In honor of the upcoming and delicious slaughter of turkeys my fellow Americans and I will be enjoying, I thought I should update a too-long-neglected series of mine. As always, thank you for reading and inspiring me in this fandom! And LIan, that is a truly blush-worthy comment. I am so glad you've enjoyed this series so much. ;)

Title: 20 Different Ways to Leap Through the Minuet, Part 1/20
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.

11.

He gives his notice in to work three weeks later, Jo cheerfully urging him on. His heart lighter than it had been since he had turned his back on the anarchic freedom of Lazy Laurence, he smiles warmly at the partners in the firm as he tells them that he'll come to work no longer, that they're welcome to buy his shares if they want, but given the lack of liquidity in the market, they'd probably be best off giving him an annual salary that could buy his non-interference from him in a most gentlemanly manner.

"I think I was actually a little disappointed to see the relief in their eyes," Laurie muses to his wife later. "I was hoping at least for a swooning fit."

"I'm sure you're exaggerating," Jo says, thumping him affectionately on the back. "They were probably catatonic with grief just then. Probably not a dry eye in the offices once you were gone, taking all the sunshine and kittens and rainbows and all such manner of wonders!"

He sighs sadly, and strokes his chin. "Oh yes, I can see it now. If only the firm of Laurence and Laurence had decided to write their ledgers in musical notes and not numbers! They'd be enjoying my golden, glorious company among themselves even now."

But they aren't and after a while, he can't imagine himself with them again, with the burden of pretending to be productive in a profession he hated once more hanging over his head like a careerist version of the Sword of Damocles. And without that sword-- and admittedly, the immense financial security that came with it-- they learn to economize between themselves, and he has to admit that he has to try harder than she does. She's always been flinty and sharp, his Jo, and living first with her genteelly poor family and then on her own had long enrolled her in the school of hard-knocks. If anything, he was always the one on the verge of impracticality, a youth of luxury and ease making him reflexively seek out the simple and costly solutions to everything, without thinking it all out.

They fight about money at first, sometimes playfully and sometimes a little more cruelly, sometimes in a way that resolves easily and sometimes in ways that make him want to walk out of their cozy home and back into the office, ready to take back up everything he has given up for (as he sometimes manages to convince himself, when angry enough) her. But he never does, even in his tantrums, and when he comes home sheepish at his own stupidity, she's always at the steps waiting for him, waiting for him to make things up for her.

Luckily, he's very good at that part.

At first, he's unsure of what he should do, now that he's gotten away from the corporate hall of mirrors. It's all well and good to think of himself as an artist at last, free to write the operas that he wants, free to spread beauty throughout the world. But as always, he should have counted on Jo to swing to his rescue at the last minute, completely missing out on it as she does so-- or at least, giving that impression willingly.

"I hate all those nit-witted women on stage right now!" she declares passionately one night after they arrive home from the cheap seats of a play, as he watched her heave with interest. "Whatever minute spark of personality they might have-- which could already be exceeded by a slow-witted orangutan-- dies in them as soon as they bundle off to get married! By God, Teddy, we could do so much better! We'll show them all how to make a heroine who doesn't keel over as soon as she slides a wedding ring on!"

He lifts an eyebrow and she smiles sheepishly and adds, "And I'd really like it if you could help me write a few songs. It'd be even better as a musical, you know."

Seeing as how she's got all the musical ability of a cockatoo with its vocal chords surgically removed, it's fair enough.

For a while, he thinks that working together might well kill them both off. He's always known that Jo's dedicated to her art but he had no idea she could transform into his artistic drill-sergeant, given enough ammunition to be. Seized with creative longings, she's like Athena crossed with Napoleon Bonaparte, gleefully burning whatever distractions lay in her path in order to reach the promised land of fulfilling creative fantasies. And though it's a process he's envied for many a year as he watched her at it, it's not an easy one for him to adapt to, as she all but forces him to keep up with her as she leaps from scene to theatrical scene.

"You and me," he says one day, in despair over how slowly he composed to how quickly she wrote, "we're getting close to being done professionally, aren't we?"

"I'm quite adamantly refusing to believe that," she answers bullishly, before yanking his sheets of music right out of his hand. "And will it help in the least if I try and pencil in a few needed lyrics? Let's collaborate, Teddy. Let's wheel and deal."

"Fine," he replies, although beneath his exasperation lurks the hint of a smile. "Those were always the hardest parts of trying to finish my opera for me."

"You never were any good at plot," she scoffs, and waives one airy hand while another gets to work. "Let Doctor Jo prescribe her medicine for that mendicant!"

"Fine," he says, and tugs her own script from her hands. "As long as you let me revise that play of yours. You're brilliant, Jo, but your men don't sound like men at all. Nobody with the appropriate packaging down below makes quite as many flowery speeches as that!"

Bizarrely enough, once they get past the initial longing to throttle one other, their partnership works quite well. He ends up having to try and keep up and occasionally correct some of her crazier ideas about men, maidens and maniacs through the course, but at the very least, it leads him to take quite a few chances on notation he never would have attempted before. His old musical tutors would have scoffed at his attempts at trying to swerve from classical traditions but with Jo, he thinks he may as well go off the beaten path.

Something about Jo always makes him want to take a chance.

"Is that a bad thing?" she asks, forehead crinkling when he says as much as they near completion at last.

"What on earth," he replies smiling as he edits dialog with half-shut eyes, "would you think that?"

Their first show isn't much of a smashing success, but it's enough to get produced by a few good friends in a small theater, and bring them a tidy little sum. And it's more than enough inspiration to write others, to work hard and turn out both theatricals for others and for themselves, to slip in and out of different characters. They create and try on different selves as easily as the teenagers they once were, and any given afternoon can find inhabiting the skin of monster, mad-man, mermaid or muse before Laurie sits down to his grand piano to figure out the proper tunes. They're are a thousand, a hundred, a dozen and themselves: Jo and Teddy, Laurence and Laurie, a young couple taking on the world with one work of art at a time, on their way to some creative promised land.

"We're going to change the world someday," she tells him, face bright and full of fervor. "We'll change something about the theater, whether the people running it like it or not! No, no, we'll do one better. If we're good enough and can write something well, we might even inspire someone to change for the better eventually!"

The work is harder than he had ever thought it was, the people even more penny-pinching and severe. The days are long, the hours strange, and the company-- both when it's merely her and when it's others-- is eccentric beyond all means. There is none of the serenity and comfort offered from his late grandfather's quarters, no knowledge that he is insulated from his own failures through the interventions of more intelligent men.

He stands on his own two feet now, just himself with her as his best help. He's his grandfather's image no longer.

"I imagine," he says finally, and smiles at his wife with shining eyes, "that you can say you've already accomplished that."

Author's Note: Happy Thanksgiving, everybody! I'll update this Christmas during the school holidays, and that'll be it for this year. Here's to having 2009 slowly come to a close.