All day there had been a lingering feeling in the back of Athos's mind that something was not right. It had started mid morning as they set off for Paris. Nothing concrete, nothing solid or factual, just a long persistent niggling feeling of the back of his mind. Not enough for him to mention to Porthos, he wasn't sure how he would have put it into words anyway.
'I have a feeling' just didn't seem like a justifyable reason, for a seasoned soldier at the end of a safe mission which they had already completed. Instincts were important for a soldier, they had their place in the battlefield not typically when it came to planning tactics.
However Athos was still relieved that Porthos didn't question him when he set a faster pace than was usual on the journey home. Especially given the fact that they were already half a day early.
So it was in the quiet coolness and bright light of the early summer evening that Athos and Porthos trotted into the courtyard of the garrison. The courtyard was not busy, most of the men were not yet back from their duties, although there was a small group who had been training for the day having a quiet conversation at the table in the corner.
"Gentlemen" Treville had appeared at the balcony outside his office, his voice held a note of surprise. "You're early, I wasn't expecting you until tomorrow." There was an uncharacteristic note of awkwardness around the captain. A sense of unease, palpable even from the distance they were at. Athos's quiet sense of unease was putting him very much on edge, an edge he kept out of his voice as he replied in the cultured politeness that had been drilled into him since childhood.
"We made better time than expected, Sir"
"Jaques will take care of your horses. I want to see both of you in my office, immediately."
This was unexpected, they were soldiers, not courtiers. Having someone else take care of their horses was so rare it was almost unheard of, in fact you practically had to be dying of blood loss or unconscious for it to happen, and even then it was typically a fellow soldier who took pity, rather than the stable boy whose duties were already more than numerous. Sensing the urgency of the situation, Athos and Porthos exchanged a glance before handing their reigns to the waiting teenager and following Treville up the stairs.
Athos's sense of unease had deepened yet again into a sense of dread, a dread he now saw mirrored in Porthos's features. They entered the office, Treville was stood behind his desk leaning on it, palms flat against the surface, arms straight and shoulders rounded and filled with tension. He straightened has his men entered; took a slow audible breath as if to steady himself, before starting to speak.
"Now I want both of you to understand, even had you been here, there's nothing you could have done." Treville's voice held a thickness to it, and now in closer quarters Athos could see the way his captain's features had been hardened by grief. "It came on suddenly."
"What came on suddenly?" Porthos's voice was anxious, scared, almost aggressive as if warning Treville to get to the point. The captain nodded before continuing.
"I didn't want the two of you to find out by rumour. I had planned to meet you on the road outside Paris tomorrow but seeing as you're here…" Treville's voice faltered momentarily before returning. "This morning, D'Artagnan collapsed during training. It was the sweating sickness, I'm so sorry, he passed away about an hour ago."
The world turned grey, Porthos swallowed thickly, before voicing the question that Athos could not bring himself to.
"Where is he now?"
"We laid him out in his room for the night, Aramis is with him." Both men left the room in a daze, the world blurring around them as they stumbled through the well-known corridors in the dappled evening light.
The sun streamed through the window of D'Artagnan's room, casting an optimistic glow over the utilitarian furnishings which utterly belied the tragic scene contained within. Their boy, their youngest was laid out on the bed in his white shirt and smallclothes, eyes closed and arms laid at his side. Someone had clearly brushed his hair, and he was lying on freshly laundered sheets, still creased from the linen chest. He could almost have been sleeping were it not for his pallor and unnatural stillness, for even in sleep the pair had never seen the gascon quite so motionless.
Next to the bed, kneeling in prayer with his elbows resting on the bed supporting clasped hands which clutched at a well-worn rosary, head bowed in devotion and body bent in grief, was Aramis.
Aramis looked up from his position by the bed, large brown eyes gleaming with as yet unshed tears. Using the bed as support, the typically nimble and lively soldier pushed himself to his feet before them.
"My friends… I'm so sorry. I tried… There was just nothing…" Aramis, the poet of the group, the one who seemed to have the god given ability to keep conversation sparkling and flowing no matter the situation, faltered in his words. He helplessly made an inarticulate gesture, rosary still clutched in his trembling hand. He took a couple of shaky, directionless steps towards them and Porthos gathered the slighter man into his arms, tightening his grip when Aramis dissolved into helpless sobs, half articulating almost indecipherable apologies.
