
Posted originally on the Archive_of_Our_Own at https://archiveofourown.org/
works/3313616.
  Rating:
      Explicit
  Archive Warning:
      Rape/Non-Con, Underage
  Category:
      M/M
  Fandom:
      The_Musketeers_(2014)
  Relationship:
      d'Artagnan/Olivier_d'Athos_de_la_Fère, d'Artagnan/Athos
  Character:
      Alexandre_d'Artagnan, Porthos, Aramis
  Additional Tags:
      Parent/Child_Incest, Past_Child_Abuse, Dark, Angst, Daddy_Issues,
      Religious_Imagery_&_Symbolism
  Stats:
      Published: 2015-02-08 Words: 1489
****** Out of the Garden ******
by SylvanWitch
Summary
     The only time he’d touched his father without fear had been to press
     his hand against the spouting blood and try to keep alive the only
     person he’d ever loved and loathed. Something of an AU episode tag
     for the series premiere.
Notes
     This story is sponsored by the snakes in my brain. Please heed the
     warnings: Triggers aplenty. There is, however, a happy ending. For a
     given value of "happy."
Blood like black treacle stains the moonlit grass.
 
He should feel relief and righteousness.  The killer of his father is dead by
his, the dutiful son’s, hand.
 
He should feel admiration for the courageous woman beside him, relief in having
found brothers in arms who are worth their word.
 
He should feel the muscles of his conscience unclenching.  He’s done what he
set out to do:  avenged his father.
 
d’Artagnan feels none of these things.  In fact, he feels nothing.  Not the
cold night air, not the impression of Porthos’ hand where he slaps d’Artagnan
in comradeship, not warmth at the sight of Aramis’ approving smile.
 
 
Later, in a tavern, the stench of unwashed bodies, spilled wine, and woodsmoke
registers only faintly.  The wine has no taste, but it spreads in his belly
with a weak chill, and he hunches against the vague sickness gnawing there. 
 
Only after Porthos has bumped his shoulder companionably does d’Artagnan
realize that Athos has proposed a toast in gratitude to d’Artagnan.  He
acknowledges it with a raised cup, swallows another mouthful of wine.
 
Then the inevitable toast to Alexandre d’Artagnan is proposed, and he finds his
hand shaking as he raises his cup.  Thankfully, the others seem to think this
is a sign of his sorrow. 
 
They cannot know, these upright, unstained men, how an object can appear
dutiful, how ownership can inspire obsessive loyalty.
 
How loss of self can look like love.
 
The only time he’d touched his father without fear had been to press his hand
against the spouting blood and try to keep alive the only person he’d ever
loved and loathed.
 
There is nothing left of him now that the fire of revenge has burned him out. 
He isn’t even a person.  How can he be when the one who allowed him his being
is dead?
 
Still, his blood pumps through his veins, his breath goes in and out, his head
pounds with a hangover, and he finds himself in the yard at the garrison
barracks watching Aramis and Porthos spar, observing the way Athos looks on his
fellow Musketeers with assessing eyes.  Such a gaze might give d’Artagnan
himself meaning, fill out the empty shape of him where only his father’s eyes
had once created fealty out of flesh.
 
He doesn’t know how to ask for what he wants in words, so instead he inspires
anger in Athos, taunts him into drawing his sword against d’Artagnan, into
cutting him open—a long, red mouth weeping out the proof that something of a
self exists independent of what he’d so long been enthralled to.
 
He wants to say,Take the cup of my blood.
 
To say, Father, father, why have you forsaken me.
 
Wants to sleep in the garden instead of sacrificing himself on the annihilating
altar.
 
Instead, he murmurs, “Father?” as Athos helps him to his feet.  Whispers,
“Papa?” with Athos’ hand strong and solid against the small of his back.
 
In a tiny room in the garrison, Athos presses a cloth into the shallow,
stinging wound on his thigh, and d’Artagnan presses his lips together to
suppress the shock of that touch.  Another part of him, however, speaks
eloquently, a line of hard flesh rising beneath the leather.
 
Athos’ hand stills in its ministrations, and d’Artagnan can’t look up when he
says, “Please.”
 
His father had beaten the begging out of him. 
 
He’d been eleven when his father had made him strip naked under the sprawling
blue sky in the field behind their house, had made him lie down on the grass
and spread his legs, made him take himself in hand and bring himself to
fullness and then had pulled d’Artagnan’s hands away, boot toes pressed into
his palms as he lay there crucified by need, begging to be allowed to finish.
 
