Author's note

Written for Season 6 of the Quidditch League Fanfiction Competition.

Round 12: Character Study: Ron Weasley

Team: Pride of Portree

Position: Chaser 2

Prompt: Write about Ron's relationship with one of his children

Optional prompts:

6. (dialogue) 'You have a kind of aroma about you.'
11. (dialogue) 'It's time to export that damn toy, I think.'
13. (song) For the River – Nickelback

Word count (excluding author's note): 2,042

Betas: Story Please, crochetaway

My characterisation of Ron is informed by the Cursed Child script, where he's generally quite good-natured and full to the brim with Dad Jokes. I imagine the temper he sometimes had in the main series was mellowed out considerably during the course of his work at Weasleys' Wizard Wheezes.

Of course, I also had to rely on Cursed Child for Rose. According to it, she is a lot like her mother—smart, headstrong, ambitious, puts a lot of pressure on herself to succeed. But she also seems to have been influenced by her father, particularly his anti-Slytherin prejudices. At school, she is well-liked, and has been a Chaser for Gryffindor since her second year. I've set this story during and just after her third year, entirely so that I wouldn't have to worry about working it into the play's main plot (which occurs during her fourth year).

Not much is canonically known about George Weasley's children, but I think it's likely they would take after both of their Quidditch-playing Gryffindor parents. So I've taken the liberty of deciding that Roxanne Weasley is the same age and house as Rose, and that they have been best friends since childhood due to their commonalities and their fathers' close relationship, perhaps even inheriting and cultivating that Weasley troublemaking streak…

As for Hermione, I hope my portrayal of her here isn't too harsh. I think anyone would be more than a little stressed as they tried to adjust to being the newly elected Minister for Magic, and as I recall from the books, Hermione had a tendency to let her emotions get the better of her when stressed. I took advantage of this to set up a situation where Ron and his 'emotional range of a teaspoon' would be the one to try to figure out Rose's troubles.

Lastly, once McGonagall became Headmistress there would need to be a new head of Gryffindor, and while some fanfics give Neville that honour, I decided to just pick someone random—one of the wave of new teachers who would have been needed to fill the vacancies after the war. So I went to the HP Wiki page on wizarding families and grabbed a name I liked: Professor Plunkett.

There's no Rose without a thorn

'Ronald!'

Hermione's shrill call sounded from the kitchen the moment the couple's bedroom door clicked open.

'Yes, your Ministership?' Ron replied as he trotted into the room, still clad in his Chudley Cannons pajamas and sounding good-naturedly blasé at his wife's distress. Hermione had been named Minister for Magic a little over a year ago, and while she'd quickly mastered the much-needed skill of keeping a level head at work, this had translated to a lack of capacity to deal calmly with issues at home. Ron, to his credit, had been taking this in stride; having spent two decades running a joke shop with his unpredictable brother had made the man unflappable.

Well, nearly unflappable.

Hermione waved a length of parchment before his face as she tried to fend off the unfamiliar owl that must have delivered the message, and was now attempting to bother a treat out of her for its efforts. 'Your daughter is in trouble at school,' she said sternly, handing the letter to Ron.

'My daughter, is she? That's a relief to know.' He chuckled as he accepted the parchment. 'What is it now? Did she finally pull off the stunt with the Murtlaps that we heard her and Roxanne brainstorming about?' He was referring, of course, to the girls' plan to talk Hagrid into lending them three Murtlaps, which they would label '#1,' '#2,' and '#4' and set loose in the school. He and George had laughed about that one for weeks.

Hermione's continued stony expression surprised him; usually his light-hearted banter served to ease her tense moods. Whatever it was, it must be serious.

Ron skimmed the letter in his hands: …caught trying to smuggle an auto-answer quill into her Transfiguration exam… behaviour will not be tolerated… during an O.W.L. would result in an automatic failure… appropriate punishment will be administered, however, we encourage you to address the matter when… He put the parchment down, having gathered the gist of its contents, and grimaced.

'Yes, she must be your daughter, because she certainly didn't learn to cheat from me.'

He was still sitting at the table at a loss for words when Hermione left for work a few minutes later. As she headed toward the fireplace, she could be heard muttering under her breath about 'Ministry raids' and 'restricted items' and 'the last thing I need right now.'

