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Porthos knows, of course, that it’s only week-old milk and some of Serge’s leftover soup - he watched Aramis mix it up after all - but that was before it was left out in the sun for three days, and the resulting smell is enough to make the bile burn and catch at the back of his throat. The inside of Athos’ old Peugeot is sweltering in the heat of an unseasonably warm spring day, and the disgusting mixture sitting in the open-topped thermos flask propped against the gearstick between them is only adding to the general sticky, unpleasant miasma.“Jesus,” Porthos says, screwing up his nose and bringing a hand to his mouth, “Why-”“You’ll see,” Aramis says, concentrating on the road. The frequent traffic from heavy military vehicles has left the tarmac in this part of France pocked and damaged. Porthos huffs a sigh and leans towards the tiny sliver of open window that Aramis has allowed.“Athos will kill you when he gets back and finds his car stinking to high heaven,” Porthos says, looking out the window. He can feel Aramis stiffen next to him. When not, if. When.“I think he’ll agree it’s for a good cause,” Aramis says.Porthos thinks of the little modifications they've made to the Peugeot since it fell into their hands, and is reminded again of the explosives in the hollowed out panel under the left back seat, the ones they need to get from the drop-zone near Bayeux to their stockpile outside of Carentan. He rolls his shoulders, feeling the heavy press of them at the edge of his mind. Today would not be a good day to be stopped and searched.They take a left turn and head towards Monfreville, the typical Normandy hedgerows overgrown and thick with weeds and wildflowers, the shiver of beech leaves neon green and reaching high above the road.“Aramis,” Porthos says after a while, “Checkpoint ahead.”He sees the other man’s hand tighten slightly on the steering wheel, but he gives no answer.“Aramis,” Porthos repeats, increasingly worried, “Aramis, there’s a checkpoint, we need to-”Without taking his eyes off the road or lessening the easy speed of the car, Aramis reaches for the Thermos between them, stretches out an arm into the passenger seat to his right, and tips the contents down Porthos’ shirt.They sit in silence as the checkpoint grows nearer.“Aramis,” Porthos says, perfectly calm, “Why did you just do that?”“Don’t talk. Follow my lead.”Aramis pulls the car up to the checkpoint with unhurried ease, the soldier manning it flagging them down with disinterest. “Papiers,” he demands as soon as Aramis cranks open the window.“Here,” Aramis says, handing over his faked paper with an easy smile.“And you-” the soldier says, leaning down to look into the car and catching sight of Porthos in the passenger seat. “Jesus,” he says, covering his mouth and looking very much as though he’s fighting back the urge to retch.“My friend,” Aramis says, reaching over and taking the papers from Porthos’ jacket, “Is...er...well, you can see…” He makes sure to surreptitiously cover the identity paper in as much of the mess on Porthos’ front as possible as he’s doing so. Porthos catches a glimpse of his own unsmiling face in the photo tacked to the ID card, peering back at him through the slick mess as Aramis hands it gingerly out the window, dripping curdled milk and half-disintegrated chunks of carrot.“I’m taking him to the doctor, in Isigny-sur-Mer. He’s not well, and possibly very contagious,” Aramis flicks a quick glance at Porthos, sitting stunned and open-mouthed next to him,“And...simple,” he adds.The soldier flinches back from the sodden paper proffered to him, and throws Aramis’ copy back through the open window with only a perfunctory glance. “Go,” he says, covering his mouth and motioning for them to move on, “Jesus.”They’re two minutes down the road before Porthos breaks the silence. “Why do you never fill me in on your plans ahead of time?”“It’s so much more authentic this way.”“Pull over so I can wipe this shit off or I’m going to vomit all over you, how’s that for authentic,?” Porthos growls, sticking his head out the window in a blast of fresh air.*"They're moving him," d'Artagnan says, as soon as he’s set foot through the door. Aramis makes sure it’s locked after him, fixes the shutters, checking carefully that they’re alone while d’Artagnan jitters from one end of the room to the other, taking off his cap and running his hands through hair that’s grown shaggy and long of late."You know for sure?" Porthos asks. He takes the packet of cigarettes from his jacket and throws it over to the younger man, who pulls one out and lights it with trembling fingers."Yes. My contact is good. The information is good.""You know," Aramis says, leaning against the table with a smirk that doesn't go all the way to hiding the sharpness of his tone, "Just because you're fucking her doesn't mean the information is good."For a moment Porthos thinks the younger man might hit Aramis, which would be well deserved and, incidentally, also amusing, but d'Artagnan only rolls his shoulders and glares. "The information is good."When they’d found out that Athos was being held near Caen it had shattered Aramis: four months and Athos had been so close, still in Normandy. Of course, he might as well have been in fucking Berlin for all they could do for him, since he’d dropped off the map as utterly as those kind of prisoners so often did. Nacht und Nebel, that’s what they called the order: Night and Fog. Political prisoners, spies and resistance fighters, disappeared without a trace.No paper trail, no graves. Nothing left behind.Or at least, until d’Artagnan’s contact - a pretty little thing, married to some pompous businessman - had come to him with some information: she’d heard, in passing from a friend of a friend of a friend, that someone the Nazis were calling the Comte was being held at Château d’Évrecy.It had all become crushingly real then. Athos hadn’t simply been spirited away on orders from London, from the Government-in-Exile. He wouldn’t turn up one day, an insufferably little quirk to his lips, swigging from an ever-present wine bottle and toasting the downfall of Hitler, the traitorous Cardinal and his Vichy government cronies as one.Four months and they’d been doing God knows what to him in that prison, less than fifty miles away.Château d’Évrecy. Jesus Christ, Porthos thinks, I wouldn’t wish that place on the Führer himself. Everyone knew the château’s walls were as impenetrable as the stories that filtered out every now and then from the place, dark little whispers through the cracks and gratings: the cruelty of the guards, the cold indifference of the interrogators, the guillotine that stood in the courtyard. A fucking guillotine, for Christ’s sake“Why are they moving him?” Porthos asks, “Where to?”D’Artagnan swallows. “A camp, somewhere in Austria.”“Fuck. Fuck.”“They must have decided he’s of no more use,” Aramis says after a while, trying to keep his voice steady. It sounds thin and strained to Porthos’ ear. “They don’t interrogate at camps.”They sit in silence for a moment, Aramis worrying his lip and Porthos watching d’Artagnan’s pacing.“We don’t know the stories about those camps are true,” Porthos says, but it tastes like a lie on his tongue. What he wants to say is: they can’t possibly be true. Because it would be too awful.It’s true there’s been nothing to prove the rumours, nothing official at least, but no one comes back to tell one way or another. The facts as they see them are that people are being loaded like cattle on to trains all over Europe: Jews and gypsies and homosexuals, doctors and writers and politicians, anyone who fights back or fits less than perfectly into the shining new Aryan world. But Porthos knows that, in the event that he could bring himself to pray these days, he would beg God that the rumours were just that. He knows Aramis does, nightly, hears him whispering over his rosary with such fervour it strikes at something in Porthos’ heart like a deft knife that eases between his ribs, until he has to go outside and smoke, or pace, or punch something.D’Artagnan stops his anxious pacing and comes to rest in a chair by the fire, but his knee still jiggles up and down with nervous energy. “What do you think he told them?” the boy asks after a while, and stiffens when the others narrow their eyes at him.“You don’t know Athos, boy,” Porthos says with a growl, “So we’ll let that one go. But if you did you’d know he hasn’t told them anything because he’s stubborn as a fucking mule.”“The very definition of stoic,” Aramis adds. “I once saw him take a bullet from his shoulder without even a sound. Just sat there frowning, hands covered in blood, picking at it - not a sound.”“I remember that,” Porthos grins darkly. It feels like a lifetime ago. “Autumn ‘41, right? Some trigger-happy little SS shit, came out of nowhere when we were waiting for that Lysander to land with those radio parts."“And we hid in a storm drain for two days.”“He won’t have told them anything, or we’d all be dead already,” Porthos says, “But he’s been there months, he’s either been feeding ‘em false information or they’ve been...persistent. Maybe both.”“Does your contact have any more information about him, about what kind of...condition he might be in?” Aramis asks.D’Artagnan shakes his head, paling visibly. “No, only that they’re moving him, saturday night.”“Aramis,” the younger man says, after a moment, “This will be our only chance to get him, won’t it?”Aramis flicks a glance at Porthos, heavy with four months of fear and desperation, picking at trails and rumours like carrion crows whilst Athos remained resolutely gone."Yes.""Well then. If Athos is half the man you say he is, we better make it count."*"You’re sure about this?" Aramis asks, for the third time that night.Porthos nods grimly, peering into the Peugeot's open grill, its innards just visible in the light of dusk. They'd probably be shot on sight if they were caught out on the roads at night with a torch, but the work isn't necessarily a precise art, and doesn’t require much light.It had been d’Artagnan’s plan, and it was a good one. They’d sat around for an hour throwing out ideas and shooting them down just as quickly before d’Artagnan stood and went to the door, asked for some time alone, and reappeared the next morning with dark smudges under his eyes and a plan to get Athos back.It was risky as hell of course, but what about life these days wasn’t? They’ve been on the knife’s edge for four years and Porthos is beginning to frighten himself with the itchy reckless feeling that hardly leaves him anymore. All he knows is that doing something is better than nothing at all.With his gambler’s logic, Porthos weighs the chances of them all surviving this one as about thirty percent. He thinks about Athos, gone for months and enduring God knows what. He thinks about growing up in Paris, doing what needed to be done, struggling to survive. It was shitty but he was free, and that’s something that couldn’t be said of anyone here since the Germans flooded over the border, and France fell.The cooling evening air feels heavy with something like waiting, and Porthos rolls his shoulders and gets back to the task at hand. He swats at a mosquito buzzing somewhere near his ear, and curses the countryside and everything in it, promising himself that when men like him can walk the streets of their own cities without fascist aryans from some shitty German backwater causing trouble for them, he’ll go back to Paris and never leave.The car hisses a sad exhalation of air as he puts his weight on the crowbar wedged in the machinery, wiggles something loose with a clang.“Sorry, Roger,” he mumbles, trying not to think about how accusatory the noises the car exudes in its death throes seem."Athos is going to kill you. He probably loves that car more than he does us."Porthos smiles grimly, “Yeah well we all have to make sacrifices.”Aramis’ face falls, Porthos can just make it out in the dimming light, before he turns back to the open grille with a sigh, and hangs his head.“Well, that was a fucking stupid thing to say. Sorry, Aramis,” Porthos says, quietly. He feels the other man’s hand heavy on his shoulder for a moment, tries to draw the strength up from it.“He’s going to be okay,” Aramis says, and his voice is steady. “It’s all going to be okay.”A shadow shifting behind them is the only warning that d’Artagnan has arrived - though not from this part of France the boy has taken it upon himself to learn the lanes, ditches and pathways of Normandy, and has the uncanny ability of moving through the brush without making a sound. Farm boys who didn’t grow up on the streets of Paris, Porthos supposes, are better at this sort of thing.A paler figure steps out from behind d’Artagnan and nods in greeting.“This is Ninon,” the boy says, waving at the others in introduction. “Aramis, Porthos.”“Good to meet you. Ready to go?” the woman asks.Porthos blinks. “Well, you’re bloody direct, aren’t you?”The woman smiles tightly, but it doesn’t go all the way to her eyes. “No point in mincing words. Don’t you know there’s a war on?”“No offence,” Porthos replies, “But we don’t know you. You could be anyone.”Ninon studies him for a moment, never lowering the slight upwards tilt of her chin. Rich, Porthos thinks, or once was: her clothes are expensive but have seen better days, her demeanour one of a woman who is used to the authority that comes with wealth and standing.“I’m someone,” she says after a moment, and there’s an odd, defiant lilt to her voice. “Someone who has a reason to help you. But, I can go if you’d prefer…”“No,” Aramis says with a start, “No. If d’Artagnan trusts you then we do too, right Porthos?”It had taken some persuading to get Porthos to agree on this plan. It’s not that she’s a woman - God knows Porthos has seen enough capable, brave and deadly women in his lifetime - but he doesn’t know this Ninon, and the war has made him suspicious of unfamiliar faces. It’s taken almost four months and a few minor brushes with death for him to believe that d’Artagnan is who he says he is, after all.But they need her if they’re going to get Athos back.Porthos makes a vague noise in reply, and nods, hoping that this will suffice.*D’Artagnan had been right: there was only one truck and no support vehicles. Porthos peers through the bushes to the right of the road to watch the canvas sides of the truck as it rolls to a stop, and feels his heart lurch up into his throat. Athos is in there.Fuck, Athos better be in there.Porthos longs for the steady weight of Aramis at his side, the press of him there in the last drawn in breath before battle, but the other man is somewhere in the deep shadows on the opposite side of the road. He flicks a glance at d’Artagnan next to him, peering through the dense green bushes towards the road, and feels a little more sure of himself at least. D’Artagnan is young but he’s sharp as a knife, and, Porthos supposes, his life has been in the boy’s hands enough times for him to trust him almost as much as he would Aramis, or Athos.One of the soldiers leaps down from the cab of the truck and advances on the pale figure of Ninon beside the broken down Peugeot with his gun levelled, and Porthos focuses back on the road.“Was ist da los?” The soldier moves a little closer and sees Ninon properly, blinking in the harsh light of headlamps. His voice softens. “You’re out past curfew, mademoiselle,” he lowers the gun and steps closer, “You could get into a lot of trouble.”“I’m sorry,” Ninon says. There’s a smudge of oil on her nose and her slim hands are painted black with it. It’s only then that Porthos appreciates how beautiful she is, slim and ghostly pale in the darkness. “I’m so sorry, I don’t know...maybe it’s out of petrol? The shortages, you know…”She flutters a shy smile at the soldier, but Porthos can see the little calculating light in the flash of headlamps in her eyes, for a moment. “Can you help me? Please?”“You’re blocking the road, so I suppose I’ll have to,” laughs the soldier.“Was ist da los, Hertz? Schaffen Sie sie von der Straße, verdammt!” The driver sticks his head out of the cab window and shouts, “Wir müssen weiter!”“Okay, okay,” the soldier replies, waving at the truck and turning back to Ninon, “I used to fix things back home, let me have a look at your engine.”“That’s very kind, thank you,” Ninon says, following the soldier to the front of the car, “I think something might have come loose here, at the front,” she says leaning down and pointing at the open grille. From where Porthos is he can see the German squat down to peer inside the grille, but out of sight of his fellow soldiers he knows there’s no one else to witness Ninon squatting down beside him, the slick flash of her knife at his throat. Porthos feels d’Artagnan tense beside him.It takes five seconds and not a single sound for the soldier to die: he bucks once in Ninon’s arms, before slumping face first into the open grille of the Peugeot. Ninon stays down, carrying on a one-sided conversation. “See, here,” she says, voice level. She glances at where Aramis is hiding in the bushes and nods once. “I think this bit has broken.”There’s a shot then, a tinkle of glass as the truck windshield is punched with a neat hole before the whole thing shatters inwards, red with blood and fragments of bone. Without thinking Porthos has raised the barrel of his rifle - an old Pattern 14 left behind by the retreating English four years ago - and fired once through the shattered window into the cab of the truck. A lifeless arm flops out the open door, the finger curled towards where Porthos crouches in the darkness.They know of course that there are more soldiers in the back of the truck with, but it’s still a surprise when two come tumbling out of the canvas flap at the rear. Porthos wonders what the hell they think they’ll achieve, since they’re under fire and have no cover, but, he supposes, they’re probably very young. D’Artagnan shoots one before he’s had the chance to stand up, Porthos brings the other down with a couple of shots.A moment later two figures drop from the back of the truck, and Porthos’ finger has already contracted once around the trigger before he realises, firstly, that one of the men is dressed in civilian clothing, and secondly that his shot has fallen blessedly short, and pings the road in a shower of splintered tarmac.In the darkening light he can’t tell if it’s Athos, and since the man is hunched in on himself all he can see is that he’s certainly not in uniform. The soldier is quickly joined by two more, who cover the hedges to the left and right of the road as one of them points his Luger at the civilian.The soldier grabs a handful of the man’s hair and pulls his head back, the barrel of the gun pressed tight against his temple where he kneels at his feet. Porthos can see the tight line of throat, dark with a fuzz of beard against the pale skin. It might be Athos. It has to be Athos. Fuck.“Shoot and he dies,” the soldier shouts. “Hertz? Sind Sie noch da?”“I’m afraid he’s not,” Ninon calls back calmly from where she is crouched out of sight at the front of the car. She pushes slightly at the body so that is slumps sideways and gives her a little room to wiggle between the front wheels.“Is it him?” d’Artagnan whispers, “Athos?”“I don’t know. I think so,” Porthos says. “Left or right?” he asks with a quirk of his head towards the road.“What?”“Want to take the one on the left, or the right?”“But the third has a gun to his head!” the boy whispers.Porthos shifts a little, quietly, and tries to get a better eyeline at the soldiers through the tangle of hedgerow between the road and where they crouch in the ditch. “Leave that one to Aramis.”D’Artagnan’s eyes are wide in the darkness beside him. Porthos seems him nod tightly.“Left,” he says.“Right. Wait for Aramis, then shoot. Fast.”Porthos knows that Aramis, across the road, is moving to a point where he can get a clean shot at the soldier with a gun to Athos’ head, but still the seconds seem to stretch unbearably, until Porthos’ arms are beginning to shake holding up the weight of his gun trained on the soldier to the right.Make it bloody count, Aramis, he thinks.When the shot comes he has no time to wonder if it’s indeed brought down its target - his finger has squeezed the trigger, the recoil buzzed through his shoulder before he’s had the space for conscious thought. D’Artagnan’s shot is an echo to his, and the three dead men hit the ground almost as one.There’s a moment of silence before Ninon raises her head above the bonnet of the car, and before Porthos can hiss for her to be careful she’s moving cautiously to the back seat and reaching for the Sten gun hidden there. Porthos and d’Artagnan crawl through the bushes and reach the road just as Aramis emerges from the other side. Ninon motions with a wave of her hand for them to stay back, and sprays the canvas side of the truck with bullets. “No one else in there,” she calls after a moment, and all Porthos can think, with a heavy rush of respect, is where the hell did d’Artagnan find this one?There’s a nervous sort of feeling, like sickness rising in his gut as he nears the man shaking in on himself, head bowed and still kneeling amongst the dead Germans.“Athos?” Aramis calls uncertainly. “Athos, it’s us.”Athos doesn’t look up, just slumps a little further into himself, and without realising it Porthos is down on his knees beside him, arms encircling the thin frame of Athos’ shoulders. The man’s breathing quickens, and he tries to flinch against the touch but Porthos holds him tightly.Aramis is next to him, crossing himself and laughing breathlessly. “Oh God, Athos...Athos...”Porthos’ heart is drumming a wild tattoo of fear and adrenaline in his chest, and it’s almost enough to drown out the outside world, until the sound of approaching vehicles hums at the back of his mind.There’s a clatter of footprints as d’Artagnan skids to a halt beside them and plucks at Porthos’ collar. “Come on, come on!”Porthos looks up to see that Ninon has already disappeared, and hefts Athos up to his feet as the first shots zip over their heads. The whine of bullets and the ping of impact on the truck and the old Peugeot behind them rise to a cacophony as two military trucks and a jeep pull up, and it’s only when they’re disappearing into the bushes, Athos’ thin frame barely a weight between them, that he first speaks.“Roger,” Athos rasps, peering over his shoulder as the road disappears behind them.*It’s a twenty minute scramble along hedgerows and one mad dash across an open field before they reach the railway bridge where they’d tethered Serge’s old cart-horse earlier that evening. It takes the combined strength of Porthos and d’Artagnan both to get Athos up onto its back, even with Aramis hefting him up from where he sits atop the horse, but the remainder of the journey passes quicker than on foot, and more silent than by car. Even if they did still have one.Athos doesn’t react when they whisper his name, tell him not long now and we’ve got you and it’s alright, Athos. Even with the circle of Aramis’ arms tight around him he won’t stop shivering, won’t lift his head from where his chin is slumped against his chest.The cool of night has fallen fully before they reach the old barn they’ve commandeered as a base for the past few weeks. The little firefly speck of Serge’s lit cigarette emerges from the darkness where he’s propped himself to wait against the crumbling stone wall. He limps over as they heave Athos down from the horse, and takes the reins from d’Artagnan with a nod. “There’s clean water and blankets in the barn.”“Oh,” Serge continues, “And I managed to find these,” he says, dropping two morphine syrettes into Aramis’ palm. He flicks a quick glance at Athos, quaking in Porthos’ arms. “Think you might need ‘em.”***
----- CHAPTER BREAK -----
The sky is a sheet of gray paper when Athos sees her - he will remember that in the weeks to come, over and over again because it seemed so incongruous: she appeared like the only point of colour in a world suddenly turned monochrome, the startling flash of her eyes, the impossible blue of her dress enough to rock him bodily on that sleet-flickered morning.She appeared like a portent, and he saw it for what it was almost instantly, felt the heavy mantle of his fate settle about his shoulders.Still, his mind ricocheted between acceptance and the certainty that he had been mistaken, that it wasn’t really his wife he’d seen but some other dark-haired girl in the crowd, because he was tired and not nearly drunk enough and still loved her - Jesus God how he still loved her. Despite all she’d done, despite the fact that she’d been dead in the ground for five years, the depth of his love for her had been tempered by hatred into something hard and glinting, the strata of their life together compressed diamond-hard in his breast. He knows it will never really go away.Athos doesn’t speak of it to the others, but it’s never very far from his mind, so that when they come for him he’s not particularly surprised. He wonders briefly if Rémy might have betrayed him, since he is arrested in the yard of Rémy's farm, but when they drag the man's broken body out into the mud he knows it’s Anne, it could only ever have been Anne, and thanks God that Aramis and Porthos are the other side of Le Havre and blessedly unknown to her.Athos is not afraid as he is pushed to his knees to have his hands bound roughly behind his back. There is only an odd sort of heaviness, something like tiredness and acceptance and perhaps, peace.They leave him naked in a fetid basement cell for three days. There is no window, and the door is solid. The only sound for some time is the dripping of water and the buzzing of the bare lightbulb that never switches off, set too high in the ceiling for him to hope to reach. It only adds to the peculiarly disjointed sensation of being muffled somehow, buried under the earth with all the creeping wriggling things, forgotten.He feels more alive than he has in a long time - it’s only the rest of the world that he is beginning to fear is dead.There’s no food or water for those three days, and it's so cold he finds sleep an impossibility. His stomach cramps hard against the hunger, and his tongue bleeds dry and cracked when he attempts to lick what little moisture trickles down the damp stone walls.When the first sounds filter under the cracks in his door he is honestly surprised, sure now that he, in his windowless cell, must be the last living soul on earth. But the screams suggest otherwise. Sometimes it’s a man, sometimes a woman, for hours upon hours upon hours. Athos had honestly never believed that a person could make such noises.The sounds weave themselves through the fug of hunger and thirst, the exhaustion in his head and heart and limbs. When the three days is up, a man comes to Athos with soft words and gentle hands in his hair, propping him up, coaxing him to drink. He is given back his clothes and, when it becomes apparent that he is in no fit state to do so himself, he is helped to dress.Athos expects questions then, or at the very least violence, but neither come. He is given a blanket and then, twice a day, guards bring him a little food and water. Otherwise he is left entirely alone.After perhaps ten days Athos begins to think that if they are in no great hurry to ask questions then he will do the honours himself. He asks the guards - politely enough - where they have taken him and what day it is. He asks for cigarettes and something to read, and after a while, when silence is the only reply, he attempts a more personal approach, asks their names and where they’re from, if they have family.No answers are ever given - in fact they don’t exchange a word with him or even acknowledge his questions, no matter the language that he poses them in, french or german or english, or when he is particularly bored, latin.After fifteen days, or perhaps twenty, the man with gentle hands comes back. His name is SS-Hauptsturmführer Meindl. He has two chairs and a table brought in for them to sit at, and asks Athos in french if he has ever heard of Verschärfte Vernehmung.
