Aki- This chapter just got long... okay, here you go.

1

She knows it sounds incredibly geeky, but Rose loves the smell of books. Especially old books. Her mom has a lot, but the Hogwarts library is where it's at. She could spend hours there, just running her finger over the old spines lined up precisely on the shelves, pulling one or two out occasionally, carefully turning the old parchment pages, reading the fine ink print. The information in discovery of these old tomes was only a piece of the treasures they were. How many hands had held these, read these lines, touched these pages, and lost time reading them. Sometimes, during her library excavations of interesting old books, she would glance around the empty stacks before lifting an opened book to her face, sticking her nose in the opened crack between the pages, and took a long sniff.

It looks incredibly stupid if anyone catches you do it, and she knows the smell is mostly dust and deterioration, but she likes what she likes and can't help that.

2

"Hmm, a Weasley, you lot never seem to stop coming. But there is a quite a bit of your mother in you too, and she was almost in Ravenclaw herself… You could do well there. Many like minds. But is that were you will do your best? I think not. You are your parents daughter through and through, whether you like it or not, although I expect the former. Has to be … Gryffindor!"

3

Rose had been friends with Albus for as long she could remember. When you were related and the same age, it sort of just happened. For a long time Al was one of her closer friends, even if he was a boy and boys are afflicted with the inability not to be complete idiots. They understood each other, though, being part of the same big family, they knew what they knew.

Then they went to Hogwarts, and they were in separate houses, and suddenly she was alone and afraid that she might lose a friend. But that didn't happen. And soon after she was introduced to that Malfoy boy, the one that dad had told she had to beat in every class, and he was surprisingly not what she expected.

Rose found herself hanging out with Albus and Scorpius a lot: doing homework, hanging out on weekends, and even sitting together in classes they shared. A lot of people (in Gryffindor and Slytherin alike) looked at her like she was weird, like she didn't get it. But she refuses to see why her friendship with two Slytherin boys has to be any different than the friendship her mom and dad and Uncle Harry shared all those years ago.

4

"Really, Rose, Divination is such a crackpot subject. I can't believe you signed up for it. You're much smarter than that class."

That was Mum's reaction. Dad felt similar. Stupid class. Waste of time. Not worth the effort.

Rose, silently, didn't agree, and her parents let up, figuring she picked the class for an easy grade and would drop it eventually. But Rose wasn't thinking that way. She was interested in the subject genuinely. She could care less about knowing the future. Rather, it was a weird mix of curiosity, rebellion, and a search for the mystical.

4.5

Curiosity— Divination wasn't something that was discussed among her family except in ways of jokes. Dad could ramble on about Quidditch and old school adventure stories and even sometimes politics going on in his job. Mum could talk just about everything else: history, magical theory, the rights of wizards and muggleborns and werewolves and house elves… But divination, something that Rose had never learned about in a serious sense, that was a mystery.

Rebellion— Rose wasn't a particularly defiant child, but everyone liked to taste that sort of freedom from their parents' values and ideals, even if it was just a little. Divination to Dad was a joke. Divination to Mum was an affront to logic and sense and the system of education itself. Rose, rebellious, liked to think the subject held serious potential.

Search for the mystical— Her mum had been raised a muggle and the reception of her Hogwarts letter had opened her up to a world that had only belonged in her dreams. Rose had grown up in it. It was run of the mill. Grandpa (grandpa Weasley, that is) was pureblood, grew up without any understanding of the muggle world and was thusly fascinated by it and its most simple attributes. Rose had spent enough time with her muggleborn mother and muggle grandparents so that nothing of that world was a surprise to her either. But divination, a magic only few possessed, maybe that held the key. If she could touch something special, find a sort of surprise in her life, the unexpectedness of truth and reality. Oh, how great that discovery could be.

5

People always tell her hair is beautiful. She thinks these people are nutters. (And they don't notice her scowling as they swoon over the color and her "beautiful curls"). Her hair is tomato red and nowhere near unique, as some would say. She could easily name over ten people who had the same hair as her (all of which she was related to). It wasn't like it was a horrible color, but there were some gingers out there that had tones of hair color she would have preferred. The lighter colors, closer to strawberry blonde or more orange, or the dark shades, like the red so deep and dark it was almost brown.

And curly hair. Everyone wanted curly hair, but they didn't know what it meant to have curly hair, natural curly hair. It was frizzy. It is impossible to brush. And when it was humid outside or it rained...well, it wasn't pretty. What Rose wouldn't give for some manageable straight hair.

5.5

Snuggled under the beach tree by the Great Lake on a sort-of date, Scorpius pushed his face into the back of her neck, into mange of curls.

Rose could feel his exhaled breath on her skin and it made her shiver.

