Self- Portraits

Aramis

"God, if you spare her and by some miracle, I am allowed to live, I vow to devote all my remaining days to your grace. I will renounce all worldly temptations, I will ... even my duty ... I am not worthy of your mercy ... my soul is prepared..." S2:E10

Enchanté, mesdames, mesdemoiselles et messieurs. Rène d'Aramitz at your service, though I am called Aramis. And I serve, again, at the pleasure of the king. Or more likely, at the annoyance of the king. Which honestly compels me to admit has some merit, though it came to pass through his own neglect and abuse of his marriage.

But that reeks of attempting to white wash my treason, and I cannot claim moral high ground. My actions were just as consequential - and wrong - as the king's. But that comes later in my Mémoires.

I am the middle child, with five older and five younger siblings. Destined from birth for a career in the church according to my mother. We were gentry of a sort, land owners, but without the acreage, and therefore the income, to be self-sufficient or titled. So we worked from sunup to sundown except on the Sabbath, to put food on the table, clothes on our backs and a bit extra in the poor box every Sunday. Mine was an idyllic childhood I know now, though like all boys I chafed under the oppression of those rules that are meant to be a hedge of safety until maturation teaches us caution. We had responsibilities from an early age, but we also had the freedom to roam far and wide when our chores were done. And those chores were never onerous.

With so many of us to feed, hunting was a part of daily life. At seven, my father put a fowling piece into my hands, and thus began my first love affair. There was an instant, mutual affinity. As I grew into that affair, guns began to whisper their secrets to me, coyly showing off their individual personalities, revealing their intimate intricacies. We became fast friends.

Weapons of any kind were not permitted at the abbey school where I was tutored from the time I was ten, though that did not stop me smuggling my beloved musket back with me on returning from my first visit home. Rules for me were merely behavioral guidelines, and the familial pile, only a few leagues distant, was a constant draw. I liked being with boys my own age, there were seven of us and I was again, the middle one, but home drew me like a beacon. Maman kept returning me, though I assured her just as many times as she scolded me for running away, that I was merely visiting home, not deserting; I never left before my school work and chores were done.

Even though I was not the oldest, the others gravitated to my leadership, drawn I suppose, by the flame of adventure that burned brightly in my young heart. My friends soon became regular visitors in our home as well and eventually the priests gave up trying to contain us. As long as we appeared at our lessons and accomplished our assigned tasks with something above mediocrity, we were allowed a lot of latitude. I took for granted all abbeys ran on the same principles and discovered too late, our abbot had been far more forward-thinking than most.

We were a rambunctious lot, always scraping knees and bumping heads, returning from our adventures with stings and bites and the occasional accidental knife slash when horseplay got too rough. Rather than run to Brother Faucheux, who would cluck and scold and dole out rewards, as he liked to call his discipline of our backwards behavior, I fell into the habit of tending to those superficial wounds. After all, my mother was the village healer, she'd sent all us herb gathering practically from the time we could toddle along on our own. There was a not a d'Aramitz family member who didn't know the properties of every medicinal herb God had created and how to use them by the time we were eight or nine.

Brother Fauchexu did eventually figure out what we were up too, but rather than forbid it, he made it his mission to deepen and broaden my knowledge of herb lore, imparting to me his vast store of knowledge as well. Now I see that he recognized an opportunity to impart his wisdom so it would not be lost. He was much on my mind during my time in the Douai abbey, where I was forbidden to undertake any duty that might tempt me back to my old life, including the practice of healing.

My schooling ended abruptly one bright autumn afternoon when Abbot Langlois came upon us practicing target shooting in the church graveyard. Just as I shot an apple off the head of Émile. In the abbot's defense, he was a gentle man, who - like the Abbot of Douai - believed wholly in his shield of faith; he had no traffic with weaponry of any kind. And I suppose the exploding apple might have looked like .. brains. At any rate, he fainted dead away and when we woke him with a pail of water, he arose, marched me down the country lanes and byways to my parental home and informed my father I was no longer a student at the Abbey of Saints Peter and Paul.

My abrupt change in status, though it would have happened shortly anyway, as I was to turn sixteen in less than a month, did not go down well with my mother. Or my father, whose sole purpose in life was to make my mother happy. My father gave me an ultimatum - the army or my older brothers' stud farm. My mother made the choice.

I was not exactly rebellious, but neither was I particularly cooperative, though my exasperated brothers tried to instill in me their love of equines. I learned to be one with a horse as a rider, but horses did not whisper their secrets to me, nor did I have any desire to learn their intimate intricacies. Foaling, while a thing of beauty to behold, did not steal my breath away like the caress of a flintlock against my cheek.