“I think we both know that enhanced interrogation is a pretty term for an ugly truth,” Athos replies, in perfect german. He smiles grimly. “We’re both soldiers. We both know violence.”
SS-Hauptsturmführer Meindl’s soft hands speak otherwise, though. Athos wonders if he has ever held a gun, though he is undoubtedly responsible for more deaths than could be counted, even by a man like Athos, with an empty cell and the barren hours of incarceration to fill.
“There is no need for violence,” the interrogator says, lips curling disdainfully.
“Was there no need with them?” Athos asks with a quirk of his chin.
“You heard that? I am sorry,” Meindl says.
Athos huffs a disdainful breath, not quite a laugh. “I’m sure.”
Meindl eyes him across the table and begins to ask him questions, soft toned and easy: where do his orders come from, does he know any wireless code sets, who are his contacts, what weapons do they have.
Athos lets the questions break over him like water, and it’s almost a relief after waiting for so long.
He has no rank to give, and his real name is not something that he wishes to speak aloud, though Meindl must know it by now. Instead Athos sits in silence, and makes a game of staring at his interrogator, unblinking for as long as he can.
Meindl repeats the sets of questions three times, before folding his hands in front of him and giving a quiet little sigh.
“So be it,” he says. “How disappointing.”
Athos is expecting the beatings to follow swiftly behind Meindl’s polite but futile questioning, but he realises only later that it’s all part of the trick. They leave him, for some hours, until he has fallen into one of the fitful and uneasy snatches of sleep that he can manage against the cold stone floor. He wakes to a confusion of blows and kicks, and in the disorientated state between sleep and awake it seems as though there are hundreds of them, swarming over him, striking and stamping with boots and fists.
The next day Meindl lifts him from the floor, and helps him into the chair at the table once more. He asks the same questions, his voice is kind and easy, but Athos can only sit there sagging, and stare, and stare.
This is what his life becomes: a rhythm of days and nights, questions and beatings that follow a pattern until they don’t, and the change is enough to set him reeling like the jarring of bones. He fights back when he can, if only for his own peace of mind - a mind he feels slipping a little further each day, in any case. There’s little he can do: the guards outnumber him, have weapons and the luxury of food and rest to fuel their brutality. Still, it’s the thought that counts, he supposes.
He has no concept of time - sometimes he is brought food, sometimes he is left without for what feels like days. There is no window to see the sun or the moon passing, but he thinks that it must be a week at least before the beatings turn to something more crafted.
Sometimes they hold his head down in a tub of ice water until his world narrows to a pinprick and vanishes, in excruciating increments, into unconsciousness. When he tries to sleep they wake him, keep him walking in circles around the cell until he falls and cannot get up, and no amount of threats or vicious slaps will do a thing to change that.
Sometimes they tie a metal pole to his back so that he cannot sit down, or hang him by his arms until the exhaustion kicks the legs out from underneath him and he will slump, his full weight against his bonds - it’s here that he dislocates his shoulder, though the pain is so intense and so complete that it takes hours for him to realise that this is what has happened. Later, he sits and counts down from five-hundred, summoning all his strength up like a drawn-in breath so that he can yank his arm in one quick burst of energy. He’s not sure if the shoulder is back in the socket, but when he’s conscious once more the pain is a dull, heavy thing, and a little feeling has returned to his fingers.
He allows himself to think about Anne - is she listening outside the door? Is she here? - but never about Porthos or Aramis. To have them there at the tip of his tongue is too dangerous, to think of them here in this place is to imagine them with him, and is too much, too much, too much.
It’s never Meindl that hurts him, but it is always he that makes the pain stop. After perhaps a month and a half Athos begins to watch the door, willing it to open, willing Meindl to step through, to lift him from the floor with his gentle hands. The relief, the sickening rush of gratitude unfurls like a banner inside him when Meindl comes, and Athos begins to both hate and love the man with a fury that startles him.
Cigarette burns and beatings with metal pipes, the ever present threat of electrocution or being forced to drink kerosene, which they hold over his head and pretend they will douse him with while others stand by flicking lit matches at him and laughing. Athos begins to realise there are all sorts of sounds a human being in pain can make, but it comes as some surprise to him that none of them are in the shape of words, or answers.
Athos has never considered himself a particularly brave person - he has simply pushed at the fear until it is something compacted and hard within him, and he can be allowed to act without its influence. But in this place the fear and pain and exhaustion combine like a blue pall of smoke around his head, behind his eyelids - an impossible blue like the sky on a spring day or the deep shadow on snow, the flash of magpie’s wing, bright and keening in his mind. He cannot answer their questions - he can barely remember his own name.
He holds his silence until one day the words dredge up from some fathomless depth within him, and it's a question of his own: are the forget-me-nots in bloom?
Once it’s uttered the thought consumes him, and it’s all he can think, all he can say. It’s like a tide that’s risen so far only to leave him beached like driftwood, utterly spent and lost. He begs them, over and over, but no one will answer, and at times it only antagonises the guards.
Meindl visits less and less. Athos feels the loss like something raw and flayed within him.
The beatings stop, the guards grow disinterested. Sometimes they remember to feed him.
Athos sits, and stares at the walls until he can see straight through - straight through brickwork and crumbling plaster and out the other side, to green fields filled with wavering blue forget-me-nots.
***
----- CHAPTER BREAK -----
Though he knows how to shoot, has used both guns and explosives and, on some occasions, his bare hands to kill, Aramis has never considered himself a soldier. Even now he often dreams of the Paris of four years ago: the heat of summer, the place straining at the seams with refugees and cigarette smoke and a desperate sort of cheer, the air heavy with the scent of the roses that rambled up walls and seemed to spring from every unloved crack and corner of the city. In his dreams Aramis still hears a piano played in an upper floor room with wide-flung windows, Chopin’s Nocturne No.2 drifting like pale blue smoke in the hot, languid evening light. He had stood and leant against the sun-warmed wall and felt more than heard the notes piling up against each other in a desperate crescendo so beautiful it made his heart cramp and hurt just to hear it. Everything seemed so much more lovely, because they could all see the cresting wave about to wash it all away.Aramis has never been overly interested in politics, but news spread like flame through the tinder-dry city and was impossible to ignore. Paris began to empty of the refugees that had only just arrived, startled onwards like a flock of birds, and soon the wealthier parts of the city took on the hollowed echo of abandonment. The government followed. The trains began to leave the Gare d’Austerlitz with no destination other than South - away, away, as far away as possible. But the poorer citizens of course had nowhere to go, and Aramis, with his few francs made from portraits and sketches sold to tourists who had long since fled the Place du Terte, counted himself amongst them. And then the British left, and the fighting grew closer and closer until everything stopped, and the wave took the city quietly and without fuss.Aramis has never been overly interested in politics, or government, but he loves this city of cigarette smoke and trash, of roses and Chopin’s Nocturnes, loves it till he’s breathless and coiled tight with it. The bone-deep jolt of abandonment was hard to understand: there was no one in charge anymore, there was no one standing up, no one even trying. Aramis searched the faces of those left behind, looking for some sign of life, of fucking fight left there. But the city of revolution and barricades lay down like a whore before the advancing army. It was all gone. The Paris that was taken by the Germans on the 14th of June was a silent one, a curled up shell of numb disbelief. The awful singing clank of the tanks rolling down the Champs Elysées sounded like the end of the world, and Aramis stood watching until the lit cigarette he held burned down to his shaking fingers. Then he went back to his attic apartment in Montmartre, packed what little belongings he had that would fit into a small canvas bag, and walked away from Paris.Three months later Aramis first held a gun, and learned to shoot, and learned too that his fine artist’s eye leant itself just as well to the aiming of a firearm or the stitching of wounds as it did to painting.He found a kindred spirit in a man named Marsac, all wild eyes and blustering laugh, and they made a formidable team. The maquis of Haute-Savoie were desperate for men, even long-haired Parisian bohemians - that area of France was in the Zone d’occupation Italienne, but there was also enough of a German military presence to keep the resistance busy. It was as far from the capital as he could get whilst still on French soil, and there was a certain pleasure in the subversive actions of resistance that spoke to the anarchist in him.Aramis’ hands may be red with blood but he is not a soldier. Aramis is an artist. He is twenty-five years of cigarettes and wine and women and a faith utterly untroubled by a less than faithful life. He will not be defined by the war, nor the choice he made whilst watching the tanks and soldiers enter the city he considers to be the one true love of his life. Aramis knows he is not a soldier - but this is proving problematic, because he’s good at it, and because he enjoys it. He knows that he has never felt as steady or as present as the moment he first killed a man.Oh, it’s not for the sheer act of killing: Aramis knows all his sins intimately, and the joyful taking of life is not one of them. But the first man he killed was going to shoot Marsac. He might have been a good man, he might have had a wife that he loved and children waiting for him in some little peaceful German town, but it does not trouble Aramis. He was going to kill Marsac, so Aramis killed him first.In this brotherhood, in this duty and love and honour he has found a peace that he has only ever known in those heavy moments after orgasm, when the world narrows and there’s nothing outside the door and everything is right. For once he is right, and there’s no more wanting. He knows this is where he belongs.Sometimes he’s not sure what he’ll do, when the war ends. So Aramis stayed in this new life, the one that had been waiting for him since the day he was born, and the Haute-Savoie region was home long enough for his fellow maquis to become his brothers, and, one snowy easter morning, for him to walk amongst their bodies in a cold forest clearing. Their réseau had been blown, Marsac said - infiltrated and betrayed - and then he had left, and Aramis was a hollow echo, a smudged after-image of a living, breathing man.He has no idea where Marsac went, but he slams the brakes in his mind before he can even think more than the first syllable of that name these days, because it tears at somewhere in the marrow and the viscera of him. Aramis pushes at it all until it’s deep down, but he can’t seem to stop it from rising like bile in his throat every now and then, before he can reel in the panic enough to get control of himself once more.The first month after Haute-Savoie is a dark and hollow void inside his head, all of him focussed on pressing hard on that swell of nausea inside him, and as a result Aramis is not quite sure how he ended up in Normandy - the complete other side of the country - or how long he would have survived in the carelessness of his grief if a dark-skinned man from the slums of Paris had not found him. Porthos tells them often that he is an excellent judge of character, and though Aramis may mock him he can’t help but feel a swell of gratitude that this man found him, and saved him, and gave him purpose again.The first time he was introduced to Athos, the leader of a small and largely unofficial resistance réseau code-named Musketeer, Aramis thought him cold and dispassionate. He sat around a camp stove in a cold Normandy barn and told Porthos that Athos was positively reptilian and that he wasn’t sure he could follow such a man. Of course, as the days became weeks and the weeks months, Aramis began to feel differently. He has new brothers now, and though the thought of outliving these too sometimes sets him shivering and sweating in the small hours of the morning, Aramis has found a kind of peace at their side.He doesn’t want to love them, you see - these men who bluster into his life and act as if they’ve always been there - but he’s always been too careless where that’s concerned.Aramis has pulled them from the brink of death or disaster with his sniper’s eye or his surgeon’s hands, his easy charm and quick wits more times than he can count, and they have returned the favour as many times over. But now, Aramis is utterly at a loss. Since the war began he has stitched and bandaged and re-set bones, removed bullets and, on one memorable occasion, a piece of shrapnel as big as his palm. He has anaesthetised with morphine when he can get it, with good brandy or eye-stinging alcohol brewed in basement vats or, as a last resort, with his fists. He knows what it is both to work all night under the cold snapping stars to save a man’s life, and what it feels like when their blood cools and crackles on his hands as they bleed out on a scrubbed farmhouse kitchen table. Aramis knows what insides feel like, all the bits that make up a human being, all the things he wishes he never knew. When he can help he does, and when he cannot he sits, or prays, or holds their hand.But now? He feels small and younger than he ever has before, shudders as his mind twangs like an elastic band back to the place he tries so hard not to think of. It’s not like remembering, not really - it has no shape or form. It’s more like opening a door on a sinking ship and letting the water rush in, knocking him flat, filling his lungs with snow and blood and twenty dead Maquis and -Aramis pulls in a breath and exhales, slowly, counting for as long as he can before his lungs burn and he allows himself another steading inhale - just like Athos taught him. It’s Athos that needs him now, but it’s like a knotted string that he doesn’t know how to untie. It's not as though he hasn't seen both Athos and Porthos in a bad state before - that palm-sized chunk of shrapnel came out of Porthos' thigh, after all - yet this is different, somehow. These are not battle injuries. These are the careful, considered results of four months of a cruelty that Aramis cannot comprehend.“Start at the beginning,” Porthos says, voice low and easy and just for him. Aramis looks over to see Porthos squatting on his haunches by the door, watching him. “Just like always.”Aramis nods once, tightly. * The beginning: Athos is hunched and shivering and won't look at them. He is painfully thin, the bones of his face stark around the dark smudged hollows of his eyes. Where the skin is visible under dirt and beard and tattered clothing it is patched yellow and purple with bruises and what look like burns, shined and angry. Aramis takes a steadying breath and tries for a moment to imagine that Athos is unknown to him, is just some man that he has never met and in need of help, but his heart still lurches and twists for any soul in such pain. There's a rush of envy for Porthos, who knows the insides of cars and generators and wireless sets, can take apart or put together a bomb or a machine as easy as breathing. Machines don't bleed though, Aramis thinks, they don't cower and writhe and suffer.Well then. Aramis takes a deep breath and thinks: it's a wireless set. It's broken and half taken apart, clogged with mud and dirt. Fix it, like Porthos would.He has tried soothing words and gentleness but Athos cannot hear him. Instead Aramis takes one of the morphine syrettes from his pocket, breaks off the little plastic guard, and with careful hands he kneels and pushes the needle into the bruised skin of the forearm. Athos doesn't even notice, but in seconds he has become pliant and heavy. Aramis lays him down as gently as he has seen Porthos set out a fragile mess of wires and components, and watches as exhaustion and the drug flutter Athos' eyes to a close. With Porthos’ help he strips Athos, cutting away his clothes in places. D'Artagnan heats water on the small camp stove so that Aramis can clean away the dirt, uncovering the bruises, cuts and burns so that he can treat the worst of them. They try their best not to gag at the smell - filth and blood and burnt skin, something low and acrid like fear. “I think he has some broken ribs,” Aramis says after a while, sitting back on his haunches and raking at his hair with a trembling hand. “And his left shoulder doesn’t look right.”“Okay,” Porthos says, his voice low and encouraging, and Aramis is struck suddenly because he’s talking to him like he’s a wounded animal, like the care in his voice is for him.“I can wrap them, and some of his burns.”“Right.”“He doesn’t look good though.”“Just do what you can,” Porthos says steadily, “We’ll sort the rest out as-and-when, yeah?”Neither of them say what they want: that they can only treat the wounds that they can see.“Jesus,” Aramis says. His hands are shaking and he just wants a cigarette, and some fresh air, and to sleep for a hundred years. "I need iodine, or sulfanilamide, or fucking something to disinfect his wounds. I don't have penicillin or...or..."“Aramis,” Porthos says, his hand a heavy weight on Aramis’ shoulder, “We’ll get it. I promise. Just do what you can.”There’s a quiet sort of steadiness in Porthos’ eyes, sad and tight as they are, and Aramis finds he can pull it towards him from where they touch, tries to imagine it flooding through him like a lulled morphine buzz in his veins. This is Porthos asking him, this is Athos, and d’Artagnan a shadow by the door, unblinking. He nods once, and sees the little quirk of Porthos lips in answer.Aramis thanks God that Athos is out cold as he works the tight knot of the man’s shoulder back into the joint, Porthos pinning his body down so that Aramis can have something to pull against whilst d’Artagnan looks on, face pale and unreadable.He wraps the ribs and the worst of the burns, cleans the rest out with the last of Athos’ good brandy and tries not to see the systematic coldness there, the neat lining up of little triangle marks that look like they came from the end point of a soldering iron, marching along the base of Athos’ throat. There is an angry and jagged mess of slices below a clavicle that looks lumpy - as if it has broken and healed wrong - and if Aramis looks too closely at the marks it almost looks like someone has tried to carve something into the skin with a blade and he has to shake his head and look away to clear the rising nausea. It’s too much. He gently dresses Athos in his own spare shirt and trousers. Then he gets up, washes his hands in the last of the water in the old jerry can, walks outside, and vomits so hard he sees stars.
