Back again! I'm actually fairly pleased with how this one turned out, and I'm sure all you R&S fans will be too :)
Also, when (not if lol) you review, if you've got any interesting prompts you'd like to see written, share them with me. My inspiration train is stopped at the depot and no one's getting on! They can be as vague as "use these words..." or just an actual storyline you'd like to see written. Is it kind of selfish, asking for prompts like that? Probably........... the Scarlett in me is saying "Fiddle-dee-dee" tho... :)
Thanks so much, read and review! ENJOY!! :) :) :)
For a moment, Scarlett was tempted to pretend she hadn't heard anything. The horse was just restless, that was all. She was sure he fidgeted most nights. His whinnying didn't mean that danger was near or that someone was approaching, why that was just--Her heart stopped. Someone had just pounded on the front door.
She waited five seconds. Oh, it was a nightmare, it had to be. She winced as she heard once more the dull thud of a hand on the front door. She sat upright in bed now, heart hammering in her chest. Beside her, Melanie had stirred and looked up weakly.
"Scarlett… what?…"
"Hush, Melly!" Scarlett hissed. She crept out of bed and pulled Charles' pistol out of the top dresser drawer. "Melanie, I want you to stay here," she whispered as she loaded the weapon. "Keep Wade and the girls upstairs. Under no circumstances are you to come down."
"Scarlett, darling, be careful," Melanie whispered fervently, her pale face white with worry.
The knocking had grown louder and it matched the pounding of Scarlett's heart as she alighted down the stairs, pistol clutched tightly in her right hand. Oh God, if it was a Yankee!… He would take everything, everything! Oh, why hadn't she told Melanie and the girls to hide? Hopefully her sisters were blissfully asleep, and if the worst should happen, at least they would die blissfully asleep too.
Scarlett had always prided herself on her steady nerves but as she reached for the door handle with her left hand and cocked the pistol with her right, both hands were shaking so badly that she nearly dropped the gun. Moonlight streamed in through the small crack created by the open door, but it was still too dark to discern who stood on the front porch and whether they were friend or foe.
"Hello?" she asked in a small, quavering voice that was not her own. She cleared her throat and tried again. "I swear, if it's you Yankees again, there's nothing here! You've taken everything the first two times you were here!" As her eyes adjusted to the darkness, she could faintly make out the outline of a man with broad shoulders.
To her surprise, whoever was on the porch laughed at her remark. "My dear, if I was a Yankee, you would be dead for that."
Scarlett gulped down a sob upon hearing the voice and flung the front door wide. There, standing in the doorway and looking a little worse for wear, was Rhett Butler. For a moment she could do nothing but gape awkwardly in disbelief, but then when he laughed again her anger flared and she lit into him.
"Where do you get the gall to come calling here, Rhett Butler?" she cried, no longer caring if the girls were awake or not. "Leaving me to die out on the road the night Atlanta fell! I'll be damned if I welcome you into this house while I've still got an ounce of life left in me! You're nothing but a rotten, deceitful--oh, what are you laughing at?" she spluttered.
"This is just the sort of welcome I expected from you, my dear, and I'm glad all those nights of picturing this moment have not been in vain. You, Scarlett, never fail to meet my expectations." Rhett articulated all of this with an extremely amused smile painted across his darkened face.
"You cad, I told you I never wanted to see you again, and how dare you try to--"
"Scarlett?" Melanie's weak voice called to her from the top of the stairs.
Scarlett whirled around, slightly embarrassed to know that the conversation had not been private, but more angry at Melanie for not obeying her instructions. "Melly, I thought I told you to stay upstairs. Don't you dare try to come down here, you could slip and fall and then God knows what would ha--"
"Good evening, Mrs. Wilkes," Rhett interrupted, nodding respectfully to Melanie. "I'm glad you survived the ordeal of escaping from Atlanta."
Scarlett was livid with rage. Glad that Melanie had survived? Why, it was a miracle that she, Scarlett, had survived! She'd practically pulled the wagon up the final hill to Tara herself, and here was Rhett commending Melanie's survival. Oh, she wanted to smack him, hit him so hard his head would spin.
Melanie smiled at Rhett's kind words and said, "Scarlett, dear, let Captain Butler inside. I'm sure he must have a perfectly good reason for calling on us at this time of night."
