Fic: Three the Hard Way
Hi, trying again with a trio fic. A little different focus here. Concrit most appreciated!
Title: Three the Hard Way (1/?)
Rating: Will range from PG to NC-17
Summary: Bloody hell, it's the only way! The best way! The three of us ... Ron doesn't want to take no for an answer.
AN: Made changes post-beta, so any remaining mistakes are mine.
"No!"
"No!"
"No?" Ron looked calmly from one livid face to the other. "Right, then. Subject closed."
Without waiting for a reply or for Hermione and Harry's faces to unfreeze from their stricken expressions, Ron turned back to his food. They were in one of their favourite Muggle restaurants in London, though Ron had to admit that it got tiring sometimes having to reach and grab for things instead of just pointing one's wand at it like a wizarding establishment. It was worth it for the steak-and-kidney pie alone, though.
"Ronald! Stop stuffing your face this instant!" Hermione had recovered fully and was scowling mightily at him. A few people at nearby tables turned around to look, but she took no notice. "You can't just - just say something like that and go back to eating as if nothing's gone wrong!"
Ron looked up then with a puzzled frown. Swallowing hard, he managed, "What are you on about? What's gone wrong?"
"You ... you ..." Hermione looked to Harry for support. Finding very little encouragement there, she focused on Ron again, giving his hand a smart rap when he reached for a bowl of pickles. "You're not taking this seriously at all!"
"I am. But I'm bloody starving! It was a tough practice and I feel like a Kneazle's trying to gnaw its way out of my stomach." Rubbing his hand, Ron looked sideways at Harry. "Mate, mind passing those biscuits?"
That seemed to shake Harry out of his stupor. "Ron ... did you hear a word either of us said?"
Ron feared that in all this very serious discussion, very little eating would be done, and steak-and-kidney pie was utter rubbish when cold. He knew, too, that Hermione and Harry would keep at him until he said something more, though he wasn't quite sure what more there was to say. Shovelling in a few large mouthfuls and washing it down with a swallow of bitters, he looked up with noticeable reluctance.
"I heard the both of you." He regarded them quietly, shoving down a spark of desire that was working its way up from his toes and pooling in a very particular area. "And I gave my answer. And you both said 'No.'"
Ron saw a panicked, almost helpless, look pass between his two best friends. "Ron, I don't think you understand," Hermione said in a much gentler tone than she had used a few moments earlier. "We - maybe Harry and I weren't as clear as we could've been -"
"I reckon I understood you fine," Ron said with a wry smile. "You're in love with me." He turned from Hermione's blushing face and stared Harry down. "And you're in love with me." Harry went scarlet, and ducked his head. "And you want me to choose between you. And I won't do it."
It wasn't lost on Ron how casual he sounded, but he knew he felt anything but casual at that moment. In fact, his hands were trembling and he thought it was just as well that he wasn't trying to use a fork at that moment. He was sure that knowing him as they did, Harry and Hermione realised that he wasn't being a prat. Not deliberately anyway. The thing of it was, Ron had long ago resigned himself to living a fairly ordinary life. The war was long over, and while he had an Order of Merlin and a strife-free world to show for it, Ron hadn't exactly been let in on the relatively cushy rewards that had awaited Harry and Hermione.
Harry had transformed from the Boy Who Lived to the Man Who Could Have Anything He Wanted after he defeated Voldemort. He was able to live comfortably on the remnants of his parents' galleons and Sirius Black's fortune and he spent much of his time writing a chronicle of the war and acting as an occasional Defence Against the Dark Arts instructor at Hogwarts.
As befitted the brightest witch of her age, Hermione had been snapped up by the Ministry and had risen from a slightly tedious research position at the MLE to Undersecretary in Charge of Magical Legislation. There were whispers that Hermione was on the short list to replace Amos Diggory as Assistant Minister for Magic next year and certainly Hermione was well-respected and admired in her post.
In comparison, Ron was living a perfectly respectable - if not particularly noteworthy - existence. He was a backup to the backup Keeper on the Cannons and saw about as much playing time each year as Severus Snape did proper baths. He had a rather nice, but small, flat in Chudley, and a tidy sum of money in the bank.
