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titriwrites · 10 months

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Polaroid Picture -- Chapter Seventeen

Well, would you look at this? At least it didn’t take me an entire year this time. These two are finally having The Talk. And I would love for you to read it, and tell me what you think! Either on AO3, or right here, under the cut :)

Suddenly, everything gets quiet. Well, actually it doesn’t. But it feels like it. Like they’re in the eye of a tornado right now. All around the group of friends – and the lawyer from New York, apparently – the people keep celebrating and drinking. Glasses are clinking, their friends – male and female – are singing along and chatting. There’s yelling, screeching, stumbling, and more. And yet, here in their bubble everything is calm.

Not everything maybe. Beth can not only feel her heartbeat in her chest but hears it in her ears as well. She’s afraid to take her eyes off the stranger with the big, very big news, but she knows that if she looked around now, she’d see the same look of confusion, the same dazed expression on Liesa’s, Steph’s, Daniel’s and Will’s faces. She’s not too sure about Tom, but since he’s just accused her of not signing the divorce papers herself, she guesses this information is just as new to him as it is to her and their friends.

“What?”

Yes, just as she thought. At Tom’s mumbled words, she looks at him for the first time in what feels like minutes. It’s possibly just been seconds. He looks pale and red and sweating at the same time, and Beth can see his hands are shaking.

“You haven’t signed the papers, Tom,” the not-paparazzo repeats. “But I have them with me, you can do it right here.”

Beth looks around. Julia is right by the jukebox, her group of girlfriends surrounding her. She doesn’t look like she’s aware of the situation or that there even is one. Good. She’s probably not in the right state for problem solving. Beth shudders just imagining the screechy yelling sound she’d make if she knew what was happening here now. The other people in the room don’t seem to care either.

“I—”

It’s Daniel, who interrupts Tom’s stuttering answer. “I don’t think that this is the right place to do it. I guess you’d want to do it right this time.” He pointedly looks at Tom and Beth each. What the hell did she do? She’s certainly not to blame for this. Not this time. She signed.

Just as she’s about to comment on that, Steph speaks up. “Maybe you can get the papers to Tom’s?” she asks the lawyer whose name Beth has already forgotten. “Make sure nobody sees that they’re not signed?”

The others nod, and Beth finds herself agreeing as well. “Sounds like a good idea,” she says, and immediately feels Tom’s gaze on her. She looks back at him and shrugs. “No need to lose them, get them dirty, or let Julia see you haven’t signed them. You’ll sign them in the morning, and she’ll be none the wiser.”

Tom looks back at the guy in the suit, who doesn’t fit in at all, but the other guests don’t seem to care. “Yeah,” he mumbles. “Yeah, you can get them to the flat, the key is… I…”

“I’ll go with you,” Will offers as he steps closer. “I know where Tom’s keys are, and I’ll make sure he’ll find the papers in the morning.” Then he claps Tom on the shoulder. “You don’t have to worry about that tonight. Got to step up as the best man, huh?”

Beth looks between them in surprise. She didn’t know Will’s the best man. She figured it would be someone from the new group of friends. But then again, Tom never mentioned anything, and she didn’t ask. Didn’t want to know, really. But the others don’t seem to be surprised in the least, so she guesses it’s not new to anyone.

Tom only nods. “Yeah.” Then he shrugs. “Not yeah to the stepping up thing. Sorry. No need to step up. But yeah, good idea. Thank you.”

***

He’s never been so nervous in his life. Never. Hell, not even when he auditioned for Loki, when he asked Libby to marry him or even the second time around, when he asked Julia. But Tom shouldn’t think about that. Because that only makes his nerves worse.

He feels sick, and he didn’t sleep at all. And that’s not because of his stag do. He didn’t touch another glass and tried to leave as quickly as possible as soon as the stupid – Tom knows it’s not his fault, but he needs to blame someone, damn it – lawyer was gone.

Tom looks down at the papers in his hands. They should have been easy to sign, and yet… and yet he didn’t. Hasn’t signed yet. He walks quicker now, he can already see Libby’s house. It’s not even 8am, and she had still been at the pub when Tom left last night. He hopes she’s not hungover.

Not like Julia. Or at least, that’s what Tom suspects. He didn’t stay to find out, too afraid she’d find the unsigned papers at home. He’s quite sure she didn’t see them last night. She was home long after him and looked like a sickly panda this morning in bed. She was still sleeping, and Tom hopes that’ll be the case for a bit longer. He needs to talk to Libby first.

Oh, he wishes that he didn’t have to.

When he gets ready to knock, he stops for a moment, then laughs out loud. He can’t help it. This is where this started too. Tom in front of Libby’s house, with divorce papers in his hands. Just that this time they’re signed by her, the black ink screaming at him from the bottom of the page. He knows there are more signatures inside the documents, little blue and yellow markers telling him where he should scribble his name – and where Libby has already done that. He still doesn’t know whether he should add his.

