#alpoise bridgerton x y/n

[margowritesthings]

Good Luck, Babe!

pairing: Eloise Bridgerton x f!reader word count: 2394 words listen along authors note: I don't know what came over me with this one- I NEVER write just angst but here it is I guess🥲🥲 I just felt like Chappell is so Eloise x reader coded. I hope you enjoy! As always, big thank you to @cowboydisaster for beta-ing💙

Dearest El,

I have departed London. As this letter will be arriving some weeks after I have departed London, and owing to your brilliant mind, I am sure you will have worked that out by now. I can only apologise for my disappearance and complete lack of correspondence, when Mama received word of Aunt Petunia’s illness, she made so much haste I barely had time to pack a quill. 

I hope with all my heart I can return to you soon. As much as the London season pains me, you bring the most incredible medicine in your company, one that I long to drink up every drop of.

As the atmosphere here in the country gets ever more mournful, the hope that I can soon be with you brightens. I feel so terribly guilty for not being as consumed by grief as the rest of my family, however I mourn every second missed by your side much more than a lifetime of a woman I never knew. 

My heart longs for more stolen moments soon,

Yours, always.

Meanwhile, at almost the exact same instant… 

My dear Miss Bridgerton,

We have been corresponding now for quite some time, and although we have never formally met, I feel as if I know you.

Forgive me if I am too bold, but I am writing to invite you to visit me. It is my hope that we might decide that we will suit, and you will consent to be my wife.

—Sir Phillip Crane

“A… A husband? You are engaged?!”

You can’t be sure you heard right for the rushing of blood in your ears and the shattering of your heart in your chest. A broken heart always sounded so metaphorical, fantastical imagery to describe an emotion. But this pain is so very real, and it hurts so badly it takes everything you have not to let your knees buckle beneath you. 

“Perhaps… we could discuss this in private?” Eloise says, and even though you see her lips moving in time to the words you hear, it doesn’t sound like her. Not the girl you grew up with, the woman you love with all your heart. Everything has changed, in all of 4 seconds. 

The pointed tone she yields makes you remember yourself, finding half a dozen other Bridgertons looking back at the two of you. There’s tension knitted between each of their brows, the resemblance in the family so striking when they’re all gazing at you with the exact same confused expression. You can’t blame them, it is a rather intense reaction for a young lady when she finds out her best friend is betrothed.

They could never know how much more you are.

How much you thought you were.

Eloise pulls at your arm, and you comply like wet clay between her fingers. The shock is really settling in your bones now, and your lip wobbles with emotion you cannot spend in front of her family. She guides you, and you’re soon both in the library, the heavy door shut and locked behind you.

Your first instinct is to resent her for bringing you here, of all places, to talk about this. This damned library, with more memories stuffed in it than books. Of stolen kisses between chapters, nervous confessions beside the fireplace, learning each and every secret the other holds in their mind, and every single inch of their body. This library was your sanctuary only months ago, and now Eloise has brought you in here to break your heart.

The silence hangs between you, Eloise’s blush lips parting and closing. You’ve never seen her like this, with so much sadness in her eyes it scares you. 

“I… I feared we had been discovered.”

You can’t argue that. It would have been the easiest explanation to come to, with what happened. One day, you’re in London in the middle of the social season, stealing away from balls to press your lover against Lady Trowbridge’s bookshelves and make her moan your name in just the way you like. The next, you’d disappeared without a trace. How was she to know the circumstances? It makes sense now, that she never wrote you back. She wasn’t even in London to receive your correspondence.

“You quit London with all your family, not a trace of you. Not even a mention in Whistledown, for God's sake. I was so worried that perhaps your Papa had discovered that we were… our secret,”

She can’t even say it aloud. 

“And that he’d shipped you off to the country. I thought we’d both be ruined and… I was scared. Scared that I had lost you and that-” 

“Scared that you had lost me and your first instinct was to marry somebody else?!” You spit, all the hurt you had to hide when the first blow hit in the drawing room rising to the surface. “You thought I had been carted off to the country and the first thing you do is find yourself a husband to save your own skin?!”

You’re being ugly and hurtful and you know it, but you’re hurting too. There’s a palpable pain all over, and it’s affecting your ability to hold onto your composure. 

But the way Eloise flinches at your rebuttal is all the more painful. In the candlelight, you spot the tear tracks down her cheeks, and it takes everything not to close the distance between you and swipe them away with your thumb. You’d kiss each cheek softly, feeling just how soft her skin is. Oh, how you’ve missed how soft her skin is… 

Your feet seem to work of their own accord for a moment, toes icing forward, but you pull yourself back, perch yourself on the desk to anchor you down. If you go to her now, you’re not sure you could ever let her go, and she has a fiancé now. 

“It wasn’t like that.” She admits, her voice so weak now. It feels so wrong, like the Earth should be hanging upside down. Even then, your El would cling on with a smile, but this is so much worse than that because she’s crumbling too. She takes a deep, steadying breath, but it does little good.

“I had been corresponding with him for a few months… I knew his wife, Marina, her and Colin were once betrothed and she… well, it does not signify. It was just a letter of condolence, but then he replied, and one thing led to another and you were gone and I didn’t know if you were coming back and-” She’s rambling, words tumbling from her lips and each one a deeper cut than the last and you just can’t listen to all the sordid details anymore.

