Disclaimer: I do not own Harry Potter.
A/N: Part Two, still very much Ellie's.
(I clearly had issues with the title. I think I'll leave it as it is.)
you are redeemable
Part Two: Lucy
Lucy doesn't say anything to him the first time she sees him, sitting at the far end of the bar, holding a full glass of beer in one hand all night, not bothering to even pretend to drink it. She doesn't speak to him the second time she sees him there, either, or the third. But by the fifth night, when she's tired of sliding a full glass down the sticky bar at eight and picking it up again at closing, she really has no choice. She is a bartender, after all. Sympathy and all that shit—it's part of their job description.
She waits until the early crowd drifts out and only a few people still linger at the tables spread throughout the yellow-lit room. When she's sure that she has at least ten minutes to spare—the least amount of time required for therapy sessions—she crosses behind the bar area to where he's sitting. He doesn't look up.
"You're a Scamander, right?"
He shoves his beer from one hand to the other. "Yeah."
Both Lysander and Lorcan had been in Lily and Hugo's year at school, meaning that this man had only left Hogwarts seven or eight months before. He is barely of age. Lucy probably should have checked his ID when he first walked in, but he looks older than seventeen or eighteen.
"Which one?" she asks. This may be rude, but at least she remembers his surname. She didn't often interact with the younger classes when she was at Hogwarts, and he must have been a fifth year when she was in seventh.
"Lysander." He looks down at his hands and his beer.
"Lysander," she repeats. Lorcan is friends with Louis and Roxanne, and Lysander used to be close with James and Albus, she thinks, although she hasn't heard his name mentioned at family gatherings in a few years. "Well, Lysander, what brings you here?"
"You're a Weasley," he says abruptly. "Red hair."
She nods. "Lucy."
"Gryffindor?"
"Ravenclaw."
"You weren't."
"Yes, I was." Lucy smoothes some loose hair behind her ear. "Why?"
"Because I was a Ravenclaw, and I don't remember seeing you around the Common Room. And also, you're working in a pub."
"I spent a lot of time in the library or in Gryffindor," Lucy explains. "And it's a job. Do you have one?"
"I do, actually." He doesn't sound defensive, even though Lucy wants him to; it's always easier to find out what's bothering someone if he's emotional about it.
"Oh?" The door chimes and a couple dressed in matching orange robes enter, sitting in a corner booth.
"Looks like you have customers," Lysander says.
Lucy's ten minutes are up, and all she's learned is that this boy is more reticent than her cousin Lily, and that is saying something.
She nods and turns, adding, "It was good talking to you, Lysander," over her shoulder.
He says, "You, too," to her back, but she can't tell if he means it, or if he's just being polite.
He's back two nights later. His stride is short and shameful as he moves to the empty space at his end of the bar, and Lucy wonders if he thinks that it is the act of going to the pub, and not the excessive drinking, that ruins lives. Ravenclaws can sometimes be obtuse that way.
"What would you like?" she asks him. He shrugs.
"Chips?"
"Only if you promise to eat them."
His smile is half-there. "I'll eat them."
"All right, then. Chips it is."
When the pub empties out and Lysander is sitting with an empty chip basket she approaches him. "Do you want anything else?"
He shakes his head. "Thanks."
Lucy sighs. "What're you doing here, Lysander? Who's the bitch broke your heart?"
He chuckles. It's a dry and dark sound, and she's not sure how someone with such a perfect face can make a noise so unbearably sad. "Nobody broke my heart." He glances at his hands and then at her face. "When you left Hogwarts, what'd you do?"
"I went into the Ministry for a week. A lower intern in the Department of Mysteries. It was hell. And then I started here."
"And here is better?"
"For me." Lucy shrugs. "Other people liked the Department; other people like the Ministry. Why, Lysander?"
"It's just draining," he says. "To work all the time, and to leave work and know that my brother's in our flat, trying to rewrite a manuscript on our grandfather for the fifth time, praying that this time someone will publish it. To leave work knowing that when I get home I'll have to listen to Lorcan rehash our family history for three hours before I can plead off to bed. That's what I'm doing here. It's less effort than going home."
Lucy bites back her curiosity about Lorcan's book. "Where are you working?"
He rolls his eyes. "The wandmakers. And it should be fascinating, right? I should love it. And I do, when I'm there. But the whole going to work thing, I don't know, Lucy. It's just so damned repetitive. Don't you ever get tired of it?"
"Not here," Lucy answers.
"Not here," he sighs. "And see, that's weird, because that means it's possible to like something enough to want to do it over and over again, every day, forever."
"Forever," Lucy laughs. "I hope not! I'm saving up to travel. Someday I'll be hopping around Africa and Asia and Europe. Your problem is that you've let yourself become stuck. You need to do something different. Go on a date, play Quidditch, get together with all your old mates, do something."
