Chapter Text
Anne has always loved beautiful things, and Roy Gardner's ring, where it rests against her pale finger, is certainly that. Finely-wrought silver, with a diamond so brilliant in its center that for a moment, seeing it in the light of the setting sun, its shine had blinded her.
("Larger than Jane Andrews'," the Mrs. Rachel Lynde who still lives uninvited in the very back of Anne's mind had sniffed approvingly, only to be roundly banished from whence she had come.)
She hasn't quite gotten used to it in the weeks since his proposal. A flower crown it is not, nor Marilla's much-coveted but rarely worn amethyst brooch. Anne, unaccustomed to wearing jewelry at all, much less every day, feels sometimes like it weighs almost uncomfortably on her hand.
That feels horridly ungrateful, though, so she convinces herself to start thinking of it instead as Roy holding her hand when they can't be together. It works, and she appreciates it all the more for the infrequency of the event itself; she has often linked her arm through Roy’s while walking, and felt safe and cherished tucked by his side, but as for hand holding itself, that is a much less common occurrence.
It’s a gorgeous ring, and she falls in love with looking at it, marveling over the way the light plays off its stunning center stone. Sunlight. Moonlight. Candlelight. Each sends a rainbow scattering ahead of her, making her beam with joy every time she watches the light dance.
She does love it, truly. If it sometimes feels like it dwarves her hand, well, that’s simply because she isn’t used to wearing it yet. But she can get used to it. She will get used to it.
In the immediate aftermath of Roy’s proposal, she’d found herself writing Marilla and Matthew a letter. Green Gables isn’t far enough away that news this important couldn’t have been delivered in person. But still, she’d found herself instead laying her fairytale down on paper, with her very favorite pen, in her very best handwriting.
It was ever so romantic, she’d written. Roy proposed in the same spot where we met, when he swept in with his umbrella to rescue me from the pouring rain. And he had cut such a dashing figure both days, like the windswept hero out of her girlhood fantasies. So like her imaginings that sometimes it’s hard for her, even now, to realize that he is real. She’d told every detail of the day in her letter, her stomach swirling with the same butterflies that woke whenever she read romance novels in the dying candlelight rather than sleeping at a reasonable hour. I can’t wait to tell you all about it when I see you again!!
All my love, my darlings.
Your Anne
And she had meant it, very genuinely, as she had written the words. She had told herself that she had chosen to write rather than ride out to see them because it was more romantic to write it down; that it gave her the opportunity to experience the joy of Roy’s proposal again a second time, and that it will be all the better when she gets to tell them in person for the waiting.
But that night, when she had finally drifted off after hours of tossing and turning, it wasn’t Roy Gardner she dreamed of.
In her dream, she was walking through Hester Grey’s garden. Barefoot, in a gauzy white nightgown that brushed the dewy grass. The scent of honeysuckle and roses filled the air, carried on the lightest and most delicious of summer breezes. Tipping her head back, she had let that breeze brush her hair tenderly out of her face, and let her eyes flutter shut.
In the silver-tinged blackness of her closed eyes, she heard the soft footsteps of someone trying to move without being heard, and she smiled. When he twined his arms around her waist and pressed himself against her back, she settled against him, heart fluttering madly in her chest. He pressed his lips to her neck, kissing his way to her pulse point. She shivered, delighted, goosebumps blooming in his wake. Reached back to thread her fingers through his curls, and felt him smile against her skin.
She had woken up with her heart slamming frantically in her throat, gasping. Had lit a lamp with trembling fingers and sat at the edge of her mattress with her feet pressed to the cool floor in a desperate, failed attempt to ground herself. She hadn’t even seen him. But she hadn’t had to. She’d known who he was.
She hadn’t slept a single bit for the rest of the night.
He hasn’t left her alone, either. It’s easy enough to distract herself during the day, with exams to worry about and the girls to keep her company. But the nights…
It’s not like it’s every night, thankfully. She’s not sure how she’d survive it otherwise. But he has a distressing tendency to turn up in dreams that are supposed to be about other things, looking all dashing and windswept. They never talk during them, and she always wakes up feeling peculiarly anxious, like there’s something under her skin straining to break free.
It’s ridiculous. She’s barely seen Gilbert Blythe in months. They’ve exchanged only the most cursory of pleasantries when they both happen to be in the same places during school breaks, and they haven’t exchanged a single letter in even longer. So why he’s come to be haunting her subconscious is really anyone’s guess, but she’s beginning to be irritated by it.
