Triangle (Harry/Ginny/Luna)
Written for the flamingnargle Third Annual Flame On! Challenge. Prompt: 15. Wrackspurts, Firewhiskey and Veratiserum.
Title: Triangle
Pairing: Harry/Ginny/Luna
Rating: PG-13
Word count: 2,281
Summary: "It’s a hot, heavy summer evening when Ginny realises for the first time that Luna Lovegood has never lied to her."
It’s a hot, heavy summer evening when Ginny realises for the first time that Luna Lovegood has never lied to her. Outside, the darkness is gathering in lumps of trembling air that hang on the branches of the trees. Inside, Harry reaches over to take her hand, smiling at her in a hopeful way that only makes her feel worse (because she knows the smile is there to cover him up). It’s odd, it’s deeply hypocritical, but she doesn’t want this, she only wants to push him away.
“For how long?” she asks, gently prying her fingers from his. On his face she sees the faint flash of hurt, quickly covered up by the reflexes from when he was a child in a cupboard.
“Since… I’m not sure,” he sighs, putting his hand in his neck (because he doesn’t know where else to put it), “it’s something that was there all the time. I just realised it one day, realised that it had always been there.”
She wants to say “When?” but doesn’t - it’s too cruel. There’s a silence. Then he says quietly: “Gin, this doesn’t mean that I’m not still madly in love with you, that I don’t still want you desperately.” This makes her smile, because she knows how much effort he has to make to say these words, even after six years of solid relationship. It also makes her smile because the hurt, the jealousy are slipping away. He’s not lying to her now and maybe he never even was (just sparing her, which would make her angry with anyone else, but which she appreciates from him because she knows how rarely he himself has been spared in his life).
“I believe you,” she tells him and she’s not lying.
*
Later, in bed, when the storm is raging outside and it’s finally cool inside, he says: “It feels good to have no secrets from you.”
She kisses him, then says: “Luna has never lied to me.”
The kiss still on his lips, he looks at her with puzzlement and a slight wariness (because he thinks her temper might still flare).
“I’ve lied to her. You’ve lied to her. What kind of friends are we?” She leaves out the you and I have lied to each other, because she knows he’ll still hear it. She sees it happen in his face. “She’s done nothing but love us and how do we repay her? By smiling in her face and telling her how happy we are.”
He’s bewildered, he’s hurt. “I wasn’t lying when I said that.”
She takes his face, his beautiful, haunted face in her hands. “Neither was I, or at least I thought I wasn’t. But when we said it to Luna, it was more lie than truth, because you were already in love with her then.” She lets go of his face, his face that’s shining in the dark. “And so was I.”
The thunder breaks the silence that follows.
“You and I have lied to each other,” he mimics her unspoken thought, nodding as though something has suddenly become crystal clear to him.
“Let’s never do that again,” she sniffs, beginning to cry.
“Let’s,” he answers gruffly, before kissing her desperately, pressing her throbbing lap into his attentive crotch. She samples his hair, his tears with her hands and kisses him kisses him and thinks of Luna kissing him too.
“GinnyLuna,” he pants, mouth close to her ear, and it alone makes her come, thinking of red and blonde and black and hands on freckles -
“It feels good to have no secrets from you,” she whispers hours later. He drags his thumb over the exposed skin of her belly in a sleepy response. They can still hear the thunder in the distance. That night, they barely sleep.
*
The night before was strange (as if the storm triggered some kind of parallel world with parallel loves), but it’s stranger to wake up close to one another and feel completely connected in the want for someone else. She can see how much she could hate Harry if he fell in love with someone else, but not Luna, not Luna with her berries in her hair and her splashing laugh. She wonders if there is anybody on this planet who is not in love with Luna.
She hopes there is. She hopes they’re the only ones.
They feel liberated, happy like foals, connecting on something else than all the other things they already connect on. Over coffee, Harry tells her how much he longs to suck on Luna’s earlobes. After some probing, he admits he would want to do it with the radish earrings in. She laughs freely, but shuts up when she visualises it (Harry’s bent back as he licks the earring, Luna’s hair spread out like a pillow, and then that laugh like water). She has to press the palm of her hand between her legs.
In their closeness to a virtual Luna, they almost forget the real thing is staying at their house, until she comes bounding down the stairs in one of Harry’s old T-shirts, her hair fuzzy. It had seemed such an innocent and friendly gesture to offer her one of Harry’s shirts to sleep in when she came to their house, but now it seems full of innuendo - Harry’s been here, and here, and here. Ginny recalls how many times she’s slept in this shirt. Ginny and Harry have been here, together, apart. She sees on Harry’s face that he’s thinking the exact same thing. It excites her. It scares her.
