Chapter 2: The Husband's Homecoming
The smell of Floo powder clung to Arthur’s woolen robes, a sharp, green scent cutting through the usual homey aroma of cinnamon and knitted blankets. He smiled, shaking soot from his sleeve. The raid had been a bust—a false alarm about bewitched lawn gnomes in Chipping Sodbury—and he’d managed to slip away early, eager for a quiet cup of tea and Molly’s chatter about how Ginny’s letter from Hogwarts had been.
“Molly, dear?” he called out, his voice echoing in the unusually silent living room. “I’m back! You’ll never believe what Mundungus thought was a smuggling operation…”
His words died. The kitchen door was ajar. A strange, rhythmic sound whispered from within. A creaking. A wet, slapping noise. A choked gasp he knew, yet didn’t know—it was Molly’s voice, strained into something primal and foreign.
His heart, a moment ago light, became a cold, heavy stone in his chest. He moved on silent feet, a Auror’s instinct overriding a husband’s confusion. He pushed the door open another inch.
The sight refused to coalesce into understanding. It was a tableau of such impossible wrongness his mind shattered it into pieces.
His kitchen. His table, where they’d shared a thousand meals.
His wife. Naked, bent over it, her beautiful, familiar body arched and gleaming with sweat. Her red hair stuck to her damp neck. Her face was turned, eyes squeezed shut, mouth open in a silent cry.
And behind her. Kreacher.
The house-elf’s spindly, hunched form was pressed against her. His gnarled, grey hands gripped the full curves of her hips with a possessive ferocity. Arthur saw the violent, jerking motion of the elf’s thrusts, saw the monstrous, inhuman length of him vanish into Molly with a familiarity that spoke of practice. Of habit.
Arthur’s breath left his body in a soft, final sigh. The world lost its color, its sound, narrowing to the obscene pulse of that connection. The Burrow, his sanctuary, curdled around him. The cozy clutter became a gallery of grotesque evidence. The cheerful clock, all its hands pointed to ‘home’, was a liar.
He must have made a sound. A floorboard groaned. Something.
Molly’s eyes flew open. They found his in the dim light from the hearth. The pleasure on her face—and it had been pleasure, he’d seen it, a look he hadn’t inspired in years—froze, then cracked into a mask of pure, unadulterated terror.
“Arthur—” His name was a ragged sob.
Kreacher did not stop. He slowed, turning his head with an infuriating, deliberate slowness. His bulbous eyes fixed on Arthur. A flicker of something passed over his wizened face—not shock, not fear. Triumph. He gave one last, deliberate thrust, deep, making Molly jolt and whimper, before pulling away with a slick, terrible sound.
He did not scramble to cover himself. He stood there, exposed, defiant, a living blasphemy in the heart of the Weasley home. “The blood-traitor returns,” Kreacher rasped, the words like stones dropping into a still pond.
“Get out.” Arthur’s voice was quiet, flat, devoid of any emotion at all. It was the voice of a stranger.
Molly scrambled upright, fumbling for her discarded robe draped over a chair. She wrapped it around herself, her hands shaking so violently she couldn’t tie the belt. “Arthur, please, I can explain—”
“Explain?” The word finally held something—a razor-sharp edge of hysterical laughter. He looked from her devastated face to Kreacher’s impassive, gloating one. The connection was a physical blow. “Explain what, Molly? Explain why my wife is… is being serviced by a house-elf in our kitchen?” The descriptors piled up, each more absurd, more horrific than the last.
“It’s not… it wasn’t…” Her words crumbled. How could they not? The scene required no explanation. It was its own perfect, damning truth.
“Kreacher was attending to the mistress’s needs,” the elf said, his head held high in a parody of dignity. “The mistress has many needs the master does not see.”
“Shut up!” Molly screamed at Kreacher, a flash of her old fire, but it was laced with hysteria. “For Merlin’s sake, shut up!”
Arthur stared at her. He saw it now—the shame, yes, but beneath it, a furious, guilty blush. A terrifying, secret knowledge in her eyes. This was not a one-time surrender. This was a thing she knew. A choice she’d made, again and again, in the dark of Grimmauld Place, and now here, polluting their home.
“You let him,” Arthur whispered, the realization hollowing him out. “You asked him.”
“Arthur, no, I…”
“Don’t lie to me!” The roar erupted from him, shaking the copper pots hanging from the ceiling. “Not now! Not after this!” He gestured wildly at the space between her and Kreacher, at the very air which felt fouled.
Silence descended, thick and choking. Molly hugged her robe tight, shrinking into herself. Kreacher watched, a vulture waiting.
“Why?” The question was a broken thing. “Is it… is it me? Have I not…?” He couldn’t finish. His fascination with rubber ducks and plug sockets felt like the pathetic hobbies of a fool. Was this what it had driven her to?
“It’s not you, Arthur,” she said, the fight gone, replaced by a numb despair. “It’s… it’s in me. A sickness. A want. I tried to ignore it, I swear I did. But it’s so dark, and he… he is that dark. He doesn’t care. He just… takes.” Her confession, whispered in their sunny kitchen, was more unsettling than the act itself.
