WARNING: My apologies, I should have put this in my initial notes. This story IS NOT show canon compliant. If this bothers you, please use your back button now.
Otherwise, happy Valentine's Day!
Chapter Four
Aramis, meanwhile, had set out his bottles and vials on top of the writing desk and had more water heating over the fire. Finished measuring, pouring and concocting, he woke their dozing lieutenant, set a small stone crock of soap on a stool pulled close to the tub and moved across the generously-proportioned room to run the warming pan between the sheets and over the pillow. While it was not exactly cold, he did not want even a suggestion of coolness to insinuate its unwanted self into the mix. He had already collected every spare blanket he could lay his hands on and piled them on the bed. The warm nest he'd created awaited only the insertion of the comte.
Athos, however, had other ideas. He was not reluctant to leave the tub, the water was no longer hot enough to be efficacious, but he would not be bundled wil-you-nil-you into bed to be dosed and plastered. He did get into bed and pull the covers up as he was the modest sort, but he scrunched himself up in a sort of seated fetal position, propped against the headboard. "Give me a moment; I need to collect my thoughts."
Aramis said nothing, just sat himself down so Athos' blanket-covered toes were pressed against his thigh. The comte was tolerant of minimal human contact, though only with d'Artagnan did he initiate it and that was only to cuff the youth affectionately, or very occasionally, and mostly when he was drunk, sling an arm around the youngster's shoulders.
The physician studied the ends of the hair curling damply around the patrician features, the fan of lashes barely concealing the half-moon crescents of purple beneath the deep-set blue eyes, the flush of color painting the aristocratic cheek bones. The face was pared down so those cheek bones were more prominent, the clavicle bones equally jutting. Their comte had not been eating or sleeping again.
"Madam Joos ..." Athos began, only to fall silent after the pronunciation of the name. A long sigh preceded the raising of bleak blue eyes. "Five years ago I hung my wife. Madam Joos is in possession of this knowledge and may use it to try to sabotage the negotiations."
Aramis did not even blink. Neither was he behind in responding. "First of all, why would she want to sabotage the negotiations? Secondly, exactly how could she damage us with this information? If you hung your wife, it was done lawfully and with reason."
No wonder the comte's thorn hedge was in full bloom. The revelation, though, instantly rearranged all the pieces of the puzzle he'd been gathering in his head for the last three years.
"I have no idea what her motivation might be. It did not come out quite as an accusation, nor was there any implied threat in the way she brought it up. It's just ... a feeling." Athos thoroughly disliked these little premonitions he sometimes had and hated even mentioning them. But once or twice they'd proved useful and perhaps this one had bearing on why the council seemed to be dragging out the negotiations. "Hanging one's wife is hardly a topic one brings up in polite conversation."
"Nor particularly conducive to flirtation," Aramis observed dryly. "You mentioned once, that you had a sibling ..." he did not quite know how to give voice to the conclusion his mind had instantly drawn, but the leap of logic was not so great as it seemed. There had been many little clues along the way and it would certainly explain the drinking. "I suppose we just assumed he had died of natural causes. Is that ... not the case?"
A long, indrawn breath whistled softly in the stillness, before Athos, his voice emotionlessly flat, spoke again. "My wife claimed it was self-defense. I could have had her indentured or transported, I suppose, though I was not in the frame of mind to do so at the time." Athos wrapped his arms around his blanketed knees, knuckles white where his hands were clenched around his ankles. This was a topic he had spoken of to no one beyond those involved in the situation. How it had reached Madam Joos' ears was a mystery he had no wish to contemplate at the moment.
Aramis gathered the patience he had learned to cultivate in his role as a healer and waited, though shock reverberated echoingly in his soul. Justice or mercy? What a choice to have to make in regards to a spouse.
"I was affianced to the daughter of my father's best friend before either of us were even born."
"A trifle presumptuous before even the begetting," Aramis murmured.
As intended, the scarred lip lifted in amusement. "A trifle," Athos echoed. "We were three years apart in age and grew up together, friends of a sort. When Thomas and I lost our parents, her father stood as guardian until I was of age. We were to marry when I came into my inheritance at five and twenty."
The comte lowered his forehead to his knees. Despite the muffling effect, his words were still clear and precise. "I met Anne on the occasion of my twenty-fourth birthday and was married less than a month later. Catherine's father was incensed and attempted to have the marriage annulled, threatening all manner of compensatory legalities, but he could do nothing beyond threaten, as control of the estate was still in the hands of the executors and they ignored him. He was the first to cast aspersions upon my wife's character, but I was besotted. I was deaf, also, to my brother's hints, and finally, outright accusations, until he lay dead at my feet ... stabbed through the heart with a dagger I knew my wife slept with under her pillow, his blood on her hands. She said he had tried to rape her. I almost believed her." The rasping voice shredded to silence for long moments. "I wanted to ... desperately."
Aramis of the tender heart wanted to hit something. Hard.
Guilt, however misplaced, was an unrelenting tyrant; once it crawled into bed with you, its companionship was a foregone conclusion. Few could outrun it, even fewer turn and fight; it overpowered even the most stalwart individuals. Aramis had done nothing but survive the Savoy massacre, and yet, five years later he still woke in a cold sweat, cuddled up with his most assiduous mistress. Guilt was amoral, immutable and insidious; one might even call it immortal. It certainly gave all appearances of being everlasting.
"The glimpses Porthos has shared of his life growing up, has given me ... a different perspective."
