Here is the next chapter! Once again, thank you so very much for your reviews; I love nothing more than a nice dose of feedback on my writing! I hope you all enjoy this. I know you're all anxious to check back in with Enjolras and Grantaire. Unfortunately at this point in the plot, there isn't much for Grantaire to do, but have no fear, his part in this story will become bigger and very important as it unfolds! But he does appear in this chapter, along with lots of Enjolras, so without further ado...


Grantaire couldn't bring himself to take a drink, no matter how badly he wanted one. Doing so seemed like a betrayal to Enjolras, who always hated this habit of his. The previous night, Enjolras gave Grantaire what he had desperately longed for: validation of their friendship. Grantaire finally realized that Enjolras might feel something more than just contempt for the cynic.

And yet, it was against the backdrop of something so unspeakably terrible. All their friends were dead. Grantaire had known that this was likely true, but until Enjolras confirmed it in the jail, he could still cling to gentle denial. The circumstances of the deaths of Joly, Combeferre, Feuilly and Courfeyrac were especially horrid. Grantaire couldn't get the full story from Enjolras; it was plain to see that this would be far too painful for him. It seemed likely to Grantaire that even the unshakable, almost priestly seeming chief may have felt some terrible, albeit misplaced, guilt. And he knew how much he loved Combeferre and Courfeyrac. All of them really, but there was a special bond between those three who'd known each other for so long.

He and Enjolras were the only ones left, and soon Grantaire would be completely alone. Enjolras would be put through the ordeal of an already decided trial and killed. And Grantaire had foolishly given him his word that he would not attempt to stop this from happening. How could he have been such a fool? How could he so readily agree to abandon someone who'd been his hero to such a fate?

But Grantaire wondered if that even mattered. What could he do, even if he had made no such promise? He was one very unexceptional man. It wasn't in him to carry out great daring rescue missions, let alone single handedly plot them. Fate was cruel to Enjolras by picking Grantaire as his last surviving ally, the cynic thought. If it were Combeferre or Courfeyrac, or any of the others, they might all have a chance. Maybe–and this was a practically impossible thought for Grantaire–the oppressed people of France would have a chance if any one of the others were in his place.

This thought amounted to sheer, unadulterated despair for Grantaire and it rested on him like a massive weight. He lied on his bed, still rejecting the old comforts of the bottle and allowed his despair to run its course in his hurting mind. He wasn't sure how much time passed, but he eventually fell asleep.


When Enjolras came to a few minutes after passing out, his assailants seemed already bored with him. From his painful position sprawled out on the damp stone floor, he watched in silence as the younger of his cellmates reached into his bunk and produced a deck of playing cards. He gestured to the massive menace, who had retreated back to his spot in the shadowy corner. Enjolras saw him ever so slightly shake his head, so the boy hoisted himself onto his upper bunk and sat. He was short enough that even sitting upright on the top bunk, there was plenty of space to the ceiling for his head. He dealt himself a hand of solitaire.

Enjolras was in terrible pain now. There were bruises forming on his face and body, his mouth was full of blood from one excruciatingly painful crack in a back molar, and his left wrist was swollen to twice its normal size. He closed his eyes and continued to lie there like that for a while. The two cellmates who'd beaten him up seemed to think he was still unconscious. He knew he couldn't protect himself like this forever, but for right now, he lacked a better idea. He only moved when he started to feel he might choke, so he opened his mouth and tilted his head to let some of the blood drain out. When that didn't work fast enough, he spat, and to his horror, a big chunk of his tooth came with the blood.

In spite of himself, he started coughing. Now his charade was up; they would know he was awake, and he tried to brace himself for another round. But he just kept coughing, louder and more violently than before. The blood splattered out of his mouth and onto the floor and his clothing with each retching. He tried to hoist himself up, but when he instinctively leaned onto his hands for support, the pain that shot through his useless left was bad enough that he fell back into his original position.

He inhaled deeply and tried to stabilize his breathing, but the blood continued to spew forth from his mouth and his coughs persisted.

"You down there had better shut up if you know what's good for you," said the prisoner who didn't bother to look up from his card game. His tone was completely devoid of inflection or expression. Enjolras pushed quickly with just his right hand into a sitting position and scuttled on the floor back towards the opposite wall of the cell. He felt cowardly, but it seemed like the most likely way to avoid another beating. Sitting up, it was easier to subdue the coughing. He found himself leaning against the lower bunk on the other wall.

"Best to keep to self," mumbled the old man in heavily accented and broken French. Enjolras had forgotten he was even there. He glanced over at him and for the first time took stock of the third cellmate. The man before him was a collection of contradictions. He looked nearly seventy, but he knelt on the stone floor with apparent ease to pray his rosary; he freely offered Enjolras advice, yet he seemed to exude the calmness that would only come from being a seasoned veteran of the criminal justice machine.

