rainjoyswriting (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
rainjoyswriting) wrote2017-08-20 10:47 am
rainjoyswriting) wrote2017-08-20 10:47 am
Entry tags:
Musketeers fic: Affinityverse
Five Times Aramis Escaped From Richelieu, and One Time That He Couldn't part five, Musketeers short, affinityverse (best catalogued in my memories) <3
Disclaimer: Okay, you know it would have been different if I'd actually owned it.
Rating: Probably only PG-13?
Warnings and spoilers: The main list's on part one, read sensibly.
Summary: First impressions count.
Note: You technically have enough pieces to solve the puzzle by now, there's only the 'why' left . . .
Treville hadn't planned for any of this. He asked for Richelieu because the two of them clearly already had some connection, some link through their affinity, and because as a water affinity Richelieu should be able to help him. Mostly, though, because he just didn't know what else to do. This situation no-one had planned for.
The calmest person in the room is the fourteen year old boy who keeps having the seizures. Treville doesn't understand the boy's philosophical response to his situation, because whenever he wakes and someone is wiping the drool from his cheek or offering him a beaker of water or tucking the sheets over him again, he smiles at them, and thanks them in Spanish, and doesn't make any fuss at all. He woke in this place where he can have no idea where he is, everyone is speaking a language he doesn't, the seizures don't stop and as awful as they are to watch they must be appalling to live through, and yet the boy is as placid as undisturbed water. How can he have more courage than the poor fool of a man who must now be responsible for him, who took charge of the affinities programme and never, never planned for this?
Treville has some small trepidation of sending for Richelieu, but he sets it aside. The petty fact of it is that he doesn't like the man, who isn't tall in the slightest but still manages to look down his nose at everyone he's near, and Treville isn't certain that he'll know how to be gentle with a child in René's situation, or any child, really. Richelieu has never struck him as a man comfortable with children.
Hell. He'd have said the same about himself.
Treville is an old soldier and has been in his share of campaigns, but awaiting Richelieu's arrival, pacing the medical bay clasping one wrist behind his back and feeling his other hand jig for something to do, he suspects himself of not being quite over the finding of the boy. Some things stay with you - any soldier will tell you that - but long-term soldiers get good at coping, and finding how to bury or expunge the images that won't leave; otherwise they don't become long-term soldiers. And like the good friend with the bone and brains showing clean through their face, that attic where they put the boy has lingered with him in an awful way, far outstayed its welcome. He was a danger to the other children, the translator had told him they were saying, as Treville carried the boy down (fever-hot limbs hanging limp and heavy). Treville had snapped back without looking at the nuns, "They are a danger to children."
The sound of the flies . . .
An agent walks in, Treville knows even before she murmurs to him that Richelieu is here, and he says only, "Send him to my office." He takes a glance back at the boy in the bed - sleeping, for now, turned so he's mostly hugging his pillow, and as exhausting as they are to watch Treville doesn't doubt that having the seizures leaves the boy spent. He checks his watch but why bother? The seizures come so erratically, how can he know whether the next will be in an hour or in a moment?
He's only just ensconced himself behind his desk when an agent knocks at the door, and opens it for Richelieu's entrance. Treville stands to shake his hand, they haven't met on many occasions so far and he still doesn't know what to make of him, knows only that he dislikes him, something it's never difficult to realise of a person. But this isn't about Treville, but René, so he gestures for Richelieu to sit and says, "Are you recovered?"
Richelieu gives him a long look with his head tilted back so that, yes, he can look down at Treville, and then says, "I still have a headache. I'm sure there was no need for all that racket."
'Racket'; René's rift breaking came with a great shattering of psychic energy, enough to be felt all the way over in France, where Richelieu was disturbed, he says, by the pleading, urgent repetition of the boy's prayers like he was saying them right into his ear. Treville understands that it was uncomfortable and to some extent painful, though he doubts very much as painful as what René is still going through.
"He's still unwell," Treville says. "I only hoped you couldn't still hear him, I don't imagine that would be pleasant."
"He seems to have learned to keep his praying out of my head." Richelieu says. "You said you wanted me to talk to him."
". . . yes. If he wakes enough to allow it, he's been sleeping, mostly, when the seizures allow. He's - the boy is young, and very ill, and very alone. I hoped, with your affinity . . . I don't know. Just that you could reach him, let him know that he's safe here. He smiles at the translators but not like he believes them."
