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May 20

a long snippet from my upcoming chapter of my piece, for the love of the sea

summary: jeanne burns, and francis burns alongside her in his fury. arthur contemplates what it means to feel guilt. ash covers them both, but only one of them gets to wash it away in the sea. ophelia, the sea herself, grants francis a mercy for his grief. hi. i've been working on this piece like crazy, and i am extremely proud of this part of the chapter that i will be finishing as soon as i can. if you'd like to read it, start here! i had to write this part first because the scene premise came to me while travelling and the symbolism made me cry.

tw : violence, burning/gore, religious imagery also - nudity?

Rouen, May 30, 1431

The morning was grey.

Not the grey of English skies, soft and woolen and familiar as a well-worn cloak. Not the grey of the Channel in winter, when the sea and the sky blurred together into a single, seamless expanse of pewter and slate. This was a different grey—low and flat and oppressive, the color of old ash, the color of a blade that had been left too long in the rain. It pressed down on the rooftops of Rouen like a weight, suffocating the light, swallowing the shadows, turning the half-timbered houses and the narrow cobbled streets into something that felt less like a city and more like a tomb.

Arthur stood in the crowd and waited.

He did not want to be here. Every fiber of his being—every muscle, every nerve, every bone that had been forged in the long fires of a thousand years of war—screamed at him to leave. To turn away. To walk out of this marketplace and out of this city and out of this country that he had conquered and lost and conquered again. To ride north to the coast and take ship for England and pretend, for the rest of his long, weary existence, that this morning had never happened.

But he could not.

He owed her that much.

The stake had been driven into the center of the marketplace, a thick post of rough-hewn oak, its base packed round with straw and kindling and split logs that had been soaked in pitch. The pyre rose in a careful, calculated pyramid around it—not too high, not too low, designed by men who had done this before and knew exactly how long it took for a human body to burn. A platform had been built beside it, draped in the blue and gold of the English crown, for the judges and the bishops and the men who had spent three months interrogating a nineteen-year-old girl and found her guilty of heresy.

Arthur stood at the back of the crowd, near the wall of the fish market, where the smell of the morning's catch still lingered beneath the sharper, more acrid scents of smoke and sweat and the particular, electric tension of a crowd that had gathered to watch someone die. He was dressed plainly—a dark wool cloak, a leather jerkin, no badge or crest or crown to mark him as England. The Regent, the Duke of Bedford, was sitting on the platform with the judges, his face a mask of cold, bureaucratic piety. The boy-king Henry VI, nine years old and already wearing the weight of two crowns on his small, narrow shoulders, was in Paris, far away from this.

Arthur had come alone.

He did not know why. He had told himself it was duty—that he was England, and England had condemned this girl, and he should witness the sentence carried out. He had told himself it was strategy—that he needed to see the fire, to know that the Maid was truly dead, that no last-minute miracle would pluck her from the flames and set her at the head of another French army. He had told himself a dozen lies, and none of them had stuck.

The truth was simpler. The truth was harder.

He owed her.

They brought her out at nine o'clock.

The bells of the cathedral had just finished tolling the hour, their bronze voices heavy and reluctant in the grey morning air. The crowd stirred, a low murmur rippling through the packed bodies like wind through a field of wheat. Arthur felt it rather than heard it—the shift in pressure, the intake of breath, the sudden, sharp focus of a thousand eyes turning towards the same point.

She was smaller than he remembered.

That was his first thought. He had seen her before—at Orléans, at Patay, at the siege of Paris where she had been wounded and captured and delivered into English hands. He had seen her on the battlefield, a flash of white armor and streaming silk, her voice carrying across the chaos of war with a clarity that had made his soldiers hesitate. She had seemed vast then, larger than life, a force of nature dressed in human flesh.

Now, she was just a girl.

Her hair had grown out a little—it was still short, a ragged, uneven crop that fell around her ears in unwashed tangles. Her face was gaunt, the round, sun-browned cheeks of the peasant girl from Domrémy hollowed by sickness and hunger and the long, grinding months of imprisonment. There were bruises on her wrists where the chains had rubbed. There were shadows under her eyes. She was nineteen years old. She looked younger.

She was wearing a white dress. They had put her in a white dress—the garment of a penitent heretic, the costume of a woman who had confessed to heresy and then recanted and then recanted her recantation, a woman who had been condemned by the Church and abandoned by the king she had crowned. The dress was too big for her, the sleeves hanging past her wrists, the hem dragging in the mud.

But her face. Her face was calm.

Arthur had seen men die before. He had seen them die on battlefields and scaffolds and the decks of burning ships. He had seen them die praying and cursing and weeping and screaming and staring into the void with eyes that had already stopped seeing. He had seen them die bravely and he had seen them die badly. He knew the look of a man who was about to die.

Jeanne d'Arc did not have that look.

Her brown eyes were clear. Her lips were moving—a prayer, a psalm, something that Arthur could not hear over the murmur of the crowd. Her hands were bound behind her back, but her fingers were moving too, tracing the shape of a cross against her own palms. She was not afraid. She was not angry. She was not even present, not really—her body was here, in this grey marketplace in Rouen, but the rest of her was somewhere else, somewhere far away, somewhere that the fire and the pitch and the men who had condemned her could not reach.

She's already gone, Arthur thought. She's already gone, and we're just burning what's left.

The reading of the sentence took forty minutes.

