Ron, Ginny, and Harry watched her with tears in their eyes. This was the hardest thing they’d ever had to do, tell Mum that she’d lost a husband and a son. It was far worse than any duel with Bellatrix or Voldemort.
Molly Weasley’s kindly eyes had turned wild with grief and her hands were clenched in her hair. Every broken screaming sob made Ginny wince, and Harry began to worry that she would break down too.
“Mrs. Weasley?” he ventured nervously. “Mrs. Weasley, can I get you anything?”
She looked him in the eyes and Harry was taken aback at the almost alck of recognition reflected within her. She paused, then said in a horrible mockery of her usual kindly tone, “No, thank you, dear. I - I think I’m going to go to my room for a bit.”
And slowly, as if she were suddenly very old, she shuffled off, absent-mindedly rubbing her thumbs together. Her children couldn’t bear to watch, but couldn’t look away.
“What do we do?” Ginny whimpered, clutching Ron’s arm painfully.
“I think . . . I think Professor Lupin will know,” he replied quietly, looking to Harry for confirmation.
“If anyone can help, he can,” Harry said, unable to get those twirling thumbs and those wild eyes out of his head. He went to get the Floo powder.
“What’s wrong with her?” Remus Lupin asked almost immediately upon arrival. “Tell me everything.”
“Well, you know how we’ve been doing runs on those clusters of Death Eaters?” Ron said. “Well, Harry and I went with Dad, Charlie, and Moody, and Mum and Ginny went with Tonks to see what we could do about these last couple bunches.”
“And ... it didn’t go so well for us,” Harry broke in, indicating the bandage on his arm. “Mr. Weasley and Charlie got taken out by one curse; before we even realized it, they were gone.”
“But Molly’s grown used to loss, we all have,” Remus said, puzzled. “Was it losing two of her family at once?”
“I think,” said Ginny with the feeling of one who might understand, “it is so terrible because she wasn’t there “ and she could’ve been. We almost split differently; she could’ve been there.”
“It wouldn’t have made a difference,” Harry muttered sadly.
“Ginny, why aren’t you as troubled?” Remus asked.
She closed her eyes for a moment, brow furrowed. When she looked up, her eyes were glistening with tears. “It’s hard to lose Dad and Charlie. But I still have people that care about me, that want me to keep going and to struggle on, and that’s why I am okay with it. Well, I’m not okay with it “ I don’t think I’ll ever be okay with it. But, even though I haven’t suffered as much loss as Mum has, I can deal with it.”
Remus nodded, pinching the bridge of his nose. “Okay. Do you guys think that it could be that this was just the last straw for your mother? That she’s just endured so much loss, so much struggle, she finally broke down and couldn’t take it anymore?”
“That could be it,” Ron said thoughtfully. “Do you want to talk to her while we let Bill and Percy know?”
“I can try,” Remus said, moving almost reluctantly toward the bedroom where Molly was lying down.
“This is terrible,” Ginny murmured, leaning into Harry and letting him wrap his arms around her. “I’ve already lost my Dad and my brother, do I have to lose my Mum too?”
“Professor Lupin will take care of it,” Ron assured her as he scribbled off notes to his brothers. “I trust him to do the right thing.”
They could faintly hear the conversation in the bedroom, with Lupin’s calm, quiet voice and Mrs. Weasley’s almost hysterical whispers creating stark contrast.
“Would it help you to forget for a while?”
“I’d do anything to get rid of this pain. Please, help me forget.”
“Are you sure? Molly, I know a spell that may help, but only for a time. Are you willing to trade a bit of bliss now for this same pain later?”
“Remus. Time will have healed the wounds, I’m sure of it. Just for a day or two?”
The three eavesdroppers heard their former professor sigh as they clutched each other fearfully. “All right, Molly. This spell will remove this memory from you for a brief period of time.”
“I’m ready.”
“Obliviate Brevius.”
After a couple minutes, Remus Lupin came out of the bedroom. “She’s sleeping,” he said, rubbing his eyes wearily. “She should be relatively normal when she wakes up.”
“Thank you so much for your help,” Ron said fervently.
“Let me know if anything unusual happens,” Lupin replied before Apparating.
Harry, Ron, and Ginny crept to the bedroom and watched her slumbering peacefully, all vestiges of grief erased by the sleep and by the spell. None wanted to say it, but they all had the unspoken question: will it work?
The new day dawned, and Harry stretched tiredly as he squinted at the rising sun. It had been a hard night. He’d had nightmares ever since the battle where he defeated Voldemort, and Mrs. Weasley’s terrible reaction to the news yesterday had only made them worse than ever. There were two bright spots in Harry’s life today: Hermione was coming to the Burrow, and Mrs. Weasley should be back to normal.
He sat up just as Ron did, and they needed only to look at each other to see that they were both thinking the same thing: how was Mrs. Weasley doing? They met Ginny on their way down, and the three of them tiptoed into the room where their mother slept on.
“Should we wake her?” Harry whispered, but just then the woman stirred “ apparently years of waking up at the crack of dawn had more force than whatever sleeping spell Lupin had used, and she soon sat up, blinking at Harry, who was closest.
“You’re Harry Potter, aren’t you?” she said, glancing at his scar.
“Yes, I am,” Harry replied, nonplussed. “Er, if you don’t mind me asking, who are you?”
“Me? Why, I’m Molly . . . Molly . . . am I married? I don’t remember having a husband, but my last name most certainly isn’t Prewett.” She glanced at her two children, who suddenly looked terrified.
