Vampirism would elevate the Lucy Maud Montgomery Cinematic Universe significantly, in my opinion. Who would you say are the best candidates?
Walter Blythe for sure and he'd have likely taken Una with him if she'd managed to force him. He'd basically be Edward Cullen Canadian version though not gonna lie.
(anne of green gables) but boy, you still look pretty
but boy, you still look pretty - walter/una - pg
He waits for Rilla outside the lighthouse, in the shadows. The pines are dark shapes around him, shrouding him. He'll step out once he sees Rilla, draw her arm in his, give her comfort. She needs him to be her older brother now, and that is a role that feels very easy to play, tonight. He feels lighter, almost free — all his burdens, his fears of what's to come.
"So you're going."
It's not Rilla. The voice is too soft, too calm.
AU idea: Narnia but it's the Anne of Green Gables characters. Does anyone see my vision.
Basically the same events as the Chronicles of Narnia except I swap out the characters from our world™ as characters from the Anne series
Jem as Peter, Nan as Susan, Mary Vance as Edmund (maybe in this au she gets adopted by the Blythes?), and Walter or Rilla as Lucy (oof I can't decide!)
Probably going to add Di and Shirley since they should join their siblings
Anne and Gilbert as Polly and Digory. Maybe Mathew is sick and Anne tries to find a cure for him, hence the apple, etc.
Oh, it would be cool if Anne, Walter, and Rilla, being so imaginative, could "see" aspects of the Narnian world in our world™ like living trees, talking animals, and mythical creatures, etc. before even going to Narnia
Faith Meredith as Jill and....idk who as Eustace
....i want to somehow add the other Meredith kids too. Or maybe an au where it's just the Merediths: Jerry as Peter, Faith as Susan, Carl as Edmund, and Una as Lucy
The Piper may have come to Courcelette, but he did not pipe Walter west.
The letter he’d written Rilla was the last they received in his own hand, though it was weeks before he came home to the Island.
The telegram arrived five days after Courcelette, the bell at Ingleside’s door ringing as Rilla sang a Scotch air that had always been one of Walter’s favorites.
Walter’s commanding officer was as generous as he might be in the wire but the message itself was simple.
Walter would come home. For good.
He was blind.
*
“Walter’s blind,” Rilla said, her voice strained and tight, as tense as Una could remember her being. Mrs. Blythe had fainted when Dr. Blythe read the telegram, but Susan had said Rilla hadn’t faltered for an instant, had dashed away the tears in her eyes and gone to the ‘phone to give the news to Nan and Di. By the next day, the entire family had rallied, though Mrs. Blythe remained pale and Rilla would not let herself have a moment’s stillness, busy at some sort of work every waking moment. It was only now, in Rainbow Valley with Mary Vance and Una herself beside her, that Rilla sat quietly, her hands holding a wadded-up handkerchief as if that’s all they’d been made to do.
“Might’ve been a lot worse,” Mary Vance replied matter-of-factly.
“He’s blind,” Rilla repeated.
“He’s alive,” Una said. Every night since he’d left, she prayed for him to be spared, to come back home and she hadn’t put any conditions on it when she begged God on her knees for Walter’s life. These were prayers she couldn’t speak of, as she could mention her concern for her brothers, and perhaps that was what made them twice as fervent. Perhaps.
“Una’s right. While there’s life, there’s hope,” Mary said. “And he could still be a professor of poetry books even if he can’t see anything. He’s got about a hundred poems by heart already—”
“But to be always in the darkness, to have to live without the dawn, without the view of the harbor in the moonlight,” Rilla trailed off. There was an echo of Walter’s voice in hers, that heartfelt yearning that Una had first fallen in love with or at least had first allowed to herself that she loved in him, and it was an unanticipated consolation to hear it in Rilla’s tone, a reminder that for all their differences, they were almost as close as the Blythe twins. Walter would sound much the same when he was at Rainbow Valley again, though Una expected he would try to conceal how his blindness hurt him.
“He did always set a store on the looks of things,” Mary agreed, crossing her booted feet at the ankle, smoothing her apron across her lap. “Never thought a man would care so much about wild asters and sunsets. I mean, I wasn’t so surprised he did when we were all kids, but he’s a hero now, saving all those men in his battalion, getting a battlefield promotion to Sergeant Blythe instead of plain Private—”
“He’s still Walter,” Una said. Walter, whose dreamy grey eyes would never light up in the recognition of unexpected beauty. “Whatever his rank is, whatever’s happened, whatever he’s done.”
