Okay, here's the fourth chapter. I haven't heard from anyone about what they think in terms of how this is progressing, and I'm sure this is the point in time when people will start getting upset that I'm playing around with the outcome and all...but that's the wonderful thing about writing fan fiction, right? So if anyone would like to review this story, or share it with their friends, I'm always interested in what people have to say.

Chapter IV

"Put him there."

Despite the late hour of the night they had come crashing into the monastery with their fallen captain suspended between the four of them they were creating far more noise than was really necessary, but Katherine wasn't in the frame of mind to care right then. His face had grown pale as the blood continued to stain every inch of clothing that she pressed against the wound, including the legs of her pants from when she had propped him up against her in the wagon. The material now clung to her thighs rather tightly to show the leaner frame that lay beneath the boyish attire, the sleeves of her shirt having been ripped off ages ago to sop up even more blood as they hit bumps and holes in the roads.

The musketeers were quick to place him on the cot that she had pointed to, stepping back as soon as he was safely on the material to give the girl as much room as she needed in order to administer to his wound. Louis had plunged it rather deeply, the bastard, causing so much damage that Katherine was beginning to panic that she might in fact lose him before the others could return to his side. But she couldn't see anything with the amount of clothing he wore, especially with it being buried so deeply beneath the old uniform. It broke her heart, knowing what she would need to do next, and she prayed that he would one day be able to forgive her. Given the choice, she would find another way...but time was running precariously short and she could no longer afford to waste any more of it. Lifting with all of her might, the brunette shifted the musketeer till he lay almost on his stomach and seized a dagger of her own to rip at the material of his uniform until it had fallen away to reveal the stained white shirt beneath it. She made quick work of that as well so that all she could see was the skin of his back and the mark of the dagger.

"I need hot water," she said, turning her head to call back at one of the waiting musketeers. "Hot water and fresh bandages...and a needle." She heard a pair of boots shifting against the flagstone floor and returned her attention to D'Artagnan, who now seemed to be barely breathing at all. As the walls around her heart began to clench tightly, she prayed that she would be able to keep her promise to Philippe and save the life of the man they both loved, for she too had come to think of him as a father figure in addition to those provided by Aramis and the others. It was simply a name when she called him "uncle," not a distinction of how she felt about him. And the very idea of losing such a dominant figure in her life was simply terrifying to the girl, who had known no love aside from what those four men had given her. But now was not the time for sentimental thought. She had a job to do.

The young woman rose from her knees and hurried to the far side of the room to grab a hold of a candlestick, bringing it closer to the side of the cot so that she could properly see what it was that she needed to do. Blood was still pooling around the skin on the outside, but at a much slower rate than before, which made the girl worry that perhaps the time to save him had come and gone before she had realized it. Footsteps told her that the musketeer had returned with the things that she needed, accompanied by two of the priests that he had woken in his haste to do as she asked of him. It took only a moment for the priests to assess the situation before they too hurried forward and knelt down by the side of the bed, having taken the things that the musketeer had brought in. "Stand guard outside," Katherine told him, signalling to the large oak doors. "We'll do the best we can, but we cannot have you hovering." None of them seemed certain that leaving their captain in the hands of strangers was a wise idea, and so they hesitated and looked between one another for some kind of direction. Only when they saw the look on Katherine's face, half shadowed because of the late hour, did they finally move outside the door and close it tightly behind them. With the needle in her hands, she held it lightly in her fingers and ran the point back and forth in the flame of the candle.

Exhausted from their efforts, the priests had cleaned up the area around the cot on which D'Artagnan lay and returned to their private chambers, leaving Katherine alone to sit in her bloodied clothes by his side. They had propped him up off of his shoulder as much as they could with the resources they had and proceeded to say a prayer over his broken form from which Katherine did not rise. She remained on her knees by his bedside, eyes tightly closed with her hands wrapped firmly around one of his larger ones as her mind continued to plead with God for his life. They had done everything they could possibly do for him at this point from an earthly level, and now all that remained was to pray that he would be permitted to continue living. It was all in God's hands at this point, and it would be at His mercy that D'Artagnan would wake to live another day and guide those who had looked up to him for so long. But for the time being, the girl was determined that she might be able to beg for his soul, willing to remain there as long as necessary until D'Artagnan awoke.

