Archive of Our Own ^beta

*

When the king leads the queen away, further into the palace and their private chambers, Aramis places his hand on the hilt of his sword and keeps his eyes on the floor in front of him. There is a strange sort of ache in his stomach, for one; for another, if he looks at the Cardinal, he may not be able to control himself and his rages.

A man knows certain things. When he is in love, when a right should be wronged, when a woman needs a smile and a light joke rather than pity. A soldier knows others; the taste of blood on his lips and the sheen of it on his hands, the smell of gunpowder, the futility of battle, who the enemy is.

Aramis is man and soldier both, but the man wants blood, and the soldier knows who is responsible.

He keeps his eyes down, and tries not to think of smooth skin like velvet and the gentle curve of a breast and hip and thigh known too well to him now.

*

Aramis tries not to think about her.

His room at the garrison is spotless. His pistols, he can only clean so many times. Porthos begs off when he asks to spar for the fourth time in two days.

(He doesn’t ask Athos. Athos hasn’t stopped glaring at him for two weeks, and the others are starting to notice.)

“Got something on your mind?” Porthos asks as he settles down next to Aramis, thumbing at a splotch of mud on his wrist. Paris has been too rainy, dirt and puddles everywhere. It is a grey, ugly afternoon turning into an evening just as foul, and Aramis can’t think of anything except the sheen of sunlight in long curls, the transparency of blue silk in torchlight.

Aramis pushes up his sleeves, the grey-white fabric billowing at his elbows. “You can’t want to talk.”

“I never want to talk about anything,” Porthos agrees in that easy tone of his. “It’s always better to avoid words.”

The garrison is strangely still, as if it is the calm before a storm. Athos and D’Artagnan are with the king, a part of his protective detail. The king will allow none but the Musketeers to guard his person, and the queen’s. Somehow, Aramis has avoided placement on her detail. He isn’t quite sure how he feels about it, but he doesn’t like it most of the time.

(He thinks Athos might have something to do with it. He doesn’t know how he feels about that either.)

“But the sparring leaves me too tired for wine, and that’s a waste of time,” Porthos adds, his smile a white clever slice against his dark skin.

There are no better men than those who are his compatriots. Aramis runs a hand through his hair - she had liked his hair, the wild abandonment of it, the curls, the highlights of red under the torchlight, she had told him so with a laugh - and lets out a loose half-laugh, half-sigh. He rests his elbows on his knees, peers up at the heavy grey sky.

“Perhaps just a drink then, instead of the talk?” he asks of Porthos at last.

Porthos looks at him with those knowing dark eyes, and claps a hand on his shoulder. “A pleasure.”

Aramis drinks until he cannot remember what she smelled like – river water and trees and something sweet and spicy, how he imagines the coast of Spain – and then drinks another for good measure. He still wakes half-hard and wanting in his empty garrison bed. Paris empties into the streets at night, the wine a sour taste on his tongue, but all he sees on his ceiling is wide blue eyes and a woman who thinks him brave and strong and good, when he has never truly felt any of those things for years.

*

Athos brings it up once.

They sit astride their horses, at a distance from the king and queen as they ride through to their country estate for a week’s rest. The queen has been pale of late, the court gossips say, and cannot abide the stench of Paris in her current mood. The court turns up their noses at Spanish stamina (and lack thereof), but Aramis feels a very different sort of clench in his stomach.

With D’Artagnan and Porthos heading up the caravan, and Athos and Aramis at the back, and a litter of guards inbetween, the royal couple are as safe as can be. That doesn’t mean that Aramis is not constantly flicking his gaze from side to side and front to back. Now that she has writhed under him and whispered his name through clenched lips, her hands in his hair and on his scarred shoulders as he kissed down her belly –

“You’ll note how little of the palace you’ve seen as of late,” Athos says in that mildly parental tone of his.

“I have not noted, thank you,” Aramis says through his teeth.

Athos glances at him out of the side of his eye, mouth set firmly in a thin straight line. The darkness usually hovering about the man seems to have intensified in the last few months, ever since the witchcraft trial and the discovery of his wife’s continued existence. Aramis doesn’t blame him; it would be discomforting to have ghosts visiting and ruining your life yet again.

(He cannot think of Isabelle. He cannot.)

“Try as I have to put it from my mind’s eye, I do have to ask – why?” Athos asks, inching his horse closer to Aramis’s.

