Disclaimer: I do not own GWTW, etc, etc, etc. Co-Written by JLT and Kitty.

"Fallen"

When she awoke the next morning, he was gone and had it not been for the rumpled pillow beside her, she would have thought the happenings of the night before a wild preposterous dream. She went crimson at the memory and, pulling the bed-covers up about her neck, lay bathed in the sunlight, trying to sort out the jumbled impressions in her mind.

Two things stood to the fore. She had lived for years with Rhett, slept with him and borne his child-and yet, she did not know him. The man who had carried her up the dark stairs was a stranger of whose existence she had not dreamed. And now, though she tried to make herself hate him, tried to be indignant, she could not. He had humbled her, hurt her, used her brutally through a wild mad night and she had gloried in it.

Oh, she should be ashamed, should shrink from the very memory of the hot swirling darkness! A lady, a real lady, could never hold her head up after such a night. But, stronger than shame, was the memory of rapture, of the ecstasy of surrender. For the first time in her life she had felt alive, felt passion as sweeping and primitive as the fear she had known the night she fled Atlanta, as dizzy sweet as the cold hate when she had shot the Yankee.

Rhett loved her! At least , he said he loved her, and how could she doubt it now? How odd and bewildering and how incredible that he loved her, this savage stranger with whom she had lived in such coolness. She had not known how cold she had grown, how unfeeling! If he had not broke through that carefully built up icy armor which shielded her from all that hurt and frightened her she would have been frozen through and through for the rest of her life. A lifeless creature that performed its duties like an automat that she had been and she only noticed it now . All the time she had felt hungry, even after a ten course meal she would still feel not satisfied, always craving for more. Only iron discipline and her excessive vanity had kept her from getting fat. Thus food and the yearning for it had ruled and possessed her all day long. And even in the long nights the hunger never ceased to torment her. How ravenously hungry she had been. And for the first time since the time she fled Atlanta she wasn't hungry anymore. She felt satiated, wonderfully satiated.

When she thought of meeting him again, face to face in the sober light of day, a nervous tingling embarrassment that carried with it an exciting pleasure enveloped her.

"I'm nervous as a bride," she thought. "And about Rhett!" At the very idea anticipation and youthful wonder swept through her. Why wasn't he here? How much she wished he would be here at her side. Life was full of color and wonderful promises, like it had been in the time before the war where every day had brought a new sensation. How could she have borne her dull life for so long she did not know. She must have lived in a permanent fog which shielded her at day and which became a viscous threat at night. Perhaps those dreams had only be a warning, a warning to change her life. And it would change now, she knew it. He loved her! She could have laughed aloud and danced through the room. Oh, why wasn't he there to share her mirth!

But Rhett did not appear to dinner, nor was he at his place at the supper table. The night passed, a long night during which she lay awake until dawn, her ears strained to hear his key in the latch. But he did not come. When the second day passed with no word of him, she was frantic with disappointment and fear. She went by the bank but he was not there. She went to the store and was very sharp with everyone, for every time the door opened to admit a customer she looked up with a flutter, hoping it was Rhett. She went to the lumber yard and bullied Hugh until he hid himself behind a pile of lumber. But Rhett did not seek her there.

She could not humble herself to ask friends if they had seen him. She was afraid of making inquiries among the servants, thus admitting her weak position. But she felt they knew something she did not know. Negroes always knew something. Mammy had been unusually silent since Rhett had went away. At last she decided to swallow her pride for once and ask the old woman about her husband's whereabouts.

In the evening, after Mammy had prepared the children for bed, Scarlett caught her before she could retreat to the servant's chambers. She inwardly prepared herself for the worst and asked her old nurse with a slightly trembling voice,

"Mammy, do you know where Rhett is? I haven't seen him…hmm…since yesterday morning. I'm seriously worried. He might have had an accident, don't you think?" She actually was talking more to herself than to the black woman.

Mammy gazed at her with a solemn look that was not without pity.

"He hadn't have an accident." She paused and then hesitantly added, "Just you wait. He'll come back, sooner or later they all come back."

"What do you mean by that? Speak clearly, not in riddles! Where has he gone?" Scarlett asked impatiently.

Mammy's face faltered.

"My poor lamb, he's done gone to that woman, to that Watling creature. I thought you knew. Everybody …" she broke off.

"Everybody in this house knows, you were going to say. The wife is always the last to know." The words were almost whispered by Scarlett. She tried desperately not to lose control, no lady ever lost control in front of the servants. She had already humiliated herself enough by making her naivety quite apparent with her foolish questions. She tried to say multiplication tables in her mind, fighting back the tears which already welt traitorously in the corner of her eyes.

