Hi! I'm back with this story too:) This time I won't apologize for my late, because I'm unforgivable! LoL I hope you like the chapter:)

4. In smoke with all our memories

So maybe I'm a masochist
I try to run but I don't wanna ever leave

A bag, then another, it was all already ready for the imminent departure that couldn't be delayed more; she didn't have a big choice actually, because just few things were left to her and that little she had, she had to take it all, since she wouldn't have entered that Palace anymore. She knew that too. She would have left very early the next morning with a great number of servants and ladies anyway, and that would have been her last night as a Queen, without the King at her side of course.

"Your Majesty!" called her loyal Elizabeth.

Catherine stopped and turned slowly, she hadn't realized it but she had reached the door with all the intention to leave her rooms.

"It is night… You should not go around the Palace, it is dark" the lady said with an apprehensive tone.

"Next time I will stay in my Queen rooms, then" the Queen retorted more sharply than she had wanted.

There wouldn't have been a next time and that would have been the first and also the last time she would have broken the royal protocol.

Elizabeth Darrell bowed her head at that bitter irony, to approach then the rocking chair and take quickly a green cloack.

"You should take this my lady… It is cold" she said hinting a shy smile and putting the cloth on the older woman's shoulder.

She smiled back and murmuring a thanksgiving, started her way to the unknown again.

Because that is what the Palace at night was for her: unknown. Whichever entertainment, that she anyway hadn't attended, had already finished and everything seemed lost in silence. Elizabeth was right: it was dark and cold, really too much. She clinged to the cloack and moved the candle to try to make the way brighter: that palace was a real labyrinth and though she had lived there for almost twenty years didn't help her to make it less complicated.

"Who knows what Henry is doing…" she found herself thinking while she was going on with uncertain steps; she touched with the palm of a hand the wall, she looked carefully the stairs and the rooms she was walking in front of, she even smiled to the guards and the few night servants she met, trying greedily to build some last memories, until any sense went to get lost far away, mixing with the memories she already had. Until suddenly the candle went to enlighten a familiar figure seated on the floor with the back against the wall; maybe it was a mere hallucination but the more she approached it, the more it seemed real. It must have been real.

"Henry!" she found herself calling, surprised by that apparition.

"Catherine.." the figure murmured, more desperate than surprised.

That was the way the Queen saw the King, as a ghost in the light of a candle.

That was the way the King saw the Queen, as an angel in the dark.

"Henry…" she called him again, covering the distance between them and bending to seat beside him for how much the bulky dress allowed her "I thought you were…"

"Hunting?" he completed with an ironic smile "I had come back and no one at Court had noticed it yet… I did not want the Court to notice it"

"You did not want to let the Court know, or you did not want to let me know?" she asked bitterly, understanding immediately the real meaning of his words.

Henry simply smiled, without saying anything, without even trying to confirm that excuse that seemed false also to him.

Til the walls are goin' up
in smoke with all our memories

And then suddenly he heard a sob, fragment of a choke crying, and it wasn't sure which sovereign it escaped to. Maybe both of them were feeling like crying or maybe none of them and that lament had existed only in their heads, memories of far crying. The death of their first born, little Henry, and then all the others one by one, the King's mistresses then and the King's great matter. But it wasn't that what they wated to remember: it wasn't pain what Henry wanted to leave to her, it wasn't regret what Catherine wanted to take with her.

"The day of our marriage, you were so beautiful…" Henry whispered while a smile formed on her lips "The walks, the balls, and Mary's birth… And the curtains of the joust, do you remember that?"

An unseen tear escaped the Queen's eyes and a sob escaped her lips this time for real: "We were happy"

"I do not want you to leave…" the King murmured, moving a hand in the dark and finding immediately the one of my wife.

"You are the one that wants me to go away" it was her tough answer.

Henry aprroached her more, until she took gently her in her arms, as if he was afraid to hurt her, as if he hadn't done it enough yet.

"What should I do? I love you, Catalina, as the first day I met you and the thought that my brother had you made me crazy for all these years… I do not want you to leave, stay with me…"

Tears were rolling down her cheeks and the words came out of his heart, before her brain gave her consent. Because it was what happened to him when he had her in front of him: all the accusations he made vanished in the sky of her eyes and the only thing she could feel was love and fear, fear of living without her.

"I still love her too…" she murmured back, vaguely uncertain and not for her feelings, but because she knew that the beautiful words she was hearing now in the dark, would have disappeared at daylight again.

"Stay with me tonight" he whispered with a voice burning of desire, starting to kiss her and making his hands loosing on her still covered body, that after twenty years remained still someway mysterious for him.

"As a last night?" she said taking his hands for a moment, looking him into the eyes.

Henry didn't answer and Catherine didn't ask more, letting herself go again and again.