A/N: Basically, this is what happens when I listen to "Stubborn Love" by The Lumineers on repeat for an entire afternoon. (Literally an entire afternoon. Like five hours straight.)
The title is from a Pablo Neruda poem, in case anyone is wondering.
It is only three months post-abandonment when Rhett first returns to the Peachtree mansion and announces, "I'm home," in a halfhearted, tired way. He watches as Scarlett's face flashes expectation and hope before shaking his head. He feels a modicum of respect when the disappointment plays only in her eyes, not on her lips.
Scarlett does her hair and their banter over dinner is forced, at best. Neither of them wants to broach the questions they should really be asking: how are you, how's your life, can we ever overcome this chasm that spans between us? Each silence is accented by the clink of a glass (don't drink alone, people always find out). Wade and Ella dance circles around their stepfather as if he is the second coming. So does Mammy, but in a more subdued way, her eyes cautious even as she pours Rhett his third glass of wine.
He stays for a day and a half before running, tail between his legs to the shipyards of Charleston, then Europe. He doesn't love this woman, he reminds himself. He doesn't love her and he doesn't love anyone, not anymore. How could he when his heart is buried down the road, six feet deep?
Scarlett stays in Atlanta and wanders the hallways of her house like a ghost, lonely phantom in lonely wings, dust and silence and stillness. She can overcome this love, she tells herself. She has done it before. Who is Rhett Butler to her, anyway, but a nasty man who got what he wanted and threw it back in her face?
Each night, she touches her lips to his bedroom door and then to Bonnie's, silent prayers and silent hopes that may never come true. The wood is as cold as she is, still as the night is young. They were all young once. Young and foolish with nothing but love in their hearts, shielded by walls of fear and hatred and too many mouths to feed. There are always too many mouths. Babies' mouths, servants' mouths, lovers' mouths, mouths of the old and young and infirmed. Mouths crying out to her, hungry and tired, crying for salvation. Whores' mouths with their wicked tongues that tell the story of her indiscretions, the Devil's hold on her heart. Mouths upon mouths and never the one she wants. Nothing has ever been about what she wants.
What does she want?
Rather than sit idly by while Rhett Butler kisses unnamed women in unnamed places, Scarlett returns to Tara and picks cotton like she did when she was a child. Inaction has never fit her quite right and she tries to gain clarity in those endless fields of white, unending sameness. A reminder of how far she's come. Suellen mocks her, but Will watches from the porch in that knowing way that's endeared him to her for the past lifetime. Will, with his understanding eyes and quiet strength. The brother she never had.
One night when Suellen is laid up in bed from the latest Benteen pregnancy and Scarlett has drunk a little too much, she kisses him.
"Will, I should have married you. You treat me better than any man I've known," she says lamely, inches from his face.
"Perhaps, Miss Scarlett," he mumbles, before helping her up the stairs.
Scarlett has an unhealthy habit of stealing beaux and perhaps an even unhealthier obsession with other women's husbands. She has always wanted what she could not have; maybe that has been the problem. Lost causes and all that nonsense Rhett claimed to believe once, when he was young. They were young. Everyone was so young and now they're gone, or old and broken and sometimes Scarlett feels like she's the only one left who understands that. Death has hovered around her for so long that it hardly seems tragic anymore, but for all her coping the pain still piles up like mountains on her sturdy heart. She keeps a list of names hidden in her corset, right underneath her breast: Melanie, Pa, Mother, Frank, Charles, Stuart and Brent, Thomas, Boyd, Cade, her three brothers, Tommy Welburn, her unborn child, Bonnie... It's a list a mile long of everyone she used to know, but doesn't anymore. Thirty three names on a dirty yellow piece of paper kept close to her breast, so close that not even Mammy or Rhett ever knew about it. No one ever knows about it; no one ever knows her pain as much as they don't realize her strength. No one but Scarlett, the dead, and God know. Her closest companions are phantoms on the ceiling, lingering around her head like the wasted years of her youth, a dozen black dresses draped in black crepe. Bonnie stares at her from the ceiling, her cheshire cat's grin never leaving her precious, porcelain face and Scarlett wonders if they can ever be that happy again.
In the morning, Will and Scarlett don't talk about her slip, or the fact that he is the first man who has never kissed her back. Will, so kind and understanding, who wouldn't let Scarlett watch her pa lowered into the ground all those years ago. Her brother-in-law and nothing more.
"He's too good for you," Scarlett thinks to herself, "that's why you never married him."
Her heart aches for Rhett.
Paris is cold in winter, but that is to be expected. Rhett wanders down the Rue de la Paix, meanders up to Montmartre. He wonders at the painters who inhabit the Place du Tertre: Renoir, Degas, countless others trying to stake out a name in a sea of acrylics.
At a cafe along the Champs-Elysees, he meets a woman with green eyes and pretends love for an afternoon. He invents the who and when and why of an imagined life that could have been, but wasn't and will not be. Rhett paints the stars on all the unfinished skies of his future and thinks that maybe this place will be good, this time, these women. Maybe forgetting is a simple replacing of details, a quick swatch of paint over the blemishes of what is now past. His heart bleeds red for a moment or two in the arms of another; his soul spilled out onto the floor of his hotel room.
Then one day, Paris is dark, it is damp, and nothing of life holds any charm anymore. So he moves on: first to Spain, then Greece, then Turkey with its mosques and nothing looks as it did in Atlanta. Each place a different hotel, different curiosities, different women, different names. He drinks from the cup of adventure and rides camels to Jerusalem and the Dead Sea. Jesus walked here once and isn't that incredible? His guide thinks so and maybe Rhett does, deep down, because he is struck with an awe that makes him feel small and insignificant. A small blip on the timeline of history. What is life but a trivial sequence of events in a larger plot anyhow? Meaning is meaningless, except in the palms of a self-made man, one with ambition enough to seize opportunity when it's staring him in the face.
