A/N: I hope you had a good Christmas, Dear Readers. Many thanks for reading and leaving your comments. I'm a day late posting this, had to do a paragraph shuffle, but back on track now.

So, onward ...

oOo

Chapter Five

Hospital Saint-Louis:

Porthos drove at some speed. At one point, Aramis reached out silently and laid his hand over Porthos's on the steering wheel. Porthos had flinched before understanding and he had eased his foot off the accelerator.

"Sorry," he had whispered.

"It wouldn't do to crash," Aramis said, softly, as they proceeded within the city speed limit.

As it turned out, they needn't have rushed. Arriving at the hospital, they had been shown into a stark waiting room they had initially shared with a middle-aged couple with haunted eyes. They avoided eye contact, taking seats by the window, Porthos finally standing and turning his back on the room, on the couple, so that he could breathe.

The couple had gone now, though the oppression that had clung to them remained in the room after they had left.

Athos, they were briefly told, was being stabilised, scanned, x-rayed. There may be internal bleeding. There were fractures. A head injury. Did they want coffee?

The subsequent waiting had been anxiety-ridden; the recent CCTV images of Athos inside the car, struggling to control it, hands clearly visible gripping the wheel and body buffeted from left to right, never out of their minds for a moment of those long, exhausting hours. They had seen it all, after the event. It had been hard to watch then and it was just as hard to relive.

"What's takin' so long," Porthos grunted, his forehead against the window glass as he stared down at the car park, three floors below. Outside, life was going on. He wondered how that was possible.

Aramis did not respond. Porthos wasn't asking a question and didn't expect an answer.

Finally, the waiting was over and they rose on unsteady legs, stumbling after a nurse and both sharing a look before following her through two sets of double doors.

And stopping.

The outcome of their friend's ambush was now in front of them under the stark white lights of the ICU that only served to emphasise Athos's deathly pale complexion.

Neither of them spoke. Neither one wanted to disturb the silence, only broken by the constant bleep and hiss of the surrounding machines.

It was a fallacy to think people in the ICU just looked asleep.

It was more than that.

They were shells, Porthos thought. Empty shells. As if their souls had already flown.

Athos wouldn't just open his eyes; not on his own. Not unless the doctors facilitated it.

A doctor had appeared to read them a list of his injuries. Porthos stopped listening after the first ones. Two fractured ribs, bruised kidneys, broken arm, broken foot. Broken. Athos was broken. Porthos stepped away. Aramis would listen carefully. He'd absorb it. Work through it. Figure out how long it would all take to heal. What to do if it didn't.

Porthos knew that people in car crashes often had broken feet. Their feet would slip under the pedals and then the impact would force their bodies back and … He shook his head.

Their first sight of him had not consoled them.

The last time Porthos had seen Athos, he had just "despatched" a cadet with a flurry of angry ripostes and lunges in the training room. Fencing had been part of their team fitness regime and was now the stuff of fierce competition between them. No one bettered Athos though and they suspected his skill was inbred from the illustrious ancestry he never talked about. And then, their talk, just the two of them in the basement, when Athos had told of his despair at the death of his witnesses and his determined but failed pursuit of Eduard Mendez.

Now, he looked diminished. Small in the wide intensive care bed.

There were five stitches in his eyebrow, the eye beneath it swollen and black. Numerous small cuts were visible on his face and across his nose. A hospital gown was draped over him, wires protruding from the neckline and disappearing into machines.

"Oh, mate," Porthos said, as he reached out to tentatively touch the fingers of the splintered arm. He thought the doctor had said they would put a cast on it later.

"There's glass in his hair," Aramis ground out, as he ran his hand gently over Athos's head.

"We'll sort that out," one of the nurses said, as she checked the machines and various tubes and wires. "He's in good hands," she added.

He'd better be, Aramis thought as he took an unsteady step back.

He felt a firm hand on his back, steadying him and looked at Porthos, beside him. Neither spoke, but they both took comfort from their own proximity.

A bright green line jumped up and down in time to the bleep it emitted.

Porthos turned to Aramis and pulled him into a welcomed embrace, before they both sank into the chairs at one side of the bed, settling into what they knew would become their world for the next few weeks.

In the ensuing quiet hours, Porthos made a wish list.

