like summer in the air
Anonymous asked: A meeting between Anne and Athos early on in season 3 [I want you near me. Being loved by you is so, so good. I want us to be a family. I want you to fill my days with love & I want you next to me holding me through all the ugliness. You are the only person who's ever really loved me & I want so much to see you smile & laugh. I want to set you free because then you'll stop thinking about me and you'll start thinking about yourself. I've always loved you more than I could ever admit to anyone]
Another ancient prompt (mea culpa, mea maxima culpa), and in the wake of Season 3 I've written this for a what-if season that never was, revisiting the idea of the Musketeers ending up in England on a mission and encountering a familiar face there. Not sure how much it actually adheres to the spirit of the prompt, but it did set my brain running … Thank you, my dearest anon, and my apologies for the amount of time I took in answering!
Title by way of "When I Look at You" from The Scarlet Pimpernel musical.
He hadn't meant to approach her at first.
He watches her from across the room, hidden in the shadow of one of the vast arched windows that run the length of the ballroom. She's smiling, and he can still read her all too clearly because that smile is one he remembers well and aches like a sword to the guts, leaves him dying a slow death. It's Anne's smile, free and unforced, and to watch her offer it up to the people around her makes him realise all that has changed with the passage of time. She has moved on, and he is where he was, no better and if anything worse than the man who had galloped to the crossroads too late.
Had she known what he would become, he wonders, to leave before sundown despite her promises? She has always understood him better than he knows himself; perhaps she had realised even then what this war would change.
He watches but he does not move. She glitters in the light and he drinks the sight of her up, but he has no place here, not with all he has seen and done, neither at her side nor among such lighthearted surroundings. The war has darkened him, command made him bleak and bitter and capable of doing what needs to be done, and he had known that such changes were inevitable and accepted them as the burden of duty, but until this moment he had not realised just how different he had become, out there and since – just how much those hard-won victories had cost him.
She has moved on, and if he has moved at all it has been only to fall, and in this moment, watching, he realises acutely just how far out of his reach she is. He had been a fool to come here tonight, a fool to think he could ever recover anything of what they had once been, and yet when she turns and her gaze settles on him, he does not (as he should) turn away.
(And he knows her still, thinks he would still know her was he blind and deaf and incapable of touch, and he does not miss how that smile falters for a moment, fades only to return more brittle. This is the Anne he broke, who became Milady, who wears her memories of him like arms and armour. This Anne he knows too, jasmine and steel and the copper tang of blood.)
This Anne, half Milady, looks back at him across the room, and for a shivering moment it is him and her alone as everything around them falls away. It has only ever been them; when she is there she is all he sees, but when she looks at him it becomes more and she is all that matters, all he knows and has ever known. For a moment he lets himself believe in fate and final chances, but he has buried his dreams with the Anne that had been in a place that will never be home again, and the only truth he knows is that there is no going back. Whatever he may wish, whatever she might have wanted, they cannot be as they once were. But the angle of her head indicates the open doors and the gardens beyond, and when she excuses herself (he can almost hear the words that accompany her smiling demurral when one of the men offers to escort her) he counts an impatient hundred beats before he lets himself follow.
By the time he finds her, she's moved past the illumination that spills out from the doors, past the small knots of partygoers clinging to the edges of that light like so many brightly coloured moths. The moonlight silvers her, gives pale skin and flax-blue brocade a ghostly glow, and he moves towards her as if in a dream. So easy, to forget. So easy – but with her, it always has been.
Closer, her face is grim enough to ruin the illusion; the smiling Anne of the ballroom is all Milady now, wary and waiting, and he cannot fault her that – not after everything that always sits there, heavy and unspoken, between them.
"What do you want?" There is a weariness in her tone, and an undercurrent of steel – a promise of consequences if he steals what she's made for herself here.
He doesn't know. He hadn't expected to see her here tonight; if it wasn't for the fact that his brothers are still inside, speaking with their English contact, he would have left the moment he saw her. (That's a lie, and he knows it. He has never been able to walk away from her.)
(To say he doesn't know is an equal lie. Her. The answer has always been her.)
"I didn't come here for you," he says instead, because the truth would do neither of them any favours, "hard as that may be to believe."
"Less hard than you think."
I did come, he thinks, feeling the glove buttoned into his doublet like a brand. I did, but you were gone, and the best of me went with you, but her laugh and her smile are still fresh in his thoughts and he does not mention it. After all he has done to her, he has no right to tread where he is not wanted. And he had seen too clearly how unwanted his presence is earlier, inside, with how the joy had gone out of her when she spotted him. Her words now only confirm it.
"And yet you and I remain bound in spite of all that. Of all the titles I have worn over the years, I never dreamed that Comtesse de la Fère would be the most painful." The words could be a jest, light as they are, but her eyes are deadly earnest and he knows it is no lie. How could he not know, when most of that pain has been at his hands.
"I'll release you from it," he says, though it would break him to do so. The last time he'd seen her she had spoken of how they were still connected, and he had thought that only death would sever that tie, and though it has been his strength in some of the bleakest moments of the past four years he will let her go if it means her happiness. Bound together, and the glove she had left has been his anchor, but he wonders now if it had been a farewell and he has been clinging to a memory all these years. "When I get back to France, I'll have them draw up the papers for an annulment. If you want to be free of me …" but he cannot bring himself to finish and so he turns away. Surely the others are done by now; surely they can leave, before the knife in his chest drives any deeper.
"Athos."
His name rings into the quiet of the night before he can get more than a few paces away. He doesn't look back, doesn't dare, afraid of what he might see – afraid of the myriad of emotions hovering just beneath the surface of her voice, splintering against the syllables of his name.
"I don't."