From Flame and Ash
— Chapter 1 —
The Truth
THE STREETS were empty and silent.
Houses and storefronts stood with darkened windows, and lonely night creatures called to each other from somewhere in the depths of the forest that surrounded the town.
A lone figure in trailing skirts moved swiftly through the darkened streets, the moon casting a silvery sheen across her hair. Her footsteps were loud in the silence. It felt as though the slumbering town held its breath, waiting.
Dark clouds scudded across the night sky in growing billows, outlined in sharp relief as a lightning bolt flickered in the distance. Thunder rumbled in her heart, stern and cold with resolve.
A storm was coming.
The familiar steps she mounted steadily. That well-known door, whose knob she'd turned so many times, opened under her hand with no resistance. She stepped through and a chilling breeze blew in behind her. She didn't shiver, for she could not be any colder than she already was.
The warmth of the room met her icy body like a wool blanket. Encircled by the warm glow of light flickering from the lone lit oil lamp behind him, sat the man whose voice had bid her enter. In hues of orange and yellow and red, the colors and sensations of the office and its uniform-clad occupant behind the familiar wooden desk settled around her and she drew a breath in, her fingers hardening inside the closed hands hanging at her sides.
He waited, waited like he always did for her, his blue eyes shadowed but flickering warmly at her in the muted light, and she spoke. She spoke of how she'd needed to talk to him, spoke of how he'd been right and wrong, spoke words that dripped from her tongue like controlled ice, and met their target like sharpened daggers. She landed blow after blow in quick succession. She saw his eyes change, their blue shining now with something she wouldn't put a name to; watched his face tighten, deep grooves fanning out from his mouth and eyes as he stood now to absorb her blows like they were a physical thing. Pain, silent and anguished, radiated from him. But it was not to be named by her. It couldn't be.
"You were right, Nathan — I do love you." His eyes had begun to light with a spark, a glow, of something that she again would not name. But then the dagger had struck. " — but I'm not in love with you."
And the blade twisted. "I realized I was looking for Jack in you."
That blow rocked him back on his feet, but so slightly it was nearly invisible. But she saw. She couldn't be sure he still breathed, so still he became in the aftermath, balancing on the blade's fine point. His red serge-clad chest almost seemed to have ceased moving up and down with life's breath.
They stood facing each other, the air frozen and taut between them, as something delicate and strong shattered down around them in a million shards of ice.
She broke the ice, broke their gaze, stepping on those shards as she turned away and moved to the door. One cold hand on the warm knob, she paused, a hesitation taking her over. She turned and found his eyes locked on her though he still stood, lean and unmoving, behind his desk. The cold she'd brought warred with the warmth waiting for her, offered to her.
She softened her voice, or thought she did. "Tell Allie I'll always think you're impeccable."
Something flared white-hot and broken in his eyes, vividly illuminated by the sudden flash of blinding lightning through the window, snapping through the room in a violent surge. Overhead, thunder crashed in savage answer to the lightning's summons.
The storm had arrived.
"Mrs. Thornton."
It was one word. One very small word. But it stopped her in her tracks, a wave of cold flooding her as the hair on the back of her neck stood on end. Mrs. Thornton!?
He moved. Steadily and so very slowly, his booted feet carried him around the desk. She found herself unable to move away, unable to tear her eyes from him.
"Words from you to my daughter about me should come from the sender."
That is your message — and only yours — to carry, his eyes seemed to say with steely implacability. Y o u take responsibility for your words.
A weight seemed to press on the middle of her chest. The heat in the room felt like a wall, pushing against her chill like a living thing. A loose floorboard creaked under her shifting feet.
"Tell me just one thing —" His voice was steel coated in velvet and he felt close, too close, although he still stood many steps from her. "Look me in the eye and tell me that you are not in love with me. Tell me again that all you see in me is your substitute for Jack."
A murderous peal of thunder rolled overhead, rattling the windows in their frames. The intensity of his eyes, lit from within like twin flames, caught hers like pools of inexorable gravity, and she felt a swirling sensation in her head, like she was drowning inside their blue-fired depths. She tried to speak, tried to form words — I'm not in love with you, Nathan, I don't want you, you're just — but the words caught fire in the radiating flame that was his presence and burned to death on her unmoving lips.
The soles of his rugged boots scraped softly against the floorboards as he took a half-step closer, still over an arms-span away from her. She stood frozen. Flashes of white flared through the window behind him, this time throwing his height and breadth into bold relief as his dark-haired figure stood facing her.
