Work Text:
"How do you love me?" Roxane asks Cyrano once, with mischief in her tone. Her petit point was cast aside some minutes earlier with a frustrated sigh, and finding Christian an unsatisfying playmate ("I love you very much," he had said with a grin, laughing when she swatted his shoulder) she turned her attention to Cyrano.
But Cyrano does not lift his gaze at her teasing, nor does his quill pause on the manuscript—he only smiles. "You know I love you as the stars love the night, for it gives them reason to be."
Roxane grins, leaning forward eagerly. "But surely they still hang in the sky during the day, outshone as they are by Heaven’s greater star. Does your love so pale beside others’?"
Cyrano does look up at that, a thoughtful expression on his face. "Yes," he said slowly. "Yes, it does pale—for surely if there is any eye that could take more delight in you, it is Heaven’s, seeing as it does truth, that beauty veiled even to love-struck eyes."
Christian leans back on the chaise, watching the both of them with amusement, and a sense of contented well-being.The light moves slowly across the floor, and there is poetry in the air.
.
Cyrano loses his purse like clockwork, halfway through the month, and always in some gesture too grand and noble to protest. The poor of Paris never ate so well as the noon he bought out Ragueneau’s pastry shop; d’Assoucy refuses to compose for the Cardinal citing “reasons of honor” and finds an appreciative audience. Wherever fool-headed bravado is in need of patronage, there is Cyrano de Bergerac, scattering coins.
Christian quietly replaces every sou, writing it into his expenses under, ‘donations to saint jude the gascoigne’.
.
Cyrano continues to write Roxane, as though to encircle her with words—he leaves verses to her in the margins of her books, on the backs of receipts, once in chalk on the courtyard wall, scraps of paper left in her boudoir and among her needlework and beside her plate, each dedicated to her lips, her eyes, the light as it lay on her breast in that morning, the way that she throws her head back when Christian's fingers—
(Well. It was unfortunate that the maid read those particular lines before Roxane did.)
Christian does not know when Roxane begins making reply, though he does remember her bitterness over how little guidance the canon of letters provided for a lady to write of her love. Yet Roxane scrawls couplets on the edges of invitations she knows Cyrano will see, stitches odes on his handkerchiefs—once, she writes a whole ballade to the thrusting of her knight's sword on a roll of butcher's paper, and delivers it to Cyrano wrapped around a sausage.
(Christian still thinks on that memory, bright and untempered as it is, when the nights spent campaigning grow long. Cyrano had turned the color of a radish and stared at Roxane as though she were some foreign creature. "It is called a euphemism, my love," she told him slyly, and Christian had been dizzy with laughing.)
Christian finds their skirmishes of lovemaking endlessly amusing and pronounces each word perfection itself, taking a perverse delight in how greatly it frustrates them. He is a singularly unhelpful editor, but there are two letters of theirs he keeps for himself, faded as the ink may be and curling at the edges. The first is written on lined paper, stolen from Christian's ledger. In Roxane's hand, is only a few lines, a list: violets, lilies, mignonettes, and roses, eggs; the cake that Ragueneau baked fresh, and crumbled, warm, in my mouth. My mother's letters. Cyrano's mouth. Christian's hands.
The second is in Cyrano's less-graceful scrawl, on a plain page:
No gilded pillars in holy temples, nor marbled palaces’ elaborate lines,
Nor even gold, or pearl embroidery, nor sweet pleasure could delight my eyes.
For that famous crown I feel no longing, that sacred wreath, gold-haired Apollo wore;
But to hear my lovers' footfalls coming toward me, from just beyond the door.
.
Roxane falls ill with the grippe one wet winter, and so they depart for Gascony, like birds flying south. Roxane nearly falls out of the carriage waving her handkerchief when Bergerac comes into view; she shouts greetings in Gascon until her already weak voice goes, but even then she cannot stop smiling.
Christian endures the mockery of mothers, fathers, aunts and miscellaneous cousins good-naturedly, expecting it as the Picard husband of Gascony’s great beauty. Cyrano gets him spectacularly drunk on Armagnac brandy to soften the blow, which helps.
Christian crawls into Roxane’s bed that night not entirely sure where his knees are, but certain they love his wife and their Gascon poet. He kisses every inch of exposed skin he can find, until he is at her hands, her breast, her shoulders—he tilts his head up to kiss her mouth, only to find her smiling.
"You’ll get the grippe," she protests, even as her fingers wind in the laces of his doublet, tugging him closer..
"You could never hurt me," he says, kissing her brow. He stops suddenly, pulling away. "Are you happy, Roxana?" he whispers.
"Yes, very," she says, stroking his cheek. In the faint moonlight from the window, she is the all the stars in the sky, and her eyes are full of the night. "You know," she says speculatively, "there is a little servant’s passageway between our rooms and Cyrano’s."
Christian and Cyrano have the grippe three days later. Roxane laughs until she is coughing, and even then.
.
"I love you," Christian breathes, kissing Roxane’s brow as she sleeps, clutching a quill to her breast like a lover’s token.
"I love you," Christian groans, Cyrano’s rough hand fisted in his hair.
I love you (still) I love you (yes) I love you (very much)
He has never thought of it as insufficient.