FIC: A Beautiful Kind Of Strange (Ron/Luna)
Title: A Beautiful Kind Of Strange
Author/Artist: starstruck1986
Characters: Ron Weasley / Luna Lovegood
Prompt number: 103
Word Count: ~4,537
Rating: NC-17
Warnings: Angst, anxiety & panic attacks, hoarding, language.
Summary: Stripped bare, there's nowhere to hide. It surprises Ron that he doesn't want to.
Disclaimer: Not mine - all characters belong to JKR.
Author’s Notes: It's very rare you'll find me writing het, but this prompt grabbed my imagination and, well, here we are! I hope the prompter likes it. Thanks to my beta, S, and the mods for running again - I always adore this fest!
A Beautiful Kind Of Strange
“So, remind me where your dad is again, Luna?” Ron asked, reaching up to wipe the sweat off his brow with his forearm.
“He's visiting his sister,” Luna said vaguely after a long silence. She didn't bother to look up from the pile of magazines she was sorting through.
When he realised that no more information was forthcoming, and recognised it had been stupid to ask because Luna was clearly somewhere else entirely, Ron swallowed and pulled his t-shirt away from his skin.
It was too hot to be sorting through years of accumulated mess. He didn't even really know how he'd been roped into it, other than his mother needling him to the point where he would have built the Lovegoods an entirely new house just to shut her up. Truth be told it hadn't been too bad so far, but he wasn't looking forward to the loft because of the possibility of spiders.
He had whimsical hopes of Luna getting distracted by family heirlooms and them never quite making it past the spare bedroom.
“Didn't you only move in here after the war?” he asked, somewhat incredulous at the mounds of stuff cluttering the house.
“Daddy's always been a bit of a hoarder,” Luna said, finally straightening up.
She swung her long, dirty-blonde hair over her shoulder and put her hands up to her head. Ron watched her as she managed to effortlessly bundle all her hair up into a massive bun and secured it in place with a hairband from her wrist.
“You're staring,” she informed him.
“Oh. Right. Yeah. I'm an idiot like that.” Ron shrugged and slipped his hands into his pockets.
Luna's big eyes stayed on him for longer than was comfortable. She could have been thinking anything and it annoyed Ron no end that he couldn't decipher exactly what.
“Well, now you're staring,” he pointed out, hoping to sound playful and nonchalant.
“I suppose I am,” Luna said dreamily.
“Ah... right. Okay. So, let's carry on, yeah?” Ron gestured to all the boxes. “What do you want me to do?”
“I think there might be things of my mum's in those.” Luna tipped the magazines she'd been looking through in a rubbish bag whilst gesturing to some boxes with her foot. “Can you take those downstairs for me? I want to have a proper sort through with dad.”
Ron pulled out his wand but Luna pushed his arm down again. “Can you take them by hand? I don't want to upset the family of gnomes that have set up in the skirting boards. They get very agitated by magic, you know.”
“Are you bloody kidding me?” Ron gaped. “Luna. You can't have gnomes living inside the house - they'll spread like wildfire if you give them an inch!”
Luna simply smiled to herself and ignored him.
For what was probably the thousandth time, Ron wondered how Luna had survived thus far in life when she was constantly off with the faeries and letting gnomes live in her house. He bent down and picked up one of the boxes.
“Be careful on the landing. There's a faery den just before the turn in the stairs. Don't disturb their circle, Ron. I'm sure you know what would happen if you did.”
Not just off with them - bloody living with them too.
“Right,” he said, deciding that commenting further was pointless.
“Here, I'll take one too,” Luna said, stooping to pick up another box.
She led the way out onto the landing and trod very quietly when she neared the stairs. Ron looked all around the carpet but saw nothing.
“Looks like your lodgers have moved on,” he said dryly, unable to keep a grin from twisting his lips.
“No, they haven't, you're just not seeing them, Ron.”
“My eyesight is perfect, Luna - there aren't any bloody faeries there.”
“Just because they've chosen not to show themselves to you doesn't mean they aren't there.”
Luna's voice didn't hold even a smidge of annoyance - merely the casual belligerence and softness of someone who truly believed that there was a faery den on her landing.
“Oh, oh, look, I'm going to disturb the invisible faery den,” Ron teased, inching his foot towards the corner which Luna was making doe-eyes at. “Going to ruin the magic circle and be cursed forever...”
It would have continued to amuse him had he not nearly lost his balance and grip on the box at once. He managed to save both at the last minute but felt rather sheepish as he straightened up. Luna was staring at him with her eyebrows raised and a faint trace of a knowing look on her face.
“Oh, leave off,” Ron grumped, and headed down the stairs.
When he had safely deposited the box in the sitting room, he took a moment to hike his jeans up and run his fingers through his hair.
“You really did put your foot in it, you know...” Luna drifted to the window and pulled back the net curtain to look outside.
“In what?” Ron frowned.
“The faery den. You made them angry.”
Ron sighed and pinched the bridge of his nose; they'd reached another point where there was clearly no point in him arguing back.
“Okay. Fine. I'm a completely terrible person and I've infuriated the faeries. Woe betide me. Woe.” He rolled his eyes. “Can we move on? What do you want me to do now?”
“Well, we need to bring the rest of the boxes down here so I can sort through them...”
“You're going to trust me going past the faeries again? They'll be in full scale rebellion by the end of the day at this rate.”
