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Chapter Text

She discovers them towards the tail-end of sophomore year in the midst of finals season, neck-deep in essays and at her wit’s end when it comes to battling her insomnia. 

Four sleepless nights in a row has put Anne on edge, tossing and turning trying to get her brain to turn off, still dwelling on earlier when she zoned out during the last ten minutes of her English 201 exam; precious time in which she could have spent reviewing the four questions left unanswered on her Scantron. Anne only halfway hears the proctor yelling “Pencils down!” as she scrambles to bubble in all C’s in a last-minute panic, wild around the eyes when she staggers up front to turn it in.

Charlie bumps shoulders with her on their way out the lecture hall, striking an especially tall figure while she hunches under the collective weight of her textbooks. “You alright?” he questions, which causes Anne to scowl.

“Probably not,” she answers, adjusting her backpack straps and speeding off in the opposite direction, twin braids trailing like streaks of lightning in her haste. She is too tired to keep up pleasantries and especially with Charlie Sloane, who can’t take a hint as it is and would interpret something like a half-hearted wave over her shoulder the wrong way. (To his frat buddies, he'll proclaim that she was “too shy to say goodbye” or something equally as ridiculous in the name of saving face.) Already, there are rumors being spread up and down Greek Row about an alleged hook-up last Saturday, which only reached her ears because Anne was too swamped with deadlines and RUD duties to firmly nip it in the bud. 

Charlie shouts something back in response, but the words get lost in the wind. Regardless, Anne has also put enough distance between them despite her body threatening to collapse.

She’s had sleeping problems going back for as long as she can remember, childhood nightmares transitioning into listless consciousness as an adult, immune to her pleading and most over-the-counter medications. Even still, this is the longest Anne has ever gone without stringing together a couple hours of sleep—fitful and restless as they are, but still sleep nonetheless. It’s a miracle she’s even alive, sustaining off of convenience store coffee and determination alone.

Ostensibly, she should go back to her dorm room and crash for the rest of the day, power down her cellphone and drift off into oblivion. But Anne foolishly elects to catalogue end of the year surveys in the Union Directorate office instead, trying to get a jump on them before everyone else leaves for the summer and wrap-up falls completely to the wayside. (The wayside being Anne’s plate, of course, since she is the only one amongst leadership who is staying behind at Redmond.)

Gilbert, who is jetting off to Paris soon for a research project on plant receptors or the like, is on his way out the doorway when Anne arrives, red-faced and sweaty from the afternoon heat. The picture of cool, he greets her with a wink and says “Don’t stay back too late” before disappearing around the corner. Which, obviously, Anne takes as a personal challenge and hunkers down for the night.

Her seat is still warm when she sits down at the table, meaning that Gilbert had annoyingly claimed her customary spot by the window despite his usual preference for the wingback chair across. He also must have showered recently because Anne picks up on the smell of his soap, piney and clean like mountain springs. His doctor’s scrawl on a sticky note denotes that last entry he’d filed, smiley face doodle in the corner a proxy for his own smirking expression. 

Anne crumples it up and tosses it in the trash. She is not a Gilbert Blythe fan by any stretch of the imagination.

Nose to the grind, she starts working her way through the surveys, oblivious as the first hour slides into three and then four, until it is well past dinner time when she thinks to look up from the stack of papers in front of her. The pile has seemingly doubled in size despite the dent of progress she’s made throughout the evening, due in part to the rotating door of RUD members dropping off new pages without her notice. Anne yawns but continues to work, internal justification being that it will hopefully tire her out later on for when she actually goes to bed.

Clown logic. A total joke.

The night drags on and Anne remains wide-awake. “What the hell?”

It just doesn’t make sense given the level of care she’s taken to prime for the night: three melatonin and a warm glass of milk. Anne wipes the liquid mustache from her lips before crawling underneath the covers. She even goes so far as to kick Ruby out of the room because the younger girl has a habit of talking loudly in her sleep and Anne cites the need for optimal conditions if she is to succeed in sleep. It is certainly no skin off Anne’s back to effectively bully her roommate into staying over at her boyfriend’s frat house for the night, if only because it has the added benefit of irritating Gilbert in the bedroom next door. 

But rarely does anything ever phase the tall pre-med major, who takes nothing personally and almost everything in stride. Calm, cool, and collected—precisely everything she is not.

In fact, the bastard is probably asleep in his bed right now, blissfully ignoring the loud, freaky sex she explicitly instructed Ruby to have.

The intrusive thought of “if you want something done right, then you have to do it yourself” creeps into her brain. No doubt a byproduct of her insomnia and also the fact that Anne hasn’t had sex in over two months; not since her last Tinder hook-up ended up an abject disaster and Diana had to drive across town to pick her up at two in the morning. Anne promptly deletes the dating app and spends the next six weeks in a whirlwind of assignment deadlines and involuntary celibacy, both of which she manages flawlessly save for the occasional dirty thought about men she otherwise wouldn’t have given the time of day. Anne’s only consolation about being randomly attracted to Gilbert Blythe all of a sudden is the fact that she also gave the Quaker Oats guy a particularly long stare-down over breakfast the other day, proving this to be an all-encompassing frenzy rather than a specific derangement.

Which is neither here nor there when Anne’s alarm clock reads 2:00 and her first final of the day starts at 9:00 AM sharp. 

In a fit of frustration, Anne opens up her laptop to put on some soothing music—anything that isn’t the incessant whine of her halfway-broken air conditioner rattling into the night. Her hand shakes from exhaustion as she scrolls halfway down the page, selects a playlist at random, and then rolls over in bed. 

The first few videos are par the course, nature noises and ambient sounds that do little to knock her out, but result in more of an imaginative state than one actually conducive to sleep. She pictures a dream version of herself—fuller and prettier and with decidedly auburn hair—wandering through a forest or traipsing through city streets, going on adventures that require her full scope of imagination. The playlist makes for a great backing track . . .

. . . until it takes a turn for the strange, no longer the usual fare but an ecclection of different videos that pull Anne away from the fantasy. 

“Hmmm?” she grumbles, blinking blearily awake.

There is little connecting the assortment of clips currently playing other than the creator’s determination to be as random as possible, cycling through short, animated affairs to longer mukbangs bordering on ASMR. After a while, Anne tunes out most of the content, treating it purely as background noise because she is too lazy to change the playlist. 

But a familiar voice drifting through the speakers pulls Anne out of her semi-conscious state, wheeling her body around to face the fuzzy glow of her laptop screen in the dark. She rubs the exhaustion from her eyes to ensure that she isn’t actually dreaming and that her mind is still a safe space that doesn’t play tricks on her before arguably her most dreaded exam of the year. (Anne is hopeless at calculus and cannot for the life of her conceptualize the volume of a washer in rotation when there are so many other interesting problems in the world to expend energy thinking upon.) 

Only sure enough, as if to confirm her worst suspicions, Anne’s archnemesis introduces himself to the camera from a distance. 

“Hi everyone, it’s Gilbert and today, we’re going to be talking about root development and gravitropism! Now, this axis can be divided into three zones: the meristematic zone, which is the site of division where cells produced by the meristem begin to elongate and push away from the tip as it continues to make new cells; the oscillation zone, where expansion occurs; and finally, the differentiation zone, where cells decide their ultimate fate!” 

She watches as his body, long and lithe, positions itself in front of the whiteboard and starts to move, the beginnings of a medical scrawl evident as he meticulously starts drawing out the different sections of whatever root zones he is droning on about in real-time. Even in grainy pixelation, Anne can make out the strong bent of his forearms, shirt sleeves rolled up so that they’re out of the way, and a mop of curly hair he occasionally has to push back out of eyes hazel enough to break through the shitty video quality. She recognizes the length of his mane and knows without checking that this particular video was uploaded sometime last October, when Gilbert was starting to grow it out in preparation for The Big Shave to benefit St. Jude’s. 

Vaguely, she remembers that Gilbert had signed up to be a class note-taker for the disability resource center on campus, but started uploading videos when he discovered that his anonymous classmate learned best with an audio-visual component as well. So even though he was getting paid the same amount of money as everyone else turning in paper notes, Gilbert still took the time out of his week to film and upload multiple lectures, waving it off as something he does for his own personal gain. “I absorb the material better when I have to explain it out loud” he says, when Winnie asks him about it before a Union Directorate meeting. Really, it’s just one of the many noble things Gilbert does because he’s annoyingly perfect and continues to do because he “hopes it helps at least one person out there.” Anne rolls her eyes into the next century and promptly forgets about the existence of these videos.

Until now. 

She is probably a quarter of the way through and considers skipping the rest because Gilbert already haunts her waking hours, she doesn’t need him to do so in her dreams as well. But her body feels like the equivalent of molasses, heavy and lethargic, but pleasantly warm. Her eyes droop and struggle to remain open for long enough to properly appreciate the way his scientific illustrations are on par with that of a four year old developing their fine motor skills, and cannot stay awake for long enough to file that roast away for later. He proves to be so boring, it puts Anne handedly to sleep. 

At least, that is what she will tell herself when she wakes up tomorrow morning. Or rather, later today. It is 3:45 AM, after all. 

-

Sunshine greets her when Anne cracks open an eyelid, languid and slow as she stretches out atop her cheap, linen covers. Ruby had returned at some point after dawn, evidenced by the overnight bag whose contents are strewn messily across her bed, but gone for the day given how her work desk has been swept summarily clean. Anne yawns and notes how much More the world seems around her, focused and clear-headed for the first time in forever. To have slept through Hurricane Ruby is a testament to how deeply Anne was asleep thanks to Gilbert’s boring Botany lecture, currently replaced by a beekeeping tutorial as her laptop continues to shuffle through last night’s playlist. 

Sluggishly, Anne reaches for her cellphone set face down on the bedside table, staring and trying to make sense of the numbers that swim hazily across the screen.

8:22

“Fuck!” she swears, finally registering the time and how little of it there’s left. Too much of a good thing, Anne has overslept her alarm and has maybe twenty minutes to make it to the other end of campus; fumbles and falls into a heap of limbs and sheets on the floor. Already, she is calculating when and where to skimp on minutes, the fastest route to Humanities, and which intersection is most conducive to being hit by traffic as a sympathetic excuse for her delay. 

She looks down at her pajamas, oversized t-shirt and soft shorts that have gone baggy at the crotch, and figures it covers enough of the essential body parts to not necessitate a change of clothing, before grabbing her backpack and keys from the foot of the bed; double-checks that her ID is still tucked safely inside her wallet.

Panicked, Anne sprints to the communal bathroom at the end of the hall, Birkenstocks slapping against the linoleum floors. The sinks are all occupied (of course), so Anne has to lean over and dip her toothbrush under the gush of Jane’s faucet, who glares bemusedly in the mirror but doesn’t otherwise protest. Anne quickly brushes her teeth and splashes whatever remaining water that isn’t used to rinse out her toothpaste to wash away her eye gunk. She is a mess, but a well-rested one at least.

Unfortunately, it comes at the expense of everything else.

From start to finish, Anne clocks in at around seven minutes, which is one over the amount of time she needed to stay under in order to catch the bus that would get her to her exam before 9. Just as Anne is rounding the corner from her residence hall, she sees a trail of exhaust fumes behind the vehicle carrying away the last of her hopes and dreams; can only stare after it and the realtor ad plastered across the back, the white-capped grin of Honest Joe Alder mocking her mercilessly. 

“But—” she can’t even finish the sentence, something close to a sob gurgling in the back of her throat.

Anne allows herself eight and a half seconds to cry before she starts miserably jogging in the direction of Humanities, backpack clanking rhythmically against her butt and riding up the hem of her t-shirt by the straps. She can hear the halfway empty Altoids tin and an assortment of other mystery items rattling around inside, waking Anne up in a way that her phone alarm failed to do this morning. And without Ruby there, she had no other failsafe to ensure that she wouldn’t oversleep. Even if that had never been a problem for her in the past.

Somehow, she knows that Gilbert is to blame. 

Darling Diana will accuse her of jumping through the equivalent of Olympics-level hoops to arrive at this conclusion, but Anne is determined to pin this on her co-VP, whom she hates with a passion. Ever since the Island-themed party at his frat house last year . . .

But speak of the devil, Gilbert cruises by on his bike.

“Going somewhere?” he asks, the perfect amount of smugness to instinctively trigger Anne’s fight or flight. Predictably, she chooses ‘fight’. 

“Don’t you have anywhere else to be? Rumors of Charlie’s conquests to spread around?”

Gilbert is normally always up for a round of verbal sparring, but something about the accusation she’s leveled makes him frown. He stops biking altogether and gives Anne pause, strangely compelled to stay in place as the world slows down around them. Her feet stall while they stand, facing each other, at the corner of Waxing and Waning, train tracks and gravel and a sweet, morning breeze.

“I haven’t done anything like that, Anne. I would never do anything to hurt you.” 

He is earnest in a way that makes her ears heat up, serious expression further furrowing Gilbert’s brow. He stares at Anne as if the answer to some unspoken question is written somewhere across her face, vivid eyes flitting from cheeks to nose to lips and lingers on the latter for long enough to remind Anne of precious time slipping away. She tries to clear her desert throat before replying, “Thanks, but I’m going to be late.” 

“Late?”

She sighs as if it’s the Universe’s fault and not her own that Anne overslept. “I have a Calculus exam in Humanities in approximately—” she checks her watch “—eleven minutes. The last forty seconds of which have been monopolized by you. So, if you don’t mind, I’ve got to run.”

Anne pivots to do just that when she feels firm fingers circling around her wrist, holding her back with more than just his gaze this time. With the other hand, Gilbert makes a gesture with a thumb and closed fist over his shoulder.

"Hop on."

