Hello, everyone! I don't really know what this, but it's late and this is apparently what happens late at night with me and a account. Also almost the entire Les Mis cast is like fifteen minutes away from my house right now so that's lovely. (Someday, guys. Somedays). Disclaimer: I don't own Les Mis or any associated characters.
It is time to get drunk! So as not to be the martyred slaves of Time, get drunk; get drunk without stopping! On wine, on poetry, or on virtue, as you wish.
—Charles Baudelaire
He comes through the door shortly after nine o'clock in the evening, chased by dry leaves and swirling refuse. The shop is dim, the air hanging heavy with dank chill.
"Grantaire." Monsieur Dupont does not smile; he presses his lips into a thin, unforgiving line. "I did not expect to see you back so soon."
"Wine flows freely these days. I always like to share." Grantaire will be damned if he is going to admit to drinking those bottles alone in his cold flat.
"Your friends must be thirsty."
"Always, Dupont." From the dusty shelves he takes two bottles. Their cool weight is comforting, almost elicit. The dark wine, the promise of its loose warmth running in his veins. He puts them on the counter. Dupont looks away.
"I'm sorry, Grantaire. I cannot."
"What?"
"You owe too much." Seeing the student's blank expression, "Your debts. You owe us too many sousfranc. I cannot accept your money, or lack of it, here anymore."
"Dupont...just this once! My friends and I—we're celebrating tonight. It's a friend's birthday, you see. Mon ami, et il est—il est—"
"I do not care who or what he is. I do not care if he is the king himself." Dupont turns away. He lights a candle and pinches out the match. "I am sorry, Grantaire. Buy your liquor elsewhere."
Grantaire fights the urge to push the bottles off the counter's edge and watch them break. He sees, for a moment, the wine running dark like blood against the dirty flagstones.
"Very well." He leaves, returns to the cold night. What else is there to do? Dupont will not take his promises of payment anymore.
He needs to drink. He aches for it.
"Hey, monsieur."
Grantaire does not look around until the voice comes again, from the darkness of a brothel's doorstep.
"Monsieur."
"Me?"
"This is the first time you've left empty-handed."
"Sorry?"
"Dupont's place." The boy sidles from the shadows. "I see the look on your face. I've got what you need, don't worry about Dupont. The old man's a real scrooge."
"Yeah," Grantaire agrees. He senses a deal closing in, and the idea is thrilling.
"If you want your wine cheap, I've got it."
"How much?"
The gamin names his price. Cheap; less than the sous he's paid for Dupont's goods.
"Sure, sure." Grantaire tosses the grimy-faced kid the coins, takes the bottles. He uncorks one with a pocket-knife and takes a couple of swigs as he crosses the street, heading north to the Musain. Surely the old café will be willing to give him a table, maybe some kind words. Lately, the student cafés have been hesitant to allow him entrance. And he knows that it's because of the drinking, and that he's a shame to university students, to those who struggle in the dim hours of the night to pen essays and read thick dusty dull tomes, but for the love of God he cannot stop.
He needs this, he needs it like air, like breath.
He can't stop.
"We're nearly closed." The pretty girl behind the counter says when he comes in.
"And I'm nearly drunk enough to agree." He winks at her. She presses her lips together and rolls her eyes, and goes on talking to the boy waiters in the kitchen. As the dishwasher joins their conversation Grantaire stumbles into a chair and slumps against the table. He tilts his head back, allows another long swallow to burn at his throat. Warm, good. Red like rubies, like blood.
This doesn't taste like wine. There's something sinister in its bitterness. He contemplates putting the wine away, asking if the pretty waitress can be persuaded to give him some of their good stuff—I'll pay you tomorrow, my word's good, darling, unless I can pay you another way, eh?—if not wine than whisky, than beer, than rum, anything.
He doesn't. Grantaire sits and drinks and he feels the weight in his chest descending and he should stop but he doesn't. The pretty girl's face and dark hair swim before his eyes and he smirks because this is all wrong, he's barely finished half the bottle, this is so, so wrong.
"It's this wine," he tells her. "The damn gamin poisoned me."
But she isn't listening. He laughs, quietly, to himself; a drunk's laugh, low and desperate. He lets his head fall forward onto his folded arms.
