Falling Apart

Rose Weasley is seven years old when everything falls apart.

"When is it going to go back to normal?" she asks her father as he tucks her into bed.

He doesn't answer, just kisses her forehead and turns out the light.

Rose is eight the first time she runs away.

"Don't bother trying to find me," she yells from the bottom of the stairs. "I'm never coming back!"

"Go ahead," says her father.

Rose slams the front door.

(She's home by dinnertime.)

She's nine when she tells her father she hates him.

"You don't mean it," he says from his place on the sofa. He's staring at the Muggle TV that neither of them knows how to turn on, the one that's included in the rent they're struggling to pay; he meets her eyes in the reflection, and she can see he's losing his composure.

"I do mean it." She's breathing hard. "You don't know how I feel."

He clenches his jaw, but doesn't contradict her.

"You're the worst father in the world."

"Rose." He's on his feet. "Go to your room."

She does, and when he comes to check on her an hour later she's fast asleep with tears staining her cheeks.

Her tenth birthday ends with her crying into the arms of her younger cousin.

"It's going to be okay, Rosie," Lily says, stroking Rose's arm.

The twin-sized bed creaks as Rose shifts her weight, leaning into Lily's embrace. "It's not."

Lily sighs gently. "Why are you so sad all the time?"

Rose sniffles. "Why don't you ask my dad?"

She's eleven when the Hogwarts letter doesn't come.

"It doesn't matter, Rose," her father says when he finds her curled up on their porch swing, looking at the stars and shivering in the October air. "I love you anyway. We love you anyway."

Rose closes her eyes tightly and wishes her mother were still there.

She doesn't know how to use a Muggle phone, but when she's twelve she musters her courage and makes the four-block trek to the nearest call box. The metal buttons are cold beneath her fingers as she presses them in the order dictated by the scrap of paper she's kept under her pillow for five years, and half of her desperately hopes it won't work.

The phone rings twice before someone picks up.

"Hello?"

It's a man speaking.

"Hello?"

She can't breathe.

"Draco, who is it?" asks a woman in the background.

Rose hangs up.

She's thirteen when her father comes home with Susan.

"She's a work friend," he explains, but Susan is all red fabric and faux diamonds and cascading blonde curls, and Rose knows friend isn't exactly the right word. A surge of betrayal rips through her body, and she wonders how long they've been friendly with each other, whether it started last week, or last year, or the very same day her father told her mother to get out of his house.

"I'm in the Department of Magical Transportation," Susan begins, but Rose is heading for the front door before the blonde gets any further.

"I'm going to Aunt Ginny's," she says without looking at her father.

"Oh, Rose, you don't have to—"

The door is already open. "Bye, Dad!"

"It was nice to meet you," says Susan just before the door slams shut.

When she's fourteen she finds out about Hugo.

"A brother?"

"A half-brother," her father says.

"Right." Rose begins to pick at a cuticle. "A half-brother."

Her father sighs and runs a hand through his hair. The wedding band on his left hand glints under the light of the lamp hanging from their kitchen ceiling. "Susan wants a kid." His voice is pained, and she can practically see him adding up the expenses in his head. "She wants—not that you're not enough for her, because she loves you, Rosie, but she wanted one of her own, and—"

"I get it."

"We thought you should be the first to know. I haven't told any of the relatives yet."

"I won't tell."

"They'll probably figure it out on their own, once Susan starts to get—y'know, bigger."

The thought of her stepmother getting fat gives Rose a strange amount of satisfaction. "Okay."

Her father offers a shadowy attempt at a smile. "And it'll be fun, right? Having a little brother around to play with?"

Rose feels her throat beginning to tighten. "A little half-brother."

"Right."

He looks like he wants to say more, like maybe he's going to bring up her mother.

For a second, she thinks she wants him to.

But as he opens his mouth, a rush of fear floods her body, so she gets up from the dining room table and mumbles an excuse about finishing her homework.

He lets her go.

Fifteen is when Aunt Ginny tells her about Draco Malfoy.

"He was a Death Eater, but you don't really know what that means."

"It's a follower of Voldemort." Rose wraps her hand around her mug of tea and lifts it to her lips. The December wind howls outside, but Aunt Ginny has a set of bright blue flames going in the fireplace to starve off the cold.

"Right." Aunt Ginny sips from her own mug. Her face is youthful even when tinged blue from the firelight, and Rose forgets sometimes that Ginny isn't a teenager herself. "I didn't phrase that properly. I meant you've never experienced a Death Eater. And thank Merlin for that."

