This story was inspired by "If I Could", as performed by Barbra Streisand. It is my view of what might have happened after Agathe's death. Don't ask me why this came out like it did, but it just did. The quote referenced is from Pedro Calderón de la Barca (1600-1681). The Sound of Music belongs to Twentieth Century Fox, no copyright infringement is intended, etc., etc.

If I Could

Tightening the knot in his tie, Georg's fingers worked through the movements without a thought, the smooth fabric slipping across his skin easily. The breeze that passed through the window of his bedroom, opened to the morning air, was cooler than he would expect in March. Two weeks ago, no matter what the temperature, that window would have been closed; Agathe had a tendency to be cold even through April. Reaching to the chair just to his left, he took hold of his suit coat and tugged it over his shoulders, buttoning it swiftly, hardly feeling the cool metal between his fingers. He did not bother to glance in the mirror, for what would he see but himself?

The villa was quiet as it always was in the mornings now, the sounds of his children's voices subdued, their words whispered, eyes glancing to him darkly if he should enter the same room. But a month ago, Liesl and Friedrich would have been running about even in the February chill, laughing as Louisa tagged after them, her energy more than a supplement enough for her shorter legs and smaller strides.

He had not seen their games for weeks, now. Well, now is hardly a time for games, is it? Georg thought, tugging on the knot of his tie once more, pulling it straight. Not since—

He drew a quick breath. He would not, could not think about that. Useless wishes, that was all those thoughts would bring. Dreams of what might have been, what should have been if not for illness and a god that seemed absent more often than not. If He had only known, Georg thought, crossing the carpet towards the door, there is no chance that He could have done—

Pulling the door open, he paused, hearing that sentence finished in his head.

—what He did.

"Not that," Georg whispered, leaning his forehead against the heavy wood of the door, pushing it closed again. It might be one thing to consider God absent, even the possibility that he was abandoned, but to let the idea that the Almighty had done this terrible thing...He could have nothing to do with such a god, yet to set himself against such a power was to be completely alone.

And to be alone now of all times...

Lifting his face, he turned his face over his shoulder, towards the cool breeze that still drifted through the open window and ruffled the ornate draperies about the deep wooden frame. You should close that, he thought. Taking his hand from the door knob, he turned on the heel of his polished boot and walked quickly across the room. His arm was easily long enough to seize the handle of the window and draw it closed, hooking the latch with a quick motion as the pane swung into place. Not a ray of sunshine broke through the thick glass before his face; the whole of the sky was layered by gray clouds, clouds that threatened rain despite the early hour.

Yes, just a month earlier, perhaps even Kurt and Brigitta would have been tagging after Liesl, Friedrich, and Louisa. Marta would have been sitting inside with Gretl, quiet as the youngest child giggled incessantly. It is what they deserve. More than anything—more than his own life, more than anything on earth—he loved his children, and more than anything else, he wished that they be given what was rightfully theirs. Liesl was but a girl of twelve, still a child, and should have been playing games, or teasing her younger siblings for a moment, offering a hug the next. Now she dried the tears that he could not.

Not a care in the world, just playing as children were meant to, perhaps coming in after the rain had broken loose from the thunderheads above, every one drenched and laughing, pushing sopping hair from their faces—that should have been the children's morning. Agathe would be clutching Marta, her brow furrowed and muttering words about colds and influenza. And himself, scolding each of them as he struggled against his laughter, finally swinging Brigitta up in his arms, laughing with his children as his shirt and jacket were quickly as soaked as his children.

But those days were gone. Laughter had for some time been absent from the house, its halls now filled with deafening silence that was only broken by the pounding of spring rains, or the occasional overhead assault of a thunderstorm. Now the rains had come this morning, just beginning to fall from the clouds above and drumming on the roof, running along the panes of glass before his face and darkening the world that lay before him: the grass just taking its green color back from the brown death it had endured beneath the snows of winter, the blue waters of the lake pummeled by the droplets of rain—just a month before, perhaps less, the entire body had been covered with a thin, pale skin of ice—and the gnarled trees, branches still bare, but the traces of buds beginning to burst forward.

