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D'Artagnan was struck at seeing two open coffins in the hall. In reply to the mute invitation of Grimaud, he approached, and saw in one of them Athos, still handsome in death, and, in the other, Raoul with his eyes closed, his cheeks pearly as those of the Palls of Virgil, with a smile on his violet lips. He shuddered at seeing the father and son, those two departed souls, represented on earth by two silent, melancholy bodies, incapable of touching each other, however close they might be.
Alexandre Dumas: The Man In The Iron Mask.
*
All that night, either from a natural respect for the dead that lay within it, or perhaps from a grief that had rendered the very structure mute as Grimaud in sympathy, the house remained silent around D'Artagnan. He did not welcome the quiet. It seemed to him in its stillness to be an excessive pall of gloom, approaching a mockery of the peace that Athos had always sought to create in his surroundings. It seemed wrong, to him in his self-imposed vigil by the dead who would never again know or care for the tenor of his thoughts, that even in nature there should be no display of grief – no rain to stand for tears nor mist to act as a softening shroud, no wind to strike branches one against the other in whipped remorse.
He wondered if Aramis, lost in exile, performed any of these duties in nature's place, if the expression that he felt constrained from showing was allowed to the banished man in his solitude.
But Aramis never wept, had come to condemn expression of feeling as a weakness, would pride himself on showing an unmoved countenance to the world no matter whether he felt all the storm within him that the world would not show on D'Artagnan's behalf. If he grieved - if he grieved – it would be as closed and hidden from them all as his motives and his thoughts, even now where there were none to care what they observed in this most self-possessed of men.
D'Artagnan, unable in that increasingly oppressive, muted atmosphere to show any of the grief he felt, or to begin to express it even to his own heart, could only look upon the faces of the dead, and found the marble tranquility that had settled upon them almost an antidote to sorrow. The beauty of the grave was too lacking in the familiar to give him anything to cling to, nothing that would remind him of what had once passed between them, all the words he would have given anything, moments before, to say again were stifled in his throat.
There were no missed opportunities for him to mourn, nothing unsaid or unexplained to cause regret or sorrow as so many losses had in his life. The only regret he felt for Raoul was the blight that had fallen upon him, regret for the boy he had lost – but they had all lost that Raoul, long ago, lost him to an impossible love and endless bitterness. Death was the only respite Raoul could have ever found, and how could D'Artagnan, in all conscience, mourn that it had come to him?
He wondered, briefly, if there were any regrets in the house of the King. Did Louise de la Valliere spare a tear for the boy who loved her so hopelessly and so unwisely? Did she even give thought to his sincere devotion, as unwanted as it was, or were all her thoughts so drowned in Louis that even Raoul's death did not touch her?
Not that it mattered now, not to d'Artagnan, and especially not to Raoul as he lay there in his box, but Athos might have gained a small degree of comfort that she had spared his son a thought. Comfort that perhaps his son had fared slightly better in love than he, himself had.
It didn't have to be like that for him, the small, quiet unworthy voice that he always tried so hard to suppress spoke up in the recesses of his mind where he had banished it as thoroughly as he had all the things it had come to stand for. He could have taken the emotions you so freely offered as well as the rest. He could have had you for a lover in all senses of the word, and you could have made him happy.
Unfair of it to speak so, in the presence of the dead, unfair, and unwanted, because he had long since stopped dwelling on what had been and what had become impossible, long since ceased to strive after what he had finally recognized could never be. Perhaps, if he had not so clumsily tried to console himself with thoughts of no regret, no wasted time, no missed opportunities to say those things that should mean all in all to the listener, it would never have spoken up at all.
But here in the house that had become more a tomb than the waiting mausoleum could ever be, it had found his weakness and hypocritical acceptance, and marked them for what they were, and used every chink that thoughts of Louise's strange bravery over her choice, and Raoul's failure to accept it, had made in his thin wall of resignation, to taunt him with all that he had been forced to relinquish, long before death made that loss irrevocable.
He had love. He chose not to take it.
