The Great Hall always brought back happy, warm memories for Molly Weasley. The happy reunion with her friends and the lavish feast at start of term came to the forefront of her mind as she would reminisce to her children of her Hogwarts days. The enchanted ceiling was her favorite, especially on a sunny day, or just after a rainstorm as a rainbow would light up the entire hall.
Tonight the Great Hall did not evoke those happier moments for Molly. In fact it looked completely alien from its appearance when she was in school. There were no House banners or long tables. The comforting smells of dinner and pudding were gone, replaced with the metallic stench of blood and death. The tables were replaced by cots rapidly accumulating wounded students and Order members. The enchanted ceiling above reflected a cold, inky black sky.
Madam Pomfrey was so overwhelmed with the incoming wounded she recruited Molly in desperation. Molly had much experience patching up minor cuts and abrasions. Being the mother of six boys and an overly adventurous girl had honed her skills as a self taught healer, but she wasn’t nearly prepared to deal with the onslaught of injuries coming her way. Madam Pomfrey however was generous and effective in her teaching, and Molly caught on quickly to the advanced healing charms.
Molly spent the next several hours healing wounds and comforting students while the rest of her family fought throughout the castle and its grounds. It was unnerving being so close, and yet so far away from them. She knew each of her sons were capable wizards, qualified to fight and take care of themselves, but knowing they were out there where danger lurked at every possible corner was enough to make her drop what she was doing and race after them. Still, she remained where she was as it was where she was supposed to be at the moment, but each time someone new was brought to her, bloody and unconscious on a stretcher, she hoped and prayed it wasn’t any of her boys or Arthur.
While Molly finished attending to a frightened and bleeding girl, her eyes caught sight of her husband rushing over in her direction. As she fixed her gaze on him, she noticed he had a solemn look on his pale face. His eyes were wide and red-rimmed and tear tracks lined his cheeks. He had been crying, but why? She wondered what could have happened to make him look so pale and sad. At that moment her mother’s intuition took over: something horrible must have happened to one of the boys.
“Arthur, what is it?” Molly demanded frantically. “What’s happened? Who’s hurt?”
Arthur didn’t answer her, but instead kept looking over his shoulder towards the doors. She looked past him to see what he was looking at or who he was waiting for, but there was no one. He embraced her, holding her gently in his arms, stroking her back and turning her around so she wasn’t facing the doors. His grip was so tight she could feel his body shaking. She only ever remembered him holding her like this when there was bad news to follow. Is that why he turned her around, so she wouldn’t see which one of her children was hurt? He still wasn’t saying anything and the silence unnerved her core and drove her fear to the unthinkable. Why wasn’t he telling her what she needed to know? She couldn’t take the silence anymore.
“Arthur Weasley, you will tell me what has happened!”
He broke the embrace slightly, but kept his arms around her. He looked her in the eyes as he answered. “A side wall of the castle was blown apart.” He took a deep breath and swallowed hard keeping a firm grip on her. “One of the boys was caught in the blast.” His voice shook at the last sentence.
“One of our b-boys?” she whispered as if saying it any louder would make it true. At that moment all the air seemed to vanish from her lungs as the images of her boggart came to mind. Seeing each of her children dead at her feet had been its last act and now it had come to pass.
Arthur nodded his head. He took a deep breath and muttered, “Fred.”
“What? No.” She shook her head. “You must have made a mistake. Did you see his face? Are you sure? No, no, you’re wrong!”
“I’m not wrong, Molly. It’s Fred, our Fred,” he answered quietly. Arthur tried to embrace her, but Molly was putting up a good fight, still shaking her head in disbelief.
“NO! STOP IT!” She started beating her fists at his chest. Not enough to hurt him but just enough to get her point across. Why did he think it was their son? Why didn’t he understand that it wasn’t Fred? It wasn’t Fred. It couldn’t be Fred. She was instantly proved wrong when Oliver Wood and Neville Longbottom carried someone into the Great Hall. Even from a distance she knew it was her son.
