#and now you may say. 'fanny youre rambling about nothing again. stop making a fool out of yourself.' | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

misscrawfords · 3 years

Note

For the AU mashup list: Neighbours and Not A Date for Edmund and Fanny of Mansfield Park?

Well, here's the Mansfield Park High School AU I never thought I'd be writing. And I'm afraid it's rather got away from me!

Edmund and Fanny have been next door neighbours all their life. Fanny's family being... well... numerous (to put it in the kindest way), Edmund's parents have been something like an aunt and uncle to her. Fanny has always adored him in that mindless way that children do until something comes to challenge the adoration. Edmund has always noticed her when she's been invisible to everyone else.

But then, final year of school, Edmund suddenly decides to do the school play. He's never been interested in drama before and frankly Fanny is surprised. But she nods and believes him when he explains at great length to her in the car as he's driving them home that he's interested in the obscure German play they've picked. He is doing German A Level after all. It's sort of plausible. If only it didn't sound like he was trying to persuade himself, not her.

So Fanny volunteers her services as backstage crew. She's never done drama either, getting up on the stage is her idea of hell (she thought it was Edmund's too but hey, it's fun to discover she doesn't know everything about him), but where Edmund goes, Fanny follows, two years younger and still in her school uniform, A Level choices not yet made, like a little ghostly shadow.

It's quickly clear that it wasn't the quality of the play that attracted Edmund. The play is literally the worst. And she's not really sure it's all that suitable for a school but Mrs. Grant, the Head of Drama, has never cared much for things being "suitable".

No, the attraction for Edmund is Mary Crawford. Prefect Mary. Music scholar Mary. Mary with the bright eyes and the peels of laughter. Mary who had once stood up for Fanny back when Fanny was in Year 9 and Mrs. Norris was picking on her again, so Fanny can't hate her much as she wants to.

Soon Fanny and Edmund's drives to and from school, previously the highlight of her day, are torture. She hears nothing but Mary, Mary, Mary. And then she's forced to watch them in rehearsals together after school, sitting high up in the auditorium, taking notes on props and lighting. She's pretending not to see them but even if she's hunched over her notepad, she can still hear them, the whispers indistinct as they bend their heads together over their scripts. Then Mary's laughter cuts through every other sound and pierces Fanny to the core.

Sometimes she isn't needed for rehearsal. She could go home at the normal time. Get the bus like she used to before Edmund passed his driving test. But she's too masochistic for that. She will sit at the back of the auditorium and nominally do her homework waiting for him to finish rehearsing, observing them over the top of the text book, waiting for another heart-sickening car ride home.

Mary looks up and notices her and her face splits into a grin and she waves. "Hey, Fanny!"

Fanny waves back weakly. Her eyes slide to Edmund. He has his hands shoved into his trouser pockets, slightly hunched, a rueful, half smile on his face as if he is trying to make himself smaller, not that he really needs to try too hard, next to Mary's brilliance and vitality.

Don't betray my secret, his expression seems to tell her, you're the only one who knows.

Oh, Edmund, you dear fool. What secret?

And so it goes on. They get closer. Fanny watches, hating every minute and unable to stop herself.

"I want to ask Mary out," says Edmund one day, driving down the dual carriageway after rehearsal, as if this was an original statement that should come as a surprise to Fanny.

"So ask her out," Fanny replies evenly as her heart flops and plummets through her stomach and into her knees and she feels like throwing up.

Edmund navigates a roundabout before replying.

"It's really hard. I don't have much experience in dating."

I know. You've always been with me.

He starts to ramble. "I've got to choose my timing because it should be at rehearsal but not when everyone else is around. If she says no, I don't want anyone else to see... I've got to make it something she'd like and she's so much more, I don't know, fancy than you and me, right, Fanny? I can't just take her to Starbucks. Maybe that independent place across the square, Parsonage's, but I have some memory she had a bad experience there... What do you think? And then what do I do about paying? I'd want to pay but perhaps she'd be offended because she's always talking about what a feminist she is and I want to respect that but will it seem like it's not a date if I don't volunteer to pay? I'm just not sure what the etiquette is."

The car has stopped and Edmund finally stops speaking. It takes Fanny a moment to register because she is staring hard out of the passenger window, her throat choked and her hands white as she clenches the pleats of her school skirt in her fists.

"I don't know, Edmund," she manages to say. "I've never been on a date either."

"Hey! You know," continues Edmund, seeming not to notice her tone, "if this does go well, we can double date. You can come with Mary's brother - you'd like him, he's very into Shakespeare."

"Isn't he already at uni?" protests Fanny. "I don't think that would be a very good idea... He's four years older than me." But she spoke very quietly and Edmund does not register her objections, too caught up in a rosy and romantic future.

"A double date would be a really good idea," he continues. "I get so nervous around Mary, I really don't know what to say - having you and Henry there would really help."

Fanny wonders in passing why Edmund is so set on dating someone who makes him so nervous he wants other people with him on the date but what does she know?

"Hey, Fanny, are you free now? You don't have homework?"

She does, but she shakes her head anyway.

"Let's go there now and get a coffee. Like a dry run."

Fanny swivels in her seat till she faces him competely. "You want to rehearse your date?"

He doesn't meet her eyes. "Yeah, is that weird? You could pretend to be Mary. Just so I can think through what to say without putting my foot in it."

"Oh! I can't do that! Edmund, I can't pretend to be Mary! We are so - so different."

He laughs. "Oh, I know that. I know you don't do acting. I just mean that you'd be there and you'd tell me if I'm saying anything stupid. You're always honest with me, Fanny."

He gives her that sweet, lop-sided smile and her heart contracts again. She can refuse him nothing. She shruggs awkwardly. "Well, I guess..."

He immediately turns the engine back on. "That's great! Come on, let's check out Parsonage's."

They are in silence for the drive back into town. Fanny's heart is pounding. She and Edmund may be best friends but they don't do things together. They ride to school together and they wave at each from their bedroom windows like the leads in Drive Me Crazy (Fanny used to think that similarity Meant Something but she knows better now) but they have their own friendship groups at school and apart from the school play they don't hang out together at school or go anywhere together at weekends.

But now they are going to a coffee shop together.

It's not a date but when they walk into the coffee shop together and Edmund holds the door for her, she cannot help pretending to herself that it is. That this is what going on a date with Edmund would be like. They approach the counter. Edmund asks her what she wants and orders for her which feels like a very important thing. Perhaps Mary, president of the school's Feminism Soc, would have a lot to say about it, but to Fanny it just feels as if Edmund is taking care of her. She digs her purse out but Edmund waves it away and pays for both of them.

"I'll pay you back," she murmurs to him as she follows him to a table with only two chairs.

He waves it away again and protests that she's doing him a favour, not to worry about it.

A favour? Is that what she's doing?

They sit opposite each other. Edmund is relaxed, but she sits stiff and straight, her knees pressed together. Her eyes glance round the coffee shop.

She leans across the table. "People probably all think we're on a date right now," she hisses at him, half anxious, half proud.

He laughs with a bit of a scoff in it. "Wow, you really sound cut up about it; I'll try not to be offended! Anyway, we know it's not a date and who cares what anyone else thinks?"

True, but Fanny does care because if everyone else looks at them and thinks they are a couple then perhaps one day he will also think that. It is a justification of her fantasy and her hopeless hope.

She knows it is not a date.

But it is the best she is going to get.

#mansfield park #fanny price #edmund bertram #edmund x fanny #kind of #jane austen #fanfiction #rose writes #this got away from me but was immensely cathartic to write #who knew that high school mansfield park was what i needed in my life?

30 notes · View notes