Regret

Prompted by Athena, with the stipulation of "set some years after Season 3".

This prompt is totally unfair breaking my heart like this. Just so you know. You are a horrible, horrible person and I love you for it. XD


"I wonder what you regret more now that you know the truth of Thomas, hanging your wife or by doing so condemning your daughter to the same life your wife tried to escape when she met and fell in love with you."

It's clear he doesn't understand – doesn't want to, shock and confusion and disbelief all warring in his eyes as he stares at her – but the moment when he realises she's not lying is equally plain, as his skin turns ashen and he gropes blindly for his mug of wine, "I didn't –"

"Didn't know, yes –" her eyes are cold, hard, mocking, utterly without mercy as she fixes them on him – because he deserves none (and neither does she, forever matched with him, because they could both have taken different roads), "– didn't know your beloved wife was with child, didn't know that snatching away all sense of security would force her to abandon the only thing she might have had left in the world of you." But she doesn't know if she could have kept the baby if she'd had a choice, suspects she couldn't have looked at that tiny face without being reminded of all she'd lost, of all she hated, of all the pain and agony (and it had seemed right that childbirth should be painful, in the face of all of that), and though she's told herself for years that it had been kinder to leave the girl with others, she still thinks sometimes of what it must have been like for her, to grow up as Anne had without parents or a family or a name to call her own, without a trace of respectability …

"Where is she?" Athos asks, and he's clutching the mug so hard his knuckles are white; his eyes are a little wild now, looking at her (or perhaps through her, seeing what might have been, this daughter with her eyes and his hair laughing as she runs through the fields at La Fère, and damn Thomas to eternal hell for ruining it all, but they'll both burn there with him when this is all done).

Her gaze is unblinking, her face betraying nothing as she says, in a tone that reveals none of her own uncertainties and regrets and the love she still carries (that still cuts her up inside), "I don't know."