Disclaimer: The Musketeers are not mine. I'm just borrowing the concepts and characters for a little while.
Spoilers: The television show and novels are fair game.
A/N: Please be aware that this is an AU, the idea for which Celticgal1041 inadvertently gave to me. I hope you will give it a chance. Enjoy!
Historical Notes: These are denoted by an * and explained at the end of each chapter. At times I did change historical facts to fit my story, but for these notes, I have made every attempt to get my details correct. If I have incorrectly noted something, please let me know and I will make changes.
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"To the outside world we all grow old. But not to brothers…We know each other as we always were. We know each other's hearts. We share private family jokes. We remember family feuds and secrets, family griefs and joys. We live outside the touch of time." ~~~ Clara Ortega.
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Chapter One: 20 March 1844, Part I
Long ago, Athos had developed the habit of reading several newspapers and magazines each week. He had subscriptions to several of them, but his newspaper of choice was the Gazette*, which had begun publication the year after d'Artagnan had come into their lives. Back then, due to his duties as a Musketeer, he'd read it only sporadically, but once he got settled into the first of his new lives, he read every issue he could get his hands on.
These days, despite the hundreds of newspapers that have come and gone in the intervening years, he still reads the Gazette, likely because of sentimental reasons more than anything else. Of the four of them, he is the only one who regularly reads any newspapers. He feels that keeping updated on what's going on around Paris and the world to be important for their long-term ability to stay in the city and hidden in plain sight.
As time goes by, it continues to get more and more difficult to remain in Paris. He fears this relatively new technology that is able to capture an image of anything the photographer* desires. He knows that there are some drawings of at least one of his friends and wonders when a portrait will be taken with the new technology. Already, he thinks these images will make it more difficult for them to change their identities* in the future.
They needed to be more careful as technology continues to evolve by leaps and bounds; it was making hiding in plain sight more and more of a challenge. For the first 100 years or so after their lives as Musketeers had ended, it was relatively easy to move around and live semi-anonymous lives. With industrialization and the more recent wars and revolutions, came the necessity to be even more vigilant about their identities – real and assumed.
Of course, if they weren't more careful about the professions they chose, then it wouldn't matter anyway. They would be caught and experimented on by the very physicians and surgeons that Aramis now works with.
Athos was the one who usually choose a profession of no great consequence. Through careful management of his and his brothers' funds over the last 100 years, he has ensured that they never had to work if they didn't want to. However, being the men that they are – always soldiers at heart – they can't abide being idle, so they usually take up occupations well-suited to their abilities, including those gained over the many years that they have been alive.
For now, he was a professor of military history at one of the colleges and sometimes teaches the finer points of swordplay at the local salle d'armes*. And in this lifetime, d'Artagnan has followed his example, though the younger man teaches a couple of different foreign languages instead. They had discovered long ago that d'Artagnan has a knack for languages, even more so than Aramis, and he'd lost track of how many his friend was fluent in at this point. It definitely came in handy for those times when they'd had to leave the country for a few years.
Since the Revolution of 1789, Aramis tended to vacillate between professions that healed the body and healed the soul; at the moment, he had a more earthly calling. Porthos amongst the four of them has undertaken the most varied assortment of occupations, and is currently attempting to be a playwright and author. Neither he nor d'Artagnan sees the two of them as often as they would prefer.
All four of them currently live in Paris, but their diverse schedules made it difficult to get together more than once or twice a month. He sees d'Artagnan the most and is glad at least one of his brothers remains close by. They still practice swords fairly often, and it is one of his true joys in life to spar with someone of talent almost equal to his own. At this point, so many years after the first time their blades had clashed, he now wins just slightly over half of their bouts. He looks forward to the day when they are truly equal in that regard, and is confident that it would happen in the not too distant future.
Lately, he has been so busy with commitments that he could not get out of that he's only had time in the mornings to read one of his newspapers, choosing the Gazette, of course. Now he was finally free to catch up on the others that had piled up on his desk, which sat near the window at the back of his large sitting room. Even with skipping the theatre and concert reviews of most of the papers, it has still taken him a while to catch up to all but the past weeks-worth of issues as well as a couple of weekly magazines he'd not gotten to yet.
After a small midday meal, he decides to continue reading and was about to begin catching up on the current day's issue of Le Siècle*, a decent newspaper with excellent writers. Unfortunately, they had started publishing serial stories on their front pages, something he felt lessened quality of the paper overall. The serial story has certainly seemed to jump in popularity the past couple of years. It was a disturbing trend and he mostly ignored that part of the paper, preferring to read literature and other fiction in book form.
He picked up Le Siècle and began to read, debating with himself over whether or not to read the past issues he still had by his reading chair. When he sees that there was no theatre review and instead another banal installment of some roman-feuilleton,* he starts to turn the page but a certain, very familiar word catches his eye. The next full line of text secures his attention, and after that, it would have taken a direct hit by a canon to keep him from finishing reading the rest of the text, which covered the bottom third of the first two pages.
Les Trois Mousquetaires*
IV. L'Épaule d'Athos, le baudrier de Porthos et le mouchoir d'Aramis*
"D'Artagnan, furieux, avait traverse l'antichambre en trois bonds et s'élançait sur l'escalier…"*
As he reads, he realizes that he has missed a few installments but, in that moment, it does not matter. He races through the text, hardly taking in the details, yet knowing that the events being described did not happen exactly as portrayed. He turns the page and reads until the end where his finds the name of the author: Alexandre Dumas.
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To be continued.
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Historical Notes, Chapter One:
-Gazette: Beginning in 1631, it was the first weekly newspaper published in France. It survived several name changes and the Revolution, only to end publication around 1915. In 1844, it was known as Gazette de France. Digitized issues are available online.
-Photography was invented in the mid-1820s, with the oldest surviving photograph taken in 1826/27.
-Identity Documents: In use in France since the 1800s. Photographs started being included in passports in the early 1900s.
-Salle d'armes: Fencing school.
-Le Siècle: Daily newspaper published from 1836 to 1932. Digitized issues are available online through the Bibliothèque nationale de France (BnF).
-Roman-feuilleton: A novel published in installments, usually in a newspaper or magazine. The first was published in 1836, with the height of their popularity from about 1842 to 1848.
-Les Trois Mousquetaires: The Three Musketeers was published in serial form in Le Siècle from 14 March through 14 July 1844. The story was published in six parts, each with a varying number of chapters, but in most books, the chapters are numbered 1 through 67 with an additional epilogue. (Note: I'll be using the book format to number the chapters.)
-IV. L'Épaule d'Athos…d'Aramis: [translation] The Shoulder of Athos, the Baldric of Porthos, and the Handkerchief of Aramis. (Note: I have decided to go with the French chapter titles as I've noticed a couple of translation differences amongst the English versions.)
-"D'Artagnan, furieux… sur l'escalier…": [translation] "D'Artagnan, in a state of fury, crossed the ante chamber at three bounds, and was darting toward the stairs…" (Note: This will be the only chapter where I quote the text in its original French.)
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A/N: Many thanks to Celticgal1041for your support and for proofing this story! Any remaining mistakes are my fault.
Thanks for reading!
((Cross-posted on Archive of Our Own [AO3].))