"Right. Thank God."

Aunt Ginny raises an eyebrow. "Thank God? Is that what the Muggles at your school say?"

Rose nods and takes another mouthful of tea.

"Such a strange phrase." Aunt Ginny shakes her head. "You know you're a witch, Rosie. You don't have to fit in with them."

Rose snorts. "Some witch. I can't do magic."

"Maybe not now." Aunt Ginny reaches out to tug one of Rose's red curls. "But when you were younger, you were overflowing with it. You made our cat fly when you were five. Scared the daylights out of him—he was never the same again."

Rose giggles. "I remember."

"See?" Aunt Ginny nudges Rose with her shoulder. "A witch."

Rose's smile fades. "But I haven't been able to do magic in years."

"So you're a little bit broken." Aunt Ginny shrugs. "Aren't we all? It'll iron itself out."

"I s'pose."

They gaze into the blue fire for a while before Aunt Ginny gives a little start. "Oh! I was telling you about Draco Malfoy."

"Yes."

"He was a bigoted little ferret. He used to bully us—Uncle Harry, your mum, all the Weasleys, Professor Long—"

"He bullied my mum?"

Aunt Ginny pauses for a long moment. "He did."

"Then why—"

"I don't know why." Aunt Ginny blinks a few times, and it's like she ages twenty years. "Maybe he's changed. Maybe your mum's changed. All I know is that you're better off with your dad."

Rose swallows. "My dad? My dad won't even let me see her on my birthdays."

Aunt Ginny pulls her into a tight hug. "It'll iron itself out," she says, and Rose stares at the blue fire until her eyes are searing.

She's sixteen when she finds out about the other half-brother.

Scorpius Malfoy's name sounds poisonous, but his birth announcement in the Daily Prophet shows a harmless infant with faint hair and a pale complexion.

Every once in a while, a woman with bushy brown hair leans into the frame of the moving photograph to plant a kiss on his smooth cheek.

Rose cuts the photo from the newspaper and stows it under her pillow with the phone number that leads to her mother.

She's seventeen when she gives in.

"Erm," says the blond man who answers the door to Malfoy Manor. "Can I help you?"

Rose is suddenly acutely aware of her hands and the fact that they're empty. "Is Hermione home?"

"Who's asking?"

It's July, and it's hot as hell, but Rose feels cold. "I'm her daughter."

The man's eyebrows shoot up. "Rose?"

"Yes."

"You—shit, I should've recognized by the hair." He lets out a small chuckle. "Been a while since I saw a Weasley." He takes a step back and opens the door a little wider. "Come in. I'll get your mother."

She follows him into a sitting room, and she's amazed by how much Muggle stuff fills this house. There's a television, a phone, a blender on the counter, an electric chandelier hanging from the ceiling—clearly Hermione has had an influence on this place over the past ten years.

(There's Muggle stuff in her own house, too, but it's only there because renting from Muggles is cheaper than renting from wizards, and her father likes the places that come already furnished.)

"Wait here," the man says, pointing her to a sofa. "She's upstairs with the baby."

"Scorpius," she blurts before she can think it through. "I, erm, I saw it in the Prophet last year."

"Right." The man looks wildly uncomfortable. "Does your father know you're here?"

She shakes her head.

"Good." He exhales heavily. "He'd murder me."

"He's moved on," Rose says.

"Has he? Surprise, surprise, Ron Weasley actually grew up."

She clenches her jaw. "You're Draco."

He nods. "Pleasure."

"I've heard stories about you."

"Yeah?" Draco sits down across from her. "And what do the Weasleys have to say about me? Bet they call me a coward, don't they? Or a villain?"

"My aunt Ginny called you a ferret."

Draco swears under his breath. "I swear to God, they'll never let that go."

Rose blinks. "You said God."

He looks confused. "Does that offend you, or—?"

"No. It's just . . . most wizards say Merlin."

"Oh." He runs a hand through his blond hair, and Rose notices a streak of gray. "S'pose your mum's rubbed off on me a bit."

The sleeve of his white button-down rides up as he rubs at the back of his neck, and Rose sees the edge of a dark tattoo on his forearm, and she opens her mouth to ask, but then—

"Draco? Who was at the door?"

Rose's heart drops.

The voice comes from the top of the stairs, and Rose makes herself count to three before she looks up.