----- CHAPTER BREAK -----
Porthos hears Aramis emptying his stomach outside and decides to give him a little time. “Do you think he’ll be alright?” d’Artagnan asks. There is something in his voice, behind the reserve that descends sometimes quite suddenly and seems so utterly incongruous to the boy they know, all youth and snapping temper, quick to love or hate, both. Porthos can’t quite put his finger on it. “Yeah,” he answers, “He gets like that sometimes, after he needs to patch someone up.”“No,” d’Artagnan replies, “I mean Athos. He’ll be alright?”“Course he will,” Porthos says, and feels the desperation puff out his chest with a bluster that seems entirely fake right now. Sometimes he resents how they need him for this, for the hope, when no one else can hold it. Sometimes he wants to scream.Outside, he finds Aramis sitting with his eyes closed, pulling in carefully steadied breaths. He’s leaned up against the old barn wall which is almost entirely overrun with a tangle of ivy and jasmine. It looks absurdly as though Aramis is trying to retreat into it, like he wants it to swallow him up. The little perfumed blooms are like tiny stars around his head, glowing slightly pink in the reflected smudge of morning light from the east.“Alright?” Porthos asks, settling down next to the other man.“Alright,” Aramis says, voice slightly hoarse.“I only have one morphine syrette now,” Aramis says, eyes still closed, head thrown back against the barn. “Porthos I need more of everything. If he gets worse, or if something happens to you, or d’Artagnan, or -”“We’ll get it. Didn’t I say so? You’re not calling me a liar are you?”“Never.”Porthos heaves himself up, and Aramis finally cracks one eye to look at him. “You off?”“Better let The Powers That Be know he’s back,” Porthos replies, crossing the yard to where his old battered bicycle is propped.“Be careful,” Aramis calls to him, “Please?” The fear is something naked in his voice, it’s been getting more pronounced each time Porthos has to do this.“Always am,” Porthos replies with a grin. *Porthos is not stupid enough to keep his wireless set in the barn, somewhere beneath the crawl space in the loft. That would feel too much like sleeping with a bomb in the same room. Ironically enough the actual bombs - hidden beneath the hay bales - don’t trouble him much, but the wireless is like a bright shining note ringing out whenever he transmits a message. If the Abwehr happened to hear it they’d all be finished.The little fisherman’s shack by the coast has been abandoned by all but Porthos for some time. He stumbled upon it by chance, and, one moonless night, set about transferring the wireless set there piece by piece for fear of being caught with it on him. He hasn’t told Aramis or Athos where he keeps it, because they never ask.Porthos tells people that before the war he was a mechanic, which isn’t entirely a lie, since he’s fixed enough car engines to fill a lifetime. He just neglects to mention that the majority of them were stolen. Porthos likes machines, likes to see how they work. Valves and wires and cogs, there’s an honesty to them: they can be put to many different purposes, but they will always stay what they are.Operating the wireless was a natural step from putting it together, fixing it on one of its frequent hiccups. Learning the poems and codes that encrypted the messages was a little more difficult, but not impossible with enough study and repetition. Porthos likes to learn new things, to teach himself. Someone once asked him if he were an autodidact, and though he didn’t know the meaning of the word at the time he taught it to himself afterwards, so he supposes he must be one, after all.But there’s something pleasing in the methodical code-work, encrypting and transmitting.Porthos takes the little Gauloises cigarette tin from his pocket, the blue paint battered and dented, and picks out his most prized possession: the little stick of chalk is now worn to a nub, wrapped carefully in a scrap of sack-cloth to disguise its telltale rattle. Sweeping a clean space on the stone floor with a broad swipe of his hand, Porthos carefully copies out the lines of poem he’d memorised in tight little block capitals, and then the assigned number for each letter until it is laid out in front of him. Next he writes the message he wants to send: C O M T E B A C K O N S H O R E And then, shortens it into manageable chunks to transmit: C M T B C K N S H R Next he carefully copies it out in the encoded numbers: 11 21 14 5 11 23 26 4 20 3 Lastly Porthos will need to transfer them into the dots and dashes of morse code, but these are so deeply ingrained in his head he has no need to write them down. With a little spit on the ragged patch of sack-cloth Porthos scrubs at the original and truncated message, leaving only the numbers, and pulls on the wireless set’s headphones. Every three days, at 5.35am, Porthos knows that there is someone listening across the channel in London. He has never been to England, but in his dreams he imagines a little firefly point of light that flickers amidst a bomb-damaged city, at 5.35am, every three days. This is the godmother to his pianist, tuning into his frequency in the hopes that he might transmit a message. If there is no message transmitted the godmother will log it as non-contact and come back again, three days later, same time, same place. Porthos knows that any more than six non-contacts will likely have him and the entire ‘Musketeer’ reseau logged as potentially compromised.He wonders if his godmother would mourn him. They say a godmother can tell her pianist’s “fist”, his particular style of message so well that she can tell immediately if something is wrong, or if the codes are being played back to her by an enemy operator fishing for information. Does his godmother know him that well?Her codename is Alice. Aramis amuses himself on long nights by imagining aloud who Alice is and what she might look like, and on the longest nights, where he would take her for dinner and how long it would take to get her into bed, the perfume she’d wear, the sounds she’d make. Porthos knows Aramis does it to tease him, and tells Aramis that Alice could very well be a man as it’s only a codename tied into the first encryption they’d used, based on some text from Alice in Wonderland. Aramis only insists that, in this scenario surely Porthos would be Alice, since if life here isn’t through the looking glass then he doesn’t know where the hell is.Still, it amuses Aramis, and though Porthos protests he can’t help think of Alice when he’s bicycling back from the little fisherman’s shack after a transmission. He thinks she probably is a woman, and that she’s strong and funny with dark soft hair, that the V1 rockets scare her but she’d never let on, that she wears a neat little uniform and is disappointed when 5.35am comes around with no message from Porthos, from her pianist.It’s a great comfort to him, because the truth is he’s scared too: those few minutes of transmission are the most terrifying of his life, more frightening even than a pitched battle. A wireless operator is utterly exposed whilst transmitting the long and complicated codes, prey to the Abwehr radio detection vans that are out there, right now, trying to pinpoint him on a map. They say the average life expectancy of a wireless operator in an occupied country is six weeks. Porthos has lasted longer than that, but it gives little comfort and makes him feel as though he’s on nothing less than borrowed time. And the others feel it too, he can tell. It’s obvious in Aramis’ plaintive demands for Porthos to be careful, in Athos gaze as it used to settle heavy on him when he left to send a message in the darkened hours of the morning. Porthos moves his set from place to place every five weeks as a precaution, the sixth lying before him in his mind like a dark chasm he’s rushing towards, but even so he knows it will only be enough until it’s not.Sometimes he dreams of a great shadowy hand sweeping across the dark countryside, right over his head, looking for him. The thought that Alice is there with him, listening, waiting, makes Porthos feel a little less afraid.The moment his watch hand ticks to 5.35 he pulls in a deep breath, and flicks the power switch on his wireless set. *Aramis hasn’t moved since he left him, it seems, and as Porthos leans the bike back up against the wall he seems Aramis’ shoulders relax. D’Artagnan is sat next to him smoking a cigarette, and smiles with a genuine relief.“Lived to fight another day? ” d’Artagnan asks.“Don’t joke,” Aramis says, getting awkwardly to his feet and shaking out cramped limbs. The sun is fully risen now, and Porthos knows that Aramis worries that he might be spotted and questioned as to why he is cycling the countryside at sunrise. A lie that feels true is always easier, Aramis says, so he has instructed Porthos to pretend to be him should he be caught - or more specifically, to pretend to be him on his way back from a secret affair with a married woman who lives nearby. Surely even the Nazis can understand the need to sneak around in those particular circumstances.“You took your time,” Aramis points out. It’s true, Porthos has been gone longer than he usually is when he’s sending a message. “Stopped by the boulangerie,” Porthos says, pulling out a loaf of bread from his satchel. It’s a sad affair, not the usual light and airy bread, but ingredients are hard to come by these days. Technically their ration cards are marked farm labourer so they’re entitled to a little more food than the average person, but it’s not really enough to ever completely chase the hunger away. Especially with hard rocks of bread like the one Porthos had picked up that morning. Still, the bread wasn’t the only reason he’d paid a visit to Monsieur Gaillard’s shop: the baker’s wife was a good friend of the wife of a local magistrate, who seemed to know everything about what was coming or going in the region, and was helpfully talkative. Gaillard himself, though not specifically a resistor in any sort of way, was more than happy to pass on the odd bit of information. Good stuff, like, where and when a certain train might be coming through. What it might be carrying, that sort of thing.“Medical supplies,” Porthos says, around a mouthful of hard bread, and Aramis perks up. “Where?”“Train, comin’ through tonight. Saint Lambert. Want to blow it up?”Aramis laughs, “Always.”“Shall I stay here?” d’Artagnan offers, “Watch over Athos?”“Nah,” Porthos says, looping an arm around Aramis and leading him in to the barn to begin the strategising, “Serge can do that. We need you with us.” By the time he’s finished talking his back is to d’Artagnan. He doesn’t see the expression that flickers across the young man’s face. It looks something like anger. * Porthos and d’Artagnan squat, fingers pressed hard into the crumbled stone of the bridge and peering over the edge as the train rumbles towards them. After jumping from the car with the medical supplies they had run to the bridge while the train idled, and waited for it to huff its way onwards again, to the spot where Aramis lies waiting to ignite the fuse on the bombs he’d laid against the rails. Porthos knows that the other man hates explosives, hates having to touch them, but Christ he hopes Aramis did it just how Porthos showed him. He squints down the line, where the tracks edge into darkness and knows that somewhere in that inked black waits Aramis, close enough to be able to see the tiny spot on the fuse that he must shoot in the darkness but far enough away that the train won’t hit him when it derails.“Watch this,” Porthos says, slapping d’Artagnan lightly on the chest with the back of his hand as the train rumbles beneath them and muffles them in a brief cloud of steam, “Your first derailment is always somethin’ special.” They scuttle over to the other side to get a better view. It’s only when the engine has disappeared into the darkness that they hear it - a single shot, a small spark against the metal line. And then a muffled, crumpling sort of sound as the explosives ignite. D’Artagnan lets out a little yelp of victory and punches the air in delight. “Good ol’ Aramis,” Porthos grins, “Never misses.”There’s a ripple almost, down the train, as the blast hits and bucks the carriages, and then a terrible shrieking sound of metal as the engine and the first two cars behind it keel sideways off the ruined track. Momentum carries the rest of the train forward into a crashing concertina, buckling into itself and off the track. And then…The world goes white.Before the blast of sound hits them he hears d’Artagnan swear and then they’re ducking beneath the parapet as shrapnel smacks and shudders the stone of the bridge.“Does that...does that usually happen?” d’Artganan says, looking at him wide eyed as a large chunk of exploded train lands not four foot from where they sit. “Aramis,” is all Porthos can say.The pop and crackle of the burning train punctuates their panicked breathing as they sprint off the bridge and jump and tumble their way through the bushes towards where Aramis had been camped out. Every now and then another small explosion goes up from the wreckage as something else catches fire. Ammo? Porthos thinks, The train was carrying ammunition? That’s what was in those boxes?They find Aramis a full twenty feet from where he’d been waiting, lying amongst charred wreckage and blasted saplings. His eyes are wide and staring up at the low clouds, softly orange now with the reflected light of the fire. He coughs once, harshly, as Porthos skids to a stop next to him, and all Porthos can think is thank fucking God and all the baby angels.“Aramis? Jesus Christ, Aramis are you alright?”Porthos pats Aramis down roughly: he’s peppered with tiny cuts and grazes, and his face is smoke-blackened, the soot highlighting the creases and smile-lines around his mouth and eyes, the little lines on his forehead that come from all that frowning at Porthos. There doesn’t seem to be any serious injury until Porthos’ fingers meet the back of Aramis’ head and come away warm and sticky. “Ah Aramis!” he says, like a curse.“Get him up!” d’Artagnan hisses, running up to them with the crate of medical supplies heavy in his arms, “They’re coming!”Porthos takes a deep breath and hopes against hope that Aramis hasn’t broken any bones. He heaves the other man up and over his back in one movement, hears the quiet huff of breath as Aramis’ stomach meets Porthos’ shoulder, hard. And then they are running - always bloody running, Porthos thinks - sticking to the hedgerows and anywhere that will offer cover. “M’gonna throw up,” he hears Aramis says softly, dangling upside down from Porthos’ shoulder and jangling like a puppet with each of Porthos’ steps. “Better bloody not,” Porthos grunts, and keeps running. Aramis keeps it in until they are half way home, at which point he hammers on Porthos lower back with his fists until the other man stops running and lets him down at the edge of a field tall with grass. D’Artagnan squats with his hands on his knees, gulping for breath while Aramis vomits into the undergrowth. “I didn’t know, Aramis, I swear I didn’t know,” Porthos says, panting. Aramis makes a vague, placating sort of hand gesture weakly in Porthos’ direction. “We can’t stop,” d’Artagnan says, looking over his shoulder. The burning train is nothing more than a faint lightening on the horizon now, but this place will be crawling with patrols looking for them soon. “Do you think you can walk, Aramis?”“Yes,” Aramis coughs.“Alright. Do you think you can run?”* Aramis’ pupils are still pin-prick small from the blast, even in the gloom of the flickering hurricane lamp that lights the barn. He sways, dazed as d’Artagnan hands Porthos gauze and bandage and the big man does the best he can to dress the wound on the back of Aramis’ head. “It’s shallow,” Porthos says, “Just….bleeding like an absolute bastard.”“S’okay,” Aramis says, slurring only slightly. “Who needs blood ‘nyway…” He grins, a little crooked, before going slightly green and swallowing harshly. D’Artagnan offers him a canteen of water, which Aramis takes gratefully with hands that shake. “He’s still sleeping, Aramis,” Serge says, over near the door, and nods towards where Athos is bundled in the cot against the wall. “You rest up, we’ll watch over him.”“You got the…” Aramis asks Porthos.“We got it all. And we know how to use it. You rest now,” Porthos says, pushing Aramis slightly on the sternum until he relents and crumples backwards onto the bed-roll.
