Author: Regency

Title: Boy, You Were A Fool

Characters: Robert, Luke, Tracy, OFC

Pairing: Tracy/other, Tracy/Luke UST

Summary: Luke pushed Tracy away, now he has to watch her love someone else. Robert thinks it’s a shame.

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Robert Scorpio’s eyes were trained on the same sight as Luke’s when he came to stand beside him in the foyer of the Quartermaine Mansion. Tracy descended the staircase slowly, a fair visage in soft curls and a radiant smile, and they two were transfixed. To think this woman, of all women, could hide such a luminosity was unimaginable to them. Her beau, upon greeting her, tucked a dark curl behind her ear and gently kissed her mouth--lingering with the promise of more at a later time. She chuckled and looked away; he held her close and whispered in her ear, guiding her out the door and to the evening that awaited them.

Robert shook his head in grim resignation and stuck his hands in his tailored pockets. “You were a fool, Spencer, to let that one get away,” he said and strolled away, leaving Luke to his foolishness and his regret.

Luke sat back on the sofa and stared blankly at the ceiling. He was stricken by the finality of all this, of the evening, of his relationship with Tracy, of his marriage to Tracy. This was it, this was where it ended. Considering the strange house she inhabited in his heart, it should have come as little surprise to him that what bothered him most was that she couldn’t be bothered to say a word to either him or Robert tonight. She was so focused on greeting the new man in her life that she couldn’t spare a single moment of attention to speak to him, neither to pester nor to mock.

She had spoken honestly some weeks ago when she’d told him she was done playing teenage games. She had asked him, without pretense, what his feelings were for her. Having newly returned from his latest misadventure, he hadn’t been in the mood for grand confessions of love. So, he’d used some careless words to change the subject…only she didn’t take the bait. Instead, she’d nodded and sadly smiled at him, telling him that he had said exactly what she needed to hear.

A man had been shadowing her for some time, he would later find. A few weeks at most, and he wasn’t the first. At some point during their short marriage, he’d forgotten the beauty he had married, and that other men found her beautiful, too. The next morning, Sunshine handed him a stack of divorce papers a mile thick with his eggs sunny-side up. He’d smudged Tracy’s jet black name as he shakily signed his own. He didn’t quite comprehend that this was the ballgame.

Not two strangely lonely evenings later, he’d had his first experience watching her walk down those stairs as a living portrait to grace and romance in a dress that just brushed the knees and set off the pale skin of her shoulders, with a pair of aquamarine teardrops dangling from her ears to accent the faint gleam of something new in her eyes. That gleam hadn’t been for him, but for the handsome man waiting by the door in patient anxiety for her arrival; a patient anxiety that vanished as she approached him and smiled invitingly.

Watching from a semi-distant doorway, he’d felt a clinching in his chest as he realized his mistake. She had been holding the bonds of their matrimony together with both hands and, with his ill-spoken words, he’d freed her to let go. And she had, taking that cue to walk into welcoming arms of another man, one Miles Hawthorne. The Doctor.

There was no sense in grappling for lost chances, he thought while rubbing at the wedding band he’d only recently taken to wearing. It was plain, but valuable. It gleamed, but was tarnished. It was somehow a treasure and yet--now, thanks to him--completely worthless. He enclosed it in his fist and felt a searing, though illusory, sensation of fire.

Spanky buns, we know what this is. This is a marriage based on fun times and mutual animosity. I antagonize you, you despise me. That’s our dynamic. Sometimes that dynamic involves other people, really good looking other people. That’s okay, because this isn’t about love. It’s about money. My money.

One day he’d learn to stop while he was ahead. That day was clearly too late, because his wife was out on the town with someone else and didn’t seem to miss him at all. But some day, one that didn’t matter now, he would learn that just because he had something that didn’t mean he always would.

He felt like the biggest fool in Port Charles tonight.

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