Musketeer!fic: Affinity!verse
Apr. 24th, 2014 09:48 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rainjoyswritingThe Birds' Augury, Musketeers fic, affinityverse (best catalogued in my memories) <3
Disclaimer: I haven't the brain right now to write the things I'm supposed to be writing, oddly enough the BBC don't fall over themselves to pay me to write things. Nor have I ever been the ghostwriter of Alexandre Dumas. For so many and so obvious reasons.
Rating: I think only PG-13, despite the presence of Aramis. But he's like fourteen here and even he can't get up to *too* much <3
Warnings and spoilers: The main list's on part one, read sensibly.
Summary: There is a bomb in a building in Barcelona.
Note: I actually meant this to be part of a larger fic dealing with incidents Treville has not been reporting in full to his superiors; haven't the brain to write the rest \o/ I find hapless!Treville dealing with teenage troublemakers really cute, if you haven't guessed by now, even though I know that's the exact reason he refuses to play along when I want fic out of him <3
The sound is so rhythmic that it takes some time to penetrate the dream and wake him. Tap tap tap tap, like a bird trying to break a snail on a stone. Tap tap tap . . .
Treville turns the lamp on beside the bed, and sits up. The sound is coming from the door - coming ceaselessly from the door - and he calls, "- oui? Entrez!"
No reply, apart from tap, tap, tap . . .
He pushes himself from the bed, unnerved, catching his dressing gown from the back of a chair, tying the belt as he pulls the door inwards. He doesn't know what he expects, and his hand is closed around the pistol in his dressing gown pocket - but outside, head hanging into the bowl of one hand, his water affinity is still impotently tapping with his knuckles at the air, tap, tap -
"Aramis!" He catches his wrist and the boy jerks but doesn't lift his head, skinny wrist on the edge of quivering in his grip. "What's wrong? It's the middle of - is it an episode? Why didn't you pull your alarm - ?"
Aramis keeps his head down, hand over his eyes, his mouth tight under it. He says, voice rasped like this throat is burning, "There is a bomb in a building in Barcelona." He gives a little snorted laugh then, mouth twitching half a smile. "Bacán, good sentence."
"There's - why didn't you pull your alarm?"
His mouth goes tight again, and he doesn't take his hand from his eyes, says and his voice is shaking, "Captain, my head is splitting."
Treville stares at him, looks up and down the corridor for help and there is none, it's the middle of the night. Just him and his fourteen year old water affinity, whose next action never can be predicted from one moment to the next though this is a new one. "Come sit down," he says, pulling him in by the wrist - he realises that Aramis has a hand over his eyes because the corridor's light is too much, his whole body is wobbling with whatever is happening in his head. "There is a bomb in Barcelona. What have you seen?"
"That you stop it," Aramis says, stumbling against the side of the bed as Treville leads him to sit, putting his hand down to check the surface and then lowering himself to it and swallowing, face twisting like that hurts. "I saw that you stop it. So you have to stop it, captain, because I've seen it, and if you don't -"
His phone is on the bedside table, and he fumbles it up to call someone as soon as possible. "Of course we will stop it."
"- the building will blow up but so will my head." Aramis can have both hands over his eyes now, cramming the pain in. He starts speaking to himself in Spanish, then clamps his mouth shut and cringes his head in further like even his own voice just hurts too much.
"Aramis, tell me what you saw. Which building? Where is the bomb?"
"I don't know! It looked - bizarre, it looked like something out of a dream -"
It's the middle of the night and a hell of a way to wake and throughout all of his episodes, Treville has rarely seen Aramis upset by them. "You're sure it wasn't a dream."
"My head," Aramis spits at him, jerking it as if to lift it but then he cringes himself still again, and his hands are shaking over his eyes. "Captain please please please believe me, people will die if you don't and my head will burst. There is a bomb in a building - salta pa'l lado, a mad building, it has a dragon for a roof -"
He puts a hand on his shoulder, feels the shivering of the muscles against the bone. "Aramis," he says, slowly and quietly because he doesn't doubt that the boy's in agony, he doesn't ordinarily trouble himself to mention being in pain, but this . . . "do you think that it might have been a dream?"
