Had We Never Loved
By Misha
Disclaimer- Everything belongs to J.K. Rowling and is not mine, however much I might wish differently. However, I am not making any money off of this, so please do not sue me!
Author's Notes- This is weird, I had the title before I had anything else. I then started thinking up the stroy to go with it and this is what I came up with. It was started before I read OotP and while it's not that far from cannon, there are some differences, such as Lucius' age. There might be a couple of other things too, I wasn't paying that much attention. This is set at the beginning of "Chamber of Secrets", after the run-in at Florish and Botts. It's just my theory on why Arthur and Lucius hate each other. Well, that's all for now, enjoy!
Pairing- Lucius/Molly, Arthur/Molly.
Summery- Things can be forgotten and history changed as if they had never happened...
Rating- PG-13
Spoilers- All five books, to be safe.
It was strange how things changed as time went by.
Molly was struck by that thought on a summer's day in Diagon Alley as she looked into the face of her past and felt nothing but contempt.
It was as if the man was a stranger and in many ways, he was. The Lucius that she had known was long gone.
She accepted that as she looked into his face at Flourish and Blotts. The knowledge was a relief as it allowed her to close that chapter in her life once and for all.
The past had no meaning, not any more.
For Lucius, the meeting had a similar affect. He saw her, though he did not acknowledge her, and thought about how different she was from the girl he had once known.
Oh, he remembered those days, though not with fondness. They were a memory of foolishness and the mistakes one makes in their youth.
Still, seeing her again made him realize that was all it was. There was no lasting feelings, only distaste that he had ever been involved with this woman. Whatever else might have been there, was long dead.
But, dead as it may be, neither of them could wipe away the events that had happened thirty years earlier.
That same summer night, they both sat up and poured over the events in their minds, trying to see how it had happened. Of course, both of their memories were tainted by time.
Neither of them wanted to admit the whole truth of those days.
It started in her fifth and his sixth year at Hogwarts.
She was a Gryffindor, he a Slytherin. But those were the days before the rise of Voldemort, before Gryffindor and Slytherin Houses truly hated each other, there was just a good dose of dislike between the Houses.
But, at the same time, it was not impossible for members of those houses to date. So they had.
Molly would never know it, but Lucius had been watching her for a year before he approached her for the first time.
He studied her, waiting for the right moment once he had decided that he was going to go after this girl.
The moment came right before Halloween and almost instantly they became a couple. They were both different then.
His family didn't wholeheartedly approve, but neither were they against the match. All they did was advice him to be cautious.
Her family on the other hand was vocal in their disapproval. They wanted her to marry a good Gryffindor boy and have good Gryffindor children, instead she was fooling around with a Slytherin.
But she didn't care what they said, she was young and she was in love. To her fifteen year old eyes, Lucius was the most handsome boy in the entire world. She had never imagined that she could feel the way he made her feel.
Lucius was not as swept away as Molly, but he too was lost in the wonderment of what they were experiencing. He was positive that there was no one else like Molly in the entire world.
For a while, it was perfect. They were lost in the magic of what they were feeling.
They made love for the first time on a snowy night in January. At that moment, Molly believed that she would love him forever and Lucius thought that for the first time in his life, he might actually know what love was.
But it was not to last.
It would fall apart before summer, due to a schoolboy prank.
Lucius and his friends set it up so that Arthur Weasley would end up alone in the Forbidden Forrest, believing that Molly was somehow lost and in danger.
Only by the intervention of one of the girls their year who had over-heard were the teachers able to get there before anything terrible happened.
When Molly heard what Lucius had done and that she had been the means to which he had done it, she was furious. She realized that Lucius was not the man she wanted him to be.
There was an angry, tear-filled confrontation. Lucius pleaded with Molly to listen and tried to excuse his behaviour, but she wouldn't listen. She just hissed that she never wanted to see him again and walked out of his life.
Of course, it wasn't that simple. They were still at school together, but Molly went out of her way to avoid Lucius.
She began to date Arthur, seeing that he had doted on her for years. He was good and solid-he was not as dangerous as Lucius.
Lucius glared in the background his hatred of Arthur increasing and his feelings for Molly quickly turning dark and bitter.
The year passed and Lucius graduated. Molly graduated the next year and quickly became engaged to Arthur.
Life moved on. She tried to forget about her dismal first love. Her parents were pleased, Arthur was all they had ever wanted for her.
The Malfoys were pleased too, she was not quite what they had intended for their eldest son
Molly and Arthur married not long after she graduated and within a year she had given birth to William and then a year after that, she got pregnant again.
Lucius found another path, after graduating, he entered the service of the Dark Lord and began looking for a suitable wife. He occasionally thought of Molly, but in time, he began to forget her.
When he thought of her, it was only as a dreadful mistake he had been lucky to escape.
They met in Diagon Alley once, during Molly's second pregnancy. He had made a scornful comment about the life she had chosen and she had shuddered at the darkness she saw in his eyes.
She wondered how she could ever have loved him. He wondered what he had ever seen in her.
They both forgot the meeting and went on with their lives.
Molly had another son, Charles and the war began in earnest. They were on separate sides, though Molly tried not to be involved. Yet she knew how dangerous the world was and how terribly bleak the future seemed. She had more children in that dark time and feared for their futures.
Lucius married his suitable wife not long after Molly bore her fourth and fifth children, twins Fred and George. They each had a son in the Spring of 1980 and their lives were far from one another's.
They never even thought about each other any more. She would have one last child, making it seven in total. He would only have ever have the one son. The Dark Lord would fall to a one-year child in the fall of 1981 and Lucius would escape conviction. Molly would hear her husband rage about it and wonder to herself how much things had changed and how stupid she had once been.
She saw him once more, not long after the Dark Lord's fall and shivered at how cold and harsh he was. She couldn't see any reminder of the Lucius she had loved so long before.
He had looked at her dismissively, seeing only a short and plump matronly woman and trying to remember what it was about her that had captivated him.
They stared at each other that afternoon, strangers trying to recognize one another.
That was when they both realized there was nothing left and they began to edit their past.
To hear Molly tell it, Arthur had been her one and only love. She would pretend that she had never had another sweetheart. Even in her own mind, she would push those days aside as if they had never happened.
Lucius would do the same. He would edit her out of his past, forgetting that he had ever mixed with anything other than the most suitable of women.
They rarely thought of each other as the years past. Even when they saw each other in Diagon Alley on that fateful summer day, it meant nothing.
The past had long been forgotten and as far as they were concerned, it had never happened. All that they had meant to each was forever lost as if it had never existed in the first place.
The End