Lodestar

Summary: After Melanie's death and Rhett's desertion, Scarlett becomes unmoored. Post GWTW.

It was completely by accident that Rhett ran into his wife at the train station in Atlanta. He was disembarking, and she was part of the waiting crowd on the platform. He would have overlooked her if it weren't for his traitorous eyes catching a glimpse of raven hair and forcing his head to turn. When he realized it was her, his step and his pulse halted. He waited for her to see him. Then the waiting crowd began to board and she followed distractedly, her head down. He saw that she was reading something, a catalogue gripped in her small hand.

She was walking away from him, but even if he hadn't seen her face he'd have known it was her by the line of her shoulders and the tempo of her gait, made a little awkward by the weight of the carpetbag she carried. As he watched, something of the old pang of affection went through his heart, for he hadn't seen or spoken to her in almost a year. But he wouldn't run after her, wouldn't call out her name. The time for any of that had passed.

Truthfully, he was a little relieved. When he said he would return to Atlanta often enough to keep up appearances, his intention was to come back every few months or so—just long enough to stave off gossip, just short enough to keep old wounds closed. When he saw her just now, he thought she'd somehow gotten word of his return and had come to give him a venomous earful about his extended absence, about how he should just leave forever, how she wouldn't care if he was dead in a ditch somewhere, et cetera.

But no. She was not here for him. She stepped aboard the train, still reading. There was a flash of her pale green plaid dress under her traveling coat, and then she was gone.

After Melanie died, Scarlett took the children back to Tara and turned them out like they were yearling colts to roam the grounds under Mammy's dark watchful eye. And then she planted a garden.

She wasn't planning on doing so. God knew that she'd had enough of plowing and planting and weeding to last ten lifetimes. Sometimes, just looking at the rolling rows of cotton surrounding Tara made the ghost of hunger turn her stomach. She had worked those fields while starving, and wasn't keen on reliving the memory. But Scarlett had just left an Atlanta that shone around her as brightly and impersonally and coldly as the stars at night, and Atlanta had starved her far more than lack of food during the war. She just hadn't felt the pangs until now.

Her best friend was dead. Her husband was gone. The love of her life was in emotional pieces. Without Melanie, Atlanta's social circle closed in around her the way sharks circle their prey. The Peachtree house was a tomb for two of her children. She couldn't stay. She couldn't bear it.

I'll come back later, she'd thought. I just need time to think—a few weeks at Tara, just to think. Then I'll come back and—and take care of Ashley. And Beau. And everyone else.

At Tara, Wade and Ella flourished. Will managed the farm with a small measure of Ellen's aptitude and, sadly, none of Gerald's bluster, and Suellen crooned to her baby while trotting across the lawn after her toddler. Mammy fussed and waddled, Pork sang as he drove the wagon down the red dirt road, Prissy and Dilcey filled their aprons with vegetables from the kitchen garden—Scarlett's family, all of them, warm and friendly and home. But for some reason, Scarlett wasn't.

Physically, she was, of course. She walked with Will most every day, discussing the planting schedule, the animals, the ledgers and the like, but on the days she didn't accompany him as mistress of Tara she would walk the grounds alone, watching the red earth rise and fall under her feet, feeling the sun like a weight on her shoulders. But her mind was wandering unfamiliar territory, and it scared her more than her nightmares ever had.

When she had realized that she'd never understood Ashley or Rhett—their love, their motives, or their minds—a cold shock had come over her, a shock she'd still not shaken off. For the first time, her inability to connect with others on any level other than the physical seemed like an active disability. Before, she had Melanie's blind love and Rhett's acute understanding of her psyche to shield her, but now she was alone, and was facing down a world that had none of her allies in it. And at the root of the problem lay Scarlett herself.

It was almost too frightening to think about the world she had made for herself—a world where she had made enemies as joyously as a person made friends, a world where she had abandoned her weak-rooted values as she charged forwards in pursuit of the means to provide for her family. Nobody else besides herself had done what she had done, and somehow they had survived, too. Maybe not thrived, but they survived. Even Rhett, reprobate that he was, had left her in search of—respectability, was it? Honor. Security. And apparently she understood none of these things and couldn't give them to him, so he had gone to join the rest of the world, where people stayed true to their values and loved each other for the sake of themselves and understood each other's feelings as easily as if they were their own.

And she? She was a woman who had set her own friendships afire. She was a woman who had killed two husbands and ruined a third. She was a woman who spent more time on her business more than her children.

And so her thoughts turned inward.

She had never been able to decipher the inner workings of her mind before, and she had no idea where to start. But, as she realized with slow, cold dread, the problem had to lie with her.

One day, in her spacey wandering over the grounds, she came upon the small plot of earth that had once been used to grow flowers and other aromatics for Ellen and the girls. Scarlett had made her fair share of sachets when she was younger but had never been interested in the growth of the actual plants. When she saw the long, narrow leaves of a lemon verbena bush waving at her from the tangle of wild oats and nettles, she could have either screamed or cried.