He snaps his head up, snaps back, "Sacar la cresta captain, this is a dream?" stabbing a finger at his head, but then he has to slam his eyes closed, suck his breath in, whisper, "I'm going to be sick."
Treville - panics.
He fumbles on the dressing table, finds nothing but an empty coffee cup to hand to him but Aramis has one hand over his eyes and one over his mouth, breathing hard through it but the worst of the nausea seems to have passed. He turns his head away from the cup like it smells bad to him but swallows, and holds it in. "Captain," he whispers, hands shaking on his face, "there is a bomb in a building in Barcelona and if you let it go off then my head will explode. Please, please -"
"Alright, alright," He pats his shoulder again, because Aramis always reacts well to being touched, even if Treville is always unsure about the act of touching him. "It's alright. Tell me what you saw." He stands up to go to the laptop at his desk, putting the cup down beside it, to turn it on. He can't call anyone to tell them anything before he knows what the hell is happening. "You saw a bomb going off."
"No. I saw you stopping the bomb from going off."
"Then you don't need to panic," Treville says, silently cursing his laptop to wake faster, "because you know I'll stop it."
Aramis shakes his head, just tightly, behind his hands. "No. I don't know. I know you have to stop it. I don't - I don't know -"
Finally Treville can open the internet, which is not his favourite place to be, but he's determined to try. "A building with a dragon for a roof. Didn't Gaudi design a lot of the buildings in Barcelona?"
Aramis says something into his hand in Spanish that sounds a lot like how the fuck should I know.
"It had crazy windows," he says, sounding sick and very young behind his hand. "And odd scales all in different colours, and a cross stuck into the dragon's back -"
Treville has typed Buildings in Barcelona into Google. "Do you have any idea where in Barcelona it was?"
Aramis has gone quiet, while Treville squints at webpages, none of which seem to help him. Aramis is happier doing things like this, Treville never knows what he's looking for, he hates the internet. Realising that he hasn't replied, Treville looks over his shoulder, says, "Aramis?"
Aramis has a hand back on the bed to support himself, a hand over his eyes, his mouth dumb with pain now. He shakes his head, just a little, and doesn't speak.
What is Treville supposed to do? He's a soldier and his first thought is to get the right information, inform the right people, make things happen but at the same time there's a fourteen year old boy on his bed in so much pain that he can't speak. He never has known what to do with Aramis, how much he can rely on so unpredictable a creature, hardly even present half of the time for all his episodes and still Treville's responsibility. Now faced with the boy looking like he might fall from the bed and this to deal with he doesn't know whether to call for Ferrand or the police in Barcelona or keep trying to find the building -
He types, quickly, Building in Barcelona dragon for a roof.
The very first page that Google brings him to makes him blink; a strange scaled building with stranger windows and a dragon's humped back for a roof . . .
"Casa Batlló," he says.
Aramis immediately corrects his pronunciation, then stills. He lifts his head, blinks raw eyes at Treville, and Treville brings the laptop over to show him the photograph on the website. Aramis stares at it, then says, "Now I'm going to be sick."
Treville just hustles him into the bathroom in time for him to retch into the toilet, hand on Aramis' back petting awkwardly at him while with the other hand he starts dialling on his phone. A lot has to happen very quickly, if Aramis is sure.
"You are sure," he says to him while the phone rings, and Aramis puts his forehead into his folded arms on the toilet seat and nods and begs, "Please turn off the light please turn off the light -"
There is no time to worry about doing the right thing, there's only the time to do it. He speaks on the telephone while turning the bathroom light and the lamp off, navigating by the laptop's thin glow, pulling Aramis back to the bed - the boy is a shaking boneless head-hanging mess by now - putting him back down to rest while he hurries back to the desk, writing the numbers he'll need to call on a notepad. He has enough authority to hopefully make people take his word seriously because 'a psychic fourteen year old who somehow last week changed my ringtone to Baby Got Back told me' isn't the most convincing evidence in the world.
Authorities in France, authorities in Spain. Police are sent, searches are carried out. It's beginning to get light outside, and when he rubs his eyes with the phone still to his ear, he glances back at the bed and Aramis is huddled down into his pillow, eyes hidden, asleep.
