Chapter Text
We find an hour together, spend it not on flowers
or wine, but the whole of the summer sky and a grass ditch.
They each have a thing they love best, of course.
Aramis loves when he is laid out on the bed, hands gripping the rungs of the headboard and kept in place only by the force of his promise not to move them. He loves when Porthos slides one of his legs up, pushing his knee back into his chest, and looks up with a leering smirk from between Aramis’ thighs.
He loves the extended, fucking unending, worship of his ass with Porthos’ tongue that comes after and leaves him tender and a little sore and utterly pliant as Porthos fucks him. Sometimes Porthos will wrap his hand around Aramis’ cock and squeeze just a little and Aramis will come so hard there are constellations behind his eyelids. Sometimes he just waits for the sensation to build up until it’s a constant roar and he doesn’t even realize he’s come, untouched, until he feels it cooling on his belly as it dries.
Porthos loves to start an evening with dinner and wine and stories. He loves to watch Aramis’ face light up when all eyes are on him. He loves how passion makes his lover glow from within. He likes to kiss Aramis all the way up the stairs to his flat, grabbing Aramis’ ass as he fumbles with the keys in the lock. But the thing Porthos loves most is telling Aramis all the things he wished he could have been doing all through dinner and wine and stories.
“I though about just dropping to my knees and taking your cock in my mouth while you were talking to the waiter. I’d just have sucked you in soft and felt you grow all fat and hard in my mouth. You’d like that, wouldn’t you?” Aramis would, he really would.
On his favorite nights Porthos pushes Aramis to the couch and strips him of his trousers to find that Aramis is already hard. “I’d complain about you getting started without me but… “ And then he guides Aramis’ hand to where his ass is stretched wide around their favorite plug. He is slick with lube and his heartbeat is pulsing in the rim of his hole. He loves it when Aramis growls and says how glad he is that he didn’t know this sooner but now that he does know… And then the plug is tugged out and dropped to the floor and Aramis buries himself in one stroke and they both groan and it feels like coming home.
In both of their favorite scenarios there are long moments afterwards spent tangled in each other. Minutes devoted to soft kisses and a list of the bits they loved and want to do again next time. Porthos will smirk and call Aramis a pervert and Aramis will arch his eyebrow and they will fall to kissing again.
They will sleep, then. Limbs wrapped tight some nights, only touching at their fingers on others. When they wake Porthos will make coffee and Aramis will grumble until his second cup and neither of them will say what is always on their minds; that they are lucky, lucky, lucky.
But this is not that story. Not yet. This is the story of everything that comes before.
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Fifteen - Paris
It’s unfair, really, that at almost sixteen Aramis is still suffering through his awkward phase. In a few years his curls will be a gorgeous tousled mess, but today he is still struggling to grow out his mother’s well-intentioned home haircut. It leaves his ears exposed and shows off that he has yet to really grow into them. And while his face will always been youthful and angelic, even well in to middle age, right now it is just the very definition of baby face.
No wonder, then, that the girl wants nothing to do with him. He smiles at her and tries to say hi, she arches her eyebrow and leaves the café with her friends. Aramis has resigned himself to buying a cappuccino and then moping into it when he hears the snickering from the corner.
The culprit is a dark-skinned young man with huge brown eyes and a massive dimple, and he is highly amused. Aramis glares at him and the boy just laughs louder.
“Oh, you should see your face! Ain’t you a picture? Looking like someone kicked your puppy in the teeth.”
Apparently the look on Aramis’ face goes from indignant to wounded because the boy settles his laughing and says, “C’mon, I’ll buy you some fancy frothy thing and you can drown your sorrows in it and we can discuss where someone with your ears ought to be setting his sights as far as women are concerned.”
Decades in the future, when they are having a fearsome argument where Aramis’ side is “The heart wants what the heart wants!” and Porthos’ side is “This isn’t dating, this is reckless endangerment!” Porthos will bring up that Aramis has always aimed far beyond where wisdom would caution him to stop.
Aramis will splutter for a moment and say, “Is this… are you talking about that girl in the café?!”
“I said it then and I’ll say it now, that girl was way out of your league.”
It will break the tension and they will be able to start discussing the real problem like mostly-rational adults. But that is years from now.
Today they sit at the corner table and Aramis notes that Porthos has no room, really, to talk about anyone else’s ears. Porthos allows as how that’s true, that he’s lucky he likes his girls less picky. The truth is that Porthos’ experience with love is made entirely of a night of frantic groping in the dark with one girl and rushed fumbling in a basement with one boy. His life doesn’t allow a lot of room for romance; he is mostly concerned with keeping his belly full and trying to not to get arrested.
When they part on the street Porthos says, “There’s a park near here, yeah? The one with the waterfall. You know it?”
Aramis does.
“Sometimes I hang out there in the evenings. If you’re ever not busy or whatever you could meet me by the old puppet theater.”
Aramis gives a casual shrug. “Sure, I might come by.”
