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After the Battle of Hogwarts, after the celebrations and the funerals, Harry found himself one morning in the Burrow’s kitchen. The first rays of summer dawn shone through the windows, providing dim lighting to the man, his early morning tea, and his dark thoughts.
“Couldn’t sleep?” A voice sounded behind him, almost startling him. He turned, to find Mrs. Weasley, looking as tired as he felt in rumpled clothes.
“I did sleep, but only a couple hours. Nightmares.” He responded. That night had been about Sirius and the department of Mysteries. Bellatrix’s mad laughter haunting him months after her demise.
“Me too, Harry. Me too.” Added Molly. Coincidentally, her nightmares also featured Lestrange. In her sleep, she was fighting at Hogwarts, but was too late to prevent Bellatrix from killing Ginny this time.
Molly shuffled into the kitchen and prepared tea for herself, silent. Both of them stewed over their dreams, reliving the horrors created by Bellatrix Lestrange.
After the tea was prepared and the Weasley matriarch seated herself in front of Harry, Harry asked the question he was burning to ask since the battle. “Bellatrix, for all that she was mad, was a terrific dueller. She bested Sirius, who was fantastic at duelling… so how did you…” He trailed off, not wanting to say the word kill, but his tone carrying it across anyway.
Mrs. Weasley seemed a bit surprised by his question. He quickly added “It’s just, I never saw you duelling, I had no idea you were good at it. Obviously you were in the Order, so you had to know how to defend yourself, but I thought your talents relied…elsewhere.” Harry was aware he was rambling but he couldn’t stop, in fear of having offended his sort of mother figure.
After a bit, Molly started slowly. “Well, it’s not that I don’t advertise it, but I think people tend to forget, but before I married into the Weasleys I was a Prewett. You see, my family may have been against pureblood supremacy and muggle hating, but they were pureblood nonetheless. I can trace my lineage to an era before the Ministry, before there was distinction between light and dark magic, and our family library reflected that. There still are…questionable books about now frowned upon subjects in Prewett Manor.” She paused a bit, to gauge Harry’s reaction. Not seeing anything negative about it, she continued.
“There is also the fact that while my own mother married into a ‘light’ family, she was still born Lucretia Black. She taught my brothers and me the Black way of dealing with an enemy: hit them so hard that they can never get back up. I think my father was against it at first, but you never argue with a woman from the House of Black for long.”
Here Harry was shocked. “You, Mrs. Weasley? A Black?” She chuckled a bit at his tone.
“Yes. The Blacks intermarried with a lot of prominent pureblood families this last century. In fact, we’re distantly related through them. Your great-grandmother I believe, Dorea Potter nee Black. Her and Charlus Potter had only one son, Fleamont, who married Euphemia Shafiq. They had James, who married Lily and had you.” She finished with a smile. “That’s why you were able to inherit the majority of Sirius’ assets and title, were you not technically descended from the Blacks, Sirius would not have been able to name as his Heir, the magic would have prevented it. It all would have gone to his closest male relative, Draco Malfoy, I believe.”
“I was related to Sirius?” Harry asked with emotion in his voice. “Very distantly I’m sorry, you’re more closely related to me, than to Sirius. Dorea was my aunt, she and my mother had a big age gap, and my parents had me late. But she was Sirius’…” she had to pause to retrace the family tree ”second cousin twice removed? Something like that.”
“Does that mean that I could have gone to you instead of the Dursleys? Since we’re family” Seeing the sadness and hope in his eyes, she answered in a soft, sympathetic tone. “Oh I’m sorry Harry, but I don’t think so. From what I gathered from Dumbledore’s explanations and remembered from the books in the Prewett library I mentioned earlier, what protected you were essentially blood wards. For them to take effect, you would have to reside with people who were related to you through your mother, since her sacrifice powered the wards.”
Harry looked down, at his steadily cooling cup of tea, feeling dejected. “How do know all this?”
“Well, being able to trace your lineage is standard education for purebloods. I taught all my children theirs, and they know who they’re related to and at which degree. I skipped teaching them the traditional holidays like Yule and Samhain because the Weasleys do the muggle ones, and Septimus, Arthur’s father, would resurrect himself from the grave to lecture me about ancient superstitions, but I taught them all the rest.”
“That and I was Head Girl at Hogwarts, I had the best grades in Defence Against the Dark Arts and Potions. I had the NEWTs to go work anywhere I wanted.”
“Really?” he asked, incredulous. “Yes, really. But I was in a relationship with Arthur, and what I wanted more than anything else was to be a mother, so we married right out of Hogwarts, and I became a house-wife. Sometimes I still brew a bit on the side, if Arthur’s salary doesn’t quite cover our expenses but it’s pretty rare.”
“So to answer your original question, when I had time during the war I would brush up on all the things I learned as a young girl. That, and I think desperation to see my family live through these troubled times gave me just enough to beat that monster. She definitely wasn’t expecting it, I was just the weak wife of a blood traitor to her, but I couldn’t let her touch Ginny. So here we are, she lost and I won.”
Gobsmacked, Harry couldn’t formulate a response to her speech. Each fact that he just learned put Mrs. Weasley further and further from the image he had of her.
The sound of the floor creaking a few floors up signalled to them that the rest of the family was waking up. The Weasley matriarch got up, cheerily declared “I should get started on breakfast” and proceeded to do just that.
Harry slowly got up to help her, torn between fear and admiration for this new facet of Mrs. Weasley’s personality.
The End