Fic: Credidi In Te
Aramis thought he had seen his friend broken before, but this, whatever this was that he was beholding at the moment, this did not compute in his mind in the least. He approached the window, in the light of which Athos was outlined like a dark statue, his hands in the same, semi-extended position as they were when he first opened the letter which he had since let drop to the floor, and picked the evidently offensive piece of paper up off the cold marbles.
“Athos?” he attempted, gently, to rouse his friend from the stupor into which the latter had descended. Instead of the missive, the apparent cause of this petrification, Aramis placed his own hands into the trembling, outstretched palm before him. “Athos. You’re actually beginning to terrify me now.”
“I need to go to La Fère,” the other man mumbled, and, as if still unaware of the company before him, ascended the stairs with a quick step.
Realizing that this was most likely the most coherent explanation he would be getting from that direction in the immediate future, Aramis shrugged and pulled the letter out from the folds of his clothes and read it himself. Nothing contained in the letter was particularly illuminating to him, at least not with regards to the behavior he was witnessing. The letter informed the comte de La Fère of the death of a caretaker named Lescaut, and allayed any of his fears by assuring him that the estates would continue to be looked after by someone else previously in the family’s service, by the name of Desplaines. All this sounded perfectly reasonable to Aramis, which, logic dictated, meant that, once again, there was something he did not understand and, therefore, he found himself standing before an abyss he dared not plunge into: the abyss of Athos’ past. Aramis groaned and mounted the stairs, taking them one at a time, feeling no particular rush to reach his destination.
He found Athos in his room… their room… his room (his own inability to place himself permanently into this place at times infuriated him), packing something into a small travel chest.
“Planning on being gone a while?” Aramis asked, suppressing his initial instinct for forcing an explanation by way of a confrontation. The other man continued to pack in silence, as if oblivious to anyone else’s presence in his vicinity. “Planning on pretending I’m not standing here, then?” Aramis tried again, feeling increasingly agitated. Athos looked around the room, as if searching for something, but still did not acknowledge Aramis’ presence one way or another. Taking a deep breath to compose himself once more, Aramis spoke one word only, but in such a way that did not mistake his intentions. “LESCAUT!”
The gaze of Athos seemed to solidify and shift towards the man standing in front of him.
“Damn it, Athos! I am right here.”
“Aramis..,” Athos began, but stumbled over some thought and ceased speaking again.
“Please talk to me. As much as it sometimes kills you to do so, but use the voice that the Lord gave you.” Aramis came closer and put his hands on either side of Athos’ shoulders, forcing him to look into his face. “And I, for one, am quite fond of the sound of it.”
“Lescaut had been taking care of the estates at La Fère ever since I was a little boy. I left a lot of … personal items… in his care. When I left…” Athos drifted off into his own mind again, forcing Aramis to tighten his hold of his shoulders. “I just… I do not trust anyone else to dispose of them properly.”
“So,” Aramis began, trying to wrap his mind around what his friend was actually saying, “You need to go back to La Fère to… get rid of… items?” Athos gave a barely perceptible nod. “And this… peculiar behavior has nothing to do with any… sentiment about the poor recently deceased?” Athos shook his head. “Right, of course… So, this is a recover and destroy mission then?” Athos alluded to assent with a movement of one of his eyebrows. “All right, I have no idea what I’m missing,” Aramis said, exasperated, as he let go of the other man’s shoulders.
“I cannot go back there, Aramis.”
“But you are going back there.”
“But I cannot.”
Aramis gave his friend and lover a long look, studying the usually impassive face, taking in the slight twitches of the facial muscles, the uncertain movements of his hands, unable to find purchase on anything either real or imaginary.
“Right,” he said. “I’m coming with you.”
