Hey guys! Merry Christmas--or Hannukah, Kwanza, Festivus, whatever. I know this isn't really very cheerful, but I haven't written any Harry Potter in a while and I needed to get back into it. I do not own Harry Potter, though it would make a nice Christmas gift. This fic contains disturbing themes--if you make it past the first section, you're past the worst, but consider yourself warned.

Thy mother is like a vine in thy blood, planted by the waters: she was fruitful and full of branches by reason of many waters.

Ezekiel 19:10

It is Bellatrix's idea to kill the child.

Rodolphus is still set on the idea of an heir. He does not realize that after this war, nothing like that will matter. They will have everything. The wizarding race, together, will possess all. Bellatrix will be a queen; and she will be his. There will be no need for heirs. Not that Rodolphus can see it. Yet.

When the child comes she is alone. She isn't prepared for the actuality of labor; for the blood and the tightening and the pain that wracks her entire body. She hasn't had time to prepare a potion, so she sprawls herself on her magnificent four-poster bed (taken from a dead Mudblood) and clutches the mattress and screams into her pillow.

She does not realize it, at first, when the child leaves her body. A girl, she notes distantly, with black hair and dark eyes. It looked like a baby-doll she had kept as a child; hushing it softly and stroking its hair.

But this baby—it cries, and has a red, paunchy face and is cold and naked and she mindlessly wraps it in the sheets and smoothes its brow. "Quiet, child," she hums. "You're alright."

The green light at its chest works instantly. Bella shivers and clutches it to her breast. When she cries, she says it is from pain; and when Rodolphus asks, she says that it was born dead (it might as well have been).

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Walburga was not born to be a mother; there are so many other things more worthy of her time. There are parties to plan and connections to be made; and besides, she loathes the thickness it leaves around her hips and waist.

She gives birth at home, with her mother and sisters around her, wiping the sweat from her brow and holding her hand. The potions have made her numb to everything, of course; and she thinks the whole thing is rather dull. There's no need to make such an ordeal of it; besides, she still needs to send off a letter to the Minister, and see that Kreacher's done the washing properly.

And so when they place the baby in her arms, swaddled in silver and green, she stares at him for a moment before pushing him off to the nurse and sliding out of bed, pulling her robes around her.

The next three days are some of the busiest of her life; she has been planning this ball for months and it is the event of the season. She dances with a man from France and he tells her that she is beautiful, in her icy blue robes. And the next evening there is a masquerade, and a ministry function the next, and she nearly forgets that she is a mother. The nurse tends to the feedings and the changings, and if she sometimes hears crying in the night; well, he's only an infant. He will learn.

On the fourth night, she is surprised at her own curiosity. She wraps herself in a thick blanket and slips down the shadowy halls, smiling with satisfaction at her own mastery of everything.

The baby—Sirius—is, miraculously enough, awake when she comes. He is not crying, and when he blinks up at her she sees that his eyes are grey and bright. His fist curls around her thumb, and she takes him into her arms. His weight, little as it is, feels awkward and out of place in her thin, white arms; she feels like a child playing dress-up. "Such a handsome little prince," she whispers to him, feeling slightly ridiculous—but isn't this what mothers do? Then he starts to cry.

"What do you want?" she begs him desperately. "I don't understand."

The nurse—a mere girl, really, perhaps fifteen—stumbles in, rubbing her eyes.

"Oh, ma'am," she says. "I can do it. You go back to sleep, ma'am."

Walburga, as she hands over the baby, sighs with relief. But her arms feel barren and empty, and as the girl sings a song—to her son—she feels something akin to jealously. But she needs her sleep, after all. There is so much to do.

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Molly loves the children, each one of them; and the ones that died in her womb—she never forgets and sometimes when she tucks the others in at night she remembers them.

And so when she is pregnant again, she knows, almost instantly. Bill, who is now just another of a rapid, tumbling horde, presses his ear to her belly and she strokes his hair. You were small once, too, she tells him, and No I wasn't! he replies, before racing out to ride brooms with Charlie, and she loves the dirt under his fingernails and the water in his socks and remembers how he was always the first; her love, her baby boy.

Charlie, next—You're going to be a big brother, she tells him. I already am, he reminds her, and indeed he is, though to her he will always be the little brother, following Bill when they were toddlers and following him now, imitating carefully how he moves his shoulders andnever crying in front of him. Just a little, when asked Does it hurt, and his arm limp and broken.