“I'll bring the boxes. Can you do me a favour and deal with a Boggart that's moved in under the kitchen sink? He's been there a while but I need him gone before dad gets home. He's having trouble with his heart. I don't need him collapsing because he's come face to face with a Chimera.”
“Your dad's biggest fear is Chimeras?” Ron asked with interest. “That's... pretty unusual.”
Luna hummed in agreement and dropped the curtain again. “Since mum died really, he's had this thing about fire. If it hadn't've been for the fire, she might have survived. But it took hold so quickly...”
She trailed off, looking at an unremarkable spot on the wallpaper. Ron swallowed on a dry throat. He knew that at the age of thirty he should know better than to blindly question the inner workings of other people's minds. They were private and everyone had demons - Merlin only knew he was at the top of that list.
“Sure. I can handle the Boggart.”
“And then we really need to get up in the loft, that's why I needed you... I'm not good with dark, confined spaces since...”
She stopped again and Ron knew what she wasn't saying. She wasn't comfortable in dark, confined spaces since her imprisonment in Malfoy Manor during the war. He didn't blame her - he'd spent only minutes in that dungeon and his memories weren't particularly fond either.
“Cool. Mind if we stop for a drink at some point though? I'm parched.”
Luna nodded and gave him a soft, distant smile before leaving the room and heading back up the stairs. Ron took a deep breath and tried not to think about the humongous spider he was about to come face to face with. He still hated them and shivered as he stepped into the kitchen.
“Right, out you come, you little fucker,” he muttered darkly, and headed for the sink.
-
Three hours later, Ron was at his wit's end. He was balanced precariously over the loft hatch, with Luna calling vague instructions from the landing below and about fifty billion spiders overhead and crawling over the things he was supposed to touch.
“I'm sweating like a bloody glass blower's arse,” he muttered to himself, wiping his forehead with his hand.
His skin was crawling and he felt roughly thirty seconds from a full blown panic attack, which he absolutely didn't want Luna to see.
Despite his extreme discomfort, however, they'd made a decent start on clearing the loft - if only to have moved much of it into the spare room they'd already cleared. Ron cautiously levered up a box marked 'books' and lowered it down as best he could onto the flat-topped ladder so that Luna could move it.
“Y'know, I thought when I split up with Hermione that I'd never have to lug boxes of bloody books about ever again,” he called down to her.
Luna laughed at that as she took the box in her arms and disappeared from sight. He took the moment of privacy to force some deep breaths into his lungs and try to inject some calm into his blood.
It might have worked had, at that precise moment, something not landed on the nape of his neck. He jerked and lost his balance.
With a strangled yelp Ron tried to grab something as he fell down through the hatch, but he had no chance of saving himself. His back smashed into the ladder and before he knew it, he was looking up at the ceiling panting hard. Each breath caused sharp pains in his lungs.
His skin felt as though it was on fire - the fire of a thousand arachnids crawling over every single inch of him, he surmised hysterically.
There was no stopping the fully-fledged panic attack after that.
He tried to get up, but he was in agony and the ladder he'd landed on meant that his body was bent in an odd shape.
“Ron?” Luna appeared in his line of sight, looking worried.
“I'm-”
He'd been about to say fine, but he wasn't fine, and Luna was so gentle and open he felt he owed her his honesty.
“I feel like it's on me,” he said weakly. “It's on me, Luna.”
“What's on you?” she asked.
“Spider,” he mumbled, feeling his face burst into flame with embarrassment.
He took Luna's hands when she gave them to him and, despite her slight build, she managed to pull him upright. Everything hurt. Luna helped him away from the ladder and the loft hatch and steadied him.
“I feel like it's on me,” he repeated, as his body was overcome with violent shivers. “It's still on me.”
Luna had her wand in her hand and Ron didn't know what she was going to do, only that suddenly he was very, very naked.
“What the fuck?” He cried, throwing one hand down to try and hide his crotch. “Luna!”
“Shh,” she whispered, and turned him around with gentle hands, moving his body in a circle until he faced her again. “I promise you, Ron, there's absolutely nothing on your body. Nothing. It's not there.”
Her voice had suddenly become like molten warmth washing over him. Despite being naked on her landing and mortified about that fact, Ron instantly began to feel a hell of a lot calmer.
He managed to take a breath which wasn't shallow or painful.
“Come with me,” Luna said, slipping her fingers into his and pulling him towards the other end of the landing.
Ron could feel it coming - the horrible, burning emotion which always followed when he got into a state. Blinking furiously he tried to force it down, unwilling to lose face in front of a friend.
“Here.” She sat him down on the edge of her bed and draped something around his shoulders.
Ron pulled it close and pooled some of the fabric over his lap to hide his dick, which he really didn't want to see at that moment and surmised that Luna would feel the same. When her arms curled around him from behind, Ron was unable to stop the moan which rumbled out of his mouth. Luna smelt of something that he couldn't place, but it was just lovely as the scent settled around him, coming from both her body and the blanket she'd wrapped him in.
“I shouldn't have asked you to go up there. I'm sorry, Ron.” Luna whispered directly into his ear, but not close enough for her breath to tickle, as if she knew that the sensation would be far too much for him. “I knew you were afraid of spiders. It slipped my mind. I'm sorry.”
“Don't be,” Ron responded, and though he felt awful and his back was killing him, he meant it. “I'd rather be upset than you be upset.”
“Why?” Luna asked; he could tell she was frowning, not understanding his willingness to suffer over causing her to suffer.
