Ah, I haven't updated this series for quite a while! Oh, poor neglected series of mine... it's taking me much longer to finish it than I could have ever anticipated. (Damn graduate school... that's at the root of most of my problems.)

But in any case, thanks again to all the fabulous reviewers who have been keeping me hooked on writing this, especially my lovely friend Idle Writer of Crack, who tickled me pink by going on a reviewing streak and making me the happiest writer in all the fandom. And thanks again goes to Dream's Sister and Elisabeth Harker for helping me figure out how to write this very, very tricky part. You and all my other readers are angels, surely.

Title: 20 Different Ways to Leap Through the Minuet, Part 10/20
Fandom: Little Women
Series: 20 Different Ways to Leap Through the Minuet
Characters/Pairings: Jo/Laurie, Cast
Rating: R for allusions to sexual content
Summary: He has always know that she would be his downfall one of these days; he simply hadn't understood how deeply strange would be the attending circumstances. 20 different looks into Jo, Laurie, and the marriage that could have been.

10.

She is more of a puzzle than anything presented by a Theban Sphinx, more difficult and more rare. It's work to love her, work to live with her, work to know that she is brilliant and he ought not be jealous of the other helpmates that she has. Yet, things are easier as well, with his confession and with her benediction, with the way they both strive hard to learn and look and understand.

And in any case, Jo gives him more than enough incentive to keep on working hard to keep her hand.

"I figure," she says one lazy afternoon on Sunday, in bed, "that if our marriage doesn't work out, I'll simply have to make sure Marmee never finds out. I'm assuming you'll be open to faking your own end?"

He looks up from the crook of her shoulder, still a little dazed from their connubial pleasures, a soft smile playing about still swollen lips. "You've got a very strange idea of pillow-talk, don't you, Jo? Whatever happened to romance?"

Her devious smile answers that question quite well. "I imagine I could get some excellent fake blood from the theater that wants to adapt my new work. Oooh, the technicians can work wonders there! How comfortable are you with lying still for long periods of time, Teddy? And also, pretending to be stabbed?"

"Very," Laurie assures her solemnly, and then cleverly diverts her by once again pressing his lips to certain areas that could never be alluded to by pen.

It's hard work, sometimes, being with her—hard to keep in mind that she was wholly her own person and had her own mind, and that he could not simply command her to obey him as would almost any other man of his rank. It's hard to know that she was independent still and would damn well feel free to show her displeasure when she felt it, rather than coat it with passive aggression. And it's hardest yet to know that even when he tried to do his best to love her, she could be prickly and unsettled by his open fervor, though there were no obstacles yet between them.

Even after they've settled down a bit, there's more push-and-pull between them than between many magnets; more friction even than that. But with friction, as Jo would say, came heat—and he could never cease to marvel at the fact that she was a woman who would always stand her ground and speak her mind and always, almost always, understand.

Eight months after they marry, he learns from a harmless-looking letter in his office mail that his grandfather is dead. He spends the rest of the day in more of a daze that usual, his eyes blank of knowledge and his mind in a haze, replaying the life he had spent loving and knowing and obeying and spiting the man who had most shaped him. The whole day, he signs his signature with more negligence than usual and can barely keep himself normal, the hollow reflection of the much better ancestor who had predeceased him.

He had never wanted the old man dead, not ever. Laurie had loved him at least as much as he had resented him, had thought him immortal and forever stable and capable of living on and on and on. His grandfather had been sick for the last few months, had been so gray he had barely been able to participate in the wedding, had coughed and looked so fragile the last time he and Jo had come to visit him in the wilds of Massachusetts. But he had never thought the old man capable of dying, not so easily. And although he had planned out the life he would lead after his grandfather's grip on him was over, he had not expected it soon. He knows himself now that he had never wanted it so soon.

He had not wanted the old man to die, not really, not even when his work made him feel miserable and inferior, and lash out even against the one he most loved.

He hadn't, but now the old man was, and Laurie couldn't help but feel that he had done something wrong, something he could not even speak of but that could never be repaired or repented, not ever.

When he comes home at his usual time in the late afternoon, Jo is there for him. She is walking down the stairs to greet him, her star-like eyes fixed on her papers, though her lips were curving up in welcome. "Teddy," she begins, "I've finished that accursed manuscript today! The publisher of my last one tells me he'd happily see it as well, as long as it doesn't raise any protests from the religious crowd. You know how those people get—"

She stops immediately when she sees his face: fear, mingled with sadness and repentance.

"Jo," he says, and it's all he can say for now. "Jo." Again and again, as though she and she alone were a balm for the holes he has burning in him.

