A/N: Primark now sell HP pyjamas. I figured a new Sunday chapter was the only way to celebrate this momentous occasion.
Disclaimer: JK Rowling wrote Harry Potter and now tweets a lot. Times have changed. This is a new and glorious era.
"I fail to see the logic to any of this. What kind of person behaves like that, Ron? In all seriousness? What were you thinking?"
Even though she was asking a question, Ron knew better than to provide Hermione with an answer. She'd been ranting as she tidied their bedroom around him for the last five minutes. Hopefully she'd tire herself out soon and he didn't want to say anything to give her extra fuel.
Sure enough, there was barely a gap between her questions and the next part of her diatribe.
"It was reckless and stupid and it could have been so much worse! Have you even thought about that? Probably not. You clearly weren't thinking, full stop." She threw his work robes into the washing hamper, her wand forgotten on the bedside table. All of this work could have been done in seconds, but doing it manually meant she got to vent her frustrations out on inanimate objects and not him. Ron almost felt sorry for the clothes.
"I just – I've known you for nearly two decades and you still manage to surprise me. Who else thinks like you?"
Ron lay back on the bed and slowly exhaled. It wasn't that he didn't feel bad for making her angry – he did – but she'd been talking in circles since she'd got home and he'd heard this already. He was just grateful that this time the effect was somewhat lost by how she was forced to whisper it at him because Rose had not long fallen asleep in the next room.
"I left you alone for three days and expected you to be able to act like a normal adult. Is that too much to ask?" With the laundry thoroughly beaten within an inch of its life, Hermione turned her attention fully onto Ron. He hastily arranged his features to appear more contrite than bored. Thankfully her anger softened as she looked at him. "How is your ankle feeling?"
Ron pulled the leg of his pyjamas up to better see the bandage. "S'all right, I guess. Twinges a bit but those pain potions really helped," he smiled, hoping a compliment to her potion brewing would calm her down.
"I'd have been able to fix it completely if you hadn't been so moronic."
Oh well. He'd tried.
With no reason to avoid being still available to her, Hermione pulled the duvet back and climbed carefully in next to him. Even when angry with him she was mindful enough to not nudge the pillow his ankle rested on. Ron smiled to himself. It was the little things about her that he loved the most.
"We can go to St Mungo's tomorrow and have them look at it," Hermione said as she settled down. "It's not going to get any worse over night and I can't in all good conscience give Rose to someone when she's teething."
"I'll be fine. Stop worrying," Ron smiled. His bone could have been poking out of his foot and he'd have gone along with Hermione's plan of action.
"You'd have been fine now if you hadn't crawled back up the stairs." She glared at him. "If you'd just stayed put and called for help then it wouldn't be half as bad as it is. I could probably have fixed it myself."
This time when she spoke Hermione sounded more concerned than angry, which Ron took as a good sign. There wasn't a whole lot of comfort to be taken in it, however, as her disappointment made him feel so much worse than her anger ever could.
"Honestly, Ron," she sighed, "who falls down the stairs, breaks their ankle and then decides to climb back up the stairs?"
"Me?" he tried weakly and noted that she looked more resigned than angry. "I told you – Rosie was upstairs. I didn't want to leave her."
"I appreciate that, but she'd have been fine for a few minutes while you got help." She took his hand, a worry line forming between her eyebrows. "You could have easily fallen again and done something so much worse."
"I know, love," he replied, stroking the back of her hand with his thumb. "But I panicked, okay? All we needed was this to be the day she decides to show some magic. The entire bathroom could have been in flames and I'd have been twiddling my thumbs."
Hermione sighed. "I know. I worry if I turn my back on her for a second."
Ron pulled her into a hug when she bit her lip. He'd be the first to say that Hermione was overly cautious with the baby, but he understood her fear. Months into this parenting thing and he still fretted about dropping her every other time he held her.
"Sorry for shouting earlier," Hermione murmured, snuggling into his embrace. "You'd hurt yourself and Rosie was-"
Occlumency wasn't needed for Ron to know that the way Hermione had cut herself off could mean nothing good for him. While trying to act as though he wasn't terrified, he hastily went over everything he'd just said to be sure he hadn't let anything slip. Seconds past and nothing came to mind.
"You said 'bathroom'," Hermione eventually said thoughtfully. "Why would the bathroom have been on fire?"
