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Athos had always been of the belief that it would be a sword that brought him down; lying on his back on a bed of leaves with a great sucking, gaping wound in his chest, he feels nothing but encroaching cold and mild surprise. War has changed, and so too had the manner of his demise: logical, even predictable. Every breath is a gasp, but they don’t trouble him. Death is cradling him in a kindly but somewhat detached grip, as if pain and struggle are someone else’s affair.
It will get to him in its own time.
No longer a young man, nor an old one. He would say he has seen far fewer summers than he has winters, and though the roar of gunfire he can no longer hear and the sharp crack of powder in the air mean eventual victory, it no longer seems to have anything to do with him. He is waiting, with the cool air soft on his face, with the forest whirling all around him, to die. Before his time, some will say. In good time, he knows. He has never longed for old bones.
The snap of a twig.
The hem of a cloak.
Oddly, he isn’t surprised that she is here either, neither that she has chosen to come, nor that she looks the same. Her beautiful face is unlined, her green eyes are set with the same slant. She drops to her knees beside him with the air of a duchesse dropping into a curtsey, unhurried, and her gaze and her being obliterate the wintry sky.
“Not the most compromising position I have seen you in.”
He wants to ask her what she is doing here, but already knows. She leans forward, and the velvet of her sleeve whispers over the ragged hole the shot has punched through him, and somehow there is less than no pain. She lays her gloved hand on his cheek, and he wishes away the leather. He stares at her, unspeaking, utterly understanding how and why she is here, why it is her, why it could only ever end like this. He longs for the warmth of her hand, but nothing will banish the ice in his veins now.
His waking mind knows it has been years, and that she is dead. His dreaming being knows that is irrelevant. She is here, evidently here, she has walked through corpses and their blood has not muddied her hem.
She is here, and that is all that matters.
“I am here to take you home.”
He must have looked the question, for she screws up her face a little. For an apparition, she is entirely herself, and appears disgusted at the unspoken question.
“Whom would you prefer, the other one?”
There was another one, but he can barely remember her now. In this fog, he sees only his wife, the deep red hood set back off her pale face, the dark curls of hair so much more innocent than the bones beneath. So little seems of note now, for death knows its business in whom it sends.
He watches her, drinks her in, does not feel the insistent drenching of his clothes and the ground below that spell his doom.
He has another question.
“Yes,” she says quietly, and with a sudden leap of his heart he sees that her throat is smooth, pretty, unblemished. “I forgive you.”
She has kept her head, as he is losing his body.
“Come home, Olivier.”
There is a brightness behind her, a warm July sun. It shines so brightly that he takes no notice of the crowd now growing around him, the weeping younger man, his stoic elder standing by, the rage of the third. Brothers, sons, their sons. More men come, more hats are removed, and he pays them no mind. He cannot see or hear them – he could never see or hear anyone else when she and he were in the same sphere. She is obliterative, and the small curve of her smile is calling to him.
“Anne.” The final syllable is lost on the wind, but she hears it.
“Come home to me,” she says, and he finds he is smiling back at her.
I'll follow thee and make a heaven of hell / To die upon the hand I love so well