One times one is one. Two times two is four. Three times three is nine.

She utterly failed in her attempt to smile at Mammy and only managed a grimace. "You can go now. I don't need you any longer."

When Mammy didn't move and continued to look at her with an odd expression on her face, Scarlett snapped. "Don't you listen! Are you deaf? You can go now. Now!"

At this, much to Scarlett's relief, the old woman turned around and headed towards the servant's tract of the house.

After Mammy had disappeared from Scarlett's already blurred vision, she allowed herself to tremble with the delayed shock. Trying to calm down, she continued to try and block out the chaos of her mind.

Four times four is sixteen. With sixteen, I met Rhett at Twelve Oaks. I won't think about that know. Five times five is twenty-five. But her mind betrayed her and her thoughts returned to Rhett again. Nothing could distract her now from the pain which had slowly and thoroughly infused her whole body.

He had gone to Belle after he and she…that wasn't possible, he couldn't be so cruel, nobody could be so cruel. And to do it so that she had to find out... Why could he not have done it clandestinely, like so many men did? Why had he to humiliate her like this, in front of the servants, in front of everyone? For she was sure everyone knew; everyone except her. How he must be laughing at her. But he had always laughed at her. After all, it was only another one of his crude jests at her expense.

"You're my pet, my dear."

A lap dog to cuddle and kick, to treat nicely and to forget the very next moment. That she was, his lap dog. No, she wasn't a lap dog. It was worse, much worse. Her face contorted in disgust. She was his….whore. A whore, no less. Another one of the women he paid for his amusement. And he had treated her like a whore, she suddenly realized with an icy shower that made her body rigid and cold. What she had thought to be passion was lust; pure, raw lust. Not passion, only animal instincts had fueled his actions that night. No wonder tenderness had only been a small part in it. He had much practice with rough and stormy nights like that and women like her...women who could be bought for money, and he had paid her like any other woman of his acquaintances, with the only difference that she had set the prize for her body much higher. Much, much higher, she thought with bitter self-irony. Marriage, he of course had to marry her. The joy and rapture in her heart was replaced by self-disgust. Always he had paid her, right from the start and she had tolerated it. Everything could be bought, he once had said and she hadn't surely set a counterexample. That had been the ongoing tune of their relationship. The carrot and the stick. He had given her money and she had taken it, taken his insults, his coldness and his wayward moods that went along with it How he must loathe her. That's why he had never treated her with respect. For she knew that she would never respect anyone that was so - desperate. How she detested herself, so much, that she wished to hit her head against the wall till it started to bleed. She stumbled along the dark floor, blindly seeking her way to her bedroom. There she laid down, rolling herself together into a fetal position, squeezing her eyes closed in a futile attempt to shut out her emotions. But they came and went, tormenting her mercilessly and she felt like a victim of a shipwreck, badly fighting to stay above the water. She would inevitably drown in the shipwreck that was her life. What was left to keep her afloat? Ashley's love of her? He had avoided her at the party, not being able to look her in the eyes. Their half-hearted affair which had driven Rhett into a wild, drunken frenzy had been at an end long ago anyway, she couldn't lie to herself about that any longer. And she wasn't a person one could love, not the person she had become at least. A woman of easy virtue, without honor, without love, without respect.

Oh yes, she had never slept with a man out of wedlock and how had she prided herself on that! She had even had the guts to look down on Belle, blissfully unaware of the fact that she shared her husband with the whorehouse madam the whole time.

But Rhett had opened her eyes. He loved to do that to people, always forcing them to face their true image in the mirror. He never permitted anyone in his presence to act a lie, palm off a pretence or indulge in bombast. At last he had overcome her resilience and made her see what she was and what her life had turned into. The veil had been lifted from her eyes to reveal an emotional desert where the only person she could rely on was herself. Herself. The though make her shudder with revulsion. She did not want to be alone with herself for she didn't like the woman she had become. He had thoroughly succeeded in his efforts to pull her down. Her self-hatred rose to fever-pitch. She wished she could omit herself from the face of earth. If she only could disappear, vanish forever.

Her thoughts abruptly drifted to a piece of gossip she'd heard some time ago. Without volition she thought of Mr. Jefferson. He had been one of her best customers at the store. Tuesday and Friday had been his shopping days and he had always been friendly, paying his bills punctually. He came regularly like clockwork until one day he simply didn't appear. The weeks went by and he still didn't show. Scarlett eventually dismissed him from her thoughts, deciding with a smirk that he had probably just decided to start going to the new store in town. So it was with surprise that she learned from another one of her customers that Mr. Jefferson had killed himself. In a confidant tone he whispered to her,

"Hung himself on a tree in his backyard! His wife found him the next morning. Her hair turned white overnight! The doctor had to put her under heavy doses of laudanum. It broke her heart, they say. The funny thing is, everybody knew they hated each other. His wife always yelled at him like a xanthippe. What a cold, spiteful woman she was! Now she's mad with grief and sorrow. It had to take a life to finally evoke a feeling for her husband in her. Isn't that sad? And of course, nobody speaks to her, they all say it was her fault. If it had been the other way 'round, they would say it's his fault and he would be the outcast now! People are so predictable sometimes, don't you think?"

