The Dress
Spring. Oh how he loathed this time of year. Oh the whether was nice enough, and the approach of May Day had all the young ladies exited, but spring meant spring cleaning, and that is never a picnic when you're a musketeer. This particular day each recruit was assigned to tidy his barrack. Poor Seroc, being the inventor and scientist of the musketeers had not only his quarters to clean but his laboratory as well. And although he had risen early enlisted the help of his friends, and almost invented a cleaning device, the project still took the majority of the day.
Late that night he was finally sweeping out the final corners of the lab, the only place yet to be cleaned was the small armoir in the most receded unvisited corner of his realm. "Give this thing a quick wipe down and then I get to sleep." The blond man yawned then set himself to his final task.
The wood on the armoir was old, faded, and shabby, thus hard to clean to satisfaction. The outside was smooth luckily, unfortunately the wood on the inside was rough and splintered. He would have to scrub harder in here. As he cleaned the inside he noticed a small chink in the bottom panel. Now normally this would have been of no circumstance, however instead of seeing the floor through the hole he saw only blackness.
Why on earth would this cabinet have a trap bottom? He hardly remembered the piece of furniture, much less what would be in a hidden compartment inside it. His natural curiosity won him over. After all what's the worst that could happen? Seroc hooked his finger through the hole in the wood and began to lift. Slower than a coffin opening did the board slowly lift out of it's resting place.
The darkness was now banished from the hiding place. And although Seroc was not surprised to find an object, the hidden item was not anything he would have expected. He would never have thought anyone would hide a dress, and it was the last thing he would think to find in HIS lab. Gingerly the blond lifted a dusty velvet dress from it's place, the condition of the dusky green and black fabric that the garment had not been in hiding for long.
He ran his fingers over the smooth trim, something was familiar about this dress. Softly a vague memory climbed out of the dark forgotten vaults of his mind. A memory that he wasn't completely sure was actually a memory.
Faint images of a sick and dieing Ramon flitted across his eyelids, flowed by vivid sensations of anger and injustice. Somewhere in the mist of all this a strange figure solidified itself. Secoc could now remember the indicant, Ramon was dieing of an infected wound and Jacques had gone crazy throwing her Spanish comrade in the Basile along with all the other Spaniards in France. He remembered D'Artagnan concocting a plan to brake Ramon out of prison.
'Has anyone ever told you, you have the most delicate cheekbones?' His friend's voice penetrated his memory. That's where this dress came, he had worn it to save his friend, he had compromised his dignity to rescue a comrade, and it had worked. He had worn the dress, played the part of a woman, stepped over the line of propriety to help a dieing man. He'd been to the other side and he never wanted to leave his own position again without great necessity.
Seroc smiled and replaced the garment. The dress could stay. Mayhap one day he would marry and give the dress and it's story to his wife.