There’s only one solution.
She has to see him.
--
Avonlea is the same as ever. It’s comforting in a way, its worn earth under her boots, the White Way of Delight bursting into bloom above her head as she rides to Green Gables. A smile plays about her lips at the thought of Matthew and Marilla seeing her, home two full weeks earlier than they’d expected.
(Phil hadn’t even pouted about Anne’s skipping their customary visit at the start of the summer holidays. She’d just batted her perfect lashes and tossed her hair and said something teasing about how Anne really did have ever so much to be contending with at home, didn’t she? And Anne had smiled and said something vague about wedding plans in agreement, and tried to feel as excited about that as she’d known she should.)
She pushes the memory of all that away, though. Now isn’t a time for thoughts of weddings or the lingering memory of Gilbert Blythe’s dark eyes. Now is a time for Matthew and Marilla, her most beloved family.
When she finally arrives, she wastes no time. Feeling suddenly five years younger, she flies up the familiar path to the door and bursts through it, her full skirt tangling around her legs. “Hello, my dearest!” she calls, her only concession to stealth shutting the door quietly behind her rather than letting it slam.
There is a single moment of silence before Marilla comes bustling in, wiping her hands on her apron. “Anne? What on earth are you doing here?” At odds with the words, her eyes are sparkling with joy; she doesn’t wait for Anne to respond before closing the distance between them and wrapping her arms around her.
“I couldn’t wait a single moment longer,” she says dramatically, curling herself comfortably into Marilla’s embrace. “I missed you desperately.”
“Yes, I’m quite sure,” Marilla replies, equal parts fond and exasperated. She gives Anne another quick squeeze and then pulls back to squint at her. “You look pale. Come on, let’s get you fed.”
“I’ll call for Matthew,” Anne exclaims, suddenly unable to bear the idea of not seeing both of her two favorite humans at the same time. Feeling light as a feather, she prances on stockinged feet over to the bell on the porch. It sings energetically through the night air, and she waits on tenterhooks until she sees the telltale sight of Matthew’s silhouetted form stumping toward her.
She gives up when he’s halfway to the house, darting out to meet him. (The ring, where she had slipped it into an inner pocket, bangs insistently against her thigh; but distracted as she is, she registers this only as a faint, inexplicable sensation.) His face brightens, a wide smile taking over his lips just as she hurls herself into his waiting arms.
“Ohhh,” he says, as if she’s punched all the air from his lungs, like he used to when she was a wee thing who needed so desperately to believe that she really, truly existed, that she was really, truly entitled to the space that she was taking up. “You are a sight for sore eyes, Anne Shirley-Cuthbert.” The callback to her first words to him makes her misty, suddenly, and she buries her face in his shoulder. He holds her there quietly, patting her back with one gentle hand, and then presses a kiss to the top of her head.
“We should go in,” he says. “Marilla’ll have my head if we stay out here much longer.”
She giggles, wiping away an inexplicable tear. “You’re right. Let’s go.”
To Marilla’s credit, though, she doesn’t make as much of a fuss as is probably within her rights. She just eyes Anne pointedly until Anne takes off her dirty stockings, washes up, and goes about helping with the last bits of table setting. “Oh, it smells divine,” she breathes, and Marilla’s lips twitch.
“I should hope so,” she says.
And then it’s all questions--Anne’s, about their health and the farm, the livestock and the Avonlea happenings. (“You’re better off getting the town gossip from Rachel,” Marilla sniffs.) Theirs, to Anne, about her courses, her roommates, and how she’d kept herself afloat during the stress of exams. For a while, she thinks she may have escaped it. But then, midway through dessert, Marilla sighs and exchanges a significant look with Matthew.
“Are you planning to avoid the matter of your engagement for the entire night?” she asks baldly, eyebrows lifted in an expression that somehow mingles concern and impatience.
“No, of course not!” Anne exclaims, her heart jumping. “I just...I thought we ought to save it until we’d gotten all the other topics out of the way.”
“Naturally,” Marilla murmurs. And then, kindly, “It was a beautiful letter, Anne.”
There’s something strange about the phrasing, and the way Marilla is looking at her. Anne chooses to ignore it in favor of gushing, “Well, it was a beautiful day. Roy was so very romantic and sweet...it was exactly the sort of thing I’ve written dozens of stories about. And, oh!” Gasping, she fishes around in her pocket and pulls the ring free with a triumphant gesture. She presses it into Marilla’s hand so that she can look at it properly. “Isn’t this just magnificent?”
