Disclaimer: Not mine.
Oh, what are we doing?
We are turning into dust
Playing house in the ruins of us
Running back through the fire
When there's nothing left to save
It's like chasin' the last train
When we both know it's too late
Oh, it tears me up
I try to hold on
But it hurts too much
I try to forgive
But it's not enough
To make it all OK…
…I cannot give anymore
And I love you a little less than before – From Broken Strings, by James Morrison and Nelly Furtado
Charles had always been a man who knew how to handle women. Some of them required careful seduction, others came to him with nothing more than a smile. But none of them had challenged him, needled him, like Margaret Tudor. At first, he had taken it in stride, even needling her back, without even thinking about it. It wasn't until she dismissed her ladies that night aboard ship, when they had been playing cards, when he'd realized that the barbs had become an odd, almost hostile form of flirtation. Before that, it had just seemed like an amusing game, a way to let her burn up some of her fury at the marriage she was being forced into, and a way for him to entertain himself on the voyage.
Even the sex, that first time, had begun as something… well, not innocent, obviously, but simple. He was bored and she was feeling rebellious, and in that moment sex was the best way for both of them to work through that. The sheer physical attraction between them had helped, of course, but even Charles normally would have been smart enough to ignore that attraction when the woman in question was a Princess. Yet with her it had been impossible to stop, even when his mind was screaming at him how bad of an idea it was, even when he suspected she was thinking the same thing.
He'd fallen in love with her, plain and simple. With the challenge she presented, with her status as unattainable… just with her, that fire and spirit that could not be broken. Or so he'd thought. When he'd told her that Henry wanted her to return to court, when she'd called their marriage one of convenience and then informed him in a choked voice that he was incapable of loving someone on a permanent basis, he realized something. He'd broken her. He hadn't meant to, but he had. Somewhere in it all, they'd lost what they had. She'd retreated into a bottle and he'd turned back to his faceless women, and… God, how had it all happened? How had it gone so wrong? He didn't know, and so he kept going back to the women who meant nothing, to forget the woman who had once meant everything.
The worst of it was, she still loved him. After everything that had happened, she still loved him. Margaret wasn't sure why, especially because she hated him too. She hated him for his infidelities, for the way he seemed not to care, for how easily he fell in and out of love. But most of all, she hated him because she still loved him, and she didn't think she would ever stop.
She drank to forget how it had all started, the fire and the intensity, the painful hope when he'd asked her to marry him. She couldn't stand to remember, not when he had turned completely to other women. And yet, even when she'd drank herself to oblivion, she could not forget. She felt him twirling her around the dance floor at the Portuguese court, she saw the look in his eyes back when he'd loved her, she heard him making their wedding vows… And then the drink would take her completely and it would all go black, but the last thing she saw were his hazel eyes. He never stopped haunting her.
When she started coughing blood, she knew better than to think it was something she might recover from. Margaret had been there when her father had died, she remembered how he had coughed blood. She just hoped she wouldn't linger as he had, weak and ill but still clinging to life. To her, the thought of leaving this world wasn't so bad.
She did feel some guilt over her children, though. Edward and Frances missed Charles desperately, and they found their depressed, weakening mother unpleasant company, but they were still her children. She should not be glad to leave them. And Eleanor… Her youngest daughter, the one who was the most like her even though she had Charles' dark hair and his hazel eyes. Ella was her child, though, her loyal little girl, who tried everything she could to make her mother happy again. Margaret knew she depended too much on a little girl, but she couldn't help it. Her husband didn't love her, her older children avoided her; the only one who cared was a child of ten.
It was Ella who watched, frozen, as her mother choked to death on her own blood after staggering through half the house. It was Ella who screamed for the servants, who collected the body and prepared their late mistress for burial. And it was Ella who had written an urgent letter to her father before her mother's death, begging him to come home. A letter that Charles, not realizing why his daughter was pleading with him, thinking she'd exaggerated, had ignored.
So it was that when the Duke of Suffolk returned home, racing there after having to tell Henry of Margaret's death, his youngest daughter was standing outside waiting for him. Her hazel eyes, so like his, were stony, and even though she had his coloring, it was like a miniature Margaret standing there, passing cold and unforgiving judgment on him.
"I told you she was sick. I begged you to come home!" she cried, eyes blazing with pain and fury. Her voice cracked, and he could tell she was trying not to cry. She might be furious, but she was still a child, a girl who had just lost her mother, and she was grieving. He reached out, meaning to embrace her, but she stepped back.
"Get away from me. You killed her, don't you know that? She loved you, and you just turned your back. I know why you went to court so much, I heard you fighting all the time. Why couldn't you just love her, and why couldn't you be here for her?"
He couldn't answer. He couldn't answer his daughter, or the ghost of her mother who he could hear shouting the same things. There was nothing to say, and so he said nothing at all, walking past his daughter and into the house.
Standing at his wife's coffin, he whispered that he was sorry as tears of guilt and grief choked him. But it was too late for apologies. Margaret couldn't hear them, and her daughter wouldn't accept them. He'd destroyed his wife, Ella was right about that. Maybe she would have gotten sick even if she'd been healthy before, but she wouldn't have died alone if he'd been here, if he hadn't left her behind.
Why had he done it? Was Margaret right, was he incapable of a lasting love? No, because he'd still loved her, he just hadn't wanted to. It had all turned so bitter so quickly, and affairs were simple. Feelings were complicated. He hadn't wanted complicated, so he'd turned away. And now he'd lost her forever. No matter what happened, if he fell in love again, he could never take this back. And deep down, he knew he'd never forgive himself for letting her go this way.
A/N: Bloody hell, I started on a depressing note, didn't I? To clear up confusion about the Tudor-Brandon children, I went a bit more historical in terms of how long the marriage lasted and how mayn kids there were. The son was called Edward because that seems to be the name of Brandon's older son in the show; I assumed that boy's mother was Margaret.
