Work Text:
The December sun in Nice does not bite; it loiters. It pours over the terraced lawns of the Jardin Public like melted honey, warming the marble of the balustrades and turning the distant Mediterranean into a sheet of hammered silver. It is Christmas Day, 1869, but the air carries none of the sharp, New England frost the March family grew up with. Instead, there is the scent of orange blossoms, damp earth, and the faint, salty tang of the sea.
On a sloping patch of green, Theodore "Laurie" Lawrence lolls with an indolence that borders on theatrical. At twenty-two, he has grown into his long limbs, yet he flings them about with the careless grace of a man who has found nothing worth rushing for. His velvet coat is unbuttoned, his dark hair is a tumbled mess against the grass, and his hat lies discarded a few feet away. He is the very picture of a disillusioned romantic taking a holiday from his own life. A few paces away sits Amy March. At nineteen, the sharp edges of her girlhood have smoothed into a striking, deliberate elegance. She sits perfectly straight on a folding stool, a heavy sketchbook propped on her knees, her fingers smudged with charcoal.
She wears a walking dress of deep blue, her golden hair pinned up with a neatness that defies the soft coastal breeze. For the past hour, the only sound between them has been the dry scratch of her charcoal against the rough paper. A fragile, hard-won peace has settled over them. The stormy letters, the unspoken griefs of the past year, and the awkwardness of their initial reunion in Europe have finally dissolved. They are friends again—not quite the children who romped through the snow in Concord, but something sturdier, forged in the quiet understanding of mutual exile.
Amy pauses, her charcoal hovering above the page. She squints at him, her blue eyes assessing the sharp line of his jaw, the stubborn pout of his lips, and the deliberate blankness in his eyes. It irritates her, this waste of splendid material. She decides to poke at him, playfully but with a purpose.
"Laurie," she says, her voice cutting through the quiet hum of the gardens, "when are you going back to your grandfather?"
Laurie does not blink. He merely shifts his gaze from a passing cloud to her face, keeping his head pillowed on his arms. "Very soon."
Amy lets out a soft, impatient huff, the sound catching in her throat. "You’ve said that a dozen times in the past month."
"Short answers save trouble," he murmurs, his voice dripping with a lazy, melodic drawl. He rolls onto his side, propping his head up with one hand, watching her with a sleepy sort of amusement.
"He expects you," Amy counters, her strokes on the paper growing sharper, more emphatic. "He misses you terribly, and you know it. So why don’t you do it?"
Laurie shrugs a single, elegant shoulder. "Natural depravity, I suppose."
Amy stops sketching entirely. She lowers the book slightly, fixing him with a look of stern, sisterly disapproval that she has spent years perfecting. "Natural indolence, you mean."
A sudden, brilliant flash of the old Teddy sparks in his dark eyes. The heavy aura of melancholy lifts for a fraction of a second. "I’ll only plague him if I go," Laurie says, a mischievous grin breaking across his face, "so I might as well stay and plague you a little longer."
Before she can utter a word of protest, Laurie vaults up from the grass with a sudden, feline agility. The laziness vanishes, replaced by a burst of restless, boyish energy. He lunges toward her, catching the edge of her sketchbook to tilt it away from his likeness.
"Laurie! Stop it, you'll smudge the shadow!" Amy cries, laughing despite herself as she tries to shield her work.
He lunges again, not for the book, but for her hands, initiating a familiar, chaotic tussle. Amy dodges, twisting her torso, her laughter ringing out across the quiet lawn—a bright, youthful sound that belongs more to Massachusetts than the south of France. But Laurie is larger, stronger, and entirely unbothered by the propriety of the Jardin Public. With a triumphant laugh, he captures both of her wrists in one of his wide hands, effectively pinning her arms, while his other arm wraps around her waist to steady her on the stool.
He holds her there, trapped against his chest. For a second, the play stops. The proximity is sudden, the warmth of his breath brushing the stray hairs at her temple. Amy’s breath catches, her heart drumming a frantic rhythm against her ribs. Laurie looks down at her, his eyes dancing, entirely unaware of the sudden shift in the air.
"You can bear it," he says softly, his voice dropping an octave, teasingly intimate. "In fact, I think it agrees with you."
The warmth of his grip feels too heavy, too real, and entirely too dangerous. Amy swallows hard, pulling against his hold with a sudden, sharp determination. "Let go, Laurie. You are being thoroughly ridiculous."
Sensing her genuine withdrawal, Laurie releases her instantly, stepping back with his hands raised in mock surrender. Amy adjusts her skirts with a series of sharp, deliberate movements, smoothing down the blue wool as if smoothing down her ruffled composure. She picks up her charcoal, refusing to look at him, and forces her attention back to the page.
"What are you doing?" she asks, her tone clipped, trying to re-establish the boundary he so easily crossed.
Laurie steps closer, leaning against the trunk of a nearby palm tree, his expression turning thoroughly cheeky. "Looking at you."
Amy does not look up, but her jaw sets firmly. "No, I mean what do you intend. To do." She punctuates the last words with two heavy, dark strokes on the paper.
Laurie blinks, the playfulness faltering slightly. "Oh. You mean with life?"
"Yes."
