December Daily: Harry/Ron/Hermione

[resonant]

reginagiraffe - "Hermione/Harry/Ron from Bed and Board in 2020"

I had to look back at the stories and do some date calculations. Bed & Board takes place in spring 1998; at the time of Paternity, Forsizia is 5 months old and Ernie & Eloise's oldest child (who was in utero at the time of Bed & Board) looks about 6, placing that story in the vicinity of 2004, when everybody's about 23. The threesome are still living in Rome at that point, where Ron's probably still doing something with Quidditch, Harry's probably still doing someting with racing broom manufacturing, and Hermione has probably earned one or more advanced degrees and gone into either academia or magical research.

Here's the thing: wizard lives are really long. If you want a big family (and I imagine that Ron and Harry do, though Hermione might not be as passionate about it), why would you do it the hard way and sentence yourself to ten years of continual diaper duty when you could have one or two at a time and then one or two more when the first batch go off to school?

By which I mean that in 2020 Forsizia is sixteen and in sixth year and spending all her spare time on, I don't know, sculpture or roller derby or whatever magical kids get up to when they don't have to save the world.

And these people are wizards, which means that Ron gave birth to the second one and Harry's pregnant with the third.

In fact, without financial pressure, I like to think of Harry not putting a whole lot of energy into the workforce at all, though he'd be ready to be called in for special projects. He's breeding wyverns, installing a vineyard and making his own wine, being the parent most likely to get up in the middle of the night with a vomiting kid or show up at the junior school on Parents' Day. Hermione's ambitious and Ron's competitive; Harry just wants to be surrounded by people who love him.

They're not in their fifth or sixth decade yet, but when they get there, I wouldn't be surprised if they go through with Ron's proposal to add another woman to their marriage, just to even things out.










laurenthemself -- "What grammatical (or punctuation, spelling) hill would you die on?"

ride_4ever if you are a maker of New Year's resolutions, post at least one -- if you are not, then comment about the concept of New Year's resolutions OR write a snippet-sized list of New Year's resolutions from the POV of one dSC6D character.

Comments

[lunabee34]

I agree completely with your assessments of their characters. Harry wants to belong. He wants friends and family; the rest of it doesn't matter so much to him.

[resonant]

If he's with Ron, he's probably the uncle of a million nieces and nephews -- bet he loves that.

[lunabee34]

Oh for sure!

[reginagiraffe]

Interesting! I hadn't thought about spreading the kids out like that. I can't remember, is there any info in the books that indicate that magical families might have them in batches like that? Living longer doesn't necessarily mean fertile longer. But they'd all only be 45-ish, so even without any magical help (except for the mpreg kind) they'd still probably still be okay.

Thanks for the response! Happy New Year!

[resonant]

No, canon doesn't at all support this -- in the canon they all marry their high school sweethearts and immediately have precisely two children. I just think that if you were going to live for two hundred years, you might approach family-building differently.

You might also approach long-term relationships differently. It might be normal for people to have amicable separations after twenty years where they continued to coparent and get together for coffee twice a week and help each other prune the hedges while it was understood that Harry was taking a break from sex and romance (giving birth really took a lot out of him) and that Hermione and Ron were both sleeping with an older ex-rock-star who was only in Rome for three months, but separately and not with each other, except for that one time when everybody had had so much of Harry's dragonberry wine that nobody could remember it very clearly.

[petra]

I deeply enjoyed revisiting this universe so I could make sense of this addition to it.