Anne seriously contemplates being late to her exam just to get away from the squirming sensation Gilbert causes in her gut, but she desperately needs the grades to maintain her scholarship at Redmond. So resentfully, Anne climbs aboard, horrified at her choice of footwear because her Birks were the easiest thing to slip on but allow her no traction atop Gilbert’s bike pegs because he doesn’t have a proper passenger seat. To compensate, her hands grip extra firm to his shoulders for balance, which he doesn’t seem to mind despite the fact that her fingers are surely digging into his skin and back muscles, tanned and defined beneath his thin, cotton t-shirt.  

“Hold on tight,” he says, almost like a joke, and starts pedaling with a fury.

Campus breezes by like this, the smell of spring in the air but slowly seeping into the first muggy hints of summer. Anne is constantly amazed at how close to nature they are despite being blocks away from the busy metropolitan of downtown, buttressed by lakes and forests to one side and the State Capitol building to the other. Redmond had always seemed like an impossibility until the day that it wasn’t and Anne never misses the opportunity to appreciate her fortune.

“I finished cataloguing all the surveys, by the way.”

She blinks. "What? How? There were like a million of them when I left yesterday night.”

Gilbert tsks, tsks, shaking his head in something close to disappointment. “Even after I told you not to stay too late?”

“Since when have I ever listened to anything you tell me to do?” Anne rolls her eyes, incredulous. “And besides that, how did you manage to get them done?”

“I woke up early today and pounded them out. It wasn’t that bad.”

“But you didn’t have to do them all,” she mumbles, almost into the crook of his neck.

“Well you looked exhausted yesterday. And it’s the least I could do.” Gilbert coughs, recognizing the suggestion behind his words. He recovers with, “As your fellow Vice President, of course.” 

“Of course.”

The breeze isn’t enough to cool down the blush that envelopes Anne’s body. She swears Gilbert can feel the heat of it like rolling off of her in waves.

By the time he deposits her in front of the Humanities building at 8:55, a labyrinth in and of itself to navigate much less try to locate the exam room, Anne is already sweating bullets; jumps off and is prepared to sprint inside when she notices Gilbert fixing to bike away. 

“Where are you going?” she asks. “Don’t you also have an exam?”

“I do, but it’s in Biomed.”

Biomed?

“Gilbert, that’s back near where you picked me up.”

He grins, lopsided and boyish. Cruises by her on his bike lackadaisically. “I know. Good luck with your exam though, Carrots.” 

Anne can’t afford to look after his retreating back, still an exam to get to somewhere in a building she doesn’t know how to navigate, but hates that she thinks about him instead of formulas all the way up until she opens her test.

-

She is still thinking about Gilbert when she settles into bed later that night; performs all the same rituals, but allows Ruby back into their room. The younger girl is out like a light in seconds, just the soft rustling of blonde curls hitting the pillow enough to knock her out. Anne, meanwhile, stares up at the ceiling, restless for what seems like hours, knowing well and good she has another early final in the morning. But still, she refuses to cave and seek out his videos, going through the motions of playing that same playlist on shuffle, so if his video just so happens to pop up, it isn’t of Anne’s choice or volition.

She doesn’t want to give Gilbert too much credit as a cure. After all, she was simply overtired and delirious and sleep was the natural result, marginally aided along by the contents of the video. Probably four more seconds of watching paint dry would have been enough to knock her out, nevermind the way Gilbert’s dulcet tones seemed to envelope her brain in a warm sense of comfort the night before. 

Anne chalks it up to fatigue, pushing her body to the brink after weeks of all-nighters, and spreading herself thin with all of the commitments she’s tied to. Nothing to do in particular with Gilbert’s videos or the way her body instinctively relaxes under the cadence of his words when Root Development and Gravitropism pops up again.

Quietly, Anne drifts off to sleep.

Chapter Text

Anne makes friends indiscriminately throughout college, picking up acquaintances and life mates from every niche and corner across campus and in the surrounding towns (“their dive bars are easier to get into with a fake ID” Anne says, flourishing her own to Diana, who wholly disapproves). This comes as no surprise considering she barely has time to breathe on top of long days monopolized by schoolwork, various student org duties, and the occasional poetry slam Anne’s afraid of performing at but attends with rapt fascination. All of which affords the redhead many avenues to socialize and enamor the entirety of Redmond’s student population at large, including Cole McKenzie, who transfers in from a community college twenty minutes outside of Chicago.

They meet, of all places, at a Free Art Friday event held in the studios near the basement of Memorial Union. Cole stands at the front door blocking traffic for a concerning amount of time before coming to a compromise with himself: he would stay for the first ten minutes and if he hadn’t met someone or struck up a conversation by then, he could leave. Which sounded reasonable until the time limit passes and Cole still hasn’t said anything more social than “can you pass me the red?” and in the ensuing minutes past ten, his terrible self-doubt starts creeping in. 

Just as he’s about to pack up and go, like a sign from the Heavens, Anne Shirley comes crashing into his life.

Like most, he is initially taken aback by the full force of Anne’s personality, which she doesn’t hold back and refuses to compromise despite nasty comments made under others' breaths throughout most of her life. Instead, she introduces herself and starts chattering away without skipping a beat, allowing Cole to get his name in edgewise, or further dwell in discomfort. Her eyes are starlight bright and she talks with her hands, gesticulating in every direction that predictably send speckled paint droplets flying clear across his canvas.

“Oh my God, Cole. I’m so sorry,” she apologizes profusely, setting her brush down lest she unleash more damage than has already been done. She hangs her head, ashamed.

Cole shakes his own, smiling softly in return. “It’s okay. Watch this,” he directs as he turns Anne’s errant mistake into a kaleidoscope of stars.

It’s like watching magic, the way Cole creates.

“Someday, when this turns up on display at The Metropolitan, I hope they put me down as a co-artist as well.”

They become fast friends after that.

Although the problem arises (if such a minor inconvenience can even be considered as such) with making so many new friends is that they all pose the inevitable question of:

“What is it with you and Gilbert Blythe anyway?”

Cole asks this over Family Dinner, which is the one thing Anne will make time for in her busy schedule to always attend on Thursday nights. They’re normally a crapshoot in terms of who shows up and who brings the food (almost always Tillie, unless she’s too lazy to cook and results in everyone shelling out money for takeout from the local pizzeria or Chinese restaurant down the block.) But for Anne, who’s never had a stable enough home life to participate in shared dinners of any kind, they are always the highlight of her week.

Collectively, the table groans in harmony, each person affecting a different tone they've perfected over the years.

“Don’t get her started,” Tillie implores, scooping more wonton soup into her bowl.

Jane disagrees. “I actually think it’s fun listening to all of her different renditions of that night. Like, is she going to set the scene with a rift opening up in the middle of the living room and Gilbert ascending from the seventh circle of Hell? Or dive deeper into his backstory as the Harbinger of Destruction? The possibilities are endless with Anne.”

“It was a dark and stormy night,” the redhead begins.

Ka’kwet rolls her eyes. “It was 76℉ and you could see every star in the sky. Anne and I got roped into going to this dumb frat party with Ruby because she ate shit going down the stairs behind Kyker Hall and some Chad from FIJI helped her up and asked if he’d be seeing her later that night at the party . . . ”

-

“Anne, please. I can’t let that be his first and last impression of me. Not if he turns out to be the love of my life! The future father of my children!”

“Ruby, you don’t even know the guy’s name.”

“Which is exactly why I need to go to this party tonight and find out!” The blonde latches onto Anne’s arm, the one not currently perusing a battered copy of Pride and Prejudice as they sit outside on the Hill overlooking campus. “Please? Pretty please? For me?”

Anne looks up from her book in mock-consideration, staring at Ruby with one eyebrow raised. “What if we had a conversation one of these days that passes the Bechdel test? Wouldn’t that be a concept?”

Her roommate huffs, all but tossing Anne’s arm aside with enough force to pop a shoulder. For such a tiny human being, Ruby packs a mighty impressive punch. “Sometimes, it’s like you’re not even speaking English!” Her bottom lip wobbles, like a child on the verge of a tantrum.

“Alright, alright, I’ll go.” Anne begrudgingly surrenders, if only to keep the peace for another week when Ruby inevitably falls in love with someone else and the cycle repeats itself as it has thrice since the semester began. Vaguely, she wonders if it weren’t for their random roommate assignment, if Anne would have ever crossed paths with Ruby Gillis, overly romantic and single-minded in her focus to graduate with a fiance. The younger girl is like a vision from the ‘50s, her college diploma merely an expensive stepping stone to her dream of someday becoming a wife. But at least for Ruby it’s a choice and not the expected trajectory of her career.

“I have to double-check with Ka’kwet though since we had a movie night planned.”

The conditional statement goes in one ear and out the other, or more likely over her head altogether. Ruby beams, planting a fat kiss on Anne’s cheek and nearly bowling her over onto the picnic blanket spread out beneath them. “Oh thank you, thank you, thank you! You’re the best roommate a girl could have! I’ve got to go get ready right now!” She stands up to leave.

To her retreating back, Anne can only call out, “Ruby, it’s not even three o’clock!” But the blonde is far too excited to do anything but charge ahead back to their dorm.

Anne pulls out her phone to text Ka’kwet the update.

2:47 PM

[anne] bad news babe we have been enlisted to help ruby on her eternal quest to find a husband tonight

[ka’kwet] ok but the last time this happened we ended up stranded in the middle of lake teeko without a paddle? have i not suffered enough????

[anne] no guarantees that this dude isn’t also on the rowing team but it looks like ruby’s only demanding that we accompany her to a party

[ka’kwet] what party?

[anne] the FIJI one

[ka’kwet] ew

[ka’kwet] hard pass

[anne] omg DO NOT abandon me and force me to look after ruby all night by myself

[anne] i’ll even take your morning shift tomorrow so you can get as drunk as you want

[ka’kwet] lol

[ka’kwet] as if i would accept a drink from anyone at a frat party

[anne] you’re right, but the offer still stands

[ka’kwet is typing . . . ]

[ka’kwet] yeah sure, i got nothing else to 2 do

[anne] xoxoxoxoxoxox i love you the most

[ka’kwet] ur only saying that bc diana went home for the weekend

-

Frat parties at the beginning of a school year are not dissimilar to a circus, complete with freaks and sideshows in the form of pledges and hazing rituals that border on cruel and unusual punishment. Anne recognizes a few guys from her floor decked out in grass skirts and tube tops, already halfway pissed if the vacant expression in Moody’s eyes is anything to go off of. Although Charlie appears no worse for wear despite the lanky constitution of his body being a detriment to binge drinking. The two of them are holed up in a corner surrounded by a group of guys with maniacal grins, the ringleader of which being the tallest man Anne has ever seen in her life. She can hear his French-Canadian accent encouraging the boys to “drink up, mes frères. The night is still young.”

Jerry Baynard is in charge of indoctrinating the new pledges during Phi Gamma Delta’s first big event of the year and the first order of business? Alcohol poisoning, of course.

Anne surmises from the situation that Moody and Charlie are tasked with drinking whatever is offered to them tonight, regardless of its contents and the legal drinking age be damned; and watches as frat stars drain whole bottles of whiskey and whatever choice liquid lying around into solo cups before pressing them roulette-style into reluctant hands. Anne is disgusted but knows her protests will go unheard, figuring her friends are smart enough to know their limits and draw the appropriate line in the sand.

Literally and figuratively, since there is actual sand littering the floor from the backyard pool leading into the kitchen and tracking all throughout the house. This being, of course, the traditional FIJI Islander party that freshmen like Anne are supposed to look forward to as a kick-off for frat socials in September. She had been dragged to a couple of Welcome Back one-offs with Josie and Diana (both rushing DG) but nothing like this: inflatable palm trees tall enough to be seen from outer space, rows of beer pong tables all miraculously occupied, and more bodies squeezed into one space than is permissible under fire code.

Anne does not come dressed in the prerequisite bikini top and short skirt, or even a Hawaiian shirt like everyone else who’s phoned it in. Instead, she and Ka’kwet stand in the corner and discuss, at length, the appropriation and bastardization of Pacific Island cultures while giving everyone the stink-eye who raises a fuss about their lack of thematically-appropriate clothing. But still, it isn’t long before a Meg song comes on and Anne can’t fight the need to embarrass herself with three plus minutes of uncoordinated dancing, trying her best to keep most of the liquid in the one drink she’s been nursing all night from tipping over. Meanwhile, Ka’kwet is killing it on the dancefloor, matching the beat with near flawless execution.

As if to save Anne from herself, Ruby appears after two laps around the house without a boyfriend to show for it.

“I can’t find him anywhere!” she yells over pounding bass music and the general din of a party at full-swing. Ruby’s standing on her tip-toes at a diminutive 5’2 and can barely see past her friends’ shoulders much less some of the boulders in attendance and spread out amongst the crowd.

“What does he look like?” Anne yells, swaying slightly to a Rae Sremmurd cut while sweat trickles steadily down the back of her neck. Briefly, she regrets putting on a white button-down and jeans instead of something more suited for ventilation. But Anne has poor blood circulation and would probably freeze to death on the way home if she were wearing any less.

“Tall with dark hair! Very tragically handsome.”

Ka’kwet doesn’t hold back a snort. “Ruby, you’ve just described like half the guys here!”

“Yeah, but he’s not like other guys. He’s different!”

“I highly doubt that,” Anne mumbles under her breath, but swivels her head back and forth trying to look for this mysterious figure anyways. Frat parties are usually reserved for those in actual frats or underaged students who can’t get into bars, but the FIJI Islander is such a big event that it pulls from outside of the usual suspects as well. Everywhere she looks is teeming with bodies, swinging and staggering, with more than a handful of them just an amalgamation of limbs, uncoordinated and sloppy in their attempts to fuse into one.

