Disclaimer: I don't not own The Musketeers.

a/n: This is a Zombie Fic, don't hate on me. I hope it's as good as it appears in my head. Fingers crossed. Here we go... (the same rules for the dead from "The Walking Dead," apply. You don't need to be bitten to be turned, just dead).

Summary:
Sickness takes France, and the dead walk the land. d'Artagnan was born special, but what happens when others discover this? Paris is supposed to be a safe haven, will the Musketeers protect him like his father promised?

the M~U~S~K~E~T~E~E~R~S - S~R~E~E~T~E~K~S~U~M eht

Life is Dead is Death
Prologue:

The first indication that Athos had that his life was turning into a desolate pit, was not the day that sickness washed through France when he'd been 25 and Thomas 15, killing anyone and everyone, before animating their dead corpses... but the day he came into the parlour to find two dead servants half consumed, the room covered in blood—and his baby brother Thomas as the turned culprit.

A sob clawed up his throat as Thomas looked up from his current meal of the footman, to see a fresh meal. He clambered to his feet and headed straight for the Comte. Athos barely managed to recover his senses before the dead man reached him. He struggled for a moment, before he managed to get a grip under Thomas' snapping jaw.

He stared shakily at his brother who was no longer his brother, but a mindless, dead creature that murdered without bias. Blood from his two victims covered the lower-half of his face, his hands and sleeves, and his entire shirt front. Flesh, human flesh was caught between his teeth. His eyes, blue as Athos' own, were a pale white with a pinpricked pupils. Behind those eyes was not the mind of his smart-aleck, strong-willed, annoying little brother that he had known for the last eighteen-years, but the mindless, soulless monster that had used his brother for killing and consuming.

It grunted and groaned as its jaw snapped at him, as if it were trying to speak, but lacked the function to move its tongue in a fashion besides wanton movements thirsting for a taste. Its fingers clawing for heedlessly and uselessly at his shirtsleeves.

With a shuddering breath, he took the knife, one of the many that he always kept on his person these days, and rose it towards his brother. Its pale gaze didn't even flicker towards the weapon. It didn't know what it was, or care.

His wife found him on the floor of the parlour, surround by death and flesh, cradling his brother in his lap, hard tears clouding his blue eyes. He'd been 26 when they married. He was nearly 28 now at the death of his baby brother.

Pale and shaking, Anne ignore the gore and knelt at his side, her arms wrapped around his hard shaking shoulders.

The raspy groan punctuated the silence and she nearly feel back in statement as the infection took over the two dead servants and reanimated their remains. Athos set Thomas down, and with the same knife, turned and stabbed each corpse through the skull and into their brains.

Anne had been his only comfort and peace. She held his heart and his soul.

Athos ordered the two servants burned, and before Thomas' burial in the cemetery next to their father and mother, he examined the body. Wanting, needing, to discover the cause for Thomas' turn. Anne tried to talk him out of it, but he wasn't to be swayed.

He suspected that it might have been a bite, though if it had, he knew Thomas would have told him. As he discovered, it was a stab wound to the abdomen that he killed his brother.

But the ground fell from beneath his feet, crumbled from existence as a couple weeks later after his brother's death, he discovered the culprit to his original murder. The one who had stabbed his human body and left him to turn into that monster.

The woman that he loved, that he cherished. Anne had murdered his brother.

So he killed her, sent her from the house and to the outside, sent her to her death. It was more than she deserved. He should have hung her, but he was barely holding on as it was. The bottle was his only true companion now.

It wasn't but a week later, that he left his life as Comte behind, the people of Pinon, his family's home for generations. He couldn't stand to be surround by the bitter-sweet memories that darkened every corner, taunting and haunting him. He didn't care whether he lived or died. Let the dead come, what did he care?

