Title: Long may she
Author: godsdaisiechain
Fandom: Reign
Challenges: voice, haunted, midnight
Type: Fic
Characters/Pairing: Mary/Francis, Mary/Bash, Lola/Colin
Word Count: ~500
Rating: NC-17
Summary: Three midnights.  Three companions.  Three loves.


*-*-*-*

Mary had been born to greatness and strife, love and loss, heroism and betrayal.  But she didn’t quite know this yet,  a young girl in the arms of her first lover.  Francis had shown her many things, but the feeling of his skin against hers, his tongue in her mouth and on her body was new.  When he entered her, she felt as if she had been born again and she cried out, like a newborn infant.

Francis  clapped a hand over her mouth.  “Hush, Mary,” he murmured, sweat pouring from his brow.  “We’re not married.  Lower your voice.”

“I love you,” she said and he climaxed.  She never found words to express the feeling of comfort and pain, weight and sweat and passion she felt in that moment, but she didn’t need to.  Francis had been her friend since early childhood.  He understood her, voice or no.

*-*-*-*

No one ever learned about the nights she’d spent with Bash.  Not Francis, certainly, nor Catherine, not even her friends.

He loved her intimately, as a man loves a woman, and with an abandon that frightened her.  Nothing mattered to him in those moments except their love. And nothing else mattered to her.

This frightened her, even as the passion intoxicated her heart and mind. Just thinking about him made her body flush and breath heave.  She could hide nothing from him. And that frightened her even more.

So she lied.  Lied to Catherine, to Francis, to Bash.  She broke Bash’s heart, she knew, but it had to be.  She could not be queen and Bash’s lover at once.

The true voice of her heart would have chosen Bash and a cottage in the wood.  Hard work and love and happiness. Yet, she was a queen and not her own.  Francis understood this and would never ask too much of her. His own heart was similarly hostage.   He kept his own secrets and respected hers.

Bash never understood, never knew, that Mary truly loved him more than her own heart and soul and mind and that was why she had to leave him.  Neither did Francis.  But Lola did.  Eventually.

*-*-*-*

Lola kept vigil each year for the lover of her youth, on the anniversary of Colin’s death. Colin who had loved her with such wild abandon that he was willing to deflower his own queen.   Mary, always kind hearted even to those who wronged her, had noticed and kept Lola company, sitting quietly beside her, watching the stars and the fire.

It had taken years for Lola to realize that Mary was keeping a vigil of her own, and not for Francis, but for Bash.  Lola would never suspect that Mary and Bash had known each other as man and woman—Mary was not the type, after all—but she disappeared each year on the day she and Bash had been engaged.

Lola followed Mary and found her tracing a faint scar on her palm.  “Can I do anything for you?”  Mary shook her head, at first unable to speak, then found her voice.

“It’s been a long time since we were in France, Lola.”

“Long and long,” said Lola.

“A long time since we were ignorant of statecraft.”

“A long time since we tasted Burgundy wine.”

“Or stayed up all night giggling.”

The friends smiled and clasped hands. Neither of them said that it had been long and long since they loved and were loved in return because in that moment they realized that the most important love was theirs.