Tu Es Ma Lumière

135 - Support *Modern*

One minute, she's sleeping peacefully, her skin slick with sweat from the summer-autumn place over. The next, he's crawling through her bedroom window, waking her as he strips off his jacket and joins her in bed. She's awoken as he crawls on top of her, laying his entire body weight upon her small, slender frame, the need for comfort increasing by the minute after the horrid twenty nine and a half hours they had been plagued by. Just for a few hours, they needed an escape from the dread and the sympathetic eyes and the borderline patronising hugs. And where better could they find an earthly heaven than within each other's arms?

Their skin is sticky from the heat of the air, it's putrid and it's moist, she can smell the heat coming from her rickety fan that doesn't do much next to her. The salt that's combined itself upon their skin, the odd scent that can only be described as damp heat nearly choking her. When he nestled himself onto her body, dwarfing her frame with his own, more domineering one, she could smell the whiskey and rum upon his breath, the smell of the moss and the woods and the grass. After they had gotten home from the hospital, he had obviously drowned his sorrows in booze, and had walked the several miles between their homes like this. Jesus Christ.

"My love." he croaks, clinging to her as he had when they were nine years old and she had been taken from him after the death of her own father. Mary's eyes flutter open, catching his gaze with his own. She didn't know how long it had been since he had gotten into her home. It could have been hours for all she noticed.

"Francis." she whispers, her throat aching as the ravenette lay upon the cream sheets of her bed, her hands reaching up to cup his face. So beautiful, so handsome, so precious, so pained. When she takes ahold of his face, he blinks at her. Owlishly, childishly, oddly realising that she was there underneath him for the first time, even though he'd been laying on top of her for some minutes at that point.

She brushed his messy hair from his face with her fingers, clasping the sides of his face tighter, bringing his focus back to her after they had temporarily fazed out. She knew what he had to be thinking about. How could he be thinking about anything else after Henry's fainting the day before at family luncheon? But right now, she had to take his mind from his father, bring it upon her. Give him some sort of respite in a world of darkness.

"I'm so sorry." she says it so earnestly that he lets out a sob. Mary cooed at him, brought him back down to lay upon her chest. She wrapped her arms around him, continued to stroke his hair and kiss his forehead as her boyfriend of six years continued to cry his pain for the father that had never been a father to him, not in the ways that mattered.

He trembles in her arms, like a child. Mary continues to coo and stroke his body and hair, kissing him and wiping his tears. Henry wasn't a brilliant man by any means, but he wasn't a monster and he didn't deserve the hand fate had dealt him. She knew how hurt Francis and Catherine's other children had been as he paid a thousand times the amount of attention towards Sebastian, rather than them. Claude was the only one who got a little bit of what Sebastian did, but Catherine set her up in boarding school so her third daughter was away most of the time.

Of course, it wasn't as though Henry wasn't there for them all at all. He lived in the Valois estate, bidded them all good morning and read bedtime stories to Hercules and Emone and Henriette, but he hadn't been the one to teach Charles about shaving or show Francis how to build a car, or told little Henri what to do around girls he crushed upon. But he had been there, and now the cancer that had taken his father and his brother stood a substantial chance at taking him, too.

 And it was different to when James died. That was unpredictable and horrible. Mary was only nine and the roads had been icy and snow covered. The breaks didn't work quick enough and the barriers weren't strong enough. The cliff was too big. James' death, the car crash and having to relocate to Scotland for a few years to sort James' affairs in order had sent Marie into a pain pill addiction, one that took her when Mary was fourteen. Four years in foster care and going on two years being on her own, she could barely remember what comforted her when she lost her parents. How could she help Francis?

But the fact that his cries turned to sniffles and his sniffles turned to snores told her that she was doing just fine as she was.