"This isn't something?" he asks, just as the door chimes.
Lucy glances over at the eight blokes who're gathering around the till. "You tell me," Lucy says, "does it feel like something?"
He's gone the next time she looks over at his corner.
She gets off early on Sunday evening, and when she pushes out of the pub she finds him leaning against the front window, tapping an unlit cigarette against his thigh.
"Lucy!" He pushes away from the window and walks beside her, his stride matching hers perfectly.
"Do you smoke?" she asks, glancing at the single cigarette.
"Oh." He looks at it, too, as if seeing it for the first time, and then drops it in a bin on the street corner. "No, some bloke just gave it to me. He and his mates were out smoking. I guess they thought I was bumming for one."
Lucy laughs. "Maybe they wanted you to join them, did you consider that?"
Lysander shrugs. "Maybe they did. I was waiting for you, though."
"Were you?" Lucy asks, as if that weren't obvious. "Why?"
"Because you told me to do something different. Lucy Weasley, will you go on a date with me?"
Lucy blinks. She hadn't been expecting that. "Um..."
"Not," he rushes, "not anything serious. Let me take you out to dinner and buy you a drink. I promise I'll eat and drink and act normal for the entire meal. You can babble my ear off like I've been doing to yours and it'll be fun."
Lucy glances at him. He looks too hopeful, "All right, all right. Can I go home and change, first?"
"Oh," he looks at the beer-stained top and jeans she's wearing and nods, "of course."
He follows her up a flight of stairs to a flat above Madame Malkin's and waits in the entryway while she runs through a messy kitchen and shuts the door at the far end.
"Sorry it's such a mess," she calls. "I haven't had company in a while. We usually all just go to Moll's."
"No worries," Lysander shouts back. "My flat is worse."
"I doubt that," she reappears, running her fingers through recently-freed waves of red hair and straightening a black dress over her hips. She slides her feet into silver sandals and grabs a purse from the mess on the table. "All set."
"Brill," Lysander holds the door for her and follows her back down the stairs and out into the dim light of the late evening.
They go for Italian, and after a long meal of discussions occasionally interrupted by companionable silences, Lysander walks Lucy back to her flat and drops a kiss on her cheek. She surprises herself by saying, "We should do this again sometime."
"I'm free on Wednesday," he says.
"Perfect." She goes to bed feeling unexpectedly happy.
They meet for dinner twice a week for the next three weeks, and when Lysander follows Lucy to her bed early on a Sunday morning it feels almost inevitable. They don't hide their eyes shamefully in the morning, and Lysander cooks eggs while Lucy brews the coffee. They sit on the floor in her kitchen—because that's the only space not covered by mess—and grin at each other between burning sips. They're back in bed before noon.
Lucy's never had anything quite this normal. This thing with Lysander, it feels ordinary. She's always been one of the girls who kisses in pubs and goes home for a night and never considers attachment or regularity. Lucy always wants to leave. And it's not that this thing with Lysander is going to last forever, but it is lasting, for now.
A few months after they begin, she comes into the kitchen while Lysander's sorting through the post on her table and she asks, "Are you going to be around next weekend?"
"Yeah," he answers without looking up. "Why, what's going on?"
"My grandmother's having a family party at the Burrow. I thought, if you're not doing anything, you might like to come?" She hesitates. "It'd be nice to have someone there, you know. For once."
He glances up at her, his hand frozen on a letter that she was probably supposed to answer months ago. "Who's going?" he asks. His voice sounds a little tense, but she ignores it.
"Let's see. Molly and James and Dom and Victoire and Teddy, probably, and Albus and Rose, I think, and Fred and Roxy, and Lily and Hugo...oh." She stops. "No, wait, Lily's not going. She's in Egypt."
"She is?" Lysander sticks his hand in his pocket. "What's she doing there?"
"Some sort of special training for Auror stuff. I don't know. Anyway, she won't be going, so it'll just be all the others and our parents. And probably a few boyfriends thrown in there. I don't think James or Albus are dating anyone."
"That sounds fun," Lysander says after a moment's pause. "Yeah, I'll come."
"You will?" Lucy grins at him. "Thank you, thank you, that's brilliant!"
"Of course," he grins back.
He seems nervous the day of the party, though. His palm is sweaty when she grabs onto it so she can Apparate them both to the Burrow, and he's chewing on his lower lip when they land on the lawn in front of the ramshackle house.
"Are you all right?" Lucy leans close to him.
"Yeah. Yeah." He squeezes her hand and nods towards the tents set up in the side yard. "Let's go say hello."
Everyone's there, and James and Albus converge on Lysander the minute they see him. "Lysander Scamander, you bastard, what've you been up to?" James hits him on the shoulder and Lucy tries not to notice that Lysander looks almost afraid before he steadies his face into a smile.
Albus glances from Lysander to Lucy and back again. "You and Lucy? Congrats, mate." Albus drapes an arm around Lucy's shoulders. "She's always been my favourite cousin."