Arthur did not listen to the words. He had heard them before, in a dozen different courts and a dozen different languages, the same dry, bureaucratic litany of crimes and errors and the mercy of the Church, which could not suffer a witch to live. The bishop's voice droned on, nasal and self-satisfied, and the crowd grew restless, and the grey sky pressed down, and Arthur stood at the back of the marketplace with his green eyes fixed on the girl who was going to die.

She was still praying. Her lips were still moving. Her eyes were still clear.

I have done this.

The thought came to him like a blade—cold, sharp, sliding between his ribs with the precision of long practice. He had done this. He was England. England had captured her at Compiègne. England had bought her from the Burgundians for ten thousand livres tournois, like a sack of grain or a prized horse. England had put her in chains and thrown her in a cell and handed her over to a court of French ecclesiastics who had spent three months looking for a heresy and found one.

He had done this.

Not with his own hands. He had not struck the chains. He had not written the indictment. He had not paid the gold to the Duke of Burgundy—that had been Bedford, the Regent, the cold, efficient administrator who ran the war the way a merchant ran a counting-house. But Bedford was England. The judges were England. The soldiers who had dragged her out of her cell this morning and tied her to the stake were England.

And England was Arthur.

He had burned fleets. He had sacked cities. He had filled the sea with corpses—French corpses, Spanish corpses, the corpses of anyone who had ever dared to challenge the sovereignty of the English crown. He had done terrible things, monstrous things, things that would have driven a mortal man mad with guilt centuries ago. He had done them for Ophelia. He had done them for love—the desperate, hungry, devouring love of a nation for a woman who would never love him back.

But this was different.

This was a girl. A peasant girl. A teenager who had heard voices in her garden and believed—truly, madly, impossibly believed—that God had called her to save France. She had broken his siege. She had crowned his enemy's king. She had turned a war that had seemed unwinnable into a war that the English were losing, slowly, inexorably, one battle at a time.

And now she was going to burn.

She will burn.

The thought echoed in his skull, and for a moment—just a moment—he did not know whose voice it was. Ophelia's? The sea had told him once, in a dream or a vision or one of those cold, wordless exchanges that passed between them like currents in the deep. She will burn. Things that holy always burn. Or was it his own voice? His own guilt? His own slowly dawning horror at what he had become?

The bishop finished reading. The crowd fell silent.

The executioner lit the torch.

The flames rose like a living thing.

Arthur had seen fire before. He had seen ships burn in the Channel, their sails catching the wind and their crews jumping into water that was cold enough to kill them before the flames could. He had seen the pyres of heretics and the bonfires of victory and the slow, smoldering embers of a thousand campfires on a thousand battlefields.

But he had never seen fire like this.

It was hungry. That was the word that came to him. The flames were hungry—they licked at the straw and the kindling and the pitch-soaked logs with an appetite that was almost obscene. They climbed the pyramid of wood with a speed that seemed wrong, unnatural, as if something was pulling them upward. The smoke boiled into the grey sky, thick and black and greasy, carrying the smell of pitch and burning straw and something else, something that Arthur did not want to name.

The girl in the white dress disappeared behind a wall of fire.

And then she screamed.

No. She did not scream. That was the thing. That was the thing that Arthur would remember for the rest of his life, the thing that would wake him in the cold hours of the night for centuries to come. She did not scream for herself. She did not beg for mercy. She did not curse her executioners or renounce her visions or weep for the life she was losing.

She called on Jesus.

"Jesus! Jesus! Jesus!"

Her voice came through the flames, high and clear and utterly, terribly calm. It was the same voice that had echoed across the walls of Orléans, the same voice that had proclaimed victory at Patay, the same voice that had promised a frightened Dauphin that he would be crowned at Reims. It was the voice of a saint—a voice that should not, could not, exist in this grey marketplace in Rouen, a voice that belonged in cathedrals and sanctuaries and the quiet, holy spaces where mortals went to meet their gods.

"Jesus! Jesus!"

The flames were at her feet now. The white dress was blackening. The smoke was so thick that Arthur could barely see her, just a shape, a silhouette, a shadow against the fire. But he could hear her. Everyone could hear her. The crowd was silent, the judges on their platform were silent, the executioner and the soldiers and the priests were silent, and the only sound in the whole vast, grey morning was the voice of a nineteen-year-old girl calling on her God.

"Jesus!"

And then, quieter, so quiet that Arthur almost did not catch it:

"Forgive them. Forgive them. They know not what they do."

The flames took her. Arthur did not look away.

He wanted to. God, he wanted to. He wanted to close his eyes and turn his head and walk out of this marketplace and out of this city and out of this country. He wanted to go back to England—the green, gentle England of his birth, the England of chalk downs and sheep pastures and the cold, clean water of the North Sea. He wanted to stand on the cliffs of Dover and feel the wind on his face and pretend that this morning had never happened.

But he could not.

He owed her.

He stood in the crowd, his green eyes fixed on the pyre, and watched the flames consume her. He watched the white dress catch fire, the fabric blackening and curling and falling away in flakes of ash. He watched her hair—that dark, uneven crop that had been the first thing he noticed about her, the detail that had made him think she's just a girl, she's just a peasant girl—catch fire and burn like a halo. He watched her skin blister and blacken and crack, watched her body twist against the ropes that held her to the stake, watched her lips move one last time before the smoke and the heat and the agony took her voice away.

And then it was over.