She lets go of her papers immediately, and they fan around them both like a rain of swan-feathers; for a moment, all he can see is heather and haze. And then in another, she is in his arms, pulling him close and kissing his lips, holding him to her as though he were a second skin.

It feels like coming home after being in a far off war, weary and wounded and worn to death, but in a place where he is loved again.

"I've got you," she says and her voice is simple and rough and loving and fierce. "I've got you now and I am not letting you go. I'm here for whatever has happened."

He puts his head on her strong shoulder and makes a thorough fool of himself on her skin.

She holds on anyhow, loving and fierce.

Later, in her arms and sprawled on their bed, he confesses as to why. His shame burns even through his genuine sorrow, but her hand remains in his for all of that. Even if the whole world had burned, he felt as though he could have remained anchored by as much: by her calm acceptance of what he had to say, by her refusal to give him deserved condemnation.

She should have. Any respectable woman would have, by the time he had gone from telling her that he would miss his grandfather, that he had loved the old man despite all his faults to telling that a part of him was glad of it, that he was free of all it, all of the expectations, all of the worries, all of the burning need to stand in for a son long since lost, to fall back in place where his father had strayed.

"I know he loved me," he says, knowing she will push him away any moment, almost hoping for it. "But my grandfather didn't even know me, did he? He always told me that I ought to be my own man, but he really meant me to be his man. And I-- I never. I never really stopped-- resenting him for that. I loved him but never... never as much as I should have."

She should have pushed him away in disgust. He wouldn't have begrudged her of that.

She holds on anyhow.

"You should hate me," he tells her, midway through, though his hands still clench knots into her dress. "You should-- should tell me to reform myself and-- and lecture me and make me your pupil and--"

Jo stops him with her look, her touch, her furious love, her complete lack of amazement. "Why? Do you think I'd feel any different in your place? Do you think I'd be any happier with what he had you do, any more glad? I'm no more a saint than you are, Teddy. I can hate just as much as I can love. And if I thought that-- or even if someone I loved had--"

Her fingers are like claws against his shoulder now, digging so deep in that he imagined she might well leave imprints.

He covers her hand with his and says, very gently, "What are you trying to say?"

"I don't give a damn about perfection," she replies through faintly white lips, "if you're also willing to let it hang."

He is. With her, he always has.

"He was a beautiful man," she whispers, once he has stopped shaking so against her. "I loved him almost as much as you did. I'll miss him as well. I wish he could have lived to have great-grand-children. But I don't want you to feel guilty about-- about wanting different things than he did for you. He loved you absolutely and completely but-- that didn't make it right, for him to cage you so."

"What are you saying?" he asks again, his voice soft and wondering, because he wanted-- needed-- to know.

"I'm telling you to bite the hand that feeds you," Jo said firmly. "If you want to. If you need to. If it's the one that's holding your leash as well."

It was. And it had already begun choking him half to death.

He had never wanted the old man dead, not ever. He had loved his grandfather with all his heart, all his soul, all the miserable pieces of him that had been left over from years of fighting and arguing and agitating with him, with trying to retain something of his romantic father and Italian mother from his grandfather's withering scorn.

But he wants to be free now, so, so desperately. And when he presses his face against her hair, it feels like the feathers of a thousand birds readying in flight, ready to take off if only he himself can.

"I love you," he says finally, when he can speak again. He knows he ought not to linger on it, that those words unsettled her whenever he pressed them against her-- only he was so tired and she was so warm next to him, so fierce and so loving and so true and so dear. Her fingers entwine with his and he kisses her hair, mute apology ringing in him.

He almost fears that she will move away at first, her Jo-ish disgust of sentiment taking over even her empathy for him. But instead, after taking a steadying breath, she merely draws her fingers lovingly down his curls and whispers, "I already knew that, Teddy. You married me, after all."

"But not how much," he says, almost recklessly, his eyes feverishly following her skin. "I've loved you at first sight and last sight and ever and ever sight. You're my only family now. You're all that I have still."

"No," she says, softly, looking a little shocked here when previously she had been so steady. "Teddy, I know you're-- you're going through a shock but I'm not your only support here! There's... there's my parents, of course, and all the rest of my family. There's John and Meg and Daisy and Demi and even Amy, really. The last time she wrote to me, she told me she hadn't imagined wringing that fine neck of yours for almost half a year!"

Impossibly, he laughed, even as tears sprang to his eyes and he pressed his face to her neck. And after, after she had finished soothing him again with soft noises and gentle murmurs against his skin, he sighed and tried to explain.