Scarlett hated Melanie's ever-charitable nature now more than ever, but begrudgingly stepped aside and let Rhett in. He moved to wipe his feet, saw that there was no mat on which to do so and stopped.
"Had to burn it as fuel for the fire," Scarlett explained coldly. She turned back to Melanie. "Melly, get back to bed, you'll catch your death walking around at night in that old thing." It was then that Scarlett realized that she herself was wearing nothing but a flimsy summer nightgown, unaccompanied in the presence of a man who was most certainly not her husband, and her cheeks flushed in the moonlight. "And wake Mammy," Scarlett snapped as Melanie disappeared up the stairs. She knew that being rude to everyone didn't do any good, as Gerald had admonished many times before, but it helped to quell her rage somewhat.
She stood alone with Rhett in the hallway, the silence ringing down loudly upon her ears. He would put her in a position like this, abuse the hospitality of the others when he knew damn well that she'd rather see him out on the street than under the roof of Tara. And to come at this hour, when he knew she would be in a socially unacceptable state of dishabille… Yes, it was definitely a typical move. A tiny piece of her had hoped that his brief time with the army would have made him less of a varmint, but all hopes were quelled with her most recent assessment.
"Why did you come here?" she asked suddenly, angrily.
"Well I should have thought that was obvious," Rhett answered. "To check on you and Mrs. Wilkes, to make sure you were all right, that Tara had survived and that everyone was safe."
Scarlett gave an unladylike snort. "Since when has my well-being ever been a priority of yours?"
"It has been for a long time, and a damn time longer than you deserve," Rhett snapped, surprising her. "I've got the decency to come here as soon as the war's over to make sure you're safe. The least you can do is show me a little gratitude."
Scarlett was shocked; she'd never heard him sound so nasty. There wasn't enough time to form a reply in her head before the creaking of the stairs under a heavy weight alerted her of Mammy's arrival.
"So this is the infamiz Cap'n Butler," she said agitatedly, narrowing her eyes in her dark face. "Well, Ah s'pose you'll be wantin' sumthin' to eat, and Ah's a tellin' you now, there ain't nothin' in dis house fit to feed a fam'ly of rabbits."
"That's all right, I'm not hungry," Rhett replied with a smile.
Mammy was annoyed about being woken up in the middle of the night for nothing; she gave a "humph" and waddled back up the stairs, muttering to herself loudly. "Jus' showin' up outta nowhere in the middle o' the night…" Again, Scarlett and Rhett were left alone.
"Well thank you very much for wasting--Oh, Rhett! Your arm!" The quip that had risen to Scarlett's lips was halted when her eyes widened at the sight of a growing splotch of red near Rhett's left shoulder.
Rhett looked down casually and replied, "Oh, that. Not to worry, my dear, it's just a wound that still bleeds from time to time. Nothing to worry about."
"Nothing to worry about?" Scarlett repeated, her voice high-pitched, watching the stain spread as blood dripped down his arm. "What on earth happened, were you shot?"
"No, it was a stab with a bayonet that did it," he answered, watching her green eyes curiously for an explanation of her sudden concern. "Don't think about it."
"Rhett, I won't have you dripping blood all over the floor. Get into the kitchen and we'll find something to clean it up…" As she ushered him to the back of the house, a single drop of his blood fell onto the wood floor of the entry hall, and for a moment Scarlett thought back to that terrible day nearly six months ago when another's blood had stained the floor… when she'd killed the Yankee. "Mustn't think about that now…" she muttered to herself.
"Sit down," she told Rhett absently when they'd reached the kitchen, laying the pistol down on the table. She began looking listlessly through the sparse cabinets for a clean rag, a scrap of linen, something to wrap around the wound and stop the bleeding. Thousands of thoughts circled round and round in her head: Rhett's arrival, the escape from Atlanta, shooting the Yankee, Rhett leaving her at Rough and Ready, hungry mouths to feed, Rhett kissing her with ardor before he left, Tara, Rhett, Melanie, Rhett, food, Rhett… She slammed the cabinet shut forcefully. His return was merely an overload to her senses, she told herself; she wasn't expecting to see him again and here he was, more raggle-taggle than any gypsy she'd heard her father tell stories about. He had obviously tried to shave with a dull blade because a stubbly shadow of dark hair outlined his square jaw; his white shirt was dirtied and bloodied beyond recognition, his once elegant black slacks a muddy brown, but at least he still wore his boots, which was more than could be said for most of the homecoming Confederate army.