The fire burned on. The smoke rose into the grey Norman sky, thick and black and greasy, carrying the smell of cooked meat. The executioner raked back the embers to show the crowd that she was dead—that there was nothing left but bones and ash and the blackened, twisted remains of the chains that had bound her to the stake. The crowd began to disperse, slowly, quietly, their faces blank and pale in the grey morning light.

Arthur stayed.

He did not know how long he stood there, his green eyes fixed on the pyre, his hands trembling at his sides. The smoke stung his eyes. The smell caught in his throat. The ashes drifted on the wind—fine grey flakes that settled on his cloak and his hair and his skin, as if the saint was marking him, as if she wanted to make sure he would never wash this morning away.

I have just killed a saint.

The thought wormed its way into his skull and lodged there, sharp and cold and unshakeable. He had killed many things in his long existence—men and women and children, armies and cities and nations, hope and faith and the fragile, fleeting certainty that the world was good. He had drowned them in the sea for Ophelia, offered them up like sacrifices on the altar of his desperate, hopeless, unrequited love.

But he had never killed a saint before.

He had not known it was possible. He had not known that holiness could be burned, that faith could be silenced, that a nineteen-year-old girl could die in the flames and still, somehow, be more alive than anyone who had watched her burn. But now he knew. Now he would always know.

I have just killed a saint, and the sea will never wash this away.

The marketplace was empty by the time Arthur moved. The executioner had gone. The judges had gone. The soldiers had gone, marching back to their garrison in the castle, their faces blank and pale and carefully, professionally indifferent. The pyre was still smoldering, a heap of blackened wood and grey ash and the occasional glint of bone.

Arthur stood at the edge of the square, his hands still trembling, and stared at the sky. The grey was breaking. A thin, watery sunlight was beginning to filter through the clouds, pale and cold and utterly without comfort.

The voice was raw, scraped bare, a wound that had not healed and would never heal. Arthur turned, and there was Francis.

He did not recognize him at first. The golden-haired poet, the elegant courtier—that man was gone. In his place was a creature of grief and fury, his face white, his eyes red, his hands shaking with a rage that seemed too vast for his body to contain. They tumbled to the cobblestones, Francis’ hand around Arthur’ throat. Arthur was mumbling, body and brain on autopilot. Arthur was too shocked to hear what Francis was saying—though he heard the last line like a resounding crack to the skull.

"I will kill you for this," Francis said. His voice was low. It was not a threat. It was a promise.

Arthur did not answer. He did not pull away. He lay very still, his green eyes meeting Francis's blue ones, and let the words wash over him like a tide.

I deserve this, he thought. I deserve this and more.

Francis's hand was at his throat, squeezing, and for a moment Arthur thought he might do it—might kill him right here, in the empty marketplace of Rouen, with the ashes of the saint still drifting on the wind. But then Francis's grip faltered. His eyes searched Arthur's face for something—remorse, defiance, guilt, the cold, implacable mask of the enemy he had been fighting for ninety years.

He found something else. He found exhaustion. He found shame. He found a man who had just watched a saint burn and knew, with the cold certainty of the damned, that nothing he did for the rest of his existence would ever make it right.

Francis let go, being pulled by guards. He stepped back, his hands falling to his sides, his face crumpling into something that was not quite grief and not quite despair.

Arthur stood alone in the square and watched him go.

After a long time—he did not know how long—he walked back to his quarters. The streets of Rouen were quiet. The half-timbered houses were shuttered, the windows dark. The cathedral bells were silent. The grey sky was emptying itself of light.

In his quarters, Arthur poured himself a cup of wine. His hands were trembling so badly that he spilled it, the dark red liquid pooling on the table like blood. He did not drink. He stood at the window, looking out at the city, and watched the smoke rise from the marketplace in a thin, fading column.

Forgive them. Forgive them. They know not what they do.

He did not think he would ever be forgiven.

That night, he dreamed of Ophelia.

She was standing on a shore made of ash—grey ash, fine ash, ash that stretched in every direction as far as his dreaming eyes could see. The sky was grey. The sea was grey. The only color in the whole vast, empty world was her eyes—turquoise, burning, unblinking, fixed on his face.

She was holding something in her hands. A heart. A human heart, small and charred and still smoldering, its edges crumbling into ash even as he watched.

You burned her, Ophelia said.

Her voice was not angry. It was not sad. It was something worse. It was disappointed.

You burned her, Arthur. She was holy. She was a force of nature dressed in human flesh. And you burned her.

"I had to," Arthur said. His voice was thin, desperate, a child's voice. "She was the enemy. She was breaking my kingdom. She was—"

She was nineteen years old. She called on Jesus as she died. She forgave you.

"I didn't—I didn't light the fire. I didn't condemn her. I didn't—"

You are England. England condemned her. England lit the fire. You are England, Arthur. You have always been England. And England has just burned a saint.

The heart crumbled in her hands. The ash fell through her fingers and scattered on the shore, and the grey waves came in and washed it away, and Arthur watched it go with the taste of smoke in his mouth and the smell of cooked meat in his nose and the sound of a girl's voice calling on Jesus in his ears.

I will remember this, Ophelia said. The sea does not forget. And neither will I.

He woke with the taste of ash in his mouth.

He lay in the darkness of his quarters, his heart pounding, his hands trembling, and stared at the ceiling. The dream was already fading, the details sliding away into the grey morning light that was beginning to creep through the shutters. But the taste remained. The taste and the guilt and the cold, implacable certainty that something had changed.