"Elizabeth . . . "
There it was. Her name. Not her title. Her proper name on his lips, said in that way only he did. Lizabeth. The opening "e" was always lost in the soft "l" that rolled off his tongue. It made her catch her breath, her shoulders coiling inward.
"Tell me." His voice was so low, so soft, it curled along the length of her nerves and made her arms clench until she felt like they would snap under the tension. "Tell me, just once, that you don't love me like I love you." His shoulders seemed to lean towards her, as if even they were speaking. "Make me believe, Elizabeth, that this is really you, and I will never speak of this to you again."
His closing whisper sent echoes through her heart, and it was as if a long-captive breath of something was caged in her lungs and burning at her throat to break free. He was not touching her. But she felt the caress of his tender gaze as powerfully as if he'd reached out and softly stroked her cheek with his calloused thumb. A quiver rippled through her.
"N-no." Then stronger. "No." She threw open the door and never breaking his gaze, backed out of the office and hurried down the steps, in her haste never thinking to take the covered boardwalk instead. The storm fell around her. Rain soaked her instantly, her shoes fighting the muddy gravel. Thunder assaulted her ears and seemed to rumble the very ground under her struggling feet.
"Elizabeth—!"
She heard him call out after her and then he joined his voice, first a blur of red in the open doorway, and then a physical force before her.
"I can't, Nathan, I can't! Please —" Her hands went out in front of her, whether to ward him off, though he made no move toward her, or to hold herself in place, she couldn't say. "Don't."
"Don't what, Elizabeth!?" They were shouting to be heard over the roar of the storm, water getting in their mouths. She could see the soaked fringe of his dark lashes, framing his eyes in spiky points, drops of water clinging to them. His eyes blazed with passionate frustration across the space between them even through the dark of night. "What is it you want from me!?"
"I want - I want . . . " She stopped short, no thought of what she ought to say. She thought she'd wanted peace in her life with no romantic entanglements. She thought she'd wanted to — no, had to — put Nathan in her past. She thought she'd come to her truth, that the pull towards him that she felt had been her feeling an echo of her love for the town's last Constable and trying to reignite her past.
But out here in the fury of the storm, facing him, with his soaked uniform plastered to the wide planes of his shoulders and his expressive face passionately questioning her, with rain dripping from his hair and running along his cheekbones, she found her mind blank and her heart seething in tumult within her.
"So you come and tell me that you aren't in love with me, that you were looking for Jack in me, but this —" He gestured, one arm lifting towards her. "This isn't you, Elizabeth. You don't even act like yourself."
No, I am, it's me, it IS me! The words shouted back in her head, but her lips refused to form them.
You're lying to yourself, a still little voice in her heart whispered back. LiarLiarLiar.
"What is it? Tell me, Elizabeth." He took a step towards her, and for a moment, as a jagged streak of lightning blazed over them, flashing them in white, his face was exposed, split open in raw vulnerability. "What's holding you back from me? Because I know - I know you feel —" He stopped full-force, suddenly going perfectly still as he studied her, rain pouring in small rivers down the front of his uniform. "Is it the Mounties? I'll give them up. I meant it when I said it."
All she could do was stare at him, trembling with cold and emotion, nearly as shaken this time as she had been the first time she'd heard him utter those words. Jack would never have offered this, the traitorous voice inside whispered again. The truth of that struck home, but she kicked it away bitterly. It was too late for that. She'd made her decision.
Nathan took but one step closer, his boots catching on the drenched hem of her skirt, and reaching out to her, finally touched her as he caught both her hands in his and lifted them between their bodies. Her smaller hands, wet and cold, nearly disappeared into the depths of his larger ones. Their warmth, despite being wet, immediately began to radiate into her skin, thawing the numb.
He made her feel. He always made her feel too much.
His lean fingers wrapped tightly around hers, their hold intense but not rough. It was his skin that was rough, his calluses against her softness.
Her hands went rigid in his as an image flashed before her eyes and she winced, fighting the urge to close her eyes against the memory. The last time he had held her hands, there had been such exquisite, warm tenderness both in his eyes and in his hands as they stood outside the Yost's wedding reception, hands clasped just like this between them. But she knew she could not expect things to be the same tonight, or after tonight.
An ache started spreading through her insides.
"Elizabeth . . . " How could a man sound so tender while nearly shouting? A woman could drown in the look in his eyes.
The storm was a living thing around them. Rain blew in sheets against them, running down their faces in rivulets as lightning tore the sky apart in streaks of white over their heads.
