What Comes After, Molly Weasley, PG-13
Jul. 26th, 2010 09:20 pm![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
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femgenficathonTitle: What Comes After
Author:![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
magentabear
Fandom: Harry Potter
Rating: PG-13
Warnings: Dark themes, self-harm, mentions of death. Please don't read if any of that will upset you.
Prompt: 149) The more hidden the venom, the more dangerous it is. -- Marguerite de Valois (1553-1615)
Summary: Molly Weasley has survived the weight of two wars. She's not about to let their aftermath crush her.
Author's Notes: Huge thanks togehayi for running this wonderful fest, to slam_girl for being such a helpful beta, and to the friends who acted as cheerleaders while I wrote this fic. And finally, thank you to any and all readers. I hope you enjoy this look at Molly.
-
-
Where is your home where is your home where is your home?
They never stop asking.
-
The war is over. But the house elves aren't free and Remus can't get a decent job—not that he needs one where he is, poor dear—and those bastard Malfoys aren't going to lose their house—she will not call it a mansion—and Arthur is still slighted when it comes to promotions. The war is over but the fighting isn't.
There are scars up and down her arms. From the battle, from the wall that fell, from the wall she kept off her face with the arms that hold these scars.
The scars burn like fresh wounds when she wakes screaming in the night.
They nod seriously and bend their heads toward Arthur's concerned face. "Nothing to worry about, all part of the recovery," they say in voices they think she can't hear.
-
Everybody has a breaking point. Everybody.
-
Percy is in the corner reading. Little Ginny crawls around his feet, setting up her dolly on the left and a battered wooden owl on the right. Percy may scowl a bit when she pokes his ankles with her toy wand but he holds his feet perfectly still. He would never muss up his sister's game.
Ron is bent over his chess game, also scowling. How that boy manages to play chess against himself is something she's never understood. If Arthur were here he'd nod as if it made sense and murmur magic, darling to her.
Seems an odd sort of magic to her, really, but at least it's quieter than the twin's version.
The twins aren't on the porch with the rest of them. Off gathering leaves and sticks and bugs and such things. Boys. She smiles fondly at Ginny in her little pink frock.
Ginny chucks the wooden owl across the porch and laughs with glee. Then she dashes over to Ron and begs him to play Kwiddiss with her.
She sighs. Well. It's almost time to take Bill and Charlie in for new books and school clothes. Perhaps it's time to let Ginny pick out her own clothes. Pink does clash horribly with her hair.
Fred and George return with grubby hands and pieces of the forest she knows they will complain about cleaning up later.
But no. Only George returns. Fred is still in the forest. He fell down, George says. He fell down and he won't get up.
Percy is in front of her describing the fall. But he wasn't there, her mind insists. He was here, reading on the porch. And of course Fred can get up. She has never met a healing charm she can't work. George simply needs to lead her to his brother and watch the magic happen.
George's eyes don't look like a child's. And he doesn't cry like one, either, when she finally sees the body of the man who used to be her son.
Sometimes it's hard to tell the living from the dead, the dreams from the reality.
-
Where is your home where is your home where is your home?
She won't give the answer Arthur gives. They cluck sympathetically and draw the shutters closed.
-
Molly doesn't tell them about The Burrow.
She tells them about Gideon and Fabian and Mother and Father and picnics and messy meals and perfect weekends at the frigid seaside. Britain truly does have the worst beaches. It's a disappointment.
Arthur took her to Greek Isles for their honeymoon.
She attended three funerals, killed a spy and learned of the Order within a month of returning home.
She doesn't tell them about that, either.
-
The walls are not white. This pleases her. She may be broken and they may have put her in a little room so she can take the time to find her mind again but at least they gave her a happy place.
Insane asylum. Insane.
That’s not where she is. She may be insane, maybe she should go find one of those, go talk to the Healers at St. Mungo's, but that's not where she is right now as she looks at cheerfully painted walls around a small window that looks out onto a neat graveyard.
Molly Weasley is at a nunnery.
It was an accident, really. Not that the nuns here believe that. Certainly not. But she didn't mean to end up here, did she? And she's now sleeping here, yes? So clearly: an accident.
