Courfeyrac doesn't feel immediate pain – he thought it would burn, but it doesn't...it feels like a sharp tug at his clothes, at his side, through the tailcoat that he is still wearing, though all the others have long discarded theirs.
He puts his hand to his side, and when it pulls away, there is red – startlingly vivid in all the grey from the powder and smoke and torn up paving stones, and sharp against the gunpowder coating his fingers. He blinks rapidly, trying to focus. It is such a pure, intense shade of red. He has seen it before, but in confusion, his mind does not connect it with the barricades and where he is in time and place.
He sees blue skies and green fields.
Courfeyrac and Enjolras have been lovers for many years. They attended the lycée Charlemagne in Paris together, inseparable even as boys. After the lights out he would sneak into Enjolras' bed, and innocently they would pull the covers up over their heads, lying arm in arm, and tell each other stories. Enjolras had found a copy of Thomas Paine and a few old decrees from the Republic, and a sympathetic schoolmaster – soon divining where his interests lay – had loaned him books. Together they talked of the rights of man and citizen, and tried to imagine that ideal world. Courfeyrac had a legalistic turn of mind, enjoying the nutting out of hypotheticals, and his scenarios butted up against Enjolras' broad idealism.
Before they moved on to the Sorbonne, the line between friends and lovers had long been crossed. It seemed wrong, obscene, that they had to hide it – their bond was as complete and natural as any fundamental urge, breathing or eating or sleeping. Had they not been forced to think about it by their circumstances, it would not have occurred to them to question it.
So Enjolras adopts a fiercely chaste demeanour, rejecting any romantic advance from a woman, letting it be known by his actions that he has taken priestly vows of chastity, although his honesty prevents him from saying as much. And Courfeyrac ostentatiously pursues women, is rarely seen in public without one on his arm. Sometimes he even beds them to maintain the facade.
And at night he still resorts to Enjolras' bed, where they talk of their ideal world, the talk as much a part of what they are together as their physical coupling.
Summer, and they are in a small village outside Rheims. Enjolras has sourced some guns from an armourer there – it turned out he was a disgruntled Bonapartist, eager to do anything to topple a Bourbon, and Courfeyrac and Enjolras are not inclined to argue the point. After the transaction is sealed, they have some hours before they can next take passage back to Paris. Instead of sitting in the Inn, they make sure the arms are secure with their contact, and wander out into the fields.
It is quiet here. For so many years they have lived in Paris, far away from the Midi of their early years. Always noise, always the smell of horse dung and human refuse and the sound of carriages and voices and hawkers. Here, in the fields, there is scarcely even birdsong, and hardly an insect to be heard in the midday heat. Only the light breeze through the high pasture.
They lie down together, spirits high from their success. Enjolras' hair is a bright, burnished gold under the sun. Courfeyrac has his hands full of poppies that he has gathered during their walk out to this spot. As they sit down in the grass, Enjolras reclines to lie fully supine, looking up at the sky with a smile. Courfeyrac leans down, kisses him, removes his cravat.
They undress, sliding from their clothes. This is quite different from how they have made love before, almost always in bed and between sheets. Here, away from Paris, feeling close to the earth, they discard their garments, and Enjolras pulls Courfeyrac on top of him. They perspire lightly from the walk, more so from their exertions as they move together, sliding, sweating, joined with nothing but their harsh breathing and soft words of love in all that silence under the sky.
When they have climaxed, they catch their breath, and Courfeyrac sees the discarded bunch of poppies lying by Enjolras' head. Languidly he takes them – for cut poppies do not last long before wilting – and begins to twine them in Enjolras' hair. The colours are blinding in their intensity, and he is aware only of the sense of sight...of the gold of Enjolras' hair, of the blue of his eyes echoing the sky, of the red of his kiss-swollen lips and the poppies.
He drops to his knees at the barricade, still looking at his hand, all his focus on the startling red. He is smiling, not aware of the bubble of blood at the corner of his mouth. As he falls to the ground he doesn't hear gunfire or smell the powder - all he sees is a summer day, and light so intense it burns, and Enjolras lying beneath him, lips parted in desire, and poppies in his hair.