CHAPTER I
The rooms of that prison were no better than the dark and terrible pits of a torturing chamber, where there are only two colors: red and black. The black is darkness, and the red is blood. The screams of the tortured man could be heard throughout the entire prison, coming forth from somewhere deep within the dreadful depth of the black oblivion, as the tormented moaning of a drowned sailor trapped in the abysses whose ghostly voice rises eerily above the sea, or as the cries of a dead man coming forth from the earth under the grave, or as the agonized screams of the damned soul that is trapped in the flaming chambers of hell, subject endlessly only to pain, to torture, to agony, and to Satan. These cries echoed down the narrow, long, and dark corridors, cut through stone walls like the blade of a knife, reverberated and shook the prison along with everything and everyone in it. When a man, a prisoner, a guard, or a soldier heard these cries, he perceived that his body, his heart, and his very soul were trembling.
If one had entered this prison, he would have perceived that somewhere, down one of these ominous halls, behind one of these sealed doors, in one of these forsaken rooms, a man was being crucified. The man was screaming, moaning, crying, begging for mercy, and a sound like a hammer striking metal did not cease. Each time the hammer fell, the man choked, and gagged, and screamed, and made dreadful sounds like the cries of a dying animal. One would have thought that nails were being driven through this prisoners hands and that he was being hung on a cross to suffer and die, sentenced to death by the judgment of the Romans, who crucified rebels and traitors, and who crucified even the innocent, the holy Son of Man and Son of God, Jesus Christ.
Enjolras was sitting upon the cold stone floor of the prison, his gut hallow and empty, his heart racing in his chest but his body still and immobile, stiff like stone, his muscles tense and hard, his hands clinched into tight fists, his jaws firmly locked shut and his teeth grinding together, his back straight and erect, pressed tightly against the cold wall behind him, his wrists and ankles bound securely and painfully in iron shackles.
The shackles had rubbed his flesh on his wrists and ankles raw and red, and they weighed heavily upon his bare feet; his beautiful locks of flowing golden hair were now untidy and knotty and hung messily around his cold face; his thin and handsome body was now smeared with filth, dirt, ash, and blood, some of it his own and some of it belonging to the friends who had died beside him battle; his fair and flawless skin was now punctured, bruised, wounded, and bleeding; his handsome face was now stained black from the smoke of the guns, bruised badly about his left eye, burned hideously upon his right cheek, scratched and bleeding; the corner of his pure lips had split open and blood was still running down his chin; his eyes, the chilling blue color of the sky before sunset, dark, cold, hard, and unreadable, gazed transfixed into the dark chamber around him.
He was in more pain than he had ever felt in all of his life. It was as if the pain was being conceived deep inside of his lower chest and upper abdomen, and now it was expanding through his body, trying to burst out of him, finding its way into his bloodstream and pulsing through his veins, pounding in his head, shaking his skull and penetrating through his brain, trembling through his limbs, forcing its way up into his throat and making him struggle against the urge to vomit. They had already beaten him mercilessly with their fists and their weapons, their clubs, the butts of their guns, sometimes even the blades of their bonnets and knifes, which opened deep, painful, and burning gashes all over his body. Most of the pain, however, was coming forth from his ribs, where they had struck him repeatedly with a metal club. The lower part of his right ribcage was where the pain was the worst, and Enjolras was sure that a few of his ribs had been broken. It hurt to move, and it hurt to breathe. When they first struck him, Enjolras had been breathing so rapidly that he started chocking on the pain, his head became dizzy, his vision faded into darkness, and he had almost lost consciousness. At length, he managed to get control over his body, and he forced his lungs to draw in slow, steady breaths. This hurt, too. His ribs were constantly throbbing, and at the slightest movement, sharp pains cut through his body. There was an incredible amount of pressure in his ribs, as well as his skull, as if some force was trying to burst through them and shatter the bones.
His entire body was weak, trembling, and in pain. He was in more pain than he had ever experienced before, but he tried to ignore it. In fact, as he sat in that prison cell, the worst of the pain was not in his body but in his heart. Nearly all of his friends had died today. They had followed him into the revolution, into the battle, into the fight for freedom, and they had fallen. The battle failed, the barricade was taken, and the Friends of the ABC were killed. Yet, Enjolras, the leader of it all, had been spared. He had been prepared to make that sacrifice, ready to follow his friends into death, willing to die for freedom, but they had not killed him. Instead, they had taken him and brought him to this forsaken place of such darkness, and misery, and pain.
