Author note: In this story, I do not mention the public events seared in my own memory: the Challenger explosion; the Tiananmen Square uprising; the night the first Gulf War began (just as my male friends were turning eighteen and registering with the Selective Service); September 11, 2001. Nor do I mention the events that rocked my parents' generation: the assassinations of John F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King Jr., and Robert Kennedy; the Kent State shootings; the fall of Saigon. But images of all these events flickered through my mind as I wrote Molly's experiences of the first and second wars against Voldemort. I'm a historian by training, and I wanted to write a story about the intersection of life with history.

We know from OotP that Molly was not in the Order of the Phoenix during the first war, but we have no conclusive evidence that Arthur was not. (Absence from a group photo is hardly conclusive evidence!) I choose to assume that he was.

The Eleventh of August

Some dates are seared in our memories. Some dates are burnt in our flesh. Always remember the fifth of November, gunpowder, treason, and plot. Quatorze juillet, and Paris on the march. For Molly, the eleventh of August.

She couldn't bring herself to say it now, but Ginny was a mistake. They already had six children, and they didn't particularly want more.

Six children was what Arthur had promised her, that cold September night, thirty years ago, when they snuck out of the castle and went for a walk around the lake and were caught by Apollyon Pringle at a quarter to four in the morning. That night on the grassy beach he first laid a tentative hand on her thigh, and Molly Prewett, who was sixteen and wasn't a prefect but wished she was, said, Arthur Weasley, what do you think you're doing? And Arthur said, Molly, it's okay, Molly, because we're going to love each other and get married and have six children and live together all our lives, and wizards live long lives. And Molly Prewett, who was sixteen, an anxious and slightly damaged sixteen, had misgivings. But just in that moment, when Arthur first said it, it all seemed to make sense. It made sense, and it was just unbearably appealing to a girl of sixteen whose parents were already dead, whose parents had not lived particularly long lives. So she put away her misgivings and her silence was a tacit yes. She put away her misgivings and she started building castles in the air.

She didn't know, that night when Apollyon Pringle caught them, that two years later she would graduate from Hogwarts into a world about to be riven by a war the like of which no wizard had ever seen. She didn't know, that night, that she would graduate from the cloistered world of Hogwarts—where all the teachers treated her with deliberate, measured kindness, because they all knew (it was covered in staff meetings) that Molly Prewett was an orphan—into a world where tragedy was multiplied a thousandfold, and her own particular tragedy was lost and submerged amid the chaos because it wasn't a legacy of the war, just ordinary illnesses, one cancer, one pneumonia, the sort of thing that could happen to anyone, anytime, anywhere.

Six children seemed attractive then to a girl who was already an orphan, who had spent her teens consumed with slightly obsessive big sisterly love for the two little brothers she was helping to raise, who had no academic talents but a great deal of hard common sense. So she put away her misgivings, and she started building castles in the air.

And yet they weren't so fantastic after all, because the winter passed, and all of her seventh year, and Arthur stuck to her like glue, and Mildred Prewett, the elderly and amiable great-aunt with whom she now lived, was just about crazy enough to concur in some of Molly's teenaged wedding fantasies.

July found her, a conscientious but unenthusiastic stringer for Witch Weekly, unfurling the Daily Prophet morning after morning and searching through columns of Ministry intrigues, dissension in the Wizengamot, the proposed International Ban on Dueling, and two or three unexplained disappearances for snippets of news that could be sugared and spiced to charm the house-ridden and hairstyle-obsessed readers of Witch Weekly. The work was vain and unsatisfying, and morning after morning Molly Prewett tapped her quill absent-mindedly on the little square desk and let her thoughts drift to her weekend dates with Arthur. Morning after morning, the desk blotter told her off for wasting time. The Witch Weekly offices were full of eighteen-year-old stringers with their minds on their boyfriends rather than the news, and all the desk blotters were charmed to rebuke malingering.

On the eleventh of August, the Death Eaters blew up a children's clinic in Hendon. No one knew it was the Death Eaters' work, of course, because no one as yet knew what the Death Eaters were; and very few had heard even of Lord Voldemort. All anyone knew was that a Muggle hospital had exploded and there was evidence of magical involvement. That was all, and on the twelfth of August there was a second explosion.

Next morning, Molly Prewett put on a white dress with violets in it and took morning tea into Great-Aunt Mildred, as she always did. And she said, "Aunt Mildred, I just wanted to tell you, Arthur and I are getting married."