He had done many things for Ophelia. He had burned fleets and sacked cities and filled the sea with corpses and called it courtship. But this—this was different. This was a stain that even the ocean could not wash away.

And somewhere in the cold depths of the Atlantic, Ophelia remembered.

She remembered the girl in white armor riding along the banks of the Loire. She remembered the voice that had called across the water at Orléans. She remembered the face that had blazed with joy at Reims, radiant and holy and utterly, achingly alive.

And now she remembered the fire.

You burned her, she thought, and the thought was cold and dark and full of a grief she did not understand. You burned her, Arthur. Things that holy always burn. But you—you were the one who lit the fire.

The sea did not forget. Neither did she.

The fire had been lit at noon.

Francis had stood in the crowd at the Vieux-Marché, shoulder to shoulder with English soldiers and Norman peasants and the burghers of Rouen in their dark wool robes. The sky had been grey—a flat, indifferent grey, the colour of old pewter—and the air had smelled of damp straw and unwashed bodies and the faint, acrid tang of fear. He had pushed his way to the front of the crowd, close enough to see the pyre, close enough to see her.

Jeanne.

She had been tied to the stake with rough hemp ropes, her hands bound behind her back, her cropped hair dark with sweat and the grime of her prison cell. Her face was bruised. Her lips were cracked. She was nineteen years old. She looked younger. She looked like a child dressed up for a passion play, a lamb led to the slaughter, and when the executioner touched his torch to the kindling at her feet, Francis had felt something inside him die.

Move, he had screamed at himself. Move. Do something. You are France. You are France, and she is your saint, your saviour, your miracle. Move—

But he could not move.

He was frozen in the crowd, his blue eyes fixed on the pyre, his hands clenched at his sides so tightly that his nails bit into his palms and drew blood. The flames rose. The smoke billowed. And Jeanne—Jeanne, who had broken the siege at Orléans, who had crowned a king at Reims, who had spoken with saints and angels since she was a child—Jeanne began to pray.

"Jesus! Jesus! Jesus!" Her voice was high and clear, cutting through the crackle of the flames and the murmur of the crowd.

Francis wept. He wept openly, unashamed, tears carving tracks through the ash that had already begun to settle on his cheeks. He wept for Jeanne, for France, for the cruelty of a world that devoured its saints and crowned its butchers. He wept until the fire took her voice, until the smoke swallowed her entirely, until the only sound was the roar of the flames and the low, hungry murmur of the crowd.

And then, through the haze of smoke and tears, he saw him.

Arthur.

He was standing on the other side of the square, near the English garrison commander's retinue. His green eyes were fixed on the pyre, and his face was utterly, terrifyingly blank. No satisfaction. No grief. No anger. Nothing. Just the hollow, exhausted emptiness of a man who had seen too much death and had no room left for feeling.

Something inside Francis snapped. He lunged through the crowd, his hands reaching, his mouth open in a scream that was not a word but a primal, animal sound of rage. He did not think. He did not plan. He only knew that Arthur was here, Arthur was watching, Arthur had let this happen, and Arthur had to pay.

His hands closed around Arthur's throat.

They crashed to the cobblestones together, a tangle of ash-stained velvet and flailing limbs. Francis felt the impact jar through his knees, felt Arthur's pulse hammering against his palms, felt the hot, ragged gasp of Arthur's breath against his face. He squeezed. He wanted to kill. He wanted to crush the life out of this cold, hollow creature who had let a saint burn—

"Francis—" Arthur choked, his green eyes wide with shock, his hands scrabbling uselessly at Francis's wrists. "Francis, I didn't—I couldn't—"

"You watched!" Francis screamed, his voice cracking, his tears falling onto Arthur's face.

"I couldn't stop it," Arthur whispered, his voice hoarse. "The Church condemned her. The Inquisition—I had no authority—"

"You are England!" Francis spat. "You have all the authority you choose to take! You chose this! You chose to let her burn because she humiliated you! Because she was winning the war you spent a century fighting! Because she was mine, and you could not bear it—"

"That's not—"

"I will kill you," Francis said, his voice dropping to a low, terrible whisper. "Not today. Not tomorrow. But one day, Arthur Kirkland. One day, when your empire is ash and your crown is rust and your name is a curse on the lips of your own people—I will kill you for this." Strong hands seized him from behind. The guards. They wrenched him off Arthur, dragging him back, pinning his arms to his sides. Francis fought them, thrashing and snarling, his eyes still locked on Arthur's face. Arthur, who was rising slowly to his feet, rubbing his throat, his expression no longer blank but something far worse: broken.

The guards dragged him away. He did not resist. The rage had burned through him like the fire on the pyre, and what was left was only ash. He let them haul him through the streets of Rouen, past the half-timbered houses and the shuttered shops, past the gawking peasants and the grim-faced soldiers. He let them throw him out of the city gates, let them hurl him into the mud of the road, let their laughter and their jeers wash over him like rain.

He lay there for a long time, face-down in the muck, and did not move.

Then, slowly, he rose.

He did not return to the city. He did not seek out his horse or his retinue or the Dauphin's court at Bourges. He simply turned towards the west—towards the sea—and began to walk.

The Norman countryside was grey with pre-dawn mist.

Francis walked through fields of barley and flax, through orchards of apple trees whose branches hung heavy with unripe fruit. The birds were not yet singing. The sky was the colour of a bruise, purple fading to grey at the edges, and the only sound was the crunch of his boots on the dirt road and the ragged, uneven rhythm of his breath.

