Three days later, the following letter appeared in the News and Courier:

To Whom It May Concern:

It is with the greatest regret that I write to this publication, withdrawing my public challenge of Mr. Rhett K. Butler of Charleston, etc. The circumstances of our written exchanges being of particular public interest, I will attempt to set the public record straight as to the nature of my own motives in this regrettable affair of honor.

Conscience, as well as the unforeseeable events of the last several days, force me to admit that my intentions in this matter were far from pure. I acted in the interest of separating that esteemed gentleman from his wife. She, however, being a lady of the highest moral caliber, a lady whose devotion and affection towards her husband could only by rivaled by her demureness and womanly grace—

"I hate you, Rhett Butler."

Rhett looked up from the open evening edition before him, and smiled, placidly.

"I trust you enjoyed yourself at Mrs. Randolph's sewing circle."

"I have never been with a group of stodgy—" One glove flew past his ear. "—old peahens—" Another soared magnificently over his head. "—I hated more."

"Well, that's a shame." Nonplussed, her husband turned his attention back to his paper. "She's a good friend of my mother's, and she's really taken a liking to you. Tomorrow you're going to join her for her embroidery-making benefit for the Children of the Confederacy."

"That's it—I'm leaving."

Furiously she began to pack, throwing dress after frock after gown into one of her many open oversized trunks. Rhett, with his usual prosaic nonchalance, read three full sections of the newspaper before the furious little noises she made while doing this task roused him.

"Where, may I ask, do you intend on going?" He did not even blink at the four or five balled-up sets of French lingerie that whizzed past his head and into a suitcase.

"Atlanta, Tara…anywhere but here!"

"Stop that, Scarlett."

"Why should I?" she retorted, baldly, from inside her toilette, knee-deep in slippers and shoes.

"Because it is extremely disruptive of my reading—besides which, it is pointless, as you aren't going."

She stopped rooting around for the other red-diamond-patterned shoe immediately.

"What on earth do you mean?"

"The terms of our agreement were that if I won—which, I hasten to remind you, I did—that you would do as I said, until such time as I released you from the matrimonial bonds you nearly killed yourself attempting to retain."

One slipper, hanging limply from her hand, fell to the floor.

"I thought you wanted me to leave. A few days ago you couldn't wait to see the back of me."

"A few days ago you were trying rather aggressively to seduce me—alas, our world is a changeable one," he replied, folding up his newspaper with a sigh..

"I won't be toyed with, Rhett."

"Do I detect the scent of hypocrisy?" Her husband smiled up at her, grimly. "Has the puppet master discovered that she dislikes someone else holding the strings?"

"I don't know what you mean."

"You had no apparent moral qualms about manipulating me, pet."

"You can't compare it, Rhett. Don't try to."

"Why shouldn't I?"

"I was…" Scarlett twisted the glove in her hand, biting her lip with what appeared to be a woman's approximation of guilt. "I was trying to save my marriage."

"I can never win with you. You devote your considerable energy to getting me back (which I resist) and the second I relent, you'd rather be somewhere else."

"This isn't what I imagined!" she sputtered, indignantly. "This isn't what marriage is supposed to be—me at your beck and call, doing whatever you want me to just because I'm your wife."

Rhett's eyebrows involuntarily rose skyward.

"I believe most marriages are rather like this, actually."

"Well…believing something is true doesn't make it so."

"A succinct summation of my own theological views, but a little beside the point."

Glowering, she flung the glove at his face. Rhett caught it, laughing, evidently impressed that she'd lasted this long without throwing anything heavier at him.

"You shouldn't work yourself into a fit of womanly distress over this, Mrs. Butler," He continued, speaking to the woman who had crossed her arms and turned to the wall. "You know your pouting rarely has any effect on me—"

"Why are you doing this, Rhett?" she cut him off, sounding altogether lost and overwhelmed. "Why don't you just divorce me?"

"…Is that what you want?"

"It's what you've wanted, practically since you married me in the first place and…" The words caught. "And it's better than sitting here, waiting for you to get…tired of this." She walked slowly over to the window and stared out onto the dismal street below.

"Come back over here, Scarlett," he ordered, gently.

"No."

"If you'll just—" Rhett took one step towards her, hands outstretched in peace.

"I don't want to," she repeated, emphatically. "And if you take another step towards me, I shall scream."

"What for? Do you think you need a protector, Scarlett?" Rhett laughed at the flash of old temper that crossed her face, wiping away the unbecoming pensiveness. "You're far and away the strongest person in this house. Now come here," he repeated, betraying to some degree his amused exasperation. "Just think of your poor mother's soul in heaven, should you fail to honor your sworn oath—"

"Oh—you—you would keep bringing that up," she huffed, reluctantly walking over to the chair where he was sitting down. "I don't even think you believe in souls, you godless—ah!"

