Fic: Noisy-le-Sec, Part I
It wasn’t so much that the search had itself become an obsession to him, or so he had maintained when he finally arrived in the township of Noisy-le-Sec. It was just something to do, in the beginning. It was something to keep him from drinking (because, after all, you couldn’t really be drunk and put that many leagues away on horseback, no matter what kind of metal you were made of), or, possibly, something to keep him from doing other things that would be monumentally even more stupid. He never once stopped to think what he would do if one day, after all the searching, the riding, the nights spent in strange places, and some with even stranger people, he might actually find the man he’d been searching for. It never occurred to him, because, as much as he may have wanted to delude himself, he knew that the man he was seeking was not, in reality, lost. He had not disappeared off the face of the planet by some sudden chance of circumstance, nor dragged to the far corners of the earth by forces beyond his control. No, he had left by his own volition. He was the magician behind his own disappearing act. And he had done so completely willingly and without the slightest desire to be sought out.
So, when he found himself, at last, sitting in the back of the chapel during Mass, devouring the abbé with his eyes, blessedly obscured by shade and other parishioners, he felt completely paralyzed for the first time in all those desperate years by something very akin to self-doubt.
The man at the pulpit was delivering a sermon that, it would have been obvious to any observer with half a mind to glean beneath the surface, was entirely lacking in conviction. Every few minutes, the abbé’s eyes would pause, as if tripping and falling, caught on the face of one young woman or another seated in one of the front rows. He would then seem to lose his train of thought, cover for it with some vaguely dismissive, mechanical gestures, and pick up his sermon with even less enthusiasm than before. However, aside from the man hungrily eyeing him from the back of the chapel, the other parishioners, most of whom were female constituents, did not seem to notice these small guffaws at all, and continued to lean inadvertently closer in the direction of the pulpit, lightly swaying with what was most likely something quite different than religious fervor.
He left without taking communion.
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René d’Herblay felt restless and annoyed, mostly with himself for behaving like some kind of a pathetic schoolboy. He knew from the very beginning that his mind wasn’t in the right place for delivering the sermon, but his apparent inability to even keep up a semblance of detached loftiness requisite in his position made him blush to the very roots of his hair and curse himself.
When it was finally over, he decided he needed to go for a ride to clear his head and forget the humiliation he felt when, after all this time, he knew he still could not control his basest desires, even in the house of the Lord. “Why did I ever leave the musketeers?” he queried himself for the thousandth time. “Things were so much simpler then. You saw something you desired and you took it; someone offended you and you killed them and went along with your day.” Yes, back then, when he was still Aramis, he took and he killed and he destroyed everything. And now he couldn’t remember why. It must have stemmed from some kind of a deeply rooted need to punish himself, he allowed on rare occasions. But mostly, he preferred not to think about those days anymore. As much as he could.
He usually stabled his horse outside of the convent, for a variety of practical reasons, including being able to get to the horse at any time of night, should such a need arise. Sometimes, it did. There was a small local tavern that allowed him the convenience of leaving and retrieving his horse with no questions asked and for a very reasonable price. The Abbé d’Herblay entered the stable, still wearing his cassock, as he was apparently not cognizant enough that day to change out of it, and he cursed himself again for apparently leaving his head irretrievably up his own rectum. However, inappropriate riding attire aside, he still wanted to take the horse out and so he approached his mare who neighed in friendly recognition.
At the sound made by the horse, there was movement on the other side of the stable, as if another person had been startled, and the abbé glanced over to see in whose company he had unexpectedly found himself. It was another rider, adjusting the bridles of his own stallion, evidently about to mount him. Unlike the abbé, this man was outfitted entirely for the road: his riding boots unrolled all the way up to his mid-thigh, hands encased in fine calf-skin gloves, wrapped in a cloak and with his hat pulled tightly over his eyes. Something about seeing this figure thusly clad once again reminded the abbé of something from his past that filled him with melancholy longing and inability to avert his eyes from the stranger. Even though the man’s back was to him, he could not help but feel there was a familiarity in that stance, or even the curve of the stranger’s back, obscured though it was by the cloak.
Feeling eyes on him, the unknown rider tensed, and pulled his horse’s muzzle very close to his face, as if planning on holding secret counsel with his equine friend. He stroked the horse’s mane with one hand, while the other furtively traveled to the hilt of his sword.
“You need not draw, Monsieur. I meant you no harm.”
At hearing these words spoken, the stranger let go of the sword and spun around to face the abbé, whose turn it was now to gasp and take a step back.
“Athos!”
Athos, for it was indubitably him, remained standing in silence, his eyes like two dark pools of confused emotion, looking as if they were about to overflow.
“René,” he finally spoke, in a voice so chilling that it sent shivers up the other man’s spine.
“No,” the abbé protested, and took a step forward. “Don’t call me that,” and he advanced another step closer.
“Aramis?” the other man said in a way that sounded more like a question than a statement.
“Always,” the latter replied and, tentatively coming up to his old comrade, he wrapped his arms around him and pulled him into a bone-crushing embrace. Athos brought his arms up, hesitantly, and finally wrapped them around his old lover and pressed his face into the part of Aramis’s skin where his neck met the collarbone. He inhaled deeply, the scent at once familiar and new, and his head had commenced to spin. Athos could feel hands roaming up his back, underneath his cloak, as if exploring to see what’s changed in the terrain. The body he felt pressed to him was still muscular and tightly wound, as if the passage of time and the change in lifestyle did nothing at all to efface the grace and beauty that was once known as Aramis. And, suddenly, there they were: lips on his lips, and it all became much more than he could handle.
“I was leaving!” he snapped, tearing his mouth away.
Aramis’s eyes suddenly got very large and, much to Athos’s consternation, he sank down to his knees, wrapped his arms around his friend’s riding boots and let out, “Please, forgive me!”
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Part 2 Part 3