----- CHAPTER BREAK -----
There’s a drip that taps sharply against the stone floor, somewhere near his head. If he were to focus on that tight, wrapped-up noise Athos could imagine that he is back in that prison at the Chateau, that his interrogator might come to him soon. Meindl. The name fits somewhere safe and compact in his mind. But there are other sounds here: someone moving quietly about, the scrape of wooden chair-legs on flagstones, rustles of mice in hay bales. Distantly there is rain, and every now and then a horse whinnying.And someone praying. The voice is familiar but Athos can’t pull together enough of himself to pin a name to it. The words are not desperate or wailed like the prayers he heard through the walls in the Chateau. They are just...steady. Quiet and grateful and sure of themselves, smooth as pebbles on a shore, each one fitting just right amongst its fellows. Athos would like to dwell on something like the sea which he thinks, abstractly, would be calming and peaceful, the heavy drag and lull of waves, the thought of cool slipping water. But really all his mind can focus on is forget-me-nots - and that dripping sound, that quiet praying, is distracting him from them.He tries to shift, to turn over and get away from the noise so he can concentrate on tiny blue flowers like fallen stars in the grass, but his body feels weighted and slow.“Easy.” The praying stops and there is a cool hand against his forehead, but it is not smooth and unlined like Meindl’s and Athos is suddenly filled with such despair he can only wince, and try to pull away as much as his exhausted body will allow. “It’s me, Athos. It’s Aramis. You’re safe.”Aramis? Aramis.Athos tries to open his eyes: one creaks wider but the other seems swollen shut. Maybe it’s a trick, he thinks. Maybe they’re trying to make him think he is back with Aramis and Porthos, that he got away. Maybe Meindl will come, after all. Maybe Anne is outside the door, listening. He resolves not to talk to Aramis, to acknowledge his or Porthos’ presence. Maybe then they’ll go away. Maybe then Meindl will come.After a while Aramis stops speaking to him, his words gentle and far away. Athos’ eyes start and prickle in his attempts to keep them open, to imagine himself deep in the cool vastness of the sea, so he closes them, and soon sinks back into oblivion. * “...wrong with him?” asks a voice, low and gruff.“...don’t know…”“...please…”“...trying…” The words fade in and out like a bad radio broadcast, like all the times they’ve tried to track down the wandering frequency for Radio Londres. But he shouldn’t be listening to that: Meindl will not be happy, he will be beaten, they won’t let him sleep, when had they last given him food? Athos screws his eyes shut and sifts through his scattered memories with rising panic. Is he hungry? Does he hurt? No. Yes. His legs feel distant and leaden - had they made him walk around his cell again, until his mind wandered with the monotony and his vision swam and his body crumpled like a sigh…“He’s awake,” says a voice nearby, a voice he doesn’t recognise. A new guard, maybe? He opens his eye a crack. It’s a boy, a young man, and not in uniform. He’ll be punished for that. He doesn’t look German, really.But no, this isn’t his cell: there is the warm wavering light of a hurricane lamp and the rest is blessed darkness, instead of the bare buzzing bulb set high in the ceiling of his room at the Chateau. There’s a sudden rush of sickening movement, and two men are hovering over him. “Athos,” one says, “How are you?”“My God you gave us a scare,” says the other. Aramis. Yes that’s Aramis, and Porthos. It really is them. Can it really be them? But how…“Forget-me-nots,” Athos mumbles, flinging out his arms and trying to steady himself to a sitting position. “Nah, nah we didn’t forget you,” Porthos says, “We didn’t. We didn’t...even know where you were and…”“Forget-me-nots?” Athos says again, trying to get his eyes to focus long enough to show Aramis how important this is.“They’re flowers, Porthos,” Aramis says, quietly, but his eyes never leave Athos’ face. “What? Why’s he asking about flowers?”The boy standing at the end of his bed seems to scowl. “He’s lost his mind,” he says, crossing his arms and looking away.“Water,” Athos tries again, and it is really such an effort to get his mouth to move away from shaping those words, from the tiny blue flowers that sit behind his eyelids. “Yes, yes of course,” Aramis says, trying to get up. The man sways a little in his attempt to stand, and Porthos puts a heavy hand on his shoulder. “You’re not alright yet,” Athos hears him whisper, “Stay.” Porthos pushes Aramis back to a seated position, and the movement shakes the bed Aramis has been leaning against. Athos closes his eyes with a sickened gasp. *The same scene repeats itself three or four times: Athos wakes long enough to gasp a word or two, some of which make sense and others that do not. Aramis and Porthos tiptoe around him, he catches the strange boy staring at him from the other side of the room in the day time, and if it’s night Athos can feel the press of his gaze from beyond the lamplight. Each and every time it takes a moment for Athos to understand that he is no longer in the Chateau, another to believe it is not a trick played by his captors, and a moment more to heave himself away from forget-me-nots, and Anne, and Meindl.His mind knows, rationally, that SS-Hauptsturmführer Meindl is the enemy. More than that - more than some patriotic German lad signed up to fight for his country and here now, far from home, following orders. No, Meindl had crafted each and every torment that had been visited on Athos’ mind and body both. He undoubtedly had done the same to so many before, was probably responsible for reprisal killings and countless casual cruelties. He really believed in the Nazi crusade, or at the very least enjoyed the power that comes from holding the lives of others in his hands enough to hitch his wagon to any cause, no matter how abhorrent.But when Athos sleeps he dreams of Anne, in a way that he has not for many years, and sure enough, before long, her soft hands become Meindl’s soft hands, and Athos wakes screaming and bereft and so disgusted with himself he vomits every scrap of food that Aramis and Porthos may have coaxed into him earlier that day. * Anne.They had met before the war, had five months of a love so perfect Athos could barely believe it was real. Of course, it turned out that it wasn’t, but he remembers being happy for perhaps the first time in his life. It was a kind of joy so intoxicating, so all-encompassing it almost completely drowned out the voices in his head that told he was a disappointment, not good enough, not good enough to be loved. He was so ensconced in Anne that he barely noticed the war creeping near. Or perhaps he just didn’t care, and the more Athos thinks about it the more he wonders if he might have been a selfish man - a bad man - before the war, and that he recognised some kind of kinship in Anne, and that he deserved everything he got.And then the Germans came, and there was no way to pretend it wasn’t happening, even in the circle of Anne’s arms and their own selfish love. And her dark hair and blue ribbons, and the way she moved on top of him at night, the sounds she made, with him so totally, shockingly in love. But they had been living in his family chateau, not far from Amiens, which in itself was close enough to the border to make them some of the first to see the tanks roll in on their way to Paris. There was a village nearby, a small, insignificant place with small, insignificant people. But one or two of the young boys there - none of them older than twelve - had cut the German telephone lines, switched signposts around. They had disrespected the invading forces in the way that most young boys will disrespect their parents, or teachers, but the Nazis had decided to use the village as an example. Athos had made himself walk through the silent streets afterwards, forced his prickling eyes open and unblinking while he walked and walked and counted every body: the men, the women, the children. He joined the Resistance in that moment, in his heart at least. And soon an old friend of his father’s has contacted him and it didn’t take much persuading. He didn’t tell Anne. Something in him warned him against that, at least.Anne was so very good at lying that there wasn’t one big, certain moment of clarity for him: she was still as present with Athos as she’d ever been, just as tender, just as sweet to him. She still carded her hands through his hair in a way that made his spine soften and his hands shake. She still kissed him like he was the sun and she had been in the dark all her life. But there was something, just a glimmer, tucked like a secret in the corner of her mouth, and once Athos had seen it all the armies of the world couldn’t make him care about anything but that.She was fucking a German soldier, perhaps more than one. She was fucking other members of Athos’ resistance unit too, he would find out later. And worse than that, Athos knew deep down that she was doing more than fuck them. They hardly saw each other any more, made excuses, but those hours she spent away from him were filled with unknown betrayals, with lies and deeds darker than he could possibly imagine. He didn’t know all of his unit, only the man he worked for and the woman who worked for him, but before he knew it one and then the other turned up dead, his whole unit blown. When he asked Anne if she was working for the Germans she didn’t even deny it. Just smiled, the movement like a shatter of ice across her face, and told him it was alright, because she’d made sure he was safe.He gave her up then, radioed her details on the wireless to whoever was listening in London and then smashed the wireless set with the heel of his boot. Someone came for her later that evening, and Athos sat at the kitchen table and drank and drank until he passed out and smashed his head on the flagstones as he fell. * They all hurt him in the end, all the people he loves. His parents, who looked at him like something foul and disfigured, and Anne, who opened him up and then took a knife to everything vulnerable and soft inside him. And so, it’s not that hard to love Meindl. In the end, when it really comes down to it, this is what Athos knows: that he will be broken down in every way possible, and that he will always, always come back for more.
----- CHAPTER BREAK -----
In early May it begins raining, and does so for days. The old barn roof leaks under the onslaught, and Aramis is sent clucking around trying to keep Athos dry while Porthos does the same for his explosives. It makes Aramis wince to think of them hiding there beneath the hay bales - so delicate! So combustible! but Porthos assures him again and again that he knows what he’s about and there would be no unexpected explosions. This is usually when Aramis lifts an eyebrow and points at the clumped and healing scab on the back of his head, and Porthos swallows visibly and looks sheepish. Aramis doesn’t blame him really - how were they to know that the Nazis would be so stupid as to put that much ammunition on a tiny, unarmoured train, after all? But it is just a bit funny, watching Porthos squirm like a large, apologetic worm on the end of Aramis’ hook. He’s caught d’Artagnan holding back a laugh at times, and once or twice even Athos looked like there might be a smile trying to break out from somewhere beneath the blankness that is his face these days.It’s on one of these endless rainy days when Ninon appears like a ghost at the doorway and Porthos jumps out of his skin and drops the fuse he’d been tinkering with on the floor of the barn with a yelp. Aramis sighs. Porthos really is good with explosives, and God knows no one else wants to do it, but really it’s a wonder they’re not all in bits by now.It seems as though the rain has not touched Ninon at all: there’s not a hair out of place on her lovely golden head. She smooths the front of her dress and glances around the barn, making small nods towards greetings before launching straight into business. Aramis rather likes how direct this woman is. He wonders idly if she would be up for a little tumble in the hay bales - the ones not sitting over Porthos’ stash of explosives, preferably.“There’re some people that need moving,” she says. “British Airmen?” Porthos asks, bluntly, and Ninon sizes him up for a moment before saying “You don’t need to know that. But yes, the British are coming to greet them”. Aramis wonders if she was always like this, always as smooth and opaque, or if the war had chipped and chiseled at everything that was soft in her and made her this cool marble statue. “There’s a landing field on the other side of the village, in a farmer’s field,” Ninon states.“Old Savatier’s farm?” D’Artagnan asks.“Yes, that’s the one.”“When?”“Tonight.”There’s a huff from the cot bed in the corner of the room, and it’s only then that Ninon really turns and seems to notice the man propped weakly against the wall. For a brief moment - so brief that it will be almost impossible for Aramis to know afterwards if he had imagined it - something soft that he can’t quite put a name to crosses Ninon’s face.“This weather is too bad,” Athos says, trying to sit himself up further. Aramis rushes over to help him, hooking an arm beneath his elbow and steadying him. He knows that Athos hates it, but honestly it’s better than seeing the man pitch over onto the flagstones. “Even if a Lysander can land in this, it’ll never take off again.”It’s the most anyone has heard him say since his return.“There’ll be a break in the weather tonight. It’s the only window we’ll have for God knows how long.” Ninon looks at Athos squarely, and then at Aramis, Porthos and d’Artagnan in turn. “It has to be tonight.” She pauses a moment and then adds, “It’s not just downed airmen. There’s someone else. A frenchman. He was being held in Chateau d’Evrecy too. He has to go, now.”Aramis’s eyes flicker over towards Athos before he can help himself, but the man in the bed stares blankly ahead as though his wounds weren’t still weeping under his bandages, as if he’d never been to that chateau.They iron out the few details. They will mainly be there to cover the landings and keep a look out for German patrols - and no doubt take care of any should they blunder into their landing field. “I’ll stay here, with Athos,” d’Artagnan offers, and this time Aramis and Porthos agree. There’s no need for them all to be there after all. As Aramis steps through the doorway a shiver seems to run through him. He turns around, can just make out d’Artagnan in the slip of shadows and lamplight in the barn. Suddenly he is afraid. “Alright?” d’Artagnan calls, softly.“Yes,” Aramis replies, shaking himself and smiling back at the younger man. “Someone walked over my grave.”“That’s inconsiderate,” d’Artagnan mumbles, and there’s a little flare as he lights the cigarette dangling from his lips.“Just...just look after him, yeah?” Aramis says.“Of course.” * One thing becomes immediately apparent: both Athos and Ninon were right. The rain did indeed stop as they neared the landing field, but the ground is a quagmire. Porthos and Aramis pace out the 300 yards needed for the Lysander plane to land in a giant L-shape across the field, swearing as the mud sucks at their boots. They mark out the strip in any case, with flashlights and bicycle lamps at intervals. “There’s no way a plane can land here,” Aramis mutters, and from the darkness they hear Ninon call back, “I know the pilot. He’ll land it.”Porthos raises his eyebrows and shakes his head tightly at Aramis. “No use, friend. Seems like this plane is coming, mud or no. Let’s just do what we can, yeah?”Aramis rolls his shoulders in annoyance and tries to shake the cloying feeling of fear that’s been crawling up his spine since they left the barn. “I don’t know, Porthos. Something just doesn’t feel right.”“C’est la guerre,” Porthos says, quirking a smile at him.They can’t hear anything, but they just have to trust that somewhere out there the RAF are keeping the local German planes busy and decidedly far away. It’s perfect weather for a bombing run, after all, the moon watery and fat, reflecting silver on the expanses of floodwater that lie in ditches and low areas of the flat dairy fields that surround them.“Used to love nights like this,” Aramis says, tramping across the field. “In Paris. The cobblestones all slick with water and the moon. Perfect weather for falling in love.”“Love,” Porthos huffs a laugh, “Is that what you called your carousel?”“Hey, how do you know about my carousel?” Aramis asks, “Did we know the same people?”“Not likely. Anyway,” Porthos retorts, “Anyone who knows you will assume there was a carousel. People coming and going all the time. It’s a wonder you remembered anyone’s names.”“What can I say?” Aramis smiles, “I love love. And I bloody hate this mud.” He shakes hopelessly at a mud-thick boot. Their clothes are sodden and the freezing weight of them isn’t doing anything to shake the feeling of dread that has been dogging him all night. He just wants this damn plane to land and take off again so they can get home, and dry, and possibly drunk. * Once the landing strip is properly marked out and they’ve all retreated to the line of trees that marks the boundary of the field, Ninon checks her watch and gives a low whistle between her teeth. “Won’t be long now,” she says, as four shapes coalesce from the shadows: three men and a woman. The British airman is obvious - dressed in civilian clothes three sizes too big and being supported by one of Ninon’s comrades, his leg held slightly off the ground and obviously in pain. There’s one more Resistance member, a local woman that Aramis half recognises, and then an older man. He stands like a soldier. He must be the one who was being held at the Chateau d’Evrecy the same time as Athos. In the darkness Aramis can see the hollows around his eyes, bruises dark shadows across one side of his face. It’s soon apparent that the British pilot doesn’t speak a scrap of French - he smiles sheepishly and shrugs when Porthos says hello - and the Resistance members gather to speak quietly with Ninon. Aramis sidles over to the man from the Chateau. The bruises are more apparent close up, and wickedly purple. “Cigarette?”The man looks at him, sizing Aramis up. He is in his fifties perhaps, and Aramis can tell instantly that this is no flat-foot infantryman but someone high up. “Best not, but thank you,” the man replies gruffly, “And thank you for this. If there were more men like you in France perhaps it would never have fallen.”Aramis makes a non-committal sound. “There are more of us than it seems, I think. Just waiting for the right opportunity.”“Well,” the man says, and he turns and looks Aramis dead in the eye, “It’s coming. Believe me, it’s coming.”“I do believe you,” Aramis says, though what he really wants to say in that sudden moment is my God I would follow you into hell itself.“Treville,” the man says, holding out a rough hand, and Aramis shakes it. “Aramis, sir” he replies.“Aramis,” Treville repeats, “I’ll remember that.” * Aramis squints at his watch. Midnight. And then, perfectly on time - there’s the British for you - the low hum of the Lysander’s engine becomes audible. They’re quick little things, these planes - painted green and grey so that they’re almost invisible against the night sky, much better than the matte black they’d been when these drops and pickups first began. People think black is the colour of the night but anyone who has spent enough time in it will tell you it really isn’t.“Here we go,” Porthos says quietly, and eases to standing from his position crouched between the roots of an ancient beech tree.As the plane lowers Aramis can feel his heart thudding painfully in his chest, and it feels like everyone is holding their breath. The plane meets the field with a squelching pull of mud, but the pilot is good and the little plane’s landing gear is sturdy. Miraculously the plane comes to a skid only barely off the strip that Porthos and Aramis had marked out. There’s no time for niceties: the British airman begins hobbling over to the plane, helped by the Resistance member, and Aramis and Porthos ready their weapons, eyes scanning the edges of the field for any movement as Treville and Ninon cross just behind. The pilot sticks his head out of the cockpit and says something to Ninon that they can’t hear, and Treville and the British man clamber aboard without a backwards glance. They have only three minutes to do this before the Lysander needs to take off once more. But when the pilot guns the engine it becomes immediately apparent that something is wrong: the plane’s wheels are stuck firmly in the sucking pull of mud. It can’t even turn around to make it back on to the landing strip.“Fuck,” Ninon curses.“Can we push it?” Aramis asks.“We’d need a team to get it out,” she replies.“Well,” Porthos says, after a moment, and then, “Aramis, come with me.” * The farmer nods curtly once they tell him what they need, and then shuts the door in their faces. Aramis doesn’t blame him - no one wants to be caught out by the Germans helping the Resistance get downed airmen and escaped prisoners out of France. As they open the barn door Aramis suddenly wishes d’Artagnan was with them and not back with Athos - he’s the only one amongst them who actually grew up on a farm.“Alright,” Porthos says, and goes straight to it. Aramis sighs, and steps into the animal smell of the barn. “Alright,” he echoes. *The oxen are huge and, frankly, terrifying, but as soon as Porthos and he had slipped the yokes and harness on to them they’d settled into dumb obedience, and walked calmly out of the barn and crossed towards the field where the plane sat still and waiting.“D’you think they’re strong enough to pull it?”“Yeah, more than enough,” Porthos replies.“Pothos?” Aramis asks, “How do you know?”“Dunno,” Porthos replies. “Read it somewhere.” *While they were gone it seems the pilot, Ninon and her friends had set about stripping out everything that wasn’t integral to keeping the Lysander in the air, and dumping it on the field. “Don’t worry,” Ninon says, breathlessly, “We’ll hide it all somewhere.” Porthos edges some of the detritus with the toe of his boot, barely able to disguise his curiosity. “I could make use of some of it,” he offers. It takes a while to figure out how exactly to hitch the oxen up to the plane, but once they have and, with the addition of a short strip of mud dug out in front of the landing gear, the animals heave the Lysander out of the quagmire. The airman and Treville had stepped off the plane in order to get the weight down, but now that the plane is moving again the pilot sticks his head out of the cockpit once more and shouts that he can’t stop for fear of getting stuck again. He taxis slowly as Treville hops up into the open door of the plane, and reaches back down to pull the hobbling airman up behind him. And then the Lysander’s engine really roars as it picks up speed and splatters off the landing strip and up into the sky.Ninon put a hand on Porthos and Aramis’ shoulders, nods her thanks, and disappears back into the night with her comrades.“Do you think she’s always like that?” Porthos asks, as they trudge back across the fields. “You know, all mysterious?”“I hope so,” Aramis replies with a crooked grin. * Aramis makes his way into the barn first, and then stops so suddenly that Porthos crashes into his back with a muffled grunt. The first thought to burst like a breaking wave upon Aramis’ mind is how beautiful the scene is: the soft play of light, the muted colours make Aramis think of Caravaggio, the composition as exquisite as a Vermeer. The warm lamplight slides on the planes of d’Artagnan’s face, the gun in his hand glints almost golden where it points towards Athos’ forehead, skin the same sallow tone as the rumpled sheets scored with deep shadowed folds on his makeshift bed. “ - the fuck?” Porthos says, and the moment shatters. TBC…