What little Aramis knew about La Fère had predominantly to do with the fact that apparently the county had some rather remarkable forests, full of several varieties of game. The road to the chateau, therefore, unsurprisingly cut through the heavily wooded area, as our two riders galloped by. Suddenly, at one of the turns, Athos had pulled up his horse, causing it to neigh and rear up. Skilled rider that he was, Athos managed to remain in the saddle and not be unseated by the rearing bay.
Aramis had turned his own horse around and hastened back to where Athos remained, still astride his stallion, yet staring vapidly at the back of his horse’s mane.
“What happened?”
“I can’t feel my legs,” Athos said, simply, a strange smile distorting his facial features in such a way that Aramis could not tell whether his friend found this situation amusing or unbearably painful.
“What do you mean you can’t feel your legs?”
Athos shrugged and rubbed a hand over one of his knees.
“Well,” Aramis found himself at a loss for words. This was… new. “We’re almost there,” he offered, hoping somehow that would salvage the entire predicament.
“I think,” Athos began, wrapping the reigns around his wrists to make sure he wouldn’t fall out of the saddle, “That might be the reason for my inability to feel my legs.” Aramis blinked.
“This has happened to you before, hasn’t it?” he asked, letting out what he hoped was an inaudible sigh. Athos rubbed his brow ridge with his hand. His feet did indeed appear to barely be holding on to the stirrups.
“Never this bad, and not since I was very young,” Athos said and, as if suddenly sickening of himself, punched his own thigh with a menacing force.
“All right,” Aramis resumed, taking control again. “You can’t ride that bay on your own. Either you’re climbing onto my horse, or I’m climbing onto yours.” Athos did not offer any helpful suggestions, so Aramis continued. “Do you at least think you can hold on to me and not fall off?” Athos nodded. “Fine, move over then, I’m coming aboard.” Aramis dismounted lightly and slipped into Athos’ saddle, making an extra effort not to kick the other man in the head, despite wondering if, perhaps, a kick in the head was exactly what was needed in order to restore some kind of sanity here. When he was settled into the saddle, Aramis looked behind him to find his lover’s face wearing one of his more casually amused expressions, giving Aramis a pang of renewed hope of normalcy. “Do not tell me this is all part of some kind of sick plan to get us into the same saddle in the middle of the forest!”
Athos scooted up closer to him and wrapped his arms around his waist, placing his forehead against the back of Aramis’ neck, sending a small shiver through the younger man.
“Sadly, no,” Athos whispered, “I really cannot feel my legs.”
Aramis reached behind him and stroked his hand over the thigh that Athos had abused earlier.
“You can’t feel this?”
“Mmmhmmm.”
“You can feel that, can’t you?” Instead of a reply, that time Aramis was rewarded by the feel of soft, warm lips on the back of his neck. “You just can’t move them, perhaps?”
“Mmmm, perhaps,” Athos consented, tightening his grip around the familiar narrowing of his lover’s waist, and kissing his earlobe.
“You’re stalling. You’re acting like a child.” Aramis tried to protest, knowing fully well that if Athos wanted something bad enough, any effort to the contrary was a forfeited battle from the start. The same would apply if Athos did not want something strong enough, he was certain. “You’re not allowed to kiss me anymore until we’ve reached the chateau,” he threatened, feebly. “And you’re definitely not allowed to punch yourself again! If anyone is going to be abusing your body, that will be me, and only as an unintentional derivative of my irrepressible desire for you.”
“Aramis,” Athos let out in a part-whine, part-supplication.
“Truly, I am shocked and appalled by you, to be cowed by something as simple as your ancestral home,” Aramis hoped that his words would have their desired effect, having admitted to himself back in Blois that whatever was eating away at Athos was a thing beyond his comprehension.
“The tree we’re under right now..,” Athos began, but interrupted himself with a groan, emitted softly into his lover’s back.
“Yes? What about it?” Aramis shifted uncomfortably in the saddle.
“I hanged her from it.”