“You,” she said, indicating Ron, “are the spitting image of a boy I knew at Hogwarts. Arthur Weasley was his name, I think. And you, you look like “ like me when I was that age!”
She registered the stricken looks that the teenagers were giving her and seemed to realize something was wrong. “Why do I have a husband I can’t remember?” she asked suddenly, looking nearly as frightened as the rest of them. “Why do you look familiar, yet I don’t know you? What is going on?”
Just then, Hermione walked in. “I thought I heard you guys in here. Hello, Mrs. Weasley, I’m so sorry to hear about your loss.”
Molly looked positively shocked at this. “Mrs. Weasley! I know who you are “ why do I know who you are, Hermione Granger, but not these children? Are they . . . are they my children?”
Hermione blinked very rapidly at this. “What’s going on?” she whispered to Ron, who had just come to give her a welcoming hug.
“Professor Lupin put a spell on her to make her forget “ you know, Dad and Charlie. I think something must have gone wrong.”
“Clearly,” Hermione replied. She seemed to decide that the best course to take was to inform Mrs. Weasley of all the things she’d forgotten. “This is your youngest daughter, Ginny,” she said, pulling a resisting Ginny forward. “And that’s your youngest son, Ron. You have five other sons.”
Molly didn’t seem particularly surprised by this, mainly very puzzled and even hurt. “And I seem to have married Arthur Weasley and had this bunch of redheads. I can believe that “ I vaguely remember him at Hogwarts. But ... why don’t I remember them?”
“It’s Professor Lupin’s fault,” Ron burst out. “And I’m going to call him right now and have this worked out.”
“Remus Lupin. Yes, I know who he is, too. He’s a werewolf. How on earth did he manage to remove my memories of my family?”
Ginny spoke up as Ron stormed out of the room. “You see, Mum, yesterday Dad and Charlie, the second son, they were both killed by Death Eaters. You were hurting so much that he decided to help you forget for a while. Now that you’re like this, I really hope it’s not permanent.”
“I once lost my brothers,” Molly mused. “That was incredibly painful. How much more painful it must be to lose a husband. I loved him very much, I suppose.”
Ginny looked like she might cry. “Yes, Mum, you do love him very much. You did. Oh, this is dreadful! Why did we ever let Professor Lupin do this?”
“Well, she asked me to,” said the man in question, hurrying in and glancing at Molly before fixing his gaze on Ginny. “This is a symptom I did not expect to see. Does she at least know who she is?”
“Yes, I’m Molly,” Mrs. Weasley broke in, irritated. “And I haven’t been rendered deaf. I think that I will manage quite well with the spell on me. Even though I don’t remember any of this family I seem to have created, I can pretend. I can imagine. I always wanted a big family, and I know that I would love every one of my children “ and even those who weren’t,” she added with a smile at Harry and Hermione. “Whatever this spell is can’t take away the love I feel for my family “ even if I don’t know who they are.” She faltered as she tried to look at Ginny in a motherly way and didn’t quite manage. “But . . . is there a counterspell?”
“It was the Temporary Memory Charm,” Lupin explained, and Hermione made a small happy noise. “It should only last for a day or two at most. In the meantime, why don’t you relax and enjoy your time off?”
“I think not,” was the quick reply, and everyone was quickly shooed out of the room so Mrs. Weasley could get dressed for the day. “I haven’t forgotten my household duties.”
“This is a very intriguing spell,” Hermione said, excited. “How on earth did you manage taking away all memories of family but not anything else, like household duties?”
Lupin looked abashed at the girl’s enthusiasm. “I wish I knew “ I’d never really done the spell before, so I didn’t know what stipulations exactly to call up when performing it. I think that my thought to erase the memory of Arthur and Charlie’s deaths somehow blossomed into an erasure of Arthur and Charlie . . . and then somehow that translated to the rest of you. I suppose if she couldn’t remember a husband, she couldn’t remember the children he’d fathered either.”
“Well, I don’t care how intriguing it is,” Ginny said petulantly. “I want my Mum back.”
“Me too,” agreed Ron and Harry.
Mrs. Weasley “ even if she didn’t remember that was her name “ was still the amazing cook she’d always been, and her lack of memory about her children didn’t prevent her from using her bossiest voice to get them to set the table.
“She doesn’t seem to be that much changed,” Lupin said later, apparently relieved. “After a while, you probably wouldn’t notice the difference.”
“I don’t think we want to wait for a while,” Hermione said softly. Mrs. Weasley treated her exactly the same as she treated her natural children, with no thoughts for her being a guest. Since Mrs. Weasley didn’t know exactly how to treat her children, they were all getting rather more bossed around than they would like.
“Just wait a bit more,” Lupin assured them. “It’ll be fine.”
Exciting as it would have been for spell researchers everywhere for this not to be resolved, it wasn’t long before Harry, Hermione, Ron, and Ginny watched Mrs. Weasley awake and felt mingled relief and sadness at the slow transition from the peace of sleep to the horror of what the day meant “ 2/9 of her family was gone forever.
“Mum?” Ginny asked tentatively. “How are you?”
“I was very foolish, wasn’t I?” Mrs. Weasley said with a sad smile. “It’s interesting how I can remember forgetting about all of you, and how terrible it was that I almost forewent the rest of my life with all of you just because Arthur is gone. I still can’t believe he’s gone. But I have all of you, and he’ll always be with me.” She got up and padded over to her jewelry box, where there was a locket with Mr. Weasley’s picture inside it. “I won’t ever forget. Not him, not Charlie, and not you. I’ve had quite enough of that, thank you.”
And with that, she bustled to the kitchen to make breakfast for some of the people she cared most about.