His father had bent over him, smacked him hard across the cheek, smacked him
again and again, open-palmed, obliterative, until blood had bloomed on his
tongue to mingle with the snot on his upper lip. 
 
“Don’t beg.  Don’t you ever beg,” his father had said, stroking his hand down
d’Artagnan’s shaking chest.
 
But he’d begged again when his father’s hand had touched him, said, “No, please
don’t.  Father, no,” and then later, “Yes, oh please, please, please,” until
he’d come, shame like a wave sweeping from his toes to his groin and then like
a drowning weight dragging him into awful awareness of his damnation.
 
He’d been a bad boy.  He’d disobeyed his father by begging again when he’d been
told not to.
 
To punish him, his father had bound and gagged him and left him under the open
sky with his spend growing cold and tacky on his belly and his humiliation
there for everyone to see.  He’d prayed to God that the cackling crows circling
above him in the sky would fly down to peck out his eyes.  How could he ever
look at himself or his father or the world again?
 
But the crows had only gone on laughing at him.
 
He had never again pleaded with his father, no matter what the man had demanded
of him.  After that day, he’d never prayed again, either.
 
Now, he says, “Please” again and then, “God,” as Athos loosens d’Artagnan’s
laces and slides a hand into his smalls to wrap around his hardness and stroke
him once, twice, whispering, “Such a good boy,” into his ear, and “So full, so
hard for me,” and “Come for me, boy, come now.”
 
A third stroke and a fourth, the callused palm dragging his foreskin away from
the glans, too much, he thinks, too rough, just right as he spills, throat
working soundlessly, eyes seeping unconscious tears as he shakes through his
completion and slides down the wall, legs spraddled, flaccid cock damp in the
cooling air, and waits for Athos to slap him, to bind and gag him and leave him
there so the others can see what an abomination he is.
 
But Athos is there beside him, knees pressed to his shaking thigh, one hand on
the wound to staunch it, the other coming up to wipe tears from his cheeks, to
touch his lips as if to still his soundless sobbing, to wrap around the nape of
his neck and pull him against Athos’ chest.
 
“Shhh,” Athos murmurs, “It’s alright.  You’ve nothing to be ashamed of.  It
happens.”
 
d’Artagnan trembles at Athos’ words, at his gentle touch, almost preferring to
be struck.  Blindly, he reaches toward Athos’ cock, saying, “May I?” in the
schoolboy voice his father had taught him to use when asking for something.
 
Athos abandons his comforting touch to grip each of d’Artagnan’s wrists in his
hands.  “That’s not necessary.  Pleasure can be mutual, but it doesn’t always
have to be reciprocal.  I can wait—we can wait—until you’re feeling more
yourself.”
 
d’Artagnan’s laugh is sharp and harsh, the croaking laughter of carrion crows. 
“And who am I?”
 
“You’re one of us now,” Athos says, as if this should be obvious.  As if
d’Artagnan should already have known it.
 
“And who are you?”  His voice sounds thin and high, like the boy he’d been
before his father had stripped him of everything he had believed in.
 
“Your brothers.”  Athos says matter-of-factly, reaching toward d’Artagnan to
clean him up and tuck him away.
 
“I’ve never had a brother.”  It had been the one small mercy d’Artagnan had
clung to all those years:  His father had had only one lump of clay to shape in
his own, twisted image, only one rib to bend to his impossible will.
 
“Well, you have three now.”  Evidence of their coupling discretely dealt with,
Athos returns to the task of stopping the sluggish bleeding of d’Artagnan’s
wound.
 
“Do brothers often do…this…together?”  d’Artagnan’s understanding of family is
limited only to his own experience, of course, but it had never seemed as if
the village children had played quite the same games with each other as the
ones he had learned from his father.
 
Athos shakes his head.  “Few brothers are so lucky.”  He gifts d’Artagnan with
a wry smile as Porthos bellows for them from an outer doorway.  “Nor so
demanding,” he adds.  He rises gracefully and offers d’Artagnan a hand.
 
Standing beside him in the dim closet, knees still weak from pleasure, lashes
still sticky with tears, d’Artagnan takes a deep breath to steady himself,
grateful for the pressure of Athos’ shoulder against his own, for the brush of
his hand against his back as he urges him out the door and into the world.
 
When he returns to the practice yard, Porthos chivvies him for babying his
injury and delaying their practice while Aramis touches his shoulder and says,
“Alright?” before handing him his sword.
 
“I am,” d’Artagnan declares for his brothers and God to hear.  From the roof of
the garrison, a raucous crow answers.
 
d’Artagnan smiles and raises his sword.
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