 

Aramis stares ahead, into thick forests just on the edge of summer’s end. The sunlight is pale yellow today, soft on the curve of her cheek as she stepped into the coach. The king, fickle as usual, turns his attentions to the ladies of the court once more, bemoans his wife’s lack of interest in the hunt and the chase. A man of frivolities. Aramis has never had the luxury of that.

Anne, though - he can call her Anne, or Anna in the Spanish native to her and easy on his tongue – is not a frivolous woman. She knows what she wants, and she knows what to do to get it.

(He called her Anna, as he sank into her that night, her thighs at his hips and her fingers digging into his back – and she sighed so sweetly, so hungrily, as if it was all she had wanted to hear.)

“It was a moment of peace,” Aramis says at last, when he is sure it would have been just as well to say nothing. “A fleeting moment of peace.”

“Ever the romantic,” Athos drawls, and clucks encouragingly at his mount.

*

A moment of peace, he calls it.

It is no lie, no romantic notion. Because he is who he is, a charming serial connoisseur of women, it is easy enough for Athos to disregard it.

But Anne knows what Isabelle was to him. Anne knows the loss he carries with him, a decade gone and still healing. Anne is a mother without a child and a wife without a real husband, and she watches and waits as the Cardinal schemes and manipulates, without a moment’s respite. Perhaps she used him; but he may have used her too, in the same way. An escape.

If Aramis could give her even a moment of peace in the way she did for him, it is worth it.

*

“You need to control yourself,” Athos mutters as they stalk away from the trembling Cardinal, into the fresh open air.

“Speak for yourself,” Aramis retorts. Athos is all but incandescent with rage at his wife and her perfidy; it soaks into the air.

“You looked as if you were going to lay hands on the Cardinal. Because of her,” Athos counters. Gravel crunches under their heels, and the horses whinny in impatience. It is another grey day in Paris. Aramis is tired of clouds. He misses the sunlight through the trees, through the fall of her curls across her back in the morning.

(He is a fool.)

“That is technically our duty. We are sworn to the king and his family’s protection,” Aramis says mildly.

Athos shoots him a glare that could cut ice, given the chance. “You don’t want anyone getting any ideas about it, Aramis.”

A low growl rumbles in Aramis’s throat, dislodged into nothing as he mounts his horse. He wants to lay hands on the Cardinal, on the king, on every courtier who cuts her down with words and glances behind their fans and glasses of wine. She is resolute and fearless in the face of a man who wanted her dead by terrible means, and she has never been more beautiful to him.

He is an utter fool.

*

All the blood rushes to his head when the king announces Anne’s pregnancy.

(Aramis will call her Anne in his mind until his veins run dry.)

He chances a glance at Athos. A massive mistake. In the cool cloudy afternoon light, shadows drawing long and thin across the marbled floors, Athos is all but a flame of dark fury and disbelief. Even D’Artagnan notices, and he isn’t the most emotionally observant. The four of them trade glances and Aramis must school his face, his eyes. He must be the cavalier, the pleasure-bound soldier of old.

His gaze meets Anne’s, on accident. There is a flush to her cheeks, a pleasure he cannot lay claim to filling her gaze. His throat is uncomfortably tight and for a moment, he can’t breathe. The air is light and happy with anticipation and joy, and all he feels is the edge of a long hard drop.

“You – “ Athos growls under his breath as they linger near the open doorway, watching as the queen and king depart to their private rooms.

“You two are like gossiping hens,” Porthos mutters.

“What the hell is the matter with you, Aramis?” D’Artagnan asks. If the kid hadn’t just had his heart broken, Aramis might have murdered him right there, friends and Musketeer or not.

“We should go. Now,” Athos says under his breath, a steady glare sent in the direction of the Cardinal.

The Cardinal. Who watches them with oily eyes, with revenge on his mind. They have bested him – Anne has bested him – but he will not stay down for long. He never has.

There is more than fear for himself or his country running through his veins now. There is a child, and Anne, and their -

He stops himself before he spirals too far into an unsteady future.

The note from the queen slipped into his tight fingers is no comfort.

*

The tavern is stuffed to the gills, far enough away from the garrison that perhaps the other Musketeers will not come by. It is full enough to have a conversation and be utterly private in the midst of the swarms of humanity.