"Convince me. Convince me that the real you doesn't love me, that all this between us is just about Jack . . . and I'll let you go. Because this, this here tonight . . . this isn't truth and we both know it." He paused, but her words were a frozen thing inside her and she could not find them. "I want to give you time to sort through whatever you need to, so I will stay out of your life until then and will not speak of this." His eyes, which had been tender at the beginning of his words, both softened and hardened. "But I won't go around acting like nothing's changed when we do meet. Our truth is messier and more honest than that, Elizabeth Thatcher Thornton."
For the space of a heartbeat, one of his hands let go, and with the look she saw in his eyes, it felt for all the world like he would reach for her face and her heart fluttered in panic against her ribs at the thought — but his eyes shuttered instead and he pulled back, releasing her.
With a final glance that seared so deep inside her it felt like her bones shook in response, Nathan Grant turned from her and walked away, pieces of wet gravel scraping against each other under his boots, his back growing smaller and fainter as he put distance between them.
The wind whipped her drenched tresses across her face, strands plastered against her cheeks as she stared after him. She wasn't sure if it was tears or rain on her face . . . but the salt on her lips gave testimony to yet another truth revealed in this stormy night.
Thunder growled, and in its primal roar the ice and cold melted away under the flame of storm and truth, and Elizabeth Thornton was left exposed and alone as she watched Nathan walk away into the dark of night, the storm raging over his bared head.
—ooO0Ooo—
Author's Note: Hello, my Team Nathan friends! Although I permanently ceased watching WCTH after that mind-numbing S8 finale (I'm quite calmly an ex-viewer of That Show now; a firm #Departie), I would like to offer this AU Fix-It Fic featuring an N&E future together for those who are interested, starting with a re-write of that unbelievable finale — specifically, N&E's final scene in his office.
To be quite honest, in the aftermath of that finale, I really didn't know if I could ever write N&E again (due to Elizabeth), although I hoped so. (Some of you may recall my first fic for them, "Beauty From Ashes", which I don't know if I'll ever have the heart to finish as that would require watching N&E's S6-8 moments again and I just cannot bring myself to go near them right now). But my imagination caught fire with some alternate story ideas so that's what I'll be presenting in this new story.
This is my ode to the clearly laid out path of Elizabeth following her heart home to Nathan's arms that we watched being developed across 3 seasons.
This is my ode to the incredible power of depth and passion and unequaled, heart-aching tenderness that Kevin McGarry brought to Nathan's scenes with Elizabeth.
This is my ode to the singular chemistry that Nathan and Elizabeth shared.
This is my ode to what was supposed to be and what should have been.
This is an AU fic, so I may use a little creative license to alter or embellish a few things to fit my vision for it. For example: This story features a younger!Little Jack and a younger!Allie. I've regressed both their ages from canon.
Nothing that happened *after* the office scene in the S8 finale will have taken place in the universe my fic occupies. Elizabeth has a lot of things she needs to set right between herself and others (most particularly Nathan), and even within herself. That's not going to be a speedy journey. Thankfully, this writer (me!) loves a good slow-burn. ;) That also gives lots of space for clean romantic tension to build — and for some justice to be served.
Elizabeth Thatcher Thornton has some lessons to learn and some humble pie to eat in the aftermath of (much of) S8. She needs to pursue him. Nathan deserves that and much more after the sickening way his character was, literally, USED.
** If you don't agree with my thoughts, please kindly scroll on by. :) Don't leave nastiness in the comments; I will delete it as there's no need for that. This is, after all, just fiction . . . just like the show.
I really hope you'll enjoy the story! My gratitude to you all for reading. See you in Chapter 2!
XOXO
Paths Through Lavender Fields
Pairings you can expect to see in this story are:
Nathan/Elizabeth, Lucas/Fiona, Faith/Gunner, widowed!Bill/AJ Foster, blacksmith Kevin/OC Mei Rose, Katie Yost/OC Will Bierhals, Lee/Rosemary . . . as well as crossover couples from my WHC story: Sam/Lillian, Joe/Maggie, Gabe/OC Astrid Larsen [see Ch 10: "Brookfield's Mountie and The Runaway Bride" in my WHC story for the beginning of their story], maybe Chuck/Grace.
*Nathan and Elizabeth will also be crossing over to my WHC fic, so there will be scenes with them there as well. (Update: Nathan arrives there in Ch. 8 "Catch Me, Love, Before I Fall"). You can find my other fics under my profile here.
Disclaimer: I own nothing herein except my ideas for the characters. All rights reserved by (and belong to) Hallmark Crown Media, LLC.