Our tricolor is red, red, and red..., (Thérésa)

[Jean-Lambert Tallien]

There would be no stay of execution and no pardon for these two priests, stripped down to linen shirts and breeches, their bald pates shining in the summer sunlight. One was rank with sweat, an older man with grey hair and a reddened, twitching nose. He looked as though he had been crying.

Lame was here because he had signed the warrant of execution months ago, but for so long the execution had been stayed due to fear of the public's reaction to the guillotining of a priest. But now, with Robespierre's full backing... the time had come. Never mind that Lame himself no longer wished for more people to suffer. Never mind that he felt nothing but pity for the two Fathers standing before the guillotine, one young, skinny, and scarred, the other ample-paunched and pale with sickly sweat.

"Do not speak out against this," he warned Thérésa in a sideways mutter. Though sometimes she would raise her voice to protest an execution, and he would make a show of acceding to her request... But Lame knew that there was no chance, not now that Robespierre's eye was on him. Soon enough he'd have to choose a place with the Terror or against it, and he knew both he and Thérésa favoured the side that would let them live.

He glanced at his lover. She was so beautiful, her dark hair dancing in the slight summer breeze, her eyes fixed on the doomed men. But sometimes her expression chilled him in its calculation.

[Thérésa Cabarrús]

Oh no, Jean-Lambert, Thérésa mused, shooting him a glance. This is one execution I want to see happen.

Priests stood before the pair, shivering, gluttonous, ruining their final moments on Earth with piteous sniveling. For all they preached and prayed, it seemed they were just as fearful as any other wretch when facing execution. She would have thought they would want to finally come face to face with the God they so often talked about. What would they feel when they discovered there was none? Nothing. Emptiness. They could weep and moan all they liked, but Thérésa had no place in her heart for priests. They were, in a word--

Disgusting.

She stood beside Lame in a simple black dress, a dark angel to his godly power over their lives, and gave him a nod. "Allez-y." How she wanted this to be over! Thérésa could only hope that when the heads of the dead hit the street and their severed bodies slumped on the ground, streaming blood, that the youth would not be too afraid to use the heads as soccer balls.



{Allez-y -- Let's go}

[Jean-Lambert Tallien]

With a sideways glance back at his beloved, Lame raised his hand in a signal that he gave his full accord to the executions. The crowd's voice rose in a roar of bloodlust, and Sanson himself led the elder priest forward to the guillotine. He shuffled slowly, as if half in sleep, his eyes closed and his lips moving in what was perhaps a prayer. Sweat ran off his bald pate, visible even from a distance, and Lame would have averted his eyes had he been younger and not so accustomed to what had happened too many times to count.

The executioner guided the priest into the kneeling position required for guillotine execution, his arms flung wide and his head in the bloody hollow where so many had rested before him. Had he looked up, he would have seen that gore from the previous execution dripped slowly to join the sweat still collecting on his head... but his eyes were closed. After the blade dropped, Lame fancied he could still see the priest's lips moving in the ending of a prayer, even as the head rolled past the grasping hands of onlookers into the wide basket that contained so many others already. A woman near him crossed herself instinctively, but stopped when he glanced at her sharply, her cheeks going white, then turned in a whirl of tattered skirts and melted into the frenzied crowd.

Indeed, there was an air of uneasiness to this execution.

When the younger priest was brought forward, he was trembling so much it was almost palpable, and he fainted when his neck reached the bloody cradle. It was, in a way, more merciful. Lame felt a stab of pity, but again, kept his gaze impassive.

When it was done he turned to Thérésa, taking her hand.

"A spectacle indeed," he murmured, stroking her knuckles with his thumb. "And they had nothing to leave behind, no sons, no daughters, no wives." The younger had probably had a mother. "But it's for the good of the Republic." He straightened up, looking around, and raised his fist in a victorious salute, conscious that those around him looked to him for validation. In an undertone, he added to Thérésa, "Allons, there may be rioting soon." He scanned the crowd worriedly, watching for knots of disturbance or dissent. Soon the National Guard would be here to control them, but he didn't want to get in the middle of anything.