Enjolras now sat still and silently in his cell, and he listened to the agonized screams that cried out through the prison. There are some sounds that will cause a man's heart to turn to stone, his blood to turn to ice, and a chill like the winter wind to fall over his flesh. The sound of a gun firing to kill. The cry of a child in pain. The scream of a man being tortured. As Enjolras listened to the harrowed screams, the strangled cries, the dying moans, and the pleas for mercy that penetrated through the stone wall behind him, his heart was ice that struggled to keep beating. They were torturing this man in the room just beside Enjolras's cell. He could hear everything. Every sound, every pained cry, every desperate shout, every soft plea for mercy, every time his torturers struck him, or scolded him, or told him to be quiet, or mocked him, or laughed at him… Enjolras could hear everything. The sounds alone made him grit his teeth and long desperately for the moment when these cries would cease.
As he listened to this torture, Enjolras thought grimly, Just let the man die.
While listening to such torture would have been terrifying and terrible for any man to hear and endure, it was far worse for Enjolras, because he knew the man who was being tortured.
He had been standing by Enjolras's side when the firing stopped. When Enjolras was alone before those guns and waiting to be executed, Grantaire had appeared out of seemingly nowhere, perhaps from behind the broken remains of the barricade or out from a pile of corpses, and he had taken his place by Enjolras's side, ready to die with and for his leader. They were prepared to die standing together before the guns, to let their lives be ended, to join their dead friends in the afterlife. But fait had not allowed it. They would have died together, but instead, they were taken. Just before the officer gave the order to fire, to pull the triggers, and to kill Enjolras and his follower Grantaire, someone had recognized Enjolras as the leader of the rebellion and it was decided that instead of being killed he be taken alive. So he and Grantaire had been arrested, and now they were in this terrible place.
Had he gone without resisting, they might not have even touched him, at all, but when the prison guards began to strike Enjolras, to beat him and to break his ribs, to punish him for leading the rebellion, Grantaire tried to fight them, to defend Enjolras, to protect his leader. Even when they started striking Grantaire, he kept trying to defend Enjolras. They punished him for it. Using the same metal club that they had used to break Enjolras's ribs, they forced Grantaire to the ground, pinned him against the stone floor, and then used the club to break his leg. As the metal slammed into it, everyone around him could hear Grantaire's bone cracking. At first the pain hit him so suddenly and so brutally, that he did not know what had happened, he choked, he could not see, he could not breathe, he could not even scream. Then, before he had even regained the capability to draw air into his lungs, they yanked him to his feet and made him walk. But he could not walk, and they ended up dragging him, wavering in and out of consciousness, through the corridors and to the cell which he and Enjolras were thrown into.
They had both been put in chains, their jackets and their boots were taken from them—Grantaire, although barely conscious, let out a terrible cry of pain as the man violently ripped the shoe off of his right foot—and the guards left them alone to suffer in the forlorn darkness of that prison. For more than an hour, Grantaire lay on the ground where they threw him, not moving, mostly unconscious but still able to feel the pain, and endless moaning spilt out of his lips as he lay there in pain and in torment.
As soon as they had struck his leg and he heard that hideous crack that made him want to cringe in pain, as if he could feel it as well, Enjolras knew that Grantaire's leg had been broken badly. Terribly. As he sat in the cell with the unconscious man and he heard him moaning in such pain and saw the agonized look upon his face even in his unconsciousness, even greater fear and dread came into Enjolras's heart. When Enjolras moved his eyes to look down at Grantaire's leg, he saw the right side of Grantaire's trousers from the knee down was completely dyed red, completely soaked in blood. Still, he did not know how truly horrible the injury was until a guard returned to the cell, at least an hour later, went in, bended down beside Grantaire, and carelessly pulled up the blood-soaked clothing to reveal his damaged leg.
The very sight of it made Enjolras's body feel weak, his head feel dizzy, and his heart began to hammer in his chest. While every human instinct told him to look away, as humans in nature do not want to see pain, suffering, and horrors such as these, Enjolras kept his eyes fixed steadily upon the distorted leg. It was far worse than he could have imagined. Ugly black bruising covered all of Grantaire's lower leg, passed his knee, and was already traveling up his thigh; his flesh was inflamed and swollen to nearly twice the normal size of his leg; and everything from his knee below was covered in, dripping in thick, hot blood, which ran down Grantaire's leg as lava runs down the slopes of a flaming volcano. There was a deep, repulsive, and gruesome gash on the inner part of Grantaire's upper shin; it was rapidly excreting blood; and distorted strips of dismembered flesh hung off of the wounds. Grantaire's bones had been weakened by years of excessive intake of alcohol, and when they struck him, the tibia bone in his leg had broken utterly in half. Just below his knee, sharp like the lethal blade of a knife, part of the bone punctured through Grantaire's flesh, opened a gory wound, and was now sticking out the side of his leg.
