Character: Molly Weasley II
Prompt: Forgotten
She isn't the oldest or the youngest. She isn't the smartest or the prettiest. She's not even the best Quidditch player. She's just a face in the crowd at family reunions, a hanger-on that falls somewhere left of centre and just barely off the mark. It's easy in a family like hers to feel as though she'll never quite measure up.
Her aunts and uncles are all legends, the kinds of people that get whispered about and pointed at whenever they leave the house. Her grandparents are admired in almost every wizarding circle for being kind, gracious, generous, and pretty much all-around excellent people. Even her cousins are sparkling with wit and life, basking in the residual glory of their parents as they create their own stories.
But Molly, well, she isn't much of anything at all. Even her name doesn't quite belong to her. It's a hand-me-down. And of course she understands why her father chose it. He was trying to right past wrongs, trying to ease his transition back into the family. But even after all these years, when everyone gets together, she feels as though they're rather like outsiders looking in.
Her mother didn't grow up with the rest of them; she didn't move in the same crowd, and Molly still gets the feeling every now and then that the rest of the family haven't quite accepted her into the fold. Her uncles all tease her father, of course; that's just a holdover from their childhood, she knows. But it's more than that. There's a hesitation in their voices when they speak to her parents, when they invite her along, as though they've come a bit too close to forgetting that this particular branch of the Weasley family exists.
Lucy has less of a problem with it. She's always been all easy-going smiles and hair tossing around with laughter, and Molly wishes she could have a bit of that brightness for herself. But she takes too much after their father, spends too much time worrying about rule breaking and the reaction of the adults in her life while the rest of her cousins run scampering off to fly their brooms or play Exploding Snap.
She knows that it's probably her own fault, that she closes herself off by being too shy and quiet in this loud, boisterous, fiery family of hers, but that's often not enough to convince her that she hasn't been just a little bit forgotten