Chapter 4: Set Fire To The Rain

The only sound in the room was the tines of the forks as they scraped against the supper plates. Ella was the first to move. Quietly she pushed her chair back and with her head bowed asked to be excused. Scarlett nodded, and then right before Ella slipped out into the hallway called to her daughter's retreating back, "If you are going to play on the piano some more, please choose anything other than a dirge, sweetheart."

Ella shuffled to a halt and peeked back at her mother, her freckled face pale and her eyes puffy. Her red hair straggled down around her shoulders, as unkempt as her dress. Scarlett doubted her daughter had changed from her nightgown more than ten minutes before their evening meal. She knew she hadn't bothered getting dressed, or even getting out of bed, until she heard the cook ring for supper.

"Alright, mother," Ella replied, her wraith-like figure whipping between the swinging dining room door and evaporating into the dim of the hallway.

Scarlett picked up her fork and dutifully shoveled another bite into her mouth. Whatever it was stuck to the roof of her mouth like cold grits and she had to wash it down with a grimace and a rare goblet of wine. A soft, sad melody drifted down from Ella's room; the familiar strains of a tragic Irish lullaby. Sighing, Scarlett took another bite. "At least it isn't a funeral march," she muttered.

"No, it's worse," Wade replied.

Scarlett whipped her head to her son. She was certain they were the first words he had spoken all day. The first words he had spoken since he had woken up at dawn with his angry, worried mother hovering at his side and a headache slicing through his skull. The first words he had spoken since he had listened to her tell him all the things Rhett had said and all the things he had done to Rhett last night. "Well," she thought. "If he can comment on Ella's playing, he can answer me."

"How's the headache?" she asked, setting down her utensils and crossing her arms. "Still tender?"

Wade dropped his eyes. "Yes," he mumbled.

"It's no more than you deserve, young man."

Wade started fringing the edges of his napkin and biting his bottom lip. Years of living with his mother had taught him to avert his gaze when her own burned hot green like that. Not that anyone with the sense God gave a goat would need years to learn that—not with the way they were sparking tonight.

"Do you have anything to say for yourself?"

"No. I won't do it again."

"No, you won't. Perhaps you have forgotten your little teetotaler pledge to Ashley, but I haven't."

Wade glanced at his mother through his thick lashes, his own brown eyes lighting up with emotion. "Bad form, mother."

Scarlett started. "Excuse me?"

Wade lifted his head and said, throwing down his napkin. "Bad form, mother to bring up Uncle Ashley. What do I care about a promise to him? Has he kept his promises to me? Have you? Has—your husband?"

"That's enough, Wade."

"Enough? I'll tell you what's enough—whatever's going on between you and…and… I'll tell you, mother, while I do remember my promises, I'll have you know that last night I didn't do anything any man wouldn't have done—and much less than most."

Wade shoved his chair back and rose to leave, but Scarlett, reeling in her wrath and shock, commanded in a low, sharp voice. "Sit back down Wade Hampton."

"No."

"Sit back down," she repeated. Her son opened his mouth to protest again and she roared: "Now!"

Glaring, Wade flung himself back down into his chair and hugged himself. Scarlett sucked in a deep breath. Her skin was clammy from rage, her hands trembling. She scooted back in to her chair, straining her spine against the cool of the wood. The cold, hard resistance was a balance to the hot wrath within. Her fight was not with her son. She didn't even know if she had much fight left in her. She certainly wasn't looking for a fight, just some answers, some peace. She spoke, surprised and relieved by the ease of her voice.

"Wade you may look like a grown man, but you are not a grown man. I am still your mother and you are not to speak to me like that again—or so help me I will remind you in a way you will not soon forget that I am the parent and you are the child."

Wade's glower softened and he again dropped his gaze. "Yes, ma'am," he submitted. The bowed humility, so much finer and majestic on her handsome son's head, touched Scarlett. As it had for years, that indefinable gentleness and meekness in Wade soothed her, drew her down as effortlessly and unknowingly as her mother's voice had, as Melly's presence had. Scarlett reached across the table and stroked her son's bruised, fisted hand. He flinched slightly, but his eyes were warm and soft when they met hers. Scarlett reclined back and blew out her breath.

