I was reading Enjolras and Grantaire's death scene and I just thought "What if that silence hadn't been enough to wake Grantaire and he'd slept through Enjolras' death?" And so this came about.
One single man remained on his feet, unarmed but formidable. The twenty or so soldiers stood in a menacing clutch together, bayonets thrust forward toward the lone defiant figure at the corner of the room. They paid no notice to the prone form slumped across a table. Destruction and noise kept Grantaire in the grip of his slumber. Even when Enjolras crossed his arms over his breast and raised his chin, refusing the blindfold, the surprised shuffle of feet, the struggles still raging on the upper floors, and the distant yells of the aggrieved and injured still echoed through the destroyed bistro. The silence was not so long nor so deep as to wake Grantaire from his absinthe-induced stupor.
A soldier dropped his weapon, refusing to shoot, exclaiming that it was as if he was about to shoot a flower. Twelve men took aim, and Enjolras looked at them proudly, the revolution still in his heart and passion in his eyes. He was untouched, unwounded, and stood before them in defiant glory. For them, this cherub had been the simple face of a man, but now they encountered the face of a lion, golden and looming. Still, the signal came as the impassioned blue eyes stared them down, and Enjolras struck the wall, pierced by the bullets, and remained. His expression had not lost its haughty defiance. The soldiers rushed away from the angel struck down; the barricade was taken. Grantaire slept on.
Stillness wakens the skeptic as silence wakens the drunkard. Both together give a jolt to the senses, tugging back the veil of sleep and drug with harsh abruptness. Now that the sounds of artillery fire and screams of the fallen had quieted, the stamps of soldier's feet were distant and retreating, Grantaire blinked suddenly awake.
The first thing he saw was not bodies, nor the bullet-ruined walls of the bistro; he saw the sky through the broken window, streaked and clouded with smoke and dust. It was a surreally ambivalent sight. He was neither happy to look out into the heavens, nor anguished at the fact that no cannonball had extinguished him in his slumber. He knew that he was not dead, and he knew that there was no sound of battle below, but that was all he knew. With a groan, he pushed himself upright, knocking an empty bottle to the floor as he did so. It did not break, but rolled across the floor to rest against the far wall. Grantaire began to stand shakily, watching the bottle's path with apathetic eyes, and only then noticed the lauded feet by which it had come to rest.
He knew who it was without having to look up, and his stand became a stumble forward, eyes staring unblinkingly at the pure face he had always venerated. His own breath was loud and shallow in his ears, and he felt as if his chest may fall apart from the strange emptiness he felt there. It was nothing like the tired scepticism of before, a tight and jeering feeling of the 'meaningful' things in life mattering little. This was a bleakness he had not felt before, and he was surprised to find tears pricking at his eyes as he reached the far side of the room where his idol still leant against the wall, ever the majestic statue. Dazedly, Grantaire stopped in front of the body of Enjolras and pressed a hand against the bloodied breast as if his faith could start its motion again.
It may be said that one who makes a beast of himself gets rid of the pain of being a man, but even beasts can feel the loss of their stars, even beasts will lose all direction and become hollow-eyed with grief. Grantaire did so now, slowly lowering Enjolras' body to the floor. He pressed a hand over his mouth to silence the shuddering tears that had overtaken him. He pushed the golden hair away from the pale face and closed the fierce blue eyes with shaking fingers. The bird had been shot down, and now the toad had nowhere to look but into himself. Apollo had been slain, and Cyparissus was left to weep at his feet.
The trouble with the dichotomous nature of Grantaire's personality was that once the affections of his heart had gone, once the lives of the men whose existence held up his own had been extinguished, there was nothing left for him hold on to. His heart having nothing left of friendship, he had only the mind that had long ago dispensed with certainty or belief in anything. To look ahead of him now was to see nothing.
Grantaire pressed a kiss to the marble forehead of his idol and groped blindly for his own pistol strapped to his hip. It was still loaded; he had never roused during the battle to use it. He again pressed a hand to Enjolras' chest, as if willing it to rise in hope of being scolded out of his morbid intention. It did not move, and his shoulders fell as though he had somehow hoped it would. For a moment, there was no movement, only Grantaire's eyes searching the face of Apollo to somehow bring meaning to the empty anguish which he felt. There being no sign, a gun was cocked, an arm crooked while the other clenched a red waistcoat in its fist. The report seemed confined to the room itself; no one stirred outside as a body fell, its head landing across the breast of the one held in such esteemed light.