Thank you for checking out my story! :)
Please remember that this story is AU, set in our world. In order to avoid any weirdness from this pairing, let's just pretend that Audrey is a few years older than she is in the movie.
The Onceler family mansion was silent and empty. The sun beamed into open windows, illuminating every lavish hallway and showing them to be in an extreme state of disarray. Furniture was moved around, and boxes were piled up on the floor. Vases were missing from the tops of desks and picture frames had been taken down off the walls. Outside, the grass was trampled and browned in the empty space where the family's fleet of luxury cars had used to be parked. Tire tracks were burned into the driveway that led through the fields and down to the road, and the dust from the passing cars had long ago settled. The fields were empty as well, full of yellowed leaves and twisted, pulpy fruit unfit for human consumption. Even throughout this vast expanse of land, the bright sun caught no movement. The only sounds came from the front stairway of the Onceler mansion, where a lanky figure dressed in a casual suit and a bowler hat was sitting on the bottom step, hunched over and sobbing softly into his hands.
He didn't blame the field workers or the manor servants for leaving. They had no obligation to him except through their contracts of employment. If there was no more money to pay them, then there was no more employment and thus no reason for them to stay. He didn't even blame Aloysius O'Hare, his business partner, for pulling out before his losses became as staggering as his own had become. He had always known that the short man with the strangely aligned hair and insincere smile was only in it for the money. But his family's leaving had left him weak with grief and shock. He had done everything for them. He had built this entire corporate empire out of absolutely nothing in order to prove that he was not the failure they had predicted him to be. He had brought them from the miserable depths of poverty to the wildest heights of wealth, and he had asked only for their approval in return. Which they had given readily when things were going well. But as soon as the bubble popped and the fall began, so fast and sudden that he was still reeling from it, they had packed up and moved on without so much as a backward glance. While he had been making phone calls and pleading with investors, his mother, brothers, aunt, and uncle had been raiding the manor, packing together all the expensive and portable things they could find in order to sell them later on. He had been too numb to stop them. And that wasn't the worst thing. As she looked out across the acres and acres of yellowed, useless strawberry fields, his mother had said that she was disappointed- disappointed in him! She had insisted that he ought to have known better, and then declared that Bret (or Chet; she probably didn't even know which twin was which,) was now her favorite son. Then she'd climbed into the loaded fleet of cars with the rest of the family and zoomed off down the road, leaving her youngest son standing alone in front of a vacant house with the weight of a failing empire upon him.
They had not been saints; they had not been perfect. But they were all that he had, and he'd been happy back when he'd been able to make them happy. He had liked the idea that he was the best out of all of them, the gifted son leading them to the pinnacle of success and fortune. But even as he'd grown stronger and bigger and ever more influential, he'd always expected his family to be there for him if any moments of weakness suddenly arose. After all, hadn't he given them everything? Hadn't he? And this was so much more than a simple moment of weakness. This was disaster; this was his kingdom crumbling around him; this was the depths of despair. And in this the truth had come out. Now that he was no longer useful to his family as a source of riches, they had cut their losses and left him all alone. His sobs became louder and more shuddering as the emptiness of the house bore down upon him. He felt like a child lost in the woods after dark. Every memory pained him. Every thought seemed to cut into him.
How had he ended up like this?
In a way, it would be all too easy to blame his associate. After all, O'Hare had been the one who had convinced him to approve the use of the new pesticide on his crops. The short man had argued that since strawberries grew very low to the ground, they were more accessible to insects and rot, leading to massive losses each season in fruit that became inedible before the harvesters could get to it. With the use of the new pesticide agent, the bugs had been driven away and they had seen a more than 40% increase in product yield from the fields. For five years, berry farming had been like a dream. The Onceler did not actually know much about what was in the pesticides. His portion of their partnership involved managing the profits and other corporate aspects of the business; sales promotion, investing, stocks, and the like. O'Hare had been in charge of managing the fields and ensuring product quality. The strawberries had come up from the fields fresher, less damaged, and in much greater quantities. As demand increased, they had been able to raise the prices as well, and the incoming flow of wealth had brought them to greater and greater prominence in the business world. They had been one of the largest corporate farms and the biggest supplier of strawberries to almost every store in the country. He'd thought that Onceler Fields could never fail.
But that wasn't the whole story. Something had been wrong with the pesticides. Maybe it was the chemicals themselves, maybe they had used too great an amount on the plants, or perhaps they had sprayed them too relentlessly without allowing the land to rest in between seasons. Whatever it was, the land had reached a tipping point in the sixth year. From the time that the strawberry plants had first begun to grow in the spring, a million problems had grown up alongside them like weeds. The pesticides had affected both the root and shoot development of the plants, hindering their overall growth. The soil could not retain as much water as it used to, and the runoff could not be collected and used to re-irrigate the land anymore; it was sick with chemicals. The bee colonies had stopped coming to pollinate the plants, costing the farm thousands. Some plants had stopped producing altogether; the strawberries which did grow out of the stems of the stunted plants were small and spongy. Aside from that, there were now groups of environmental activists and public health officials declaring that the produce from his lands contained dangerously high levels of chemical residue, and was not healthy for public consumption. Of course, he had mobilized his PR campaign to fight these accusations, but it was a losing battle. Sales had been driven way down, and lawsuits had been filed. His company was bleeding out money faster than the strawberries in the now-empty fields were bleeding out their juices under the hot summer sun. When it had all come to a head, O'Hare had bailed out with the majority of his finances still intact, and left his partner, the official owner of the lands and frontman of the company, to take the fall all the way to the bottom. Only now did the Onceler realize that the older man had used him- his impetuous desires, his youthful fearlessness, his drive to push the boundaries of what was advisable- to fill his own purse while the company was up. He had probably always known that it was going to crash. Yet even though the Onceler would have gladly welcomed the opportunity to pin his painful failures on O'Hare, he knew deep in his heart that the real fault lay no further than his own nose. He had been too trusting, too foolish, too giddy with wealth and flush with success to look deeper. He had not considered that the long-term effects of using the pesticides might be vastly different than the short-term benefits. He had not bothered to know the things which he'd had a responsibility to be aware of, about the pesticides and about O'Hare. And now he was paying for his stupidity ten times over.