Scarlett wetted a limp rag she'd found by the fire and walked back over to Rhett. She stared unblinkingly at him for a few moments, and when he didn't move to expose his wound, she said coldly, "Well do you want to bleed to death or what?"
"And what a lovely death it would be if you were my last sight in this life, my dear," Rhett said with a cocky smile.
Scarlett glared at him. Oh, how could he make jokes at a time like this? Just as she was about to throw the rag at him in disgust, he held up a hand in protest and began unbuttoning his shirt. Scarlett's nose twitched in annoyance at his childish time-wasting but sighed resignedly and pulled up a chair beside him. Rhett's chest was as dark and smooth as the rest of his skin and speckled with scars. Unbidden, dozens of questions sprung to her mind. How did he get here? Where did he fight? How had he gotten all these scars; were they from previous disagreements? Some looked older than others… She shook her head to clear it and asked the most important one first.
"How did you get here?" And then, with more hope in her voice. "Do you have a horse?" Oh, what they could do with another horse! One could be used in the fields and the other to go to Jonesboro for food and supplies--but her hopes were dashed when Rhett spoke.
"I walked."
She gawked at him. "You what? All the way from--"
"I don't know where… somewhere in Tennessee, most likely. But yes, I walked."
Her head was spinning. Rhett had walked all the way from Tennessee to make sure she was safe… oh, how ridiculous the whole idea was… Scarlett turned her attention to the bayonet wound on his shoulder. It was ragged and bloody, but at least it didn't look like it was infected. She had seen enough gangrene while nursing in Atlanta to be able to tell a clean gash from an unhealthy one. This wound wasn't dirty, but it was deep and blood was seeping out at an alarming rate.
"Does this happen often?" Scarlett asked, mopping away the blood with the rag.
"What, beautiful women tending to my battle scars?" Rhett teased. "Really, Scarlett, I knew I had a reputation but I didn't know it was anything as bad as that."
Scarlett wiped harder and snarled, "You know what I mean."
Rhett gave a short, sad chuckle and shook his head. "It doesn't bleed often, only when it's exerted for a while."
Scarlett felt a tiny pang of guilt in her heart. He'd walked to her from Tennessee and now he was practically bleeding to death in front of her. But, she told herself, he was the one who'd chosen to come here, and all because of his damned guilty conscience. None of this was her fault.
She continued to clean the wound as best she could with the limited number of rags she had, and once the bleeding finally stopped, she tied a scrap piece of linen around his arm as a sort of tourniquet. Giving a satisfied sigh, she sank back in the chair and Rhett slipped his shirt back on, wincing only slightly.
The time she had spent nursing in Atlanta hadn't been a very enjoyable one, but Scarlett did know that cuts like this one only became worse if they were dirtied again. And here was Rhett, putting on the same shirt he'd been wearing for eight months… the damned fool was going to get himself killed. "Oh, don't put that old thing back on," Scarlett snapped. "I'll get one of Pa's shirts for you--" The sentence halted halfway out her mouth. They both knew that Rhett's broad shoulders had no chance of fitting into one of Gerald's little shirts. Her resourceful mind went to the next option. "Oh, here, give it to me, I'll wash it for you."
Rhett smirked as he tossed her his soiled shirt. "A woman to clean me up and do my laundry too. It's what every soldier wants to come home to."
"I don't care at all for your patronizing remarks," she sniffed haughtily, and took Rhett's shirt out on the back porch and doused it in the bucket they used for washing.
Rhett followed her and leaned in the doorway, watching her scrub away the dirt, bathed in moonlight. So much had changed since they'd last seen each other, he realized. Scarlett had become head of house at Tara, in charge of everything from the few darkies to the finances to putting food on the table. She had looked death in the eye and not blinked, he reckoned, on that long road home to Tara. And in the meantime, Rhett himself had seen horrors that kept even him awake at night. They had both changed significantly, grown up a little, but somehow he still loved her.
