just as you should be doing," the matron replied. She took a good look at Trowa and added "You look just like your mother, but you have your father's eyes."

"Magically exhausted"? And what the Hell did she mean by that remark? An angry and confused Trowa thought as he looked at Quatre's supine form.

The tow-headed boy looked so peaceful in his repose, and the cinnamon-haired youth couldn't resist finger-combing the soft hair from Quatre's sweet face. It was becoming difficult for Trowa to believe that just a few hours ago, he and Hiiro were fighting for their lives against Quatre; a Quatre possessed by a demonic mobile suit operating system.

At the other end of the hall, Wu Fei slipped out of his borrowed room and into the room Harry assigned to Hiiro and Duo. Once inside, the Chinese boy checked the hall to make sure no one was around to eavesdrop. After closing the door, Wu Fei grabbed the chair by the desk, then turned it towards the twin beds and sat down in it. Then and only then did the three Gundam pilots start talking about the Potters and the Weasleys.

"What do you think? Can we trust them?" Hiiro asked his two comrades.

"I don't know... they seem all right, but...," Wu Fei replied.

"But what?"

"They're hiding something from us," Duo chimed in. "They're not lying to us, at least not that I can tell, but they are definitely hiding something they think is important from us. Something about Trowa. Damn, I wish Cat were awake! He's the human lie detector, not me!"

The three boys looked down at the hardwood floor and wondered if their friends were all right.

Meanwhile, back in the room occupied by Trowa and Quatre, the woman with the bushy brown hair came in with a creature that looked like every description his old Captain had ever given him of a goblin, only he was dressed in a three-piece business suit. The creature withdrew a small, curved and wickedly sharp bladed knife from a pocket of his waistcoat and the jabbed the tip of Trowa's middle finger, drawing blood.

"OW! WHAT THE HELL?!" Trowa bellowed while the goblin, Hrothgar, watched the blood from Trowa's finger drip onto an ancient piece of parchment.

After a moment, the names and lines of a family tree began to form on the sheet, starting with someone named Triton Remus Potter and going back several generations, but it was the identities of this Triton's parents that threw him for a loop.

"Well, Hrothgar, what's the verdict?" an anxious Harry asked.

"It's him, Lord Potter," Hrothgar said with a curt nod in Trowa's direction. "This young man is your son Triton."

-== 0000 ==-

Author's Notes: I just want to start out this chapter's AN by saying that I apologize for how long it's taken to get this chapter finished. My dad isn't getting worse but he's not really getting any better, and I'm still having a hard time trying to replace my laptop.

When I decided to write Teddy into this (he appears in the next chapter), I had to look up not only his birthday to find out whether or not he would be older or younger than Trowa, but Jamie, Al, Lily, Rose and Hugo's birthdays, as well. Teddy's a few months older than Trowa (Teddy and Relena's b-days are in April), Rosie is Al's age, and Hugo and Lily are the same age.

Speaking of birthdays, I'm going by one of the Gundam Wing production books had on the pilots birthdays. Duo's is on February 2nd (known to Catholics as Candlemas and to the US as Groundhog Day), so he's already 15. Trowa's is on July 22nd and Hiiro's is on August 7th (17 days apart), so they're almost 15. Wu Fei and Quatre share a birthday; December 12th, and Wu Fei is the elder of the two. They're still 14. I know Gundam Wikia says the dates are fanon, but when the official sites say they're canon, they are.

The term "full frontal cowlick" is mine, but feel free to use it if you want. Something that funny should be released to the Universe.

The spell Harry uses to free the boys, Removere sua constrictionem, the one to break the Tabula Rasa curse, Hanc puer animum retro leniter a abyssi, and the one that put Trowa to sleep, somnum fili mi, literally translate from the Latin to "Remove their restraints," "Bring this boy's mind back gently from the abyss," and "sleep, my son." I always thought Alohomora was more a lock-picking spell for doors, not restraints.

Funny thing, every time I read or write something with Cathy and/or Sally in it, my mind won't use Cathy Weseluck's voice as Cathy Bloom's nor Moneca Stori's for Sally; my brain uses Moneca's voice for Cathy and Samantha Ferris' voice for Sally. Sally's in this chapter, and if you've been wondering where Cathy is, she'll appear in Chapter 8.

While I'm here, I thought I'd let everyone know that I've translated Chapters 1 through 3 (so far) into Japanese and posted them on a site called Pixiv, which is kind-of like a Japanese deviantArt. I can't read Kanji (YET), but people in the Land of the Rising Sun seem to like it, too.

Next chapter: While on a reconnaissance mission, Hiiro meets up with someone who thinks OZ has carried out the execution order on the Gundam pilots, Trowa meets more members of his family, and Wu Fei has a reunion of his own.