Honour
For the anonymous guest who left me this prompt along with a lovely review for chapter 22. Thank you so much, dearest Nonny!
Set nebulously post-S2, flagrantly ignores S3 canon.
Something in him had snapped and he was not sure which of them was more surprised when he had challenged the duke in defence of her honor, but even after everything she was still his wife.
"I wasn't aware you though I had honour to defend," she snaps at him afterwards, pacing the chambers he's been given; her spine is straight, her muscles tight and trembling in a way that echoes the fury simmering in her eyes, and he wonders what's going through her mind, what she truly thinks, whether the root of her anger is his intervention or the implications that pervade it or something else altogether.
"Your honour reflects my own," he responds, because it's true and because this is no different from when he'd said he was to blame for her actions – because he'd made her who she is when he'd hanged her and in a thousand small ways since that day, and that has haunted him ever since he missed her at the crossroads and ever since they found her here across the sea, an achingly familiar face amid the strangeness of the English court – and because it is just one more small way in which so much of what they are and have been and will be is forever entwined, in which she remains inextricably woven into his very being, no matter the time or the distance or anything else that passes between them.
The words must be just the wrong ones (it is all he has seemed to manage around her, since her resurrection, since they first fell apart) because she whirls to face him, and there is enough rage blazing there that he nearly misses the shadows beneath it, enough rage to freeze him stock-still even as she snatches the basin beside her and hurls it at him with a strangled sound; the pain registers dimly, distantly, nothing next to what he sees etched plainly there in her face, the naked emotion all the more shocking for what thuds through him in response, an echo far louder than the thump of the bowl falling unnoticed to the carpet underfoot.
"Anne –?" he makes the single syllable all of the questions he cannot put words to, because this makes no sense, not when she had been the one to leave, not when she is the one who's put this space between them, kept him at arm's length since his arrival, looked at him like she wishes he were anywhere but here, staring at her with all those unvoiced sounds dying on his lips and tasting like ash and despair on his tongue.
"Shut up," she snarls, "don't you dare, just shut up," and though the anger is still vibrating through her and the pain of old wounds flayed open is still plain underneath it there is more to that fire, more – there has always been more, and nothing between them will ever be simple or easy, and before he can react she has closed the space between them, and he wonders if it is possible to drown and burn in the same breath, and then wonders nothing at all.