But it wasn't an unreasonable accident, that she will admit. She's not Ophelia, running off to a nunnery because things went bad with a couple men. No, things went wrong with her entire world. All Ophelia lost were some melodramatic fools. Molly lost heroes. Gideon and Fabian were heroes, men born straight from the Round Table itself, men who could have saved everyone if only they hadn't trusted the wrong man. Took five Death Eaters to bring them down, it did.
Fred and George were heroes, too, once. And perhaps George will be again someday. If there's one thing these quiet little nuns have taught her, it's patience. Theirs is a hopeful patience, one that honors the waiting as much as the reward. That's what she has now, what she cloaks around herself against the pain Arthur brings with every visit. He brings her news, but it's never anything new. He tells her how little the children have changed since she left, how the paranoia won't leave Ron and the despair still haunts George. But she has her patience and she has her hope and at the end of every visit, just before Arthur tips his hat to the lovely nuns, she grasps his hands in hers and tries to share that peace with him.
-
Mother was a devout Catholic from the moment she was born until the moment she returned to ashes. Molly's red hair isn't an accident. It's the Irish blood Mother never forgot, the same blood that made her tuck a wooden rosary into Molly's pocket the morning she left for Hogwarts.
She lost the rosary before she made it across the lake.
Mother's favorite place in the whole wide world was the sedate graveyard on the other side of the hill by their little cottage. The house is gone now but the graveyard isn't. Molly didn't know this when she apparated out of The Burrow, desperate to escape for just a moment, desperate for a measure of peace among the grief and the fights and the devastation in George's eyes.
That's where the nuns found her.
They don't know where to put her back.
-
The scars on her wrists truly are from the walls of Hogwarts. They weren't self-inflicted. The nuns don't believe her, though she can hardly blame them for that. Crazy woman shows up in a graveyard and pulls a stick out on them when they come to tend the flowers, that's what they can understand. And they can judge the scars—and they do—but they don't judge her. She knows the compassion that takes.
When they find her, when they start to usher her inside the walls of the nunnery and start asking questions in measured Healers' voices, Molly doesn't mind. She thanks them. She thanks them and she lets them think whatever they want about her scars.
She knows those scars are what save her from returning to The Burrow.
Arthur was with her when the walls fell down. His scars are on his back, though, the part of him that took a beating when he threw himself over her and told her don't worry, darling, I've got you.
The lines streak up and down her arms, marring the clean white skin she used to show off so many years ago at the seaside.
-
Fred is dead. So are Gideon and Fabian. So is the George she once knew.
She dreams of them often, her missing boys. Because in her mind, Gideon and Fabian have never grown. She's old enough to be their mother now. They would have liked her boys, and doted on her lovely girl. She sees that in her dreams.
She dreams about killing Bellatrix and the spy. Those dreams happen more than she likes to admit, not that her screaming at the end of each one really helps keep it a secret. She does her best, though, and not even Arthur knows how often the dreams end with her dropping her wand and walking away, leaving the burden to someone else.
Molly didn't want to kill them. That ought to count for something, in the end.
-
Where is your home where is your home where is your home?
Still they ask.
-
George has scars, too. They aren't from the walls.
He shows her his scars, places his wrist next to her own and compares the lines, and he says he understands. He doesn't. Their scars don't look alike in the slightest, and doesn't he remember her bandages, those days after the war? But he doesn't remember, and he can't see the truth in front him. He can only see his pain.
Molly looks at George and sees Gideon, looks at Fred's picture on the wall behind them and sees Fabian, looks at the scars on George's wrists and tries to imagine Gideon without Fabian. She looks at her son and sees the hurt he can't control scratched onto his own arms.
That's not Molly's way. When her brothers were killed, she didn't cut herself. She cut the spy that ruined them. When her son fell, she didn't put on a black veil and hide. She killed the woman that broke the sanctuary that should have protected him. She shares her pain. George hoards his. If she's not careful, he'll hoard hers, too.
She looks at his scars and feels him slipping away.
