Blinking open tired, sleep-swollen eyes, Molly made a low humming noise as she gazed up at the fuzzy, twisty image of a person. They reached down and touched her face; it was so nice and cold - like the water of the brook near her home on her skin in the hottest days of summer. Clumsily, she brought her hand over to clamp down on the fingers on her face.

She felt the person attached to the hand jolt. "Molly?" they asked.

Molly squinted at the person above her. She could vaguely make out a frame of brown hair around a squarish face. "Noel?" she inquired.

The hand on her face relaxed some and even began to pet her cheek. "That's right, Molly," the person said in a tinny, faraway voice. "Now, keep talking to me, alright? Mabel and Catherine went to get a professor."

A feeling of panic overwhelmed Molly. A professor? That was the last thing she wanted! If one came in, they'd know. They'd know what she'd done and they'd tell her Mum and Dad and then Arthur would find out and–

"No!" she sobbed, struggling to sit up through her fever daze. "Nooo!"

Noel pushed down on Molly's shoulder. "Don't get up, please, Molly," she begged. "You're all bloody."

"'Course I am," she sniffed as she lay back down. "That's how you lose a baby."

The girl's eyes went wide and shocked. "Oh, you didn't!" Noel bemoaned.

"Wasn't ready to be a proper Mum. Don't even know what I'd have named it," Molly muttered as she curled up around her middle as her body was wracked with a sudden, engulfing pain.

Molly just barely saw her other dormmates come in with Professor McGonagall and Madam Pomfrey before she passed out into the comforting arms of oblivion.

●○●○●○●○●○●○●○●○●

The next time Molly woke up, there was no hovering person, no familiar, smells or materials. Everything was white and the room was sharp with the scents of the medicinal and everything from the pillow casing she has her head laid out on, to the socks on her feet are scratchy and uncomfortable. What made it all the worse, though, was the quiet sound of someone whimpering. Turning her head, Molly saw that it was her mother sniffling into her handkerchief in a chair beside her.

"Mum?" she croaked.

Big, doe-like eyes caught her gaze and mist over with a new wave of tears.

Reaching over, Molly weakly gripped the fabric of her mother's skirt and asked, "What happened?"

Her mother, a woman who's best known for her laughter and smiles, did not give either and instead began to sob loudly and painfully. Terrified by her mother's odd behaviour, the teenager asked again, "What happened, Mum?"

Shaking her head, Molly's mother buried her face in her handkerchief and, with her fears now spiked to a level akin to a rodent about to be caught by a cat, Molly started to breath frantically. "Mum?" she begged as the woman gave another wheezy wail. "Mum? Mum! What happened! Mum, what's wrong? What's wrong!"

A couple aides ran into the room at the sound of Molly screaming. When they saw she was sitting up, heaving hard as she shouted herself silly. The duo came to her side and took her arms in constrictor-like grips.

"Calm down, Miss," a fairly burly fellow, ordered in a low grumble.

Still yelling as she fought against the hands of the aides, Molly attempted to get her mother to give her an answer one last time by screaming, "Mum! Mummy, what happened to me?"

From the corner of her eye, she could see the two aids passing something between them as she looked to her mother who'd turned fully in her chair to face away from Molly. Suddenly, she was sputtering as the non-burly aid pressed a vial against her lips and made her start to gulp down its contents.

Almost instantaneously, Molly started to calm down. Within a couple of minutes, her heart began to slow down to a normal pace and the feeling of fear that had spurred her fit was overtaken with one of tranquillity.

It was sort of like the feeling she got when she and Arthur laid together on the ground and watched the clouds change shape above them. However, it was different, too, as there was something forceful about this calm, it just covered the fear that she knew was still there - lurking in the back of her mind waiting for the peace that had implanted itself in her to leave.

Even so, she still asked, "What happened to me?"

"Just wait a minute, Miss Prewett, we'll get the healer," the one that fed her the Calming Draught said.

Nodding easily, Molly gave them a beatific grin and settled her hands in her lap. "Oh, yes, please do."

The pair smiled back at her and left her room, only to be replaced by a rather old and balding healer a minute or more later as her mother shifted back to face Molly and continue her incessant sniveling.

Coming over, the healer gave her his hand. "Hello there, Miss Prewett, I'm Healer Jones," he told her.

Shaking the hand, the teenager nodded. "Nice to meet you, sir," she said. His hand was warm and his fingers calloused, very much like her father's. Mind drifting, she wondered where her father was and if he was at St. Mungo's, was he just getting something to eat or outside waiting?

Healer Jones cleared his throat. "Now," he warbled, "I was told you wanted to know why you are here, is that right?

Snapped back to her ever less pressing problem, she nodded. "Yes, would you mind explaining, Healer Jones?" she asked.

The balding man's face took on a look of regret as he took a seat gingerly on the edge of her bed. "What I'm about to tell you will likely be quite upsetting, dear. It's not a happy thing in the slightest," he told the teenager.

"I'll be alright," Molly replied confidently as she carefully manoeuvred herself to be on level with the sitting man. The Calming Draught the aides had given her was in full effect and had left her with a vague feeling of optimism.

Nodding along, Healer Jones replied, "Right. Well, to put it simply, that concoction you took to expel the fetus was several doses higher than it should have been and in the process of getting rid of your pregnancy, also damaged your uterus so severely that it can no longer carry a baby."

"So, I'm sterile?" Molly asked for confirmation.

Healer Jones patted her hand. "That you are, Miss Prewett. But don't think this means anything else. You can still engage in intercourse. You can still raise children and do all the other things women do with their lives. You just can't carry a baby anymore."

"That's too bad, I always wanted to have one." Molly sighed, the slightest niggling of sadness making itself known through the hazy feeling of peace that kept her calm.

Getting up, the balding man told the teenager, "You still can, dear, adoption is always an option."

"You're quite right, I suppose."

Standing straight up and ready to leave then, Healer Jones concluded his discussion with, "I'll have an aide bring in a few pamphlets on adoption and sterility for you–just so you can get an idea of what things will be like."

"Thank you, sir," she called after his retreating body.

Then, moving her gaze onto her mother, Molly remarked from her cloud of calm, "That wasn't so hard, was it, Mum? I can't have any babies, what's so difficult about that?"

Her mother's eyes, hard, blue jewels of pain, stared at her. "Molly, you've always wanted to be a mother," she murmured softly.

"Well, I guess I'll have to find something else to be," she declared as she turned away from her mother.

Settling her head down on her pillow, Molly didn't mind its itchiness nearly as much as she had in the beginning. The feeling of peace having lulled her into a state of sleepiness, she muttered, "I'm tired, wake me in an hour."

And with that, Molly let the haze of the Calming Draught help her back into slumber.

A/N: Thoughts? Do you like this even though there will be no Weasley children, and are Molly and Arthur still going to be a couple?