----- CHAPTER BREAK -----
“ - the fuck?” Porthos says, from over near the door. D’Artagnan doesn’t even start, or turn - all his attention is fixed upon Athos, who lies there wide-eyed and steady. D’Artagnan’s chest is heaving, like the air is suddenly leaden around him. The pistol he holds at an angle, not pointing directly at Athos but not exactly at the floor, either. Aim at him, d’Artagnan tells himself, willing his hand to lift the barrel of the gun higher, pull the trigger. Kill the bastard. “You’re working for the Germans, then?” Aramis asks, but he doesn’t sound like he really believes it, and d’Artagnan swears and shakes his head with a quick tight snap. “No,” be bites out, “I wouldn’t….no….never…” “You can excuse us for jumping to that conclusion,” Aramis says, voice steady as he eases a step closer, “Considering you have a gun leveled at our friend.” God, d’Artagnan’s whole arm is shaking now, and he grabs his forearm with his other hand to steady it, feeling suddenly embarrassed. The man in the bed - this Athos, who he has heard so much about, who he has lain awake at night dreaming of killing - just blinks at him. He looks nothing like the monster d’Artagnan has imagined him for so long. Neither does he look anything like Alexandre d’Artagnan, but still, suddenly, in the flickering light there is something about his father there, around the eyes perhaps? Why can’t he just pull the godamn trigger? “Why don’t you put down the gun then, if you’re not working for the Boches?” Aramis suggests. “Put down the gun and we can talk…” His voice is careful, so painfully careful. Porthos on the other hand is standing like a coiled spring, like one of his bombs about to explode at any moment and d’Artagnan wonders if he’d even make it to the door if he were to shoot this gun right now. Porthos very much has the look of a man who would tear him limb from limb. “Here,” Aramis says, and d’Artagnan watches from the corner of his eye as the other man bends slowly to put his gun down before kicking it gently across the floor. After a moment Porthos does the same, brow lowered in a frown, and when Aramis whispers something low to him he sighs and takes out the big hunting knife in his boot too, nudging it away from his reach. “There,” Aramis smiles, “Naked as the day France fell. Won’t you put yours down too?” “I don’t want to,” d’Artagnan says after a while, voice strained, and it takes a moment for them all to realise it’s not the gun he’s talking about. “I don’t want to do it, but-” “But what?” “He killed my father,” d’Artagnan spits. He shakes his head, which seems to be full of a terrible buzzing all of a sudden, like someone just tipped over a beehive inside his skull. “Or…or he knows about his death at least. He must do!” God it’s been so hard: to hold it all in, to grow so close to these men - to come to love them even - and carry this dark purpose the whole time. The only thing that has kept him sane is the little pilot light of his own vengeance glowing steadily behind his ribcage, and even though d’Artagnan could feel it beginning to burn away at all the places in him that were good and happy and pure, he could not risk letting it go out. His father had been everything to him. And Athos had taken him away. “What?” Athos rasps from the bed, and d’Artagnan starts at the sound. “My father, he was killed...we were….he was killed in a hotel outside of Paris, the Resistance were there…” d’Artagnan shakes his head again. Everything is becoming very confused all of a sudden, when he had been so sure of it all for so long. He heaves in a shuddering breath. He has to be strong now, he has to be a man. He’s waited so long. “We had nothing to do with the Resistance, nothing. We were passing through, I stepped out and when I came back...my father, he was shot. He said….he said Athos, and then he died. The Milice said the Resistance did it.” “So that’s why you came here?” Porthos asks, “You came here all along to find Athos?” D’Artagnan nods, the movement a strange jerking sort of tic. “I never meant to lie to you, please believe that,” he says, and the gun is fairly jumping in his quivering hand now, for godsake why can’t he just be a man? He turns to look at them finally, and he knows the desperation must be so clear on his face. All these months of lying and he can’t do it anymore, he can’t be anything but himself right now and he is angry and scared and tired. “But I came here and he was gone, and I...I had to do it. It had to be by my hand, I couldn’t let the Nazis do it in that chateau….” Athos’ eyes look almost black in the low light, against the brittle paleness of his skin. He does not look like a monster. “Fuck,” d’Artagnan whispers, and the tears are beginning to prickle in his eyes now, he can feel his cheeks flushing with the shame. “It’s all fucked up.” “He didn’t kill your father,” Porthos says. Athos is struggling to sit up, and Porthos just swears and crosses to the bed to help as if d’Artagnan weren’t still standing there with a gun pointed at the man in the bed. Because it is pointing at Athos now, d’Artagnan realises: his arm is shaking but he’s holding the gun with the barrel aimed squarely between the man’s eyes. Aramis takes the opportunity to step a little closer too, and d’Artagnan knows that he’s near enough to reach out and take the gun now, but he doesn’t do it. “He didn’t kill him,” Aramis says, and his tone is easy and calm as if he was speaking to a frightened horse. “How do you know that? You can’t know that!” d’Artagnan shouts, and the words expel themselves like bullets from his mouth. “Have you ever killed a man?” Athos asks, and it comes out as a whisper, and the room falls silent in its echo. It’s a moment before d’Artagnan answers with a nod, quick and tight like something involuntarily. “What did it feel like?” He is silent, the moment stretching long and languid and heavy. D’Artagnan’s swallows around the leaden thing in his throat, and pulls in a shaky breath. “Did...you like it?” Athos prompts. This time there is no delay in his response: d’Artagnan shakes his head harshly. “No. No.” “I’ve killed eleven men since the war began,” Athos says, leaning heavily on Porthos. He closes his eyes with a sharp inhalation of breath. “Eleven men. And I tell myself I had to. Like you had to.” Aramis moves slowly into d’Artagnan’s eyesight, and now he does lift his hand slowly and carefully to take the gun from a grip that is suddenly unresisting. “That’s how we know,” Porthos says. “Unless your father was a Nazi soldier in Normandy, Athos didn’t kill him.” “Oh God,” d’Artagnan says, and it comes out like a sigh. He lets his legs buckle until he’s kneeling on the floor, his head hanging low and bowed. “Thank you,” Athos says, laying a hand to rest on d’Artagnan’s head. “For trying to kill you?!” d’Artagnan says, and it’s a hysterical kind of hiccup. “For saving him, idiot.” Aramis says, slumping to sit cross-legged beside d’Artagnan. He suddenly notices the gun is still in his hand, and slides it along the floor away from him with a disdainful quirk of his lip. * “Why do you think they gave Athos’ name, when they killed my father?” D’Artagnan jitters, pacing a little in the space outside the barn. His eyes feel wide and aching, and he can’t seem to stop them from flicking around, never alighting on anything for long. He feels like his whole body is buzzing and hot. Porthos’ brow lowers, and Aramis gives a grim little smile. “Someone's trying to blacken his name?" The two men sit on the remains of a low stone trough against the wall, Porthos easing out his long legs. “The Germans?” “No. Not like them. Another reseau,” Porthos grumbles. “Those fucking Communists maybe.” “One united France - too much to hope for,” Aramis shrugs. “We’re contrary bastards I suppose. We might all be fighting for the same thing, but it doesn’t mean we’re of one mind politically.” “Race to the finish for ‘em,” Porthos says, and looks rather as if there’s a nasty taste in his mouth, “So they can win France back for the French and then govern it however they want, Socialists, Communists, whatever-the-hell-ists.” “What about you? I’ve never heard you speak politics before.” D’Artagnan asks. Porthos roars with laughter and it makes d’Artagnan jump. “We look like damn politicians? Nah, if anything we’re Gaullists - if anything. I just want the Germans back in Germany and the French back in France, and Porthos back in Paris where he doesn’t have to be afraid of being shipped off to some fucking work camp just ‘cause he don’t quite fit the Aryan ideal.” “And I just want to go back to how things were before,” Aramis says, but there’s something about it that sounds like a lie they’re all pretending not to notice. “So,” d’Artagnan says after a while. “So. You’re not going to...kill me, then?” “Can’t promise anything,” Porthos grins, all wide and glinting teeth. “No,” Aramis says levelly, “We’re not going to kill you.” “Funny thing, war, isn’t it?” Porthos muses, “I never trusted much before, you looked out for yourself where I came from. Took a bloody long time to trust you, when you first showed up.” He fishes for a packet of cigarettes in his shirt pocket. “And I broke that trust,” d’Artagnan says. He dips his head low as he speaks the words, but raises it then, chin held high with a slight nod of acceptance. “Not broke,” Porthos supplies, cigarette wobbling from his lips. “Just bent a bit, perhaps.” “Fighting beside someone - it’s true, do you understand?” Aramis says, leaning out to catch d’Artagnan’s eye. “Something is shared. We don’t believe you could have pretended for all this time…” “You ain’t that good an actor,” Porthos supplies. “We’re not going to kill you,” Aramis says, keeping his voice level, like he needs d’Artagnan to see how important this is, “But you can’t stay, d’Artagnan.” “But you said - you said you trusted me...” “But did you trust us? Did you trust us when you thought we lived and fought beside a man who killed innocent farmers from Gascony?” Porthos questions. “I…” d’Artagnan trails off, and the panic is there now, easing in behind the fleeing adrenaline and taking up all the space. “It wasn’t like that.” Aramis sighs, tired and heavy. “We know you won’t betray us to the Germans. But you can’t stay, d’Artagnan. Not after that.” Aramis looks like he wants to say he’s sorry, but d’Artagnan knows he’s not sorry, not really. D’Artagnan made his choice. He could have told them, he could have trusted them. He’s not a child, though in this moment he feels more like one than he ever has. “But, I don’t have anywhere to go,” d’Artagnan says, and he hates himself for how small it sounds. * D’Artagnan’s knuckles skitter across the wood of the door. He’s not sure if it’s loud enough to be heard inside the house, but the rain began sheeting down soon after he left Serge’s yard and continued the half hour walk into the village, and he’s so soaked through that he can barely feel his hands any more. The door opens a crack, and warm light pours through. A single eye, blue as a stormy sea, widens at him. “Please…” d’Artagnan mumbles, “Please, Constance…”
----- CHAPTER BREAK -----
Athos has no idea what he looks like and no desire whatsoever to see his reflection in a mirror, but his lank hair and dark scruff of beard makes him feel tired and heavy - more tired and heavy than he already feels, at least. So one day he asks Aramis for a razor and a mirror and some soap. Porthos disappears and comes back later that evening with a beautiful mahogany box inlaid with swirls of mother of pearl, a discreet swastika tucked into the design. “Liberated it from our friends down the road,” Porthos says with a shark’s grin as Athos opens the box to find an expensive looking shaving kit. “The SS Officer they belonged to doesn’t really need ‘em anymore.” It’s an action he’s done countless times before, but Athos still struggles when he raises the blade to the plane of his cheek. He hears Aramis intake a sharp hiss of breath: Athos’ hands are jumping as though he’s driving his old peugeot down a pocked and cracked road. “Let me,” Aramis says, catching the razor from Athos’ quaking grip. Aramis puts out one hand to cup Athos’ jaw as he bites his own lip in concentration, focusing on the soft drag and catch of the blade against Athos’ cheek. The closeness, the touch against his skin is so gentle and so intimate that Athos has to swallow back a heave of fear and desire. Meindl’s hands were nothing like Aramis’ - not rough and etched with callouses, black with drawing charcoal or blood, depending on what kind of day it has been. But still, it’s there that his mind goes. He holds himself as still as possible, afraid that he will move, but he doesn’t know if he wants to throw himself away from or into the unforgiving edge of the blade. When he sleeps he dreams of Anne: she cards soft fingers through his hair like she used to, but her nails were always a little sharp. It did something to him when she raked them across his scalp, when she hurt him, and he wonders if there is something inside him that longs for pain. Since she’s been gone it’s true he’s not done much to deny the pulling desire for punishment, to make his body hurt as much on the outside as it did inside. But he knows it was there before Anne, and it staggers him that people have ever been able to look at him and see a strong, healthy man when he’s known all along that he is rotten inside. Athos loved Anne and she hurt him. Athos loved Anne so he hurt her. Meindl hurt Athos and it made him feel alive. Athos feels the bruises, the burns, the cracked ribs and shoulder still raw and aching from dislocation and thinks - not enough. So in his dream Anne’s hands in his hair, on his body, hurting him, bringing peace, become Meindl’s, and he wakes crying and yearning and so disgusted with himself that he wants nothing more than to disintegrate entirely. To float away, particles of nothing. * When Aramis had first unpacked the liberated medical supplies he had wondered aloud at the little tins of pills, but not being able to read German he’d put the small package at the back of the crate and continued with counting and listing what they had and what could be put to use. That could have been the end of it, if it weren’t for, well, everything. Athos hates lying here with nothing to do but feel, and think. His life before the war had been one largely of leisure, but since joining the Resistance he has been moving almost constantly, keeping one step ahead of his own mind. Now, when the others aren’t here the silence collects like shadows in the corners of the barn, but the noise of their chatter when they return is too much for him sometimes too, and he can only lie there, gritting his teeth, feeling like a bathtub just overflowing endlessly with water, feeling utterly too much. The only relief is the sleep that dogs him relentlessly, but that offers little comfort, populated as it is by ghosts and shame. It’s times like this that he needs something to…distance himself from himself, and that’s when he reaches for the bottle. So about a week after they’d taken him back from the Château Athos finds himself alone in the barn, and ventures across the expanse of the room to see what he can find to drink. And there sitting against the far wall, the box of medical supplies. He pauses a while over the morphine syrettes, and closes his eyes for a moment to imagine the deadened lull that would sing through his veins if he just took the small glass vial and smashed the needle into the meat of his thigh, right now. How the quiet would be calm instead of suffocating, how he could sleep without dreaming for a while at least. But he’d seen Aramis count them out again and again, he’d surely notice one missing. Athos would like to imagine that he was the sort of man who would refuse the morphine because he wouldn’t want to take it from a comrade in need, but he knows he’s not so selfless, and that it is only fear of being found out and stopped that keeps him from starting down this path at all.Then his hands find the package of tins, each one marked with a blue and red logo and the words “Pervitin - Methamphetamine hydraclorid” emblazoned across the paper wrapping. He’d heard some of the guards at the Château talk about them, how it helped them stay awake and alert. That sounds very nice to Athos: to be awake but not tired, not frayed at the edges with exhaustion and too afraid to sleep. To be able to move again, maybe even to fight. Athos swallows one before he can even think about it, the large white pill catching in his throat for a second. He sits, and waits. Breathing flattens into a steadiness, his heart thumping too loudly in his ears. And then, a slow bloom - perhaps fifteen minutes later - so slow that when he notices it it feels like the drawing in of seawater before the wave crashes over his head and suddenly it’s all around him, this singing, pushing hum. Athos imagines he can feel every single vein lighting up like a current through him. The muscles in his legs begin to shake, and he jumps to his feet - actually jumps, when half an hour ago he could barely drag his bones from the bed. There’s nowhere for him to go, nothing to do, so he paces around the barn - thinking distantly, flittingly, because there is no time for thoughts with this intense buzzing inside of him - that he could have used some of this all those times they’d made him walk around his cell at the Château. The irony now of choosing this, of running from sleep when it was all he’d wanted to do back then. He laughs out loud, and the sound is startling and alien. It’s so nice to feel powerful, purposeful again. All the bad things, the things that hurt are too slow for him: Athos still feels the pain in his body but it’s like his mind is moving too fast to register it properly. And then he takes another two - just to see? To tempt fate? This time the high, on top of the rush he was already feeling almost bowls him over. He stamps his feet, teeth jittering and tongue loose in his mouth. He feels like he could jump to the top of the Eiffel Tower in one leap. God bless the fucking Nazis, it’s a wonder they’ve not conquered half the world already if their soldiers are taking these pills, feeling this invincibility. By the time Aramis and Porthos arrive home most of the jitteryness has worn off, so that Athos feels he can act relatively normal. Just the fact that he’s sitting on the edge of the bed instead of lying in it is enough to make Aramis’ eyes widen with surprise. “You’re up!” he exclaims. “Calm down Aramis, he’s only sittin’,” says Porthos, but he crosses over to sit next to Athos - nearly crushing the camp bed in two beneath their combined weight as he does so - and loops an arm around Athos’ shoulders joyfully. Athos hopes Porthos can’t see the slight quiver to his left leg, the way his teeth are tightly gritted in the effort to keep it from tapping out a rhythm across the floor. “You do look a bit flushed though,” Aramis says. He tries to press a hand against Athos’ forehead but Athos flinches out of the way, before Aramis looks him squarely in the eye and repeats the motion, slowly this time. “I just want to check you don’t have a fever,” he says, calmly, and Athos, willing his heart to calm from the instinctive fear and the drug both, nods. “No fever,” Aramis concludes, “Just a little sweaty.” “Lovely,” says Porthos, jumping to his feet. “Now, let’s get some dinner sorted. Think you might be able to eat something a bit more substantial than broth, Athos?” Athos swallows the dryness in his throat and finds himself curiously un-hungry. “Maybe,” he lies. That night he stays awake in his bed, restless, his body desperate to move. He doesn’t mind though. Athos holds himself as still as possible, listening to the breathing of his friends as it flattens into sleep, and then pulls his aching limbs out into the yard, not caring about the pain. He walks, around and around and around, thinking blissfully of nothing. And when his body is simply too tired to continue it’s like a switch flipping inside him. He barely gets inside in time to fold himself bonelessly into bed a little before dawn, where he falls into an hour or two of unconsciousness so perfectly deep it’s like something closer to death than sleep. * “Are you sure you’re alright?” Aramis asks, suspiciously. “I’m just sitting out in the yard, Aramis,” Athos mutters, “I am not cycling into town for a glass of wine with the Germans.” “You just…you just don’t need to help is all,” Aramis says, scrubbing the dirt from a few potatoes they’d dug up from Serge’s garden. “I know you say you’re feeling better but, as a friend, I should tell you that you look like absolute shit.” “You do and all,” agrees Porthos, who is trying his best to skin the rabbit they’d snared that morning. Athos caught sight of himself in their old shaving mirror the other morning and had to agree, he doesn’t look his best: his hands have been shaking too much for him to shave properly, and whenever Aramis had attempted to come near him with a razor once more he had flinched so violently they had agreed to just trim the beard as best as possible. Underneath, his skin is pale and clammy most days, and he