p2 of taking bridgerton siblings and switching their respective love stories. I don't know if I'll do all the siblings, mostly because it's hard to reimagine FGH's stories with anyone else. If u can't tell, im tryna keep their core personality, just briefly changing the ways in which they got together. instead of Polin's friends to lovers this is more... complicated.
(Rivals to friends to almost lovers to strangers before going right back to rivals to friends to lovers)
Kathani Sharma, at nine and twenty, was most assuredly a spinster and all the happier for it.
With her sister wed to a most wonderful prince and settled into a life of enviable comfort, Kate had long ago relinquished the ton’s narrow expectations. Rather than languish in the shadow of dwindling prospects, she had spent the better part of eight years in India as a governess. Warm weather, a delectable array of actual spices and curiosity aplenty kept her well and hale. Distance from the dreary British Isles had suited her. Freedom had suited her better.
Thus the unexpected missive that arrived in what she knew to be the end-Season for the ton had unsettled her more than she cared to admit.
Her sister’s hand had trembled across the pages. Grief seeped into every line, her usual careful writing wrought with ink blots and misspelt words. The loss of her youngest child had hollowed her, and Kate, for all her proclamations of independence, had never been able to deny her baby sister anything. Within the fortnight she was aboard a ship bound for England, bracing herself for the suffocating embrace of society once more.
She arrived months later hurried and dusted with travel, her thoughts fixed entirely upon her sister’s sorrow. It was all the more unfortunate that she had arrived on a night where her sister was stuck in her guest quarters, unable to receive company in thanks to another dreadful ball. Her sister was due to end her official mourning period soon, even so, Kate knew Edwina's request was made having known how long it would take for her to return home.
So despite the rather ghastly glamour of the Queen's Ball, Kate straightened her shoulders and handed her sealed letter to the palace steward. A footman joined her, taking her to the spot that had apparently become Edwina's and her husband's most treasured hideaway. A temporary place of rest until the Ball cleared out and she was able to once more greet her baby sister.
And there, in the gardens of the palace, she encountered the once bane of her existence.
Anthony Bridgerton. Thirty and two. Arrogant, insufferable, possessed of a face that invited a most satisfying slap.
Their rivalry had been forged in youth, sparked by a careless remark about his Eton readings and fanned into flame by her scathing indictment of his privilege. What began as... A spirited debate, had hardened into years of barbed exchanges, each determined to outwit the other. And yet, time had softened certain edges. In her girlish naivete she had once considered him a friend. His challenges had sharpened her; his laughter burning a fire within her soul.
At the close of her second Season, years before Edwina’s debut, she had even permitted herself a dangerous thought.
That he might be a man of honor.
A man capable of treating her as an equal.
A man who, despite her sharp tongue and surly disposition, might one day court her.
She had imagined companionship in him. Imagined a shared understanding of what it meant to shoulder a household in the wake of a grieving mother. She had read meaning into the flick of his wrist as he signed her dance card. Mistaken invitations to Bridgerton gatherings for interest. Forgotten her own flaws when his smile curved in her direction during their walks in Kensington Gardens.
The illusion had not survived the Season.
“Court Kathani Sharma? Are you mad? If one desires a painful end, there are far easier ways to achieve it.”
The words had reached her ears with brutal clarity. They had scoured her of girlish hope in a single stroke.
In the years since, Kate had come to cherish a spinster’s freedom. She had shed the ton’s expectations like an ill-fitting gown and grown wilder, wiser, more wholly herself. Whatever true anger she once harbored toward the Viscount had long since burned itself out. Indifference had replaced it, cool and clean.
She wished him neither ill nor joy. His daily pursuits mattered little to her.
And yet, as she felt his gaze upon her across the lantern-lit gardens, steady and unyielding, something old and unruly stirred within her chest.
Annoyance, surely.
Nothing more.
Anthony Bridgerton, for his part, at the age of thirty and two was once more faced with the shackles of his privilege. The weight of his duty. His younger sister's marriage was most fortunate in that the scandal of it had not been revealed and that his best friend had managed to only barely escape a bid for his life. But the reality of their marriage had merely impressed upon him the weight of his own responsibilities. He was close now to outliving his father, without heir and with no proper training afforded to his brothers should, God forbid, a tragedy take him away as well.
Sienna had proven that Anthony has no room for love in his future, so he wades through these vapid waters, looking for an exceptional and agreeable Viscountess to be. A Lady shrewd enough to maintain his household, if fate proved unkind. An obedient Lady, willing to defer to his decisions. One of good repute and able to bear him an heir.
And then, at the Queen's opening banquet, he spies the strangest thing in the distance.
