Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

I.

He finds her at the crossroads, just like she says. 

Strange. For some reason, he had convinced himself she would not be there. Then again, this is what Athos had learnt to expect of love, of his love. Fleeting. Or is it fleeing?

For all his doubts, she is there. Eyes wide. Gloved hands twitching in a lap where they would be more at home around a hilt. Lips parted in something that he would have said was surprise, if he thought her capable of it. 

She steps from her carriage and he thinks, stupidly, of catching her. 

Perhaps that is what he is doing: catching a bird in a cage, a doe in a snare – except this dove can bite, this deer is venomous. She does not look as if she minds being caught. She looks, for a second, like something willing to give up flight, if not feathers. She even smiles. It is very nearly enough to convince him to tug on his reins and turn back for Paris.

And then D’Artagnan catches him and the horizon, and Milady de Winter’s lip curls.

“Did you not understand me, Athos?” She calls. “I said come alone.” 

If they were not themselves, it might sound like grief. 

“Change of plan. You cannot leave Paris.”

But though they are nothing if not each other’s ghosts, they have never once grieved. 

“Is that a request from my loving husband or an order from–”

“Treville extends his warmest willingness not to execute you if you comply,” D’Artagnan says, proffering a letter from his saddlebag with no amount of gratified dislike. 

“If I wanted the adolescent perspective, I would have asked.”

“Maybe don’t mess with the man who’s missing his own honeymoon to scrape your sorry snatch off a highway.”

“Chafing, are we?” Milady snorts. “I wouldn’t have thought you’d be missing much. Dear Constance doesn’t seem the type to wear white.”

“Says the whore.”

“The farm boy doesn’t fuck far from the tree.”

“That the same tree the psychotic bitch should be swinging from?”

There is the noise of a pistol being cocked under a woman’s cloak.

There is the rasp of steel as a rapier is unsheathed. 

There is the groan of a captain that should by all rights by drinking himself to death in a Red Guard tavern. 

“Enough,” Athos hears himself say. “The Crown requires your service. Anne.”

We are not done with one another yet. She had told him that.

His wife raises her chin. 

“Do I have a choice?”

He wonders how many times she has said such a thing. How many choices that are not choices she has weighed, and still strung out into something that almost looks like it will not snap. He wonders if his first proposal had been one such choice.

He jerks his head, once.

She smiles – a bitter, sore-lipped thing. 

He’d kissed her this morning. 

“For the record,” D’Artagnan is saying, “this is the worst plan we’ve ever had.”

Chapter Text

II.

“You will have no contact with any of your contacts in Paris. Understood?”

She nods. 

“Understood?”

“Understood.”

“You will not attempt to leave the Garrison without specific instruction from me or the Captain of the Musketeers. Understood?”

“Understood.”

“You are in the service of France now, not yourself. Understood?”

“I’m not about to turn compatriot.”

“Understood?” 

She gives Treville a look which hopefully expresses her dearest wish of peeling the skin from his bones.

“Understood.”

D’Artagnan snorts. 

“Something to say, D’Artagnan?”

The newest musketeer waves a hand at her, at their situation. 

“Nothing. Just that we’re attempting to root out Rocheforte’s spy network, probably inherited from the Cardinal, and you’ve decided to employ France’s most talented liar.”

Treville waits. 

Aramis coughs delicately. He’s all fancy manners, that one, Milady knows. She’s already taken the measure of each of them, and dismissed the pretty theologian with the appropriate amount of disinterest. 

“What D'Artagnan is trying to say,” Aramis offers, “is that she serves only herself.”

“And historically, half of Paris.”

Milady whirls on the boy soldier, but he’s already yelped. Constance looks angelic beside him. Milady knows feigned innocence too well – she invented that look – so she’s not surprised when D’Artagnan winces around his next words, as if his bride might pinch him under the ribs again. 

“I’m just saying. She can’t be trusted.”

“If I might be allowed to continue?” Treville’s nostrils flare. “You are not a Musketeer. You do not have the authority, nor the protection, that the position of Musketeer affords.”

