Small Mended Corners
This is what happens when you take a prompt, turn it an arbitrary number of degrees, and just go. It never actually got to the point of Milady taking her daughter back (and I don't think she would, barring unforeseen circumstances, but that's another story), so I'm not sure it addresses the prompt as much as using it as a starting-off place, mentally speaking? Sorry (not sorry), Athena!
Original prompt: Milady post S2.(When I got enough money together I go back for my baby but I am afraid. I am afraid to touch her, scared I to hurt her but then I looked at her tiny & perfect & she smiles & I am not scared because she is not scared of me. I think to myself I need to learn so many things, her favorite blanket, toy, how she likes to be rocked and I swear to myself I will be there for her! It won't be like it was for me. I would lay down my life for her & never abandon or betray her.)
Title and quote from Talis Kimberley's "Small Mended Corners", which is 100% a Milady song in my book. Post-season 2, AU that as far as I'm concerned links to Just One More but isn't explicitly connected (even if the start picks up pretty much where that left off). Written in fits and starts and fragments over several weeks at work where my brain would just not behave for beans.
Trigger warnings: pregnancy and childbirth; discussion of abortion.
"As to who I am now if you're prompted to ask
I'm the ghost of my future and the sum of my past ..."
In the end, though she knows it is a fool's choice, she cannot bring herself to drink.
The tea grows cold as she sits there, staring into the amber liquid as if some answer will manifest within its depths. But she is no fortune-teller, doesn't believe in fate to be read in the first place, and when she makes her choice and dumps it out, the flecks of herbs left clinging to the cup don't even spawn fanciful visions of what might come. Sense dictated one road, and while this would hardly have been the first life she's taken, nor even the first innocent - isn't even a life yet, if one believes in souls - for the first time in years sentiment wins out. To drink would have felt like a betrayal, and she has had enough of those. The only thing she can say with certainty, after, is that her choice was not driven by thoughts of sin, though she sometimes wonders if it might be some small hope of salvation, for all that she doesn't really believe in that either.
She has no time for such thoughts, though. And even if she cannot bring herself to destroy what grows within her, she is not so blinded by sentiment as to think she can raise a child. Her means are still limited, and she refuses to seek out a man to accept her like this only to ensure her security; she has too much pride (and the heart she refuses to dwell on, the heart she can silence except in the small hours of the night) for that, does not want to have to depend on the vagaries of men ever again. And so she begins to make discreet inquiries, eventually finds a childless couple, innkeepers in a small town several hours' ride from Le Havre, and makes arrangements for her offspring even as she arranges matters in her own life. Survival is still what matters most, and she has always been good at surviving.
(She must not think she does so in any part for this child; once it is settled with its new parents, she can be nothing more than an occasional visitor, for many reasons. Son or daughter, she will not have her child grow up with the stigma she endured, will not make them a target for her enemies. As always, she must live solely for herself.)
- x -
She's sold many parts of herself over the years, but she meant it when she told him she didn't like the woman she'd become, and she won't take that step back (not until she has no other course, and if she were the sort to pray she'd ask the god she doesn't believe in to spare her that need). There are other things she can do to put coin in her purse and food in her belly, even now.
Like any port - like any crossroads - Le Havre is a town full of information. She winnows rumour from fact, gleans snippets and strings them together, pieces out news, then turns around and sells it once again. Stories become her stock in trade, truth and falsehood alike passing as the coins dictate, and if she never acts against France itself she can lie to herself and call it self-preservation, and no one knows her well enough to be any the wiser. Besides, there are plenty of separatists within the Spanish empire who'll trade for her information; for once, she can afford those sorts of high-minded principles.
(It's not for the good of France, she thinks, when his words come back to her. France has never done anything for her; she owes it nothing. She does not dwell on what it is for.)
She keeps odd hours, lingers in the shadows of mist-shrouded streets and smoky taverns alike, and under cover of full cloaks and beneath corsets laced more and more loosely, her body changes. Some days she resents the invader growing within, when she wastes an hour retching or an evening that should've been spent listening and learning curled up in exhausted half-slumber, but most days it simply is, just one more part of who she is at this moment (and she has always been changeable; she will shed this skin as easily as she has others before, as easily as she is sure to do again in the future, and whether the shadows of who she has been cling to her even now or not is a thought she pushes away). She is not the sort of woman upon whom impending motherhood sits lightly; the pregnancy is troublesome as often as not, but she has set her course, and she is not minded to change it.
- x -
She has known pain before, has been bruised and stabbed and hanged near to death (has had her heart ripped from her chest and crushed underfoot, but that was a wholly different hurt), but none of that prepares her for the pain of childbirth. She bites nearly through her lip in an effort not to give voice to her pain, digs nails deep enough into her palms to cut, swears every epithet she knows (and there are many) at the midwife and her assistant, who bear it all with the stoic detachment of women who've seen this many a time. It's early - she can count, after all, and knows that with certitude - and it makes a cold knot of fear settle in the pit of her stomach, contrast to the knife-edged agony and the burning ache of overstrained muscle. She refuses to accept the idea that this will end in death, however; surely the world owes her some small mercy, when it has mocked her enough. (But the world does no one favours, and so she grits her teeth and does as bidden and bears down, silences the pain as best she can, hopes despite herself - thinks, with a wild urge to laugh, how ridiculous this all is, that she'd once thought to kill this child and now here she is yearning with all her might for it to live.)
"Good," the midwife praises as she bites down harder, strains, "good, there, almost, once more -" And, as Anne collapses against the bed, sweat-sodden and gasping for breath in the aftermath, "Yes, there you are, good, good ..."
It's too quiet. She can't hear their murmurs over the rush of blood in her ears, and she forces her eyes to focus, wets lips dry and bloody. "What -?"
