A/N This was eritten for my dear dear friend and muse storytellers as a Christmas present. She insisted that I should post it here, so I hope you all enjoy it.
All the dead of the barricades had ended up in the same part of the old cemetery. Children lay near old men, brothers wrapped in brothers' arms, rebel with soldier, policeman with convict. Death had taken a scythe and painted a large and bloody path through Paris, retreading old haunts from her glory days and reaping young and old alike.
In the end, it hadn't mattered what side of the barricade the dead had fallen on. Bodies had been piled together in heaps of humanity peeled and cored down to the most basic elements. A shred of fluttering rags falling down half across the face of a dead national guardsman with the beginnings of his first moustache on his face, an eye staring at blackness, a hand clutching still for its weapon, a shoe dropped off a tiny foot and resting in the mud. Little more than tangled limbs and broken lives all mixed and mingled until the red of the guardsmen matched the red of the revolutionary coats and they were brothers under the blood they had shed.
Perhaps in the days following the fall of the barricades, the rebels would have been sifted from the 'valiant protectors of the peace' as they were so eloquently touted in all of the royalist newspapers – but pressure from the wealthy relatives of some of the dead revolutionaries as well as a certain popular sentiment of sympathy that was brewing for the romanticism of youth cut off in its bloom of spring ensured that each man with a name was found and labeled and placed in a grave next to the other, all men together and in between them, sometimes in the same grave were the others. The children with no names, the old men and women and the poor ragged offerings that had burnt out their little bit of light on the failed pyre to liberty.
All the dead of the barricades lay side by side, mixed into a strange new people, equal through death. Months and seasons passed by overhead, mourners thinned and trickled and ceased, the people passed by their dead without thinking, the wind weathered and the rain battered and children left bits of string, chalk scrapings, lead etchings and other debris scattered on the tombstones and around the graves. Time had, as it always did, passed by the Pere Lachaise, until enough months had passed to bring a chill and crisp Christmas Eve. The first since the fall of the barricades, the first since the death and carnage of ideals and dreams.
If there had been a clock in the graveyard, it would have tolled the half hour between the magical moment of midnight and eleven. There was no clock, and stars were trying their best to mark out seconds and seasons in their own special patterns in the cold black sky. A young man was walking aimlessly between the graves, tall. Young and tall with very fair hair that caught the guttering lights of the few lamps left to guide late mourners. He did not seem particularly interested in any one grave, simply walking walking walking, up and down rows and back again to the beginning.
His face was almost serene, eyes fixed on the stars instead of the earth, mouth pressed into a thoughtful line. He seemed to all intents and purposes to simply be out for a late night stroll and to have stuck in a tide that passed him around this selection of graves, giving the indication that he didn't particularly care and was sure he would be on his way again quite soon.
He had, in fact, passed around the large oak for the fifth time and was heading back through the smaller unmarked gravestones at a sedate pace when a second figure, also male and fair-haired, appeared near one of the graves at an end of a row. It belonged to a national guardsman, and the young man observed it for a moment before kneeling down on the damp cold earth to clear away the litter, making a soft tsking sound at the back of his throat.
The first young man – whose name, had you asked him, was Etienne Vernois – paused in his walk for the first time and studied his new companion. They were perhaps five graves apart, Etienne standing facing the other man's back and the similarity between them was striking. The man kneeling was broader at the shoulders and his hair fell free and loose, he was wearing a white shirt far too light for the cold weather, and dark trousers and no coat. But then Etienne also had no coat. They were almost like brothers, five rows apart.
A wind picked up, howling through the trees, and Etienne watched the man rise and move along to the next grave, kneel as solemnly and dab away a few chalk marks with a dirty white handkerchief. This one was a rebel's grave, and Etienne stepped forwards.
"Good evening."
"Hello." He picked a bit of paper from the stone and flicked it away, turning slightly on his haunches to look up at Etienne with sharp blue eyes. "You're up late."
"As are you."
"I have business here, as you can see."
Etienne made a face. His face was the charming mobile intelligent roundness of youth that expressed neatly every emotion that crosses his mind. The current emotion of choice was disdain with both 'd's were pronounced and enunciated clearly. "Business? That's the grave of one of the damned revolutionaries."
"I know." The man spat on the handkerchief and rubbed harder. "Feuilly, the stone says under all this chalk. All this mess – no respect for the dead."
Etienne raised an eyebrow. In his opinion there was little to respect in schoolboys taking arms against their own government. And failing at it. "Which side do you fall on, m'sieur? That of the guards or the rebels?"
"I don't think they would like to be called rebels," the stranger replied easily, getting up once more and patting the stone as through it were a friend he was meeting again after a long absence. "Revolutionaries and republicans, but not all words starting with 'r' are created equal." And here – surprisingly – he laughed. A bright clear laugh completely strange and odd and bewildering in the graveyard, like churchbells after dawn.
The laugh disarmed Etienne with its suddenness, and instead of walking on as he had intended, he bent to look at the next grave. "This is one of the National Guard's graves."
"I know," his companion was clearing it with as much tender regard as he had shown with the previous two. It seemed strange, this double fealty, this attention to both sides of the battle. As Paris herself had shown when the people woke in the morning and saw that blood had paid for their lethargy, it was not a subject that allowed for neutrality. It was a war, and war was heavy and bitter, foul and blunt and full of guts and mud and sweat and death. War was not herois or idealistic or beautiful, no matter what the newspapers said, and Paris had known that – at least for a little while.
"Why?"
"Why what?"
"Why are you cleaning both the rebels and the guards?"
