Work Text:
Her heroine finds love because her publisher deems it so.
He waves a hand in front of her like it’s obvious, the ending, and she tries to will her heart to accept it. He won the battle, you won the war.
She agrees with a firm handshake and partial ownership of her art.
Another wave of the hand, a dismissal, but she still leaves with a smile.
She passes a printing press, the musty smell of the ink a welcome reprieve. Ink was always her preferred scent, inhaling the permanence of it. A creation of the mind made eternal.
Jo tries to slow her breath and take it all in, but it’s too exciting, too much of everything she’s ever wanted.
“Mine,” she whispers to herself.
“You love him,” Amy had said, eyes wide and full of mirth.
Jo could only meet her sister’s gaze, lest she let her eye wander, because what in the world is love anyway.
“I only love you, and this family,” she said with a strong tilt of her head. “And my words.”
Amy rolled her eyes, muttering about pretension and the heart, but she’d given Laurie a kiss on the cheek before leaving the room with her arm curled around Meg.
Jo finds herself wishing for her quill, finally an ending forming in her mind.
Her notebooks fill with words and essays on the state of the world, but nothing of the state of her house. Kids run and laugh and her sisters’ husbands chase after them. No matter how much her mother says differently, everything has changed.
Every time a passing thought inches its way in her head, one of those thoughts she never allows herself to think, and she feels the need to write about it, her hand reaches for a quill. But then the raging in her heart tells her not to, a sort of ache she’s never felt before.
There’s something so definite about it, a shift in how she relates to her thoughts now. There’s shame, and a reluctance to give into things she wishes never crossed her mind. Her notebooks have always been an escape but the power of her pen feels too real now. Something that makes it true, how different everything truly is.
For now, she’ll blame Beth. Her absence, the lack of the push Jo needs to get it down. The reality of it is too complicated, the permanence within grasp too harrowing.
Laurie runs a hand sloppily through his curls, mutters, “You chose this, Jo.”
She turns toward him. It’s mean, and he’s tipping the flask to his lips again, a stray drop falling from the corner of his mouth, dark and murky. She briefly wonders how often he gets like this, deep in his drink, but lets the thought pass just as others have. He is not hers. Her teeth dig into her lip, harsh words threatening to fall out, but she bites even harder, swallowing it down. No, they will not do this. Not in the dark of night, not ever.
Laurie turns his head into one of the cushions, leg haphazardly draped on the arm of a chair. He passes out in a few moments, his breath shallow. Her stupid, messy Laurie. Her Teddy. Well, not quite anymore.
With a shaky breath and a blanket to throw over him, Jo whispers into the quiet room, “I know.”
A kiss in the rain, she decides.
Orchestral music and confessions of love. She spends hours perfecting the dialogue, the final grand gesture to put the bow on her final product. Jo imagines maidens reading it and seeing themselves as her heroine. At least in her version it’s the woman going after what she wants.
Marmee reads it and purses her lips. She looks up at her daughter. “Is this how you see a love story?”
Jo shrugs, chin pointing up. “How else have these men taught women to view it?”
“But she barely showed interest in him before,” her mother says after a moment.
“I can go back,” Jo says, somewhat defensively. A few edits, a line here or there connecting the dots and making the climax feel earned. She’s sure of it.
The pages sit in a stack in her mother’s lap. There’s a moment of silence between them and for some reason Jo feels like she’s about to be pitied. Or lectured.
But then Marmee sighs and hands her the pages back gently. “I hope she’s happy.”
Jo breathes heavily, eyes lowering. It’s not something her publisher would ever ponder and she’s not entirely sure she’s thought it herself. But Marmee’s eyes are kind and Jo hears laughter from the garden, signaling a life she’s not apart of, not really.
She will be, she almost says, but those are words saved for invisible lines in her journal.
She’s long past the proper dining time for supper, but she just couldn’t let the words that were begging to be put to paper stay within her. They flowed and flowed and she has ink stains on her hands that will last for weeks, but she hasn’t felt like this in a long time. Freed, content, happy.
And so she comes down the stairs, high off the progress she’s made, grin on her face. She passes Amy in the kitchen and gives her a proper smile for the first time in a fortnight, in that moment so content and proud of her progress.
Jo exclaims when she reaches the table, “Forty more pages done.”
Marmee gives her a wide smile, gesturing to the food. “It’s about time, darling. You must be starving.”