"I am old man, you climb to top, not me," he elaborated, as Enjolras realized he was technically leaning on the man's bed. He nodded and quickly stood up. On his feet, he felt a bit light headed, but he refused to advertise this fact at all. He was defeated in this round, but it didn't really matter; the end result would be the same no matter what. But, as a point of pride, he glared into the corner where his large attacker was leaning and he met the man's darkened eyes. Wordlessly, but without breaking eye contact, he summoned all of his strength and hoisted himself painfully up into the top bunk, where he lied on his back and stared up at the ceiling, tracing its cracks and seams.

The bunk was made of wood with a thin covering of straw beneath a scratchy blanket. Enjolras's exposed skin around his wrists and ankles and beneath a few holes in his clothing immediately began to itch, and it wasn't long before he reached to scratch his head only to find a tiny insect in his hair. On his back was the closest thing to a comfortable position, because he could rest his broken wrist on his chest. It hurt terribly. Enjolras was left handed, so this was not only painful but a handicap now. It would make it harder for him to eat, defend himself, climb into the bunk or write.

Enjolras had decided almost immediately that he would represent himself in court. It seemed foolish to hire an attorney to lose the case for him when he was all but officially qualified as one himself. He didn't even know who he would hire. Courfeyrac was freshly licensed, but he was killed before he'd ever had the chance to take a case. Marius would have finished his studies soon if he too hadn't met that fate. Since Enjolras was so terribly alone in the world now, it just seemed fitting that he would face the court alone. So he would be his own advocate, although he knew an acquittal was impossible. Instead, he would use the platform to be an advocate for the cause.

They had charged him with treason. This allegation offended Enjolras to his core. Treason was betrayal; disloyalty to one's country. That was unspeakable to him. If he had truly committed treason, no officers of the court would be necessary to bring him to the scaffold; he would have ran there. The insurrection was an act of the highest loyalty. Enjolras took up arms that day with the intent to give his life if needed for France as eagerly as he would have had she faced invasion or some other threat. France was under siege from within, from a status quo, embodied by the monarchy, that perpetuated the oppression and suffering of her people. Many things weighed heavily on Enjolras' conscience, but revolting against this foe would never be one of them.

He looked forward to using his day in court as one last opportunity to appeal to whoever cared to listen. When that was over, it would be time to rest and take his place with the rest of the martyrs, and he hoped he would be worthy.

Enjolras didn't know how long had passed, but he knew he never fell asleep or passed back out. Staring up at the ceiling was the best distraction from the pain that wracked his body in pulses. To his relief, his cellmates were now mostly uninterested in him, and he paid them little attention.

He had no idea of the time, but soon the unrest in the cellblock gave him a clue. Within his cell, the young prisoner only looked up from his card game to, speaking to no one and everyone, inquire about when they might be fed. Enjolras suspected the other inmates were as unaware of the actual time as he was; it seemed terribly unlikely that any of these dozens of prisoners owned a watch, let alone happened to retain it through that degrading intake search ritual. The prisoners clearly had a small market and system for obtaining and trading various items; no doubt Enjolras' cellmate acquired his playing cards this way. Enjolras imagined this market was likely not complicated and imagined that he would likely utilize it before his time there was up. But even with that, none of these men would care to go to even a little trouble for a watch. Some objective proof of time, of the world moving on without them, of the little pieces of their lives, in some of the inmate's cases, the very last little pieces of their lives, frittered away in this heinous dungeon, a watch would never be a coveted item.

Without a time instrument, the men were reduced to animal clocks. They slept many hours and looked forward to meals. Enjolras felt the weight of this urgency about the evening meal, even if little was articulated verbally. He was still a creature of the outside world; he had so recently belonged to the real world that his mind still obeyed its conventions, so he wondered about the time in numbers, not meals.

Not that his stomach wasn't aching with hunger, though. It had, however, been so long since he'd eaten, that his hunger pangs just gave way now to a dull pain that blended in with the rest.

Suddenly, his intimacy with the ceiling was disrupted.

"Enjolras," hearing his name, he snapped up, narrowly avoiding hitting his head in doing so. Standing outside the bars of his cell were a pair of guards, different from the ones who had escorted him here. "Rene Enjolras, come here now," the order was repeated.

Getting down from the upper bunk was strangely more difficult than getting up. He moved slowly and hoped beyond hope that he wouldn't stumble on touching the ground. Unfortunately, he wavered and fell all the way to his hands and knees, sending a burst of pain through his wrist. The guards looked down at him through the bars with contempt.

"I want to speak with the maitre'd," called the voice from the other top bunk. "Our dinner is unacceptably late this evening, gentlemen."

"Shut up," one guard grumbled back at him, as Enjolras hoisted himself to his feet. "Hands," he instructed as soon as Enjolras was close enough to the bars to comply. He dreaded the moment when they would attempt to cuff him and it was even worse than he feared. The swelling was so bad that the cuff barely closed; when it did, it pinched the skin and put terrible pressure right on the point of the break. Enjolras almost whimpered from it before he even had a chance to compose himself.

"So what, does pretty boy get to dine in private because he's rich?"

The other guard unlocked the cell and grabbed Enjolras by the arm, pulling him forward. "We've got instructions to bring him back to interrogation. If you'd like to switch with him, I wouldn't mind."

