Just One More - B-Side

For an anon request on Tumblr for Athos' POV for this story. I may be developing a habit of Athos castigating himself for being a fool. (It's accurate. He's just far from the only one being foolish on this show.)

Not sure if this is at all what you had in mind, my dear anon – the original piece was so deeply Milady's that it was surprisingly hard to write from Athos' side. If it's not what you were hoping for or if you there are questions you'd hoped to have answered that aren't, please feel free to let me know. I am more than happy to babble about things at the slightest provocation.

'Fool,' he thinks after, because he can't stop thinking about that night – and, later still, 'thrice-damned fool,' because he should know better, but the admonishments do nothing.

Things should never have reached that point between them. And yet sense and should-be are so often mere afterthoughts when it comes to her, because she is more heady than the most potent spirit he's ever tasted, clouds his mind more than wine and war alike. She has been a weakness from the first lie and will be one until her last breath, because when he is around her reason ceases to have meaning, and all that remains are the passions he tries so hard to tame.

He'd wanted this once, more than anything, back when he'd been a fool yet unknowing and loved a dream. He'd held her against him, soft and sweet, closed his eyes and drunk deep of the scent of flowers and imagined the flat stomach beneath his hand rounding with a child – imagined their children, filling the quiet halls of his family home with laughter and warmth.

That dream is dead, buried, burned to ash, and yet when she tells him, it haunts him once more, like the ghost of flowers on his pillow.

'Fool, fool, stupid naïve fool.'

He believes her. After everything, against his will and the sense that seems to elude him, he believes the words true, if only because there had been a raw honesty in her words he'd only ever heard once before. It doesn't mean he wants to believe – god knows he wants nothing of the sort – and yet for all that he is a fool, it is not he who lies, even to himself. (He wants, even now, and the intensity of that wanting terrifies him more than he will ever confess.)

And yet he does not go. He cannot go, even before Tréville's hand is there on his arm, because he cannot forsake one duty for another (and though he had already failed his duty to her years before, that thought is no less a coward's refuge than being glad the choice was taken from him). He thinks of her there, waiting and wondering, and thinks that perhaps she too already knows, and it is no consolation. She will hate him for it. He deserves no less.

And yet in the depths of war he wakes sometimes to the ghosts of high laughter and fields of flowers and, though he should know better, hopes.

Endnotes: Questions or prompts? Hit my Tumblr askbox if you'd like. I am, as always, myalchod over there.