Masks
Anon request for the Tumblr AU meme, with #13 (costars AU). This should not have taken me five months to figure out how to write.
They're good when the cameras are rolling – good to the point where their names side by side on a movie poster practically guarantee a box-office smash, to where they are spoken of together more often than apart, to where questions about whether their onscreen chemistry translates offscreen are a frequent thing. They're both used to it by now; she always deflects it with an airy laugh, he with a forbidding scowl. It only serves to intrigue the press further, but even when they can agree on nothing else, they agree on how to handle that. The rule has been the same from the first, and it's simple: never confirm or deny anything.
"How does it feel to be playing opposite Anne de Breuil again?" a reporter asks him during a news-show appearance, and he just settles back into the plush chair, forces his hands to stay lax on the armrests.
"It's always wonderful to film with her," he says, and it's true. It's when the filming stops that the problems arise, when they shed skin and seeming and character and become Olivier and Anne again, two idiots who don't know how to leave their shared past behind.
(He tries not to lie. It's a strange thing, perhaps, but it makes him uncomfortable, which is damned ironic considering his choice of career. But it's not a lie to say he enjoys working with her, when despite all that's gone between them they still play off each other so easily. In every role but themselves, they fit – and they'd even fit there, once. Before.)
"There's more between you, isn't there?" the reporter presses, and Athos feels his features shift into a familiar scowl.
"A gentleman never tells." And he may only be one on the surface, wears his aristocratic upbringing like an ill-fitting coat most days, but it doesn't mean he's any more willing to divulge. He knows the answer will just make the press more curious, make them more certain of some grand offscreen romance, and if things were easier between Anne and himself (as they had been, years before) he'd have told her the story later, sharing a laugh over drinks and dinner and going over a script, but it's strictly business now and has been for years, and the perfunctory text he sends her after the show is only a courtesy, when someone's bound to bring it up in a later interview. She doesn't reply; he hadn't expected her to.
Interviews together – inevitable as the film approaches its release date – are like acting, and with the eyes of others on them it's easy to remember the stern talking-to they'd been given years before. "I don't care if you want to claw each other's eyes out," their director had said, looking from one to the other. "As long as the camera is pointed at you – and it always is, except when you're at home – you're acting." And so they sit side by side on the couch, his hand resting on her knee and his eyes fixed on her as she gestures animatedly while taking the lead on the questions, and it's just another role, another part to be played, never mind how the warmth of her thigh against his and the sweet smell of her hair remind him of what was, make him want to sink back into the days when they were as much them as they were individuals, when they lived in each other's pockets and things were simple, happy, easy.
(He wonders – not for the first time – whether he'd ever known the real Anne, or whether everything had been one role or another and if she is as hollow under those masks as he is, just a pretty doll to be dressed up in whatever seeming the studios ask for. It's so easy to doubt that the woman he'd fallen in love with when she'd first walked onto the set all those years ago, shining eyes and laughing mouth and boundless enthusiasm, had ever existed outside of the spotlight; it's so easy to believe that whispered words and broken promises were nothing more than some script he'd never been privy to. It still hurts, but somehow it hurts less than the idea that everything between them had been real, once.)
And if he sometimes sees, out of the corner of his eye or in moments where character seems to wear thin, that woman, he reminds himself that to act is to lie and tell the truth in the same breath, and that a glimpse of what might have been signifies nothing.