hasn’t been able to put any weight back on since he is never particularly hungry. “Thank you,” Athos says, “And you’re making a mess of that,” he gestures broadly towards Porthos and his rabbit. “Well I don’t bloody know what I’m doing, do I?” Porthos grumbles. “Come,” Aramis says, “d’Artganan showed us enough times. It’s…you just…like pulling off a sweater.” Porthos wrinkles his nose. “Wish he-” “We’ve talked about this,” Aramis interjects. “D’Artagnan had to go.” Athos knows they’re looking at him out of the corner of their eyes, so he gets up and limps over to where Porthos is standing next to an old farm table, dragged out into the yard. It’s a perfect, mild May afternoon, the starlings screeching and wheeling overhead and the breeze stirring idly at the leaves in the nearby trees. “Where did that limp come from?” Aramis asks, brows lowering a little. Athos knows the other man is feeling guilty, thinking it’s the product of some hurt that he has missed in his ministrations, when actually it is a result of Athos’ night time pacing. “The Château d’Évrecy, I suppose,” Athos says, hoping it might be the end to it. “Here,” he takes the rabbit and the knife from Porthos, who reaches forward for a moment, as though he thinks Athos can’t do it, shouldn’t do it. Perhaps he thinks the sight of blood, of skin and muscle and all the things inside a body will make him think back to the Château, to the things done or threatened to him. But neither Porthos or Aramis know what the inside of Athos’ mind really looks like these days: it feels full and wild and raging but the sense, the awful truth, is like a rabid dog locked in another room. The banging sound it makes as it throws itself against the door makes his eye twitch sometimes but his limbs are filled with an agitated energy that makes it easy to move along, to not let it in. There have been a few nights when circumstances have meant he’s had no privacy to take the Pervitin, and those nights have been so awful that Athos knows he has no choice but to swallow one of those pills as soon as he gets the chance. His dreams - the ones not death-dark and leaden with the drug - are still filled with a horrible amalgamation of Anne and Meindl, like they are waiting behind his eyelids for him every night. Their hands are still soft and forgiving, still touch him in a way that feels like a blessing. And it’s bad enough when he thinks of Anne like this but to put Meindl there too feels like an act so depraved and unforgivable and makes him want to vomit himself clean. But when he takes the Pervitin…nothing. But now he’s thought about it, fuck, he’s thought about him, he’s slowed down long enough, and Athos can feel those pills waiting inside the little tube, in the package, in the crate, in the barn. He can feel them and he wants them to wash away Meindl, and he is filled suddenly with a rage so complete and consuming that he lifts the rabbit high and >yanks the skin so hard he pulls the whole carcass in two. “Jesus Christ!” Porthos laughs, and it punctures Athos’ rage like a nail through a tyre. “What did the poor bastard ever do to you?!” Athos’ eyes dart to meet Porthos once. And then he bends double, and vomits all over his boots. * It was Aramis who came to them with the plan. Without d’Artagnan and his contact they had had few whispers of movements or exercises they could raid or blow up or sabotage in one way or another, and they’re all feeling the inaction leaden in their muscles. But Aramis has heard, through some mutterings in town, that the council building at the end of Rue Félicie Charles has become temporarily in possession of all of the census files for the Calvados department when the roof of the records building in Caen had begun to leak this past spring. ”So…” Porthos asks, confused. “So it has names and addresses of every child who’s going to leave school this year.” “And be old enough to be sent for compulsory labour service in Germany,” Athos finishes. “Oh,” Porthos says, face darkening. “Can we blow it up please?” “Maybe more of a gentle…conflagration,” Aramis says. “Just a bit…fire-y,” Porthos agrees. “The odd flame or two, in the right place, at the right time,” nods Aramis. * It shouldn’t be a difficult operation, really. They are expecting a couple of bored German guards, maybe a dog. The Germans seem to be labouring under the false impression that the Resistance craves only pitched battle, huge explosions, dramatic altercations. In reality the majority of the resistance in France is small, a battle of attrition, a subtle disrespect or an irksome delay. For instance, they had once put itching powder into bins at a local laundry frequented by German troops, until an entire company of soldiers were scratching their skin raw. Across France people signposts are swapped or mysteriously felled, wires cut. Not enough to even deserve retaliation, most of the time. Their work tonight is one such act: they will make it look like a faulty gas line or a spark from an old electric cable. It will slow down rather than stop the Germans, but it will buy some time for a thousand or so young people. They wait until nightfall and approach the tall building from the scrubby field behind, keeping low. It is the perfect night: the wind worrying at the trees that line the streets and covering any sound they might make, the weather bleak enough to keep the civilians tucked up inside and the soldiers hurrying about their tasks. There is a door at the side of the building. Porthos hunkers low, a dark shape that twitches just slightly as he picks at the lock. It resists him for only a minute before the door sighs open and the three men slide through into the waiting darkness. There is a guard sat in a pool of light at the desk by the front door. Presumably at some point he will set aside the magazine he is leafing idly through and make his rounds along the darkened corridors, but for now it takes barely anything for Aramis and Porthos to slip soundless up the stairs, having removed their boots and socks to dampen their footfalls along long municipal hallways and staircases. Athos jitters for just a moment at the thought of being shot without his boots on, but the idea of it slips like a leaf downstream in his mind. It is the ghost of a kind of shame or fear that the old Athos might have been concerned with. He keeps watch in the shadows of the doorway and makes sure that his gun is out, loaded, safety off, held hidden behind his right thigh. A few moments pass, or perhaps it is hours. Athos finds he is grinding his teeth very hard, and wonders for one mad moment if the German can hear the sound of it when the guards looks up from his magazine and looks around. But he doesn’t not spot Athos, and rubs at his neck yawning, and goes back to his reading. The effort to stay still is almost too much for Athos. He can feel every single muscle in his body, lithe and tensed and screaming to move. The Pervitin tickles through him, singing to him. It crooks his finger in a slight rustle and Athos stops breathing for a moment. The building intensity in his body is like an on-coming orgasm. He grinds his teeth again, wouldn’t be surprised - if he let his hand wander - to find himself half hard in his trousers. He swallows around a dry mouth and blinks to clear his vision. There. Between one blink and another. Standing beside the guard’s desk. Athos is perhaps twenty feet away but could see even in the darkened hall that Meindl is here. Meindl. He cannot be. Meindl is surely back in the Chateau d’Evrecy, siting across a table from some other poor bastard, asking soft questions and deciding when the pain comes or halts or ends with the full stop of death. But Meindl - here, now - looks at Athos, and a smile spreads like a dawning across his mouth, easy, sick. Athos stutters a cry and the guard looks up, scrabbling for his gun. Before Athos knows what he’s doing he has stepped out from the shadows around the door, his gun lax in his hand. The soldier lifts his pistol and shoots, the bullet scratches a line across Athos’ cheek and still he cannot move. And then he hears a shot from upstairs and the guard slams backwards and topples the chair behind him, disappearing from sight. Athos feels the mad zip of his eyes back and forth, but Meindl is not - was never - there. There is a confusion of noise as Porthos and Aramis give up on stealth and fly down the stairs. A shout comes from another room and a door springs open, another German darting out and straight into Porthos. “Go!” Aramis shouts, fisting a hand in Athos’ shirt and dragging him towards the back door. In his wake Athos can smell a ghost of smoke, and as he stumbles out into the night he catches sight of a faint orange glow beginning to bloom from an upstairs window. They run, bare-footed, scrabbling through the darkened fields and along ditches filled with black mud, until they are outside Serge’s farm. Aramis stops to dump his armful of boots to the ground, and he and Athos sit panting, pulling numbed and muddy feet into their boots and tying threadbare laces. It’s only now Athos sees that Porthos has dragged the German soldier with them. The big man scowls and pushes the soldier at Athos so that he can lace up his own boots. “Here,” Porthos spits, “Clean up your mess.” Athos’ brain feels like it’s vibrating in his skull. “And while we’re at it, what the fuck was that?” Porthos asks. Athos looks at Porthos, tongue huge and numb. “You just stood there,” Aramis says, quietly, and then seems to draw himself in. “It’s my fault. You’re not ready. I should have known, I’m sorry.” He turns to Porthos, “I’m sorry Porthos.” Aramis’ seemingly infinite well of mercy, his need to bear responsibilty fills Athos’ mouth like bile. The German soldier shivers in his grasp. “Bitte,” he pleads. He is young. Athos pushes him away with deadened hands. They cannot let him go now that he knows of them. He’s likely to have very little if any useful information for them, and the thought of interrogating the soldier makes everything in Athos recoil. Clean up your mess, Porthos had said, but Athos just stands, staring at the pleading soldier. A gunshot claps through the storm-hung night, and Athos flinches. Aramis has put the gun away before the German even hits the ground. He did it so quickly, so matter of factly. Did he even need to aim, Athos thinks? Something dark and oily moves like a fish in Athos’ chest. He nearly got them killed. He nearly got them killed and he couldn’t even do what he needed to do, had to make Aramis do it. Porthos huffs once, and disappears around the corner of the barn to find shovels. While he is gone - no more than a minute or two really - Aramis sighs and apologises quietly. His eyes are very kind. Athos thinks that he might throw up. While the others are digging, Athos searches the dead man’s pockets for anything of use. Inside the jacket he finds a photo of a woman in a neat blouse, a smile just beginning to blur at her lips. With it is a letter that Athos will not read, and a scrap of linen embroidered with tiny blue flowers. It is undeniably a piece of baby blanket. Carefully he wraps the photo and the letter in the cloth and tucks them back into the dead man’s chest pocket. Aramis and Porthos are busy hefting earth away from the grave, so Athos can take a moment to slip away with a mutter about fetching their canteens. He comes back with the water a few minutes later, and returns to searching the German’s pockets - finds an unused bandage, a pack of something that might be sulfa powder, a couple of syrettes of morphine. It’s barely anything to slip the last of the tins of Pervitin pills into the dead man’s uniform. His hands are very steady. Athos forces his mind up into the sky, up somewhere with the rushing of leaves in the wind-shaken canopy of beech trees he can hear in the darkness. They heft the man’s body into the hole and cover it quickly with the earth. Porthos had even taken time to cut the top couple of inches of soil out in pieces so that once the grave is filled and the turf put back you could barely tell what was underneath. Porthos claps Athos once on the back as they walk away, as if in apology, as if he understands anything that Athos has done or thinks or is, now. He cannot dig up the pills, they are gone. He won’t begin to feel any kind of withdrawal for some hours in all likeliness - and he has no fucking idea what shape or form that might take, for how long, how bad - but Athos could very well stay silent on the matter and buy himself a few hours of peace, to gather his thoughts if nothing else. But he doesn’t, because his muscles are still achingly tense, and he feels that same awful, glorious coil of deep wanting inside his belly and he craves nothing more in this moment than to feel something to answer that, to meet that terrible need. Athos walks into the barn and says, calmly and clearly, “I have been taking pills, from the German medical supplies. I have been taking them since you came back with them.” He looks ahead, his chin raised almost in a challenge. He knows that his voice has taken on that imperious tone, that it will invite their ire. Porthos frowns and quirks his head to the side in confusion. “What?” Aramis just looks at Athos, holding his gaze for a moment before he crosses the room to where the medical supplies are stored. Athos watches as the other man takes out the hidden crates, opens the empty Pervitin boxes that Athos had carefully replaced each time he had raided their contents. Aramis pauses a moment. He looks at Athos, face unreadable, then turns back to the crate and begins to check that their morphine supplies have not been similarly diminished. “I don’t understand,” Porthos says, and then, “Fucking hell I’m tired of not understanding you bastards.” “I have been taking pills, Porthos, in secret. Every time you were out. Every night while you slept. Once I took them I couldn’t stop. I needed them. I need them still. I buried them with the German.” “What did they do?” Aramis asks, standing up. His voice is curiously flat. Athos won’t look away. He imagines Aramis’ hand darting for his gun, the searing moment as the bullet parts the skin and bone between his eyes just as it did with the German soldier not that long ago. He is hot with the anticipation of it. “They kept me awake, and then when I slept I slept hard. Dreamless.” It’s so easy, just to say it all. “They made me feel strong,” he goes on. “As if I could do anything. Untouchable.” “What else?” Athos swallows drily. His body thrums, heady, like he could explode. He wonders if Aramis knows that he is giving Athos exactly what he needs, if Aramis knows just what his steady gaze is doing to him. Is he playing along? Does he know? The thought that he might quickens low and delicious in Athos’ belly. “Hot. Feverish. As if my heart would burst out of my chest.” Athos feels as though he is standing in front of them and undoing his shirt, one flick of button at time. Stripping his shirt, his trousers, his undergarments. Digging fingernails into skin and peeling it back, cracking open his ribs so that they can see all the sawdust and all the dry and dead things inside him. God he could orgasm from the thought alone, he is so ruined, so grotesque. “What else.” It is no longer a question but an order. “Aramis,” Porthos says quietly, looking between the two warily, but Athos feels the pleasure burst a smile across his face. “Happy,” Athos answers. “What else.” Something cold and hard has crept into Aramis’ voice now. It is cruel. He is exposing Athos. It is exactly what Athos wants. He shivers with the need for them to lay their hands on him, to hurt him. “Angry,” Athos says. “Furious. Like I wanted to kill, fuck, tear it all apart. I saw things. Ghosts. Heard things that weren’t there. I jeopardised the mission. I didn’t care if I died. I didn’t care if you died. I don’t care.” “It’s alright,” Porthos bursts out as though he cannot bear to hear more. “We forgive you.” He crosses the room in three quick strides and puts his hand on Athos’ shoulder, but Athos grabs it and moves it up to his throat, presses hard. The span of Porthos’ wide palm, his strong fingers burns across his skin and Athos shivers with pleasure, eyelashes fluttering closed against the gauntness of his cheekbones. He lifts his chin higher, bares his throat, an invitation. “Yes. Please,” Athos whispers. Porthos tugs his hand away as if he has been burned. “Fuck…” he spits out. “Take his gun,” Aramis tells Porthos, and Athos lets him. * Athos sleeps, on and off, for the next two days. Aramis and Porthos watch him constantly, on shifts. They will not let him near a gun or a blade. They take his belt and the laces from his boots. The despair comes almost immediately, and when he is not sleeping Athos is lying shivering in the bed, freezing cold but pushing stubbornly at the heat of tears that sit behind his eyes. He will not cry. Aramis feels for his temperature regularly, brings water, tries to coax him to eat a little, but Athos soon begins to feel his stomach cramp and vomits until he brings up nothing but bile and blood. Otherwise they don’t speak to him, and Athos doesn’t know if he’s grateful for that or not. Meindl comes, a lot, sits at the other end of the room and smiles kindly at him. Athos lies wide eyed and shakes his head compulsively. “No no no no no no please no fuck fuck please…” He doesn’t know if he’s asking Meindl to go or to stay, to leave him alone or put his hands on him or all of it. Everything, at once, and in doing so consume Athos utterly. Sometimes it is not Meindl but Anne. Athos screws shut his eyes and shakes until he hears the cool whisper of her leaving. One night he wakes gasping from a dream so strange and so vivid that the cool light of approaching dawn wipes it instantly from his brain, and he can only lie there sweat-prickled and wild. Aramis sits propped against the wall beside his bed, eyes closed, the long vigils taking their toll, so Athos is able to shuffle past him, past Porthos who is splayed out on a cot nearby, and out to the field where they rush to find him ten minutes later. His fingernails are ragged and torn from where he claws at the ground, at the grave. He wants the pills. He wants the suffocating earth, to stretch himself beside the dead soldier and lie blissfully still for once. But Athos cannot stay still. They pull him - shushing, soothing noises - back into the barn, but he is twitching too much for Aramis to do anything for his bleeding fingers other than to pour a little water over them, a meagre attempt to wash away the filth of him
----- CHAPTER BREAK -----
At last, Athos is sleeping more peacefully. Aramis puts a hand to lay against his forehead and feels the other man flinch away from his touch, but his skin at least is free of the clamminess of fevered sweat. It’s a relief, almost, to see Athos pull away from him: for the last week or so, since his confession in the barn, Athos had pushed himself forcefully against any touch offered him, chasing some sort of violence at their hands. Aramis has spent sleepless nights scanning the barn for anything that Athos could use to hurt himself, but really he knows that the other man wouldn’t do that. If he wanted to he would have already. It’s Athos’ desire for them to hurt him that sits horribly in the pit of Aramis’ stomach, compounded by the way his own muscles quirk and tic. Athos wants Aramis to hurt him, and Aramis wants nothing more than to smash his fist into the other man’s face, find all the soft and open places and hit, hard, make Athos see how furious he is with him.He won’t of course. So he goes outside and slams his knuckles dumbly into the gnarled trunk of an old oak tree.“Well that’s a bit fucking stupid,” Porthos says, walking up to him. “Please don’t tell me I’m living with two masochists, now.”Aramis scowls and cradles his sore fist. He doesn’t think he’s broken it. “Feel better?” Porthos asks.“Actually, yes,” Aramis says with dull surprise, feeling the anger ebbbing slowly with the pulsing ache in his hand. “And you know, experiencing pain has never really been a turn on for me.”“You can’t be angry with him,” Porthos says, offering Aramis a cigarette. Aramis takes it and replies sulkily, “I fucking well can.”Porthos raises an eyebrow in a scolding sort of way, and Aramis sighs. “I know, Porthos,” he takes a deep drag of the cloying smoke, scuffs the toe of his boot into the dirt and dead leaves under the tree. “Now, if I had a willing woman around here I wouldn’t have to go around letting everything out by punching trees.”Porthos frowns, “You’ve always got a woman somewhere, and besides if it’s violence you need to get out it’s better you’re aggressive with the tree.”“Oh I wouldn’t be like that with a woman,” Aramis says, “Unless of course she wanted me to.” He sighs. “It can be nice, if everyone is willing, and safe, you know.”Porthos looks askance for a moment. “I don’t mean…hitting, or anything,” Aramis soothes, “Just…a little bit of…dominance,” he says, rolling the word around on his tongue. “Control. Of course, the opposite can be quite lovely too, at times.”Porthos rolls his shoulders, uneasily. “Well,” he says carefully, “I suppose we have to blow off steam somehow. Like a pressure engine. Goes boom if you don’t have a valve somewhere.””We all need valves, somewhere,” Aramis agrees, face like a saint.Porthos chuckles. “What about you, Porthos? How do you let off steam? Do you punch poor innocent trees? Do you have a woman somewhere? Or…not a woman?” Aramis wiggles his eyebrows suggestively and Porthos almost chokes on his cigarette. “I do not have an anyone, anywhere,” Porthos says. Aramis has heard about Alice, the agent waiting somewhere in London for his wireless transmissions. He wonders if Porthos thinks of her often - thinks of her when he needs to…blow off steam. ”You have me,” Aramis says, easily. He feels the directness in his words, feels curiously sure in the way his gaze lies steady and unblinking at the other man. Porthos just stares at him, still as the broad tree trunk at his back. The moment warps and hums like a mirage. And then Aramis smiles, and sets off back to the barn.”Thank you for the cigarette, mon ami,” he says to Porthos over his shoulder. “I promise not to blow off steam with anyone or anything, unless they are sane, safe, and ask me very, very nicely.””Which a tree cannot do,” Porthos calls.”Which, of course, a tree cannot do,” Aramis agrees. When he reaches the barn door he chances a glance backwards, sees Porthos standing very straight and very still, with the palm of his hand wide and splayed against the spot on the tree trunk that Aramis had hit.
