Three days later, Constance picks D'Artagnan up on her motorbike an hour before his call time. She's tense; he can feel it in her posture when he sits down behind her.
"Don't forget your blocking in the early scenes!" she yells worriedly over the roar of the highway. "Sometimes you're upstaging Ruth. And you're still coming in late on 'Away, Away!'"
"Constance!" He shouts, sounding harsher than he'd meant to. "It'll be fine, I promise!"
He nuzzles the inch of neck visible beneath her helmet. After a moment, he feels her nod, and they ride in silence.
"It'll be fine" is the mantra he has been repeating to himself since three this morning, just before he finally managed to fall asleep. It'll be fine. You know your lines, the ensemble's not terrible, Aramis will be with you the whole time, Constance and Porthos and Athos and Treville will all be backstage – just don't balls anything up too badly and they'll do the rest.
D'Artagnan feels like leaping off the back of the motorbike and flinging himself into oncoming traffic.
He actually looks green. Athos has never seen a human being turn a color like that, and he thought he'd seen every possible permutation of the hangover. But this is no hangover. D'Artagnan is sitting, in full makeup and costume, in a corner of the dressing room, staring blankly at the floor while everyone hurries around him. Nobody else seems to have noticed him; they are all too busy with the million other tasks that need doing.
"Fuck," Athos mutters to himself, forgetting about his headset for a second.
"Ah, hell, what's wrong?" Porthos' gruff voice surprises him into action.
Shit," Athos says again. "Porthos, can I borrow you for minute?"
"No."
"Porthos get to the dressing room, now!" he hisses into the headset, whirling around and scanning the faces rushing past him. He catches a glimpse of a dashing moustache and heads towards it.
Aramis is getting his makeup done. Constance is attacking him with a Kabuki brush so fiercely he's coughing translucent powder.
"I know we're in a hurry, but Jesus, Connie, could you – hold on a minute. Is that a hickey?" Constance cuffs him.
"Done, get out of my sight. WHERE'S SERGE?!" She stomps off and Aramis spots Athos. He raises an eyebrow suggestively.
"It was definitely a hickey. Well done D'Artagnan." "Now is not the time, Aramis. Come with me." Athos sees Porthos poke his head in the door and waves him over.
"Look at D'Artagnan," Athos whispers to them, nodding at the corner. Comprehension dawns at the same time on both their faces. Aramis puts a hand to his beard and curses softly.
"Well, he doesn't look healthy," Porthos says.
They approach as one, carefully, like filmmakers in a wildlife documentary. D'Artagnan looks up, registers their presence, and looks immediately down again.
"Hello," Aramis says brightly. "All right, D'Artagnan?"
"Yeah," D'Artagnan grunts in response.
"Sure about that?" asks Porthos. He glances significantly at Athos and they both remove their headsets. Treville and the crew can wait for this.
"Yeah."
"Good." Athos signals and Aramis and Porthos each seize an arm, hauling D'Artagnan to his feet. They frog-march him out of the dressing room and down the hall, frantically, while he tries unsuccessfully to free himself and yells vulgarity at them.
"Shut up, you're gonna scare the ensemble!"
"Everything scares the ensemble, screw the ensemble, I'm scared, what the fuck are you DOING, you maniacs, we open in twenty minutes - !"
"Exactly," Athos interrupts loudly. He steps ahead of the struggling trio and throws open the door to a broom cupboard he's used before as a recovery station. He kicks aside a few buckets, two empty bottles, three sponges and a broken Punch 'n' Judy puppet to clear enough room for the four of them to fit.
Aramis and Porthos shove their way inside, deposit their charge unceremoniously on the floor, and body-slam the door shut before D'Artagnan can make a run for it.
"Are you three fucking hazing me after everything, you certifiable mother – "
"Shut up!" Athos snaps. "Jesus, if only you'd get this worked up in your fight scenes, we might actually have something with this show."
"Piss off, Athos," D'Artagnan replies peevishly, but he settles somewhat. "Someone tell me what's going on."
Aramis opens his mouth, but Athos cuts him off. This is his mess, his responsibility: today might as well be the day to start owning it.
"We don't think you're ready." Porthos turns a pair of round, horrified eyes on him, and Athos mentally pleads for his trust. Just one more time, mate.
"You- what?" D'Artagnan spits. "Not this again, come on."
"No, you're not ready. Look at you, you look like you're the consumptive character in a Dickens adaptation, not a pirate! You're so nervous you can't bloody think straight."
"I'm fine," D'Artagnan says, grinding his teeth audibly. "Let me out of here."
"No," Athos says. "We're not leaving until you're ready to go on stage and do the job absolutely no one thought you could do when you first got here. No one."
"Not even me, really," Aramis says, without a hint of shame. Athos glances at him, and he winks. Athos thinks his friend might be starting to understand the situation.
"But you could. You did. Better than anyone else. And everyone changed their minds. And now they trust you. They think we might be able to get ourselves out of our hole. You did that."
D'Artagnan still looks green, but there are spots of bright red starting to appear in his cheeks. His eyes look a bit like those of a spooked horse.
"What's happening right now?"
"Pep talk," Porthos says simply.
"Everybody trusts you. Even me," Athos continues. "And – and I'll prove it." He swallows.
"Athos," D'Artagnan says quickly, "mate, it's fine, I get it, you don't have to." Athos feels a rush of affection for him and his instinctual kindness. He probably doesn't realize how unusual a trait that is, or that other people have to work for what seems so utterly natural to him.
"No, I'm going to. Stupid, really, that I didn't tell you before. It's not – it's not even really a bloody big secret. It's just… ordinary. A little sad. A little sordid." He shrugs.
