No one die of shock. Yes, this is a new story. No, I haven't disappeared from GWTW, I've just been very busy. The very basic idea of this story came to me years ago, and a brief sentence description has been sitting in my idea folder for at least 5 years, and yet just in the last week, this story suddenly came to life. So there is potential that the other stories might someday see the light of day. Although I'm not sure that anyone is ready for some of them… Thank you dearly to dear Sara for reading this and giving input. It is always a highlight of my day to have someone as wonderful as you be my sounding board! I'm so thankful for you, as should anyone who reads this story and many of my other writings.

The death of Melanie Wilkes was the final straw in his sham of a marriage. Scarlett had rushed home from her death bed with confessions of love and news of the passing of the only respectable woman in town that would champion either of the disgraced Butlers. Melanie had seen fit to let it slip about Rhett's secret love. She had poured out her heart, suddenly realizing that she had loved him for a long time. But it didn't matter, he was broken inside. And he didn't love her any more. And just to prove that realization, he had left her the very next day. He stepped out into the heavy fog of the early morning of the late September hush and had disappeared, finding it difficult to imagine that he would ever return, despite his promises to the contrary. After all, he was no gentleman, so there was nothing binding him to these vows. And he imagined with a wry smile that the ties that bound him to his wife and her children and this desolate town were loosening and weakening with each mile that he placed between them. Belle was wrong, Scarlett was not in his blood. He could escape from her poison. And yet he could not shake the feeling that something had followed him, as a shadow trailing behind him, yet ever present.

After fleeing from this feeling for weeks now, he tried to shrug it off as merely an over active imagine, liberally augmented with the help of whiskey. He now sat quietly stubbing his cigar, as he stared out at the misty water, the haze shrouding the shoreline as though an errant child had spilled water on the canvas of a watercolor painting blurring any distinction from where the waters began and the land ended. He could hear the faint clanging of a bell or chains out on the water. The entire scene was a little eerie, which was fitting when considering the locals superstitions about All Hallow's Eves. The Irish were strong believer's in the belief that this was the night when the ghosts and goblins were once again free to roam the earth. He shuddered as a cool finger of wind swept across his neck, the small hair standing up as he was overcome with the feeling that someone or something was watching him.

He glanced over his shoulder, and yet there was no one there, at least no one that he could see, he nearly chuckled at the thought that he had been swept away for a moment with the nonsensical superstitions of these Irish peasants, which there was a singular person from Irish peasant stock that he could not seem to escape from.

He closed his eyes, attempting to block out the headache that was building behind his eyes. Before long, he would be blindsided by knee bending pain. He heard faint whispers, as though conversations were going on around him, although there was no one there. Yet the whispers did not cease, but continued to build. The faint wailing of an infant and the paper thin voices that seemed oddly familiar echoed, as he felt himself slipping into a daze. For a moment he could have sworn that he could hear Wade's voice, full of accusation, but it was not Wade's voice, there was something different, but it sounded much like his step-son. Charles Hamilton? He could barely even remember what Scarlett's first husband looked like, yet he couldn't help but imagine that the similarities to Wade, as he looked nothing like his mother.

"Rhett" the wind seemed to whisper his name. The clanging grew louder, as the wind began tossing his hair, twisting and churning. "Rhett Butler." He reached to brush an errant hair out of his face.

This time the voice was clear, coming from directly behind him, and he turned sharply towards the sound. A ghostly specter was emerging from the swirling abyss. There was faint glowing in the darkness where the face must have been. Dark coals glowed as a replacement for eyes, for where there was only darkness growing from darkness, all light seemed to be sucked into this ominous figure.

As the darkness surrounded him, blocking out all of the fog, and the darkness growing so thick that he felt like he was choking. "Rhett Butler, it was you…."

Rhett's normal composure began to falter, as the figure drew even closer, Rhett's throat squeezed tightly as he began to slowly recognize this menacing figure. "You lusted after my wife. You watched and waited like a spider..." The hood fell back to reveal the grayed decaying flesh with a bloody hole in the forehead.

"Frank..." Rhett stammered for a moment, fighting the urge to rub his eyes to remove such a vision as the one before him. "What are you doing here?"

"This is the night when the living and dead collide. And I left my wife and you were the one proposing before I was even in the ground. And yet, not that many years later, you've completely abandoned her." Frank moved closer to Rhett, so that the scent of gunpowder and the metallic odor of blood all over powered by the strong odor of rotting flesh. "You know that you wanted me dead. I wasn't a fool. You wanted my wife. You wanted her and my daughter to be yours, and yet now you've tossed them to the side like rubbish. I know that you watched as my child grew inside of her that you wanted that child to be your flesh and blood."

