Disclaimer: There will be one more post written after this. I love this couple and this story is AU to my official fanfiction and I hope that I can start posting it soon. For everyone who has read/favourite/reviewed (I'm looking at you you wonderful Redluna) thank you very much and I hope that you are willing to read the official one when I start posting it as many parts of this story make sense in that one. Thank you.
The door creaked open on its hinges and I turned to look up as she stepped through the jagged doorway, a guard behind her and pulling the rusted door shut with a screech of protest that sharpened in my ears. She stepped away from it carefully, her skirts rustled over the stone and her cloak pulled over her curls that fell hidden over her shoulders. I slowly stood, the poor light of the cell dulling everything and in contrast brightening her every edge and making it richer, deeper more beautiful in comparison to everything or anything God's light had ever touched.
"Wife."
My voice caught on it, broken and torn on my lips like a bloody blade lodged in my throat and risking my collapse and despair.
"Husband."
She curtseyed somewhat, the cloak pulling around her and catching at the small swell of her stomach. Only four months along. Our child. Our last.
"Please, sit."
I gesture her towards the bed with its frayed and dirtied blanket poorly pulled and tucked around its splintered edge. She walked over to it and gently sat, her skirts fanned out around her and rippled around her knees in the heaviness of fabric. The reality of where I was and what my punishment was settled in heavier when she was there. How far I had fallen. How hard I had worked to keep her condemned in any part of what I had been accused of. She looked around somewhat, taking in the grime coating the walls, the rusted bars over the window and finally turned to take me in. The stain of dirt and sweat coated to my shirt, my hair tangled and worn and the bones protruding under my skin.
"You look well."
It was a lie. It burned like a dying crisp in the air and on her tongue. I was not well. I did not look it nor feel it but my heart ached and twisted with the attempt she permitted.
"As do you."
She did. She was still healthy. Still beautiful. Always.
"Thank you."
She said it quietly; embarrassed by the gentle compliment as she always was when someone saw fit to pay her one. I smiled faintly, the unnatural feel of it tensed over my lips like they had forgotten what it felt to have one. What it felt for her to inspire one so easily and effortlessly.
"How are the children?"
She raises her eyes to me, the faded light from the window almost ethereal carved over her faced and caressed over her shoulders.
"They are well. My sister is taking good care of them. For the moment they know nothing."
I nod. Not until after it is done. Not after until I am executed and my head paraded on a pike for everyone to see and take heed of as a warning that the King is to be obeyed and not questioned. I swallow hard and taste bile in my throat, burned and rough on my tongue in a fear that I don't want to recognize. A realization of my own mortality. And my close call to its head.
"Good. I do not want them to worry."
I will never see them again. None of them. They are free and full and warm in the life of the living while I stand trembling in the world of shadows just on the edge of this world and the next. She nods and turns away from me, her eyes frozen on a puddle collected and shattered across the cobblestones with the murky surface poorly reflecting her face.
"I do not wish for you to worry either."
I say the words carefully, uncertain of their balance between question and demand. I can't remember how to speak to her. Not after all this time at staring at the rotted cell walls and running her memory through my thoughts like finest silk between my fingers, too ethereal to fully grasp and too close to assure myself it isn't real.
"Of course I worry. You are my husband."
She turns to look at me and I lower my eyes, the simplistic press behind her words not enough to satisfy me and any hope I had that she might fear for my life. She doesn't. I don't mean enough to her for that.
"Of course."
I cannot deny her that basic wifely concern. The fear of leaving her alone. Our children alone. Unprotected and uncertain in a world where the favors of a man or woman shift and shatter on the barest turn of the wheel or the command of a king. But she'll survive. Beneath all that kindness and innocence she has a strength and she will find a way to survive.
"I spoke to the King."
I raise my head, the dirtied strands of my hair falling into my eyes and briefly blurring everything's edge until only she stands poignant.
"The King?"
She turns to me, her curls disheveled under her hood and her eyes frozen on my face and their edges hardened in the strength that I so often saw breaking forth from her core and too easily misjudged and forgotten by others.
"Yes. To plead for your release."
My heart rate increased in my chest, the beats uneven and jagged in their pulse that made me feel like I was slowly bleeding to death on the inside.
"You did?"
I dare to ask the question, tease the possibility that I misheard her. She simply nods, surprised that I even had to ask the correction. I smile faintly though I know it is a loss cause. The King, my nephew, and those closest to him will not be swayed by the pleadings of the wife of a traitor. There are too many traitors. Too many wives. And yet to me in all the rest she stands out. After all these years, all these hours and moments hushed together in my personal reminder that alone she stands poignant. I reach for her hand, running my thumb over the back of it and the simplistic ring she wears that Jane made her and gently press my lips over her knuckle. My skin is so dirtied in comparison to hers, so rough and so broken while hers stands clean, softened and whole. A physical reminder that in all the years I love her that I never once came close to deserving her.