Treville sighs, and stands, and unties his dressing gown one-handed. He lifts it awkwardly, still murmuring to the voice on the other end of the line, getting it just so over his hunched-up water affinity, who doesn't acknowledge a thing. He puts the gun on the bedside table, and pulls the fabric down quite carefully to cover his feet.
Thirty-three minutes to six in the morning and they tell him that they found it in a cleaner's cupboard in the museum section of the building, primed to go off at ten thirty that morning. Treville closes his eyes, sits in his desk chair, can hardly think around the exhaustion of the relief.
More phone calls to be made, more to be confirmed and cleaned up. At six his alarm goes off by the bed and Aramis hunches away from it but doesn't lift his head as Treville shuts it off. It's half past seven before he can finally hang up - his ear feels hot - and rub his face, and the light is getting in around the thick curtains, morning outside and Treville yawns hard. He needs twenty minutes to close his eyes and he'll be fine for the day. Aramis -
Is still asleep on his bed, spilt there the way puppies collapse, breathing slow with exhaustion.
He stands over him for a moment, unsure about waking him. Aramis had been afraid that if Treville hadn't stopped what he had already seen him stop, it could kill him; Treville wonders now if it could. They have little experience of water affinities outside of a circle, Richelieu was the last of his circle's rifts to break, and Aramis, he can already tell, is not like Richelieu. The things Aramis sees -
How many lives did he just save? How many people would have been in that building, how many would have known nothing until too late, innocent until they were already torn apart . . . ?
He stands looking down at the boy and feels it slow and low in his stomach, that Aramis will never be free, now. The things he sees just matter too much. Treville signed up to be a soldier when he was a young man; Aramis has been signed up by life, given away at fourteen to his powers, because now that people know what Aramis can see they will never let him go. And when he has a circle - if he has a circle -
What kind of things could he see if he could only control what he saw . . . ?
He sleeps in Treville's bed, the boy who wrote in beautiful cursive made of bullets Fuck Richelieu into a firing range target yesterday, and Treville thinks about touching his shoulder, waking him, telling him that it's all alright now, the danger is done. But he's sleeping, puppy-peaceful, for once not causing some kind of careening chaos but just sleeping in Treville's bed, like he's safe there. Treville thinks about his powers, everything about his powers, and what people would do to Aramis if they knew about them because people are greedy, and frightened, and selfish. He remembers the orphanage. He remembers the smell. And he remembers his every episode, and the way he asks for him afterwards . . .
He pulls the dressing gown a little higher on his shoulder, touches his back, and sets his alarm to give himself another twenty minutes to lie down on the couch with his coat over himself. He's a soldier, and he's slept in worse places.
When he wakes Aramis has rolled over in the bed, eyes closed to the light pooling around the curtains' fall, still peaceful and still. Treville twitches his mouth and thinks that he'll probably leave out of his report the part where the boy found his way into his bed. He doesn't like to wake him but nor does he want him to wake alone in the room; he calls for an agent to come sit with him, and washes and dresses quickly in the bathroom.
It's half an hour later, when an important call from Richelieu comes through, that he discovers that Aramis has somehow changed his ringtone to Barry White.
Disclaimer: I haven't the brain right now to write the things I'm supposed to be writing, oddly enough the BBC don't fall over themselves to pay me to write things. Nor have I ever been the ghostwriter of Alexandre Dumas. For so many and so obvious reasons.
Rating: I think only PG-13, despite the presence of Aramis. But he's like fourteen here and even he can't get up to *too* much <3
Warnings and spoilers: The main list's on part one, read sensibly.
Summary: There is a bomb in a building in Barcelona.
Note: I actually meant this to be part of a larger fic dealing with incidents Treville has not been reporting in full to his superiors; haven't the brain to write the rest \o/ I find hapless!Treville dealing with teenage troublemakers really cute, if you haven't guessed by now, even though I know that's the exact reason he refuses to play along when I want fic out of him <3
The sound is so rhythmic that it takes some time to penetrate the dream and wake him. Tap tap tap tap, like a bird trying to break a snail on a stone. Tap tap tap . . .