Arthur felt nausea rise. This was beyond infidelity. This was a descent into a shadow world he couldn’t fathom. His Molly, his bright, bustling, motherly Molly, hungering for something monstrous.
Kreacher snickered. “The witch speaks true. She comes to Kreacher. She begs for the old ways. The filthy ways.” He took a step toward Molly, not touching her, but asserting a proximity that screamed of intimacy. “She likes that Kreacher is not a gentle wizard. She likes that he is a creature.”
“Don’t you speak to her,” Arthur snarled, his wand hand twitching. Every instinct screamed to curse this vile thing into dust. But he couldn’t. The binding magic, the laws, the complicated, horrible fact that this elf was now, unbelievably, entwined with his wife’s desires. It stayed his hand.
“Or what?” Kreacher challenged, his eyes gleaming. “The master will throw Kreacher out? Then the witch will find Kreacher. In the night. She knows where.”
It was the final, crushing blow. Arthur looked at Molly. She didn’t deny it. She just stood there, tears streaming silently, her body still humming from another being’s touch.
The foundation of Arthur’s life wasn’t just cracked. It was vaporized. The love, the trust, the shared history—it all crumbled under the weight of this new, unbearable reality. He wasn’t enough. His love was a clean, well-lit room. She had developed a taste for dungeons.
He backed away, one step, then two, toward the doorway. The motion was that of a man retreating from a biological hazard.
“Arthur, wait,” Molly pleaded, taking a step forward.
He held up a hand, stopping her as if she were the contaminated one. “Don’t.” His voice was tired. Empty. “I can’t… I need to… I have to think.”
“Please, we can fix this,” she sobbed, the domestic instinct to mend, to tidy, surfacing through the wreckage.
Arthur’s gaze swept over her, then to Kreacher, who stood as if rooted in the floorboards, a permanent, grotesque fixture in his home. The contrast was total: the warm, cluttered kitchen, the scent of her pastry crust still in the air, and this scene from a nightmare.
“Can we?” he asked, the question hanging in the air, heavier than any spell. He didn’t wait for an answer he knew she couldn’t give. He turned and walked out of the kitchen, leaving the two of them standing in the wreckage of his world.
He didn’t go far. He stopped in the living room, staring at the empty hearth. From the kitchen, he heard no sounds of fighting, no sounds of weeping. Only a low, whispering murmur. He couldn’t make out the words. But he knew the voice.
It was Kreacher’s.
And in that silence, broken only by that ancient, hateful rasp, Arthur understood the true depth of his defeat. The battle for his wife wasn’t over. It had already been lost, in the dark, on cold floors he never thought to check. And the victor was still in his kitchen, whispering to her, already reclaiming the territory Arthur had just abandoned.
The whispered words slithered through the quiet house, more penetrating than any shout. Arthur stood rooted in the living room, his back to the kitchen door, listening to the ruin of his life. Kreacher’s voice was a dry rustle, the tone unmistakable: possession, not consolation.
“The master is gone,” Kreacher hissed. “He sees the truth now. He sees what the witch is.”
From the kitchen, no rebuttal came. No outraged sob, no sound of a slap. Only a brittle, waiting silence.
Then Molly’s voice, thinned to a thread. “What am I?”
“You are Kreacher’s,” came the reply, immediate and absolute. “You are a thing of dark corners and hungry secrets. The master’s world is sunlight. It makes you itch.”
Arthur’s hand clenched on the back of his armchair, the woolen upholstery rough under his palm. He should storm back in. He should end this. But his feet were stones. The image of her face, that blur of pleasure and terror, paralyzed him. She had been a stranger in that moment. He was married to a stranger.
“He’ll leave me,” Molly said, the words hollow with certainty.
“He has already left,” Kreacher corrected, his logic pitiless. “His feet walked, but his mind left the first time you knelt on the Black kitchen floor. You feel the emptiness he left behind. It is a cold space. Kreacher fills it.”
A shuddering breath. The scrape of a chair leg on the floor. Arthur could see it in his mind—Molly turning, her robe gaping as she moved, facing the creature who had unmade her.
“It’s a sickness,” she whispered, but the conviction was gone. It was just a word now, an old excuse dissolving.
“It is a taste,” Kreacher murmured, closer now. “A true taste. You have swallowed it. It is in your blood. You cannot vomit it up.”
Arthur heard a small, broken sound. It took him a second to recognize it as his own breath leaving his body. He was waiting for her to deny it. To come rushing out, to grab him, to promise oblivion and healing. The silence stretched, taut and screaming.
In the kitchen, Kreacher extended a single, bony finger. He did not touch her skin. He touched the faded floral fabric of her robe, over the curve of her breast. The fabric was all that stood between his touch and her flesh. Molly flinched, but didn’t pull away. She watched his finger as if it were a wand casting a fatal spell.
“The master’s touch is soft,” Kreacher said, his voice a low chant. “It asks. It is grateful. It is quiet.” His finger traced downward, over the swell of her belly, to the knot of her belt. “Kreacher’s touch takes. It owns. It is loud inside your head. Which does the witch crave now, in this empty house?”
