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the hope only of empty men
Porthos has had the same dream for several nights in a row, now.
He can never quite say what exactly it is the morning after; he only remembers flashes of light, a nauseating blur of images, a terrible, burning thirst, and Aramis, at the end of it all, saying only that it is done. He wakes up every time with his heart pounding, the taste of metal in his mouth. He’s never cared much for dreams or nightmares—sleep is far too precious to be wasted on them, as far he’s concerned. He knew a wizened old crone in the Court when he was a child, who would make her living interpreting dreams in the city. She’d share some of her coin with him on the days it was too hot, or when she was too bent by illness and infirmity, and he would carry her on his back from street to street, from citizen to gullible citizen. Every good dream and every prediction of untold fortune meant another coin in his hand, another meal in his belly.
He has no need for dreams anymore.
This morning, he wakes up and waits until his heart has stopped galloping and his ears have stopped ringing. He turns his head to see d’Artagnan huddled against the wall, stump tucked inside his shirt, watching him intently, and his heart stutters again.
“d’Artagnan?” he says, his mouth dry. Has the lad been sitting like that all night long–?
“Are you all right, Porthos?” d’Artagnan asks.
“I’m—” Porthos starts, before he bites his tongue; this is hardly the time or place for needless rumination. “Let’s get you back to your own bed, yeah?” he says, striding over to d’Artagnan, tucking his hand under his elbow, and lifting him to his feet. “Before people start wondering where you’ve got to.”
“Are you all right?” d’Artagnan asks again. He walks mostly under his own power, but his gait is listless and he is pliant under Porthos’ hands, going where Porthos leads him. “You didn’t answer.”
“I’m as hale as can be,” Porthos says, distractedly. “Were you sitting there the whole night, d’Artagnan?”
d’Artagnan doesn’t answer.
Porthos grinds his jaw, sighs, then asks, “How many nights have you spent watching others sleep?”
“All of them,” d’Artagnan says, his voice low and quiet with despair. “I can’t sleep. Or maybe I just haven’t woken up yet. I can never tell.” He looks up at Porthos now, and there are tears in his eyes but a strange rictus stretching his lips, and Porthos’ heart freezes. “The things inside of me have crawled into my head, Porthos. They don’t rest. They can’t rest.”
Porthos has nothing to say to that. He leads d’Artagnan into his room, makes him lie down on his bed, and pulls a sheet up to his chest. “Close your eyes,” he says, a little desperately. “Get some rest.”
“I told you—”
“I’ll watch over you this time,” Porthos says. “Maybe then they’ll shut up, yeah? And you can finally get the sleep you need.”
d’Artagnan looks hopeful; he nods and closes his eyes. Porthos settles on the floor, leaning against d’Artagnan’s bed. He tilts his head back and takes a deep, deep breath.
They’ve paid much too high a price for foolish dreams already.
-
Aramis examines the dirt under his fingernails with the kind of studious concentration that Porthos has only ever seen him devote to sewing wounds and studying scripture. A faint whiff of something rotten wafts in through Athos’ window, and Porthos is suddenly, almost violently reminded of the time Aramis was picking the remains of d’Artagnan’s dead flesh from his skin, and his patience snaps.
“Aramis,” he says, watches the other man flinch, and ploughs on anyway, “what did you do?”
“I saved his life—”
“Don’t—don’t give us that again,” Porthos growls. “What did you do?”
Aramis looks startled; his gaze drifts to Athos, standing impassively against the door, and his eyes drop to the ground. “There was—a rumour,” he says haltingly, “not far from here, which spoke of a—power, terrible, yet benevolent, that could only be found by those in desperate need of it; by those that it was already seeking.” He wrings his hands. “I did not know what to do. d’Artagnan might’ve lasted days yet hanging on the very brink of death; I could not bear to see him suffer any longer—”
“And you think that we did—” Porthos starts indignantly.
“Porthos,” Athos says quietly, silencing him. “And did you find this power?” he asks Aramis.
“She found me,” Aramis says. “Lord help us all, she found me, and she gave me what I needed.”
“Which was–?”
“She gave me a heart,” he says quietly. “The heart now beats in d’Artagnan.”
Porthos’ mouth is dry; he swallows audibly. “That’s… impossible.”
“Even blasphemous, one might say,” Athos says, one eyebrow raised, and Porthos’ hands shake with the urge to punch that remote expression off his face.
“Men of faith can be desperate too,” Aramis says, a little too loudly, his voice curling and quavering at the corners. “And my faith has always been in a power that would not let a dear friend die such a cruel, meaningless death if something can be done about it.” He leans forward. “He is alive; that is all that matters!”
“And yet he suffers,” Athos says, his voice hard. “And you sit here having paid an incomprehensible price, having sold your soul, for absolutely nothing!”
