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His footsteps break sharp and brittle on the frozen ground, where hollows lie thick with pine needles and the loamy soil of forest floor. Each creak of ice sets a shiver through him like the shatter of old bones.
Everything else is so quiet, so fucking quiet: just the ice, the hollow loneliness of wind through the trees - and his own ragged breathing, the wild tattoo of his heart an off-beat rhythm to his stumbled steps.
Still, Marsac can feel him following, the silent press of him like a breath of dead air at his back. It takes a long time to realise that it's not really Aramis, and by the time Marsac spins to face him the sun is wilting low and wan through the stark trees, the air burning his lungs with its cold.
"So you're just going to leave me, then?"
"You're not really here," Marsac says, tongue slow and heavy. Aramis looks pale and tired and flickering. He shrugs, and the blood slips fresh from the wound at his temple, fury-red in the stark forest of white and black. “No I’m not. You left me, remember?”
Marsac turns back, forces his feet to lift and swing and step.
"There's a village a mile east," Aramis says after a while, “You saw it when we rode through two days ago.”
Marsac doesn't answer, the huff of his breath the only noise.
"You should-"
"I'm not going to the village," Marsac bites. "Shut up."
"Ten livres pay in your pocket," comes the voice behind him. "Marsac. Send a message to Paris. They need to know what happened. Marsac."
“Shut up,” he hisses once more, “Stop talking. You’re not here.”
"Perhaps I'm a ghost," Aramis says behind him, something considering in his voice, "Perhaps I died when you left me."
Marsac shakes his head, an involuntary motion like a nervous tic, bones loose and jangling. "No."
"You left a wounded man in a forest, the snow and night coming on, surrounded by his dead friends. You saw the blood. What did you think would happen?"
"No!" Marsac says, whirling, and it comes out like a gasp, like the angry last huff of breath from a dying man. “Fuck off, fuck off!”
The forest is empty of everything but the stark masts of trees, the dark fuzz of tangled underbrush between bone-white patches of snow drifted in the piney hollows.
No Aramis. No slick paint of crimson at his temple, no hollow shadows beneath his eyes.
Just him. Just Marsac.
The lights of the village twinkle coldly for him as he nears. The livres in his pocket bribe a rider for the long road to Paris, along with the promise of more coin from the Captain of the Musketeers upon delivery of the message that Savoy has made corpses of his men.
A barn on the outskirts of town provides shelter for a few hours as the cold stars ease themselves out, and the frosty night hangs thick with ribbons of freezing air. The dark space is heavy with the animal sounds of livestock shifting, the soft warmth of their breath. Marsac settles down in the hay in the darkness, the pale glimmer of Aramis beside him.
“Don’t leave me.”
It was meant to be a whisper, but the sound is torn harsh and sobbing from his throat, from his heart, and Marsac shudders into himself.
"Never,” Aramis replies, after a while.
*
Marsac crosses the border into Spain one night as the stars flicker in the dark purple of a Pyrenees night. He feels like a snake slithering from the dried husk of his old life, shucking it off like something paper-thin and dead, and he’s afraid for a while that what lies beneath will be pink and raw and soft as new skin, but in the event it is only numb.
His horse and jacket, sword, pistols, bedroll and blanket are stolen, but they are all he needs. He find himself picking up the language without realising, the few words of Spanish he’d heard from Aramis over the years enough to get his point across at first. In any case, he knows the sword he carries at his hip and the spark of flint in his eyes are eloquent enough. He fights for whoever pays, not caring much for honour or politics.
Aramis is true to his word: if he leaves he’s never gone long, and every night his presence is like a heavy blanket around Marsac’s heart, muffled and safe and suffocating him by degrees, until he comes to crave it like wine in his blood.
Sometimes he tries to touch him, shuffles awkwardly where he is curled on his side at night and puts out a wavering hand, but Aramis is always just out of reach like the brush of something cold and dead, a hair’s-breadth from his fingertips.
Aramis’ wound never heals, the blood slipping incessantly from the gape at his temple as Marsac watches, stomach roiling with disgust, though there’s rarely enough in it for him to vomit up.
*
He’s working for a man near Granada whose name he doesn’t care to know, and it’s not the pleas and lamentations of the women or the screaming of the children as he and his men burn the farmsteads that does it in the end, but the weight of Aramis’ eyes on him.
Marsac leaves without collecting his pay, just turns his back and spurs his horse onwards until he reaches the sea, and buys passage on a ship to Palermo only because there is nowhere else to ride.