"Mum?" she whispers. She's vaguely aware of Draco standing.

Hermione looks almost exactly as Rose remembers her, albeit with a few more wrinkles. The tangle of curls, the wide eyes, the slight upturn at the end of her nose—it's all there, and it's all Rose, they both have Granger faces even though one has Weasley hair, and for just a second everything is okay again.

"Is that—Rose?" Her mother comes down the stairs, eyebrows pinched together in confusion. "What in the—does your father know you're here?"

Your father.

Rose has hated her father for years for leaving her mother.

(It only occurs to her now that her mother is the one who left.)

"No," Rose says. "Dad's at home with Hugo."

Her mother doesn't ask who Hugo is. She wraps Rose in a hug, and suddenly it's too warm in this house. "It's so good to see you," her mother whispers, and Rose realizes that this woman has been absent from her life for more time than she was ever a part of it.

"I can't," Rose says, pulling away from the embrace. "I can't—I can't breathe."

Her mother looks confused. "What's wrong?"

The world is turning black. "I'm not—I shouldn't have come here."

"Rose?"

Draco has his wand out, he's conjuring a glass, he's filling it with water, he's trying to hand it to her, but she doesn't want anything from him, she doesn't want anything from these people, she can't breathe—

There's a loud crack as the glass explodes.

(There's a louder one as every window in Malfoy Manor follows suit.)

She's eighteen when she starts her first year at Hogwarts.

"My parents split up when I was seven," she explains to the eleven-year-olds in the Gryffindor Common Room on her first night after the Sorting. "It was messy, apparently, although they hid the worst of it from me at the time. My mum wanted me to come live with her and her new husband, but my dad—well, he thought it was best if I stayed away from the Malfoy side of the world. So he cut me off from my mother completely. All I had was a phone number to her new house, and I had to keep it hidden."

A chorus of oooh's from the other First Years.

"I became depressed, I s'pose, and it made my magic go dormant. That's what they told me at St. Mungo's. So we all thought I was a squib. Didn't get a Hogwarts letter or anything. And then last year, when I went to see my mum for the first time in ten years, all that pent-up magic just sort of exploded out of me."

"What did you do?" asks a buck-toothed Lysander Scamander.

Rose grins. "Erm. Well. I shattered my mum's windows." She pauses for effect. "All seven hundred of them."

"At the same time?" cries a girl called Natalie Jordan, and Sean Wood launches into a story about his accidental magic making a building fall over.

"What happened with you and your mum?" Lysander asks.

"After the initial shock, I think she was quite proud of me." Rose shrugs. "We've spoken a bit. We're trying to reconnect. Dad's not happy about it, but he's thrilled I've got magic again." She heaves a sigh. "And that's the story of why there's a fully-grown adult sharing your common room."

A few of the First Years applaud. Most of them are yawning.

"I'm off to bed," Rose says, standing and making her way toward the girls' dormitory. "I'll see you lot in the morning."

"Goodnight, Rose," says Lysander. "I'm glad you've got a happy ending."

Rose smiles. "It's all ironing itself out."

She is twenty-five when she graduates.

Her mother comes to the ceremony, eight-year-old Scorpius in tow, and sits in the front row and cries while Draco looks like he'd rather be anywhere but here. Her father sits in the third row between Aunt Ginny and Hugo (Susan is nowhere to be found, but they say the divorce is going smoothly) and lets out a whoop when the Headmistress calls "Weasley, Rose."

"I'm proud of you," her father says afterwards, and she knows how hard it is for him to talk about his emotions like this, so she wraps her arms around him and lets out a muffled, "Thank you," against his chest.

"Go on," he says, pulling away and nodding toward her mother—she's standing by the Black Lake laughing at Draco, who is up to his shins in the water pleading with a soaking-wet Scorpius to stop splashing and come out. "They probably want to say congratulations."

Rose bites her lip. "They're busy." She looks at her father—really looks at him—and tries to find the similarities in their faces. She has the Granger eyes and nose, but she also has the Weasley cheekbones, the Weasley mouth, the Weasley ears . . . and the Weasley stubbornness, too, and the Weasley courage, and the Weasley strength. "I'd rather do something with you, Dad."

(They both pretend not to notice the tears in his eyes.)

Quidditch League Round 8: Next-Gen Lovin'

Holyhead Harpies, Seeker

Prompt: Rose Weasley

Word Count: 2,573