A/N: Okay, for the very first time in this story
(minus the Draco outtake), I am allowing another character other than Harry,
Ron, or Hermione to take control of the view.
You will see what I mean later.
WARNING: This chapter does include
angst and absolutely no fluffy, mushy-gushy stuff.
And PS- Thanks for all the lovely reviews!
Disclaimer: Nope!
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Molly Weasley was everything Harry had ever imagined a mother to be.
She was worn with age but still full of spirit. With children ranging from their mid-twenties all the way down to
a newborn infant and everything in between, it was impossible for her to even
think about slowing down. She was the
epitome of what a good mother should be.
Her eyes shone with years of bandaged cuts and kissed foreheads. She always smelled like freshly baked pastries whether or not she'd spent any time at all in the kitchen that day. She could scold like no one's business, but she always had a good reason when she was firm.
Everything about her just oozed with motherliness.
Harry, who had grown up without parents of his own, had always imagined his own mother to be exactly that type of woman. When he'd been very small, he had often imagined what his life would have been like if his parents had never been killed; in his fantasies, he always imagined himself as the oldest in a long line of children, lots of brothers and sisters who would play with him and grow up with him. And none of them would even remotely be like Dudley Dursley.
And then he met the Weasleys.
To the untrained eye, they were nothing more than a large family with more children than could reasonably be afforded. "All Weasleys have red hair, freckles, and more children than they can afford." Yes, that had been the first description he'd really heard of the redheaded family whose son sat in the same compartment with him on their first train ride to Hogwarts.
But then Harry got to know them.
It turned out that they were much more than what he'd originally observed. They were, honestly, the closest to the perfect family that you could possibly get. Sure, they had their fair share of problems, but with nine- well, ten now- members of the household, a few tiffs were perfectly acceptable.
But they all really loved each other.
Like Ginny and Ron, for example. They
were, with the exception of Fred and George, the closest siblings
chronologically, separated by not even an entire year. Harry had heard each of them complain
endlessly about the other, and they fought like cats and dogs most of the time
when they were together. But Harry had
been there and seen the look on Ron's face during their second year when they
overheard Professor McGonagall say that Ginny had been taken into the Chamber
of Secrets. And it was more than clear
that they shared a whole lifetime of secrets that no one else, no matter how
good of a friend, could even begin to compare wealth to. They might not have liked each other for
every second of the fifteen years they'd spent growing up together, but they
had always loved each other.
And that was the beauty of Molly Weasley.
She had somehow managed to raise a whole line of children in one house, and shockingly, none of them hated each other. And the weirdest part of all that was that each of the Weasley children was a world's different than the next. She'd raised a Gringotts curse breaker, a dragon trainer, a ministry official, a dual set of pranksters, one-third of the trio who was expected to save the world, an incredibly brave young woman, and she was set to do it all over again with the newest addition to her household.
It was truly amazing.
Harry couldn't imagine any other woman being able to do it. Mrs. Weasley was, and would probably always be, the closest thing he'd ever have to a mother of his own. She hadn't raised him or anything like that, but she'd given him more of a motherly love than anyone ever had before.
It was insane really how sometimes Harry was so jealous of Ron. It wasn't like he ever meant to be jealous,
but he couldn't help it. Actually, the
whole situation was totally crazy and ironic.
Ron wanted nothing more than to be known for something; he wanted
desperately to just once be the center of attention. He wanted money and individuality and fame and all the other
things he'd grown up without. And
Harry had every bit of that. But he
would have given it up in a second flat if asked to; he would turn over every
knut in his Gringotts vault just to have a fraction of the pure love, which Ron
received so generously from a family who couldn't afford to give their children
the material things they so desired. Ron
didn't know how lucky he was to have brothers and sisters who looked out for
him and a mother and father who loved him unconditionally. He didn't know, and would probably never
know, how badly Harry had wished for just one day with his parents, just one
scraped knee healed perfectly by a mother's kiss, just one afternoon spent in
the company of a father, just one hug given just because, and just one bedtime
story read while he was tucked away in bed.
But wishing had never done shit for Harry Potter.
He would never get any of those things, and he knew this. But as a young child, he'd clung desperately to the idea of hope and faith and wishes made on the brightest stars.
One of his earliest memories occurred when he was only three years old. He remembered standing behind the large China cabinet in the Dursley's living room and watching as his aunt read a book to Dudley. Dudley had never been small, but at the age of three, he was still able to sit on his mother's lap comfortably. Harry, who had learned at a very young age that being quiet was definitely beneficial, watched silently, listening to the story and grinning to himself when Aunt Petunia disguised her voice to match those of the various characters. Before long, though, the story was over, and she was closing the book.
