He woke in need of an exorcism, his head spinning as though the earth had spiraled off its axis. Squinting only splintered the light pouring in through the window into infinite refractive prisms, each point piercing as though Aramis was attempting trepanning in multiple places all at the same time. Athos got an elbow under his side, the one attached to the heavily bandaged shoulder his questing hand informed him when he fell back, gasping with the pain.
Hands at his shoulders lifted him to adjust pillows, then a cool compress was applied to his forehead. He smelled … violets again.
Memory flooded back.
"Everything hurts." Athos cracked and eyelid.
"It's going to for awhile." Aramis, perched on the side of the bed, cocked his head. "Which might not be a bad thing." He sighed theatrically. "Perhaps it will keep you from rushing back to the garrison to finish the job."
If it hadn't hurt so much, Athos might have rolled his eyes. "I told you so is so démodé."
"And keeping your word is so déclassé."
"I made no promises."
"And yet," Aramis mused, scratching his head, "you stated clearly that you heard everything I said to you two nights ago. You might not have said the words, but you certainly implied that you would remain here."
Athos blinked and slammed his eyelids shut again. "Two nights ago?" he echoed.
"Yes, well, Porthos was a little overenthusiastic when he put your lights out." Aramis removed the compress to rewet it. It was heating up worryingly fast, but he did not immediately put it back. "And since you've thinned your blood practically to the consistency of that poison you've been pouring down your throat, it geysers out of you like one of the palace fountains now. Fortunately, or perhaps unfortunately, Frayne managed to miss all the major blood carriers in your shoulder. We were joking, you know, when we said to fall on some puppy's sword," he added, sounding exactly like Porthos.
Athos attempted to sit up again. "Wit and charm. I am all aflutter." The room tilted so crazily even pressing a hand to the wall he could not tell which way was up and which way down. He subsided, panting.
Aramis muttered imprecations under his breath as he replaced the compress. "I distinctly remember telling you not to go the garrison, that you could hurt somebody besides yourself in your condition."
Athos was in enough pain that heeding his tongue was not foremost on his mind. "Which - for the second time - I managed not to do. Do you know what kind tour de force that requires?"
For a moment Aramis sat staring unblinking at the comte.
Athos dropped his head back on a sigh. "I did not expect to trip over an imaginary piece of wood."
Aramis collected himself with a slight shake of the head. "I really must stop betting with Porthos."
"Good God, am I really that endlessly fascinating? What now?" It was their little device for encouraging his return to humanity, but just now, despite the inquiry, Athos was not particularly interested in Porthos' insightful little commentaries on his evolution. He did not want to evolve; he just wanted to crawl back into the bottle where pain and this enervating weariness evaporated like mist over the lake at home when the sun came out.
As if reading his mind, Aramis only smiled and moved on without answering, though he would have to pay up. Porthos had bet him that underneath all the - I'm a dissolute, worthless wreck – there was still a vis vitalis that knew its worth. "Correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe we had a conversation about seeing things that aren't there as well."
"We did?" Athos draped an arm over his eyes. It was not that he did not remember every one of the long list of symptoms Aramis has warned him to expect, but he was not in the mood for lectures either. Even lying still, his orientation in space was suspect. The vertigo intensified when he closed his eyes, for there were no longer points of reference to focus on, keeping them open, however, was extremely painful. He let the strangely heavy arm slide away, wincing when even that small movement pulled at the opposite shoulder. "How bad is it?"
"Better than you should have a right to expect." Aramis pulled Porthos' chair around and sprawled in it facing his patient. "If you'd listened to me, this never would have happened. If you'd been wearing the damn pauldron this never would have happened," he stated, sounding just like Porthos again. "Right now I'd like to hit you myself."
"Be my guest. If it will vent your spleen and save me further lectures, please do so and get it over with. I doubt I can feel any worse than I do just at the moment. And you did not answer my question."
From Athos, that was the equivalent of an entire manifesto.