Instead of doing either, she stepped over the old bricks that marked the edges of the bed, carefully held her skirts back and pulled up the tall weeds. Upon clearing them, she saw that crabgrass was choking the verbena at the base of its stem. She picked at the tough grass as best she could, and then set her teeth and dug her fingers into the hard clay. The clump came up trailing runners. Before she knew it, she was on her hands and knees, crawling through shoulder-high greenery, pulling up everything she recognized as a weed, and some plants she didn't recognize but pulled just to make sure. The way the dirt parted and allowed her to yank out the weeds satisfied her the way nothing in recent memory had. If only she could do the same to her brain—plunge her fingers inside, pick through her own thoughts, uproot the tangled knots of emotions, relationships, everything, and find out if there was anything good and growing.

When she was done, the sun well on its way to setting, her hands were crimson with mud and there was nothing left growing in the bed except the verbena. She sat back on her heels, breathing hard, sweating a little under her broad-brimmed straw hat. She'd cleared a patch roughly ten feet by ten feet, the verbena waving green and lonely without the weeds and grass crowding it out. Scarlett chewed her lip. She hadn't ever really liked working outdoors, and her hobbies had tended more to keeping County boys at her mercy than frippery like growing flowers.

But there was something about Tara's dirt under her hands that made them less…grasping.

She sat looking at the verbena and only left to go up to the house when her stomach started grumbling. In the days that followed, to Mammy's displeasure, she hoed up the entire bed and dug up the border of old bricks and re-set them. After all this, the verbena looked even more isolated. The sight nagged Scarlett day and night. When Ellen was alive, she'd been Tara's living heart, with everyone crowding around her for love and reassurance and direction. And even though it was silly, Scarlett wanted the same for her mother's verbena. She made a mental note to pick up some seeds in Atlanta—once she had the strength to go back.

Scarlett stayed at Tara for four months before the necessity of business forced her back onto the train to Atlanta. Determined to be surreptitious, she dressed demurely in a neat dress of green plaid and covered it up with a gray wool coat. A million years ago, she would have returned to Atlanta like a conquering queen, dressed in her finest and tossing her head at her whispering neighbors. Now, she wanted to be as unnoticed as she had been when she was eavesdropping at the barbeque at Twelve Oaks.

I won't even look at anyone, she thought doggedly. I'll keep my head down and my mouth shut. If somebody tries to make small talk with me I shall scream. And I'll come right back to Tara.

Ashley, still deep in the stupor of grief, hadn't been able to keep up the books at the mill like she'd wished. Scarlett hadn't the heart to upbraid him—Lord, she'd treated poor Wade far rougher than she'd ever treated Ashley—so she came to balance the books herself. After two days, she closed the ledger, now full of her corrections, and left for the hotel. She wasn't going to set eyes on the Peachtree house, much less sleep in it.

But on her way up the street, her head down, her feet moving quickly, she passed a small book shop, and through the window she saw a display of catalogues. Her feet stuttered to a halt when she saw one advertising the sale of seeds. She remembered Ellen's verbena. Her mouth twisted to the side. With a furtive glance up and down the busy street, she ducked into the shop. If the shopkeeper recognized her, he didn't say anything. It wasn't as if she'd ever been there before.

Sutton and Sons, she read as she scanned the cover decorated with illustrations of fat turnips, sculpted heads of lettuce, half-blown roses. A quick scan through the little book showed pages of inventory. Clover and lantana. Eggplant, radish, onion. Thyme and dill. Lemon verbena.

A quote stood out on the back of the front cover. The cultivation of flowers is an appropriate amusement for young ladies. It teaches neatness, cultivates a correct taste and furnishes the mind with many pleasing ideas.

She hadn't had a single "pleasing idea" for longer than she could remember. It was all darkness, and grief, and something close to despair.

She paid the clerk and left. She hadn't intended to read it as if it were a novel, but somehow the descriptions caught her interest and held it all the way back to the hotel, and the train station after that. Her resolve crystallized. She'd plant a sweet little herb garden of her own and help it grow. And it would grow. She'd make sure of it. She'd prove—to plants, if not anything else—that she didn't just sow destruction.

It would be a good place to start, before she looked at what was growing in her heart.

And so Scarlett began her time as a gardener.

AN: I recently read the book and have now joined the legions of people who will be sobbing over it for ever and ever, amen.

War would make a sociopath out of anybody, so Scarlett, with her innate traits, was pretty much doomed from the start. I wanted to explore the possibility of her realizing this, despite Margaret Mitchell telling us that Scarlett would never ever "understand a complexity". This is fanfic, dammit.

Please don't expect any of my drivel to be historically accurate.