She feels him withdrawing, and feels her anger building, and her despair struggling to break out and most of all, more than anything else, she feels something she can't name spreading through her chest and making words impossible. The crying starts and it doesn't stop and never has she felt more hopeless or more useless.
George hugs her and makes her promise to get help. She extracts the same promise from him.
She goes to the graveyard. He goes to the pubs.
Molly hasn't seen him since.
-
Perhaps she is insane. She's at a nunnery watching flowers bud around a small graveyard, after all.
But Molly isn't insane, this she knows. And it's not her mind she needs to find again.
It's her heart.
Something broke inside her long ago, and she never really took the time to piece it back together. It's not her fault. She didn't have time to fix herself. There was a war to fight, a family to raise and a community to comfort. She did the cooking for every funeral and every wake and every memorial of every Order member. She likes to think that helped the families.
Even if it didn't, the cooking helped her. When Arthur told her she was wearing herself out, to rest before the baby came too early, she shook her head and called it her penance. He never questioned that, just left her to her pots and her breads and her roasts. And while she made those meals filled with food meant to ward off despair she told herself it wasn't her fault, it had never been her fault, they killed her brothers first, they killed them too soon, and she had only reacted to what they did to her. It wasn't her fault she was living in a war and the little brothers she should have protected weren't.
Maybe she could have been a better person, could have been the person her parents raised her to be and the person her children think she is. But she had a breaking point—everybody has a breaking point—and they killed her brothers before she understood that killing someone means killing someone's child.
She understands now. She's lost a child.
So no, it's not her fault. Except for the part that is.
-
The nuns heal her. They say the word that's been clawing at her mind and choking her speech. They say the word and slowly—slowly but with the persistence Father always praised her for—she starts to live again.
Guilt, they murmur.
It was never grief.
Grief is watching her son turn his back on them. It's watching her husband stoop with age and hide the grimace of pain. Grief is burying her brothers before her parents and then watching her parents fade away. It's an ugly scar on the face she created, on the first face she put into this world, back when the first war was still the only war.
When the doctor brings her a tiny little girl—perfect with her red hair and blotchy face and tightly clenched fingers—and she vows to that perfect creature that she will bring her a sister, that she will give her the best friend she always wanted and never got, and then the Healer touches her shoulder and her husband bites his lips before he says this is the end while the Healer says words that don't matter—that is grief.
Grief doesn't put her in a small yellow room at the edge of a nunnery in the English countryside. She is stronger than grief. Molly has tackled it before and could have tackled it again, all without forgetting a single relative's birthday or missing a single dust bunny.
Guilt, though. That's a whole different thing.
-
Where is your home where is your home where is your home?
She gives the answer they want and soon The Burrow is home again. It's where she sleeps and cooks and laughs and worries and plans and hugs her children. It's where she loves her husband.
It's where the grief is always present, in the empty seats where the twins should be. George won't come home anymore, not without Fred and not with scars he thinks his mother understands all too well.
It's where people talk in hushed whispers about the Malfoys, and Ron blushes and stammers when he realizes Molly has heard them discussing Bellatrix. It's where Harry yells and Hermione reads and Charlie sends cartoon pictures of his dragons, complete with naughty jokes the children will never know she finds hilarious.
Mothers have very specific roles in the lives of their children. Molly understands this. So does Arthur. He hasn't told anyone about that spy, so many years ago. Why would he? Mothers are supposed to create life, not end it.
She may tell George, though. There's an anger that comes from losing a sibling, a helpless anger he must feel more sharply then even she once felt.
Gideon and Fabian were supposed to be at her wedding. They had promised to make it back from the mission in time. Sworn it on Mother's rosary, in fact. Instead they died. They died because a spy saw them and realized what they knew and called for more Death Eaters and put an end to it all. Molly learned this from the spy, before.
Fred was supposed to be George's best man. They all know that.
George won't live long enough to need a best man if someone doesn't stop him, but only Molly knows that part.
-
Ginny is angry. She's furious.
Angry at her mother.
Well. So be it. Molly is angry, too.