Aunt Mildred looked down her spectacles as she sugared her tea, and said, "God bless you dear. Today?"

And Molly, who hadn't told Arthur about this yet, said "Yes, I think today."

Aunt Mildred said, "Well, dear, I wish I could come, but my glaucoma's hurting terribly, and Knickerbocker ate a gnome last night and threw up on the bathroom rug, so I'm afraid I really can't." Knickerbocker was the family Kneazle.

Molly said, "Oh, yes, Aunt Mildred, that's quite all right, but do you mind if I take Gideon and Fabian?"

Aunt Mildred shrugged amiably and said, "Why, yes, dear, do. Keep them entertained. Summer vacation, always very difficult for schoolboys."

So she gathered up her adolescent brothers, clad in the scruffy t-shirts and bell bottoms that young wizards wore in those days, and she Flooed them to the Ministry, where department heads were having kittens in the hallways and junior assistants were swapping sleeping-pill-induced nightmares in the cafeteria. She strode unannounced into Arthur's tiny cubicle, and Arthur stood up and said, "Do you want to get married today, Molly?" and Molly said, "Yes."

They tried to Floo Arthur's parents, who were hard to reach, but they walked in half-way through the ceremony, which was being performed by the Head of Magical Transportation, because Arthur had found him in the men's room and he said he was licensed to perform weddings. It was Friday the 13th of August, which some people might have been superstitious about, but half the department heads thought the world was ending and all the junior assistants' blood was liquid coffee, so no one really noticed at the time. There were a lot of weddings like that, that first summer.

At Florean Fortescue's they bought Gideon a milkshake and Fabian a hot fudge sundae and Arthur's parents two large mugs of sugary tea and another newspaper. Florean Fortescue himself took their order, and he stood Molly and Arthur each a large bowl of ice cream. And that was Molly's wedding: no invitations, no flowers, no presents, no photos. No misgivings, either.

She stayed on for another six months at Witch Weekly, and she concentrated a little better. Then Aunt Mildred died. She quit her job and settled the Prewett estate, which consisted of debts and scuffed furniture, and she started molding the Burrow into a home for her husband and her two orphaned brothers. After that came Bill, who was born into a state of unambiguous war.

Charlie was three months old, screaming and colicky, when Arthur came home and announced he had just joined something called the Order of the Phoenix. And Molly said, as levelly as she could, Arthur, why, Arthur, why do you think this is a good idea? We have no savings and no connections, two children under the age of three and two teenaged brothers to raise. I've never held a job in my life, except for that stint at Witch Weekly, because I went practically straight from Hogwarts to my husband's home and was pregnant at nineteen. If anything happened to you—if anything happens to you—Arthur, look at me, Arthur, listen to me, Arthur, if anything happens to you—

It turned out that he thought it was a good idea because Gideon told him it was. Because Gideon, who was all of eighteen, was joining the Order too. The only reason Fabian hadn't joined was that he hadn't passed his NEWTs yet.

These revelations did not make her feel any better.

But Arthur said, quietly, calmly, Molly, you're in Gryffindor. Molly, don't you read the news?

And just in that moment, when Arthur first said it, it seemed to make sense. So she put away her misgivings, and her silence was a tacit yes. Reluctantly, conscientiously, she resumed reading the news.

Even when, a few seasons later, he announced that he was taking time off from the Ministry and going underground, she said nothing but "I love you" and "Come back soon." She didn't see him for a year. She still doesn't know quite what he did in that year, where he went. He told her little and she isn't sure she wants to know more. In a marriage with no secrets, this is the only silence.

For a year Molly sat at her kitchen table, at naptime, at bedtime, on weekends when Fabian was with the little boys, and pounded out copy for Witch Weekly. She was much, much better at it now than she had been at eighteen. Splendid long articles flowed from her quill. Teething and tantrums, salads and scones. How to be a good big sister. How to settle your great-aunt's estate. How to bury your parents and be glad they lived such long, full lives. Planning the wedding you already know you're not actually going to have.

The trials of a single mother.

The editors snapped the articles up like hotcakes and begged for more. They didn't get them, because the babies came thick and fast once Arthur got back home, scarcely two years between the births.

But when, for the sixth time, the morning sickness started, she felt more shock than delight. The war had been going on for a decade by then, with no sign of intermission. They still had no savings and no connections, and they already had six children. She had moved from her ridiculously fertile twenties into her presumably less fertile thirties, and though she wasn't actually using a Contraceptive Potion yet, as Ron was still nursing (he was only nine months old), still she had assumed . . . They had long since agreed on six children. Six was enough, even for Molly. Six was more than they could afford.