He wished they had arrested Eduard Mendez, or whatever he called himself, when they had a chance. They knew he was dangerous. According to Aramis, the department hadn't wanted to mess up the arrest though and had been over-cautious of his lawyers. They had waited for firm evidence, which never materialised because the witnesses had been eliminated.

Well, they had that evidence now.

Eduard Mendez had climbed apparently unscathed from the wreckage of his own car after battering Athos's and had turned to the CCTV camera and waved.

Bloody waved.

So Porthos's second wish was to tear Mendez slowly limb from limb, should they meet again.

And he fully intended to meet him again.

The third wish was easy.

It saw Athos on his feet again, tight-lipped at their teasing, yelling when he had had enough of them. Smirking when he thought they weren't looking. They were always looking though, that elusive smirk the goal they always sought; the reason for all their jokes and banter.

So that wish was easy.

"We are so lucky to live in this century, brother," Aramis had said later, as they numbly walked across the car park, the sounds of the machines still in their heads. "A few centuries ago, a broken bone could be a death sentence. They can work wonders now."

Time slipped by, agonisingly slowly, hours into days.

They survived on bad coffee and vending machine rubbish, too strung out to properly shop, or sleep.

The nurses cared for Athos with a single mindedness that Aramis admired and was grateful for.

They were strict though, now only allowing them in one at a time after the initial visit. So they each went in separately and then reported back to the other in the waiting room. Not that there was much to report. The ICU was a twilight world where life hung by a thread and hope was something clung to; an all-consuming emotion that was nurtured and fed by a positive machine reading or indeed, the status quo. They would both take the status quo.

They quickly got to know the two assigned nurses by name. Kate and Julia. They teased and cajoled them, but the nurses were always professional. Perhaps they had seen their like before and were well versed in drawing a line.

"You Musketeers are very charming," Julia had laughed one morning.

"He's charmin' too," Porthos had replied, running his fingers over the back of Athos's hand. "Once you get to know him."

They watched the CCTV footage several more times on brief visits back to the office. It didn't get any easier. Especially when they saw that at one point, Mendez had pulled a knife as he leaned in toward the broken car window. It was a threatening gesture, but not one that had been delivered. That seemed worse, somehow. Taunting an injured man.

Treville had set various wheels in motion and for now, he was allowing Porthos and Aramis to spend as much time as possible at the hospital.

Athos had been sedated for almost five days. His injuries were severe and the surgeon had instructed sedation to allow his body to recover a little from the brutal onslaught he had suffered as Mendez's car had battered his on the lonely city road.

The surgical team had watched the CCTV footage in order to map his injuries. Those images were still uppermost in Aramis's mind. They would be used in any trial and in that case, Athos would see them and have to testify against Mendez.

And then, the doctors announced that they would decrease the sedation. Athos should wake.

"Should," they thought, left alone once more; Porthos chewing the pad of his thumb and Aramis running his hands through his hair.

So, another waiting game began.

Equally nerve-wracking, but now, at least, hopeful.

oOo

Aramis had been staring at Athos for almost two hours now.

Porthos was flicking through a magazine he had found in the waiting room on one of his rambles along the corridor when things became too much. They were both allowed in the room now, but both were in their separate head spaces.

In the dark of the ICU, their friend looked peaceful in sleep. They had started to withdraw the sedation and his eyes had flickered a few times that morning. The day had worn slowly on and turned into evening, though only their watches told them that, as day and night were the same under the blue/white lights of the ICU.

At 3.00 a.m. Kate, Athos's primary nurse, came silently into the room, to check readings on the machines. She smiled at them both. A careful smile; nothing too bright for that would grate. These men were united in grim determination to get their friend well and out of here and false brightness would not go down too well. Some people got comfort from it, but Kate knew when it would not be appropriate. These men wanted hard facts not platitudes and, in the middle of the night after a long day, false brightness would not do.

"You should be able to talk to him properly soon," she said, after listening to Aramis whispering words of comfort to his silent friend.

Aramis looked at her, a confused look on his face.

"Athos," she smiled; a careful smile. "He should wake sufficiently for you to talk to him. Whether it will make any sense, I don't know," she added, ruefully.

"Anythin' he says is alright by us," Porthos had replied, dropping the magazine on the floor by his chair.

It was what they had both agreed, in a fraught, frightening discussion earlier. However Athos emerged from this, he was their beloved brother, and they just wanted him back.

oOo

To be continued ...