No new revelation, that, and yet still as devastating as when he had realized its truth for the first time.
*
"You will learn, as you grow older, D'Artagnan, that there are certain things you can trust in," Athos told him, his voice as mellow as the brandy he had been drinking. "A good horse, a good sword, and a good drink – those you can trust. But never in fate, luck or women."
"No trust for friendship?" Porthos chuckled as he stood up and moved toward the game of dice that was going on in the corner. He had the look of a man with entirely mercenary intent, and was very obviously soon to be lost to gaming for the night.
"Oh… he can trust your friendship, dear Porthos, as long as there are no cards or women involved." Athos called after him. "But no one should ever trust mine."
Aramis, pointedly, opened the book he had been reading before they had forcibly closed it on him, and flicked slowly through the pages until he found where he had left off. He raised it closer to his eyes, an exaggerated sigh coming from behind the leather cover. D'Artagnan had a feeling it was less to do with his apparent contempt for the turn the conversation had taken, and more a strategic avoidance of having to say any of the things he was doubtlessly thinking. Aramis's tongue, unleashed, was usually unforgivable in its tone and observations, and his only concession to their protests was silence rather than modification of his outlook. Since this particular bon mot had also left D'Artagnan speechless - though in his case more because he was choking on protest rather than irritation - he could hardly fault the tactic.
D'Artagnan waited for Athos to continue, but apparently that was all he had to say on the subject, his eyes having taken on that slightly unfocused look they got whenever he was either very drunk, or lost in thoughts of the past. Since he knew how long Athos had been drinking and that the brandy bottle was not yet empty, D'Artagnan had to assume it was the latter that was haunting his friend tonight.
That gave him even more impetuous to protest, because Athos, blue deviled and melancholy, was never a pleasant companion and worse, could even be dangerous as he struck out at people around him with little regard for reason.
It was usually Aramis they could rely on to stop these times from becoming damaging, know that he would choose some spinningly provocative topic and force it onto them like a true Jesuit debater, and make everyone annoyed enough or confused enough to forget what had been threatened by Athos's gloom. But Aramis, for whatever reason, was not playing his part this time, had decided that he wanted nothing to do with any of them, and oddly, that hurt. Not that he should care so little for Athos's appalling view of what constituted self-assessment, but that he could have decided that such a remark was beyond what he wanted to deal with - that they were all outside his care, for once.
Our invisible protector, D'Artagnan had called him, scant days before, with death and guilt still clinging to them all in a more binding conspiracy that any crime could have imposed. It had not occurred to him until now, as he struggled for words and Athos stared into some inner vista of hell, and Aramis's white fingers delicately turned a page, that it was not some innate gift and ability that belonged to the former abbe, but rather a choice that he made each and every time. And this time, he had chosen not, had by his silence passed that duty over to D'Artagnan, and by God! he did not want it.
"Wise or not, " D'Artagnan said simply, hoping it would either be taken as sincere regard or be turned somehow into a tension relieving joke, "I trust you."
"More fool you," Athos grunted back and, amazingly, shoved back from the table and moved toward the door, leaving the brandy behind.
D'Artagnan looked imploringly at Aramis, hoping for some bit of guidance. "Should I go after him?"
Aramis shrugged, not looking up from his book. "Entirely up to you," he murmured blandly to his pages.
"Aramis -" D'Artagnan said pleadingly, and the black eyes finally raised to meet his, an excoriating anger in them that D'Artagnan somehow knew was directed inward rather than at anyone else, even him.
"Yes," he said curtly. "Go. You are a better and a braver man than I will ever be for even thinking it tonight, but go."
Abandoning raging crypticism for more comprehensible if equally frustrating melancholy, D'Artagnan hurried out into the street.
His gaze went left and then right along the roadway but he didn't see the familiar figure, "Athos?"