He had not slept. He could not sleep. Every time he closed his eyes, he saw the flames. He heard her voice—Jesus! Jesus!—high and clear and impossibly brave. He smelled the smoke, the terrible, sweet-rotten smell of burning flesh, and his stomach heaved, and he bent over the roadside and vomited until there was nothing left but bile.

He walked on.

His clothes were ruined. The fine blue velvet of his tunic was streaked with mud from the road, torn at the shoulder where the guards had wrenched him. His blonde hair—faded now to the color of winter wheat, streaked with the first threads of silver—hung lank and greasy around his face. His eyes were red-rimmed, raw from weeping, ringed with purple shadows. And he was covered in ash.

The ash had settled on him during the execution, fine grey flakes that clung to his hair and his skin and his clothes. It was in his mouth. He could taste it—bitter, alkaline, the taste of endings. It was under his fingernails. It was in the creases of his palms, where his own blood had mixed with it to form a dark, rusty paste.

He did not try to brush it away. He did not deserve to be clean.

The sun rose, pale and watery, behind a veil of clouds. Francis walked. He passed through villages where the peasants stared at him with hollow eyes—a madman, clearly, a nobleman reduced to beggary, talking to himself in a language of sobs and broken syllables. He did not see them. He saw only the flames. He heard only the prayers.

She was nineteen. She was nineteen, and I let her burn.

The road forked. One path led south, towards the Loire, towards the court at Bourges where Charles VII—the king she had crowned—was no doubt already forgetting her name. The other led west, towards the sea.

Francis took the western road.

He did not know why. He was not thinking clearly enough to know anything. But somewhere beneath the grief, beneath the guilt, beneath the ash that coated his soul like a shroud, an instinct was pulling him towards the water. Towards the only being in the world who might understand. Towards the cold, eternal embrace of her.

The road wound through a forest of oak and beech, their leaves dark green in the June morning. Then the trees thinned, and the ground grew sandy, and the air began to smell of salt.

He emerged onto the coast as the sun was setting.

The beach was a desolate stretch of shingle and sand, battered by the grey waves of the Channel. The cliffs rose behind him, chalk-white and crumbling, veined with seams of flint. The tide was coming in, each wave creeping a little higher up the shore, swallowing the rocks and the driftwood and the bleached shells of long-dead crabs. The wind was cold, cutting through his ruined clothes, and the salt spray stung his raw eyes.

Francis collapsed.

His knees hit the wet sand at the tideline, and the shock of the cold water jolted through him, but he did not rise. He could not rise. He knelt there, in the shallows, and let the waves break over his legs, and he wept.

He wept for Jeanne. He wept for France. He wept for himself—for the poet he had been, the lover he had tried to be, the nation he had failed to become. He wept until his throat was raw and his eyes were empty and the tears would not come anymore. He tore at his clothes—the ash-stained velvet, the mud-caked linen, the boots that had walked him a hundred miles from Rouen to this desolate shore. He tore at his hair. He tore at the sand, clawing great furrows in the wet shingle, as if he could dig his way down into the earth and never have to feel anything again.

Ophelia emerged from the water without sound.

She had felt him coming from miles away. His grief was a jagged, discordant note in the song of the sea, a vibration that cut through the patient rhythms of the tide and the current and set her teeth on edge. She had been in the deep Channel, drifting with a pod of grey seals, singing their slow, mournful songs of fish and migration—and then she had felt him, and she had stopped, and she had turned towards the shore.

She had been waiting for him.

She rose from the water as the last light of the sun bled out of the sky and the first stars pricked the eastern horizon. The water was her clothing, streaming from her black hair, from her bare shoulders, from the curves of her breasts and the dip of her waist. She moved through the shallows with the effortless grace of a creature born to the deep, and when the water grew too shallow for her tail, she let it dissolve into legs—bare, brown, salt-rough as old driftwood—and walked the last few steps onto the shore.

Francis did not look up. He was still on his knees, still clawing at the sand, his shoulders heaving with sobs that would not stop. He was covered in ash. She could see it even in the fading light—grey smears on his cheeks, on his hands, in the tangles of his blonde hair. He smelled of smoke and mud and the bitter, metallic tang of despair.

She knelt before him in the shallows. The waves lapped at her hips. The cold did not touch her. It never did. She did not speak. She simply opened her arms.

Francis fell into her embrace like a drowning man.

He did not see her—his eyes were too blurred with tears, his mind too fractured by grief to register anything but the cold, the salt, the sudden, impossible presence of her. But he felt her. He felt her arms close around him, cool and smooth as sea glass, pulling him against her chest. He felt her hand come up to cradle the back of his head, her fingers threading through his matted hair. He felt the cold of her skin, the ancient, patient cold of the deep ocean, pressing against the fever-heat of his grief.

He broke.

"She is dead," he choked, the words muffled against her shoulder. "She is dead, and I could not save her. I stood there—I stood there—and I watched her burn, and I did nothing—"

His voice cracked. His body shook. His fingers clutched at her—at her back, her arms, whatever he could reach—as if she were the only solid thing in a world that had dissolved into nightmare.

"I am France," he gasped. "I am France, and I could not save her. I could not save a nineteen-year-old girl who crowned my king and saved my kingdom and believed—she believed in me, she called me holy, she said I was the soul of her country—and I let her burn—"

Ophelia held him. Her arms were cold. Unyielding. Eternal. But they were steady. They did not tremble. They did not waver. They were the arms of the sea itself, vast and patient and utterly without judgment.