Shit.
"Er – well – if..."
Hermione sat up, leaving Ron's arms hanging stupidly in the air. Maybe if he pretended she was still there then she would lie back down and forget this stupid and highly unnecessary conversation.
"You told me Rose was in her cot," Hermione accussed him, narrowing her eyes. "If Rose was in her cot then why would the bathroom be on fire?"
He could've lied. It would have been so easy to laugh it off as him just saying the wrong thing after a long day. He'd hurt himself after all. The pain potions could be screwing with his head. Really, he shouldn't be held responsible for anything he said or did for the next twelve hours. The now infamous bathroom inferno could have been a reality and he'd be too preoccupied counting the pink kneazles dancing around the room.
Before he could draw breath for his fantastic deflection, Hermione's accusatory glare went up a few notches. If he tried to get around her questioning he would likely be the one to go up in flames.
"Rose, um, may have been in the bath."
"What?"
Years of experience had taught Ron that dishonesty usually led to anger, but Hermione's reaction shocked him regardless.
"You put our baby in the bath?" It was a miracle Ron could understand every furious word, seeing how Hermione was barely moving her lips. "She could have drowned! What on earth were you-"
"Oh no! No, no, no!" Ron hastened to interrupt. "Rose was in the bath, but water wasn't!"
"Why-" Hermione snapped her mouth shut and pressed her fingertips into her eyes. The mental countdown from five was almost audible. "Explain."
"She was being really fussy," Ron began, thankful that he didn't have to see his wife's face for this. "She cried if I picked her up, cried if I left the room... It'd been like that all day. I just... I just wanted to brush my teeth. I hadn't had chance to in two days. I just wanted to brush my teeth," he repeated despondently.
At some point in his confession the helplessness and desperation he'd been feeling while Hermione was away with work came back to him and wheedled its way into his voice. Looking after Rose on his own for three days had been one of the hardest things he'd ever had to do. He hadn't had more than three hours sleep at a time, he was covered in more food stuffs and bodily fluids than he wanted to know and he hadn't had a conversation in days with someone who wasn't her bloody cat.
None of this was lost on Hermione, who had dropped her hands and was looking at him with sympathy.
"So I sort of... put her in the bath," he continued, eyes on the duvet. "She stopped crying and everything. And it wasn't like she could go anywhere. I think she likes it actually."
"I'll set her play mat up in there tomorrow."
"Really?"
"No."
Finally smiling at him, Hermione pulled on the sleeve of Ron's t-shirt until he was resting against her, head buried in her hair. Despite being a grown man who was married with a kid, Ron couldn't stop himself from nuzzling further into her like Crookshanks. There may have even been a hint of purring when she ran her fingers through the short hairs at the nape of his neck.
"You did a great job, Ron," she said before kissing his temple. "I would have appreciated some washing up being done, but Rose still has all of her limbs. Not that I ever doubted you," she added.
"Liar."
For the first time in days Ron felt himself truly relax. That was the best part of this whole marriage thing, he decided. When life got too hard there was always someone there to keep him on his feet and to lean on. Not for the first time, he thought he'd really lucked out when that someone was as strong and caring as Hermione.
He would have been happy spending the rest of the night like this, even with the angle making his ankle twinge, but Hermione was growing restless. Instead of moving, he waited until her fidgeting was as annoying as how he could hear her thoughts going a hundred miles an hour.
"So, if you were brushing you teeth," she began slowly, nudging him off her shoulder, "how did you fall down the stairs?"
Ah.
He'd been stupid to think she wouldn't pick up on that. Well, he knew she would but he'd been very, very optimistic that she wouldn't ask. Knowing the next few minutes weren't going to be pleasant, he took a deep breath.
"There was a spider," he answered on the exhale.
Hermione blinked. "A spider."
"Yeah, it was in the bath – near Rose." Ron shuddered at the memory. His precious little girl, completely defenceless and just inches away from a monstrous beast... "I tried flicking water at it so it'd get away from her, but then – I swear – it bloody lunged for me!"
It'd happened hours ago, but the horror still remained. The spider hadn't appreciated its impromptu shower and had turned on its attacker. While the objective had been to save Rose, who was now safe, Ron couldn't say he was pleased to be the new target.
"And I sort of backed away. And tripped over something and fell down the stairs," he finished lamely.