"I haven't gone far," Athos's voice growled out of the shadows near the side of the building. "Like a dog on a lead…"
D'Artagnan gave a sigh of relief and joined him on the bench, "You know that's not true, Athos. You lead us far more than you are ever willing to be led. "
"Thank you," Athos said, insincerity so thick in his voice that D'Artagnan found himself blushing at his own innate gaucherie. He was no good at this sort of thing, no good apparently even at stating the obvious, and he felt his lack of grace all the more when Athos continued - "I meant you, as it happens. "
Well, that was certainly a more apt description, even if it remained hideously unflattering. D'Artagnan sighed, but his embarrassment ebbed slowly into a more welcome feeling of mild resentment. There were times when the line between melancholy and outright incivility was very thin indeed, and Athos seemed to cross it with a kind of twisted pleasure, as if wondering just how badly he could behave before he got a response that matched whatever it was his dark moods craved.
"Well, yes… quite," D'Artagnan muttered. "Shall I leave?"
Leaving though, seemed to be the last thing he wanted to do tonight for some reason, and he settled himself more comfortably on the wooden bench as if Athos's answer would have little effect on what he actually did.
"And show a new tendency towards using sense? I couldn't stand the shock," Athos said, having, from his tone, taken more from D'Artagnan's actions than his words. Despite the harshness of his own words, however, there was very little in his voice, rather a resigned half-amusement that suggested he was at least making the effort to pull himself out of whatever dungeon his mind was currently inhabiting.
"Sense is a highly overrated virtue, I've always thought," D'Artagnan replied. He knew he used his own seldom enough, but had always assumed it was a fault of youth. But now, after spending so many hours in the company of the Three Inseparables, he wondered if that were actually true. "It leads, rather quickly to utter boredom."
"I blame Porthos entirely," Athos said a little obscurely, but D'Artagnan thought he rather knew what was meant. He had always been prone to recklessness, even before his somewhat disastrous journey to Paris, but Porthos, with his insouciant reliance upon others to do his thinking for him when it came to evading the usually inevitable consequences of his actions, had simply inspired him to be more confident in how he approached his sometimes headlong rush at life, knowing that there were those who would exert themselves on his behalf, whatever the consequences.
But not quite. Not quite, and for the first time he began to see what Athos had meant about his friendship, the joking about his imminent incarceration taking on a new meaning as he thought of what had actually been said and by whom, even in jest.
"Whatever may ensue, I will go," he had said of his conflicting not-quite invitations from Richelieu and a purported benefactor who wanted him to ride in the woods at an appointed hour, trying to conceal his hope with determination, and meaning it, intending to make both destinations whatever the cost. But it was Athos who had distanced himself from the affair, though D'Artagnan had never questioned his support, placing all responsibility firmly on the younger man's shoulders, as though trying to impress upon him by means of diffidence that it was not only affairs of the heart in which one should not trust blindly and utterly.
"If you are determined, do so."
If you are determined. No more than that, none of the casual acceptance that the whole affair might end in prison-breaking that had come even from cool Aramis, but merely that acknowledgment that this was something he could not protest.
How often, D'Artagnan wondered, had he missed that insistent detachment, that constant effort to make him see that if his actions were his own then the results of those actions should be his as well? How often had he suspected this was a lesson he must learn, and ignored Athos's attempts to bring it to his attention?
It should never have taken Constance's death to make him see. It should have been something he understood without attendant guilt or grief, long since, and a sudden access of affection filled him as he thought of how often Athos must have hoped so much would not come to pass before he had learned the necessity of it.
"He makes such a lovely scapegoat, doesn't he?" D'Artagnan pulled himself back into the current conversation, aware that he was brooding over a past he could no longer effect any more than Athos could effect his own. "It's that blank look in his eyes and the way the ends of his mustache sort of droop when he realizes he's taking the blame and can't think of anything to save himself. Poor Porthos."
"Poor Porthos? Fortunate Porthos, more like," Athos retorted, half-turning so that he was facing D'Artagnan instead of out into the night. "He at least knows what his first love is - himself - and places no guilt upon any of his behaviour as long as that first love is served."