He says it like an insult. Like there would be a day when she would ever want in on their bullish tactics and the filth of soldiering and the absurd notion of a moral distinction between a stiletto blade in a spine and a good, clean kill. 

Killing is never clean.

Thomas’ blood on the floor, her first kill squealing like a stuck pig, the Queen’s noble head emerging from a tent while a white robe turned red. Blood sticks – even fine fabrics cannot deny it.

“What about the King?” 

Whatever Aramis is drinking, he chokes on it.

Very carefully, Constance asks–

“What about the King?”

“He granted me clemency. I’m a free woman. What’s to stop me leaving?”

Treville looks at Athos. 

Something in her stutters – only for a second, and then she’s grabbing fistfuls of herself, a feeling like fingernails sharp and familiar against her ribcage. It stings all the same: the thought that Athos might have told them. About the crossroads, about the cupboard. 

Do you maintain that my brother tried to rape you? 

His voice had been hoarse, his expression broken and perhaps she was too, if she had really believed him capable of changing. 

She summons a sneer, something to stop the situation unspooling more than it already has, except–

Athos clears his throat. 

“The Crown is willing to pay.”

It’s almost worse. Money is so – banal. Common. As cheap as she is. Because if there’s one thing she has never had enough of, it is coin. 

She snorts. “Louis will throw a regal tantrum as soon as he sees me.” Athos’ jaw clenches. “What makes you think he’ll put me on the payroll? Unless–” She scans the faces in front of her, the way they’re all studiously not looking at a certain one of their number. “Ah. It’s not the King’s payroll I’m on, is it? Tell me, musketeer, how is Her Majesty bearing up after her ordeal?” She runs a tongue along her lips, sharpening it. “My, my. Did you learn nothing from Rocheforte? Barely a day out of the Bastille and already you’re providing a shoulder for her to… Hmm. I'm sure she's finding a use for it, anyway.”

“That’s enough.”

Athos holds up a hand. 

She ignores him. It's Treville she's talking to now.

“Whatever you’re paying the rest of them, I want ten times as much. And my own quarters. And a clothing allowance. Equal to what I had at the Louvre. And–”

“Looks like she’s staying,” Porthos says drily. 

She wants to say that she doesn’t have a choice. That a list of demands makes it easier to play her part, and it’s a damn sight better than looking anywhere near Athos. Would he be relieved? Resolved? Disgusted? She can’t say that this is just another contract, ink now but blood already welling against wherever she will sign. She thinks of a papal seal, a leathery hand forcing her chin upwards, a screaming, writhing mass inside her mind that she had to teach and trim until it looked like anything approaching revenge, anything other than a name, over and over and–

She’s done it before. 

What’s another choice, at the end of it all? They all end up taken from her. 

She could tell them all of that. Make Athos hear exactly how she sealed her last contract. 

Instead she says, “I’m not done."

— 

He catches her arm once the others leave. Porthos is telling some story about a Portuguese envoy, a melon spoon, and a very naked Aramis, and Constance is chiding one of the new recruits about his uniform, and D’Artagnan and Aramis are arm in arm as if affection were something easy. Maybe it is, for them.

Athos’ fingers dig in. She hopes they’ll leave bruises. Maybe they’ll look like affection, all broken veins and purple blotches against her skin. 

His eyes are wild and she wants to say it again. I’m not done. 

He opens his mouth and she remembers how she used to call him Oliver, how he could barely get the word out when he first introduced himself, the shape of his mouth all he could manage, O-O-O-Oliver, and she can’t bear it. 

“It’s forgotten.” 

He frowns, caught. 

“The crossroads. The palace. Everything. Consider it a parting gift, since we never got to the parting part.”

“Anne–”

“No.”

He makes a noise in his throat that once would have been anger.

“I said you were a soldier, once. Same as me.” Her locket tangled in her fingers; their breaths, tangling in the Paris alley; her hands in his hair, soft and greedy. “Looks like I was right. So let’s be soldiers. Everything else is just–”

Her throat closes around her, but there he is, her husband, who was always better at politics than he gave himself credit for.

“They don’t know. What you offered.”