Had he really done something to influence Rose in this way? Of course he'd had his moments at Hogwarts that were… what he might call academically disingenuous, but he'd never talked about that to Rose. Had she heard him and George joking and took it to heart? Or maybe the joke shop was a bad influence after all?

The real mystery, Ron mused to himself as he finally stood up to continue getting ready for work, was why she'd felt the need to pull a risky stunt like that. She'd inherited Hermione's brains, after all; at the end of each of her first two years, she'd come home proudly bearing top marks.

By the time he was ready to Floo to the shop, he'd pushed the matter from his mind. There was no use dwelling on it until Rose was there to talk to them.

The next week, however, when Rose and Hugo arrived home for the summer, not much talking ended up happening.

At Platform 9 ¾, Rose said goodbye to all of her friends, hugging Roxanne as though they didn't know when they'd ever see each other again (even though they both knew perfectly well that summertime meant countless Weasley family gatherings). She then approached her parents with visible apprehension—McGonagall must have told her that the school would be writing home. As a public figure, Hermione couldn't very well put her family life on display while surrounded by half of wizarding Britain, but the steely look in her eyes made it perfectly clear that Rose was in big trouble, young lady.

Hermione was better suited to being the disciplinarian of the household—she had a way of explaining what they'd done wrong in a serious but empathetic manner that actually reached through to the kids. Ron's occasional attempts to sub in were met with limited success; his occupation as professional jokester didn't lend him much credibility.

But this time, Hermione only had time to express her extreme disappointment and ground Rose for a month before she had to rush into her study to take a Floo call. It was clear that something big was going on at the Ministry, as she'd been like this ever since mentioning the raid last week, though it was still a matter of such security that she hadn't told Ron what it was about yet. He had a feeling Harry was in on it, though; at their biweekly double dinner date last Friday, Ron had walked in on the two of them whispering furiously in the sitting room, and he'd heard Hermione say cryptically, 'It's time to export that damn toy, I think,' before she noticed he was there.

That was why, after a week of Rose barricading herself in her room to listen to angsty music, Ron decided to give it his best shot and try talking to her.

'Nowhere to hide 'cause someone's gotta find you / Trying to breathe when everybody's right behind you.'

He had to pound heavily on her bedroom door to be heard over the screeching guitar coming from within. 'Rosie, can I come in?' he called.

He heard what sounded like Rose yelling 'Fine!' and so made his way in. Ron found his daughter lying on her bed, listening sullenly to the pounding rock song.

'I've never heard this one before,' he shouted conversationally.

'It's Muggle music,' Rose informed him. 'Everyone listens to it now.'

'Better be boss like the Kennedys,' the Muggle man wailed before Rose turned the song off.

'Do you even know who the Kennedys are?' Ron asked her.

'That's not the point of the song,' she evaded.

'What is, then?'

She glanced at him moodily. 'It's about feeling trapped, and trying to get away.'

'Is that all this is about?' Ron exclaimed. 'Well, no one's keeping you here! Go on, we'll have one less mouth to feed.'

He was halfway to her closet to continue the bit by fetching her trunk when Rose spoke again from behind him. 'It's not here I feel that way. Home is the only place I feel normal. But everywhere else I'm the Minister's daughter.'

Ron stopped, turned, and held his tongue until his Dad Joke impulse subsided. 'Oh?'

'You won't understand,' she lamented. 'The both of you are so famous you're on Chocolate Frog cards! And Mum's the Minister for Magic, and she's the brightest witch of your generation. How am I supposed to live up to all that?'

Ron almost laughed out loud in his relief. He was about to go down in history as the first man in all of wizardkind—nay, all of humanity!—to understand a teenage daughter's woes.

'Oh, Rosie. And that's why you felt you needed to use that auto-answer quill?'

Her cheeks coloured. 'Everyone says how I'm so much like Mum. It's like, "well, of course Rose will be perfect in all her classes, how could she not be?" But now I've got Quidditch and elective classes, and it's just… everything is getting so much more difficult. And it's not like I can ask for extra help—Mum aced all her classes while fighting a war; I should at least be able to turn a teapot into a tortoise on my own. But then we had extra Quidditch practices because we were up for the final, so I didn't have enough time to study for all my exams, and… and I thought if just this once I used the quill, then next time I would plan it out better, I would be better…'

Rose finished her rant and took a deep breath, looking away from her father to busy herself with the ragged cuticle on her thumb. Ron moved to sit beside her on the bed.

