Chapter Text
Aramis notices first, with the strange sort of sixth sense that he seems to have when it comes to the whereabouts of Porthos. He whistles sharply between his teeth, not wanting to cause a panic in the crowd, but Athos is stood next to the King some distance away and doesn’t hear over the hubbub of the parade.
Flicking a glance upwards once more he can just make out the dark shape of Porthos blotted out against the glare of the sun, creeping towards a hunched figure. Aramis decides there’s nothing for it. “Athos!” he calls, sharply, and the other Musketeer looks up just as Porthos, on the rooftop above them, launches himself at the man with the gun.
The shot is fired, wildly mis-aimed as the assassin is wrestled to the ground but still towards the knot of people surrounding the King. Arquebus, Aramis thinks absurdly as the noise cracks across the square, I’d have used a musket from that distance.
Then the screaming starts, the crowd pushing and heaving to get away, blue-cloaked Musketeers and Red Guards here and there attempting to push them back. The King is being hustled away into a coach. And then there is Treville, hunched over Athos.
The cobbled street lurches beneath Aramis’s feet.
“The King…” Athos is saying, struggling against Treville’s iron grip.
“Gone. Safe,” their captain replies, “Now stay still, Athos, before I have to knock you out. Aramis is coming.”
“Here,” Aramis says breathlessly, dropping to his knees. There is blood everywhere, so much that he can’t tell where the wound is. “Left thigh,” Treville says, pushing back down at Athos once more. “Stay still, dammit!”
“Anne,” Athos gasps, his gaze unfocused, lips beginning to turn blue. “My God...Anne…”
Treville frowns, untying his blue cloak and settling it around the wounded man. “It’s alright Athos, Aramis is here, you’re safe, the King and Queen are safe.”
There’s a strained note to the captain’s voice that is oddly comforting to Aramis, anchoring him. He reaches for the main gauche on his back and unceremoniously cuts into Athos’s breeches, the leather already sodden and clinging with blood.
The wound is clean and fairly small, but Athos’s leg is quivering and jerking beneath Aramis’s hands, and the blood is incessant. He pushes down hard on the wound, his hands slick and sliding over the skin within seconds. “Here,” Treville says, pushing Aramis aside and applying pressure himself, so that the other man might have his hands free for better purpose. Unbuckling his belt with fumbling fingers, Aramis unwinds the blue sash around his waist and reaches under Athos’s leg to tie it tight about his thigh, above the wound.
Sitting back on his haunches, Aramis scrubs a shaking hand through his hair, unaware of the trail of red it leaves across his temple. “The artery. I think” he mumbles. Treville shoots him a questioning glance. “Can it be sewn?”
“Possibly,” Aramis says. Athos’s face has gone slack and white now, though he’s still conscious. “I’ve read of it.”
“Can you do it, Aramis?” Treville asks, again.
There’s a sudden movement beside him and Porthos hunkers down breathlessly, his hand heavy on Aramis’s shoulder. “Of course he can.”
It’s only a few minutes in the back of a commandeered coach, but by the time they reach the garrison the seats are already stained dark and Athos is no longer answering when Porthos calls his name.
*
Aramis won’t remember the next few hours, it’s only in the depth of his sleep that he’ll recall flashes: the slip and slide of blood and flesh, the noise the bullet had made rolling to the floor after Aramis had pulled it out with the tips of his fingernails, the litany of desperate prayers he’d repeated only in his head for fear of what would come out if he opened his mouth. It’s just another thing to wake screaming from in the dark hours of the night.
*
The sunrise is just starting to haze the sky the faintest pink, and the garrison courtyard is deserted. Aramis spares a moment to give thanks for that as he empties the contents of his stomach onto the dirt. His legs are trembling painfully, so he gets down on his knees, trying and failing to breathe deeply against the threatening rise of bile in his throat.
It’s a while before he notices the press of a hand on his shoulder. Porthos doesn’t say anything, but he obviously knows his friend well enough to realise that for all his flowery words it’s only ever been touch that means anything to the ever tactile Aramis. Besides, what would he say right now to make it all better?