Bonnie is staring him in the face everywhere, all the time. He thought that maybe if he went to the ends of the earth that the pain would subside, but it hasn't. He could no sooner forget his daughter than he could forget himself, though arguably he has done just that. When he examines his life nowadays it is with Bonnie's eyes, scrutinizing and suspicious. Who is this man who rides camels through deserts and cares nothing about the life he once claimed to want? Rhett doesn't know the answer, only that he misses his daughter with an intensity that may never abate no matter the distance between his body and that grave.
And then one morning Rhett rolls over, looks at his pocket watch, and realizes with a startling clarity that he misses his wife. Bonnie's shadow hangs over his shoulder, watching, waiting, and there's a bitterness to his morning coffee that can only be his guilt, personified. Scoundrels, both of them, but Rhett is beginning to think he has never looked anyone in the eyes the way Scarlett has and maybe, just maybe, there could be something left of charm and grace in that.
It rains the day Rhett once again returns to the Peachtree mansion. He's tired, cold, and self conscious as Scarlett stares at him peculiarly from the top of the staircase (like she did once before on those steps, toes perched precariously on the unknown precipice of their swift demise). He meets her halfway and places his palm to her throat, wonders if this will be the first in a series of surreptitious touches, or maybe the last. Scarlett swallows hard and looks at him with those beautiful green eyes and he has missed this, somehow. He doesn't know how or why, only that it is an inescapable fact. He has missed this woman and the way his heart felt beating through his chest. The way she breathes life into his collapsing lungs.
He kisses her softly on the staircase where one child died and the other one lived. And here they are, Scarlett and Rhett, living. They are alive. They are alive and in each others' arms on the staircase where so many things ended that maybe it's time they give it a chance at a beginning. Maybe it's time they give each other a chance.
"I'm home," he whispers softly into her hair. Scarlett chokes out a laugh that turns into a sob and digs her nails into his shirt. She has missed this too.
Rebuilding a life proves more difficult than recapturing the romance of a lifetime.
Every now and then Scarlett recounts some memory of Bonnie (a dress, a pout, a laugh) and Rhett stares blankly out the window, lost, alone, as Scarlett feels in these moments. And then suddenly he will snap back to himself and add his own recollections. He confirms the memory that their daughter was a living, breathing person who brought joy to their lives and not just the chains wrapped around their throats, the weight of all past time. They had two children once, for a brief moment. Two children: two small, black ribbons tied around their wrists, knotted in the space between their bodies. A thread that cannot be undone.
Everything hurts, but everything is beginning to hurt less.
Scarlett lets Rhett redecorate the parlor. Rhett asks her opinion on furniture placement, but nothing more. They smile and wrap arms around waists when guests compliment them on the change, the muted whites and beige that feel so out of place in the rest of the darkly colored house.
"It was my husband's idea," Scarlett says with a smile.
"Ah, but it was my wife who financed the whole thing," Rhett grins, the devil in his eyes.
He kisses her at night with a tenderness foreign to them, rekindling the spark of what once was. They broach the questions they should really be asking: how are you, how's your life, what can we do to fix this and carry on? Every word, a wooden plank placed on the ropes tied between two hearts, a bridge they are building from distant cliffs. Scarlett waves frantically from her's, Rhett increases in urgency with each plank placed, each nail reinforced. Scarlett builds halfway. Rhett builds halfway. There's an uncertainty as to how they go about connecting the two sides. Fear of collapse. There's a want, too, though. A feeling building between them that cannot be denied, like Aristophanes' two halves desperately seeking their whole. Desperately seeking love.
Then one morning, as the sun breaks through the jungle mist, Scarlett O'Hara sets down her hammer and steps over the threshold of their long sought middle.
"I don't believe in soulmates," she tells him. Rhett is taken aback. "If we had never met - if you hadn't shown up with Frank that day at Twelve Oaks, if I had married one of the Tarleton twins, if the war had not happened - we could have been happy without one another, maybe even happier. It isn't fate that keeps us here."
Rhett stares at her, quietly perplexed, because what could be a better indicator of fate than the two of them sitting across from each other, sharing breakfast like civilized human beings? Rhett has always been a believer in making your own way, but nothing about this love has felt anything but predestined. He was made to love this woman. He has always firmly believed that. He is a man who doesn't believe in fate and yet cannot trust in anything but. The romantic who mocks anything of romance.
"Fate implies some inevitability," Scarlett continues, "it implies we don't have a choice. I have a choice, Rhett Butler, and so do you. We make choices in our lives and despite the overwhelming pain that fills this house, we still choose each other. I still choose you. And doesn't that mean more than if God had willed it? I could have been happier, I still could, but I don't want that. I just want you."
Scarlett wraps a hand around his forearm, her words hanging in the air like icicles from the roof. Profundity hidden in the unanalytical head of his wife, espoused by her lips, encased in his heart. His heart and her's and Bonnie's grave only a few miles away, but somehow light springs to his eyes and it doesn't feel as sacrilege as it did before. The soothing ministrations of Scarlett's fingers tugging at his soul.
Love.
Rhett ruffles his newspaper nonchalantly, eyeing the headlines. Rain in the forecast, but a lot of clear days, too. Scarlett's hammer lays idly on the bridge; Rhett breathes in deep and leans down to pick it up.
"Would you like to visit New Orleans again?" he asks suddenly.
Scarlett stares at him for a moment, takes a bite out of her toast and simply replies, "yes."