Treville turns the lamp on beside the bed, and sits up. The sound is coming from the door - coming ceaselessly from the door - and he calls, "- oui? Entrez!"
No reply, apart from tap, tap, tap . . .
He pushes himself from the bed, unnerved, catching his dressing gown from the back of a chair, tying the belt as he pulls the door inwards. He doesn't know what he expects, and his hand is closed around the pistol in his dressing gown pocket - but outside, head hanging into the bowl of one hand, his water affinity is still impotently tapping with his knuckles at the air, tap, tap -
"Aramis!" He catches his wrist and the boy jerks but doesn't lift his head, skinny wrist on the edge of quivering in his grip. "What's wrong? It's the middle of - is it an episode? Why didn't you pull your alarm - ?"
Aramis keeps his head down, hand over his eyes, his mouth tight under it. He says, voice rasped like this throat is burning, "There is a bomb in a building in Barcelona." He gives a little snorted laugh then, mouth twitching half a smile. "Bacán, good sentence."
"There's - why didn't you pull your alarm?"
His mouth goes tight again, and he doesn't take his hand from his eyes, says and his voice is shaking, "Captain, my head is splitting."
Treville stares at him, looks up and down the corridor for help and there is none, it's the middle of the night. Just him and his fourteen year old water affinity, whose next action never can be predicted from one moment to the next though this is a new one. "Come sit down," he says, pulling him in by the wrist - he realises that Aramis has a hand over his eyes because the corridor's light is too much, his whole body is wobbling with whatever is happening in his head. "There is a bomb in Barcelona. What have you seen?"
"That you stop it," Aramis says, stumbling against the side of the bed as Treville leads him to sit, putting his hand down to check the surface and then lowering himself to it and swallowing, face twisting like that hurts. "I saw that you stop it. So you have to stop it, captain, because I've seen it, and if you don't -"
His phone is on the bedside table, and he fumbles it up to call someone as soon as possible. "Of course we will stop it."
"- the building will blow up but so will my head." Aramis can have both hands over his eyes now, cramming the pain in. He starts speaking to himself in Spanish, then clamps his mouth shut and cringes his head in further like even his own voice just hurts too much.
"Aramis, tell me what you saw. Which building? Where is the bomb?"
"I don't know! It looked - bizarre, it looked like something out of a dream -"
It's the middle of the night and a hell of a way to wake and throughout all of his episodes, Treville has rarely seen Aramis upset by them. "You're sure it wasn't a dream."
"My head," Aramis spits at him, jerking it as if to lift it but then he cringes himself still again, and his hands are shaking over his eyes. "Captain please please please believe me, people will die if you don't and my head will burst. There is a bomb in a building - salta pa'l lado, a mad building, it has a dragon for a roof -"
He puts a hand on his shoulder, feels the shivering of the muscles against the bone. "Aramis," he says, slowly and quietly because he doesn't doubt that the boy's in agony, he doesn't ordinarily trouble himself to mention being in pain, but this . . . "do you think that it might have been a dream?"
He snaps his head up, snaps back, "Sacar la cresta captain, this is a dream?" stabbing a finger at his head, but then he has to slam his eyes closed, suck his breath in, whisper, "I'm going to be sick."
Treville - panics.
He fumbles on the dressing table, finds nothing but an empty coffee cup to hand to him but Aramis has one hand over his eyes and one over his mouth, breathing hard through it but the worst of the nausea seems to have passed. He turns his head away from the cup like it smells bad to him but swallows, and holds it in. "Captain," he whispers, hands shaking on his face, "there is a bomb in a building in Barcelona and if you let it go off then my head will explode. Please, please -"
"Alright, alright," He pats his shoulder again, because Aramis always reacts well to being touched, even if Treville is always unsure about the act of touching him. "It's alright. Tell me what you saw." He stands up to go to the laptop at his desk, putting the cup down beside it, to turn it on. He can't call anyone to tell them anything before he knows what the hell is happening. "You saw a bomb going off."
"No. I saw you stopping the bomb from going off."
"Then you don't need to panic," Treville says, silently cursing his laptop to wake faster, "because you know I'll stop it."