She nods enthusiastically in response, absentmindedly moving toward the seat nearest Laurie. He gives her a funny look, one she hasn’t seen in ages, but she can’t decipher it. In this moment, she feels sixteen, heart alight and wearing the smile of self-satisfaction. She was finally able to understand what she was writing, the purpose, and was able to rework it into the previous draft. The feeling of accomplishment and joy is a welcome one.
But then Amy enters the dining room, lips pursed.
Jo gives her a look of confusion, and Amy says, not unkindly, that her seat is opposite their mother. Laurie tries to give her a good-natured smile, but she won’t let her eyes meet his or anyone else’s.
Jo’s cheeks flush scarlet, and she’s so mortally embarrassed that she feels like fleeing, tears she shouldn’t be shedding falling away. She awkwardly moves to her designated seat, avoiding the apologetic gazes thrown her way. Such a small mistake, but it feels much larger than it really was.
But then the meal continues, for she didn’t even realize they’d already started without her, and she spends the rest of the dinner staring only at the sweet potatoes on her plate.
Jo rushes to her room as soon as she deems it respectable enough, unshed tears threatening to fall the entire way.
When her seat always used to be next to his, it’s an awful sensation to be told it isn’t anymore.
“I thought you’d finished it,” is what she hears. Laurie comes walking toward her, hands in his pockets, and he looks so boyish she could cry. If she shuts her eyes tight enough he can be fourteen again, hair too messy, her hand tucked in his pocket.
She’s sitting in the crook of a tree far off in their yard, far enough away from the house that she can be at peace with her words while still being close enough to run inside for more ink.
Jo looks at him a second more, hating herself for the questions she wants to ask, the things she wants to say. He gives her a small grin when he comes closer, head cocked toward her stack of papers underneath a small rock to keep them from blowing away.
“Not yet,” she finally answers, her eyes flitting away from his. He never much cared for her writing before. He was never unsupportive, but he was never so inquisitive as to invade her space while she was doing it. At least, it never felt like an intrusion before. Where he began and she ended and his presence in her life felt as natural as breathing.
Laurie nods, and she thinks, probably, that he’s still trying to bridge the gap between them. How does she tell him they never can if he never asks?
“Jo,” he starts, and his tone makes her gaze travel to his, his eyes sad and his hair in disarray as if he’s moved his hands through it. She tries not to remember the day atop the mountain, the breeze moving between them, his hair a right mess, his words cutting through her like a blade.
She hates that day. She doesn’t know what she’d change differently if she could, but his face is etched into her memory forever, the pleading in his eyes and his voice like a knife to the heart still. I've loved you ever since I've known you. Maybe she’d have left the door open, maybe if her feelings had caught up with her sooner. Maybe she’d have done nothing different at all. Maybe, maybe, maybe. This isn’t a story with which she can rework the pages.
“Jo,” he starts again, “I miss my friend.”
She lowers her head, and she will not ever let him see her cry. Not when he belongs to another, not when he made his choice and came back with a ring adorning his finger. “I have to bring these pages upstairs,” she says quietly, gaze still lowered.
Laurie moves closer. “No you don’t, Jo.”
Her eyes meet his briefly. “Yes I do. This is my whole life. I must.”
He looks at her quietly. “Why can’t we just go back to the way we were? When we were friends and everything made sense?”
She could scream, give him the speech that rolls around her head in the middle of the night when she can’t sleep and the stars above taunt her with their bright light. The same stars bear witness to the words she can’t ever and will never say to him.
Jo gathers her things, the stack of papers, the bottle of ink, her quill, and the blanket she brought with her to sit on. She can’t meet his eye.
“Jo,” he starts, but she interrupts him.
“We just can’t, Laurie.”
It feels odd on her tongue. So foreign. For her he was always her Teddy, but she’s been telling herself lately, usually late at night, that he can’t be anymore.
She doesn’t notice that he has tears in his eyes, but she can feel hers coming, so she runs and runs until she reaches her room, only letting herself breathe when she’s alone. The tears she only lets herself cry at night come out then, the stack of papers falling to the floor in an unordered mess.
Comparatively, it doesn’t bother her as much as it normally would.
She opens the school with a satisfied smile, twirls around the house with memories swirling of reading to Aunt March, of long afternoons aching to be anywhere else.
Amy and Meg file in behind her, carrying baskets filled with baked goods to celebrate. Jo picks one up, mouth open as she chews.
“Doesn’t mother tell us to act like ladies?” Meg asks with a laugh, picking up a scone and picking at it daintily.
Jo rolls her eyes. “I’m not a lady.”
“And what’s so bad about being a lady?” Amy asks, walking around the room, hands skimming books and shelves.