But Rhett pulled her into his lap, effectively laying aside any further accusations of heathenism.

"Let go of me!"

"Not until you answer one question."

She slapped the rogue hand that crept suspiciously up her waist.

"If you don't let me go this instant, Rhett Butler…"

"Answer me this one question, truthfully, Scarlett, and I'll release you from any and all…grips, you believe I have you, er, held fast in."

"Ask the question, then," she impatiently twisted his arm, face flushed with anger and (he hoped) a more…delicate emotion. Though, truthfully, it was difficult to imagine the softer passions holding sway over a woman who was quite prepared to bite his hand if he didn't let go of her.

Scarlett's face was very near his. She hadn't been this close to him in years. He hadn't really looked at her, really scene her—in even longer. Rhett could see tiny, almost imperceptible lines in her face, creases framing her delicate and impossibly green eyes. That mulish Irish chin of hers was no longer perfectly smooth—there had been death, hunger, grief and pain to mar it.

Funny. The idea that she could age at all—that she was human—had scarcely crossed his mind more than half a dozen times in all the years he'd known her. She was, though. The creature trembling in his arms now could not more human.

"…Do you still love me?"

The face that he had just been examining, the face that he had studied when it was scheming, alight with the pleasures of a dance, viciously angry, blissfully asleep…went completely blank.

"Let me loose." Immediately she struggled, but he held her fast.

"I told you to answer me truthfully, Scarlett."

"You are the most insufferable, arrogant man that ever—"

"Leave the editorializing to your burgeoning letter-writing career and tell me—" He tightened his hold almost imperceptibly. "Are you still in love with me?"

Her nostrils flared, her eyes flashed—Rhett felt as though he was holding a raw flame in his arms.

"What's it to you, anyway? I'm tired of begging—I won't, ever again, not to a man who doesn't love me—no matter how much I…no matter how I…"

He was there, looming in front of her, his face as dark and swarthy as an Indian Prince's. Dark eyes were boring into hers, searching with a frightening intensity she had known only one night in her life.

"No matter what, Scarlett?" She felt dizzy, as though she had had one too many glasses of champagne and Rhett was the only solid thing in the room. Perhaps it was just an excuse she invented to explain why she was leaning into him, gripping him so tightly, allowing her hands to (of their own accord) to lay flat on his warm chest.

"No matter how much I…well…you know."

He did know. He was so certain of it now that the words need not be spoken. She stared up at him, dazed and bewildered and yet so…defiant. She looked like he had felt for the last twelve years.

"For a long time I didn't think that you did," he broke the silence, finally. "I didn't think that you were capable of it.

"I realize now that my logic was flawed. You, Scarlett, with your famous displays of unbridled passion—I think that if there is anything you are incapable of being, it is loveless."

"Rhett, what are you on about?"

"I, on the other hand," he pressed on, ignoring her. "Have always been a reluctant participant in the game of love. Love and I have been strange bedfellows. I'm afraid that you have suffered the most from this sad fact."

"I don't know what you mean."

"I've always prided myself on being a risk-taker, Scarlett. There's nothing that can be gained in gambling without taking risks. Love is…the most high-stake game of all. The fact that I wasn't willing—wasn't able to take that chance—that's why the game was a net loss."

"Will you stop rattling on about cards and tell—"

"—I was afraid to tell you that I loved you before I was certain that you loved me. For nearly a decade I lied to you, and because I was a coward, I lost you."

"You haven't lost me!" Green eyes swam in front of him, helplessly trying to provide comfort. Tentatively, Scarlett reached out and placed one of her own tiny hands over his. The action was a small one, but he felt it keenly. The maternal soothing that had come to Melanie Wilkes so naturally was, in Scarlett's hands, a clumsy tool at best. Still, the fact that she was trying…

"I did, Scarlett. You couldn't see it, at the time—perhaps you never will—but I lost you. The love I felt for you—such that it was—had brought nothing but misery to us both." He laughed, harshly. "I suppose I thought I had gambled away any chance of our being happy."

"Oh, but Rhett—it wasn't all bad. There was, well, our honeymoon, and the first year we were married…and…and Bonnie—"

The word hung out, a word that was hopes and dreams and fleeting memories—shared, unknowingly, by the two souls in the room.

"When you speak that way, Scarlett," he said, finally. "I think you are the most beautiful woman I've ever seen."

"Really, Rhett? Truly?" Even in a somber mood, she could not hide the way she sparkled at his words, as if every thoughtless remark, every pointed barb had never taken place. Years before he would have accused her of thoughtless vanity, but age had given him a more liberal perspective on Scarlett's vivacity.