In short, His life was fine, but rather ordinary. Harry and Hermione's confessions to him that night had so much potential to make his life very much less ordinary, but apparently it wasn't to be. Ron smothered a sigh and eyed his tankard of ale longingly. Just my bloody luck.
"There's more to it than that, I mean, it's ..." Harry began in a low voice before taking off his glasses and rubbing the bridge of his nose. "We shouldn't have done this. Spring it on you this way. Here." He took a noisy gulp of air. "But we were afraid we'd lose our nerve if we tried to talk to you in your flat or one of ours. And we thought there was a lot less chance of you apparating away if you felt weird about what we had to say."
Ron found it interesting that Harry and Hermione felt more at ease baring their hearts in a pub full of Muggles than in a place that was more familiar and comfortable to all of them, but he let it go.
"But why now?" he asked, head whipping from side to side. "Why tell me this now?"
There was another curious glance that flitted between the two. "We'd hoped," said Hermione in a halting voice, "We'd hoped that if you fancied one of us, you would have chosen by now." A brief smile lit her face. "When Harry and I realised that we both fancied you, we -"
"Wait - when did you know that?"
"That we both wanted you?" Hermione's forehead wrinkled in thought. "I suppose after we got back to Hogwarts for seventh year."
"You both started to fancy me in seventh year?" Ron's voice was subtly disbelieving. Hermione had made Head Girl and Harry returned as Quidditch captain for Gryffindor, and he'd thought that the two of them had been much too busy to fancy anyone, least of all him, especially after the summer they'd had hunting Horcruxes and preparing for the battle ahead. Certainly Hermione had seemed to resist his overtures that they take their friendship to another level. Likewise, when Ron let drop several hints that he wasn't above admiring a bloke's arse, Harry hadn't seemed to respond. Ron had initially thought that Harry was still in mourning for his lost relationship with Ginny, but when Ginny went back to Dean and Harry didn't so much blink about it, Ron knew that he'd been mistaken.
"No, we didn't just begin to fancy you then," Hermione said. "I ... I knew fourth year." She looked slightly embarassed. "I truly hated that it took so long for you to notice that I was - as you so eloquently put it - a girl. I'd quite noticed what a boy you were well before then."
Ron very much disliked remembering how much time he'd wasted back then when it had come to Hermione. It was a wonder that she hadn't thrown her hands up in disgust and given him up completely. Forcing the thought out his mind, he looked to Harry, eyebrows raised.
"Fifth year for me," Harry said, eyes going hazy behind his glasses. "You have no idea how fit you looked in Wood's old Quidditch robes, mate."
"I ..." Ron cleared his throat, not quite sure how to respond to any of what had just been said. "Oh."
"What happened seventh year was that we realised that both of us fancied you about the same. I mean, I was pretty sure that you fancied Hermione and I didn't have a chance, but I thought I saw you checking out Davies' arse a few times, so I had to wonder ..."
Ron almost choked. So Harry had been paying attention to his little "hints" after all.
"Hermione caught me staring at you a couple of times," continued Harry, passing the biscuits at last. "And one day we just started discussing our feelings."
Ron shook his head in amazement. "Where the bloody hell was I when all this was going on?"
"Well, when we talked about you, we were usually in the library, revising for N.E.W.T.s," said Hermione with a fond smile. "You were usually in the common room playing chess with Seamus."
"I was revising, too, you know!" Ron spoke with a little heat as unwelcome memories of tests and classes flooded his brain. "Just because I didn't have my nose in a book all hours of the day -"
"Er, anyway, it just came up," Harry said hurriedly, earning a reluctant smile from Ron. "I asked Hermione if you and she were ... you know ..."
"And I asked Harry if you and he were ..." Hermione made a most distracting movement with her hand. "And we realised that neither of us was with you and both of us wanted to be. That presented a bit of a problem."
No it doesn't! Ron wanted to shout it, but he held his tongue. That little idea had already been shot down, and he didn't want dinner to end with Hermione or Harry or both leaving the dinner table in a huff.
"So we decided to just wait and see," said Harry, fiddling with his napkin. "We agreed that we'd make it your choice. We wouldn't approach you or put any pressure on you. If you wanted to be with Hermione, I told her I'd be happy for both of you and accept it ..."