"Please," she begged softly, lifting her head and opening her eyes to look at her uncle as she pressed his cool hand to her cheek. "Please wake up. Do not think to leave us now...not when we need you so." There was no response from him, nor did she expect there to be. A good deal of his blood had been spilled when Louis had plunged the dagger meant for Philippe into his back, and much of it had dried into the tattered clothing that she now wore as she forced her body to remain in a prayer position against the cold floor. Still, she felt it was cruel for Philippe to have finally found someone who loved him after so many years of imprisonment and loneliness to be faced with the prospect of losing them so soon. While Louis had grown up with his parents, knowing exactly what he was to become as servants came to him on bended knee, Philippe had known none of that. The chances of him even being told of his true parentage were rather slim, especially once Louis had inherited his crown from his father. But to learn that his father was not even the previous king...how much of a blow had that truly been?

Katherine closed her eyes again and gently lowered her head, allowing it to rest against the hand that she held so gingerly in her own two smaller ones. She could understand the pain of never knowing who you really were or where you came from better than most other people could. The feeling of being abandoned for death as a child was something she could not shake, even now that she was twenty and had been fortunate enough to live a comfortable life within the monastery walls. Had he been so lucky? She could not imagine that his entire life had been spent behind the walls of the Bastille, and so wondered how he had been raised until the time that he had been first forced into that mask. The very thought of that terrible thing gave the girl shivers as she remembered the shock she had felt when first she saw him round the corner behind her father and the others, afraid that he was one who had followed them in their attempt to save the king's twin from a lifetime of imprisonment. Never in her wildest dreams had she thought that the man behind that monstrosity was in fact the very man they were saving.

So lost in thought was the young woman as she knelt beside D'Artagnan's unconscious form that she did not take any notice of the passage of time. The darkness outside was slowly beginning to give way to light as the dawn approached them, the candles burning down to mere stubs within their holders. Only when she felt a hand placed on her shoulder and she nearly jumped out of her skin did she come to recognize that she had not moved for a great deal of time. Athos looked down at her with concerned eyes. "You need to go and rest now, Katherine," he told her gently. "There is nothing more you can do for him." She did not immediately move, but turned her head slowly to look back at her uncle and the tiny movements that came from his chest to tell her that he was still clinging to life. "What if I was too late to save him?" The question hung in the air for a few moments as Athos watched her, noting that her eyes had begun to well with tears, a rather strange sight for young Katherine who had always been so tough in the face of hardship and tragedy. But this one was much closer to her heart than any incident she had dealt with before, he realized, and so it would affect her much more than he had originally thought. "You will have done all that you could," Athos murmured gently, placing his hand under her elbow to help ease her aching body off of the floor. "But you know that he would never forgive you for spending so much time in worry for his sake."

A soft flutter of laughter passed from her lips as she blinked, the tears falling slowly down her cheeks. There was truth in his words, for D'Artagnan would surely chastise her for spending much of her time worrying about his well being when he insisted that it was his job to worry about her. That was simply one of the many things he had told her over the years as the little girl grew up to ask him about what he did for the King and if his life was ever in danger. He had told her quite a few things in order to ease her mind until she was old enough to handle the truth of his job, and at that time she had begun longing for the day when she could join the ranks of the musketeers herself. But alas, as a woman, he had said that there would never come a time when that would be permitted. Serving the King in such a manner was no place for a woman, who was regarded as being less than a man and merely a piece of property to be traded and sold at will. "Nor can I forgive myself if I should have failed him in his hour of need."

Looking upon her with a saddened gaze, Athos drew the girl to his chest and hugged her tightly against him, stroking her knotted hair gently as she sobbed softly against the material of his uniform. Despite the rift that had grown between himself and D'Artagnan over the King's involvement in Raoul's death, Athos had learned quite a bit about his friend in that short time that they had fought side by side. And now that he had come to know the truth, his own heart ached much in the way that Katherine's appeared to, feeling that there was a chance he may never get to tell D'Artagnan just how sorry he was for all that he had endured.

