Watchman
For Zed (enemiesbrotherslovers on Tumblr), who sent me sleep from a prompt meme, for one character watching the other sleep.
Athos takes the dawn watch.
The fire has dwindled to embers by then, and with little reason to feed it he just wraps his cloak more securely around himself and sets his back against the tree. It's perhaps an hour to sunrise, and with his erstwhile companions fast asleep he has some much-needed time to compose himself.
Whatever he might have expected to find when they rode out to find the king, Anne had never been it – Milady, he reminds himself, Anne was never anything but a lie and a dream, and yet across the cooling embers the small body curled up under her own cloak is achingly familiar. How many times had he watched her sleep back in Pinon, almost entirely burrowed into the blankets until she grew accustomed to his presence?
She had looked too innocent in slumber then, and she looks equally innocent now, one hand curling loosely into the cloak and the other tucked beneath her head. He can see the outline of a knife beneath the fabric, and it does not surprise him; she has no reason to trust any of them.
Milady, he reminds himself, but it is futile; he has never been able to see anything but Anne.
She has outmaneuvered him again in this. With Louis on her side, blinded by the same lies he himself had fallen for all those years ago, he cannot make good on this threat. And yet he knows those words had been a lie, and that even had she returned to Paris on her own that he would not have been able to kill her. He has never had the heart for that, not when his head was clear. Is it any better, he wonders, if he has killed what they were, what they might have been?
A curl falls across her face, and her nose wrinkles in vague irritation. His fingers itch to tuck it behind her ear, but he has no right, and he does not want to touch –
(Lie, always a lie. She will always be his lodestone.)
It would have been easier if we never saw each other again, he thinks, but that is just another in the endless string of lies he tells himself about her. He does not even know if such a thing would have been possible, when they always circle back.
Is she dreaming of him – and if she does, is it softly, perhaps those golden days in Pinon, or is it blood and recriminations and choking on a past that will not let either of them go? Do her dreams echo his, as they always seem to echo each other, or does she dream of sweeter things, darker things, things that have nothing to do with him? Milady had washed her hands of him, once, but she is neither Milady nor Anne, or at least not either alone, and he does not know the woman who sleeps before him (does not, dares not, and yet somehow always does).
She rolls over with an indistinct murmur, curls up smaller beneath her cloak, and he does not move, does not breathe – a poor watchman indeed, when all he sees is her.