But the morning sickness continued, and her tummy began to thicken, and she had to wean Ron. In the eleventh year of a war she feared would never end, Molly faced her seventh bout of motherhood with less than usual enthusiasm.

In the eleventh year of the war, the Order of the Phoenix was outnumbered twenty to one, and Death Eaters were picking them off like flies. Molly didn't know half of what was happening, because she had her hands full with no money and six children, and Arthur and Gideon and Fabian, knowing her fragility, cocooned her in one vast affectionate conspiracy of silence. Their friends flitted through her kitchen now and then, playing with the children: Sirius Black, whom she never liked much, and Alastor Moody, whom she liked but never trusted, and Remus Lupin, whom she liked though he always seemed so damaged and so sad. Marlene McKinnon, before she was killed, and Alice Longbottom, before she was tortured, and Caradoc Dearborn, before he disappeared.

It was Alastor who woke her on the eleventh of August, buzzing and buzzing, leaning on the doorbell, apparating into her kitchen at five o'clock in the morning as she tumbled down the stairs in wrinkly and unbecoming maternity nightwear. She looked at her clock, which in those days had more hands than it would subsequently have, and she saw that two hands were gone. She looked, tight-lipped, at Alastor, and he looked straight through the back of her clock with his magic eyeball, and he tapped his recently fitted wooden leg on her kitchen floor, and he said, "Molly, I'm sorry." And she thought, damn you, Alastor, for wanting to fight Dark wizards and making other men think they want to too. He said, "Our intelligence was good, but it's never perfect." And she thought, damn you, Alastor, I would expect perfection, if I were sending men into danger, if I were running intelligence. He said, "Molly, there's nothing to say."

No, there was nothing to say.

No, she had nothing to say, as she slipped, half-fainting, into a kitchen chair.

There was simply nothing to say.

And then she felt a shock of pain—not in her head, not in her heart, but in her midriff. Another, and another. Arthur wasn't home, and before she could get to St. Mungo's, her water broke. And Molly blanched, because it was too soon, it was much too soon, it was nearly a month before the baby was due.

So Ginny was born, quickly, early, unexpectedly, on the eleventh of August. And somehow, amid all that pain, the shocking, numbing, tortuous, lonely pain that went on and on long after the birth was over and the tiny infant was stabilized and they both left St. Mungo's, Molly realized how wrong she had been not to want this last, belated, inconvenient baby. Molly, like most purebloods, had been brought up without much religion, but in the wake of her brothers' death, she craved meaning and she found it. On the worst day of her life, God had given her something for which to be grateful.

Ginny was the extra. Ginny was the gift.

The war was almost over.

She breathed a sign of relief, and she got herself a good reliable Contraceptive Potion, and she started building castles in the air. Charlie grew up with Gideon's smile, and Ron developed Fabian's chin. Slowly, slowly she learned to be happy when she saw her brothers in her sons. She never tried to shield them from stories of the war, so that Ginny would later claim, with pardonable exaggeration, that she heard the tale of Harry Potter from the hour of her birth.

In the silence when the children left for Hogwarts, she got out her wistful old wedding articles for Witch Weekly, and she thought, I have a daughter now. Against all odds, against all expectation, I have a daughter, and the world's at peace, and there's such a thing as second chances, sometimes, now.

She didn't know, on the eleventh of August, that sixteen years later her unexpected daughter would be turning sixteen amid another war and losing her heart to another teenaged boy who just couldn't stay out of the fight. Molly doesn't know what's going on these days on the grassy beach at Hogwarts, but she can guess. And Ginny is not the sort to have misgivings. Ginny is not, like her mother, the sort to say, Harry, what do you think you're doing? Nor is Ginny the sort to say, Harry, why?

Ginny is far more likely to say, Harry, let me come too.

She knew from the day Ginny was born that she belonged in Gryffindor. More than she ever did. Hers had been a courage, not of action, but endurance.

She doesn't quite know how it happened, but Ginny is turning sixteen. She doesn't quite know how it happened, but it's been twenty-eight years since they eloped, and their last little child is almost grown-up. In a year she'll be of age, and there's no saying what she might do. And Molly thinks, if the world keeps on like this, if the war just goes on and on, that's one more wedding that isn't going to happen, one more match that was writ in the stars.