“Because I care about you,” he answered. “I wanted to help, and there was no way I was sending you up knowing you were afraid.”
“Oh,” was all Luna said.
Ron groaned as he shifted slightly, pains shooting all the way down his back into his bum and beyond into his thighs.
“Merlin's arse I'm going to feel this tomorrow.”
“You landed on the ladder. You might have broken something.”
“Well, if I have, it won't be the first time,” Ron pointed out. He hissed in agony as he shifted his weight slightly.
“I did warn you about the faery ring...” Luna pointed out.
Ron thought it was probably a good thing that he was in too much pain to consider getting back into that argument. He gave a non-committal hum in response.
He looked up, relieved to find his vision no longer blurred. Luna's bedroom was painted in a light blue colour with a delicate trail of ivy painted all the way around the room, just under the coving. Vines tumbled down the walls in places, with spidery offshoots curling into the paint. Ron fought off another shudder. It was beautiful, but he could well imagine that in the dark it would look like things were crawling on the walls.
“They remind you of spiders,” Luna said astutely.
Ron wondered how it was that she could correctly pluck such a strange thought from his mind yet not understand why he would enter a loft full of spiders rather than see her upset over doing the same.
Luna was a beautiful kind of strange. Ron had known that for a long, long time, but had never really appreciated her for it until that moment.
They settled into an odd kind of silence which Ron was loathed to break. Luna's weight and warmth against his back was comforting and her arms held him tightly; he couldn't remember the last time he'd felt as safe - as protected.
Luna wasn't exactly hulking or frightening.
“Ron...”
“Mm?”
“I want to do something, but I'm not sure if I should.”
“What kind of something?”
“Something which you might not want me to do.”
“Well, tell me what it is, then I'll tell you if I want it or not.”
The scent of her grew stronger as she leaned further over his shoulder; her hair brushed against his skin. Ron waited, growing more curious with each passing second, until Luna pressed her lips against his cheek, then again at the corner of his mouth.
In a million years, Ron hadn't expected that. As her delicate hand reached around to his other cheek and turned his face towards her, he couldn't help but nose at the skin of her wrist, allowing her unrecognisable scent properly into his nostrils. Without a clue about what was possessing him, Ron pressed a kiss there, opening his mouth to let his tongue graze across the pulse point.
Luna made him look at her. Ron found her eyes full of unnerving fear - in all their years of friendship, Ron rarely recalled seeing Luna be frightened.
He understood the fear of rejection more than she could ever guess.
Ron bridged the minimal distance between them and kissed her on the mouth. Her eyes widened and then closed. Her eyelashes were so blonde. He'd never had cause to be as close to her before.
Despite the pain from his fall, and despite the fact that he was stark bollock naked beneath the blanket she'd given him, Ron turned as best he could and put his arms around her, trying his hardest to maintain the lip contact. Luna moved gracefully with him and made no protest at all when Ron pressed her back into the duvet cover, his naked body eclipsing her own.
In fact, she urged him on, hooking her legs over his hips and locking her ankles behind his back.
Ron shivered when his very interested dick met coarse curls, soft flesh and absolutely no underwear whatsoever.
Luna had been wearing a simple sun dress all day. He'd not paid any attention to what she might have on underneath it, because she was his friend and until that moment, with his cock having very significant ideas pressed against her naked cunt, he had never thought about her as anything else.
He put his hands up to cup her breasts - she wasn't wearing a bra, either. Her eyes widened as he gently squeezed, but Ron froze.
“Is... is that not okay?” he whispered, worried he'd crossed an unspoken boundary.
“Do it again,” she whispered. Her smile lit up her entire face.
Ron smiled back at her before putting his fingers at the hem of her dress.
“Can I..?” he looked up once more, seeking permission.
Luna answered by grabbing the skirt of the dress herself and pulling it up and up until it cleared her head, and she was there in front of him, every bit as nude as he was, her hair a beautiful blonde puddle on the duvet.
Ron couldn't help the way he stared at her, seeing her naked for the first time. She was so slender that he could see the corrugation of her ribs and the jut of her hip bones. Despite that she still retained a certain softness, perhaps from the glow of her skin, which was translucent enough for him to follow entire veins across her body. He followed a line down her stomach to see the blonde curls he'd already rubbed against. Again possessed by something unknown, Ron dropped and pressed his face into them, nosing against her and inhaling her. Luna's fingers threaded into his hair and massaged his scalp. Breath hitching, Ron kissed a further path down to where the skin grew fleshier and slipped his tongue between the fold he found there.
Luna's gasp of his name was loud and breathy and it only spurred him on to do it again, and again, again until she had let her legs fall open and he had full access to her. She tasted of sweat and tang and it was so fucking good.
He flicked his tongue against her, drawing harsh breaths out of her chest, and then trailed his tongue down, down, until he allowed it to unfold properly into her body. It had been a good while since he'd had cause to put his tongue to such use, but he assumed from her moans that he was making at least a semi-respectable go of it.
Ron looked up then, to see Luna's head thrown back, her breasts pressed into the air, nipples hard.
He was overcome with the urge to suck on them. He gently withdrew his tongue, pressing a kiss over her hole to make up for the loss, and sat up slightly. His eyes caught sight of a set of scars on the inside of her right thigh, which were silvery and straight and had been put there with a great deal of precision.