Suddenly the girl drew herself back from Athos, startled and afraid of what she might have missed in the time that she had left the Bastille. "Papa? Porthos?" She dared not breathe Philippe's name, for she knew nothing of the boy and was too far beneath him to even consider uttering his name aloud. Athos gently stroked her cheek, removing some of her tears. "They are both safe. We have taken care of the King...and he can no longer harm anyone." His words felt almost cryptic, confusing the girl even further as she looked up at him with puffy eyes. Was that supposed to mean that Louis had suddenly turned himself completely around? No, that was as likely to happen as Katherine becoming the Queen of France. If anything, it sounded as though Louis and Philippe had finally been set in their rightful places, and so it would be Louis who would scream for an eternity in that hell, locked away from the world and void of the material things he had come to enjoy so much. Now her mind turned to the very reason she still stood in that room, practically supported by Athos as her body slowly began to give way on her. "I promised I would save him." The older man nodded, kissing her forehead gently. "You have done all that you can," he repeated to her as he adjusted his hold on her body. "And now it is time to do what you can for yourself. You must rest."

Lacking the energy required to try and defy him, Katherine merely nodded slowly and straightened her knees beneath her. Her skin pulled tightly as she moved, the blood having dried both her skin and the material of her clothing together, and so that was the first thing she would need to take care of. Yes, she would go and rest as she had been ordered to do...but perhaps not in the way that they would like for her to go about it. While she had vocalized her fear of losing him after the efforts of trying to save his life, she had not said that she was afraid of what might happen in her absence. Someone needed to watch over him, to make sure that there was still some kind of life in his body. Katherine pulled herself slowly away from Athos and turned toward the door, a hand immediately flying to her side as she grit her teeth against the stabbing pain she was now experiencing. "You did not take care of that, did you?" Closing her eyes, the girl wordlessly shook her head but dared not turn around to look at her uncle. "Go clean yourself up. Come back here when you have finished and I will dress it for you."

A slow breath left her lips as Katherine held tightly to her side and continued out the door, passing the musketeers who continued to stand guard and heading for her own quarters within the monastery walls. It was a small room, as those who lived their lives here normally did not require too many material things, but as Katherine was the only woman, they had permitted her to have a few more items than one might normally see. Her bed was tucked neatly in the corner of the room beside a window, still closed against the cool air from where she had left it the night before. On the desk on the opposite side sat a candlestick, a brush and a small mirror that they had given her as a gift for her eighteenth birthday. Various pieces of parchment and quills sat on the top of the desk as well, placed in the upper right hand corner in a rather tidy manner. On the small table beside that sat her bowl, towel and jug of water, the very things that she went immediately to as she moved slowly into the room.

Her clothes would need to be washed, though she doubted that anyone would be able to get that much blood out of them entirely. Stripping them off was the painful part, as she had to stretch her side in order to pull the remains of her shirt away, while bending over to remove her shoes, socks and pants. A few more steps forward took her right to the table and the waiting sponge that lay in the bottom of the bowl. The water that she poured from the jug was colder than normal at having been left out all night without a fire to warm it, and so the girl shivered slightly as she took the sponge in her hand and began to dab at her aching body with it. Beads of water rolled down her body as she pressed against her collarbone and neck, removing all of the dirt and sweat from her skin. The Bastille was a filthy place, she thought to herself as she slowly sponged her body to a cleaner state of being. It hadn't taken long for traces of it to attach themselves to her and cling viciously to her clothing and flesh, yet another reason for her to be terrified for D'Artagnan's life.

The makeshift bandage was still tightly wrapped around her side and crusted with her blood, but Katherine did her best to ignore it for the time being. While she could handle the chaos that came with bloodshed and injuries, she wanted to wait until Athos had taken a look at it so that he could assess the damage that had been done to her. His eyes would be a little more careful than her own, seeing things from a better angle and hopefully cleaning it much more thoroughly. Content with the fact that she had washed herself as well as she could for the time being, Katherine moved slowly to the tiny chest of drawers that sat at the foot of the bed and pulled one aside to reveal the normal clothing that she wore as a woman. In minutes she had dressed herself again, wearing a simple shirt and skirt that would allow her to move and Athos to address the issue of her battle scar. The brown material itched her side slightly before she tucked the gentler fabric of her shirt into the waist, slipping her feet into a small pair of leather shoes. All that remained was for her to attempt something a little more appropriate with her hair, which was now a tangled mess from the evening's adventures...