"She was always going to burn," Ophelia said quietly.

Her voice was the sound of waves in a cove. It was not loud. It did not need to be. It carried the weight of tides, of continental shelves, of the lightless abyss where even time forgot to pass.

"Things that holy cannot exist for long in a world this cruel. You know this."

Francis shuddered against her. "Knowing does not make it hurt less."

"No," she agreed. "It does not."

She held him while the stars emerged, one by one, from the darkening sky. She held him while the tide crept higher, the waves inching up the shore until they lapped at her waist, at his knees, at the hem of his ruined tunic. She held him while his sobs gradually subsided into hiccups, into shudders, into the exhausted, hollow silence of a man who has wept himself empty.

Francis closed his eyes. A shudder ran through him.

"I do not know what I am anymore," he breathed. "I do not know what France is. She saved us, and we let her die. What kind of kingdom does that make us?"

"A kingdom that must learn to endure without her." Ophelia's thumb traced the curve of his cheekbone, smearing the ash that still clung to his skin. She leaned forward and pressed her lips to his forehead—a cold kiss, salt-tinged, brief as a wave breaking on sand. "You are not finished, Francis Bonnefoy. The world is not finished with you. And neither am I."

She drew back. Her hands moved to the hem of his tunic.

"Come," she said. "Let me wash this away."

She drew him deeper into the water.

Francis did not resist. He could not resist. He was a hollow shell, empty of everything but grief, and her hands on him were the only thing keeping him tethered to the world. He let her guide him into the shallows, into the place where the waves broke gentle and white, where the water was deep enough to reach his waist but not deep enough to swallow him.

She undressed him with slow, reverent hands.

Her fingers found the tear at the shoulder of his tunic, the place where the guards had wrenched him, and she pulled the fabric apart with surprising strength. The velvet—once fine, once blue as a summer sky—ripped like paper, and she peeled it away from his chest and let it fall into the water. The waves caught it, tugged it, carried it away into the darkness.

She unlaced his boots. Her fingers were steady, patient, working the knots that had tightened during his long walk from Rouen. She pulled them from his feet—one, then the other—and let the sea take them too. His hose. His undershirt. Layer by layer, she stripped him bare, until he stood before her in the cold Channel water, naked and shivering and too broken to feel shame.

And still, he was covered in ash.

It was real. He had not imagined it. The fine grey powder had worked its way into every crease of his skin, every strand of his hair, every inch of his body. It was the ash of the pyre. The ash of the wood that had burned her. The ash, perhaps, of Jeanne herself—her flesh, her bone, her cropped hair, all reduced to this grey, clinging residue that would not let him go.

Ophelia looked at him. Her turquoise eyes swept over his body—not with desire, but with assessment. She saw the ash. She saw the scratches on his palms where his nails had drawn blood. She saw the bruises on his knees from the cobblestones of Rouen. She saw the hollow of his belly, the sharpness of his ribs, the way his shoulders slumped under a weight no mortal should have to bear.

"Close your eyes," she said.

He obeyed.

She cupped water in her hands and poured it over his head.

The cold was a shock—a gasp, a jolt, a sudden, sharp reminder that he was still alive. The salt water ran down his face, his neck, his shoulders, carrying the ash with it in grey rivulets. She scooped more water, and more, pouring it over his hair, working her fingers through the tangled strands, loosening the knots, washing away the smoke and the soot and the memory of the fire.

"Let the sea take it," she murmured. "Let me take it. Give me your guilt, Francis. Give me your grief. Give me every bitter, broken thing you are carrying. I can hold it. I have held empires."

He shuddered. His hands came up, unbidden, and gripped her hips—not with passion, but with need. He needed something to hold onto. He needed her cold, her steadiness, her vast and patient presence. He needed her to be real.

She washed his shoulders. His chest. She ran her wet hands over the sharp lines of his collarbones, the hollow of his sternum, the place beneath his ribs where his heart was still beating. The ash came away in clouds, darkening the water around them.

Francis let out a breath that was almost a sob. His hands tightened on her hips. "I don't know how," he whispered. "I don't know how to let it go."

"Then let me teach you."

She drew him deeper. The water rose to his chest, to his shoulders, and the cold was no longer a shock but an embrace. She pulled him against her, his bare chest pressing against her bare breasts, his legs tangling with hers beneath the waves. He could feel the pulse of the sea around them—the slow, patient rhythm of the tide, the heartbeat of the deep.

She scooped water into her hands one last time and poured it over his head, and this time, something shifted. The ash—the last of it—dissolved into the water and was gone. The grey clouds swirled around them for a moment, and then the current caught them, pulled them away, carried them out to sea where they would be diluted and dispersed and, eventually, forgotten.

Francis opened his eyes.

He was clean.

His skin was pale in the starlight, scrubbed raw by salt and cold. His hair was plastered to his skull, dark with water, the grey streaks at his temples the only ash that remained—and those, he knew, would never wash away. He was still hollow. He was still grieving. But the weight—the crushing, suffocating weight of the pyre—was gone.

"It is not gone," Ophelia said, as if reading his thoughts. "It is in the water now. It is in me. I will carry it for you, and you will carry on. That is the bargain. That is what it means to be loved by the sea."

Francis stared at her. "Loved?"

She did not answer. She simply took his hand and led him back to the shore.

