With Good Intentions

At their unplottable home, Harry and Ginny worried that Molly Weasley had transformed herself into the biggest threat to peace in magical Britain. 

That it should take the planet-sized mound of evidence before them to force true observation can be blamed on who they were and who she was. When considered objectively, no one can easily blame an only-daughter or a man desperate for a mother for ignoring the damage wrought by someone who continued to cook for, clean for and think for them all.

The tipping point in scraping off the moral cataracts from their vision arrived when they returned from an outing to find Molly disciplining one of their children (over her knee with a belt to his backside) for asking over missing family pictures. Young James visited often with his Uncle George and Aunt “Angie” since his cousin’s birth and took great joy in sharing his knowledge of family with the baby.

The child's innocent question —

“Mum-Mum, why are your pictures and Uncle George’s different?”

— gained him a solid thrashing. Molly would brook no insubordination where the definition of betrayers was concerned. She’d cull the traitors and turncoats from George’s album on her next visit. Mother Weasley’s rabid admonishment — to “do a better job raising James” — to her adult children, Ginny and Harry, wiped away whatever incapacitated their recognition of right and oh so wrong.

“You need to teach this child who’s family and who isn’t. He’ll be consorting with the likes of werewolves and Death Eaters if you don’t.”

The young parents rescued their child with haste born of shock at the thin traces of blood seeping through the back of the child’s button-up shirt, an offering to the deserving dead. Both young parents, with silent looks at each other, reconsidered whether enough had been sacrificed to grief over Fred’s death — a much easier reconsideration when abuse hit close to home.