Creation

They are crying salt tears...

Because she loved open-armed

Throwing love for a cheap thing

Belonging to everybody -

Cheap as sunlight,

And morning air.

-- Carl Sandburg,

Repititions

As Sunlight

Arthur Weasley does not know why the girl lying on the clean, white bed makes him want to laugh, to cry, and to rejoice that he has found her.

He is not the sort that people remember - he is a lank redhead, diaphanous, a Ravenclaw easily forgotten amongst the tomes of Muggle books. He is the sort that people wonder about, who could just as easily have been in any other House, the sort who chose Ravenclaw for its quiet and in its quiet has found obscurity.

But Molly Nelson, lying before him, her face pale and causing her auburn hair to look much brighter, is just the sort of person that he is not - just slightly plump and vibrant, something about her bombastic, and a Gryffindor who could have been in any House if she had put her mind to convincing the Sorting Hat.

He doesn´t know why he is drawn to her, for she interrupts the quiet of his seven-year sanctuary.

He doesn´t know why the room seems brighter, suddenly, when her eyes struggle open and she looks up at him like a newborn - he knows, suddenly, that the old ways are ended, that the quiet is over and he will never be the Ravenclaw he was before.

But the tears on his thin cheeks are not because of that.

Because She

Arthur Weasley´s face is over her when she awakes.

She doesn´t know how he would have found her in the Gryffindor Common Room - he is a Ravenclaw, after all, but a Prefect, and probably knows all the passwords.

She doesn´t know why his face, with its long nose, smiling, weeping, makes her want to love him, to laugh at him, with him, for him. And in that confused moment between the warm darkness of sleep and the light of day, she wants to be an innocent girl dancing, flinging her arms around Arthur; it rises in her, almost against her will.

But now she is a good girl - she will not do things like that, not after all this.

She will be as she used to be, laughing, just out of reach, but she will be good; oh, how good she will be!

And somehow, in this midst of all this goodness, there is something wrong - she was never really good before, she can never really be good now. She has forgotten just what happened

Arthur Weasley´s nostrils flare ever-so-slightly as he laughs (at her? she doesn´t know) and the illusion is broken.

Cheap As Sunlight

She is not a good girl, she has found. No, no, she is damned.

In her dreams, Arthur Weasley comes up to her and says, "I wish to be damned with you, more than to be blessed with all of Hogwarts."

But she wakes up to silence, for who really wishes to speak to the damned? Arthur does, says hello to her when she passes, but of what sustenance is a hello?

She is hungry for something, anything - could she hunger for pressure upon her lips, of arms entwining about her?

They all think she is cheap and unworthy of their attention.

And she cries, starving, and not noticing the sun.

For isn´t it, too, cheap?

Cheap Thing Belonging

Molly resembles the sun ever-so-slightly, Arthur thinks, watching her.

He does not know why he watches from the shadows - why he is so glad when Lucius Malfoy is not there, watching his Molly.

When did she become his? When he saved her? (Did he, really? Another Gryffindor would have found her, surely.)

She resembles the sun like that; she is his because he says so, for no other reason.

But she sparkles,

a voice in him says.

But the sun doesn´t sparkle, his common sense replies.

It amuses Arthur, for he never disagrees with his common sense as he does now; Molly Nelson has created a stunning tear in him. It causes him to laugh (this startles everyone in the library, Arthur Weasley is not the sort you´d expect to laugh), and for the first time in a long while, to close his book without any new insights revealed.

For didn´t the ancients worship the sun?