"He won't last long." Richelieu says dismissively. "If his rift has him like that."
Treville's heart is suddenly smaller, the world is suddenly smaller, thrown between the memory of the boy's sleeping face and that. He says, and keeps his voice steady, "Is that something you've seen?"
Richelieu looks at him with a wearied, even gaze, then says, "No. Only what anyone with common sense could see. He's a child and that rift is throttling him, I don't give him a month. Don't get attached. It's not what you're paid for."
Treville stares at him, too stunned at first even for the anger before that does come, with the white heat of a new-fired bullet. "As long as he's under this roof he's my responsibility to see to a circle. Do you think that you can help him or not?"
Richelieu raises his eyebrows at the clipped military tone, and pushes himself to stand. "I'll take a look at him," he says. "It shouldn't take long."
"I wouldn't want to take up too much of your valuable time." Treville says, still bit out in the carefully cultivated tone one always can use to a superior officer who is behaving like a toddler to make that matter obvious without courting actual disciplinary rebuttal, and he stands to lead Richelieu to the dangerously ill boy he has so graciously found the time to come look at.
As they walk through the villa Richelieu says, "You're as good as God, then, to him."
"What?"
"That's who he was asking to save him, and he got you instead." Richelieu smiles, as if any of this is funny. "Begging for his 'Father', and then you turn up."
"They had locked him in their attic. There was - he's bruised like they beat him but it's only because they left him there to hurt himself in every seizure -"
"Maybe a little longer than a month," Richelieu allows, giving an interested look out of one of the windows as they pass; it looks like it may snow. "Now he has a nursemaid who does care so very much."
Treville marches with his eyes straight forwards, teeth bit hard, and none of this is funny.
He's tried talking to the boy himself, but through a translator it doesn't feel natural and the translator found the boy hard enough to understand, rattling through what she said was strange slurred Spanish, too quick and curious an accent to be easy. And René himself doesn't appreciate the translator, seems hurt to be so little understood even in his own tongue and isn't given to talking very much, as if not being understood is just too saddening. Treville remembers - early, one of the first times René was able to sit in the bed and wait for their questions, watching them with his dark ironic eyes, always patiently amused to see what they might do next in their fussing and panic. Treville said to the translator, who already looked frazzled, "Ask him if he understands what the rift is. I need to know how he survived it."
The translator spoke to him and René looked at the bandages taping the drip to his wrist, picked at them, and spoke to them - spoke in machinegun Spanish, and even Treville thought the difference in flow was excessive; the translator held up her hands, said, "Habla más despacio, por favor -"
René muttered back something that was probably rude, and picked at the bandages until Treville put his hand over his to stop him. The boy looked up at him, one of his mute, eerily adult looks, and Treville said, "Ask him how he survived the first seizures."
Treville knew from the nuns' eventual report that René, his behaviour increasingly erratic, increasingly saying things he shouldn't have known, couldn't have known, had collapsed into the first pit of his powers a few days before Treville found him - the opening rift must have been that first seizure, when the frightened nuns locked him in an attic room, and sent for a priest. The priest had decided that René required exorcism, which never would have saved him from the rift inside him. But somehow, locked away and prayed over and only occasionally given water he couldn't even keep down, René had survived. The rift hadn't torn him open. It had burst every pipe in the street, the road outside had been a river, but it hadn't torn René inside-out and drowned the entire city. Treville isn't one to believe that the nuns' prayers saved him. So how the hell had a fourteen year old boy survived a rift alone?
The translator spoke to him, but René was still watching Treville's eyes. René spoke, overly slowly and deliberately, as if trying to make the poor dull translator understand; "La oración."
"Prayer," she said, and Treville felt a fist inside his chest, the fury of how he found the boy, the thought that he could still think that the nuns had helped him by doing any of that -
"Their prayer didn't save you." he said, hard, and the translator shared it for him, and René just held his eyes, so strangely solemn, making him understand.
"No, capitán." Quite calmly. "La mía."
Somehow Treville understood better than the translator, who said, "He thinks you're a captain."
No, captain. Mine.
The boy smiled, and said, "¿Cachai?"
He says as he walks, "He was raised by nuns to trust in God and he did exactly what they told him to, even after they did that to him. And he is now in my care, so he does seem to have got what he prayed for in the end, however it came about. The medical bay is through here."
