"All of Your Flaws and All of My Flaws, They Lie There Hand in Hand"
by: singyourmelody
Disclaimer: Don't own Scarlett, Gunnar or any of the Nashville characters. Title is from Bastille's "Flaws" which is just lovely. This takes place after the most recent episode. Some spoilers from previews for the next episode.
She wakes up with his head tucked below her chin and his arm tightly wound around her middle and she can feel his chest rise up and down, up and down, even and calm, steady and smooth.
And all she can think is What have I done?
They don't talk about it.
Or Jason.
Or the gun or the murder or the fact that they are both so overwhelmed with guilt that it almost makes it impossible to inhale without suffocating.
Instead, they live around each other, no words, no glances, no anything.
He's grieving and he needs space. She knows this. But she doesn't know what to do to help him, other than what she's already done, which has probably caused more damage than anything. She doesn't know what she was trying to accomplish when she kissed him. She just . . . couldn't stand to see him so destroyed. She had to put him back together again. She had to do something. But now.
We might as well be strangers for all I know of you now, the lyrics echo in her head before escaping softly from her lips and failing to fill the empty space of their house.
February melts into March and they get the call from the record company.
"Fade Into You" has been picked up and recorded and within a few weeks, three more of their songs are optioned and Rayna James' new label has set up an official signing meeting.
"Seems like you've made it," Deacon says to her one morning between bites of blueberry pancakes.
She shrugs and stares at the ring she's twirling on her pointer finger.
"How is Gunnar anyway?" he asks.
She looks sharply at him.
"Scarlett, come on. It's no big secret."
"I don't know how to help him," she says, quietly.
Deacon shrugs. "You're there. Sometimes that's all people need."
She nods at her uncle and he smiles back a sad sort of smile, one that she has come to attribute to him. She thinks of his life, of the years spent pining away for something he couldn't have, of the months and months and months of being there. He's frozen, stuck in a memory of what could have been and it's so heartbreaking that she has to do something.
"How come you never went after Rayna?" she asks. And she knows it's a bit of a low blow, but she has to know.
Deacon chokes on his coffee and his eyes harden. "That's not a question you get to ask."
"Why? Why didn't you go after her? She's not even married to that guy anymore and you love her and it's no big secret." Her words echo his and she knows she's pushing it but she's tired of living in the silence and she needs to know.
Her uncle leans closer to her. "I know what you're trying to do. Stop being afraid and make things right with him. It doesn't matter what's come before or who has come before you. Make your own path."
She sits back and takes a sip of her coffee. She nods. "Maybe you should take your own advice."
"And maybe you should stop being such a smartass."
She smirks and the corners of his eyes crinkle just a bit as he turns back to his paper and they finish their breakfast in the quiet morning light.
When she opens the door, she is welcomed by the sounds of guitar chords streaming through their living room and hallway. It's a strange sound, one she hasn't heard for months and her heart begins to race.
She walks in to find him sitting on the couch playing.
"Hi," she says, because that feels like as good a place as any to begin.
He looks up at her. "Hi."
"You're playing."
He looks down at the guitar in his hands. "Yeah, I just wanted to." He sets it down on the coffee table.
"No, don't stop. It's good. This is good."
She walks over and sits down next to him and he continues playing a melody she's never heard before. It a sorrowful tune and it's almost painful to listen to, but it's real. It's him, right now, where he is at this moment.
He stops after a few minutes. "I don't know what to play anymore."
"Can I . . ." she starts, but falters. "Can I help?"
But he shakes his head. "Not just yet," he says, before standing and backing away.
He's punishing her. Or himself. Or both of them, she's not sure.
She follows him. "Is this because I kissed you?" she asks.
"What?"
"Because I kissed you and then we . . ." she trails off. Somehow she can't bring herself to say it out loud. Naming it makes it real.
"Yeah, I've been meaning to talk to you 'bout that," he says, his voice firm, his tone bitter. "Next time you want to have pity sex with someone, you should give your old friend Avery a call. I'm sure he'd be happy to oblige."
She blinks once and then again and he disappears into his room and even though he takes the time to shut the door silently, it feels like it's been slammed in her face.
He doesn't speak to her for a full week. It's like she doesn't exist.
Not to him, maybe not even to herself.
She never noticed before how he was her tether, that link keeping her grounded to the earth, preventing her from drifting up and up, farther and farther away until she's not anywhere anymore, but instead is floating, alone.
She decides she hates the feeling of weightlessness.
And so, on the eighth day of silence, she marches into his room and slams the door behind her.
"You don't get to be mad at me forever."
"What are you doing?" he asks, springing up from his bed.
"I honestly don't know. But I can't stand this anymore and I know you're still upset with me and I'm sorry that I made everything worse by kissing you because that was the last thing I wanted to do. But you were just so devastated, Gunnar, and I couldn't stand to see you that way for a second longer," she states.
