Made and Meant for Each Other (an Anne of Green Gables fanfiction)

Roy Gardiner

Lifting his head, Roy Gardiner gazed out the window, not seeing the beauty of the manicured lawn and caefully tended flowers in his abstraction. "Forlorn," he murmured. "Lovelorn? No. Scorn? Never that. Unborn? No, not quite right. Adorn. That's it. 'When those lost words your lips adorn ...' Yes." With a nod of satisfaction, he looked down at the paper before him and began to write, the ink flowing rapidly across the page in his perfect copperplate handwriting. This might well be his masterpiece, this ode to love fairly won that slipped out of one's grasp just as you thought you had caught it.

For a moment he saw Anne's white face and distressed eyes in his memory, but that felt uncomfortably real, so he banished the image and retreated into the solace of the poetry, of the rhyme and the beautiful words that took a moment that could have been painful and ugly and elevated it into something almost noble.

He worked for another hour, perfecting several lines. The poem wasn't nearly finished, but it was coming along, and he hummed softly to himself as he put the papers carefully away.

His sister Dorothy came in as he closed the desk. There was a letter in her hand, and she looked concerned. When she saw him, she held the letter down by her side, as if she hoped he hadn't noticed it, and forced a smile. "You look cheerful. How's the poem coming?"

"Well enough. What do you have there?"

"What?"

"The letter you're holding." He looked pointedly down at her hand.

"Oh, that? Just some news from an old school chum." But she looked guilty. Dorothy never could lie with a straight face.

"Which one?" he demanded, growing suspicious. Again he saw that anguished look on Anne's face, heard those words that tore straight through him, and he pushed the image and the sound out of his memory, safely away where they couldn't hurt.

Annoyance flashed across Dorothy's face, and then guilt and sympathy. "Anne. She's ... she's getting married."

"To Gilbert Blythe," Roy finished, his fist clenching. He'd known it. Known it all along. It had been in the sparkle of Anne's eyes when Gilbert was near, the way words danced from her lips so gaily in his hearing, the times she glanced over her shoulder to see if Gilbert was watching. It had certainly been in the way Gilbert looked at her when he thought Anne couldn't see him, the studious way he kept his distance and pretended to be fascinated by that bore of a Christine Stuart. Roy had never been fooled by that relationship—there was nothing loverlike between them. But he had taken Gilbert's longing for the yearning of a suitor whose hand had been spurned; he had taken Anne's glances and vivacity as tokens of her triumph over Gilbert. It had never occurred to him that he didn't have Anne safely nestled in his hands like a bird until she had already flown.

"Yes," Dorothy said, confirming his guess, not that he had needed her to.

For another flash, Roy saw the white face there in the gazebo, but for the last time. It was over, she was gone, and she had someone else. He, too, would find someone else. He wondered what she would look like.

"Are you all right?" Dorothy asked.

"Yes, quite well. Shall we go for a walk?"

"I'd like that. Let me get my coat."

As she hurried from the room, Roy thought of the poem, nearly finished. It was lovely; he would treasure it.