A short while later she reappeared in the infirmary room, noting that Aramis and Porthos had also returned in the time that she had been gone. The three of them stood close together and muttered in hushed tones, so low that Katherine could not make out any of their words as she entered. Porthos first took notice of her and moved away from their group, causing the other two to bring their eyes up to look at her with the same concerned glances she had seen on them earlier that night. "You look at me as if you think I am a ghost, Papa," she said in a weak attempt at humour. "What happened after I left you?" Porthos gently wrapped an arm around her back and lead her forward to another cot in the room, gently prompting her to sit on the edge as Athos knelt down beside her and pulled her clothes away to deal with the bloody bandage on her side. She leaned her body away, stretching the skin with a bit of a wince as he began to untie the knot that she had used to keep the cloth in place. He was being as gentle as possible, she knew that, but the bandage would not remove easily, for the blood that had dried to it would also have dried to her skin and thus made them one. "Louis and Philippe have both been put in their rightful places," Aramis said gently as he moved across the room to bring a bowl of water to Athos.

"Meaning that Louis is now in the Bastille?" she whispered, clenching her teeth a little as the tugging began. Aramis nodded silently. "The King is back in the palace and a cover story is being created as we speak. I need to ride to the palace tonight and speak with him and his mother." A thought struck her. If D'Artagnan was indeed the man who fathered both Louis and Philippe, that meant that Queen Anne was still their mother...the two had been lovers. It was a scandalous thing to know about your uncle, that he, who was entirely devoted and loyal to his country and his King, had allowed himself to perform one of the most treasonous acts possible by falling in love with the Queen. And it wasn't merely feelings that he had experienced with her, but the two of them had actually established a relationship that went above and beyond Queen and musketeer. Katherine wasn't certain of how she felt about that, but could not condemn either of them for falling in love. In truth, it was said that the old King had paid precious little attention to his bride when she had first arrived from Austria and had taken a few lovers of his own over the years. Apparently, not all of them had been women either...but that in itself was merely a rumour that could never be proven or disproven now that he lay in his grave. And since Louis and Philippe were the only known children ever to come from the old King, that made them the sole heirs to the throne.

Though she supposed that they were not truly his sons after all.

Aramis sat himself on the far end of the cot and gently nudged Katherine's body until she lay on the opposite side, her head resting in her father's lap as her eyes continued to look over at D'Artagnan's motionless body. None of them had yet changed out of their old uniforms, she noticed, which meant that sleep was not in the cards for them either. She flinched as Athos began pressing against the gash on her side, closing her eyes tightly while Aramis began to gently stroke her hair and cheek in an effort to soothe her. "What are you going to tell them?" she wondered aloud, breathing slowly as she did. Aramis thought for a moment. "I'm not sure yet. I need to tell them that D'Artagnan is still alive...for now. And we must discuss what is to be done with the prisoner in the Bastille." Even now that they were safe within the walls of the monastery and no longer being hunted by the musketeers, Aramis knew it was not entirely safe to discuss the fact that Louis was the prisoner of which he spoke. They needed to secure Philippe to his new position of power and begin teaching him the very things that Louis had known for years. Their task was not going to be an easy one, but it had been the very thing they had vowed to undertake when they had initially planned to swap the twins around. "I do not believe that the Queen will allow him to remain there for too long."

"He deserves to stay there," she said through grit teeth, anger burning in her stomach again. "For what he's done to his people, and to D'Artagnan." "Hush," Aramis ordered gently as he leaned forward to kiss her cheek. "Now is not the time for you to waste your energy on such feelings. You were wounded at the Bastille, and now you need to rest." His hand continued to move gently over her cheek as he soothed her anger, watching as her eyes grew heavy and began to close. "I cannot leave him," she whispered, dozing off a little despite herself. The old man couldn't help but smile, glancing over to where his friend was nearly finished dressing her wound. "I shall not move you, and when you wake, you may stay with him. He would feel safe in your hands." The thought brought a small smile to her lips as Katherine finally allowed her head to drop and her mind to fade away from the events of the evening, bringing her into a darkness that was comforting and welcome to her exhausted body. With her breathing finally growing even, Aramis gently slipped himself out from beneath her and waited for Athos to pull the side of her shirt down again before he covered her smaller body with a blanket.

"I do not know what we have ever done to deserve her," the priest whispered softly with a glance upward at his two friends. "But if anyone can bring him back from the brink of death-" "It will be our Kate," Porthos finished with a smile of his own. Athos nodded his agreement, looking down at her for a brief moment before he turned away. "If we must go to the King...we should perhaps rest for a while and make ourselves look presentable." A chuckle sounded from Aramis as he reached forward to clap his friend on the back and headed for the door, not wanting to disturb the peace that had taken over the room. Yes, if anyone could help perform a miracle, it was their Kate.