It would have been condemnatory, were it not for the fact that there was no censure in Athos's tone, rather a fond amusement, and D'Artagnan felt a slow grin start to curl at his mouth.
"You approve," he said in dawning realisation. "You think he's the one who's got it right, don't you? My God, you actually envy his narcissism!" He ended on a shout of laughter, feeling almost deliriously gleeful at having discovered this unexpected flaw in the man he so often thought of as approaching the status of a demi-god.
Athos gave a rude huff of a laugh, "It may not be virtuous but he seems to be happy. And that is what I envy."
"Yes, but…" D'Artagan's voice trailed off. How could he, indeed, argue that? Porthos did appear to be happy by all he could judge and his narcissism had never made him less of a friend to the rest of them.
He tried to collect his rather scattered thoughts and ended up, rather feebly, by saying - "So does that mean the rest of us are doomed not to be happy, then? If that's what it takes? Because I'm not certain I'll ever manage it, and I know you're incapable of it, and Aramis -" He waved a hand, rather vaguely. It was impossible to consider Aramis and ordinary behaviour at the same time, never mind put them into a sentence.
"Yes, Aramis, like the peace of God, passeth all understanding," Athos agreed dryly, but D'Artagnan, who had learned what that dismissiveness usually meant, heeded the neatly-done warning off on that subject. Thinking back to Aramis's inward-turning rage back at the inn, he wondered, briefly, what Athos had managed to do to finally penetrate that armoured superiority, and decided he was happier by far with it remaining beyond his comprehension.
"So should the two of us cry, "Woe. For never shall we be happy"? Because I'm not certain that I'm ready to give up that fight." D'Artagnan told him, keeping his voice light and joking, for he wasn't certain sure that his friend hadn't give up that same battle long ago, with the discovery of betrayal in the form of a small trefoil brand.
"I'm not sure that happiness is something that should need to be fought for," Athos said thoughtfully, "but then I would cut a poor figure indeed, sat upon a bench and announcing a state of woe to the world. So I regret I will have to decline both the fight and the despair - is there nothing in between those two for those of more subdued temperament?" He sounded genuinely amused, but D'Artagnan knew from experience that Athos's amusement tended to well from the spring of unending, self-loathing rage that had fuelled so much of his life in Paris, and was wary.
"Something in between?" D'Artagnan repeated, giving himself a few extra moments of thought. "Perhaps the answer is simply to wait. To live and do the best we are able and eventually happiness will just….arrive. It might not be a bright flame but it's more likely to keep you warm and content, don't you think?"
Athos looked at him for a long moment, and D'Artagnan found all his hopeful ideas shrivelling up and fading under that steady, pitiless eye. "It's an attractive picture," Athos said at last. "Pretty enough for me to ignore its limitations. It's a good image to believe in, boy. Keep it."
He had not realised, until then, how long it had been since Athos had used that particular name for him, nor how much of a relief it had been when he stopped. It seemed somehow to put a distance between them that all the familiarity and knowledge and hard-fought-for confidences in the world could not cover.
"Don't condescend to me, Athos," D'Artagnan bit out the words. "I know my failings and my youth amuse you, it's not something I need to have pointed out. I'm not Aramis. I can't battle you with words and I don't have the facility for humor that Porthos has. I can only be myself, young and more than a bit naïve, I'm sure. But you are my friend…and I love you. And yes, I trust you as well, foolish or not."
D'Artagnan broke off his impassioned speech, looking down at his feet and waiting. For what, he wasn't sure – laughter? Derision? Snores that heralded the fact that he had bored Athos into sleep? – something.
"Well," said Athos at last, and D'Artagnan looked up, startled, because of all the things he had been expecting, of all the responses that had crossed his mind in a rather nightmarish parade of horrendous possibility, that note of faint surprise had never been among them. "You remain....undaunted, I'll give you that much."
D'Artagnan gave a self-deprecatory laugh, "I'm not on the qui vive enough to know when I should be daunted, Athos. I'm just incredibly stubborn to make up for that."
