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Chapter Text

The half-light of the cellar only serves to make Aramis more tired. There’s a single lantern flickering over on the other side of the large room, but it doesn’t do much against the gloom where Aramis is shackled. He reflexively tests his bonds: they are new wrought iron, but even though the loop they run through is old and rusted it is huge, and fixed firmly to the massive horizontal wooden beam of the old mill.

He is resting for now, leaning heavily against the beam. It runs to meet a huge shaft that reaches up into the darkness of the ceiling, but luckily for Aramis it appears that whatever mill stone was once attached to it has long since been taken away. He thanked God for that, the first time they made him push the beam in a giant circle around the axle in the middle - this thing was made for horses to push. Two or three of them.

Aramis casts a furtive eye at the door. Perhaps they’ll leave him for a bit longer this time? He lets his body slump a little further, and his eyelids to close.
God, it feels delicious, he thinks. It feels like water to a drowning man. It feels like-

A bright ribbon of fire flares against the backs of his legs, and he arcs his body upright, eyes opening to a cracked-wide strain.

“Fuuuuck!” He spits out. And they lash him again, just to really get their point across.

“Walk on, horsey,” the man laughs. And Aramis has no choice but to walk, pushing the heavy beam around and around.

The only purpose in making Aramis walk is the slow degradation of his will. At each rotation one of his captors will ask him a question: where is the drop-off happening?

And each time he will say nothing, and he will walk on. Sometimes they lash him or dump buckets of cold water over him, sometimes they only crack the stick beside him, close enough for him to hear it and flinch, close enough for him to feel the air part around it.

Sometimes they throw in other questions, ridiculous ones: when is his birthday, what is the name of the King, the Cardinal, the country in which they live? He knows they are trying only to get him to speak, to confuse him in one way or another, and with the monotony of constant movement and the fact that they will not let him sleep…well, it’s working rather well.

Aramis focuses on the pain to clarify his mind: his back and calves where they have lashed him and where the thin linen of his shirt and braies has stuck to the wounds with the blood. The pounding of his head from thirst. His bare feet against the rough ground, and the aching of the muscles in his thighs and neck and arms from pushing and pushing the beam - because, although it is much lighter than it would be had it been attached to its original mill stone, it is after all a huge beam of wood afixed to a rusted contraption that hasn’t been turned in years.

He loses track of how many times he has walked around the room. He just heaves, and walks, and concentrates on the battle to not fall, either to the ground or into despair.

*

What is your name?

Where is the drop-off happening?

Would you like some water?

Are you a Musketeer?

Why did you choose the Marais for the drop-off?

What year is it?

Is Treville captain of the Musketeers?

Is the drop-off happening in the Marais?

Would you like your boots back?

Where in the Marais?

Do you want to sleep?

Where in the Marais?

Where in the Marais?

Are you tired?

Where in the Marais?

*

Aramis hangs from the beam by his arms. The massive horizontal axel is high enough off the ground that he cannot quite sit or kneel easily, so he slumps ungainly. His body has obviously decided that it is better than standing, but it is certainly not particularly comfortable.

The welted lash marks on the backs of his legs throb dully, and the pain is such that Aramis cannot fully sleep.

He thinks wistfully of Porthos’ fist slamming into the side of his head, the sweet ensuing unconsciousness. It is rather inconsiderate that his captors don’t even have the decency to knock him out.

Everything is hot and blurred and awful with exhaustion and the half-light and the pain and where in the Marais.

Wait…

What?

Where in the Marais.

Did they ask him that?

Wait.

Had they asked him that?

Fuck.

Shit.

How did they know? Had he told them? Had he told them where the drop-off was going to happen? Where Athos was going to be waiting with the King’s letters for the English agent? Is that why they’ve left Aramis alone? Did he tell them?

The panic sluices through Aramis like fetid water. He shifts, heaves himself to a stand. His heart is rampant and painful in his chest and he feels the sweat breaking out all over his body.

Did he tell them?

Fuck fuck fuck.

*

Aramis marinates in the horror of it, the shame. He’s told them and Athos is probably dead, and because Porthos and d’Artagnan would have been waiting on the street, watching from a distance, they were probably killed in the ensuing fight too. Aramis probably told his captors exactly where each of them would be, how best to take them down. France is going to fall and his friends are dead and no one is going to come back and unhook him from this fucking horse mill and he will just rot here.

A sad, pathetic end. Not in the manner he could have predicted, it has to be said. Not felled in battle, nor at the end of an angry husband’s blade. Not even a slow descent into pox and madness with the Neapolitan Disease.