After a while, Anne becomes too overheated and needs to slip outside.

“We’ll join you in a sec,” Ka’kwet calls over her shoulder as Ruby drags them away to follow someone matching Prince Charming’s description down the hallway towards the basement.

“Not if he’s the one!” is the blonde’s fading response.

She can only laugh and heads through the front door since the back leads to an even bigger crowd, fences bulging comically trying to contain the drunken masses. There is a DJ booth set up on a raised platform and a mosh pit of all things forming only inches away. The front lawn, at least, offers snatches of non-recycled air which Anne breathes deeply, appreciating the crisp coolness of September circling around in her lungs. Taking a seat on the front porch, she watches the moon.

Absent-minded, Anne twists and twirls her hair around a finger, pulling it up into a bun and letting it fall again, pushing it to one side and then flipping it around to the other. It is a force of habit at this point and something she does to pass the time because Anne can’t help but fuss over the part of herself she both likes and hates the most. She had, at one point in high school, attempted to dye it black while chasing the raven-haired vision she’s always dreamt of becoming, but the shitty box-dye from Target ended up turning her hair green, damaging it to the point of breakage, and forced Anne to shave the whole of it the summer before sophomore year. Ever since, she’s been afraid of doing anything more drastic than a trim around the edges. Although over the years, her red hair has become something of a calling card and one of the features that sets Anne apart. Even if she wishes, sometimes, that it was more of an auburn.

“You alright, Miss?” a curious voice asks from her right. Anne tears her gaze away from the night sky to look up into a pair of hazel eyes instead, framed by expressive eyebrows and cheeks flushed slightly from activity. He’s too lucid to be drunk, steady on his feet and somewhat purposeful in his approach, gesturing to the spot next to Anne, as if asking permission; smiles when she grants it because Anne finds him just a little bit attractive.

“Miss?” she teases, angling to face him under the anbaric glow of the porch light and stars.

“It’s Mr., actually. Gilbert Blythe. And you?”

“Anne.” She shakes her head, teasing. “You don’t need to know my last name.”

“Well for the purposes of stalking you later on social media, do you spell that with an E?”

“I’m not actually on social media, but yes. I do spell it with an E.”

Gilbert seems surprised. “None? At all?”

“Not unless you consider LinkedIn.”

Shamelessly, he replies, “If there’s a feature that makes it possible to slide into your DMs, then it counts.”

Anne regards his cheeky grin, the ensemble of his tube top and grass skirt marking him as a Phi Gamma Delta pledge, if the general air of mischief didn’t already give him away. She wonders whether she should indulge him any further in this flirtation. “Are you normally so bold with strangers?”

“Hey, a cute girl is a cute girl.” Gilbert leans in conspiratorially, close enough for his breath to tickle the sensitive shell of her ear. “And between you and me, I might have a thing for redheads.”

“You might?”

He shrugs nonchalant, radiating smarm that somehow comes off as endearing. “You’re the first redhead I’ve ever met, so I guess that makes it true.”

“We are a dying breed,” Anne laments.

He goes to open his mouth, hazel eyes sparkling, and she shoves him aside with her shoulder almost immediately.

“What?” Gilbert questions, like butter wouldn’t melt in his mouth, trying and failing to contain his laughter. His shoulders shake. “I didn’t even say anything.”

“Yeah, but I heard it anyway.”

Something along the lines of “I can fix that.”

Anne flushes at the suggestion. The extent of her experience with boys is a few sloppy kisses in the backseat of a car, with a guy who is a little too old and ashamed to be seen with her in public. Anne tutored him in Algebra and he smelt of stale, Marlboro Lights. There was no build-up to their relationship, only the quiet suggestion of touch and Anne’s overwhelming loneliness. In summary, the complete opposite of what Gilbert is giving her now: all playful banter and the buzz of anticipation.

She’s not quite sure what to do, but he makes up for it with gusto.

They spend a few minutes going through the motions of asking all the standard college student questions like what year are you? and what are you studying? Neutral territory that shockingly branches out into more. Gilbert grew up on an orchard and likes plants so botany was the natural choice, but he wants to be a doctor because learning about illnesses and their origins was the only way to stay sane during his father’s own. Anne shares that she’s an English and journalism major because she wants to create something that lasts (and that she isn’t on social media because she’s never stayed in one place for long enough to make any meaningful connections).

“College will be different right?” she asks, not intending to get so sentimental right off the bat but looking to Gilbert for reassurance anyway. There is something about him that feels too much like comfort, the kind of relief she could never afford growing up.

He is quiet for a stretch, reaching deep into the well for the right thing to say. He probably senses, more than anything, how critical his response is in determining whether or not their relationship survives past this moment; where Anne finds herself vulnerable and entirely in his hands. Maybe she shouldn’t be placing so much significance into what should be a shallow but pleasant interaction. After all, this isn’t the first or last time she’ll ever be hit on at a party and there’s nothing about this night that should stand out in her mind.

But she remembers Gilbert being careful, handling his answer with grace and (looking back) an unsurprising degree of thoughtfulness. “I think college is what you make of it. Whatever friends, family, or memories you create. They’re all up to you. Whatever you want to do.”

“Truly?” Anne’s voice sounds small.

Gilbert nods, sincere as always. “Truly.”

To prove it, he asks for her phone, and waggles his fingers when she doesn’t immediately comply. Gilbert's pout is so pronounced she has no choice but to give in. Anne reluctantly hands over the device, an older generation iPhone she bought secondhand after working an entire summer to afford it. But if Gilbert notices, he doesn’t comment; merely opens up the camera app and leans in once again, the smell of sweat and spring water and artificial pine. “Smile!” He directs and snaps a series of pictures. Anne’s certain she looks bad in every single one of them when compared to Gilbert’s classic good looks, but can’t bring herself to care when his silly expressions force candid giggles from her lips.

“Hopefully one of them is good enough to be your inaugural post on social media.”

“Hopefully,” she echoes.

He kisses her gently then, on the corner of her face where mouth and cheek meet. A fleeting peck that tastes sweeter than syrup. A good memory she keeps locked away.

-

Anne, obviously, does not relay any of these things in her multiple renditions of the events of that night. She’s not ashamed, per say, as much as she is embarrassed by her naked vulnerability; how swept up she felt beneath the weight of Gilbert’s gaze. It is also a hard pill to swallow for people who know the fervor of her hatred and to reconcile it with their romantic introduction. Gilbert doesn’t bring it up either, whether because he’s following her lead or is equally as embarrassed. But still, it lingers between them like an unspoken intermediary, the chink in Anne’s armor during all their barbed exchanges, the dull edge to her tongue, and all the punches she holds back.

They part ways when Gilbert is summoned by his frat brothers for their continued hazing of the night. He’s gotten off easy so far because Jerry is a friend and Gilbert is a little bit older besides, haven taken a gap year between high school and freshman year, and now rushing as a sophomore. He can’t, however, get off completely scot-free, evidenced by the way he is forcibly dragged away. Anne waves him off after letting him know her schedule at the bookstore/cafe tomorrow morning, promising Gilbert a free cup of coffee when her shift ends at noon. He calls it a date and she remains seated until she can no longer see the wide expanse of Gilbert’s back in the dark, tube top riding low from the struggle of being manhandled all the way around to the pool.

Curious as to what Ka’kwet and Ruby have gotten up to, she stands to go back into the house, making it as far as the staircase when she overhears two frat bros talking in low tones over the more muted trap beat in the background. Normally, Anne knows better than to kill brain cells listening in on their no doubt troubling conversations, but the subject matter sounds familiar and so she stays rooted in her spot.

“Did you see the ass on that Native girl earlier?”

“Nah, I had my eye on her blonde friend. A real cutie.”

“Definitely freshmen though. Do you think they’re 18?”

“God, I hope so.”

“They were with a redhead earlier, no?”

“Oh yeah, for sure. She had an ass on her, too.”

“Do you think the carpet matches the drapes?”

Anne starts to see red, fists clenched beside her and five seconds away from swinging. She is about to pop out from beside the staircase and give them a piece of her mind when the next sentence stops any thought of taking action.

“We’ll find out sooner or later. Billy tasked one of the pledges to find out before the end of the week. Otherwise, he’ll pull the bid.”

One of them, the taller of the two, laughs. “Which unfortunate pussy boy pulled that short end of the stick?”

“The older one, I think? Gerald or something.”

“Gilbert?”

“Yeah, that’s the one.”

And this is how Gilbert Blythe becomes the victim caught in the crosshairs of Anne Shirley’s temper.

Chapter Text

For someone who boasts of such an active imagination during her waking hours, Anne very rarely dreams and even rarer will remember the contents of them when she does; pretty much forgetting how to altogether in middle school when her insomnia takes a turn for the worse. Alternatively, Anne perfects the art of crafting scenarios before bed and spends hours ruminating on them until she drifts off into some liminal space before sleep; not quite a dream in that Anne dictates exactly how her fantasies play out and is in control of every action and manifestation that transpires, but close enough that she comes to embrace this aspect of her nightly routine. A routine she has known and done for years until one day, Anne finds herself in a clearing beneath baby blue skies, poppies and cornflowers swaying softly in the breeze.

It is a beautiful scene albeit somewhat generic, and leagues above what the average subconscious is capable of conjuring on any given day. But Anne feels dissatisfied knowing the full scope of her imagination and tries to construct a mountain range, snow-capped and glistening, for a little extra pizzazz. The result is a useless endeavor that leaves Anne shaking from the effort, and only after several more attempts at modifying the landscape around her, swallowtails stubbornly refusing to morph into monarchs, does Anne realize that it’s not a matter of scale, but ability. That this is, in actuality, a dream and she is simply along for the ride.

“Well what am I supposed to do now?” she asks aloud, looking around to see not a single soul in sight. There is only Anne, the flowers, and the summer sunshine beaming down. If she listens carefully, she can almost hear waves lapping softly upon a shore.

When no answer makes itself apparent or known, Anne sits criss-cross applesauce in the grass, spreading out the skirt of a yellow sundress she remembers wearing in the earlier days of her youth. Only here, it is cleaner and infinitely less frayed. Anne had worn that dress to death during the warmer months of July and August growing up, hemline coming up a little shorter each year as Anne grew taller, until it eventually split apart at the seams when her boobs arrived at fifteen—the last nice thing she remembers owning before she ages out of the foster system a couple years later. As a graduation gift, Anne splurges on three new dresses from the sales rack at Zara, which meant rationing ramen packs for the remainder of the month, but worth it for the way Anne feels when she sees herself in the reflection of store windows passing by.

As if to greet her and compliment the color of her dress, one of the swallowtails Anne tried to modify earlier floats by and sits gently atop her finger, its companion taking reprieve on the sun-warmed crown of her head.

“I hear butterflies are attracted to the color red most of all.”

Anne whips around, startled, which sends the creatures aflutter. She immediately recognizes the familiar face and feels that familiar tug of her heart, the one she always ignores or chalks up to an undiagnosed murmur when he’s around. She’s just irritated that of all the people her subconscious could conjure up, it chooses him instead of someone like Dev Patel.

Gilbert merely shrugs, as if knowing he is the last person Anne wants to see and is being appropriately apologetic about it for her sake. Because even the way he is thoughtful is aggressively annoying.

Anne tries to ignore him and fails, the antithesis of oblivious when she is so attuned to his every movement and sound. Gilbert eats up space just by virtue of being large, but his presence spreads wider than the area his physical body consumes. Upon seeing the smattering of freckles on his face as he sits down beside her, Anne realizes she must observe Gilbert a great deal more closely than she thinks because this dream version of him is entirely too detailed, perfect down to the little lock of hair on his forehead that never seems to lay flat.

“What are you doing here?” she questions, little heat to her words. Anne’s puzzlement beats out whatever annoyance she feels, peering at him sideways because she can’t bear to look at him head on.

“This is your dream.” Gilbert grins like he’s caught her in the middle of a trap. “If anything, you should be the one explaining this to me.”

“I’m clearly hallucinating. Must be all the subliminal messaging from watching too many of your dumb videos.”

“You mean dreaming.” He sounds entirely too smug. “Not hallucinating. You’re dreaming of me, Carrots.”

Anne bumps him violently with a shoulder, flushing despite the fact that he shouldn’t have such an effect on her in the first place. “Don’t phrase it like that. It’s gross.”

“But it’s true. You are dreaming of me.” Gilbert all but sing-songs the sentiment. “And it’s a happy dream too, seeing as how we’re in the middle of a meadow.” He is clearly pleased by how soft their surroundings are and the way Anne doesn’t immediately back away upon realizing he’s been inching towards her throughout the course of the entire conversation. Anne can only blink, temporarily paralyzed at the way all of her senses are overwhelmed by him completely.

At the very least, she retains some control of her brain, frantically whirring trying to come up with a quip. “What I don’t understand is why I couldn't dream a version of you with a less irritating personality. Or better yet, the inability to speak.”

He shrugs again, backing up to give her space because Dream Gilbert senses how easily he could shatter this illusion. How Anne would rather wake up than come to terms with certain truths about her attraction. “Because you like the sound of my voice.”

It’s what got you here in the first place. In this meadow, with me.

Anne noisily clears her throat, thankful for the distance to regain some of her more important faculties. Like the ability to breathe. “Well, is there at least a purpose to your presence? Like guidance on some spiritual journey through the dreamworld or whatever?”

