It seems that time freezes, for once. Freezes like a fish in the midst of ice, caught unawares in a net so much stronger than anything it had ever known. Time freezes like the air in her lungs, the beat of her dead heart, coming back to life, freezes like a gasp not yet torn from her throat.
Would that time had stopped before.
Before it had all hapened. Before centuries had become history, and fact story and myth and legend.
Would that it had stopped before Ysabeau's heart had been irrevocably broken.
The vacuum birthed in her grief dies and is sucked into being, into air, as eyes blink and a pair of eyebrows is raised and that mouth, the mouth she had learned and known and loved, opens around a word.
"What..." he begins, not quite certain and gods in heaven, his voice. A whispered word, four letters, and she's gone. It's his voice that breaks her, his voice that undoes every ounce of careful indifference sculpted in her being over the millennia.
Before she can control it, before Ysabeau can lock it back in herself and never let it see daylight, a sob breaks free from her chest, and it comes from an ache so deep and unending in her heart, an ache like nothing else in the world, because he is here.
Philippe. Philippe as she'd forgotten him, tall and strong, all harsh edges, strong lines and smooth curves. Her eyes rake over him as one, then a second, and maybe a third sob heaves from her throat, and he's there, he's there, and he is full of all the small and half-remembered details grief had stolen from her, details unknown and yet familiar; it's the soft crease between his straight eyebrows, the twitch of his eyelid, the shadows of his lashes against his skin, golden in the candlelight.
She does not allow herself to look for too long at one feature, one quirk of life in a dead memory, for there's a deep, infinitely strong fear somewhere in the back of her heart, and it crawls and whispers softly at the edge of her consciousness that oh, he'll be gone, tis but a dream turned a nightmare, and now you'll awaken and it'll all be dust in your eyes and shards down your throat, so she does her best to look, to see, to remind herself of the very essence of his soul, to remember it all.
The folds of rich fabric straining against his shoulders, the slope of his waist, his calloused hands and hard, unbroken knuckles, and gods, he's in front of her and kneeling, why is he kneeling, and Ysabeau realises that she must've fallen to her knees on the stone floor, and she fights the urge to look, because this nightmare is too close, too close and she knows, and yet goes against her every rule she'd created when the night terrors were too real to be bearable.
Never look into his eyes, whatever is left of her brain whispers as she looks up, this is when gorged eyes and empty sockets greet you merrily, and they're weeping blood, Philippe's blood, and it flows like the Acheron, while he screams and screams that you've failed him yet again.
She should force her lids shut, to hide from memories and nightmares and pain, but before she can, her eyes, treasonous beasts that they are, slip from the point on the stone floor and go up and up and up, and there is brown and gold and flecks of forest green, and she forgets what it means to breathe.
"Ysabeau?"
She stills, cold as death, and loses herself in those eyes. Gods. God. Any deity and demon that may grace the heavens and hells of this world,
She is trembling as warm hands come against her bare shoulders, callouses against cold flesh and one heartbeat later, as her husband's arms come around her, Ysabeau de Clermont feels herself fall forward, curl her legs to her chest, inhale deeply and scream.