She plays with his hand as the sweat cools off both of their bodies, running her fingertips over the lines of his palm, circling his signet ring, touching the slightly calloused skin beneath his fingers.
"I remember Kenna saying once that all royals had girl's hands, you know? But you don't." She says without thinking, her mind still too much of a jumble to filter what words leave her mouth.
"Excuse me?" He asks her laughing loudly, his stomach rumbling beneath her fingertips.
She closes her eyes quickly in embarrassment. Francis has this effect on her, this way of completely undoing her; that her thoughts tend to be nothing but a discombobulated mess afterwards, in absolute disarray during those moments while they come down of their pleasure. Much to her chagrin, it's not the first time she's blurted out something odd.
"So my hands are… what? More manly than the common royal?" He asks, smiling amusedly, once his laughter has died down.
"Yes, I mean, they're calloused; not, not that it's bad. I actually like it, the way it feels when you touch…" Her cheeks flame up. "I meant, what Kenna said, it's from never having to do any work. All royals, all titled people, really, they have servants. They never have to do anything by themselves so their hands aren't thoughened by work. That's what I meant. And yours, aren't…like that." She stops her ramble kissing his palm softly, and he smiles to himself, running the tip of his finger over the pretty blush on her cheek. He finds her too endearing for words.
"That's from making swords. I've had a couple of years of trying to master the skill, you know? I was about…12, when I started. I set everything up with Bash's help. I'm not even sure if my father knew that all those materials were for me. He probably would have chastised me for it. Perhaps I could've been stupid enough to cut my fingers off." He says flippantly, but she runs a comforting hand down his chest.
"I didn't care." He continues, pushing a few curls behind her ear. "I just needed something to do, other than listening to meetings for hours on end and my governess' lectures on everything under the sun. I was wound up.
I don't know why I chose making knives as a way to fix that, but it helped. Whenever I was frustrated, angry…I went up there and took it out on the metal I suppose." He shrugs his shoulders as much as he can with her weight on one of them, listening intently to him. "It was good knowing that no one would come to bother me there, that I had that place to myself."
"My old rooms, you mean." She tells him coyly, having taken a breath and recuperated from her slight, rambling, lapse in judgment. Not that she really has any shame in front of her husband.
"I did take over them, didn't I?" He asks her, looking down at her. "Your toys were still strewn around, so many memories…I guess I always missed you, even if I didn't want to admit it to myself."
He brushes his lips across her forehead, and a comfortable silence falls between them before she speaks up again.
"You would have made a fine bladesmith." She tells him out of nowhere, her voice laden with a certain remoteness.
"Is that so?"
"Uhmn" She nods.
He gives it some thought before he asks her, wondering. "Is that what our life could have been? If we were just a man and a woman, not royals? I would have been a bladesmith, and you would have… milked goats?" The mental image makes him laugh as much as settles a strange feeling on his chest.
"And made cheese," Mary added, matter-of-fact, "and perhaps gathered colored stones to help you decorate the hilts of your knives."
"You did try to do that the day you came back and I was an arse to you." He tells her, playing with her earlobe, not able to stop touching her. "I'm sorry." She doesn't say anything, just presses a kiss that tastes of salt to his bare chest, a smile on her lips.
"And what would I do with those decorated knives?" He asks her to spur her on.
"Sold them at the village market of course." She sits up then, her eyes lighting up. "And we'd have a small house near the river-"
"I would have built it for you myself, however you'd imagined it." He tells her, caressing his finger up and down her thigh. Playing along to her fantasy because he so loves the excitement that floods her countenance.
"And we'd raise our babies there, and let them walk barefoot on the grass."
"Like you did when we were younger?" He asks teasingly, a clear image of a 7-year-old Mary taking off her shoes much to their governess astonishment and running down the grassy hills near the castle, picking flowers and kicking up dirt in the first weeks of spring.
"Yes, exactly like that." She says, grinning at his teasing, but after a moment her smile slowly fades away. "And we'd get by with what we could, and we'd be happy. Sometimes, I almost wish that could be our life." With the constant pressures and fears of court, the attempts on her life and threats to her country, the immensity of the weight that rests on her young shoulders… sometimes, in her weakest moments, she could have wished it fell on someone else.
He's not lying at all when he says, "sometimes I do too."
He'd always been groomed to be a King, until not so long ago he'd thought it was the only thing that mattered. But now, he knew that he could've had a happy life if he was no one as well, as long as he had her by his side. That he felt adrift once he lost it all mostly because he lost her. If he had her, it mattered little what he was or what he had or where he lived. She was the only constant he needed. He'd be lying if he said he didn't wish for a world in which he could love her freely, from the start, without the reservations of what was best for his country. A live in which he could always put her first.
"But I don't want it." She shrugs it off, laying back down to rest her arms on his chest, and her chin on her hands. "I have you. By luck, or fate… we have one another, in this life, now. And that's what matters to me the most. Although I'm sure we'd find each other in any life."
"So you'd love me even if I was nothing?" He asks, knowing in his heart the answer, but nonetheless wanting to hear her say it. All his life he'd been treated a certain way for his title, wanted or liked or even hated for being the dauphin of France. No one paid much attention to the man underneath.
"I'd love you the same, if you were a King or a beggar. Or the village's bladesmith." She adds with a wink; and then says, lower, "My heart would be yours, just as it is now."
"And mine yours." He tells her, leaning forward just slightly to kiss her lips, "my beautiful milkmaid." He adds in jest, and her eyes widen as she slaps his chest softly.
He takes her and flips her over, her laugh ringing through the room as her back bounces of the mattress. And then he is on top her, his mouth on her neck turning her giggles into moans, his lips whispering against her skin as he goes lower and lower. "My Queen…my love…my wife…"