“Do you love him?” You interrupt, your question asked if it is the most simple in the world when, really, it is anything but. Seconds seem to stretch to hours, Eloise choking on her words and fighting with herself to finally shake her head no.

“It is a marriage of convenience. Sir Phillip is a widower. He has children who need a mother and I… they need me.”

But I need you.

You could tell her that. You could lay your heart out, tell her her place is right here, next to you, but you’re terrified. The chance you have of walking away from this night with your heart in one piece and your soulmate by your side is dwindling by the second. You’re losing her, and the fear turns to ugliness. 

“And that is what you wish to be, now? His wife, their mother?” You spit the titles out as if they are a curse, “What about-”

“What about what? Growing old together as spinsters, those strange ladies who live together in the country and see nobody? The ones who not just ruined themselves with the scandal, but their entire families?! At least I can be his wife. I can be their mother. It’s legal, and accepted, and perhaps that has never mattered to me before, but you left, and I didn’t know when you were coming back and Phillip was there and offering me a place to go and and I… I had to be realistic. Stop living in this fantasy.”

The word ricochets inside you, cracking bones, puncturing organs and leaving you bleeding out in front of her. Fantasy. 

All those long hours reading together, discovering parts of the world nobody would teach two young ladies.

A fantasy.

Your first kiss, hidden from the heavens under the covers of a thunderstorm, discovering other things they’d never teach you.

A fantasy.

That first time, and the next, and the next, and every time after that, skin to skin, bodies so connected you couldn’t tell where one of you ended and the other began. 

Moaning each others names, decorations of love and passion and lust and everything in between tying you both together for what seemed like forever. 

The plans you had to escape to the countryside together, away from anybody who could ever keep you apart.

A fantasy A fantasy A fantasy

The feeling of absolute inadequacy starts to creep in, until you realise it isn’t you Eloise is giving up on, it’s her. 

“This isn’t who you are, El…” You whisper, all the energy and fury in your own words dying off. You’re devastated, not just for yourself, but because you know who Eloise Bridgerton is, and the woman in front of you is letting her down.

She meets your eye, and you do all you can not to lose yourself in those sad, grey pools that tell you everything her words are not. 

“What if it is? It is how every other woman is, is it not? Why should I be so different? What we do- what we did- isn’t how it is supposed to be done and you know it. It could have been nothing- a blip. What if… if I’m not actually like that and I just hadn’t…” The words die in her throat, and you know it’s because she doesn’t mean them. So much so you’re not even hurt by it. She feels just as you do, that tether between you just as tense on both ends, but denial is rearing its ugly head now, and you’re powerless to it.

Eloise takes in a deep breath, sighing it back out as if it will settle her nerves. But you see the way she tugs at her own fingernails, the way her feet shift every other second. She’s nervous. She’s lying, and you don’t know who’s benefit it is for. 

“You can say that we are nothing, but you and I both know the truth, Eloise. You would have to burn the world down for what is between us to cease.

One day, you will wake up in the dead of night and you will realise you are a wife to a man you do not love, a mother to children that are not yours. You will have walked into another woman’s life, a life you do not want, because you think that whatever this is between us will cease, that whatever resides inside of you will simply disappear… Eloise, I promise you now that it will not.

You’ll still love me, all those years from now, I swear to you that you will, and even if you don’t, there will be another but you know it will not be him… Please, El, I beg of you not to do this. Not just for me, but for you. Do not rob yourself of who you truly are because you are scared, please do not do this-”

You don’t know when you started crying, nor when you allowed yourself to finally close the distance between you and Eloise and grab hold of her hands as you beg for her life. She’s too limp in your grip, the fight burning in her already extinguished.

“It… It does not signify. I have already married him.” 

A final blow knocks you back a few paces, from the one you thought you knew so well.

The one you truly didn’t know at all. 

No, you knew your El. You knew Eloise Bridgerton, who had two sugars in her tea and fought harder than anyone else in London for what she believed in. 

You do not know Eloise Crane. 

Not one bit.

“I see.” You choke on the two little repeated syllables, packing thousands more into their subtext. Weaving in the pain and betrayal, wrapping them around the confession that even after all this, you still love her. Maybe she finds those secrets in your short sentence, it’s impossible to tell with this faux composure she’s clinging onto. 

“It all moved so quickly. He asked me to visit him, and my brothers… Well, you know how they are. They believed he compromised me, so we… I… I am sorry. Truly, I never meant to hurt you… It all got away from me.” There’s a weakness in her final sentence that leads you to think perhaps Eloise didn't have much of a say in the matter at all. It makes you angry, furious that these men who claim to love her, her own family, would steal away her future like this. Would steal her away from you.

You want to scream. You want to cry. You want to storm up to Anthony Bridgerton and give him a piece of your mind, but El is right. None of it signifies anymore, because the deed is done. 

Eloise Crane will live the rest of her life within a lie.

And so, it seems, will you. 

She’s openly sobbing now, the two paces backwards you took in the aftershock feeling like miles and miles now. 

“I’m so sorry…” 

And then, so quiet you could have missed it for your own heartbeat,

“I love you.”

It feels as natural as breathing to say it back. You have done, thousands of times. From written into letters left hidden under pillows to moaned voices in each other's ears.

This time, though, the words get stuck. They mutate, catching all that pain build up inside you on their way out and becoming bitter. 

“I wish you the very best of luck with your new family, Lady Crane.”

You try not to look back, but it is awfully difficult.