Aramis decided that the best reply under the circumstances would be the spurring on of their unfortunately shared mount, carrying both of them away from the cursed spot, and hopefully, Aramis prayed, ever-so-slightly further away from the incensed ghost of Milady.
Obviously, he had underestimated. Evidently, he had been wrong all along when he thought that with just one touch of his hand he had cured this wound. Aramis could see that really all he had done was put a very thin bandage over the bleeding, gushing wound of Athos’ heart. He had hoped… he had believed… but his faith was misplaced.
It took two men to carry the long-absent master of the house into the main bedroom. Aramis was fairly sure he could have done that all by himself, but Athos had threatened him with literal, not figurative, death, if he even so much as lifted a finger to extricate him from the saddle. Through gritted teeth, the comte de La Fère had instructed the servants to transport him into whatever the hell was known as the “Green Room” around here, leaving Aramis standing in the spacious vestibule of chateau de La Fère, feeling just as daunted by ghosts in here as earlier in the forest.
He thought he might go for a walk around the grounds, after all, this place didn’t hold the same terror for him as it apparently did for his unhinged friend. To bury something so deep that the very thought of confronting its shadow rendered you incapable of walking, this was something that Aramis had only seen alluded to in texts before, not something he would ever expect to see, certainly not in a man he had been to battle with over and over again. He was standing shoulder to shoulder with the man as he spoke to the woman. Right before the blade had cut off her head.
I forgive you…
A thin bandage over a gushing wound. Aramis hated himself even then for seeing and not understanding.
… the evil you have done me.
It was like trying to count the stars, to begin to enumerate the ways that Athos must have perceived this evil done to him.
I forgive you my future shattered, my honor lost, my love tainted…
Oh, Athos, but Pride had always been your main deadly sin, Aramis thought, bitterly. For you had no pity for me then, but it was I who stood by your side when you spoke those words. You will never know how much they hurt me.
… and my salvation forever compromised by the despair into which you have thrown me.
Forever compromised, it all sounded so incredibly foolish to him, even back then. And in all the years, Athos had given his body to him freely, but never gave up this despair, guarding it greedily like a gorgon guarding the gates of Notre Dame, made just as surely of just as cold a stone.
Die in peace.
Aramis tossed a stone into an overgrown pond and watched it sink to the mossy bottom. Waters closing over the cloak containing her remnants. He was there. The judge and the jury. And even then, he feared that he had lost Athos forever. But that man, that incubus, had convinced him to stay. And he believed. Miserere Domine, in Athos, more than in God himself. He believed.
It was getting dark when Aramis stumbled upon the small family chapel on the other side of the lake, closer to the main road. I have given up everything for you. And you cannot walk. Looking at the family crest emblazoned above the entrance to the small nave, Aramis tried once again to imagine what it was like, what it meant to have been what Athos had been, and what it finally meant to lose it all. But I have given up everything for you. Will I never be enough? With a shaking step, Aramis entered the chapel.
He was surprised to find a few candles lit around the altar, but even more than that, he was surprised to discover that he was not alone in the chapel.
“Well,” Aramis started, a bit flabbergasted, “You were certainly the last person I expected to find here.”
“I was looking for you,” Athos lifted his head from his arms, as apparently he was using the pews for a place to nap. “I figured,” he gestured towards the altar, “this might have been a good place to start.”
“How did you get here?” Aramis asked, genuinely curious.
“I… walked.”
“Hm,” Aramis emitted a non-committal noise.
“That saying of ‘you can when you want to’ is certainly appropriate, and feel free to tell me exactly that.”
“I wouldn’t presume.” Aramis was thankful for the dimly lit space of the chapel, it served to hide the flushing of his face.
“This is not how I wanted it to be. I wanted to bring you here myself, at a time of my choosing. I just… didn’t think it would come now.”
“Is now any better or worse than some unspecified time in the future?” Aramis asked, biting his lips.
“No one really cares, but myself.” Athos rose from the pews, and walked over to the velvet-covered railing separating the altar from the rest of the nave.
