Bound
Chiara's fault for posting this and giving me reincarnation-loop feels: chiaracheccaglini[period]tumblr[period]com[slash]post[slash]143700933510[slash]and-though-my-soul-departs-the-earth-i-count-my
A billion thanks to Swellie for beta reading, handholding, and bouncing ideas back and forth (and generally enabling me in the best way possible). I L U, darling.
1625
I know her, he thinks for a fleeting moment when her eyes first lock with his, surely I know her from somewhere, but he doesn't - there's no reason for them to have met before, no reason why she should be familiar. But her gaze catches his, green to blue, and the sounds around them blur into an indistinct rumble, and he cannot shake the thought.
It chases him in the days after, as he falls more and more in love with her. There are a thousand little ways in which she seems familiar, ways he never quite manages to put a finger on, and there are moments where he stops, arrested by something - her laughter, the slope of her shoulder, a phrase she's spoken - that reawakens that sense. But then the truth comes out, in a day of blood and bitterness, and he tells himself after that surely that familiarity had been one more part of her art, one more lie to blind him.
"I love you!" she cries, and it cuts into his soul, and he knows with the same certainty of recognition that those words are also true, and it terrifies him more than anything ever has and he turns away, unable to bear the guilt.
When he sees her to the hanging tree, they are both silent.
274
The screams of the dying fade to hoarse cries and laboured breathing as the sun sinks lower; by nightfall, those around him are all dead or close enough as to make no difference. In the thickening silence, footfalls sound louder than usual. The approach is halting, punctuated by the muffled clang of metal and the occasional meaty thump, and as the sounds draw closer he exhales, understands. It was only a matter of time before scavengers (two-legged, four-legged, winged) arrived. It will only be a matter of chance as to which finds him first.
It's a woman, in the end, though he might have taken her for an adolescent boy easily enough. There is a grimness about her that suggests this is not the first battlefield she has gleaned, and he wets his lips, finds his voice. "End it." (He would not have had the strength to do it himself even were he not pinned by fallen comrades, but he is already half-dead. To cross over now would be a mercy.)
She knows it, too; an unexpected sorrow flickers, quickly there and gone, across her face, makes him think incongruously of flickering firelight and home. There is a knife already in her hand and he tips his head back as much as he is able, bares his throat, repeats, "End it - please."
Her eyes shutter briefly before she crouches beside him; her thigh brushes his shoulder, warm as fire with how cold he's grown, and she murmurs a prayer as the blade kisses his throat.
512
This is mercy, he tells himself, and when that fails, she deserves far worse, but neither thought sits on him easily. He knows what she has been judged and condemned, and when he takes her into the forest one last time, along the narrow game-tracks they have travelled innumerable times, it feels as if there is no escape. God sees, and he has sworn, and there is no other way. He knows that. He knows.
(He knows her, though, and that makes this all the harder, because to know her is to know that she would do what she is accused of, though perhaps not in the manner it is said. In the end, it does not matter who the man she killed was, what kind of a person he had been. She killed, and the court has spoken, and all he can give her is this dubious kindness.)
She stops in the clearing they have frequented since they were young, and the sight of her - pale and proud and defiant in the faint moonlight - almost makes him reconsider. He could let her flee, and no one would be the wiser. But he has sworn, and if he forswears himself then who is he?
I'm sorry, he thinks but cannot bring himself to say (because to bend will be to break, and he can give her nothing but this without fracturing his entire world), and she watches as he draws his sword, and though there is resignation warring with the anger in her eyes she does not try to run. He does not think either of them wants to know what would happen if she did.
"If you have any kindness in you," she says, her voice harsh, "make it quick."
Forgive me, he thinks, and strikes.
846
"Why?" he demands, trying to ignore the way his voice breaks on the question. "When I have never been unkind to you, never been unfaithful - why?"
The man in her bed has retreated to the corner of the room, fumbling with his tunic frantically, but he pays him no mind, intent only on his wife. She sits in the middle of the furs, unashamed of her nakedness and regal as any queen, and there is undisguised anger in her voice as she spits back, "I gave you everything I was when I married you, yet I was never enough for you. Why should I not have someone who looks at me as if I were?"