Miss Kathani Sharma.
She moved through the dark palace gardens with a single footman trailing as her chaperone, her smile bright as struck flint beneath the lantern light and her laughter obvious even if he could hear nothing of it. Kathani Sharma who, last he had heard, was employed as a governess. A baffling prospect, considering her sister’s advantageous marriage. Kathani Sharma who had all but relinquished her place in polite English society when she absconded to India years ago.
And now she was here.
Older. Unapologetic. Radiant.
Anthony should look away.
He should despise the impropriety of her easy familiarity with the palace staff. Should resent the way she tilted her head back when she laughed, unguarded and unafraid, the enticing lilt of her neck visible in thanks to the brightly lit hall behind him. Anthony needed to remember that Miss Sharma was the exact opposite of what he needed in a Viscountess.
A spinster, spoken of poorly among polite Society. Stubborn to a fault. Vexing and argumentative and all the more alluring for it.
Eight years he has not given her a single thought. Longer even, if you count the way they had gracefully side-stepped each other before her sister's debut.
For a while, long ago, he remembers her fire consuming him. Driving him to her side at every event, invitations sent, letters and gifts gone with his footman to her residence and their banter shared in hushed murmurs through daily promenades. Now he can't quite remember why they had ever stopped their friendship, sharp and unique a friendship though it may have been. Can't recall what had dimmed her fire, what had iced her personality to a frigidity that both bored and annoyed him.
Now though.
Now, her fire had sharpened. Even from afar he could tell. And his traitorous feet could not steer clear of her, could only follow after her, hung up on her every step, her every word that faintly flew his way as he neared her.
Her wit cut cleaner. Her beauty devastating in a way he had never before allowed himself to see when they were in their youth. And when she turned to spar verbally with the footman, teasing him about some minor misstep, Anthony felt something treacherous stir in his chest.
She was everything he could not be.
Free where he was bound. Reckless where he was rigid. Untamed where he was shackled by duty.
She could never be his Viscountess.
She would never bend. Never soften herself into agreeable silence. Never make herself small for his comfort. Kathani Sharma would set his orderly world ablaze simply by inhabiting it.
And yet his soul—traitorous, disloyal thing—sang for her.
He willed her wandering gaze to find him at the Garden Arch. To lock onto him. To recognize him not as the distant Viscount but as Anthony, her Anthony; the boy who had at ten and three, at ten and six, at twenty and three, raced her through fields and lost with poor grace.
As if hearing his prayers, her eyes flickered up. Narrowed tightly with familiar challenge, the press of her brows delicate and enrapturing.
Her words faltered, her smile dropped.
Kate could never be the Viscountess he needed. He knew this intimately, as surely as he knew the exact spark flickering in her stare. As surely as he knew the barely there tilt of her head. Not a greeting. Not an acknowledgement. Instead a challenge, subtle and goading as always.
A provocation to close the distance instead of observing her like a coward prone to lonely shadows.
Anthony quite suddenly saw her. All of her. Every vexing, provocative, tempting bit of her and his stomach knotted. He knew then, with a dreadful sort of clarity, that he did not want her obedience.
He wanted her defiance.
He did not want a life carefully measured and stripped of all passion.
He wanted her.
And God help him, for the first time in months, duty did not feel like enough.
If it required him to realign the sun and coax the stars from their courses to win her favor, he would. If it cost him every spare pound from his private accounts, he would pay it without hesitation. If it demanded the labor of a thousand men to shift the rigid judgment of the ton and restore her standing in their narrow world, he would undertake it gladly.
He would move heaven and earth, bend society to its knees, and remake the world as she deserved it to be.
Before now he had never known the depth of his feelings for Kathani Sharma. And he will spend now and forever more showing her this depth of feeling.
Everything and more, if only to make her his wife.
bit more story like this one. i kinda got too into anthony's part and then had to do a rewrite to match kate's part to his, which is annoying since I wrote her first and i deffs vibed more w/ her part. and mans was not supposed to be bended at a knee as soon as he saw her. at most he was supposed to be intrigued and finally viewing her as a woman. instead he went "she's gonna be my wife" like ok bro calm tf down. you havent even talked to her. you haven't even truly considered the ramification of this kate being your intended. and Anthony was like 'naww, she's way too hot and cool for that. i want her to be mine' so then. this. also if its not obvious asf, they've both been down bad for years but early 20s anthony was a loud mouth, drunk idiot and a Rake and 19/20 yo Kate's reaction to that was to cut him out of her life. except he was too busy to really care, or at least, consciously acknowledged he cared until he saw her again.
