WARNING: Tissue Alert! Possibly I'm just weird, but I cried lots of tears writing this piece. I hope it makes you cry too.

(For those of you reading Astray, it's not abandoned, I just needed little change of scenery. I think this turned out pretty well for two days work. One shots are so much easier to write, everyone should try it. Go on, you know you wanna!)

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April 15th, 1917.

Scarlett ran her fingers over the smooth surface of the highly polished grand piano. She paused and picked up his photograph, tracing the line of his jaw with her fingertip. Rhett had never liked the picture, saying he thought it made him look old. When she casually pointed out to him that he in fact was old, he had grabbed her around the waist, pulled her into his lap and tickled her until she retracted her remark. It was the last picture that had been taken of him before his death, five long years ago.

The Butlers had spent the spring of 1912 in England visiting old friends and had booked a passage back on that most glamorous and luxurious of ships, the world's largest passenger liner, whose maiden voyage had also been her last. She was the ship of dreams, but for so many like Scarlett, the voyage had become an unthinkable nightmare that had devastated her life.

But, oh, how she had anticipated the journey. The splendour of the occasion had appealed to the social climber in her, as Rhett had known it would, and being surrounded by all that wealth and excess delighted her no end. They had danced those few nights away, and even now when she closed her eyes and thought of it she could still feel the ghost of his arms around her as he had twirled her around the dance floor. Every day since she had cursed ever setting foot on that infernal boat.

Scarlett eased herself into a chair and turned her attention to a different picture, one of a much younger Rhett taken many years earlier. It was encased, along with a miniature of their eldest daughter, in a locket he had given her that now hung permanently around her neck and nestled close to her heart.

The elegant piece of jewellery had been a gift of no particular significance, given simply because he thought she would like it. And she had. She smiled down sadly at the face she knew so well looking back at her. Even in a photograph his dark eyes held mischief, though she doubted anyone other than she would be able to see it.

He liked to joke that the war had started the day they met, not just the Civil War, but their own private war which began with Scarlett firing the first shot when she had hurled that china bowl across the library of Twelve Oaks in a fit of rage and injured pride. Fifty one years later, almost to the day, he had died.

Their later life together had brought them both a peace and happiness neither had known during those tempestuous early years of marriage that had culminated in his leaving her.

But Scarlett had refused to let him get away. She had pursued him relentlessly until Rhett claimed he was too exhausted by the constant attention to resist her any longer and they had reconciled. The truth was he had fallen back in love with her and they both knew it. The damage had slowly been repaired, the pieces carefully put back together as indiscretions and poor judgments were forgiven and they had gone on to live happily, producing two more beautiful children together.

Their war, like all wars, had reached its end.

Rhett would have been 84 had he seen his next birthday and had shown no signs of slowing down. He tired more easily, but his feet were still light, and his mind was as sharp as ever. He didn't look his age, never acted it and most people were surprised to learn he was a good ten years older than he appeared. He had wanted to enjoy life to the fullest while he was still able and she had been with him every step of the way.

Scarlett by contrast, who had always had the strongest of constitutions, knew at 72 that her time was nearly at an end. She had little fear of death now, and had accepted her doctor's diagnosis with a matter of fact attitude that worried the young man. She did not want to die but she was ready for it and had no desire to fight the inevitable that awaited her. It irked her a little that Rhett had lived that much longer than she would, and Scarlett felt almost certain that if they were reunited in the hereafter he would waste no time in teasing her on that score. She had always expected that he would to go first, leaving her to cope on her own for what might well have been decades. Five years was long enough.

She wanted to be with her husband. Scarlett missed everything about him, his teasing laughter, his face, the simple warmth of his body and the sound of his breathing as he lay next to her in bed. How she now hated sleeping without him by her side. Those little things that she had never paid much mind to before, had taken for granted as if they would always be there, were now painfully obvious in their absence. The silence at night was deafening.

Rhett's clothes remained hanging in his dressing room, Scarlett at first unable and later unwilling to part with them. His scent lingered there still now, five years after the room's owner had last set foot in it, and some days she would find comfort simply in sitting among his things.

He was with Bonnie now, and she smiled at the thought for them welcoming her home. If indeed there were a life beyond the grave. Despite her Catholic upbringing, Scarlett was no longer sure. She had turned away from God following Rhett's death. She had never been one for religion anyway, but she found no comfort in it now. The fire within her had died that icy night in the north Atlantic, and try as her friends and family might, it would not be rekindled. She had lost the will to go on without him and merely went through the motions from day to day.

She knew he would have been ashamed of her, and some days she was ashamed of herself. But she had no desire to move on, no interest in finding happiness with anyone else. No-one would ever begin to compare.