Red rises at her words, clouds his vision. He closes the distance between them in three quick strides, seizes her - one hand clutching her upper arm to haul her to him, the other tightening around her throat as if he can keep her from saying any more. But he cannot silence the accusation there in her eyes, and after a trembling eternity hurls her away, to fall back against the bed. "Out," he growls.
She pushes up on her hands, looks at him through the tangle of her dark hair, and god above he still wants her, but not like this - cannot erase the memory of other hands on her, does not know if he can bear that -
"Out," he repeats, struggling to master the rage, "both of you - and if I ever see you in my lands again, I will kill you."
1037
She is quiet and demure, this convent-reared orphan who will become his brother's wife - at least, he thinks her quiet at first, until an encounter with brigands leaves them the only two survivors, and he looks up from pulling his sword out of the body at his feet to discover she has snatched up a dagger and acted in her own defence, for the blade is stained red and there is a wild grim satisfaction in her eyes and he does not think he will ever think her meek again.
"You're hurt," he says though, stupidly, because there is sluggish red trickling down her arm, and her gaze follows his as though she hadn't noticed.
He tells himself it is only the rush that comes with battle that brings them together that night - that and the cold - but even as he thinks that he knows himself for a liar. It cannot explain the nights that follow, as they continue to make their journey back to his family home, nor can it explain the fear that he is falling too far too fast, but even as he tumbles deeper and deeper with each smile, each touch, each time he looks into her eyes he finds he lacks the strength to stop. To see her happy is worth almost anything, and if she were not promised to his brother …
But she is, and this must end, and by the time they have reached the keep he knows he dares not stay.
1193
The road to Jerusalem is long and weary and the one back longer still, and he survives both and the gaol between them not through faith but in the memory of the young wife he left behind. Thoughts of her had sustained him in the interminable weeks in that cell; he has dreamed his homecoming more times than he will admit, and if his fellow knights had taunted him for spending evenings mooning over a portrait-locket and an embroidered scarf rather than joining them in their wenching he had not minded, no more than when his fellow prisoners had called him naïve and a dreamer. Duty had compelled him to his king's side and he had obeyed, but his heart had never been there.
He has dreamed his homecoming, but never like this - worn, weary, with little more than a tired gelding and battered armour and an empty purse. Never like this, to a village that eyes him suspiciously, without recognition. Is he so changed that, like Odysseus returning from Troy, they know him not?
(Will she know him? Surely she must, after all this time, when she has been his reason to continue in the face of everything.)
But he is no Odysseus, to have learned Agamemnon's lesson, and she proves to be no Penelope.
1358
He grows old before his time, and cold with only the memories of those he has lost to warm him. And in half-waking dreams they come to him again, those he knows and those he has never known, as vividly alive as the people who sit around him, and he wonders at the ones he has never met but recognises nonetheless - wonders which are real, and which only the products of wine-soaked imaginings.
The tavern-wench brings him another tankard, and he is too lost in the haze of cheap alcohol to flinch from the contempt in once-familiar green eyes.
1632
"I'm bound to you," she says, that day in the garrison, "as you are bound to me," and he feels the truth of those bittersweet words echo in his soul. (He has known that from the beginning.)
And he goes, he follows her without fully knowing why, only that he must, drawn to her even now. But by the time he arrives she is gone, and he wonders if perhaps he was once again mistaken and all they have ever been is a lie.
1794
The world has gone to madness around him, and none of it makes sense anymore - not even her, though she always had before no matter how strange everything else became. There is so much anger in her eyes as she stares at him, so much fury and pain (and regret bound up in that pain), but it had not been enough to make her keep his secrets and it is thanks to her that he stands here, bareheaded and shivering in the winter air, waiting for his appointment with Mme. Guillotine.
The scent of blood is thick in the air, an iron-tinged miasma that couples with the crowd's cheers to deepen this nightmare. He thinks of his country, drowning in blood and hate, thinks of those who have clambered those wooden stairs before him, wonders how long it can last and what will come next - what will be left of France when she has glutted herself on blood.
