Work Text:
Roslyn
Rose.
They call her Rose because they want something beautiful in the world. Harry remembers sitting in the small room with them, so scared that something was wrong because they were worrying that something was wrong.
She’s impossibly small on the screen, just as James had been, just as Freddie and Roxanne had been in the scan photos he traded with George and Angelina the year before. But Rose is the perfect name, it rolls off of Ron’s tongue in the same moment that the three of them are told that the baby is a girl.
She’s not Harry’s, but at the same time she is. They share no blood, but that was never what makes a family, Harry had known that since he was eleven and he met the pair of them. Ron and Hermione are the family he always wanted, the bossy older sister he adores, the favorite brother that he needs. They are a family, the three of them, for as long as they have known each other, it was always going to happen and they don’t talk about the first two months where they didn’t orbit around one another.
(It’s said that somethings will cement a friendship, fighting a ten foot mountain troll at eleven or twelve will do that. Destroying a man that is less than a man will do that. Recovering and growing and living a life together will do that.)
Her name is actually Roslyn, but no one will call her that. It’s Rose, and she is so small in Harry’s arms when he gets to hold her. Hermione refused to give birth without him holding her hand, Ron on her other side.
She is small, but she has a familiar nose and chin, familiar cheeks and wispy hair. She has freckles and blue eyes and smells every bit like Ron and Hermione. She isn’t his daughter in the traditional way, she’ll grow up to call him ‘uncle’ just as little Victoire had since he had known her.
It still sounds weird even now.
Roslyn, Rose, is sweet and even tempered, she has a drive that is all Hermione, but desire that is all Ron. She is quick witted and smart, she is courageous and humbled, she is her mother and her father and her godfather or uncle or whatever Harry is to her.
She is his first daughter, before his own is born, before his second son is born, Rose is his first daughter.
(Harry gets to do things with her he isn’t allowed to quite yet with his own children, Rose gets a toy broom at two that Hermione refused to allow Ron to get her. She gets cookbooks at six even though she’s just learning to read and Ron rolls his eyes at him over. She gets to learn to drive with Harry beside her, Albus and Scorpius and Becca in the backseat, all egging her on to go faster.
Harry also goading her into going faster too, his wand held tightly in his hand.)
Rose is a beauty in light sundresses with her fiery red curls pinned back, she dances gracefully and sings loudly. She is so smart and funny and wonderful that Harry can’t believe he gets to know her as well as he does. He gets to see her first kiss to a boy that her parents would never approve of, he gets to comfort her over the loss she feels so deeply in a single summer, he gets to see so many first and lasts and he loves it.
He had fallen in love with her when she was too small to know. He was the first person to know of her after her parents, and the scan photo will hang proudly in his cubicle until he finally pulls it down after he retires. She’ll give him love that he holds onto for years and years beyond his time or hers.
Rose is the best piece of love he knows, given to him by the first two people he had learned to love. Ron and Hermione took up the role of parents and siblings and best friends and family all in one moment and he holds onto it even if it hurts. His family, is so important, so wonderfully important, as he had fought tooth and nail to gain it, keep it close to him.
Rose is the embodiment of all that hard work.
(She is the first of many to call him ‘godfather’, Teddy Lupin had been the first, but she is the first goddaughter.)
He finds the right moment to dance with her at her wedding, the first kiss boy, the son of a long ago past enemy, watching her with devoted eyes. He knows that she’s done good, that she’s happy and will have a life that she’s always wanted. He sees a happy future full of love and want and needs fulfilled, something he could never dream of for himself, even at her age.
He sees so much good for her that it makes his own heart ache. But it’s all happiness, and Ron and Hermione tease him about the tears on his face even if their own faces match his. They’re all a crying mess, but it’s what they want, and they hold each other close as they always had. Ron with his arm around Harry’s shoulders, Hermione’s hand wrapped around Harry’s waist, all of them touching and holding one another as Rose laughs and dances and sings as she had since she was old enough too.
She is a beauty in white, a beauty as she always was.
Harry loves her as he does his own children, the four he raised with Ginny, and this one that he raised with Ron and Hermione. She doesn’t share his blood, but she is every bit a Potter as Harry has been a Weasley, a Granger.
(He can never wish anything different for her, for his little Rosie Girl.)