Aramis can hear the blood singing in his ears, every push of his heart. Everything in him is trembling, adrenaline and nausea and fear combined to buzz through his veins like fire. His eyes are so wide open he feels them prickle and sting, and there’s a coiled, manic sort of tightness to him.
“God….” he says after a while, wiping his mouth with trembling hands, “What must you think of me, Porthos?”
Porthos is silent at his side, and Aramis almost cringes until he looks up at the other man and sees his disbelieving frown.
“I think you saved our brother’s life tonight, you idiot.”
Aramis twitches, feeling his stomach clench again. He wants to say he’s not saved yet, but Porthos is looking at him with such certainty and God, it’s what he needs right now.
The air is warm and stifling. Porthos helps heave Aramis to his feet and props him up on a bench at the side of the courtyard, where he sits with knees jittering. The other man investigates the bottles discarded on the table, and grunts as they yield only a few drops of stale wine. “I’ll get you some water,” he says, moving to rise, but Aramis flings out a hand and fists it in his shirt, “No.” He shakes his head against the roiling heat in his stomach, and breathes deeply. “Please. In a moment.”
They sit together for a while, Aramis concentrating on breathing, until he feels a little more sure of himself and allows Porthos to go and get a pitcher of water.
“Do you hate it?” Porthos asks quietly, handing a cup to Aramis with a quirk of his chin as instruction to drink. “You know. Doctorin’?”
“No. Yes. I don’t know,” he sighs, spreading his fingers wide and looking at his hands, ingrained with dark lines of Athos’s blood. “I like helping.”
“We’d all be in the grave a few times over without you.”
Aramis huffs out a laugh, though there’s nothing remotely funny. “Tell that to the dead of Savoy.”
“Aramis,” Porthos say, low and tight. “Don’t.”
That’s what Aramis had become, after Savoy, his world spiralling down into books and papers and squinting at diagrams every night because sleeping wasn’t a good idea anymore. His sleep was full of blood and corpses, but strangely the act of filling his waking hours with them too was a comfort. Paris being fairly forward-thinking when it came to the study of medicine (and a city with a plentiful supply of bodies) meant it was fairly easy for Aramis to find the places to go and the people to speak to about such things.
He wondered sometimes, if it was a punishment he was inflicting on himself, forcing himself to look at what he could not bear to see in that forest, two years ago: his friends, broken down into their component parts, organs and arteries, muscle and bone. And though it turned his stomach so often he began to grow pale and wan, it was a compulsion he could not bear to end.
The others had borne it long enough, until one day Porthos had snapped and broken Aramis’s nose in fury, and later, made him promise that it would stop now. Though he’d sworn that he wouldn’t go to any more dissections (and hadn’t Porthos turned pale and furious at that revelation?) Aramis couldn’t keep himself away from the books and the studying.
He has to be better, from now on. That’s what Aramis had told himself each time he’d emptied the contents of his stomach, because though it was getting easier, for almost a year afterwards the sight of blood had brought him back to that night in Savoy. He had to be better. Next time, if God forbid there ever was one, would be different. Aramis would save some, at least.
Being the men that they are, there have been many times since Savoy where a blade or a musket ball has brought them down. Each time, Aramis has pushed down the panic until his mind has gone blank enough for him to extract the bullets or sew up the wounds with detachment, until it is almost muscle memory.
“Did you ever think about calling a surgeon? Did Treville?” he asks.
Porthos shakes his head dismissively. “Enough blood in there without fetching a butcher,” he states fervently.
It’s odd. Aramis chose this. He does like that he can help, that he can patch them back together and, for the most part, his hands can stay dispassionate and steady enough to do what needs to be done. He likes that he can make such a difference, now, because he’d sworn he would never be so helpless again. And he knows the way people see him, because he takes care to present himself that way: foppish and louche and carefree. Yet he is the one who might save them, when the bullets and the blades strike home.
But another part of him is filled with such furious anger, that this should be put on him and him alone. And suddenly he is the lone survivor again and he’s just Aramis and Jesus God, how could he possibly hold that responsibility? Why does it have to be him that sees them breaking and broken and tasked with the impossibility of putting them back together again?
He wants to shout, or cry, or break something, but he’s suddenly overcome with tiredness so intense that all he can do is fold in on himself with a sigh.
*