Richelieu looks at him as if at a child who has soiled the floor, then breezes on ahead, into the medical bay where the boy waits.
Ferrand looks up from the papers on his desk, says, "He's awake." and eyes Richelieu in a stony way. "Who is this?"
"Armand Richelieu, of the last sealed circle. He's here to see if he can communicate with René."
"René," Ferrand says steadily, "was given a Spanish to French dictionary, which had to be removed from him once we realised which words he was looking up in it. But by all means, communicate with him. If you keep him occupied it saves the rest of us doing it."
There's a screen up beside René's bed, presumably put up by Ferrand so the boy couldn't see and pester at him while he's writing up his reports. As they approach, as there's no way to knock, Treville calls, "René? ¿Hola?" and steps around it.
The boy looks up. He's sitting upright, guilty expression on his face; he's got a pen, a ballpoint, God knows from where - Treville automatically reaches for his own pocket to check - and in lieu of paper, he's writing on his arm. He's written there, on the skin, ARAM and Treville is for one second thrown, jarred with a thought he can't place and then -
Recognises, half recognises the word; is he trying to write 'arm'? In English?
- then René sees Richelieu.
Afterwards, it's a phenomenon Treville will learn to recognise, will become in his own sick way used to. But this is the first time; René lurches his arm up to point at Richelieu, shrieks at him in Spanish, panic like the shattering of a tsunami -
"¡Cuervo! ¡Escorpión!"
The horror in his eyes, the shock like Treville is walking towards him with a bloody butcher's knife rather than another water affinity - switches clean off, gaze gone blank, Treville sees as his head slumps one way and his shoulders slump the other that the consciousness has snapped off in him and - he curses, scrambles forwards, bellows, "Ferrand -"
Richelieu is staring, jaw flexing tight as Treville gets there too late, René has already struck his head twice off the head of the bed, it lurches back like his neck is a spring as Treville tries to drag the boy's body to a more comfortable position, there's - blood -
"Ferra-"
"I'm here, get him away from - did he hit-"
"His nose is bleeding, he - Richelieu, get out of here, go back to my office -"
Teeth clenched, apparently René's seizure too wearing on his headache, Richelieu grits out, "I don't know why you asked me here to see to some ill-mannered brat who can't even-"
"My office!" Treville roars at him, and Richelieu stares, then clenches his fists and strides away, and as Treville tries to hold René's wrist before he can bruise it black jarring off the headboard like that, he hears the medical bay door slam.
It's violent, he's never seen one like this before, little grunts forced out on René's breath with the force of it, and there's so much blood bright scarlet from his nose, with the jarring of his head it's flecked the sheets and the wall . . . the translator has crept over, holding the book she was sitting by the wall reading in one hand; she says, nervously, "He called him a crow." She doesn't seem to like to get too close. "He called him a scorpion."
"He was wearing black," Ferrand says, grimly trying to pull René back onto the bed, his lurchings are trying to drive him sideways off it. "You'd think he was coming to a funeral."
"He just dresses like that," Treville grits out, as René's seizure fights him, wants to take the boy's wrists and his skull and batter them off the nearest hard surface they can find until there's much more blood to worry about, but Treville won't let them.
Ferrand says, "What the hell has he written on his - where did he get a pen?"
Treville is given glimpses into René's suffering, in how exhausted he is, how his limbs want to tremble their weakness, by the time the seizure is done and the boy is limp again and can be released from Treville's aching hold. René's head is slumped sideways, there's blood everywhere, it's in his teeth. Eyes closed René mumbles in Spanish and the translator has to lean her head in, cocked to hear, before René's lips still, and he's just breathing, slow, and lost. The translator looks up, nervous eyes. "I couldn't catch all of it," she says. "Something about a corridor."
Treville lifts a hand to rub his eyes, sees the blood on the palm, crooks a knuckle to do it without smearing a boy's blood on his face. "I have to go get rid of Richelieu," he says. "I don't think René will be talking to him."
"I need a scrubbing brush." Ferrand says acidly, lifting René's limp arm and scowling at the ink on it. "What the hell was he even . . ."
"The translator can ask him, when he's awake."
"He hardly makes sense half the time anyway, in any language. When I signed up to be a military doctor," Ferrand says, rearranging René to a more natural sleeping pose in the bed and not stopping scowling while doing it, "babysitting children was not on my contract."
"I'm sorry." Treville is getting a headache, whatever Richelieu is facing right now. "None of us imagined that this would happen."
