THE BEST IT COULD BE

In which everything is as it should be, thirty years from now.

I'm new on this block, writing for Nashville, so please all be nice! Just what I'm writing to help me cope with everything that's happening/not happening in for the Deyna fans right now.

Disclaimer: None of it belongs to me.

Spoilers: None, really. But I suppose anything where we are on the show now (October 2014) is fair game.

Summer 2044

It's lips on her cheekbone that wake her up, as they always have, almost every morning the last 29 years. Sure, they've been on tours separate from each other, or more frequently standalone events, but whenever they've gone to bed together; either passion burning, and not getting a lot of sleep, or collapsing exhausted after seemingly endless performing, whenever he's been there, he's woken her up with his lips against her cheek.

"Happy Birthday." He breathes, his morning voice, scratchy and nearer a growl than a whispers. She runs her fingers down the side of his face and presses her lips to his, joints complaining as she leans into her husband.

"It's been a long time since birthdays have been a good thing, Deke." She breathes. "We're getting old, you and I."

He gives her a little smile and runs his fingers through her hair. "But look where we've got, whilst we were getting old, Ray…"

She smiles at that, because she supposes they've got further than they ever thought they were going to get, and everything seems to have finally slotted comfortably together. Everything fits, and although with hindsight she can see a thousand times she could have walked in a completely different direction, and one thing after another wouldn't have happened, she supposes everything does always happen for a reason, and those reasons all lead up to getting her right here, right now.

And it's beautiful.

Summer 2015

make me feel like I'm real and alive

A knock on the door had woken him up in the middle of the night, and he gave a slight sardonic smile to himself as he realised he'd fallen asleep, back against the wall, guitar in his lap. In days gone by, he would have been drowning in alcohol – tonight was the night of Rayna's wedding, because 'Ruke' (they'd tried and tried to make it Layna, without any success) was really still happening, and he felt like his whole world was crumbling around him. But he'd changed, whether she'd believed him or not, and he hadn't even really thought about how drowning his sorrows in a bottle of Bourbon would have helped for long. He'd picked up his guitar, and was playing around with something he'd started writing with Scarlett last weekend, and he'd been able to lose his mind, in somewhat the same way. He'd never realise, but that was a bigger sign of how far he'd come than he'd ever know.

The woman at the door, however, in the light summer rain, wearing what was quite definitely not the wedding dress she should have been wearing in that moment, or at least hours before, was Rayna James.

For a moment he just stared at her, words on the tip of his tongue falling back down his throat in the last moments. In the end, she was the one to speak first.

"I shouldn't even be here." She murmured, looking down at her feet with something of an ashamed look in her eyes. "I have no right to be here anymore."

"What are you doing here, Ray?"

She shrugged slightly, and when she looked up at him, there were tears in her eyes, and despite everything, despite everything she'd done to him in the past year, every struggle that he'd had that was her doing, it tugged a little on his heartstrings.

"I…" she gave a small, bitter laugh, "My whole life can never be normal… I literally let the doors open and I was looking down the aisle at Luke, Deacon, and all of a sudden he wasn't Luke anymore, there you were, and I couldn't think, and I couldn't breathe, and I didn't know anything…" she took a deep breath, letting her eyes meet his, "The only thing I knew was that I couldn't marry him…"

He ran a hand through his hair, exasperated. "What, Ray, I…" he leant against the doorframe, suddenly feeling unsteady on his feet, "What do you want from me?"

The tears were rolling down her cheeks then, and he wasn't sure when they started. "Nothing. I have no right to ask you for anything. I just ran away from everything I've been planning for the last year, everything I've been trying to tell myself was what I wanted… I got there, only to discover it wasn't what I wanted, you've been right all along… I didn't have anywhere else to go, I'm sorry… I should have just checked into a hotel somewhere, or something, or flown out of Tennessee… I should never have turned up… I'll just go, pretend I wasn't here…" she was turning, as if she was going to walk away.

He couldn't just let this moment slip away. They'd been built on too many lies and incomplete truths for too long, he couldn't let this moment get out of reach.

He stepped forward and caught her arm, and she spun her head back, suddenly her face was a great deal closer to his than it had been a minute ago.

"What do you want, Ray? Why did you come here?" he said through gritted teeth, something burning in his eyes.

There was silence for what seemed like minutes, and she looked something like a deer in the headlights, on his doorstep, his fingers curled around her left arm, in the rain.

"You." She breathed, so faintly he wasn't sure he'd heard it. "It's always been you."

He didn't have it in him to have any sort of a reaction to that, for a few moments.

"I've been stupid, for so long, Deacon… and I know we've both broken each other, but it's been me breaking your heart in the last months, and I had no right to turn up here, not when you're moving on… but it's always been you, although I haven't realised it… I've been stupid, I've been pretending to myself, I've been pushing everything I've been really feeling into a little box in the back of my mind somewhere, so I wouldn't have to feel it… it's always been you. I've always loved you."

That, he had a reaction to. He pressed his lips firmly against hers, the match of everything they'd ever been and ever could be immediately reigniting.

As he pulled her in the front door, he whispered against her skin, "I'd never stop loving you, Ray, even if I wanted to."