She guided him back to the dry sand, above the tideline, where the waves could not reach them. The driftwood log was smooth and silver-grey, worn by years of salt and sun, and she sat beside him with her shoulder pressed against his, her legs now fully formed—bare and brown and salt-rough—her feet buried in the cold sand.

The stars wheeled overhead. The sea murmured its eternal song. The wind was cold, but Francis did not feel it. Or rather, he felt it, but it did not bother him. The cold was part of her, and she was part of him, and for this moment—this brief, suspended moment between the horror of the pyre and the unknown trials of tomorrow—he was at peace.

For a long time, neither of them spoke.

"You are a fool, Francis Bonnefoy," Ophelia said softly. "But you are my fool."

She leaned over and kissed him.

It was not a kiss of passion. It was not the brutal, demanding kiss she had given Rome on the portico, or the fierce, hungry kiss she would one day give Spain in the Court of the Lions. It was gentle. Tender. A salt-water kiss that tasted of grief and gratitude and the cold, patient affection of something eternal.

Her lips were cool against his. She tasted of the deep ocean, of ancient salt and patient darkness and the memory of a thousand shipwrecks. Her hand slid into his damp hair, cradling the back of his head, and she kissed him the way the tide kisses the shore—inevitable, unhurried, full of a love that was not love but something older and stranger and infinitely more enduring.

When she pulled back, Francis was trembling again. But this time, it was not from grief.

"Endure," she whispered against his lips. "Endure, my pretty poet. The world is not finished with you yet." .

When Francis opened his eyes, she was gone.

The tide was coming in. The first pale light of dawn was bleeding into the eastern sky, turning the grey clouds to rose and gold. The sea was calm, its surface smooth as glass, reflecting the colours of the sunrise. The driftwood log was silver in the growing light. The sand was marked with their footprints—his bare, human prints, hers smaller, already filling with water.

He was alone.

He sat there for a long time, watching the waves, feeling the cold kiss of the sea breeze on his bare skin. The grief was still there—it would always be there—but it was no longer drowning him. The guilt was still there—he would carry it for the rest of his long, immortal life—but it was no longer crushing. He had been washed. He had been held. He had been kissed by the sea, and the sea had taken his burden and carried it into the deep.

He rose, slowly, his joints aching from the cold and the long walk and the hours spent kneeling in the sand. He found his clothes—what was left of them—scattered along the tideline. His tunic was torn beyond repair, the fine blue velvet ruined by salt water and ash. His boots were gone, claimed by the waves. But his hose had survived, and his undershirt, and he pulled them on with the slow, deliberate movements of a man learning to inhabit his body again.

When he was dressed—or as close to dressed as he could manage—he turned his back on the sea and faced the land.

The Norman countryside stretched before him, green and grey and shimmering with dew. Somewhere to the south, Charles VII was holding court at Bourges. Somewhere to the east, Arthur was nursing the bruises on his throat and staring at the ceiling of his garrison quarters, wondering if Francis's curse would come true. Somewhere in the soil of Rouen, Jeanne's ashes were cooling, mingling with the earth of the city she had tried to save.

And somewhere in the deep, a woman with black hair and turquoise eyes was swimming west, towards the Atlantic, towards the infinite, uncharted waters beyond the Pillars of Hercules, carrying with her a lock of golden hair and the memory of a kiss.

Francis began to walk.

He did not know if he would ever see her again. He did not know if he deserved to. But the taste of salt on his lips was not ash. It was her. And that, for now, was enough.

#hetalia #hws #historical hetalia #hws france #aph #aph england #aph france #hetalia fanfic #hetalia world stars #historical #francis bonnefoy #fruk #france x england #arthur kirkland #aph ocean #aph ophelia #aestiva posting #hetalia fanfiction #ao3 #ao3 fanfic #joan of arc #jeanne d'arc #historical fiction #seacore #hetalia france #hetalia england #aph jeanne #the hundred years war #aph oc #hetalia oc

aphaestiva

May 20

a long snippet from my upcoming chapter of my piece, for the love of the sea

tw : violence, burning/gore, religious imagery also - nudity?

Rouen, May 30, 1431

The morning was grey.

Arthur stood in the crowd and waited.

But he could not.

He owed her that much.

Arthur had come alone.

The truth was simpler. The truth was harder.

He owed her.

They brought her out at nine o'clock.

She was smaller than he remembered.

Now, she was just a girl.

But her face. Her face was calm.

Jeanne d'Arc did not have that look.

She's already gone, Arthur thought. She's already gone, and we're just burning what's left.

The reading of the sentence took forty minutes.

She was still praying. Her lips were still moving. Her eyes were still clear.

I have done this.

He had done this.

And England was Arthur.

But this was different.

And now she was going to burn.

She will burn.

The bishop finished reading. The crowd fell silent.

The executioner lit the torch.

The flames rose like a living thing.

But he had never seen fire like this.

The girl in the white dress disappeared behind a wall of fire.

And then she screamed.

She called on Jesus.

"Jesus! Jesus! Jesus!"

"Jesus! Jesus!"

"Jesus!"

And then, quieter, so quiet that Arthur almost did not catch it:

"Forgive them. Forgive them. They know not what they do."

The flames took her. Arthur did not look away.

But he could not.

He owed her.

And then it was over.

Arthur stayed.

I have just killed a saint.

But he had never killed a saint before.

I have just killed a saint, and the sea will never wash this away.

The voice was raw, scraped bare, a wound that had not healed and would never heal. Arthur turned, and there was Francis.

"I will kill you for this," Francis said. His voice was low. It was not a threat. It was a promise.