The boy's head rolls heavily where it's put on the pillow, face filmed and peppered in blood, and he doesn't wake. There's still a bandage taped to one cheek, over the cut Treville can't work out the provenance of. However he banged his head off the floor, how did he manage to open a cheek? "Do you . . . I have to be prepared. I'm responsible for every person in this villa." His jaw flexes, his throat feels unnatural in him. "Do you think his rift will take him, soon?"
The doctor holds René's wrist for his pulse, and his breath sighs out through his nose. "He's strong," he says. "And young. And unperturbed by everything happening to him, which I suspect to be half the battle won. Were he distressed the seizures might . . . but he hardly seems to mind them. He gets more amusement than he should by telling me he likes my eyes."
"- your eyes?"
"Very pretty, the translator informed me." Ferrand gives him a withering look. "I can guess half of what he says to the translator sometimes, he seems less troubled by having the seizures and more bothered by being alone in that bed."
Jarred, Treville snaps, "He's fourteen."
"How old were you?" Ferrand says, and walks off for his desk, an enigmatic sort of question Treville wouldn't know how to answer anyway, certainly not to him. "I need to clean that blood off him, we'll have to change the sheets . . ."
Treville looks down at René, and says, as if the boy could understand the explanation even if he could hear it, "I have to go get rid of Richelieu."
The boy could not have made clearer his distress at Richelieu's approach - something about their affinities being too similar, or too different? - and if upset might make the seizures harder, upset must be avoided, at least for now. The boy just sleeps, and Treville thinks, When I signed up to the military, teenagers were really not on my mind either.
He turns to walk away, to his office. He keeps his back straight. He slots his hands behind his back, loosely clasping one wrist.
On the bed, René's eyes flicker beneath the lids. He's dreaming about scorpions.
Disclaimer: Okay, you know it would have been different if I'd actually owned it.
Rating: Probably only PG-13?
Warnings and spoilers: The main list's on part one, read sensibly.
Summary: First impressions count.
Note: You technically have enough pieces to solve the puzzle by now, there's only the 'why' left . . .
Treville hadn't planned for any of this. He asked for Richelieu because the two of them clearly already had some connection, some link through their affinity, and because as a water affinity Richelieu should be able to help him. Mostly, though, because he just didn't know what else to do. This situation no-one had planned for.
The calmest person in the room is the fourteen year old boy who keeps having the seizures. Treville doesn't understand the boy's philosophical response to his situation, because whenever he wakes and someone is wiping the drool from his cheek or offering him a beaker of water or tucking the sheets over him again, he smiles at them, and thanks them in Spanish, and doesn't make any fuss at all. He woke in this place where he can have no idea where he is, everyone is speaking a language he doesn't, the seizures don't stop and as awful as they are to watch they must be appalling to live through, and yet the boy is as placid as undisturbed water. How can he have more courage than the poor fool of a man who must now be responsible for him, who took charge of the affinities programme and never, never planned for this?
Treville has some small trepidation of sending for Richelieu, but he sets it aside. The petty fact of it is that he doesn't like the man, who isn't tall in the slightest but still manages to look down his nose at everyone he's near, and Treville isn't certain that he'll know how to be gentle with a child in René's situation, or any child, really. Richelieu has never struck him as a man comfortable with children.
Hell. He'd have said the same about himself.
Treville is an old soldier and has been in his share of campaigns, but awaiting Richelieu's arrival, pacing the medical bay clasping one wrist behind his back and feeling his other hand jig for something to do, he suspects himself of not being quite over the finding of the boy. Some things stay with you - any soldier will tell you that - but long-term soldiers get good at coping, and finding how to bury or expunge the images that won't leave; otherwise they don't become long-term soldiers. And like the good friend with the bone and brains showing clean through their face, that attic where they put the boy has lingered with him in an awful way, far outstayed its welcome. He was a danger to the other children, the translator had told him they were saying, as Treville carried the boy down (fever-hot limbs hanging limp and heavy). Treville had snapped back without looking at the nuns, "They are a danger to children."
The sound of the flies . . .
An agent walks in, Treville knows even before she murmurs to him that Richelieu is here, and he says only, "Send him to my office." He takes a glance back at the boy in the bed - sleeping, for now, turned so he's mostly hugging his pillow, and as exhausting as they are to watch Treville doesn't doubt that having the seizures leaves the boy spent. He checks his watch but why bother? The seizures come so erratically, how can he know whether the next will be in an hour or in a moment?