Jo shrugs, doesn’t even think when she says, “I’d rather have my freedom.”
There’s silence, punctured by the breeze that blows through an open window. Amy gives her a look, and Jo has the decency to lower her gaze. Meg, to her credit, doesn’t try to diffuse the tension like she normally would, but rather moves to a room they’ve designated as a schoolroom.
“I don’t mean,” Jo starts, but Amy silences her with a look.
“We all make our own choices, Jo.”
She leaves to inspect the estate further and Jo feels a pang of shame from her own callousness, mentally kicking herself for being so abrasive. She thinks of her sisters and their choices, and feels pricks on her skin when she considers the scope of the women in her life and in her world.
Not everyone wants what you want, she tells herself, a reminder she sometimes needs when painting with a broad brush.
They’re actually good together, she finds.
Amy makes him laugh, takes her position as wife seriously. It hurts her heart, sometimes, but on sunny days when the kids are running around the yard with John and Laurie chasing after them, it’s hard to feel so melancholy.
One day in town she spots an easel that she knows will be too expensive, but one that screams Amy.
When she gives it to her, a delighted unveiling of the sheet covering it, Amy looks at her with questioning eyes.
“I,” she starts, “I don’t anymore.”
Jo rolls her eyes, pulling her sister by the hand toward the easel. “You should.”
Amy looks at her with something Jo can’t describe, something she can’t understand, something darker than she’s seen in quite a while. “I’m not good enough.”
Jo puts an arm around her youngest sister, the closest they’ve been in months, her chin sitting on the crown of Amy’s head. “While I don’t believe that, so what? Do it anyway, because you love it.”
Amy’s arm goes around her waist, and they stand there, eyes on the easel. Jo feels a shift in their relationship, and for the first time in a while, feels heaviness leave her chest.
The first time she feels her book in her hand, she’s too awestruck to say anything beyond a cursory acknowledgement to the man with ink on his hands giving it to her.
Mine, she thinks, scared and exhilarated, as she sits on a nearby bench.
Her fingers move over the embossed letters, the engraving, and her eyes close in glee. She doesn’t even realize her eyes have welled up until she feels tears fall down her cheeks. Setting the book down carefully next to her, she wipes her eyes with a handkerchief, gaze going back to the small square of accomplishment sitting on her right.
Jo picks it up again, gingerly, fingertips taking in words originated during a bad storm in the March attic.
All me, she thinks, proud, and finally feels emptiness leave her in increments.
“Same Jo, different tree,” Laurie says in greeting. He takes in her muddied slippers and branch scrapes on her arms.
She nods quietly, clutching her notebook, quill twirled in her hand.
They sit in silence, the warm spring breeze providing more than enough sound. They watch the kids run around the flower bushes, her sisters chasing after them with smiles on their faces and red flushing their cheeks. She wishes she could paint them in this moment, brilliant smiles and hair windswept, Amy’s growing stomach in her gentle caress as she moves across the field.
It makes Jo ache, but not in a way she would expect. The months have passed and the pang her heart felt for so long feels lessened. Not completely gone, but settled within her comfortably. Or, at least as comfortably as it will.
She thinks of Meg’s wedding, of her heart swelling watching Teddy twirl Beth around and around. Beth might be gone, but she’s not alone quite yet. She looks at her Teddy, the other half of her heart, and feels something akin to whatever people call love.
Jo turns toward her companion, thinks about it for a moment before bumping her shoulder against his.
Laurie turns his head in her direction, a small grin spreading across his lips.
“Still my Teddy,” she whispers, mostly to herself, but she knows he’s heard.
He leans over to put a hand to hers, squeezing lightly, and she feels a breath release within her, a moment of peace or forgiveness or whatever it is she, for once, can’t quite put into words. Her hand turns over to thread her fingers through his, closing her eyes and letting herself just be.
“Always, Jo,” he says low, hair wild in the breeze.
The words come to her then, her hand holding onto his. It makes her smile.
Seeing her book in the shop downtown makes her breath run short. Jo runs across the street to the bookshop, like gravity pulling her there, and sees it sitting on a shelf, untouched, red binding glowing through the glass.
“That’s mine,” she says to a couple passing behind her. They nod courteously but go on their merry way, but her nose is pressed to the glass, every part of her on fire.
“Mine,” she repeats, the satisfaction so big she feels her chest tighten.
A bell chimes, and the door to the shop opens as a customer walks through it. Jo takes a moment before entering, slowing her breath. Hand still on the glass, the grin on her face is slow to move.
Jo closes her eyes and takes it in, her new world.