"Grantaire. Grantaire. Hey. Hey, Grantaire. Will someone wake him up?"
"Wake up, idiot." Someone punches his arm, hard.
Grantaire opens his eyes, blearily. The café swims with light and noise.
"How long have I been passed out?"
"Long enough." Enjolras sweeps past with a patched flag in his hand.
"A couple of hours, at least." Marius checks his pocket watch. He puts a hand on Grantaire's shoulder. "Don't worry over Enjolras. I'm sure that he's just worried that you'll sleep through the revolution."
"Impossible, with all the damn racket he makes." Grantaire stands up and he only reels a little. Across the room, Enjolras gives some eloquent piece of advice to Jehan and Joly, his hand on Jehan's shoulder. Joly unfurls a ridiculously huge map of the Parisian arrondissements, examining the parchment. Jehan takes a drink of wine.
"Maps and wine." Grantaire cannot help but smirk at Marius. "Not much a revolution that I would miss."
"Soon," Marius returns, stubbornly, and Enjolras glides over as if he's heard them; as if he's been summoned by the mere mention of the revolution. Their revolution.
"I'm glad to see you upright, Grantaire. It makes for a pleasant change."
Marius snorts, not unkindly. Grantaire tries to bristle at the petty insult, but he cannot deny it and so he laughs and slaps Enjolras on the back, only a little too hard. When Enjolras jumps and glares back, the corners of his lips curl into a cool smirk.
Night, and then day. He sleeps at the Musain, crashes with Joly for a night, with Courfeyrac, spends two nights at Marius' flat, on the cold hard floor but he is too drunk to notice. The next afternoon he asks if he could please stay another night, just one more.
Marius agrees; of course he does, bless him—he might have bourgeoise blood in his veins but the boy's a saint, really. And Grantaire feels awful asking to kip there again, and so he says,
"Actually, I've thought of somewhere else to stay. I won't trouble you like this anymore."
"You don't have to..." Marius says, and touches Grantaire's arm. "You can stay as long as you like. You're like a brother to me, you know that."
And Grantaire agrees, swallowing his doubt and something heavy that he thinks might be regret. And he says, "I know, Marius," and he leaves Marius' rundown flat. Éponine, the gamin girl who dogs Marius' every footsteps, watches him from the building's shadows.
"Been kicked to the curb again, R?"
"Don't call me that," he snaps.
"I'm so sorry, Monsieur." She sweeps a low, mocking bow. Grantaire is faced with the uncomfortable realization that his constant drunkenness probably puts him at the bottom of her social ladder; why should she respect him as she does the other Amis? He's only a poor sad drunk, always drifting, never landing, never dropping his anchor in one place long enough to make a lasting impression. "Have you been evicted again, good sir?"
"No." He kicks at the cobbles. "I left. I don't want to impose upon my friends like that."
"And where will you stay? The streets?"
"No. I know of another who might take me in."
She looks at him with wide, sad eyes. Grantaire sees her as she is: Marius' lonely shadow, a girl so hopelessly, stupidly devoted to a boy who will never love her. For this he pities her.
"Bon chance, Grantaire." She turns and meanders up the sun-gilded street, aimless. Grantaire knows that she pickpockets, sometimes, from those few unlucky rich men and women who wander haplessly into the Court of Miracles. He thinks of Marius, alone upstairs in his dismal apartment, and wonders just how much longer the boy will remain in the dark.
"Grantaire..." Enjolras says, quietly.
"One night. Please."
Enjolras stands in the doorway and he stares at Grantaire, hard, like he's looking into his fucking soul, and then he says, "One night."
"You're a lifesaver." Grantaire says, and grabs Enjolras' shoulder, and then wishes that he hadn't asked so soon, because it's only mid-afternoon, and what are they supposed to do for the next five hours before it's socially acceptable to fall into bed completely drunk?
"A bar. I shouldn't have expected anything else, I suppose."
"With me? Never." Grantaire laughs, loudly and gaily. He ushers Enjolras into the dim establishment. Barely dusk, and already the scene is raucous: swaggering men, drunken ladies in tight dresses hanging from their shoulders. As they make their way to the derelict wooden bar a young woman in a shoddy, low-collared dress grabs at Enjolras' arm.
