For the "I Dare You" thread on NGF
I don't own anything
It's a choice between a dragon slayer and a wizarding lawyer, someone exciting, ferocious and intoxicating, and someone who can set her heart on fire with one look. It's Lysander Scamander and Scorpius Malfoy, and she finds herself drawn further into the trap of loving two men at once, forging two relationships which are exclusive of the other to the point that she doesn't tell any of her friends that she's dating anyone.
She's Lucy Weasley and she used to be the good girl of the family, the one who got straight O's in Hogwarts and moved straight into the Magical Law Enforcement; she was someone who had a steady relationship with Gregory James, fellow Gryffindor, until she found herself dumped for not being exciting enough.
And it's stemmed from then, this stage in her life of being exciting: going out and getting so pissed she can't remember her own name, speaking her mind to the point that she's sacked from her job, and, of course, the fact that she's dating two men at once – and nobody knows about either of them.
She sees them in different places, different situations, and she's pretty different with both of them; with Lysander, she spends most of her time in the wizarding club near Kings Cross, drinking the nights away and then taking him back to her flat. She pours out her deepest secrets to him in the dead of night inbetween frantic kisses, knowing that Lysander is more than just a pretty face and that he wouldn't tell anyone. When she tells him secrets, he tells her about his relationship with Dominique, and how she couldn't take his lifestyle: never there, always on the run from something that she could never understand, as he's never really liked to commit.
And then there's Scorpius, flirtatious and bold from the first moment they met, when she applied to become his assistant and he then asked her out for a drink. They tend to spend their time in romantic restaurants before going back to his bare apartment, never talking about their past, because he understands that she doesn't like discussing Gregory, and she would never try and make him talk about when Rose ran off with her Healing partner. They take the relationship at a normal speed: peck on the cheek on the first date, kiss on the lips on the second, until she finally lets him rip her clothes off on the tenth.
With one, she gets the chance to be exciting and slutty, living the life of the twenty-something girl she is, but has never felt like, since she's spent most of her life comforting her Father over the death of her Mother, and making sure that Molly never falls to pieces when she gets rejected from everything she tries to do. The other makes her realise that she has the chance to go back to who she used to be, to try and become the girl who was universally loved and was successful in everything she did.
And it turns to be that she's sneaking frantic kisses with the both of them, seeing one on a lunchtime, and one at night, telling them that she's got urgent meetings all the rest of the time. As she tries to reinvent herself with Lysander and rediscover herself with Scorpius, Lucy actually becomes something completely different, as she's struggling with her inner conscience as to the fact that she's dating two guys at once. All she wants is to take one of them out to her Dad's house, to tell him that his one time perfect daughter has someone who she loves, but then it comes down to making the choice between Lysander and Scorpius, and she freezes again, back to being content with her lot, because it's pretty perfect.
She finds herself loving the attention they both give her, enjoying the way that she gets everything she wants, yet it begins to eat away at her insides, her lack of morality stunning her whenever she's alone. Soon, she finds herself begging them both to leave her alone, fabricating business trips to Lysander and family emergencies to Scorpius, something neither of them question. They both trust her explicitly, and time only serves to make her realise that she's changed; she's no longer the girl she used to be, or the girl who lost her way, but rather someone who carries on what she's doing for attention, for the chance to make herself feel better – but she loves them both.
In the end, she's got to make a decision, got to decide between the two of them, and it threatens to tear her apart. One half of her loves Lysander more, with his, "what you doing, sugar?" that gets her every time, the promise of mystery, allure and complete and utter excitement for their entire relationship; the rest of her knows that Scorpius is the one she wants to be with for the long haul, that he's got the more complex personality that she finds herself trying to unravel whenever she's alone, because he never leaves her thoughts. He's managed to get himself into her head without her realising it, sometime between the first time they kissed, till the first time he told her he loves her.
Her heart fractures and threatens to break entirely as she weighs up everything in her mind, before she decides to go for instinct. If she had to choose one of them, who would she choose?
As she makes her decision, she writes them both a note, one of them telling the boy that it's over, the other saying to meet her under at the Leaky Cauldron at 6pm – she considered saying Paris, but decided against it, ruling it would be too cliché for a situation wrought with the cliché over whether excitement or desire is more important.
And so she sends the notes, one to Lysander who has returned to Romania for another month, the other to Scorpius who is in central London, before making herself look pretty, because she's a whorish bitch on the inside, so why not at least try and look nice on the outside? She doesn't like what she's become and wants to go back to how she ought to be, what she should be like, and so made her decision based on that.
~x~
That night, she stands outside the Leaky Cauldron, her dress covered by a black overcoat that seems to shimmer in the moon's light, and knows that across the world, Lysander's heart is breaking.
Because she can see Scorpius running up to her, his blonde hair dishevelled, his face slightly rosy with the exertion of running all the way across town, just to hear this important message.
"Hey," he smiles as he sees her, his lips pressing to hers for a customary greeting kiss, and it's all she can do not to laugh. She's lost the burden of guilt about dating two men at once, lost the need to feel as though she's a repulsive human being, as that's now in the past, confined to memories.
"I love you," she comes straight out with it, this being the way that she decided between the two of them as well, because the man she would say "I love you" to first would have to be the man she chose.
And so they stand together under the starry night, kissing, until he slips them into a side street and they Apparate home, and Lucy's thoughts don't linger on Lysander once throughout the entire night, because she's happy now, with Scorpius, and that's all that matters.
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Vicky xx