"I remember the beginning." She remembers his red hair during Transfiguration, a phoenix reborn in his soul and shining through; his smile when he got a question right, "Great, Arthur! Ten points to Gryffindor!"; and those thick glasses that almost hid his blue eyes when she watched him in the common room. She remembers the day he ducked his head, his ears burning until they burst into his hair, when he noticed her noticing him.
While Muggle borns tossed crumpled pieces of paper across the room, Arthur and Molly folded paper into shapes and magicked them into each other's reaching hands. She folded swans, hummingbirds, and phoenixes that she colored until they matched his hair. Arthur folded only airplanes because (as he whispered to Molly one day), "It's the only airplane I know how to fly."
Molly remembers a day, one she tells him about now, when she spent hours putting on make up and nail polish, doing her hair and magicking her clothes spotless. When she was seventeen, when Hogwarts was still a close memory and her parents asked her if she would be a reputable witch. When all Molly wanted to do was go on dates with Arthur Weasley, the boy who apparated to her doorstep every week with a fresh bouquet of flowers.
"Good evening, my Molly," Arthur said, grin reaching his eyes as he leaned in to kiss her on her cheek. He pressed the flowers into her hand, but held her light fingers between his for just a moment.
"Hello Arthur," Molly said, dropping his hand sooner than her fingers wanted to stop touching him and reaching back to place the flowers just inside the house.
Inside, Molly imagined her parents straining forward into their seats, dangerously close to slamming their noses into the hardwood floors. That was all they did, always with one foot forward to find out if Arthur was going to make a respectable woman of their daughter. He was pureblood but, in their minds, that wasn't a binding contract of morality.
"Brighton again?" she asked.
Molly watched his eyes light up at dusk, his head nod until it might have rolled off his shoulders and into the flowerbed of sunflowers. "Oh, yes, please. But first—" Arthur cleared his throat and pushed through the crack in the door behind her, and she felt her heart pick up when his shoulder brushed hers. "Mr. and Mrs. Prewett, Molly and I will be going to the beach now."
She heard her parents respond, but Molly focused on the touch, on him being close—it was what he did to her. He stood close and her gravity pulled down against his.
"Bye Mum, Dad," she shouted, pulling Arthur away in the middle of a conversation about "it". "It" was probably some Muggle contraption he'd been fiddling with for weeks; his only downfall, Molly thought. Even as they walked down to the beach, using the same route they took every week, he paused to point out anything new.
Nudging a broken wooden box, the carved flowers in its side fading and a dancer lying on the sidewalk:"Do you think this is pretty?" He paused, rolling the trash between his hands. "I'll keep this one." Molly looked at him sideways, waiting for him to drop it. But he didn't, and pocketed it in his robes instead. "I'll fix it!"
Waving wildly at a Muggle riding a metal pole with two wheels that had a cloth box dragging behind: "It's called a bicycle, and they pedal to go forward. The box on the back is called an enclosed walker! They put their babies in it."
They were nearing the beach and Molly shook her head. "The things Muggles do. It's a wonder their children live so long."
Arthur shrugged, "Oh, I don't know." He brought Molly's hand to his mouth and kissed the back. "I'd like to let our babies ride in a walker."
Molly laughed, and dropped his hand to start running towards the beach. A storm was coming, the air stirring her robes around her like a gown, her red curls dancing around her face. "Oh, but Arthur, who said anything about children?" She laughed and sat down in the sand on top of a blanket she didn't notice him spell into life. "I don't remember talk of children, and certainly not of children using Muggle contraptions."
"But Molly," he said, kicking at the sand, "I like Muggle contraptions and I like children." The wind blew as he leaned down to dig a metal pole wrapped in plastic out of the sand.
Molly heard the sky groan open and the sound of raindrops pattering up from the south. She reached in her robes for her wand, but Arthur had opened the Muggle object into a large, upside down plastic cup. "I don't think—"
Arthur shook any sand off it and sat next to Molly, wrapping one arm around her. "It's called an umbrella." He held it over the two of them just in time for the rain to come.
Molly flinched against Arthur, fretful the rain would destroy her dress, yet it never came.
"Umbrellas work quite well," he said, and those blue eyes were looking at her, leaning in.
"Two hours later, you surprised me. With 'it.'" Molly shakes her head, smoothes the bed sheets around her husband. She's careful not to nudge where the snake bit him and brushes through what red hair he still has; she's anxious to keep him warm like he kept her dry. "Since then, we knew it would be 'till death do us part,'" she says, "but this is no time for parting, Arthur."
Molly sighs, kisses his forehead and walks to the door. Grasping the doorframe of Arthur's room at St. Mungo's, she says, "I'll be back soon. I expect you to be awake, Arthur. We can discuss what happened on the beach after you brought out the Muggle-magicked umbrella."
She smiles and blushes, and leaves the room.