He looks away. "I killed him."
She steps closer to him then, she has to. "No you didn't. His choices led him to that alleyway."
"But I could've stopped him. I could've let him stay."
"No one knows, Gunnar. No one knows what would have happened," she says to him, to herself.
"Then why do I feel so responsible?" he asks, turning his steely gaze on her, before slumping onto the bed.
She moves to sit next to him. "Because you love him. Because you would never want anything bad to happen to him. You were brothers."
He doesn't respond for a few moments. "I'm not a good person, Scarlett."
She shakes her head. "You're the best person I know. And until you come to remember that, I'll be right here reminding you."
Tears fill his eyes and she knows he needs some time, so she leaves quietly.
She often thinks of that first song they sang together. "If I didn't know better," the lyrics proclaim.
She remembers his hands ghosting over the bare skin of her back and his mouth at the base of her neck and of the way she responded so immediately to him, as if he was some extension of her, as if he knew what she was thinking before she could even form the thought.
Of the two of them, she's always been the one with the hidden emotions, the one who stifled anything more, the one who only let her true feelings seep out through coded lyrics and riddled rhymes. She kept the line firmly in place. She was the one who knew better. Until that night when she decided the line didn't exist, or wasn't important, or something.
She's never been one hundred percent sure of how she felt about him.
It was easy when he was her songwriting partner. Easy when he was her Bluebird coworker. Easy when she was with Avery and her carefully crafted world was still intact. But nothing has turned out how she thought it would and looking back, she had to have known it would end up here when she asked him to move in. Because seeing him every day, every night, sharing leftover Chinese while watching old Dukes of Hazzard reruns and borrowing his socks because they are warmer than hers and holding the flashlight while he fixes their sink, all of it, it's changed her. He's become part of her world in an entirely new way. She didn't think he could become more engrained in her system and yet, here he is, inching his way closer to her, minute by minute, day by day.
She sits up in her bed. She needs to stop thinking about all of this because there's nothing she can do about it until he's ready to at least talk to her and she is driving herself crazy.
That old Patsy Cline melody floats through her mind and she sings softly into the darkness, "I'm crazy for trying and crazy for crying and crazy for loving you."
She stops herself there. It's too soon to be thinking of loving someone else. Avery was her whole world for years and you don't just bounce back from that, don't just fall in love with someone else months later. You break and you heal and you eventually get to a place where you can be okay. And yet, she feels okay. She feels whole. She feels . . . like she could love him. It's a strange thought at first, but the more she turns it over in her mind, the more she is sure. She cares for him and not just because he pushes her to do big, scary things and not just because he understands her in ways she doesn't even understand, but because when she wakes up in the morning and he's still not talking to her, she feels like she's dying a little inside. And because when she wakes up in the morning, he's the first person she wants to see. Even when her hair isn't done and her makeup is smudged from the night before and she has pillow creases imprinted on her cheek.
Pushing back the covers, she heads to the kitchen. She needs some water to clear her head, maybe the cool liquid can wash away some of her overthinking.
But when she walks in, he's already there.
There are no lights on, only the moonlight streaming in through the windows and she tries to say something, but no words come to her mind. For all of the words she had bouncing around her head only minutes before, she is now completely blank.
He looks at her briefly before staring at the floor. "I'm sorry I've been taking this out on you. It's not your fault."
"It's not your fault, either," she says, her sense of speech finally returning to her.
He nods. "I'm trying to remember that."
She takes a step closer, but not close enough to bridge the two feet between them.
He lifts his head then and she sees the sadness in his eyes, but also something else. Something that gives her a glimmer of hope that he is going to be okay. Something strong.
"Tomorrow will be kinder, Gunnar."
"I hope you're right."
He greets her the next day at breakfast and they decide to catch a movie three days after that. It's life returning to normal, as normal as life can be now.
The first time he laughs, after she stumbles on the uneven sidewalk and almost dumps the grocery bag she is holding, she stops and turns to him.
"Sorry, I know I shouldn't laugh at you," he apologizes. And when she just stares at him, he says, "What?"
She smiles. "Nothing. I'm just glad you're back."
They cook dinner together that night and after he's finished drying the last plate, he picks up his guitar and starts playing the melody he wrote so many weeks before. She sits next to him and when he asks, "Sing?" she's more than happy to oblige.
She pulls out her book and flips through the pages until she finds a poem that fits and together they create another masterpiece.
And it's just like coming home.
Now, it's harder to forget what happened. They start spending a lot of time together and she has to stop herself from staring at his mouth. And his eyes. And his hands that are so much larger than hers, slightly calloused from years of guitar playing. She has to stop herself from remembering how he felt because she's not supposed to know those things now. They are supposed to be partners and roommates and just leave it at that.