Aramis watches as the barmaid drops tankards in front of him and the others, his knee jangling under the scuffed wood table. The air is hot and his collar is tight, his hair sticking to the nape of his neck with sweat. Athos has his dark steely gaze set on him, with drink after drink. Porthos, utterly amused, looks back and forth between them as if it is a tennis match.

It is D’Artagnan that finally cracks the silence, amid screaming card games and squealing ladies of ill-repute.

“Something is clearly the matter,” he says in that gentle, practiced way of his. A good man, to the bone. Aramis wonders how long that will last. “Is it Musketeer business?”

Clearing his throat, Aramis stares into his dark tankard of ale.

“It might be,” Athos says dryly. “Now, it’s just between friends.”

There is the pact. The four of them, united here. Aramis glances at each one in turn, his mouth dry. How can he not tell them? These men will protect Anne with their dying breath, if anything should happen to him.

I will lay down my life, he had told he in the cool glass-enclosed room, his lips on her knuckles, tasting her skin for the first time in months.

He will be courageous like his father, she had said with every sort of warmth in her bright sky eyes.

(If he was used by her, it is a using he could grow accustomed to.)

“It cannot leave the four of us,” Aramis says at last.

Porthos’s grin fades, amid the raucous sounds and smells of the tavern. D’Artagnan looks as he did when he was mad with worry over Constance – lovely, smart, willful Constance, with a husband who ought to be tossed into the river. They will stand with him, Aramis believes. He must believe it.

“When we were under siege at the convent, I – “

Aramis pauses, glances around.

Rolling his eyes, Athos leans over to whisper in Porthos’s ear. “You’re incredibly dramatic, did you know that,” he says casually at his normal tone as Porthos chokes on his ale and coughs, slapping his chest with a broad scarred dark hand.

“Thanks for that,” Aramis replies wryly.

Grinning that slight smile of his, Athos leans across the table and whispers to D’Artagnan. Like girls at a convent, Aramis thinks – and then he thinks of the hard mattress beneath them, of how her dress pillowed their heads and how she wrapped around him as if she would never let him go, the bruise of her mouth on his throat.

Damn him to hell.

“So, you see how imperative secrecy is,” Aramis says as Porthos and D’Artagnan stare at him, wide-eyed. A knot in his middle relaxes; his brothers know. These men – his family – they know.

“How long will it stay a secret, I suppose, is the question,” Porthos says at last, drinking his tankard as if it is a lifeline.

“It may not be yours,” D’Artagnan offers, still bug-eyed. “Clearly, she would have – “

“I understand,” Aramis says through gritted teeth. He has no interest in exploring that mental image, of Anne and the king, of –

“What matters is that the queen’s privacy and health is of utmost concern to us all,” Athos chimes in coolly. “As Aramis is our brother-in-arms, his vows are ours as well.”

“Of course,” Porthos says. “But good god. Was it really necessary?”

D’Artagnan slaps Porthos on the shoulder. “That’s a terrible thing to ask.”

“If perhaps an appropriate question,” Athos murmurs over the rim of his tankard.

Wetting his lips, Aramis stares down at the scarred table under his fingertips. She had touched his scars with such – not reverence, but not curiosity. It was care that she had touched him with, care and appreciation, and wanting. He hadn’t wanted a woman like that in many moons.

Her favor sits around his neck as a talisman. He reaches up and wraps unsteady fingers around it.

“It was a moment of peace,” he says quietly to his brothers.

“One that may well start a war or end with us hanged,” Athos says evenly.

It is D’Artagnan who grins and raises his tankard. “All for one?”

Aramis catches the younger man’s eyes and smiles slightly. “One for all.”

The four of them knock their tankards together, and the secret breathes out between the four of them. It is a weight off of Aramis’s chest.

She will be safe, and so will the child.

*

Anne does not ride any longer, out of precaution for the unborn child. She takes daily walks in the gardens now, as summer wanes and autumn settles over the landscape. The leaves on the trees darken and curl at the edges, crunch under their heels.

Aramis walks with her, her ladies ten steps behind, and D’Artagnan bringing up the rear. Deep in the palace, the captain sits with the king and the Cardinal. This is the closest he has been alone with her since that day two months ago, surrounded by glass and her knuckles against his lips.

(He still wakes, half-hard, wanting her.)