"Want a taste of this, Angel Face?"
Enjolras pulls his arm away. "How old are you?"
She tilts her head sideways. "Old enough."
"You're barely a woman," he says, and his eyes are dark. "You should not be plying your trade here. It's unsafe."
"Baise-moi," she spits, and sweeps away.
"Why do you bother?" Grantaire asks as they pay for drinks. "She'll only go elsewhere. There's always going to be another man with a hard-on."
Enjolras looks unsettled. "They're children, Grantaire."
"Ha." He fishes out his knife and jabs it into the bottle's cork. "This is a city full of wasted youth, my friend."
"That doesn't change anything."
"Should it?"
Enjolras looks doubtful.
"Never mind that," Grantaire says, and pushes a cup into his hand. "The wine of friendship never runs dry, right?"
"Right."
They drink together. Someone plays a fiddle in the gloom at the other end of the bar; a high, clarion song whose notes stir something in Grantaire's chest.
They talk about Éponine, the way that she follows Marius like a lovesick puppy. This last quip is Grantaire's; Enjolras shakes his head and stares down at the table and says,
"She's lusting after a shadow. Forgivable, she's young, she doesn't know better."
"Not that young."
"Well."
"Well, what?" No. He isn't nearly drunk enough for this. Grantaire pours wine into his glass; enough dark liquid to fill it to the brim. He swallows for a long time, lets it run warm down his throat.
"Marius has nothing to give her. His other women—those girls that he talks about, it's petty and stupid. A daydream."
"He hasn't got a lover, if that's what you're getting at."
"Good. None of us should be—similarly involved. A revolution is no time for love."
"Passion, then."
"Passion for the fight. For Patria."
"Oh. Passion for your mistress."
"That's vulgar." Enjolras says. He puts his cup down. "We are young, and alive."
"And?"
Grantaire expects Enjolras to make some eloquent comment expounding upon the merits of chastity. He doesn't. He stares into his drink and says, after a moment,
"I don't know."
Grantaire drinks more. The bottle is empty, but he tilts it back anyways, trying to shake drops from the sides, maybe. Anything that's left.
An accordion joins the fiddle.
"Music," Grantaire informs the room at large, "is the breath of life—the only life in this mad, mad world."
"You're drunk."
"Am I never not?" He laughs but there is nothing funny here at all, nothing in the emptiness that floods his chest.
"Your hands." Enjolras takes Grantaire's in his own, almost curiously. "They shake when you drink, sometimes."
Grantaire pulls his hand away. "No, they don't."
Something in his chest—his heart, maybe?—turns an anxious, unexpected flip.
"Let the wine of friendship never run dry!"
"At the shrine of friendship never say die!" Enjolras sings, his voice high and clear in the still, scalding night.
Grantaire lets out a sharp laugh and throws an arm around Enjolras's shoulder. Enjolras rolls his eyes.
"That's all you'll get out of me tonight, Grantaire."
"Oh, I'm certain." But he withdraws his arm. It's the drink, of course, that's speeding up his heartbeat, that's playing tricks on him like this.
They track northwest, to a dingy block of apartments and they go upstairs and Enjolras has to push hard on the door because the building is very old, and sometimes the wood gets stuck in the doorframe. This he explains and then he apologizes because the flat is one room and it gets so hot in here at night.
"Er, where should I sleep?" There is a threadbare rug beside the fire, grate. One bed.
"Well, here." Enjolras gestures. He looks confused, Grantaire thinks. He smiles sideways. "Do you think that I would deny a brother space in my bed?"
"I. Uh." Grantaire forces himself to laugh. His hands tremble and he is drunk but he can still feel the nervousness creeping up on him. Enjolras strips off his shirt. Grantaire does not follow suit. It's late, after all; sleeping in one's clothes is forgivable at this time of night.
They lay in Enjolras' bed with a good foot of space between them, as much as can be afforded. Grantaire is practically humping the wall but there is no way that he going to get cozy with their fearless leader. He feels stiff all over, rigid with...fear? The fear that he might touch Enjolras in this blue darkness and that will wake something within him?
