#one downside of these seating arrangements is that the steps are in direct sunlight

[silverfoxstole]

I’m so glad I still have a proper camera with a long zoom lens as I needed it this afternoon.

[holypersonpeach-blog]

Harry stood up ahead on the dusty path, right where a line of tall pines dropped away and were replaced with dark and leafy rhododendron bushes, just on the very brink of flowering.  Ginny could smell them, thick in the mountain air, spread low over the steep slopes before and behind her. A sudden peal of laughter cut through the sound of the trees, making something leap in Ginny’s stomach, and she watched as Harry stopped in her tracks; bent over at something Cho had said and shaking with it. Munro wriggled around on the floor at her feet, barking and excited and happy like he was laughing with her, kicking up dust under his little paws.

Everyone laughed when Harry did, small children, grown adults, forest animals, even Malfoy sometimes, which Ginny thought was categorically ridiculous. The first time she had ever heard Malfoy laugh in a way that wasn’t nervous or mean was at a joke Harry had made on the night bus, when they’d all been half asleep and crammed into the long seat at the back and coughing at the smell of the engine. The lights had flickered and everyone had gone silent and it hadn’t felt real, but Malfoy hadn’t even noticed because her face had been buried in Harry’s neck. Ginny sometimes wondered at the things Malfoy had missed because her face was busy being tucked against various parts of Harry’s body, and generally thought that it was probably quite lot, possibly about five percent of her whole life.

“I thought it was supposed to rain all the time in Wales,” Pansy said, raggedly, from a couple of steps behind her, and was staring up at the blue, afternoon sky when Ginny turned to her. She’d pinned her hair back, behind her ears and away from her neck, and her loose t-shirt was slipping down off one tanned shoulder, crumpled and a little bit damp with sweat. Ginny swallowed, watched the long line of Pansy’s throat, the underside of her chin.

“It usually does,” she admitted, fixing her eyes on the white, wispy clouds hovering above the treeline. “I have no idea where this weather came from.”

“I signed up for rain,” Pansy said, and plucked her t-shirt away from her skin, exposing the complicated straps of a lavender sports bra. Ginny had to look away. “I was prepared for rain, wind, possibly a storm or two…” She trailed off to pant despondently for a moment.

“It’s literally right around the corner,” Ginny offered, “we’ll be there in five minutes.”

“How long?” Malfoy shouted, from way back down the path, in the shade where the pines were thicker, “Ginevra, Weasley, how long?” She’d stopped with Luna to help her collect some nettles, holding open a canvas bag warily, and at arm’s length, as Luna levitated them in leaf by leaf.

“Five minutes,” Ginny called back, then, quieter, just as a test, “how did you even fucking hear me?”

“I have excellent senses,” Malfoy shouted. “It’s all the inbreeding.”

“She’s doing that fucking charm,” Pansy said, rolling her eyes, “we used it in school when we wanted to spy on people.”

“Fuck off Parkinson,” Malfoy called, “nobody likes a tattle tale.”

“Well isn’t that just the height of hypocrisy,” Pansy mused, laughing brightly when Malfoy made a muffled hurt noise that they only just caught.

“Come on,” Ginny said, trying to be encouraging, “literally five mins, and then we can swim.”

Pansy’s eyes went all sparkly at the suggestion, and she rolled her shoulders a couple of times before setting off at a pretty fast clip. She had very long legs, which Ginny had noticed thanks to Pansy’s ongoing love affair with tiny shorts. Ginny was-- she wasn’t complaining about it.

Harry had collapsed into a patch of springy, purple heather when Ginny and Pansy turned up at the lake where the path ended, clouds reflected onto its dark, shining surface. Her chest was heaving after the steep walk, her eyelids closed and her mouth parted. She looked so young; she looked younger and younger with every day that passed since the war, almost her actual age. Ginny piled on top of her because she couldn’t think of anything else to do, dropping her backpack on the floor and tangling their limbs together. Harry laughed and struggled for a few seconds before giving up and going limp.

“What?” she asked, “what do you want?”

“Nothing,” Ginny told her, and then squeezed her arms as tight as she could around Harry’s waist. She smelled like the furze underneath her back, and deodorant, and hot skin, and Ginny kissed her neck briefly before getting up. Harry was smiling.

“We should set up the tent,” Pansy said coolly, and was staring determinedly in the other direction when Ginny turned to agree. “And then I was promised swimming.” She’d crossed her arms, and her fingers were twitching against her biceps restlessly.

“There’s nothing like swimming outdoors, nothing like a good lake,” Harry sighed, arranging her arms behind her head and crossing her ankles, very satisfied with herself and with her life and at the day.

“You’re such a wanker,” Ginny told her, “stop lounging and help with the tent.”

“I found a spot!” Cho called, from about a mile away in a patch of bright sunlight, and suddenly Ginny felt tired where before she hadn’t, and all she wanted to do was to lie down with Harry and Pansy and go to sleep for a few hours in a patch of warm grass.

“Too far!” she shouted back, cupping her hands around her mouth. “I can’t walk all that way!”

