#gilbert please

[anneshirleycuffbert]

awae fans: are you ever going to clearly admit your feelings to Anne?

Gilbert:

[mercurygray]

Could you write something with cider and shiver for Margaret and Gilbert, please?

[send me a word and I’ll write you a drabble!]

Dinner was nearly at an end, and Gilbert was trying very hard to remember his manners. It seemed an age since he’d last eaten in company, and even if it was only the doctors and warders from the Bethlehem Hospital, certain niceties needed to be observed.

The good manners, for instance, not to jump up and attack one of his hosts for attending a little too well on Margaret.

It was only logical - they were starved at the hospital for female company and apt, therefore, to take advantage when it came among them, especially in so pretty a person as Gilbert’s nurse. But it did try a man’s patience, when everyone else at the table could lavish flirtations upon a woman and he could not!

Margaret, of course, was bearing the whole business with her customary grace. Dinner had not been an expansive affair, supplies being rather short, especially for winter, but there had been a roast turkey, and potatoes, and apples stewed and sauced, the best efforts made by their poor kitchens to impress their lofty guest. But it had still seemed long  - especially when, after nearly a month of taking meals together,  they had been given seats at opposite ends of the table, and he could not even take comfort from her conversation, and had to content himself with watching the rest of his table-mates amuse her, half-following what was said around him.

This was the game they played now, when they were in company, where he was the master and she the servant, unworthy of his attention. And it was a game he would have to get better at - here in Bethlehem there were few people to notice, but when they returned to camp…

“Miss Frances, you are shivering!” Doctor Munro rose quickly from his chair, moving towards Margaret, pretty in a green gown she had begged or borrowed from somewhere, her dark hair dressed in a reasonable approximation of current fashion. “Here, you must come by the fire, where it is warmer.” He moved her down the table, offering his own chair nearer the hearth. Gilbert clenched his fist under the table as Margaret took Dr. Munro’s hand, smiling at him with polite thanks as she took the offered chair, leaving him to stand behind her, his hand light on the high wooden back. (It was a posture made for paintings  – could he see a portrait above a mantle somewhere, a husband and wife presiding over their own party?)

“Shall we have a toast?” one of the other doctors offered, rising from his own chair and raising his tankard. The others agreed, quickly, each man raising his drinking vessel. “To our excellent guest the Marquis de Lafayette - may he enjoy many long and successful years in service to his country, and many victories to go with them.”

Gilbert raised his own tumbler in acknowledgement. “And to my equally excellent hosts, good luck and good health in the New Year.”

“Hear, hear!”

They all drank, the farmhouse cider in their cups sweet and sharp. No wine, unfortunately - but the cider warmed just the same. Someone else rose to give a toast to Washington, and then the Army, and the Congress, and a half-dozen other votaries, the speeches getting a little more grandiose as the pitcher of cider made another round, until finally Gilbert, patience gone, begged the excuse of a long road and a dark night, and Planchet went for their cloaks and the wagon to drive them home.

The cider had been strong, and Gilbert felt himself swaying a little in his boots. “Miss Frances, you are shivering,” He said quietly in the dark, a little bit of mockery in his voice as he tried to ape the Doctor’s Scottish burr. Margaret’s hand reached out from under her cloak, finding his hand and holding it close.

“When we get home you must fix that.”

And suddenly Gilbert had all the patience in the world.

[mercurygray]

Lafayette, in turn, appreciated the humor when Franklin poked fun at his outsized devotion to all things American. On September 17th 1782, when Franklin learned that Lafayette intended to name his newborn daughter Virginie "as an offering to my Western Country" Franklin jested that Lafayette "did well to begin with the most ancient State" and wished that the Lafayettes would "go thro' the Thirteen." Enjoying the conceit, Franklin added that "Miss Virginia, Miss Carolina and Miss Georgiana will sound prettily enough for the Girls; but Massachusetts and Connecticut are too harsh even for the Boys."

Laura Aurricchio, The Marquis: Lafayette Reconsidered, p. 82

[mercurygray]

For the Veteran's Day prompts, how about Gilbert and Margaret, maybe shipping out in a WWI AU, if that fits the theme?

It should have made him happy, this sudden drive to the German frontier, this wild rush from town to town, making leaps and bounds across country that hadn’t felt the touch of French boots in years. They were winning, finally – in one last desperate push back to the border, as the Germans tripped and stumbled and fell backwards over themselves, fleeing before the tide given new life by the recently arrived Americans.

It should have made him happy. Yet all Gilbert du Motier could summon was a sense of impending loss.

They were constantly packing and unpacking, it seemed – headquarters, dressing stations, hospitals, leap-frogging over each other as the front pushed forward. And soon there would be no front at all, and they would pack up one last time and go home, back to America. And that was what he feared most of all. Gilbert had come to love the Americans, in the scant months since they’d arrived.

Well, all of the Americans, but one American in particular. An American he was trying desperately now to see as she, too, helped with the packing up of her hospital.

“Nurse Frances!”

A young woman had just emerged from one of the wards, the crisp whiteness of her hood and apron making her pale skin look still paler. She barely paused to look at him, her arms full of packing crate. “Major du Motier.”

“I was wondering if I might have a word,” Gilbert said, following her down the duckboards. “Concerning a patient of yours…”

She paused at the door of one of the hospital huts, waiting for him to catch up so that he could open it for her and the two of them could head inside.

He’d barely closed the door behind himself when she was in his arms, kissing him desperately, no longer the cold, professional woman of outside but the soft, affectionate woman that Gilbert had come to love over the last several months. He drank up the feeling of her arms around his shoulders, trying to resist the urge to pull her cap off of her head and run his hands through her hair. Their kiss was long, breathless – the exchange of two people who have done this many, many times before, but know that each time might be their last. He tried not to think too much about that. For there would be a last time. It was inevitable.

“I don’t want to go,” she admitted, finally, when their desperation had exhausted itself and the kiss broke apart so they might both breathe. Gilbert tried not to smile too widely. It was the only victory that mattered to him now, to hear Margaret say such things.

“Who says you must?” Stay here forever, he wanted to say. Stay here with me.

[sharkprncess]

froggo replied to your post:FROGGO FORGOT TO PICK FLOWERS TODAY EVERYBODY...

i need to pick flowers today now

YEAH U DO

you need to pick flowers every day as does everyone else unless that's not their thing idk maybe their thing is crocodile wrestling but u gotta do it it's very important

just like i need to go pet a baby snake who has been presSING HIS FACE UP AGAINST THE FUCKING GLASS LIKE AN IDIOT FOR ABOUT FIFTEEN MINUTES