“You’ve been reading way too much YA fantasy, Anne. I’m only here to keep you company.” As if to prove a point, Gilbert lies back on the grass and pats the empty space beside him, an open invitation for Anne to do the same if she’d like. It takes an internal debate and a quick glance around for potential witnesses before Anne finally deigns to join him, making sure to leave a good couple inches in between their bodies as a buffer lest he get any ideas. Gilbert scoffs at the false modesty, but doesn’t otherwise comment, lifting his hands and using his interlocked fingers as a cushion for his head. Anne notes the strong cords of muscles peeking out from beneath the sleeves of his shirt and immediately looks away, vowing to stop paying so much attention to such useless particulars when she’s awake. The accuracy with which she renders him has got to be taking up more real estate in her brain than should otherwise be allotted.

They stay like this for what could be seconds or hours; Anne can’t entirely be sure when time flows differently in this limbo stage of sleep. The sunshine tickles her nose after a while, too irritating to ignore, and when Anne moves to itch it, there is a tell-tale stiffness in her limbs that speaks to long-term inertion. She stretches out to relieve the pressure, starfishing to shake out the tension, and winds up whacking Gilbert accidentally in the face.

“Oh shit, sorry.” She sits up to inspect the damage, misplaced concern when she realizes that he is no worse for wear. The impact isn’t even enough to rouse him as Gilbert slumbers on, rhythmically breathing with his mouth slightly ajar. Anne leans in closer just to be sure, scanning everything from his eyelashes to cheekbones in search of a bruise. There isn’t so much as a single blemish on his frustratingly handsome face—the same one he doesn’t wash with anything else besides water.

“A hate crime,” she mutters, thinking of her own twelve-step routine.

This comment, of all things, is what ends up waking Gilbert.

He rubs the remnants of sleep from his eyes before focusing in on Anne, still hovering close enough to reach out and kiss. Realizing her proximity, Anne quickly retreats, scrambling to sit up and regain what’s left of her composure.

“There was an, um, I was just—”

He smiles at her, serene, and goes to crack his neck in either direction. “Relax,” Gilbert instructs, sitting up as well. “It’s fine.”

Immediately, Anne’s defenses are raised, wondering if his nonchalance isn’t some kind of Trojan Horse in disguise. It’s hard to tell with Gilbert, when every bone in her body is screaming at her to trust him. Undeserved as Anne, obviously, still hasn’t forgiven him for the aftermath of the FIJI Islander party. “Excuse me?”

“You don’t have to try so hard at pretending you don’t like me, you know.”

“What makes you think I’m pretending?” she glares.

Gilbert looks as if he’s holding back an eye roll. “At most, you think I’m annoying and a little bit entitled. What white, frat guy isn’t to some varying degree? But you’re still friends with Moody and sometimes tolerate Charlie, even though I’m much better behaved than the two of them combined. So what is it you’re holding a grudge against me for, Anne? What’s got you hanging on to all this bogus anger? After all this time?”

“You know what you did.” Anne rips out two handfuls of grass and throws them petulantly in his direction. The wind cuts them down and the blades fall just short of their mark.

“Do I really though?” he asks, so earnest it makes Anne almost doubt herself completely. Gilbert sighs when he sees the determined slant of her brows, running a hand through his hair as a way to expel the pent-up frustration.

Truth be told, Anne has never addressed the problem with Gilbert directly or repeated the foul words she heard that night to him aloud. Not even when he shows up at the coffee shop after her shift the next day, casually dressed in a t-shirt and jeans but not enough layers to fully absorb the cup of water she splashes directly in his face. She then proceeds to spend the rest of the semester rebuffing his advances and actively avoiding him at parties, using Ka’kwet and Diana as human shields, although Gilbert never comes across as aggressive or so much as toes a line with her ever. Throughout it all, he is almost a gentleman, and never rises to the bait; is patient even when Anne is being nothing short of a brat and probably more churlish than he has ever deserved.

“You hurt my feelings excruciatingly,” she admits for the first time out loud. Which is dumb that Anne would ever let a man do anything of the sort, but it’s true—Gilbert Blythe broke her heart and she resents greatly him for that. Imagine the first person she opens up to about her lonely past, only to have it turn out to be some callous prank in order to bed her for a bid? Anne doesn’t quite develop trust issues as a result, but she is definitely more wary about sharing the more intimate parts of herself moving forward.

Dream Gilbert isn’t having it though, which means some deeper part of Anne must question it herself. “Given everything you know about me—which is clearly a lot and more than you let on, even to yourself—do you really think it makes sense that I would ever agree to such a dare? For something as dumb as a bid from Billy, who wasn’t even on the selection board that year? And to continue pursuing you, even after I pledged? Just think about it, Anne. Does that really make sense?”

Anne resists the urge to slap two hands over her ears, “LALALALALA” as he pleads for her to consider the possibility that she’s mistaken. Not that Anne has the time to do so anyway.

At 8:15 AM on the day of her last exam, Anne wakes up in her dorm room alone.

-

Gilbert visits her dreams most every night after that, although they never broach the topic of their ill-fated relationship again nor does he bring it up when they’re together until morning. For the most part, Anne dials back on the hostility once she comes to terms with the fact that her subconscious only ever wants to conjure up the tall, pre-med major in her sleep and accepts this as something that is beyond her control. It’s hard, though, to reconcile the months she’s spent hating him and the softness with which she suffuses them in her dreams.

It is doubly hard quitting Gilbert altogether, try as she might after the semester ends and everyone goes their separate ways, he off to Paris while she remains behind at Redmond. Anne barely makes it past three days, tossing and turning and glaring at her laptop across the room, trying to fall asleep without the aid of his videos, before she finally gives in in the wee hours of the morning. It tastes of bitter defeat on her tongue when Gilbert appears in front of her afterwards, smug, in the meadow she’s come to associate as theirs.

“Miss me?” he asks, once again patting the patch of grass beside him for her to rest.

“Shut up.” Anne complies, and if there is an inch or so less of distance between them this time compared to the last, then it is certainly unintentional.

Increasingly, Anne seems to qualify every advancement in their relationship as “unintentional” and outside the scope of her prerogative. But plausible deniability gets thrown out the window when she slowly bridges the gap night by night, until it isn’t unusual to find herself wrapped up in Gilbert’s arms every night, legs knotted and the tip of her nose pressed into the sweaty crook of his neck. The first time it happens, Anne leaps ten feet away in order to disentangle their bodies, heart pounding and curse words flying before Gilbert even fully wakes up.

“You’re the one that moved,” he points out, yawning and stretching so that the bottom hem of his t-shirt reveals just the slightest glimpse of his stomach, flat and toned and definitely doesn’t make Anne swallow. “Look at your shoes.”

Sure enough, the sandals that Anne kicked off in favor of digging her toes in the grass sits abandoned where she left them a few inches away.

This exact scene happens three more times until Anne blinks groggily awake, weighing her options and assessing the situation, before burrowing in closer for a few extra minutes of sleep. At one point, she thinks she feels his arms gripping her tighter in response.

Some nights, they leave behind their meadow in favor of different sights and sounds, like other lifetimes in a universe filled with infinite possibilities. In one dream, they grow up as schoolmates during the time of steam trains and buggies, where Anne wears beige pinafores and Gilbert pulls on her pigtails during class. Or he is Prince Wisteria riding into her land, now enemy territory after a wicked scheme tears their kingdoms’ alliance apart. Occasionally, it is sometime in the nearby future, the two of them married in a house at the end of the lane. Anne likes these dreams the best, where nothing much happens except to watch the rise and fall of his chest. The way he murmurs her name during a particularly good dream, soft smile dripping from the curve of his lips.

An entire summer passes like this, together with Gilbert, when it’s suddenly September and her junior year of college kicks off. Anne still hasn’t told anyone about her compulsive need to hear Gilbert’s voice in order to fall asleep (not even Diana, who chalks it up as another one of her various eccentricities.) And it’s mostly fine until Anne cuts it close after a night out at the bars and the girls all settle for crashing at Josie’s place rather than going home in their plastered state. At least at Josie’s, Diana (the only one amongst them who isn’t belligerently drunk, par the course considering her incredible self-restraint) can watch over all of them at once.

Anne elects to take the sofa, lumpy and uncomfortable, because it provides a small measure of privacy in which to watch her videos. But Jane commandeers it and settles in for the night, sticking her tongue out before disappearing underneath the blanket for good. Meanwhile, Anne ends up wedged between Diana and Ruby in the guest room, a tight squeeze as it is, but with three bodies offers her almost no room to maneuver without jostling either of them with an elbow to the spleen.

She tries her best to fall asleep—to not use Gilbert’s videos as a crutch for her insomnia—only to be met with very little success. Anne ends up lying motionless until morning, bolting after breakfast so that she can crash in the comforts of her own bed. After so many years of restless nights, Anne refuses to subject herself to any more loss of sleep, especially considering she has a fool-proof method of inducing it at any time.

Thankfully, the timing of things allowed Anne to rely on these videos without having to face Gilbert in real life, as he was off in Paris on a summer fellowship at the Sorbonne. Anne stayed behind, working away at her student loan debt juggling her job as an orientation leader and doing freelance pieces for the local newspaper on the side. But now, with the new school year starting up, the circumstances are different.

You’d think, on a campus of 43,000, she’d be able to avoid him to a certain extent or to only see him in passing at the student union sometimes. Anne is a journalism student and he is botany/pre-med; theoretically, their interests should not align. But of all the student clubs and organizations he could have joined, Gilbert sauntered into the Union Directorate during the fall of her sophomore year, just as Anne set out on her campaign to be elected vice president, an ambitious feat for a rising junior with deeply entrenched seniors to beat out.

But as is expected, Gilbert waltzes in and charms everybody around him, including the incumbent president Winnie who Anne used to regard with the utmost respect, chipped away little by little whenever she looks over to see her and Gilbert together.

Prior to the election, Anne had dedicated the last two years of her life in preparation for the role, time spent running around like a headless chicken making sure her events go off without a hitch, countless emails sent and received in order to sort out logistics and bookings, and the stress of troubleshooting when technology goes astray or someone somewhere in the chain fucks up her directives and she has to piece together when and where things went horribly wrong. Throughout it all, Anne effectively chairs both the Music and Arts committees, which are monsters in and of themselves, so it makes sense the amount of trust and recognition she received for all of her hard work.

Unfortunately for Anne though, Gilbert worked hard too, and earned top-billing after single-handedly reviving the Outdoors and Recreational committees from an uncertain death. At the end of his first semester with the Redmond Union Directorate, Gilbert effectively curates a magic touch that elevates all of his events to must-attend status for students in every niche and social group on campus.

Anne goes on to win the vice presidency but so does Gilbert in a two-way tie, the first in Union history, and since the organization has taken on additional responsibilities and the completion of another student union, the most prudent decision is to promote them both to the office of vice president.

And as such, this narrows down Anne’s 43,000 student-populated campus into a conference room on the second floor of Union South, every Tuesday from the hours of 7-8, trapped inside with the four other members of the council, including Gilbert Blythe.

The first meeting of the new school year goes about as well as could be hoped for given that Anne and Gilbert famously don’t get along. Or rather, that Anne hates his guts and Gilbert must be some sort of masochist for sticking with her for so long. She knows and has heard the rumors floating around Greek Row about Gilbert's only flaw being his devotion to Anne. Despite this, she’s convinced it’s all an act to draw sympathy on his part, no matter how much Cole and Diana roll their eyes and argue ‘til their blue in the face.

“His being attracted to me didn’t make sense when he approached me at that party, and it doesn’t make sense now given all the beautiful people around him.” In his few years at Redmond, Gilbert has become the Big Man on campus, elevated from Golden Boy status after Elijah Hanford graduated early last December. But even before FIJI and in the ten seconds after he introduces himself, Anne knows without a doubt that Gilbert is someone that is a once in a lifetime type of person. And is perhaps why she was so susceptible to believing that he had ulterior motives in hitting on her during their first initial encounter.

Diana rolls her eyes because she knows better than to humor Anne’s pity party and poor self-esteem. Cole, on the other hand, goes on a personal crusade to point out all of the redhead’s best qualities—a rookie mistake considering she’ll get mad when he eventually runs out of things to say. Cole could go on for hours and Anne will still respond with “See? It’s such a short list!”

Gilbert could and would go on forever if Anne weren’t so intent in cutting him down before he could try. She had expected some level of discomfort seeing Gilbert again after spending the summer physically apart but together at night; to feel some type of way about the two versions of him that exist in her life. What actually happens is that Anne gets too distracted trying to sort out the bits of him that are real and imagined, she ends up half-asssing their quarrels and disagreements.

There shouldn’t be much room to argue considering these meetings are mostly formalities to go over final decisions made in committees anyways. But somehow, Anne and Gilbert still manage to find ways to snipe at each other over the table, much to the dismay of Winnie who keeps the peace, and to the amusement of both Pauls, who gleefully egg them on.

“No, Bhangra Club should get the opening slot and then Ballroom. They’re much more high energy and entertaining to watch.”

Gilbert doesn’t argue the point, but overall disagrees. “Ballroom has more members and more people coming out to support them, so we should front-load the event to get alcohol sales up early.”

“I’m sorry, since when did we install a fucking Keystone lobbyist on our leadership board?”

“First of all, I would be a Budweiser lobbyist and you know it. And secondly, we need the extra funding if we’re going to pull off RUDstock next semester.”

“We put aside plenty of funding for that!”

“Well it’s not enough to book Kendrick Lamar.”

And so on and so forth, although as the weeks go by, Anne finds herself losing the fervor for it all. She bickers more out of principle now than any actual dissent, especially after coming to the conclusion that Gilbert can’t always be wrong and that it wouldn’t kill her to give in sometimes. Plus, the more and more she acknowledges that the sound of his voice soothes her, the more Anne finds herself actually listening to Gilbert when he speak. She might even enjoy the quiet wit and humor in his jokes, the thoughtfulness to which he expands upon his ideas and considers others’ opinions, and even his laughter, once grating before but somehow becoming almost pleasing to the ear.

