Hello. I’m Anna Weasley. You’ve heard of me, I‘m sure. I’m the one with famous parents, Ron and Hermione Weasley, and even more famous aunt and uncle, Harry Potter and Ginny Weasley.
I’m the one whose father left one day, and never returned.
I can’t remember Dad at all, really, but I like to think I can, using the stories I’ve grown up with. The one about the knocking out the mountain troll, drinking Polyjuice Potion, and The Complete and Utter Fiasco (know also as The Yule Ball). Plus my favourite--Mum and Dad's first kiss.
But no one tells those stories anymore. Or, not around Mum, anyway. She‘s turning into a complete nervous wreck, to be honest. Often, I’ll find her crying quietly. The first time it happened, I was shocked “ my mother was usually so strong.
Ever since we moved to the Burrow, I’ve noticed that Mum‘s not as strong as she used to be, she‘s falling apart. Some days, she locks herself in our flat with a bottle of firewhiskey and doesn’t talk to anyone or come out or do anything. Grandmum Floos me to Uncle Harry and Aunt Ginny’s when this happens.
(I don’t call either of them ‘Aunt’ or ‘Uncle,’ actually, just ‘Harry’ and ‘Ginny.’ They told me to when I was little, because they said that they thought it was peculiar for me to call someone my uncle when he wasn’t even related to me“ Harry isn’t technically my uncle since he’s not married to Ginny. But they live in the same house“they have for seven years“ so we think of him as a relative.)
It’s as though Mum had only been strong in those five years we were on our own for me. Now that I’ve had other people to help me grow up, other people to be there for me, she doesn’t have to.
Mind you, sometimes Mum would still be Mum. We might go to Florean Fortescue’s, or to a fancy dress shop, or, more often, we would just hang out at the Muggle public library for hours on end. Even though I look like my dad (or, everyone says so), I inherited Mum’s love of reading and studying. I was always dying to go to Hogwarts.
I receive my letter right in the middle of my eleventh birthday celebration. Aunt Ginny is the first to notice.
"Anna! ANNA!" She is staring at a large-ish, square envelope, with writing in green ink on it's surface.
"What?" I have no idea what the heck this is about.
"It’s your Hogwarts letter!" A grin is slowly spreading across my aunt's face.
Instantly, people are crowding around me. Everyone except Mum.
*
It’s only after all my relatives“to some extent “ stop squeezing me to death, after Uncle Fred and Uncle George stop instructing me on a variety of different pranks (I assured them I know too many already) and Grandmum stops smothering me in kisses, that I notice who's missing. I don’t think anyone besides Ginny and I do. My aunt has this knack for noticing things like that. I excuse myself on the pretense of going to the bathroom and instead trek up the long expanse of stairs to our flat, a million different thoughts flying through my head. I knock once hastily before flying in.
"Mum?" I ask tentitivly. Sometimes she will blow up at me for coming in.
She’s sprawled on the bed, her face half-buried in the pillows. She had looked up when I came through the door.
"Oh, Anna." she says softly, but I can feel her pain. All too well.
She looks so tired, so defeated. "Congratulations," she says in the same quietly painful voice, with a watery smile that doesn’t quite reach her eyes.
"What’s the matter, Mum?"
"You don’t want to know."
"Oh, yes I do," I assure her, sitting next to her on the bed.
Mutely, she hands me today’s Daily Prophet. Wondering what it has to do with anything, I take it and look. It’s open to the “obituaries” page. There, about halfway down, I see it:
‘Mr. Ronald Weasley, to this day having been missing for five and one half years, is proclaimed legally dead.’
I know no one has seen him for five years, and I know most people would say, ‘Well, of course he’s dead, isn’t that obvious?’ But somehow reading those words all solid and final in front of me, makes it undeniably true. My father is dead, and I can’t pretend otherwise.
I stand up my legs shaking, and throw the whole paper into the grate. There the flames lick greedily at it, destroying it. Mum joins me, both of us just watching the offending piece of parchment curl up and burn. I hear her sniff, and see that she’s crying. Suddenly, my eyes start to sting, too. And that's exactly how Ginny finds us, fifteen minutes later, standing side by side, watching the last remnants of a fire flicker and go out, tears running down our faces.
She joins us.
Searching by Nadia Malfoy
Chapter Notes: Hi! I am SO sorry that I have made you wait this long for and update! (If, of corse, you haven't given up this story in disgust.) Well, here it is! Thanks to by betas, Wings of the Morning and Jazzinator. You rock, girls!