Chapter Text
Meg, married. Amy, married. Teddy, married. Beth… gone. Marmee? Well, Marmee would always be there, solid and immovable as the earth itself, but was that really her only safe harbour? Must she become a spinster, a homebody, pottering about the world of her childhood until all those who loved her were dead and buried, or moved away? She wanted to see the world! The great castles, the ancient ruins, the innovations of today and tomorrow that even now greater minds than hers were churning out like a wonderful story!
And she wanted to see it all with somebody - somebody all hers and nobody else’s! - by her side.
Teddy would have been a formidable adventuring companion. She would have only just managed to drag him away towards the next wonder before he was pulling her eagerly off to another. He would have listened for hours to spirited recitations of her latest story, chiming in with only congratulatory ‘hurrah!’s as she paced wildly. They would have cavorted madly at social occasions, the subjects of stares and hushed whispers by those who were only envious of their unrestrained friendship. And all those dreams and fantasies for nothing because he was married!
It was humiliating to admit to herself, that the contemplation of a solitary future ached so very much that it felt as though it would rip her heart from her chest. It stung with the sour taste of defeat. She had forever prided herself on her tenacity, on her undaunted individualism. She was always the eleventh-hour hero in her attic revels, and so she would be in her own life! The name ‘Jo March’ would be emblazoned across the memoirs of her existence with no subtitle, no co-author.
Because how else would she survive?
To accept a companion into her life - to accept a husband really, for who else would fill the role? - it meant subservience. It meant clinging to the scraps of her former life as they slipped through her fingers one by one, so gradually she didn’t even notice she was dropping them. The moment another living person became hers, she would, by the simple laws of grammar, become theirs. Fading away until she was translucent - a memory of the girl who had once been Jo March. She could not stomach it.
She would not be his in the same way he would be hers - she knew this for a fact. A husband came with all kinds of unreasonable demands and expectations. Even Teddy, darling Teddy, would want things from her. He would not consider himself unreasonable, of course. He might even see himself as magnanimous in allowing her to forego an obligation or two. But he would want her kisses, her tender affection, and, after marriage, her body and her children.
She had slipped the letter into their shared postbox envisioning a future where she allowed herself to be subject to his affections. His kisses, she reasoned with herself, would not be so terrible. She would close her eyes and endure, and then they would be over, and he would be happy, and she would not be alone. Like plunging a hand into the snow as her fingers ached and froze to search for a dropped glove. A moment’s pain for a greater good.
But it would not be a mere moment’s pain. And as she imagined him moving ever closer, a panther stalking its prey, and the cold bed linens pawing possessively at her back, she knew she would hate him. Perhaps not after the first time, nor even after a month, but give it a year, or two, or three and the humiliation would turn to disgust would turn to loathing and it would seep deep down into her very bones and fester there like so much spoiled flesh. She would snip at him, she knew, pick fights, as revenge for these wrongs. He would avoid her company and hunt down pleasanter girls who would entertain his attention and his fancies. She would make herself more bitter, to encourage him to stray, and then feel jealousy constrict her heart when he eventually did.
And yet she drowned in loneliness! Why was happiness such a very transactional affair?
She smiled for him, of course, when he broke the news, even as these thousand thoughts and emotions battered her insides like rough seas. Smiled and clasped his hand and blessed the union. Pride would not allow anything else of her, and she had always had more than enough to spare of that. She cried only later, locked in the attic with the pages of her manuscripts strewn about her feet as she read through them with scorn.
So much romance littered the writing! Dashing heroes and swooning heroines and dramatic kisses on windswept cliffs. It had all been so vivid as it poured from her mind to the page. She had imagined it, lived it, loved it. Stood in the shoes of the fair Clarissa and bathed in the honeyed words of her Rodrigo. Felt her heart beat faster in her throat as she was clutched to his chest atop castle battlements, having only just been saved from plummeting to her death. Cold stung her cheeks, rain lashed her face, but his kiss burned hotter than fiery suns and she was warm and safe in his arms…
She read into the night, eyes straining against the encroaching darkness, as the candles burned down and guttered again and again. Everything she had ever put to paper she consumed with the fresh eyes of disillusionment, twice or thrice or more. Lies, all of it! Why could she write what she did not feel? Why did she not feel what she so heartrendingly wrote?
It dawned on her slowly, the realisation that she had penned the bloody violence and looming peril in much the same vein. Revelled in it, painted it with that same sheen of romantic unreality. The blood shone a little too bright, the screams rang a little too loud. Hearts beat fast in throats and lightning rent the air, and emotions roiled in breasts with all the turbulence of the sky above.
She did not write from life - she had always been criticised for that, had she not? The romance was as much a lurid fantasy as the violence. A blood-soaked corpse might thrill her in black ink, but should she stumble upon one in the street, she was sure she would promptly be sick. The romances she so voraciously penned were all well and good in the once-removed world of Clarissa and Rodrigo, but were Teddy himself to recite even one of her impassioned soliloquies, she would not bear it. And the swooning! She did not think she would be able to muster a swoon if she tried, and perhaps that was just as well, for she thought it would only leave her feeling silly and embarrassed.
She could not yet tell if this realisation brought contentment, but it certainly brought her temporary peace of mind. She was not a madwoman, with her brain convinced of two entirely contradictory points concurrently. She did not both desire and revile romance at once. That she simply reviled it was a matter to be worked through at a later date. The problem of Teddy was settled. She would not have married him, even if Amy had neglected to. She would be twice as joyful at breakfast tomorrow in voicing her congratulations and prayers for their future wedded bliss.
Sleep came easier that night, and romance and violence danced and blended in her dreams.