Dear Rose,
I haven't come to a decision just yet, but I would really like to meet up with you and Sam, maybe over a butterbeer, just so we can get a sense of each other.
Would that be too weird? If it's too weird, I totally understand... I guess I just want to know whether this is all going to work.
Name the time and place, and I'll be there, I'm on the early shift at Mungo's this week.
Love, Aaliyah Shafiq
Rose folded the letter up and pressed it to her heart.
It wasn't like everything had suddenly worked out, but it was a step in the right direction.
Chest thumping, Rose let out a sigh of relief and tried to slow the adrenaline that had flooded through her when Aaliyah's spotted eagle-owl Penny had swooped into her cottage on the outskirts of Puddletown, Dorset.
Since finishing up her Healer training Rose had moved out of her parent's house to a small, peaceful village near Dorchester.
She could get all of the hustle and bustle of London, the Leaky Cauldron or Diagon Alley after finishing a shift at St Mungo's, but when she really needed to a break, flooing home to the countryside and riding her bicycle around town or to a peaceful view, was much better for a young Healer's sorely-needed recuperation.
Maybe Sam and Aaliyah meeting to talk things through was necessary, before they made a decision. They might as well get to know each other, Rose thought to herself as she fed Penny a few pellets of food.
There was no point putting it off… right? Rose unstoppered a bottle of ink and pulled out her favourite peach-plumed quill to write to Sam with the request, hoping against hope that it would all work out.
"Hey Sam, come on in!" Rose called in an overly cheery voice as she opened the door to her cottage.
She gestured to her living room where Aaliyah was already sitting on an ugly dark purple velveteen couch.
Sam smiled nervously and shrugged off his coat, his heart thrumming along at a much faster pace than usual.
As he wiped his shoes on the doormat he thanked Merlin he'd managed to remember that the weather in Dorset was especially miserable; negative 8° and drizzling, just delightful, no?
.
Thankfully it was toasty warm in Rose's apartment due to a to a few good heating charms and a crackling fire in the living room.
"I was just going make some tea, I'll be out in a minute," Rose practically chirped.
She shook her head, confused at herself. She really was trying far too hard.
'Stop trying to overcompensate with perkiness Rose' she muttered to herself as she walked into the kitchen. .
Filling the kettle with water from the tap and heating it up with a tap of her wand, Rose looked around for viable vessels.
As she grabbed two chipped brown mugs and was struggling with the third, she heard a chuckle from behind her.
"Need some help there Rosie?" Sam smirked, leaning casually against the kitchen benchtop arms folded across his chest.
Rolling her eyes, she set the two mugs down on the counter.
"I guess you can grab the mugs then-"
"I figured, seeing as the chips on those old guys clearly illustrate you don't handle them with enough care," Sam joked, his nerves feeling soothed as he and Rose sank into their usual banter.
.
They walked back into the living room together and Rose bent down to fill a bright red teapot with the water from the kettle, to let the tea steep.
Aaliyah broke the silence, "So Sam, you work in magizoology I hear. You found a job in Britain yet?"
'She's just trying to trying to smooth things over and set everyone at ease. She wants to get to know you, she wants to see if this will work. Just be cool Sam! Easier said than done...'
Sam sat down on the other side of the couch, trying to reply without looking like his mind was racing a mile a minute with one hundred other thoughts about what was happening in this very, very weird gathering.
"Yeah, I've been working in care of magical creatures since I graduated school and I just got an offer for a role at a remote care centre in Northern Wales working with Luna Lovegood. She and her husband are more international wizarding naturalists, but her and Rolf have set up this new centre and were looking for someone to run it. It'll mostly be work with injured or escaped creatures the Ministry doesn't deem a quadruple X and above."
.
Aaliyah nodded thoughtfully, trying to show engagement and keeping her judgment to a minimum (even though she'd set up this whole meeting to see if Sam was down enough for this to work).
"Interesting. Well obviously at our work we see a lot of victims of quad or quint X magical creatures, especially in the kids wards with children who've wandered off and gotten themselves into trouble. Have you had any injuries?"
"Nothing too serious-"
Rose snorted loudly, "Oh yeah, except for your near-death experience via Scrofungulus-"
"Well that was less of an injury and more of a contamination issue - at least I live life to its fullest potential, what kind of town is this anyway Weasley? I never took you for a country bumpkin-"
"We went to boarding school in the Scottish Highlands, what did you take me for, a big city girl?"
.
Aaliyah watched them carefully as the rapid fire continued.
Strangely, they seemed totally at ease with being... rather mean to each other.
It was bizarre, but the conversation trundled along as if it was the most natural thing in the world. She couldn't imagine Rose interacting with her like that, they had such a different dynamic.
Seeing them together though, Aaliyah could definitely see why Rose was attracted to him. He was witty without being aggressive, he had a quirky smirk and a laid-back physicality. They had a fun back-and-forth, were obviously very comfortable with each other and seemed to be very competitive with each other - which wasn't in Aaliyah's nature at all.
Sam noticed that Aaliyah was observing them a little too keenly and tried to turn the conversation into something more inclusive.
"So Aaliyah, you're a Shafiq. One of the Sacred Twenty-Eight."
"Yeah, we've had a long history here in Britain but my Dad's side of the family are actually muggles. Not so sacred anymore, thankfully."
They both chuckled lightly.