Lysander rolls his eyes as Lucy elbows Albus in the side. "You lie," she laughs, but her hand seeks Lysander's and she twists her fingers with his, so tightly it's almost painful.
James and Albus draw Lysander into a discussion on an apparently violent Quidditch match they'd once played against a group of Slytherins at Hogwarts, and Lucy scans the party, looking for Molly.
Her eyes settle on another red head, and she interrupts the boys' conversation abruptly, "What's Lily doing here?"
Lysander's hand drops hers instantly. Lucy looks up at him while James says, "Oh, she finished her training yesterday. Didn't Gran tell you? This is her welcome home shindig."
"No." Lucy shakes her head. "Come on, Lysander, let's go say hi to Lil."
"Actually," Lysander tugs at the collar to his shirt, "I just remembered that I promised Lorcan to give his manuscript one last read through today. He's sending it out tomorrow. I'm sorry, Luce," he drops a kiss on her temple and Disapparates with a crack.
Lucy looks from James to Albus. "That was strange."
"Yes," James agrees.
"I should go find out what's going on."
"Probably," Albus says.
"Tell Lil I said hi and bye and stuff."
"Of course," James says, but Lucy's already gone.
She finds Lysander in his flat, sitting on his bed with his head in his hands. He doesn't look up when she comes in.
"Are we permanent?" he asks her.
"What does that even mean?" Lucy asks, leaning against the doorframe and staring at the paleness of his fingers where they grip his dark hair.
"Are we trying to make this last—you know, like someday I'll propose and we'll get a flat together and it'll be messy and we might have kids or we might not but we'll definitely only sleep with each other for the rest of our lives?"
Lucy shakes her head. "I never thought of us as that sort of permanent. Don't get me wrong, Lysander, I love you. I do. But I don't think that love could last through everything I need to do in my life. I don't think you want to follow me around the world, or wait for me to stop always wanting to be somewhere else."
Lysander raises his head. "But we have fun," he points out. "We haven't fought once, and we practically live together."
"We get along well," Lucy agrees. "But...Merlin, Lysander, don't you want something more than what we have? I mean, this is good for right now, neither of us wants to settle down—I thought—and so it works. But for forever? Don't you want somebody who makes you emotional, who makes you angry and happy to such polarizing degrees that every moment feels world-changing?"
"That's too much," Lysander says. "Way too much."
"What do you mean?" Lucy crosses and sits beside him, leaning her head against his shoulder and taking one of his hands in hers. "Have you ever felt that?"
"I think, once." He seems older than her, suddenly.
"And it ended?"
He sighs. "It never really existed."
"How do you mean?"
"She didn't...I don't know, Lucy. I still don't understand it." He laughs, and Lucy's brought sharply back to the first conversation they had in the pub. "She somehow made it seem like it meant nothing. And I was left wondering what the fuck I'd spent my seventh year doing."
"Who?" Lucy knows, though.
"Lily, of course."
And the way he says it, the way he doesn't make it sound like a shameful thing, like he hasn't been cousin-hopping, makes Lucy grateful. Maybe she is his rebound, but at least he thinks enough of her to love her for herself, and not for her red hair and her last name.
"Lily's hard," she tells him.
"I know."
"What are you going to do?" she asks. She takes her hand back from him and inches away from him on the bed. She feels a sharp sense of dislocation in her chest and she knows immediately that she must stop this now, before he pulls her back to him and pins her down on this mattress and turns her into a restless wanderer of this city's streets.
He looks at her. "We're that impermanent, Lucy? We're just over, like that?"
Lucy shrugs. "I need to get out of here. And you're still in love with my cousin. Don't deny it, Lysander," she says, "you are. Those are two facts that we cannot fight. Maybe someday, I don't know. But right now, yeah, I think we're over. Like that."
He shakes his head. "So I say goodbye to you and you go out in search of happiness somewhere and what, I'm here just the way I was before we started except that I can't go to your pub and I won't find you and what does that mean, Lucy?" He sounds hopeless. "What was the point?"
"We happened." Lucy takes his hands again. "We happened, Lysander, and that matters. That was the point. The happening was the point. You can't just go around looking at every little thing that happens in your life like it means something more."
"But now? What do I do now?"
Lucy looks at him for a long moment before standing and kissing his dark hair. "You just need to be, Lysander. Just live. Stop analysing everything for a little while."
He stands, too, and pulls her into a hug. "I don't know, Luce."
"Just try, Lysander," she presses her cheek against his collarbone and reminds herself that he is young and that he has time.
"Come back to me, someday?"
Someday is a nice word, she thinks. She grins at him. "Maybe." And then she Disapparates, and the air crackles around him for a moment, and she is gone.
A/N: I promise I'm mostly done with the angst, now. I appreciate reviews!