She was angry long before Ginny. She was angry when Mother made her carry a rosary and when Father wanted her to be a Hufflepuff and when Arthur jumped feet first into the Order without telling her and when Gideon and Fabian got themselves killed a week before her wedding. She was angry when Dumbledore didn't cry telling her the news, and when her parents did nothing but cry.
Molly has known grief, has known anger and loss and yes, she has known guilt, for much longer than Ginny can ever imagine.
She will hold her ground. No matter how often Ginny asks, no matter how often Ginny yells, she will not apologize. She needed the nuns, needed the quiet of that small room by the graveyard, needed to be away from The Burrow. She needed it and she will not apologize.
And besides, she never abandoned her family. Quite the opposite, really. Her family abandoned her, Gideon and Fabian and Mother and Father left her. They left her to create her own way and she did, and she did it beautifully, thank you very much, and now she has returned from the graveyard where her parents are buried under fake Muggle names and kind nuns with quiet smiles plant daisies every spring. She's returned to help Ginny plan a wedding and Percy find his place again and Bill create a family of his own. She's returned to cook meals that will keep them healthy and stable and whole, just like she almost is for the first time in too many years.
-
She likes to think it's a good thing she had so many children. It almost makes up for the two she snatched away.
She never did find out that spy's name. He was wearing the mask when she killed him and she saw no reason to remove it when the rage had passed. She doesn't even know what he looked liked. She just knows he ended her brothers' lives. That was a mistake on his part.
George will understand. This time, she will make sure he does.
-
They visit the graveyard together, her and George.
It's not an easy conversation.
-
Patience. She will always thank the nuns for that, for the patience they taught her.
Molly has outlived the venom of her past. She thinks. She's close, at any rate.
But even if she's not close, even if she wakes up angry and afraid from every dream she has for the rest of her life, at least she's learned from her past. At least she can see the path she took to get here, and where she wants to be in the end.
She killed Bellatrix face-to-face, did she not?
That's progress.
George comes over for dinner sometimes. Bill has to forcibly drag him across the door and Percy spikes everyone's drinks with calming potions when he thinks they aren't looking but still. They eat together.
That's progress, too.
And for now, that's enough.
-
-
Author:
magentabearFandom: Harry Potter
Rating: PG-13
Warnings: Dark themes, self-harm, mentions of death. Please don't read if any of that will upset you.
Prompt: 149) The more hidden the venom, the more dangerous it is. -- Marguerite de Valois (1553-1615)
Summary: Molly Weasley has survived the weight of two wars. She's not about to let their aftermath crush her.
Author's Notes: Huge thanks to
gehayi for running this wonderful fest, to slam_girl for being such a helpful beta, and to the friends who acted as cheerleaders while I wrote this fic. And finally, thank you to any and all readers. I hope you enjoy this look at Molly. -
-
Where is your home where is your home where is your home?
They never stop asking.
-
The war is over. But the house elves aren't free and Remus can't get a decent job—not that he needs one where he is, poor dear—and those bastard Malfoys aren't going to lose their house—she will not call it a mansion—and Arthur is still slighted when it comes to promotions. The war is over but the fighting isn't.
There are scars up and down her arms. From the battle, from the wall that fell, from the wall she kept off her face with the arms that hold these scars.
The scars burn like fresh wounds when she wakes screaming in the night.
They nod seriously and bend their heads toward Arthur's concerned face. "Nothing to worry about, all part of the recovery," they say in voices they think she can't hear.
-
Everybody has a breaking point. Everybody.
-
Percy is in the corner reading. Little Ginny crawls around his feet, setting up her dolly on the left and a battered wooden owl on the right. Percy may scowl a bit when she pokes his ankles with her toy wand but he holds his feet perfectly still. He would never muss up his sister's game.
Ron is bent over his chess game, also scowling. How that boy manages to play chess against himself is something she's never understood. If Arthur were here he'd nod as if it made sense and murmur magic, darling to her.
Seems an odd sort of magic to her, really, but at least it's quieter than the twin's version.
The twins aren't on the porch with the rest of them. Off gathering leaves and sticks and bugs and such things. Boys. She smiles fondly at Ginny in her little pink frock.
