debut

[aspecialkindofwoman]

The carriage ride to the coast hardly registered despite the state of the road. She had too much on her mind. There had been something there. She knew it. She knew that she had gotten through to him, too. How he kissed her, how he looked at her was enough to tell him that what had once thrived between them was not entirely dead.

And yet, he did not come. She berated herself for even thinking that he would have. She was a fool. Just the kind of woman she would have no respect for. But there had been a chance. She had meant what she said, too, about wanting to be something else. Wanting to be the woman she had been with him.

It seems he had not wanted the same. And she had to face that. When she feels the carriage slow, the woman known as Milady de Winter steps out of the carriage … and into some place she has never been before, an opulent hallway, of some design she has not seen. People walk past dressed in all manner of clothing, much even by her standards to be considered scandalous. She takes a moment, leaning a shoulder against the wall as she attempts to get her bearings.

Where is she? When she turns, there is no carriage behind her, but more of this hallway. A door, when tried, is locked. Where is she? As one unused to being in situations she cannot control, she watches for a long moment before she begins to walk, looking by habit as if she has always been here, even if she is scrambling for clues as to where she is and what she is to do.

Comments

[armedagainstlove]

It is a ghost he sees when he rounds the corner for his room, but should not be surprised. Caught in place, he sees her as he had through his drunken haze in the manour, ash and smoke obscuring her figure (one that Athos could not ever forget). He stares at her with such longing that it makes him hate himself for it and he is suddenly far too sober. "You cannot be here," he accuses, but it is not her that he is angry with, but his own mind which has twisted five years worth of longing and need into these awful visions.

He has drank far, far too much. And yet, at the same time, he has not had near enough.

[aspecialkindofwoman]

His longing is met by hers. Despite his not being at the crossroads, does that mean that he had indeed found a way to meet her. But even as she thinks that, she realizes that he doesn't look the same. He looks different ... off.

So, that desire, that hope, battles with the need to protect what little dignity she clings to.

"And yet I am," she says, her hand against the wall, a discreet means of bracing herself. She lifts her chin. She still doesn't know where they are, but she cannot yet admit that.

[armedagainstlove]

The locket he wears upon his neck feels as if a brand, burning its way through cloth and skin to remind him of her presence here. He can still feel the knife to his throat, just as he can feel the sorrow of finding Thomas' body and the betrayal of watching her hang (and how he could not watch). "Do you mean to haunt me through every dark corridor in every large manse we find ourselves in?" he asks, but there is little sharpness or strength to his words.

[aspecialkindofwoman]

"I asked you to meet me. But you did not intend to come, did you." And yes, she's hurt that he wouldn't come. That her offer of a fresh start together meant so little.

"Where are we?" she finally asks, because she does not like the pain of rejection. She is stronger than that, isn't she? That horrible creature she's become anyway.

[armedagainstlove]

"The last I saw of you, you were trying to kill me in my family's home," Athos replies calmly, though he fears that there is a slight tremble in the words that give away his distress at the situation. Had it not been for d'Artagnan, he would have been ash and rubble with the beams and the roof. "Forgive me for not arriving at this seeming invitation I did not receive," he notes dryly.

[aspecialkindofwoman]

What? (Though, that does explain why he seems so different from how she'd last seen him.).

"That was months ago," she says first, not bothering to deny what happened, though the why is more complicated than that.

"And that doesn't explain where we are now."

[armedagainstlove]

"Only weeks for me," is his tender reply (tender not for the affection that he knows lurks beneath the hurt, but tender in the way that an open wound can cause bleeding when poked at continuously). "You are at the Nexus Hotel, in the midst of nowhere," he says. "I wonder if it's my presence that drew you here," he wonders.

As if his continuous thoughts of her has done this.

[aspecialkindofwoman]

There's a sharp comment waiting to be uttered but she doesn't say it. His presence, his thoughts very well could have drawn her. They are, as she'd said to him, bound to each other.

First one step, then another. Closer, as she takes in his words. "In the middle of nowhere? How is that possible?"

[armedagainstlove]

He stays where he is, but merely because he refuses to cede ground or to show any weakness. He takes her in -- the softness in her face that looks so different from the woman he had seen in the fire and ashes and smoke. "I've stopped demanding explanation when I realised there's none to be found," he admits. "Where was I supposed to meet you?" he asks, wondering how much could change in the time between them that she would wish for him to meet her, rather than wish him dead.