Aramis does not come into his parents’ flat crowing about how he thinks he made a friend, but his mother can see the excitement on his face. They’re new in Paris, they’ve transferred in from Lyon and he is entranced by this gorgeous, lush city but getting to know people in a new place isn’t easy.
His mother misses Argentina, she has since the first time his father’s job moved them out of the country. She knows she is settling in slowly and she feels guilty about how it must be affecting Aramis; but she misses her family and the countryside and the sound of her language in her ears. Aramis is fluent in French but he speaks Spanish at home, for his mother.
“Tell me what has you smiling!” she says, “and what kept you out so late.” It’s not late, really, but his mother is a worrier.
Aramis tells her about Porthos, about how he’s from another part of the city but he comes to that café sometimes to read. In reality Porthos comes to a building near the café for court-ordered anger management counseling. He walks there and spends his Métro fare instead on coffee and one of the fruit tarts the owner makes from her grandmother’s recipe.
He sits in the corner and tries to read and misses his mother so much it feels like someone’s punched him in the chest. He likes the café because it’s quiet and quiet is a rare commodity in Porthos’ life. Someday Porthos will tell Aramis all of this, all of the things that happen when he is out of Aramis’ company, but not that first day.
Aramis tells his mother that the boy is smart and funny and helped him not feel so bad about the thing with the girl. He explains about the girl and his mother fusses and says that’s nonsense that he’s beautiful and will be having to beat women back with a broom. He blushes under her praise.
The next evening, all the evenings he can, he goes to the Parc des Buttes-Chaumont to find Porthos. They kick a football back and forth and talk about everything and nothing. They stare at the tall bridges and the Temple de la Sibylle and Aramis talks about how different Paris is from Lyon. Porthos just listens. He’s lived in Paris, or close enough, his whole life but he and Aramis don’t live in the same city at all.
They talk about how their mothers both came to France from other countries. Porthos talks about how his mother was from Côte d’Ivoire. He tells his mother’s stories, about her family and her home. He doesn’t tell his own stories. He likes having someone in his life that’s never thought of him as a troublemaker. Aramis is someone who doesn’t know all the things Porthos had to do to keep food on the table before his mother died and a roof over his head after. He is starting to like the person Aramis sees.
When Aramis twists his wrist bad enough to be sidelined from any sport for a week he says the only bright spot is that his mother will make him empanadas árabes for dinner the next day. They are his favorite, hers are the best, and they always brighten his mood.
They have known each other for six months now. Porthos’ counseling is over but he still walks three or four miles through Belleville to spend time with Aramis. He knows that Aramis knows he’s not from this area. He knows that Aramis has never once brought it up, never pried, never made him feel like anything other than a friend.
So instead of just nodding and smiling Porthos opens his heart a tiny crack and says that he has no idea what his mother made when he was feeling bad. In even his earliest memories she was already so sick. He knows that when she was in the grips of a pain episode he took whatever meat and vegetables they had left in the house and boiled them in water and brought the not-quite-entirely-soup to her in her favorite tea mug. When she drank it he'd proclaim her nearly well and then fall asleep with his head on her leg and her hand in his hair.
He says all of this while tossing the ball back and forth between his hands and looking out over the park. In the silence that follows Aramis stuffs his hands in his hoodie and looks in the same direction. “Wanna come to dinner tomorrow?”
“Yeah, alright.”
Over the next year Porthos comes to Aramis’ house for dinner regularly, but even in the face of intense maternal fussing he limits himself to no more than once a month. He knows he could get used to it, the warm light and enough food to feel full. He’s promised himself to never get used to anything provided by someone else. Not again.
At seventeen Porthos walks past a boucherie with a “help wanted” sign in the window and thinks that even a year ago he’d have kept walking. He is growing into his limbs and filling out and the owner says he could use someone not afraid of some heavy lifting. Truth be told, the owner is a little desperate for reliable help. The work is hard and honest and the owner’s wife cooks them huge lunches. He takes odd jobs for the weekends if he can find them and he starts, cautiously, to think about what his future might look like.
Aramis has been talking about going to seminary for weeks before the penny drops for Porthos. “I don’t get it. You’re leaving? To become a priest?”
“That is the general idea, yes.”
“When?”
“After I’m done with school. Three months.”
Porthos grips his shoulder with a meaty hand and says they’re going to fit all the misspent youth they can into those three months.
They drink until they fall down. They drink until inadvisable women are the loves of their lives. Aramis has sex for the first time on the office floor of their favorite bar after the bartender, dark-eyed Charlotte, hears them discussing Aramis’ plans and says no one should have to die a virgin.
She isn't much older than them but she carries a worldly patina that makes her all the more attractive to their inexperienced eyes. It is every cliché of an awkward fumbling first time but it still takes Aramis almost an hour just to stop smiling. She fucks Porthos the next night after he jokingly asks when his turn is and she looks at her watch, shrugs and says, “I have a break coming up.”
He wraps her legs around his waist and holds her up against the walk-in refrigerator; fucking her so hard they can hear the shelves inside clattering. She digs her nails into his back as she comes and when she’s straightening her skirt Charlotte says, “You should teach your friend a few of those tricks.” Porthos feels the heat creep up the back of his neck and his pupils go wide.