The man sat back on his haunches again and looked at him, blue eyes rather stern. "Revolutionaries."
Was there really a difference? "Republicans."
"That's it." The man ignored the obvious distaste in his voice with an air of aplomb which was frankly irritating. "The way I see it, if we were all meant to be equal alive – how much more equal is the dead?"
Dust to dust, ashes to ashes, the priest had said over all of them. Dust and ashes, worms and earth. Despite the overt hint of republicanism in the sentiment, Etienne couldn't argue its logic, so instead he drew back and reassessed the situation for a different avenue of attack. "You believe as they did."
"I do." The man smiled. "My name is Valentin, by the way."
"Etienne."
"Good to meet you. You'll excuse me if I hurry, I don't have much time." Valentin rose and moved on up the rows of graves, clearing each one off with a certain careful efficiency as he talked, leaving Etienne to follow behind. "I am, indeed, of their beliefs. They died for an ideal – for a world that is worth dying to achieve. Perhaps this time it did not happen, but there will be another time, and another until we will have freedom. All of us, not simply those that call themselves republicans but the workers and the intellectuals and the children and the women and the elderly and the soldiers and all the people of the earth living together as one people. That people is what they died for, and they were glad to do so."
"They were students of philosophy," Etienne said sharply, flicking a limp dead handkerchief from the corner of a stone simply titled 'Xavier de Courfeyrac'. "Of law, of humanities. Most of them were from wealthy families themselves. They read too many books and thought themselves the reincarnations of Robespierre and St Just, sent down to France to lead the people out of tyranny. And instead they led the 'people' into death and failure. Where's the glory in that?"
"There is no glory in an untimely death," Valentin said quietly. "Nor was there meant to be. It wasn't for glory that these 'students of philosophy' took up arms. It was for mercy, for hope, for justice. Not to be remembered but to create a change so that those who come after have a future to look forwards to instead of looking back at what had come before."
They sat together before de Courfeyrac's grave for a few moments, the light from the lamp just above catching both bright bowed head and turning them to burnished gold. There were still a few flowers around this grave, peonies and roses, marigolds and lilys… odd jumbled bunches smelling of perfume and tied with hair ribbons or bits of lace.
"They were just boys," Etienne said finally, bitterly. "Stupid, foolish, reckless boys. They didn't know anything."
Valentin stood up and looked out across the graves from the barricades for a moment. Then he gestured. "Combeferre, Bahorel, Prouvaire, Joly, Lesgle, Courfeyrac, Feuilly, Grantaire, and Enjolras. They were the voices of the barricade, the leaders and the lieutenants. The heart, the soul and the spirit moving it along. Combeferre died trying to put a plug in an artery wound to a young soldier's leg. Prouvaire was a poet, a gentle soul with a warrior's heart and he was shot without trial. Feuilly was a worker – a fanmaker – an artist. He held out to the last with our doctor and our dandy and our eagle and our dear malade imaginaire. They were warriors then, such warriors." His voice throbbed with a strange sudden fierce pride. "Courfeyrac, that was, the lover of women and fashion and life, and Joly – who thought every cold was the plague along with Lesgle who did everything with him – to the death. Bahorel was a brawler and a fighter, and died like he lived, in the thick of the fray. That, my friend, is how they died. All of them men and people bigger than this name 'schoolboy' that the world is so eager to diminish them with."
Etienne frowned, unable to resist the slow humanization of the men who had stood again law and government and died for it. It was easier not to think of them as human, like the way the papers and gossip placed each side in camps to lessen the impact of the dead. The National Guard became their uniforms, bright buttons defining their persons beneath a military air, and the rebels – or revolutionaries – became a brightly coloured sash, a waving tricolor and a shout of Freedom.
Of the two, he had never been able to decide which had come out the worse off.
"What about him?" He gestured at a smaller grave right next to a large marble slab. "The drunk. He didn't even fight with the others, just sat in the back and drunk until he was asleep. He was no hero, no warrior, no loyal man. He was a coward. If their cause was worthy, then his death defiled their barricade."
It made sense, at least to him, that a true believer in this 'Cause' of Freedom would agree that a man who couldn't be bothered to fight alongside his friends was useless. Even if he hadn't believed in this talk of freedom and equality, then he should still have stood with them.
However, Valentin turned with an expression that was so suddenly fierce and furious that it drove Etienne backward two steps. "Do you know him? Do you know anything about him? Then leave him be. Let him rest in peace where he chose to rest. He deserves that at least."
They stood in silence. Then Etienne looked at the marble stone. "He killed me, you know."
"I know," Valentin said quietly. "I'm sure he didn't want to."
"But he still did."
"They killed him too."
"We both died."
"We did."
"Why did you come back?"
"I wanted them to have some dignity. They are all equal now, in death. We died together, you and I and my friends and your friends. We fought and we died and the world has forgotten us. I wanted someone to remember."
Etienne sighed. "They won't remember."
"Not yet, maybe."
"You killed me." It nagged at him, that.
"I know. I would say I'm sorry… and I am that you had to die. But you were killing my friends, so I had no choice."
"I know. We are the same, in that."
"We are brothers."
Etienne nodded. "We are."
A man appeared then, seemingly from nowhere. A thin, shabby sort of man with a lot of shaggy dark hair and a soft, cynical smile. "Apollo? It's time to go."
"Already? I'm not finished."
"Time, nonetheless."
Valentin smiled and nodded and took the dark man's hand. He waved, and Etienne waved back, and then he was alone once more. He stood there with the dead brothers until the clock ended the last chime of the third hour, and then he too was gone, and the dead were asleep once more under a fine layer of Christmas snow.
The End