Weak
By: 1000th Ghost
I am a weak man.
I possess more affluence than anyone I personally have ever come into contact with.
I was a successful blockade runner with little care as to which side was hurting from my efforts.
I survived imprisonment - not to mention a death sentence - and even befriended my jailers.
And Scarlett. I got her. It took me longer than I would have liked, admittedly, but eventually she was mine. And, in what has been perhaps my most impressive feat, I used nothing but brute strength and incredibly seductive prowess (you think I am exaggerating? you think I am pretentious? no, I don't believe that you do) to force her to willingly succumb.
I am a weak man.
I am weak because, for all my many skills, for all my endurance, for all my ability to charm almost anyone into doing what I wish them to, Scarlett still controls me. That fiery brunette has had a hold of my heart (not to mention another organ) since the moment I first spied her, and she stubbornly has not let go. Of course, I love her cursed stubbornness. That's all she is, really: a bundle of stubbornness with a seventeen inch waist.
When I told her that I did not give a damn, I do believe that I meant it. For exactly the amount of time it took to utter the sentence, and maybe for about five seconds after that, I truly couldn't have cared less what happened to that insufferable girl. But after that heated moment of enraged apathy had passed, after I had stepped into the swirling fog alone - and how alone I was! - my thoughts immediately went back to her. Because I am weak.
My heart suddenly had the audacity to remind me that she loved me and that she loved me fully and me only, as I had wasted my life wishing that she would. Then my heart triggered my brain into thinking that if I would just turn around, stop this ridiculous journey of escape, run back to my tormentor, that I would have everything I had ever wanted. I can't think of any man, weak or strong, who would deny everything he had ever wanted. Giving into my desires is not what makes me weak.
No, what makes me weak, I knew, as I spun on my heel and started back down the same path in the opposite direction, is that, even if I had stuck to my brief moment of strength and left her for good, she would have gotten me back. My Scarlett is stubborn, and her Rhett is weak.