A Deeper Communion

Notes: This was intended to be part of Never and Always but it didn't quite work into the timeline and flow. So ... have it on its own? Takes place a couple of months after the end of that story, but spoils pretty much nothing in there and mostly stands on its own. (Just accept that Tréville hired Milady on as a spy and that's enough background. XD )

Title and opening quote once again from T. S. Eliot's Four Quartets.

Home is where one starts from. As we grow older
The world becomes stranger, the pattern more complicated
Of dead and living.
- (T. S. Eliot, East Coker)

Anyone who saw Tréville and Richelieu only at court would have thought the two men bitter adversaries. In many ways, they were: one the honourable soldier, the other the ruthless politician, there had been a great many points they would never see eye to eye on. And yet despite that - perhaps even because of it - there had been a grudging respect between them, one that had over the years developed into a strange sort of friendship.

Tréville has never been a politician; he has neither the mind nor the stomach for it, and never wanted to develop either. While Richelieu was alive, he'd had that luxury, because despite his attempts to gain the upper hand the cardinal had understood that the Musketeers (and their captain) were a necessary part of France. Tréville could count on his men largely being left alone if they did not get involved in politics.

The months since Richelieu's death - especially the ones between Rochefort's arrival and his demise, and the beginning of this war - have been a rude awakening. To be a general in the fields is leagues distant from this genteel war of whispers and debts and pieces on a board; these are maneuvers he is ill-suited to. He is learning, has had no choice, but just because he better understands what needs to be done with an immediacy absent before doesn't mean he likes it any better. Strange as it is to realise, he misses the man who had been rival and peer and friend all by turns.

And so it's respect and that strange friendship that bring him to the Sorbonne, a year after Richelieu's passing. The cemetery is quiet as he walks through it, bare and chilly in the damp fog, and he thinks himself alone among gravestones and mausoleums until he reaches the one he's looking for and finds a familiar figure already there.

His master of spies rises as he approaches, and though her typical faintly sardonic smile pulls at the corner of her mouth, there's a sorrow shadowing her eyes he suspects is mirrored in his own. "Minister Tréville," she says, utterly mildly. "I did not expect to see you here."

There's a candle burning behind her, freshly lit atop the marble stone; he can see it now that he's closer. His brows lift faintly in surprise. "I could say the same to you."

"Because we both should have simply hated him," she agrees, "but such things are never simple."

"It was easy to hate the cardinal. But he was more than that." And most of the country - most of the world - had never known the difference between the cardinal and the man. It should not surprise him, in retrospect, that she saw something more as well, whatever it had been.

Anne's sigh is faint, her exhalation a ghost in the cold air. "And yet he was also an easy man to hate."

He was, Tréville thinks. Armand Jean du Plessis, Cardinal Richelieu and First Minister of France, had been ruthless, determined, power-hungry, uncompromising - had been principled, willing to do whatever his country needed despite the stain it left. He wonders, not for the first time, how heavily the other man had blackened his immortal soul for what he believed was necessary, and how that had weighed him down. Tréville himself was raised a good son of the Church, but he has never given much thought to the balance of demands between God and crown. It's the sort of choice his faith would not bear. How could someone like Richelieu decide between the two? (How, he wonders suddenly, will Aramis?)

"He was …" The words won't come, though, and so he trails off awkwardly, unsure of how to describe the man he'd known and their complicated, conflicted dynamic in a few scant syllables.

She steps away from the grave, stopping beside him. For a long moment they stand side by side in silence, both watching the small flame flicker, before she says, almost brusquely, "He was a man, in the end - no better and no worse than most." When he looks over at her, the smile is gone and her expression is inscrutable once again. "I'll leave you to pay your own regards, Minister. There's some news I should be chasing."

And then she's gone, just a whisper of skirts as she passes and the crunch of pebbles under her bootheels as she strides away. Tréville stands motionless, watching the candle until the sounds fade, before pulling a votive of his own from the pouch at his belt and approaching the stone.

"Even in your absence you're an arse," he grumbles as he strikes flint to kindle the wick, sets his candle down beside Anne's.

It's not hard to imagine Armand chuckling.

- fin -

Endnotes: The historical Richelieu died on December 4th and was buried at the Sorbonne, and since the show hasn't shown any contrary evidence I've stuck to that. This was basically spawned from having a soft spot for Richelieu mentoring Milady (especially if one slews more historical and less to adaptational villainy), and in this show for Tréville and Richelieu as long-suffering somewhat reluctant not-quite-friends.

I am not Christian, much less Catholic, so hopefully the gestures of remembrance/mourning here are plausible - they seemed to be.