Disclaimer: I own nothing. These characters are my friends; borrowed, but not for me to keep.

I hope you enjoy! I'll try to update every week (perhaps more often) but life, that pesky nuisance, has an unhealthy knack of getting in the way. In the meantime, please leave me reviews if you're enjoying my story! Your criticism, positive or otherwise, will be much appreciated.

"Listen to me! I have loved you the way they said!"

The words echoed in Karen's mind, a hard, resonating truth that had fallen, point-blank, on the sitting room floor and was now her burden to carry. The words, so harmless by themselves, had formed together as Martha spoke and had fallen in neat, heated jabs that stung her insides. "I have loved you the way they said!" Nothing could have prepared her. All of the years of friendship and memories and late nights of work and penny-pinching while they had put their school together, and she had never had an inkling of what Martha had sprung on her only minutes prior. The recipient of thousands of confidences, the innermost, most intimate one had remained unknown to her, locked away for years. Karen had no idea how long Martha had bided in pain. This part of her had opened up a cavern inside of Karen, cold, dark, and imposing; how could she not have known? How could she not have seen?

Karen mused in muted despair as she stood at the entrance to the school. She watched Amelia Tilford's stooped back hobble to the car, her driver waiting to close the door after his mistress. Karen found herself unable to look away from the starched, pressed cuffs at his tanned wrists, marveling that anything could still fall in neat, clean lines. Mrs. Tilford's eyes met Karen's for the briefest moment of time before Karen looked away; she did not want to witness the sorrow of the older woman. It was not an emotion she was in the least prepared (or willing) to see from the woman who had so foolishly believed in the words of a spiteful child, words that had ignited into a fury that had rent their lives apart so irrevocably. Words that, up until ten minutes prior, she had conceived as being so far separated from reality they could've belonged to a fairytale. But the distinction between fairytale and reality had dissolved with Martha's confession of love. For her.

She turned back into the house. Despite herself – and despising herself for it – she could not help but feel the repulsion that the townspeople must have felt toward the both of them. The repulsion of being faced with something alien, something so rarely seen or heard of in a quiet town; something that could've been so ordinary were it not for its foreign nature. Karen felt battered by a curious combination of emotions; she was uncomfortable, she was unsettled, it felt as if the world had turned upside down and she struggled to remember her surroundings, and who she was. She felt hot and damp; she was drifting in a haze and everything had a surreal quality to it, as if she had walked into a dream. Or a nightmare.

But her uneasiness did nothing to mitigate the growing concern and warmth she felt toward Martha. Martha's disgust for herself had nestled into her breast in a tight pain that hurt with every breath. No matter what, no matter the complications that must arise from such circumstances, Karen had to be – no, needed to be there for Martha. She needed to comfort her and love her as she had for all these years, and, most importantly, make it clear that Martha's budding preference would do nothing to hamper Karen's affection for her. She wanted her there, by her side, for now and forever, as her best friend.

An occupation that, she dearly hoped, would be enough for Martha.

Karen steeled herself for a few moments, listening while Mrs. Tilford's car started up, the rumbling of its engine fading as it left the school grounds and headed back into town. She then turned and slowly began ascending the staircase, taking each step slowly and deliberately. At the door to Martha's room, she hesitated; unbidden from the back of Karen's mind came Mary Tilford's words, of how Karen and Martha had touched and kissed each other. Martha's confession had thrown these words into a new light and Karen shook her head at the uneasy pit that'd settled into her stomach. Martha had never crossed the bounds of propriety and she would never dare presume to; she had had the opportunities and let them all fall, unacknowledged and unheeded. The least Karen could do was spare Martha her own misinformed judgments. She drew a breath to steady herself, leaning lightly against the door for a moment before gently turning the knob.

Martha's back was turned toward her as she entered, but she looked back as she heard Karen's light footstep on the threshold. Karen met Martha's blank gaze steadily; her eyes were still swollen from crying but beyond that, there was nothing. Karen hesitated for a second, wishing to speak with care; there were right words and wrong words and above anything else right now, she wanted to use the right ones. Martha turned away as she spoke, though Karen took care never to let her gaze leave the back of Martha's head.

"Martha, I'm going away someplace to begin again." She waited, but Martha said nothing. "Will you come with me?"

Martha's voice, when she did speak, was colorless and lacking. "Thank you Karen." She made a mighty show of smiling blandly at her, before turning away again and nestling deeper into her armchair, drawing a blanket up to her chin "Let's talk about it tomorrow. I want to go to sleep."

Karen stared at her. In the sitting room below, Martha had been all movement. It was as if she'd been holding herself in all of this time, through the accusations and the trial and aftermath; her confession had unleashed all that was pent up, the oscillation of her body an echo of the inside workings that had poured through the worn out seams of herself. Now, only minutes after, she was still as a stone. She had smiled blandly, she had gazed blankly; the scandal could never have happened, the confession might never have been made had Karen not read the hollowness of her movements, had she not seen the effort of Martha straining to sit still.

There would need to be another talk; there would need to be several. The aftermath of Martha's confession, and their sudden release from perdition, would need to be dealt with; adjustments would need to be made, and changes would have to be facilitated. But they had been through, Lord knows they had been through enough for that day. She wouldn't push it, she would let Martha be; she said nothing more as she closed the door gently behind her and headed back downstairs.

