Author's Note: This was written for PilferingApples, for the Les Mis Trick or Treat exchange.
Ascendance
The granite door creaks open on rusty hinges, sending bits of oxidized iron down to the ground like bloody rain.
"Tell me what you're thinking." Bahorel grunts out the command as he allows the door to fall into an open position, the solid block of stone hitting the mausoleum wall with a whump.
"Nothing terribly exciting. Just that enough rust can look like dried blood when it falls down." Jehan peers down into the dark maw of the tomb. He is only able to see vaguely more when he presses the button on his wrist to activate the red bio-luminescence in his black suit. He smiles as he reaches out to gently touch the dry, craggy wall, his fingers casting long shadows down into the darkness.
"Mmm, I like that idea. Work it into a poem for me." Bahorel shakes his wrists and twiddles his fingers, wincing as he does. "This thing hasn't been opened in ages, has it?"
"Why should it have been? It's been over two hundred years since these children died, after all." Jehan carefully eases himself down onto the first step, feeling a fine wisp of spider-web brush against his left cheek. It feels like the ghosts of the past, urging him down into the depths, and he takes the next steps faster, chasing down that fleeting feeling.
He passes candles, melted against the wall. His clothes are skin-tight now, carefully designed to preserve heat and moisture, but he imagines briefly what it would have been like to wear the clothes of earlier lives—trousers, robes, skirts, gis, hakama, lamshi, trills—and watch the fabric brush uselessly against the ingrained soot stains of generations past. If he'd had more time to plan this expedition—all the expeditions he and Bahorel have been on in the last twenty-four hours—he would have ensured that he had more appropriate clothing to wear.
"Children, eh?" Bahorel follows him in near-silence, the larger man's feet barely scuffing against the stone. "I suppose that we were children this time."
"Fifteen and sixteen. I don't think even you made seventeen that time." Jehan slows as he reaches the bottom. A slide of his finger along his shoulder brightens the illumination coming from his suit, displaying what he came here to see, bathed in the color that he wanted to see it in.
There are nine bodies. They are well preserved, even after all these years, first by the embalmers and then by the dry heat of the environment. They are laid out gently in individual niches, forming a circle that is divided into ten equal portions by the resting places and the stairway down.
In front of each tomb there are offerings. Most are worn away by time into unrecognizable blobs, but he can make out the occasional dried flower, withered scraps of cloth, children's toys from centuries past.
A glint of gold, turned a ruddy red by the light he radiates, draws Jehan's eyes up, to the inscription that encircles the top of the room.
The words are in a language and alphabet that has been dead for a century—well, as dead as languages are allowed to get nowadays, preserved as they are in the translation technology that every child is equipped with at birth. Jehan's eyes water as the cell-thin layer on the top of his corneas activates, producing the thick dark lines of Human speech beneath the curling swirls of his once-native tongue.
He blinks, trying to ignore the dark lines, trying to read the words as they were meant to be read. For a moment he almost succeeds, the syllables on the very tip of his tongue.
Then they are washed away and he jerks back, a hand to his chest where shrapnel bit too deep, the sound of Enjolras quietly repeating a mantra in the curling language filling his ears and lungs like smoke:
We will not leave.
The memory departs as quickly as it came, and Jehan spends a moment leaning against Bahorel, drawing in breath after breath. This time he doesn't try to read the lilting script, instead allowing the translator to do its job.
The children who stood for us all.
He laughs, a sound that is too close to a sob. "We would have hated that, you know. Being called children like that. We hated the way we were dismissed as mere children by so many when we were so very certain that we were right—that we knew what to do when everyone else was just wringing their hands and bemoaning how the expansion was going to destroy all culture."
"We were children who had lived ten squared lives before. We were children who had fought and died over and over and who were seeing our dream turned into a nightmare—humanity united into humanity forcefully unified, the expression of all beliefs turned into the eradication of beliefs for the material good of some unfathomable Mankind." Bahorel studies his hand, the faint scars criss-crossing his knuckles, in this life like in so many others, and the unfamiliar wrinkles starting to pucker the fingers. "We were children and we weren't children and dying here... dying like that... it made a difference."
"It always makes a difference. We never spend our lives needlessly—Enjolras never spends our lives needlessly." Jehan walks deeper into the silent crypt, drawing a breath of musty air through his nose. Scenting the history that dances tantalizingly in and out of his dreams, in and out of his memory. Would it be better, he wonders for the hundred thousandth time, if they didn't remember anything? Would it be better if they simply skipped life to life, time to time?
Would they find each other again so successfully, if they didn't have some memory?
He doesn't know, and he will take all the painful memories his mind and soul can hold if it means finding these people who are his soul-brothers time after time.