[Thérésa Cabarrús]

From her position at the side of the Place de la Concorde, Thérésa watched with a carefully blank expression - but, invisible to the crowd, her blue eyes flashed with excited interest as the executioner released the mechanisms holding the great blade aloft. Its descent was too fast for the naked eye to follow, but Thérésa's eyes were locked on the base of the guillotine, where the priest's head was beginning to separate from the sticky, gore-riddled blade with a horrible sucking noise. She smiled - a woman in the crowd crossed herself in horror.

The younger priest was led, slowly, to his death, fainting at the last moment. The crowd behind and beside her seemed to breathe a sigh of relief. Thérésa could only scowl in disgust. Though she'd once faced a similar fate, only to be saved by the minister of death himself, she felt no sympathy for the young man. At least the old one had had the grace to offer himself up before God. The second had no thought but his own mortality.

What a priest, indeed!

Neither one was any great loss, so Tallien's comfort was a wasted breath. Her only response was a nod, that yes, they should be on their merry way before anyone in the crowd decided to take execution into his own hands.

[Jean-Lambert Tallien]

Lame led his unfazed lover away from the bloody spectacle. and the roaring crowd, slipping his arm around her waist. There was a time when you couldn't show such affection in public. But of course, recently all sorts of rules had gone out the window--this was the least of them. He leaned over to press his cheek against hers, enjoying the physical (if not entirely emotional) warmth.

As they hurried away from the crowded, bloodthirsty square, he fancied he could feel the air rippling with emotion. Terror, fear, anger... those were the flavors of the Revolution. And Lame could still recall glorying in them. He still did, sometimes, but now, what he really wanted was the softer sensation of his Thérésa. Though he sometimes questioned the depth of her love for him, he never questioned his feelings for her... though lust and love, he told himself, really were not so very far apart in the male heart.

Or the male body.

"Nothing like affirming life after such a sight," he whispered in her ear, a little wickedly, tugging her after him into an alleyway for a quick grope. That was one thing he liked about Thérésa. If he doubted her heart, her body at least was always willing.

[Thérésa Cabarrús]

Her body moved easily in the direction it was pulled, trailing after Tallien into the dimly-lit alleyway. Not long ago, she imagined, the royals had tried to flee through these very passages in a desperate attempt to escape death. The thought was thrilling in more ways than one - if there was anything Thérésa loved more than sex, er. . . Tallien, it was power. And the idea that her people had forced the royalty to flee like rodents through the streets was well, exciting.

Thérésa pressed her back to the wall of the narrow alleyway, giving Lame's hands a quick tug, pulling him up against her. "Nothing like it," she whispered back, breathless, in unaccented English. "Mon cheri." Yes, she wanted him - but here, in this dank, dirty alley?

Why not?

The total breakdown of the social order she had come to know and flourish in had had some benefits; this was one. Such public displays could have cost the couple more than just their respect, but now. . . who could say? And besides, it was already known about Paris that Tallien and Thérésa were lovers. Why not affirm their suspiscions? Tilting her face up, Thérésa bestowed a kiss on her lover's lips. Her hand slowly guided his to her breast, tracing the stays up the front of her bodice that concealed her body from view.

"Je vous appartiens."

[Jean-Lambert Tallien]

Lame laid his hand on the bare skin spilling over her bodice and closed his eyes at the rush of emotion he felt when she said she belonged to him. But scrupulousness lived even in alleyways--though it wasn't the same sort of scrupulousness that had been present before the Revolution.

"None of us belong to anyone, my love, you least of all." It was true, but she said she loved him (or did she? In so many words? She had, he knew that much). He kissed her, his hands working quickly to undo her stays. And if they were in an alleyway, so what? It would only show Robespierre that his so-called 'alliance' with the former noblewoman was one of honest passion, not of political subterfuge or sympathy. He kissed her jaw, then her neck, sliding one hand up to tangle in this wisps of hair escaping at her nape.

"But I love you dearly in any case," he said. "All the more for knowing you're not mine." He didn't add that he was hers. She knew it. She had his heart held in her open hand, and she could crush it if she chose. Yes, Lame was the vulnerable one in this affair.

His other hand quickly pulled her bodice open, taking in the feel of her hot soft body under the cotton shift she wore beneath. "I love you."