“I don’t expect he’ll look much different and plenty of soldiers will have canes, so he won’t stand out,” Mary said.
“He’s coming home, anyway,” Rilla said, letting out a soft breath that might have been a sigh. “They can’t send him back. He’ll be back home, here at Ingleside, and we’ll all just have to muddle through and wait for Jem and Shirley to come back too. And Jerry and Carl, Una—"
“Would’ve been worse for Jem,” Mary said. “He could never be a doctor blind.”
*
It was weeks before Walter came back to the Island. The time neither flew nor lagged. The days went by, pearl beads on a string, and if they had had a number they’d been promised, it would have been impossible, Susan fretting about the linens and the state of the pantry, Mrs. Blythe staying out too late in her garden, Jims whining and naughty with the growing apprehension, but there was no telegram with an update until the day he arrived. It beat the train by barely an hour, which was just enough time for the Blythes to hurry to the station and for Una, her father and Rosemary to join them.
Una had crammed the first hat at hand on her head as they’d gone out, which was why she was waiting for Walter wearing Rosemary’s old blue velvet cloche.
He wouldn’t know and that couldn’t be a relief, nor an agony. It simply was.
There was a nurse with him, a plain, spare woman that Una knew she herself could have turned into if he’d never returned, but the woman had retreated as soon as the Blythes had surged forward to take Walter into their embrace. Mrs. Blythe clung to him and Dr. Blythe stood very near and Susan let tears stream down her face and wiped them with the hem of her apron instead of a handkerchief. Una could hear Jims little voice piping “Willa? Willa?” and thought she should have offered to carry the baby so Rilla could greet Walter unencumbered but there’d been no time to say anything.
It took a good fifteen minutes before Una could see Walter.
She would never have known he was blind. He looked almost exactly the same as when he’d left, still slender and so finely made, his dark hair shining, his face unscarred. She’d seen men return missing arms and legs, their faces ruined by scar, bandages around their heads, backs bent. Young men made old before their time, their bodies frail and trembling.
Walter looked every inch the young prince, just as he had when he’d first gone away. Then he turned his head, as if he was looking for someone, and faced in her direction and she saw he was no longer a young prince but a king who’d gone into battle, willing to sacrifice everything for his people. Who’d come back to acclaim and praise and the most exuberant welcome when all he wanted was the peace of Rainbow Valley on a terribly hot August afternoon and the quiet of the calm sea in the winter moonlight.
“Perhaps we should call round tomorrow,” she murmured to Rosemary, who was, as ever, the most understanding person of Una’s acquaintance. “The Blythes, and it’s so much right now, it must be overwhelming—he can’t want—”
“Very sensible,” Rosemary said, as if anything Una had said was remotely sensible and not a jumble of words, her emotions scattering her thoughts like petals in a storm. “Tomorrow and we can bring some shortbread. Walter always liked shortbread more than pie.”
“But the butter is rationed,” Una said.
“It was meet that we should make merry, and be glad: for this thy brother was dead, and is alive again; and was lost, and is found,” Una’s father quoted, giving her a little wry smile that said he understood how the verse did not exactly suit the moment.
He thought it was only that Walter had never been thought to be dead.
Rosemary gave Una a look that said she understood Una had two brothers, not three.
*
A month later, the shortbread delivered with Susan still too overjoyed to do much more than sniff disparagingly once, the regular pattern of visits re-established, Una found herself alone with Mary Vance on the Ingleside sitting room. The wintry day was dank and chill without, a fire crackling merrily in the fireplace. Rilla had gone up to settle Jims who was fractious with a cold and Una and Mary had been left to their own devices.
“Poor old Walter. It would’ve been better if he’d never come back,” Mary said.
“You think he’d be better off dead?” Una said, aghast, relieved that Rilla was not present, that Mary had at least waited until Rilla had left them to say something so devastating.
“Of course not! Don’t put words in my mouth, I’ve plenty to say for myself,” Mary replied, shaking her head and pursing her lips. The firelight was flattering to her, but her flare of temper was more so, imperturbable Mary slightly flushed, her chin lifted. Annoyance made her positively pretty. “I meant, it would have been better if he hadn’t come back to Ingleside. His folks don’t know what to make of him, well, the womenfolk. Dr. Blythe might do all right if it was just him but the rest of them can’t decide whether Walter’s to be stuck on a pedestal or pushed around like a baby in a wagon. Think about it and tell me I’m wrong—you mightn’t like the way I say it, but you can’t argue with the facts of the matter.”