He's only just ensconced himself behind his desk when an agent knocks at the door, and opens it for Richelieu's entrance. Treville stands to shake his hand, they haven't met on many occasions so far and he still doesn't know what to make of him, knows only that he dislikes him, something it's never difficult to realise of a person. But this isn't about Treville, but René, so he gestures for Richelieu to sit and says, "Are you recovered?"
Richelieu gives him a long look with his head tilted back so that, yes, he can look down at Treville, and then says, "I still have a headache. I'm sure there was no need for all that racket."
'Racket'; René's rift breaking came with a great shattering of psychic energy, enough to be felt all the way over in France, where Richelieu was disturbed, he says, by the pleading, urgent repetition of the boy's prayers like he was saying them right into his ear. Treville understands that it was uncomfortable and to some extent painful, though he doubts very much as painful as what René is still going through.
"He's still unwell," Treville says. "I only hoped you couldn't still hear him, I don't imagine that would be pleasant."
"He seems to have learned to keep his praying out of my head." Richelieu says. "You said you wanted me to talk to him."
". . . yes. If he wakes enough to allow it, he's been sleeping, mostly, when the seizures allow. He's - the boy is young, and very ill, and very alone. I hoped, with your affinity . . . I don't know. Just that you could reach him, let him know that he's safe here. He smiles at the translators but not like he believes them."
"He won't last long." Richelieu says dismissively. "If his rift has him like that."
Treville's heart is suddenly smaller, the world is suddenly smaller, thrown between the memory of the boy's sleeping face and that. He says, and keeps his voice steady, "Is that something you've seen?"
Richelieu looks at him with a wearied, even gaze, then says, "No. Only what anyone with common sense could see. He's a child and that rift is throttling him, I don't give him a month. Don't get attached. It's not what you're paid for."
Treville stares at him, too stunned at first even for the anger before that does come, with the white heat of a new-fired bullet. "As long as he's under this roof he's my responsibility to see to a circle. Do you think that you can help him or not?"
Richelieu raises his eyebrows at the clipped military tone, and pushes himself to stand. "I'll take a look at him," he says. "It shouldn't take long."
"I wouldn't want to take up too much of your valuable time." Treville says, still bit out in the carefully cultivated tone one always can use to a superior officer who is behaving like a toddler to make that matter obvious without courting actual disciplinary rebuttal, and he stands to lead Richelieu to the dangerously ill boy he has so graciously found the time to come look at.
As they walk through the villa Richelieu says, "You're as good as God, then, to him."
"What?"
"That's who he was asking to save him, and he got you instead." Richelieu smiles, as if any of this is funny. "Begging for his 'Father', and then you turn up."
"They had locked him in their attic. There was - he's bruised like they beat him but it's only because they left him there to hurt himself in every seizure -"
"Maybe a little longer than a month," Richelieu allows, giving an interested look out of one of the windows as they pass; it looks like it may snow. "Now he has a nursemaid who does care so very much."
Treville marches with his eyes straight forwards, teeth bit hard, and none of this is funny.
He's tried talking to the boy himself, but through a translator it doesn't feel natural and the translator found the boy hard enough to understand, rattling through what she said was strange slurred Spanish, too quick and curious an accent to be easy. And René himself doesn't appreciate the translator, seems hurt to be so little understood even in his own tongue and isn't given to talking very much, as if not being understood is just too saddening. Treville remembers - early, one of the first times René was able to sit in the bed and wait for their questions, watching them with his dark ironic eyes, always patiently amused to see what they might do next in their fussing and panic. Treville said to the translator, who already looked frazzled, "Ask him if he understands what the rift is. I need to know how he survived it."
The translator spoke to him and René looked at the bandages taping the drip to his wrist, picked at them, and spoke to them - spoke in machinegun Spanish, and even Treville thought the difference in flow was excessive; the translator held up her hands, said, "Habla más despacio, por favor -"
René muttered back something that was probably rude, and picked at the bandages until Treville put his hand over his to stop him. The boy looked up at him, one of his mute, eerily adult looks, and Treville said, "Ask him how he survived the first seizures."