"Now I have no intention of chastising you again and again for your behavior last night. The drinking bothers me much less than what the drinking did to you. Trust me, I've seen more hot heads lit up from whiskey than there are water buckets to drench them with. Great balls of fire, Wade, if you could have known the men I knew growing up! Wild tempers, the lot of them—your grandpa the worst of them all. But I will not have you sass me like that again. I will not have you, my own son, judge me without knowing much of any—"

"I know more than…" Wade began, but one look from Scarlett was enough to silence him again.

"I will not have you say things that you know nothing, or very little, about. And no matter what you know or think you know, I will not have you comment on my private affairs. With that said, I do trust you Wade. I trust you not to go blabbing to the town that in a moment of reminiscence and weakness I kissed your uncle—maybe not for the first time ever, but it might as well have been, and most certainly it was for the last time ever. Fair enough?"

Wade nodded, swallowing loudly. Scarlett pressed her lips together and clasped her hands. She smoothed her damp palms down her dress. Time, she was buying time. This next confession would be more difficult.

"Now this morning, I told you all that Rhett told me last night, except for this—he asked me to come see him tonight and I agreed."

Wade stiffened. "Why mother?"

"Because he told me he would leave town if I did."

A new, softer, sadder song floated down from above. The eerie notes hung in the air, cobwebs of music. Scarlett watched her son, wishing there was something she could say to him to wipe that sadness from his face, the worry from his young, wrinkled brow.

"Can I ask you something, mother?" he whispered, looking directly at her.

She shrugged. "Of course."

"Do you still love him?"

"Maybe," she said, slowly standing up. "But, not as much as I hate him."

~/~/~/~

No matter how much Scarlett had aged, no matter how far her past had scattered behind her, nostalgia was not the tonic to her soul, the toxin to her mind that it was to so many others of her generation. And so when her carriage stopped in front of the National Hotel, she did not spare a thought for those days in the early part of her marriage to Rhett that she had spent there. No warm memories wrapped around her as she stepped down into the frosty December air. She only cursed the soggy ground, the puddles of melted snow that littered the walkway up to the door and the neglectful hotel staff that were to blame for her muddied train.

Uncaring she berated the first bellhop that crossed her path and marched up the stairs to Rhett's room. He had told her the room number last night and she had thought that it would be less conspicuous if she just met him in his private rooms than sitting with him at a meal in public. Her haughty confidence wavered when she approached his door. For a moment, that mask of steely arrogance broke. It was only for a moment, though. She had been working up to this all day, laying in her bed, drowning out Ella's playing. In some ways, she had been building toward this inevitable moment since Rhett had walked out on her six years ago. She shook off the last droplets of mud on her dress and knocked on the door four distinct times

Rhett answered immediately. With a smile and a bow, he ushered her into the room. She glanced around, taking in the smells of the blazing grate and the spicy aroma of pine. She plucked her gloves off her hands, finger by finger, and stiffly sat down. Rhett offered her a drink, she declined. He offered her coffee, she declined.

"Water?"

"No—"

"Thank you," Rhett finished, smirking and pouring himself a glass of whiskey. "You don't mind if I indulge, I hope."

"Don't be absurd."

Rhett winked and threw back his glass, sliding down into the chair across from her. In the flickering light the marks on his face were obscured to mere shadows, the whites of his teeth brightened, and the tan of his skin deepened. His suit creased down his long body with impeccable, almost indecent lines. He looked flawless. He could have been any age. Still, even in his pristine elegance, there was something dangerous, almost wild about him, something that had always been there, but only now, only after so many years of being separated from it, could Scarlett begin to perceive it. Instinctively she leaned away and crossed her arms, her body reacting against her desires.

