Lost
Her brothers are dead.
Her sweet, overly protective, slightly neurotic brothers are both dead.
Gideon and Fabian were just here. They were just in her kitchen, not even an hour ago, making jokes about Arthur's graying hair and laughing at Bill's attempts to get on the toy broomstick they had gotten him for his birthday last year. He still hasn't mastered it, which is a shame, because once he's on it there's no one in the world who can claim he's not magnificent.
That's not the point.
The point is: they were here. Standing, right next to her, and eating the chocolate cake she made this morning for Arthur's birthday. Gideon was throwing cake at little Charlie, who was throwing his cake right back at his favorite uncle, and Fabian was talking to baby Percy, not yet one, about the properties of bezoars.
And now they're dead.
She wasn't there when they died, and she wishes, wishes, wishes that she could have been there, could have cradled her older brothers in her arms and been with them at the end; that they wouldn't have died alone in the dark.
She can picture the battle as clear as day: Fabian fighting off two masked men as Gideon fought a Death Eater twice his size, the smoke and the lights of their spells and hexes as bouncing from the bricks of the alleyway like rainbows from a prism. She knows, deep in her heart of hearts, that when Fabian and Gideon finally fell to the ground - like heroes, Alastor had said, they'd fought and died like heroes - the only sound anyone would hear was Bellatrix's loud, scornful laugh. And Molly knows that laugh, knows it anywhere, because she used to know what Bellatrix sounded like when she really laughed.
She knows Bellatrix hasn't laughed in years.
That's not the point.
The point is: her brothers are dead and she knows - like the back of her hand, or Arthur's smile, or how two and two make four - that Bellatrix has had a hand in it. Gideon, always so wise, always able to offer advice or a shoulder to cry on, so sarcastic and witty that many thought him suited more to Slytherin than Hufflepuff. She loves him so much it hurts, and now he isn't here to love her back. Fabian, the jokester, her parents' pride and joy, the life of the party. He died with a smile on his face. She likes to think it was his way of saying not even death scared him, but she knows that it did.
She doesn't remember their last words, or the last things they said to her sons or what color robes they were wearing. She doesn't know what to tell Dorcas when Arthur calms her down, when she's stopped crying something hysterical and just stares at the diamond ring on her finger like it's going to bring her Fabian back. She doesn't know what she's going to tell her boys when they ask why Uncle Gid and Uncle Fabe aren't at Sunday supper. She doesn't know how she will ever feel whole again, not when her boys - her men - are no longer living.
But she can picture their four hazel eyes and the way the spark of life left them, and she feels sick, right down to her very bones, as she imagines a battle-hardened Bellatrix walking amongst her brothers corpses, laughter on her lips and twirling her wand in her hand like she has just disarmed Molly in the Charms classroom.
Molly does not know how she will survive this loss, but she does know that somehow, some way, she is going to kill that bitch.