The story had only elicited pity in her. She saw no parallels to her own life then. But her mind had been completely occupied with keeping her family alive. In times of such hardship, all her will power had been focused on survival. She had never questioned her relationship to Frank. Her marriage to him had been a mere necessity. When Frank had died her conscience had awakened for a short moment, but was quickly appeased again by the thought that she had to do it for the sake of her family and Tara. But Rhett, that was quite another thing altogether. Rhett hadn't been a necessity. She had married him because she coveted his money as much as he had coveted her body. They both had seemed so well matched, their greed only been surpassed by their selfishness. But she had lost the last traces of personal integrity during this rather strange marriage. Rhett had deprived her of dignity and pride, the only virtues she hadn't managed to destroy herself. He might not be at fault for her downfall, she had had her fair share in that, but he had accelerated the process. With cold vindictiveness she decided that he was going to pay for that. Pay very dearly, she would see to that. She felt weak and helpless, her inner strength no longer a fortification to the evils of the world.

But she possessed the power of the weak. What would hurt him the most? Oh, she knew clearly what would hurt him the most. If she could manage to expose his false halo as a mere deception, if she could sow the seed of mistrust against him and his now oh so proper reputation….if she only could manage just that.

And then she saw what had been clearly been laying in front of her eyes for a long time; and all the pieces of the puzzle fell into it's places. There was only one way she could win this war... She would have the last word, finally, infinitely. The control over her life would be hers again, the control he had taken from her a long time ago. No longer would she be a puppet on his string. Her attempts on extinguishing herself with alcohol had been met poorly and unsuccessfully. This time she would make it right.

With this thought, she rose from the bed, her senses wide awake now. She went over to the dressing room. Agitatedly she searched through her hat boxes. Where was the one with the blue ribbon? Ah, there it was. With a sigh of relief she knelt on the floor, opening the box with trembling fingers. She looked inside and saw Charles' revolver which had laid there all the time, almost forgotten by it's new owner, waiting patiently…for her?

For a long time she just stared at it. Then she took it out, watching it like a lover would watch the object of his desire. She felt the smooth, cold steel, the weight of it's lethal power. She caressed it almost coquettishly. Flirting with death, wasn't that a very suitable way for her to die? She almost smiled at the thought. And to decide upon one's own dying day, what could be more powerful and seductive? She took the weapon and pointed it at her breast. Her heart was beating hard and fast. Something inside her rebelled, she was too young, there were so many things to do, so many things that she had wanted to do, but never did. She thought of her religion. After having committed suicide her body could not be buried in consecrated earth. She would burn in hell. But she already was in hell. She shortly thought of her children who had never mattered much to her. She had never been a good mother, so they would not miss her. Rhett would take care of them and if it only was because of his bad conscience. Her mind conjured up the vision of a grief-stricken Rhett, white-faced and sad, standing at her grave, Bonnie's little hand in his. Her power over him in death would be much more imminent than it had ever been in life. Her image would forever haunt him. That was the decisive factor. Pulling herself together she rose to her feet and positioned the revolver under her left breast. She quickly prayed the Hail Mary and begged for forgiveness. Summoning up all her will power she pulled the trigger. A loud click broke the stillness of the room.

It took her a while to realize that the revolver hadn't fired. A sense of utter foolishness swept through her. How ridiculous. So ridiculous. No dignity for her, not even at a moment like this... The gun hadn't been loaded of course. She had noticed the small carton on the bottom of the box when she had opened it, but what it meant had been lost on her at the time. The small carton contained the bullets. In a house with children one kept no loaded revolvers in hat boxes. Why hadn't she thought of that? What a fool she was, a bloody fool. She took the carton and went over to the bed, sitting down on the edge. She opened the chamber of the revolver and filled in the bullets. She pondered for a while. Her body felt numb with exhaustion. How she could go to this ordeal again she did not know. Tomorrow, she thought, tomorrow was another day. Tomorrow she could muster the strength to do what had to be done.

Suddenly she felt very weak, all of what was left of her strength having been drained in that one painfully tense moment. She couldn't do it now, oh, not now. With that thought she lied down, outstretching her cramped limbs and fell into a merciful sleep at last.