"Now, you run upstairs and change into your jam-jams," she said sweetly, running a hand over her son's blonde hair. "And Mummy'll be right up to tuck you in."
Dudley had jumped down from the chair and raced for the stairs, never noticing
Harry as he crouched behind the cabinet, completely hidden by the shadows of
the doorway. But when Dudley was safely
upstairs, Harry had attempted the impossible.
"Aunt Petunia?" he asked quietly, stepping out of the shadows and a little closer to the chair where his aunt was still sitting.
"What is it?" she asked briskly, frowning at the sight of him. "You're supposed to be in bed."
Harry knew perfectly well that he was supposed to be in bed, but, as he was feeling extremely brave, he still managed the impossible request. "Well..." he stuttered slightly, growing more and more nervous of being in an adult's presence. "I... I was wondering if maybe..." he took a breath, "...if maybe you could tuck me in, too."
For a long, long moment, his aunt just stared at him. Harry was almost positive that her lack of answer doubled as a no, but just as he started to turn around and retreat back to the hallway, a hand stopped him. Aunt Petunia raised her hand just slightly, and Harry flinched automatically, but to his surprise, she simply laid it lightly on his shoulder. He was sure that someone must have held him long enough to change his nappies when he was a baby, but he couldn't remember any of that. The only times his aunt had ever touched him were to clock him upside the head after he accidentally spilled his drink or happened to be in her way as she was cooking. At three years of age, he related his aunt's touch to fear and punishment, but there was nothing in this touch that spoke of any such thing.
She was being gentle.
Harry stared back at the woman in the chair and tried to fathom why she was looking at him like that. She was watching him calmly, her eyes gazing over slightly as she stared. Harry, being too young for glasses, looked back, emerald green eyes so large and innocent.
And
then Aunt Petunia started to cry.
She wasn't being loud and whiney like Dudley so often was when threw a temper
tantrum; her tears were silent and meaningful.
Shaking slightly, she raised her other hand to his cheek and carefully
placed it against the skin there, never taking her eyes away from his own.
"Oh, Lily..."
Her words were quiet, but Harry heard them, though he didn't understand them. At that age, Harry didn't have a clue as to who Lily was or why she was making his aunt cry. He didn't know anything about his parents; he could just barely comprehend that he didn't have any. But he knew his aunt, and though she wasn't the kindest of people, she was the only family he had.
And it hurt him that she was crying.
After standing before her for several more terrifying moments, he finally found his voice long enough to whisper, "Aunt Petunia, are you okay?"
This was seemingly all it took for her to snap out of her momentary lack of sanity. She immediately took her hands away from him and stood up, wiping quickly at her eyes before stalking past him as if she hadn't even seen him standing there. Harry turned around and watched as she walked briskly up the stairs to tuck her only child into bed.
And then he returned to his own bed, a pile of blankets on a cot in a tiny cupboard underneath the same set of stairs his aunt had just ascended. He lay awake for a long time that night, remembering the way his aunt had touched him so gently, the way her tears looked as they fell down her cheeks, the helpless tone of her voice as she said that name- Lily. And who was Lily? Could she possibly love him in the way that his aunt never had and never would? And he waited, for what seemed like hours, for Aunt Petunia to come and tuck him in.
She never did.
Twelve years later, Harry was over the idea that his parents might magically reappear and rescue him from his aunt and uncle. He no longer held onto the desire of being tucked into bed at night or any of the other childhood rights he'd been denied. He was too old for all of that anyway; he was fifteen years old physically and somewhere close to forty mentally. There weren't many other teenagers who had been forced to deal with the things that Harry Potter had been faced with in his short lifetime. But it didn't do to dwell on the past or on the promise of the inevitable future.
His parents weren't there.
They had never been there.
They would never be there.
And to top all of that off, Harry was also being forced to deal with the fact that his parents might not have been the people he'd always imagined. In his mind, they had been perfect, good people- people who had been killed in a tragic act of love and protection for him, their only child.
But maybe that wasn't how it happened at all.
Maybe his parents had never truly loved him; from what he'd recently been told, they had never even wanted him. Maybe their marriage had been one of circumstance instead of commitment. Maybe all of his childhood fantasies of growing up in a loving household with brothers and sisters and warm, caring parents would never have been the situation even if they had survived the attack.