He stares up at the ceiling. He wonders if Enjolras prays, and if so, to whom.
Patria, maybe, he thinks dimly, and is aware of laughing quietly before he falls into a dark and intoxicated sleep.
He wakes in the middle of the night and someone's arm is around him, pulling him close, and he puts his head against the other boy's chest and closes his eyes and he thinks this is wrong but nothing, not even a revolution, could pull him away from this.
Predawn, and everything in the tiny flat is cast in tepid blue light. The air is warm and unmoving. Grantaire becomes slowly aware that his body is tangled up with Enjolras' and somewhere in the distance a bell tolls. He breathes into the still silence.
When he wakes he is alone in the bed. Sunlight streams, hugely harsh, through the windows. Grantaire struggles out of bed and finds the flat empty. Enjolras has scribbled a note on a torn-off piece of parchment.
I'm at the Musain with Courf. Lock the door when you leave. I've left you the spare key.
Grantaire stares at the scrawling handwriting for a moment. Then he leaves without packing up his things.
Days trail into weeks. Joly, bless his heart, lends Grantaire enough money to pay the rent for another month. Returning to his flat feels like coming home, but he doesn't want to be home.
He realizes that he wants to be with the Amis, crashing on someone's floor, someone's bed, sharing stories and cheap wine.
Talk of the coming revolution draws tension like a drawstring between them. Joly washes his hands almost compulsively, and Jehan begins to write poetry that sounds like propaganda. The promise of the fight hangs in the air, and no one can think about anything else.
Except Éponine.
She hangs around the Musain, looking lovelorn, with her dirty face and bare feet. And this is where he finds her on a scalding weekday afternoon...sitting on the café's doorstep.
"Hello, Grantaire," she says. He sits down.
"Hello."
She leans close to him and inhales. "You don't stink like wine. That's good."
"I don't now. Maybe later."
Éponine turns to him and her thin face is sad. "Is Monsieur Marius inside?"
"You should know. You follow him everywhere."
"Enjolras does not permit girls in the back room."
"He shouldn't. You shouldn't keep company like us, anyways."
She shakes her head. "You don't understand."
"No," Grantaire says, suddenly. "I do, Éponine. I understand."
She looks at him, sideways. Her eyes are dark with unspoken agreement.
She walks south through narrow streets, and he follows her. Grantaire wants to talk, and her to talk with him. Éponine seems preoccupied but she's listening, obviously.
"What is love, anyways? A folly, that's what. Loving another person is only throwing your heart away. They don't seem to return the favor, do they? Maybe they don't know. Maybe they don't care."
Éponine lets out a high, hollow laugh. "And how do you think that I feel, Monsieur Grantaire? All of you Amis know me as the girl who follows Marius, whose so—hopelessly devoted—whose so stupid as to...bother..."
Grantaire wants very badly to say something to make her feel better, but he cannot. Weakly, he supplies, "you and Marius are close. Even I can see that."
"He sees me as a friend," Éponine scoffs. "Nothing more."
She turns. "I'll see you, Grantaire."
And then she's gone, skirting away through the alleyways. He walks back to the Musain with a heavy heart. It's impossible—an undeniable falsehood—to deny her reasons for confiding in him, to allow him to know secrets that she keeps from others. She sees him the foolish drunk, as the stupid poet whose step is always reeling. She probably imagines him lusting after some pretty girl from a rich family.
She cannot know. She won't guess, either. But she understands, at least. She understands love's path, tortuous though it may be, and she understands that looking into the heart of love is like looking into a mirror.
"A storm is coming."
It's Courfeyrac who says it, peering through the back window.
"Yeah, look at those clouds. Rain will be here by two o'clock, I'm guessing."
The heat is stifling, choking. They place empty bets on when the rain will begin. Enjolras stalks around the room like some kind of caged animal, making halfhearted attempts to refocus the Amis on the coming revolution.
Because it is coming.
The maps have been drawn and redrawn, and plans formulated. And Grantaire knows that when it happens, all the plans will fall to ruin and they will scramble and pick themselves up and fight, fight, fight.
Jehan wins the bets. He will not accept money (good thing, because no one offers it very seriously). The Amis begin to drift away sometime around three o'clock. Finally only Gavroche and Courf and Enjolras and Grantaire are left in the back room.