God damn him, he loved her even more now that she could take care of herself and anyone else. She was still so defiant, so headstrong--and yet there was an air of selflessness about her that he knew she would be mortified to learn she possessed. He had sensed it when she'd sent both Melanie and Mammy back upstairs, assuring them that she could handle everything. He felt it when she had cleaned him up; he felt it now as he watched her wash his shirt in a bucket out on her back porch in the middle of the night wearing her nightgown. It didn't suit her. Here was a woman who was made for finery and coquettishness, not working on a plantation and washing shirts and nursing wounded soldiers. Scarlett, the real Scarlett, the girl before the war, was a dying breed of woman, the kind who in the face of danger wasn't afraid to put herself first and didn't see anything wrong with it. The fact that she'd sacrificed so much made him angry. If he had his way, she'd be up to her elbows in decadence and ruffles and frills--but she didn't want that. Not from him, anyway, he thought bitterly.
But more urgent now in his mind was a question that had been vexing him ever since his arrival at Tara. "Scarlett, when you answered the door you mentioned that the Yankees had already been here twice before."
Her heart thudded in her chest; she was afraid he would mention that, and it was a subject she really didn't feel like discussing, least of all with him. "Yes," she replied calmly, objectively. "I did."
Rhett chuckled inwardly; he should have known that she wouldn't talk about it freely. He tried a different approach. "So, what did they do?"
Scarlett sighed tiredly. Talking about it only made it more real, made it seem like she was admitting defeat. If she verbally acknowledged the fact that the Yankees had left her with absolutely nothing… It was more than she could bear to talk about it so openly, and she told Rhett as much. "Just look around you, that's what they did," she answered simply, bitterly.
"Well did they steal anything?"
"That's not any of your business."
Another thought occurred to him, one that was more alarming than the prospect of her being robbed or looted, and he cursed himself for not asking her the moment he'd arrived. "They didn't hurt you, did they? Touch you?"
Scarlett narrowed her cat-like green eyes at him and hissed, her voice low and dangerous, "That's definitely not any of your business."
Her secretive answer made Rhett all the more annoyed and concerned. "Yes it is, Scarlett, now tell me, did they lay a hand on you?"
"No, all right? No!" she shouted, and that was all he needed to know. He relaxed his tense muscles and leaned back against the doorjamb. A peaceful quietude fell upon them once again and the only sound was Scarlett swishing his dirty shirt around in the washing bucket. After several minutes, she rose and wrung the shirt out.
"We'll leave it out here to dry and then in the morning it'll be good as new. I'm lying in with Melanie so you can have my bed. Upstairs, second on the right." Scarlett's voice had an air of weary authority, as if she knew it was her responsibility to sort all this out and was not comforted by the fact.
"Scarlett," Rhett said quietly, crossing the porch to her. "What are you doing here?"
She looked at him, confused. Wasn't the answer obvious? "Tara is my home, Rhett. It's all I have left and I'll be damned if I let the Yankees take it."
A smile graced his face at her spirit and determination. "And you must be doing quite a good job; it looks like you've got things under control."
"Well I'm glad it looks like that," she replied evasively but tartly. She moved to go back inside to the kitchen but Rhett blocked her way.
"What about the others?"
"What about them?"
"Well aren't they helping you?"
"Fiddle-dee-dee, Rhett! All I've got in this house is three sick girls, three children, an unstable father and four darkies, and you expect them to help me?"
"Don't you?"
"I stopped expecting things from everybody a long time ago," Scarlett countered icily.
Rhett considered many different ways to ask his next question and finally decided on, "What if I told you that you could expect help from me?"
She scoffed. "I wouldn't believe you, and even if I did I wouldn't accept your charity." It was completely untrue; she was absolutely dying for help, but she'd be damned before she let him know that. Oh, how wonderful it would be if she'd really meant those words! How lucky were the rich, those who could turn away offers of assistance and money! Scarlett was also unnerved by the fact that her need for help was so apparent to him. Her head was spinning in anger and confusion… Tomorrow, she told herself wearily.