----- CHAPTER BREAK -----
Please,” d’Artagnan said, his voice shaking slightly. Constance cannot tell if it is is the rain, his wet clothes, or something else. He has a look in his eyes that’s half-wild and desperate in a way that frightens her. She clucks and shakes her head to dispel the wrongness, tries to pull herself back into something more sure. “Wait here,” she says, and closes the door abruptly in his face. Constance doesn’t know why she does this because there is nothing really for her to organise, and she is alone in the house. She uses the small moment to lean her forehead against the reassuring solidity of the door with a small thunk, and pulls in a deep and steadying breath. When she reopens the door d’Artagnan has the mournful look of a kicked and half-drowned dog: the rain has plastered his dark hair to his face and his eyes are very wide. “I thought you wouldn’t come back,” he says, plaintive. “Oh, I closed the door for all of thirty seconds,” Constance mutters, grabbing him by the sodden shoulder and pulling him inside. She’s only let him in the house once before, when they were still almost strangers to each other. Since then it’s been the odd, fleeting stroll in the woods where they hold hands and pretend to be lovers in case a patrol comes by. But the things she whispers in his ear - troop movements and rumours and which top-brass Nazi is coming to dinner tonight - are regrettably un-romantic. Once he even had to press her up against the trunk of a broad old beech tree, every part of her body that touched his feeling like it was shot through with an electric current as a truck-full of jeering soldiers rumbled past. Her hands - one on the breadth of his shoulder, one gripped softly into the hair at the back of his head - and his hands - one pressing hard into the meat of her thigh, the other high enough on her waist for the edge of his thumb to graze her breast - is a memory that has kept Constance awake in the small hours of the night more often than she cares to admit to herself. She will lie there frowning, with Jacques snoring next to her, and press her fingertips into the mattress as hard as she can to keep her hands from wandering between her legs at the sheer memory. D’Artagnan has never met her husband which is probably a good thing. Their wedding photo sits on the mantelpiece over the old fireplace, with its huge kitchen range set into where a fire would once have sat. In it Constance and Jacques Bonacieux are stepping over the threshold of a church, tiny white rose petal confetti caught like smudges on the camera lens. Neither of them look particularly happy, and there is something mean and small about Jacques that Constance is embarrassed of. “Where is he?” d’Artagnan asks as Constance sits him down in a chair beside the stove. “Him,” he says, quirking his head towards the photograph. Constance’s feels her mouth go into a tight little line. “At the factory. He’s there a lot these days.” “Let’s just hope the British bomb it soon then eh?” d’Artagnan says, darkly. “Don’t say that,” Constance replies, frowning. She has never told him, but she knows that d’Artagnan understands that while she does not love her husband - while she hates his collaboration with the invading forces so much that she is more than willing to help the Resistance - there is some invisible line inside her that she cannot bring herself to cross. Constance cannot say she knows its exact location, the size and shape of it, but she bumps blindly up against it sometimes, bruises herself like walking hard into a chair in the dark, and it hurts just as much.Jacques had hit her once. She’d told d’Artagnan out of the blue one day, as they walked through the rustling quiet of the woods outside town. Jacques had hit her so hard she’d fallen down and passed out, and all she could think later was how she didn’t think he had it in him. The weaseling pride and anger was not a surprise to her, but her misdeed - referring to the Nazi officer who had just left the hospitality of their dinner table as a “stupid prick” - was. It was then she really saw Bonacieux for the first time, saw the vulture-like quality to him: not able to make the kill but more than happy to take any leftovers for himself. “Why are you here, d’Artagnan?” She asks, bluntly. D’Artagnan sighs, and seems to crumble. “Because I have nowhere else to go. Because I’ve broken everything.” Constance wonders suddenly if he might cry and the thought is alarming and enticing all at once. She’s never seen a man cry before. She doesn’t think it would weaken him in her eyes - rather the opposite, because she suspects that the honesty of it would be more erotic than anything else her life has presented her with so far - but she pushes the curious softening in her belly away and thinks instead of fingers jammed into the mattress, and rose petal confetti, and this fucking war. Constance busies herself at the stove while d’Artagnan explains, his voice faltering here and there “This man had been tortured?” “Yes,” d’Artagnan answers. “I don’t know what they did to him, but he didn’t look good.” “And he was unarmed, in bed. And you were going to shoot him?” Constance doesn’t turn around, but her back feels like a wall towards d’Artagnan and she knows he understands that this moment could hinge one way or another. If he lies to me now I’ll tell him to leave and never come back, she says to herself. “I wanted to,” d’Artagnan says, after a moment, and his voice is very steady and very serious. It is conspicuously not an answer to her question, which itself says a lot, and it is also very plainly the truth. She sighs, and bites her tongue to stop herself from saying more as she flips a crepe in the pan. “Is that meat?” D’Artagnan asks suddenly, his voice high with surprise. “Just mutton,” Constance says, wiping her hands on a dishcloth. D’Artagnan is staring at the plate she put in front of him: it’s just a crepe with some cabbage and a little meat and onions, but it steams enticingly and he is looking at it with eyes as wide as saucers. “Mutton,” d’Artagnan repeats, in something like wonder. He seems to draw himself upwards for a moment, and Constance is struck suddenly by how tall he is, and how young he looks. “We farmed sheep. Back in Lupiac.” He’s never really spoken about home. In fact, Constance realises, they have never spoken of anything other than the war. It feels all of as sudden as if someone if pouring a jug of cold water into her head, trickling down her insides to her toes, the sadness of it. Constance does not really know d’Artagnan. He could be anyone. Why has she invited him into her home? Why has she, so quickly, moved towards him? Because that’s what it is, she realises: it’s like she’s growing towards him as a plant moves towards the light. There is a part of her - a very robust part - that says you know him. You’ve always known him. “I can’t imagine you as a sheep farmer,” she says. It’s meant to come out with a note of levity, but it sounds hollow even to her ears. “Hmm,” d’Artagnan says, still staring at the plate. “I enjoyed it, mostly. I hated the smell of the wool though. Lanolin, you know? It stinks. But it was just me and my father most days and…” he trails off, uncertain. They look at each other across the space of the kitchen. The rain throws itself at the window and there is a clock ticking somewhere, but everything feels heavy and still, except for something - a note, a glimmer, like a little silken thread of spiderweb on the breeze between them - that is so incredibly fragile that Constance feels if she breathes too loud it might blow it away. “What about you? What did you do, before the war?” He asks. “I married Bonacieux.” “Before that,” he urges, and there is something naked, yearning in his eyes. “I…played music. Piano, and violin. I was going to study at a conservatoire in Paris.” He smiles, a little sad, a brief and fluttering thing. “I’d love to hear you play, some day.” “Some day.” “I thought I’d grow old and die a farmer. And then the war came,” D’Artagnan says. And he looks at her, and the depth of his eyes, the honesty there is startling. “I’m glad it did.” “Is that bad?” He asks, in almost a whisper. “I’ve never felt more alive,” Constance says, and it’s like an offering for him. He nods once, sharp as gunshot, and it seems to let the air out of the moment. She feels it sinking around them and sits down heavily in the chair across from d’Artagnan at the table. He shakes himself slightly, takes a breath. “Where did you even get it? The meat?” “Jacques is - my husband is… well the Germans give him extra food rations.” D’Artagnan’s eyebrows go up. “Well, doesn’t cowardice pay well?” She knows the words aren’t aimed at her so cares little for the barbs in them. He picks up his knife and fork and sets to work. “I can’t remember the last time I even saw meat, so I’m more than happy to eat your traitor husband’s ration.” “It sticks in my throat,” Constance says, miserably. And it really does, like a hot lump of tears that she cannot swallow around. And before she even knows it d’Artganan has set down his fork and is reaching over. He lays his palm softly against the back of her hand where it rests on the table, and her eyes are pulled to his like a magnet. “You are not altered by him,” he says, simply. “You are not your husband.” “I feel filthy,” she whispers, and though she hasn’t allowed herself to truly think it until now she knows it for the truth. Jacques Bonacieux had seen the wind change, and changed right alongside it with an ease that was frankly astounding. It felt like the first troops had barely marched into Normandy before Jacques had offered up his factory - a family business, making small and boring parts for cars - up to the Nazis. They’d happily taken it and it now made small and boring parts for German tanks. And the Bonaciex’s dined with SS officers and drank champagne and ate proper meat, and Constance felt little pieces of her soul dying every day. In order to survive she had made herself small and dumb, playing at vacant and pretty because anything else would either go unnoticed or punished. But the effect of this was that the conversation had begun to flow around her like water, and Constance had begun to listen. The more stupid they thought her the more careless they became. Does it make it easier? To bite her tongue, or bear the touch of her husband - if she can only keep reminding herself that she will pass on every little crumb to d’Artagnan and the Resistance? Maybe. Maybe not. Either way it’s all that she can be. But now it seems that d’Artagnan has alienated himself from his Resistance contacts. He has finished eating and is staring at her. When their eyes meet for a moment his gaze darts up, away to the side, and his mouth shapes as if he is trying to think of something to say. My God, he’s beautiful. Constance presses her fingertips into her thighs hard enough to bruise, but even that sensation is too close to something like wanting. She draws in a deep breath. “I’ll get you some blankets,” she says, standing and smoothing a slight wrinkle in the front of her housedress. “You can sleep in the garden shed.” * “I was terribly hungry, I am sorry,” Constance says again. Jacques is still sulking that there was no meat left for his dinner when he came home, at almost midnight and stinking of cigarette smoke and alcohol, listing slightly. He curls a lip at her and sits down heavily on the edge of the bed. “Well?” He says, gesturing at his feet. Constance frowns, confused. “My shoes, woman. Unlace them.” Even in his slightly drunken state there is a calculation in Jacques’ eyes. In the dim light of the bedroom reading lamp they look tepid as a cup of stale coffee, and Constance has to look away, because he is regarding her in such a calculated way as if this is some kind of test. She gets to her knees and begins picking at the damp laces of his shoes. “They’ll need polishing in the morning,” Jacques says, lightly, “And I’m leaving early, so best make sure you’re up earlier. No sleeping in tomorrow morning, lazy bones!” Constance smiles, dully. “I have a gift for you, when you’re done,” her husband says, and there’s that calculated note again, “Over on the bureau.” Constance takes Jacques shoes off and gets to her feet, placing them over beside the armoire. On the bureau is a package wrapped in brown paper. “You needn’t have.” “Yes,” agrees Jacques, “But I wanted to.” Constance’s fingers are curiously a little numb as she pulls gently at the string and the brown paper, careful not to let it rip. She forces herself not to look at what’s inside until she has neatly folded the paper and string to use again, but she can tell by the weight and shape of it that it’s a book. Still, it does surprise her a little. “Oh,” she says. “You’re welcome...” There is a leading note in her husband’s voice. “Thank you. Goodness. ‘Ma Doctrine’,” she reads. “The title loses a little in translation from the original German,” Jacques supplies, loosening his tie and shrugging out of his jacket. He lets them both crumple to the floor for Constance to pick up and put away. “But it has some interesting ideas. Many are beyond your sphere, but some might even be relevant to you. About the role of women, that sort of thing, you know. And you can always ask me, if there are parts you don’t understand,” he offers, graciously. “Hmm,” Constance says, carefully, “The Fuhrer certainly does have a lot of big ideas.” “Yes,” Jacques agrees, as Constance brings him his slippers and pyjamas, and puts away his discarded clothes. “He’ll clear up all of this …unpleasantness in no time.” It takes a very real effort, but Constance works hard to let her husband’s voice become a droning buzz and - rather less of an effort - thinks instead of the way d’Artagnan’s hand had felt laid on hers at the kitchen table. * It’s late the following afternoon before Constance has the time to go to the shed at the bottom of the garden, half-hidden beneath the droop of an old willow tree. The day has been mild and dry, though the ground is wet and sucking with mud from last night’s rain as she walks down the garden path, carrying a small basket of what she hopes looks like odds and ends to be stored in the shed. The door sticks a little as she opens it. The sight that greets her almost makes her laugh out loud: d’Artagnan is caught, eyes wide, his hair slightly disheveled. “I’m sorry,” he says, “I was….er…quite bored.” He has tidied and reorganised the neglected shed and its contents, stacking old plant pots and gathering and cleaning tools and varied nails and screws that have been scattered around. “Mise en place not just in the kitchen, my mother always said.” “Well thank you, Madame d’Artagnan,” Constance says, and feels the smile cracking across her face like thawing ice. The sensation is so unfamiliar it’s almost painful, but it sets alight a similar expression on d’Artagnan’s face and then they are standing there just grinning at each other stupidly for what feels like ages, before Constance shuffles her feet and looks away. “Anything else you need me to tidy? Polish? I could mow the lawn?” D’Artagnan offers. “Plenty, and that would be wonderful, but I rather think Jacques would notice.” “I don’t,” d’Artagnan says, plainly, “I think he’s blind. And the stupidest man in France, too.” And they’re staring at each other again, and there’s that curious weight to the air around them again. No, Constance thinks. No. “You can’t just stay here the whole time, d’Artagnan,” she says, a little too brusquely, a little unkindly. “It’s not like the Nazis are looking for you. They don’t know you’re with the Resistance.” “Well…I’m an out-of-towner, and I’m not sure my papers would hold up under a proper inspection,” d’Artagnan says, scratching awkwardly at his head and conspicuously looking at anywhere but Constance. “Well that might have been relevant information, oh, a few months ago!” Constance says, appalled. “I’m sorry! I thought you wouldn’t even speak to me if I…” “Oh never mind,” Constance says peevishly, “So you’re expecting to spend the rest of the war - however long that might be - in my garden shed then?” “No! But I just…I don’t really know where else to go.” “Oh…give me your papers,” she says, huffing and holding out her hand, “I might know someone who can help.” * Constance stands at the side of the road for some time, pretending to be looking at a stall of sad looking vegetables - whatever is left after the Nazis pick their way through the best - and inspecting her ration book. She is beginning to think that the blonde woman sitting at a table outside the cafe across the street is set to be there all day, when she stands and takes a couple of coins from her pocketbook and places them on the table. A moment of taking a cigarette from a case in her jacket and lighting it - effortless, elegant - and the woman begins to walk down the street. Constance’s heart leaps in her throat. She crosses the road and stoops as if to pick something up under the table just vacated by the woman. “Excuse me, mademoiselle,” she calls, “Excuse me!” The blonde woman turns, and she is so exquisite in the mild May afternoon: her hair is curled at the nape of her neck in a way that is somehow both effortless and artless, the cool eue-de-nil blue-green of her blouse, the light linen slacks belted at her slim waist. “Mademoiselle de Larroque?” Constance says, clearing her throat, suddenly breathless, “I think you dropped this.” She holds out a paper. It’s last week’s grocery list. Constance knows that the other woman can see the careless scrawl in Constance’s hand, the things Jacques had requested for dinner and her notes of how many ration tokens each item would cost. “Oh, thank you,” the woman says, easily, though her gaze is coolly assessing and Constance feels suddenly as if she has walked out of the house without her clothes on this morning. She takes the paper, and places it in her pocket. “Please, call me Ninon…?” “Constance. Bonacieux,” Constance says, trying to keep her voice steady. Ninon smiles, like the dawning of a slow, cool morning. “I’m walking to the river, if you’d like to join me, Madame Bonacieux? Such a beautiful afternoon.” They walk for a little, idly, until they reach the path that branches down to the old mill and the river. The trees cast cool strobing shadows on them as they walk. “Bonacieux,” Ninon says, taking a pull of her cigarette, “Your husband owns the factory outside of town? I hear he is kept quite busy these days.” “He does. He is,” Constance replies, carefully. She is suddenly, stupidly aware that her connection to Jacques might close doors with this woman, and the thought sends a push of panic through her. If Constance plays this very carefully and does not reveal anything unless Ninon gives her some sort of suggestion, out-loud, that she is part of the Resistance, the worst that can happen is that Ninon will be very confused. The trouble is that Constance suspects she is not very good at these kinds of acts of subterfuge. (A small voice inside her says that she is, actually, that she has been passing information to the Resistance through d’Artagnan for some time and has been living a whole life of a lie with her husband for much longer. She shakes herself. Screws her courage to the sticking place.) When they reach the little bridge over the rushing slip of water they stop, and Ninon leans against the warmed stone. “I need your help,” Constance says. “What help could the wife of Monsieur Bonacieux possibly need?” Ninon raises an eyebrow. “And surely there are plenty of…other places that she could get help, should she need it?” Constance sighs heavily, frowning. She is suddenly very tired, and feels her courage coming thoroughly unstuck. “Oh, God you’re good,” she says bitterly, “And I’m awful at this.” Both of Nixon’s perfectly arched eyebrows raise now. ”I am not my husband,” Constance says, firmly, remembering d’Artagnan’s words from last night. She tries to pull a little of his certainty into herself. “He does not speak for me. And I have a friend who needs help.” “And what makes you think that I can help?” Ninon’s voice is steel now, and it takes a lot of effort for Constance to stop from shying away. “I haven’t heard anything, if that’s what you’re asking,” Constance says, “You’re safe. It’s just that…” she draws in a deep breath, “You’re very clever. And educated. And…outspoken. If anyone is…if anyone can help, then I think it might be you.” “How do I know this isn’t some sort of trap?” Ninon asks, directly. “I am not my husband,” Constance says, again, because it’s all she can say. “No,” Ninon says after a moment, “I don’t believe you are.” So Constance takes d’Artagnan’s papers out of her purse and hands them to Ninon. The other woman looks around, a darting glance, before she drops her cigarette, stubs it out with the toe of her shoe and takes the papers. Her face stills. “This is your friend?” Constance nods, trying not to blush like some sort of schoolgirl. “Hmm. I know him,” Ninon says, and a rush of relief - tinged with a private kind of victory - goes through Constance, because she was right in her assessment that this woman would somehow be involved with the Resistance. “These papers are…” “Not good forgeries,” Constance finishes, “Even I know that.” “Hmm,” Ninon agrees, and slides the papers into the breast pocket of her jacket, “They don’t have the new stamp on them, to start.” She looks out at the old, crumbling mill. “There’s a loose stone in the wall there, about a handspan from the edge, two feet or so off the ground. Check it on Wednesday morning.” Constance walks back through the village alone after parting with Ninon, and after the thrill of the interaction she feels as though she is floating. Her heart jumps madly and it takes all of her strength to keep the wild smile from cracking across her face. It’s only when she walks down a side street - a short-cut back to the Bonacieux house - that she comes back into her body with a painful thud. There