What Strength Was For

Porthos had spent a very long life being underestimated, and he had made his peace with it decades earlier, on a specific afternoon he could still recall with some precision: a court gathering where a minor nobleman, observing Porthos's size and his relatively plain manner of speech, had remarked to a companion, not quietly enough, that here, surely, was a man built entirely for lifting things and entirely unsuited to any conversation more demanding than the weather.

He had not corrected the nobleman, then or afterward. He had simply gone on being exactly what people expected, because he had discovered, fairly early in his career, that being underestimated carried real practical advantages for a man who intended to make his way through the world primarily by his sword arm rather than his wit. Opponents who dismissed him as a simple brute made mistakes that opponents who took him seriously never made, and Porthos had built an entire long and largely successful career out of precisely this gap between what people assumed of him and what he was capable of delivering.

What he had never quite managed to explain to anyone, including, for most of his life, himself, was that there existed a considerable distance between being underestimated strategically, which he had learned to use, and being underestimated personally, which had cost him more than he generally allowed himself to acknowledge. Aramis was clever, and everyone knew it, and treated him accordingly. Athos carried a nobility of bearing so evident that even strangers granted him a natural authority within minutes of meeting him. D'Artagnan had a quickness of wit that announced itself in nearly every sentence he spoke. Porthos had his size, his strength, his true and uncomplicated courage, and a public reputation, built up across decades, as the group's reliable muscle, invaluable in a fight, and not, by general unspoken consensus, the friend one consulted on matters requiring subtlety.

He had told himself, for most of his adult life, that this reputation did not trouble him, and for long stretches this had even been true. He was, after all, proud of his strength, had cultivated it with real discipline across decades of training, and took a straightforward, uncomplicated satisfaction in being the man his friends could rely upon when a situation called for exactly what he offered. It was only in quieter moments, increasingly frequent, as the years accumulated and his own mortality became a subject he could no longer entirely avoid considering, that he found himself wondering whether an entire lifetime spent being valued for one quality, however actually and repeatedly useful that quality had proven, amounted to being fully known by the people who mattered most to him, or only fully used.

He had never resented Aramis for this, not truly, though there were nights at Belle-Île, in these final weeks, when something adjacent to resentment surfaced in him with a clarity that troubled his sleep. Aramis had recruited him into this final grand scheme, a conspiracy of a scale and ambition that even Porthos, no student of politics, understood immediately exceeded anything the two of them had ever previously attempted together, using precisely the argument that had always worked on Porthos across their long friendship: an appeal to his loyalty, his courage, his willingness to commit himself fully to a cause a cleverer friend had judged worth committing to, without requiring Porthos to fully understand every intricate detail of the plan itself.

Porthos had agreed, as he always agreed, because Aramis asked, and because the prospect of one final grand adventure alongside a friend he had loved for most of his adult life struck him as worth almost any risk the adventure might carry. It was only now, with royal ships visible on the horizon and the conspiracy's collapse no longer a distant possibility but an approaching certainty, that Porthos found himself turning over a question he had never previously permitted himself to ask directly: whether Aramis had ever, across their whole long friendship, valued Porthos's actual judgment on anything that mattered, or had simply valued, with the same clear-eyed practicality Porthos brought to his own reputation, having a reliably loyal and reliably strong ally available whenever a plan required exactly that.

He did not resolve the question that night, walking the rocky shoreline of an island that would very shortly become either his refuge or his tomb, depending on currents of royal politics he had never claimed to fully understand and had, in truth, never much wanted to. He found, turning the question over without resolving it, that the not-resolving troubled him rather less than he might have expected. He was sixty years old, or near enough that the precise count no longer seemed especially important, and he had spent every one of those years being exactly, consistently, reliably himself: a man whose strength had carried his friends through difficulties their cleverness alone could never have survived, however rarely any of them, including Porthos, had ever paused to say so aloud.

Whatever Aramis had valued him for, across their long partnership, Porthos found, walking the shoreline in the gathering dark, that he was not prepared, at this late date, to trade the friendship itself for a fuller accounting of its exact terms. He had given what he had to give, for as long as he had been asked to give it, and if the giving had never been fully seen for what it cost him, he suspected — turning at last back toward the fortress, and whatever the coming days intended to demand of him — that this had always been the particular, unglamorous burden of a man built, by nature and by long habit alike, to carry weight rather than to be asked what carrying it actually felt like.