She nods, not trusting herself to speak. It hurts, somehow. Not her pride – something nearly forgotten, ill-used. So he hadn’t even trusted his brothers with the truth. Hadn’t trusted that the offer of a common street slut wasn’t contaminated, catching. Her fingertips are singed all the same. 

She nods. 

“Let’s be soldiers.”

—

“Is this really necessary?” 

She slings a look around the men ranged around her. Toy soldiers, playing at war. Asking her to join their games. 

She’s in a pissy mood and she’s going to make sure the whole of Paris knows it by the end of the day. That’ll teach Treville not to give orders that she be woken at dawn – dawn, like she’s a common labourer – with an icy bucket of water and a gruff voiced husband ordering her to be in the courtyard in ten minutes or he’ll send in Porthos. 

The four prancing twats, or whatever nickname they go by nowadays, are ranged in front of her. Waiting.

This is what happens when men get to stay children, she thinks, women get to do all the growing up. “I know how to kill.”

“But not to fight.” 

Athos is firm. 

“Fighting gets you killed.”

“Ain’t that the fun part?” Porthos asks. 

“How like a man to say so.” 

“How like an assassin to look down on a soldier for liking an honest fight,” Aramis, ever one for flowery words, counters. 

She closes one eye, sighting down the musket. Breathes in, once, twice. Takes in Athos at the end of her aim. Cocks her weapon. 

She always takes what she can get, so she takes the shot.

It cracks around the garrison, ringing like a slap. 

Athos traces the place ripped in the torn target by her musket ball. It’s slightly to the left of the centre. Only by an inch, but it’s there. 

Aramis whistles.

“Athos said you were good,” he says, like it’s a secret, like the two of them might share secrets, “he didn’t say you were nearly as good as me.”

“Because she missed.”

“Come on now,” Aramis is telling her husband, “she missed the centre by a hair.”

“She missed,” Athos insists.

His face is impassive. 

“Fine,” she snaps, then raises her voice. “I suppose one inch means more to you than it does to me.”

Athos says nothing. Only takes a pistol from his belt, loads, fires.

It lands a breath south of the centre. 

Aramis whistles. 

She raises an eyebrow and asks–

“Did I hit a nerve?” 

“Hit the fucking target,” Athos tells her. 

She shrugs. Fires. 

The musket ball rips through the centre.

There’s the torn stitches of a smile playing in the corner of Athos’ mouth when she turns around. She wants to rip them out of his face. 

“Push me again,” she tells him. “And the next shot goes through your fucking liver.”

Aramis nods approvingly. Looks like they both know the second best way to get information out of an informant. She wonders how he squares that talent with his god.

She wonders if Aramis knows the best way to get what he wants out of men. 

Athos does.

“Can you do it with distractions?”

She pulls another pistol from his belt. 

Her posture is perfect, her hand steady, and the shot is just ripping through her when the Captain of the Musketeers coughs. 

“Spit it out,” she says, adjusting her stance. 

“I’m curious,” Athos admits. “You looked almost eager at the crossroads. Did you really think I would consider coming with you?” 

There’s the clatter of plaster, shot out of a wall and onto the ground of the garrison. The wall had it coming, Milady reasons, slapping the pistol into Aramis’ palm. 

Athos is already holding the next one out to her. 

“Unsurprising. You seem convinced that I will always ensure your survival. With Catherine. When you were thrown from the Louvre. In the eclipse.” She ignores him, until– “When I let you leave Paris.” The bolt handle catches, her breath is ragged in her throat but she will shoot, she has make these fucking children think she’s one of them, can march to their tune, shoot in their unindurable, precise lines. “The first time I dragged you out the gutter.”

She doesn’t care that she’s in the middle of the musketeer stronghold. 

She presses the pistol against the smug prick’s throat. 

Aramis exclaims. Porthos and D’Artagnan and Treville and about seven new recruits whose names she couldn’t care less for are already running towards them. 

Athos waves a hand. 

“Do you think I’ll hit the target this way?” She asks sweetly. 

“Even now, you look to me as a way out,” he says, soft enough that it could be merciful. “Why is that?”

She would claw her way through his throat if it meant she could live another minute. She could shoot him here and now and never think on him once. 