Porthos suddenly found himself sinking to his knees as he unexpectedly had to support Aramis's entire weight, the man's own knees having given out on him in his grief. The pair stayed there, kneeling on the floor wrapped in each other's arms for a long time. The heart-wrenching sounds of Aramis's sobs filling the room, the sound spilling out into the corridor beyond, and Porthos's quieter tears gradually soaking though the fabric of Aramis's jacket as he murmured meaningless platitudes, words of comfort meant as much for himself as for the friend he held in his arms.
For his part, Athos barely registered the interaction between his brothers, his entire being was focused on the deathly still figure lying upon the bed. In careful measured steps, Athos crossed the room until he was stood right next to the headboard. With graceful, economic movements, Athos tugged the glove off his left hand and reached out, with an entirely too steady hand, and lightly cupped D'Artagnan's cheek, allowing himself to feel the soft hairs which almost couldn't truly be considered stubble as it took the lad so long to grow a beard.
Had taken him so long to grow a beard, Athos forcefully corrected himself in his mind as the touch confirmed what he had not quite been able to trust his eyes and ears too. D'Artagnan's skin was cold, not deathly cold, not yet, the boy had not yet been gone long enough for that, but too cool to still contain life on that warm summer evening. The disbelief and denial that had been raging within Athos since hearing those impossible words gave way to the twisting nausea of realisation. In this moment his reserved stillness gave way to an understated trembling and slight wetness around the eyes. Sign's that could be easily missed by anyone who chose not to look too closely.
Nobody moved in that room for a long time. At one point in the evening Treville entered, intending to let his three best soldiers that they were relieved from their duties the following day, and he hoped that he could leave arrangements for the funeral in their capable hands. But in truth he was a man of action not words, and upon entering the suffocating stillness of D'Artagnan's room, could not quite find in himself the strength or inclination to break the silence, and so he left again without uttering a word.
It was dark the next time the silence of the room was disturbed. The early evening light had made the gradual transition into the heavy darkness of night and the genial buzz of background noise that filled the evening's in the garrison had faded into the quieter hum that indicated most of the men were either sleeping or absent. At some point the three soldiers had slid so that they were all slumped on the floor, Porthos against the wall near the foot of the bed, Aramis' head resting in his lap, and Athos against the opposite wall beneath the window. Athos opened the drawer of the bedside table and rummaged around a little in the mess.
"What are you doing?" Aramis' sobs had long since subsided but his voice sounded somewhat hollow, his throat having been left raw and scratchy after his earlier outburst.
"Searching for matches, if we are to keep this final vigil for D'Artagnan there is no need to do it in the dark."
The rummaging continued just a few seconds more, before the hissing of a match and a dim light from the candle on the bedside table banished some of the darkness from the room. None of the three found they could look at D'Artagnan in this ghoulish half light, they would keep the vigil, yes, but none of them could bring themselves to look at the visual reality of the death that hung so heavily over the room.
"Aramis." Athos voice was as refined as ever, but for an emptiness that permeated through the perfectly enunciated syllables.
"Yes"
"Could you tell us what happened?"
Aramis hesitated, he had been reliving the events of the day since D'Artagnan's passing, replaying them over and over again in his mind, interspersed with earlier, memories of the boy. But he was not sure that he could relate these events to his brothers, not now when the grief was so raw. Then he saw Porthos's hopeful gaze and realised that he could not deny these men, now more dear to him than any other living on the earth, this small comfort, if it was a comfort at all.
"We were sparing this morning when it first came on. You know D'Artagnan needs to… needed to work on his footwork. For the first couple of hours he was fine, plenty of energy, witty comebacks, his usual self. Then he missed a parry he should have blocked easily. I was surprised, and short with him, I had to pull the blow to avoid doing him serious injury. I teased him but it became obvious very quickly that there was something… very wrong. He started swaying as though struggling to maintain his balance. I put a hand on his shoulder to steady him and he almost collapsed into my arms. He was shivering like mad, too weak to even lift his arms, but awake. He was confused and frightened, he didn't understand why he had suddenly collapsed. I didn't understand. It didn't help that one of the other new recruits was backing away and loudly announcing to the courtyard that it must be witchcraft.
