The Barony
Porthos had wanted, across the entire long span of his adult life, exactly one thing with a consistency that outlasted every other ambition he had briefly entertained: a title. Not wealth, though he had accumulated a comfortable fortune through inheritance and careful management. Not fame, though his exploits alongside his three friends had earned him a considerable measure of that too, however much credit for the group's cleverness typically settled on Aramis and d'Artagnan rather than on him. He wanted, specifically and above all else, to be able to say, with full legal standing, that he was a baron, a small enough ambition, he was aware, for a man who had accomplished as much as he had, and precisely because of its smallness, an ambition he found himself unable to set aside no matter how many years passed without its fulfillment.
He understood, in his own plain way, exactly why the title mattered to him so disproportionately, though he would have struggled to articulate the reasoning aloud even to Aramis, the friend he trusted most fully with matters he could not easily put into words. He had spent his entire life being underestimated on sight: his size mistaken for simplicity, his straightforward manner mistaken for a lack of depth, his real loyalty mistaken, by people who had never troubled to look past his physical presence, for the unreflective devotion of a large dog rather than the considered choice of a grown man who had decided, deliberately, what and whom he valued. A title would not change any of this directly. But it would provide, he privately believed, a form of evidence that even the most casually dismissive observer would be obligated to acknowledge: a formal, legal recognition that Porthos, whatever anyone assumed of him at a glance, had accomplished something the world's own official records were required to respect.
When Aramis had first suggested, months earlier, that the grand and dangerous scheme now unfolding at Belle-Île might, if successful, finally secure Porthos the barony he had wanted for so long, Porthos had felt something he recognized, with some private embarrassment, as an almost boyish surge of hope, the specific, undignified hope of a man who has wanted one particular thing for decades and has learned to keep the wanting carefully contained, only to feel it break loose, all at once, at the first credible suggestion that fulfillment might finally be within reach.
He understood, now, walking the fortifications at Belle-Île with royal ships gathering on the horizon, that the scheme had failed, and that whatever barony might once have been within reach had failed along with it. He found, turning this understanding over with the same plain, unhurried attention he brought to most difficult questions, that his disappointment, while true, was considerably smaller than he might once have predicted it would be, and he spent a good portion of that evening trying to work out why.
The answer, when it arrived, arrived with the particular simplicity Porthos generally preferred in his own conclusions, whatever complexity had gone into reaching them. He had wanted the barony, he realized, not for the title itself, which was, after all, only a word attached to a piece of paper, but for what he had believed the title would prove about him to other people. And standing now on a fortress wall beside Aramis, having risked everything he possessed in loyal service to a friend's grand and ultimately unsuccessful ambition, Porthos found that he no longer needed the paper to prove anything. He had proven it, to the one person whose good opinion had always mattered most to him, simply by being exactly who he had always been: loyal past the point of easy calculation, brave past the point of easy comfort, and present, without hesitation, at precisely the moment his friend most needed him.
He mentioned none of this to Aramis directly. It was not, he understood about himself with the same plain clarity he brought to most self-assessment, the kind of thing he was built to say aloud, and he suspected, correctly, that Aramis, brilliant, subtle, endlessly capable of finding the precise words for any occasion, would have found Porthos's simple, unpolished version of the realization somewhat inadequate to the moment, however really Porthos meant it.
What he did instead, as the royal ships drew closer and the scheme's final, desperate hours approached, was exactly what he had always done across their long friendship: he made himself useful in the specific, physical, uncomplicated way that had defined his entire life, checking the fortress's defenses with the careful attention of a man who understood exactly how much weight a given wall or gate could bear before it gave way, calculating angles and distances with an instinct for physical reality that no amount of Aramis's cleverness could substitute for.
He thought, once more, about the barony, and found that he could set the thought aside now with something close to real peace rather than mere resignation. Whatever the coming days demanded of him, Porthos understood, with the particular clarity that sometimes arrives only when a lifetime's smaller ambitions finally step aside to reveal what had mattered underneath them all along, that he had already received, from this friendship and from this final adventure, exactly what the title had always been meant to represent. He had been seen, fully, by the person whose seeing mattered most. Everything else, he decided, walking back toward the fortress's inner keep to report what he'd found, was simply a piece of paper he no longer required.