Work Text:
The candle has burnt itself out, and Francis has nothing to relight it with.
The room is so perfectly dark. He has no way of knowing how long he has been here. His hunger has dulled to a slow ache. He has not got any less hungry, instead he rather thinks that he has got used to it.
His mouth is so dry that he would not taste food, anyway.
“You have the appetite of ten squires,” a slight boy in his mind’s eye says, throwing out his arms. “No – a hundred!”
“I have a perfectly healthy appetite,” he tells the shade in his mind, and he almost senses that he feels the boy laugh.
He falls asleep at the desk, and his ribs do not thank him for it.
He dreams of oh-so-serious eyes and fleeting smiles. He dreams of pale and sturdy skin flexing under his own, actions that would go against the church if they knew. He dreams of the boy made man, of coronations and births, of disappearing children that the boy wept for every night.
He dreams of Richard.
And then he wakes.
“How,” he tells the emptiness, his voice a mere croak now. “I almost thought that was you calling me.”
The darkness does not respond.
Francis has been so alone for so very long. Even before he fled here, in the dead of night and still spitting blood from Stoke Field, he was alone. He has been alone for years, the clash of polearms and swords still ringing in his ears as a voice bellows “Treason!” with a dying scream.
“Now I am the traitor,” he chuckles to himself, his ribs aching with every breath. “Fool of a Tudor gave away my land, did you know?”
“Arise, Viscount Lovell,” the darkness says, a royal duke staring at him as he kneels in Northern mud. “Arise and continue to serve.”
“Always,” he says, and lets the darkness take him. “I will always serve you.”
The light when he wakes hurts his eyes. He has been in darkness for too long. He is lying on a bed softer than the one in his secret cell; the softest bed he has felt in a very long time.
His ribs do not hurt.
Francis feels – strange. Younger, if he were to put it into words, but he could not stop and explain just how he knew that.
He takes to his feet slowly, watching as his legs tremble. He is in his undershirt and breeches, but his feet are bare. His hair is unbound, and he reaches up a hand to tug it off his shoulders, tying it with a thin leather strap that has been left on the dresser.
The room is sparse and plain – like a squire’s room in Middleham, a world he remembers well.
(He is not that young, he decides, after perusing himself in the mirror. He does not have the scars from Scotland and the North yet. If pushed – perhaps he is early into his second decade.)
Outside, he hears the clash of swords and iron, and yet he does not hear the dying screams that he would associate with it.
I am dead! he realises all of a sudden. I am dead, I am finished, I am free of that awful place.
And he dares hope.
Down the stairs he goes; it is a castle that he does not recognise, but one he feels he knows. Perhaps – he stops before he reaches what he knows instantly is the Great Hall – perhaps this is – mayhap that other world was his dream. Perhaps this is who he is, a young knight in a castle he does not know the name of.
Perhaps he did not see Richard die.
Perhaps Richard was part of that world.
“I would rather be dead,” Francis tells himself firmly, his voice ringing out amongst the stonework as clear and bright as he remembers hearing himself. “I would rather be in that cell with him in my memories than know he didn’t exist at all.”
And so he opens the door.
There is a swarm of people inside that hall, more than Francis has seen in an age, and many he knows, but he sees none but the man sitting to the right of the throne, playing with the hilt of his dagger as though nervous hands must have an occupation.
“And what took you so long?” Richard asks, and motions to the empty seat beside him. “I have been waiting for quite the while.”