stars, i have seen them fall
The stars are shining above the Burrow.
Of course they are, they always do. It was one of the things Molly loved the most about living so far away from the city—that the sky was always dark enough for the starlight to shine through. She could look up at the sky and be comforted by the beauty of a thousand embers glowing in the night. She could pretend, even for just a little while, that everything was alright.
But nothing ever lasts, Molly knows. Least of all the stars.
For all that they seem to be an unchanging, ever present source of comfort, this is the path the stars must take: they spark to life, and glow brighter and brighter until they eventually burn out, and then they die. To flicker and flash and fade—an endless, cruel cycle of beautiful things burning through their lives.
Molly is no stranger to loss or grief. She remembers, all too well, the night Alastor Moody came to tell them that Fabian and Gideon were gone. Both lost in one night.
They died like heroes, people said later. It took five Death Eaters to take them down.
They were her boys, first. Boys she had practically raised when their parents had gone. Laughter and smiles she would never hear again. Gone.
But then she saw shadows of them in her children. In Bill's wit, in Charlie's recklessness, and even Ron's unassuming bravery, but none of her children reminded her more of Fabian and Gideon than Fred and George, who she'd named after Fabian and Gideon. To honor them.
She didn't talk about them much; it was far too painful. Still, Frederick Gideon and George Fabian had turned out far too much like their uncles. And as they grew up, she lived in fear, that they too would burn too brightly and have the same fate.
When George lost an ear, she thought, now. I have to stop this now before it's too late. And she tried. She really did. But she had tried with Fabian and Gideon. She tried with Ron and Harry, as well, and look how well that turned out. Again, still, she tried with Fred and George. Like Fabian and Gideon, and all her other children who have made their own choices and gone their own ways, she knows she does not get a say.
But then Fred, oh—
It's the worst pain in the world, they say, for a mother to have to bury her child.
Fabian and Gideon. Fred. All bright, beautiful, fearless boys. Brave and headstrong. Gryffindors to the end. All gone before they had turned 25.
She looks at the sky, not looking at any one star but seeing all of them at once anyway. The beauty, the wonder of it all. She thinks back to the lives her boys have led. The lives they've touched, for being the people they were—the people she raised them to be.
The truth in our stars is this: they are fleeting. And she thinks, perhaps they are all the more precious for it.