It's much later, these days, when they depart for the night before the funeral. They squeeze every last bit of the peaceful fourth out and don't leave until it's technically a couple of hours into the fifth, when there is only the one bartender left, who would have thrown them out long ago if he didn't know they had a revolution to prepare for.
Gavroche waits to leave with Éponine, as they've done a few times now, but she smiles and waves him on.
"Not tonight, I have something I need to do. I'll see you tomorrow, though." He nods, and with a wave and a returning grin, heads off.
Courfeyrac seems to know Gavroche the best, but he left a minute ago, in deep conversation with Jehan. So Éponine goes to Combeferre.
He looks up from the supplies he's gathering with a smile. "Hello."
"Gavroche," she says without preamble.
Combeferre nods. "Yes?"
She hugs her own arms, as if it's cold in the room. "He's smart." Combeferre nods. She is ashamed to be only just getting to know her little brother that they all seem to know so well. "He really believes in all this."
Combeferre nods again, his eyes sad. "Well, in a way he's what this is all for. Him and people like him who suffer the most at the hands of a system that can't recognize his worth the way we can." He sighs. "The point of all this, I suppose, was not to win this republic for ourselves, but to die so that people like Gavroche could have it."
Éponine isn't sure what to say. When he started speaking, saying "people like him," she expected pity, but that isn't quite what she got. She doesn't know how to respond to someone with the same fears and regrets for her brother as she is beginning to have, she's still getting used to the genuine and the heartfelt.
Combeferre looks up from his thoughts and smiles faintly. "Oh, I didn't get a chance last time we spoke, I meant to say-"
Here it is. "Our parents aren't very nice people, and they've never pretended to be nice to Gav," Éponine explains hurriedly. "So he left, soon as he was old enough to walk out. Me and my sister weren't so smart as that. He comes home every now and then, but not very often, and… well, that's why we don't know each other very well."
Combeferre's eyes are gentle. "I only was going to say I see the resemblance now, I don't know why I didn't notice it before." Éponine reddens. He pauses. "You have a sister?"
"Azelma. Just a bit younger than me. She takes care of herself by now. I mean, so does Gavroche, but…" She trails off helplessly, but Combeferre nods, understanding.
"But he shouldn't have to," he says.
When the next day comes, she fights with them. There's thunder and lightning in her face as she stands on the barricade in the morning light, a rifle in her hands.
Gavroche smiles brilliantly. They still do not let him stand on top of the barricade, especially during the first assault, but Gavroche stands at the bottom and looks up at his sister and grins.
"Do you remember the first time you died?" Grantaire asks Feuilly.
It's evening and they're inside the Musain playing checkers while everyone waits for dawn. They've lost Jehan, this time. The mood is always more subdued when they lose someone on the fifth; everyone speaks quieter, huddles closer. Courfeyrac sits by himself, reading from a stack of loose leaf paper.
"I think so," says Feuilly. "I was bayonetted in the back." He moves a piece. "Unless that was the second time."
Grantaire jumps Feuilly's piece and palms it idly. "I got drunk and slept through the fight."
Feuilly pauses in surprise with his hand suspended above the board. "You… didn't die, then?"
"Oh, I did. I woke up just as they were about to execute Enjolras."
Feuilly takes a moment to process that, but to anyone who knows Grantaire it's not hard to fill in the unsaid. He pauses, looking up at Grantaire while Grantaire looks at the board.
"You were all dead," he says calmly. "Enjolras was the last one left. He was surrounded, but I pushed through and stood next to him. He... took my hand."
They sit in silence for a moment.
"Grantaire…"
"Are you going to move?"
Feuilly brings his hand down on the piece he was still hovering over and moves it. "Is there something wrong?" Grantaire laughs and Feuilly frowns impatiently. "You know what I mean. More than usual. Or different."
Grantaire only regards the board and scratches his chin in thought. His hands are not quite steady, since he still doesn't have his bottle today. Their perpetual renewal is both a blessing and a curse for Grantaire's alcoholism—there's never quite enough time for Grantaire to start withdrawing completely on the goes he doesn't drink, but any progress he makes is undone on the fourth.
Feuilly glances up at Enjolras, who is sitting casting bullets with Combeferre. Feuilly is pretty sure Enjolras has been watching he and Grantaire all night, but Feuilly hasn't yet caught him at it.
Grantaire moves a piece and Feuilly promptly jumps it. Grantaire curses under his breath.
"It's only that tonight you're awfully…and I don't know, you and Enjolras seemed like you've been… all right, lately," Feuilly prods.