Maybe he would have grown up exactly the way he'd always imagined Malfoy had.
It was no secret that Draco Malfoy had been raised in a less-than-nurturing environment. Harry had proof of this assumption from the few occasions he'd viewed Malfoy in the company of his parents. When he was with his parents, Malfoy was no longer the smart-mouthed intimidator he was at Hogwarts. Quite the contrary, actually; he transformed into the intimidated, and he never spoke without first being addressed. Of course, Harry had no way of really knowing what went on behind the closed doors of Malfoy Manor, but he saw the way they came across publicly. Narcissa Malfoy was the epitome of the highest ranking social circle in the wizarding world. She was stunning and always impeccably dressed and groomed; she clearly represented decades of wealth and good breeding. Her husband, Lucius Malfoy, could clear a room anywhere he went, purely by the sheer presence of power and influence he seemed to exude. Together publicly, Lucius and Narcissa appeared happy with each other, smiling and even occasionally touching each other. But, of course, everyone knew what the situation really was. Lucius could see, even sleep with, anyone he wanted to, and Narcissa's role was to pretend as though it wasn't happening. It was an understanding, really; he got the opportunity to take other women to bed, and she got the opportunity to be Mrs. Lucius Malfoy. The name in itself demanded attention and recognition. They only had one child together, most likely because they believed in the oldest rules of society concerning namesake and inheritance. A son was born on the first try, and there was simply no need nor was there a desire for anymore children. It was clear that neither Narcissa nor Lucius really concerned themselves too much with their son; he was more of a trophy, a necessity, if you will- he was someone to teach the family ways to and leave the family fortune to.
Maybe Harry's life would have been exactly like that.
His father had obviously fallen into a rather weighty inheritance somewhere down the line, and from all Harry knew, the Potters were also a well-respected Pureblooded family. He didn't have sort of clue as to where the fortune came from or what sort of business his family took part in. If Snape was being truthful, the Potters had also held several very old-fashioned views about the mixing of wizard and Muggle blood. If he had survived, perhaps James Potter would have viewed his only son in the way that Lucius Malfoy viewed his own- as nothing more than a future for the family.
Was that what his life would have been like?
Would he have grown up knowing that the only concern his parents had for him was how well he carried the family name?
With all the money his parents had possessed, the likelihood of them not using some of it to get others to raise him were very slim. He imagined what it would be like to be raised by a series of nannies, none of them even coming close to what a real mother should.
And what about his real mother?
Had she really considered him just an accident? A fortunate accident, of course, as it had certainly done wonders for her social status and bank account. But an accident. He was an accident.
She hadn't wanted him.
He had no mother.
Closing his eyes to the thought, Harry climbed into Ron's extra bed and tucked himself in.
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When Hope's whimpering finally died out, and the baby was quiet and still, Molly carefully placed her back into the wicker bassinet, which had seen so many other babies before it. Hope, lying properly in her baby bed, slept on peacefully, her tiny chest rising and falling with each little breath that she took.
Molly watched her youngest child and smiled fondly, remembering so many other nights just like the one she was currently having, so many sleepless nights spent tending needy infants. Hope was actually one of the quieter ones; she was already sleeping much longer than most babies her age, and her cries were very rarely loud wails of despair. She was a lot like Percy in that way; he'd been the most even-tempered baby she'd ever seen, a trait, which had stayed with him growing up.
Charlie had been the most restless of her children. He was sick and colicky from the time he'd been born, and Molly hadn't gotten an entire night of sleep until he was a full two years old. Bill had been mostly average, cranky on certain nights but an angel on others. The twins had always done everything in unison, and this had included midnight screams of hunger when they were infants. Surprisingly, though, handling the twins as babies hadn't been nearly as much trouble as it had been handling Ron and Ginny together. Neither of them were particularly fussy on their own, but there had always been an unmistakable rivalry between them, and Molly had nearly lost her mind on some nights when it seemed as if they were screaming purely for the purpose of competing with each other.
Thinking back, she grinned at the memories of them growing up. She had fond memories of all of her children, of course, but while her older children had gotten along fairly well and had all been rather mature for their ages and the twins had been holy terrors from the time they were born- always into something or other, messing things up and scheming up pranks, Ginny and Ron had been downright mean to each other.
There had been so many times that she'd wanted to throttle the both of them, countless occasions that she had watched them do things for no other reason than to annoy each other. But the most memorable moments had been the times she'd caught them playing together nicely and looking out for each other. Of course, they rarely did any of those sorts of things when they knew someone else was around. No, but she'd often spied them playing calmly in the backyard as she watched them secretly, hidden by the curtains of the kitchen window.