“I can’t,” Una said. “I can’t blame his family—”
“Nor I,” Mary replied. “But it doesn’t change the truth. He’d be better off somewhere else where people aren’t mourning his life to his face and counting on him being too blind to notice.”
“Mary!”
“Jem wouldn’t let it happen,” Mary went on. Mary was fondest of Rilla of the Blythe clan, but she admired Jem the most and if you were someone like Una, used to observing the small detail and nuance, if was easy enough to see how that admiration might be become something more.
“I don’t suppose he would,” Una said. “But I don’t think there’s anything much he can do from the Front. I’m not even sure Dr. Blythe’s written about Walter’s injury to Jem. He didn’t want to do anything that might endanger Jem, distract him.”
“You’ll have to do something then, that’s all there is to it,” Mary replied.
“Me?”
“No one cares about Walter more than you do, Una, and no one will expect you to speak up, let alone make a fuss, so they’ll go along with whatever you do. Rilla will be relieved, see if she doesn’t come to you by and by and say so,” Mary nodded as she spoke, something between encouragement and exhortation.
“You sound so sure,” Una said.
“I’ve eyes, ain’t I? He’ll listen to you. He always paid attention to you, even if you didn’t think he did,” Mary said. There was a sound above of a door closing and it meant Rilla would be coming back down shortly. “Anyway, it’s not just me—Cornelia believes you’ll be the making of Walter if you’ll only try though she said it with twice as much vinegar as I just did.”
“I’m so sorry,” Rilla said, walking into the room and sitting down in the chair near the window. Before the War, she would have toed off her shoes and tucked her feet up beneath her, but now she sat as properly as Susan could ever have wished, though without a basket of mending. “Jims would make such a noise and I didn’t want Walter disturbed. He needs peace and quiet more than anything.”
Una was certain that the sound of Jims crying would not have bothered Walter a bit and might well have been a comfort, a homely sound far from the brutality of the Front, the choked whimpers of men in hospital, half-drowned from gas and nightmares.
Mary was right, which she would crow over. Una must find a way to help Walter before his loving family made his survival a burden too great to be borne.
*
It had taken Una a fortnight to decide what she ought to do and how to say it. To whom and when. She came to Ingleside nearly every day and noticed how quiet Walter was, how still. How his family bustled around him and spoke for him, cossetting him and plying him with cups of tea he didn’t drink and Susan’s “bites” he didn’t eat. She saw how few questions they asked of him and how they avoided speaking of Jem and Shirley, Carl and Jerry, of Di’s quest for the medical course. Miss Oliver was the most natural around him, trying to discuss metaphysical poetry and the novel her student Elspeth Sheridan was writing, but Walter was diffident and in their various ways, his family hurried to fill silences he left. Una considered what was happening and what might. She prayed beside her narrow bed and shook hands with Walter when she left each day.
She chose a Tuesday, the day Susan did her baking. Una wore her best gloves and hat, though it couldn’t make any difference to anyone at Ingleside, and she’d waited for a time she knew Rilla would be away from home with Jims in tow. Susan had fetched Walter, who came down the familiar staircase with more care than he ought to have needed, and then she left them alone, because she trusted Una.
“Let’s run away, Walter,” she said.
As she’d hoped, he smiled but didn’t laugh. She had not been so close to him since his return and noticed that there were streaks of silver in his dark hair, but his face was unmarked. He wore his old clothes, but somehow there was still a sense of him being in uniform.
“Run away? You and I?” he said.
“We’re not who they think we are. Our families, everyone in the Glen,” Una said. She knew he’d want an explanation, though she was not used to being the person who spoke at length on any topic. “They love us, who they think we are, but that love isn’t enough—”
“It’s too much,” he said softly. Bitterly. “A prison—”
“A crypt,” she replied, startling him. She hadn’t spoken so frankly before he went away. Before, she had not imagined he could ever come home and find it something other than a joyous reunion. He’d offer her a kind smile and a greeting when he came to visit and he’d forget about her as soon as he walked away. Before, she’d thought she’d be the one left behind when he went on to greater things, his splendid shining life as a poet, renowned, celebrated.
Something like that was still possible for him, but not in the Glen. Perhaps not even on the Island. He could write again, but not here. He could live a full life, altered but not diminished, but not here.
