Molly knows that death is coming for her family. She knows it with a certainty that haunts her day and night, so that the only time she is ever completely at ease is when all her family is in one house together.

As the war progresses, those times grow farther and farther apart. And when they come, indistinct shadows seem to flit in the corners of the rooms where they laugh, oblivious and young.

She begins to dream at night about Gideon and Fabian, her beautiful, clever brothers, the first people she thinks of, even now, whenever anyone mentions 'the twins.' Once, she had overheard Alastor Moody talking to Harry about them, saying that they had 'died like heroes.'

In the daylight hours, she turns that phrase over and over in her mouth.

They had died like heroes.

Like heroes.

They are dead, like heroes.

Molly knows, again with certainty, that each and every one of her children, and Arthur, and Harry and Hermione, are all heroes too.

This thought begins to keep her awake at night. Not until then do the dreams stop.

Molly works hard for the Order, mostly in an attempt to distract herself from her anxiety. Someone has to find a place for the children who have already been orphaned by the war. And while other people have recognized the need to protect the families of Muggleborn wizards, no one seems to realize, until Molly points it out, that Muggles can't use magic to wash clothes or cook meals or heat the temporary shelters where they must live without electricity. Tonks can joke all she likes, but what most of the Order need isn't faster brooms or deadlier strategies, but a stern tutorial in domestic charms.

She takes care of the homeless children during the day. Many of them are so young that this entire war will one day be no more to them than a feeling of residual, inexplicable unease. Unless they come too near a dementor, they will never know the sounds of their parents' voices. They run about the Weasley house and play like all children do, though sometimes they pause in the middle of their games and ask "Where's mama? Where's papa?" They cry when Molly cannot answer, but her tears are still fresh long after theirs are forgotten.

In the evening she consults the Relocation team, and, wearing an out-of-date Muggle dress, Apparates to the homes of Muggleborn wizards. There, with as much authority as she can muster, she explains to the parents of Hogwarts students why they must leave behind their homes and all their possessions in order to flee an invisible threat from a world they still believe is half-imaginary. In fifty percent of all cases, with the consent (and occasionally the assistance) of their children, she is forced to Stun them and transport them to the protected site by means of an illegal Portkey. Hermione's parents, tired of being treated like children who don't know what's good for them, had to be prised from behind a closet door.

When she comes home at night, Molly kisses those of her own children who are stopping in between assignments, and tries to keep most of the trembling out of her voice when she inquires after their day. There is a comforting normality to the way Ron and Ginny still half try to wiggle out of her arms when she hugs them, down-playing her concerns with familiar grimaces. It is Percy, brittle and apologetic, whose manner is foreign, a reminder of trust betrayed and innocence lost.

Molly sits in a chair and watches Ginny scream with laughter as Hermione comes off the worse in a game of Gobstones and gets a face full of foul smelling liquid. Hermione evaporates the mess with her wand, and remarks that she still doesn't see the point of the game. Ron looks up from the chess match he is playing with Harry, to say that she just doesn't like being bad at something for a change. Instead of the irritation Molly is expecting, Hermione smiles, as though Ron's just made a joke. This causes Ginny to roll her eyes at Harry, who is looking at her over Hermione's head.

"You know, mother, it's really rather strange to see you sitting completely still," Percy says, as Molly is listening fondly to the chatter. She realizes, startled, that it's true. When the children were growing up, her hands were never idle, could never afford to be. None of the others are as observant as Percy, and he doesn't mention it again, but a few minutes later she leaves the parlor and comes back with a basket of knitting.

Later in the evening, she happens to glance over at Harry, and realizes, with an almost physical jolt of shock, that he is looking at her. Their gaze only meets for a second before he turns away, but there is a look in his eyes that she recognizes immediately.

She shouldn't be so surprised. She's known for years that none of the normal rules apply to Harry, but it is still a shock to see him watching his friends with the same tense sorrow he must be able to see in her own eyes.

He can sense it as well—the near stench of loss that lingers in her family's wake. He, too, knows what's coming.

But then, he always has. That is his gift.
For the first time, Molly can appreciate both the sorrow and the burden of it.

Her days are very full, but there are still hours that hang heavy with silence, after Arthur is asleep and the children have grown quiet. These are the times when she finds herself thinking more and more of her brothers, how they lived and died.

She sees bits of them in all her children: in Bill's dandyish long hair, in Charlie's recklessness, and in Fred and George's bright, misapplied talent. Percy has Gideon's studiousness, Ron, Fabian's thirst for self-improvement, and Ginny....well. She hasn't got her sly ways from Arthur's cheerful, earnest family, has she?

She'd had no choice other than to stay well out of the fighting, nineteen years ago. Pregnant, first with Fred and George, then with Ron, tethered to a house with four tiny children to look after, she was unable to do anything for Arthur or the Order besides keep herself and the boys as far away from risk as possible. The children had come quite close together, and she was still young enough then to think her lot a harsh one, stranded from the reassurance of adult contact and having nothing to do when the boys were in bed besides fret herself sick. She longed to fight, as Gideon and Fabian were fighting, to know what was happening as it happened, and have some more immediate gauge of theirs and Arthur's safety than the illegible, heavily coded messages that arrived by infrequent and exhausted owls.

When Gideon and Fabian were killed, Arthur came home for two whole days, a longer period of time than they had spent together since the war began. He had minded the children while she lay in the bed, sobbing herself senseless. When the boys were occupied, he slipped in the bedroom and held her and they cried together.

After Arthur left again, Molly went rummaging through the Muggle rubbish he kept in the shed outside. A half hour's searched yielded a broken clock that chimed thirteen times at midnight. Over the next fortnight she spent every spare second of her day experimenting with locator spells, cloning charms, and arithmantic calculations designed to trace magical signatures. She had bits of hair from Arthur and each of the boys, and only thought to snip a lock from her own head when she had finished spelling everyone else.