“Oh Anne,” Marilla says, as she examines it. She sounds impressed and more than a little wary. “It’s lovely.”
“I do wish he had asked permission,” Anne confesses suddenly. It feels disloyal somehow, confessing a fault in her fairytale afternoon, but she’s spent nearly ten years now imagining what would happen when she eventually promised herself to someone else, and she’d always incorporated Matthew and Marilla both into her fantasies. “Of you, I mean.”
“Oh, well now,” Matthew says gruffly, scrubbing one hand over the back of his neck. “I’d say it’s more important that you’re the one who agrees to it, after all.”
Her heart swells in her chest, and she catches her breath sharply. She beams at Matthew, but now that she’s said it, she can’t quite shake the realization: Roy barely knows Matthew and Marilla. He barely knows anything of Green Gables besides what she’s told him, or even Avonlea itself. And of course that’s not his fault! How should he have come to know it, after all? In the two years they’ve been courting, there has been ever so much to do; and even after they had met each other’s families, there were classes and travels and all sorts of things to distract them from spending time in Anne’s sleepy little hometown.
“Have you started discussing arrangements?” Marilla asks, pulling her back to the present.
“Not as such,” she admits. “He said he wanted to give me time to discuss things with you all before we started making decisions.”
And that’s so lovely of him, she reminds herself, settling a little more comfortably back into her chair. To know that her family is so important to her, to let her be the one to control when and how they found out that things have gotten serious.
“Well,” Marilla says, “perhaps he can come for a visit during the summer holidays. We can get better acquainted.”
“Yes,” Anne agrees, emphatic. She lets herself drink them in, her dear, dear guardians, and imagines Roy there at the table with them, all dark good looks and charming, musical murmurings. He has met them before, of course, and he had said and done all the right things. But that had been a designed visit, a planned meeting; somehow, in the cozy firelight of this particular, domestic evening, it’s difficult to imagine him here.
It will be fine, though. Of course it will.
“I’ll write to him,” she decides. “I’ll invite him in August, perhaps. That way he’ll have time to be with his mother and sisters for a time, and it won’t be so silly, reuniting when we’ve only just parted. Besides, a bit of distance adds such a tragically meaningful air to the romance, wouldn’t you say?”
“And your life certainly needs more tragical meaning,” Marilla tuts, shaking her head. She’s smiling a little, though. “In the meantime, Anne, I daresay I can excuse you from doing the dishes this evening. You must be exhausted from your travels.”
She isn’t, though. She feels strange, elated and melancholy all at once, and she knows to the depths of her that her darkened gable room is not an option quite yet. “Not at all,” she chirps. “I’m happy to do them. Sit. Rest your eyes, dear one.”
Marilla exchanges another look with Matthew, who shrugs at her. “Alright then,” she says decisively. “If you’re so eager to wash them, I won’t stop you, that’s for sure and certain.”
Anne keeps up a steady stream of chatter as she washes the dishes. She lets it be about the wedding of her dreams, sure that Marilla expects her to be caught up in daydreams of the impending day. She talks about having Diana by her side, about Matthew leading her down the aisle, about a flower crown woven of blossoms from the Snow Queen who still reigns supreme outside of her window. And she talks of the veil, handed down from Marilla’s own mother, that waits patiently for the head it will next adorn.
In short, she talks of all the things she’s been imagining since she was thirteen years old, until finally she realizes that the itch beneath her skin is being stoked rather than soothed by her words. “I think,” she says, almost breathless with the profusion of words she’s been speaking for the past quarter of an hour, “that I’d like to take a walk around the orchard before bed.” She sets the final mug down, just a little too hard, and offers them both a brief, shining smile.
“Go on,” says Marilla patiently. “I’ll finish the drying up.”
And Anne is grown now--she does not bolt for the door, no matter how much she wishes to. But when she finally catches a breath of the sweet summer air, she feels something jagged begin to smooth out inside of her.
She walks laps around the orchard, slow and meandering. She makes friends with the blossoms, the bright green leaves on the trees. Apologizes for leaving them behind for so long. Tips her head back and lets her gaze travel the velvet blackness of the night sky, peppered so much more liberally with stars than the one she sees in the city. Visits the stables, even, and strokes Belle’s nose. Murmurs secrets into her dark mane and breathes her comfortingly familiar scent. By the time she finally returns to the house, she feels almost like herself again. And for the first time in a long time, when she settles down in bed, she falls immediately into a dreamless sleep.