Everybody, he reminded himself, had demons. Ron ducked to press a kiss to the scars and then put them out of his mind. He covered Luna's body with his own again and did what he wanted to - he bent his head and sucked one nipple into his mouth, closing his eyes and moaning around the nub between his lips. Luna's hips bucked against him.
Ron looked up at her again, but she was looking back at him this time. He begrudgingly left her nipple in favour of giving her another kiss, unable to keep from enjoying the idea that she was tasting herself in his mouth.
“Fuck me,” she mouthed against him. “Ron. Please. I want you to fuck me.”
Ron didn't need to be asked a third time. He positioned himself between her legs, ignoring the sheer agony of his back, shoulders and neck.
“Are you...?”
“Yes.”
“Have you...?” For some reason his full question about protection didn't clear his lips.
“Yes,” Luna answered anyway.
Her hands sank into the flesh of his bum cheeks and pulled him forward. Ron moaned as he sank into her, trying to remember when the last time he'd fucked anybody without a Muggle condom.
Dating Muggles was easier than coping with the pressure of anybody from the Wizarding community. They all wanted to use condoms, though, and despite hating them, Ron didn't ever feel as though he had the right to push the fact.
So fucking Luna, cock gloriously unsheathed, understandably did things to him. He wanted to lie there and fuck her forever, exploring every inch of her - but he knew that in reality if he lasted longer than few minutes he would be bloody lucky.
Luna didn't seem to care about longevity, though. Once she had taken him wholly within her, she threw her legs back up around him, locking him in place, and began to rock against him. She captured his lips in a kiss and sank one hand into his hair at the nape of his neck. Momentarily frozen, trapped in her embrace, Ron felt undeniably content. Loved, even, which he immediately scrapped as a ridiculous idea because they were having sex for the first time and Luna couldn't possibly love him.
It rose to a climax without him really paying attention. Luna was tight around him, clenching hard with every thrust and he was lost in the frantic in-and-out rhythm they'd worked into. It was gorgeous; she was gorgeous.
“You're so beautiful, Ron...” she murmured against his mouth. “So gorg... Oh... Oh!”
Everything hurt a hell of a lot more when Luna's body clenched around him and started to tremble, her hips rolling uncontrollably as she came hard against him. It was too much for his addled brain and broken body to withstand; Ron buried his face in her shoulder and made fists in the duvet as he lost control and came - equally as hard - into her.
It was long and delicious and made his toes curl. By the time he was finished he was panting into her hot skin.
Immediately Luna softened her arms and stroked his hair with one hand and the small of his back with the other. Ron had no control of himself when he collapsed fully on top of her with 'whoomph' of air from his lungs. She didn't complain.
Normally by that point, Ron would have been halfway to the land of nod. But lying there with Luna all around him, her fingers caressing him, her heart thrumming away against his own, he was suddenly brimming with curiosity and desire.
Luna kissed his cheek and then his hair. Ron wanted to return the intimacy but she had hold of him so tightly that he was unable to move without dislodging her - and it was just too fucking beautiful to do that.
“Thank you,” Luna whispered, after a while.
“No, thank you,” Ron answered playfully, glad that she couldn't see his smile or how hard he was blushing.
He was still inside her, soft and damp and filthy. She seemed in no hurry to change that.
“Luna...”
“Don't,” she whispered, and kissed his ear. “It's okay. We don't have to talk about it.”
“I want to talk about it,” he said quietly.
“Why?”
Incredulous, Ron had to prise up a little to look down at her, no matter how comfortable he'd been before.
“Because that was fucking amazing, and I've never had one sexual thought about you in my life, but I think you might have had more than one about me.”
A day of firsts, Ron also thought it might be the first time he'd ever seen Luna Lovegood look embarrassed. About anything.
“I think about you often,” she confirmed, lowering her eyelids. “Because I love you, you see.”
“You love me?” Ron repeated, still incredulous.
So he hadn't been imagining it, the way she'd made him feel as she held him in her arms. The way she had made love to him so fucking tenderly.
Made love? Merlin's cock sort your head out, Weasley.
Luna was suddenly staring at him, once more unabashed.
“Why would you love me?” he whispered, suddenly abashed enough for the both of them.
Luna smiled then and shook her head. “That you don't know is most of the reason why, Ron.”
Her fingers cupped his cheek.
“I'm not easy to love,” she announced, as if discussing the weather, looking him dead in the eye. “I'm not... I know you think I'm odd. And that you laugh at me sometimes.”
“I laugh at everyone sometimes.” Ron knew he had been cruel in the past. He hated himself a little more to think that she would consider it a barrier to him caring for her. Loving her. “It doesn't mean I don't care. I do care.” He tried to kiss the hand on his face but met thin air instead.
Luna looked over him, her slightly-protruding eyes assessing every inch in a way which made him feel barer than he had at any point thus far.
“I'm not easy to love either,” Ron said finally. “Because I'm a fucking idiot who pushes people away so they can't hurt him.”
It was the truth. He did. He'd pushed Hermione away enough for her to leave. He'd pushed Harry away out of fear.
The result was him, alone, with his complex back catalogue of Muggle fucks and nobody that ever made him feel happy or special.
He looked down at Luna and tried hard to process the feeling which was spreading through him. He didn't recognise it at all.
All he knew was that it didn't matter that he was in pain; it didn't matter that he was naked on top of a woman he'd known since he was fifteen; it didn't matter that he could have ruined a friendship he adored.
Because Luna was a beautiful kind of strange, and he wanted her, and she wanted him, even if he had absolutely no idea why.