Rhett was watching her, watching her as he always had, and she sank deeper into the velvet cushion of her chair. She prayed he couldn't read her as he always had. A log in the grate hissed and she shivered. The fire felt too cold, too hot.

"So I imagine you have questions," Rhett drawled, setting down his glass.

Scarlett shook her head. Last night, he had told her nothing more than where he had been imprisoned—Panama—before he had gone. But she couldn't think of one thing she wanted to ask him. She only wanted to know that he would be out of her life for good when this was all over.

"You don't have any questions?"

"No."

"You came for the pleasant conversation then?"

"No, I…" she floundered under his gaze. "I came because you said you would leave Atlanta if I did."

Rhett's eyes glistened black and cold as the puddles outside. He never moved them away from her face, and Scarlett wouldn't look away. She couldn't. She barely blinked.

"I knew inquisitiveness was never a very strong trait of yours, but I had no idea of the depths of your intellectual apathy. You aren't curious, not even in the least, why your husband was in a foreign jail? Or why he was released? Or if he was even guilty in the first place?"

Scarlett shifted in her chair, tapping her feet and hands. "You were, weren't you?"

"I was what?"

"Guilty."

"Actually, no—which is the reason they couldn't hang me. Well that and because they were trying to hold me in order to, er, provoke me into giving up my gold. State-sponsored kidnapping must be more lucrative than direct taxes in other instances, else why all the theatrics?"

Scarlett's hands and feet stilled. "So Belle's son—he isn't dead? She killed herself for nothing?"

"You care about Belle now?"

"No…it's just—well, you always did say she was like me, and I didn't throw myself off a third story balcony when life got too hard."

"Everyone has a breaking point."

"That's mighty rich hearing you say that to me."

Rhett's smile was sly and slow, the effect of it trickling over Scarlett as a cool drip. "My, my but you have changed—admitting to share some traits with the madam of a whorehouse, implying not only that you do have a breaking point, but that I am it. What's next, Scarlett? Are you going to tell me that if I were to cut you, you would bleed?"

Scarlett rolled her eyes, that old annoyance snaking its way back up her spine. That annoyance tinged with excitement, an excitement that felt all too comfortable, too natural. "Aren't you going to answer me?" she said. "Isn't Belle's son alive somewhere?"

"You know, for one who professes not to have any questions for me, I believe that is your third or fourth one in the last two minutes."

"Well, are you going to answer me or are you going to continue to prattle on? Or did I injure your feelings too much by not caring a lick where you've been?"

He laughed then, drawing another quelling look from her. "Fine," she snapped, throwing up her hands. "Fine, laugh as much as you like. You're the one who is so eager to spill the gory details of your world of pain that you begged me to hear you out."

The laugh dimmed from Rhett's face. "It was a world of pain, Scarlett. You have no idea. You never will, either, but don't flatter yourself. My feelings aren't hurt by your comical need to assert your independence from me."

Scarlett shivered again and Rhett continued, his smooth voice revealing a story of horrors: "Belle's son is dead. He was murdered, but not by me. He was murdered by his best friend. They were both with me, traveling the world with an old, drunken bastard, happy for the free girls and whiskey. I liked having them around—Henry, Belle's son and my ward, was always fond of me. He believed I was his father."

"Were you?" The question was spoken before she had even thought it. Rhett took a long time to respond, long enough for beads of sweat to collect across Scarlett's brow and her legs to itch.

"I don't know, Scarlett. I never have. Belle liked to think so, but when she became, er, with child, well, let's just say she wasn't as exclusive as she was later in her life. It could have been me. It could have been any number of other men. And as fate would have it, he looked more like Belle than Belle did."

"But he was your ward? He was the one you visited in New Orleans?"

"He was."

"How old…"

"He was twenty when he was shot—that was four years ago."

"Four years ago, but…"

"I wandered around for a couple years before I wound up in prison—Charleston for a bit, New York, Boston. My last stop before sailing south was New Orleans, where I met up with Henry and his friend Joe. Well, things got complicated in Panama. Investments got tricky. Business and personal relationships got messy. The result was Henry's murder at the hand of his friend."