A thin, thready cry reaches her ears, and the mounting tension flees her as she sags back with relief. Not stillborn, then. She should have known any child she and Athos made would have been too damned stubborn to die.
"She's small," the midwife says brusquely, tending to the child as her assistant talks Anne through the afterbirth. "That's a good grip, though. Early she may be, but I think she'll do fine."
She's sore, sticky with sweat and blood and other things, exhausted beyond measure, and yet she holds out her hands all the same. When the baby is placed in arms (tiny, red-faced, scowling), she feels an unexpected surge of protectiveness, and reminds herself forcibly that she cannot get attached. She must not, if her girl is to have any hope at normalcy.
- x -
This is not abandonment, she reminds herself nearly a month later, when she delivers the baby to her new parents. It is not abandoning a child when she is placing her into a far better home, a far better life than any Anne could give her.
The midwife had urged her to spend more time recovering, but time is one thing she can ill-afford; the longer she waits, the greater the chance someone will discover what has happened (the greater the chance she will grow attached). As it is, she's taking far more of a chance than she'd have liked leaving midwife and assistant able to tell her tale, and the sooner she is gone and the less they can say the better. (Milady would have ensured their silence in the only certain way, but she is determined to be Milady no longer, no matter how often she thinks it the safer path. To leave them with only fragmented knowledge is a calculated risk she is willing to take, if it means she can put off crossing that line just that much longer.)
And so she leaves Le Havre early one morning without any farewells, hitches her cloak more tightly about herself to fend off the cold drizzle. The baby (not her daughter, never her daughter, she must abandon such thoughts) is tucked against her chest, tiny body held close against her skin for warmth, and whether it is due to the early meal or the the horse's steadily rhythmic motion she sleeps soundly, waking only when Anne stops to feed her again.
She arrives there as the clouds are finally starting to burn off, and before the noon hour has struck is closeted with the innkeeper's wife in the couple's small sitting room. The other woman is of an age with her, and dark-haired, but the similarities end there; this is a woman who has known hardships of a wholly different sort, and the steely determination beneath her easy cheerfulness is only superficially like her own iron. She will bend, Anne thinks incongruously, watching her with the babe, and I have broken, but now is not the time for such musings.
"What's her name?"
She blinks, startled, but manages to keep her words calm. "That's for you to give her," is all she says. (Naming things is knowing them. She cannot.)
- x -
She comes back for the first time almost a full year later.
It's not a wise course of action, but she rationalises it by telling herself it's reasonable to want to ensure things are going well, and that one visit won't be enough to tip anyone off. She's back in Le Havre anyway, and a detour of a few days to visit familiar places won't signify much. And it's good to be back in France again, after the dreary grey of the English fog and long weeks spent flitting hither and yon, on isle and continent both. There's coin in a pouch under her skirts and in several secret caches, more than she'd left with; the world has been generous with that in these months, as if to recompense her for all it has taken or denied. If nothing else, she'll be able to ensure some stability for -
No, she reminds herself firmly, for what might be the hundredth time since she left the port. She is not your daughter anymore. She never was. Put that thought away.
And yet she wonders - wonders how the child has grown, which of them she resembles more, what she's learned from her parents. If she cries, if she sleeps easily, if she's grown to ordinary size or is still tiny and fragile. Wonders if the babe has changed enough that she won't recognise her (though she thinks she always would, suspects there's enough truth in the notion of maternal instinct to bear that out).
She wonders about him too, sometimes, but she has gleaned knowledge of his movements and actions from the news she collects and sells, and she is long-accustomed to ignoring the raw-edged empty places he left within her. The war on the southern border is one of skirmishes and attrition, and if the Musketeer captain had been injured or taken or slain, she would have heard something. He is, no doubt, as well as he can be under these circumstances.
(She does not wonder about what they might have been, all three together.)
- x -
The innkeeper and his wife treat her as an old acquaintance when she arrives, not quite a friend but someone they know, and somehow this leads to being left in one corner of the common area, asked to keep an eye on her (their, damn it) daughter while they tend to a newly-arrived party. And though she tries to protest that she knows nothing of children, they have bustled off before she can get more than a few syllables out, and there's nothing to be done for it but to watch the chubby dark-haired girl as she plays with a set of wooden blocks, stacking them only to knock them over with a gleeful noise and then repeat the whole matter again.
"She likes being held," the innkeeper's wife says as she passes by on her way to the kitchen, pausing to tweak the babe's nose and getting a block waved emphatically at her in response. "If she insists, it's easier to give in." Just as earlier, though, she moves on before Anne can voice a protest, leaving her sitting there to contemplate the words and the sudden swell of conflicted emotion that has risen at them. How, she thinks wildly, can hands so accustomed to death and destruction, so stained with blood, hold an innocent child - how will she not taint this life, if she tries to find a place in it when there surely cannot be one for someone like her? She was made for the darkness of the world; she'd learned that young, realised the truth of it in the years after her hanging, under Richelieu's tutelage, and while she may steal from joy and sunlight she will only ever be the thief, borrowing what can never truly be hers.
How, she wonders too as she watches the round-cheeked girl awkwardly try to pull herself upright using the bench before falling onto her backside (she fears tears will follow, but the babe just gurgles with laughter), could she and he have created something so pure and unstained? It seems so alien to them both, especially as they are now, and she thinks (not for the first time, and surely it won't be the last) that it would be better to keep her distance; she knows what she is, what nature and nurture alike have made her, and she cannot but believe that her touch will bring the same sorrow to her daughter's life, as her own mother's marked her with. She knows -
But the child has tottered over and sits now at her feet, looking up with wide curious eyes, and as that rosebud mouth pulls into a toothless smile and little arms reach up, she wonders despite herself what might happen if she did try.