is a commotion up ahead on the street: soldiers are milling around, there is shouting, and people are streaming in and out of a tall house. It is the Bachelard house. She sees Monsieur Bachelard struggling, flanked by soldiers who throw him to the ground and begin to kick him savagely. Constance sucks in a breath as if to shout, but stops herself suddenly, and the shame is like a flame licking at her skin. Bachelard is crying. Bachelard is on the ground, blood from his mouth. Bachelard is in his eighties. A stange, discordant noise rings out. A large grand piano is being manhandled clumsily out of the thrown open doors, turned on its side. There are boxes and books discarded on the floor, a gilt-framed painting that looks as though a boot has gone through the canvas. As she watches someone throws a piano stool from an upper floor window and it hits the street with a splintered crash, the seat splitting open like a screaming mouth. Something white and thin drifts from it on the breeze and clings to Constance’s leg. She stoops down to pick it up and sees it is a piece of sheet music, a piano sonata. “Ah, Schubert,” a voice sighs behind her, “Beautiful. Do you play, Madame?” Constance turns to see a Nazi officer: tall, perhaps in his early fifties, good looking in a particularly German way. Inside the Bachelard house a woman begins to scream. “Please,” she hears Monsieur Bachelard say, “Pu..please. My grandaughter!” The officer smiles at Constance, serenely. After a moment Constance shoves desperately at her fear until it twitches the muscles of her face into a facsimile of an answering smile, and it is possibly the hardest thing she has ever done. The sheet music quivers just slightly in her hand, but the breeze covers the telltale movement. “Madame?” The officer prompts, “The piano? Do you play?” “Yes. Though not…not for some time,” she replies, forcing herself to look at him and not towards Bachelard. From the house there comes a single cracked gunshot and Constance startles almost out of her skin. The woman has stopped screaming, and Bachelard is making a high, thin keening sound. The officer keeps smiling pleasantly at her. She swallows, tries to calm any note of fear or shock in her voice, “We do not..we do not have a piano at home.” “Ah? You are Bonacieux’s wife, are you not?” “Yes, Monsieur.” “A shame. There is not enough music in the world, not enough beauty,” the man says, shaking his head sadly. He holds out a hand, “SS-Hauptsturmführer Meindl.” And he takes Constance’s hand, brings it to his lips, kisses it courteously. * Later that day, Jacques stands wide-eyed as two polite young Nazi soldiers maneuver the Bachelard’s piano into the Bonacieux parlour. “What…?” Constance clutches the note that accompanied the piano. It is written on thick, smooth but slightly grained card. Expensive. So that the Bonacieux house may be full of music, and yet more beauty still, it reads. Jacques snatches the card from her loose hands. “SS-Haupstumführer Meindl wishes you to play for him at dinner on Wednesday evening,” he reads, “When he will attend with his fellow officers. He hopes that his little gift may make up for the rudeness of inviting himself to dine at our home. Well. Well.” Jacques says, a pleased expression easing across his face. “Well!” And Constance walks slowly up to the bathroom, locks the door carefully, and vomits into the sink. TBC…
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D’Artagnan wonders if he might, actually, be in purgatory. Or hell? One of the two. The time slips by with nothing to show for it. He waits until dark to use the old, largely abandoned outhouse at the end of the garden, which Constance assures him no one else uses since they had a bathroom installed in the house proper. It is cold and damp and infested with spiders, but d’Artagnan doesn’t care overly. Constance brings him food and water at least once a day. Otherwise he is alone. Otherwise he is confined entirely to the four tiny, close walls of the garden shed. He hasn’t washed in a while, sniffs experimentally at his shirt under the arms, curls his lip in distaste. He will ask Constance very nicely if she might bring him a bowl of water and a cloth the next time she visits. He glares at a mouse that periodically sticks its little whiskered nose from a hole in an old hessian sack in the corner opposite him. The mouse glares back. It squeaks at him, and he sighs. “I know, I know,” he says, miserably. “I deserve it all and worse.” The mouse squeaks again, sniffs. “Of course but I can’t just go back, can I?” Squeak. “A peace offering?” d’Artagnan frowns. “What could I…I’m talking to a mouse. What could I possibly give them?” The mouse scuttles away. “Well fuck you, then,” d’Artagnan huffs, kicking out his legs and letting his head thunk back against the plant pots behind him. * When it gets dark enough D’Artagnan carefully shifts a crate of old paint cans away from the shelf in front of the window, and allows himself a sliver of a view out into the garden. If he cranes his neck he can just see the corner of the house, a square of light on the grass thrown from the window. He watches it, feeling utterly, strangely calm, his breath like a tide in and out until Jacques or Constance draws the curtain and the light is snuffed out. It’s so quiet. He’s always loved that, the stillness of the dark allowing the little nighttime noises: an owl in the distance, the ululating call of a fox, a train passing somewhere far away. If he closes his eyes and concentrates d’Artagnan wonders if he can imagine himself back in Lupiac, before the war. The silence of this little Norman town is in fact that of the swell of hill above the farmhouse, where he would sit and watch the stars come out amidst the gentle animal noises of the sheep as they settled for the night against fences and under the spreading handspan of hawthorn trees. Sometimes it feels as though it were only yesterday that he and his father crossed the demarcation line from the southern, Vichy-controlled half of France. His father had been vague about the details of their travel, but their papers were in order and Alexandre d’Artagnan had produced, from somewhere, two free-movement cards that allowed them passage across the line. “Business,” his father had said, and d’Artagnan - stupidly, blindly - had been too enthralled by the prospect of leaving Lupiac to ask any real questions. He wonders what answers would have been given if he had, if any. He has wondered many times since his father’s death if Alexandre d’Artagnan was not already somehow involved in the Resistance, or some sort of coordinated effort against the invading forces. But now d’Artagnan will never get to ask. It still hurts. Like something sharp and cruel twisted into his lungs so that his breath stutters and never seems quite enough. There is an empty space that opened up inside him when his father died, and he battles constantly with the dizzying desire to fill it with something, anything: a woman, a gun, the burn and tic of muscles pushed too hard, too fast. For a moment - with Aramis and Porthos - he had begun to feel as though that hole inside him was being filled at least. Smoothed over on top, pat down the earth, nothing to see. You would not know it to look at him, but Charles D’Artagnan is a lonely boy who has lost and lost and grown into a lonely man. The night has settled across the countryside like something weighty, moonless. A good night for sneaking about, d’Artaganan thinks, idly, and then of course he is back with them in that barn, his hand shaking against the hard planes of the gun in his hand. D’Artagnan draws in a sharp breath, and sits back down on the shed floor. The concrete is chilled beneath the fabric of his trousers and he lets it sink into him like a punishment. He doesn’t know why he couldn’t pull the trigger, after months imagining that very moment. He doesn’t think he’ll ever be able to forget the way Athos looked up at him from the bed, a look of serene acceptance on his face. “Don’t you want to live?” D’Artagnan had asked. “Don’t you want to know why I’m going to kill you?” “Not really,” Athos had said, very steadily, and d’Artagnan wasn’t sure which question he was answering. But D’Artagnan does know why he didn’t do it, though the thought frightens him and so he pretends he doesn’t: underneath that awful messy moment, for just a fraction of a second, he had spotted something almost like a mirror. He had seen himself in Athos and Aramis and Porthos, seen a future and a home and a kind of love he has been looking for his whole life, and he was dancing along some hideous, jagged edge, about to blast it all to hell. “And now I’m here,” he says out-loud into the close silence of the little shed, and tries not to cry, and fails. * Constance comes to him on Wednesday morning, and hands him a new identification card. Alexandre d’Artennes it says, which is close enough for the name to come easily to mind when asked. The photo from his old, badly-forged papers has been lifted carefully and placed on the new, better forged card with barely a mark to show for its transplanting. “You’re free,” she says, indicating the card. “Now you can go outside and if you’re stopped, well, I’m sure it’ll hold up.” He marvels at it, running his fingers across the worn and rounded edges, the slight smudge of the official-looking stamp as if some bored bureaucrat had closed the card before the ink had dried. “Incredible,” he says, “Constance, how did you…?” She seems to consider for a moment if she ought to tell him, but rolls her shoulders and says, ”Ninon. I think you know her?” D’Artagnan blinks, putting the card into his shirt pocket. “Oh. Yes. Good.” What he wants to say is she helped me even though I betrayed my cell? But perhaps Ninon doesn’t know yet, what he has done? He shifts from foot to foot, the idea of it like something hot and prickling at the back of his neck. The thought of Athos, and Aramis and Porthos just compounds the lonely awfulness of having nowhere else to go: d’Artagnan could wander out onto the main street for a coffee but it doesn’t change the fact that he has nowhere to sleep at night. “You can say no,” he says, catching her wide - god, so beautiful - blue eyes with his gaze, “But, well, can I still sleep here at night?” Her eyes widen. ”I know it’s dangerous…I don’t want to put you in danger…” ”Of course you can,” she says, smiling a little at him now, “I know you’ll continue to be careful. And it’s probably better than you getting caught sleeping rough.” D’Artagnan can’t help the grin that seems to be splitting his face in two all of a sudden. The thought of saying goodbye to her now and walking away was a yawning void behind his sternum, and to stay a little longer, so close to her, is a sudden and glorious joy. He looks away, schools his expression into something more neutral and scratches idly at his hair. “Well,” he shrugs, “That’s good. I’ve made friends with the mouse that lives in here, you know, and he’d be terribly sad to see me go.” Constance is looking away, worrying at her lip. “Constance?” He asks, “Is everything alright?” She lets out a burst of breath. “I met a Nazi officer the other day and he…well. He frightened me. And he sent me a piano.” “A…a piano? Wait, did he hurt you?” D’Artagnan asks, fiercely. “No, he was very polite. It was…unnerving. And now he and some other officers are coming to dinner tonight - thank God they’re sending over the food so I won’t have to cook for them - but…” “Just get through the evening,” d’Artagnan says. “It’s like dining with sharks.” And then her tone softens a little with worry, he can see it in her eyes, “If you go out today please come back after sundown, once they’re in the house. And be careful,” she says. “Of course,” he nods. They stare at each other - they seem to be doing a lot of that lately. The shed is so small they are forced to stand quite close. Without realising it, d’Artagnan spreads the fingers of his right hand wide, and there is a curious burning ache in them, a purposelessness, a grief. His little finger bumps up against Constance’s - small, curled loosely - and they are staring at each other, and the moment stretches languid as a sleeping cat. She lets out a small sigh of a breath, and suddenly his hands are on her, that ache gone now that they are where they are supposed to be. They don’t even have to step towards each other: Constance just collapses a little against d’Artagnan and he catches her, presses her backwards just an inch or two until her backside comes up to meet the sideboard. She casts blindly backwards and sweeps the clutter of things off the surface and he lifts her until she sits right on the very edge. “Can I kiss you…” d’Artagnan asks desperately, where his face is pressed into her neck just at the juncture of her jaw. “Yes,” she gasps, “Yes, yes…” She tastes of apples and coffee and something sweet and unidentifiable. D’Artagnan thinks he might burst into flames. He might die like this and it would be glorious. His hands find the soft warmth of her thighs under her skirt, his mouth gasps at her breasts through her blouse. Her fingers brushing against him as they undo the buttons on his trousers, the way she licks the palm of her hand broadly before wrapping her fingers around the length of him almost breaks him right there and then.Time is not a linear thing: everything is fits and starts and snapshots of beautiful coherence and wonderful blurred moments of just the impression of heat and tightness and wetness and Constance. One of her hands is clutching desperately at the hair at the nape of d’Artagnan’s neck while the other circles between her legs, where he thrusts up into her. She throws back her head and hums a high, breathless monotone and all he can say is her name, over and over between the furious pounding of his heart. And then she slams her head forward with a bitten-of-shout, almost head-butting d’Artagnan in the process, and shakes out her orgasm with a fluttering tightness that sends him over the edge too. They stay there, shaking, deadened hands clawed into hair and clothing and skin, the sweat cooling and trickling between them. Neither of them seems able to move: it’s like they’re frozen suddenly under some searchlight, as still and quiet as possible. And then a dog barks in a garden a few houses down, and they both startle, and the moment breaks. “Oh…” d’Artagnan mumbles, suddenly. “Oh…God…I’m sorry, I. Well. I finished in you. I’m sorry…” “It’s alright,” Constance says. The thought of his seed in her almost twitches him back into hardness, and d’Artagnan slides out and away with a little stuttered breath, turns to tucks himself back into his trousers. ”Um…” he says, looking up at the top shelf against the wall opposite, where he sorted and tidied jars of nails and screws just a few days ago. “Um.” He palms the back of his neck, sticky with sweat. Her hand ghosts across the small of his back as she leaves. ”Please be careful tonight, d’Artagnan,” she says. * That evening is a strange mix of moments of jolting terror, when he realises how close he is to imminent capture - interrogation, torture, the Chateau, coming out looking like Athos - and mind-numbing boredom because he is, after all, stuck in a small garden shed in the dark with nothing whatsoever to do. D’Artagnan entertains himself a while by imagining Athos and Porthos and Aramis bursting through the door to the Bonacieux house with sten guns and taking out every one of those smug, vile SS bastards currently sitting around the dining table, but after a while the thought only leaves a sick taste in the back of his mouth. He picks at a loose thread on his sweater, hums quietly, stretches his toes in his boots. He wonders, once or twice if he might like to undo the buttons of his trousers and palm himself to hardness, if just to pass the time, but he thinks that it would probably be a bad idea to do so considering he is currently hiding out right next to a house full of Nazis, doesn’t really fancy the thought of being arrested with his trousers around his ankles. Anyway, he’s not quite sure he wants to, feeling somehow as if it would erase what happened between him and Constance earlier in the day. He closes his eyes, tries to recall the noise she had made as she orgasmed and then immediately tries to forget once more as all the blood in his body seems to rush to his dick. Oh god. Constance. Just the thought of her is too beautiful and too terrible. It’s as though admitting the actual scope of what he feels would be an opening up of himself, something delicate and vulnerable that couldn’t possibly survive the life they find themselves in. And she is, after all, married. D’Artagnan groans and runs his fingers through his hair, gripping it at the roots until the sting of it calms him a little. The night stretches on and at some point d’Artagnan is sure that he must have sunk into a kind of half-sleep because he can hear music, and there is something about the notes that say unequivocally that they are being played by a hand and not on a phonograph. He can’t help himself. Carefully, he eases open the shed door, and slides noiselessly from shadow to shadow until he can work his way into the bushes nearer the house. It is dark enough for him to feel fairly certain that he won’t be spotted, but the adrenaline is still something spiked and quicksilver in his veins. From his position in the greenery he can see through the window into the warm glow of the Bonacieux parlour: there are a number of officers sat drinking whiskey from glass tumblers, eyes turned towards a corner of the room that is hidden from d’Artagnan’s sight by the angle of the window frame. It’s the piano. It’s Constance, playing the piano - d’Artagnan is sure of it. The piece is a curious one. At times it’s like a lullaby, something right and comforting and pure, before it swings loudly into some uncertain, unresolved and shadowy place. Then back it goes, flitting on tiny delicate wings like a bird. The tempo is strange: some of it is incredibly fast, the notes piling up on each other in a cascading tremulo, others slow and paced. It sounds like moonlight on water and the awful shadowed darkness between the ripples, and it makes d’Artagnan want to cry. The officers seem equally as entranced by the music. One of them is open-mouthed, his glass frozen half way to his mouth. Another - an older man with pips and stripes on his collar signifying some high rank that d’Artagnan cannot identify from the distance - is still and unblinking. As he watches the man moves a hand to touch slowly at a tear on his cheek. The music swells, building and cresting like an orgasm until it dwindles into a stillness, before crashing back in a final, furious phrase - the notes of which are thrown out with purpose, like grenades, and make the watchers jump visibly. And then the piano rings itself into a shocked and echoing silence. “Madame Bonacieux!” The senior officer calls, springing to his feet, and the others raise their glasses and call out her name and applaud. A few moments later the back door opens and Constance comes rushing out, breathless, shaking with what d’Artagnan can sense even from here is a kind of fury that seems to thrum and pulse and swallow the evening air into a ringing vacuum. “Constance!” Calls a voice from the doorway, and she stops, but does not turn around. D’Artagnan can see her chest heaving against the rust-red satin of her evening gown as her husband marches towards her and grabs her bicep roughly, turning her towards him. ”Oh!” She gasps, and her other hand comes up instinctively between them as if to protect herself before thinking better of it. Her long fingers twitch against the air, and d’Artagnan thinks suddenly of them spread across the keys of a piano, of them touching herself as he fucked her, and it’s all he can do not to go to her right now. “I just need a little air, Jacques,” he hears her say. “I should think so, after that spectacle!” Her husband hisses. “They liked it, didn’t they?” Constance shoots back. “You could at least have played them some…some Wagner or some such!” Something falls across Constance’s face, and even from the bushes d’Artagnan can see the flashing vitriol there for a moment, so unlike her usual careful composure when speaking of or to her husband. “Chopin a little too patriotic for you, Jacques?” She says, voice low and pointed like a blade. Even from a few meters away, in the dark, D’Artagnan can see the way Jacques fingers press hard around Constance’s arm. He raises his other hand as if to strike her, and shakes her again, teeth gritted. D’Artagnan feels his muscles quirk in anticipation and his vision narrow painfully just to that man’s hand, so hard around his wife’s arm she gasps with the pain of it. D’Artagnan pictures, very clearly, his own fist smashing hard into Jacques Bonacieux’s face again and again until it comes away red and dripping. “Jacques,” Constance says, softly, before d’Artagnan can throw himself out of the bushes. “I’m sorry.” Very slowly, hampered by his iron grip on her arm, she leans forward and presses her whole body against her husband, pushing her lips against his in a soft kiss. D’Artagnan wants to tear the whole world apart. ”Bonacieux?” A voice calls from inside, “More champagne, man!” Jacques pulls away from the kiss and drops Constance’s arm roughly like he’s throwing something to the ground, and Constance sways slightly at the action. “Come back within one minute or I’ll drag you back in,” he says quietly, and turns and hurries back into the house. D’Artagnan’s heart is beating so furiously he’s amazed it can’t be heard in Berlin right now. His breath is coming short and hard, and the anger is a living thing inside him. Constance stands a moment, staring out into the darkness. “Blow up the factory,” she says quite clearly, into the night. “They’re touring it next week. Raze it to the fucking ground.” Then she turns, and follows her husband back into the house. TBC