Aramis just stares at him, unblinking, while Athos storms out of the room, slamming the door behind him.
-
The taste of wine has barely begun to sour at the back of Porthos’ tongue that night when there’s a knock at his door and a tentative, “… Porthos?”
d’Artagnan. Porthos is tempted to not answer, to just sit and wait until he gives up and wanders off. Preferably to Aramis’ room. It’s a terrible, selfish desire, but he can hardly bring himself to be ashamed of it; the last few months of his life has been so utterly full of that lad, nursing him from one deathbed to the next, worrying and wondering—half-expecting that the moment he turns around, d’Artagnan would cease to exist, every part of him rotting and flaking away, like his arm.
Porthos is so tired—
There’s one more knock, a long, long moment of silence, and then: “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have—um. I’ll go somewhere else.”
Porthos chews fiercely on his lower lip, sighs, then finally throws opens the door. “Get inside now, come on.”
d’Artagnan blinks at him, startled. He’s dressed in nothing but breeches, shivering in the chill breeze wafting down the corridor. Porthos can’t help but stare at the coarse black thread holding the young man together, the long scars stretching from his navel to his throat pinkish-white and grotesque. The bullet wound high on his chest—barely three days old—is nothing more than a round scab, the skin around it slightly swollen.
d’Artagnan stands and breathes and lives in spite of everything, a foreign heart beating under his skin, and for a moment the floor pitches under Porthos’ feet and his heart is pounding and there’s darkness at the edges of his vision—
“I was just leaving,” d’Artagnan is saying, as though from very far away, “I’m so sorry, they wouldn’t let me, they—I—but I’m all right now, I promise, I’ll just—”
If Porthos is really going to collapse, he definitely doesn’t want to do it in the corridor. He grabs d’Artagnan’s hand and pulls him inside, growling, “Just get the hell in,” and closes the door firmly behind him. He sets the lad on the bed, pulling an old blanket around his shoulders, tucking it securely in front so he doesn’t have to see—so they don’t have to see—
“Thanks,” d’Artagnan says, as Porthos tries to catch his breath.
Porthos half-collapses to the floor, leaning against the wall, taking in long, desperate gulps of air. He can taste the evening’s wine at the back of his throat.
“I met Constance today,” d’Artagnan says after some time, picking at an errant thread from the blanket, “and I thought—maybe—maybe I could, you know. That maybe some things could be normal again. And, for a while, they were, but—she couldn’t stop staring, Porthos, and she was soscared, of me, and I can’t, I can’t—” His voice breaks.
Porthos closes his eyes. “d’Artagnan.”
“They let me dream today for the first time,” d’Artagnan says. “They were so quiet in my head, for the first time, and all I could see was my father. He died just like this, you know,” he brushes the wound on his chest with trembling fingers, the blanket slipping from his shoulders, “in my arms. There was—so much blood, and it was all so meaningless, because it was in the middle of nowhere, and nobody else died, and we had nothing, I had nothing—except for this body to call my own, and now even that has been taken from me.” He’s quivering all over, and Porthos levers himself to his feet. “I am dying now, in every second from now to eternity, because I should’ve died that night, should’ve—”
“Stop that,” Porthos says firmly, crouching in front of d’Artagnan. “You are alive and with your brothers, and for now that is all that matters.” He swipes his thumb across the tears streaming silently down d’Artagnan’s cheeks. “Everything else will follow.”
“I don’t know what I am,” d’Artagnan says, a sort of dawning horror in his voice that Porthos recognises all too well; in far too many soldiers it has preceded a desperate, pathetic sort of madness, sent them reeling, blind with panic and breathless with guilt. “I’m dea—”
“You’re alive. You’re here.” Porthos crushes d’Artagnan’s hand in his grip; the man barely flinches. “That will never change, and I won’t let it.”
“Porthos, I—”
He leans forward and kisses d’Artagnan roughly on the lips. The lad seems surprised at first, but he responds, his hand scrabbling desperately at Porthos’ back, grabbing handfuls of his shirt, his nails digging into his skin. He’s cold, as cold as the day Porthos found him in that cave, hanging onto life by most slender of threads. The memory makes him growl, and he pushes d’Artagnan back onto the bed, his fingers reaching to tug at his breeches, nails snagging on the thick sutures snaking down his abdomen.
“You’re here,” he says. “You’re here.”
“I am,” d’Artagnan says, like this moment is all they need for it to be true.
Much later, d’Artagnan has finally fallen asleep against Porthos’ chest. He can hear his heartbeat, steady and slow, even as Porthos’ own pulse pounds beneath his skin. The rhythm hasn’t changed, not through their grief, not through their pleasure, not through their desperation, and Porthos, for the first time, is very, very afraid.
“You’re here,” he says again, to the empty air.
Finis