"... And I promised Harry the same thing if you chose him." Hermione paused. "And we promised each other that if you chose someone else, we'd support you and try our best to be happy about it."
Ron could tell that neither Harry nor Hermione much desired that last option. "I still don't understand why you're just coming to me with this now," said Ron, scratching the back of his neck. "It's been 10 years since we left Hogwarts!"
"Well, as we said, we'd thought that by now, you would have someone - either me or Harry or someone else," replied Hermione. "As the years past and Harry and I realised that our feelings hadn't changed, we just relied on each other to be patient and keep up our end of the bargain."
"But the other night at Neville and Luna's engagement party, we decided that we had to change tactics a little." Harry was studying him intently. "You had us concerned, mate, and we thought that maybe we'd been going about things the wrong way."
Ron was momentarily confused, but then it dawned on him what Harry was referring to. A few nights ago, the three of them had gone to toast Neville and Luna, who had stopped nittering around each other and were getting married later that Spring. Ron had been a little depressed at the party and had more champagne than was probably good for him.
As he'd gotten slowly pissed at the celebration, Ron reflected that as content as he was in most respects, some aspects of life were passing him by. Just about all his friends were settling down and he was very much alone. Occasionally, he'd invite a bloke or a bird home, but he didn't have any serious relationships in the offing.
Seeing Luna and Neville so happy and in love had made him just a tad bitter, and he'd gotten in his cups, going on and on incoherently about feeling as if he were going die alone. Hermione and Harry had helped him home and tucked him in, staying with him until he dozed off. The next day, Ron woke with only a vague recollection of the events of the previous night and a mouth that felt as if a Niffler had died in it. Remembering it now, Ron winced to think of how pathetic he must have sounded.
"We couldn't let you go on believing that no one wanted you, that you didn't have any hope of a loving and long-lastng relationship," Hermione said. "So we discussed it and decided that since we jointly decided to withhold our feelings, we needed to approach you together and hope you didn't hate us for thrusting this on you."
Ron was quiet for a second, feeling a slow anger begin to burn in his stomach. He was reasonably sure that it wasn't because of the pie. "And you really expected me to just listen to all this and pick between you? Flip a galleon, maybe, and tell the loser, 'Oh well, no joy there, mate', like it was nothing?"
"We didn't expect - or hope for - anything except that you'd listen to us," Harry said, gripping his mug of beer. "If you wanted to make a choice, that was your right. If you wanted to tell us both to piss off, that was up to you, too. We just didn't want you to go on thinking that you had to be alone if you didn't want to. We love you, Ron." Harry's voice was soft. "But if you don't want either of us, we'll live with it."
Ron did a silent count to four before again trotting out his initial response. "I want both of you. If the two of you are saying you want me, then I'm saying I want the two of you. I want all three of us together."
Their faces hardened and Ron felt his heart sink. "Ron, we've already said that it isn't an option. Harry and I have absolutely no interest in having a relationship with each other." Hermione shot Harry an almost apologetic look. "We want you, alone. If you can't choose, well, I suppose that means that neither of us can have you."
Out of the corner of his eye, Ron could see Harry nodding slightly. Ron started to speak, but thought better of it. It was on the tip of his tongue to rail at the two of them for doing this to him, raising his hopes and then dashing them almost in the same breath. The idea of being with Harry and Hermione at the same time had existed in his mind only as shadowy fantasies, and here it seemed he had the chance to make them reality. They both loved him. They both wanted him. And since the three of them had been best friends for years, it seemed to Ron that all of them being together was a natural next step in their relationship, especially if Harry and Hermione had been telling the truth about keeping back out of respect for the others' feelings.
But they don't want it. Ron wondered why he felt so irritated by that. Two brilliant, beautiful people wanting him all to themselves - it should have made him feel a touch smug, but Ron didn't feel so at all. He was quite serious about not wanting to choose. As polite as their little agreement sounded, Ron was almost certain that whoever was left out of the "Ron Weasley bonanza" might feel quite hurt, indeed, and he'd rather tear his own heart out than cause either of them any of them pain. But for all that, it seemed a bloody waste that they'd all bottle up these feelings and cast them aside altogether.