He’s hard against her hip. 

“Take the shot,” he murmurs.

The pistol is still at his throat.

She lowers it, just enough that the target becomes a more likely victim than the captain’s thyroid. 

“I hate you,” she tells him.

Aramis’ whoops tell her where the shot flew.

Porthos claps Athos on the shoulder.

It looks easy, but Milady recognises it. There’s anger in there, and something else, something jagged and uneasy. It brushes against her sides and she nearly gasps in recognition. I know you, she wants to say to Porthos, to the delicate and desperate thing shuttering in his eyes. 

“Was that really necessary?” He asks, and he may as well have cut a rope, untied the rich stays of a street thief who does not belong in a court. 

Athos jerks his head. 

“She is not one of us. And she has to be.”

D’Artagnan is laughing at something Aramis said, and Athos is turning away, but Porthos catches her staring. He looks back at her, into her, and she wants to scream. Do you feel it?  She wants to ask him. Did the hunger ever really leave you? Does sleeping on anything except cobbles feel like an ending? Do you ever hate them because they were ready made, but we had to rip ourselves open a hundred times for a second glance? 

“Can you?” Porthos says suddenly, not taking his eyes off Milady. She thinks he’s heard her until Athos turns, and his brother in arms is asking again. “Can you do it with distractions?”

There’s a hardness in his eyes. Athos doesn’t challenge it.

Just accepts a musket. Finds his stance.

Porthos winks at Milady. 

She’s already moving. 

Athos tilts his head like he expected her touch. A hand on his shoulder, her breath on his cheek; he hasn’t kissed her since Rochefort and his breath stutters out of him as she leans in–

And knees him in the groin. 

A horse whinnies in shocked pain, its rump bleeding profusely, but she’s too busy cackling at her husband. 

He looks up, eyes red and watering. 

She could almost swear he’s laughing too.

— 

She goes back there every morning. 

He watches her from his window, then the balcony, the benches. 

One morning, he finds himself handing her a staff and taking up a fighting stance. 

She comes whirling at his elbows, knees, wrists, soft parts, hardly stopping to let the sunrise catch its breath. 

He wonders where she learnt to train like that. Where she learned to spit out defencelessness like it is something sour in her mouth, like it should curl like a bloody lip and die at the corners of a grim smile. He tries not to think about the men in which those lessons were delivered. 

He does not succeed, because there she is, gasping around a blow he hardly saw himself deliver. 

There he is, helping her rise. 

Chapter Text

III.

“Absolutely not.”

“Athos–”

“Did you not hear me? No.”

Treville folds his arms, solid and immovable behind his desk. “Rochefort visited that brothel near-daily. Enough that Perales knew to look there for his assassin.”

“We all know how well that went,” comes Porthos’ aside. Milady preens at that. He knocks her with his shoulder. With his strength, the movement smacks her hip into the bureau by the wall they’re leaning on. It’s violent, but there’s a gruff kind of respect in it. More, when he winks at her, eyes sparkling. 

“No is such an ugly word,” Aramis muses. 

“Depends how you say it,” Athos scowls. “It’s all in the delivery. Here, listen: no.”

“Athos, can we please talk about this?”

“No is a wonderful word,” Athos says, gaining speed and syllables. “Let’s try again. You ask me if I’m prepared to sign off on lunacy and I say, why, no. ”

They’ve been like this for near-half an hour, battering away at each other as if they’re trying to bring new meaning to the word bullish and destroy the good mood she had worked up handing Athos his arse at training this morning and dragging information out of one of her informants. Dragging the informant too, now she comes to think of it. He was hardly out of short trousers. Would likely be back in them soon, since he’d soiled himself shortly before telling her that Rochefort always paid for a half hour’s bed but settled his account a handful of minutes after that. Too many to simply be dawdling on the stairs. Which meant, to anyone with a brain (and the remaining musketeers bereft in that department)–

“Rochefort was slippery,” Treville explains with crystallising patience. “Rarely met anyone removed from palace affairs. Kept to himself where he could.” Aramis furnishes the room with a rare scowl. “We have no idea where to begin looking for the first thread of the network of informants he inherited from the Cardinal. That he dawdled in the brothel, outwith his–”

“Deposits?” D’Artagnan offers helpfully. Then: “Milady, you’re the professional. What would you call it?”