They set the table in a companionable silence they've spent the last 29 years finding, and falling into completely. There's a pie in the oven, and all the desserts are setting in the refrigerator, and everything's almost ready. Deacon lays the last fork with a little smile, having taken the opposite direction to his wife around the large dining table, and having finally met back up with her at the opposite end to where they started. He catches her hand there for a moment, smoothing his fingers over her skin, looking into her eyes. Because despite everything, despite almost whole lifetimes of knowing one another, despite 28 years of marriage this time and almost immeasurable time performing together, they can still make each other stop, just for a moment, and hearts race, just by looking into one another's eyes.

The sound of a key in the door and the pitter patter of two sets of tiny feet running through the house stops their moment, and they both find themselves smiling at the calls of "Bonnie! Kaitlin! You should have taken your shoes off!" from Daphne at the front door. The twins are seven now, and still as mischievous as ever, running their mother and her long suffering husband, neurosurgeon Jake, off their feet.

Daphne had decided to go to college, even when her sister was already performing on the southern states circuit, and she'd studied to become a specialist music teacher. She'd reacquainted with Jake at Ole Miss, he'd been a boy she'd known in middle school, and to directly quote Daphne, he'd been a bit of a 'nerd'. Turns out she'd fallen in love with said nerd within months of being on the same campus, and they'd fallen together in something of a fairy tale.

Maddie, on the other hand, had been something of a different story. She'd started performing full time barely seconds out of high school, and she'd experienced the difficulties of a new career in the business without much help from Mom and Dad, who had their time all quite caught up in a new baby in that year. She'd had a number of dysfunctional relationships with other musicians, all ending in tears and vows never to date another guitarist, and in the end, had ended up with Scott, one of the drummers, and never looked back. She had had Teddy only months after the wedding and Callie three years later, and they were suddenly everything to a woman who hadn't even known if she'd wanted to settle down.

She was still more of a star than even her mother ever was, however, and once Teddy and Callie got a little older she was back on the road full time, dragging her pair of teenagers along with her in the school holidays.

As Bonnie bowls into her arms, Rayna thinks about how time seems to be moving so much more quickly now she's older, new faces seeming to be appearing as permanent fixtures in her life every few seconds. Hell, Teddy's bringing his girlfriend this afternoon. When did he get old enough for that? It seems he was toddling around with a dummy and then she blinked.

Toddling around, that reminds her of someone...

Autumn 2017

The plus sign spelt it all out, but she stared down at it for a moment, certainly not willing it to disappear, but somewhat disbelieving.

Her hand was shaking as she set it down and washed her hands, glancing in the mirror at a face with nothing different about it other than a couple of shades paler.

She took a step out of the bathroom and slipped down the stairs into Deacon's music room, where her husband was strumming his guitar absentmindedly, mumbling only half created words.

"Deacon." She breathed, and he spun, because there was fear in her voice, and he hadn't heard fear in her voice for years, not since that night on his doorstep, when everything had started to happen.

She looked incredulous, and there was a smile on her face as she whispered "I'm pregnant." and stepped into his arms with a grace years of stability had given them. "And we weren't even trying, and neither of us are as young as we used to be, and…" she trailed off, looking into his eyes, and there are tears there.

"Maybe we get another shot." He breathed, pressing his lips lightly against hers, "Maybe after everything we're ready to get another shot…"

Virginia 'Ginny' Claybourne was born in March 2018, a perfectly healthy, screaming baby, with dark eyes and red hair. And she'd become a singer, almost before she could talk, but no one would have expected anything else of the daughter of Rayna James and Deacon Claybourne. These days, she's engaged to her guitarist Ethan, in a romance worryingly reminiscent of her parents in the really old days, but there's something slightly more grounded about Ethan than there ever was with Deacon back then. He's been being a father and a responsible adult for fourteen years now, ever since a teenage relationship had resulted in a little blonde girl, Hayley. And her mother hadn't been cut out for all that, and she wasn't around much, she cared for the bottle slightly too much, and really, Ethan was both the mother and the father. And strangely enough, that seemed to fit for Ginny, so it hasn't been questioned. Everything seems to work.

She's the driving force behind her parents ever really doing any performing these days, not just sitting behind desks in the central office of the hugely successful Highway 65. She has them up every now and again for a hideously reminiscent rendition of 'No One Will Ever Love You' among her set list, or she'll organise the occasional Greatest Hits concert at the Grand Ole Opry. Rayna and Deacon joke that with every show their audience seems to be getting older, but it's something of a truth, really. Time's passing, everyone they've ever known is aging, and it's starting to show.

Around the table, hours later, with Scarlett and Gunnar (who've actually only been together these last few years, since Gunnar's somewhat messy divorce with Zoey, the mother of his children), and Juliet, Avery and the whole Barkley clan of children (and a new grandchild from their eldest) conspicuous in their absence, on holiday in Italy over the whole of summer, everyone laughs, and the sounds of different conversations mingle.

In a moment, and only for a moment, before Callie engages him in conversation about the latest guitar she's going to put on her Christmas list, Deacon takes Rayna's hand, and leans in to whisper to her.

"We made something wonderful. We made all this."

And for just a second, her eyes fill with tears. Because it wasn't easy, getting here, so many times along the way. But here they are, now, and she supposes that it doesn't matter how long it took them, how difficult it was, how many times they broke each other's hearts, because they got here, eventually.

FINIS

That's a wrap! As this is my first foray into the world of Nashville fanfiction, I'd love to know what you think, if it's any good, if you'd like to see me write more for Nashville! I love the show, and am an avid reader of the archives, but this is my first attempt to write something!