Title: queen of hearts
Summary: Maybe tomorrow she'll run a little faster or stretch her arms out farther but, today, she is Lucy Weasley and she is stuck in her crumbling palace of make believe games and pretending and she will never escape / Lucy, chasing golden days and being dealt a royal flush.
Challenge/Prompts: Camp Potter: Tech Discovery, with the prompt Lucy Weasley.
Notes: Um, this is the kind of madness I write at 2am – including a rebellious Lucy, a sincere Lorcan and a bizarre ending. Enjoy!
"I always thought it would be fun to have glory days" – Stephen Chbosky, The Perks Of Being A Wallflower
Upon imagining the future, everyone always tend to glorify it. No child is ever born with the intention of living a mediocre lifestyle, nor are they inclined to waste their days away or die young. Children are born with an invincible sense of pride and the naïve view that they will live forever and it is wrong to sit them down and tell them that when it boils down to it, they will eventually fall and that the kingdom of childhood will fade into a mirage of forgotten memories.
But, no matter how hard you pretend, it always will, inevitably.
Your lived days will always blur into one never ending merry-go-round of laughter, dreams and colours and then, you'll be faced with a future you never planned out – you never truly do live through golden eras or invincible days, no matter how much you think you will, and you have to face it because, you can't run from your future, no matter how strong or invincible you are.
But, despite this, every child is born with make believe, fairy-tale notions of the world and some children maintain this false sense of fantasy for a lot longer than expected – some cling onto distorted illusions of the world, some think that they will live eternally in the palace of their minds and some think that they will one day reach their glory days.
The sad thing is that these palaces of fantasy always crumble, eventually. And when they crumble, the people trapped inside can never, ever outrun their forgotten dreams of childhood – they'll always spend their lives searching for the golden days they imagined, looking for the make believe land they think could be true.
But, no matter how hard they try, they'll never quite touch the glorified image that they've always thought of.
It's always just out of their grasp.
Midnight hangs over the castle grounds and, in a haze of lavender smoke and alcohol fumes, two silhouettes sit, leaning against rocks, hopelessly chasing after their childhood dreams of golden days.
"Luce, aren't these supposed to be our glory days?" the boy asks, in his baritone voice, his words echoing off the rocks that surround him.
The distorted whisper of his voice crawls back to the girl and it reverberates around her head like it has some sort of significance.
Lucy simply raises her cigarette up to her cherry red lips and inhales, slowly, allowing the cloud of heather grey smoke to seep into the gaps between her ribcage, where a beating heart used to once lie. Now, instead, there is nothing but icy veins and a perpetual mist of addiction and rebellion.
"These are my glory days," she replies fiercely because despite the booze, drugs and sex, Lucy is still a queen – when the cards were dealt and the dice thrown, Lucy Weasley secured a royal flush and she played her cards and the gods to perfection – she ended up as the Queen of Hearts – a beautiful, sly heart-breaker that lived in a crimson tower of façades and childhood games that should have faded away years ago.
And that is who she still is – her golden crown of thorns still rests upon her head and smoke cannot change that. She will always be Lucy Weasley and, even though the diamonds are jaded and the metal cracking, it still lies on her head and it will do forevermore because, honey, royalty isn't something you gain or earn, it's something you're born into.
(The day Lucy Weasley played the gods and the cards was the day she assured her status as royalty.)
"Really, Luce? Getting high and drinking Firewhiskey by the Black Lake every night with me whilst lamenting about lost lovers is your idea of glory days?" Lorcan asks, staring in disbelief at the shroud of smoke that surrounds their silhouettes.
"Yes," she says, defiantly, "I'm enjoying myself. People are in awe of me. My family only talk about me. Molly is forgotten. I'm still the most beautiful girl in the school. I still have my crown intact. I'm dynamic, now. What more could I want?"
Lucy takes another angry drag of her cigarette and stares out across the rippling, inky black waves of the lake she's overlooked for her whole six years at Hogwarts. She chucks the butt of her cigarette into the water, and she watches the ripples spill out from it, dancing across the surface and disrupting the steady flow of the tide. She thinks that it's a metaphor for her life – wherever she goes, she disturbs everything and changes the current just to suit her and, to be honest, she likes it that way.
"What is your idea of your glory days, then?" she asks him in a mocking tone.
Lorcan considers the question for a minute, before turning to the lake and answering, in a sincere voice filled with shattered hope, "I'm not really sure – I think my idea of my glory days was always me, sat in a cerulean tower, star of the Quidditch team, with a beautiful, kind girl, being the sort of boy that read intelligent books and came out with poetic, romantic lines – didn't quite happen, eh?"
"Instead, you're a Gryffindor who spends their days hanging out with a fucked up girl who is addicted to the limelight and illegal substances."
They both laugh, a laugh that is carried through the night by the wind, but really, they shouldn't be laughing because after all, it is his life and it's screwed up, and there is some truth in what he's saying about their glory days.
"I suppose so. So, Lucy, even if you are living your 'glory days' right now, you must have had a different idea of what they were going to be when you were younger – you must have. Children aren't born longing to fuck up their lives and die young,"
"No, I always wanted to have this kind of power," Lucy replies, staring blankly across the lake and trying to dredge up her younger self, "I think I wanted to be the queen of the castle, I wanted to wear silk and gold and jewels. I wanted to be beautiful and pirouette through life with a sheet of golden hair and sapphire eyes. I wanted to have some sort of power."
And, she does have power: she sits on her crimson throne of beauty and manipulation and she can make people do her bidding, with just a flick of her hair and a flutter of her eyelashes – despite the alcohol and the cigarettes, she is still the card dealer. She is one of the gods.
Lorcan scoffs, disbelieving, "Are you sure, Luce? Is that all you ever wanted? Really?"
Lorcan looks at Lucy, and he sees just another tragic beauty, with platinum locks and a painted face, wearing a leather jacket and crimson lipstick, smelling of ash and whiskey, wearing a crown of power and deception. She is just another girl who got caught up in the tide of rebellion and can never fight against it – once, she was a little girl with dreams for the future and now, instead, she is living in her own world of concocted tales.
"Yes," Lucy replies angrily, but as she says it, she sees a fleeting glimpse of a memory of sunlight and the promise of goodness, of wanting to be a dancer and wanting to shine. Lucy realises that Lorcan is right – she once wanted so much more.
Lucy was always going to be a queen (she made sure of that straight away) and she could have even been a god (she was dealt the golden cards and all she had to do was play them right) but, right now, all she seems to be is a naïve little girl clinging to an illusion of glory and a make-believe fantasy of some kind of happiness.
"Cigarette?" Lorcan offers, holding temptation in his palm.
Wordlessly, Lucy takes it and turns back to the lake, imagining the days of glory that she could've lived – she could've chased after her days of glory but, instead, she is sat on the shore of the lake, killing herself slowly with smoke and despair.
At the end of the day, it boils down to this: Lucy Weasley is a queen, she has the potential to be a god; Lucy Weasley was dealt a Royal Flush and Lucy Weasley secured her crown to her head but, in the midst, she didn't grow out of the games she used to play, and now, she is stuck in the crumbling kingdom that she forced upon herself and happiness and golden days are suddenly out of her grasp, at least for today, when she is still deluded by the thoughts of eternal life.
Maybe tomorrow she'll run a little faster or stretch her arms out farther but, today, she is Lucy Weasley and she is stuck in her crumbling palace of make believe games and pretending and she will never escape.