“I cannot even begin to know anymore,” Aramis sighed.
“I was an idiot,” Athos explained. “Do you know who I was? I was the man who killed the woman he loved at the first suspicion. And I loved her, Aramis, or… I thought I really did.”
“I’m sure you had your reasons,” Aramis replied, coolly, not sure where this conversation was steering towards.
“Family honor, pride, heraldry…” Athos gestured around the chapel again, as if illuminating the walls by the movement of his hand. “These things meant something to me once upon a time.”
“And now?”
“And now?” Athos took a step closer and Aramis felt as if the dim light from the candles had been redirected towards him. “I am shocked to discover that they are nothing but an echo resounding in an empty hall. I would gladly have laid all of them at your feet, only to keep you with me.”
Aramis felt himself sway, dangerously close to that precipice into which Athos and his words were constantly pulling him.
“I came here,” Athos continued, approaching closer yet, “fearing the ghosts of the past, fearing that the weight of this place would crush and destroy me. And yet, the only thing I could not bear after getting here was not having you by my side.”
“Damn you,” Aramis squeezed through his teeth, “Damn you, Athos! I am always here, right here!” Aramis grabbed the other man’s hand and pressed it to his heart, no longer afraid to let Athos feel the quickening of his own pulse. “I have always been right here!” he repeated, feeling his face consumed by an angry fire.
“Except when you weren’t,” Athos whispered, bringing his face so close to the face of his friend that their foreheads touched. Aramis was still pressing the other man’s hand with both his own hands into his chest, and so he remained standing there, allowing their heads to touch, allowing the beat of his heart to pulsate through both their bodies.
Finally, he let out an audible sigh.
“I was told I had better change mounts,” Aramis whispered to Athos. There was a pause, as Athos was evidently trying to convince himself that he interpreted the meaning of the words correctly.
“By whom?”
“By the Cardinal.”
“Did he mean me?”
“No, he meant her.” Aramis lifted his eyes to meet the darkly glowing eyes of Athos. “But he intimated he knew about you both.”
“That’s… why you left? So suddenly?”
“It would have been too easy for him to destroy all three of us had I stayed,” Aramis held tighter to the hand in his grasp. “I was no threat to him or to anyone tucked away in a monastery.”
“Aramis…”
“We are both not very good at telling each other what we really think, what we really intend. How we feel.” Aramis wasn’t sure where he was going with this, but something inside him felt like bursting. It looked as if Athos was about to say something in protest, but Aramis shut him up by pressing his lips to his mouth. “I love you. And I’m here.”
Athos gave Aramis a crooked smile.
“Here… where I married her. Life has a funny way of mocking things sometimes.”
“Forget her!” Aramis snapped, grabbing the other man by his arm and dragging him towards the altar. “On your knees,” he ordered, roughly slamming both of their bodies onto the floor at the feet of the triptych.
“What are you doing?” Athos asked, with a look tinged with bewilderment and excitement at the same time.
“I am swearing, here, in your family chapel. I’m swearing that I, René d’Herblay, will love you, Olivier de La Fère, until my last living breath, placing no others above you.”
“But do you also swear to honor and obey?” Athos smiled and reached in to kiss the other man.
“Don’t push your luck,” Aramis playfully slapped his friend’s approaching face away. Athos laughed and picked up Aramis’ hands, bringing each one in turn to his lips and kissing them.
“You promised to love me, not to never leave me,” he pointed out.
“I only swear to those things which I have direct control over,” Aramis shrugged.
“Well, in that case,” Athos spoke in a very calm voice, still holding his friend’s hands in his own, “I also swear to love you until my last living breath, placing no others above you. And I swear to you that never have I loved anyone as much as I love you right now, as much as I have ever loved you.” He paused and looked downwards, as if suddenly embarrassed by his own words. “My beautiful Aramis,” he whispered.