Aramis took the seemingly left turn in stride, partly because he sensed that interrupting would cut off the flow, partly because even his facile tongue was struggling to find words of comfort. He'd seen the winters of desolation and despair etched into the fine lines bracketing those usually fathomless eyes, now he understood what he had seen with his heart but been unable grasp without the context. This new understanding explained the why of the firm line of the lips, the reasons behind the cant of the hat brim the comte wore like a shield against the slings and arrows of life.
"Anne grew up in similar circumstances and yet in my limited understanding I saw only that I had been played by a virtuoso. I did not have enough life experience for mercy to be included in my repertoire as magistrate of my own lands. Three days after she murdered my brother, I murdered her ... we had been married ... a year to the day."
The words alone were hard to hear; Aramis could not control his internal flinch. Moreover, the healer in him instinctually grasped the certain knowledge that Athos had loved - and loved deeply. That this man, who believed he had murdered his wife, had not been able to murder his love for her. This last piece of the puzzle completed the picture.
"Your rational mind at least understands that not only the law of the land, but canon law as well, supports your judgment?" It was inflected as a question, though it was a statement of fact as well.
"An eye for an eye," Athos rejoined wearily. "Moral high ground is nothing but an island of insanity."
This was not the first time Athos had refuted Donne's poetic disclaimer.
With Athos, Aramis had learned a brisk response worked better than tilting at windmills on the comte's behalf. "If we might return to the original reason for this visit to the confessional - as already noted, Madam Joos' ammunition is flawed." He scratched the back of his head as if cultivating the thoughts piling up in there. "Though I must admit to curiosity as to how she discovered the information. However, that's neither here nor there at the moment. You are not the perpetrator; you are the victim. Yes, you made a bad bargain, and you lost much because of it, but you did not compound your bad bargain by letting the perpetrator get away with it. You did what the law required - a life for a life."
Aramis rose, shrugged out of his coat and folded it over the back of the chair at the desk. The room was warming up quickly. As he set about removing his shirt buttons, he added almost conversationally, " For all practical purposes, I am the king's personal assassin. I've lost track of the number of times my particular skill set has been called upon to euphemistically 'take care of a problem'."
The marksman set the buttons in a tray on the desk specifically designed for holding a gentleman's accouterments before turning back to find Athos watching him.
"Your point?"
"Does that make me a murderer?" Aramis turned the chair around and straddled it, rolling up his shirt sleeves before crossing his arms over the coat.
"I am not endorsing a simplistic view of morality."
"Well," Aramis said contemplatively, "it seems to me that's a matter of opinion. I uphold the law as interpreted by the king and his council. On your land, you are also required to uphold the king's justice. And yet you judge yourself guilty of murder - but not me."
"Nothing is ever that black and white."
"Unless it applies to you."
"From your own perspective, more than once, is that not human nature?"
"Touché, but at least you see the flaw in your self-flagellation." Aramis returned, again, to the origin of the debate. "So what if the Joos woman knows? Was it done in secret in a scared grove like some pagan sacrifice?"
"Of course not."
Aramis cocked an eyebrow. "You made her stand on the balcony railing in your home and pushed her off so it would appear as if you'd murdered her?"
"She was hung from a tree within sight of the house."
"And - just to be clear in your own mind - the law gave you the right to hang her for her crime?"
"Yes."
"Then, I repeat, the Joos woman's ammunition is flawed if she thinks to use it in some way to muck up the negotiations. It might even work to our advantage if she did try to make something of it."
"How so?"
"I'd wager good money that a man who upholds the law even when it's detrimental to his own well-being would be considered a most honorable man in the eyes of anyone with pretensions to honor." Aramis poured a tot of the spirits, stocked in the sitting room, that he'd been using to mix his elixirs, into a squat crystal glass. "You should still mend fences with her, but," he raised the glass in a mock toast, "let Madam Joos do her worst. The truth, my good man, will set you free," he offered, downing a mouthful of the medicinal.
"Good God, further biblical mauling." Athos abandoned his fetal position, slumping back against the headboard. In the next instant he was out of the bed and across the room in three galloping strides, pounding their pseudo physician on the back. "What the hell?!"
Aramis, folded in half, sounded like a wheezy shofar. Athos snatched the glass out of Aramis' fingers and sniffed it.
The healer, breathing fire, righted himself from his bent posture, pushing off his knees, still trying to catch his breath. "Good God indeed," he choked out, ineffectually fanning his face with a hand. "That stuff is potent. Have you tried it?"
Athos grabbed the back of the desk chair and slumped over it. "Idiot." He sucked in air much the same way Aramis was still attempting to draw breath. "I thought you'd been poisoned." The instant battle rush the aspect of Aramis gasping like a fish had brought on, dissipated as swiftly as it had manifested. Athos gathered what was left of his dignity and made his way back to bed, unashamedly using the furniture as handy props. While whatever Aramis had put into the water had helped his breathing, he was beyond exhausted and the let down from this little bit of rush was not helping.
"That's enough to singe the hair off your chest," Aramis grated, "I think it took a layer of skin of off when it went down." He eyed the mug he'd mixed the potion in.
"Maybe it will burn out this - whatever - that's plaguing me. And besides it isn't that bad, if it puts me to sleep, I will be forever grateful."
Aramis reluctantly collected the mug and handed it over, and Athos downed it in one swallow without even blinking. "Wake me in the morning."
"I don't think -" Aramis began.
"I can't remember the last time I put a foot through the door of a church; God may resent my presence, but I will go."
"We'll put d'Artagnan beside you; he'll deflect any lightning strikes."
TBC 4/19