Wait.

How can he be sure that he is really here? Perhaps he does have the Neapolitan Disease. Perhaps he’s gone mad. He might be lying in his bed, in his room. He might be the King of France. He might be dead, or might never have been. Perhaps Aramis is just a dream. Whose dream? A woman? A man. Or a horse. Why would a horse dream of Aramis, dying of the pox chained to a horse mill? Perhaps there had been an Aramis - an Aramis who is not him, because he is a dream - and this Aramis had wronged the horse at some point and now the horse is dreaming of its vengeance.

Aramis’ head hurts.

Do dreams have heads that hurt?

Do they have arms that are deadened from being hung above their heads for hours and hours. Or maybe days. Weeks? Aramis has no idea how long he’s been here.

In front of him, across the room by the wall is a pile of something. It comes into focus in the gloom, just a little, when he squints: it’s his breeches and doublet, he thinks. And his boots.

They sit discarded carelessly where they’d ripped them from him, and the big cuffs loll open like gaping mouths, utter blackness within.

Suddenly he can’t stop looking at them, his eyes feel tacked to the yawning darkness of his open boot cuffs.

Did they just move?

Aramis blinks back the grit in his tired eyes.

Yes. They are definitely moving closer to him.

The open cuffs look hungry

He unsuccessfully tries to suppress the shudder that runs through him.

God.

*

Aramis can come to only two conclusions: he is either mad - from the Neapolitan disease or otherwise - or his boots are genuinely trying to eat him. He is a rational man and knows that boots do not come alive and try to consume a man, so he can only assume it is the former, and the prospect is utterly terrifying.

In the brothel where Aramis grew up there were clients who occasionally visited whose grip on sanity was tenuous, at best. They were viewed with caution, but their coin was considered good until they reached a level to which the Madame felt they were a danger to the whores, and therefore a risk to her takings. At this point they would be denied entry by the muscle who loitered at the door each night.
Once, one of the whores went mad, too. It happened quite suddenly, and terrified Aramis. Now he wonders if she might have contracted the Neapolitan Disease or some other pox through her work that had affected her mind, because the madness descended on her like lightning and left her raving in the corridors of the brothel. She was gone very quickly, and no one would tell him where. Before, she had been one of the most popular girls at the brothel and had been kind to Aramis, giving him little sweet treats and ruffling his hair, but she could no longer work and there was no provision for whores who could not earn their keep.

Aramis is not ignorant to the state of mind that he tarried in after Savoy. He thanks God every day that he wandered his way back to the land of the sane, but it has left him with an abject and bone-deep terror of losing his mind for good.

He will not put his friends through that again

“It’s the pox,” his boots tell him, rather spitefully. “A punishment for your lust. Adultery too - you’ve done enough of that.”

“Shut up,” he hisses, very determinedly not looking at the boots. He screws his eyes to a point on the far wall where the damp has bloomed white and black in mottles of mold. “You’re not real.”

“Who is real, anyway,” say the boots. “Are you real, Aramis?”

“Yes,” he hisses.

“Then why have you behaved as if you were not?” The boots ask, “All that sin. Did you think God couldn’t see you?”

“Of course I didn’t…of course He sees everything…”

Then why have you sinned? The boots don’t need to talk because the voice is inside his head now. Why have you sinned, Aramis?

Why have you sinned and sinned and sinned again?

“Mea culpa,” Aramis whispers, swallowing down a heave of panic and shame, “Mea culpa, Mea maxima culpa.” His voice shakes, does not sound like his own, and all of him is shaking now from his cramping muscles to the weakness borne of no sleep or food or water in God knows how long.

Yes, he thinks. A penance, he thinks. I must do penance. With great effort he raises himself from where he hangs by the shackles and then lets himself fall, heavily, jolting his shoulders in their sockets. Penance, he thinks. I must do penance, and lets his weight tug at his shoulders again, and again, and again, until something wrenches loose in his shoulder and the pain blossoms like something holy through his entire body.

“Mea culpa,” he gasps. “Oh God, I’ve sinned…”

TBC

Chapter Text

There is a strange sound coming from the other side of the door - a sort of constant scuffling, grinding noise. Porthos cannot place it and it is only fuelling the raging of his anxiety, his fury.

They are fairly sure that Aramis is within the room: they have taken out all but one of his captors, only leaving the youngest and most frightened tied in an upper room. Porthos had knocked him over the head with the butt of his pistol - just to be safe, and because it felt good - but before doing so the boy had been more than happy to let them know that their friend was being held in the basement and that he really hadn’t had anything to do with it all and had certainly not done any of that stuff to Aramis.