Luna’s showing an awful lot of leg.
“Good morning,” Luna chirps, dropping down on the third chair. Then, noticing the silence that has suddenly fallen and their stricken faces, she lets her knife fall to her plate with a clang.
“Obviously there is a routine to breakfasting I wasn’t aware of,” she says slowly, looking at both of them in turn. “Am I supposed to have done something different? Recite a poem? Impersonate a Nargle? Are you supposed to say something to the breakfast before you eat it? In fact, that sounds rather logical. A eulogy of sorts.”
They look at her and Ginny already feels the laugh bubbling up inside her chest, and oh how she loves Luna then, genuine, gorgeous, glorious with the sun falling onto her shoulders and her legs still bearing the creases of their spare bed’s sheets. She’s wearing the radish earrings and Harry’s shirt. It’s almost too suggestive for Ginny to bear.
Harry laughs, freely, openly (something he doesn’t do very often, something that makes Ginny’s heart almost ache with love). “No,” he says to Luna, “but I wouldn’t mind to see you impersonate a Nargle.” He touches her - her shoulder, her shoulder that’s wearing the shirt, but the shirt is his and to Ginny it seems infinitely intimate.
Luna beams at Harry. “It’s hard to impersonate a Nargle. They have wings.”
They laugh, all three of them - Harry bangs his fist on the table, Ginny has to wipe away tears of mirth. It’s the stress; no, it’s the relief. Luna makes them laugh in ways that no one else can.
“I’m taking the both of you out for a picnic,” Ginny tells them.
*
The picnic is almost too good to bear. Ginny’s brought cherries - not because she had intentions, but because she really does just like them (as she assures a smirking Harry later) - and Luna loves them. They’re full and ripe and almost bursting. Luna devours the one after the other, tenderly pulling the red fruits from their stems with her teeth, and Ginny knows from Harry’s expression what her own must be like: aflame, hungry. She can see what he’s thinking: I wish I was the cherry’s pit. She shivers. There’s water to drink and Luna spills it over her white skirt. She’s oblivious, although Ginny can’t see how - Harry’s wearing the face that he sometimes gets after not having seen her for a week. It’s the Initiative Face. If there was a bed he’d throw Luna on it. Ginny splashes water into her face, feeling heat rising to her face at the thought. When Luna worriedly touches her cheek and asks if she’s alright, she says: “No. Yes. No.”
She’s lied to Luna before, but not today.
They sit close together, almost touching. When Ginny moves her leg she can feel the soft blond hairs on Luna’s. For the moment, the sun on their bodies binds them and it’s enough. They talk about Hogwarts and about travelling. Harry says: “We should do it, the three of us.” He means travelling, but realising what he’s said, he blushes scarlet. Luna beams. Yes, she says, yes. Ginny can’t take her eyes off her face, her mouth forming the words.
Harry grips her shoulder firmly when they walk home. They retreat to their room while Luna reads, pulling at each other’s clothes wildly. Is it the best sex she’s ever had? Maybe it is, because they fuel each other with their words and fantasies, but maybe it isn’t, because something is missing. Will it always be like this?
They talk, she and Harry. He says: “I don’t want to hurt you.”
“You’ll hurt me if you stay with me while loving another woman.”
“I love you as well.” He’s almost like a child when he says it.
“I know.” She smiles at him. “But we won’t be complete and you know it. I’ll hurt you. You’ll hurt me. We’ll hurt Luna.”
Maybe it’s the last thing she says that makes him do it (but she thinks it’s all of it). He grabs her shoulders and kisses her. “Let’s tell her,” he says.
The “Yes” is out before she can even think about it.
*
Ginny finds herself alone with Luna, while Harry is out in the garden. Luna’s reading the Quibbler, something about geometry and magic. When Ginny joins her on the sofa, Luna only needs to murmur something and they retake their familiar position immediately. It feels odd, being so close to Luna - and it’s odd that it’s odd, because they’ve sat like this, back to back, so many times. Luna’s back is warm because the sun had been on it before Ginny came and the full contact almost sends her reeling. This feeling is one she’s always had when being close to Luna, but she only realises its implications now, now that she’s admitted it to Harry, now that he’s admitted it as well.
Could this really work? Haven’t they invented someone to love because they want to spice up their own life? (No, she thinks immediately.) Haven’t they forgotten about Luna’s interests in all of this? (Maybe.) In their mind, they already love her like lovers and she doesn’t even know it yet.
“Will you stay?” Ginny breaks the warm silence.
“Tonight? If you want me to.”