In the dank and fetid hold of the ship, timbers arcing above him like some monstrous creaking rib cage, Aramis sits opposite and stares at Marsac with eyes that do not blink or waver.
“Never again,” he says, and Marsac nods, hollowed and heavy with exhaustion and shame. It’s all gone too far, and it’s an experiment in how far he can fall if nothing else.
“Never again, Aramis,” he whispers, and cries until he can feel his soul ripping away from bones and muscles and tendons, until he floats out into the windswept night on the Alboran sea and finds peace there amongst the salt spray, and can sleep a little.
*
"Do you ever think about who attacked us, in Savoy?" Aramis asks as Marsac wipes the sweat from his brow in a sun-golden field somewhere in Tuscany, the wheat lying thick and wanton and ready for his scythe. Honest work, Aramis calls it, but it brings Marsac little relief from the jangling itch in his sword arm.
"No," he answers, drawing a bright line in the wavering field with the blade at the end of his reach.
Aramis laughs, bright and ringing like a bell. "Well I do. And I'm a figment of your fevered imaginings, so, by extension, you must also."
"You never did know when to stop talking," Marsac mutters.
*
In Dalmatia the edge of an axe, itself at the end of the arm of a mountainous Turk, glances along Marsac's throat. There's a chip a centimeter deep in his collarbone and a wound that weeps and festers until he falls and cannot get up, somewhere in the mountains near Spalato. He wakes three days later, clammy and weak with the ache of sickness in his bones, a country priest hovering over the bed in which he lies, and Aramis propped pale and silent in the corner.
"Don't die," Aramis says, "Or you'll take me with you."
Marsac leaves in the middle of the night as soon as he's strong enough to walk, taking bread and wine and the contents of the tiny church's collection box by way of thank you to the priest who saved him from the death that, by rights, should have been his a year ago, in a forest near Savoy.
*
He lets the wind blow him where it will: twice more across the Adriatic, by land to Venice, up into Bavaria, and if he stops long enough to think at all he knows it’s time to move once more. There’s no comfort to be found in the arms of whores or brown-limbed farm girls, no joy in wine or company or a fire and warmth for the night. He moves on - with Aramis, always and only with Aramis. Sometimes they will go days without speaking, at others they will talk for half an hour before Marsac realises it’s a remembered conversation once spoken in a Musketeers garrison in Paris, that some part of his brain has been holding on to.
Some days he wonders if he has gone mad, and if so, if he really cares any more.
Everywhere there is need for a sword, for a man to wield it who asks few questions and takes his pay in silence. If he ever stoops too far he knows Aramis is there to pull him back up with his heavy dark eyes, the sheen of blood gleaming wetly at his temple.
He’s collecting his pay in a tavern in Stuttgart when he hears the gossip beloved of soldiers and old wives, the stories filtered and exaggerated as they pass from person to person, cross borders and languages: France is to sign a treaty with Savoy.
Savoy Savoy Savoy. The word pounds through him like a harsh stab of metal, cold and unmerciful.
“Don’t go back,” Aramis says, as he makes to cross back into France for the first time in five years. “Don’t do this, Marsac.”
There’s something pleading and naked in his voice, and for a moment it makes him sound almost alive.
“I know what you’re thinking,” he says.
“Of course you do,” Marsac replies, twisting in his saddle, “You’re a figment of my fevered imaginings, after all.” His smiles comes brittle and cruel, but he can’t hurt Aramis, not really, not any more.
“Please,” Aramis says, though his voice is a little more distant now. “You don’t have to do this.”
“You know I do.”
Marsac feels Aramis leave like a door closing somewhere, just out of sight. He puts his heels to his horse’s side and crosses the border.
*
Sitting on a bed in a cloth-merchant’s house on the Rue des Fossoyeurs, Aramis sits warm and real and vibrating with five years of fury and hurt beside him. It’s enough to make Marsac’s heart break, the want and need and a tight hot flame of anger all balled up like a curl of fire in his gut until he lets it flicker out into his limbs.
He quirks his finger, lets it brush against the shiver of Aramis’ hand, neither of them meeting each other’s gaze. There’s a thin white line at his temple, but when Marsac flickers a glance towards the other man there is no blood there, and it’s enough to make him gasp out a sharp exhalation of relief.
The Aramis he’s been carrying around with him for five years was gone the moment he set foot on French soil, and the real thing before him now is in such stark contrast Marsac wonders how he ever could have thought the Aramis in his head was the same person.
“You don’t have to do this,” Aramis says, and his voice is rough and pitted with all the things Marsac knows he wants to say.
“You know I do,” Marsac says, and closes his eyes.
***