Anne still refuses to engage in actual conversation with him, stubborn as she is to maintain the status quo, and settles for hovering just in hearing range of wherever he wanders. If Gilbert notices the closer proximity in which she orbits, he doesn’t comment on it, but does increase the rate of accidental touches by tenfold. More often than not, Anne finds his fingers brushing across her own as he hands out paperwork or borrows a pen, gentle taps on shoulders to grab her attention, and once when he fishes a flower blossom from her hair, lingering while splaying out the auburn strands in his hands.

Gilbert takes to walking her home after meetings as the semester dips further into fall and the sun sets closer to seven than it does to eight. He takes the outside shoulder on sidewalks so he can wheel his bike along the road and also, she suspects, because it’s the gentlemanly thing to do.

She learns a lot about him on these walks, mostly against her will. Like the fact that he took a gap year after high school to take care of his dad, technically two years older despite being only one year ahead. This is what inspired him to pursue medicine as a career and why he takes his education so seriously. More than just preventing death, Gilbert also wants to celebrate new life. He shows her pictures of baby Delphine on his phone, pleased as punch when Anne coos and ‘aww’s in all the appropriate places. And when their shoulders bump at multiple points along the way and Anne doesn’t immediately pull away, Gilbert’s grin grows just that much brighter.

It gets harder to seperate the two: the Gilbert that exists in her head and the one that stands before her now. So much so that she blurs reality and her dreams, more affectionate than she normally allows herself to be and open in a way she hasn’t been since they first met at that party underneath the stars. Anne lets herself laugh at his jokes and even flirts when she’s feeling so inclined. It’s like a whole different dynamic aside from the moments when she catches herself slipping and makes up for it with harsh detachment or a pointed remark. The back and forth would give Gilbert whiplash if he weren’t already so attuned to Anne’s various eccentricities and bears her a wide berth no matter how strangely she’s been behaving these days.

But even if Anne is all over the place, Gilbert remains consistent as ever in his pursuit of Anne’s attention.

“What are you doing two weekends from now?” he asks once they reach the front door of her shared house. He slips Anne’s backpack from his shoulder, having made a habit of carrying it for her, and hands it over.

“Two weekends from now?” Anne repeats, wracking her brains for why the date should sound so familiar. “Isn’t that—”

“Yeah, it’s the date of FIJI’S fall formal. We rented a bunch of log cabins down by Lake Homer and Heron. Me, Jerry and Moody are all sharing one so—”

“Ruby and Diana are going to be there.”

“Exactly, and why I figured to mention it since it would be extra incentive for you to say yes to going.”

Anne purses her lips, reluctant. She's heard stories about these formals and . . . “I’m not trying to hook up with you, Gilbert.”

“And you won’t have to. Not if you don’t want to.” He adds in that last part as an afterthought, just a little bit hopeful that she’ll contradict him after all.

She doesn’t, of course. “But everyone expects—”

“Well I’m not everyone. Just me. And that will never be my expectation.”

She shifts her weight from foot to foot, ready to say no except for the tiny part of her brain that is compelling her to agree. He is just so stupidly earnest about everything, it’s hard to make a decision either way. So she deflects, instead. “I’m sure there are hoards of other girls you could invite that would love to go and also hook-up.”

Gilbert shrugs, scuffing a toe on the sidewalk. He fidgets terribly with his bike handle before admitting, “Truthfully? I would much rather hang out with you, Anne-girl.”

It is truly unfair.

Chapter Text

She ends up accepting Gilbert’s offer, but only after a lot of hemming and hawing and a gentle nudge from Diana, who looks at Anne with an expression that speaks of Knowing without any intention to divulge. In fact, there’s rarely a time when Diana isn’t looking at Anne like she’s waiting on something to click into place, but remains patient enough to let her friend reach this “obvious” conclusion on her own, and is content to postpone the inevitable for just a little while longer. The familiar twinkle tends to come out whenever they are talking about Gilbert, or rather around him because Anne refuses to put a name to all of her mood swings as of late. She’s already spent the last two weeks in a near-constant state of frazzled, tip-toeing around Gilbert at org meetings and parties, who is, in stark contrast, essentially floating on Cloud 9.

Even Dream Gilbert seems pleased at her decision to be his date in real life and eagerly wakes her up the morning of departure when the sun begins to rise. Normally, he’s loath to let Anne leave his side, constantly begging “five more minutes” despite the sound of her alarm shaking the ground around them like a post-apocalyptic event. It used to be a chore trying to extract her body from his arms but now, Gilbert can’t get her up and conscious soon enough.

“Why stay here in this dream when reality is so much sweeter?” he asks, and she feels the curve of his smile brushing against the shell of her ear.

Anne groans and snuggles closer; would normally beg to differ, but she’s still emerging from her sleep-warm cocoon and hasn’t recovered enough of her faculties to snark back with the vehemence he deserves.

Gilbert sits up and tugs at the end of a braid he’s got curled around his finger, peppier than he has any right to be given that she won’t be getting a wink of sleep this entire weekend. Not with Real Gilbert in such close proximity, anyways. And frankly speaking, Anne would rather stay up for 72 hours straight than risk exposure and have to explain why she has MP3 rips of his YouTube videos saved directly to her phone. The mortification alone would be enough to end her.

“Rise and shine, Carrots! It’s a beautiful day to be alive!”

Anne aches in a way that makes her suspect she’d been hit by a 10-ton truck at some point during the night, all sore muscles and a phantom throbbing in her back. “It’s barely morning and I’m barely alive.” She swats his hand away like a fly.

The man most likely sitting behind the wheel of the aforementioned truck only laughs. “Carpe diem! Seize the day!”

“You think you’re being motivational, but you’re really just being annoying in two languages instead of the usual one.”

He pinches a cheek and smooths over the ensuing sting with a gentle caress. Anne can barely make out the silhouette of his body through the translucency of her lids; feels his breath fanning, soft, across her nose bridge and eyes. Gilbert shifts and effectively blocks out the sun when he hoists himself up onto his elbows and knees, looming inches from her face as his limbs bracket her own and leans in close enough to kiss.

Secretly, Anne wishes he would. Kiss her like that night they’d met under the stars, sweet and measured in a way she tries her best not to recall. Anne burns, inside-out, willing him to make the first move, but he won’t—not again. Not without her consent.

Gilbert is the paradigm of patience, even in the privacy of her dreams.

His sudden nearness is entirely meant to rile her up. “You’re cute when you’re grumpy.”

It totally works.

“I bet you I’m cuter when I’m asleep.” Anne rolls over, shoulder bumping against his chest as she pivots to create some marginal space between their lips. Her side soaks slightly, dampening from the dew drops still forming atop flower blossoms and grass tips. The resulting chill sends shivers down her spine and has nothing to do with how Gilbert’s intimate positioning makes her tremble. She curls an arm beneath her head as a makeshift pillow, attempting to get comfortable and drown the world out around her. “Plus, it’s too early to wake up. I can afford a couple more hours.”

Gilbert points out that if she wants to shower, she will have to do it soon, especially if she wants her hair to dry on time.

“Trying to get me naked?” Anne mumbles into the crook of her elbow, as a joke.

“It wouldn’t be the first time.” The suggestion in his tone is damning.

She immediately knows what he’s referring to because it floats, ever-present, in the back of her mind; contributes, in part, to why she’s been so on-edge the past few weeks whenever Gilbert’s around. Anne’s fallen into the habit of . . . taking care of business in bed after she discovers that the sound of his voice in her ear takes her all the way There; and for as long as it’s been happening, she’s been fighting it for five times as long—clenched fists and heavy breathing, crossing her legs beneath the covers to relieve some of the tension. It’s still a recent development and Anne’s only pleasured herself a handful of times to his videos ever since, but she'd rather eat rocks than admit that they’re the greatest orgasms she’s ever had, even if they’re tinged with feelings of shame and guilt in the afterglow.

“Look, Anne, it’s obvious that—”

“Do not finish that sentence,” she warns, sitting up to twist her hair into a bun. The air against her exposed neck feels like ice compared to Anne’s internal body temperature right now, molten lava coursing swiftly through her veins. It works its way up her chest and through to the crown of her roots. Red-faced and red-handed.

Gilbert purses his lip, but reluctantly heeds the command. She’s almost disappointed to see the determined set of his jaw, having fully expected him to be teasing the first time he brings it up, and smug enough to smack the smirk right off his face. It would fall more in line with the Gilbert she knows in real life.

But the one she conjures up in her dreams is not entirely exact, and while physically accurate, his nature is a maelstrom of elements that are equal parts his touchstone and Anne. The parts of herself—every thought, feeling, and emotion—she refuses to name but holds close to her heart, poured directly into the mold to create the carbon coby before her now. Dream Gilbert is an extension of Anne that epitomizes the way she can’t always face her fears, which has contributed to the development of her extensive imagination as a means to escape exactly that.

Feeling lonely and isolated bouncing from foster placement to placement? Anne conjures up Katie. When she was small and afraid to face the light of another day? Her beloved Snow Queen appears. At a low point when Anne can find nothing to love about herself? She sheds her mortal coil and assumes the role of Princess Cordelia instead.

And now that Anne is questioning whether someone like her can be worthy of love?

She turns away from his gaze.

“We should talk about this,” Dream Gilbert insists. “About us.”

Anne pinches herself, sharp. Enough to trigger her consciousness into stirring. “Not if I can help it,” she grits and wakes up in her room all by herself. The silence is daunting and settles on her like a second layer of skin.

Anne ends up taking a shower, after all. Tries and hopes to scrub every corner of her heart and brain clean, too.

-

Diana comes over later at Anne’s behest, visibly freaking out and in need of an audience for her dramatics.

“What if this turns out to be a total disaster?” she whines, parallel to the floor, and looking for the stick of deodorant she had knocked over in a frenzy to get out the door yesterday morning.

Diana shrugs, unyielding and as cryptic as ever. She watches as Anne resumes flitting around the room, throwing too many clothes into a suitcase because she’s just started packing. Anne had put it off in the hopes of denying reality, which only serves to magnify the situation and her stress levels even more. Meanwhile, the buses are scheduled to leave in half an hour to Camp Wingra, although Gilbert and Jerry are the type of guys to hold everyone up to ensure that their dates got on before departure. It is very sweet in a very entitled sort of way. “I guess we’ll find out.”

“I’m being serious, DD.”

“Well, what constitutes a disaster? That you have a bad time?” Darling Diana rolls her obsidian eyes. “Because it’s a frat formal and that’s pretty much everyone’s baseline expectation. Personally? My money's on you having fun with Gilbert and throwing a fit because you’re already thinking about how to deal with the consequences if that’s the case.”

She tosses Anne That Look.

Anne scoffs and starts rummaging through her closet for a pair of spandex because she can’t face her friend right now on top of everything else. Especially when the look in Anne’s eyes verges too close to incriminating, sheepish around the irises and just a little bit alarmed. “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” is her automatic response.

“Oh, you do. You’re just being stubborn, as per usual.”

She snaps, “Oh sage and clever Diana, I wish you would impart your wisdom on me one of these days instead of constantly lording it over my head!”

Anne instantly regrets her temper, quick to ignite as it is, and turns to apologize, only for the words to be promptly forgiven and forgotten. Even-keeled Diana is the most darling of all her kindreds, but also the most insidious, holding enough pieces of Anne to tip her over the careful precipice from which she dangles.

At the very least, Diana knows enough to be self-aware about the inner turmoil she’s sowing in her wake.

“Me saying your feelings aloud doesn’t speak them into existence, Anne.” Her tone is gentle, like a doctor delivering bad news or the kind veterinarians use to soothe animals right before they lay them to rest. “They’re already there. The only thing left is just admitting them to yourself.”

Yeah right.

She folds her arms, obstinate. “I—”

“Don’t know what I’m talking about?” Diana finishes, picking out the three extraneous pairs of pants Anne packs and puts them off to the side. It frees up a considerable amount of room for the redhead to toss in a winter parka despite the fact that the weather isn’t projected to dip below 60℉ all weekend. Clearly, her nervous energy is manifesting as an overzealous packing habit that Anne needs Diana to curtail, second only to her need for Diana to stand down and cut it out with the third degree. Anne throws a pleading look in her direction to this effect, and her friend eventually acquiesces with both hands held up in surrender. “I’ll back off for now,” Diana promises, but not without doubling down on That Look once again.

Anne is already on the verge of a breakdown as it is.

It feels like a great and sudden change is hovering somewhere on the horizon and while Gilbert is accepting of this fate and waits with wide open arms, Anne grows more reserved and unsure of herself as the days go by, leading up to this weekend where she’s reached a fever pitch. After spending so long viewing Gilbert as an adversary, the literal bane of existence, the thought of him occupying space outside of that carefully defined role gives Anne whiplash, and she struggles to redraw the boundaries of their relationship and his place in it with any sense of accuracy or precision.

Looking back, she’s not even sure why she even agreed to go in the first place when attending this frat formal as his date is the closest she’s come to blurring the line between them in years, discounting the way that she dreams about him every night as a delusion and not a mark in Gilbert’s favor. The fact that she even agreed at all clearly points to some small (or largely buried) part of Anne that is wavering in her conviction to maintain the status quo. She might even, God forbid, enjoy Gilbert’s company to a certain extent.

But right now, that part of herself remains silent. Most likely out of shame for putting her in this situation: stuck on a tour bus with all of Phi Gamma Delta and their equally drunk dates, sandwiched in between the window and Gilbert’s forearm hogging up the entirety of the arm rest.

She tries to nudge him off of it, pressing the length of her limb against his own and pushing it none too gently towards his lap in an attempt to exert dominance.