“I have seen so little of you, Aramis,” she says, cool and soft. There is just the slightest swell to her stomach but she glows with it, with the pride. Five months, he thinks. Five months since he has touched her and known her and kissed her, since he kissed down her belly and between her thighs and –

“A thousand pardons, Your Majesty,” he says before he can’t remember his own name. “Musketeer business keeps us quite busy.”

“As long as you have not been avoiding court,” she says, eyes bright and sly.

He wants to be alone with her, to taste the sweet salt of her throat and ask if it was just a convenient moment, a moment in the face of death. Or a way to get a babe. He understands in both cases, but – perhaps it is the eternal romantic in him, but he would like something more.

(Again: he is a fool.)

She looks at him for a long quiet moment, sky-blue gaze searching. The gold-brocaded panels of her gown catch the afternoon light, her hair soft and swept up in high curls. He likes the look of it down, strewn across a pillow, silky against his chest.

“I wonder, if you would take a turn in the gardens there with me. My ladies can entertain your companion,” she says, her voice lilting in a kind order. “It is private business concerning the King.”

He bows, low. D’Artagnan’s face stays even, bless him, though his eyes question Aramis. With a slight shrug, Aramis follows Anne as she slips through the far right hedges and away, out of sight from her ladies, and D’Artagnan. In the mild afternoon air, Aramis feels hot all over.

Yards away, she comes to rest behind a thicket of hedges. They are concealed, though he still glances around, ever the soldier.

When she takes his hand in both of hers, his mind stutters.

“I imagine you have stayed away on purpose,” she says softly.

The sunlight catches in her hair, the jewel-studded coronet set atop her head. She tilts her head up, and her chin trembles.

“No, my lady,” he says gently. “I would not shirk a vow.”

“I know,” she says, her voice thin. “You are a good, solid man.”

A man, not a King, he thinks for a sour moment.

Her fingers stroke over his knuckles, the calloused fingertips and palm. Her touch shudders right through him, a hard grip on his heart.

“Is it because of the Cardinal?” she asks, the astute woman she is.

He lowers his head, drops it closer to hers. She is so slight, barely at his shoulder. Every part of him wants to take care of her, support her - but no part of her is his. He can smell the ocean on her, faint and salty-sweet, and lavender in her hair. Her fingers against his are like satin, like the fall of her dress under his eager hands as he reaches for more, for more than he deserves –

“You have him in a moment of weakness. But he will not stay conciliatory for long, if I know him,” he says at last. “I did not want to endanger your reputation.”

Anne smiles then, and lifts her hand to touch his cheek, his neck. She did so once before, when he was injured at the prison. Perhaps he knew then, but now he just knows he’s damned out of his mind and immortal soul.

“I am fully aware of the Cardinal’s machinations. I am keeping an eagle eye on him, to be sure.” She smooths her fingertips along the line of his jaw. He wants to sink into her, press her to the hedge behind her and drop to his knees in front of her. “As for my reputation – I know how to play their games, my dear Aramis.”

He does not touch her. He cannot touch her –

“Will you kiss me?” she asks, in a soft pleading tone he does not recognize. “Aramis?”

Cupping her face between his hands, he leans in and kisses her. His eyes shut and he feels the melting of her mouth and muscles under his touch. It is enough. Her hands fist in his cape and she opens her mouth to his, and there is such need and longing in it, between the both of them, that he nearly cannot breathe. He kisses her until he truly needs air, rests his forehead to hers.

When he opens his eyes, she is there, waiting. Smiling, if tremulously. Her palm rests over his heart.

“A part of me is always with you, Aramis. Just as a part of you is always with me,” she whispers, cheeks flushed.

She brings one of his hands to the swell of her belly. The feel startles him.

“I am your knight and champion, Anna,” he breathes to her, his broad palm flexing once over her belly.

Her smile broadens. “I like when you call me that,” she says, all joy.

He kisses her once more for that, his heart pressed hard to his ribs. They rejoin her ladies and walk her back to the palace. When he is left just with D’Artagnan, he schools his face into dull simplicity.

D’Artagnan is no fool.

“You look like you need a drink,” he says to Aramis lightly.

“Couldn’t hurt,” Aramis mutters. He can still taste her on his lips.

*

Small moments of peace is all Aramis can expect for now.

Her knuckles under his lips.

He will take it. The small part of her that is his. He will not relinquish it.

(An utter, untenable fool, the man and soldier both.)

*