Sharpe: "To March Again"
Fandom: Sharpe
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Title: "To March Again"
Rating: PG
Pairings: Sharpe/Wellington
Summary: Leading up to Waterloo.
Author's Notes: For the look_sharpe October Picture Prompt challenge. I recommend also that you listen to this song by Kate Rusby. I have always loved it, and I think it suits this piece quite well.

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He was too old for this; far too old and he knew it. The past few months he had spent in contentment at the farm with Lucille – fixing the tiles, ploughing the fields, tending the crops and the cows. For so long he had wondered what he would do when Peace broke out, and when it finally did he had found his answer here in Normandy, where for the first time in his life he knew he had found happiness; true, lasting happiness, with a woman who loved him, doing something else than killing, and living out the rest of the years of his life as a man at peace with the world and himself.

But then Bonaparte had returned, and in an instant had overturned that dream-like state of happiness.

Sharpe had decided he would march again. He had been offered the rank of Colonel and a place secured on the Prince of Orange’s Staff, a discrete note accompanying the official papers (written in an achingly familiar hand) suggesting that Slender Billy needed all the support of the best experience he could get; and Wellington had always maintained that Sharpe was the best.

He told them why he marched. To win back the right to his farm, to see Boney face to face at last, because he had never been a colonel before, to be there at the end of it all – because one way another, this campaign would see it end – to secure his own peace of mind. Those explanations satisfied the others, led them on to believe what he wanted them to believe. Even Harper, who had known him so long and so well, believed him.

But none of those was the real reason. Sharpe did not march for King or Country, for friends or fortune, for fame or glory, or even the sight of the fabled tyrant. He marched for the reason he always had; for a pair of cold, clear blue eyes which could at times contain such warmth. He marched for a man whose life he had saved, for the one who had lifted him from the gutter, given him rank and never lost faith in him though he had given him cause to do so far too many times. For eyes that loved him and forgave. He marched because Wellington was once more going to war, and Sharpe could not bear to be left behind.