Here Porthos had needed to fight back the urge to pry from the boy - inch by screaming inch - just exactly what that stuff had entailed. Hence the tight grip of Athos’ hand against his upper arm, and the brief satisfaction of bringing the butt of his pistol down on the youth’s head.

The door is solid, and locked with a mechanism that - though old and rusted - is heavy and holding. Nevertheless Porthos throws his body at it shoulder-side-on with all of his weight, grunting with the effort, his mind a hazy and furious place.

“You’ll hurt yourself,” d’Artagnan calls from behind him, “Porthos, it’s not shifting.”

“I’ll make it shift!” Porthos roars, readying to throw himself once more at the door when Athos’s arm comes down in front of him, holding a ring of keys.

“If you wouldn’t mind,” he asks, voice parched dry, “Perhaps we might try one of these before you break a bone or two?”

Porthos scowls and tears the keys from Athos’ grasp. There are a number of smaller ones and one big, rusted key that Porthos holds up to scrutinise its size, before shoving it bluntly into the old lock. The thing clicks free after some concerted jiggling, and they push the old door open with a scrape of wood against rough flagstones.

Inside, Aramis is heaving with all his might at a huge wooden beam, attached to some sort of axle that runs vertically into a ceiling. The beam grinds in a circle with his effort and there is a ring of blood on the rough flagstones that suggests he has been around and around this room countless times, his bare feet ragged and what look like lash-marks at the back of his calves seeping red to the floor.

“Aramis!” Porthos calls, surging forwards, but Aramis doesn't seem to hear him. He is reciting something to himself, under his breath, and his eyes are huge and round and flick continuously over to a pile of what looks to be his clothing and boots, taken from him by his captors and dumped at the side of the room. His left arm hangs at an odd angle from his shoulder, and so he is having to use his right arm and his chest to heave the huge wooden beam around.

Even when Porthos stands right next to Aramis he does not seem to see him, and doesn’t pause his mumbling or his ceaseless pushing at the beam.

Porthos shoots a glance at Athos, who is standing stony-faced at the door. “What’s wrong with him?” Porthos asks, the panic starting to swell inside him. It’s been three days since Aramis disappeared, and the thought that he has been here in the gloomy basement walking in circles since then is horrifying.

“What is he saying?” D’Artagnan asks, and Porthos leans a little closer.

“Mea…mea culpa?” Porthos replies, confused, looking back at Athos.

“He is saying that he has sinned,” Athos says, but he still does not move from the doorway.

“What…Aramis,” Porthos says, and puts out a hand to Aramis’ shoulder.

Aramis looks at him then, his eyes are manic and there is a sweating kind of paleness to his face. “No,” Aramis pants, desperately, “No. Mea culpa.
No.” He shrugs at Porthos’ arm and tries to go back to pushing, but Porthos grabs at the beam to hold it in place.

“Aramis, stop it.”

Aramis shakes his head, a quirking jitter. “No,” he says, “I’ve sinned. I’ve…this is my penance. Because I’ve sinned so much.” He gives a heave at the beam again and Porthos lets it go in shock, lets him continue with his pushing, confused.

“Mea culpa,” Aramis says, as much to himself as anyone else it seems, “Mea maxima culpa. I deserve this,” he nods, decisively, “…with…with Adele, and…and the Duchesse de Chevreuse. Isabelle. Anne…Anne…and I gave up the information you see, I told them where Athos was and now he’s dead, they’re all dead mea culpa mea culpa…mea…culpa…”

“I am very much not dead,” Athos says, walking over towards Aramis and Porthos now. “Aramis? Can you look at me?”

Aramis just shakes his head, continues pushing so that Porthos and Athos have to walk slowly alongside him. “No,” Aramis says, “Because I’ve lost my mind, you see? I have the pox. Neapolitan. My boots said so,” he lowers his voice as if someone might hear and says, “They’re trying to eat me.”
“Your boots. Are trying to eat you,” d’Artagnan repeats from over by the door.

“Yes,” Aramis nods, eyes glued downwards at the beam he’s leaning heavily against, “But…but I’ve lost my mind so they’re probably just boots and mea culpa, d’Artagnan, because you’re dead you see? You’re dead because they said…they said where in the Marais and I must have told them the Marais or they wouldn’t have asked that, would they?”

Porthos is bewildered, and Aramis’ state is beginning to truly frighten him now. The man is twitching and sweating, dark purple shadows beneath his eyes, and suggest he has not slept for days. Porthos looks pleadingly at Athos.