“Apparate,” Cho suggested, and Harry snorted and rolled over, staying very still for a few seconds before heaving herself up with a groan. She picked Ginny’s backpack off the ground and dusted it off. “I don’t have the energy to apparate,” Pansy moaned, “please Merlin what’s wrong with right here?”

“Well,” Harry started, looking around to assess, “it’s a bit wet, isn’t it.”

Pansy made a noncommittal sound, and sat down beside Ginny’s feet, which Harry apparently took as an invitation because she then lay down again, and Ginny joined them both, a little thankful for the excuse to rest for a while.

The downside, Ginny thought, while she arranged her feet in Pansy’s lap, of knowing about a small and secret lake at the top of a mountain where nobody ever came, was that there inevitably had to be some downsides. The issue with this particular lake was that it sometimes had trouble staying where it was supposed to, and bled out into its surroundings, making everything murky and soggy for a good, wide perimeter before the ground became firm again. They were safe at the moment on the huge bed of heather, and the path was alright, growing tall with grass, but then the rushes started, and the boggy earth, before cutting away to expose hard, grey rock and the glassy surface of the still water.

Eventually Malfoy and Luna rocked up, dusty and stung, and they all made the executive decision to trudge over to slightly higher ground, where Cho had sat down with Munro and was letting him drink water from her cupped hands. The short grass was soft and bright green and perfect for their single tent with the undetectable extension on it. Harry never said anything, but Ginny knew it was the one she had used when she’d been out in the wilderness with Ron and Hermione, searching for Horcruxes. Occasionally she got this horrible fond look on her face when she went through the canvas door, which terrified Ginny to no fucking end, even though it wasn’t exactly as though she wanted Harry to be scared of it or anything. She wondered if Malfoy knew, and then suspected that if Malfoy knew then she would have burned the thing to the ground, or something else incredibly dramatic and ridiculous.

The sun was setting when Luna and Cho started making dinner, on the campfire Harry had built a few feet from the door of the tent with a steady and practiced confidence. It scared Ginny that Harry would pull these skills out of nowhere, as if it were no big deal. As if she’d learned them on some fucking sleepaway camp like the ones Ginny had gone to, in the summers when she’d been growing up. She talked the same way, fine and normal and then once in a while something truly awful would come out, and she’d just… laugh about it, while Ginny would sit there in horrified silence. Ginny wanted to bring Harry very close to her, never wanted to let her out of her sight, wanted to make sure she was loved for the rest of her life. And then sometimes she had the horrible urge to shake her apart, force her to look at herself, say this isn’t normal, the things you had to do weren’t normal.

“Hey,” Pansy said, putting her hand on Ginny’s shoulder as she watched Harry stuff nettles into a dull, copper saucepan and laugh with Malfoy. Ginny tilted her head back.

“Hey,” she replied, “did you want to go swimming?”

“Are you jealous of them?” Pansy asked, one foot in the water, in a way that made Ginny think she’d been wanting to ask for a while.

“Of who?” Ginny said, buying herself some time. She slid herself into the lake slowly, wincing at the freezing cold, catching her foot on a shelf of rock.

Pansy laughed. “Come on,” she said, just standing there, “you know who.”

“No,” Ginny told her, more forcefully than she’d initially meant, “I’m not jealous. Are you jealous?”

“Sometimes,” Pansy admitted with a shrug, shivering in her black swimsuit, goosebumps rising on her arms. Ginny didn’t know what to say, she hadn’t thought that the answer would be yes, otherwise she wouldn’t have asked. She never knew what Pansy was thinking, what went on inside that head of hers.

“What’s going on?” Ginny asked her, because she was sick of this fucking conversation and she didn’t know if Pansy was trying to be mean to her or not.

“I’m just wondering,” Pansy said, sitting down and putting her legs underneath the surface. They were broken by the water, dyed orange in the light of the sunset over her shoulders. “You seem as though you are, sometimes, it’s not a big deal.”

“I’m not,” Ginny told her again, “I’m seriously not, I want Harry to be happy.”

“And what about you,” Pansy said, as if she was making some great big point. Some statement. As though Harry and Ginny’s levels of happiness weren’t tangled together, as if they were separate.

“I want myself to be happy also,” Ginny told her, slowly, “Harry wants me to be happy. If something wasn’t working then we would talk about it.” She didn’t say it’s none of your business.

Pansy raised her eyebrows, as though the very idea was foreign to her. “Is she jealous of you, do you think.”

“It’s none of your business,” Ginny said, before she could think. Pansy snapped her head backwards, more shocked than Ginny thought she had any right to be.

“I’m not trying to--” she started, and then she was cut off when Harry screamed, and Ginny’s stomach curled in on itself.

“Oh my god,” Harry said, shrill and high, laughing now as she ran down to the edge of the water with Cho chasing her, “I didn’t mean--” She screamed again when Cho caught her arm, high and happy, like she’d never screamed for any other reason in her life.

“What the fuck are you doing?” Pansy snapped, twisting her neck to glare at them. Malfoy stalked over with her hands in the pockets of the cardigan she was wearing, rolling her eyes.

“Harry dropped Cho’s phone in the soup,” she informed them. She was wearing wellington boots. Ginny could hardly believe her eyes. “On purpose,” she added.