Ginny chucks the wooden owl across the porch and laughs with glee. Then she dashes over to Ron and begs him to play Kwiddiss with her.
She sighs. Well. It's almost time to take Bill and Charlie in for new books and school clothes. Perhaps it's time to let Ginny pick out her own clothes. Pink does clash horribly with her hair.
Fred and George return with grubby hands and pieces of the forest she knows they will complain about cleaning up later.
But no. Only George returns. Fred is still in the forest. He fell down, George says. He fell down and he won't get up.
Percy is in front of her describing the fall. But he wasn't there, her mind insists. He was here, reading on the porch. And of course Fred can get up. She has never met a healing charm she can't work. George simply needs to lead her to his brother and watch the magic happen.
George's eyes don't look like a child's. And he doesn't cry like one, either, when she finally sees the body of the man who used to be her son.
Sometimes it's hard to tell the living from the dead, the dreams from the reality.
-
Where is your home where is your home where is your home?
She won't give the answer Arthur gives. They cluck sympathetically and draw the shutters closed.
-
Molly doesn't tell them about The Burrow.
She tells them about Gideon and Fabian and Mother and Father and picnics and messy meals and perfect weekends at the frigid seaside. Britain truly does have the worst beaches. It's a disappointment.
Arthur took her to Greek Isles for their honeymoon.
She attended three funerals, killed a spy and learned of the Order within a month of returning home.
She doesn't tell them about that, either.
-
The walls are not white. This pleases her. She may be broken and they may have put her in a little room so she can take the time to find her mind again but at least they gave her a happy place.
Insane asylum. Insane.
That’s not where she is. She may be insane, maybe she should go find one of those, go talk to the Healers at St. Mungo's, but that's not where she is right now as she looks at cheerfully painted walls around a small window that looks out onto a neat graveyard.
Molly Weasley is at a nunnery.
It was an accident, really. Not that the nuns here believe that. Certainly not. But she didn't mean to end up here, did she? And she's now sleeping here, yes? So clearly: an accident.
But it wasn't an unreasonable accident, that she will admit. She's not Ophelia, running off to a nunnery because things went bad with a couple men. No, things went wrong with her entire world. All Ophelia lost were some melodramatic fools. Molly lost heroes. Gideon and Fabian were heroes, men born straight from the Round Table itself, men who could have saved everyone if only they hadn't trusted the wrong man. Took five Death Eaters to bring them down, it did.
Fred and George were heroes, too, once. And perhaps George will be again someday. If there's one thing these quiet little nuns have taught her, it's patience. Theirs is a hopeful patience, one that honors the waiting as much as the reward. That's what she has now, what she cloaks around herself against the pain Arthur brings with every visit. He brings her news, but it's never anything new. He tells her how little the children have changed since she left, how the paranoia won't leave Ron and the despair still haunts George. But she has her patience and she has her hope and at the end of every visit, just before Arthur tips his hat to the lovely nuns, she grasps his hands in hers and tries to share that peace with him.
-
Mother was a devout Catholic from the moment she was born until the moment she returned to ashes. Molly's red hair isn't an accident. It's the Irish blood Mother never forgot, the same blood that made her tuck a wooden rosary into Molly's pocket the morning she left for Hogwarts.
She lost the rosary before she made it across the lake.
Mother's favorite place in the whole wide world was the sedate graveyard on the other side of the hill by their little cottage. The house is gone now but the graveyard isn't. Molly didn't know this when she apparated out of The Burrow, desperate to escape for just a moment, desperate for a measure of peace among the grief and the fights and the devastation in George's eyes.
That's where the nuns found her.
They don't know where to put her back.
-
The scars on her wrists truly are from the walls of Hogwarts. They weren't self-inflicted. The nuns don't believe her, though she can hardly blame them for that. Crazy woman shows up in a graveyard and pulls a stick out on them when they come to tend the flowers, that's what they can understand. And they can judge the scars—and they do—but they don't judge her. She knows the compassion that takes.
When they find her, when they start to usher her inside the walls of the nunnery and start asking questions in measured Healers' voices, Molly doesn't mind. She thanks them. She thanks them and she lets them think whatever they want about her scars.