"Your hair's so soft," he whispered lightly.

Rose suddenly didn't think her hair was all bad after all.

6

Hugo was her one and only sibling, a younger brother by two years. James had this whole thing about being the oldest and the responsibilities it entailed, but Rose never felt that protective of her younger brother. It wasn't that she didn't care for him, she really did. He was her brother, after all, and he was, in her measure, a lot less annoying than most people found there little siblings.

It's just she thinks Hugo is a lot more clever than most people think he is. Sure he didn't read like she did, or scheme like James or Freddie, or wax angsty poetic like Albus, but he knew what was up.

Hugo could take care of himself, but he could rely on her too. However, he never seems to have to. She is not sure how she feels about that.

7

Almost everyone calls her Rose. But not dad. He calls her Rosie. Other people (Mum, grandparents, uncles and aunts) sometimes use the cutsie nickname, but it's fairly rare. But Dad, he calls her Rosie all the time, every time he needs to address her—from the time she just barely remembers as a young child and even through her teenage years. Sometimes she even slips back from using Dad to Daddy. Whenever she did, she could swear the corners of her Dad's mouth would upturn just a bit.

They were just nicknames, but between the two of them, they felt like everything.

7.5

Rose usually got on very well with her mum. But she was a teenage girl, and teenage girls had a notorious history of fighting with their mothers, so it was bound to happen sometimes. The thing that really annoyed Rose, though, was that her mum always won every fight. Mum was logical and well informed. She could site reasons and examples and dates and it was endlessly infuriating. Sometimes Rose even found herself agreeing with her mother even as the stubborn, perhaps more father-like side of her was sure that her mother was wrong and she was right.

None of the fights were big. And as much as it annoyed her, her mum's rightness, sometimes, it was great to have on her side.

(Especially when it came to dad and dating. Especially especially when it came between dad and dating Scorpius Malfoy)

8

Rose hadn't intended it. It sort of just happened. Scorpius had just been her friend. He towered a good amount height over her, was pale and blonde and a little peaky. He wasn't unkind, but just always a bit smug with her as an unspoken competition with grades raged on, with Albus watching from the sidelines in horror (that anyone could care that much about grades and that his grades were nowhere near those of his two closest friends). They could be engaged in a sarcastic comment battle and then a moment later be ganging up to tease the mickey out of Albus as he glared back at them.

And she started hating going back to her dorm at night, and she thought it was simply because she didn't have many friends there. Then she always felt so happy in the mornings at breakfast when she was able to catch sight of the blond haired boy next to her cousin across the Great Hall. They would throw each other glances throughout the meal, sitting at opposite sides of different tables. It took her a while, a ridiculous while, to realize that she loved spending time with Scorpius, and wanted nothing else to then just be around him, and she often felt that there was nothing else she could do without him.

It was infatuation. It was young and untested and unsure. She might've been too young to say it or mean it or feel it… but if this wasn't love she was feeling then love damn freaking awesome, but what she was feeling was freaking awesome itself.

9

She really wondered if they could make it sometimes, Scorpius and her. It's not easy, sometimes, when no one seems to be on their side. Albus supports them, but it's like he is the only one. Dad is uncomfortable with her dating a Malfoy. Mum condones it, but Rose can still sense the tinge of uneasiness with it, not over who Scorpius is, but with the proximity Rose now has with his less than reputable family. Scorpius likes to joke about the expression on his father's face when he broke the news of their relationship to him. But it's a joke to cover up something else, the truth, reality, the little bit of bitterness in Scorpius' eyes as he says it.

Most of the outright criticism had died down. I mean, there family had accepted Albus in Slytherin and Scorpius as their friend. They had mostly learned to tolerate him by the time Rose and Scorpius decided they wanted to progress their relationship. But even in school there were still whispers and glares and wonderings why this Slytherin/Gryfindor was dating someone from a rival house.

It had Rose starting to think if the world had really progressed as much as people kept thinking it had.

10

It seemed really stupid to point out that she had a big family, but she did. It was amusing how people tend to assume, especially in their childish years when their experiences had been limited, that their size family was typical. The kids that had just a few members of extended family that they saw only on holidays or someone with a good average lot of cousins, but half of them lived far away and where rarely seen, or the incredibly close knit families…all variations really. Rose had to point out to people, that her family was quit gigantic by typical terms. And that was just her dad's side of the family. Her mum was an only child, so Rose can only imagine what it would be like to have double (or at least some more) cousins if her mum had had siblings.

It would take five minutes more than forever for Rose to try and explain exactly what her relationship with her whole family and each member was like, if she ever could. At the same time, she thinks she can explain her feelings of what it is like to be with them, and the word is warm.

Aki- Hugo's next. Um, can you review please?