"I called for aid and with the help of a couple of others we bore him up to his room. He was shivering like mad, we covered him in blankets, lit a fire, just to try and help him get warm. That was when the physician turned up. He didn't stay for long. He quickly identified it as the sweating sickness, and said that as D'Artagnan was young and strong he had a good chance of survival He explained that at some point in the next few hours, D'Artagnan would stop shivering and start sweating with a very high fever. He explained that we must try to keep the fever down, get him to drink as much as possible and above all keep him awake. If he could remain awake until the sweating passed in all likelihood he would live, if not, he would pass. Then the man left. He didn't even tough D'Artagnan, he clearly couldn't get out of here fast enough.
"For the next few hours I tried everything to get him warm, heated bricks from the fire, I even stripped down and got under the blankets with him to try and share the heat from my body but nothing seemed to work.
"It was early afternoon that it changed, D'Artagnan stopped shivering and in my naivety I hoped that maybe something we had tried had worked, that maybe he was returning to normal. Within 10 minutes he was burning with fever. Up until this point he had been fairly lucid but when the fever struck he seemed to be terrorised with nightmareish visions. I tried to keep him grounded, keep him awake, but really his moments of lucidity became briefer and briefer. He kept asking for water, but when he drunk it he couldn't keep it down, almost always vomiting back up more liquid than he had managed to take in.
"It was probably around half past four that he really started to flag, he had been tired before and I had tried to keep him grounded, to keep him awake, but at this point my best efforts all seemed for naught, he was confused, he kept asking for his father. In all honesty I'm not sure he even knew who I was in the very end." Aramis's voice cracked as tears he did not think he had left in him spilled out.
"At just before five he fell unconscious and although I tried to wake him, shouting, slapping his face, cold water everything I could think of it was only a few minutes before he stopped breathing. I tried to bring him back, I even tried breathing for him the way you would for a man who had nearly drowned but it was no use, his heart stopped beating and he was gone. Someone pulled me away, gave me a brandy I think, kept me away until I calmed down. Until I calmed down enough to regain my senses, to understand what had happened. When I returned someone had changed the sheets, and laid D'Artagnan out as you see before you. I knelt by the bed and started praying. The rest you know."
The weight of the shared grief lay like a thick blanket over the room, muffling any small insignificant noise as Athos and Porthos slowly processed the events of that tragic day.
The next person to speak was Porthos. "Did he ask for us, leave any message."
"There was no message, I'm not sure D'Artagnan was aware enough to leave a message, but he asked for you both, several times over the course of the day, and myself at times, when he seemed unaware that I was yet with him. It was only at the very end where he seemed to lose all sense of where he was, I think his mind retreated to a time when he was younger, some point in his childhood perhaps, before he was tainted by the grief of losing his father."
"He was still a child really." Athos's voice was fond, "Only 22 and green as grass. Skilled? Yes. Promising? Undoubtedly. More honourable than most of the men I know including the king? Without a doubt, but he was still a child. He hadn't quite lost that childish optimism, that wonder at the world. He was nearly there, but I'm not sure that he was yet an adult."
"It's strange if you think about all those times we came close to losing him in some skirmish or other, where he was overconfident, or we were, like with Vadim, but despite his ridiculous luck we could still lose him to something as meaningless as the sweating sickness." Porthos was morose.
There was silence for a moment, then the tinkling of a wine bottle rolling across the floor.
"Whose wine is this then?" Aramis asked, propping himself up on his elbows as he caught it.
"D'Artagnan's." Athos replied. "It was in his bedside table, somehow I don't believe he'd object to us having some."
"He always was far too generous, with everything really." Pothos murmured with a humourless smile.
"To D'Artagnan then" Aramis announced, "Our brother in every way that mattered, brave, loyal to a fault, and one of the best men I have ever known" With these words he took a deep swig before passing the bottle and cork to Porthos.
"To D'Artagnan, may he have gone to the best possible place" Porthos stated, before taking a deep drink of his own from the bottle, before loosely corking it and rolling it across the uneven floor to Athos.
"To D'Artagnan" Athos echoed quietly, and as he lowered the bottle from his lips, a solitary tear, which had been threatening to fall all evening slipped down his cheek, safely unobserved in the half light of the grey dawn and the almost burnt out candle.