"Truly—though, not being a sentimental man, I didn't always think so."

"I remember," Scarlett sniffed. "You said you met prettier girls when you were in England at the end of the war."

"What a memory you have for personal slights—almost as acute as your memory for compliments." He paused to allow for her inevitable huff. "Of course, my views on the matter have changed. When I told you that, I was only madly infatuated with you. I was still capable of viewing you with some degree of impartiality." He gently cupped her cheek. "Now when I look at you I see a face that cannot hope to compare with any other. I'm blinded, I suppose."

It had all been so beautiful and heartfelt, but Scarlett was no fool, and she could tell a jibe was coming. An ironic turn in the middle of a heartfelt confession seemed made for him—much to her annoyance.

"How silly, Rhett—" she interrupted, annoyed. "When you know as well as I do that you can still shoot as straight as an Indian!"

"Blinded by love, you obtuse creature."

Rhett relished in her surprise. Shock sat quite fetchingly on her high cheekbones and brilliant eyes. Then, to his astonishment, instead of widening in understanding and brightening in delight, her eyes narrowed in suspicious shrewdness.

"What do you mean?"

"I think that's rather obvious—"

"I don't believe you."

At first he couldn't believe her—after all that, denying what she apparently wanted so desperately to hear—but the stubborn glint in Scarlett's eye quickly convinced him otherwise. Sighing, as if he was the long-suffering husband of a more pedestrian ilk, he forced himself to ask the inevitable question.

"Why not?"

"If you really loved me," She lightly turned her head, giving him a mouthful of hair and a prime view of her perfectly proportioned neck. "You would have come with me three days ago. You wouldn't have made me go through he—Halifax and back to get you."

Made you go through it?

"Perhaps I prefer to love from afar."

"You? Ha!" She sniffed, primly. "You're far too boorish."

"Still the varmint in your eyes, pet? I'll admit it isn't my preferred modus operandi, but I can play the Don Quixote when I want to—I pined for you for years from afar, after all."

"Oh, honestly, Rhett," she snorted. "You were always calling on me, giving me gifts, driving me about, even when I was married to Frank. Everyone in town said you were a hound sniffing 'round Pitty's door."

Normally he would have pointed out that she had been an entirely willing, even encouraging participant in this whirl of Atlanta intrigue, but he knew clarifying would have been a fruitless exercise.

"A hound?" Rhett pulled her closer—dangerously close, and he felt her heart rate accelerate in tandem with his own. "How inadequate. I hope you defended my honor—or at least my reputation."

"No, indeed," she said, breathily, with noticeably less conviction. "I think they were—quite right."

"No, you don't. You don't think they went far enough. I've heard you call me much worse to my face, you must have been annoyed they were too gently bred to abuse me as—" He paused a fraction of a second, searching for the perfect word. "—colorfully as you do."

She twisted out of his arms, which to her surprise (and annoyance) had gone slack. Rhett laughed, darkly and richly.

"Perhaps you're right, my dear—I don't like to play the chaste lover. But then again, I don't think you've ever really minded." Without warning, she found the pull of something on her wrist—the same thing that had been pulling on her since the day that she flung a piece of china over his head and swore he wasn't a gentleman.

The kiss came so suddenly that she could not finish her exclamation—for there was Rhett, holding her possessively, his lips on hers, and as much as she wanted to hate him, to push him away and holler at him for his extraordinary liberties—she could not. He was power, power incarnate, and she knew the second their lips touched that she had him, totally and utterly, and that realization only increased the ferocity of her hunger.

Her response sent a familiar rush through him, and it was as though a dam were breaking—the desire and love and passion and anger and need he'd always felt, mingling and banging against his consciousness with all the subtlety of a freight train—all this, mixed with the intoxicating security that Scarlett O'Hara felt at least as much as he did.

"Rhett—" She pulled away, needing air. "I—"

"Be quiet and listen, Scarlett," he ordered, and the raw passion in his voice silenced her. "By God, I'm going to say my piece, even if it kills me.

"Do you have any idea what it felt like, to see you fall off that damned horse? Do you have the smallest inkling of—all I could think about, all I could see was you falling down those godforsaken stairs. Knowing what it felt last time to almost lose you—what it did feel like to lose Bonnie—I…"

Scarlett had never heard him so incoherent. The day he left he had been so cool and collected, emotionally distant but…maddeningly elegant. That was his way. Even ten scotches to the wind he could quote Shakespeare. It astounded her that a commonplace fall such as hers could affect him so.

"Oh, Rhett—you didn't think I was going to…"

"I did," he answered, grimly. "I know you find the idea ridiculous. You're young, and you've survived so much…perhaps you think yourself invincible. I used to think it of myself. Once you've looked death in the face as many times as I have…Those brief moments, thinking I might lose you, were proof enough that I can't, not ever again."

