HEADCANON  — Molly Weasley’s meetings with grief.
FABIAN AND GIDEON die when she is thirty one. They are murdered and their bodies are beaten and bloody and not at all resembling the boys she grew up with. She had grown up protecting them, helping them, looking after them, and she never really stopped.
    She failed them. She knows this.
    She also gets to know grief for the first time. When her grandparents died, she brushed the hand of grief for a moment, but she barely got to meet him properly. When her brothers were ripped from her, though, it was thrust into her life, and she didn’t know what to do with it. If you asked her now, what she did during those first weeks after their deaths, she’d tell you that she mostly wept.
   This is true. Molly continues to live her life – she has six kids to look after and no time to stand still – but she does it weeping. She changes diapers with salt trickling down her nose and hitting Ron’s young face, gets rid of the garden gnomes sobbing and screaming, does the dishes with shaking shoulders. She scolds the twins – already so mischievous at a young age – with tears burning in her eyes because why do they remind her so much of them, how can she raise two kids who are so much like her dead brothers?
   There is no time to grief, then, with kids to raise and another on the way. She doesn’t do it properly, and it is only when she has time to stand still, years and years later, that she realises the damage that it did.
GINNY is said to be dead when she is forty one. She is told the news in an office that is too full for her liking – and she likes clutter – and she cannot fully grasp it. Her youngest, her only daughter, only twelve years old, dead?
   She weeps again. God, Molly feels so stupid that that’s all she can do as a response; shake and cry and whimper. A wounded animal, hurt by the losses of those she ought to look after, powerless and frozen in headlight.
   She failed Ginny, too. She should have known that something was amiss, even all those miles away.
   She’s alive, though; saved by a boy who is as much her son as he can be. Molly does not get to meet grief again, and she is glad of it; this time she does have the time, and Merlin knows what would happen, then.
   It’s a parent’s worst fear to lose a child and Molly Weasley almost does. It is that day that her Boggart changes and it will forever remain the same. She has nightmares of Dumbledore’s office for years after.
FRED dies when she is forty seven. Her Boggart has become true. One of her children is dead.
   Molly falls into a state of despair. This time there is no time for grief, with a world to rebuild and people to help and so much to do, but she cannot do anything but that. Grief becomes her, takes over everything she is. She doesn’t even notice it.
   Her warmth is replaced by coldness. Her smothering nature changes into a distant one. Her lively eyes become old and tired and marked by darkness caused by lack of sleep.
It takes weeks for her to begin to return to her former self and Molly can only feel guilt and shame and more of the same. Not only has she failed Fred, she has failed her other children, she has failed her husband — she knows that her warm, smothering nature can be much at times, but that it’s also a source of comfort among the Weasleys, and she has deprived them of it by being swallowed by her own pain.
   Her grief does not become any less after this, but she is returning to herself again. Slowly but surely, she learns that pain demands to be felt and that there’s nothing wrong with leaning on others every now and then.
   She starts writing. Molly writes all her fears in a little notebook at first and then fills others with memories and more with other thoughts. She does what she does best: she helps, she listens — and this time she helps and listens to herself.
   The idea to create a tribute to the fallen starts small but ends up big. It’s a project, a way to help herself and the rest of the grieving wizarding world. She publishes a book filled with stories of dead people two years after the battle of Hogwarts, and Fred is the first one named.
   She talks to George about Fred mostly, knows that he hurts even more than she does – she wonders how he’s not drowning and then realises that, perhaps, he is, but that he’s learning to breathe under water – and asks him about pranks. She wants to know about them, wants to understand the things that angered her when her twins were younger. It’s too late, she knows, but many things are. It won’t keep her from doing them.
   Her grief never becomes any less. Molly just learns how to handle it better than she did before.
HARRY dies when she is seventy two.
   She has lived through two wars; how she could be so naive to think that her family would ever be safe, is beyond her. Still, she really thought they were safe then, after all those years of grief and loss and war.
   Another child of her dies, though, and she doesn’t know if she can go through that process again. Of course, Harry is not her son — but he’s as good as, and while it is completely different than losing Fred, it still hurts all the same. Grief is becoming Molly Weasley again, and she is afraid of what it will do to her.
   There is only so much one can lose, you see, and Molly questions her strength more than anything now that it’s being tested again. She won’t admit it — too many people rely on her, look at her — but the fear that she will fracture and break is all too real.
   She doesn’t write any more. It’s too confrontational. In stead, she helps. She makes tea for people who need a little bit of comfort and gives phenomenal hugs and tries to keep herself together by trying to keep others together. It works well enough to keep her from coming apart.
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