'Rosie, d'you remember the stories your mother and I told about how we met at Hogwarts? How we didn't like each other at first?'

She nodded, still picking at her thumbnail.

'I was the youngest of six brothers, and from the minute I got on the Hogwarts Express, I worried about how I would live up to the lot of them. They were all clever, brave, funny… brilliant at Quidditch, had tons of friends… well, except for Percy, but at least he did well in lessons and all the teachers liked him. Bill and Charlie were even mildly famous after being involved in that Cursed Vaults ordeal.'

Rose nodded again; who could forget about the thrilling conclusion to that adventure?

'I don't know what I expected in my first year, but it certainly wasn't Hermione. She was always there being right about everything and making sure everyone knew how smart she was. She was yet another person reminding me how average I was.'

'But then you found your own special talents and used them to help save the world?' Rose asked hopefully.

'Er… Not really, no,' Ron admitted. 'Honestly, I had a rough go of it. I doubted myself all through my Hogwarts years; I could never really understand why the genius and the hero would want to be friends with me, of all people. In the end, my insecurities got the best of me, and I deserted Harry and Hermione in the middle of the war…'

Rose looked horror-stricken. 'So you're saying I'll be unhappy forever and then betray everyone I love?!'

'No! No, of course not.' Ron quickly attempted to backpedal. He'd only wanted to explain to her that he had made mistakes of his own when he was younger, but clearly, he hadn't gone about it well. 'Right, moral of the story, let's see… Okay, so, yes, I was unhappy quite a lot, and I let my friends down. But once I finished feeling sorry for myself, I realised that not everyone can be the best at everything, and that if we were, the world would be an awfully dull place. All you really need to be the best at is being yourself.'

'Ugh, Dad,' Rose groaned. 'That's so corny.'

He chuckled. 'Right? It really is true, though. My greatest contribution to the war was being there to support Harry's heroics. And I'm fine with that because really the only opinions that matter to me are my loved ones'.'

'So… you don't feel insecure anymore?' Rose asked, peeking at him from under her mass of frizzy curls.

'If I did, I never would have offered to help George with the shop. I'd have been too worried about whether I'd ever be as good a partner as Fred was.' He slung an arm around Rose's shoulders, pulled her close, and kissed the top of her head. 'Nowadays, all I worry about is how best to embarrass my children. And I've never been happier!'

'At least you're good at that,' Rose giggled.

'So just focus on what makes you happy, and I think you'll start to feel a lot better.'

Ron was slightly startled to receive a fierce hug from Rose. 'Thanks for understanding.'

'Of course, Rosie. Come on then, it's almost dinner time, and I think we ought to talk to Mum and see if we can't shorten your punishment a bit…'

Rose hopped up off the bed and grinned devilishly at her dad. 'That reminds me—at least there's one good thing about being the Minister's daughter. Professor Plunkett said that usually anyone caught cheating in an exam would be kicked out of all their extracurriculars, but he said I could stay on the Quidditch team due to my exemplary student record—which basically means "we don't want the other students to find out what happened in case we end up at the heart of a political scandal"!'

'Oh, but they'll find out,' Ron said seriously as he guided her toward the dining room.

'What? How?'

'You have a kind of… aroma about you.' He sniffed comically, looking as if he'd caught a whiff of something vile. 'You just smell like a cheater.'

'Dad!'

A/N: Final notes! The big thing at the Ministry is that very same thing that was the main plot device in Cursed Child. And the joke about the Cursed Vaults is that the Harry Potter: Hogwarts Mystery game is still incomplete, so nobody knows its thrilling conclusion yet. Also, I just think it's funny to reference Bill and Charlie's 'fame' because obviously their connection to a big, widely-known adventure is never alluded to in the main series, since HP: HM was written much later, but in retrospect that makes it seem like their involvement was just forgotten. (Though in my headcanon, their involvement is why they both got such prestigious jobs right out of Hogwarts.)