Title: Love Stories
Author: Calliopeia17
Summary: The love stories of Molly Weasley's life. Written as a present for Kelleypen, who wanted Arthur/Molly.
Rating: PG
Pairing: Arthur/Molly
Warnings: None
Reviews: Feedback is cherished.
Disclaimer: I do not own Harry Potter. That honor belongs to JKR and Warner Bros.
Take a look into the Gryffindor seventh-year girls' dormitory. The girls themselves are in class, the room empty of all but the artifacts of their everyday lives. There are four beds strewn with cosmetics and the top witches' fashion magazines. Tubes of lipstick and mascara and perfumes litter the nightstands.
The fifth bed is just as cluttered, but not with cosmetics. Molly Prewett's bed is strewn with books. They are not textbooks, nor the heavy-bound tomes from the library, however. Molly is a bright girl, but she doesn't adore schoolwork and learning the way that the Ravenclaws do. The books are of romance and love and passion, and they are well-worn from frequent reading. Some of them are cheap bodice-ripper paperbacks—The Witch of the Wiltshire Moor, for instance, whose cover is a lurid pink, with a buxom blonde witch in slinky, low-cut robes reclining in the embrace of a shirtless, tanned, and muscular wizard. Some of the books are more respectable. There is a small book bound simply in blue fabric that contains all of Shakespeare's sonnets. Another is Tennyson's love poetry. There are plays and poems and novels of all the grand passions of myth and history—Lancelot and Guenevere, Tristan and Isolde, Romeo and Juliet, Heloise and Abelard, Antony and Cleopatra, Dido and Aeneas. Molly Prewett loves to read the stories of those who suffered and died for love.
From what has been recorded above, it may sound as though Molly Prewett is not particularly interested in cosmetics and fancy dress robes and the ins and outs of Hogwarts dating. This is not precisely true. Molly is, in fact, quite a lovely young woman. She does not wear as much makeup as her fellow seventh years, and her clothing is not always in the very latest style. However, she is lovely all the same—fiery red hair and eyes that are always lost in a dream. At least, this is what Arthur Weasley thinks.
Arthur Weasley is a Gryffindor seventh-year who always feels slightly awkward around the rest of his schoolmates. He has a penchant for stumbling over his words when he gets nervous (which is often, around Molly Prewett), and when he feels embarrassed, his entire face turns crimson. When he was younger the other boys called him Tomato-head, but they have, of course, matured since then, as boys are wont to do, and stopped. Except the Slytherins, that is, who never tire of mocking the Gryffindors, and, for that matter, never quite seem to grow beyond petty childhood rivalries. Arthur is also dreadfully interested in Muggle things—it's really amazing all the sorts of things they dream up to compensate for the lack of magic. He tells this to anyone who will listen, which does not do much for his popularity among the standoffish pureblood crowd.
Still, Arthur is more concerned about Molly Prewett than about what the other purebloods think of him. Of course, he is a Gryffindor, and therefore, the solution to his problems seems easier solved by direct action than by careful planning.
So it is that when Molly returns to the dormitory after classes, she finds her bed strewn not only with romance novels, but also with several dozen Gryffindor-red roses, enchanted so that the thorns can't prick. She gasps, blushes almost as red as the roses, and reads the note that accompanies them, which invites her to Hogsmeade the following weekend and is signed with a dramatic flourish by one Arthur Weasley.
Molly has never thought about Arthur Weasley quite in this light before. He has never seemed the romantic type. After all, he is quiet and a bit awkward and doesn't play the violin or write dark and passionate poetry or fight duels in her honor—not that she expected the last, of course, but it was the sort of image she'd had of her ideal man. She doesn't really want to go to Hogsmeade with him, actually. He is always tinkering with Muggle inventions and such—not romantic at all. Still, there are those roses to consider.
Perhaps without the urging of the other girls in the dorm, Molly might not have decided to go. But urge they do, and go she does, and so it is that Arthur and Molly begin dating.