Bloody hell, it's the only way! The best way! The three of us ... His mind presented an arresting vision of a large bed, a tangle of naked limbs and hair ... kisses placed indiscriminately on whatever stretch of skin was readily accessible. Ron swallowed hard, glancing at the two of them in turns. Their expressions were unchanged, and he sighed. That was it, then. No use beating his head against a wall.
"Then that's the way it's going to be," he said in a low voice. "Because I can't pick one of you over the other. I won't."
Harry blinked and nodded once. Hermione flushed a deep red, but when she spoke, her voice was steady. "We respect your decision, Ron," she said, lifting her chin a little. "I suppose then it might be time for all of us to think about moving on, then."
A lump the size of a gobstone lodged in Ron's throat, and he found he needed to take a long pull on his drink. Over his mug, he saw Harry's lips tremble a little, but his face was impassive. Hermione, on the other hand, looked like a person who was speaking in a daze, hardly aware of what she was saying.
"And ... we know that it's a great deal to ask, but ... we hope that you understand that we thought long and hard about talking to you about this at all," Hermione went on, "and one of our fears was that our friendship would suffer. We hope that doesn’t happen: All of this aside, our friendship means a great deal, and -"
"No worries there," Ron interrupted. He wanted to put them both at ease, but he wasn't sure he could take hearing Hermione go on and on about "friendship." Not after all this.
"Nothing'll ever come in the way of that. Ever. And it was ... I think it was ..." He chewed his lip, trying to choose his words carefully. "It was right brave of the both of you, telling me at all. I'm just sorry it -"
Ron thought it just as well to stop talking before he put his foot in it again. He focused his attention elsewhere, not wanting them to be able to look into his eyes and discover that he was lying. He knew bloody well that it wasn't all right and he really didn't understand at all. It all seemed so simple; why were they resisting? Before, during, and after the war, they'd shared just about everything. Why not share each other?
Ron's gaze fell on his plate, and he pushed away from him in a half-hearted movement. He wasn't hungry at all anymore.
Title: Three the Hard Way (1/?)
Rating: Will range from PG to NC-17
Summary: Bloody hell, it's the only way! The best way! The three of us ... Ron doesn't want to take no for an answer.
AN: Made changes post-beta, so any remaining mistakes are mine.
"No!"
"No!"
"No?" Ron looked calmly from one livid face to the other. "Right, then. Subject closed."
Without waiting for a reply or for Hermione and Harry's faces to unfreeze from their stricken expressions, Ron turned back to his food. They were in one of their favourite Muggle restaurants in London, though Ron had to admit that it got tiring sometimes having to reach and grab for things instead of just pointing one's wand at it like a wizarding establishment. It was worth it for the steak-and-kidney pie alone, though.
"Ronald! Stop stuffing your face this instant!" Hermione had recovered fully and was scowling mightily at him. A few people at nearby tables turned around to look, but she took no notice. "You can't just - just say something like that and go back to eating as if nothing's gone wrong!"
Ron looked up then with a puzzled frown. Swallowing hard, he managed, "What are you on about? What's gone wrong?"
"You ... you ..." Hermione looked to Harry for support. Finding very little encouragement there, she focused on Ron again, giving his hand a smart rap when he reached for a bowl of pickles. "You're not taking this seriously at all!"
"I am. But I'm bloody starving! It was a tough practice and I feel like a Kneazle's trying to gnaw its way out of my stomach." Rubbing his hand, Ron looked sideways at Harry. "Mate, mind passing those biscuits?"
That seemed to shake Harry out of his stupor. "Ron ... did you hear a word either of us said?"
Ron feared that in all this very serious discussion, very little eating would be done, and steak-and-kidney pie was utter rubbish when cold. He knew, too, that Hermione and Harry would keep at him until he said something more, though he wasn't quite sure what more there was to say. Shovelling in a few large mouthfuls and washing it down with a swallow of bitters, he looked up with noticeable reluctance.
"I heard the both of you." He regarded them quietly, shoving down a spark of desire that was working its way up from his toes and pooling in a very particular area. "And I gave my answer. And you both said 'No.'"
