three times true
For an anonymous prompt on Tumblr in response to a Five Things meme. I was given Milathos and surprise.
Title by way of Lewis Carroll's "The Hunting of the Snark" - what I tell you three times is true.
1. Paris, 1624
She has kissed before; a kiss can be a tool in the streets, a coin, a weapon, and she has learned a half a dozen uses for her kisses before she ever meets him. Despite the stories she's heard of romances she knows better than to give them any credence when fairy stories are a luxury for girls with more gold than sense, not street sparrows who must survive by any means necessary - and she is a survivor above all else, and can ill-afford illusions. And he is an opportunity, one she recognises as soon as she notices his eyes on her, and with her feet in the gutter and the dust of poverty thick upon her skirts it is an opportunity she would be a fool to pass up.
When she goes to kiss him, her eyes and her head are clear. She has known him for several weeks, spent enough time with him to judge her initial instincts correct - he is nothing like the men she has known before who will use and discard with equal parts alacrity and lack of care, has a gentle hesitation to him that confirms he is an ideal mark. If she can get him to wed her, she will be secure, but she suspects he will need a push when he has not so much as laid a finger upon her improperly. And so when they pause beneath a tree one afternoon she leans in, brushes her lips against his, just the barest whisper of contact.
His breath catches; his hand lifts, almost unconsciously, to the small of her back. His lips tremble against her own. She has known all this before, but never has the power of her sex felt quite so heady. It emboldens her, makes her kiss him again, and this time - this time he kisses her back, and it is her turn to gasp.
"Anne?" he asks, when they come apart. He sounds startled, uncertain but not displeased - if anything, quite the opposite.
"I'm sorry," she stammers, ducking her head as though she is shocked at her own boldness.
(She is shocked, but not at that.)
2. Pinon, 1625
She had never thought she might come to care for her husband, when she had married him; she had never thought she might look at him and think no, this man is different, never thought that she might look at him and see hope and love and a whole world of possibilities she'd never even dreamed of when she'd once only seen security. (She had never thought a man would make a fool of her. The girl who'd grown up in the streets had been too hard too young, too bitterly cynical to ever allow for such a thing. And yet he had worked his way into her, blood and bone and heart, and somewhere along the way she found herself wondering not whether she was falling for him but rather how it had come to pass, and when, and how she had not noticed it.)
They are one, she thinks - a thought oddly fanciful for a girl who had never had the time for dreams, but the lazy summer sunshine makes her drowsy, and with his head pillowed on her stomach and her fingers curling into his hair and his breath very nearly becoming her own it is easy to drift, easy to believe she is what he sees when he looks at her. With each day that passes, she becomes more and more the woman she sees reflected in his eyes, and what had once been a lie she'd sold him in exchange for a life of safety and security becomes a truth she desperately wants to be, not just for the position it gives her but for the uncomplicated pleasure of it. Anne, she finds, is an oddly comfortable self to wear, until she forgets with the days that the reality is that Anne is only a mask, almost as thoroughly as she forgets the girl beneath.
If she had not become that woman, perhaps Thomas' demands would not have sparked the actions they do. If she had not been - but she is and is not, and a part of her is still the girl she'd been before Anne, and while it is Anne's pride in who she is that makes her refuse him, it is the girl who grabs the knife and bloodies her hands unthinkingly. (She is Anne enough to refuse him; she is not Anne enough to trust that her husband will heed her words. She is truth and lie in a single breath, and that makes her nothing at all.)
And yet she hopes, she still hopes, but he proves her fears all too true when he refuses to listen, and the shock in her words is unfeigned, no less true than the shock that cuts through her when he asks if she ever loved him.
(She did, she did, despite herself she did, but it is clear now that love would never have been enough and she had been right to doubt the stories.)
3. Pinon, 1630
If she believed in such things, she would say it was fate that brought them both back to Pinon at the same time.
If she believed in such things, she would say perhaps that it was fate that had caused their eyes to meet five years and more before, but that too is a fairy story and any part of her that had been fanciful died here, died by his word, and the only dreams she has known since are nightmares and the hope of revenge. And so perhaps there is something of fate in this after all, that he should be delivered to her at such a time, in such a state, wine-sodden and guilt-ridden and looking at her as though she's a ghost.
(She is; she has been since that day. Her husband had looked at her like she had been a stranger then and she has only become stranger since, with nothing but her vengeance to anchor her to this world. If he were gone, she wonders suddenly, would she drift away, unmoored - would she cease to be?)
And when he looks at her she can see that strangeness of her self reflected in his eyes and wonders if perhaps Olivier had died here just as surely as Anne, and they are only corpses, memories given flesh who have not yet realised that they have no place in this world. They have been bound since that first glance, and it is hardly a surprise to look into his eyes (blue tinged gold in the light of the past as it catches and flickers around them, hazy as though he sees more of the past than the present) and see there a hollowness she knows too well. Her heart, empty organ that it is, thuds uselessly against the prison of her ribs.
"Anne," he whispers as he turns into her, a plea and a prayer and a benediction all in a single exhalation, and the unexpected sound fills her up until she cannot breathe.