Grantaire glances up at Enjolras too, who still has his head bent over his work. "Well, not for much longer," he mutters. Feuilly's eyebrows go up.
"Are you planning to make it… not all right?" Grantaire doesn't respond, just moves one of his pieces. "Grantaire."
Grantaire looks up and smiles dully. "Your move."
The sun rises. The barricade falls. (Éponine dies on the barricade; Gavroche climbs up and takes her rifle from her hands, and shoots one soldier before he is killed.)
There is always a pause between when the artillery stops and the soldiers charge the barricade.
In that pause, while everyone is distracted loading guns or pounding pleadingly on doors, Grantaire hits Enjolras in the back of the head with a bottle.
Enjolras wakes up in an unfamiliar room with an overwhelming headache and something wet on his face.
There is a terrifying moment when he thinks that Bossuet's story he pretended not to hear has happened to him. At least it won't last long with a wound like this, judging by the blood—
Some of the wetness on his face drips past his open lips. It's not blood, it's just water. He reaches up and touches his forehead, and pulls away a wet rag. He searches his forehead with his fingers for a wound, but there isn't one. The pain is at the back of his head anyway.
"It helps when I'm hungover, so I thought it was worth the try," says Grantaire. He's standing in the doorway, his arms crossed, and all Enjolras can think is he feels like he's back in one of their long ago meetings again, arguing a point with Grantaire. At first he's not sure why he thinks that because there's no familiar smirk on Grantaire's face, none of the old teasing, only jutted jaw, guarded eyes. No, he realizes cloudily, this is what was behind the smirk—the waiting, the challenge, the readiness to flinch. The stubborn, pained conviction of someone who knows they've just invited cruelty. He tries to think of what he said to make Grantaire look like this, what Grantaire has said, but they haven't said anything. His head hurts.
"Where are we?" he says.
"My place," says Grantaire. He's swaying a little. Enjolras finally notices the bottle in his hand. Ah. That's the other thing that's like before.
Enjolras is waking up now. He sits up fully—he's on a bed, he notices—and looks around, frowning. "Why are we here? What happened? Where is everyone?"
"They died," says Grantaire flatly. "Everyone died. If you stay at the barricade, you die. Even you must have worked that much out by now."
"Why are we here?" His alarm is starting to rise. He swings his legs off the bed.
"Because I brought you here."
"Grantaire," he says, figuring it out, making one last attempt to keep his voice level, anger and horror heating in him. "What have you done?"
"I've saved your life!" Grantaire snaps. Enjolras stands, a little too fast, stumbles back onto the bed. In the doorway, Grantaire twitches with the impulse to help him, but stays where he is. He takes a drink instead.
"I didn't want my life saved!" Enjolras snarls back.
"I know, you idiot! Which is why I had to do it for you!" He shakes his head emphatically, shakes it too much, his movements sloppy with the wine in him, and his eyes blinking heavily against alcohol and unspent angry tears. "Bossuet had it wrong when he thought he could get off the wheel alone. I'd have probably made the same mistake. But what would the universe want with him, or me? Out of all that wasted life, of all the people the world needs alive, it isn't us. It's you, Enjolras."
"And if it works?" Enjolras shouts back. "What if it works? Then they're all dead."
"They're dead," Grantaire agrees. "They're dead and you're alive and you'll hate me forever. Maybe you'll go out tomorrow on our first June seventh and go against the national guard on your own with a rifle in your hands and you'll die hating me. Or maybe you'll live, and you'll go back to having meetings with a new batch of young dewy-eyed idealists and you'll hate me. And I'll drink myself into an early grave, or maybe I'll hang myself, and you'll hate me, and perhaps someday, when France is actually ready, you'll finally give it its glorious republic and you'll hate me, and maybe you'll even live to be an angry old gray-haired statesman, and young revolutionaries will ride your hearse to new barricades and from inside your casket you will hate me." He nods, still stubborn but listless, his sudden angry energy just as suddenly gone. "I know. It's fine."
"It isn't fine!"
"Well, it isn't fine, then," he says carelessly. "Anyway, I have the door locked and it's nearly the seventh." He turns from the doorway.
"You're just going to keep me hostage?"
Grantaire's retreating back shrugs. "Look at it this way," he says. "Maybe it won't work."
Grantaire wakes up on the fourth, still in his clothes from the third like he always is, lying on top of the blankets in the bed he'd dragged Enjolras onto. He rolls over and looks at the other side of the bed. He has never felt so tired in his life.
Grantaire cries. He figures he's earned the right to.