Treville knew from the nuns' eventual report that René, his behaviour increasingly erratic, increasingly saying things he shouldn't have known, couldn't have known, had collapsed into the first pit of his powers a few days before Treville found him - the opening rift must have been that first seizure, when the frightened nuns locked him in an attic room, and sent for a priest. The priest had decided that René required exorcism, which never would have saved him from the rift inside him. But somehow, locked away and prayed over and only occasionally given water he couldn't even keep down, René had survived. The rift hadn't torn him open. It had burst every pipe in the street, the road outside had been a river, but it hadn't torn René inside-out and drowned the entire city. Treville isn't one to believe that the nuns' prayers saved him. So how the hell had a fourteen year old boy survived a rift alone?
The translator spoke to him, but René was still watching Treville's eyes. René spoke, overly slowly and deliberately, as if trying to make the poor dull translator understand; "La oración."
"Prayer," she said, and Treville felt a fist inside his chest, the fury of how he found the boy, the thought that he could still think that the nuns had helped him by doing any of that -
"Their prayer didn't save you." he said, hard, and the translator shared it for him, and René just held his eyes, so strangely solemn, making him understand.
"No, capitán." Quite calmly. "La mía."
Somehow Treville understood better than the translator, who said, "He thinks you're a captain."
No, captain. Mine.
The boy smiled, and said, "¿Cachai?"
He says as he walks, "He was raised by nuns to trust in God and he did exactly what they told him to, even after they did that to him. And he is now in my care, so he does seem to have got what he prayed for in the end, however it came about. The medical bay is through here."
Richelieu looks at him as if at a child who has soiled the floor, then breezes on ahead, into the medical bay where the boy waits.
Ferrand looks up from the papers on his desk, says, "He's awake." and eyes Richelieu in a stony way. "Who is this?"
"Armand Richelieu, of the last sealed circle. He's here to see if he can communicate with René."
"René," Ferrand says steadily, "was given a Spanish to French dictionary, which had to be removed from him once we realised which words he was looking up in it. But by all means, communicate with him. If you keep him occupied it saves the rest of us doing it."
There's a screen up beside René's bed, presumably put up by Ferrand so the boy couldn't see and pester at him while he's writing up his reports. As they approach, as there's no way to knock, Treville calls, "René? ¿Hola?" and steps around it.
The boy looks up. He's sitting upright, guilty expression on his face; he's got a pen, a ballpoint, God knows from where - Treville automatically reaches for his own pocket to check - and in lieu of paper, he's writing on his arm. He's written there, on the skin, ARAM and Treville is for one second thrown, jarred with a thought he can't place and then -
Recognises, half recognises the word; is he trying to write 'arm'? In English?
- then René sees Richelieu.
Afterwards, it's a phenomenon Treville will learn to recognise, will become in his own sick way used to. But this is the first time; René lurches his arm up to point at Richelieu, shrieks at him in Spanish, panic like the shattering of a tsunami -
"¡Cuervo! ¡Escorpión!"
The horror in his eyes, the shock like Treville is walking towards him with a bloody butcher's knife rather than another water affinity - switches clean off, gaze gone blank, Treville sees as his head slumps one way and his shoulders slump the other that the consciousness has snapped off in him and - he curses, scrambles forwards, bellows, "Ferrand -"
Richelieu is staring, jaw flexing tight as Treville gets there too late, René has already struck his head twice off the head of the bed, it lurches back like his neck is a spring as Treville tries to drag the boy's body to a more comfortable position, there's - blood -
"Ferra-"
"I'm here, get him away from - did he hit-"
"His nose is bleeding, he - Richelieu, get out of here, go back to my office -"
Teeth clenched, apparently René's seizure too wearing on his headache, Richelieu grits out, "I don't know why you asked me here to see to some ill-mannered brat who can't even-"
"My office!" Treville roars at him, and Richelieu stares, then clenches his fists and strides away, and as Treville tries to hold René's wrist before he can bruise it black jarring off the headboard like that, he hears the medical bay door slam.
It's violent, he's never seen one like this before, little grunts forced out on René's breath with the force of it, and there's so much blood bright scarlet from his nose, with the jarring of his head it's flecked the sheets and the wall . . . the translator has crept over, holding the book she was sitting by the wall reading in one hand; she says, nervously, "He called him a crow." She doesn't seem to like to get too close. "He called him a scorpion."
"He was wearing black," Ferrand says, grimly trying to pull René back onto the bed, his lurchings are trying to drive him sideways off it. "You'd think he was coming to a funeral."