(He wonders what will happen to her, too - whether that anger will remain or whether she will know remorse in time. It would be easy to hate her like this, but he finds that sorrow weights his heart instead because whatever they might have become, whatever they have been (whatever society says they should be, child of the nobility and child of the street) he had loved her. Even now, after what she has done, he still does, and the realisation burns less than it should.)
As the blade falls, her eyes are all he sees.
1847
It would be easy to be dazzled by her, he thinks - easy, but he must not let himself be blinded like others before him, not when this is a job. He is to find out what she knows, not to fall in love, and yet as the days go by and she allows him further entry into her private life it seems as if it would be all too easy to do just that. It's not just beauty, when beauties are a dime a dozen here at court, no matter that hers is as much sharp edges as it is softness and all the more fascinating for both; no, if he had to name it he would be hard-pressed to do so, only that there is something in her that he wants to touch and discover and lose himself in. She feels right, and that's more dangerous than anything else.
But she is a job, a duty, and he is a soldier first and foremost, and so he forces himself not to speculate on her innocence. He knows what he will find, has known it from the first - came into this knowing that it was not a matter of if he found evidence of her crimes but when. (And he is a soldier through and through, and it his place to fight, not to judge, even if this is not any battlefield he would have chosen for himself.)
He tries not to feel - as he delivers the letters to his captain, knowing even as he hands them over that he has condemned her - as if he is the one who should carry the guilt. It is she who has committed treason.
(He carries his last glimpse of her, shocked betrayal fading to grim resignation, to his own grave.)
1916
"Love," she reads aloud, holding the slim volume between them like a shield as she backs out of his reach, "noun - a temporary insanity curable by marriage or by removal of the patient from the influences under which he incurred the disorder. This disease -"
He lunges, closes the distance between them, snatches the book from her hands. "And what if I don't want to be cured?"
Something indecipherable flickers through her eyes, here and gone, though her smile is unwavering as she leans back against the wall and does not try to slip free. "Then perhaps it's just as well that you can't marry me."
He would, if he could. But he has a wife back home, and the liberties which are condoned during war cannot be allowed in peace. If he survives this - no, when, because he must survive - then he will go home to his wife and do his duty and forget about this interlude, but he doesn't want to consider that eventuality now, not with her here, wickedness in her mouth and challenge in her eyes as she gazes up at him, and he tries not to think about why this one woman makes him dishonour himself so readily when he's never so much as considered that before.
I love you, he thinks, but does not (dares not) say.
2013
His collar is too tight. Maybe it's nerves, a reflection of how he does and doesn't want to be here, but it feels like the shirt is choking him. Restless, he undoes the top button with one hand (too formal anyway, not that he cares), looses the second, breathes more easily as he leans against the wall to wait.
He's only here because his brothers - well-intentioned meddlers, the lot of them - have concluded that he needs the same happiness in his life that they've found in theirs and decided to set him up on a date, and hadn't seen fit to tell him until hours before. And whatever else he may be, he's enough of a gentleman (positively old-fashioned, the youngest has chortled, and oh, they know him too well!) not to stand up a lady. So he'll meet her, and explain, and if he's monumentally lucky it won't be the most awkward experience of his adult life
He recognises her from the photo when she approaches the café, but recognise suddenly seems too pale a word for it when she slides her phone into her purse and looks up, and as her eyes meet his the world falls away for one dizzying, endless moment.
Breathe. He'd forgotten how, for a moment. From the minute tremor in her fingers as she pushes a stray dark lock back, he thinks she might have been similarly affected.
"Hi," she says, extending a hand, and all he can think is that his brothers will laugh and laugh and laugh, because he knows this isn't going to end in an awkward explanation like he'd first thought - not when he already knows he wants to drown in those eyes forever, and that hesitant smile makes him think she may want the same. "I'm Anne."
The book Milady is quoting from in 1916 is Ambrose Bierce's The Devil's Dictionary (originally The Cynic's Word Book). Text via Project Gutenberg.
As always: I'm myalchod over at Tumblr for any questions or conversations. (And still working on the next part of Between Midnight and Dawn, promise!)