Milady glances at D’Artagnan and Constance. They’re folded into each other, the way couples often do, like they’ve been together long enough that they eroded the edges of each other: D’Artagnan perches on a table, thumbing Constance’s cheek absent-mindedly while she leans her head against his knee, using him more than the chair she sits on. In this, perhaps, she cannot fault D’Artagnan’s judgement: the draper’s wife is lovely, smiles easily and angers easier still. She smelled like soap and sunshine, even in Saracen’s basement. The scent had lingered for days, along with the blood she had spilled. She shifts, unwittingly shaking off Milady’s gaze. 

Did she and Athos ever look like that? Likely not, she decides. Steel doesn’t wear steel, only leaves scratches. 

“Opportunity,” she decides, tearing her gaze away from the newly-weds. “If he’s meeting someone in that window, if there’s the beginning of the cardinal’s network sequestered in that place…”

“We should begin there,” Porthos finishes, clapping his hands together. 

“Which leads me on to the plan. We need someone on the inside. Someone who will attract little suspicion. Someone who can gain the trust of those inside the brothel.”

She knew it was coming. It doesn’t stop the sharp, gritty sting that goes through her. Worse, the way it all feels so inevitable. Because of course she’s back here. She’s always back here, so much that it sometimes feels as if she’s never anywhere else: the gutter, Saracen’s foxholes, Athos’ estate and Thomas’ stare and the Cardinal’s employ and every waking moment and of course, she was brought back to Paris for the only thing she’s ever been good for. Constance’s eyes are melancholy when they meet hers and it makes her want to scream.

She opens her mouth to agree. 

Only someone beats her to it.

Porthos had looked uncomfortable from the moment Treville began to brush up against the edges of the plan. She finally knows why when he shuffles his shoulders, looking smaller than his usual self and gives a weary–

“I can do it.”

The entire room snorts. Even her.

Porthos’ reluctance evaporates. 

“What?” He looks at each of them in turn, then the mirror by the door. “What? What!” He studies his reflection, tilting his head this way and that. The snorts turn into full-blown hysterics. “I could be a courtesan. You don’t know. I might make a great courtesan.”

“I–” Aramis pats him on the shoulder, hiccuping. “I know, buddy. You could put all of Madame Devallay’s out of business with your – hic – legendary skills. But maybe you’re not – hic – quite the build of your typical–”

“What he’s saying is,” D’Artagnan chirps, “no one’s going to give good coin to a prostitute who looks like he’s more likely to break their spine instead of the bed.”

Porthos looks relieved, then scowls to save face.

“They don’t know what they’re missing.”

“I know, buddy,” Aramis says soothingly. “But let’s face facts. There’s one obvious candidate to assume the position by, if you’ll pardon me, assuming the position.” He seemed confused by the blank looks on the other musketeers’ faces. “Me. I’ll do it.” The wave of his hand is classic Lothario – almost enough to distract Milady from his clenched jaw. If she didn’t know better, she might call the musketeer reluctant. 

“We know you will,” Treville sighs.

“That’s why we kept it well away from you,” D’Artagnan adds.

“We’re just worried…”

“We thought maybe…”

Milady snorts. Purely to be helpful, she fills in the gap.

“You know that he’s already fucked half of Paris and that putting him in a brothel will have one of three effects: he’ll bump into enough old flames to burn our cover down to the ground; he’ll be the epicentre of the worst syphilis epidemic since Henry the Eighth started window shopping for wife five; or he’ll enjoy it too much and forget he used to be a musketeer in the first place. Or maybe he’ll outdo even our expectations! After all, his libido is currently to blame for one international conflict.” Aramis looks smug. Men, she thinks viciously. “Why stop there?”

Treville holds up a hand. “I am not sending Aramis. There is an obvious candidate–”

“Finally addressing the prostitute in the room…” D’Artagnan mumbles. 

Constance elbows him. Hard.

