By: Trilla Weasley
Rating: G
Ship: H/R/Hr
Genre: Romance
Warning: This story does hint at trio slash, though there is nothing graphic.
Summary: Hermione's fascination with a certain type of flower catches the attention of her boys.
Notes: This is my first trio fic just to test the waters and see if I want to write others. Enjoy!
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When they had decided to move in together, just Harry and Ron, Hermione insisted she couldn't live with them when they asked her to because her mother had certain ideals concerning female decorum and living with two men, no matter how good of friends, was improper for an unmarried young woman. Little did Mrs. Granger know how far Hermione was straying from these ideals.
Even though Hermione didn't live with Harry and Ron, she visited so often that it seemed like she was.
Hermione had gotten a job in the department of international magical cooperation, which accorded her the freedom of travel. Frequently she would arrive at Ron and Harry's flat first after these trips, bringing with her the aura of foreign lands, instead of back to her own home. Hermione soon got fed up and rather bored with her mother's opinion on respectability and moved in with Harry and Ron, she explained, "as it should be."
Soon the boys noticed that in her garden Hermione only ever grew one type of flower.
She told her boys that she had fallen in love with trillium on her trip to the States and, on finding that they were not native to Britain, became determined to bring back as many different types as she could: Large leaf trillium, sweet trillium, wake-robin, and snow trillium.
Ron thought she had gone mad because never before had Hermione shown much interest in gardening.
Hermione caught him surveying her garden of trilliums in their backyard one day and asked him what he thought of them.
"They're just flowers," he replied with a shrug and wandered back into their house.
Though Ron didn't care too much for flowers, he did find the similarities to his, Harry, and Hermione's lifestyle a little too close to home. How was it, he thought to himself, that flowers being flowers with no minds to speak of would allow the unusual trillium to survive when Wizard kind, in their infinite wisdom, was far less accepting of their relationship? For it was true that the snowy white triple-petaled flowers seemed quite normal the way they were.
Harry was equally curious of Hermione's new hobby and, inquiring of her one day as she was tending to them, asked how the trillium could survive in such a different habitat.
"With magic," she replied, smiling slightly with that glint in her eye she only ever got while reading a fascinating book.
Being common mostly in the Eastern United States, Hermione nonetheless set about researching every type of gardening spell she could find and eventually transformed a small plot of land to mimic the flowers' home environment.
"Do you also magic them to turn pink?" Harry asked, noticing the slight color difference in a few of them.
"That is their way with or without magic," Hermione replied, simply. "They change color and darken with age. With time they will become red."
Seeing this new fascination of Hermione's, and after some consultation with each other, Harry and Ron set about acquiring other kinds of flowers for her garden to give it more variety. Though Hermione seemed excited about the new rose bushes, daffodils, and chrysanthemums, she never paid too much attention to them claiming that they were too common and she would rather have something different.
Very soon Ron and Harry came to realize that she was not only talking about her precious trillium. When they asked her about this she replied with that calm sense of patience she had used with them when they were younger:
"Common is not us. Are we as common as roses? Or is it that we are as different as trillium? Roses have many petals, trillium only three. Each petal connected at the center and each one touching the other so none are left out. That is us and that is how it should be."
Yes, as it should be, three best friends living together, defying the normalcy of monogamous relationships. It was perhaps lucky that trillium is so long lived for it to be seen as a favorable sign.
It wasn't something that had happened abruptly as things usually do during nights of generous drinking parties with friends. They needed no such catalyst. Theirs was a relationship that had been seven years in the making, forming even before any of them had felt designs toward the others. Yet it was this subconscious desire going untapped that brought them closer together then they were before.
The only difference in their relationship was that there were three instead of two and these three were closer than anyone could imagine.