Chuckling
to herself, she quietly snuck out of the tiny downstairs room, which had been
transformed into a nursery and made her way up to the second landing where her
own bedroom was located. On a whim,
though, she had the urge to look in on Ginny sleeping, memories of her as a
little girl still fresh in her mind.
Being careful to make no noise, she slowly opened the door to her other
daughter's room and peered in.
Ginny was lying on top of the blankets, as she so often did due to her
unnaturally hot-bloodedness. Her hair
was down and falling across the pillow freely, her pale skin illuminated by the
moon's soft spring glow. Smiling at the
beauty that was her oldest daughter, Molly turned to leave again but stopped
suddenly as her eyes flitted to the extra bed in Ginny's room. It was empty.
For a split second, panic hit her body full force. She had a crazy vision of herself attempting to explain to the
Grangers that their daughter had suddenly turned up missing for no
apparent reason. But then the vision
vanished. There was a reason, and Molly
Weasley was willing to bet money that it had something to do with her own
youngest son.
Now on a mission, Molly left Ginny's room and headed back up the stairs, very intent on blessing both Ron and Hermione out. She reached the fourth floor in record time and walked directly to the only door on that landing. She raised a fist to knock on the door but stopped almost immediately.
Twenty-six years of motherhood and eight children had left Molly's ear trained to hear things. And a nightmare in process was one of the most recognizable of all the sounds.
Twisting the knob and pushing the door open, Molly stuck her head into the room and instantly halted. Ron's bed, as she had expected, was empty, but that was no longer her concern at all. No, her concern was the occupied bed in that room.
Harry Potter, the Boy Who Lived, was lying on her son's extra bed, lost in a fit of dreams and nightmares. He was mumbling something that she couldn't quite hear properly, so she crept closer, straining her ear to make out the words.
"No... no, no..." he muttered intently to someone Molly could only assume was hidden behind his closed eyelids. His head jerked slightly, and his mouth twisted up into an abnormal line. "Don't!" he commanded firmly.
Molly held her breath and sat gently on the edge of the bed. She had dealt with her fair share of nightmares; raising children naturally ensued taking care of their normal fear of darkness and monsters under the bed. But those were average nightmares, dreams that a hug and a cookie could erase from memory. Something told her that no amount of sweets was going to vanish the visions that Harry was seeing right then. These were a different sort of nightmares.
And she'd only seen this sort once before.
Once again, her mind drifted back to Ginny. As a child, she hadn't been frightened of much, but she had returned from her first year at Hogwarts as a timid, jumpy, nervous little girl, scared of everything. And her nightmares had been like nothing Molly had even imagined. She would actually scream out in terror, cry for hours, and refuse to go to bed at night. Molly had tried to imagine what it would be like to prefer insomnia to a night's sleep, but she'd never been fully able to comprehend the demons and monsters that haunted her little girl each night.
Now, watching Harry beg someone unknown for mercy, she felt her heart break.
Harry Potter was a child. He was no older than her own youngest children, Hope excluded. Too much was expected of him, had always been expected of him, and it wasn't fair.
He couldn't be expected to take care of the whole world when no one had ever taken care of him.
"Please, don't..." he whimpered helplessly into the darkness.
Molly placed a soothing hand to his forehead and found his face drenched with cold sweat. Just as her mind had drifted back to memories of all her other children, she thought back to the first time she'd ever laid her eyes on this one and wondered fleetingly when she had begun thinking of him as one of her own. The first time she saw Harry Potter, she hadn't even known it was him. Her motherly instinct had told her that the little boy who approached her all alone and shyly asked her for help on getting onto Platform 9 and ¾ was simply a Muggle-born child whose parents had been to busy to be bothered.
She had never guessed that he was Harry Potter.
And she had certainly never expected Ron to end up being best friends with him. But he had, and she'd immediately fallen in love with the child. True, she was fond of most of her children's friends, but Harry wasn't like any of the others. And no, it wasn't that he was the Boy Who Lived; his fame had never had anything to do with it. It was the fact that he was an orphan whose life had so-far held nothing but hardship and strife. He was so innocent and unknowing.
She had immediately felt the urge to mother him.