But the thing is. The thing is she can't forget and she doesn't want to. And she has no idea what to do about it. If she should do anything at all. Hasn't she pretty much given up her rights in this area? She slept with him when his heart was broken. She broke his heart more.
That is not something you can easily forgive.
The official contract from Rayna's label is slapped on the table in front of them.
And it's not just a songwriting contract. It's a full on artist contract. The label wants their songs and wants them to be the ones singing them.
The executives give them a few minutes to talk it over and suddenly it's just the two of them in the enormous conference room.
"Well?" he says.
"Are we doing this?" she asks, because there's no point asking anything but the truth. They are past anything else now.
"Do you want to?"
"I don't know."
He nods. "Of course."
"What is that supposed to mean?" she asks.
"It means you never know what you want, Scarlett."
She looks down at the polished cherry table and doesn't say anything, so he continues.
"How can you even entertain the idea of not wanting to sing? You sing our songs and you are amazing at it. You're a good songwriter, I'll give you that, but somebody else singing our songs? It's just not right. It needs to be us and you know that, so stop pretending you don't know what you should do." His voice is firm and harsh and her eyes flick up to meet his and something inside her snaps.
"What you should do and what you want to do aren't always the same thing." Her bitter tone matches his.
"What does that mean?"
"It means that I don't know if I can do this. Not with the way our partnership or relationship or whatever this thing is going," she states, gesturing between the two of them.
"What does that even matter?"
"Are you kidding me, Gunnar? When I sing with you, something inside me comes alive and I can't even explain it, but it happened with our first song and it's happened every time since and you can't tell me that that isn't somethin' we need to figure out."
"Figure out? I can't ever figure out anything with you, Scarlett!" he says, his voice rising with every word.
"I'm the same way with you! This thing is messy and awkward and I never should have slept with you when you were so upset because I ruined our first time which was supposed to be special and amazing and my last first time and I'm sorry." She looks up at him then, her eyes wide as she realizes everything she just said. "I'm sorry," she says again, quietly.
He looks more than a little shocked.
"Scarlett, I. . ."
She cuts him off. "I know you want to go back, but I just can't do that, because I now know what we could be and I can't get that out of my mind and I honestly don't want to."
He opens his mouth to say something, but the record execs come back at that moment and she picks up the pen, signs the contract and walks out without another word.
She goes to bed early that night, long before he comes home, but she tosses and turns and stares at her ceiling for longer than she would care to admit.
Finally, as she watches the clock turn from 2:59 to 3:00, she gets up to make herself a cup of tea. The kitchen is dark and the moonlight shines ever so slightly through the windows and it reminds her of their meeting here not so long ago. She promised him that tomorrow would be kinder. And it has. He's getting better, despite all of her emotions spilling out everywhere threatening to destroy what little relationship they had left. She still can't believe everything she said to him in that conference room.
The kettle whistles, snapping her out of her chastisement and as she watches the water pour into the cup, she hears a noise beside her.
He's there. She jumps slightly and turns to him.
"Gunnar, you scared me. I thought-" she starts, but he walks right up to her and kisses her and she soon can't say anything more.
It's different than before. He's not devastated; she knows what she's doing. It's thoughtful. Premeditated. And perfect.
She blushes the next time they sing on stage together.
It's their first official performance as contracted artists and all she can think about is the fact that this guy, this singer, this other half of her, whose harmonies blend perfectly with her melodies, has seen her naked. And knows that she snores a little. And makes fun of the fact that her feet are always cold and that she takes way too long getting dressed in the morning. He sleeps on the right side of the bed, which works pretty well because she has always been a mostly center, slightly left side sleeper. She's adjusting. So is he.
They fight over who gets to drive when they go out for dinner and they fight over whose turn it is to do the laundry. They do their laundry together now. He might as well put a ring on her finger, she muses to herself.
"What are you thinking?" he asks. They are sitting on the porch swing, her head in his lap as the sun slowly begins to set. "You're smiling."
She closes her eyes, the grin still tugging on her lips. "None of your business."
He knows how this story ends.
Boy meets girl.
Boy falls in love with girl.
Boy waits seemingly forever for girl to realize that maybe, just maybe she loves him too.
Boy and girl make beautiful music together for the rest of their lives, with the charming backyard wedding and the countrywide tours and the first baby named after his brother and the family vacation to Hawaii and the slowly built fan base and everything they've ever wanted coming true before their eyes.
But even more so, he knows how this song goes.
It's a song of patience, a song of expectations, a song of sparks flying and quiet nights. It's a song that was never quite complete. And it's a song he thought he'd forever sing, lonely fingers plucking rigid strings, but he was wrong.
Because his song was never meant to be a solo; no, their song, it's a duet.
Thanks for reading and reviewing. Love to all.