With rough and thoughtless care, Grantaire was taken out of the cell for medical treatment, and Enjolras was left alone. Only minutes later, the screaming began in the room beside his cell. They were probably amputating Grantaire's leg, Enjolras grimly reasoned as he listened Grantaire scream. Had he been taken to a hospital outside of this wretched prison, then his leg could have been spared, but Enjolras knew well that the doctors here did not care about Grantaire or about any of the prisoners whom they were forced to treat. These doctors only treated the prisoners at all, because it was their job to do so. They did not care about any of them. In this knowledge, the fastest and easiest way to treat a broken leg from which the bone was protruding through the flesh was to cut it off. Enjolras cringed as he thought of this, and he deeply hoped that Grantaire would pass out soon. Even then, though, he would probably still be able to feel the pain.
Amputations were terrible. T he very thought of Grantaire, awake and with nothing to dull his senses, tied down to a table, surrounded by men whom he did not know, who would not listen to him, or acknowledge him when he spoke, or answer him when he asked a question, who hurt him and treated him like an animal, who used a blood-covered saw to cut off his leg, a long hook to dig the broken arteries out of the muscle, a metal file to smooth the rough edge of the broken bone, and a large needle to sew up whatever was left of his leg. Enjolras shuttered at the thought.
"No! No! No! Stop it! Please!" Enjolras heard Grantaire yelling just beyond the wall that kept them apart. "No!" Grantaire cried again, but his words soon turned into an agonized scream.
Then, Enjolras could hear the doctors mocking him.
Poor Grantaire, Enjolras thought, gritting his teeth at the sound of the young man's screams. Before the battle, Enjolras had hated Grantaire. He despised him. Because he was a drunkard, a gambler, a libertine, a deceiver, a trickster, a liar, a sinner, and because he believed in nothing, not God, not love, not hope, not the Revolution, Enjolras had hated the man. Grantaire was the utter most opposite of Enjolras, who was a believer, a Christian, a supporter of the Revolution, and the leader of the group of rebel students, the Friend of the ABC. Enjolras was courageous, brave, passionate, virtuous, good, loyal, noble, and strong. Grantaire was none of these things. He was nothing that Enjolras was and everything than Enjolras was not. He did not believe in anything. No, that was not completely true. Grantaire did believe in something. He believed in Enjolras. Enjolras was the reason that he had stayed with the Friends of the ABC and fought with them at the barricades. Grantaire admired, venerated, followed, and loved Enjolras, but in return Enjolras rebuked, scolded, detested, and hated Grantaire. At least, before the battles. When Enjolras was standing alone before those guns, waiting to die by himself, Grantaire had appeared and he chose to take his place beside Enjolras, to die with him rather than save himself, to declare himself a believer in the Revolting. In that moment, something had changed between them. Enjolras could not know for certain, but he thought that, if Grantaire survived the torture they were putting him through, things would be different between them, now. Now, Enjolras might even call Grantaire his friend.
Grantaire continued to scream, his voice high, strained, desperate, and anguished. Enjolras cringed as he listened, as if he could feel the pain himself. Enjolras was in pain but this pain, he knew, was nothing compared to that which Grantaire was enduring.
Not long later, Enjolras heard something like a hammer pounding in the room beside him, and Grantaire's screams became more terrible, more frantic, and more agonized. What are they doing to him? Enjolras thought with dread and with horror. Crucifying him!?
It was terrible, listening to the agonized screams, the desperate cries, the vain pleas for mercy… Enjolras wanted to run, to get away from this place, to hide from such cruelty.
Then there was silence. Deathly silence. Silence like that which looms over the graves of the dead. All at once, abruptly and suddenly, without cause or warning, all of the souls in this prison, this tomb, which buried its victims alive in chains and in stone, were executed and murdered. A moment ago these souls had been in torture, in torment, and in suffering. Now, they were in hell. Enjolras alone remained. He did not move. He remained sitting stiffly against the wall, every muscle tense, and he tried to listen. Listen for any sound, any hint, any sign or hope of life… The only life that he could hear was that of his own heart beating, pounding painfully against his broken ribcage.