Aramis shakes his head, just tightly, behind his hands. "No. I don't know. I know you have to stop it. I don't - I don't know -"
Finally Treville can open the internet, which is not his favourite place to be, but he's determined to try. "A building with a dragon for a roof. Didn't Gaudi design a lot of the buildings in Barcelona?"
Aramis says something into his hand in Spanish that sounds a lot like how the fuck should I know.
"It had crazy windows," he says, sounding sick and very young behind his hand. "And odd scales all in different colours, and a cross stuck into the dragon's back -"
Treville has typed Buildings in Barcelona into Google. "Do you have any idea where in Barcelona it was?"
Aramis has gone quiet, while Treville squints at webpages, none of which seem to help him. Aramis is happier doing things like this, Treville never knows what he's looking for, he hates the internet. Realising that he hasn't replied, Treville looks over his shoulder, says, "Aramis?"
Aramis has a hand back on the bed to support himself, a hand over his eyes, his mouth dumb with pain now. He shakes his head, just a little, and doesn't speak.
What is Treville supposed to do? He's a soldier and his first thought is to get the right information, inform the right people, make things happen but at the same time there's a fourteen year old boy on his bed in so much pain that he can't speak. He never has known what to do with Aramis, how much he can rely on so unpredictable a creature, hardly even present half of the time for all his episodes and still Treville's responsibility. Now faced with the boy looking like he might fall from the bed and this to deal with he doesn't know whether to call for Ferrand or the police in Barcelona or keep trying to find the building -
He types, quickly, Building in Barcelona dragon for a roof.
The very first page that Google brings him to makes him blink; a strange scaled building with stranger windows and a dragon's humped back for a roof . . .
"Casa Batlló," he says.
Aramis immediately corrects his pronunciation, then stills. He lifts his head, blinks raw eyes at Treville, and Treville brings the laptop over to show him the photograph on the website. Aramis stares at it, then says, "Now I'm going to be sick."
Treville just hustles him into the bathroom in time for him to retch into the toilet, hand on Aramis' back petting awkwardly at him while with the other hand he starts dialling on his phone. A lot has to happen very quickly, if Aramis is sure.
"You are sure," he says to him while the phone rings, and Aramis puts his forehead into his folded arms on the toilet seat and nods and begs, "Please turn off the light please turn off the light -"
There is no time to worry about doing the right thing, there's only the time to do it. He speaks on the telephone while turning the bathroom light and the lamp off, navigating by the laptop's thin glow, pulling Aramis back to the bed - the boy is a shaking boneless head-hanging mess by now - putting him back down to rest while he hurries back to the desk, writing the numbers he'll need to call on a notepad. He has enough authority to hopefully make people take his word seriously because 'a psychic fourteen year old who somehow last week changed my ringtone to Baby Got Back told me' isn't the most convincing evidence in the world.
Authorities in France, authorities in Spain. Police are sent, searches are carried out. It's beginning to get light outside, and when he rubs his eyes with the phone still to his ear, he glances back at the bed and Aramis is huddled down into his pillow, eyes hidden, asleep.
Treville sighs, and stands, and unties his dressing gown one-handed. He lifts it awkwardly, still murmuring to the voice on the other end of the line, getting it just so over his hunched-up water affinity, who doesn't acknowledge a thing. He puts the gun on the bedside table, and pulls the fabric down quite carefully to cover his feet.
Thirty-three minutes to six in the morning and they tell him that they found it in a cleaner's cupboard in the museum section of the building, primed to go off at ten thirty that morning. Treville closes his eyes, sits in his desk chair, can hardly think around the exhaustion of the relief.
More phone calls to be made, more to be confirmed and cleaned up. At six his alarm goes off by the bed and Aramis hunches away from it but doesn't lift his head as Treville shuts it off. It's half past seven before he can finally hang up - his ear feels hot - and rub his face, and the light is getting in around the thick curtains, morning outside and Treville yawns hard. He needs twenty minutes to close his eyes and he'll be fine for the day. Aramis -
Is still asleep on his bed, spilt there the way puppies collapse, breathing slow with exhaustion.