"You shouldn't have done that."
No matter how pure or kind her intentions it was not safe of her to do so. Not worthy of me for her to risk so much. She pulls her hand from mine and brushes it past my cheek and to entangle in my hair, holding it back from my face so I can see her eyes crystallized staring back at me. They are fierce. And they are angry.
"Of course I should have. I do not care what they say, what is testified you are innocent. All the lies, all the confessions, all the witnesses who lie through their teeth to your name you are innocent, Edward. And nothing can never convince me otherwise."
Her eyes stare back into mine angrier then I have ever seen them, her fingers dug into my hair and hours seeming to pass with me unable to drop her gaze.
"You called me Edward."
She blinks as if she had not realised, as if it did not matter. But it does. In all our years of marriage she had never once called me Edward. Had only called me Husband as if the name stripped me of any detail accept the basics of who I was and who we were. Husband. Wife.
"That is your name."
I grin. It is so innocent, so wonderful and so terrible that she replied so. That after all these years of refusing to say it the only reason to speak it now is that it is my name.
"It is, Charlotte."
Her own name is warm on my tongue, heat burned and folded through my throat and like pinpricks all over my body. How long since I had said it out loud. How often I whispered it to myself in the dead of night as the one last desperate attempt I had to hold out on madness.
"You called me Charlotte."
I can see the faintest trace of a grin at her lips, pressing into her cheeks and along her jaw so that her skin seems delicately painted with light that puts the cell and it's dank quarters to shame.
"That is your name."
We both laugh and it's so wonderful it hurts. We never had this. The teasing or flirtations that those in love shared. Just simple words and cold kisses that consumed me on one hand and left her untouched on the other. But we are not a normal love. I loved and love her enough for us both but we are not a normal love. But in this moment I do not care. I do not wish for a normal love. I do not want it. I want her and she cannot give me a normal love. So I do not take it.
"Time's almost up."
The guard yells through the rusted bars, his steely dark eyes glaring at us as he turns away with the torch light darkly illuminated down the back of his neck. She leans carefully to me and presses her temple to mine, the faint pulse their alert against my skin and in tender though that I am still alive to hear it.
"I will be there."
She does not have to explain further. We both know where she means. At the gallows. At the block where I will kneel before the crowd with my hands bound and the executioner standing above me with the axe ready and gripped in his hands. Where I will look for a face in the crowd to rest my eyes upon and find her standing, alone and strong amongst those that hate me as the blade comes down and I find darkness. I have relieved the moment enough in my dreams to pinpoint every possible detail. To know that any change in them will not bring me real comfort.
"If you wish."
I have no right to tell her otherwise. To deny her this basic wifely duty. She gently pulls back from where she rests to my cheek and I see her staring back at me and can almost see the little girl all those years ago introduced to me only as my betrothed. The look in her eyes when she pulled away from my kiss and I was forever lost and forever hers.
"Times up!"
I grit my teeth and turn to glare at the guard, the only source of defiance I have and she lets her fingers fall from my hair and stands. I stand after her, the poorly constructed bed creaks and she turns back to me, for a moment froze in an eternity of ever changing moments and yet this one forever mine. She hurriedly steps toward me and throws herself into my arms, her face buried against my chest. I cannot move for a moment, too unprepared for this sudden affection that I wasted precious seconds before I wrap my arms around her and constrict her to me with my face lost and buried in her hood and hair. Every moment I had strengthened myself, told myself to be strong, to be brave and not show her fear is gone and I cannot let her go. I cannot let her leave, cannot let her out of my sight my arms because then she will be gone and this will be the last moment that I can touch her and now life that no ordinary man can know.
"That's enough!"
The guard is yelling and I can hear his footsteps angry in the room but I cannot let her go. She is my wife and she is in my arms and no reason makes sense for me to have to let her go. She is jerked back from me as the guard grabs her arm and anger is heated in my blood at the thought that he saw fit to touch her. I step forward to hit him, to crush my fist into his stomach, his face when she breaks herself from his grasp and her lips are against mine. My mind is blank and I am a thirteen year old boy again, kissing my betrothed for the first time with the scent of Summer sweet on my tongue and no other thought but a selfish one that lets me know I can kiss her as she will one day be my wife. Her lips break from mine as the guard shoves her away and I stand breathless in the cell as she is forced from the room, her steps rushed to keep up with the guards and the door is slammed shut. I cannot move for a moment, the last seconds she was there too rushed and collided in my thoughts for me to break me apart. Except one. She is gone. The next time I see her will be when my head is on the block and the axe is achingly held above me. I slowly kneel onto the stool, my every bone ached and frozen in a hurt I cannot fathom and I bury my face in my hands.