“I’m expecting a phone call,” Cho moaned, “why do you hate me?”

“It’s fine,” Luna shouted, from beside the tent, she was waving the phone over her head like a beacon, “I did a drying charm. Cho! It’s fine! Come back!”

Harry cackled. “It was an accident,” she said breathlessly, backing away from Cho, hands raised, “honest.”

“I’m going to push you in the lake now,” Cho warned, “and after that we’re going to be even.”

“This is the best day of my life,” Malfoy decided, when Cho did exactly that before stalking off, and Harry was left floundering in the water with her middle finger raised.

“Get in,” Ginny suggested, clicking her tongue against the roof of her mouth, dancing her shoulders around, “it’s so warm, Malfoy.”

“It is actually fucking freezing,” Harry said, enunciating sharply, splashing her way over, wrestling a sopping t-shirt over her head. “Am I wearing a bra?” she asked, when it was already half off.

“Yes,” Malfoy told her, and took of her cardigan, folding it carefully on the dry rock under her feet, “it’s nice, too.”

“Oh good,” Harry said, throwing the t-shirt in Malfoy’s direction, pulling a face when it missed by about a mile.

Pansy stood up, suddenly. “We were actually having a fucking conversation,” she said tightly, and abandoned them all there, gawking after her.

“What did you do?” Malfoy asked, and she was talking to Ginny.

“Literally nothing,” Ginny replied, watching Pansy walk away through the marshy reeds.

“Maybe you should like, follow her?” Harry suggested, grabbing Malfoy by the ankle and tugging. Malfoy shook her off.

“Yes,” she said, “do that, Ginny, I want to murder Potter in private.”

“As if you would,” Ginny said, because the very idea was so patently fucking ridiculous. “You’d be lost without her.”

Harry crowed as Ginny hauled herself out of the water. “Lost without me,” she echoed, “Malfoy, that girl has you down to a fucking T.”

“Thanks Ginevra, honestly, that’s so appreciated, I thought we were on the same side,” Malfoy said, but Ginny wasn’t listening.

“Hey,” she called, and Pansy stopped walking. “Pansy,” she said, “wait,” as she made her way over the uneven ground, mud squelching in between her toes. The air smelled boggy and wet, heavy with water and the evening dew.

“I wasn’t trying to be mean,” Pansy said, crossing her arms over her chest. Her hair was sopping, dripping down her shoulders. “I don’t know what I’m doing.”

“With--” Ginny started, and then stopped for a second. “With what?”

Pansy stepped closer, and Ginny became very aware of the fact that she was wearing a fucking bikini. She wanted to mirror Pansy, to cover herself, but resolutely didn’t. “I’m just trying to understand,” Pansy said, “because I don’t know how you can all do it.”

“Do what,” Ginny said, quietly starting to shake. She’d left her wand in the tent.

“You make it seem easy,” Pansy said, her whole self softening, her shoulders slumping. The sky was getting darker, Ginny could hear Malfoy and Harry laughing behind her, their voices muffled by the water.

“Make what seem easy.”

Pansy took a deep breath. “This is going to sound--” she shook her head, “I don’t think I’ve liked one person the same way you like Luna and Cho and Potter.” She cut off, looked lost for words for a few moments, “I don’t know how you aren’t just… spreading yourself thin.”

Ginny didn’t know how to articulate the way that being in love made her feel, it wasn’t anything like Pansy was imagining. It didn’t… empty her. Ginny’s love wasn’t a finite resource.

“You love Malfoy,” she said, and then when Pansy nodded, “I don’t know, does that feel like you’re giving something up?”

“Sometimes,” Pansy said, tilting her head to the side, “very occasionally, yes.”

Ginny wanted to kiss her. She wanted to put her hands on Pansy’s waist, she wanted to lick the water off her shoulders. “She loves you,” she said instead.

“Not like she loves Potter,” Pansy replied.

“It’s Harry,” Ginny said helplessly, shaking her head, trying to explain that-- Harry just-- made you feel that way, like you couldn’t possibly love anyone more. “I don’t think you can do anything about that.”

“I don’t want to do anything about that,” Pansy snapped, and took a step back, splashing water over her calves, “I don’t know what the fuck I’m talking about.”

Ginny let it go, then, because Pansy seemed sad and slightly angry and Ginny didn’t know what to say to make that better. She waited until later that night to kiss her, on the sofa once everyone else had gone to sleep, when Cho was outside making another mysterious phone call. She put her arms around Pansy’s waist, then her hands in Pansy’s still-damp hair, restless, and kissed Pansy’s soft lips.

“What are you doing?” Pansy whispered, pushing Ginny back against the cushions, straddling her hips with her long legs. Ginny arched her back, to kiss her again.

“What are you doing?” she responded after a while, Pansy’s hands on her skin, roaming underneath her jumper.

“I have no idea,” Pansy said, low and conspiratorial, and laughed, “do I seem like I know what I’m doing here?”

Ginny tilted her head back, lifted her arms so that Pansy could take off her t-shirt, “Merlin,” she sighed, “kind of, yeah.”