Molly's Chambers

"How did you meet?"

Well, it was a perfectly legitimate question to ask the baby-producing, 'good gracious you have a lot of children, you must be wonderfully patient' story-book couple that was Arthur and Molly Weasley. Married for nigh on thirty years, they were the living advertisement for the perfect, through thick and thin, till death do us part marriage that produced seven lovely children and in future years, a multitude of grandchildren. As those seven little ones grew up, they naturally began to wonder about their perfect parents and where the union between the saintly Molly and the loving Arthur had been sown, nurtured and had resulted in a couple so deeply in love after all these long, hard years.

"Why, at Hogwarts of course. How do you think most wizarding couples meet?"

This answer was firm and steadfast and it had lasted them through the years. In all honesty it was true, in its barest form. The pair had been sorted into Gryffindor in the same year and had known each other through the eternal mystery of the inner workings of the sorting hat and had merely explained that over the years at Hogwarts they had become friends, found a mutual like for each other, then love and finally marriage with children.

Lies.

These lies had been encouraged through the years, to save the face of the Weasley family, already faced with poverty and hardship. Molly and Arthur had not, as their children thought, fallen in love in the Gryffindor common room, amongst all the teenage angst, noisy yelling, mutual flirting and unfinished pieces of homework. In fact, the truth was that Arthur Weasley had never so much as thrown a glance at Molly Brocklehurst and she had never sought him out from amongst their fellow classmates when she wanted companionship. The two had passed their Hogwarts years side by side, yet never becoming closer, their contact limited to brief hellos and various arguments as the rivalry between Molly's giggling friends squared up against the teenage machismo of Arthur's gang. Those seven years had passed in a blur of fighting, laughter and tears and the two had entered the real world, to face the problems of finding a job, finding a partner, finding a life, with only the briefest of goodbyes and no intentions of meeting again in years to come.

Sparing not another thought for the fiery, slightly domineering, but kind and comely girl he had last seen sobbing into Lena Bradshaw's wide, heaving shoulders on their last day at school, Arthur joined the Ministry of Magic six months after leaving, and more specifically the Misuse of Muggle Artefacts office to indulge in his lifelong passion for Muggle objects. They were, for the time, his greatest desire. In that small, musty office, where there was barely room to move parchment from the overflowing in-tray to the scratched and worn desk, he indulged in as much Muggle splendour as was reasonably allowed under working conditions. Under the loose, faded floorboard in between his desk and a filing cabinet that had seen better days around seventy years ago, he hid away a secret stash of Muggle appliances: wires, light bulbs, records and cigarette lighters, all buried in the darkness underneath the musty, silent office. Above all these little pleasures he had one he adored more than above all others, a pleasure that he guiltily hid deep away until Perkins left the office and he pulled his little piece of heaven quickly from their hiding place and placed them tenderly on his desk, as if they would burn away if he was too rough with them. His prized Playboy magazines had been confiscated from the scene of a crime, where a wizard had been caught stealing from a Muggle bachelor's house in Grimsby. Perkins had passed them to Arthur that cold night, smirking that Arthur had more use for them than he did, and every day since, when Perkins left the office, they were removed from their hidey-hole and were visually devoured, page by page.

The still women that haunted these pages entranced Arthur. The way their seductive pouts and smouldering glances never moved as Arthur felt himself slip away beyond the little office. He was enchanted by their bodies that never rippled and their flesh did not display any imperfections that they had as the women did in wizarding magazines. These women were Arthur's fantasises, the women he would gaze at for hours on end and imagining all sorts of scenarios in his head, and yet they remained untouchable. That was one thing he loved about these models; they were so far away and yet he could mould them into whatever he wished them to be, whether it be tame thought of love and marriage or the other type of thoughts that made him blush and caused Perkins to laugh outright and make barbed comments about being "a healthy young lad." Like most men, Arthur had one model he loved above all the other pouting beauties; the skinny blondes and brunettes who smouldered on the pages paled in comparison to this goddess who gazed up from her still position on the page, beckoning him with her eyes, making him feel as though what she was doing was for him only; that it was their little secret. This girl was red headed and curvy, standing sideways to the camera so that her head was slightly tilted and looking straight ahead; one hand was pushed through her long red hair and the other was placed just above her most intimate area. The woman's plump thighs that were slightly open, her round, curved backside and shapely breasts sent Arthur into a dizzy exultation that, peaked in the office's toilet was hastily flushed away, hidden in toilet paper.

Fixated on this woman, he soon began to seek out women who fitted this image of the perfect woman, his perfect woman, this goddess amongst dirty pages of the magazines. He supposed that it would be more likely to find her in the Muggle world than his own and he took to stalking the Muggle streets at night, searching for her, his Mother Earth, his own model, whom he could touch and love, whom he could explore all his little thoughts and deepest desires. He braved the unknown world of Muggle London, the thrill of ending up hopelessly lost in a strange world he neither knew or understood, added to the excitement of finding this woman and making her his. He regularly kicked his way through the dirty streets where grime covered the windows and the winter nights howled with wind as the rain beat down and soaked him through. The Muggle streetlights cast a yellow light on the cracked pavements and Arthur loved to watch his shadow glide through the fading streets of poverty and depression. For months he walked those streets, twice ending up in fights with young Muggle men whom he'd had to curse. One young man had ended up in hospital when Arthur's bat-bogey hex left him floored and unconscious. Arthur hated himself for it and the guilt added to the sexual and dangerous thrills he felt as he searched constantly for her, going against the oath he'd sworn to keep when entering the office he loved.

