Snake in the Grass
Written with a prompt from the wonderful Athena as inspiration: "You choose that life when you're young and desperate. You don't think about waking up with someone you love. When it happens, you keep on lying because as long as they believe the lies, god you start to believe the lies ... If I told you the truth I would loose you. How could I Ioose the one person who meant everything to me?"
Precanon and (currently) canon-compliant.
When her brother-in-law drops the first sly insinuation, Anne can easily convince herself it's nothing. Paris is far enough away and Pinon is a sleepy village, quiet and uneventful. There is no reason to believe that he knows she is as common as the dirt of the fields, no reason to think he would have found something to connect the newly-minted Comtesse de la Fère to the ragged child who'd scraped for whatever living she could muster, by any means necessary, in the gutters of Paris. And so she manages to put the thought from her mind – easy enough at the time, with Athos at her side – and forgets it, for a little while. But it does not end there, and as Thomas' whispers become more frequent it becomes all too plain that this is not something she can ignore.
She lies awake one night, watching Athos as he sleeps and tracing the now-familiar lines of his face with her gaze and wondering how this could all become so tangled. When they'd first met she'd seen him only as an escape, a chance at a life that had to be better than dying nameless and forgotten, just one more victim of hunger or the elements or those around her. She'd never expected him to ask for her hand, but that had become another step, another unexpected surety taking her further from the only world she'd known, and thinking of a roof over her head and food in her belly what answer could she give him but yes? He had seemed a far kinder man than many, and he was young and hale and handsome, and if he was fool enough to love her – well, she was hardly going to complain when that flaw benefited her.
It has worn at her, this life, chipped away at the armour she'd donned in the streets and woven through the chinks until she realised one day that despite her care he had taken root in her heart. She could not pinpoint when it was the mask she'd assumed had become more truth than falsehood, only that now, faced with the prospect of façades crumbling with a false step or an ill-timed word, she finds that the prospect terrifies her utterly.
She can't lose him – she can't. Not because of the title she'd lose, nor because of the prospect of being thrust once more into an uncertain world, but because of what he's made her, of what he is to her. He is the best part of who she's become, and so much of what is good in her these days – so much that she has never had the luxury to be, never had cause to be, never wanted to be – is bound up in him. Without him, she would –
No, she tells herself firmly. No, she will not think of it.
But Thomas' words eat at her in that same quiet way, though these bring poison with them rather than warmth. She wakes these mornings with equal parts fear and anger cramping her belly, no longer secure even with Athos' arm draped heavy and warm over her waist. His sleep-rumpled smiles make her heart catch even now, but the niggling thought of what-if always intrudes to taint everything. She had never known before what it could feel like to fear loss, when all she had to lose was a pale semblance of a life, but now – ah, god, how things have changed. The truth will damn her no matter whether she speaks it or Thomas does, and so she keeps her silences.
"Swear that nothing will ever come between us," she begs her husband one day when the fear is too much, but he does not understand and she dares not explain and his promise does little to reassure her.
She had never believed in romances and fairy stories, and yet away from the house, with nothing but sky and grass and him around her, she can almost let herself fall into those lies she's spun for him – can almost believe that she is a simple woman who was fortunate enough to catch the eye of a comte, to love and be loved –
And yet they must always return, and Thomas' smiles are too knowing and Catherine's eyes are flint-hard, and almost is never quite enough to quell those fears.