Aramis' squint of incredulity went unnoticed since Athos still had his eyes closed. Sighing, he leaned forward, clasping his hands between his knees. "Tréville said it looked like you tripped over something, too. Said that's how you acquired that little scratch you bound up with your filthy shirt. Which, by the way, is infected now. It appears filth and grime anywhere near a wound equals infection. The shoulder wound has closed up nicely. In a couple of weeks it probably won't be giving you any trouble at all. That is, of course, if you don't die of infection before then. So what happened?"
That explained why his right arm was throbbing worse than the left. Athos opened one eye cautiously. Strangely, the room spun only half as fast. "May I have some water … please."
Aramis leaned further forward, reaching for the pitcher and glass on the small table he'd placed by the bed. It held physics and salves and a roll of bandaging. He slipped a hand under Athos' head and tilted the glass to his lips. "The giddiness will pass in a bit. What happened?" he repeated, this time a little more emphatically.
"You were right about the phantasms." Athos tilted his head back and rolled his stiff neck when Aramis let him lie back down.
"What? I'm not sure I heard you correctly." Aramis returned the glass to the table and leaned back again.
"You were right," Athos repeated in that annoyingly flat voice he used so effectively.
"As regards most things medical, I'm rarely wrong."
Aramis had told him to expect the apparitions within a few days of going stone cold sober. The younger man had been rather adamant that Athos curtail his activities when the withdrawal symptoms began. Athos was very certain he had remained neutral on the subject of confining himself to his apartment at any point in the proceedings. He did not like enclosed spaces much these days, and had expected to at least have the freedom to roam if he could not be at the garrison.
If he'd been out for two whole days, then the phantasms had begun nearly a week past, when his dead wife had appeared, stalking him like a shadow - at a stall in the market place he passed through on the way to the garrison; disappearing around a corner as he came upon it; standing watching him from a second story window. She had appeared twice in the garrison courtyard, skulking as if hiding behind the posts, though she had been plainly visible. To him. No one else had remarked her presence.
When objects had begun to appear in his path, large things at first, that Athos could see through, despite what his mind was telling him he had known them for what they were – mirages. It had been a horse the first time, and then an herb bed like the one just outside the kitchen door in Pinon.
In the courtyard during the lesson with Frayne, he had twice tripped over the same table leg, apparently ripped from the communal courtyard table, for when he'd looked distractedly in that direction, the table, full of food, had been listing on the fourth corner, the food sliding off onto the ground.
He'd known immediately it was not real, for no one among the observers had been paying the least bit of attention to the slippery slide of their dinner. But it had not stopped him tripping over the same piece of imaginary wood a second time.
"Blind obedience has never been a skill I possess."
When Aramis did not immediately jump on the confession, Athos opened his eyes again.
The musketeer had on his considering face. "As contrition, that might be a little understated," he said at last. "But I accept your apology – if that's what you intended - though I did not ask for obedience, much less blind obedience. If, in my attempt to be diplomatic, I did not make it clear that I was asking for your cooperation, then I must apologize as well. However, this time I will have you word that when I tell you something for your own good, you will not ignore my advice."
Athos sighed again, but capitulated without argument. "You have my word, sworn on whatever you hold as sacred."
"Works better if you swear on something you hold sacred."
"Then we are at an impasse, as there is nothing I hold sacred."
"I find that a very sad state of affairs. Is there nothing you ever held sacred?"
Once, and it was his first thought, once I held my marriage vows sacred. Athos said only, "Not in recent memory." And changed the subject. "I need a bit of privacy – and the chamber pot." It was unlikely he could reach it given how weak he was at the moment.
"One chamber pot coming up." Aramis retrieved it from behind its wooden screen. "The privacy might be a bit of an issue unless you can get out of bed on your own."
Athos admitted defeat and accepted help only after the third attempt to rise, though he really wasn't given a choice. The urgency of nature's call and Porthos' timely appearance had him on his feet in a trice. They left him, propped with the chair, to fend for himself.
Thankfully.