-fin-
Author/Artist: starstruck1986
Characters: Ron Weasley / Luna Lovegood
Prompt number: 103
Word Count: ~4,537
Rating: NC-17
Warnings: Angst, anxiety & panic attacks, hoarding, language.
Summary: Stripped bare, there's nowhere to hide. It surprises Ron that he doesn't want to.
Disclaimer: Not mine - all characters belong to JKR.
Author’s Notes: It's very rare you'll find me writing het, but this prompt grabbed my imagination and, well, here we are! I hope the prompter likes it. Thanks to my beta, S, and the mods for running again - I always adore this fest!
A Beautiful Kind Of Strange
“So, remind me where your dad is again, Luna?” Ron asked, reaching up to wipe the sweat off his brow with his forearm.
“He's visiting his sister,” Luna said vaguely after a long silence. She didn't bother to look up from the pile of magazines she was sorting through.
When he realised that no more information was forthcoming, and recognised it had been stupid to ask because Luna was clearly somewhere else entirely, Ron swallowed and pulled his t-shirt away from his skin.
It was too hot to be sorting through years of accumulated mess. He didn't even really know how he'd been roped into it, other than his mother needling him to the point where he would have built the Lovegoods an entirely new house just to shut her up. Truth be told it hadn't been too bad so far, but he wasn't looking forward to the loft because of the possibility of spiders.
He had whimsical hopes of Luna getting distracted by family heirlooms and them never quite making it past the spare bedroom.
“Didn't you only move in here after the war?” he asked, somewhat incredulous at the mounds of stuff cluttering the house.
“Daddy's always been a bit of a hoarder,” Luna said, finally straightening up.
She swung her long, dirty-blonde hair over her shoulder and put her hands up to her head. Ron watched her as she managed to effortlessly bundle all her hair up into a massive bun and secured it in place with a hairband from her wrist.
“You're staring,” she informed him.
“Oh. Right. Yeah. I'm an idiot like that.” Ron shrugged and slipped his hands into his pockets.
Luna's big eyes stayed on him for longer than was comfortable. She could have been thinking anything and it annoyed Ron no end that he couldn't decipher exactly what.
“Well, now you're staring,” he pointed out, hoping to sound playful and nonchalant.
“I suppose I am,” Luna said dreamily.
“Ah... right. Okay. So, let's carry on, yeah?” Ron gestured to all the boxes. “What do you want me to do?”
“I think there might be things of my mum's in those.” Luna tipped the magazines she'd been looking through in a rubbish bag whilst gesturing to some boxes with her foot. “Can you take those downstairs for me? I want to have a proper sort through with dad.”
Ron pulled out his wand but Luna pushed his arm down again. “Can you take them by hand? I don't want to upset the family of gnomes that have set up in the skirting boards. They get very agitated by magic, you know.”
“Are you bloody kidding me?” Ron gaped. “Luna. You can't have gnomes living inside the house - they'll spread like wildfire if you give them an inch!”
Luna simply smiled to herself and ignored him.
For what was probably the thousandth time, Ron wondered how Luna had survived thus far in life when she was constantly off with the faeries and letting gnomes live in her house. He bent down and picked up one of the boxes.
“Be careful on the landing. There's a faery den just before the turn in the stairs. Don't disturb their circle, Ron. I'm sure you know what would happen if you did.”
Not just off with them - bloody living with them too.
“Right,” he said, deciding that commenting further was pointless.
“Here, I'll take one too,” Luna said, stooping to pick up another box.
She led the way out onto the landing and trod very quietly when she neared the stairs. Ron looked all around the carpet but saw nothing.
“Looks like your lodgers have moved on,” he said dryly, unable to keep a grin from twisting his lips.
“No, they haven't, you're just not seeing them, Ron.”
“My eyesight is perfect, Luna - there aren't any bloody faeries there.”
“Just because they've chosen not to show themselves to you doesn't mean they aren't there.”
Luna's voice didn't hold even a smidge of annoyance - merely the casual belligerence and softness of someone who truly believed that there was a faery den on her landing.
“Oh, oh, look, I'm going to disturb the invisible faery den,” Ron teased, inching his foot towards the corner which Luna was making doe-eyes at. “Going to ruin the magic circle and be cursed forever...”
It would have continued to amuse him had he not nearly lost his balance and grip on the box at once. He managed to save both at the last minute but felt rather sheepish as he straightened up. Luna was staring at him with her eyebrows raised and a faint trace of a knowing look on her face.
“Oh, leave off,” Ron grumped, and headed down the stairs.
When he had safely deposited the box in the sitting room, he took a moment to hike his jeans up and run his fingers through his hair.
“You really did put your foot in it, you know...” Luna drifted to the window and pulled back the net curtain to look outside.
“In what?” Ron frowned.
“The faery den. You made them angry.”
Ron sighed and pinched the bridge of his nose; they'd reached another point where there was clearly no point in him arguing back.
“Okay. Fine. I'm a completely terrible person and I've infuriated the faeries. Woe betide me. Woe.” He rolled his eyes. “Can we move on? What do you want me to do now?”
“Well, we need to bring the rest of the boxes down here so I can sort through them...”
“You're going to trust me going past the faeries again? They'll be in full scale rebellion by the end of the day at this rate.”