Ron saw a panicked, almost helpless, look pass between his two best friends. "Ron, I don't think you understand," Hermione said in a much gentler tone than she had used a few moments earlier. "We - maybe Harry and I weren't as clear as we could've been -"
"I reckon I understood you fine," Ron said with a wry smile. "You're in love with me." He turned from Hermione's blushing face and stared Harry down. "And you're in love with me." Harry went scarlet, and ducked his head. "And you want me to choose between you. And I won't do it."
It wasn't lost on Ron how casual he sounded, but he knew he felt anything but casual at that moment. In fact, his hands were trembling and he thought it was just as well that he wasn't trying to use a fork at that moment. He was sure that knowing him as they did, Harry and Hermione realised that he wasn't being a prat. Not deliberately anyway. The thing of it was, Ron had long ago resigned himself to living a fairly ordinary life. The war was long over, and while he had an Order of Merlin and a strife-free world to show for it, Ron hadn't exactly been let in on the relatively cushy rewards that had awaited Harry and Hermione.
Harry had transformed from the Boy Who Lived to the Man Who Could Have Anything He Wanted after he defeated Voldemort. He was able to live comfortably on the remnants of his parents' galleons and Sirius Black's fortune and he spent much of his time writing a chronicle of the war and acting as an occasional Defence Against the Dark Arts instructor at Hogwarts.
As befitted the brightest witch of her age, Hermione had been snapped up by the Ministry and had risen from a slightly tedious research position at the MLE to Undersecretary in Charge of Magical Legislation. There were whispers that Hermione was on the short list to replace Amos Diggory as Assistant Minister for Magic next year and certainly Hermione was well-respected and admired in her post.
In comparison, Ron was living a perfectly respectable - if not particularly noteworthy - existence. He was a backup to the backup Keeper on the Cannons and saw about as much playing time each year as Severus Snape did proper baths. He had a rather nice, but small, flat in Chudley, and a tidy sum of money in the bank.
In short, His life was fine, but rather ordinary. Harry and Hermione's confessions to him that night had so much potential to make his life very much less ordinary, but apparently it wasn't to be. Ron smothered a sigh and eyed his tankard of ale longingly. Just my bloody luck.
"There's more to it than that, I mean, it's ..." Harry began in a low voice before taking off his glasses and rubbing the bridge of his nose. "We shouldn't have done this. Spring it on you this way. Here." He took a noisy gulp of air. "But we were afraid we'd lose our nerve if we tried to talk to you in your flat or one of ours. And we thought there was a lot less chance of you apparating away if you felt weird about what we had to say."
Ron found it interesting that Harry and Hermione felt more at ease baring their hearts in a pub full of Muggles than in a place that was more familiar and comfortable to all of them, but he let it go.
"But why now?" he asked, head whipping from side to side. "Why tell me this now?"
There was another curious glance that flitted between the two. "We'd hoped," said Hermione in a halting voice, "We'd hoped that if you fancied one of us, you would have chosen by now." A brief smile lit her face. "When Harry and I realised that we both fancied you, we -"
"Wait - when did you know that?"
"That we both wanted you?" Hermione's forehead wrinkled in thought. "I suppose after we got back to Hogwarts for seventh year."
"You both started to fancy me in seventh year?" Ron's voice was subtly disbelieving. Hermione had made Head Girl and Harry returned as Quidditch captain for Gryffindor, and he'd thought that the two of them had been much too busy to fancy anyone, least of all him, especially after the summer they'd had hunting Horcruxes and preparing for the battle ahead. Certainly Hermione had seemed to resist his overtures that they take their friendship to another level. Likewise, when Ron let drop several hints that he wasn't above admiring a bloke's arse, Harry hadn't seemed to respond. Ron had initially thought that Harry was still in mourning for his lost relationship with Ginny, but when Ginny went back to Dean and Harry didn't so much blink about it, Ron knew that he'd been mistaken.
"No, we didn't just begin to fancy you then," Hermione said. "I ... I knew fourth year." She looked slightly embarassed. "I truly hated that it took so long for you to notice that I was - as you so eloquently put it - a girl. I'd quite noticed what a boy you were well before then."
