Work Text:
“Ella Lorena Kennedy! What did you do with my papers?”
Ella glanced up at the sudden voice of her stepfather as it boomed throughout the house. Automatically, she hid the dolls she’d been cutting from what she’d believed to be spare paper on the carpet behind her and sprung to her feet. She was only five, and everything felt overwhelming to her – the size of the house on Peachtree, the breadth of Tara, her mother’s sense of disappointment in her and the household’s adoration for her little sister, Bonnie. The household was still rocking on delicate legs from the near-dissolution of her mother’s third marriage. Ella – quiet and responsible, her plain face and silence taken for lack of intelligence – didn’t want to add to her mother’s troubles.
And her mother always seemed to have trouble circling her heart like a hawk.
“I’m sorry, Mister Butler,” she said. “I just wanted to make dolls and I ran out of paper, and Mammy was too busy with Bonnie to…blast!” She dropped the scissors as the glided along the tip of her finger, pricking it slightly.
Mister Butler’s features softened. “Ella, you must stop calling me Mister Butler,” he begged. Getting onto his knees before her, he plucked his fancy blue-bordered silk handkerchief from his pocket, then took Ella’s scissors from the floor and cut them into strips.
She gasped in horror. “Oh, Mister Butler, don’t!”
“It’s all right. I have thirty more like it upstairs.” Rhett took her arm carefully, and then cupped her hand in his larger one. “Now, I must request that you start calling me something less formal. Like Father Rhett…” He frowned. “No, that makes me sound like a priest. We’ll come up with something, hey?”
Ella nodded. She watched him bind her little wound with a small scrap from that fancy silk handkerchief. “I know it must be hard. I love your little sister very much – but that doesn’t mean I don’t love you as well, Ella.”
“But…”
“Now, don’t contradict me,” he said. “I love you and Wade. You may not be my flesh, but you’re both good children who mean well, and I'm proud to raise you the way your fathers would have had you raised.” He patted her shoulders. “Would you like to sit by me? I’m sure there’s something I could read to you.”
“But what about Bonnie?”
“Bonnie’s with Mammy, and your brother won’t be home from school for an hour. Come on now, sit with me.”
Rhett found a picture book on the shelf and brought it down. Ella sat stiffly beside him, but as he read to her from her sister’s book of fables she found herself growing sleepy, and when she began to suck on her thumb he didn’t speak up to correct her or force her to dunk her thumb in that hated vinegar. Resting against his side, she fell asleep, feeling, for once, loved.