"You love me, Rhett?" If any of Scarlett's schoolgirl rivals could have seen her in this moment, they wouldn't have believed it. Scarlett O'Hara, having any doubt of the love of a man.

He let out the self-deprecating laugh of a man, at long last, bested.

"Damn it all, Scarlett, I do."

"And you—" She hesitated. "You want to live with me? As man and wife…truly?"

His eyes softened, brow crinkling in its usual ironic humor.

"To have and to hold, in sickness and in health—perhaps even to know—in a strictly Biblical sense, mind you." He looked off into the distance. "I don't think plumbing your depths would be healthy for a man my age. "

The faint feeling that something both deliciously indecent and highly insulting had just been said, but not caring a fig either way—that was loving Rhett. She flung herself at him, for once not caring at all what her mother, what anyone, not even he, would say or think or do.

Familiar scents mingled—cigars and magnolia, the past and the future. Discordant but intoxicating—

"Oh, Rhett…" Scarlett closed her eyes and breathed deeply—home at last. "…You won't regret it, I swear."

His laughter broke an otherwise tender moment by affronting the creature in his lap to no end.

"What is so damn funny?"

"What an inauspicious way to start afresh, my dear." At her confused expression, he continued, "I thought we'd at least have a day or two before regret came into it."

"Don't be ridiculous—I only meant that I love you as well, and I promise to try very hard to prove it to you. Of course you have to twist what I say and make me look like…like some sort of—"

"—Irish wool merchant, reassuring his clientele that the rumors of hoof rot are entirely untrue?" The words were out of his mouth before he had time to access to what degree they'd be appreciated.

"I think you're making fun of me, Rhett Butler."

When was the last time they'd talked like this, all goading and banter and the promise of something more? It had been too long, and as ridiculous as the whole argument was, it felt too natural for either one of them to let it go.

This was coming home, too.

"Perhaps making 'light of' would be more appropriate." He gave her a wicked squeeze. "Losing to me has done little to temper your combative spirit, I see."

"If you think I'm going to let you walk all over me—"

"Rest assured—" he cut her off, deftly, kissing her exposed neck. "If ever I should find myself filled with regret, I will merely conjure up an image of you on top of that card table."

"Rhett!" Despite her protestations, he could practically feel his wife's face flush.

"One wonders what might have occurred, has there not been that untimely interruption…"

The fact that she did not slap him at that last comment was proof that this was real. Scarlett was, after all, like him, and like all Southerners, a lover of hopeless causes. For so long he'd not allowed himself to believe her feelings were genuine, instead thinking that her manic need to get him back was fueled by the same irrepressible, quintessentially Irish driving force that drove her to do everything in her life. But it wasn't instinct, or gumption, or the childish need to have something denied that had brought her to Charleston.

It was love. A love just as passionate and selfish as his own—but a love all the same.

Some time later, having found some way to pass the time, Rhett returned to the discarded paper.

"Scarlett, a thought strikes me."

His wife, currently curled up on his lap like a luxuriating cat, stirred.

"What is it?" She yawned, and a small amount of guilt niggled at him for disturbing this rare moment of peace. He tapped the wrinkled newspaper in front of him thoughtfully.

"This is the closest thing to a love letter either one of us has ever written," he started, amused. "And you had to be coerced into hiring someone else to pen it, signed it with a pseudonym and refer to yourself in the third person."

Scarlett blinked up at him sleepily. The fading light from outside the window did little to illuminate the long look she gave him.

"You haven't written me any nice love letters." She finally said, with surprising dryness.

"That's a fair point. I shall have to compose a sonnet to your eyes and, er—other virtues." Not find his ridiculous chatter particularly interesting—Rhett reveled in his own cleverness more than needed encouraging—she burrowed back into the folds of his coat. "I, of course, defer to on the matter of a hired pen. Do you think Longfellow charges by the line?"

"Don't even talk about it," she muttered into his pocket. "I hate to think of it at all."

"Why?"

"Because," she whispered, drifting off into the first peaceful sleep she'd had in God knows how long. "Letters mean you'll be far away."

He lay one hand on her head, thoughtfully considering it.

"…You have a talent for inadvertent profundity, Scarlett. Has anyone ever told you that?"

Of course, by then she had already fallen back asleep.

I can't believe it's been over two years since we decided to get all sunny and funny and have a contest. Thank you everyone for all the support, encouragement and criticism over the years of writing this and other stories. The GWTW fandom has gotten me through more than a few rough patches. I hope you enjoyed TWIMC as much as I (usually) enjoyed writing it. Alica, sorry it took me so long to fill your prompt—I hope you enjoyed it.