A/N: In which there is slash. Feuilly/Grantaire, E/C, and unrequited E/R. The lyrics belong to Suzanne Vega ("Out of Reach", from her book The Passionate Eye); Les Amis belong to Victor Hugo; Grantaire's mini-speech is a line from Phantom by Susan Kay.
Secondary A/N: I know Feuilly is a fan-maker, not a poet. My drama teacher misspoke introducing the characters and the description stuck. Please review.
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Some years ago, the back room of the Café Musain was for lease. By the hour, or so it was whispered. He'd had his share of painted women, and taken others with him, but all out of duty to the vigor of youth. His passion was drink, and all else turned to lethargy.
I am looking through your eyes again
At the maze there in your head
Their prince was among the younger men who drifted uneasily into Grantaire's abyss in the fall of 1830. No one would have called him credulous, but there was a terrible contradiction in the boy of great power in loyal hands of equal innocence. An idealist, who spoke of utopia with a passion too perfect to mar with cynicism.
I heard what you just said
And I believe your mind is bending
Grantaire toasted him mockingly, night after painful night. He could not be opposed, for he knew nothing at all.
"Believe me," the cynic told Feuilly, a young poet of terrible sadness matched only by silence. "no matter how many monarchs France disposes of, the urge to bow and scrape and curry favor with ones superiors is as ingrained as the stench of onion on a peasants hands."
Their prince appeared with a gentleness born of emptiness. He put a hand on the back of Grantaire's chair, and was quiet a moment before he spoke, "You will come to see differently, I hope, when you learn France is no man's harlot."
He snorted, "Spirited words, monsieur, from the man with no harlot to speak of."
He had spoken without thinking. The boy went unexpectedly pale, withdrew his hand, and looked at Feuilly with what, in a year's time, would be a command.
I have followed you as long as I could
And once or twice I even though I understood
Indulgence condemned on two sides, on the righteous for its depravity and on the unrighteous for its timidity. It was a few years since his relative indifference to women sought him a different kind of pleasurable company. The poor poet's innocent soul, caught with unrelenting darkness, was drawn to Grantaire's fabricated cynicism. He convinced himself he was to love what could not be loved.
A promise kept. The poet was gentle, the darkness in him of loneliness, surely, for he was pure.
And now I'm standing here alone
While you fly right out of reach
It was too long before he learned their savior's name. Enjolras was all anyone ever called him, though his given name was meant to be Augustan. It was known that he had the determination to refuse all offers of forgiveness from his family, the pride to refuse all offers for help, and the forwardness to deserve to be called their leader. Beyond that, his only intimate was a young doctor named René Combeferre.
Grantaire determined to be amused rather than stirred when he saw the two of them, heads bent close in discussion, this one's feverish, the other's determined. He saw their savior press his fingers to his mouth like a woman.
Telling me your broken drunken speech
There was written by my hand
"You believe in nothing." It had been too simple to say. Grantaire forgot now what he had said to deserve it. The soul may be strangled for faith. Doubt may darken; doubt may kill. Their savior would damn him again, through the years he endured this life, impatient for the next. Grantaire had no name to him. He was hindrance more than recruit. Their savior turned back to the doctor, and nothing Grantaire said would grant him another look, even of contempt.
All you're asking for is a simple human touch
Is that so very much? Well that depends on where you want it
He walked along Saint-Denis with the poet once, late one night as the moon set. Feuilly watched as the streets they walked began to decay, and he turned to the man beside him with tears in his eyes, "Look,"
Vals d'amour, the city's most notorious pleasure house, had an ominous bullet hole in the door. The street was silent, and the brothel was dark. Feuilly wanted to look inside. Grantaire took his shoulder and pushed him on.
"Look," the poet said again, pointing to the fallen leaves along the stones.
"How strange it is," said the man beside him, "that we should find their death so beautiful. Will the Guard look on us so fondly?" Feuilly laughed quietly, obligingly, a high spasm of a sound unfamiliar even to him. Grantaire looked furtively up the street before taking the poet in his arms. "This'll do."
"Look," he said, once more, taking his hand and turning him to the second corner. A pair stood in shadow there, moving slowly.
You don't know about the times I have wished the sky would just give up
And let the stars come falling crashing spinning down
And never stop
The street swayed first with drink, then with recognition, then at long last with envy. Their savior stood there with his one intimate, his arms tense as though fighting a very old instinct. The other stood not six inches away, speaking softly through the mistrust in their angel's face. As their imitations watched, the other took the savior's jaw in his hand, laid the other on his arm, and kissed his lips with a purpose so subdued it seemed nearly disguised.