Molly’s eyes were glazed, fixed on that point of contact. The domestic scent of her own baking—a rhubarb crumble for Arthur’s expected return—clashed with the musk of sweat and sex that still hung in the air. The two realities, the one of warmth and the one of filth, pressed in on her. One was a memory. The other was a fever burning her up from the inside.
“I can’t,” she breathed, but her hand rose. Not to push him away. It hovered in the air, trembling.
“You can,” he insisted. “You will. The witch is lonely. The loneliness is an ache. Kreacher is here.” His other hand came up, and with a slow, deliberate tug, he undid the knot of her belt. The robe fell open.
The cool air of the kitchen hit her skin. She felt terribly exposed, and yet the exposure was a relief. The pretense was over. The robe had been a lie. This was her truth: her nakedness, the sticky evidence of Kreacher on her thighs, the hollow where her husband’s love had been.
Arthur’s footsteps sounded then—a heavy, deliberate tread on the stairs. He was retreating to their bedroom, or to Ron’s old room, or to some space where the air wasn’t poisoned. Each step was a nail in a coffin.
The sound decided her.
It was the sound of the sunlight world withdrawing. The door to normality closing. Leaving her in the dim, familiar gloom with the only thing that understood the chaos inside her.
She didn’t look at the doorway Arthur had passed through. She looked down at Kreacher. His bulbous eyes were black pools, reflecting the pathetic, naked woman before him. There was no love there. No tenderness. Only a kind of savage recognition. He saw the rot in her and did not judge it. He coveted it.
Her trembling hand finished its journey. It didn’t go to his face, or his shoulder. Her fingers, still smelling of pastry flour, wrapped around his thick, leathery wrist. She guided his splayed, bony hand to her own stomach, pressing his palm flat against the soft, warm flesh.
His skin was cool and rough like parchment.
It was an invitation. A ratification.
“Fill it,” she said, her voice stripped of everything but need. “The emptiness. Fill it up.”
A grotesque smile stretched Kreacher’s toothy mouth. It was not a smile of affection, but of conquest. He understood the assignment perfectly. This was not just about sex now. This was about annexation.
“Kreacher will fill it,” he grunted, his fingers digging possessively into her soft waist. “He will fill you until you forget the shape of his emptiness. You will remember only Kreacher’s shape.”
He pushed her back, not toward the table this time, but toward the hearth. The warm, cooking hearth, the symbolic heart of the Weasley home. She didn’t resist. Her back met the rough stone of the fireplace, still radiating a residual warmth from the day’s baking. The contrast was shocking: the homey, soot-stained stone against her skin, and the vile, ancient creature pressing his body against hers.
He didn’t ask. He didn’t maneuver. He simply lifted her, his strength surprising as ever, and she wrapped her legs around his narrow waist, an instinctive clutch. He entered her in a single, harsh stroke, pinning her against the symbol of her own domestic life.
Molly cried out, a sound lost in the stone. Her head fell back, thumping softly against the mantelpiece. Her eyes were open, staring at the ceiling beam above, where decades of smoke had darkened the wood. She didn’t close them. She wanted to see where she was.
Arthur was upstairs. The remnants of her family slept in photographs on the walls. And she was here, being claimed against her own fireplace by a monster, her body opening for him with a shameful, welcoming ease. The pleasure-uncoiled, insistent, and utterly divorced from love-was a drug she finally stopped trying to refuse.
She moved with him, meeting his jagged rhythm, her breath coming in sharp gasps that fogged the cold stone near her cheek. This was joining. This was the terrible, final merger. She was choosing the darkness over the light, the filth over the clean, the owning over the asking.
“I am yours,” the words tumbled from her lips, not a sweet vow, but a fevered confession into the shell of his pointed ear.
“Kreacher knows,” he rasped, his rhythm fracturing into a final, deep series of thrusts. “The house knows. The stones know.”
His climax was a silent, violent shudder. She followed, her own release a silent scream, her teeth sinking into the thin flesh of his shoulder to muffle it. The taste of his skin, salty and foreign, filled her mouth.
They stood there, locked together, breathing in the ashes and the sweat. Slowly, he lowered her. Her legs barely held. She leaned against the hearth, spent, marked, and irrevocably changed.
Kreacher stepped back, adjusting himself. He looked around the kitchen, his gaze no longer sly or secretive. It was proprietary. “The mistress will clean herself,” he stated, not unkindly. It was an order. “Kreacher will be in the corner. Watching.”
He didn’t slink away to the shadows. He walked to the rag rug by the sink, turned, and sat down, drawing his knees up. He was making himself at home. He was staying.
Molly, naked and used, pushed off from the hearth. She walked to the sink on unsteady legs. She turned on the tap, the cold water loud in the silent house. She didn’t look at Kreacher. She didn’t look at the empty doorway. She looked at her own hands under the stream, washing away the physical proof.
But the hollow was gone. It was full now, with a heavy, permanent darkness. Upstairs, the floorboard in their bedroom creaked. Arthur was pacing. Down here, the floorboard by the sink was occupied.
She belonged to the thing sitting on it.