A/N: For Jeanuary, because Jean deserves to be celebrated and to find her happiness, just as we do. I wound up cutting a ton of it, so it's shorter than I thought it would be.
Rated M for a brief, non-descriptive mention of abuse. Jean got pregnant so young, I imagine she'd ran away with Christopher.
Jean Randall falls in love in the winter, on a blustery July Tuesday. She doesn't know his name, not really, but there's time for all of that.
She's sixteen and he kisses her behind the fence to the schoolyard, and a thrill runs through her. His name is Christopher, and she likes him well enough, she supposes, or at least enough to have Moira and Cynthia giggling at her when she speaks of their dates. Long before she'd learned his name, when he was a young man in town with broad shoulders and a kind smile for her, she had called him her escape plan, and really, that's what he is, she thinks, when she steals away into the night and meets him in the rail yard, where he whispers out a proposal and all of her cherished possessions are nestled in a small sack hung around her shoulder.
He grips her wrist kindly. She grins at Christopher through the blurring of tears that erupts suddenly, then, glad it's dark.
She thinks of her younger sister, and finds herself yearning to turn back, to tug her wrist from Christopher's eager grip, and dash back to the house and meet the familiar, cool lick of a belt buckle, because surely, that's better that the uncertainty of her future now. But his hand is warm, and he looks at her in awe, like she's the sunset, striking purples and oranges across the sky.
She follows him instead.
Jean prays and atones and stays awake far into the night, and when Christopher wakes next to her, cap askew and eyes warm, looking at her like she holds the answer to every question he's ever asked, she is more uncertain than ever.
She falls in love in the summer, this time, with the way her belly swells with child and the way the ring, newly placed on her finger, glints in the sun. Jean Beazley imagines good things for the future, the way her child might coo in the night, hungry for her milk, the way Christopher might don his cap and roll up his sleeves and brush his lips against hers as he goes out to work in the fields.
That doesn't last long, but good things never last.
She spends most days indoors, scrubbing half-heartedly at the floor of the small farmhouse and pretends not to notice that Christopher doesn't look at her with nearly as much adoration as he once had.
She attends confession on an April Sunday, and the weight of the stares that follow her is nearly too much to bear.
This time, two boys, one after the other, bless her, and they are happy and healthy and adoring.
Soon, Christopher and Jack are nearly grown, the years having passed her by like too much water cupped in her hands.
The small farmhouse where she and her husband had built their life and watered the ground with their lifeblood, is now filled with the booming voices of two young men who are too grown for her to make any difference in their behaviors on her own. She has land to work and bills to pay and Christopher's debts to seek forgiveness for.
She writes to Christopher to the address he'd sent his first letter from— and maybe she is seeking forgiveness or perhaps, sending him a reminder that he is loved, longed for— but receives no reply.
Instead, three years later, she receives a caller at the house who tells her he is dead, that he has been for months. The stranger hands her every letter she'd written her husband, unopened.
She buries them away, deep in a box, beneath a photo of the two of them on their wedding day.
Good things never last.
Jean Beazley finally understands this when she sets foot inside the Blake residence for the first time. She doesn't expect she'll be there long, but she's in need of steady employment, and her boys are long gone now.
Doctor Blake is kind, if a little gruff at first, and she enjoys the solitude that the job affords.
He dies, and the grief makes her heart twist unusually.
The young Doctor Blake, Lucien, comes to Ballarat in the autumn, when the fog hangs low and the winds catch her coat and chill her to the bone.
Lucien is rude, bullheaded, and she'd like to tell him as much, but she hears him crying in the night, long after she's meant to be asleep.
She thinks that perhaps he has his own demons to face.
Later in the mornings, when he steps out for police business, Jean picks out dozens of bottles, all empty, from the drawer of his desk.
Jean bites her tongue, bides her time, and she's not incredibly kind to him— she still thinks him a fool, after all— but she warms his meals, and sometimes waits long into the night for his returns, with a cup of tea and a sympathetic ear.
Perhaps, after all, he could be afforded some affection now and again.
She falls in love with Lucien Blake slowly, so slowly she's not even sure it'd happened at all, not until she's cradled in his arms in the sunroom, and Lucien smells of warmth and whisky and everything that Jean Beazley has ever been afraid of.
He follows her to Adelaide, when she runs away— she runs when she's afraid, she always has, and she knows that she's just as much of a coward as he. She'll look down the sight of a gun, voice hard and firm, hands quivering, for him, to save him, but Jean Beazley has always run away, in the end.
Jean is brave, though, after that.
For the first time in her life, she chooses to be brave.
She stays for him, in the house that she could see as hers, theirs, someday, because she cannot bear but to be anywhere but with him now, and she lets herself dream of a future that is theirs because after all of this, after the war and after everything that they had done and been and said together, they deserve this.
In a moment, a single turn of fate, it all falls apart. Jean finds then, that this is perhaps the cruelest hand fate had dealt her yet.
But, she thinks as she smiles tightly at Lucien's wife, fate has never been kind to her.
Good things never last, after all.
She pulls together what semblance of a life she'd had left, before all of this, before Lucien and fanciful illusions of love and a life together, and moves on as best she can. The way she pours the tea, the way she prepares meals; all of that is changed now, and it's all as it was in the beginning, when he was an angry, sullen man, and she was grief-ridden. Their conversations are stilted and awkward now, stiff in a way they had not been, even before.
Lucien toes the line of propriety, because he is, if nothing else, a gentleman, and he will not drag her through the muck of town gossip. Jean loves him for it and hates him for it all the same.
Jean Beazley leaves his lips stained pink with lipstick in the drive soon after Mei Lin leaves, having murmured promises of a divorce, and perhaps it's too soon, and too much, but she loves him.
Jean meets Lucien at the end of the aisle and at the beginning of their life together wearing pearls and adorned in cream, and he smiles at her as if he's been waiting for her for a lifetime.
Good things never last, but wonderful things are another matter altogether.