Bang!
A sound like a gunshot cut through the walls of the prison, echoing down the long, dark corridors, shaking the foundation of the building, and reverberating through the floors. Enjolras's body and heart leaped in horror as the door of his cell flew open and slammed against the stone wall behind it. Two guards appeared at the cell's entrance, dragging what appeared to be a bloody corpse behind them. Grantaire.
Enjolras's heart froze and his stomach began to twist into a knot, as if his intestines had become snakes and were trying to devour one another. He remained still against the wall as he watched them drag Grantaire's body into the cell and throw him carelessly down so he hit facedown against the floor slammed into the wall, secure shackles around his ankles, and chain him to the stone wall. Without another look at Grantaire or a single glance at Enjolras, the guards departed, locking the cell door behind them and disappearing into the darkness of the corridor. Now, Enjolras and Grantaire were alone.
For a moment, Enjolras could do nothing but stare with wide eyes and a white face at the unconscious body that had been hurled into the cell with him. Grantaire was covered in blood. His skin and his clothes were red. His usually tanned face was deathly white, as if no blood and no life remained in his cold flesh. He was not moving, and Enjolras could not tell if he was breathing. Enjolras thought he was dead.
"Grantaire," he heard his own voice call out into the cell, before he realized his lips had opened. Grantaire did not respond. He did not move. The only voice to answer him was the echo of his own words as they collided with and ricocheted of the stone walls, dancing about the cell as if to mock and torment him, like the doctors who had been mocking Grantaire. "Grantaire!" Enjolras tried again, but the bleeding man still did not answer.
For the first time since he had been thrown in this cell, Enjolras forced his injured body to move. He shifted the position of which he had been sitting, getting up very slowly and carefully because of the pain that it caused him to move, and he came to rest on his hands and knees. Only from this simple motion, he was panting and out of breath, struggling to breathe through the pain. Enjolras was in a lot of pain only from broken ribs… he could not imagine the pain that Grantaire was in. He did not want to imagine it.
Despite the aching, the throbbing, and the burning in his ribs, he manage to crawl across the cell, his chains groaning noisily as he moved, and approached Grantaire's still body. The chains that restrained him were just long enough to allow Enjolras to get to Grantaire and sit down beside him.
Grantaire was still alive. Now beside him, Enjolras could hear Grantaire struggling to breathe through the pain. Poor Grantaire, Enjolras thought again. It would have been better for him if he were dead. Enjolras let out a soft sigh, although he was not sure if it was in disappointment or in relief. Then, moving carefully as not to hurt him any more, he rolled Grantaire onto his back, took him into his arms, and held him, cradling him like a child, allowing Grantaire's head rest against his chest, holding him as a father would hold his young son who was about to die.
He frowned as he looked down at Grantaire's broken body, and dread came to fill his gut and his heart. At once, he knew that Grantaire would not last long in this condition. Enjolras gently used his hand to brush Grantaire's messy curls of hair out of his face. As he did so, his figures touched something wet, and he drew back his hand. It was blood. There was blood in Grantaire's hair.
Enjolras hesitated a moment, looking nervously down at the unconscious drunkard and not knowing what to do. He did not know where the blood was coming from. If he touched Grantaire, perhaps, he would hurt him worse… With effort, Enjolras managed to swallow the knot that was forming in his throat, and he reluctantly moving his hand again toward the unconscious man's face. This time, he proceeded to carefully brush the wet hair out of Grantaire's face. That explained things. There were deep lesions, bloody gashes, as well as bruises all over Grantaire's face and forehead, which confirmed Enjolras's speculations that they had been hitting and beating Grantaire. Enjolras let out a heavy sigh as his heart and his hopes sank deeper into dark oblivion, oblivion like the darkness of this godforsaken prison. His heart then began to beat faster and his stomach began to churn as he shifted his eyes to look at Grantaire's leg.
It was still there, surprisingly. At first, Enjolras was relieved, but after he carefully pulled up the blood-soaked leg of Grantaire's trousers and looked upon the distorted limb beneath it, he thought that it would have been better had Grantaire's leg simply been amputated.
After he was taken from his cell, Grantaire was brought into a cold room, stripped of his clothing, and tied down, lying on his back, to a wooden table that was stained red with the blood of the patients that had been treated before him. Cords were secured tightly around his wrists and his ankles, over his waist and his chest, and several doctors, their white coats splattered in red blood, were all around him. Many of them laid their hands on him and held him still, restraining him and holding him in vicious grasps, so that he could not move, whilst the others performed the operation. During all of this, Grantaire was too weak to resist.