"Come on, Gavroche," Courf says. "Climb on my back and we'll go see if that Gypsy woman is still selling candy in the Court."
Grantaire watches Gavroche and Courf go off together, both of them laughing, and part of him yearns fiercely for childhood, for the innocence of it.
He takes another drink of wine.
"Are you going home, Grantaire?" Enjolras extinguished with his forefinger a burning candle.
"I'm not drunk enough."
Silence. Grantaire stares at the wall. He hears footsteps, and then the screech of a chair sliding out.
"I worry about you, you know." His voice, so soft. Grantaire swallows with difficulty. "Drinking like this."
"Like what? Life is easier this way."
"You're not the man that you could be."
"This is the only man that you know me as." He hears the breakable quality in his voice.
"No." Enjolras puts his hand Grantaire's shoulder. His touch is warm. "You could be more. You're hurting yourself, you're only hurting yourself."
"Don't touch me." Grantaire pushes the boy's hand away and he stands, and he's not too drunk to fight. "You try to lead us, with your maps and your plans and your barricades—but you're fooling yourself." He sits down and takes another drink, laughing loudly and cynically. "This is all a farce, Enjolras."
"Oh. Oh." Enjolras' face darkens. Something behind his eyes closing the storm shutters. "And you're one to talk, Grantaire—" and he spits the name out like it's poison "—you, the lazy drunk."
"Lazy?" Grantaire smirks. These words shouldn't hurt. They do. They do.
"You don't believe in anything." Enjolras cries, and his truth is like a stinging slap across the face.
And then Grantaire is speaking in a rush, words tumbling out of his mouth before he can clap them inside, shut his lips.
"I believe in you."
"What?"
"I believe in you." Grantaire says. "I believe in you, you stupid fucking bastard!"
He drops his bottle; it rolls beneath the table, following the slope of the floor to the back of the café.
"Don't you dare call me a bastard," Enjolras begins, but Grantaire is on his feet.
"Is that what you wanted to hear? That I believe in you? Isn't that why you do this? Because you want people to follow you, to listen to you?" He shoves at Enjolras' chest, hard, and the other boy stumbles. "Does it get you hard? You won't fuck any girls like the rest of us—you say that your mistress is France, but it's power, isn't it? Isn't it?"
And in that instant, that lightning-strike instant, he sees Enjolras' face. And the lie in the other boy's eyes. And the refusal and the hurt and the anger.
"Get the hell out of here," Enjolras says. "Get the hell out."
And for once, Grantaire obeys.
They do not speak for nearly a week.
Grantaire makes himself scarce; he doesn't talk to the other Amis, he's conspicuously absent from the Musain. He talks to Éponine, briefly, but the revolution is coming and no one has time for the stupid lonely drunk Grantaire.
It's coming, and soon. Lamarque isn't long for this world, and Grantaire fears that when Lamarque dies the barricades will arise. And he's afraid of that, in a way that he can't explain.
The tension comes with the choking heat. He can't breathe properly. He won't admit it but he needs the Amis. He needs Enjolras.
He drinks.
He drinks and he goes out, sometimes, and one night he goes to a shady bar and meets a youthful-faced girl and she sits on his lap and when he gets hard he feels this horrible repressing guilt but they go outside anyways, and he fucks her against a cold brick wall, and when he comes with his eyes closed he can think only of another man's face and his hands and his gentle touch in the warm stillness of an early morning. And he pulls out of her and he realizes that his eyes are filled with tears.
Another day, another storm.
He wakes to hard rain beyond the windows. The streets shine with it and rubbish runs in the gutters. Grantaire walks for a long time in the rain, wet but he doesn't care. On the street he hears whispers about Lamarque, and they turn something inside of his heart like a strange sickness of the soul. He feels dirty and he feels cleansed.
He feels like walking in a dream. The pavement glints like dull silver. Morning fades into afternoon, into evening. He goes north until he sees the lights of the Musain blazing like a warship on the empty street.
Empty, or not.
"Grantaire." She appears at his side. Her damp hair hangs over her pallid face. If she did not look so sad she might be beautiful. He thinks that it is a shame that Marius will never love her back.