Gilbert doesn’t budge, of course, and flexes against her efforts, cords of muscles and veins bulging in a way that makes Anne’s mouth run dry. He is mid-conversation with Charlie when this happens and, without skipping a beat, entwines their hands so that hers is flush atop his own and doesn’t let go, even when she jumps a little in surprise and knocks her knee clumsily into his leg. Any further protests from Anne gets shut down when Gilbert’s thumb begins rubbing slow circles along her wrist.

Coloring, she snaps her head quickly towards the window to hide the rising heat in her face, but still doesn’t object. That energy is otherwise expended by crushing firmly, underfoot, the fluttering feeling that erupts in the pits of her stomach.

Anne isn’t an idiot, of course. She knows what all of this means . . . what Dream Gilbert wanted to discuss . . . the conclusion that Diana wants her to draw . . .

She’s in love with Gilbert Blythe and has been for a while now. Maybe even the whole time? Although Anne doesn’t want to diminish the warranted rage she felt in the aftermath of the party and can hold multiple things to be true. She can feel strongly about Gilbert while balancing on opposite sides of the spectrum, one foot straddling hostility as the other tip-toes toward the inception of something deeper, more potent, and threatening to become all-encompassing if she isn’t more careful moving forward.

This is all uncharted territory for Anne, who is still crossing over from a deeply entrenched place of hatred towards friendship, and with miles to go before she can be firm in her decision to love. She’s so used to diving head-first into anything that strikes her fancy, giving her heart away freely and without the semblance of hesitation; but when accepting someone else’s love into her heart, Anne becomes decidedly more guarded, almost surgical-like when discerning, and especially since Gilbert has so much of it to give.

She senses it in the gentle way he stares, looking for the birth and death of the universe hidden somewhere in the freckles on her face; the little things he does, acts of service in her name, like cataloguing a mountain’s worth of surveys in the early hours of the morning or going out of his way to take her to class, walking her home after dark and taking the outside shoulder when he does. It’s in the way that he listens, eyes never once glazing over and taking in the whole of her long-winded diatribes, and how he can recall even the most trivial of points later on, sometimes weeks after she made them.

It is obvious that he loves her. Gilbert has not exactly kept this a secret from anyone, including Anne, who tries her best not to notice.

Because paying attention to Gilbert is tantamount to loving him and she is already too late. He consumes her every waking thought and the unconscious ones as well. All the animosity she’s collected and their rivalry throughout the years—a total wash that ends up having the opposite effect, beyond her tightly-reined control. In ignoring Gilbert all these years, Anne has actually singled him out; like playing a game of “Where’s Waldo?” in reverse where she highlights everything that isn’t him, and in the negative space left behind, her attention is naturally drawn.

In that negative space, she has somehow fallen in love.

Anne presses her forehead to the window and rejects the urge to slam against it a few more times for good measure.

The scenery doesn’t even provide much of a distraction. The Midwest rolls by in a neverending landscape of corn fields and cows, irrigation rigs and tractor trucks breaking up some of the mundanity, but otherwise a wash of amber golds and greens that blur into the hazel of Gilbert’s eyes. The two-lane highway is a long stretch of nothingness like a void, somehow hypnotic in the absence of anything else.

She dozes off at some point as Gilbert keeps up a steady stream of conversation with Charlie and his Pi Phi date, Louise. They are arguing over the future of cryptocurrency and Bitcoin, which is so beyond her capacity for caring that her brain automatically isolates Gilbert’s voice from the chaos for long enough to wash over her and lull Anne into sleep. Dreamless and idle, but sleep nonetheless.

-

Anne wakes up, forty minutes later, when she feels Gilbert extracting his hand to stand and retrieve a water bottle from the overhead compartment. He fumbles to pop the lid open and takes down half of its content in one long gulp before she fully manages to rub the sleep from her eyes. He must have been thirsty for a while, Anne thinks groggily and sits up straight in her seat.

“Sorry,” he says, slicking the moisture from his lips away with a thumb. He sits back down, but doesn’t move to continue their link. “I didn’t mean to wake you.”

“I didn’t mean to fall asleep.” Anne yawns and stretches as much as she can without bumping against her seat partner or the window to her right. She feels a crick in her neck, deep-seated and sore, but is too self-conscious to crack it and relieve the discomfort. Another unfortunate side effect of being in love with Gilbert Blythe? She actually cares what he thinks about her now.

It’s honestly the worst.

Oblivious to her internal dilemma, he grins. "At first I thought you were faking to avoid talking to me on purpose, but then you started snoring so I figured it had to be legit."

Anne protests. "I do not snore!"

"You definitely do but it's okay, I think it's kinda cute." He stares at her, curious. “Did you find a cure for your insomnia then? Diana tells me you've been sleeping better these days.”

“Do you and Diana gossip about me often?”

“It’s not gossiping,” he asserts. “I’m just . . . gathering intel.”

“To what end?”

Gilbert shrugs, the answer obvious without him having to say it aloud. “The same one as always.” Winning your heart.

“You’d be better off asking a Magic 8 Ball.” She rolls her eyes and tries to keep from looking pleased.

Dawning on an idea, he places a hand on either side of Anne’s cheeks, soft and slow to give her plenty of time to escape. She is thoroughly confused until his fingers curl around the back of her neck for purchase and Gilbert begins rocking her head back and forth in a gentle, swaying motion. Her vision shifts all around but Anne remains anchored by his gaze and for a minute, she actually forgets how to breathe, heartbeat stuttering while her lips part automatically for air. “Does Anne Shirley like me back?” he asks so quietly, so earnestly, that she can’t help but to melt.

Heating in a way he can definitely feel beneath his palms, Anne ponders if she should tell him the truth —that she has, at long last, come to the conclusion that she does indeed like him back. And staring into his eyes, so hopeful it hurts, Anne resolves to come clean, to match him for every iota of sincerity he’s displayed because it’s what Gilbert deserves . . . only the thought of it twists her stomach and what comes out instead is, “Outlook not so good.”

Anne wants to kick herself for such cowardice, but can’t entirely blame herself either. It’s just too embarrassing letting Gilbert know how I feel! When I’ve barely even admitted it to myself????

It is a testament to how familiar he’s become to her indifference that Gilbert doesn’t even flinch. Or perhaps he can hear the hesitation in her tone because he just ‘shakes’ her again, undeterred. “Will Anne Shirley ever like me back?”

She throws him a bone—the sliver of courage she musters up. “Cannot predict now.”

Which is not an outright rejection, but still far from the truth she holds close to her chest. He can probably feel the hitch of her breathing, the erratic pace of Anne’s heartbeat, beneath where his fingers sit softly around the column of her throat. Nevertheless, her lack of encouragement doesn’t stop the optimism from blooming wide across Gilbert’s face.

He forges ahead. The same soft motion. “If I play my cards right this weekend, will Anne Shirley change her mind?”

She swallows past the lump in her throat. A third chance at redemption.

Anne straightens her spine. Whispers: “Signs point to yes.”

The sheer wattage of his smile would be enough to light a continent, shooting straight through Anne and settling somewhere right below her ribcage. Gilbert’s thumbs trace soft patterns on her cheeks, towards her lips, and she thinks he might kiss her (Anne thinks she might let him) only there’s a commotion up front working its way down the aisle.

“We’re here!”

“Oh hell yeah!”

“LET’S FUCKING GOOOOOO!”

Gilbert coughs to clear his throat, the moment clearly gone, and retracts his hands. Anne pains at the loss of them but recovers smoothly enough, bringing her attention back out the window to see the welcome sign getting closer and the buses pulling into a relatively empty parking lot to deboard. There is a mad dash amongst everyone to stand and gather their belongings, even though they end up getting off in an orderly and staggered fashion despite people jumping the gun. Gilbert lets Anne climb out in front of him, maybe intentionally so that she can feel his looming presence pressed against her back as she makes her way towards the front and down the stairs. The back of her neck tingles the entire way out.

The immediate lake breeze entrances her more than anything else.

Camp Wingra is little more than a cluster of cabins around Lake Homer and Heron. The bigger, more expensive rentals sit at the far end of Lake Homer and descend in order of opulence stretching out towards the lip of Lake Heron. To Anne, even the more cost-effective models are beyond anything she’s ever envisioned, accustomed as she is to nylon tents and roughing it in the woods beneath royalty-free stars. End to end, there is probably six miles of shoreline, although the fleet of golf carts and scooters they rent out serve to cut down on a lot of the travel time and inconvenience.

In the hands of the small family units and couples that usually occupy these cabins, the landscape is almost idyllic; deciduous pines surrounding the sparkling waters, rocky shorelines interrupted by wooden docks that jut out proudly and perpendicularly. She even hears birdsong from those that haven’t migrated south yet for winter.

In the hands of Phi Gamma Delta? Anne can’t help but feel a sense of impending chaos and depravity.

“Which one is ours?” she asks, looking out at the line of cabins like specks of dust in the distance. She picks a brown shape at random and points with false confidence in its direction. “Is it that one? I bet it's that one.”

Gilbert follows the trajectory of her finger and laughs, shaking his head because she’s way off base. He tugs at the elbow to steer Anne more to the right, bringing his face close enough to see the view from her perspective. “That one is ours,” he says, and his warm breath tickles her cheek and ghosts down the collar of her 2020 FIJI FALL FORMAL shirt.

Anne’s heart stutters and she scurries away, an animal in retreat, linking arms with Diana who watches everything with a smile.

The familiar twinkle is gone. Instead, there’s joy.

Something has finally clicked into place.

Chapter Text

The earlier feeling Anne gets of impending chaos and debauchery proves to be true when not six hours later, they burn through their supply of alcohol for the weekend and need to secure more before people start getting desperate. Upon discovering the rapidly dwindling stockpile, Jerry sends out a mass group text forbidding anyone from raiding mini fridges on pain of death or disinvitation from the formal, whichever seems worse, because despite the selection being somewhat decent, 25$ a pop for mini liquor bottles and wine is too steep a price to pay for such little return.

He gathers everyone who could conceivably blow less than 0.08 on a breathalyzer test and funnels them into the living room of Roy Gardiner’s cabin, the most lavish of the all rentals and therefore the obvious choice for turning into the de facto social hub for the weekend.

Anne curls up on the couch next to Diana and watches the tall French-Canadien blink back the intoxication from his eyes, trying his best not to slur as he gives out instructions aloud.

“We’re drawing sticks.” He shakes a fist full of broken spaghetti noodles at the group, unsteady on his feet and ten seconds away from tipping over. “Shortest one gets more alcohol.”

“That’s not fair!” Ruby whines. She looks over to her boyfriend as if expecting him to come to her defense. Meanwhile, the brunette is tilted back in his seat, cross-faded and mesmerized by the ceiling fan blowing around and around.

Knowing that her former roommate is the type of drunk to cry at the drop of a hat, Anne takes it upon herself to explain in gentle tones, “Shortest stick, not shortest person.” Which assuages the brunt of Ruby’s frustration, but not enough to guarantee she won’t have an emotional outburst somewhere down the line.

“Is this even necessary?” Gilbert asks from his perch, leaning against the armrest of a chair occupied by a body predating their meeting and slumped. “I’m clearly the most sober one here and honestly don’t mind going.”

“Juste est juste,” Jerry insists. “And plus, it took me a long time to remember to break these noodles in a size that isn’t half.”

Gilbert is incensed, straightening up to his full height which is substantially shorter than Jerry but effectively gets his anger across. “Over someone’s literal dead body are we taking the chance of putting someone like Charlie behind the wheel. No offense.” He nods in apology to his friend, who only shrugs because he can’t exactly disagree. Charlie’s been halfway drunk since this morning, having perfected the art of drawing out a buzz, and continues to sip on the coke and rum he’s been nursing for the last twenty minutes.

“I’m going. That’s final.”

“Take Anne with you, too!” Diana puts forward, batting her eyelashes in response to her friend's thunderstruck expression. “I would offer to come as well, but someone needs to stay behind and make sure nobody accidentally drowns in water or worse.”

“Surely we could use the extra hands.” She looks around, desperately, for other volunteers. One cursory glance around is enough to tell Anne everything she needs to know: that everyone is down for the count or at least temporarily out of commission. Realistically, they would serve as little more than drunk ornamentation taking up precious real estate in the car. She and Gilbert are the logical, moral, and therefore only choice in this matter.

Coquettishly, Diana whispers, “Ride safe!”

“W-wait,” Anne splutters and would continue to splutter if it weren’t for Gilbert’s hand reaching out to help her up from her seat.

His eyes are bright. “You coming?”

Embarrassed, she nods but she doesn’t take the proffered support; feels almost sorrowful watching the way his fingers curl up and clench after her rejection, fist raised to lips and played off as a cough before dropping back to his side. She maybe mistakes his hurt expression, but wonders if Gilbert shouldn’t be used to her rebuffs by now. Then again, Anne has never given him as much hope as she had before this morning, only to quash it with her expert avoidance of him for the rest of the afternoon.

Gilbert hangs around in her periphery to no avail since Anne has gone to great lengths to dodge him and ensure that they’re never alone for any measurable amount of time. Mostly, it’s because she’s still reeling from their obvious display of intimacy on the bus and later on, determining which cabin was theirs and Gilbert lowers his face so close, if she only turned her head, Anne’s mouth would surely graze the cut of his particularly splendid chin.

More and more, the lines between dream and reality blend away into nothing, and when Gilbert touches her, it feels just as real as anything else, down to the whorl patterns of his fingertips dragging along the lengths of her skin. Together, alone, nothing else exists. Just the two of them. Anne and Gil.

