Fearless

For an anonymous flashfic prompt: "D'Artagnan and Constance talk about having children one day (I feel the show really dropped the ball on this one because they both seemed to have different views but I feel like it was more to do with Constance being scared of having to raise them alone should anything happen to D'Artagnan rather than not wanting kids at all)" My dear anon, thank you for your prompt, and bless you for pushing me out of my comfort zone and into characters I don't really write. I hope I've done them justice!

Plausibly canon-compliant, set vaguely during Season 3.

"I'm afraid," she says, into the stillness of the night.

His laugh echoes through her, reverberates in her bones where her cheek lays against his chest. "Afraid?" he says, disbelievingly, as he twines her hair around his fingertips. "You're the most fearless woman I know, Constance."

Fearless just means putting on a good face, she thinks, but doesn't say anything at first. Charles is silent too, and she can't tell what he's thinking, but he's the first to break the silence – breath puffing out in a sigh that whispers across her skin. "Of what?"

He's extended a hand; it falls to her to meet him halfway. And it's easier like this somehow, in the dark of their bedroom, and harder in the same breath, because the fears she battles in the daylight hours seem foolish with the warmth of his body solid against her own and his arm curled around her. But since she met him she's realised she is more brave than she had ever thought, and it gives her the strength to be weak. "Every time you go out there, I wonder if it'll be the last time I see you."

"I – it's not a war out there."

And she knows that – she does. But she's also known four years of thinking she would never see him again, of wondering with every letter whether this life she'd never dreamed of and so unexpectedly found would be taken from her before she ever truly realised it, and small wonder if that knowing is the stronger of the two, and she should feel an utterly irrational sense of loss each time he rides out.

But she can't put words to that fear, when she does not think it something he could understand (someday, perhaps, but not now, not yet; his fears are different, the thunder of cannons and the screams of dying men and an enemy that he can see and fight, and hers are shadows and maybes and the memory of black gowns and the thought of a broken heart), and so she just makes a vague sound, agreement and negation in a single breath. "I know. And maybe it's not sensible, but I do."

The hand in her hair skims lower, traces briefly over her hip before his fingers splay across her stomach. "Is that why you don't want …?"

It's too intimate, aches too deeply in the moment, and she pulls away. He lets her go, watches her with baffled dark eyes as she curls up against the wall. "I do want children." It sounds so simple like that, but there's so many edges to her words – she doesn't even know if she can have a child, never managed it before, but she's always taken steps with him in her bed, pulled the green glass jar down in the mornings and drunk her tea down before facing the world, at first because she'd been married to another and then because of the war, because she couldn't bear the thought of raising a child alone and looking into a little face and seeing something of a man no longer there. (And the fear is there, and she still brews her tea, and her belly does not round, and the question remains unanswered.)

But Charles is still looking at her, nothing but confusion and concern on his face, and she reaches out, laces her fingers through his. "I want a family," she finally says, because it's the only way she can put this into words. To confess the full extent of her fears feels as if it would give them strength and power, and she dares not let them be real.

Confusion becomes slow understanding as he opens his mouth, thinks the better of it, closes it again. He pushes upright, comes to sit next to her, shoulder and knee and the warm solid line of his body fitting against her own. "I'm not going to leave you," he murmurs. "The war is over, and I'm staying here, and we can make that family. And – it frightens me too, Constance; I know what can happen to women during birthing. But when has being afraid ever stopped us from trying?"

She turns her head to look at him, startled, meets his hesitant smile.

"The bravest woman I've ever known," he says, "the most amazing, the most wonderful –" and the air is clearer now; her fears are still there, and his too, equally valid and equally real, but they matter less now.

(And she'd forgotten: bravery isn't the absence of fear. Bravery is moving forward despite it.)

The next morning the jar sits, untouched.