Molly watched as they placed Fred ever so gently with the others on the stone floor in the center. He looked so peaceful; a slight smile still graced his boyish face. For an instant she thought he might simply be asleep were it not for the stillness of his chest and the paleness of his complexion.
With a mother’s hope she kept watching him, waiting, hoping, and pleading for any sign of movement. Tears started to well up obscuring her vision. She quickly wiped the tears away, afraid to blink, afraid she might miss some sign of life in her son. Yet, Fred just lay peacefully, unmoving on the stone floor. She broke away from Arthur and slowly moved closer to where Fred lay.
She knelt down next to him, staring in numb disbelief at the thought that the young man lay motionless in front of her was actually gone. She thought maybe if she touched him surely she would feel some life pumping in his veins. She convinced herself that they probably hadn’t checked for a pulse in their haste to get him out of harm’s way, so she stretched out a shaky hand to gently grasp his wrist, but there was no pulse beating there. Reminding herself that finding a pulse in some people with faint heartbeats was difficult, she was sure she wasn’t touching the right place and that was why she couldn’t feel anything. She moved her hand to his neck. Still, no pulse beat beneath her fingers. She started to get angry at her senses failing her simple requests. Why couldn’t she feel a pulse? There’s got to be one. He can’t be dead.
She placed her head on his chest to see if she could hear a heartbeat. She waited expectantly to hear the gentle thud of his heart beat against her ear. A few seconds turned into several minutes, still no heartbeat. The only heartbeat she could feel was her own as it thumped faster and louder in her chest at each passing second of silence. Why wasn’t his heart beating, unless he really was gone?
“F-Fred, p-please wake up,” she sobbed, not moving her head from her son’s chest. An empty, hollow feeling began to overwhelm her. It pressed on her heart, breaking it as she thought of all the dreams and hopes she had for him that would never be fulfilled.
She should have been there with him, protecting him, shielding not only him but all of her children from death. Isn’t that what a good mother is supposed to do? Isn’t that what Lily had done for Harry, sacrificing her own life so her son could live? In a heart beat she would have done the same thing for Fred, but she failed him. How could she have let this happen?
She closed her eyes as the pressure and pain of each breath started to make her light-headed. She tried taking deep breaths, but soon started hyperventilating. She was sobbing uncontrollably now and didn’t know whether she wanted to cry or breathe.
She could feel Arthur stroking her hair and back. Other people were surrounding her now. She held on to Fred, afraid one of these people had come to take him away from her. She resolved that no one would pry her from him. But no one touched her except Arthur, his gentle hands trying to comfort her broken heart. She wasn’t sure how long she lay there crying, but she didn’t care. It wasn’t until she calmed down a bit and regained a normal breathing pattern that she realized the rest of her family was surrounding them.
She looked up and her heart stopped at the sight of the face in front of her. It was Fred, alive and whole. But her brain processed all too quickly that it was not Fred, but George. George was kneeling at his brother’s head, a look of shock and disbelief on his ashen face. Fat tears streamed down his cheeks, but he did nothing to stop them. He just stared at Fred shaking his head.
“G-George?” she said quietly. He didn’t respond to his name, but continued to shake his head. “George, dear?”
George’s eyes met hers, but only for the briefest of seconds. He quickly returned his gaze to his brother’s face. Molly, with the fullness of a mother’s love for an emotionally wounded child went to him immediately, gently embracing her grieving son. She could feel George stiffen at first, not wanting to give into the sorrow and sadness, but soon he was holding onto her. Initially she could feel a few hot, lonely tears roll down his face, but then he began to cry in earnest.
There were no words of comfort she could give him, nor did she even try. She just held him, rocking him gently like she did when he was younger and he had awakened from a nightmare. How simple those times were when George was a boy. All it took was a couple of minutes in her arms or a cup of hot cocoa to calm him down. Fred would have made a silly joke, teasing his brother for being afraid and the boys would be back in bed, asleep in no time. But Fred, she remembered with a jolt, wasn’t here anymore and this was one nightmare that would never go away, no matter how long she held him.