He knocks. And wishes he’d have more time, but it’s just seconds before Libby opens the door. The most embarrassing thing – and maybe Tom should even be offended by this – is that Libby doesn’t look surprised at all when she sees him standing there.

“Come on in,” she says. Another thing so different from the first time he’s done this just a few short months ago. This time, she’s wearing comfy clothes and her hair is wet, probably from a morning shower. “I’ve just made some fresh coffee. Do you want some breakfast as well?” she asks, though her voice betrays her. Libby might have suspected him to be here, but that doesn’t mean she’s comfortable with it.

And somehow this grounds him. It feels like he’s right to be nervous about this. For whatever reason. But it feels big. Bigger than he cares to admit. Which is definitely something he shouldn’t tell her. And yet …

“No, thanks,” Tom answers as he enters. Just when Libby closes the door behind him and leads him into her kitchen, he speaks up again – which he really shouldn’t do, damn it. “I’m too nervous, and I think you’re, too. I also think we both know why, and I definitely don’t want to talk about it, and still I’m here, and—”

“—and you haven’t signed the papers,” Libby finishes for him, now leaning against the counter, her back to him, before she pours him a coffee and offers him a seat. He can only nod as he sits down at the table, waiting for her to join him, accepting the mug with a soft ‘thanks’. “So, why?” she asks as she’s sitting down at the other side of the table.

“I wish I knew.”

“You don’t want to marry her?” Before Tom knows what he’s doing, he feels himself shaking his head. He only realises when he looks up from his coffee mug to find Libby staring at him. He frowns. She does, too. “You don’t?”

“I—” “Tom—”, they say at the same time. He lets her go on, because really, he doesn’t know what to say. He doesn’t even know what he wants. “What is this? Where does this come from? This whole going back here, making me sign the papers, hell, manipulating me, luring me in. This was all about us getting divorced, so you can marry. And now… and now you tell me you don’t want to?”

“If I didn’t want to marry her, would you still have signed?”

Now it’s Libby who seems lost for words. Then she sighs. “I think it was time for us to do this anyway, wasn’t it?”

The thing is, Tom’s not so sure about it anymore. It feels like him not signing was deliberate (it wasn’t), and that some higher power made him forget about weddings, feelings and all of it. Which seems kind of crazy, since that’s all he’s been here for and all that anyone ever talked to him about. Well, everyone except for Libby and his parents.

“Was it?” he asks, and when Libby just stares at him like he’s crazy (maybe he is, probably), he adds, “or maybe this isn’t the time to sign but time to talk?”

***

So, that’s what they do. They talk. Moving from the kitchen to the living room, back to the kitchen – Tom does want some breakfast after all – and then back to the living room. At some point they’re out in the garden, slip out of the back of the house and through the fields and to that little barn, where they’d already hid from those paparazzi months ago – which brings back a whole different set of memories. But there they stay. Tom had called Julia to tell her he won’t be home anytime soon, some meeting or the other, which she understood. She’s feeling that hangover anyway. Beth suspects Tom feels a bit bad about that and about lying, but he does it anyway.

They brought some sandwiches with them, and also some drinks, nothing heavy, just beer. They keep talking, and yet they don’t. Because they’re still very good at avoiding the elephant in the room. So, by the end of their second bottle of beer which also marks the end of the afternoon and reaches the beginning of the evening, and even the night, the both of them have shared everything they’d done in the past six years; their career choices, their old and new friends, their families. But it isn’t until Beth finally finds some courage – maybe the drink helps – and asks, “So, why don’t you want to marry Julia?” that Tom stares at her, and they finally reach the conversation they were meant to have for months.

She’s scared of the answer, and when Tom finally speaks, she knows why. They’re sitting next to each other on a small picknick blanket, their shoulders touching, and Beth feels rather than sees Tom taking a big breath and looking at her.

“Maybe it’s not about me not wanting to marry her, but about me wanting to stay married to you.”

She swallows heavily, gulping down the remains of her beer, and stares at a spot on the floor in front of her. “That’s not fair, and you know that. We haven’t been together for six years, and you got engaged. You can’t do that do her, and you can’t do it to me, either.”

“So, you don’t want to stay married to me?”

Beth shakes her head, still not looking at him. “This isn’t about what I want, Tom. And this isn’t something you can change your mind about every couple of weeks. I signed the papers. I thought you did, too. And it doesn’t matter what I want. This is totally on you, don’t put it on me. If you want to sign, do it. If you want to get married, do it, too. If you sign and don’t marry, do that! And if you don’t sign, and we stay married on the paper, there you go. You know what I did, you know I signed, you’ve got your answer.” Now she’s looking at him, sees him staring at her. “Do what you want, for fuck’s sake.”

“But we’ve been there. Before,” he mumbles.

“Huh?”