God, Milady likes her. That complicates things. She doesn’t want to like Constance Bonnacieux. But the girl’s got dark curls and enough steel strapped to her to constitute a small armoury. What’s the harm in looking? She may not particularly care for her own reflection but she’s never been able to resist walking past a mirror without seeing what lies behind the glass.

“You have a whore in your arsenal,” she finishes the war minister’s thought. “You may as well use her.” She puts enough emphasis on use to make sure Treville loses sleep over it.

He meets her eye and she knows he won’t.

“And here we are again,” Athos says, soft as death. “And I still say no. ”

“This is hardly your choice,” Aramis reminds his friend. 

“What pretty boy means,” she tells Athos, “is shut your fucking mouth and let the grown ups do the talking.” God, she had missed swearing like a sewer rat when she’d been in the cardinal’s employment. Here, no one cares about taking the Lord’s name in vain. Hell, Treville looks like he’s about to let loose a creative torrent about some of the less holy disciples if she says another word. She wouldn’t mind hearing that, so she gives Athos another little smile and says: “How like your family to answer on my behalf. You have to appreciate the irony, though; you seem convinced my answer is no, whereas Thomas wouldn’t have known the meaning of the word if it was screamed a dozen times.” Her next grin shows teeth. “I should know.”

Aramis is looking at her like he’s never seen her before. Or… Not her. His stare goes through her, like he’s seeing someone else. Hearing someone else. He touches the crucifix at his neck. Opens his mouth like he might say something. If it’s prayer, she doesn’t trust herself not to vomit.

Athos is silent too, and she’s almost disappointed it was that easy. 

Until he leans forward and hits her with an–

“Talk like that hardly volunteers you for such a task. We need someone unfazed by such an environment. Not a hot-headed, broken fool who will turn tail at the first man who won’t take no for an answer.”

She tackles him. 

It’s sudden enough that Athos has no time for resistance. She takes him out of his chair, down to the ground. There’s a roaring in her mind that could be silence, could be her. Her teeth feel like fangs, like they might cut her lip, and all she can think about is burying them in Athos’ neck and ripping out everything she can reach. His head smacks against the floor and she wonders absently whether she might have gone too far. She slams his head into the ground again. This time, the noise it makes is a dull, wet thud. Athos’ eyes have gone glassy. 

It’s the only time she’s ever thought he looked like his brother.

The realisation makes her dig her thumbs into his windpipe.

There’s shouts around her, useless fucking noise that won’t stop her killing her husband. She reaches for the steel at her belt. She’s going to bleed him like she bled Thomas and he’ll die looking up at her like she’s the only death he’s ever wanted. Is it wrong? That the only time he looks like he wants her is when she’s killing him? Or is it just that death and lust look the same on him? That there’s rarely been a distinction, especially when it comes to her? 

It won’t stop her killing him; just takes the sting out of it. 

Until, that is–

Porthos grabs them each by the scruffs of their necks and forces them back into their seats. 

“Athos, that’s out of line. Milady, put the knife away. He says shit like that again, I’ll help you bash his teeth in. Until then, both of you can sit the fuck down.”

Athos raises a hand to his throat, considering.

D’Artagnan makes no attempt to conceal his disgust when he looks at her.

“Send her in,” he says. “What do we care if she goes berserk? Maybe they’ll do us a favour and put her down for us.”

“Oi–” 

She holds up a hand and Porthos clams up, though he doesn’t look happy about it. She congratulates herself. Her one ally, lost.

“It’s my call.”

“Couldn’t agree more,” D’Artagnan waves a hand in mock-chivalry. “What do we care?”

“I care,” Athos says suddenly.

“Terrific,” Treville mutters. 

“I am your captain and she is my wife and I refuse to entertain this ridiculous idea any further–”

Porthos’ hand cracks down on the table. “Have you noticed she’s only your wife when you want something?”

D’Artagnan and Athos’ heads snap to Porthos as one. She only notices because hers does the exact same.

“The fuck does that mean?” 

Athos takes the opportunity of D’Artagnan’s distraction to get another shot in.

“I don’t see you volunteering Constance.”