“I’m s-sorry Mum. I s-should’ve been there,” George muttered. “I c-could have warned him or pushed him out of the way. I s-should’ve-“
“No dear, there’s nothing you could’ve done. Don’t apologize, you did nothing wrong,” she consoled him while trying to comfort herself with the same words. She wondered if they sounded as hollow to George as they did to her. “You…you were where you were supposed to be and-“
“But maybe I could’ve-“
“No sweetie, you were where you were supposed to be.”
She wasn’t sure that was enough for him to hear in his present state of mind. It wasn’t enough for her when Arthur told her the exact same thing the night her brothers were killed, but he was right. She was where she was supposed to be, and so was George.
She continued to hold him while he sobbed in her arms. She wished she could say more to him, but the right words escaped her. Nothing seemed good enough or would be good enough to take this hurt away from him.
After a long while, George broke the embrace and began to wipe his tear-stained face with his sleeve. Molly looked into his puffy red-rimmed eyes and reaffirmed her last statement. “You were where you were supposed to be.”
George nodded his head and hugged her tightly.
A loud magnified voice broke through the tender moment between mother and son.
“Harry Potter is dead.”*
Molly couldn’t hear anything else other than those four words, the horrible sound of them kept echoing in her head. She watched as Ron, Hermione and Ginny raced out of the Great Hall followed closely by Bill, Charlie and Percy. George broke the embrace and quickly followed his brothers. She couldn’t even form the words to say ‘stop’ or ‘I love you’ as they ran off.
She looked beseechingly at her husband hoping he had heard something different, but one look at a face that revealed just for an instant the panic that all their fears had come true, convinced her that he heard the same thing. Fresh tears cascaded down her cheeks.
Not Harry too.
It wasn’t fair. None of this was fair. Lily and James had sacrificed. Fred had sacrificed. She looked around at the surrounding dead and wounded, a good portion of them students, whose futures had been cut short by war. Their sacrifice was evident. They were so brave fighting against You-Know-Who and his Death Eaters, but it pained her that so many parents would now be burying their children. It wasn’t fair that their lives ended before they had even begun to live.
The injustice of it all gripped her so tightly she could feel a physical pain in her chest with each breath she took. She could also feel something different brewing inside her. It was so much bigger than grief. She felt anger, a righteous anger only a mother could feel at losing a child so unjustly.
“It’s got to end, Arthur. We have to finish this. They can’t win,” she said through her tears. Arthur nodded in agreement.
Loud screams and shouts snapped them out of their reverie. Arthur ran to join the crowd outside. Before she could register what had happened, chaos ensued and the fight resumed as it spilled into the Great Hall.
She observed in horror as each of her family members fought and dueled. Arthur and Percy were dueling Thicknesse. George and Lee Jordan were taking down a Death Eater of their own. Ron and Neville were fighting that despicable bastard Fenrir Greyback.
She glanced down one last time at Fred, and kissed him on the forehead. “I love you,” she whispered. She picked up her wand to join the fight.
She watched as a Death Eater dueled three young people at once. She immediately recognized Hermione Granger and Luna Lovegood, but her heart collided in her throat as she watched the third person miss death by an inch. It was her daughter Ginny. She knew then that she had found the target for her anger - Bellatrix Lestrange. Before she knew it she was running to catch up with the fight. She already lost one child, and Harry who was so like a son to her was also dead. She was not going to stand by and lose another.
“NOT MY DAUGHTER, YOU BITCH!”* she yelled as she aimed a curse at Bellatrix who lazily blocked it. “OUT OF MY WAY!”* She was ready to face down death. The evil reign had to end, it had to stop now.
