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Late Night Parenting
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Ron Weasley's sleep had been quite disturbed the past couple of weeks, so when a wind blew some branches across the bedroom window, he woke up with a start. Breathing quite heavily, he turned around to look at his wife sleeping next to him.
This is the part where the story gets rather peculiar. His wife for almost three years wasn't snoring gently with her head on the pillow next to his, a hand over her swollen belly. Now, this isn't the most peculiar thing about this incident. No, what made Ron Weasley frown in confusion was the fact that the covers were all messed up, not lying smooth, covering her half of the soft mattress they shared.
Hermione Granger had not made her bed.
This baffled her barely-awake husband, and as he got out of bed – not tidying it up, of course – he took his wand with him.
As he made his way through the slightly crooked but unbelievably clean house Hermione and he had bought together a week before the wedding, he couldn't help but expecting the worse. A year of full out war will do that to you, and he had seen more than he ever thought he would. Many brave people had died at the hands of the bloody bastards who served Lord Voldemort. And to make bad worse, many of those brave people had been friends of Ron's. Neville, who probably was the last person in the world who deserved to die, had fallen as a hero, taking Bellatrix Lestrange and Lucius Malfoy with him. He had received a posthumous Order of Merlin, First Class and Ron always felt inexplicably proud of the way Neville had stood bravely when faced with his death.
Another person who had gone down was Lavender Brown. The girl who had given Ron his first kiss, albeit a bit sloppily, was dead. Now, he was fully aware that he had never loved Lavender, nor did he look back at his time with her fondly, but your first kiss is your first kiss. It will always be special, however bad it might have been. And she had also given him the confidence to approach Hermione and woo her properly, as she deserved to be wooed. And for that, he would always be thankful. But Lavender was dead now, and she had died only a week after her wedding with Seamus Finnegan, Ron's dorm mate from Hogwarts School, and in full rage, Seamus had blown up the ten Death Eaters closest to him, targeting himself as well. They were now buried next to each other, Neville and many others on the Hogwarts Grounds, under some large trees just by the lake.
Every day Ron would thank God and all higher beings that he still had his family. Also, nothing had made him more relieved than when Harry survived and finally could begin to build a family of his own. And with Ron's younger sister nonetheless, a fact which made Ron incredibly happy.
And then there was Hermione. She was stubborn, temperamental and too smart for her own good. Just the way he had always wanted her to be. All the way through his years at Hogwarts, he had always been fascinated with the way Hermione tackled her Ancient Runes assignments or S.P.E.W. conspiracies, but nothing had captivated him like the way she prepared for motherhood. Heaps and heaps of parenting books such as Witch or Wizard? and Control Your Hormones: 231 Ways to Keep Calm When You Are Bearing a Magical Child, she sang to her stomach, read aloud from ridiculously complicated old tomes, and sometimes Ron found her sitting somewhere just talking aloud, probably – no, hopefully – to the baby. He could almost feel his heart burst with love just at the thought of the things she did for their unborn child.
Nearing the large living room, he suddenly heard a noise and whipped around, running straight to the kitchen. There sat Hermione, hugging her knees tightly and crying with her face pressed onto them. When Ron burst into the room, wand at the ready and a terrified look upon his face, she lifted her head to frown at him.
"Ron," she said, looking startled though her eyes were puffy and red, "what on earth are you doing?"
"Sorry," Ron said sheepishly, putting his wand down on the kitchen counter behind him. "Habit."
Hermione looked at him for a moment, and then she put her head to rest on her knees once again. Ron could see her shoulders shake slightly and thought that she must be freezing sitting there in nothing but her thing pyjamas. Then he caught the sound of a small sob and realized that she wasn't cold after all. Something else was wrong, though.
Without saying a word, he went to the stove and made them some hot chocolate, his mother's best way of getting her children to sleep when they suffered from insomnia. He sat down next to her and put her cup on the kitchen table in front of her knees, listening quietly to her weak sniffles.
"Love?" he said in a tone he only used for her when he thought she needed it. "Tell me."
Hermione made a kind of snorting noise and looked at him with tears in her eyes. "What was I thinking, Ron?"
"Oh, if I only knew half the things you thought about…" he joked, but she didn't smile, she just glared at him.
"Ron, we are clearly not ready to become parents," she then said in a matter-of-fact voice that made it clear that she could not be proven otherwise.
But Ron wasn't the person who could resist a challenge. If he was, he probably would have married Lavender Brown. The thought made him cringe, but then he felt instantly ashamed. Lavender had become a hero.
"That's ridiculous, Hermione," he said, shaking his head.
She sat up properly and turned to face him. "I am not being ridiculous! We should never have been so irresponsible as to become pregnant."
What she said hurt Ron so much that he couldn't put it into words for her. He sighed deeply and turned away, looking down at the wooden table in front of him.
"How long have you felt this way?" he said in a low voice. He didn't even realize that he had said it until he heard it out loud.
"A while," Hermione answered, growing rather pink in her cheeks. "A week or two."
Ron's eyes widened. Two whole weeks and he hadn't noticed a thing. "Explain."
"I…" said Hermione, but it came out very high, and she cleared her throat and started again. "I just don't think that I'm ready to become a mother. I really don't want to let you down but I don't know anything about parenting, I barely knew my parents, with me being away from home so much, and now…" She looked dangerously close to tears again.
Ron winced. Her parents had died in a Death Eater attack on their hometown. They had been the main target. Hermione barely ever talked about them, and Ron understood and accepted that she dealt with it in her own way. He put a gentle hand on her shoulder. "I'm sorry you feel that way, but I've got to tell you something."
"What?" inquired Hermione rather hopefully.
"Being able to be a parent isn't something you're born with or something you magically learn," he said slowly, looking into his wife's wide eyes. "It's something you learn with time. Sure, you're going to make mistakes, but you'll learn from them and never repeat them again."
Hermione stared at him in wonder. Then her whole face broke out into a smile and she chuckled. "You sound just like me! Just like a course textbook."
Ron laughed with her. "Yeah, I've been talking with mum and she said this day would come, so I kind of… memorized every single word she said. So I could make you feel better."
Hermione smiled at him, and then she leant in and kissed his lips. "That's very sweet," she said.
Grinning, he continued, "So you agree that we're not being irresponsible, right?"
"Well," she said, "we could have thought it through a bit more, planned a bit more, read up on some –"
"Hermione," Ron said in a very serious and slow voice. "We are going to have a baby together. A little mix of you and me in miniature. A part of you and me together. We should never regret or be ashamed of that."
Hermione sighed and put a hand against her husband's night-raspy cheek. "Oh, Ron, when did you grow up?"
"Don't think I did," he mumbled, blushing slightly.
"But you did," Hermione insisted. "You're quite the man, Ronald Weasley."
Ron laughed out loud, ruffling her hair. "And you're quite the girl, if I may say so. And then there's our little Granger in here," he grinned, rubbing her stomach.
"Woman, thank you very much," she said playfully, leaning in for another kiss. "And the baby will be a Weasley."
"No," Ron protested, "He or she will only be half Weasley, even though that's your last name now. So how about Granger-Weasley? I think your parents would've liked that."
Hermione smiled at him and he could see tears in her eyes again. "I think they would have. Thank you, Ron."
"I love you," he said, smiling.
That night he slept better than he had in months.