"I'm drunk," he tells her.
"Good," she says.
The rain, hard, relentless, and he sees Joly and Jehan come out of the Musain, and then Bahorel and Courfe and the others and then Enjolras, who comes last, trailing behind the others. They leave him at the corner beneath a dripping awning and go off into the night. And Grantaire comes closer up the street; Enjolras turns and their gazes lock and hold.
The first words out his mouth are, "I'm sorry."
"No," Enjolras says. "No."
And his eyes say that is not enough. And Grantaire agrees but Enjolras is forgiving, by nature; he sees the good in men, he sees the fights, he sees their private wars and he understands.
"I'm sorry."
"Yes."
"What I said, I meant." He touches his chest; the movement feels contrived. "I did. I meant it."
Something closed; shuttered behind Enjolras' eyes. Grantaire feels the rush of sick sweet desperation, and in a swift movement he steps forwards and closes the distance between them and he kisses his friend, his leader, his secret strange love. A hot, savage kiss with his hands tangled up in Enjolras' hair, like he's trying to drink the elixir of forsaken life through the boy's lips.
And for a moment Enjolras moves against him and it's sweetness and sadness and everything full to the brim, and then Enjolras pulls away with a sort of soft cry.
"Get off of me."
Enjolras pushes him back, and his face in the darkness is white and shocked.
Damn it, damn it, damn it.
"God," Grantaire breathes, softly in the back of his throat. He cannot swallow properly. "Oh, God."
"Grantaire."
They stare at each other for a long cold moment.
"Walk with me," Enjolras says. "We have to talk."
They go back to his flat and the rain does not stop.
Grantaire feels stiff and hot with embarrassment. He wants to leave, needs to leave.
"I'm sorry," he says, again and again. "I'm drunk, I'm sorry."
And Enjolras says, "I understand."
The night unravels between them, and Enjolras says,
"Come to bed with me," and he calls Grantaire brother, and when the candles are extinguished Grantaire lies facing the wall and he cries for Éponine and for Enjolras and for himself and for the coming revolution. And in the night they shift against each other, and he speaks into the darkness and he says,
"I love you."
And there is no reply.
Revolution, then.
He sits in the front of the bakery with the baker's daughter on his lap.
"Raise the barricades!" Enjolras cries, and others take up the chant, their war-cry. A portly woman refuses to move from her chair and he kisses her hard, aching for someone else's lips.
He drinks. Furniture is hurled to the streets. Grantaire thinks that he can hear his own heart breaking with the tables, the chairs, everything spinning around him.
The madness of the world collides, and Grantaire revels in it. The other Amis shout and run in the streets, preparing.
"The storm!" Jehan calls, and slaps Grantaire's shoulder. His face is bright and wild. "The storm is here!"
The gunfire rings in his ears like screaming. Soldiers and shouts and the clamor of madness.
Marius and Enjolras hold up the left and right ends of the barricade, flashing swords and guns. Shots ringing, shockingly loud in the unmoving air. He had expected it to be different; not like this, sudden and sharp like the edge of a knife.
Dusk falls. The uniforms of soldiers, and the barrels of their guns.
He is ducking behind an overturned table, reloading his gun, when he hears the shot, and he knows. He knows without looking, without hearing.
It is Marius who holds her. The rain falls soft, timid; he wants to go to her, apologize, and he is angry because Marius did not, does not, lover her. Only days ago he sighed over the ghostly girl who had come into his life, and now he holds another in his arms. Éponine's face in the rain is beautiful and tragic, old and full of youth, damned and saved. She touches Marius's face and she dies with tears in her eyes.
Grantaire swipes his own tears away quickly, ashamed even though the others are crying, too. They all knew her like a sister, Éponine, the daughter of thieves and of wolves, dirty and debased and clever and more knowing than any of them could ever have hoped to be.
"She'd seen so damn much," Courf says. Joly puts his arms around him. Grantaire sees at the edge of his vision Enjolras crying, silently.
He stares for a moment, heart heavy, and then turns away.
Disorientation. He drinks until he can barely stand, and then sleeps it off behind the barricade. In the torchlight there is a brutal beauty to Enjolras' face, to his pale eyes. The air is hot and still, as in the instant before the lightning strike.