For my 17th birthday, in October of 1619, I got my wish. My father took me to Paris to enlist. Fortune - or fate - landed me under the command of one M. Tréville, captain of the Louvre garrison.

Tréville, in those days, was in the business of training cadets and I found myself in the middle again - between the privileged younger sons of nobleman and a slum-raised giant of a youth who obviously had an in with the captain, though it was clear he was well-respected by the younger sons as well. I fit into neither world and found myself on the outside, instead of the ring leader.

Nature, for some odd reason, imbues us with the innate ability to be absolutely certain about anything and everything at that age. We believe ourselves to be walking, talking works of art, though we do not extend the courtesy of that belief to anyone else. We alone are the center of the universe and everyone else should recognize it and act accordingly. Not even siblings can root out that belief.

I knew I was good; Tréville had not been forthcoming with the standard praise I was used to receiving from adults, but I was already a keen observer of humanity and recognized the gleam in his eye. I saw no reason not to make everyone aware of my brilliance, just so they understood I belonged among them, that I deserved their adulation and praise. What I got, as the old saying goes, was taken down a peg or two.

If it hadn't been for Porthos, I would have folded my tents and snuck out as I'd done so often from school. He was far more observant than I'd given him credit for. He took me to a flogging in the Tulleries, briefly explaining along the way, the man was a deserter. We returned to the barracks and I returned the supplies I'd been gathering for my own departure, to their assigned places.

Porthos never mentioned it again, though from that day forward our friendship was cemented. It was a whole new education to pal around with him, he had so much more life experience than I, having grown up mostly self-raised in the teeming denizen of the Court of Miracles, where Paris' criminal elements lived cheek-by-jowl with the poorest of the city's inhabitants. I was as appalled as I was fascinated by the things he knew. And it was Porthos who first introduced me to fishing for a patron, though he could not have known where it would lead me.

For Porthos is was a game in order to meet a need, usually monetary. As far as he was concerned, women required far too much work. I ... well, suffice it to say, I did not find it work at all. I discovered Paris was a flower garden of sweet-scented blossoms just waiting for the right man to gather their essence. By day I was training to be a sharpshooter, by night a daring street Romeo from whom no balcony was safe.

Because the garrison was a training facility rather than a mobile unit, there was a high rate of turnover among the cadets as they were assigned to other regiments on completion of their instruction. Depending on skill level, and my marksmanship put me in the top rankings, most cadets spent no more than a year under Tréville's command, though Porthos had been with Tréville for five years already when I arrived. There was no formal graduation as such, when your skills were honed to the point Tréville believed you were prepared, you moved on.

As my 18th birthday approached, I was in daily expectation of receiving notice of my new posting. Porthos and I - when I was not off pollinating my growing garden - had become close friends. We were each other's shadow. He'd taught me to fight, and when necessary, how to fight to win; I'd taught him to shoot straight and where to aim most effectively to disable, or kill if necessary. He taught me how to lose a tail, how to cheat without getting caught, and how to drink without waking up to the after affects of overindulgence. I taught him to shoot melons off my head, though he's better at it when he's drunk than when he's sober; no worries about shooting me.

It was not unexpected when the call to Tréville's office finally caught up with me. Porthos was, for once, tight-lipped, though he often knew who was posting where well before the cadet himself knew where he was going. I'm not ashamed to admit I entered the guardhouse attached to the captain's office with a fair amount of trepidation. With all the confidence of youth's indestructibility, I was anxious to test my skills in a real battle, but I did not want to leave my friend behind. I was prepared to beg to stay or ask for Porthos to be posted with me.

I did not have to do either.

Forgive me, I digress, but this has bearing on my fate as a Musketeer. Captain Tréville had been amongst Louis' father's retinue as an aide de camp to the Duc de Sully, chief minister under Henry IV. He had befriended the young dauphine, we found out much later, out of boredom. The resulting friendship had carried over when 9-year-old Louis' father was assassinated and the dauphine became king of France.

Tréville's role in the rout of the Medici-Orléans attempted revolt eight months earlier, aided and abetted by Porthos' uncanny ability to collect the oddest bits of seemingly unimportant news, had sealed the captain's status as advisor to our monarch. Following that February dénouement, rumors had begun to fly of a new regiment to be founded as the king's own personal guard.

That October afternoon, Captain Tréville confirmed the rumor, and informed me I was to be among the first who would be commissioned directly by the king as an elite company to be known as the King's Musketeers. The words 'elite' and 'obviously you will be stationed in Paris' were the most important I heard that day.