"My parents moved to South Sudan to get away from all the pure-blood puritanicalism, right before the worst part of the war - they were lucky they had dual citizenship or they could have been in real danger."
Sam nodded in understanding, "When did your parents move back to Britain?"
"Right before I was born actually, they wanted me to get my enrollment to Hogwarts at birth, no other school was good enough apparently," she said wryly before leaning over and pouring a cup of tea for herself.
.
They chatted amicably for the next half hour, exchanging pleasantries and getting to know one another.
Rose finally relaxed and stopped overcompensating with perky quipps. Surprisingly, everything seemed to be going fine.
Everyone had settled comfortably into the hideous couch, Sam's nerves finally disappeared and his hands had stopped sweating, although externally as usual he looked very calm and collected.
Finally, just when everyone thought the most awkward parts were over, Aaliyah brought up the elephant in the room: their relationship with Rose.
.
"So I've thought a lot about how all thi-i-i-s," she gestured with her pointer figure at all of them in a circle a few times, "could work."
She took a deep breath, "Bottom line is we both love Rose and we want her to be happy, and I don't want to end things with her… So if you feel the same and you think you can accept us all being in an open relationship, we should talk about how we can try and make things work."
"Yeah that make sense," Sam responded, his stomach dropped in nervousness but he kept his composure without a second thought.
Rose her hands start to shake a little while holding her tea cup, she gripped it tighter with both hands.
They were all a little stressed, but there was no way anything was going to work out if they didn't talk this through.
.
"I think the first thing to establish is," Aaliyah paused for a moment, "it all goes both ways."
"So we can all date other people?" Sam pressed his lips together, this was news to him.
Aaliyah raised an eyebrow, "Yeah, it's not just Rose who gets to have all the fun," she said like it was obvious, then she grinned to break the tension.
"We will all agree on what's okay, our ground rules as such. Seeing other people isn't cheating, because we're open, but we can still break people's trust, which is a kind of cheating. So we need total transparency - we should always tell new partners we already have a partner, we can't get overly involved in anyone else's intimate relationships, we should try to care for all our partners equally instead of neglecting one for the other - I guess we'll work out more as we go along but here's something you could both read to get started."
Aaliyah pulled a piece of parchment out of her pocket, it was a duplicated page from a book she had found in the London Library.
She lay her wand over the page and quickly made two more copies and then handed them to Rose and Sam.
.
"This page is a few do's and don'ts, but it's basic. We can make specific rules for us, as long as everyone agrees, and it will just help."
Rose thanked her lucky stars that Aaliyah was such a diligent person, if Rose hadn't been so caught up in everything happening this was exactly the kind of thing she would have done herself.
Sam scanned over the parchment quickly and raised his eyebrow curiously, "So it says here to ensure we aren't overly jealous, what's overly jealous exactly? I mean, we're all bound to be a little bit jealous sometimes…"
"Well we've all got to really think about where that jealousy is coming from and if it's reasonable-"
"But everyone's opinion on how reasonable it is will be different... Besides, jealousy is an involuntary reaction, how can I control it by thinking about how reasonable it is - I'll probably just end up repressing it but that can't be the solution."
.
Aaliyah tried to stop a look of annoyance from flashing across her face.
She was not successful.
"No one needs to repress anything, I'm just saying we can try to think through our jealousy and-"
Sam cut in again, "And what, it will magically disappear? Are we going to Evanesce our own emotions? We are going to feel jealousy, the question I was asking was the difference between overly jealous and appropriately jealous!"
"Well if you stopped cutting me off every time I tried to talk maybe you would know that already!" Aaliyah snapped loudly.
.
She hadn't meant to yell, but her voice was definitely reverberating off the walls…
"Look, you've never done this before either, I just don't get why you're acting like you know what you're doing."
Sam muttered tersely but trying hard not to escalate the situation.
"Well I did actually go and research this, in my own damn spare time, which as a Healer, is hard to come by seeing as nobody stops dying just because my love-life is going to shit."
Rose had been sitting statue-like, watching the friction unfold, getting more and more anxious.
Maybe she should have had this conversation with Aaliyah alone first, and then with Sam?
.
"Let's not fight. I know this is really bloody complicated, and that's mostly my fault."
"It's not your-" Sam and Aaliyah both spoke at the same time, "fault," Aaliyah finished.
"Yeah this is weird," Sam remarked.
They all sat together tensely on the unseemly purple couch, unsure where to go from here.
None of them had really thought things would go completely smoothly but they didn't exactly think it would divulge into a shouting match.
.
Sam sighed, "Look we're here Rose wants both of us in her life. She can't be happy if she isn't with you, so of course I want that for her. She's capable of so much love…"
Sam looked tenderly at Rose, she blushed under his gaze, "That I know."
He reached over and grabbed Rose's hand, which had been clenched tightly on her leg.
"I may feel jealous, but I can barely believe I get another chance at being with you, and treating you right this time. No matter what, I would never let any jealous feelings I might be having be an excuse to invade your privacy, read your personal letters or try to control you. I know that before, I loved you in a selfish way, in a toxic way. I won't ever do that again."
AaIiyah nodded look at Sam, "Exactly. You gotta have faith in yourself to do what's best for the person you love, no matter how jealous you might be feeling. We have to trust that deep down, Rose's love for someone else doesn't change how much she loves you."
Rose took Aaliyah's hand in her other one and squeezed them both tightly. "Yeah, exactly."