[aspecialkindofwoman]

He really doesn't know. That's clear from his expression; he is not as cagey as she is, nor will he ever be.

She looks between his eyes, deciding to be honest as well. "At the crossroads on the way to Harfleur. To leave for England together," she tells him. "A new life. A ... what we were meant to be." Rather than what she had become. What they had become.

[armedagainstlove]

How can this be? Even if she is back in his life, somehow, how could he allow such a thing to happen? This woman killed his brother, hid from him, tried to kill him and burn down the home he grew up in. And yet, he is about to abscond with her to England? "Aramis," he begins. "Porthos, d'Artagnan," he lists the names. "Are they alive? Well?" he demands explanation, for he cannot understand how he would leave them with such a tumultuous storm in his heart and mind in regards to this woman before him.

(Woman? She is no woman. She is his wife and will always be)

[aspecialkindofwoman]

"Everyone is fine, yes," she says with a sigh and the slightest roll of her eyes. After all, she knows that they are important to him, all of them. That's why she saved Aramis after all. That's why she helped all of them (that and to get back at Rochefort, as well, of course). "Alive and well and, if I'm not mistaken, d'Artagnan and the Bonacieux woman are to be married."

[armedagainstlove]

So what has happened between them to make Athos wish to leave them? To even consider leaving the duty that had claimed him and given him protection for five years from the ghosts of his past? There is so much that has happened and he is beginning to see it clearly that he will not know until he goes back and lives it.

"I don't understand any of this, Anne," he breathes out her name like a plea, keeping his distance because he knows he is subject to her touch and wants nothing but to be able to love her without thinking of the blood in La Fère, but his mind will not allow him that.

He needs a drink.

[aspecialkindofwoman]

The way he says her name urges her forward, a few more steps to where they nearly touch, to where they nearly share the same air. She doesn't understand this either - this place, how they can be from different times - but she cannot admit that, admit such a weakness.

"I do not have to be what you think I am," she murmurs. "I have not lied about what you think I have, Athos." About Thomas. About what happened that day so long ago.

[armedagainstlove]

It is not the right thing to say. Athos stiffens suddenly at the reminder of why there is an ocean of icy distance between them and he remembers the tomb, the way Thomas had been so cold. His wife had killed his brother, then she had escaped hanging by seducing Remy. It all makes his head turn with grief and his stomach follow, until he casts his head to the side, to avoid her gaze.

"I am afraid proof has been incontrovertible as to who you are," he informs her, as if upset and determined to trust to what he knows. "Who do you work for?"

[aspecialkindofwoman]

Jaw stiffening as she refuses to drop it, she steps back. "No one," she says quietly, defiantly. "I do not work for anyone."

Proof is only incontrovertible if he continues to see the truth of what his brother was, that streak of cruelty and entitlement.

[armedagainstlove]

"Then you are doing what you do on your own? What you did to La Fère, what you try to do to me?" Athos wonders if that is not worse. Perhaps he could blame it on a benefactor, if she were to work for someone else's wicked means.

[aspecialkindofwoman]

Her mouth opens, then closes and she sighs, looking away down the hall. "That ... that was a different time." When she was endebted to the Cardinal. "Now, I do not work for anyone. And I will not again."

[armedagainstlove]

He does not dare take his eyes off of her. Perhaps because she will slip away or perhaps simply because he does not know if he trusts himself to look away. "And you were to meet me and we were to go to England. Away from Paris and my duty?" he says it again and again, it does not make sense to him.

[aspecialkindofwoman]

"Perhaps. I told you where I would be and when to meet me." Her shoulders rise and fall in a shrug. "You had not come by the time I was leaving. Perhaps," she says, meeting his gaze, "you were not going to come."

And that idea hurts a good deal more than she would like to admit; it shows her face too and she, for once, doesn't bother to mask it.

[armedagainstlove]

It is too much to cope with and handle. Athos cannot do this any longer, cannot listen to truths or lies or whatever she is saying. He is too weary to discern between them. Pushing away from his perch near the wall, he does little more than afford her one last look before he walks down the hall without a word of parting, thinking he needs a drink more than ever before.

[aspecialkindofwoman]

There is too much pride in Milady to follow. She stands there, understanding this place no better than she did before.

If they are both trapped here, though, perhaps they will cross paths again. It is their fate, isn't it?

They are bound to each other after all.