Series: « L'histoire française », 20 historical Francis Bonnefoy drabbles. Written for lj/hetachallenge. Find my table at lj/coeurgryffondor.
L'histoire française
Downfall
"You fucker!" A hand slaps him against the face for what must be the thousandth time and yet Francis is too tired to respond, his head rolling back in Arthur's arm. "Get up fucker, get up!"
Pars! he tries to say, Quitte! Leave and never come back! The tears come despite his silent cursing of them, of Napoleon, of Wellington, of Arthur, of this place called Waterloo and of Fate for being ever the cruel mistress, resistant to the French nation's charms. Let me die, he attempts in a moan, and he's not sure anymore if he's speaking English or French or maybe Latin.
"No!" There was a pause before that word, as if in shock, and Francis is only barely aware that maybe that last thing he had managed aloud. "No, you fucking idiot, I'm not going to do that! Come here!"
The least-delicate arms to ever grace the earth hoist Francis up into a sitting position, his head rolling onto the Englishman's shoulder. There's a throbbing in his left leg that is less worrying than the lack of sensation in his right one; he can curl the fingers of his right hand a little more than those of his left hand. From the way Arthur keeps touching the back of his shoulder the Frenchman gets the impression that that there may be a bullet lodged there.
"You and your fucking battles," he hears Arthur murmuring to himself and that he registers was in French, old French, French that he taught a little Saxon boy when he was just a small Norman himself. "You never could just surrender to me could you?"
"If I die," Francis manages and Arthur stills at that, his eyes wide as Francis looks up painfully, "you'll have gotten your one, final, sweet surrender."
More indignation meets the comment, the Brit's face twisting from furry and anger and something else that Francis both loves and is afraid of because he feels it too. "Idiot," the man finally manages as a snort, little else to say.
"You won," the Frenchman complains as Arthur tries without success to carefully stand, lifting the slightly-heavier nation with him to drag somewhere across the battlefield. Like a painting imagined for years the canvas has been filled, the players all carefully placed as corpses, the sun setting. It is both beautiful and horrifying and Francis commits it all to memory as they set off.
"What kind of a victory," Arthur huffs as they move and Francis tries to help but simply can't, "would it be if you died? If I lost you?" The man looks away when he finishes his rhetorical question and there it is again, that emotion.
The one they've both felt, for years, decades, centuries.
The one that Francis adores and Arthur despises.
The one that the nation of love so easily embraces with all others.
The one that is the sort of things poets write of, the young yearn for, mortals pass whole lives looking for and never finding.
"Arrête," Francis manages and Arthur pauses, hoisting him higher up, slinging his arm further over those shoulders. "Arthur," and he tries his best to pronounce the h, "is this really worth the effort?" Francis is going to die and whether it's here on the field or in some English medical tent doesn't really matter, but the effort Arthur will waste moving him somehow does bother him.
That's when the one called England looks at him, really looks at him, green eyes looking straight into his Catholic soul and without hesitation, without reservation, without anything but pure love, in perfect French, Arthur announces, "You've always been worth the effort Francis." They set off once more. "Idiot," the man grumbles and Francis manages something of a smile.