Life was coming back from its sleep through winter, awakening to a world as wonderful as the one it had left in the autumn. Wonderful for some, he thought, reaching for the draperies on either side of the window. He wrenched them across the rod harshly, the deep red fabric fluttering before his face as the panels met before his eyes. He needed, he wanted no reminders of what he had lost, of the loving mother his children would never again embrace, the mother who would never wipe away tears from a scraped knee.

Louisa's smile had never been more absent, Friedrich's outlandish stories never so silent, and Brigitta's face, already so often hidden behind the spines of books thicker than any child her age should have been reading, was seldom seen. But perhaps for her, the grief was easier, simpler that way, to bury herself in a world that would ever remain constant, familiar each time she returned to it.

But how would a six year-old grieve, he asked himself. A six year-old could hardly know the meaning of death, the biting emptiness it brought him day in and day out, as if a knife had been thrust harshly into his ribs, never to be removed—only twisted. Marta and Gretl, though, they could have no memories of the woman who had given them life; surely it would be easier that way, he told himself as he stepped back from the window, turning to the door once again.

That face in the mirror, though, just a flash in the glass as he turned—it caught him, held him. Powerful bones beneath the skin, deep blue eyes set far back in the face, dark hair just tinged with gray at the temples—and nothing but emptiness gazing back. For there were circles beneath the eyes, reminders of the sleep that had been impossible to find for days at a time; no expression came across that face, as though the heart that must have once beat within had ceased its task.

Could that truly be—him? That blankness that seemed to fill the entire structure of the face, that surely flowed in the veins of that body...And yet not merely a body, but a spirit as well, a soul already adjusted to solitude and silence.

Stop, he thought, continuing his walk to the door once more. Will you try to make an utter fool of yourself? Nothing is the same—and it never will be again, without her. You know it—and nearly every one of your children knows it as well. "God," he whispered, the word a curse on his tongue. It wasn't fair—no, damn it, it wasn't right!

To complain about fairness was the place of children, but to be right, to be wrong, that was broader. Nothing was clearer. His days in the navy had taught him that much: whether or not it was fair that they huddled in their coats in the midst of the vast ocean that spread on in every direction farther than the eye could see was never questioned, but whether for them to be there was right or not...Therein lay the question.

Because it had certainly not been fair, that Georg had decided after but a few days into his time within the military: removed from family and friends, and all familiar surroundings. Yet whether it was right: he never pretended to himself that he had answered that question. But for God to have taken her from him, from them all—that he could answer with ease.

Georg stood at the door once more, that last shield between himself and them. Living emblems of the treasure he had lost—living, breathing reminders of her. Damn them all, every single one! he thought, his hand curling to a fist. Perhaps they had been a source of joy once, all they could be now was that same pain that had threatened to tear his heart in two the morning after—

Don't think about that, he said to himself, running his hand over his face. Don't remember that. Can she truly have wished for—

But then again, what good were the memories? Another ounce of pain to numb, another hour that he lay awake, almost fearful of the sleep that eluded him; he could never escape those memories in his dreams. Only when awake was he free from her, and even then, there they were, another cut across his heart. Liesl's face, so very much like her mother's, Brigitta's wit and intelligence, and where else was he accustomed to seeing Gretl but on Agathe's knee? And they ached as much as he did, every moment of every day. God only knew he would do something—anything!—to give her back to them.

"Yet such is the futility of dreams," he said, dropping his hand to the door knob another time. "I might as well chase the wind." Or happiness.

That...What was it, he had read it years prior, just that thought seemed to call to those words he could not find. Pulling the door open and stepping through, the words slipped upwards in his mind, the final phrase seeping through his memory as the handle fell in place, closed. For this I have come to know, that all human happiness finally ceases, like a dream.

And why chase it, if failure was certain? Only a fool set after what was unattainable. "I am no fool," he said to himself, his feet treading that familiar path along the hall from his rooms to the staircase into the foyer. There was nothing he could do, no words he could speak to ease the grief, to lessen the pain. If he could, he would take every ache of their mother's death from them and bear it himself. But he could not. Against their pain—against his own, even—he was powerless.

Merely that thought was enough to raise the anger within him once again. He despised weakness in all its forms, in weeping, in long stares that seemed to wish for the past, all the things the war had deadened in him. A sailor had no time to mourn for the men whose ship he had just sunk, whose duty was the same as his own: to serve the country that had made its call upon him.

He would not be weak, would not succumb, not even to grieve.

A/N: Republished April, 2017.