She knows those scars are what save her from returning to The Burrow.
Arthur was with her when the walls fell down. His scars are on his back, though, the part of him that took a beating when he threw himself over her and told her don't worry, darling, I've got you.
The lines streak up and down her arms, marring the clean white skin she used to show off so many years ago at the seaside.
-
Fred is dead. So are Gideon and Fabian. So is the George she once knew.
She dreams of them often, her missing boys. Because in her mind, Gideon and Fabian have never grown. She's old enough to be their mother now. They would have liked her boys, and doted on her lovely girl. She sees that in her dreams.
She dreams about killing Bellatrix and the spy. Those dreams happen more than she likes to admit, not that her screaming at the end of each one really helps keep it a secret. She does her best, though, and not even Arthur knows how often the dreams end with her dropping her wand and walking away, leaving the burden to someone else.
Molly didn't want to kill them. That ought to count for something, in the end.
-
Where is your home where is your home where is your home?
Still they ask.
-
George has scars, too. They aren't from the walls.
He shows her his scars, places his wrist next to her own and compares the lines, and he says he understands. He doesn't. Their scars don't look alike in the slightest, and doesn't he remember her bandages, those days after the war? But he doesn't remember, and he can't see the truth in front him. He can only see his pain.
Molly looks at George and sees Gideon, looks at Fred's picture on the wall behind them and sees Fabian, looks at the scars on George's wrists and tries to imagine Gideon without Fabian. She looks at her son and sees the hurt he can't control scratched onto his own arms.
That's not Molly's way. When her brothers were killed, she didn't cut herself. She cut the spy that ruined them. When her son fell, she didn't put on a black veil and hide. She killed the woman that broke the sanctuary that should have protected him. She shares her pain. George hoards his. If she's not careful, he'll hoard hers, too.
She looks at his scars and feels him slipping away.
She feels him withdrawing, and feels her anger building, and her despair struggling to break out and most of all, more than anything else, she feels something she can't name spreading through her chest and making words impossible. The crying starts and it doesn't stop and never has she felt more hopeless or more useless.
George hugs her and makes her promise to get help. She extracts the same promise from him.
She goes to the graveyard. He goes to the pubs.
Molly hasn't seen him since.
-
Perhaps she is insane. She's at a nunnery watching flowers bud around a small graveyard, after all.
But Molly isn't insane, this she knows. And it's not her mind she needs to find again.
It's her heart.
Something broke inside her long ago, and she never really took the time to piece it back together. It's not her fault. She didn't have time to fix herself. There was a war to fight, a family to raise and a community to comfort. She did the cooking for every funeral and every wake and every memorial of every Order member. She likes to think that helped the families.
Even if it didn't, the cooking helped her. When Arthur told her she was wearing herself out, to rest before the baby came too early, she shook her head and called it her penance. He never questioned that, just left her to her pots and her breads and her roasts. And while she made those meals filled with food meant to ward off despair she told herself it wasn't her fault, it had never been her fault, they killed her brothers first, they killed them too soon, and she had only reacted to what they did to her. It wasn't her fault she was living in a war and the little brothers she should have protected weren't.
Maybe she could have been a better person, could have been the person her parents raised her to be and the person her children think she is. But she had a breaking point—everybody has a breaking point—and they killed her brothers before she understood that killing someone means killing someone's child.
She understands now. She's lost a child.
So no, it's not her fault. Except for the part that is.
-
The nuns heal her. They say the word that's been clawing at her mind and choking her speech. They say the word and slowly—slowly but with the persistence Father always praised her for—she starts to live again.
Guilt, they murmur.
It was never grief.
Grief is watching her son turn his back on them. It's watching her husband stoop with age and hide the grimace of pain. Grief is burying her brothers before her parents and then watching her parents fade away. It's an ugly scar on the face she created, on the first face she put into this world, back when the first war was still the only war.
When the doctor brings her a tiny little girl—perfect with her red hair and blotchy face and tightly clenched fingers—and she vows to that perfect creature that she will bring her a sister, that she will give her the best friend she always wanted and never got, and then the Healer touches her shoulder and her husband bites his lips before he says this is the end while the Healer says words that don't matter—that is grief.
