this world and yesterday

For a long-overdue anonymous prompt: "Milathos because I have so enjoyed your drables of them and I fear we will not be getting them this season (You have been running away using the war as your latest excuse but you are a coward! You can't face that we will never be over. We are messy and inconvenient but we have is the best and realest thing you will ever know and that scares the hell out of you.)"

Fully canon-compliant; set post-S3. Title by way of Mediæval Bæbes. Thanks to Swellie, as ever, for being my voice of reason.

It is inevitable that circumstances draw him back to Paris and to her – inevitable, inexorable as the passage of time or the pulse of blood in his veins, steady until he sees her and his head swims. He had given up wine months ago but she had always been more intoxicating than it, and the glimpses he catches of her when he visits the palace leave him more desperately thirsty than the drink ever had. He wants to swallow her down, glut himself on that still-familiar taste, and yet he knows it would never be enough. His thirst for her is the one thing he has never been able to slake.

She never looks at him, never slows her pace, flits out of reach as if she was no more than an elusive shadow, leaving him wondering if she had ever been there. It is not new that she should haunt him, but he had forgotten (or convinced himself he has, away from Paris, away from her) how deeply she is wound into his very being. He had forgotten, but the glove and the pauldron he keeps locked away bear mute testament to how little he has let go, even if he tells himself otherwise. Whatever he is, whatever she is, certain truths remain immutable.

And he holds himself back, because what can he do? He holds himself back because he has no right to reach, no right to want, no right and yet every right, because there are vows and history and so many emotions that still tangle between them, crackling in the air even if their eyes never meet and their hands never touch, even if they have never been in the same room for more than moments. It is he who had turned away, who has always turned away; it is he who left, who came back, who tries to remind himself of all that has changed, that they can never go back, that they are over, have been over, must be over –

It is he who looks, and yearns, and finds it harder and harder to remind himself of the why behind any of those claims.

She never looks but she knows he is there; he can read it in the stiffening of her spine and the tightness of her shoulders, in a stubborn line to her mouth that he remembers kissing until it softened lifetimes ago, in the way her fingers spasm towards some hidden weapon when he steps too close. He knows she knows, and she must surely realise that, but it changes nothing. It means – it must mean – nothing.

It is he who made a life without her; it is he who had convinced himself she did not know what he wanted. And yet …

He returns – to Paris and to her – again and again, and lies to himself that it is only because the Crown needs him. He returns and he lingers, and the life he had thought he wanted seems more and more alien in the face of all those familiar things. In the rooms he borrows, at the palace or at Porthos' home or the rebuilt garrison, he finds himself thinking more and more often of what might have been and of what if, and less of what he leaves behind with every time. He wonders once whether it is the city or the country that holds more of him, until he realises that both are false: she has always held the lion's share of him, even now, and even now the prospect is both terror and comfort.

He returns again and again, and it is inevitable with time that circumstance contrives to put them in a room together, when the Queen and her First Minister need information from them both. He watches her out of the corner of his eye as she leans back against the wall, arms folded and a familiar cynical smirk tugging at the corner of her mouth. He says little during the meeting and she says less, but when it is done and he looks for her she has already vanished, slipping away as if she were never there, and Aramis asks him a question before he can go in search of her. He wonders, not for the first time, if it was only his imaginings that conjured up her presence.

He does not see her again that day, nor the next, but on the third he retires to his rooms in a largely-unused wing of the Louvre to find her waiting for him. It's too similar to the last time they met, and yet nothing alike, when the expression on her face is grim and unsettling and he cannot see Anne there no matter how he searches. (He wonders, briefly, how much of Anne remains, or if he had truly choked the last of the life from her that fateful day. His hands fall, lax and useless, to his sides.)

"You."

"Me," she agrees, and her voice betrays nothing of whatever she may be feeling.

The heavy door falls closed with a thud of finality as they stand there, just looking at each other. He waits, when surely she must have come here with some purpose in mind, and though at first she only studies him as if he were a particularly recalcitrant puzzle she's trying to unravel, at length she asks, "Why are you here?"

It's not the question he had expected, and it throws him off-guard even more than her presence here already has. "I was summoned –"

"By a crown whose service you renounced. By friends you walked away from."

There's no lie there, and he does not argue; he has no answer for that, save perhaps that he has realised he could walk away from none of those things (no more than he could from her), and he does not think she wants to hear that. He is, in truth, not sure there is an answer she does want to hear, and so he just gazes back at her until her mouth twists in a hard grimace and she pushes off the wall to close the distance between them.

"Coward."

She all but spits the word into his face, standing before him, and this close he can see the tremors that clenched fists imperfectly hide, for all that he cannot say if they are born of anger or fear or something more. "You ran, Athos – you ran away ten years ago and you ran away five years ago and you've never stopped running, because if you did you'd have to face the truth, and you're too much of a coward for that."

As ever, her anger ignites an echo in him, puts steel into his spine and fire in his blood and he looks down at her and remembers the last time they were like this, but the heat in her eyes is fury and not hope, and his own fingers are curled into the hem of his doublet to keep from reaching for her (to do what he dares not wonder). But the echo is there, and it makes him snap out a reply before he's thought the better of the words, "Then tell me, if you know me so well – tell me what I'm running from."

"Us."

And he freezes – god, he freezes even as he burns, because it's nothing but truth and they both know it. Who they are together has always been too big and too bright and too overwhelming, and if he let it this would devour him and he would welcome it, but he cannot, dares not, does not want –

– does, god, does and is terrified of it, and she knows that; how can she not?

The knowing is there in her green eyes as she looks up at him. Her colour is high, a flush mottling her skin, the anger too clearly riding her. "You ran," she repeats, more slowly, as if she has to force each word steady before she lets it slip free, "and you're still running, but we both know nothing is over between us. Nothing ends until death. If you wanted to be free of me, you should have killed me then and spared us both this trouble."

The knowing is in him too; he can read what's there between the words, hiding in the softness he can now glimpse, in the Anne that is still there beneath it all. No peace until we are both dead, she had said a lifetime ago, and he had forgotten and he had lied to himself but it is still true, cannot be otherwise when her presence still sings in his blood and his bones and his heart. No peace until both of them lie dead and still and silent, and it had taken the semblance of peace to make him realise that it is not what he wants – not if the price is all of him that is and has always been hers, the part he cannot and does not want to reclaim.

"Yes," he says, because what else can he do? He had run when he should have not, but it had taken the running to realise those hard truths, and with that perhaps he cannot say that he was wrong to do so. There is little sense in wondering what might have happened if he'd stayed; the truth is that he did go, and there is no changing the past.

But the future – the future he had thought he wanted and the future he is realising he's been yearning for – can surely still be changed.

His agreement seems to take the wind out of her anger, replacing the tension in her body with a desperate, unexpected weariness. "Why are you here?" she asks again, and her eyes have shuttered but he does not need to look at them to see the confusion of emotions in her – does not even need to see, when he can feel that same tangle in himself at her words.

But he looks all the same, drinks in the sight of her as he stands there, miserable and aching and aware all too late of truths he had run from – looks and hoards the sight of her against the seemingly-inevitable time when they fracture apart once more, and his breath comes out in a sigh. "I don't know," he confesses.

Do you?