Porthos had been fighting to stay alive since he could first remember. The outlook of life had not been a good one for him form the very start of his life. His mother, a single, impoverished, freed-slave who spoke broken French, was left to the gutter with her infant son. He was forced to grow up fast. Learned to see the dangers that no child that young should. Learned to wield a dagger and use his fists like bricks, his fingers nimble to snatch.

He was 8 when he lost his mother. His two best-friends became his family. Charon and Flea. They watched each other's backs. They took care of each other. He was fifteen when the first person became sick, a man in the Court. Soon after, the dead walked.

When the sickness came, the Court of Miracles was like a hotbed. The close quarters, people living shoulder-to-shoulder. It wasn't a year before King Louis ordered the Court to razed to the ground, safe in his Palace surrounded by guards.

Charon had been bitten and put-down some weeks before. Flea refused to leave, even as the smoke clogged the streets. This was her home, where she belonged, she had declared to Porthos. Porthos was determined to either stay beside her in death, or knock her out and drag her away. But somehow, against it all, she managed to convince him dumbly that he was meant for better things than to die in the Court, to go down as nothing.

So he'd kissed Flea one last time, pressing his forehead to her own, his hand grasping the nape of her neck through her dreaded and beaded blond locks. And then he was gone through the smoke, shoving and slashing through the bodies; unable to tell which were the living, the dead, or the Red Guards with torches and pitch. And then he was into the streets of Paris, determined to do as Flea had told him (like he always did) and find out his destiny.

Aramis' father had been a very devote man, his faith never wavering. Not when the five d'Herblays: Alejandro and his beautiful wife Roberta, with their three sons Antony, Maurice, and René, immigrated from Spain to France for a better life. Not when the trip cost Maurice his life. Not when years later, Roberta was taken during the birth of their stillborn daughter. And then his eldest son was claimed after injury working in the field.

His belief did not falter, not when René was 12 and sickness overran France, killing the living, and raising the dead. It was a test from God. When he watched his neighbours and friends, their children and families, the people from his church become sick and then turn on their own.

Even after the dishonour and sin his youngest did of laying with a neighbour girl in the town, during the dangers of the night. When the girl Isabelle, just sixteen, fell pregnant, it was the right thing, both fathers agreed, that the two married.

The wedding was held in the town's church, and what was left of its people attended. It would be good to lift people's spirits, to show them that even through all the death and devastation, there was still things that were worth loving, there was still life to be lived, even surrounded in death.

René, even though just seventeen, with his whole-life ahead of him, was happy. He was with the girl that he loved, he was soon to have a son or a daughter. A family of his own after his were taken from him one and then another. Despite how the world, so beautiful before, was now painted macabre with the dead walking. He still found pieces of joy. Six months into the pregnancy, Isabelle miscarried. The anniversary the next year, she disappeared. One year after that, Alejandro finally died of a heart attack.

Aramis was alone. His entire family, gone before him. His wife and child. He had wanted to give up, give in. There was nothing here for him now. But he stayed alive for his father, who had also watched him family die one at a time, but still kept faith.

So Aramis held onto that belief, that he was still alive in this God forsaken world, because God had a plan for him.

The sky was black, the stars in the night sky painted over with dark clouds. A rain was coming down, masking the natural and unnatural sounds of the outside. The shadows of the cave were cast aside by the flickering flame of the quickly made fire.

Moans of distress punctuated the air, sounds desperately trying to be quiet. Nature in its purest sense was taking its course, even if in the most unnatural circumstance. An exchange—for as long as time itself. One life leaving the world, and a new one entering it.

Alexandre d'Artagnan and his young wife Ella had tried to be as helpful as they might when the sickness first started. Offering shelter to those in need of it, giving away food from their fields. But quickly, even the farmlands out in Gascony, so spaced, were slowly overrun by the sick. And not one-year into the epidemic, they were forced from their home.

Not by the dead. For all their charity to strangers, a group a men had forced the couple from their home. Alexandre knew there was naught he could do. If he fought, they would kill him, and who knew what they might do to the heavily pregnant Ella.