In this time, resetting a bone was a very serious and extremely painful surgery… especially when the surgeons did not care about the traitor who was receiving the operation. A broken bone in the leg was more severe than that in the arm, because the thigh and the calf muscles are larger and stronger than most of muscles in the body. When a bone breaks, the muscles around it contract and tighten, bunching up into knots. Grantaire lied helplessly upon the table with nothing, not even a sip of alcohol, to numb the pain, as the doctors "fixed" him. One man grasped him around his thigh above his knee, whist another grasped his calve below the knee. Using their own muscle and strength, they pulled on his leg and stretched the muscles until they were fully elongated, and then a third man used a hammer to pound the bone back inside the bleeding wound in his leg. Rather than wrapping his leg in a brace, as a doctor usually would have done after this operation, a nail was hammered into Grantaire's bone to hold it in place. Finally, after this had been completely, his leg was recklessly stitched up. The wound was closed, but it was still bleeding.
One can scarcely imagine the pain that this young man, only twenty-five years of age, a student, still in school, still only a boy, was forced to endure. To break a bone alone is terrible pain. It hurts, it throbs, it pulsates, it aches, it causes one to become dizzy, lightheaded, nauseous, and sometimes causes him to vomit or to lose consciousness. The slightest touch of a hand or a figure, the smallest shift of the muscles, even the fabric of one's clothing sliding over the broken bone causes the poor boy to feel as if a knife has stabbed him, sharp pain shoots through his body like a bullet, and sometimes he cries out. On top of his broken bone, not merely fractured but utterly broken in half, there was a wound where the bone had cut through his flesh, tearing it open, and broke out of his leg. A wound from a knife is agony. A wound from the sharp edge of a broken bone is worse by far. It was excruciating. The wound, itself, burned so Grantaire thought that his leg had caught on fire and the flame was burning up his flesh, eating up his blood, and drying out his bones like the logs that flame devours in a stove. Then the doctors began to touch his wounded and broken limb, to stretch his broken leg, to hammer the broken bone back into the bleeding wound, to put a nail through the broken bone… One can not imagine the pain that this boy had no choice but to endure. But those who heard him screaming understood only a shadow of his agony.
Enjolras frowned at the swollen, inflamed, blackened, and bleeding leg before him. He was not a doctor or even a medical student, for that matter—Joly or Combeferre would have known better—but it did not look to him as if Grantaire's bones had been property reset. Perhaps, it was due only to the severe swelling and bruising, but Grantaire's leg seemed to be twisted slightly in the wrong direction. Enjolras was not surprised. These doctors did not care if a prisoner's leg was crooked. They did not care about the prisoners, at all.
Beyond this, blood was still flowing freely out from between the uneven row of stitches that went down the inner part of Grantaire's calf and that were supposed to be holding the wound closed. Grantaire had already lost a lot of blood, and he was still loosing more. If he did not bleed to death, Enjolras thought darkly, then surly his leg would become infected and that would kill him. Grantaire would not long survive in this prison.
Enjolras hesitated only a short time longer, thinking and trying to figure out what to do. He decided. Moving slowly and carefully as not to hurt Grantaire, who was still unconscious in his lap, he ripped a long strip of fabric off the bottom of his own shirt and used it to tightly wrap up Grantaire's leg, beginning above his knee and finishing at his ankle, and trying the fabric in a tight knot. Grantaire's face contorted in agony, and he let out a pained moan, but Enjolras was glad to hear any sound of life from him… even a dying moan. There. At least now Grantaire's open wound would not be so vulnerable to the assault of whatever dirt, illness, disease, and bugs polluted this filthy prison cell.
As Enjolras finished tying the bandage around Grantaire's broken and wounded limb, the man let out a low moan of pain, and he began to stir. It was the pain that finally dragged him out of his unconsciousness. Enjolras took him back into his arms, held him tightly against his chest—it hurt Enjolras's ribs to hold Grantaire like this, but he ignored it—and looked down at Grantaire, waiting.
He sat silently in his cell, leaning against the stone wall, holding Grantaire in his arms, and waited. Waited for the guards to return, waited for Grantaire to wake up, waited for him to bleed out, waited for him to die, waited for whatever was to come next. Enjolras feared that Grantaire would die. He did not want Grantaire to die, yet when faced with the alternative, he did not know which option was grimmer. Death or life in this hell… Enjolras wanted Grantaire to live, but at the same time, he knew it would be better that he die.