It was another year and a half before it came to pass; in January of 1622, Porthos and I were the first to be commissioned as King's Musketeers. There were twenty of us that day; by the time the Musketeer headquarters were moved to a large hôtel located in the rue de Tournon near the Luxembourg gardens, our ranks had swelled to two hundred.

Our work was not arduous and in fact, our status garnered us invitations to the most prestigious parties of the day. We were often in the homes of the rich and famous, ripping away on the tennis courts or in the fencing salons, and equally as often on the dueling fields. Nothing at all like the life I had expected to live. I cannot say I missed the deprivation or life constantly on the move, but I was better with pistol and musket than a sword and dueling did not did not excite me. In short, I was bored. So I was the first to volunteer for the training mission to Savoy. Porthos and I had had a falling out over some silly thing, neither of us can even remember what it was anymore, but I had taken up with another sharpshooter by the name of Marsac in his absence. Tréville appointed Marsac and I to lead, since Porthos refused to go.

I'm grateful he was not there for more reasons that I can count, but mostly because he did not die alongside the twenty young men who did. Savoy burned away my youth and tempered the man who rose, finally, from those ashes. Porthos stood by me throughout the long struggle to find my way back to the living.

Somewhere in that time frame, Tréville, to my surprise, turned down the request of France's greatest sword master to purchase a commission. He was not happy when we presented him with our save-the-comte scenario, but he let us keep Athos, who turned out to be one of the Musketeers most valuable assets. Porthos says saving Athos was the saving of Aramis as well. I did not consciously recognize it, but I can see, looking back, that there was a dawning recognition that I could easily slide down the same rabbit hole of guilt we were trying to pull Athos out of.

Only a couple of years later, the puppy turned up on our doorstep, growling as though he was a full grown mastiff up to any challenge. The kid was hurt, he'd thrown himself out a second story window on discovering he'd been set up for the murder of the Spanish ambassador, and still he came stomping into the garrison, apparently with every expectation he held the winning hand.

You know how it is when a puppy follows you home, it's hard to get rid of them, they're too cute to kick back out in the street and before you know it they're sleeping in your bed and chewing on your boots. d'Artagnan carved out a space among the Inseparables just about as quickly.

And then I blew it all up as effectively as if I'd a tossed a bomb into our midst.

One would think, after all my years of assiduous cultivation, and given with whom I was euphemistically 'sleeping', I should have had the sense to prevent conception. Even if neither of us expected to live through the next day.

If Athos hadn't needed me and my skill with firearms to at least keep up the pretense of trying to save ourselves, he might have shot me himself.

I did not mean to bargain with God when the consequences of my actions caught up with me. Adele, Isabella, and though I did not know it at the time, Marguerite ... dead. Constance to be executed, Tréville and the remaining Inseparables as well, if Rochefort won the day.

Desperation does not become the uniform, but I could not leave anything to chance if it was within my purview to affect the balance of power. And so I did the only thing left to me - I prayed. I made a vow to God to devote all my remaining days to his grace, to renounce all worldly temptations, even my duty.

And when it was over, when I had been reunited with my brothers and released with the king's blessing, I left them standing on the leafy path and walked away without looking back.

I thought standing in that chamber that served as my court room, parsing every word that came out of my mouth, knowing I was damning my immortal soul just as Rochefort claimed, had been the hardest thing I'd ever do. Alone and friendless in that chamber, my head told me I'd been deserted, that my friends were distancing themselves from my treason, that I would die alone as well.

But I was wrong.

And my heart knew better.

Walking away was the hardest thing I'll ever have to do no matter if I live to be one hundred. I knew if I stayed one moment more, Athos would have been reminding me of the innumerable times I'd told him God doesn't require expiation. Porthos would have been hollering about coerced promises and d'Artagnan would have just looked at me with those huge, puppy dogs eyes and probably leaked all over the place. My vow would have been broken on the wheel of friendship before the echo of words in the prison cell had died away.

While Douai was not what I expected, it was a sanctuary of sorts, where I could take the time to dredge my soul and offer up a broken and contrite heart without a shred of expectation of it ever being mended. I found neither joy nor peace in a life of contemplation and would have turned up mad as Rochefort if it hadn't been for the children.

I have not perfected my faith, it is yet a work in progress, but I can tell you this, mesdames, mesdemoiselles et messieurs, I know that God hears our prayers and rewards even the smallest crumb of faith. For by some miracle, not only am I alive, I am Aramis, formerly of the King's Musketeers, now - First Minister of France.

This has been a work of transformative fan fiction. The characters and settings in this story belong to the British Broadcasting Company, its successors and assigns; the story itself is the intellectual property of the author. No copyright infringement has been perpetrated for financial gain.