4. Paris, 1631
One miscalculation, and whatever small bit of stability she had eked out for herself here is shattering, crumbling beneath her, and there is nothing she can do to shore up the ruin.
(She had, as a child, nearly fallen through an old rotten roof, placed a foot wrong and almost gone crashing through the ancient shingles. This is not dissimilar, the pit of her stomach in free-fall, and yet she had known from the first that the king is capricious and she is no fool; she has fallen at the whim of a man before, and knows the better to steady herself for the landing.)
The man who had taught her that lesson falls in beside her as they walk out into the day, and she tries to ignore the way her skin prickles at his nearness. She's still too aware of his presence, attuned to him in the wake of this whirlwind of a rescue in a way she hasn't been since they were other people, and it had been unsettlingly easy to fall back into old rhythms, unsettlingly easy to discover how well she still knows how to move with and around him after years and more of separation and enmity and worse, never mind how different this dance from any they've danced before. She knows he trusts her no more than she trusts him, but she'd watched his back earlier and he'd returned the favour and surely that is worth something.
One miscalculation, and she wonders if it would have been wiser to have let them go alone - to let them risk their lives on the toss of a different coin, to have waited and perhaps retained something of her position or her prestige, balanced on that precarious rooftree for just a breath longer. But the tumbles are inevitable, she has learned with the years; what matters is what you carry with you when you fall, and how you rise again.
She will survive. She's always been good at landing on her feet. But that knowledge is little balm to the irritation of her nerves, frayed by the king's dismissal and the frustration of a gambit gone sour, and it makes her lip take on a cynical curl and leaves her words caustic.
"You have my respect," is all he says in reply, and she is shocked to feel a slow warmth unfurl in her chest, unexpected and unwelcome. She had not realised it still mattered to her.
5. Le Havre, 1632
Drinking alone, she thinks, is far more her husband's provenance than her own - and yet here she sits in the shadowed corner of the inn, nursing her wine and licking her wounds.
She would not need to be alone if she chose; she has been approached, more than once, but in her current mood she has no interest in dalliances. She never had, truly, whatever he may think of her, when the men she's bedded have only ever been the means to an end. Even he had been merely that, once, until she had opened her eyes one morning and realised he had somehow become intolerably more, an old wound she keeps picking open and raw to feel the familiar pain wash through her, because to feel nothing at all for him would be unimaginable.
She feels it now, though the ache of abandonment is one she should be well accustomed to. And so she drinks, though not enough to be drunk, and so she regrets, and if in her maudlin self-absorption she is acting remarkably like him it is not altogether surprising, when he is why she is bleeding once again.
The scrape of bootheel against the packed earthen floor and the thunk of pottery onto the wooden trestle table alert her to the arrival of another, though she does not react beyond laying her fingers against the knife hidden in her skirts. "I'm not interested in company," she tells her own mug. This is growing tiresome.
"You made," the man standing opposite says, as he ignores her words and folds onto the bench, "very bad time in arriving here."
She wonders suddenly, wildly, if this is how he had felt on that long-ago eve in Pinon - drunk, convinced he was dreaming, baring his throat for her knife. But she does not have the fog of alcohol to excuse the vision before her, and she suspects this is no dream. "I," she begins, but the words dry up, leave her throat tight and her skin aching in her shock. He should not be here. He cannot be here. (This must have been how he felt.)
"You didn't wait."
I have learned, she thinks, choking on all that has been between them, what waiting for you gets me. She, never at a loss for a retort, finds that there is nothing she is willing to say now, nothing that will not lay too much of herself bare to him, and so she does as he would and drinks, and he does as she would and watches, weighs, assesses. She can feel his eyes boring into her.
"You left early," he continues, and she forces down the past with a swallow of wine and looks at him now, as steadily as she can manage. "I came, and you were gone, and what was I to think of that - what was I to think when all I had of you was a new token and another lie?"
It would not have mattered, she reminds herself - it would have not mattered if he had come, it does not matter that he did, because she has never been his choice. There has always been something else - Thomas, his duty, the law - that he has held in higher regard than her, no matter any vows he has made her. Swear nothing will ever come between us, and yet so many things have since he gave her that lie. His hand is on hers, skin against skin and burning like fire, but he may as well be a world away.
"Anne," he says, and she shakes her head to silence him, suddenly furious and wanting to weep, wondering if either of them know who Anne is. How can he not see Anne is dead, gone, buried as surely as Olivier must be, both of them lost forever in the house in Pinon that is now ash? But he repeats it again, "Anne," and how is it that he can always make her hope even when she hates him - how is it that she loves him even like this, bleeding anew from a past that will never heal?
"Anne," a third time, implacably, and she thinks of the stories she's never believed in, wonders wildly if naming can make things real, can make them real, if she even wants that when she'd been the one to run this time (but she does, she meant every word, and even if she can never be the Anne that was again she knows she cannot continue being Milady), but his thumb slips across her knuckles and his eyes are soft and sad and knowing and she wants to look away but cannot, thinks perhaps she would not even if she could, no matter how her chest hurts and her lungs are tight. "Come home," he says, an entreating exhalation that nevertheless rips through her like a lightning-shock, and for the first time in days, months, years, she breathes.