Over the years, Harry had become as much of a fixture in her home as the rest of her children. Whenever she and Arthur discussed matters concerning their kids, Harry's name was always brought up, almost second-naturedly. And if the opportunity was ever to arise, she would immediately bring him to live at the Burrow permanently; in fact, she had gotten into a rather heated argument with the Headmaster of Hogwarts over that very issue the year before while Harry had lay unconscious in an infirmary bed after the Third Task of the Triwizard Tournament. Dumbledore had insisted that the home of his Muggle aunt and uncle was the safest place for Harry at the time and had refused to budge on the issue. He had, however, promised to allow the switch if the situation changed.
Her eyes fell on the scar that adorned Harry's forehead, and her fingertips softly slid down the length of it as she thought about all that it represented. It had been the scar that had saved and destroyed his life all at once. It was the only remnant of what had been the most significant moment of the wizarding world in modern history. And just as the scar that rested on his forehead was permanent, the effects of that night would never disappear.
A whole world had been changed on that night.
And one little boy had lost everything.
Molly had never known Lily and James Potter, as they'd been several years younger than her. In fact, she had already been married with children of her own when they graduated from Hogwarts. It wasn't until 1981 that she even heard their names.
She remembered that morning perfectly, as though it had happened just
yesterday. She'd woken up early with a
particularly fussy Ginny, who was only nine months old. The owl post had arrived rather early,
something that wasn't a common on normal mornings, but she had immediately seen
the reason the second The Daily Prophet had been dropped into her lap.
Two people had been killed the night before, but unfortunately that headline had been quite frequent in the past. What jumped off the page, though, was the fact that You Know Who had vanished as well.
"The only known survivor of the attack is the Potter's only child, fifteen month old Harry Potter."
Fifteen months old... He was a baby, and he had done the impossible. He had survived what hundreds of fully grown and trained witches and wizards could not. He was the savior of the wizarding world.
Molly didn't think anything could ever amaze her as much as that newspaper article had.
Ten years later, she was proven very wrong.
The savior of the wizarding world, as she had always thought of him, turned out
to be nothing more than a painfully shy little boy, too short and far too thin
for his age, with horribly oversized clothes and taped together glasses that
were half hidden underneath the mass of messy black hair on his head.
Of course, Harry was no longer the tiny and timid eleven year old that she'd once known. He had grown up a lot over the past five years, shooting up several inches and putting on a good number of much-needed pounds. He was still on the short side, but he probably always would be. His hair was as messy as ever, and the glasses, though properly fixed, were still the same ones he had worn back then. He wasn't as shy; he could even be considered talkative when the subject turned to something interesting to him like Quidditch. But he still hated being the center of attention.
"I didn't mean to..." he whispered desperately to the pillow. "Please don't!"
She wondered what he was dreaming of and realized that she didn't want to know. Dreams were a private thing, both those that were good and those that were bad. If he perchance wanted to talk about his nightmare, she would be more than willing to listen, but she wouldn't ask, nor would she continue to imagine what he was seeing. That was for him, and she would allow him that.
His body jerked from side to side rapidly for a few seconds, and then he jerked upright into a sitting position, his eyes still closed and giving away his still slumbering state. Molly reached for his shoulders in order to steady him and keep him from falling off the bed, but to her surprise, Harry fell forward into her arms, his face pressing into her shoulder. Not knowing what else to do, Molly did the only natural and instinctive thing.
She wrapped her arms around him and hugged him.
As soon as he was safely in her embrace, she felt him begin to tremble. His voice was so quiet that she just barely heard it.
"Mum?"
Molly closed her eyes and bit down hard on her lower lip. He was asleep, and he had stared to cry. She had never seen him cry, and she never imagined that she would. Harry was a private person, a very unemotional one as well. But now, as he was lost somewhere in a dream, tears slid down his cheeks and soaked through the material of her nightgown. He was shaking; his body was tensed and frightened.
He was just a baby.
Molly wanted to cry, too, but she didn't. Her tears would do nothing to help the young man who was huddled in her arms; crying for him would only make him a charity case. And he wasn't a charity case. He was one of her own.
Not by blood but by every single thing that truly mattered.
And just as she would have done for any of her others, she made up her mind to protect him with every breath in her body. Another woman did exactly that for him fourteen years before.
And, no, Molly wasn't his birth mother. She wasn't Lily Potter, and she didn't want to be. She wasn't asking to be a replacement because there could be no such thing. But Lily Potter had done everything in her power to protect her son, and to do this, she'd given up the most precious thing any mother could dream of.
She had never seen her baby grow up.
But Molly
Weasley had. And while she wasn't
really his mother, she would do her best to provide him with the motherly
guidance that all children his age needed.
She would take care of him, support him, watch him grow.