Then, in the cold, bitter January, where the sleet fell constantly, and the fog clouded his view, he'd decided to give up on the pipe dream he'd harboured those past months since he'd joined the Ministry. He would find a nice girl to settle down with and finally shut his mother up. Yet, as Fate so often does, on that last night before he gave up completely, he saw her standing near a filthy Muggle alley on a depressing, desolate street where the houses seemed to have given up trying to look nice and given themselves over to the grime. She was wearing a tiny skirt half way up her plump, pale thighs; a black blouse, unbuttoned to expose a generous amount of chest; and long red hair flowing over her shoulders. He battled with himself, watching her push her chest out for a group of drunken men who leered at her as they lurched past from the pub down the road. They laughed and loudly exclaimed that they preferred thin blondes. Whether it was the indignity of the slur or the fact that even from where he could see her shrink back into the shadows, no doubt humiliated, he fought the shyness threatening to engulf him, meekly walked over the street and stood a few yards away from her. He was transfixed watching as her naked white skin was reflected against the yellow glow from the Muggle streetlights and she came out from her place in the shadows. Mixing with the shyness was a rising desire within very specific areas of his as one pale leg stepped into view, followed by the rest of her. Too excited by what he was about to do with this living replica of the model, he didn't realise that he knew the face that was staring at him in the dull light. Evidently, Molly had already recognised him and stared with surprise and shame as Arthur felt himself to begin to blush and looked down at the rubbish-strewn street when she turned to look down the alley.

He looked up to see she had found her composure and was now cockily smiling at him, looking as if she had no idea who he was, that he was another faceless stranger and brashly took him by the hand and led him down the damp alley, infested with all kinds of dirt and smelling of urine and rotting food. He silently marvelled at her as he was taken to some unknown place. He was in awe that a witch who had boasted of becoming a Healer at St Mungo's was reduced to selling herself in the depressing Muggle London and still acted as if she ruled the place. Most of all, he loved how she was his own version of the model in flesh, and for that he couldn't care if she had been with half the men in the East End. All he cared about was that she fitted the image in his head and that this moment she was his. She led him into a squat at the end of the alley and nodded towards the mattress on the dirty floor that was covered in dust and he was sure he could hear mice scuttle across the floor and into one of the many holes in the peeling skirting boards. He began to pull off his clothes and watched her as she shook a pillow and some faded, ragged sheets to free them from dust. His thoughts drifted to why she was here; why was a witch from a pureblood family selling herself to the first drunkard that came along for hardly anything? His only explanation was that she too needed the money, just as he did; however Molly had not gained the NEWTs needed to fulfil her dream of being a Healer. Molly's branch of the Brocklehurst family tree was as poor as his own family, and hers hadn't supplied the love and attention Arthur had received. From the snatches of conversation he had overheard in the common room over the years, he had gathered that Molly's father was a drunkard and a womaniser and her mother was too ill to work. He gazed at her figure as she undressed and as she turned to him wearing a smile that was brash but a gaze that was desperate and haunted. His heart wrenched towards her as she gestured to the bed, tilting her head the way the model in the magazine did.

That night, Arthur made love, something he last did aged fifteen with Flora Lewisham, the Hufflepuff sixth year, who had cornered him behind the gamekeeper's shed. Molly cried as he thrust into her, she pleaded with Arthur to take her away from this dump and he clumsily leaned over to kiss the tears away. At that moment, Molly would have let Arthur do anything to her, as long as he gave her refuge from here, gave her a chance to run away and forget what she was. And the next morning she was gone, leaving behind the damp mattress on a filthy floor. He noticed as the weak sunlight poured through the gap in the moth-eaten curtains that she had made sure he was warm by tucking him in, and had placed his clothes away from where the mice could gnaw at them. He dressed in a delirious haze and Apparated back to his home, crawled into his warm bed and fell into an uneasy sleep, where Molly drifted in and out, reaching out for him, before snatching her hand away and running off into blackness. She had burned herself into Arthur's mind and he couldn't get her out. Every thought was mingled with her; he couldn't even look at a piece of parchment without seeing her in it, or her name written on it. The morning after meeting her, he took the magazines from their hidden enclosure and burned them in the fire, watching as the still models remain still as the flames licked their bodies.

The two played a game of cat and mouse for months after that first night. Each night he would meet her outside the same alley, he would follow her into the same dingy squat and he would make love to her, as she cried and told him that it was free to him, that she gave it to him for free. Even when it was that awkward time of the month for Molly, they would still meet and he would lie on that mattress, with her in his arms and they would talk of running away together and setting up a home where Molly could look after the many children they would have and Arthur would bring his wife fresh flowers every Tuesday, which she would place on the kitchen table. She gave him a promise, which she wrote in the dirt on the floor, that if she were still there when Arthur woke up, then she would give all this up and "you can make an honest woman of me, Arthur." For many months, Arthur woke to find an empty space next to him, and the familiar, looped handwriting had scrawled sorry on the floor, until one fine June day, when a brilliant sunlight streamed through the curtains, he opened his eyes and felt her heavy breathing against his chest. He'd kissed her awake that morning and the two had leant back together, not speaking, just lying back in the silence and clinging to each other, watching the dust float gently down to the floor in the summer morning.

They never spoke of those months. They were Molly and Arthur's lost months, which had been glossed with a few details, something about finding their feet in the real world before making any rash commitments. The love that had been sparked in the most distasteful of circumstances had grown with each child Molly had pushed into the world and the two, Molly in particular, beamed at the sheer perfection of it all, shuddering to think what might have been if Arthur had not been wandering the streets that night. And each time she scolds her children for lying, Molly has a pang of guilt, because whatever lies the children tell, she and Arthur lie more than they can ever know.

Everybody lies. It's just some lies are greater then others.