The cynic was pleased at first that no response came of the reassuring advance, that after a long moment their savior seemed to shudder, but soon after they parted did a change come over him. He tried to speak as though to say his name, he pulled the other into an embrace as gently as he dared. Their savior accepted a brief kiss with clinging uncertainty. The young doctor led him now as in everything, bringing the two of them into the grass and their shadows didn't hear the protest, but instead the response.
"To be on one's knees before what is right, that is the nature of progress." Both were kneeling before they embraced again. All this the poet and the cynic watched. The cynic watched the stars and was sick from drink and hatred and horrible, horrible envy. He was bitter with casual words.
"Perhaps not tonight."
Feuilly closed his eyes. "I understand."
And now you say you hear the voice of reason
Laugh right at you
"René, would you call be morally bankrupt?"
"I would call you a man who pretends to like depravity more than he does."
"Then you would call me an idealist with a cynic's face?"
"I would call you a man whose regret outweighs skepticism."
"Then would you call me a doubtful martyr?"
"I would call you a man in love. Sublime, yes, but commonplace. We are all of us men in love."
"You are a man in love."
Maybe it's true
Maybe it ought to
All the coldness available to a man of strangled fire went into that accusation. René Combeferre betrayed neither anger nor denial. He checked his watch, wrote a line, checked, wrote… an incessant pattern. "He is a man in love." Came the answering murmur, delicately, almost tenderly spoken, "As am I."
"Kneeling before what is right… does it give you as much pleasure as it gives him?"
René looked at him with strange, pitying dignity, and said nothing.
"Did he know you meant to lie with him when you walked last night? But the virginal are not inclined to fight those with pretty words to spare."
A hand took his shoulder then, spun him hard enough to make him stumble into the wall. Their savior did not have to advance to make himself heard.
"I will not have him spoken of like that."
"My dear child." The cynic spat without looking into his eyes, "We are, all of your countrymen, harlots in our way."
"Leave him, Enjolras." A precautionary threat, a word to draw back, a hand to still anger. René still looked at him with that hard-edged pity. "He is not worth it."
"Willingness to fight is folly, not love." Grantaire regretted those words every day that followed.
Now you want to know
If I can fix your bleeding face
"Don't move."
His eyes closed sharply with the pain. "Don't treat me as if I deserve better."
"You certainly don't." Feuilly knelt and touched and bound and concealed with greater tenderness than competence. "How many times more will you walk away with your breath?"
Grantaire smiled bitterly. "I find I must speak my mind."
"No," Feuilly told him, "You find it more diverting to play Devil's advocate than speak your mind." He touched the black eye last, and most delicately. Grantaire winced.
If I can bring you back some grace
If I have seen your honor somewhere
"You have beautiful hands."
A pause, "You have a telling voice."
"You damned poets, never saying what you mean."
"Then you are a poet yourself."
"Can you be plainer?"
"You don't speak your mind. If you did the love you found there might make of you an honest man."
"Don't be ridiculous, little one. Yes, alright, enough of your medicine. Permit me to thank you." He held out his hand, "I've a healthy respect for speech and for deceit, Feuilly, but that does not make me a poet."
Feuilly nodded, wearily, and turned his face away.
If I could take you in my arms and make you whole
If I could break the spell and make you well
I would have done it long ago
Grantaire was not one to force honesty. He took a drink, then took hold of the poet and had no need to turn his eyes back to his own. He bit his lips until they bled against their savior's name and closed his eyes to Feuilly, who hid his face. Both dreamt of René Combeferre, Feuilly wished for his wisdom, Grantaire for his persuasion.
Dreams have no power to ease contempt, but contempt sustained him longer than indifference.
Grantaire thought the next day of what René Combeferre had said about their savior as a man in love. France is no man's harlot… "No, Apollo," he murmured, bitterness bringing an edge to triumph, "Not even yours."
France was not to be trusted, and Paris least of all. She had her moonlit flights with revolutionaries, indulgent and frequent as young lovers. She craved their attentions, their foolish loyalties. Free, she was a courtesan without a master.
If I could hold you all together
If I had the magic power
If I had the healing touch
She could not sustain her people with passion, and bread was scarce. But passion would make her monarchs jealous of young love. He would kill his rivals, too much like the children who peopled the Café Musain, leaving her satisfied and dreaming her faithful. Entire causes died with her name on their lips. Leaving her satisfied. Dreaming her faithful.
The cynic and the poet looked at the table the savior and the other had to themselves. No hope for men in love. No use in trying.
Maybe I could make you know how much
I have needed you.
None of the lovers abandoned Saint-Denis. Even when the fighting began, it was between these streets they retreated, to speak words of love through the willingness to fight. The only consolation of the poet was that he was killed first. The only consolation of the cynic was that, facing a moment before death, contempt may turn in desperation to hope. The savior turned to the man he had given up, took his hand, urged him to believe. In the absence of hope, in the presence of love, the cynic smiled.
The smile had not finished before the order was heard.