Ron very much disliked remembering how much time he'd wasted back then when it had come to Hermione. It was a wonder that she hadn't thrown her hands up in disgust and given him up completely. Forcing the thought out his mind, he looked to Harry, eyebrows raised.
"Fifth year for me," Harry said, eyes going hazy behind his glasses. "You have no idea how fit you looked in Wood's old Quidditch robes, mate."
"I ..." Ron cleared his throat, not quite sure how to respond to any of what had just been said. "Oh."
"What happened seventh year was that we realised that both of us fancied you about the same. I mean, I was pretty sure that you fancied Hermione and I didn't have a chance, but I thought I saw you checking out Davies' arse a few times, so I had to wonder ..."
Ron almost choked. So Harry had been paying attention to his little "hints" after all.
"Hermione caught me staring at you a couple of times," continued Harry, passing the biscuits at last. "And one day we just started discussing our feelings."
Ron shook his head in amazement. "Where the bloody hell was I when all this was going on?"
"Well, when we talked about you, we were usually in the library, revising for N.E.W.T.s," said Hermione with a fond smile. "You were usually in the common room playing chess with Seamus."
"I was revising, too, you know!" Ron spoke with a little heat as unwelcome memories of tests and classes flooded his brain. "Just because I didn't have my nose in a book all hours of the day -"
"Er, anyway, it just came up," Harry said hurriedly, earning a reluctant smile from Ron. "I asked Hermione if you and she were ... you know ..."
"And I asked Harry if you and he were ..." Hermione made a most distracting movement with her hand. "And we realised that neither of us was with you and both of us wanted to be. That presented a bit of a problem."
No it doesn't! Ron wanted to shout it, but he held his tongue. That little idea had already been shot down, and he didn't want dinner to end with Hermione or Harry or both leaving the dinner table in a huff.
"So we decided to just wait and see," said Harry, fiddling with his napkin. "We agreed that we'd make it your choice. We wouldn't approach you or put any pressure on you. If you wanted to be with Hermione, I told her I'd be happy for both of you and accept it ..."
"... And I promised Harry the same thing if you chose him." Hermione paused. "And we promised each other that if you chose someone else, we'd support you and try our best to be happy about it."
Ron could tell that neither Harry nor Hermione much desired that last option. "I still don't understand why you're just coming to me with this now," said Ron, scratching the back of his neck. "It's been 10 years since we left Hogwarts!"
"Well, as we said, we'd thought that by now, you would have someone - either me or Harry or someone else," replied Hermione. "As the years past and Harry and I realised that our feelings hadn't changed, we just relied on each other to be patient and keep up our end of the bargain."
"But the other night at Neville and Luna's engagement party, we decided that we had to change tactics a little." Harry was studying him intently. "You had us concerned, mate, and we thought that maybe we'd been going about things the wrong way."
Ron was momentarily confused, but then it dawned on him what Harry was referring to. A few nights ago, the three of them had gone to toast Neville and Luna, who had stopped nittering around each other and were getting married later that Spring. Ron had been a little depressed at the party and had more champagne than was probably good for him.
As he'd gotten slowly pissed at the celebration, Ron reflected that as content as he was in most respects, some aspects of life were passing him by. Just about all his friends were settling down and he was very much alone. Occasionally, he'd invite a bloke or a bird home, but he didn't have any serious relationships in the offing.
Seeing Luna and Neville so happy and in love had made him just a tad bitter, and he'd gotten in his cups, going on and on incoherently about feeling as if he were going die alone. Hermione and Harry had helped him home and tucked him in, staying with him until he dozed off. The next day, Ron woke with only a vague recollection of the events of the previous night and a mouth that felt as if a Niffler had died in it. Remembering it now, Ron winced to think of how pathetic he must have sounded.
"We couldn't let you go on believing that no one wanted you, that you didn't have any hope of a loving and long-lastng relationship," Hermione said. "So we discussed it and decided that since we jointly decided to withhold our feelings, we needed to approach you together and hope you didn't hate us for thrusting this on you."