It’s only when the answer disappoints her that Ginny realises she had meant forever. That takes her by surprise.
“I want you to,” she says quietly.
Luna puts her head in Ginny’s neck.
*
She says to Harry: “Are you sure?” Are you sure you want her? Are you sure you don’t just not want me anymore? Are you sure you’re willing to risk a wonderful, old friendship for something that might or might not work?
“Yes,” he says, to all of it.
*
“Do you want to say something to me, Ginevra?” Luna asks genuinely, putting the plum she was eating down.
Ginny starts. “Why?”
“Because you were looking at me with an odd look.”
She wants to say it then, she really does - I think I’m in love with you, or no, I’ve realised that I really do know that I’m really in love with you - but she thinks of Harry and how it might be selfish when it turns out okay, and really wrong when it turns out bad.
She settles for the truth, only a different one. “I really like how you eat fruit.”
Luna smiles widely. “That’s nice to hear.”
“I feel a bit strange, Luna.”
“Don’t worry about that. It’s the Wrackspurt season again. They infect your brain and touch your heart.”
If that is true, Ginny thinks, then you’re a Wrackspurt.
*
They’re playing a game. What makes me think of you?
Harry says to Ginny: “Firewhiskey, because you intoxicate me and you can still burn me, even after six years.”
Ginny says to Luna: “Wrackspurts, because you get to me.”
Luna says to Harry: “Veratiserum. Because you sometimes seem as if you think you might need it, and you just need to realise you don’t.”
“No no,” Ginny says, “you’re Veratiserum, Luna. You never look away.”
Luna smiles. “Maybe that means Harry thinks he might need me.”
Suddenly, unplanned, there it is: The Moment and they know it. Harry coughs. “Then you’re not Veratiserum, because I really need you, and I don’t need to realise I don’t.”
Ginny takes over, because she feels Harry’s words falling away. “You don’t force us, Luna, and the truth is? We love you. We do. In so many ways.”
It’s strange how quickly Luna understands them. She smiles widely. “Does this mean I don’t have to sleep in the spare bed anymore?”
It does mean that. They do nothing but sleep that night, touching at every angle. There’s no sex, there doesn’t need to be any - not yet.
*
Over coffee, Luna reads the Quibbler to Ginny, whose head is resting in her lap. Harry’s listening from in the doorway.
Something about geometry and magic.
“The triangle,” Luna says, “is the strongest shape there is.”
end
Title: Triangle
Pairing: Harry/Ginny/Luna
Rating: PG-13
Word count: 2,281
Summary: "It’s a hot, heavy summer evening when Ginny realises for the first time that Luna Lovegood has never lied to her."
It’s a hot, heavy summer evening when Ginny realises for the first time that Luna Lovegood has never lied to her. Outside, the darkness is gathering in lumps of trembling air that hang on the branches of the trees. Inside, Harry reaches over to take her hand, smiling at her in a hopeful way that only makes her feel worse (because she knows the smile is there to cover him up). It’s odd, it’s deeply hypocritical, but she doesn’t want this, she only wants to push him away.
“For how long?” she asks, gently prying her fingers from his. On his face she sees the faint flash of hurt, quickly covered up by the reflexes from when he was a child in a cupboard.
“Since… I’m not sure,” he sighs, putting his hand in his neck (because he doesn’t know where else to put it), “it’s something that was there all the time. I just realised it one day, realised that it had always been there.”
She wants to say “When?” but doesn’t - it’s too cruel. There’s a silence. Then he says quietly: “Gin, this doesn’t mean that I’m not still madly in love with you, that I don’t still want you desperately.” This makes her smile, because she knows how much effort he has to make to say these words, even after six years of solid relationship. It also makes her smile because the hurt, the jealousy are slipping away. He’s not lying to her now and maybe he never even was (just sparing her, which would make her angry with anyone else, but which she appreciates from him because she knows how rarely he himself has been spared in his life).
“I believe you,” she tells him and she’s not lying.
*
Later, in bed, when the storm is raging outside and it’s finally cool inside, he says: “It feels good to have no secrets from you.”
She kisses him, then says: “Luna has never lied to me.”
The kiss still on his lips, he looks at her with puzzlement and a slight wariness (because he thinks her temper might still flare).
“I’ve lied to her. You’ve lied to her. What kind of friends are we?” She leaves out the you and I have lied to each other, because she knows he’ll still hear it. She sees it happen in his face. “She’s done nothing but love us and how do we repay her? By smiling in her face and telling her how happy we are.”
He’s bewildered, he’s hurt. “I wasn’t lying when I said that.”