It is such a heady sensation and Anne often forgets how the intimacy she shares with Dream Gilbert is not reflective of the progression she’s made with the one in real life, who as of seven hours ago probably thought that she’d remain fixed in her loathing forever. Anne’s a capricious creature on her best days, but this turnaround is abrupt even by her usual standards, and in magnitude a great deal more than just a sudden flip in mood or loosely-held opinion. This is Anne changing the dynamic of their bond, only to seemingly reverse it back again in regret. Gilbert barely has time to wrap his head around the concept, much less keep up with Anne’s mercurial behavior in reaction to such.

He obviously isn’t privy to the resolve in Anne’s heart. He doesn’t even know that her heart belongs to him in the first place.

Jerry pushes them both out the door, tossing a set of keys to Gilbert, who catches it cleanly and gives one last mock-salute in farewell.

Jerry returns the gesture before slinking around back to where a spirited game of capture the flag has broken out, stumbling twice along the way, and growing more uncoordinated as the shots he took earlier start to finally settle in. As an afterthought, he yells, “Just buy enough to last through tomorrow and hurry, before mass mutiny erupts!”

“Ready?” the pre-med major asks to be polite.

“I’m surrounded by animals,” Anne complains, mostly to herself but loud enough for Gilbert to overhear. They make their gradual way towards a minivan parked two cabins over, driven in by one of the older brothers who was kind enough to shuttle everyone else who had a Friday afternoon class they couldn’t skip for attendance.

“To be fair,” he defends, “the planning committee had gone with a more conservative estimate for drinks and probably didn't take into account the wifi being spotty and the lack of anything else to do for miles around.”

She scoffs and climbs into the passenger seat of the car, surprisingly clean given that the evidence of light pregaming going on as well. “This is all because you guys don’t know how to do anything in moderation and now I’m the one who has to suffer the consequences.”

“I would hardly call spending quality time with me a consequence.”

“You’re right. It’s definitely more in line with capital punishment,” she smirks.

Gilbert sticks his key in the ignition, contemplative when asking, “Do you reckon I’m broken?”

“Yes, obviously. But in what specific way are you referring?”

“The way I find I find even your negging adorable.” He laughs and does that inexplicable thing men do that drives all women crazy: reversing with one hand while the other grips her headrest, half-turned in his seat to check carefully for clearance. The sight of it does things to Anne, who gulps nervously and deflects.

“You’re a relentless flirt.”

“And you’re a relentless killjoy. Wouldn’t we make such a perfect pair?”

She doesn’t deign to answer and settles for fiddling with the aux cord instead, plugging in her phone without realizing that it would automatically continue playing whatever she was listening to last.

“The behavior plants exhibit—”

“WHAT KIND OF FRAT PARTY RUNS OUT OF ALCOHOL ANYWAYS?” Anne shouts over the audio, fingers feeling like million pound weights as she scrambles to change the track. A BROCKHAMPTON cut comes on and is predictably loud, but doesn’t come close to drowning out Anne’s pulse pounding away in her ears. She doesn’t dare look over to gauge the recognition in Gilbert’s gaze, hoping against hope that he isn’t paying attention, or enough of it to identify his most popular video on YouTube.

Please don’t address this, please don’t address this, please don’t address this.

Gilbert is quiet for a stretch too long to suggest that he’ll do anything but, only to decide at the last second to continue on without a challenge. Regardless, his gaze flickers between the road and her profile in an unformed, unspoken question.

“All of our other formals were held in country clubs with open bars or hotel floors with generous guest services. But given last year’s fiasco with Billy, the unanimous decision for this year was somewhere more remote to give us maximum freedom without the passive-aggressive phone calls from front desks or noise complaints from neighbors. Obviously, it comes at the expense of some of our usual amenities.”

“Including the one that matters most.” Anne mimes taking a shot, thankful for the diversion provided by Gilbert’s willful distraction. She only wishes it was more so out of ignorance than indulgence that he skates past the matter, and Anne definitely isn’t stupid enough to believe that he won’t bring this up later at a more inopportune time (probably when she least expects it). Either way, she’s grateful and starts chattering away, every sentence another mile in between the memory of her mistake.

From there, they fall into a rhythm that feels as easy as breathing, or perhaps something less misleading considering how Anne finds it hard to do anything of the sort around her crush. Internally, she marvels at how little of their dynamic has actually changed on its face and how, to an outside observer, this dynamic is only more of the same. They still bicker back and forth, he pushes her buttons in a way that drives Anne up a wall, and she rolls her eyes more often than can be healthy for her optic nerves holding on by a fibre. Really, it’s only Anne’s perspective that’s changed, rose-colored glasses transforming her annoyance into a more tender affection.

Have I unintentionally been flirting with Gilbert this entire time?

Anne doesn’t dare dwell that particular thought for much longer. Her pride has already suffered enough of a blow as it is.

-

It is rather domestic walking shoulder to shoulder with Gilbert, up and down the aisles of the nearest liquor store in town and filling up their cart with tried and true classics, alongside whatever else happens to catch their eye. Despite the fact that she has a hastily drawn-up grocery list compiled from the thirty or so texts Gilbert receives on the way over, they take their sweet time picking everything out, and laughing over ridiculous brand names like (Anne’s personal favorite) Seamen’s Shot.

“Would you drink something named Donkey Piss?” she asks, holding up an otherwise innocuous bottle of light-colored tequila.

He grabs the bottle and smiles, placing it in the cart without a second thought before heading towards the check-out line with his wallet already in hand. She’s surprised he finds the room, filled to the brim with cases of beer and other assorted liquors as it is. “No, but I’m sure we can find someone else to do it for us.”

Anne helps unload some of the alcohol from the cart while Gilbert swings around to the end of the conveyor belt to bag it. “Is there a limit to how much alcohol someone’s allowed to buy in one go?” she asks, having a Mary Poppins moment with her never-ending cart of booze.

The cashier snorts, an older gentleman wearing a grubby store uniform that is yellowing at the pits. “The limit is how much money you’ve got in your bank account and how much supply of it we have in the store.”

Anne breathes a sigh of relief when her fingers finally touch the cold, diamond-patterned metal at the bottom of the cart, only to be disgusted once again looking at the total charge of $2500. It’s more than enough money to pay for housing for the rest of the year and then some.

Gilbert hands over a credit card and signs the pin pad with a flourish, thanking the cashier before wheeling their packaged goods out to the car parked in front.

The question bursts from Anne’s lips before she even thinks to curtail it. “How can you afford all this?” She gestures broadly to the alcohol, but is also asking about the cabins and the chartered buses and the gourmet food provided by their in-house chef as well.

He unlocks the trunk and begins transferring the haul. “Mostly dues, but we have plenty of rich members and alumni willing to foot the bill in the name of brotherhood.”

“That must be nice.” She only sounds a little bitter, hopping around to the other side to help.

“It doesn’t give me warm and fuzzy feelings either, if that’s your impression.”

“Then why stay? Why be a part of this old boys’ club that’s helped perpetuate decades worth of racist and predatory behaviors?”

“Well there’s the obvious answer you’re looking for, which is Not All Frat Guys, because it’s true.” He wipes the sweat from his forehead and shoves the last case of beer atop a pile that blocks off the left half of the windshield. It’s a precarious fit at best. “And maybe I’m just seeing the forest for the trees, but I think we’re making positive strides. Slowly, but surely. We can’t all be revolutionists like you, Anne-girl—ready to burn everything to the ground. Sometimes it takes the daily slog of changing mindsets and internal processes to see long-term, sustainable change.”

She isn’t satisfied by this response. “You can’t fix a broken system.”

“On the contrary, the system is doing exactly what it’s intended to do, which is keeping Greek life white and wealthy. But if the system is made of people and you’re able to change their intentions, then doesn’t that ipso-facto mean that you’re able to change the system at large?”

“You are one person in one chapter of one fraternity on one campus. Maybe you get a couple of your brothers together and implement a different training topic every year. How is that going to affect the broader culture of Greek life as a whole?”

“At the end of the day, this will always boil down to the fact I am incrementalist at heart and you are one passionate individual, above all else.”

They’ve reached an impasse, as is normally the case when it comes to two sides that mostly agree but diverge at that last 1%; a white flag Anne would have easily blown through in the past.

“Yes, but you still shouldn’t have pulled out the old ‘ipso-facto’ on me.” She pouts and cracks open a solo Truly she grabbed from the refrigerator aisle as a treat.

Anne needs to get a little bit of a buzz going if she is to survive the rest of the car ride, especially considering sustained arguments with Gilbert render her hot and bothered in a different sort of way.

-

Twenty minutes into the drive, Gilbert takes an unauthorized left turn off the main road leading back to the cabins, veering off with a wink when Anne looks over at him in confusion.

“What are you doing?” She turns her attention away from the window, having fallen into a comfortable silence the closer they get to Camp Wingra and Anne begins picturing a tiny woodland nymph weaving in and out of the trees following alongside the car. Outside, Golden Hour has arrived with all the warmth the name implies.

“Lucky that we got picked to go on the supply run alone,” is Gilbert’s ominous reply. “Because I spent a lot of time wondering how I was going to convince you to come out with me unnoticed.”

For obvious reasons, this is a terrible response. “Oh God, is this the part where you kill me and leave my body to be ravaged by wolves?”

Small dimples make an appearance at the corner of his mouth. “No, of course not. Your imagination knows no bounds.”

“Well what else am I supposed to assume when you’re taking me out into the middle of the woods without a bar of signal in sight?”

“Um, speak for yourself? I have full service.” He flourishes his phone with the 5G status displayed across the top to prove his point.

Anne plucks the offending object from his hands, petulant when she demands, “What’s your passcode then? I’m shooting off a text to Diana, just in case.”

“You’re being paranoid for no reason. I promise you’ll like my surprise.”

“Nice evasion tactic, Bundy.” She taps impatiently at his screen.

Gilbert rolls his eyes. “0309.”

She plugs in the numbers and goes directly to his contacts. “It’s a perfect square.”

“It’s our birth months combined.”

Anne blushes red to her roots, his words coinciding with the moment she sees her name at the top of his list: “Anne-girl” followed by a single carrot emoji. She couldn’t say why the sight of it clenches her heart when mere months ago, she wanted to throttle him every time he employed the nickname to her face.

Gilbert wears his affection tattooed across his chest and is too secure in it to even have the decency to look embarrassed.

She scrolls and selects Diana’s name under D, relaying a quick message about being late and dropping a pin to their location, just as much a joke as it is a silent cry for help.

Whatever Gilbert has in store is bound to kill her either way, the only questions being how quickly and how thoroughly his methods turn out to be.

“It’s a bit of a climb to get there, but a short hike overall.”

“You’re making me climb a mountain in my final, dying moments?”

“I won’t be the death of you yet.”

He pulls over beside a giant, sap-marked tree and she observes how the patch of earth surrounding has grown bare in a manner suggesting that cars have semi-regularly parked here before. With a growing sense of anticipation, Anne unbuckles her seatbelt and slides out of the car, trailing after Gilbert who has already started walking a little ways ahead. He slows his pace down enough for Anne to catch up, and matches her strides despite the longer length of his own. It’s a quirk of his, she knows, to never lead the way but rather nudge his companions in some subtle direction, and despite the fact that she has no idea where they’re going, they’re on the right path leading towards Gilbert’s secret destination.

“Can I have a hint about where we’re going?” she pleads, staring ahead at the heavily wooded area, hawthornes and hornbeams providing enough cover so that only small spots of dappled sunlight shine through.

“So me and some of the guys on the planning committee drove out to Camp Wingra earlier to check out the property and one of the booking agents told me about this super secret spot to sweeten the deal.”

“Is it actually a secret? Or just a glorified tourist trap?”

“You saw how obscure the road leading here was. To be honest, I almost missed the turn.”

Anne purses her lips. “You haven’t actually given me a hint, Gilbert. Just exposition.”

“Hold your horses” he laughs, helping her over a fallen tree in the way. “I’m getting there.”

It seems that the longer they walk, the more dense the forest becomes, to the point that she can hear little else outside of birdsong and crunching of dirt beneath their feet. Gilbert forges on ahead.

“Get there faster, please.”

“I never thought that you, of all people, would be one to rush a storytelling attempt.”

“Are you telling a story, or just prolonging my death?”

Gilbert looks down at her fondly. “Anyways, I was telling her about how I had a girl I wanted to ask as a date for formal but didn’t know if she’d say yes.” He casts a meaningful look in her direction. “So Pamela pinky swears me to secrecy about this location her husband of twenty-three years had proposed at and how, in my description of you, it instantly came to mind. She showed me pictures and gave me careful directions, and when I came to check it out for myself later that day, I knew I had to take you here come hell or high water.”

“Are you planning on proposing to me, too?” she jokes.

“I would in a heartbeat, if I suspected you’d say yes.”

There he goes again with the sentiment, so saccharine she drowns.

It’s ridiculous, sometimes, how openly he adores her and how entirely unexpected it is to Anne still, even after all these years. The devotion with which Gilbert tends to her fire, much of it unwarranted and more often than not spurned, would have made many men abandon the cause from the start, heads held high because unrequited love is an endeavor Herculean in nature. But he has defied all expectations, for man and frat kind alike, sticking with Anne through thick and thin; a singularly thoughtful person whom she regrets expending so much of her energy determined to hate.

She didn’t owe him anything when she resolved not to like him, yet now that she loves him, she feels like she owes him the world.

Anne barely notices when Gilbert’s hand grasps firmly at her own, too busy staring at the series of steps carved into a slope up ahead; erosion and time the sculptor and architect, respectively.

“Watch your footing,” he warns. “Unless you want me to carry you up like Madam Zeroni.”

“If I die on the way up, I’ll curse you and your family just like Madam Zeroni.”

But she’s only snarking for the sake of snarking, being an avid adventurist herself, and more than capable of reaching the top without any assistance from the pre-med major otherwise. Although admittedly, she likes holding his hand too much to actually let go, even when it would have been more prudent to retain the function of both of her limbs to climb. And true to his word, the journey up top takes less than fifteen minutes in total, steps eventually plateauing into a second layer of trees with a small gap in the distance.