Grantaire again let out a miserable, tormented, agonized moan, and he began to stir, whimpering quietly as he tried to breathe. Enjolras looked down, and he saw Grantaire weakly open his eyes. His blue eyes were red and wet. There were tears in them.
"Grantaire," Enjolras said, taking care to keep his voice even, steady, calm, soothing, strong… despite the uneasiness, the insecurity, and the fear that he was feeling.
To hear his voice, somehow, it brought comfort and reassurance to Grantaire's troubled soul. When he opened his eyes and saw his young leader's face looking down at him, when he found that he was no longer in the brutal clutches of his merciless torturers, when he realized that he was in the protection of Enjolras's arms, when he felt the warmth of Enjolras's body warming him, and when he heard Enjolras's steady heartbeat singing him a lullaby, he let out a soft sigh of relief. Enjolras was astonished when a weak smile appeared on Grantaire's cold lips.
"Enjolras," he struggled to reply, and when he managed it, his voice was so soft, so thin, and so broken that Enjolras could nearly feel the pain that Grantaire was enduring. He suddenly closed his eyes and grimaced as the pain increased. Still he tried to speak, "Where…"
"We are back in our prison cell, Grantaire," Enjolras answered. "You may not remember, but they arrested us and brought us here after the battle."
"I remember," Grantaire said, as he weakly opened his eyes again. He had barely finished saying these words, when he cringed in pain and began throwing up. He tried to roll onto his side and vomit onto the cell floor, but the pain it caused him to move was too great, and most of the vomit ended up on Enjolras. Now, shaking and trembling, Grantaire, his voice shaking as much as his body, whispered, "I'm sorry." His voice was scared, pained, ashamed. A tear spilt out the corner of his eye and rolled slowly down the side of his face, only to be replaced by the new tears, which flooded into his afraid eyes. "I'm sorry, Enjolras… I didn't… I didn't mean to…"
"That is alright, Grantaire," Enjolras replied as if unaffected and unbothered by this. "I am sorry that you are in so much pain."
A great look of relief and gratitude passed over Grantaire's face when he realized that Enjolras was not angry at him. But even more obvious on his face was a look of terrible pain. "It's just…" he choked out after a moment, struggling to speak, struggling to breathe, struggling to hold back tears, "…my leg…"
"Yes, I know," Enjolras agreed. "Do not move unless you must. You are in bad condition, and you do not want to injure yourself worse than you are already injured."
Grantaire gave a weak nod, and he attempted a smile of gratitude, but he was in too much pain to manage it. Instead, he closed his eyes and winced, letting out a soft whimper, and Enjolras thought that man was about to burst into tears and weep. As much as he felt the urge to, however, Grantaire managed to hold it in. "How…" he started to say. He opened his eyes and looked fearfully up at Enjolras before asking in a soft and scared voice, "How bad is it?" Enjolras could see that he was afraid.
"Your leg is still there," Enjolras answered bluntly, and he could see great relief come into Grantaire eyes. But Enjolras was not one to hide the truth. He was not one to tell someone that they would be alright if they would not be. He was not one to tell someone that they would survive if they were going to die. He told the truth as it was. It was crueler, he thought, to tell someone that there was hope if there was none than to tell him the truth, no matter how grim the truth may be. "But your leg is in terrible condition," he went on. "I do not think that the bone was reset correctly. I doubt that you will ever be able to walk again. Or if you can walk one day, it will probably take years."
A grim smile came over Grantaire's lips and he muttered, "Do not fret over it, Enjolras. We will both of us be dead by then anyway."
Enjolras did not deny it. He knew that Grantaire was right. Yet, rather than being ominous and condemning as these words might have seemed, they somehow brought comfort and reassurance. Yes, he and Grantaire would be dead soon. But now, the thought of death was not so bad as it once seemed. What was it to die? To die was nothing. It was a gift, a blessing, an escape from torment and from pain. Now, after their friends had died and they had been left behind to face this pain and torture, Enjolras and Grantaire knew this to be true. Dying was not so bad. As they sat there in that cold prison cell, they both would have rather been dead. So when Grantaire said this, Enjolras nodded and a sad smile appeared on his lips.
Death would come soon. When he did come, Enjolras and Grantaire would run to him with open arms, go to him with gladness, greet him like an old friend. After all, they had seen death already many times. They had seen him come to take away all of their friends. All of their friends were dead. Enjolras and Grantaire, alone, were still alive. But death would come for them soon.