“I'll bring the boxes. Can you do me a favour and deal with a Boggart that's moved in under the kitchen sink? He's been there a while but I need him gone before dad gets home. He's having trouble with his heart. I don't need him collapsing because he's come face to face with a Chimera.”
“Your dad's biggest fear is Chimeras?” Ron asked with interest. “That's... pretty unusual.”
Luna hummed in agreement and dropped the curtain again. “Since mum died really, he's had this thing about fire. If it hadn't've been for the fire, she might have survived. But it took hold so quickly...”
She trailed off, looking at an unremarkable spot on the wallpaper. Ron swallowed on a dry throat. He knew that at the age of thirty he should know better than to blindly question the inner workings of other people's minds. They were private and everyone had demons - Merlin only knew he was at the top of that list.
“Sure. I can handle the Boggart.”
“And then we really need to get up in the loft, that's why I needed you... I'm not good with dark, confined spaces since...”
She stopped again and Ron knew what she wasn't saying. She wasn't comfortable in dark, confined spaces since her imprisonment in Malfoy Manor during the war. He didn't blame her - he'd spent only minutes in that dungeon and his memories weren't particularly fond either.
“Cool. Mind if we stop for a drink at some point though? I'm parched.”
Luna nodded and gave him a soft, distant smile before leaving the room and heading back up the stairs. Ron took a deep breath and tried not to think about the humongous spider he was about to come face to face with. He still hated them and shivered as he stepped into the kitchen.
“Right, out you come, you little fucker,” he muttered darkly, and headed for the sink.
-
Three hours later, Ron was at his wit's end. He was balanced precariously over the loft hatch, with Luna calling vague instructions from the landing below and about fifty billion spiders overhead and crawling over the things he was supposed to touch.
“I'm sweating like a bloody glass blower's arse,” he muttered to himself, wiping his forehead with his hand.
His skin was crawling and he felt roughly thirty seconds from a full blown panic attack, which he absolutely didn't want Luna to see.
Despite his extreme discomfort, however, they'd made a decent start on clearing the loft - if only to have moved much of it into the spare room they'd already cleared. Ron cautiously levered up a box marked 'books' and lowered it down as best he could onto the flat-topped ladder so that Luna could move it.
“Y'know, I thought when I split up with Hermione that I'd never have to lug boxes of bloody books about ever again,” he called down to her.
Luna laughed at that as she took the box in her arms and disappeared from sight. He took the moment of privacy to force some deep breaths into his lungs and try to inject some calm into his blood.
It might have worked had, at that precise moment, something not landed on the nape of his neck. He jerked and lost his balance.
With a strangled yelp Ron tried to grab something as he fell down through the hatch, but he had no chance of saving himself. His back smashed into the ladder and before he knew it, he was looking up at the ceiling panting hard. Each breath caused sharp pains in his lungs.
His skin felt as though it was on fire - the fire of a thousand arachnids crawling over every single inch of him, he surmised hysterically.
There was no stopping the fully-fledged panic attack after that.
He tried to get up, but he was in agony and the ladder he'd landed on meant that his body was bent in an odd shape.
“Ron?” Luna appeared in his line of sight, looking worried.
“I'm-”
He'd been about to say fine, but he wasn't fine, and Luna was so gentle and open he felt he owed her his honesty.
“I feel like it's on me,” he said weakly. “It's on me, Luna.”
“What's on you?” she asked.
“Spider,” he mumbled, feeling his face burst into flame with embarrassment.
He took Luna's hands when she gave them to him and, despite her slight build, she managed to pull him upright. Everything hurt. Luna helped him away from the ladder and the loft hatch and steadied him.
“I feel like it's on me,” he repeated, as his body was overcome with violent shivers. “It's still on me.”
Luna had her wand in her hand and Ron didn't know what she was going to do, only that suddenly he was very, very naked.
“What the fuck?” He cried, throwing one hand down to try and hide his crotch. “Luna!”
“Shh,” she whispered, and turned him around with gentle hands, moving his body in a circle until he faced her again. “I promise you, Ron, there's absolutely nothing on your body. Nothing. It's not there.”
Her voice had suddenly become like molten warmth washing over him. Despite being naked on her landing and mortified about that fact, Ron instantly began to feel a hell of a lot calmer.
He managed to take a breath which wasn't shallow or painful.
“Come with me,” Luna said, slipping her fingers into his and pulling him towards the other end of the landing.
Ron could feel it coming - the horrible, burning emotion which always followed when he got into a state. Blinking furiously he tried to force it down, unwilling to lose face in front of a friend.
“Here.” She sat him down on the edge of her bed and draped something around his shoulders.
Ron pulled it close and pooled some of the fabric over his lap to hide his dick, which he really didn't want to see at that moment and surmised that Luna would feel the same. When her arms curled around him from behind, Ron was unable to stop the moan which rumbled out of his mouth. Luna smelt of something that he couldn't place, but it was just lovely as the scent settled around him, coming from both her body and the blanket she'd wrapped him in.
“I shouldn't have asked you to go up there. I'm sorry, Ron.” Luna whispered directly into his ear, but not close enough for her breath to tickle, as if she knew that the sensation would be far too much for him. “I knew you were afraid of spiders. It slipped my mind. I'm sorry.”
“Don't be,” Ron responded, and though he felt awful and his back was killing him, he meant it. “I'd rather be upset than you be upset.”
“Why?” Luna asked; he could tell she was frowning, not understanding his willingness to suffer over causing her to suffer.