Glancing up, he could see Hermione was trying to remain sympathetic but the cracks were starting to show.
"So you went back up the stairs after you fell because..."
Ron looked at her as though she'd asked him why he didn't just drown both Rose and the spider straight away just to be sure. "There was a spider! In the bath! With Rosie!"
Seeing as he was expecting further questions to what was surely basic logic, Ron was surprised when Hermione's eyes began to water. Courtesy of pregnancy hormones, he was pretty much used to spontaneous displays of unnecessary emotion, but it didn't mean he had any idea what he'd said to set her off this time.
"You crawled back upstairs-"
"It was more an odd hopping thing, really."
"Hopped, then. Upstairs on a broken ankle to save our daughter from a spider?"
Why was she saying it like that? Like any self-respecting parent wouldn't have acted the same way without a second thought?
Before any of these questions could be answered, he was being pulled into a kiss that he accepted greedily. What with the shouting and the injury, there hadn't been a lot of time for kissing since she came back and he missed it. Three days was far too long to be separated.
"What is it with you," Hermione said against his lips, "and being far too courageous for your own good with broken bones?"
"So I'm a hero, then?" he smiled as she giggled.
"No, you're a fool." She kissed him again when he pouted. "But the good kind."
"The kind that gets pity sex?"
Hermione arched her eyebrow in a way that said no but her smirk was definitely one of the Convince Me variety. Unfortunately, before Ron could calculate his chances based on the rest of her features, Rose started wailing.
"I suppose it's my turn," Hermione sighed, throwing the covers back.
"It's your turn for the foreseeable future," chuckled Ron. He nodded at his ankle.
Hermione grumbled as she stood. "I hate teething."
"I don't understand why the teeth come this late on. Why don't we put her back inside and wait until she's fully done?" Ron suggested.
Rolling her eyes, Hermione left the room, the bright orange of her shirt still visible in the darkness. Originally it was his shirt, but she wore it around the house more than he ever did. He didn't really complain, no matter how much he had liked it. Seeing his wife in Chudely Cannons' apparel and holding their daughter was basically a collection of all his favourite things in one place.
Ron's vision of perfection entered the room, but with added screaming and shushing.
"Can you hold her while I get that teething gel?" Hermione asked over the top the squirming mass in her arms.
"'Course."
With practised ease, Ron took Rose from Hermione and began gently rocking her in the hopes that she'd calm down. It didn't seem to be working. Her face was bright red, clashing horribly with her ginger hair, and covered in her tiny tears.
"Come on, Rosie, you promised you'd be good when Mummy got home," he cooed, knowing she wasn't capable of making any kind of promise. He'd just repeated it to her at four in the morning in the hopes it would be true. "Daddy loves you – more than anything – but he also loves Mummy's boobs and he hasn't seen them for days..."
It could have been the sound of his voice or the memory of her promise, but Rose replaced her screaming with whimpering. It broke Ron's heart to see his little girl in so much pain, and he wished he could just curse whatever was causing it. Of course, that meant knocking his daughter's teeth out and that was generally frowned upon.
Over the last few months, Ron had discovered that parenting was twice as wonderful as he'd expected but also twice as messy and exhausting. It had taken less than two weeks for him to stop using things like cloths to clean up snot and spit up and to just use whatever was closest. It wasn't until Hermione questioned it that he thought anything was weird about resting his daughter in the bath.
He really regretted laughing at Harry when he found him trying to read the paper with James asleep on his face as though it was completely normal.
The one thing about about being a dad that he was glad was fading was the fear that a strong gust of wind could shatter his baby girl. The first time he'd knocked her arm against the door frame, he'd almost broke down crying as he checked her fragile limb for any sign of injury that proved what an awful father he was. Now he'd seen her punch the rails of her cot and knew she wasn't made of glass.
Maybe he should have been more concerned the time he spilt some yoghurt on her and just scooped it off her head to continue eating, but no harm had been done. Hermione had over-reacted. Possibly. The first time it'd happened.
He wasn't the perfect parent, but no one was. Mistakes had been made but they'd learnt from them and somehow months had gone by and the tiny bump in his wife's belly was now growing teeth. They were doing all right.
"Mummy found out about the spider, you know," he whispered, offering his little finger for chewing. "She took it well so I think we're in the clear. Now, if we can just keep our secret about me leaving you in Asda on Friday..."