“It doesn’t have to be this way,” she said.
“What way should it be, Una? How could we go—”
“However you wanted it to be,” she said. She took a deep breath and reminded herself he could not see her blush, even if he’d hear her shy boldness in her voice. “You didn’t write me as many letters as Rilla, but I didn’t think—they weren’t the same as the ones you wrote to your sister, she read me hers… We might be friends, I’ve no particular expectations but I care—oh Walter, I care very much and I’m not like everyone else, I don’t think that has to look a certain way—”
“You deserve better—”
“Surely, you must have learned life isn’t about what we deserve! You can’t think you deserved to lose your sight,” she exclaimed.
“Sometimes, it seems the only way the scales could balance. What I saw, what I looked away from, and now the darkness, there’s no respite from the memories…I can still see in my dreams, you know,” he said.
“I didn’t know,” she said. His shoulders were hunched, his head canted in an angle she knew meant a fearful grief held him. She got up and went over to where he sat, kneeling before him. His hands lay on his thighs and she took them in her own, holding them very lightly. “You didn’t deserve this, Walter. It doesn’t have to be the way it is. We, you and I, we can change it. We can go somewhere else and live another life.”
“Are we fleeing in the middle of the night?” he asked. It was a good sign, that he was teasing her. It wasn’t something he’d done before but it could be something he did now and in the future.
“I didn’t think so,” she replied. “I shouldn’t like to worry anyone.”
“You’re very dear, Una,” Walter said and tightened his grip on her hands subtly. “I ought to tell you no, but I’ve discovered I’m selfish and I want what you’re talking about.”
“Another life,” she said, the repetition a question without the form, a seeking after clarity. She wanted him to tell her what it was he wanted.
“With you. You,” he said.
“I’ll always be your friend,” she said.
“I hope more, one day. If you don’t tire of helping a cripple, leading me around, a clumsy, blind crock,” he said.
“Don’t say those things. You don’t need to hope for some distant future,” she said. “I told you, I care, very much. Now. Today. I know that’s forward, terribly forward, but I don’t want you to wait when you needn’t—”
“Now?” he asked and drew her up with his hands, pulling her close to him so she was on his knee. His grey eyes were unfocused but she knew that expression from well before the War, when he was half-beguiled thinking about some turn of phrase, some piece of errant loveliness he’d spin into a sonnet.
“I told you I wanted to run away with you,” she said, just above a whisper.
“That’s not exactly what you said, but I gather it’s what you meant,” he said. “I should have written you more letters. I thought of them, in France, but I didn’t always want to connect you to that place, those horrors. And now I can’t write any more letters myself.”
“You shan’t need to write to me and I’m sure I’ll get quite good at taking dictation,” she said.
“Shan’t you want more than that?” he asked.
“If I do, I promise to tell you,” Una replied.
“When. Not if,” Walter said.
*
To begin with, they didn’t run very far.
Rosemary and Mary Vance stood as witnesses at the brief wedding Una’s father officiated at the manse. Rilla’s telegram to Leslie Ford secured the unlet House of Dreams for the next year, though Una suspected they would not stay until their anniversary. They ate Susan’s pie at the Ingleside table and Mrs. Blythe bid them goodbye with a warning that the bottom of the garden was too shady for peonies and the gate latch had a trick to it. Dr. Blythe shook Walter’s hand and kissed Una on the forehead.
They left Ingleside. They left the Glen. They came to the sea, both of them unfamiliar with the way the salt breeze tasted on their lips.
They discovered the salt did not taste the same, shared in a kiss.
That if sufficiently provoked, Una would lose the temper no one ever supposed she had.
That Walter made a better loaf of bread and kneading the dough was the best remedy for those mornings when he wished he had not woken.
That Mary Vance was a better friend to them that either had given her credit for and when they attempted to, she laughed it off, though they could tell she was very pleased indeed.
When Jem came home, they’d gone. Walter was offered a place at Redmond, but they’d moved to Montreal, to McGill.
One day, Walter would return to France. He’d bring Una and they’d both be fluent in French.
@freyafrida your Walter/Una fic recs list inspired me to write this!
justice for una Meredith omg. lmm did not give miss girl the ending she deserved. after being the nicest character for two books she just is supposed to wallow about Walter? I saw a post on here that said it's likely she, after a couple of years, moved on, and I'd like to think so too. because she deserves it!