There are soldiers gathering, out in the darkness, thirsting for the blood of foolish schoolboys. Grantaire knows this and he does not allow himself to feel the fear, not completely. Detached. This is what he is.
He talks with Courf and Combeferre and Joly, and Jehan sings them all a crude song that he remembers from his childhood. The Amis begin to drift off to sleep.
Grantaire wanders into the empty Musain; the door has been propped open, and a thin crack flashes across the front window. It feels good to be alone, to be breathing in the warm air.
Or not alone.
"Grantaire. What are you doing awake?"
They stare at each other.
"Taking a piss," he says. "What do you think?"
Enjolras looks away first.
"I was looking for you." The way that he says it, like a confession.
"Why?" Does he need to ask?
Enjolras comes closer. "This isn't what I had...she shouldn't have—mistakes, that's...I thought..."
Grantaire sees, then, the weakness. Their leader, the lover of light, of justice, of Patria—he has been brought down by the death of a gamin.
"It isn't going to be like we planned, Apollo," Grantaire says, and the cold smirk twists his mouth because he realizes, they both realize.
"I know. I know." And then they are embracing, roughly, holding each other as if there is nothing left in the world, which maybe there isn't, not anymore, and Enjolras keeps muttering, "I know, it's alright, it's alright," against Grantaire's shoulder like he's trying to reassure him but Grantaire knows that he's trying to reassure himself.
They return to the barricades. The few Amis left awake talk, quietly. The firelight is unforgiving, and they look young and frightened in its red cast.
"If we..." Joly pauses. "If this is our last revolution..."
"I should've drunk more," Jehan mutters, glancing at Grantaire.
"I should have fucked more girls," Grantaire says, and this draws soft, sad laughs from the others. He looks at Enjolras when he says it, stares him in the eyes and Enjolras stares back and then looks down and away.
"Pretty girls, the ones who went to our heads," Prouvaire mutters.
"And the witty girls—those who went to our beds," Joly adds. "I'll drink to that. To them."
And they do. Someone sings, soft and low, in the darkness.
Grantaire looks around and he sees scared young boys. And he thinks: the world won't remember us at all.
When Enjolras rises and leaves them, vanishing into the Musain, Grantaire follows.
"The hell do you think you're going?" He calls into the blue darkness. Enjolras turns and his face is stricken.
"I can't look at them," he says.
They sit on the stairs in the still, stifling night.
"I'm leading them to their deaths," Enjolras says.
Grantaire drinks from his bottle. "I know."
"You don't know. You don't understand. How it feels. Like the weight of the world—the damned world—is on your shoulders."
"Maybe not," Grantaire says, and he drinks more and he shrugs. "But hey, life is fleeting, anyways."
"That's easy for you to say, R."
Something, maybe his heart, breaks a little.
"You never call me that."
"R?"
"Yes."
Silence.
"I'm sorry."
"Don't be." Grantaire finds himself leaning against Enjolras, finding at least that marginal comfort in another warm body beside his own. "Don't be, it's alright. Don't be."
Sitting together, in the midnight silence, he knows that Enjolras will never know.
He thinks, I love you.
He thinks, it's okay.
"I have to go." Enjolras says, and he stands. Grantaire tries to follow him but his movements are slow and clumsy. "I have to attend to the others. They need me."
Grantaire thinks more than I do? but he keeps quiet. He catches Enjolras' hand.
"Stay."
"I can't." Enjolras looks at Grantaire, almost pityingly. Then he kneels before him and kisses his forehead.
When he leaves, Grantaire laughs into the empty café.
Dawn. Soldiers coming back. Grantaire stands. He walks unsteadily to the others.
"The rain's ruined our ammunition—it's low. We'll need to find more." Marius says.
"The other barricades will have some," Enjolras calls over his shoulder. Grantaire sees the look on Marius' face and his chest sinks like a stone.
"There are no other barricades," Marius says, and Enjolras turns and his face is white.
"What?" The words heavy in the still air.
"There are no other barricades. We're the only ones left."
The storm breaks, silently. Enjolras speaks and he tells the others that Paris' citizens have deserted them because they are scared, scared of change but that's not true, that's not true, Grantaire thinks, and he is angry because Paris' citizens do not care.
