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"Fancy a game?" someone asked, and Aramis lifted his head before he realized that he'd planned not to do that. Then, he saw the uniform and realized it was just as well.
"No," he said, which sounded a little rude and curt, so he added, "Thank you," assuming that would be enough to send the other on his merry way and leave Aramis to go his own.
God willing, it will be brief and not too terribly undignified.
The guy shrugged, said, "Suit yerself," and sat down.
"Would you - " Would you mind pissing off so I can get on with killing myself? Well, clearly, he couldn't go around putting it quite so bluntly; Treville might hear, and decide it was his obligation to Do Something.
Last lone survivor of That Mission killing himself: wouldn't look good at all. Far better to make it look like some sort of accident - not quite a duel, perhaps, but some sort of brawl. A bar fight. Uneven odds, but then, of course, one of the King's Musketeers was more than an even match for at least two of anything else. (Three, if they were Red Guards, as the Cardinal seemed to believe in quantity rather than quality, which was his prerogative, naturally. Also, his mistake.)
" - have a drink with you? Don't mind if I do. Porthos."
What if I do mind? "Aramis. Pleasure." Hardly. On the other hand, a drink wasn't that much of a bother. Porthos was looking for someone to play cards or dice with; Aramis was looking for a likely prospect to kindly put a blade where it wouldn't hurt for very long; no reason they couldn't do their looking from the same table while enjoying some excellent wine.
Or, more realistically put, some cheap swill that vaguely tasted of grapes.
"So," Porthos said, after Aramis'd poured him his second glass. (He'd helped himself to the first glass, offering to refill Aramis's as well, which Aramis had politely declined.) "You don't play, and you don't drink. Makes a fellow wonder what you're here for."
Aramis wondered suddenly if Porthos had been sent here by Treville. "What's it to you?" he said.
"Nothing." Porthos shrugged. "Just making conversation."
"Why don't you go and make it somewhere else?" If Treville actually knew already, and knew he was here, that would be bad. "As you pointed out already, I don't drink. I'm not going to let you cheat me at cards. Or dice. And I'm not interested in conversation."
"Right," Porthos said. "Looking for a woman, then," which was fair enough; it sounded reasonably harmless, and it might even have been true, under other circumstances, even if Aramis preferred to meet women in slightly more ... genteel surroundings. "Or a man," Porthos added, which was a little less fair and, in the wrong company, far from harmless.
"Is that an offer?" Aramis asked, more in the hopes it might be offensive enough to make Porthos leave him alone than because he genuinely thought some complete stranger might be trying to proposition him.
Porthos grunted. "You need help taking him down, I'm your man. Us Musketeers got to stick together, don't we?"
Oh. It had been an offer, then. Just not of the kind he'd imagined. "No questions asked?"
Porthos shrugged. "Depends on whether you want him gutted, or just beaten up a little. Which is it?" He grinned, and it took Aramis a few seconds to understand why.
"A question already." Us Musketeers got to stick together. Or die together, really. Better for everyone that way - and kinder. "There's no one I'm looking for, man or woman. I'm here to - " look for trouble " - be alone."
Porthos looked around the room. It was not quite crowded. "Good place for that, this is."
"Were you sent here by Treville?"
"Treville?" Porthos leaned back and arched an eyebrow at him. "That wouldn't be Captain Treville now, would it?"
He hasn't been sent by Treville. Just his luck, then: he'd picked the one drinking hole in Paris where he'd run into another Musketeer. "Another question."
"What can I say?" Porthos settled back in his chair and reached for the bottle again. "It's a habit."
"I lied," Aramis said. "Just now. When saying I wanted to be alone. The truth is - " I want to be dead. To have died with the others. Better, perhaps, to wish for the others to live as well, to wish the ambush had never happened, that they had returned to Paris together, safe and whole.
If wishes were fishes, we'd all be fishermen, and there'd be nobody there to bake our daily bread.
"Complicated," he said. "The truth is complicated."
"Oh. Don't tell me, then." Porthos raised his glass. "I'm a simple man."
A simple man would have moved on to a more likely prospect to drink and gamble with, Aramis thought. "We were ... sent out. On a mission. To Savoy."
"These things happen," Porthos said. "Or so I've been told."
He must know. They all knew; all the men and women he'd met since he'd gotten back. It was in their eyes, the way they looked at him. Pity and sympathy and this faint sense of disdain, that never asked question: why did you survive? why you, when all the others died? what makes you so special? "They were my friends. My brothers." My lovers, when the wine had flowed freely enough and the room was dark. That wasn't spoken of, naturally. Not in polite company, and not even in impolite company. "I should have died with them."
"Yeah," Porthos said. "You should have."
The shock of it - of hearing someone say out loud what he'd been telling himself for the better part of two weeks was like a cold dash of water in his face. Even Treville had only mouthed sympathy at him, empty platitudes - like 'thank God at least you survived' and 'just try to get some rest' and, always a favorite: 'they would have wanted you to move on with your life'.
And Aramis had stood here, and he hadn't asked 'how would you know?', even though he'd thought it. Treville was a good captain, a good man. Of course he'd never say out loud that he felt disappointed in one of his men. He probably wouldn't even allowed himself to think it.
"But," Porthos went on, "the fact of it is, you didn't. So ... "
So I should fix that. Except that he couldn't, could he? Dying in some bar brawl, with some poor idiot's knife in his gut - it wouldn't actually fix anything. It wouldn't help. It wouldn't make Treville think of him any more kindly, or Porthos, whom he'd only known for a few hours but who seemed a decent enough fellow, which was only to be expected, of course, what with his being a Musketeer.
"Sucks to be you, huh?" Porthos said. "C'mon, have a drink with me."
"Does that mean you'll be buying the next bottle?" Aramis asked.
"And the one after that, if that's what it takes."
Aramis didn't ask 'what what takes?'. "You really weren't sent by Treville?"
"You really are a paranoid bastard, aren't you?"
Does it even matter? Truly? "That's not what my mother told me."
"Yeah, well," Porthos said, and Aramis half-expected him to come up with some story about how his own mother had left him in the gutter to fend for himself at the age of six or something like that; he had that look about him, the look that people got when life kept kicking them in the teeth and they kept kicking back. Twice as hard. "She loved you. I don't."
"I'm wounded. How can you possibly have resisted my incredible charm and dashing good looks?"
"Ah," Porthos said, waving over one of the serving girls. "Don't worry 'bout it. Probably just the bad light in this place."
"Yes. That must be it." He was, Aramis realized, very close to smiling.
And crying, but as long as Porthos wasn't going to bring that up (which he wouldn't, Aramis knew), he wouldn't either.