Athos draws in a breath, and comes to walk in front of the beam and block its path.

“I have heard your confession, my child,” Athos intones, his voice remote and steeped in that cool authority that seems to come so easily to him.

Porthos frowns at him, confused, but Athos darts his eyes back at him and shakes his head minutely.

“You’re not a priest, Athos,” Aramis says, trying in vain to push his weight against the beam.

“Who is to say? After all: I’m dead, and you’re mad,” Athos says, pushing back.

Aramis stills for a moment. “Well…yes that is true.”

“I am a priest and I say that I have heard your confession, and witnessed your penance.”

“…you have?”

“Yes. The Lord has freed you of your sins,” Athos says, quite seriously, and Porthos knows as well as anyone that Athos believes in none of this but Aramis, Aramis believes it with every part of his being.

“Go in peace, Aramis,” Athos says softly. “You can stop now.”

“I can…I can stop now,” Aramis repeats, something lost and small in his eyes. “I can stop, Father?”

“Yes,” Athos says.

“Oh Athos,” Aramis sighs, “I’m so happy that you’ve found God at last.” And Porthos steps forwards just in time to catch him as he sags downwards.

*

The smaller keys on the ring they had found turned out to have been for the shackles around Aramis’ wrists. Once free they had laid him out on the floor as he veered in and out of awareness, and Porthos had gripped fast to hold his right shoulder and abdomen to the floor while Athos worked the dislocated left arm back into its socket with a popping grind of bone. Aramis’ eyes had flown open with that, but after a staccato hiss of whimpered breath he had fallen back into a teeth-gritted silence.

“Christ I hate that part,” d’Artagnan complains, hand to his mouth and a faint look of nausea on his face, “It looks exactly as awful as it feels.”

“S’done,” Porthos says, as he and Athos carefully hoist Aramis’ sagging weight between them. “Now we need to get him up these stairs.”

*

Outside on the street they use their Musketeer pauldrons and a well-placed and weighted suggestion or two to commandeer a horse and cart from a trader making his way along the Rue Saint Victor. The cart in question is full of turnips, which they manage to shift only slightly, and so Aramis is laid on a rather lumpy and uncomfortable bed of vegetables for the trip back to his lodgings.

Porthos is surprised that the man hasn’t fallen into unconsciousness, or failing that, sleep, since he looks like nothing more than a revenant come back from the grave at this point.

“Why don’t you sleep?” He says quietly, as the cart hits a pot-hole and they are all jilted sideways in a roll of limbs and turnips, and Aramis hisses out a thin ribbon of pain again.

“I…” is all Aramis can say. His eyes are slitted with the weight of his exhaustion but there is something tight and rigid about him that doesn’t seem to want to let him rest.

It is difficult to get him up the stairs to his rooms as the walls are far too close to allow three men abreast, even when the one in the middle is sagging bonelessly. After some attempts at manoeuvring, Porthos just huffs in agitation and throws Aramis over his shoulder like a ragdoll, and Aramis lets out an oof of surprise but doesn’t seem to have the energy to resist.

“Porthos,” he says quietly, as they near the top of the stairs.

“Yeah?”

“If you wouldn’t mind…my legs…” he trails off, a note of absurd apology even as his face is pressed upside down into the small of Porthos’ back, and Porthos looks and sees how he is holding tight to Aramis around his legs where they have been flogged and the tooling of his doublet and the edges of his gloves are rubbing at the still weeping lashes there.

“Sorry mate, nearly there,” he says, and steps through the doorway just opened by d’Artagnan and makes straight for the bed to lay Aramis down. With some help from Athos and d’Artagnan they get him laid out on his front so as to not aggravate his wounds any further.

It is a mark of how regrettably often they do this sort of thing for each other that Porthos, Athos and d’Artagnan fall into a rhythm around each other almost immediately: Athos kindles a fire, d’Artagnan finds an old and mostly full bottle of wine and dumps it unceremoniously into a pan to warm over the blaze, and Porthos finds a clean linen sheet in a cupboard and tears it into strips.

Once the wine is warmed enough Porthos uses it to clean the wounds. He knows from experience that this hurts like holy hell, but for some reason he doesn’t understand it tends to lessen the chances of a wound turning stinking and foul. Aramis - still awake - takes it in fairly bland spirits bar for the odd hissing breath. But the worst part by far is when Porthos begins to try to pick out the tattered edges of Aramis’ braies and shirt from where they have been torn, pushed by the blows and then dried with clotting blood into the meat of the wounds.