He sighs, leaning his head back against the bark, trying to recapture the flippant tone from before. "I’ve been writing an opera, actually. Quite a grand thing. I’d be the central figure, naturally. A tragic, misunderstood sort of fellow—"
"That’s a waste of time," Amy interrupts cleanly, her voice devoid of any indulgence. She looks up, her gaze steady, piercing through his armor of indifference. She has seen him drift for months, wasting his talent, wasting his inheritance, drowning in a sea of self-pity that she no longer has the patience to tolerate.
Laurie’s smile fades completely. A shadow crosses his face, a defensive prickliness sharpening his posture. "What would you have me do, then?"
"Go back and work for your grandfather," Amy says, her voice softening just enough to convey the deep, aching care beneath her harshness. "And make something of yourself. Don't idle away your youth because things didn't go precisely as you planned."
The silence that follows is heavy, thick with the unsaid. She watches him, her heart aching for the boy he used to be, yet fiercely demanding the man he ought to be. He watches her back, a mixture of resentment, admiration, and a strange, dawning realization in his dark eyes. He sees, perhaps for the first time, that the little girl who used to throw mud balls is entirely gone. In her place is a woman who sees right through him—and still expects greatness from him.
Wanting to break the unbearable tension, Amy turns the page of her sketchbook. "Here," she says quietly, holding the book out toward him.
Laurie hesitates, then steps forward, coming around her shoulder to look at the drawing. It is a striking sketch of him as he is now—sharp-featured, brooding, a bit weary around the eyes, captured with a brilliant, mature technique. But as he looks closer, his gaze drifts to the loose sheet tucked into the opposite pocket of the binding. It's another sketch, drawn on older, slightly yellowed paper. Laurie reaches out, his fingers brushing against the edge of the sheet. He pulls it free. The drawing is hurried, charcoal smudged by what looks like sea spray, but the subject is unmistakable. It is him, years ago, laughing on a windswept beach. His hair is wild, his smile unburdened, radiating a pure, unfiltered happiness.
A profound look of tenderness softens Laurie's face. The cynical mask drops completely. He holds the paper as if it were made of spun glass. "When did you do this one?" he asks, his voice barely a whisper.
Amy feels a sudden tightness in her throat. She looks away, toward the glittering sea. "It was the day at the beach," she says softly, "when I met Fred for the first time."
The name hangs in the air like a sudden drop in temperature. The phantom presence of Fred Vaughn—wealthy, respectable, and thoroughly proper—materializes between them, shattering the fragile intimacy of the garden. Laurie's hand drops slightly, holding the old sketch by his side. His posture stiffens, the tenderness vanishing, replaced by a sudden, volatile intensity.
"When is he coming back?"
Amy shifts uncomfortably on her stool, an inexplicable embarrassment flushing her cheeks. She plucks at a loose thread on her cuff, suddenly unable to meet Laurie's eyes. "A week or two... he has business in London. Important business."
Laurie stares at her. The sight of her flushing over another man, the realization that she might actually bind herself to a bloodless English aristocrat, ignites something fierce and desperate within him. The stagnation of the past year evaporates, replaced by a sudden, terrifying clarity. He steps into her space, dropping the sketch onto her lap. "Don’t marry him," he says. The words are abrupt, harsh, rushed out as if he cannot contain them a second longer.
Amy freezes. She looks up, her breath hitching. "What?"
"Don’t marry him," Laurie repeats, his voice shaking slightly, raw and unpolished. He drops to one knee beside her stool, his face level with hers, his dark eyes burning with an urgency that frightens her.
"Why?" Amy whispers, her heart hammering against her ribs like a trapped bird.
"You know why..." he breathes, reaching out to grasp her hand. His palms are warm, his grip tight, desperate, as if he is trying to anchor himself to her.
For a single, agonizing second, the world stops. Then, a cold, violent wave of reality crashes over Amy. She pulls her hand away with a sharp, definitive jerk, tucking it against her chest as if she had been burned. It doesn't feel real. It feels like a cruel, beautifully staged play. She looks at Laurie—at his beautiful, intense face—and all she can see is a man grasping at the nearest raft in a storm. She remembers every letter from home. She remembers the way his eyes used to track Jo across the orchards in Concord. She remembers the devastating crush of the news that he had proposed to her sister, had wept for her sister, had broken his heart over her sister.
I am the second choice, the thought echoes in her mind, bitter as gall. The replacement goldfish. The girl who is convenient, who happens to be in Europe, who happens to look enough like the favored March to fill the hollow space in his chest. She refuses to be the person Laurie Lawrence settles for out of exhaustion. She has too much pride, too much dignity, and far too much love for him to accept a fraction of his heart.
Because that is the cruelest joke of all. As she looks at him kneeling in the grass, her mind flashes back seven years. She remembers a little girl who was so desperate to leave a piece of herself with him before he went away that she made a clumsy, freezing plaster cast of her own foot, presenting it to him like a treasure. She has spent her entire life—quietly, fiercely, from the shadows of her brilliant, tempestuous older sister—loving him. Every stroke of her brush, every attempt to climb into high society, had been driven by the quiet, burning need to be worthy of a world that included him.
"Don't, Laurie," Amy says, her voice trembling but hard as flint as she stands up, forcing him to look up at her from the ground. "Do not say things you only mean because you are lonely."