Thematic continuation with the last Snack, though this time with warning for dark thoughts.
(I have already apologised to Athos.)
XV. A Rediscovery of Taste
It hurts, what he's doing to himself. Not the drinking, not the deliberate wasting of body and mind - they're merely symptoms of what he's going through. The cause and the ailment is self-hatred.
The wine, contrary to the assumptions of a majority, does not bring forgetfulness, let alone condolences. The wine he chooses to drink is fit only for the most wretched drunkard who is no longer capable of taste. Athos is nowhere near that state and that is the entire point of it. His wine is bitter and sour, sticking inside his mouth and coating his tongue in a disgusting layer of brewery ineptitude: gone are the fine vintages he's grown to enjoy, gone is the self-allowance to feel joy. There is nothing indulgent in the way he drinks.
It is with a purposefully-twisted move that he reaches for a new bottle to wash down the lingering taste of the previous. He pulls the cork open in a spike of malignant cruelty; pours the liquid into the cup fully aware, and intently wicked in the anticipation of how awful it is going to be. He squashes the feeble voice of reason in his head heeding him to stop, enough, stop; with a dark sneer he tips the cup back up and gulp-gulp-gulps it all in one go, feeling a meek satisfaction at the self-harm furthered when it's all gone. Lord, it is awful. Not just the taste, but the way the liquid pools in his stomach, weighs and sloshes and presses against his bladder; the alcohol goes straight to his head, taking his vision up for a chaconne and disarming him in more ways than he is aware of. This is the state he deliberately puts himself in. Because this, this deplorable vision of a man, sprawled on a chair in some sordid tavern he doesn't even know the name of, with the gaunt, flushed face and cross, glassy eyes, red stains all the way down his once-white shirt and the cuffs, this is his true self. This nobody, unmarked by either title or uniform, unmarked save for the repugnance his very state of being provokes, is truly him.
He is baring himself to the world to be seen.
(He is daring the world to see what he sees.)
He had once bared himself to a girl with green eyes who had brought him to ruin. Now he is bare again, but with an odd kind of brazenness that is challenging the world: what does he have left to lose? His heart is already broken, left in shatters under a tree in Pinon; his soul is in tethers, he will not find a priest so devout as to take it on. He hasn't counted on a man named Porthos, and another one called Aramis, or a boy from Gascony to respond, and thoroughly beat him in a game he'd thought his own.
But not yet. It is too soon, too raw, too wild - he will not allow himself to be helped. Within ever-thickening walls it is getting colder and colder, and when those hands reach, Athos lashes at them from the inside with dark glares and stiff postures and simple avoidance. He will not tolerate trespassers on his own ground.
There is nothing to salvage here.
Leave him be - this is what he deserves.
(Leave him be – how dare you intervene?)
I did not ask for your brotherhood.
Don't you dare.
/
Yet he'll still wake up to hands holding him, steadying him and caring for him - nothing too gentle, no sign of pity; grunting and cursing and manhandling - (he won't make it easy) - but still, there. Despite the growls from deep in his throat, the acrid spite and the attempts to push them away, he will not be let go. Why, why, why? Dear God, why will they not go?
What kind of punishment is this?
These hands are causing a pain he'd thought himself incapable of feeling anymore!
These hands – they're stoking a fire of rebellion within him. The flame trying so valiantly to leap to life is painful; it hurts so much that it makes Athos want to weep and beg them to stop, please, stop. They're waking a part of him that, despite his most ruthless efforts, is beginning to respond. Like a beaten dog offering its belly to the first kind, petting hand it finds, pitiful and pathetic, it is taking it and relishing it and wishing for more. That is disgusting.
In his more sober moments – in his less blink-drunk moments - the loathing the recollection of that yearning brings is outright despicable.
Pity. That is the cause of it all. Even from himself, that is the one thing he definitely, absolutely will not take: there's nothing worthy of it in him. To be seen as susceptible to it is, simply put, unacceptable.
(Perhaps that is how they find a way through his defence after all. Because there is never any pity in the way Porthos and Aramis approach him, and Athos has never been prepared for kindliness.)
Years later, when he's long pulled himself up and out of those rank depths, re-established himself on firm ground and begun to take stability as something that is granted again, he looks back, and sees that having searched for something to anchor himself to in the first place, having tied himself to the Musketeers all those years ago just for something to do, the part of him that he had so valiantly tried to murder then, had sown the seeds of its own victory even before he had set down on that path.
He has Porthos, Aramis and d'Artagnan to thank for having gradually regained his taste for wine. Over time and with the wondrous support of those men, he'd slowly begun to allow himself to feel pleasure again.
The pleasure he'd found not in fine wine, but in the company he'd had with which to share it, was something entirely else.