Chapter Text
The road into Paris was not as they had left it.
Claire had known, in the abstract, practical way she knew most things, that five years of war would leave marks on the city as surely as they had left marks on everything else. She had known it the way she knew that December was cold and the Seine ran fast in spring.
The feeling arrived anyway, somewhere along the last mile, when the road widened and the first outlying houses appeared, and Paris began to press its weight against the horizon.
It was louder than she remembered. More crowded. The road was thick with traffic that moved in sullen, jostling waves: carts piled with household goods, men on foot with everything they owned bundled onto their backs, hollow-eyed children running alongside with no destination. Refugees.
They had left the border one week earlier; war, it seemed, had followed them home by a different road.
“Well,” Porthos said, drawing up alongside her. He surveyed the scene with a frown, as though revising his expectations downward. “There it is. Paris.”
“The court will be delighted to see us,” Aramis remarked, adjusting the brim of his hat against the winter light.
“The court,” Athos said from just behind her left shoulder, “will be busy arguing about who replaces Richelieu and will not have noticed we were gone.”
“For five years?” d’Artagnan said.
“They have a great deal to argue about.”
Claire glanced at Athos. He was watching the road ahead, his expression composed in that way that meant he was already reading something in it. His eyes found her for a heartbeat, as if he had felt her gaze on him. Something soft and bright flickered there before it settled; he tilted his head toward the city walls. She answered with a quick smile and faced forward.
“How long do you think before someone tries to kill one of us?” d’Artagnan asked.
“Optimistically?” Porthos said. “Three days.”
“I give it one,” Aramis said. “Perhaps less, if we enter through the main gate.”
“We are entering through the main gate,” Athos said.
“Then I revise my estimate.”
Just then, the gates came into view. The sound hit them first: voices overlapping and colliding, and underneath it all, something newer and harder to name. Tension.
Then the movement: a press of bodies filling the street ahead, surging in two directions at once, and between them the flash of red coats and drawn steel.
“Trouble ahead,” Porthos said, already urging his horse forward.
“There you go,” Aramis said dryly.
The crowd broke apart around them as they pushed in, forcing a path through the press of bodies. On one side: people, dozens of them, the same hollow-eyed exhaustion Claire had seen on the road dressed now in desperation. On the other: Red Guards, advancing in a tight, orderly line. Between them, a narrow strip of street that was rapidly becoming a battlefield.
“Where are our boys, Marchaux?” a voice bellowed from somewhere in the press.
“They were taken three nights ago!” another echoed.
“Back. Stay back!”
A captain emerged from the Red Guard line, barking orders at the crowd and at his own men in the same breath. Claire registered him in a single sweep: tall, well-fed, wearing his authority like a coat he had not earned and had never thought to question. His hand was already raised to wave his men forward.
“I should throw you all in jail. That would teach you.”
“Bastard!” came the answer, and a stone flew in a long arc, followed by another, then several at once. The Red Guard kept advancing, blades half-drawn.
“This is getting ugly,” Aramis murmured. His hand was already moving to the pistol at his belt.
Athos slid from the saddle and turned to look at Claire. “Stay here.”
“Wait. Look,” she said.
A flash of familiar blue cloaks cut through the press of guards and civilians: a handful of young men wearing the Musketeer colours, looking quite lost and frightened as they tried to talk the crowd back without laying hands on anyone, and among them—
Claire narrowed her eyes. “Is that—?”
“Constance.”
D’Artagnan had already dismounted. He lunged into the crowd, his eyes fixed on the small figure who had placed herself in front of Marchaux, chin lifted, her blue eyes bright with anger.
Athos shot an alarmed glance at d’Artagnan and dove into the crowd after him.
“What is this, Marchaux?” Constance was saying, her hands at her hips. “The people are asking for an explanation, and your answer is to draw steel?”
Marchaux looked down at her with open disdain. “Out of the way, woman,” he growled. “Or I’ll arrest you along with the rest of them.”
“You arrogant—”
The slap cut clean through the noise of the street. Claire flinched at the sound of it.
Constance’s head turned with the blow; she gasped and brought a hand to her cheek.
From somewhere in the crush, d’Artagnan’s roar broke free — “Don’t you dare touch her!” — as he shoved toward them through bodies that weren’t moving fast enough.
But someone else reached Marchaux first.
From the thick of the crowd, a figure surged forward, quick like lightning. Claire barely had time to register a dark braid snapping in the cold air, and a grin that was equal parts ferocity and delight—
And then Théa’s fist connected squarely with Marchaux’s jaw.
The sound was deeply satisfying.
The silence that followed was approximately one second long. Then everything happened at once.