It would not have been as big a problem if the effects of the pesticides upon the land could be easily eradicated. If all they had to do was stop spraying the crops and wait a few years for the chemicals to wash out of the dirt, his investors would not have left him and his company would still be alive. But the problem was much, much worse than that. The pesticides had stripped the organic matter from the soil, meaning that the chemicals would not be quickly broken down and flushed out. They could linger in the land for decades, affecting the quality of the soil and contaminating any food that grew there. The land had been used to the maximum, and now it could be used no longer. He was living in the middle of a dead, depleted earth, and it was all his doing.
He suddenly didn't want to be in the house anymore. He wanted to walk out the open door, through the empty fields, past the end of his property, miles and miles away. He wanted to walk all the way to the ocean, board a ship bound for some foreign country and start over, re-make himself with nothing but the clothes on his back and the gloves on his hands. He had done it once before; he could do it again. But the Onceler knew that he could not walk all the way to the ocean. Even if he could, it would be naïve to think that he could get away that easily. News stations were no doubt fervently covering the epic downfall of his company at this very moment. The entire town that lay just west of Onceler Fields was in a panic about it. Creditors would be coming after him to strip him of the last material remnants of his former life of leisure in order to pay off their bills. He was not free as he had been when he had first come to this valley. His life was now tied to his failures, and he couldn't see any way out.
A faint rustle at the end of the hallway that led to the east wing caused him to start and look up. There was someone still here? Immediately, his eyes caught onto a blaze of incandescent orange, lit up by the sunlight streaming in through the windows. The orange blaze belonged to the hair of a girl in a yellow-and-green patched dress who was standing down at the end of the hallway, looking directly at him with an unfathomable expression on her face. She was no one he had ever seen before, probably a few years his junior, with wide green eyes and a sun hat pressed underneath her arm. The Onceler straightened up and wiped his eyes, pained at the realization that she had probably seen him crying. He wanted to maintain at least a small portion of his dignity while others were watching.
She approached him hesitantly, her small feet padding noiselessly over the carpet. "Mr. Onceler….?"
He sniffled and turned his face away. "The door's right there. You can take whatever you want from the manor. I don't care."
She did not turn in the direction his finger was pointing. She continued to stand silently in front of him, her eyes vast and troubled, like a passerby observing the scene of a deadly car wreck. He drew a deep sigh and stood up, towering over her. "Look, you ought to just go. You're the last one here. All the cars have gone, but if you start walking right now, you should be able to make it into town by sundown. You'll have to find a new job now. The strawberry fields are dead. I'm s-sorry, but whatever kind of life you've had here is over."
He leaned weakly against the wall as he uttered this last statement, gazing out the door and across the fields which should have been a healthy green, but were instead a sickly yellow, like legal notepaper. The girl turned around to look at them too, and for a long while it was silent. The phrase too big to fail kept running thoughtlessly through his mind like an unholy mantra. The air from the fields tasted strange in his throat as it washed through the front door. He coughed roughly.
The girl pivoted and gazed at him directly once again. "Mr. Onceler, you should really go and lie down in bed."
He coughed again, and nodded vaguely. "Bed…..yes. Yes, I think I will." Fumbling with the banister, he dragged himself up the stairs, shoulders drooping and head hanging low. At the top, he paused for a moment to look back down at the girl, with the hazy idea that he ought to say something to her. She was standing still at the bottom of the stairway, patiently watching his retreating form. She would no doubt leave while he slept; he did not care what items she took with her. Everything in this house was a reminder of what had been and could be no longer. Saying nothing, the Onceler turned his back and ducked underneath the arch that led into the manor's private hallways. He leaned his hand against the walls as he made his way back to his bedroom and slipped in through the double doors. He strode through the lavish room and immediately went to his medicine cabinet, drawing out a bottle of sleeping pills. He located a glass of water and gulped down as many capsules as he could safely swallow without risking his life. Normally, he did not like relying on synthetic products to keep him awake or cause him to sleep, but this was an emergency. There was nothing he wanted so much in the world as to separate himself from the bleak and miserable nightmare his reality had become. He yanked the curtains closed and took off his hat and vest, allowing himself to fall backward onto his quilted sheets. The last thing he remembered was that their softness repulsed him. They hadn't ought to be so soft, they were taunting him, reminding him of gentle days gone away…. And then he was asleep, and in his dream he thought he heard the sounds of music and a lively party going on downstairs. He rose up out of his bed and went to join them; but no matter how many doors he opened or hallways he travelled down, he could not reach the location of the happy voices, and he was left standing out alone in an endless corridor.