"Do you remember," he tells her softly, "the way I told Amy once that I was jealous of any man who belonged to the March family?"

"Yes," she responds slowly, her tongue dragging on the word, her teeth nipping her lower lip softly. "And... and I can understand why, of course. My family is rather grand, isn't it? And Teddy..." The tenderness in her eyes might very well kill him, as she circles her fingers firmly against his shaking wrists. "I know you lost your own family in Italy. I know you wanted parents and a whole, grand extended family once more. And I'm happy to give it to you, dearest. You wouldn't be alone even if I wasn't here."

"Your family is grand," he says patiently, although she didn't yet understand. "And wonderful and forgiving and very, very kind to take me in even though I spent many, many months being an idiot about which of its daughters I'd rather marry. And yet..."

His fingers stroke her skin, her hair, her neck, the corners of the eyes that widened as the light of understanding began to dawn on them.

"Yet I wanted to be a part of the Marches because of you, Jo," he finally confesses, his eyes solemn. "And you're the main reason I longed for it! You, with your wildness and your ridiculousness and that enormous heart of yours-- you who would find some poor, lonely boy and draw him into your family, even if it were not proper! Do you suppose Meg or Beth or Amy would ever have let me in the way you did, without your pushing them first? And so how could I have loved any of them, even as wonderful as they are, without having previously having loved you best of all?"

He sees her face still momentarily, though she does not pull away, her fingers still absently running against his skin.

"I love you best," he whispers, "and even if my life had been different and I ended up with another March daughter, I would never have ceased feeling that. I know that you don't like... don't like romance or sentiment when it comes to being... the two of us but... but I felt, just this once, I had to say it. Now that I know how easy it is to lose someone. Now that I know I still can."

Another long moment, another still minute of silence. And then, just as he began to be deathly afraid of her pulling away, of him losing her just when he most needed it, he sees the tears spring to her eyes as she softly begins to laugh.

"What is it?" he asks finally, not sure whether to be happy or displeased at what's happened. "Jo, if I've upset you or said anything rash..."

"No!" she finally cries out, still chuckling to herself softly. "Just... just realizing how much of a complete ninny I've been over the last few years. That's it."

He has to smile slightly, although he is still puzzled by what she means. "A complete ninny? That's a bit harsh, Jo, although I know you've had your awkward moments."

"A complete ninny," she repeats firmly, her eyes very firm. "And-- and-- and we're both total fools, did you know that? Oh, Teddy, I'm so sorry to have made you feel as though you couldn't even tell me you loved me after all these months together-- which is only part of my ninnydom, really. The other part is that-- well, that a part of me honestly didn't want you to say it. After all..."

And here she paused, his Jo. Jo, who had always been brave about almost anything but what reached into the heart of herself. Jo, who would ask the world of anything but what she wanted most.

"I thought you married me primarily because I could offer you family," she said, her mouth twisting slightly. "And also, frankly, because I wouldn't constrict you as much as Amy. So I... I didn't want you to lie to me about... about tender and lover-like things. Not after I was sure that-- that maybe you were trying to convince yourself about how much you wanted me--"

"Jo--" he interrupted, almost angrily, more indignant on her behalf than she could ever be. "How could you even think such-- such crazy--!"

"I told you I was a ninny," she said, simply, stopping him with a soft hand on his mouth. "And I love you too, my fellow ridiculous fool. Completely and absolutely. And now, as far as I can see, the one thing left in this O. Henry masterpiece. If you'll allow me a moment of whimsy...?"

Her hand is in his, and it's covered with even more calluses. She's never been ladylike, this wild wife of his, and he's never wanted her to be either.

"I allow away," he says, his heart blazing with tenderness and pain and warmth and silence, branded with the old man he had lost and the young woman who still stood with him. "Give me any words you want. I'll freely carry them."

"I'm yours," she said, and he could see the joy in her so clearly, "for just as long as I endure. And now that you're free from being a business drone finally, Teddy, are you going to tell those rude nincompoops off at the office yourself or may I come along?"

Author's Note: We're actually at the half-way point for this series so... ten more chapters and this will be done. Actually done! Although knowing my slow pace, it will still be a while... Still, following Jo and Laurie through all the rest of their life will be worth it, I hope. I especially can't wait until I get to follow them into old age. They'll be the most adorable little old couple ever, honestly!

And as always, reviews, comments and constructive criticism are *much* appreciated. I know I can't update my fics for the Little Women fandom as much as I used to, but that only makes me happier to receive feedback. Please do let me know if you're reading and enjoying this. 3