Grief doesn't put her in a small yellow room at the edge of a nunnery in the English countryside. She is stronger than grief. Molly has tackled it before and could have tackled it again, all without forgetting a single relative's birthday or missing a single dust bunny.
Guilt, though. That's a whole different thing.
-
Where is your home where is your home where is your home?
She gives the answer they want and soon The Burrow is home again. It's where she sleeps and cooks and laughs and worries and plans and hugs her children. It's where she loves her husband.
It's where the grief is always present, in the empty seats where the twins should be. George won't come home anymore, not without Fred and not with scars he thinks his mother understands all too well.
It's where people talk in hushed whispers about the Malfoys, and Ron blushes and stammers when he realizes Molly has heard them discussing Bellatrix. It's where Harry yells and Hermione reads and Charlie sends cartoon pictures of his dragons, complete with naughty jokes the children will never know she finds hilarious.
Mothers have very specific roles in the lives of their children. Molly understands this. So does Arthur. He hasn't told anyone about that spy, so many years ago. Why would he? Mothers are supposed to create life, not end it.
She may tell George, though. There's an anger that comes from losing a sibling, a helpless anger he must feel more sharply then even she once felt.
Gideon and Fabian were supposed to be at her wedding. They had promised to make it back from the mission in time. Sworn it on Mother's rosary, in fact. Instead they died. They died because a spy saw them and realized what they knew and called for more Death Eaters and put an end to it all. Molly learned this from the spy, before.
Fred was supposed to be George's best man. They all know that.
George won't live long enough to need a best man if someone doesn't stop him, but only Molly knows that part.
-
Ginny is angry. She's furious.
Angry at her mother.
Well. So be it. Molly is angry, too.
She was angry long before Ginny. She was angry when Mother made her carry a rosary and when Father wanted her to be a Hufflepuff and when Arthur jumped feet first into the Order without telling her and when Gideon and Fabian got themselves killed a week before her wedding. She was angry when Dumbledore didn't cry telling her the news, and when her parents did nothing but cry.
Molly has known grief, has known anger and loss and yes, she has known guilt, for much longer than Ginny can ever imagine.
She will hold her ground. No matter how often Ginny asks, no matter how often Ginny yells, she will not apologize. She needed the nuns, needed the quiet of that small room by the graveyard, needed to be away from The Burrow. She needed it and she will not apologize.
And besides, she never abandoned her family. Quite the opposite, really. Her family abandoned her, Gideon and Fabian and Mother and Father left her. They left her to create her own way and she did, and she did it beautifully, thank you very much, and now she has returned from the graveyard where her parents are buried under fake Muggle names and kind nuns with quiet smiles plant daisies every spring. She's returned to help Ginny plan a wedding and Percy find his place again and Bill create a family of his own. She's returned to cook meals that will keep them healthy and stable and whole, just like she almost is for the first time in too many years.
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She likes to think it's a good thing she had so many children. It almost makes up for the two she snatched away.
She never did find out that spy's name. He was wearing the mask when she killed him and she saw no reason to remove it when the rage had passed. She doesn't even know what he looked liked. She just knows he ended her brothers' lives. That was a mistake on his part.
George will understand. This time, she will make sure he does.
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They visit the graveyard together, her and George.
It's not an easy conversation.
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Patience. She will always thank the nuns for that, for the patience they taught her.
Molly has outlived the venom of her past. She thinks. She's close, at any rate.
But even if she's not close, even if she wakes up angry and afraid from every dream she has for the rest of her life, at least she's learned from her past. At least she can see the path she took to get here, and where she wants to be in the end.
She killed Bellatrix face-to-face, did she not?
That's progress.
George comes over for dinner sometimes. Bill has to forcibly drag him across the door and Percy spikes everyone's drinks with calming potions when he thinks they aren't looking but still. They eat together.
That's progress, too.
And for now, that's enough.
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Date: 2010-07-28 08:05 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-08-23 12:21 am (UTC)