“Because I care about you,” he answered. “I wanted to help, and there was no way I was sending you up knowing you were afraid.”
“Oh,” was all Luna said.
Ron groaned as he shifted slightly, pains shooting all the way down his back into his bum and beyond into his thighs.
“Merlin's arse I'm going to feel this tomorrow.”
“You landed on the ladder. You might have broken something.”
“Well, if I have, it won't be the first time,” Ron pointed out. He hissed in agony as he shifted his weight slightly.
“I did warn you about the faery ring...” Luna pointed out.
Ron thought it was probably a good thing that he was in too much pain to consider getting back into that argument. He gave a non-committal hum in response.
He looked up, relieved to find his vision no longer blurred. Luna's bedroom was painted in a light blue colour with a delicate trail of ivy painted all the way around the room, just under the coving. Vines tumbled down the walls in places, with spidery offshoots curling into the paint. Ron fought off another shudder. It was beautiful, but he could well imagine that in the dark it would look like things were crawling on the walls.
“They remind you of spiders,” Luna said astutely.
Ron wondered how it was that she could correctly pluck such a strange thought from his mind yet not understand why he would enter a loft full of spiders rather than see her upset over doing the same.
Luna was a beautiful kind of strange. Ron had known that for a long, long time, but had never really appreciated her for it until that moment.
They settled into an odd kind of silence which Ron was loathed to break. Luna's weight and warmth against his back was comforting and her arms held him tightly; he couldn't remember the last time he'd felt as safe - as protected.
Luna wasn't exactly hulking or frightening.
“Ron...”
“Mm?”
“I want to do something, but I'm not sure if I should.”
“What kind of something?”
“Something which you might not want me to do.”
“Well, tell me what it is, then I'll tell you if I want it or not.”
The scent of her grew stronger as she leaned further over his shoulder; her hair brushed against his skin. Ron waited, growing more curious with each passing second, until Luna pressed her lips against his cheek, then again at the corner of his mouth.
In a million years, Ron hadn't expected that. As her delicate hand reached around to his other cheek and turned his face towards her, he couldn't help but nose at the skin of her wrist, allowing her unrecognisable scent properly into his nostrils. Without a clue about what was possessing him, Ron pressed a kiss there, opening his mouth to let his tongue graze across the pulse point.
Luna made him look at her. Ron found her eyes full of unnerving fear - in all their years of friendship, Ron rarely recalled seeing Luna be frightened.
He understood the fear of rejection more than she could ever guess.
Ron bridged the minimal distance between them and kissed her on the mouth. Her eyes widened and then closed. Her eyelashes were so blonde. He'd never had cause to be as close to her before.
Despite the pain from his fall, and despite the fact that he was stark bollock naked beneath the blanket she'd given him, Ron turned as best he could and put his arms around her, trying his hardest to maintain the lip contact. Luna moved gracefully with him and made no protest at all when Ron pressed her back into the duvet cover, his naked body eclipsing her own.
In fact, she urged him on, hooking her legs over his hips and locking her ankles behind his back.
Ron shivered when his very interested dick met coarse curls, soft flesh and absolutely no underwear whatsoever.
Luna had been wearing a simple sun dress all day. He'd not paid any attention to what she might have on underneath it, because she was his friend and until that moment, with his cock having very significant ideas pressed against her naked cunt, he had never thought about her as anything else.
He put his hands up to cup her breasts - she wasn't wearing a bra, either. Her eyes widened as he gently squeezed, but Ron froze.
“Is... is that not okay?” he whispered, worried he'd crossed an unspoken boundary.
“Do it again,” she whispered. Her smile lit up her entire face.
Ron smiled back at her before putting his fingers at the hem of her dress.
“Can I..?” he looked up once more, seeking permission.
Luna answered by grabbing the skirt of the dress herself and pulling it up and up until it cleared her head, and she was there in front of him, every bit as nude as he was, her hair a beautiful blonde puddle on the duvet.
Ron couldn't help the way he stared at her, seeing her naked for the first time. She was so slender that he could see the corrugation of her ribs and the jut of her hip bones. Despite that she still retained a certain softness, perhaps from the glow of her skin, which was translucent enough for him to follow entire veins across her body. He followed a line down her stomach to see the blonde curls he'd already rubbed against. Again possessed by something unknown, Ron dropped and pressed his face into them, nosing against her and inhaling her. Luna's fingers threaded into his hair and massaged his scalp. Breath hitching, Ron kissed a further path down to where the skin grew fleshier and slipped his tongue between the fold he found there.
Luna's gasp of his name was loud and breathy and it only spurred him on to do it again, and again, again until she had let her legs fall open and he had full access to her. She tasted of sweat and tang and it was so fucking good.
He flicked his tongue against her, drawing harsh breaths out of her chest, and then trailed his tongue down, down, until he allowed it to unfold properly into her body. It had been a good while since he'd had cause to put his tongue to such use, but he assumed from her moans that he was making at least a semi-respectable go of it.
Ron looked up then, to see Luna's head thrown back, her breasts pressed into the air, nipples hard.
He was overcome with the urge to suck on them. He gently withdrew his tongue, pressing a kiss over her hole to make up for the loss, and sat up slightly. His eyes caught sight of a set of scars on the inside of her right thigh, which were silvery and straight and had been put there with a great deal of precision.
Everybody, he reminded himself, had demons. Ron ducked to press a kiss to the scars and then put them out of his mind. He covered Luna's body with his own again and did what he wanted to - he bent his head and sucked one nipple into his mouth, closing his eyes and moaning around the nub between his lips. Luna's hips bucked against him.