Despite the trauma of the day, Karen's heart felt, if not lightened, perhaps less burdensome. The nightmare of a hundred days and nights was finally lifted; the record would be set right, and although they would never be able to find work in this town again, the doors to the world beyond were not closed. She would do some research that night and find a suitable place for them, a fresh, unsullied place to begin again. Now, however, she felt a need, more than anything, to escape the stale air of the farmhouse and feel the breeze on her face again. There were pressing matters to be attended to, but they would have to wait.

Karen put on her coat and stepped outside; the foreign, but not forgotten feel of the sun warming her skin was like a balm to her frayed nerves. She took a deep breath at the threshold before stepping out, as if by this very act she could baptize her insides and exhale the problems that had plagued her for so long. Her mind was surprisingly undisturbed as she headed down the path, away from the house and toward the arch that lay at the entrance to the school.

It was autumn now. They had gone into hibernation during the spring and missed most of its swollen, budding glory; the slight greenness of the grass and toward the bottom of the flower buds was the only testament to what had been thriving life before it. Now, the leaves crunched underfoot; the air held a crispness that couldn't be found at any other time of year. Birds swooped from the trees, grazing the remnants of pulp and bud with the tips of their wings as they dove downward and back up again; a squirrel and his mate burrowed in the yard, plump with the expectation of the coming winter; the wind stirred the tree branches, lifted the debris of spring and set it swirling away to the south. The sky seemed almost swollen with the buttery warmth of sunshine; the clouds, plump and white, seemed to encourage the gentle warmth that hung in the air and clung to the trees. Everything seemed to thrum with life; everywhere was movement but calm, as if actively working to create this placid idyll. The wind swept first this way and then that, as if desperate to share the fruits of nature's labor from all directions.

This scene, almost heartbreakingly beautiful in its peaceful candor, should have been enough to carry away even the deepest of worries. But Karen was not at ease. A nagging pain tugged at the deepest part of her; the icy fingers of apprehension crept up her spine. She tried to ignore it, but her sense of trepidation increased with every step she took. She was halfway to the arch and Karen knew, invariably, that something was wrong.

She stopped on the path and listened. Nothing seemed changed; the wind rustled the trees, there was the rumble of a distant engine on a road beyond the hedge; the squirrel and his mate had disappeared up into a tree; the house lay silent and undisturbed, with no sound to indicate that anything was amiss inside. It was this, the farmhouse's placid calmness that frightened her most of all. Karen was reminded of Martha, who a few minutes prior had sat still as a stone, whose gaze had been so empty, so devoid of any movement. The calmness of the facade had hid the chaos beyond. But Karen knew nothing could stay still for long; the strain would show at the seams, then movement would burst forth like a breached dam.

Something was going to happen. She did not know the nature of the something, but that did not stop her heart from thumping against her ribcage in painful jabs; this did not stop the dampness that spread over her skin and covered her with a tangible layer of fear; this did not stop her breath from coming out in terrified gasps as she hiked up her skirt and ran as fast as humanly possible back to the farmhouse, whose undisturbed nature instilled in her every moment a new level of rising panic at what chaos she would find within.

Karen burst through the front door and to the landing, up the steps to where Lily Mortar was attempting to coax a locked door to open. She ran desperately to the trophy room across the hall; every moment that passed was a moment too long and she grabbed the first she could find and threw herself back toward Martha's locked door. "She won't let me i-" Mortar vexed dramatically before Karen, none too graceful, pushed her out of the way and began desperately to heave the heavy metal against the door. "Martha! Martha!," she could not stop her desperation and fear from spilling out into cries that raised with pitch and fever at every repetition, "Martha, please! Martha!" She was half-sobbing; adrenaline pumped itself out of her pores and covered her damp body in a poison of terror as the lock began to give way. "Martha!" She heaved herself with everything in her, felt the lock begin to buckle and finally give as she tumbled headfirst into Martha's room.

Martha was standing on a chair, a noose around her fair neck. The moment suspended itself, time froze as their eyes met; it was a moment that carried with it all of the pain and suspension of a nightmare but this was not a nightmare, because this was real and Karen had locked eyes with her best friend who, at any second, would take the leap that would end her life. The moment suspended itself and Martha, stopped for a second by the unmanned arrival of her friend, pushed aside her surprise. Her eyes flitted away from Karen's and fixed on a spot not in this world, but in the next.

She twisted, she turned, and suddenly, she dropped.

The snap of the rope awakened Karen. She leapt up, bile in her throat, and hurled herself to the supply closet. Her hands slipped and she felt the sting of a blade as she made contact with the knife hanging on the wall and she grabbed it, desperately ignoring the pain as she bound up the steps to the doorway where Martha lay framed, spasming, a movement Karen knew with a fever pitch of fear that would end soon, and Martha with it. She threw herself across the threshold, up onto the trunk at the foot Martha's bed and then the bed itself.

She swung out wildly. She felt the fibers snap as she made contact one, two, three times, and the weight of the rope's burden fell.

A/N: My use of the phrase "budding preference" is from a documentary called "The Celluloid Closet" in which Shirley MacLaine, who played Martha in the 1961 film version of "The Children's Hour," discusses her experience with the character and on the set of the film. It is a wonderful documentary and I encourage anybody with an interest in how homosexuality has been portrayed through film to check it out for themselves!