"But you were arrested for it?"

"Joe had made some well-placed friends in Panama. I had not."

"But you got out of jail. You made friends in jail?"

"Better than that, Joe made enemies. The people who wanted to see me burn and pilfer my coffin had a change of heart—and I finally had an out. You see I couldn't just give in to the blackmail. My money was the only thing keeping me alive. If I gave it up, they would just as soon kill me. But when allegiances shifted, I spotted an opportunity that might lead to my release. I bribed the right person and made the right deal."

Scarlett unknowingly leaned over. "What was your deal?"

"I promised to track Joe down and kill him—something the officials in Panama could not do. New Orleans is sort of out of their jurisdiction and I had the advantage of knowing the rat's former hiding places."

"And so, did you?"

Rhett glanced at the grate, his hawkish features sharpened by the haze of the firelight. "Of course, and just between you and me, I rather enjoyed myself." He turned back to Scarlett, his face a mask she remembered well. "Joe was the one who wrote to Belle and told her I had shot Henry. I would kill him a hundred times over if I had the chance."

Scarlett slunk back into her seat, nodding. Words escaped her. Thoughts fled from her. She only had Rhett—this man she knew hardly at all sitting before her, showing her the darkest parts of himself after years of misdirection and neglect. A shudder danced up her spine. Something about tonight, down to the cold damp of the air, reminded her of the ghost stories her pa used to tell her as a child. And her voice carried the wonder, the confusion and the openness of a child, when she asked, "Why are you telling me this—why are you here?"

Rhett, whose gaze had been staring past her, distant and still, slid back down to meet hers. Life returned to the black eyes. Scarlett folded her hands in her lap; her clasp so tight her knuckles paled white and her fingers bled red.

"Prison gives a man nothing to do but think—hours upon hours of having nothing to do but be alone with his thoughts. Those thoughts become the only things worth living for. Those memories that can take him away from the monotonous misery, the only things worth thinking about, the only things worth holding onto." Rhett paused, that familiar alertness in his eyes, studying her, measuring her reaction. "Out of all the people from my past, you were the only one who I cared to remember, Scarlett."

Again, the question rushed from her lips as an errant thought, "Why?"

Rhett looked her over, tenderly. "Do you know how many people I've lost in my life that I love, Scarlett?"

She shook her head, thinking about Belle, Melanie—Bonnie. But she couldn't bring up any of those deaths right now. They each carried their own kind of pain. They were their own kind of pain. And at the moment, so too was this conversation.

Rhett smirked, seeing through her as if she were made of glass. "I've cared for people. I've admired people. Belle was probably the closest thing to a real friend I ever had. But for all her love, I never loved her."

"Rhett…"

He waved his hand at her. "No, I'm not planning on taking up that gauntlet tonight, or any night to be frank. I'm only telling you this to let you know that there have only been two people in my entire life who I have loved and lost."

"Bonnie," Scarlett whispered. "And…Henry?"

"Bonnie," Rhett whispered back. "And you."

Scarlett's mouth fell open, and then her shoulders lifted, her jaw squared and her eyes narrowed. She mustn't let him know how much he could affect her. She mustn't let him see more than he already could. With his eyes on her like that, she was glass.

"You said you didn't give a damn, Rhett and it seems to me that barring a few lonely months in prison, you don't."

"Is that how it seems?" he asked, standing up and walking toward her.

"Yes, and I think that if Belle were still around you would go looking for her. Whatever you say, you always did run to her whenever you had a problem."

"There's something to that. But Belle isn't around, and even if she were, I would still, as you put it, want to run to you." Rhett stopped in front of Scarlett and she shrank a little deeper into the chair. "I always did want to run to you whenever there was a problem. You just didn't want me. Let's not forget that. If you're digging around in the past, take care where you stick your shovel."

"I'm not afraid of my past, Rhett."

"No, you're afraid of your future." He bent down and placed his hands on the chair's arms, boxing her in. His breath rushed across her face. "Perhaps this is too abstract for you Scarlett, but the fact that you are here to run to is the main reason I want to run to you."