It’s fiddly work, this part, an Aramis cannot help his body jerking automatically as if trying to get away. They all know how necessary it is, or again the wounds may go bad, and so they end up with Athos sat on the other side of the bed holding Aramis down by the shoulders while he buries his head and sends his hums and the odd startled shout of pain muffled deep into the pillow.

One or two of the wounds are a little deep in places, where whatever instrument used to flog him must have caught against an existing stripe of bared skin or at an angle that plucked at the flesh of his leg, and there are a handful of lighter marks against his back and the ragged soles of his feet, but the majority of the wounds are shallow and Porthos feels they will heal well.

All in all it strikes Porthos that keeping Aramis awake and forcing him to push the horse mill around in fruitless and endless circles was the main form of persuasion for him to talk, with the lashing only secondary.

“Will need to stitch a few places though,” he hums, sitting back after satisfying himself that he has examined all of the lash marks, and d’Artagnan fetches Aramis’ own suturing kit so Porthos can get to work.

Aramis is silent through this but for the odd long and shaking exhalation: they’ve done this to each other enough times too, and Aramis knows better than anyone how important it is to lie as still as possible while the curve of the needle drags flesh and catgut back together.

D’Artagnan, Porthos reflects, needs to get better at mastering his squeamishness when such wounds are tended - oddly he is almost as stoic as Athos about his own hurts, but watching others’ wounds being stitched or otherwise tended to seems to bother him. A number of times he has to go over to the window and breathe deeply. A good war will knock that out of him, Porthos thinks, rather sadly.

Athos meanwhile sits with his back propped to the wall, staring into space. He has found a bottle of wine on a shelf somewhere and has quietly and
unceremoniously uncorked it. Once Porthos has tied off the last of the stitches he gets up with a creak of cramped knees and crosses to take the bottle from Athos, who looks up at him with a slightly shocked expression and a small and involuntary wounded sound. “Aramis needs it more than you,” Porthos just says, takes a swig for himself and then goes about trying to get a little down Aramis’ presumably parched throat before he sleeps.

“Porthos?” Aramis croaks, after perhaps half an hour where the only sound is the crackling of the fire, the quiet creaking of Athos’ doublet as he lifts the bottle to his lips - it has somehow ended up back in the man’s hands - and the soft sleeping breath of d’Artagnan.

“Yeah, Aramis?”

“Do I have the pox?”

“Hmm,” Porthos says, “Don’t think so. Why would you have the pox?”

“The Neapolitan disease,” Aramis says, shifting slightly. The side of his face is pressed into the pillow as he lies on his front, legs and back and feet bandaged and stitched, and from what Porthos can see his eyes are hooded and muffled with exhaustion, his skin pale.

“Ah,” Porthos says, understanding dawning. “Well,” he says, “You’re a careful man, aren’t you?”

“As any man can be,” Aramis allows, sleepily.

“Well then,” Porthos says, “It’s just the not sleeping, Aramis. Makes you see all kinds of things that aren’t there.”

“So it’s not the pox.”

“Nah. Not the pox.”

“And I’m not mad.”

Porthos takes a brief moment to think of his friend: the man who seduced the Cardinal’s mistress, who survived a massacre he never speaks of, who regularly allows drunk friends to shoot melons from atop his head.

“Completely sane,” Porthos says, face like a saint.

The room falls into silence again, but Aramis does not seem able to close his eyes.

“Porthos?” He asks again.

“Yes, Aramis?”

“Did I tell them where the drop-off was happening?”

Porthos only shrugs. “We changed the location as soon as you went missing. And for the record, no one would have blamed you if you had.”

“Not true,” Aramis mumbles, “If Athos had got hurt…if something had…”

“Yeah, but nothing did, did it?” Porthos says, glancing over to where Athos has quietly slumped sideways into slumber, the bottle still cradled to his chest.

“Nothing did.” Aramis’ voice is barely more than a sigh now, but he still seems hesitant to sleep. In fact, he appears to be frowning across the room at something, his face splayed flat into the pillow.

Porthos looks in the direction of Aramis’ gaze, to where the man’s boots are propped against the wall near the door. Without a word Porthos gets to his feet, crosses the room and picks them up to dump them unceremoniously in the hallway outside.

“We’ll get you new boots, Aramis,” he says, sitting back down in the chair beside the bed.

“Less hungry one,” Aramis agrees, and his eyelids begin to sag in earnest.

“Go on,” Porthos says, “Sleep now, yeah? I’ll keep watch.”

END