"I once thought I would go to Hell and back for you."
Anne worked desperately to overlook Aramis' use of once, but years of politics taught her that no word should be cast aside. Now her beloved Musketeer stood before her saying he once felt such devotion, and it unleashed chaos in her mind. Did he feel it no longer? Had his time in Douai finished the work Rochefort started, the loss of the one man she truly, deeply loved? After all, Aramis had always been a man of carefully chosen words; he would not say once if that was not precisely what he meant.
A gentle pressure on her hands brought her out of her pondering. She chanced a look at her lover's face, afraid of what she would find there but desperate to understand where their conversation, his apparent confession, was going.
"And there was a time when I believed it with my entire being." A tear slipped down Aramis' cheek leaving Anne quite certain their hearts had broken, shattered, the loss of their love like the destruction of a stained glass window. She'd never experienced the end of a cherished relationship before, but she felt she was coming to understand why some called it breaking up, for how else could one describe the cleaving of their fragile hearts?
"Aramis…" she exhaled, unwilling to hear what would inevitably follow.
He squeezed her hands once more before releasing her right hand to thumb a tear from her cheek. Then he lowered his head until their foreheads met, their breath swirling together in the chilled, night air.
"Do you trust me?" he whispered after what felt to her like an eternity.
"Yes," she responded and placed her hand upon his chest. It was the heart she felt beating beneath her hand that showed her love was possible, tangible even. It was that heart that illustrated how old wounds could heal, and it was his heart alone that taught her love is a war worth waging, a risk worth taking. Of course she trusted him, trusted that heart and its steady rhythm beneath her palm.
"I'm not leaving you. I cannot leave you; it would be worse than dying a hundred thousand deaths. We are-" Aramis paused to allow a childlike giggle to escape him. "We are Guinevere and Lancelot, my love."
"Does the tale end well?" she asked, not at all meaning Lancelot and his Queen, and she knew by the way Aramis pulled her flush against him that he understood her question.
"It matters not. We are the tellers of our own tales, the authors of our own stories."
For several minutes they stood there in each other's arms, breathing in and becoming intoxicated by their closeness, their moment of intimacy. After winters spent in the king's bed, this simple embrace was the most refreshing of springs, and Anne was determined not to end it before its time.
There was more Aramis intended to say; he refused to leave until he could confess to her and apologize, no, beg forgiveness for wronging her the way he was sure he had. Taking a deep breath, he forced his mind to settle but was dismayed by the way the queen's arms tightened the slightest bit in response to his deeper breath.
"Do you trust me?" he asked again, wondering why Anne seemed so on edge. She didn't verbally respond as she had last time, but he felt her nod against his chest all the same.
"I thought I would go to Hell and back for you, slay the demon hoards if need be, and I told you as much on a number of occasions." Aramis took a deep breath before pressing on. "But I broke that promise."
Upon hearing Aramis' words, Anne pulled away from his hold to look him in the eye.
"No, you've never broken that promise. We survived Rochefort's scheming; how is that a broken promise?"
A tear rolled down his cheek, and in the dim light Anne saw his lip quiver ever so slightly. A tremulous smiled lifted one corner of his mouth.
"To Hell and back I told you. I walked with you all the way, and we stormed the gates hand in hand, but…"
A slight tremor invaded his words, and her composure cracked in time with his voice.
"But I left you there. I abandoned you at the gates. I left to find my own way back, to find my way to anywhere but where you were. To Hell and back I told you, but I got turned around, and I was afraid. Oh, how I was afraid, for you, for-for our child, for my brothers. Marguerite took her own life. Lemay was executed, and Constance nearly shared his fate. Porthos was off on a fool's errand. The king-the king was a child! And Rochefort." His voice fell, a weariness taking the place of his passion and old fears. "Rochefort opened my eyes, I thought. In that cell I was alone with my thoughts, and in no more than an hour I had myself convinced that death follows after me. First Adèle, then Isabelle. And you were next. When I found you, the chain was around your neck, and…"
Aramis voice truly broke then, and all of his energy seemed to leave him in a rush. He sank to the ground, Anne mirroring the move and then pulling her lover to her. Together they wept, the deluge of emotion far too powerful for either to resist. Aramis' head dropped to Anne's shoulder, and without hesitation her hands wove their way into his wavy hair before one drifted to rub slow circles across his back.
"I broke my promise," he said at last only to be hushed by the queen.
"I forgave you long ago, Aramis. I was not alone. I had Constance, and since your departure, I have learned that Porthos is an excellent should to cry on. He told me you only needed time, that you needed distance in order to come to terms with everything that happened. Honestly though, I am uncertain which of us he was attempting to reassure."
That remark was rewarded with a watery chuckle before they lapsed once more into silence.
"Forgive me. I've ruined your dress," he said, finally sitting up and rubbing at his eyes. "And I'm not sure where these have sprung from." Although he was beginning to laugh with a little more of his standard gaiety, tears continued to gather in his eyes.
She took in the sight of her lover and found herself leaning toward him. He appeared so out of sorts and lost but hopeful, and in the place of his typical confidence was a kind of youthful bashfulness that Anne was finding terribly irresistible, especially after such a separation.
Deciding they could do no worse than what they'd already done, she abandoned her self-control and reason. She caught his hands where they'd remained near his face in their effort to erase the moisture there, pulled them down, and captured his lips with her own.
A/N: I wrote this a while ago and then apparently forgot about it until I stumbled across it today. I guess I felt the need to write a really sappy moment between Aramis and Queen Anne once Aramis finally returns to Paris. And I do realize that the use of "breaking up" has no place in 17th century Parisian society, but this is fiction, so there it is.