The closer that the dead man came to him, the more Rhett's stomach revolted against the smell and the memories of a dark March night.

"Or is there more to the story than what the rest of the town believes." Frank's papery lips moved and the sound was as brittle as tree branches rubbing in the wind.

Rhett started to rise to fight off the attack, "No, of course not."

"It's awfully convenient that I died that night wasn't it. Convenient how you were able to save nearly everyone else but me, when it was my wife that you wanted as your own, that would have been your own if not for your stubborn pride." Darkness seemed to twist around him like wisps of smoke, "Yes, Butler, I know more than you think that I do. I know an awful lot. I know that she came to you to save her and her family, and you turned her down. Did that burn inside of you, knowing that those nights when I was holding my wife, she could have been yours. Oh, I know that she didn't love me like a wife loves her husband, but the thing is that she was my wife. She did try to be a good wife. She could be sweet and charming, and yet what did you do to her? You've destroyed her as surely as you destroy everything that you touch."

The usual swarthy skin that had been tanned over the years as a ship captain, was suddenly milky pale, as Rhett began to sweat profusely at Frank's accusations. "I didn't destroy her. She destroyed me." But the strength in his voice faded, and his voice came out in a cracked whisper.

"Apparently, you've been away from our wife for longer than a few months. You know nothing about her. You somehow missed the fact that she's been broken for years. She was broken before you married her, but her life with you only broke her more. You can't see it, but she is fragile in her own way. And yet even in her darkest moments, she protected you. She wouldn't let anyone know that you had been fighting on the stairs. She might have lied to everyone and refused to admit that you wanted her to miscarry, but I know it. And you know what you told her. You told your wife who was carrying your child, that you might as well have violated, that you hoped she would have a miscarriage." Frank's cold hand was now on Rhett's shoulder, squeezing with surprising strength. "She wanted that baby. She was thrilled to be pregnant, for the first time she wanted the child she was carrying, and yet you wished for that child to die. And you nearly killed her, the woman that you loved, if you even know what love is."

Rhett struggled against the grip of death, trying to rise and fight, "she didn't want the child..."

"But she did. And she's been grieving that child for years now, and then to lose Bonnie and Melanie… I know that she is strong, stronger than most, but still there is point when we all break. She is past that point, remaining upright only by the strength of her will… Not that you would care, after all everything was her fault, isn't that what you told her before you left her?" Frank prodded.

"No one was there, how do you know what i said?"

"I didn't have to be there." Frank countered. "I'm dead. I am wherever I want to be, or maybe I'm just your guilty conscience."

"This is absurd. I have nothing to be guilty about..." Rhett rose, but found that his feet could not move, as though his boots were mired in quicksand.

"You didn't succeed in killing her on the stairs when you murdered your child, so I guess you thought it would be better to slowly kill her. Well, you are succeeding to now to do what war, famine, and the loss of everything she loved couldn't.."

"You're wrong." Rhett weakly protested. "You never knew her."

"I knew her in ways that you never did. I saw the wounds that she carried that you discounted as something to be so easily repaired by a few meals and safety. I saw the way that she was terrified of losing money, for money meant her security. I saw how she wanted to be like her mother, a lady. You've never seen her as a lady. She's nothing but a whore to you, that refused to be bought except but by the most expensive payment of matrimony, something you surely had vowed to never fall to." There was nothing fussy or maidenish about this spectre, "but I digress, not understanding your wife is one of the least of your crimes. You killed your children, a tiny baby that never even had a chance to be held."

And suddenly a child was before him with dark curls and green eyes, a toddler of only a few years who looked at him accusingly. The boy smiled briefly, with a smile that was so like his own that he could not refute the origin of this child. And yet the child before him flicked and vanished like the flame of a candle snuffed by a wind in the night. And then in his place, a ghost of his daughter, her skin pale, but her eyes bright. The look on her face was not an expression that he had ever seen there before. Her eyes accused him, laying the burden of problems at his feet, but all too soon she was gone, leaving him only with this shadowy version of Frank.

"I've..." Rhett tried to defend himself, but nothing would come. He was at a loss for an explanation, and the brief vision of his dead children had silenced him.

"Please, stop. I'll make amends. Just stop."

Suddenly the darkness receded, and he was alone standing on a cliff overlooking a misty sea. He frantically glanced around, but there was nothing and no one to suggest if his encounter had been real or imagined. Yet he could not stopper the words that had been spoken to him from repeating over and over. Had this occurrence been merely his guilty conscience, or had he really been visited by the ghost of Frank Kennedy?

So the simple, single line sitting in my ideas folder was Rhett Butler is haunted by the ghost of Frank Kennedy. There was no direction other than that, and then suddenly it was there. I hope you enjoyed it! Alica