Molly tried focusing her anger on the evil injustices and misguided notions of power the woman in front of her represented, but she couldn’t seem to separate the two. Her hatred for Bellatrix was so heated she could feel it burning inside her. Every curse Molly sent her way was easily blocked or dodged by her obnoxious opponent. She could see other students in her peripheral vision coming to her aid poised with their wands at the ready.
“Get back! Get back! She’s mine!”* she shouted not taking her eyes off her target.
“What will happen to your children when I’ve killed you?”* Bellatrix taunted as she dodged one of Molly’s curses. “When Mummy’s gone the same way as Freddie?”*
The taunt intended to make Molly cower or fear her challenger only intensified her anger. She wasn’t scared of Bellatrix. On the contrary, the only fear that gripped her was allowing Bellatrix to live and continue to wreak havoc on an innocent world. She wasn’t afraid of dying, but of surviving and failing to protect her children and every other child in this country. She was fighting to the death to end a way of life that should never have invaded her world or its children. This realization strengthened her resolve and reinforced her focus.
“You-will-never-touch-our-children-again!”* she screamed with such force her throat felt raw. If she was going to die she would make certain that the most evil of Lord Voldemort’s followers died with her.
Molly channeled all of her anger into her wand strokes and reflexes. She would not allow it to cloud her judgment and blind her with revenge, because simply killing Bellatrix Lestrange wasn’t enough or nearly as satisfying as ending the corrupt principles this woman represented. She detached her focus from the woman in front of her and focused simply on what the woman embodied, prejudice, power, death, destruction and pain.
Bellatrix was still laughing manically at her previous exclamation. At that moment Molly took advantage of her opponent’s momentary arrogant lapse in judgment and aimed a curse that hit her squarely in the chest.
Bellatrix’s manic face froze in disbelief as she fell limply to the ground.
Molly froze as well watching her defeated opponent collapse unceremoniously onto the stone floor. She was breathing very fast, nearly hyperventilating. The crowd around her cheered and roared in triumph, but a scream of rage caught her attention. She turned to its source and saw Lord Voldemort sneer at her through his red slits aiming his wand at her chest.
There was no time for her to react. She closed her eyes anticipating the flash of green light that would reunite her with her son, when a familiar voice shouted.
“Protego!”*
Molly opened her eyes as a shield charm surrounded her. Looking around for its caster she saw Harry pull off his invisibility cloak. Hope was not yet lost.
Harry Potter was alive.
A Mother's Lament by kalae_zoe
Story Notes:
Special thanks to my husband and Potterphile12 for betaing this story.
Chapter Notes: Special thanks to my husband, Michael and my very special beta Potterphile12. Thank you so much Suya, you made this story so much better than I imagined.
Also I do not own these characters they belong to the great J K Rowling.
The quotes that have an asterisk next to them are taken directly from "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows" pages 728, 736 and 737.
Chapter Endnotes: This story was inspired by something I experienced earlier this year and doubly inspired by the below quotage from PotterCast episode 143 "Of Two Minds"
FF: If you wanna be a housewife, and just be a mother, that's an honorable thing.
MA: It's a powerful thing.
FF: And the fact that Molly was up to scratch too, like she could take out Bellatrix? Pff. Amazing.
MA: I love it and I love and what I really hope they try to emphasize is that this whole series has been about being a good mother and being good to your children and loving. And if they keep all those elements in, Narcissa lying about Harry being dead, Lily's- the specific magic of Lily's sacrifice … And the fact that she [Lily] didn't know. She did it out of pure love. She didn't think, "Well, if I do it this way, it'll be the most strongest magic." She just loved him that much. Like that was it. And people kinda roll their eyes and think that it's morbid and maudlin and what, but specifically what it was about, you know? And, uh! I just remember reading Seven and thinking, "How is it possible I didn't realize that with J.K. Rowling as the author of this series that this was going to be so much about being a good mother."
Frankie “Frak” Franco III and Melissa Anelli – excerpt from PotterCast 143: “Of Two Minds”