D'Artagnan is out of his chair and inches from Athos’ face faster than Athos can regret bringing her into this. Worst luck, because without time to register that he was being a stupid prick, Athos shoves D’Artagnan backwards. The younger musketeer brings his fist with him on the rebound.

Athos barely flinches on the blow. 

“Happy to!” Constance is saying. Milady nearly closes her eyes, at the eagerness in her voice. So young. Then again, she’d been young once. It hadn’t made the blindest bit of difference.  “Let me go! Let me help!”

“Constance,” D’Artagnan says through his teeth. Athos seems to be calculating how hard he will have to hit the younger musketeer to take some of those teeth out. “Stay out of this.”

Constance looks murderous. 

“Athos–”

“I said no. ”

D’Artagnan stares at Athos, incredulity dawning on his face. If she didn’t know better, she would have said there was hurt there, too. Actually…

Athos and the younger boy up against the alley wall where she had deposited Athos only seconds before. A hand sliding through shorter hair than it had been tangled in moments ago, burning away the last of the past. The golden boy, reducing the remainder of her to ashes. A forget-me-not in her locket, wound around her finger. A newer bloom wound around Athos, aiding her oblivion. 

She does know better. And there’s hurt in D’Artagnan’s eyes, open and trusting, even as that trust breaks a little.

She was always going to say it. Maybe draw out the debate a little longer, make them sweat for it. She didn’t think she would be opening her mouth because of the look that passes between D'Artagnan and Athos. She just wants to be rid of it. Can’t bear to see Athos look at D’Artagnan with a soft, broken expression that says forgive me? She had never gotten a sodding apology. And he’d broken her neck, not her fucking feelings.

“For fuck’s sake, I’ll do it.” 

Six sets of eyes slide to her. 

She seeks out her husband. 

Athos’s jaw is set, a black eye blooms, courtesy of D’Artagnan, but the marks are nothing compared to the undiluted fury on his face.

She gives him a grim little smile that she knows he will be puzzling over for days. 

“Sounds like my kind of fun.”

—

“Remind me why she can’t just give us all the names? She was part of the network too.” 

D’Artagnan plays with a thread on Athos’ cuff. The motion is quiet, careless, and she might feel as if she were interrupting if it wasn’t her husband and her old lover, discussing the woman they’d both fucked over in endlessly creative and occasionally gymnastic ways.

Athos’ eyes are soft and her breath catches on the hurt of it. She remembers when she was the bright young thing with which he might have been gentle, once. 

“We do not know,” Athos says, careful, “how much she knows. She may be toying with us, for time, for coin. Or she may not.”

“Do you trust her?”

“You trusted Porthos and Aramis, when you first came to Paris. You trusted the men who might well have killed your father. To save me.”

“From her. It was her plan that nearly got you hanged–”

“I lived.” There’s a finality in it, something that says so stop asking. It’s well-practised enough that she wonders how many times they’ve had this conversation. How many times they’ve been too caught up in whatever past they shared before Constance, after her, during, to notice the woman hidden in the passageway behind them. Athos had shot D’Artagnan, she remembers. For show and her sake, but the thread tugs at her all the same: the implacable remembrance of how Athos loves. A ring around her neck, Ninon’s pillaged estate, the scar that decorates D’Artagnan’s side. She remembers binding the wound Athos had left. She had wondered then, and she wonders now, if Athos had seen over the end of its healing, as she had seen over its beginning. If he had pressed a kiss to the damage he had done in a way he had never done for her. An image presses itself into her mind: Athos’ hands skating over D’Artagnan’s sides, careful to avoid the ribs he had broken, guarding the breath in his lover’s chest like it were something worth holding onto. 

Her throat like old rope, she shoves past them. D’Artagnan has to catch his footing, swordplay grace filling in the space where a stair should have been; he rights himself with a glare. 

“I was never a part of the cardinal’s network,” she says, not bothering to turn around. If she has to catch their conversation, they should show her the same fucking courtesy. 

D’Artagnan’s scoff snakes around her ankle.

She wants to stamp it out, squeeze the smug life out of it with her heel. She wants to find Constance Bonnaciueux and even the score, but that’s an impulse to examine later.

“I was an entirely different creature.”