She takes his face, his beautiful, haunted face in her hands. “Neither was I, or at least I thought I wasn’t. But when we said it to Luna, it was more lie than truth, because you were already in love with her then.” She lets go of his face, his face that’s shining in the dark. “And so was I.”
The thunder breaks the silence that follows.
“You and I have lied to each other,” he mimics her unspoken thought, nodding as though something has suddenly become crystal clear to him.
“Let’s never do that again,” she sniffs, beginning to cry.
“Let’s,” he answers gruffly, before kissing her desperately, pressing her throbbing lap into his attentive crotch. She samples his hair, his tears with her hands and kisses him kisses him and thinks of Luna kissing him too.
“GinnyLuna,” he pants, mouth close to her ear, and it alone makes her come, thinking of red and blonde and black and hands on freckles -
“It feels good to have no secrets from you,” she whispers hours later. He drags his thumb over the exposed skin of her belly in a sleepy response. They can still hear the thunder in the distance. That night, they barely sleep.
*
The night before was strange (as if the storm triggered some kind of parallel world with parallel loves), but it’s stranger to wake up close to one another and feel completely connected in the want for someone else. She can see how much she could hate Harry if he fell in love with someone else, but not Luna, not Luna with her berries in her hair and her splashing laugh. She wonders if there is anybody on this planet who is not in love with Luna.
She hopes there is. She hopes they’re the only ones.
They feel liberated, happy like foals, connecting on something else than all the other things they already connect on. Over coffee, Harry tells her how much he longs to suck on Luna’s earlobes. After some probing, he admits he would want to do it with the radish earrings in. She laughs freely, but shuts up when she visualises it (Harry’s bent back as he licks the earring, Luna’s hair spread out like a pillow, and then that laugh like water). She has to press the palm of her hand between her legs.
In their closeness to a virtual Luna, they almost forget the real thing is staying at their house, until she comes bounding down the stairs in one of Harry’s old T-shirts, her hair fuzzy. It had seemed such an innocent and friendly gesture to offer her one of Harry’s shirts to sleep in when she came to their house, but now it seems full of innuendo - Harry’s been here, and here, and here. Ginny recalls how many times she’s slept in this shirt. Ginny and Harry have been here, together, apart. She sees on Harry’s face that he’s thinking the exact same thing. It excites her. It scares her.
Luna’s showing an awful lot of leg.
“Good morning,” Luna chirps, dropping down on the third chair. Then, noticing the silence that has suddenly fallen and their stricken faces, she lets her knife fall to her plate with a clang.
“Obviously there is a routine to breakfasting I wasn’t aware of,” she says slowly, looking at both of them in turn. “Am I supposed to have done something different? Recite a poem? Impersonate a Nargle? Are you supposed to say something to the breakfast before you eat it? In fact, that sounds rather logical. A eulogy of sorts.”
They look at her and Ginny already feels the laugh bubbling up inside her chest, and oh how she loves Luna then, genuine, gorgeous, glorious with the sun falling onto her shoulders and her legs still bearing the creases of their spare bed’s sheets. She’s wearing the radish earrings and Harry’s shirt. It’s almost too suggestive for Ginny to bear.
Harry laughs, freely, openly (something he doesn’t do very often, something that makes Ginny’s heart almost ache with love). “No,” he says to Luna, “but I wouldn’t mind to see you impersonate a Nargle.” He touches her - her shoulder, her shoulder that’s wearing the shirt, but the shirt is his and to Ginny it seems infinitely intimate.
Luna beams at Harry. “It’s hard to impersonate a Nargle. They have wings.”
They laugh, all three of them - Harry bangs his fist on the table, Ginny has to wipe away tears of mirth. It’s the stress; no, it’s the relief. Luna makes them laugh in ways that no one else can.
“I’m taking the both of you out for a picnic,” Ginny tells them.
*
The picnic is almost too good to bear. Ginny’s brought cherries - not because she had intentions, but because she really does just like them (as she assures a smirking Harry later) - and Luna loves them. They’re full and ripe and almost bursting. Luna devours the one after the other, tenderly pulling the red fruits from their stems with her teeth, and Ginny knows from Harry’s expression what her own must be like: aflame, hungry. She can see what he’s thinking: I wish I was the cherry’s pit. She shivers. There’s water to drink and Luna spills it over her white skirt. She’s oblivious, although Ginny can’t see how - Harry’s wearing the face that he sometimes gets after not having seen her for a week. It’s the Initiative Face. If there was a bed he’d throw Luna on it. Ginny splashes water into her face, feeling heat rising to her face at the thought. When Luna worriedly touches her cheek and asks if she’s alright, she says: “No. Yes. No.”