Ron looked up at her again, but she was looking back at him this time. He begrudgingly left her nipple in favour of giving her another kiss, unable to keep from enjoying the idea that she was tasting herself in his mouth.
“Fuck me,” she mouthed against him. “Ron. Please. I want you to fuck me.”
Ron didn't need to be asked a third time. He positioned himself between her legs, ignoring the sheer agony of his back, shoulders and neck.
“Are you...?”
“Yes.”
“Have you...?” For some reason his full question about protection didn't clear his lips.
“Yes,” Luna answered anyway.
Her hands sank into the flesh of his bum cheeks and pulled him forward. Ron moaned as he sank into her, trying to remember when the last time he'd fucked anybody without a Muggle condom.
Dating Muggles was easier than coping with the pressure of anybody from the Wizarding community. They all wanted to use condoms, though, and despite hating them, Ron didn't ever feel as though he had the right to push the fact.
So fucking Luna, cock gloriously unsheathed, understandably did things to him. He wanted to lie there and fuck her forever, exploring every inch of her - but he knew that in reality if he lasted longer than few minutes he would be bloody lucky.
Luna didn't seem to care about longevity, though. Once she had taken him wholly within her, she threw her legs back up around him, locking him in place, and began to rock against him. She captured his lips in a kiss and sank one hand into his hair at the nape of his neck. Momentarily frozen, trapped in her embrace, Ron felt undeniably content. Loved, even, which he immediately scrapped as a ridiculous idea because they were having sex for the first time and Luna couldn't possibly love him.
It rose to a climax without him really paying attention. Luna was tight around him, clenching hard with every thrust and he was lost in the frantic in-and-out rhythm they'd worked into. It was gorgeous; she was gorgeous.
“You're so beautiful, Ron...” she murmured against his mouth. “So gorg... Oh... Oh!”
Everything hurt a hell of a lot more when Luna's body clenched around him and started to tremble, her hips rolling uncontrollably as she came hard against him. It was too much for his addled brain and broken body to withstand; Ron buried his face in her shoulder and made fists in the duvet as he lost control and came - equally as hard - into her.
It was long and delicious and made his toes curl. By the time he was finished he was panting into her hot skin.
Immediately Luna softened her arms and stroked his hair with one hand and the small of his back with the other. Ron had no control of himself when he collapsed fully on top of her with 'whoomph' of air from his lungs. She didn't complain.
Normally by that point, Ron would have been halfway to the land of nod. But lying there with Luna all around him, her fingers caressing him, her heart thrumming away against his own, he was suddenly brimming with curiosity and desire.
Luna kissed his cheek and then his hair. Ron wanted to return the intimacy but she had hold of him so tightly that he was unable to move without dislodging her - and it was just too fucking beautiful to do that.
“Thank you,” Luna whispered, after a while.
“No, thank you,” Ron answered playfully, glad that she couldn't see his smile or how hard he was blushing.
He was still inside her, soft and damp and filthy. She seemed in no hurry to change that.
“Luna...”
“Don't,” she whispered, and kissed his ear. “It's okay. We don't have to talk about it.”
“I want to talk about it,” he said quietly.
“Why?”
Incredulous, Ron had to prise up a little to look down at her, no matter how comfortable he'd been before.
“Because that was fucking amazing, and I've never had one sexual thought about you in my life, but I think you might have had more than one about me.”
A day of firsts, Ron also thought it might be the first time he'd ever seen Luna Lovegood look embarrassed. About anything.
“I think about you often,” she confirmed, lowering her eyelids. “Because I love you, you see.”
“You love me?” Ron repeated, still incredulous.
So he hadn't been imagining it, the way she'd made him feel as she held him in her arms. The way she had made love to him so fucking tenderly.
Made love? Merlin's cock sort your head out, Weasley.
Luna was suddenly staring at him, once more unabashed.
“Why would you love me?” he whispered, suddenly abashed enough for the both of them.
Luna smiled then and shook her head. “That you don't know is most of the reason why, Ron.”
Her fingers cupped his cheek.
“I'm not easy to love,” she announced, as if discussing the weather, looking him dead in the eye. “I'm not... I know you think I'm odd. And that you laugh at me sometimes.”
“I laugh at everyone sometimes.” Ron knew he had been cruel in the past. He hated himself a little more to think that she would consider it a barrier to him caring for her. Loving her. “It doesn't mean I don't care. I do care.” He tried to kiss the hand on his face but met thin air instead.
Luna looked over him, her slightly-protruding eyes assessing every inch in a way which made him feel barer than he had at any point thus far.
“I'm not easy to love either,” Ron said finally. “Because I'm a fucking idiot who pushes people away so they can't hurt him.”
It was the truth. He did. He'd pushed Hermione away enough for her to leave. He'd pushed Harry away out of fear.
The result was him, alone, with his complex back catalogue of Muggle fucks and nobody that ever made him feel happy or special.
He looked down at Luna and tried hard to process the feeling which was spreading through him. He didn't recognise it at all.
All he knew was that it didn't matter that he was in pain; it didn't matter that he was naked on top of a woman he'd known since he was fifteen; it didn't matter that he could have ruined a friendship he adored.
Because Luna was a beautiful kind of strange, and he wanted her, and she wanted him, even if he had absolutely no idea why.
-fin-