Naïve
I really wanted one more line in this for a verbal answer from Milady rather than that final thought, or maybe just a lot more words because this is one of those bits that feels as if it wants a bigger story. Set in a hypothetical post-S2 AU.
(Original plan: to end with implications of adrenaline-fuelled sex. Instead I got angst. Story of my writing life. XD )
"You'd better be careful, if you keep this up, I may have to take you for granted."
He wrenches his sword out of the body at her feet and looks up at her, and there's something in his eyes, wild and a little uncontrolled and so unlike what she's used to seeing in him, something that suits more than the veneer of civility he wears along with his doublet and pauldron and cloak – something that makes her think that perhaps she's not the only one who's changed, or perhaps they have both shed the skins and seeming they wore those years ago, and he has become who that young nobleman was always meant to be. There is blood around them and on them both, their own and that of those dead and dying at their feet, and there is a packet of despatches and critical information wrapped in boiled leather laced into her corset that needs to be delivered to the front as soon as possible, but none of that matters in this moment quite so much as what she sees there, in his slight smirk and that hot blue gaze fixed on her own.
"What, you'd trust that I would ward your back?" his tone is caustic, mocking, but there's a note beneath that makes it clear he's not unaffected by this either; she wonders, suddenly and inappropriately, what he might do if she were to kiss him right now, one hand in his sweat-darkened hair and the other twisting into blue leather, wonders whether he'd taste of blood and gunpowder and exertion instead of regrets and might-have-beens, wonders –
"Right," she retorts, though, with a toss of her head before kilting up her skirts to find a clean spot in her petticoats to clean her own blade with, "how naïve of me, to think we might ever be such fools again," never mind that they have, they are, that you have to trust your partner (however reluctant) with your back in a situation like this or you'll end up just as dead as trying to fight it out alone (never mind that her instincts clamour that she can trust him, because he's learned to bend and the man he is now might have listened and might not have judged who she'd been once, might have understood why she kept silent, might have understood that sometimes there can be honour, or at least reason, in a lie).
When she glances back up through the tangle of her hair, Athos's eyes are not (as she'd have suspected they might be, now) on her bared thigh, but rather watching her face, and for a moment they look at each other, the air electric with all they do not say, before he turns away to deliver a mercy-cut to the last of the ambush party still groaning on the forest floor; when he looks back at her, handkerchief in hand to tend to his bloodied rapier, it is once more with the cool, composed mien of the Musketeer captain, and all he says is, "Of all the things one might call you, naïve has never been among them," and she thinks, with sudden bitterness, 'Except when it comes to you.'