She tried to move past him into the house again but he grabbed her arm and wrenched her around to face him. "Stop it Scarlett, will you? Stop it!" He was angry now. "I came here to offer to help you get Tara back on its feet and you've sure got a funny way of showing gratitude."
She didn't like seeing him like this and she struggled to get away. "Rhett, I--"
"Look, I know it's been difficult for you, but you've got to know when enough is enough. You need help here, Scarlett, desperately. I know it's got to be hard, with so many mouths to feed and not enough hands to help… I know, Scarlett. Don't think I don't. In the last eight months I've seen things even your nightmares couldn't imagine. In the Confederate Army, the weak outnumbered the strong, the dead bodies outnumbered the able-bodied. Every day I saw men killed before my very eyes, fought men hand-to-hand until I didn't know whose blood was whose anymore--"
"Stop it, I don't want to hear this!" Scarlett cried, squirming to escape his grasp.
"You will hear it, damn it!" Rhett shouted, and then he was kissing her, just as desperately as he had on the night they'd escaped from Atlanta. It was hot and forceful and powerful and stirred within her emotions she didn't want to feel. Scarlett thrashed viciously to get away and when their lips finally parted she shoved him backwards into the kitchen, her heart banging against her ribcage, words coming out in a spluttering rage.
"Get out of here, you… you… scoundrel, you! You haven't got any more decency than a field hand, calling on us in the middle of the night, kissing a woman in her nightgown--!" She stopped, too embarrassed and too outraged to continue.
"I'll kiss you whenever I want, and to hell with what you're wearing," Rhett growled, and she was in his arms again, powerless against his passionate kisses. How did he do this to her, turn her thoughts to nonsense and her resistance to nothing? Why did she feel so safe in his strong bare arms? Maybe it was the comfort of the first useful man she'd spoken to in ages; maybe it was the fact that he was right, that they'd both been through hell and needed each other; maybe it was the moonlight that bewitched her so. But something made her kiss Rhett Butler back with enthusiasm and longing and wantonness.
She felt his large hands at her waist through the thin material of her nightgown, holding her in place, grounding her to sanity. Slowly her arms encircled his neck and his hot breath tickled her ear. Scarlett wanted to remain cinched forever in this tight embrace, away from all her trials, but they bumped into the kitchen table in their desperate caresses and were jerked apart. She let out a little yelp into Rhett's mouth and they grimaced at each other, a little embarrassed for their clumsiness.
Scarlett understood with a heavy heart that the moment was gone, over, done. "Thank you, Rhett," she whispered quietly, and turned to go.
But his voice was in her ear, his hand gripped a fistful of her long black hair and his arm snaked around her middle possessively, protectively. She feared her knees would buckle. "Don't you want to forget? Escape all the problems? Look at me, Scarlett."
She let out a weak moan as his tongue flicked into the delicate hollow of her collarbone. "Oh, Rhett, I do want to forget it all. I want to forget everything. I want to get lost somewhere and never find my way back. I want…"
Then the world was a blur of sticky lips, frantic thrusts, stifled gasps, muffled moans and complete release as colors spun in and out of focus and the room seemed to shake before her eyes…
…"Scarlett! Scarlett!" It was Melanie's trembling hands and worried whisper that woke her.
She sat up with a start, looking around wildly. There was no Rhett, no shirt drying out on the back porch, no horse crying outside… Scarlett let her head sink back down to the pillow.
A dream.
Her stomach twisted sickeningly.
It had all been a dream.
"Are you all right, dear?" Melanie asked, her brow creased in confusion. "I heard you calling out, I couldn't understand what you were saying."
Thank Heaven for that, Scarlett thought. "I'm fine, Melly, just another nightmare." She tried to steady her ragged breathing.
"You're sure you're all right?"
"Yes, you silly goose, I'm fine," she snapped, and Melanie lay back down and was asleep again in seconds.
But Scarlett was wide awake. Oh, a dream, a dream, a dream! She didn't want to believe it. It had all been so real, escape had been within her grasp… and in the end it was only a dream! Hot tears pricked at the corners of her eyes. It wasn't fair to be taunted so. And now she would have even more trouble going to sleep than before. For she found lately that a fewer number of her sleeping hours were consumed by mist, and more and more of her thoughts and dreams were spent with Rhett Butler.