Especially because they aren't all painful memories, he reminds himself a moment later, as fragmented echoes of conversations from this life slip through his mind too fast for him to hold. There is camaraderie and hope to balance and soothe all the pain, and he will never, ever allow himself to forget that.
Bahorel has moved ahead of him, the man's skin-tight scarlet clothes emitting a soft white light that illuminates the niches as he moves steadily around the circle. "We're looking for the crow and the coyote, right?"
"Right." Jehan nods, moving the opposite way along the circle. The first mask that he looks down on has a beaked jaw staring back at him. "Luck's with us. Found mine."
Bahorel continues to work his way around the circle, until he is in front of the niche next to Jehan's. "And here's me. They did a lovely job making it look like all my limbs are still attached."
"They made us very presentable. Hard to start a religion around dismembered corpses. A movement, yes; a religion, that's harder." Jehan reaches out, touching the smooth surface of the mask, the hooked beak. The black paint doesn't flake beneath his fingers, but he can feel where the pigment was etched into the hard mask. "Enjolras would have hated that—being turned into demigods."
"Only if it meant that others thought they didn't have the need or ability to follow in our footsteps. And since our religion—their religion—was all about striving for a better world, I think he'd be able to understand the use of symbols." Bahorel gently picks up one of the hands of the mummy before him. "Odd to think that this was me, once—that I wore these fingers, that I loved this body, that I breathed and dreamed and fought here. Died here."
"Odd but beautiful, to know that there is something that continues." Jehan reaches out to pick up his own corpse's cold, dry, papery hand. "To know that though we die, though we forget—and oh, Bahorel, there is so much we forget, so much I see only in dreams and don't understand and want to grasp on to but can't—we'll never truly be gone."
"An interesting choice of words, given that tomorrow we'll be more gone than any civilian's ever been." Bahorel grins, taking out the tiny laser knife that they've used to collect mementos at the other graves they were able to find.
"To the stars. Finally. After all these years of fighting for it." Jehan leans down and presses a kiss to the crow's mask covering the dead boy's face. He's already lived twice as long in this skin as he was able to in the boy's, the fight finally, finally, finally costing more in words than in blood. "You would have loved the stars, old-child. And that's why I'm going to take a part of you there."
The procedure is quick and clean—even if the corpse had blood left to ooze, the laser knife cauterizes as it cuts, leaving a faint black mark behind.
Bahorel tosses the tiny bit of bone and dried skin he cut off the Bahorel-who-was into the air before snatching it and stowing it in the pouch at his side. "That's it, then. A little piece of all the lives we were able to find. A little bit of ourselves and our history to offer out to our new planet when we find it."
"And we leave behind a relic with fingers to match the holy number." Jehan quietly slips the finger he took into his own pouch.
"Nine, the number of the angels." Bahorel arches one eyebrow in clear challenge.
"Nine, the number of perfect accomplishment."
"Nine, the number of the muses."
"Nine, the number of pain.
"Nine, the number of the dragon."
Jehan can't help but laugh at the grin on Bahorel's face as he says dragon. "If we're going with fire, then nine, the number of circles in hell."
"Hellfire is not nearly as awesome as dragon fire. Nine... nine..." Bahorel's grin fades away. "Nine, the number of friends who changed the world. Or at least the minimum number. Credit where credit's due, we've had a lot of help from a lot of others."
"We have. It was almost Musichetta who died with us this day instead of Joly." Jehan caresses the crow mask once more before stepping back, the red light he casts sending deep shadows skittering across the mask and causing the gold-painted eyes to glint. "Are you ready?"
"Always." Bahorel heads back to the stairs, climbs up two, and then turns to survey the room again. "It really is beautiful. I hope someone continues to look after it."
"I doubt there's much here to entice vandals." Jehan also surveys the tomb once more, the still bodies laid out in homage. "It's not like gold's been worth anything for the last hundred and fifty years."
"Hence why it's still on the walls." Bahorel's arm wraps around Jehan's shoulders, pulling him close. "Do you remember Enjolras saying we will not leave?"
"Yes." Oh, yes, an echoing, cavernous memory waiting to devour him as he stands in this place of ghosts.
"Funny how that's what we fought for back then—a place to call our own—when now we spent years fighting to leave the planet."
"To leave in peace." Jehan's hand once more caresses the thick, uneven wall of the stairs. "To take humanity out to the stars as scientists and artists and dreamers instead of as a military force. To open the stars as we opened the world—to everyone, for everyone."
"To the stars, then?"
Jehan allows Bahorel to turn them both around, heading them toward the light streaming down from the blue, blue sky of their home. "To the stars, old friend, with all that we've ever been."