That, at least, was extremely true. He'd made a place for himself in the middle of a rock-solid trio of friendship using that very thing. A less stubborn man would have given up after the first of Aramis's scathing putdowns, or Porthos's schemes, or Athos's relentless broody torments.
"True enough," Athos said with a faint smile, and D'Artagnan was left with the irritating knowledge that despite everything Athos had ever said about his talents and intelligence, he still felt the need for vindication, still wanted to have it confirmed that those rare compliments were sincere - pure folly, since of all Athos's faults or talents, dissembling was not among them. The little comments that could have been agreement with his most denigratory of self-assessments were distinctly unsettling, and he wondered, briefly, if that was what Athos had meant by saying he did not make a friend to be trusted.
"It doesn't matter," he said aloud, and Athos's vaguely amused smile dissolved into irritation.
"What?" he demanded rather snappishly, and while his annoyance was always preferable to his melancholy, D'Artagnan still found himself scrambling to explain.
"What you think," he elaborated, and then, seeing the irritation start to become real annoyance, "about yourself. It only matters what I think."
There was a silence in which Athos stared at him incredulously, and D'Artagnan frantically thought over what he had just said, before realising quite how idiotic he had managed to sound.
"Well, you did imply narcissism was the way forward..." he said weakly.
The laugh that followed seemed to come from Athos's very soul. It was rough with disuse but it was a true laugh, holding nothing of his usual sharpness of wit nor knifelike temper. "Yes, it seems I did."
There was a moment of silence before Athos continued, "I suppose that means that I am obligated to attempt some of my own, don't you think?"
It was a fairly awful thought, even as a concept yet unattempted, and D'Artagnan could not even muster up a trace of sincerity to go with his rather feeble nod of agreement. There was part of him that knew he was going to have to listen to whatever Athos came up with, not because he really wanted to know, but because like any oncoming disaster, it was impossible to look away. The rest of him had already retreated to the back of his mind and was quietly trying not to scream.
D'Artagnan closed his eyes , so that only one of his senses had to deal with whatever was coming.
He waited…
And then waited some more…
Athos never spoke, he just leaned in and placed the softest of kisses on D'Artagnan's lips. D'Artagnan's eyes flew open at once, looking over the face of his friend and wondering what had possessed him. It could have been affection. It could have been Athos in one of his more quixotic, peculiar moods, and given the topic of conversation, that was more than likely true. The kiss could have meant anything. It could mean what he wanted it to mean and whatever maggot was in Athos's mind be damned.
But the hand that still rested on the side of his face left no room for interpretation. Only the intent of a lover or the last gesture to the dying could evoke that kind of possessive tenderness, and D'Artagnan was a long way from death indeed.
"Since we're being narcissistic, I'm going to believe that you wanted me to do that." Athos gave a dry chuckle.
Wanted, D'Artagnan thought from somewhere in the depths of bewilderment, was probably the wrong word. It implied that he'd even considered it before, apart from anything else, and since he hadn't, the concept of whether or not he might want it had never really crossed his mind. Now, though, Athos's hand warm on his face and a myriad of unspoken questions needing to be answered, he was thinking, and to the effect of realising just why he was called foolish and naive so often. They were kinder words than 'wilfully blind'.
"No," he said, crystallising it all into the important difference that needed to be made. "But I want it."
And knew, as soon as he said it, that he had got something right. Not because Athos smiled, for he did not. Because he did not draw away. Because he did not lower his hand.
Because he did not smile, and so did not dismiss D'Artagnan's words. And in that moment, the young man had truly believed that his stubbornness, like the fabled third time, had truly paid for all.
*
It had been an impetuous decision, one that had eventually caused them both pain. His, because he really did love Athos far beyond what their friendship encompassed. And Athos's because, no matter how hard D'Artagnan tried or the new ways he found to prove it, that most selfless and yet strangely selfish of men could never be brought to feel himself worthy of being given any kind of true love with a whole heart. Not believing himself worthy of it, and yet unable to refute D'Artagnan's granting of it, he had withdrawn first what little of that side of himself he had to offer, retreating into the physical expression of what he would not allow himself to receive in words – and then, at the last, fled even from that, delaying even correspondence until even the brightest flame could no longer claim to be more than embers. True or not, D'Artagnan could no more deny him that flight than he could the giving of his whole heart, and their separation had become mutual.