“What use is all the beauty in the world to me if I cannot make you happy?” Aramis asked, in earnest, pressing his forehead against the forehead of Athos once more.
“You make me so happy… I can walk.”
“That’s the sweetest thing you’ve ever said to…” but it was Aramis’ turn to be interrupted by a mouth insistently closing around his own. He opened his lips to allow the searching tongue to breach them, and he closed his eyes in contented bliss. Hands were snaking their way down his spine, drawing soothing circles along his lower back. “I see,” he whispered when he came up for air, “you have regained function of more than just your legs.”
“Oh no,” Athos reassured him, “I never lost that function.” With these words, Athos leveraged the weight of his body to maneuver the younger man to the floor underneath him.
“All right, what is it with you and … religion?” Aramis snickered, gazing up at the angels painted on the chapel’s ceiling.
“It has nothing to do with my preferences!”
“No, of course not,” Aramis wrapped his fingers around his lover’s neck and pulled him down into another kiss.
“Can I help it if I’m constantly finding you in such settings?” Athos inquired, licking a trail down Aramis’ neck and diving vigorously into the folds of his shirt, unlacing it with his teeth.
“I suppose it doesn’t really matter. I did just swear to be your loving wife.”
“You did no such thing,” Athos corrected, pulling his friend’s clothes off, layer by layer. “For that would have been polygamy, as you’re already married to Jesus.” Aramis laughed, despite himself. “I can’t help but live in a state of perpetual jealousy of him.”
“That explains your predilection towards prie-dieux, crucifixes, and chapels…”
“You try having the Lord Our Savior for a rival!”
“Athos! Stop, you’re actually killing me,” Aramis tossed his head back in a mock swoon. Athos took the exposed neck as an invitation, gently sinking his teeth into the tender flesh right above the collarbone. Aramis let out a small, helpless moan. He was always helpless, like this, with this man, his own personal incubus.
“Aramis,” he felt the whisper of his name against his skin, felt strong hands pressing deeply into his muscles, pulling on his lower back, stretching his body into a familiar, seething embrace. He shut his eyes again, not daring, not wanting to look at the painted cherubs, and sank his fingers into the black curls of the man whose mouth was now traveling down his stomach with the voracity of a vulture.
“Athos,” he gasped, his lover’s name burning his lips on its way out. It was hot and it was moist and he had believed, he believed, he believed… Until my last living breath. “Yes!” he did not know what it was anymore that he was affirming. “My love! My everything!” The angels were flying in insistent circles before his eyes and for a moment he thought he might actually pass out. His hips were lifted, he felt the slabs of the stone floor underneath his feet (at some point Athos must have removed his boots), it was cold, but he did not care.
“I’m sorry,” he heard the heated whisper against his neck. “For everything. I want to keep you.”
Just like so, like a toy, like your dog. Keep me, he thought, feeling his body being filled to the brim, the heat emanating off his lover’s sweat-soaked limbs heating him to a core he did not always know he possessed. My everything. He climaxed, sobbing out his lover’s name, clutching at the body on top of his own with a ferocity he had not felt in some time. His flailing limbs must have knocked over the few candles by the altar because the chapel was plunged into a sudden darkness.
He heard Athos laugh from somewhere nearby.
“I’ll find your clothes,” the disembodied voice promised.
“I’m all right like this,” Aramis mumbled, in a post-coital haze.
“Come, my love,” he felt a hand upon his arm, pulling, upwards. “I promise you, the Green Room is much more comfortable than the cold stone floor of our family chapel.”
“What?! And leave you bereft of further opportunity to blaspheme?”
“Oh, my Aramis,” he heard the whisper right in his ear. “So long as you are around, the world is never safe from my blaspheming.” A cloak was hastily thrown over him and soon they were hand in hand, running across the wet grass. The sparse lights from the chateau de La Fère glimmered ahead of them in the darkness. And still they were running, running and laughing.