“Brace yourself, Carrots.”

A touch dramatic, if walking through the gap didn’t feel so much like entering into a different universe completely, disparate down to the composition of molecules making the air smell that much sweeter. They stand at the edge of a clearing filled with poppies and cornflowers and little bluestems intermixed; a little slice of isolation, secluded from civilization and perhaps reality altogether.

Impossibly, Anne recognizes the spot—the crystalline sky, the endless hills, and something like the faint sound of waves lapping upon a shore. How could she not when this is the same meadow she’s visited every night in her dreams, void of its usual cheeky inhabitant because the real rendering is standing right in front of her eyes, searching Anne’s face for any small sign validation?

“Gilbert, this is—” she swallows, at a total loss for words.

“Amazing? Incredible? Breathtaking?” The list goes on.

“A dream.”

“A dream?”

Anne nods. “A place of dreams. Somewhere I can only go when I’m asleep.”

A ball of uninhibited joy, she twirls . . . once, twice, thrice . . . and can’t the giggle that bubbles up to the surface, leaking past her lips and into the open sky. Her laughter carries off as easily as dandelion seeds and maple ‘copters in the breeze, a similar one blowing past to rustle her hair and press a kiss upon both cheeks. A credit to Anne’s dreams, there is not a singular blade of grass out of place, and her heart bursts at the sight of it, so tangible and real. “Gilbert, this is everything,” she breathes and takes him assuredly by the hand.

Anne leads him closer towards the sunset and then down onto the ground, slipping off her sneakers to weave her toes into the grass. She lays down, sighing, and Gilbert eventually follows suit.

“If you proposed to me right now, I might be tempted to say yes.”

“Now don’t go saying things you don’t mean just because you think the scenery is pretty.”

She cranes her neck to see the perfect slope of his nose, the long fan of his lashes, and the red tip of his ear. Gilbert is pleased then, that she likes his little surprise so much.

Anne can’t imagine why he even cares.

“What if we didn’t meet at that party two years ago?” she asks, seemingly out of the blue.

Gilbert turns to face her too, puzzlement evident in the crease between his brows. “What?”

“What if it was some other girl you saw sitting on the porch outside the house that night?” Would you have loved her the same? Would we have ever crossed paths?

“It wouldn’t have mattered, Anne. I wanted to approach you.”

And something in the wording of the phrase sets her off like nothing else.

“To see if the carpet matches the drapes?” she spits, stabbing pain radiating through the thick of her chest. She sits up to retreat, every bit the animal licking its festering wound.

I should be over this by now, Anne thinks, but can’t stop the rage from coursing through her veins; from the words that come unbidden and slip like lead weights from her tongue. She thought she had put this matter to bed when Dream Gilbert walked her through her faulty reasoning the first time they met. But evidently not, when she brings it up like this, in the middle of a moment that should bring nothing but bliss.

“What are you talking about?” Gilbert sits up, alarmed at the sudden hostility in her tone.

Anne does the same, if only to determine whether or not he’s telling the truth from the green in his eyes, the color blooming much more vibrant whenever he’s worked up or annoyed. At the present, they are a muddled moss-brown, speaking more to his confusion than anything else.

“I overheard them, you know—your frat brothers talking about how Billy dared you to bag me.” She wipes an angry tear from her cheek; hates the way her voice sounds so wobbly when it should be filled with resolve. To give it the weight her accusation deserves. “To see if the carpets matches the drapes?”

Recognition suddenly dawns across his features. “Anne—”

But she can only press on, something feral clawing its way through her chest and up her throat, the culmination of years’ worth of active suppression and nonconfrontation. Its potency has only strengthened over time, a hurricane building and making landfall in their meadow. “Did you lie and tell them yes? Is that how you got your bid?”

“Listen to me, Anne—”

“No, YOU listen.” She sticks an errant finger in his chest. “If this is some kind of long-con, or guilt trip to ease your conscience, then you can save it because I’m fine. I’ve always been fine, with or without you in my life . . . But I can only take so much of this—of you running around, pretending to love me, showing me care and comfort at every turn, with a passion for banter and the wit to keep up. That look in your eyes.” Anne swallows, the taste metallic from where she has accidentally drawn blood biting down on her cheek to keep the tears from spilling over. “It was fine, back then, because I didn’t care. Or outwardly cared. Or could admit, even to myself, that I cared . . . But now, it’s different. I’m different. Everything’s changed and I can’t take it anymore . . . So let’s quit while we’re ahead. Start over from the beginning and pretend we never met.”

“I can’t do that, Anne. I can’t quit you.” He sighs, and she can hear a sadness to it that is too well-polished to be fresh. “I’m not sure I even want to try.”

“Well you have to!” she demands. “Because I’m certain I won’t ever forgive you.”

“For something that isn’t even true?”

“You’re denying it? You’re denying something that I heard first-hand?”

Gilbert runs a hand through his curls, frustrated but trying his best to push through. “Well, what exactly did you hear?”

“Are you really going to make me repeat it again?”

“Just the part that makes you so sure it has to be me.”

The memory isn’t hard to recall. “One of the guys asked who Billy had given the task to and the other answered, ‘the older one’ and guessed a name starting with G. The first one said your name, and then the other confirmed. So there,” Anne finishes. “Try and gaslight me again.”

“And it never occurred to you, over the last two years, that there’s another guy in my pledge class with a name that starts with G?”

She stares at him blankly. This is breaking news to Anne.

“Gardiner,” he supplies.

“But his first name is Roy!”

“It’s technically Royal, which is why he more commonly goes by Gardiner.”

“But the other guy said definitively it was you!”

To this, he only shrugs. “They were probably mistaken.”

“Is that the best you could come up with?”

“It happens often enough since we’re both tall with dark hair. To a couple of drunken idiots, that practically makes us twins.”

“But—”

“And to address your second claim, nothing about how I act or feel has ever been faked. If anything, it’s been severely downplayed.” He pauses to register the disbelief in her eyes, deducing that this is Anne’s last-ditch effort to deny, deny, deny: his feelings, her own, and what this means moving forward. The great and sudden change she’s been scared of, all along.

“Love is such a big word to throw around, I know, when we’re so young and you’re only just starting to feel it, too. But I’ve known for a while now, Anne, that you’re the one for me. The one I want to marry and grow old beside, to fix the dwindling ginger population with, while cherishing all the practice attempts in between. I’m not engaged, nor will I ever be, unless it’s to you. It has been and always will be you.”

Happiness floods through every nook and cranny in her body, a lightness like helium that threatens to lift Anne clear off the ground.

“Now don’t go saying things you don’t mean just because you think the scenery is pretty,” she repeats.

Gilbert tugs until she is perched almost halfway on his lap, hands snaking soft around her neck as he presses a delicate kiss to her temple . . .

Lingers, and bestows another one for good measure.

“I love you, Anne,” he whispers.

I love you too, she doesn’t say.

But she’s pretty sure he hears her anyway.

-

By the time they make it back to Camp Wingra, the sun has set and everyone has sobered up enough to fully enjoy the fruits of Anne and Gilbert’s labor, itching with impatience to get their second bender and nightcap started.

From there, the drinks pour freely as they hop from cabin to cabin, each one its own unique experience in terms of how they choose to rage. Flip cup, beer pong, and games of waterfall abound; skinny dipping, hotboxing, and the occasional hook-up as well. Pandemonium ensues, but they all still adhere to the unspoken rule that by midnight, everyone wraps it up, and returns to their own respective rentals.

The boarders at Sixteen Sandals stay up and unwind by the fire, quietly chatting as the hours go by, until two in the morning when Ruby and Moody decide to call it quits, the former having spent the last twenty minutes curled up and drooling onto her boyfriend’s lap. He tries to shake her awake, but Ruby only sits up for long enough to wrap her arms around his neck and automatically, Moody slips two hands beneath her thighs and carries the blonde into their bedroom upstairs. Jerry and Diana follow soon after, twin twinkles of mischief in their eyes that don’t speak to sleeping any time soon.

For as sex positive as Anne is, she can’t exactly wrap her brain around the idea of her dearest friend being someone who partakes in such an act—a consequence of having placed Diana on a pedestal too high for any mere mortal to ever reach much less seduce. It therefore makes sense that Jerry, being the tallest human being Anne has seen in her life, rises to the challenge and is the only one who’s managed to garner any modicum of success. Although, that last bit is surprising.

She had initially dismissed his attempts at flirting with Diana as a mere amusement for her friend, who is simply playing along because she’s too kind to actually reject the FIJI president outright. It’s only when Anne catches his hand up Diana’s skirt during a “French lesson” in the study nook that she comes to realise the reality of the situation: that Diana is indeed a sexual being, and one with an exhibition kink to boot.

“I’m going to head up and use the bathroom first, if you don’t mind.” Gilbert speaks in low tones, though manages to cut through and pierce Anne’s innermost thoughts.

She nods and tells him she’ll be soon, which turns out to be a lie because Anne doesn’t retire for a while, waiting until the last embers of the fire exhaust before she even considers heading up. She briefly contemplates taking the couch and claiming she passed out from fatigue before Anne’s spine straightens up to remind her that she’s not a coward and that Gilbert is just a boy.

One that holds some special power over her dreams in one hand and Anne’s whole heart in the other, but a boy all the same.

Relax. Anne repeats the word like a mantra as she drags herself upstairs using the wooden banisters for support. Despite every step feeling like Everest, she eventually makes it to the top, hooking right towards their bedroom to note that the door is slightly open. Long and lean, Gilbert’s shadow can be seen pacing back and forth in the lamplight, and the stretch of it towards Anne makes her suddenly retreat.

She prolongs the inevitable by swinging into the bathroom to brush her teeth, giving herself a pep talk in the mirror with different variations of the lines, “You can do this, Anne Shirley. You’ve done it plenty of times before. You are perfectly capable of sharing a bed with Gilbert Blythe. It’s just like any other night.”

Except it isn’t and she’s not. Capable of sharing a bed with him, that is. Not when she is so in her head about the whole thing, which shouldn’t even be that big of a deal in the first place, only Anne is massively blowing everything out of proportion.

She’s just so nervous and wishing she could crawl out of her own skin.

It also doesn’t help matters that when she exists, a moan sounding vaguely like Diana’s echoes loudly and bounces off the taxidermied animals on the walls, spurring Anne to walk faster and pull the door closed behind her. Anne’s heart is pounding as she wonders if Gilbert heard the vocalization as well, or if he’s heard more than just the one-off and has been waiting for her all the while to return—if he’s been getting himself worked up or if he’s already cooled himself off, earlier, in the bathroom before she came.

Anne flushes and tries to banish the thought from her mind, bringing her attention back to the dimly-lit room. She notices a thread-bare blanket draped unceremoniously across the floor, two pillows and Gilbert attempting to get settled. He must have bolted as soon as he heard Anne’s footsteps approaching from down the hall.

“What are you doing?” she asks, even though the answer is obvious. He’s being noble, the twit, having noticed Anne’s discomfort and skittishness of her newfound feelings. There’s really no other way to characterize the fact that Anne sat quietly by the fading fire for half an hour just now to avoid heading up as anything other than distress.

“I can take the floor,” he offers. “If that’ll make you more comfortable.”

“On the contrary, I’m uncomfortable just looking at you,” she asserts with more confidence than she feels. Hardwood floors retain very little heat and she’s never met a college student without some sort of back pain. Gilbert especially, considering the long hours he puts in hunched over medical textbooks and tiny specimens under a microscope.

Anne practically drags him into bed because she is a mature adult that is in total control of her hormones. But, just in case, she sticks a pillow in between.

“His and hers sides,” she grins, punching her own and collapsing on top with a flourish.

Tentatively, Gilbert crawls in beside her and turns off the light.

The room is bathed in moonlight so she can see every feature of his strong, handsome face. They stare at each other for what could be hours before Anne blinks, shattering the moment, and turns over in a huff.

The issue when it comes to sleeping with Gilbert Blythe is that she can’t exactly pull up his videos when his face is mere inches away. And he isn’t sleeping as she’d hoped so Anne can’t surreptitiously do it either.

After a while, she hears him whisper, “Can’t sleep?”

She turns back around. “It’s my insomnia. What’s your excuse?”

He clears his throat, eyes flickering briefly to her lips. “A lot on my mind, I guess.”

“Like what?”

Anne watches him scramble to come up with a topic, amusement diffusing the jittery tension she holds in every inch of her body.

“Um . . . “

“Forget it,” she snickers, bringing the covers up to her chin. She wiggles and tries to get comfortable, sinking deeper into the mattress until she’s cocooned in blankets and memory foam. “Tell me a story, instead. Since the one from earlier sucked.”

“The one about Pam’s engagement? That’s kind of rude of you, Anne.”

She wrinkles her nose. “No, the one where you told me how you came to learn about Pam’s engagement, and not the engagement itself.”

“Semantics.”

“Are you going to tell me a story or not?” She kicks him underneath the covers.

This does the trick, because she asks her seriously, “About what?”

“Something real, I guess. Your imagination’s not robust enough to come up with something good on the spot.”

“You’re probably right, but just know that I disagree on the basis of defending my honor.” He furrows his brow in thought. “Have I ever told you about the time, for my fifth grade talent show, I sang a duet by myself?”

Anne shakes her head and closes her eyes, letting the sounds of GIlbert’s voice wash over her once again.

-

At some point during the night, she wakes up in Gilbert’s arms.

Dream Gilbert or real Gilbert, she’s too tired to find out.

But as she drifts off to sleep, pressing a kiss to his lips, the last thing she remembers is her apparition kissing back.