Athena
A/N: Athena was a celibate goddess who was born fully grown, sprung from her father's head. This is how I picture the relationship between Montag and Granger- intellectual.
Montag never quite got over the fire- its warm, soft glow and strangely hard to detect smoky aroma. The heat got him most, though. The way it reached out with childlike hands, embracing him and melting into his bones, warming him.
Warming, that was the key word. Warming, not destroying.
The contradiction jarred him for as long as he lived. It was too hard to shake his heritage with the firemen.
Firemen. He never got over the Book People, either. Every time Granger offered him coffee, or lovingly clapped a hand on his shoulder, there was a strange electric sensation. Kindness. With Beatty, there had only been lust and fire. With Mildred, not even that. Ice.
Granger was the first person he really liked. More than he had liked Faber, or even Clarisse. Without Granger, he may have never been able to truly pick himself up again. There was something about the way the leader of the Book People talked, his raw optimism and just plain realism, that made him magnetically attractive and impossible to ignore.
Montag was given the leisure to digest this information as he sat across the fire from the vessel for Plato's Republic, them being the last two awake that starless night.
It was nice, so nice, to be able to sit with someone and not have to listen to the roaring of the "walls" or get out flamethrowers every other night. To just sit and talk about real things, like Clarisse's family had, or even just sit and think together, which Montag had found to be even more intimate.
Thinking. Quality of information. Leisure to digest it.
Montag knew he needed to complete the cycle.
Silently, he moved over by Granger and took his hand. No words were spoken, they were connected only by thought, but Granger wasn't surprised when Montag brushed their lips together. It seemed he welcomed the advancement.
The third necessary thing.
Freedom to act on what had been digested.
