They didn't have a plan.
It wasn't the kind that required the spontaneous, a plan to not have plans. Theirs was a contented yielding of command over futures, until the end.
Molly Prewett had known this for some time. They were young, and beyond any means that a careful measure could direct them. She had, once, been brimming with plans and dreams. She was going to live in a Tudor, starched white plaster and dark timber beams.
She was going to have a dark and shadowy husband, and a brown haired daughter, Rhea, who would smile with the dimples of her mother.
She was going to be a respected gardener on the edge of a mostly muggle town, a town where people wore hats on the street and chatted with their neighbors about local politics.
Her younger brothers would live there, both high ranked ministry officials, and their children would be as good as hers.
This was before she met Arthur. When she could run faster than both freckled blonde Gideon and tall Fabian on the field behind her house. There were milk-stemmed dandelions and pinecones hidden in the thick grass, but they never, ever, wore shoes. Her brothers would steal the fresh laundry from the line and they'd clutch damp cotton in their hands; spooky ghosts in a game of tag, veiled care in airplanes of joie de vivre.
Molly was full of the same heart-pounding, knee-weakening color, and Arthur held it too.
This was their wedding day.
The castle bounced off the lake in untidy reflections. It was the lake they knew. Molly remembered the brief haze of unclarity; running for Louise, after a sunlit afternoon around the lake with Arthur. He had held her hand as they talked, a most natural thing. They were friends.
It was a breathless and calm friendship, full of lip-bit smiles and little dares.
It was, almost, as if they lost sight of most things when they were near each other. And he, everything but blind, certainly had sight for none but her.
Arthur dreamed of function, but he carried an organized mess. He was Captain of Gobstones and purveyor of answers, although he promised none. It was a fumbled existence; he reveled in it.
He'd kissed her in the greenhouse. Bent over for a whisper and before she could imagine it, he'd brushed her neck. The smell of mulch had lingered on her robes that day, and she had worn it proud.
The same mulch smell held in the forest that night. Louise, her oldest friend, had magically sowed pansies near their tread and woven a crown of bluest forget-me-nots into Molly's hair. A matching sprig sunk over Arthur's pinhole
They hadn't known each other the first two years. Then they were friends. The more happened so gently, that neither remembered a first kiss, or a first hand held. They remembered casual kisses hello and heartfelt hands that meant anything platonic, and had somewhere arrived everything but.
They had run into each other, a happy accident from hundreds of acclimating instances
Crisp night dew in late march air grew from a canopy above their heads, the dense edge of the forest full with the light from the bright moon and lit castle, full of sleeping students.
She was beauty, dressed in aged white lace. It held stiff looking frills that had lost their anger long ago and settled, drooping and cream in a style that had not been sewn for a bride. But it was hers, her mother's, borrowed and forgotten; too late to return.
It was her wedding dress, and she smiled across at Arthur, her round face full of shy joy.
Arthur remembered her here, on the lake. It was on his way to class, and it was the only time he'd been late to class, before Molly. He'd seen a glimpse of red from one the stone windows, and waited as he watched it bob and splash with youth vigor. She was swimming with a blonde blur, too heated and immersed to feel the chill of early October.
Molly had always been driven by that fire. He loved her for her innocent strength, the character that always had him wondering whether she was some Joan of Arc, who lived for her cause and would die by her word and her sword.
Then they were together, and her careful plans lost their careful compass rose. They were ideas which would always hold the same appeal, but the Tudor had become black-and-white. She would garden other things.
And they so they had begun to decay, without her sword to wield them.
Hume Peabody was his best man. He much deserved the position, although it had had irregular duties. The couple, of the past few months inseparable, had arrived on his doorstep late that afternoon. Her face was flushed and curving frame held by Arthurs arm round her. He was grinning, calm but bursting.
They were getting married, as soon as they could find a minister.
Hume had been surprised, but Arthur and Molly did rash with the precision of fate.
Arthur had known Hume since their first days at school. It had been Hume, a muggleborn, who had first introduced him to the mystery that surrounded that other world. He had become enamored of the mechanics and cogs, that turned into the complex functions of sparks and heat and flying; he didn't understand it, and how it turned magic even when you had all the bits figured out
Molly was like that. She was a cog that somewhere fit into his story, and somehow, it fell together even while what he knew was falling around him.
There was no denying that they were living in a time of uncertainties.
But that was not why they were there, on the edge of the forbidden forest, recounting vows that they knew for all their hearts.
It wasn't because the Dark presence had killed Molly's brothers and mother and cousins in the time since their graduation.
It wasn't because Arthur was joining the Order, and following the same path as her late family.
It wasn't because they couldn't afford anything more.
It wasn't because Molly knew a little Weasley was on its way, already.
The five waited in near silence, the spring crickets hum and bowtruckles buzz dim in their ears.
"I do"
"I do"
They kissed. And they were married.