Charlotte’s grin says she didn’t miss a thing. “It’s like that, is it?”
“No. It’s not.”
“Whatever, you’re the one who’s running out of time.”
The walk home takes forever and is not nearly long enough.
The next night Porthos brings two bottles of something just this side of vinegar and proposes that they sit in their park to drink them. They sprawl out next to the lake; underneath them the ground is still warm from the sun. Either Aramis is looking for an excuse to loosen his tongue or the wine is much stronger than they expected, whatever the reason he is barely halfway through his bottle when he starts to talk.
“Porthos? We don’t say it but… you do know you’re my best friend, right?”
“Sure.”
“I've never met anyone like you. You don’t take any shit and you’re so loyal and...” His words drift off and he stares up at the stars as Porthos speaks.
“Before I met you there was this kid I thought was my friend, yeah? He’d hang out with me and we’d get into trouble together.” Porthos digs at the grass with a twig and Aramis just waits and listens. "He turned on me the first chance he got, made sure I got into trouble without him. Big trouble.”
In fact Stefan, faced with a lengthy sentence for auto theft, had told the police about the burglary he and Porthos had been planning together. The police were waiting inside the house when Porthos got through the window.
Stefan got a lighter sentence on the other charges, Porthos got a short stint in the juvenile detention facility and, after the complete wreck he made of the interrogation room with his fists and boots, the counseling that brought him to Aramis’ neighborhood almost two years ago.
Porthos takes another pull at his bottle. “You never turned on me. Every time I tell you something I expect you to go running. But you never do. I’ve had lots of people who said they were my friends, but you really are.”
With three more swigs of wine in him Aramis dares “I don’t have a brother but-“
“Sure you do,” Porthos says, cutting him off. He holds his bottle out and clinks it against Aramis’ and they drink in silence for a few more moments.
“So,” says Aramis, flopping back to lie in the damp grass and waggling his eyebrows at Porthos. “That Charlotte is certainly something.”
Porthos gives a great barking laugh that bounces off the old quarry walls around them. He props himself on his elbows and takes another deep swallow of wine.
“She said I should teach you some of my tricks.”
“Oh?” Aramis’ breath is caught in his throat and his voice suddenly sober. “What tricks are those?”
“I do this one thing… “
“Maybe you should demonstrate it,” Aramis’ eyes are bright.
Porthos chuckles low, “Cheeky suave fucker.” And then he is kissing Aramis. He is pressing his mouth against Aramis’ lips and waiting for Aramis to bolt. Waiting for him to say that they’re drunk and this is a bad idea and that he doesn’t think of Porthos that way.
He’s waiting for that but instead Porthos feels Aramis’ mouth open under his. The wine tastes sweeter in Aramis’ mouth and the kiss becomes hot and dirty. Porthos can feel Aramis clutching at his jacket. He pulls his head back, tugging at Aramis’ lower lip with his teeth.
He looks down into Aramis’ eyes, black in the dark, and says, “Yeah?”
Aramis laughs and pushes Porthos over on his back, draping himself over Porthos’ chest and saying, “Yeah,” before licking into Porthos’ mouth and sliding his hands up under Porthos’ shirt. His fingers dig into Porthos’ ribs and he moans.
Porthos grips Aramis by the ass and brings their hips together with a shameless grind and Aramis gasps out a shattered “Fuck!” He looks down and grins. “Do that again.”
Porthos leers back. “You do it.” Aramis does. Everything after that is a blur of kissing, hot wet panting into each other’s mouths, and the slow drag of their jeans against each other. Porthos’ hands come up under Aramis’ arms and hook over the top of his shoulders. He uses the leverage to press Aramis down against him.
Aramis ruts against him twice and then his voice breaks on a sob and he is coming in his pants. Porthos rolls him onto his back, looks down into his face and kisses him, close-mouthed and soft and then drags his hips against Aramis’. In seconds he has his face buried in Aramis’ neck to muffle the loud “Shit shit shit!” as he comes.
There are more soft kisses after that and Aramis says, “Porthos,” soft and fond.
“I said we’d get some living in before you went off, didn’t I?”
“You did, and we certainly have. And it’ll keep me from temptation because nothing else could be as fun as these months have been.”
Porthos laughs because Aramis has no idea what else the world holds, but he’s going off to become celibate, so it hardly seems fair to tell him now.
The day Aramis leaves, Porthos comes over to say goodbye. They’ve promised to write, but they both know how this might end. Standing by his father’s car Aramis wraps Porthos in a tight hug. His mouth against Aramis’ ear Porthos says, “I love you, brother.”
Aramis pulls back, and with his hand on the back of Porthos’ neck he brings their foreheads together. He looks Porthos in the eye and says, “I love you, too.”
Porthos watches them drive off and awkwardly hugs Aramis’ mother as she cries. He’ll still come for dinner, yes? She promises to make the empanadas.
“Yeah,” he says. “Wouldn’t miss 'em.”