Percy—poor, dear Percy; caught between the big boy games of Charlie and Bill and the impenetrable fortress of FredandGeorge and usually fitting into neither. He teaches himself to read early and when she sees how he has to prop the heavy tomes on his knees and sound out every word she is proud of him and ashamed of herself. You will have to be in charge of the new baby, she tells him. Mummy will need all the help she can get, and you must make sure the twins always mind you. He smiles at her; I will, he says, and finds a place to be.

The twins—Fred and George, not that she can tell who is who half the time. Her brothers laugh at her, but they can't tell any more than she can. And besides, it doesn't seem to matter. They tug together at her skirts and prod her belly with their toy wands. Mummy's gonna explode, says one—or perhaps both. She tugs their ears and kisses their noses. You silly, naughty boys, she says.

Ron, her baby—still her baby. She still holds him to her chest and loves him; how she loves him. But he is starting to walk now—he must walk; she cannot carry him for long. He cries at the hugeness of her belly; she presses her face to her abdomen and he laughs when the baby kicks out from the inside. Baby dear, baby dear, she sings into his hair. My baby, my boy, I love you, I love you. He gurgles and coos and smiles at her quaking voice.

The baby is a girl. Molly's hand trembles as she touches Ginny's porcelain hands and her bright shock of red hair that will never be shorn short, and pulls a pink dress over the tiny ears and nose and eyes. A girl. Someday her lips will be red and round, and her feet will wear little yellow shoes.

Someday—though Molly does not yet know it—she will hold this girl more tightly to her—when her husband is bleeding to death on the ministry floor; when her son brings home that skinny, scared Potter boy (she will love him, too); and when her baby—man, by then—is ripped out of her hands and dashed to death on a marble floor—she will clutch her daughter to her, and then she will let her go and they will fight, together.

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Narcissa has never liked the idea of motherhood. It isn't as if she is free now: she can't stop Lucius from leaving whenever his arm burns black and she can't save her sister from the madness that is taking her and she can't even leave the house anymore without curses and charms from people who think she's in as deep as her husband is.

But a baby? A baby means midnight feedings and birthday parties and crying and smells and filth. An inconvenience; if it were up to her he would be left to the servants, but Lucius says that no son of his will be brought up like that and she loves Lucius. She can see the need for an heir, but she wishes it could be done without so much trouble.

And so—it shocks her, more than anybody else, when she actually begins to love him. He needs her. And she needs him, as well. Needs his miniscule fingernails and his see-through eyelashes and his yellow hair. She sings songs to him when he cries in the night.

Lucius loves him as much as she does, and this surprises her too. She hasn't seen him like this, twirling his son in his arms and holding her close to him, the three of them together.

"Draco," she whispers. "Draco, Draco, Draco."

His name is very pretty, after all. She looks at his constellation in the hot summer sky and her hair is in the fresh young grass like it hasn't been since she was five and Lucius' lips are at her ear. Love. She is in love and she loves and she is loved.

She will do anything for him.

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Everyone has always said that Alice is one of the bravest in the Order. Even James Potter says that she is a "brilliant old bird." She can cast spells with the best of them. She has never been hurt on a mission, and no one has ever been killed beside her.

Once Neville is born, that changes.

It isn't that she suddenly becomes a coward. She does not. But she is afraid for him, like she has never been afraid for anyone else. She is afraid that she will put him down one day and never pick him up again. She is afraid he will grow up without remembering her face. She is afraid, she is afraid, she is afraid.

And so it hardly surprises her when she and Frank are ambushed. She clenches her fist and sets her face, but her wand is halfway across the alley and Frank is already on the ground and soon she is there, too.

She recognizes one of her assailants: Bellatrix Lestrange. They were in the same year at school. Beautiful Bella, the belladonna. Her eyes are black and large, and she laughs when she says the spell—Crucio! Crucio! Crucio!

"Please," Alice says. "I have a baby."

"I don't care," says Bellatrix, and while other Death Eaters have said that before none have meant it quite like this.

Eventually Alice stops seeing her at all. There is a red cloud in front of her eyes and she feels nothing and she knows nothing.

Neville.

Her baby.

Someday the spell stops. And she trembles and shakes and does not know it, and cradles air in her arms and sings it lullabies until she is in the arms of someone else, an older woman who she used to know, once, perhaps.

"Alice, Alice, baby," the woman says, and Alice stares at her. Water is leaking out of the woman's eyes. That used to mean something, maybe. Alice can't remember. And she is tired, so tired.

"Mother," she says suddenly, weeping. "I want my mother."

The woman's hands clench tightly around her shoulders. "I am your mother she says."

Alice doesn't believe her. A mother would have protected her.

"Neville," she says, and falls into herself.

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