He stands over him for a moment, unsure about waking him. Aramis had been afraid that if Treville hadn't stopped what he had already seen him stop, it could kill him; Treville wonders now if it could. They have little experience of water affinities outside of a circle, Richelieu was the last of his circle's rifts to break, and Aramis, he can already tell, is not like Richelieu. The things Aramis sees -
How many lives did he just save? How many people would have been in that building, how many would have known nothing until too late, innocent until they were already torn apart . . . ?
He stands looking down at the boy and feels it slow and low in his stomach, that Aramis will never be free, now. The things he sees just matter too much. Treville signed up to be a soldier when he was a young man; Aramis has been signed up by life, given away at fourteen to his powers, because now that people know what Aramis can see they will never let him go. And when he has a circle - if he has a circle -
What kind of things could he see if he could only control what he saw . . . ?
He sleeps in Treville's bed, the boy who wrote in beautiful cursive made of bullets Fuck Richelieu into a firing range target yesterday, and Treville thinks about touching his shoulder, waking him, telling him that it's all alright now, the danger is done. But he's sleeping, puppy-peaceful, for once not causing some kind of careening chaos but just sleeping in Treville's bed, like he's safe there. Treville thinks about his powers, everything about his powers, and what people would do to Aramis if they knew about them because people are greedy, and frightened, and selfish. He remembers the orphanage. He remembers the smell. And he remembers his every episode, and the way he asks for him afterwards . . .
He pulls the dressing gown a little higher on his shoulder, touches his back, and sets his alarm to give himself another twenty minutes to lie down on the couch with his coat over himself. He's a soldier, and he's slept in worse places.
When he wakes Aramis has rolled over in the bed, eyes closed to the light pooling around the curtains' fall, still peaceful and still. Treville twitches his mouth and thinks that he'll probably leave out of his report the part where the boy found his way into his bed. He doesn't like to wake him but nor does he want him to wake alone in the room; he calls for an agent to come sit with him, and washes and dresses quickly in the bathroom.
It's half an hour later, when an important call from Richelieu comes through, that he discovers that Aramis has somehow changed his ringtone to Barry White.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2014-04-24 09:14 pm (UTC)But, back to the story :) Aramis' power is already this strong when so young. I can't wait to see his true potential when he actually has a full circle to lean on. I mean, we already know that he can somewhat control it just with Porthos there, so I can't imagine what he'll be able to do when Athos and D'Artagnan join them.
Lovely update, as always. And now I should really go to bed, otherwise I will hate myself in the morning.
no subject
Date: 2014-04-25 05:12 pm (UTC)Power and balance and control, ah. We'll see. But I'm glad you're still enjoying it honey, and hope you slept well - thank you for reading! Thank you =)
no subject
Date: 2014-04-25 05:12 pm (UTC)Diantre, you make Treville confront the internet, you cruel, cruel being, it's no wonder he refuses to cooperate. Well, I think the interrupted night of sleep might have something to do with it too.
Apart from that, little Aramis keeps breaking my heart by being on his own and suffering so much because of his ability, by not having a choice and being at risk of being exploited or destroyed because of something he never chose - although he does manage to make me laugh with his campaign against Richelieu (bullet writing, that's a new one; just how much ammunition he used for that purpose is probably one of these things Treville isn't completely open about in his reports). I'm so glad Aramis has Treville (because that soldier's heart is so clearly melting like a snowman in spring) and, once more, I can't wait for him to have a whole circle (and in the meantime I'll re-read some passage where he's up to no good with Porthos because it's already someting that he has him and I have a fragile heart that needs a band-aid).
Also, I hope your brain is okay, since it seems to be having a hard time <3
no subject
Date: 2014-04-25 05:17 pm (UTC)I know, poor Treville, the *internet*! The bane of all sensible people. Aramis is remarkably zen himself about everything happening to him, even if everyone around him is aware that it's a bit horrible - he's too busy making himself unbabysittable to mind much, ahem.
My brain is being a bastard today, I'm spending my evening curled up with a bottle of beer, channelling Athos and hating life. But thank you ;) Hope all's well with you honey - and than you for reading, thank you <3