“I did what I wanted. I left you, I moved, I stayed. Didn’t ask, just decided. Moved on, made you sign, and now I don’t know what to do. Because suddenly I feel like I’m throwing this away. Like I did before, and then it made you unhappy. It’s okay that I’m not happy, that I’m trapped in this new me. But I can’t make that decision for both of us again. I don’t trust myself to do it.”

“But—,” she starts, “you’re miserable like that. You can’t still feel guilty about this.”

“I can.”

And he does. Beth realises this now. After all these years he feels guilty. And maybe he didn’t fully notice it before, but coming here, seeing the what-ifs and the what-could-have-beens, he’s feeling all those things again. He punishes himself. “You think you deserve this.”

Tom nods, and now he’s the one looking away. “I left despite loving you. And if I do this, I’m leaving you again, despite loving you.”

“You’re not in love with me. Don’t say that.”

“Maybe not in love. Maybe not in the moment. But I do love you. And I think you love me, too. And I think I could go back there. With time, see where it’s going.”

Beth rises a brow. She didn’t expect this. Her heart is beating fast, she doesn’t know what’s happening here. “But you love Julia. You’re in love with her. And I’m sure she loves you, too.”

Tom shakes his head. He looks at her, his shoulder bumping hers and his blue eyes so piercing that they stare right into her soul. He wants her to believe him, and at this point he could probably tell her everything. She’d think he was right.

“She does love the new me. This hurt, closed off, success driven version of myself. The version that went through heartbreak when he left you, the one that was heartbroken that it was so easy to leave you.” It hurts her. To hear that it was easy for him to leave her. She was sitting in her flat for months, maybe years, and he can freely admit that it was easy? Beth opens her mouth to speak, but Tom beats her to it. “Why did you make it so easy for me to just leave you like that? Why didn’t you come, why didn’t you fight? Why didn’t you change my mind? I could have been happy on a London stage, why didn’t you tell me to come back?”

That… isn’t what Beth expected. She stares at him, moving away, so they don’t touch anymore. She can’t be so close to him right now. What is he saying? He didn’t want to leave? He wanted her to bring him back? But…

“I wanted you to be happy, Tom. You were happy. You told me that those opportunities made you happy. I was your wife. And I knew you weren’t happy with me. You would have resented me for making you stay with me. That wasn’t going to be on me, Tom. I didn’t care about how I felt. You were happy, and no matter what you think, you deserve to be happy now, too.”

“It wasn’t just about being happy. I didn’t feel like you loved me anymore. It was so easy to leave, because you didn’t hold me back.”

“You were loved, though,” she whispers. And she means it. Of course, she does. “You deserved to be loved, you are. Julia loves you.”

“I told you. She loves the Tom now. She would have never loved the Tom you knew. And just as she couldn’t have been in love with me then, I know that you probably couldn’t fall back in love with me now, huh?”

“What?”

“I told you I could go back there, but honestly, I don’t think you could. I’m not the sunny, bright, sunshine person anymore.”

“Maybe not. Doesn’t mean you’re a bad person. Doesn’t mean I couldn’t fall for you again. In fact, I’m pretty sure I could. I am. Which is why it’s not me who should make this decision. I signed the papers. I let you go. Did it once, can do it again. I want you to be happy, I wanted you to be happy then, and I thought you were. Until I recently saw that maybe you aren’t. But I do still know you. And I know that you can be happy, because I know the person you can be, I know who you’ve been, and I know who you will be. We both didn’t fight hard enough, because it was easier to pretend. I could have been in love with you then, but I sure as hell didn’t want you to look at me like I destroyed your dreams.”

There it is. They’re both breathing heavily now. It’s like they don’t come up for air until it’s all said and done. Until they get six – and even more – years of poor communication off their chests. But Beth isn’t finished, yet. “But I can’t let you do it this way around. I can’t be this person who comes between you and your fiancée. Not until you don’t know what you want for yourself.”

Just when Tom looks like he’s got a speech prepared for this, and just when Beth finally feels the tears that must have been streaming down her face for minutes, and when she sees the tears in Tom’s eyes as well, she gets up. More space, she needs more space. And she needs this to not be about her.

“I won’t be the one holding you back, or not holding you back again. We won’t test each other like that again. I love you, I hear it when you say you love me, but it won’t be me calling it.” She doesn’t let him speak, she just grabs her bag and gets ready to leave. “You sign the papers, or you don’t. I’ve done my part, you know where I stand. You go talk to Julia. You get this out of the way with her. Marry her, don’t marry her, stay married to me, or be single for you. You know where to find me, I’ve made my peace. This is my peace, I’ll survive. You go and make yours. And when, or if, you stop feeling guilty, you be the man I know you are, Tom Hiddleston.”

And with that, she turns. Tears streaming, a smile on her face, and her heart as light as heavy as it hasn’t felt in six years.

Now, it’s Tom’s turn.

***

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#polaroid picture #tom hiddleston fanfiction #beth + tom #chapter 17 #fanfiction

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