Ron was quiet for a second, feeling a slow anger begin to burn in his stomach. He was reasonably sure that it wasn't because of the pie. "And you really expected me to just listen to all this and pick between you? Flip a galleon, maybe, and tell the loser, 'Oh well, no joy there, mate', like it was nothing?"
"We didn't expect - or hope for - anything except that you'd listen to us," Harry said, gripping his mug of beer. "If you wanted to make a choice, that was your right. If you wanted to tell us both to piss off, that was up to you, too. We just didn't want you to go on thinking that you had to be alone if you didn't want to. We love you, Ron." Harry's voice was soft. "But if you don't want either of us, we'll live with it."
Ron did a silent count to four before again trotting out his initial response. "I want both of you. If the two of you are saying you want me, then I'm saying I want the two of you. I want all three of us together."
Their faces hardened and Ron felt his heart sink. "Ron, we've already said that it isn't an option. Harry and I have absolutely no interest in having a relationship with each other." Hermione shot Harry an almost apologetic look. "We want you, alone. If you can't choose, well, I suppose that means that neither of us can have you."
Out of the corner of his eye, Ron could see Harry nodding slightly. Ron started to speak, but thought better of it. It was on the tip of his tongue to rail at the two of them for doing this to him, raising his hopes and then dashing them almost in the same breath. The idea of being with Harry and Hermione at the same time had existed in his mind only as shadowy fantasies, and here it seemed he had the chance to make them reality. They both loved him. They both wanted him. And since the three of them had been best friends for years, it seemed to Ron that all of them being together was a natural next step in their relationship, especially if Harry and Hermione had been telling the truth about keeping back out of respect for the others' feelings.
But they don't want it. Ron wondered why he felt so irritated by that. Two brilliant, beautiful people wanting him all to themselves - it should have made him feel a touch smug, but Ron didn't feel so at all. He was quite serious about not wanting to choose. As polite as their little agreement sounded, Ron was almost certain that whoever was left out of the "Ron Weasley bonanza" might feel quite hurt, indeed, and he'd rather tear his own heart out than cause either of them any of them pain. But for all that, it seemed a bloody waste that they'd all bottle up these feelings and cast them aside altogether.
Bloody hell, it's the only way! The best way! The three of us ... His mind presented an arresting vision of a large bed, a tangle of naked limbs and hair ... kisses placed indiscriminately on whatever stretch of skin was readily accessible. Ron swallowed hard, glancing at the two of them in turns. Their expressions were unchanged, and he sighed. That was it, then. No use beating his head against a wall.
"Then that's the way it's going to be," he said in a low voice. "Because I can't pick one of you over the other. I won't."
Harry blinked and nodded once. Hermione flushed a deep red, but when she spoke, her voice was steady. "We respect your decision, Ron," she said, lifting her chin a little. "I suppose then it might be time for all of us to think about moving on, then."
A lump the size of a gobstone lodged in Ron's throat, and he found he needed to take a long pull on his drink. Over his mug, he saw Harry's lips tremble a little, but his face was impassive. Hermione, on the other hand, looked like a person who was speaking in a daze, hardly aware of what she was saying.
"And ... we know that it's a great deal to ask, but ... we hope that you understand that we thought long and hard about talking to you about this at all," Hermione went on, "and one of our fears was that our friendship would suffer. We hope that doesn’t happen: All of this aside, our friendship means a great deal, and -"
"No worries there," Ron interrupted. He wanted to put them both at ease, but he wasn't sure he could take hearing Hermione go on and on about "friendship." Not after all this.
"Nothing'll ever come in the way of that. Ever. And it was ... I think it was ..." He chewed his lip, trying to choose his words carefully. "It was right brave of the both of you, telling me at all. I'm just sorry it -"
Ron thought it just as well to stop talking before he put his foot in it again. He focused his attention elsewhere, not wanting them to be able to look into his eyes and discover that he was lying. He knew bloody well that it wasn't all right and he really didn't understand at all. It all seemed so simple; why were they resisting? Before, during, and after the war, they'd shared just about everything. Why not share each other?
Ron's gaze fell on his plate, and he pushed away from him in a half-hearted movement. He wasn't hungry at all anymore.