Rose

Rose Weasley adored her father. As far as she was concerned, he was the reason the stars hung in the sky and the sun came up each morning. There was nothing he couldn't do and nothing he didn't know. Merlin sounded pretty cool, and Albus Dumbledore was worth hearing stories about, but to Rosie, her father was the real hero, and the best one anyone could ever ask for.

He told the best bedtime stories, too. Every night, since before she could remember, he told her and her brother tales of the adventures of the two greatest storybook characters ever, Prince Billy and Princess Jean. As far as she could tell, her brilliant father made these stories up out of his own head, because no one else had ever heard them.

Which meant the world was missing out. Prince Billy and Princess Jean were miles better than Marvin the Mad Muggle or Babbitty Rabbitty. Billy, Jean, and every once in a while, their friend Sir Harold, had done everything — saved a castle from a monster with two heads; defeated a monstrous snake with the power to turn people to stone; overthrown an evil, magical toad who had enslaved a kingdom; befriended werewolves and giants and thestrals; battled Acromantulas and Dementors and the fearsome Skrewt; and the three of them together had led an army to bring down the treacherous Lord Riddle, the darkest wizard of all time.

Rosie was eight when she started to figure out that Billy and Jean were actually her mother and father, and recurring characters like Lady Knight Jennifer, Master Jester Forge, and Stuffy Lord Percival, to name just a few, were her aunts and uncles and parents' friends.

Knowing her father had fought these battles and slain these monsters just made him rise in her esteem. Her dad had done so many incredible things, saved the world so many times! And when she was eight and she told him she'd figured it out, he'd promised to tel her the real stories someday.

Rosie was almost ten when she decided that day should come sooner rather than later.

She knew her father liked to spend a few hours each night working in his study, that he shut himself in there about an hour past her bedtime. So one night, after a tale of 'The Time Prince Billy Saved Princess Jean from the Clutches of the Tyrannical Duke Crummy' – a story that always made her mum roll her eyes, for some reason, and counter with the tale of 'The Time Princess Jean Had to Protect Prince Billy from the Suffocatingly-Irritating-But-Not-Terribly-Dangerou s Princess Purple' – she slipped out of bed and into her father's empty study to wait for him.

Rosie's favorite chair in the whole house was in her dad's study. It was burnt orange and threadbare and her mother hated it, but it was so soft and comfortable! And Rosie hardly ever got to sit in it, so she took advantage of the chance now and curled up to wait.

She'd almost fallen asleep when her father finally slipped in, and he didn't even see her until he'd sat down at his desk. He froze, and then one eyebrow rose.

"Does your mother know you're down here?" he asked. She sat up and clumsily tried to raise one eyebrow back at him.

"If Mum knew, do you think I'd still be down here?" she asked, and her father laughed.

"No, I suppose not," he said.

"Are you gonna make me go back to bed?"

"Well," her father said, sitting back in his chair and considering. "I think I'll decide that once you tell me why you're staking out my study."

Suddenly shy, Rosie looked down and focused on her hands, chewing at the inside of her lip. "You said you'd tell me the real stories someday?" She glanced up at him quickly, and was startled to see him looking at her really closely, like he was trying to figure out something about her.

"Okay," he said finally. "I think you're old enough." And he turned his chair to face hers and sat forward so his arms were resting on his knees. "Where do you want to start?"

She hadn't really thought this out beyond asking the initial question. For a moment, she was at a loss, but then the firelight caught the strange faint scars that wound around his wrists and arms. Before she'd figured out the secret of Prince Billy, she'd never given them a second thought. But seeing them now, knowing some little bit of the truth, she thought and thought but couldn't find a Prince Billy story where Prince Billy got hurt like that.

"Where did your scars come from?"

The only sign that her father was surprised by the question was in the way his eyebrows rose. He raised his hands slightly and turned them toward her. "You mean these?" he asked. She nodded. He considered the scars as if he hadn't thought about them in a long time. "That's . . . a big first question, Rosie. These . . . well, you know Uncle Harry's Pensive?" Rosie's eyes widened.

"Uncle Harry's Pensive did that?" she asked, shocked. "But it's just tucked away on a shelf! It could fall on anyone! Do you think he knows?"

Her dad laughed. "No, sweetie. I mean, you know because of the Pensive that thoughts can be real, physical things?"

"Oh," she said, sinking back into her chair, feeling much less panicked. "Yes. I know that."

"Well, I . . . got on the wrong side of some very powerful thoughts. Concentrated all at once, not like the single thoughts that get diluted in a Pensive. That's where they latched on."

"How old were you?"

"Sixteen."

"And which Prince Billy adventure was it?"

Her father smiled. "Oh, let's see. That would have been Successfully Navigate The Puzzle Rooms, which were part of the Evil, Magical Toad enslaving the kingdom, and overlapped with both Save the Grim Prisoner and Save Sir Harold from Possession at the Hands of Lord Riddle."

Rosie was silent for a long time, digesting this. Then, she said, "This is gonna take a while, isn't it?" For the third time that night, Rosie's comment made her dad laugh.

"Yeah," he said. "So how about this? You go on up to bed before your mother finds out you're down here, and I promise that the next time you make your way down here, I'll start at the beginning, hmm?"

"Okay," she said reluctantly, dragging herself out of the chair. Her dad smiled and kissed her head.

"Night, Princess," he said.

"Night, Daddy," she said, kissing his cheek.

Rosie became a frequent fixture in her father's study after that, and night by night, story by story, Rosie learned the truth behind the tales, the good and the slightly ugly. It didn't happen in weeks, or even months, and there were some sides of stories that took years to come out, but everything she learned, even the ugly parts, only made her dad more of a hero in her eyes. And every story made her more determined to become the kind of girl worthy of being his daughter.

My Pieces Rose shares two canons: Rose from the Roses Trilogy and Rosie from Bedtime Stories. She gave me a little trouble because I've already written so much about her, but in the end, I decided I wanted to focus on what mentality from her childhood kind of drives her in the Roses trilogy. Her father is such a hero in her eyes, and she wants so badly to live up to the kind of character he was in these childhood stories, and she was so in awe of and filled with love for him, and that determination to be worth something in his eyes, that she managed to miss what was beyond obvious to everyone else.

I really enjoy writing Daddy!Ron, too, so that was fun to explore a little further here. I honestly think Ron would be the best kind of dad. He's not perfect, but he tries so hard and loves his child so much. I hope I captured that.