"I…I…" Scarlett stammered, the heat of his nearness, the heat of the fire flashing across her skin. The room was heavy with heat—sweat on their brows, condescension on the decanter, and an electric current between their bodies.

"I knew that if I ever got out of that hellish pit you would still be here—fierce, stubborn, alive. Not only alive, but you'd be thriving, and somehow, in the most vital and important ways, unchanged from the day I met you."

"But I'm not unchanged, Rhett. You saw to that when you left."

Rhett's eyes flickered with a distant light and he leaned his head to the side, his cheek brushing against her cheek. "I was never your breaking point, darling" he whispered into her ear. "You were always mine."

Suddenly he pulled back, the air filling up that space between them; that line in the void she had promised she would not cross, but knew could be blown away with the faintest of winds. She turned her head up at Rhett, wanting to run away and knowing she could not.

"I don't know what you want from me, Rhett."

"For once Scarlett, I think you do."

He was right. For once in their long, torrid history together, Scarlett knew exactly what Rhett wanted from her. And it was the one thing she could never give him again.

"I can't," she said.

"I know."

And with that, it was done. Rhett strolled back over to his glass, and swiping it up, poured himself another drink. He downed it cleanly in one swallow. Scarlett stood and pulled on her gloves, distracted. With blank eyes, she gazed into the fireplace, following the strands of smoke that swirled above and disappeared into the sooty backdrop of the chimney.

"A drink to warm you for your ride back home?"

Scarlett jumped and turned to find Rhett right beside her, his arm extended toward her with a brimming tumbler in hand. He tilted his head to the side and tipped the glass at her. The amber contents sloshed, making gold ripples on the surface. Sighing, Scarlett took the proffered glass.

"To freedom," Rhett toasted, lifting the open decanter in his other hand.

"To freedom," Scarlett muttered with a dimple, tapping her glass against the decanter.

As she pulled back her glass, her fingers rubbed against Rhett's knuckles and she paused, staring at the blending of her white gloves with his brown hands. She could feel the warmth of his skin through the fabric. She remembered what it was to feel that warmth on her body. Rhett cleared his throat and Scarlett yanked her hand away, looking up at him.

"Funny thing, isn't it?" he mused.

"What?"

"How easy it might have been between us."

Blind to everything but his dark, spinning eyes, she threw back her glass. It had been years since she'd felt the hot sting in her throat. The burn of the whiskey raced down into her belly. The aftertaste tingled on her tongue. She closed her eyes and licked her lips, wishing for the sweet oblivion of alcohol and the softness of her bed, savoring the giddiness already coursing through her blood. She glanced back over at Rhett.

"If I didn't know any better, I would think you wanted to get me drunk."

"But fortunately, you do know better."

He took a long swig from the decanter and faced the fire. The flames danced on his skin and clothes. The bruises from last night that peppered his jaw line and the under of his eye were thrown into brutal relief. Scarlett allowed herself one last look.

"Goodbye, Rhett," she said softly. "I'll let myself out."

She placed her glass on a table and whirled away from the fire. A chill flashed over her as she walked toward the door. The crackle of the flames grew dimmer and dimmer with each step. She refused to turn around. She refused to go back. And then she felt him from behind, and instinct overcame her resolve. She spun around and Rhett grabbed her by the shoulders.

"Not goodbye Scarlett. Not just yet."

As he drew her in for a kiss, she knew it wouldn't end there.

Note: This chapter's been in my head for months, apart from the end. I didn't know which way I was going to go with this. I still don't. Sorry if there are a bunch of mistakes. I didn't take the time to edit it. Just wrote. But, I'm glad my head was feeling up to letting me write tonight. I see there are so many new stories, great stories, to catch up on and I'll do my best to read up on them. Cheers and thanks for the reviews. It's like Jon Stewart said recently, lately it's been a difficult...time...to be human. Fanfiction is a nice distraction.