She would love him.
Just as she loved all her other children.
Harry eventually stopped trembling, and she could no long hear him mumbling mindlessly through random tears. Carefully, she lay him back to the pillow and pulled the blanket up around him, tucking him into bed for, what was unbeknownst to her, the first time in his life since his parents.
A noise behind her caused her to turn her head slightly and look toward the doorway. Ron was standing there, still dressed in the clothes he'd worn that whole day and looking incredibly guilty. He had stopped dead in his tracks and was staring back at his mother with an extremely nervous look.
"Where have you been?" she asked calmly, smoothing Harry's blanket once more and standing up.
Ron glanced behind her at Harry's bed and then looked back to his mother. "Um," he said quietly. "I was just... I just went for a walk."
She nodded expressionlessly. "Is Hermione in bed now?"
Ron turned a bit pink and looked to his feet. "It wasn't... It was my..." He met Molly's eye, and she raised a single eyebrow to reiterate her question. Nodding slightly, he mumbled, "Yes."
Molly pushed a curl away from her eyes and nodded again.
"Look,
Mum," he said sullenly. "I'm really
sorry, okay? We won't just sneak..."
But she shook her head. "Okay."
Ron stopped mid-sentence and stared in disbelief. It was clear that he had expected to be in trouble or, at the very least, get blessed out properly. And doing just that had been Molly's original intent, but that was no longer her concern.
"What's..." Ron furrowed his brow a little and looked toward the extra bed, "... wrong with Harry?"
Molly
turned and glanced once more at the sleeping teenager; he was no longer
restless and tortured. He appeared to
be sleeping peacefully now. "He's fine
now. Just a bit of a rough night."
Ron looked ashen for a moment and then nodded wordlessly, walking to his own
bed and fumbling with the blankets.
"He has them frequently, doesn't he?"
Ron stared at the bedspread before shrugging a single shoulder.
Molly sighed and crossed her arms over her chest. "How often?" she asked pointedly.
Ron didn't face her; he just continued to tug his blankets until they were lying half off the bed. "I don't know," he said blankly.
"You were never a good liar, Ron," she said smoothly, though she did find the fact that Ron wouldn't betray Harry's trust quite admirable.
Ron stopped turning down his bed and sighed dejectedly. "A lot."
Molly didn't answer; she'd expected as much. Instead, she just nodded and pursed her lips slightly. "Are you okay?" she asked carefully.
It was a loaded question. It was the sort of question that mothers across the world prided them on, simple and basic and liable for any number of different answers.
"Me?" Ron asked curiously. "Yeah, sure. Why?"
She
just shrugged. "Just making sure," she
said simply. "Things are a lot
different now than they used to be."
Ron nodded sullenly. "Yeah, no kidding."
"Take care of him," she said quietly, both of them knowing perfectly well who she was referring to.
Ron looked slightly embarrassed but ducked his head slightly in a nod.
Molly looked at her youngest son and realized for the first time that he wasn't still a little boy. Of course, Ron had always been tall for his age, but his face had always had a childish light to it, his eyes a mirror of innocence.
That was all gone now.
And suddenly, she wanted to cry.
But she wouldn't. Not in front of Ron. Not in front of any of them. She was the mother, the pillar of strength. The world as they all knew it was crumbling around them, but she was going to stand tall and tell them all that it would be alright.
When she had no way of knowing if things would ever be alright again.
So, instead of crying, she opted to wrap her arms around her youngest son and hug him. He seemed surprised at first, but he reluctantly returned the embrace. He was so big now, so much bigger than he'd been when he'd left for Hogwarts all those years ago. In her mind's eye, that was when he'd stopped growing. She knew, of course, that he returned each summer taller and thicker than the summer before, but she always had an image of him as a ten year old in what would be his last full year at home. For two years, he'd gotten the chance to be the oldest sibling in the house, and he clearly enjoyed the power; Molly had watched fondly as he strutted around, taking his responsibility as the eldest at-home child very seriously.
He would never grow any older than that in her mind.
"And take care of yourself," she whispered almost longingly, running a hand through his thick locks. Growing up, whenever Ron was sick, Molly would have no choice but to spend hours fingering his hair, as it was the only thing that could calm him long enough to put him to sleep. She closed her eyes at the flood of memories and finally released her hold on him.
She smiled softly and started for the door. "Don't go sneaking out again," she said as an after-though before leaving his room.
And once she was safely in the fourth floor hallway, she let herself cry.
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Ah, the power of angst...
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