Scarlett had resisted the pleas of her children that she make a new home with one of them. She didn't enjoy rattling around in the over-large Peachtree house on her own, but it had been his home too, their home, and she refused to leave it.

Her family brought her great joy and comfort, but there was always his presence that was absent. She felt it particularly keenly at family gatherings and while she knew they all felt it too, it was not the same for them. They had lost a father, an uncle, a grandfather, but none of them knew the pain she felt at losing a mate who had been her source of comfort, love and laughter for half a century. And not only had she lost her lover, she had also lost her best friend.

Scarlett often wondered if there had been something he hadn't told her, that he sensed or perhaps knew that his time was drawing near, just as she now concealed from her family an aggressive cancer that was rapidly eating away at her and would send her to her grave before the year was out. She wouldn't have wanted him to suffer the ignominy and discomfort of decrepitude any more than she wanted her family to suffer through her own illness. She couldn't picture him dependant on anyone and was grateful he had been spared that.

She closed her eyes, her fingers going to her lips as she tried to remember the feel of his mouth on hers. He had kissed her for what turned out to be the last time just before he had handed her onto a lifeboat, smiling reassuringly as he told her he would be on the next available vessel.

Had Scarlett known that kiss would be her last she would have savoured it, memorised every detail from the feel of his hand on the back of her neck to the faint rasp of stubble against her cheek as his lips met hers.

It would be months before she finally accepted that he had not found a space somewhere. She didn't think now he would have even tried, not when there were others more in need than an old man whose life was nearly at its end anyway. Women and children first. He would have known there weren't enough lifeboats.

But he was first class, damn it, he could have gotten a boat. He could have been in her boat. There'd been room for him, as there had been in so many others. It needn't have ended that way. It hadn't been his time to go and Scarlett had been angry for a long time.

She felt cheated. She hadn't had the opportunity to get used to the idea that he was leaving her, to find some sort of acceptance. Knowing, expecting it, did not dampen the pain of loss, but it would have lessened the shock of it somewhat.

She hadn't even been able to tell him she loved him. To tell him goodbye. That wound festered for years before she had been able to let go of her anger and accept what had happened.

So many of the fifteen hundred souls who perished had been needlessly lost that fateful night, including the one she loved more than anything. He had taken her heart with him to the bottom of the ocean when he died.

He would have gone quickly she had been told. In the freezing waters of the north Atlantic someone of his advanced years would not have suffered long. Even the hardiest of souls would have been dead in a matter of minutes. It was no comfort to her. She hadn't been with him. She wanted to have been able hold his hand when he died, if only for her own comfort. He would have told her everything would be alright, made her believe it somehow. He had always been able to allay even the worst of her fears.

Had he been afraid too? How could he not be, when faced with an unbeatable foe?

The unearthly silence that had descended not long after the ship had gone down and the desperate cries for help had faded would haunt Scarlett forever. They'd waited too long to rescue those who could have been saved for fear of the lifeboats going down as well as people scrambled to get in.

Just as she was now unable to listen to orchestra music without being reminded of the band, she had never and would never willingly set foot on a ship again. Rhett had often taken her sailing and she had loved the freedom and exhilaration of it, but the memories of that night had become prohibitive.

For weeks, months even, after her return home following the disaster she had refused to allow herself to mourn him as she held out hope he would come back to her. Any day he would walk through the front door, hat in hand, with a box of bonbons or a pretty little trinket, and a grin on his face as he teased her about worrying for nothing. He never did. Every pair of boots coming up the front walk, every ring of her doorbell set her heart racing. One little iceberg was not enough to get rid of a man like Rhett Butler.

But it had been.

And as the long lonely weeks turned to months, that faint hope of his safe return began to fade.

His body was one of over a thousand never to be recovered, never to be brought home and buried, not in Charleston with the rest of his family, nor in Atlanta's Oakland cemetery next to his beloved Bonnie. Scarlett had eventually held a memorial service and erected a headstone there when her four children had together finally been able to convince her Rhett was not coming home. That acceptance had broken her heart.

Yet somehow it seemed to her a fitting end for a man whose life had been one long adventure, who had laughed in the face of adversity, and Scarlett knew he would have appreciated the irony of going down with an unsinkable ship. That was her only consolation.

For now she would go on. It was all she knew how to do, all she could do.

But no-one, not even Scarlett O'Hara, was unsinkable.

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FIN.

Please note this story independant of, and has very little in common with, another gwtw/Titanic fic that has been brought to my attention. If you want to read that it's on the network54 gwtw fanfic site - it's called (purely coincidentally) The Unsinkable.