Arthur did not answer. He did not pull away. He lay very still, his green eyes meeting Francis's blue ones, and let the words wash over him like a tide.

I deserve this, he thought. I deserve this and more.

Francis let go, being pulled by guards. He stepped back, his hands falling to his sides, his face crumpling into something that was not quite grief and not quite despair.

Arthur stood alone in the square and watched him go.

Forgive them. Forgive them. They know not what they do.

He did not think he would ever be forgiven.

That night, he dreamed of Ophelia.

She was holding something in her hands. A heart. A human heart, small and charred and still smoldering, its edges crumbling into ash even as he watched.

You burned her, Ophelia said.

Her voice was not angry. It was not sad. It was something worse. It was disappointed.

You burned her, Arthur. She was holy. She was a force of nature dressed in human flesh. And you burned her.

"I had to," Arthur said. His voice was thin, desperate, a child's voice. "She was the enemy. She was breaking my kingdom. She was—"

She was nineteen years old. She called on Jesus as she died. She forgave you.

"I didn't—I didn't light the fire. I didn't condemn her. I didn't—"

You are England. England condemned her. England lit the fire. You are England, Arthur. You have always been England. And England has just burned a saint.

I will remember this, Ophelia said. The sea does not forget. And neither will I.

He woke with the taste of ash in his mouth.

And somewhere in the cold depths of the Atlantic, Ophelia remembered.

And now she remembered the fire.

The sea did not forget. Neither did she.

The fire had been lit at noon.

Jeanne.

Move, he had screamed at himself. Move. Do something. You are France. You are France, and she is your saint, your saviour, your miracle. Move—

But he could not move.

"Jesus! Jesus! Jesus!" Her voice was high and clear, cutting through the crackle of the flames and the murmur of the crowd.

And then, through the haze of smoke and tears, he saw him.

Arthur.

His hands closed around Arthur's throat.

"Francis—" Arthur choked, his green eyes wide with shock, his hands scrabbling uselessly at Francis's wrists. "Francis, I didn't—I couldn't—"

"You watched!" Francis screamed, his voice cracking, his tears falling onto Arthur's face.

"I couldn't stop it," Arthur whispered, his voice hoarse. "The Church condemned her. The Inquisition—I had no authority—"

"That's not—"

He lay there for a long time, face-down in the muck, and did not move.

Then, slowly, he rose.

He did not return to the city. He did not seek out his horse or his retinue or the Dauphin's court at Bourges. He simply turned towards the west—towards the sea—and began to walk.

The Norman countryside was grey with pre-dawn mist.

He walked on.

He did not try to brush it away. He did not deserve to be clean.

She was nineteen. She was nineteen, and I let her burn.

Francis took the western road.

The road wound through a forest of oak and beech, their leaves dark green in the June morning. Then the trees thinned, and the ground grew sandy, and the air began to smell of salt.

He emerged onto the coast as the sun was setting.

Francis collapsed.

Ophelia emerged from the water without sound.

She had been waiting for him.

She knelt before him in the shallows. The waves lapped at her hips. The cold did not touch her. It never did. She did not speak. She simply opened her arms.

Francis fell into her embrace like a drowning man.

He broke.

"She is dead," he choked, the words muffled against her shoulder. "She is dead, and I could not save her. I stood there—I stood there—and I watched her burn, and I did nothing—"

His voice cracked. His body shook. His fingers clutched at her—at her back, her arms, whatever he could reach—as if she were the only solid thing in a world that had dissolved into nightmare.

"She was always going to burn," Ophelia said quietly.

Her voice was the sound of waves in a cove. It was not loud. It did not need to be. It carried the weight of tides, of continental shelves, of the lightless abyss where even time forgot to pass.

"Things that holy cannot exist for long in a world this cruel. You know this."

Francis shuddered against her. "Knowing does not make it hurt less."

"No," she agreed. "It does not."

Francis closed his eyes. A shudder ran through him.

"I do not know what I am anymore," he breathed. "I do not know what France is. She saved us, and we let her die. What kind of kingdom does that make us?"

She drew back. Her hands moved to the hem of his tunic.

"Come," she said. "Let me wash this away."

She drew him deeper into the water.

She undressed him with slow, reverent hands.

And still, he was covered in ash.

"Close your eyes," she said.

He obeyed.

She cupped water in her hands and poured it over his head.

"Let the sea take it," she murmured. "Let me take it. Give me your guilt, Francis. Give me your grief. Give me every bitter, broken thing you are carrying. I can hold it. I have held empires."

Francis let out a breath that was almost a sob. His hands tightened on her hips. "I don't know how," he whispered. "I don't know how to let it go."

"Then let me teach you."

Francis opened his eyes.

He was clean.

Francis stared at her. "Loved?"

She did not answer. She simply took his hand and led him back to the shore.

For a long time, neither of them spoke.

"You are a fool, Francis Bonnefoy," Ophelia said softly. "But you are my fool."

She leaned over and kissed him.

When she pulled back, Francis was trembling again. But this time, it was not from grief.

"Endure," she whispered against his lips. "Endure, my pretty poet. The world is not finished with you yet." .

When Francis opened his eyes, she was gone.

He was alone.

When he was dressed—or as close to dressed as he could manage—he turned his back on the sea and faced the land.

Francis began to walk.

He did not know if he would ever see her again. He did not know if he deserved to. But the taste of salt on his lips was not ash. It was her. And that, for now, was enough.

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