She’s lied to Luna before, but not today.
They sit close together, almost touching. When Ginny moves her leg she can feel the soft blond hairs on Luna’s. For the moment, the sun on their bodies binds them and it’s enough. They talk about Hogwarts and about travelling. Harry says: “We should do it, the three of us.” He means travelling, but realising what he’s said, he blushes scarlet. Luna beams. Yes, she says, yes. Ginny can’t take her eyes off her face, her mouth forming the words.
Harry grips her shoulder firmly when they walk home. They retreat to their room while Luna reads, pulling at each other’s clothes wildly. Is it the best sex she’s ever had? Maybe it is, because they fuel each other with their words and fantasies, but maybe it isn’t, because something is missing. Will it always be like this?
They talk, she and Harry. He says: “I don’t want to hurt you.”
“You’ll hurt me if you stay with me while loving another woman.”
“I love you as well.” He’s almost like a child when he says it.
“I know.” She smiles at him. “But we won’t be complete and you know it. I’ll hurt you. You’ll hurt me. We’ll hurt Luna.”
Maybe it’s the last thing she says that makes him do it (but she thinks it’s all of it). He grabs her shoulders and kisses her. “Let’s tell her,” he says.
The “Yes” is out before she can even think about it.
*
Ginny finds herself alone with Luna, while Harry is out in the garden. Luna’s reading the Quibbler, something about geometry and magic. When Ginny joins her on the sofa, Luna only needs to murmur something and they retake their familiar position immediately. It feels odd, being so close to Luna - and it’s odd that it’s odd, because they’ve sat like this, back to back, so many times. Luna’s back is warm because the sun had been on it before Ginny came and the full contact almost sends her reeling. This feeling is one she’s always had when being close to Luna, but she only realises its implications now, now that she’s admitted it to Harry, now that he’s admitted it as well.
Could this really work? Haven’t they invented someone to love because they want to spice up their own life? (No, she thinks immediately.) Haven’t they forgotten about Luna’s interests in all of this? (Maybe.) In their mind, they already love her like lovers and she doesn’t even know it yet.
“Will you stay?” Ginny breaks the warm silence.
“Tonight? If you want me to.”
It’s only when the answer disappoints her that Ginny realises she had meant forever. That takes her by surprise.
“I want you to,” she says quietly.
Luna puts her head in Ginny’s neck.
*
She says to Harry: “Are you sure?” Are you sure you want her? Are you sure you don’t just not want me anymore? Are you sure you’re willing to risk a wonderful, old friendship for something that might or might not work?
“Yes,” he says, to all of it.
*
“Do you want to say something to me, Ginevra?” Luna asks genuinely, putting the plum she was eating down.
Ginny starts. “Why?”
“Because you were looking at me with an odd look.”
She wants to say it then, she really does - I think I’m in love with you, or no, I’ve realised that I really do know that I’m really in love with you - but she thinks of Harry and how it might be selfish when it turns out okay, and really wrong when it turns out bad.
She settles for the truth, only a different one. “I really like how you eat fruit.”
Luna smiles widely. “That’s nice to hear.”
“I feel a bit strange, Luna.”
“Don’t worry about that. It’s the Wrackspurt season again. They infect your brain and touch your heart.”
If that is true, Ginny thinks, then you’re a Wrackspurt.
*
They’re playing a game. What makes me think of you?
Harry says to Ginny: “Firewhiskey, because you intoxicate me and you can still burn me, even after six years.”
Ginny says to Luna: “Wrackspurts, because you get to me.”
Luna says to Harry: “Veratiserum. Because you sometimes seem as if you think you might need it, and you just need to realise you don’t.”
“No no,” Ginny says, “you’re Veratiserum, Luna. You never look away.”
Luna smiles. “Maybe that means Harry thinks he might need me.”
Suddenly, unplanned, there it is: The Moment and they know it. Harry coughs. “Then you’re not Veratiserum, because I really need you, and I don’t need to realise I don’t.”
Ginny takes over, because she feels Harry’s words falling away. “You don’t force us, Luna, and the truth is? We love you. We do. In so many ways.”
It’s strange how quickly Luna understands them. She smiles widely. “Does this mean I don’t have to sleep in the spare bed anymore?”
It does mean that. They do nothing but sleep that night, touching at every angle. There’s no sex, there doesn’t need to be any - not yet.
*
Over coffee, Luna reads the Quibbler to Ginny, whose head is resting in her lap. Harry’s listening from in the doorway.
Something about geometry and magic.
“The triangle,” Luna says, “is the strongest shape there is.”
end