Molly had never been brilliant at her schoolwork—not that there was anything wrong with her mind, as her teachers liked to remind her, but she, like most of her children, had lacked somewhat in concentration. This project, however, was nothing like anything she'd ever done for school, and she worked harder at it than she had worked at anything in her life. She found old school books, Arthur's Arithmancy and Transfiguration notes (he had been Head Boy, after all) and twice only just stopped herself sending owls to old teachers for advice—not the thing to do when there was a war on, she told herself. When at last she finished, two months after first conceiving of the idea, she hung the finished product over the mantel and watched in satisfaction as the hand bearing the legend "Arthur Weasley" sailed smoothly to the position on the clock face labeled "Work," bypassing "Mortal Peril" without a pause. The other six hands, representing herself and each of the children, were piled up across the word "Home."

After the war ended, and Molly had altered the clock to reflect Ron's and Ginny's births, Arthur refitted the mechanism into the body of an old grandfather clock. They placed it by the door, where it has stood ever since. There are times when she regrets having ever made the clock; she has wasted so many hours studying it, dreading the moment when one of the hands will leap dramatically to the left or the right. Sometimes she fantasizes a history rewritten, one in which she creates the clock a month earlier, in time to make hands for Gideon and Fabian. She might have been able to help them—with sufficient warning, she could have apparated to Hogsmeade, raised the help that would have saved their lives...

On the other hand, she can too easily imagine what it would have felt like, watching their hands drop from "Mortal Peril" to the great space at the bottom of the clock, where nothing is written at all. She has never adjusted to the stagnating horror of helplessness, despite all her experience with it.

She watches the clock now, most of the hands pointing at "Work" and the rest at "Sleep." Only Molly's hand, though she looks right past it, is indecisive, trailing somewhere between "Mortal Peril" and "Traveling."

The letter, in McGonagall's spiky, studious handwriting, says simply, "Thomas and Helen Creevey, 46 Swandham Lane, Holloway Gardens, Kent."

According to the schedule for the Muggle protection programme, the Creeveys, parents of Dennis and Colin, are not down for relocation until next month. When she receives a letter like this, it means that Snape has given them recent intelligence; Death Eater have slated the family for a raid, tonight, tomorrow, or any time in between.

There is a stated protocol for emergency relocations. Molly is to find a partner, Apparate no nearer than half a mile from the Muggle home, and cast a revealing charm to determine whether it is safe to enter. Once inside, they are to Stun the family, and Portkey them immediately to Grimmauld Place.

Molly almost never abides strictly by the protocol. They might as well be Death Eaters themselves, behaving as though magic gives them privileges that supersede basic courtesy and the free will of others.

It is six o'clock when the letter arrives, already full dark. She has a superstitious mistrust of the darkness, and the deeds it may hide. There is no time to Apparate all over London until she finds someone she can bully into a mission so few of the Order seem to consider a priority.

She changes into her Muggle clothes, wraps herself in a cloak, and with one last glance at the clock in the hall she Apparates to Kent.

She does not know Rabastan Lestrange personally, but she knows that the grinning figure in aristocratic robes who answers her knock at the Creevey's door isn't likely to be a Muggle milkman.

Molly is no duelist. Outside of Defense classes at school, she's probably only cast half a dozen curses in her life. But she grew up with two older brothers, and when she sees the Death Eater leering in the doorway before her, she raises her wand reflexively and casts the first spell that comes to mind—the first Gideon ever taught her.

Lestrange doubles over in a screaming fit of laughter as the Tickling Hex brushes every square inch of his skin with feather light touches. Molly shoves her way past him, scanning the parlor just behind.

The slight body of a fair-haired man is crumpled, motionless, on the floor, half-hidden by a sofa. There is no sign of anyone else.

She can still hear Lestrange laughing in the doorway behind her. She looks around until she spots a staircase, and then she Apparates.

There are only two rooms on the first floor. Both are dark, with closed doors. She pauses only a second, then goes by instinct to the one closest by.

A woman with dark, curly hair is huddled in the bath tub. She has torn the sheer plastic shower curtain from its rings in a panic, and she is clutching it to her chest, as though it could somehow shelter her.

Molly grabs the first thing she sees in the half light—a hairbrush on the cabinet, long dark hair stuck in its bristles. She grabs it in one hand, and touches her wand to it with the other, muttering "Portus."

There is a loud crack at the landing of the stairs behind her. She does not turn to look at Lestrange before throwing the hairbrush at Helen Creevey, who is watching her with wide, blank eyes.

In the instant before it strikes, Molly worries that the woman is sunk too deeply in shock to react. But reflex takes over, and Helen Creevey throws up a hand to guard her face. She doesn't catch the brush, but the momentary contact of deflecting it is enough. She disappears, shower curtain and all.

Gideon and Fabian had died in a duel with a party of Death Eaters in a small Muggle town, protecting the villagers and giving most of them time to escape. Outnumbered three to one, they held out for six hours and were killed in almost the same moment.

She has imagined those six hours many times in the years since their deaths. She wonders now, as she smiles and faces Lestrange, if they had seen death barreling toward them. If that bare bit of prescience is a family trait.

She doesn't have time to process the thought before the curse has worked its way past the Death Eater's snarl and knocked her, senseless and inert, to the floor of the loo.

But there is just enough time, before death sweeps her off her feet, to think of her family.

She holds them in her mind, and sees them, for the first time in many months, with no hint or shadow of uncertainty clinging to them.

She doesn't need that assurance in order to die. There is nothing to cling to in death, nothing she can carry with her.

But in the moment before dying, it is enough. And there is time to recognize it for a gift, more than she would have ever thought to ask for.