"I had a brother, Thomas. He's your age – or, he would be, now. He died, about seven years ago. Leukemia. He was sixteen." D'Artagnan's face falls.
"Christ. I'm – I'm sorry, Athos." Athos takes a steeling breath, swallows the sudden ache in his throat.
"No, I mean – he'd been sick for ages, on and off for years. Couldn't ever quite get the remission to stick. But – but yeah, that's not where the story ends.
"Thomas, he always wanted to be a playwright. Towards the end, he started thinking he wasn't ever going to get to do that, for real. I kept telling him, y'know, take it easy, don't work yourself so hard, just live. I wanted… I wanted him to be there with us, while he still could, I guess. But he was wrapped up in that play, I think he wanted to make sure he left something behind. Arrogant bastard, really, my little brother."
D'Artagnan snorts, more from surprise than humor, and it breaks Athos' concentration for a second. He chuckles. Aramis and Porthos try and hide their grins.
"No, he was. Cocky asshole, like you lot. Even wrote that play about himself, about his own life. When he was gone, I was just a year out of drama school, drifting through jobs, and I decided to try and finish the play, get it produced, get it on stage. Maybe I'm biased, maybe my grief made me oversensitive, but I think it was good. Thomas was talented. He might've been great.
"It was around that time I started seeing Milady de Winter."
"May she burn in hell," chimes in Porthos.
"Oh, I knew it!" D'Artagnan says, snapping his fingers. Then he looks mortified. "Sorry, shit, I just mean – I figured she had to have been an ex-girlfriend, there was that weird thing between you two."
"A frisson," Aramis agrees. "Yeah, chemistry was never exactly an issue with them."
"No, the issue was she turned out to be a raging hellbeast," Porthos adds.
"SO I STARTED SEEING MILADY DE WINTER," Athos says, trying to regain control of the situation. To their credit, all three of them look chagrined.
"And she wasn't just an ex-girlfriend. She was my fiancée – briefly. And I loved her. For a while I really did." For a while, she had been wonderful.
"So what happened?" D'Artagnan asks, very gently.
"She stole Thomas' play," Athos says, and saying those words out loud is not as explosive as it has been before. "Sold it to the Cardinal Company, said she was doing it so we could have a better future together. She probably really thought that what's she was doing, too. I don't know, she was always a complicated, ambitious woman.
"We broke up, I threw her out, and I wasn't in great shape, but I might have been alright except that then they produced the play, or a weird, bastardized version of it, and they made a killing. And for some reason, that pushed me over the edge. I became an alcoholic, lost my job, and now I'm here." He chuckles again.
"It does sound a bit pathetic when you put it like that," he says, but cheerfully. Honestly - cheerfully. D'Artagnan's face splits into a puzzled smile.
"It does a bit," he says. "But you know what's really pathetic? I thought I had problems, back there in the dressing room. I thought I was broke and talentless and shit in bed and alone."
"Can't vouch for the 'shit-in-bed,'" Athos says, "or the broke, really, I'm not intimately acquainted with your finances. But as to the other two… I think I still win."
"Yeah, give it until intermission," D'Artagnan replies lightly. "We'll see who's in the lead." He's returned to his normal olive-skinned color, and Athos suddenly feels like he can breathe again.
There is a soft knock on the door, and all four of them jump.
"Um, Athos?" Anne's clear voice calls. "Treville wants to call places soon."
Athos checks his watch and then quickly opens the door. If Anne finds anything strange about the sight of the four of them crammed into a broom closet, Aramis and D'Artagnan sweating through their doublets, she doesn't show it.
She smiles encouragingly at D'Artagnan. "Is everything good here?"
He looks at the other three, and they look back at him, and it is good. Porthos gives one of his ridiculously enormous shark-teeth smiles and ruffles D'Artagnan's hair.
"We're good," he says confidently. Aramis laughs and the corners of Athos' mouth lift, and D'Artagnan thinks that everybody was right: it kind of does look like the fucking sun when the man smiles.
And then it really is places and D'Artagnan waits behind the curtain with Anne. She's not on for a few scenes yet – he thinks she might be covering all her bases. There's no need; he feels calm. But it is nice to have her there nonetheless.
"Hey," he whispers to her, nudging her shoulder affectionately. "Thanks. You're the best costar." She looks faintly surprised.
"Well," she says. "Same to you." He chuckles.
"No, I mean it!"
"So do I," she replies. "But if Athos and Porthos and Aramis hadn't gotten you into that closet, I was probably going to drag you bodily on stage myself."
D'Artagnan looks at her and her tiny frame. Somehow he still doesn't doubt she could do it.
"I guess I'm glad they got to me first, then." The lights are starting to dim, so he turns resolutely to face front. The orchestra hasn't started up yet.
"D'Artagnan?"
"Yeah?"
"Don't hurt Constance, okay?" Anne has a groove between her brows and she's pressing her lips tightly together, so D'Artagnan's first instinct to laugh off this somber pronouncement vanishes. He stares hard at the crushed red velvet of the curtain beside him, remembering Constance's skin in the morning, the pale color at the tips of her eyelashes.
"I'd never forgive myself if I did." He can feel Anne's little exhale of relief.
"Good. Break a leg, D'Artagnan," and she slips backstage again just as the first drum roll rumbles from the pit.
D'Artagnan clutches the handle of the sword at his hip, the one Porthos trained him to use so thoroughly he's got calluses on both hands, like a real pirate - as stupid as he realizes that sounds. He thrusts his chin into the air, smiling; closes his eyes.
The curtain rises.