The two of them go to Madam Puddifoot's, in Hogsmeade, and drink tea and make uncomfortable conversations about the weather and Transfigurations NEWTs and when Professor Dumbledore will finally become Headmaster. There are many awkward silences and long pauses, and it seems like so much work to go on dates. Molly has always imagined it differently—she would go out with a lovely, witty boy who would sweep her off her feet, admit that he had always been in love with her, and possibly propose marriage right there and then. There, perhaps, also ought to be the reading of some carefully composed love poetry, which rhymes and scans perfectly, and, ideally, the playing of a ballad in her honor on the lute. Arthur does none of this. There is no instant connection between them. When she looks in his eyes, there is no magical spark to signify their deep and abiding soul bond. In short, it is nothing like the romance novels at all.
Molly dos not completely understand why she agrees to go with Arthur to Hogsmeade a second time.
However, as the weeks pass, the conversations get easier. Arthur and Molly have jokes now, that they share. It turns out that they both root for the Chudley Cannons, and listen to the Beatles—one of the few Muggle bands that anyone in the Wizarding world pays attention to. They both prefer pumpkin juice to butterbeer. They share a mutual dislike for the caretaker, Appolyon Pringle, who seems to hold a personal grudge against Arthur. When they kiss for the first time, it is messy and a bit wet, and their noses bump into each other, but Molly feels oddly comfortable in Arthur's arms, and they can laugh off the awkwardness together. Still, it isn't the same kind of all-encompassing passion as Lancelot and Guenevere, and Molly is confused. Is she in love, or isn't she? She doesn't feel on fire, or like lightning, or any of the other things that all the books describe love as being like. Instead, she just feels happy. Comfortable. Maybe a little bit warm, and sort of glowy, but certainly not like the raging inferno of passion that all the books talk about.
It's three days before the end of term that Molly realizes that the warm, glowy feeling is indeed love. It is two days before the end of term when Arthur proposes marriage—after he has a stable job, of course, and they can be financially secure enough to start a family.
That takes another two years, but Molly doesn't really mind the wait, and when she finally walks down the aisle, a vision in white, she has never felt happier. And then she kisses Arthur at the altar, and she realizes that this moment is even better. A year later, when she realizes she is pregnant, that joy is eclipsed once again, and again when Bill is born, and again with Charlie, and Percy, and Fred and George, and Ron, and perfect beautiful Ginny. Named Ginevra, really. After Guenevere. It seems to make sense.
And through all this, Molly loves Arthur. She loves him constantly, unalterably. The books she used to read never properly explained what love feels like, she decides one afternoon as she is nursing Ginny. Love as she has known it has never been a grand, destructive passion like in the tales. It is simpler, purer, and also more powerful and enduring.
And then He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named rises again, and the dark times begin all over and Molly has never been so frightened in her life as when she realizes that her children are grown and going off into battle and could very well—she will not think of that, though the Boggart upstairs at Grimmauld Place is more than willing to put an image to her terror.
It is something Dumbledore tells her on the terrifying afternoon when her two youngest children return safely, wounded but alive, from the Department of Mysteries, that assuages her terror somewhat.
"Molly," he says, as Arthur comes to stand behind her and wraps a loving, comfortable arm around her shoulders, "don't underestimate the power of love. That is Voldemort's weakness. All the love that you hold in your heart, ever-expanding and ever more powerful—that love is our greatest hope."
And then he apparates away, and Arthur leans down and kisses Molly, and, though even now after all these years of marriage, it is still a bit clumsy, Molly has never felt more certain that her love is even better than those love stories she used to read. Lancelot and Guenevere only had the power to destroy with their passion. Molly and Arthur have brought forth life out of their love, and, perhaps more importantly, love out of their love. If there is more love in the world on the day Molly dies than on the day she was born, she decides, as the kiss finally breaks off and Arthur smiles into her face, her life will have meant something. She closes her eyes, and lets Arthur's breathing ruffle her still-red hair.