"He just dresses like that," Treville grits out, as René's seizure fights him, wants to take the boy's wrists and his skull and batter them off the nearest hard surface they can find until there's much more blood to worry about, but Treville won't let them.
Ferrand says, "What the hell has he written on his - where did he get a pen?"
Treville is given glimpses into René's suffering, in how exhausted he is, how his limbs want to tremble their weakness, by the time the seizure is done and the boy is limp again and can be released from Treville's aching hold. René's head is slumped sideways, there's blood everywhere, it's in his teeth. Eyes closed René mumbles in Spanish and the translator has to lean her head in, cocked to hear, before René's lips still, and he's just breathing, slow, and lost. The translator looks up, nervous eyes. "I couldn't catch all of it," she says. "Something about a corridor."
Treville lifts a hand to rub his eyes, sees the blood on the palm, crooks a knuckle to do it without smearing a boy's blood on his face. "I have to go get rid of Richelieu," he says. "I don't think René will be talking to him."
"I need a scrubbing brush." Ferrand says acidly, lifting René's limp arm and scowling at the ink on it. "What the hell was he even . . ."
"The translator can ask him, when he's awake."
"He hardly makes sense half the time anyway, in any language. When I signed up to be a military doctor," Ferrand says, rearranging René to a more natural sleeping pose in the bed and not stopping scowling while doing it, "babysitting children was not on my contract."
"I'm sorry." Treville is getting a headache, whatever Richelieu is facing right now. "None of us imagined that this would happen."
The boy's head rolls heavily where it's put on the pillow, face filmed and peppered in blood, and he doesn't wake. There's still a bandage taped to one cheek, over the cut Treville can't work out the provenance of. However he banged his head off the floor, how did he manage to open a cheek? "Do you . . . I have to be prepared. I'm responsible for every person in this villa." His jaw flexes, his throat feels unnatural in him. "Do you think his rift will take him, soon?"
The doctor holds René's wrist for his pulse, and his breath sighs out through his nose. "He's strong," he says. "And young. And unperturbed by everything happening to him, which I suspect to be half the battle won. Were he distressed the seizures might . . . but he hardly seems to mind them. He gets more amusement than he should by telling me he likes my eyes."
"- your eyes?"
"Very pretty, the translator informed me." Ferrand gives him a withering look. "I can guess half of what he says to the translator sometimes, he seems less troubled by having the seizures and more bothered by being alone in that bed."
Jarred, Treville snaps, "He's fourteen."
"How old were you?" Ferrand says, and walks off for his desk, an enigmatic sort of question Treville wouldn't know how to answer anyway, certainly not to him. "I need to clean that blood off him, we'll have to change the sheets . . ."
Treville looks down at René, and says, as if the boy could understand the explanation even if he could hear it, "I have to go get rid of Richelieu."
The boy could not have made clearer his distress at Richelieu's approach - something about their affinities being too similar, or too different? - and if upset might make the seizures harder, upset must be avoided, at least for now. The boy just sleeps, and Treville thinks, When I signed up to the military, teenagers were really not on my mind either.
He turns to walk away, to his office. He keeps his back straight. He slots his hands behind his back, loosely clasping one wrist.
On the bed, René's eyes flicker beneath the lids. He's dreaming about scorpions.
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(Anonymous) 2017-08-25 04:28 pm (UTC)(link)It's also a sign of how much Aramis' condition has degraded over time that seeing him say "¿Cachai?" made me go all "aaaw" while quietly breaking my heart. I miss our little psychic shit, as Porthos so lovingly puts it.
And no matter how much Treville had to openly disapprove of Porthos', and later Athos', behavior when they first met Richelieu, I now suspect that part of him was not only relieved to that Aramis now had one, then two people unquestionably in his corner, but also experiencing some deep schadenfreude.
Thank you for this small update (even though I KNOW it means the next one in the series will be that time Aramis didn't escape, and I KNOW it's coming soon, and I KNOW it's going to be bad). Now off to read the other one /o/
Wishing you the best <3
- Niitza
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On the "¿Cachai?", I have really missed that too ;___; All of them have changed through the course of the fic but it's so obvious in Aramis' *voice* what he's lost, I miss him being an obnoxious Chilean psychic shit tooooo . . .
I hope you've enjoyed the rest of this despite the creep towards the plus one honey, thank you for reading it! <3