It had all been wonderful and frightening and even heartbreaking, by the end, and yet, for all of that, it was a time in his life that D'Artagnan could never make himself regret. And yes, when he came to find Athos after so many years, even fearing the worst, even after all that time, he would have started it all over, despite knowing how it must inevitably come to grief once more. He would have used all his old stubbornness to pursue it and reignite that old and undeniable passion, if he had been given even the slightest sign that it was something Athos would welcome.
But any hopes that it might have been so were long gone, he admitted, even before Athos's disappearance into the strange facsimile of a family life that he had created for himself and Raoul at Blois, before he had even left the Musketeers. It had been narcissism, in the end, and as such fated to bring neither happiness. For all that he had spoken of wanting, Athos had not wanted to be loved for his own sake - had not been ready to admit that was even possible - and D'Artagnan had been neither experienced enough nor innocent enough to make his feelings credible. Aramis's black, inward-turning fury had almost been his, towards the end of their time together in Paris, and he had wondered, then as he still did now, whether it was witnessing that process, witnessing it because condemned by his own steps back towards his faith to do no more, and whether it was knowing the cause of it from first-hand experience or merely from observation, which had finally driven their protector from their circle and into the haven offered by the Lazarists.
Conceal your wounds when you have any, the former abbe had warned D'Artagnan, long before even the truth of who Milady was had become clear, before ever Athos's kiss had turned the world in a swift revolution that made all new. He had been speaking of those wounds resulting from a love unreturned even then, though he could not have known what his words would come to mean.
To love you cry, 'Fie! Friends are shadows! The world is a sepulcher!
"And we were right, the two of us, all that time ago. We were right even in melodrama and half-jest," he murmured into the strange hush of the room, now a sepulcher of its own. "I never felt for Athos nor could have made him feel the depth and breadth of love he had for Raoul. There was nothing in either of us that would have caused death to seem preferable to a life without the other's presence, nor would we have wanted it. Athos was right then, too, right to deny me, right to leave Paris and the musketeers and me, right even in what I saw as abandonment of all that could have been good, and as always, it took me unconscionably long to see it."
It was a freeing thought, though a sad one, to finally clarify this in his own mind. He knew that Athos had never had anything of meaning with Raoul's mother, so it had been just the two of them, father and son in their own small world, with Athos ladling out all the affection he had stored up for years on Raoul's head.
It was fitting and right, he supposed, that it should be that way.
He thought, oddly and fancifully, and letting himself indulge in those things that suited his younger self far more than they did his current age and position, that perhaps all the love that had been given to Athos by him, and left like so much unneeded rubbish, had in fact not been wasted or discarded at all, but rather stored up so that this most detached and cynical of men could find reserves with which to love the child who had needed him; to love the young man that child had grown into, who had been betrayed by the world and damaged by that betrayal just as irrecoverably as his father had once been. No narcissism there, only an endless, selfless wealth of emotion that had been the only thing tying Raoul to the world, at the end.
The way that Raoul had been the only thing tying Athos.
D'Artagnan looked out the window at the lightening sky, watched it dapple over the fields where his friend had, at last, found some peace. Watched as the coffins were, at last, closed and fastened shut, ready for the short journey to the mausoleum.
"I'll see you again, my dearest Athos." He whispered into the now empty rooms. "Soon."
He turned on a gentle breath, soft as that very first kiss, and blew out the candles to let the first harsh glints of daylight have reign in that silent house.
Memories of love deserved to be more than hidden ghosts. They two remaining, the exiled Bishop and the still-stubborn Musketeer, lived to prove that for a fact, though they would never meet again in any world.
FIN