And then someone screams.
"Gavroche!"
"No!"
"Get him down!"
"Gavroche!" Courf scales the barricade, his face white with panic. "Get down, please!"
But the gamin, the little boy who they have all come to love so much, too much—he is stepping onto the street. And a shot is fired, and they suck in a collective breath.
"Do something!" Jehan cries, and everyone turns to stare at Enjolras.
And another shot cracks through the air, so sudden.
"No," Courf moans, quietly, "God, no, please."
And another.
And Gavroche staggers backwards and he falls with his eyes open.
Someone cries out, howling like an animal.
Courf runs, stumbling, before the barricade, and the others try to pull him away but he is already there, lifting the slight body and bearing it back. And he falls to the ground, sobbing, his face—once so open and laughing—twisted mad with grief.
Enjolras says, "They will pay for this," and there is murder in his eyes.
"French Revolution!"
Dammit, Grantaire thinks. Dammit.
Too late.
The storm breaks.
"Grantaire!"
He is the Musain with his bottle in his hand and his gun in the other.
Enjolras comes through the door with his shirt halfway open and his eyes wild.
"In case you have failed to notice, there's a God-damn revolution going on outside!"
Grantaire stares at Enjolras and Enjolras at Grantaire.
Their eyes say more than their lips ever could.
He is aware of stumbling against a wall and the bottle slipping from his fingers, and wanting to move but he's too drunk. He lets the darkness slip over his head like a sweet wine-smelling hood and he thinks, good.
And he wakes to a gunshot.
Opens his eyes, tries to stand. His legs are weak and the Musain is full of soldiers.
No.
There is a body outside in the dirt and he sees the blood and he recognizes Joly and there is Jehan beside him. On the floor not ten feet from him: curly hair and a white face and so much blood and there is Courf and Combeferre and their bodies are all tangled up, hopeless, they didn't have a chance, they didn't have a fucking chance.
His first thought: Enjolras.
And then soldiers. Two of them, sweeping past with rifles over their shoulders.
"They have the leader cornered upstairs, like a hunted animal."
The second laughs, without humor. "I guess that the hounds finally caught the fox."
Upstairs, his heart a war-drum in his ears.
Soldiers and so many guns.
And Enjolras, backed up against the window.
Oh God, oh sweet God, oh God.
Something goes out of Grantaire's chest.
He sees in an instant the love and pain and fear and hatred, a pyrotechnics show before his eyes, and all the things left unsaid and undone.
"I am one of them!" He cries, and Enjolras turns and sees him and his lips twist into what might be a smile and what might be a grimace, or might be both. "Let me die as one of them."
He stands beside him; his love, his hatred.
Enjolras reaches and Grantaire's hand is there, has always been there. Fingers twisting together and they face the guns.
He thinks, dammit, I loved you.
Enjolras raises the flag.
The flash is blinding.
He feels nothing.
He opens his eyes.
I am not dead.
His hands, shaking, and the gritty wood grain of a table.
A girl's voice, then.
"He's been there for hours."
Éponine. His heart jumps like a mad animal in his chest. He tries to speak but no words will come.
"Two hours, at least, and he keeps talking to himself—something about a revolution."
"Leave him be, I say."
Marius.
"I don't think the boy's well, Marius. Look at how his hands shake. He's been drinking that wine, too—d'you think it's bad stuff?"
Footsteps. He struggles and raises his head; his vision clears, momentarily, and he sees the three of them: two waiters, the dishwasher. The girl with dark hair and the freckled boy with a soapy plate in his hand and a towel in the other, and the blond boy whose has taken and broken his heart.
"We should call for someone," she says, softly. "He's young, yet. He could get help, dry out."
"No." His boy, his Apollo, shakes his head. He looks down at Grantaire and his eyes are full of pity and there is no mercy, only sadness. "People like him, they never change."
Grantaire's heart breaks again. And it will never stop breaking, and he lets himself laugh but it's an empty sound and his head falls back onto his trembling hands, and he lets the darkness take him.
A/N: thanks for reading this far, guys! I know that it's long, and I hope that you liked the plot twist! Peace, love, and all that jazz.