Alexandre was a prepared man, and having feared that one day, unwilling, they were forced from their home by thugs, he'd set up several different locations around his land to make camp.

It was night and all they had was the light from the full moon and the peppered stars in the sky. The wood was filled with shadows. And the shadows were filled with the hidden. They'd been nearly to the cave that Alexandre had found and hidden supplies within, praying that they were untouched by both weather, nature, the living and the dead—though the dead only bothered after things with warm flowing blood—when the trio of walkers crossed their paths.

He was able to kill the first one almost instantly, slashing the top of its decaying head off. The second, he thrust his sword, it got caught in the creatures skull and he stumbled back, trying to wrench it free. That was when he heard Ella scream and his heart stopped.

Abandoning his sword for the moment, the walker dropped to the ground dead, and he spun around, his knife in his grasp. The creature was on top of her, its teeth latched onto her arm held in defence of her stomach. In her other hand was a hefty rock, which she was currently beating the dead with, but it seemed to have little effect.

Alexandre grabbed the collar of the walker's shirt and wrenched it off his wife, shoving his knife into its brain in the same moment. He shoved the dead off him, and rushed to his sobbing wife. She was a dead woman, marked. No one survived a bite.

Ella simply refused to give in though, and after giving a shuddering breath, she stilled and focused and locked eyes with her husband. In a lightly trembling voice, said cut if off! Alexandre had been horrified, he could not mutilate his pregnant wife like that. But her denial and mention of their child who would be here in a matter of days, convinced it. Alexandre stood and retrieved his stuck sword form the walker's skull. He doused it and Ella's arm with the small flask of wine he had, gave her a stick to clench between her teeth, laid her trembling arm straight and tied it off.

Her scream was just as horrible as when she'd been bitten. The limb came off after two blows, and blood spurted everywhere. She only managed to stay conscious for a few short moments before passing out from the pain or blood loss. He quickly wrapped the wound and picking up his unconscious wife, and carried her the rest of the way to the cave.

Luckily, thankfully, the supplies he had left there were untouched.

He settled his wife and built a fire, sticking his dagger into the flame. He was going to have to cauterize the wound, there was no other choice. He watched his wife throughout the night, and by morning, it was obvious that fever had taken her. Though Alexandre could never be sure whether it was from the bite or her arm.

Ella held on for four days, and then she forced her husband to face reality. She wasn't going to make it, but their child, their son could. And the babe in her stomach seemed to agree, because not a few hours later did her water break and the fevered and pained woman went into labour.

Ella never even got to hold her son before she passed.

Tears clouded his dark eyes, as Alexandre punctured his wife's brain with his knife, the mark hidden in her dark hair. Her skin was still warm from the fever. He caressed her sleeping face for a moment, taking her in, remembering her, before the fussing on the naked babe in his arms pulled him back to the here and now.

Alexandre knelt at her side, and one handed, started to undo the laces of her shirt. She'd been bitten, and he had no idea how it had effected her milk, but at the moment, he had no other choice. He hugged the dead woman to his chest and bared her own. Arms wrapped out them both, he put the baby to her breast. Almost instantly, he latched onto the nipple and started to suckle.

His son was all he had left, he would do everything and anything, to make sure that his son—Charles Xavier d'Artagnan—lived, even if it was in a cruel world like this one.

[tbc]

the M~U~S~K~E~T~E~E~R~S - S~R~E~E~T~E~K~S~U~M eht

So... is this making any sense to you? It's just a little background into how it all started for our boys, that lead them onto the path of coming into each others lives. Obviously, as you can see, the ages are all messed up. I know, I confused about it myself. The story will take off presently in the next chapter, 15 years after d'Artagnan's birth. Thank you for reading, please review so I know I'm not entirely insane and illiterate.

And, as is well known René is Aramis' given-name.

Thanks! :)

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