When the guards closed and locked the cell door behind them, Enjolras heard the reply, mixed with laughter: "Godspeed, pretty boy!"

They lead him back down the corridor the same direction he had come earlier that day. This time, the other inmates were quite uninterested in him. When the returned the interrogation room, Enjolras felt a surge of dread that this round might be tougher than the earlier one, and he was weaker from his day.

Waiting for him, seated at the other end of the table was a middle aged man dressed in civilian professional clothing. His greying hair was neatly pulled back in the older style and he wore no beard. His eyes were stern and fierce. There was a young man standing behind him, silently holding a stack of papers, who looked more fearful than Enjolras felt. He had no doubt that this was the prosecutor he was about to spar with.

The guards sat him roughly down in the chair, and stepped back towards the door. The prosecutor wordlessly turned slightly in the direction of his nervous assistant, and the boy immediately produced a sheet of paper that had many scrupulously organized notes. The prosecutor drew a heavy, intimidating breath, then cleared his throat and addressed Enjolras.

"I will be prosecuting your case," he said without making eye contact. "My name is Jarnot." He silently wrote a few lines on his paper, and Enjolras said nothing. Enjolras knew the name of Claude Jarnot well; he was famous in the legal world as the very best of the crown's prosecutors. The frightened assistant was probably in the top of his law school class and lived every day in terror of blowing this holy grail of an opportunity to be a glorified secretary.

"You've expressed intention to represent yourself," Jarnot began. "Is that correct?"

"Yes," Enjolras replied calmly. With his cuffed hands on the table, he fruitlessly fiddled with the manacle on his broken wrist in a vain attempt to make it more comfortable.

"I've taken the liberty this afternoon of speaking with some of your old professors at the university," Jarnot began. "I want to independently verify that you are competent to do this so that we don't have to endure a circus of appeals on this matter after you've lost. Several were rather distressed to hear of your predicament. Monsieur Bellanger, who is actually a former colleague of mine, quickly wrote you a letter which he asked me to take to you. Since I know Bellanger to be nothing less than a true professional, the fact that he would forget himself so much as to ask a prosecuting attorney to function as messenger boy took me quite aback. I of course informed him of this and refused him, so you can likely expect this urgent message to arrive through the jail's normal post channels, unless he feels compelled to pay you a visit. He seemed intent on taking your case, although he and the other faculty to whom I spoke admitted that you are more than capable. At least for my purposes, even should your counsel situation change, I have no reservations about speaking to you now unrepresented."

Enjolras nodded silently. He didn't want M. Bellanger to try to take his case. He had a great deal of respect for him as a mentor and a legal academic. Taking the case of a doomed revolutionary would expose him to scandal and possibly even harm his career. Enjolras didn't want to take anyone down with him, so to hear about the old man's eagerness to help him filled him with guilt.

"I'll make this simple, Enjolras," Jarnot began, clearing his throat again. "If you plead guilty to all the charges, and give a detailed statement about your group's involvement in the rebellion, including all your contacts and accomplices, I will not pursue the death penalty."

Enjolras laughed out loud. "So I can have a long full life with my cowardice to keep me company as an old man in prison? What makes you think that would interest me?"

Jarnot leaned forward. "No matter what you say, boy," he started, this time speaking slightly softly, but no less aggressively. "I, being the best at what I do, know that deep down, no man cannot be moved by the threat of death. I think that you know who I am. I think you know that I have never lost a capital case. No criminal who ever thought he could be the exception is alive to tell you about the worst mistake he ever made. Yours won't even be a challenging case. I could take this case to trial tomorrow and the jury would be demanding your head faster than they could say so."

"You say the case against me is so iron-clad," Enjolras began. "I will relish the opportunity to tell a court of law about the lawless executions of my lieutenants after their testimony against me was extracted, dirtily I'm certain."

"I know nothing about this," said Jarnot. "As I am a thorough man, I will look into the matter. If what you say is true, than I will have words for the police, because such conduct from officials cannot be condoned. I would have dealt with your friends lawfully as I intend to deal with you. But it makes no difference to your case. I seriously advise you to reconsider my offer. You have a legal education; I'm sure you understand that it has an expiration date. I don't feel at this time compelled to tell you what that expiration date is, so you'll want to make up your mind quickly."

"My mind is made up," said Enjolras.

"Is it?" Jarnot asked rhetorically. He looked down and began to write more on the page, then he looked back at Enjolras and sized him up. "Are all of your injuries from the barricade or have you been mistreated here?"

"What's that to you?" Enjolras asked.

"My conviction will not be overturned on allegations of police brutality," Jarnot began. "You may wish to represent yourself in court, but if you have no advocate for you in here, I'm not confident that you would be tortured if they think you know anything relevant to their investigations, because many of them are too brutish to reason through a case like civilized men. So answer my question, have you been tortured or otherwise abused?"

Enjolras just shook his head.

"I will be paying you visits between now and your trial date," Jarnot began. He looked at the paper. "It's scheduled tentatively for the first of July. But until then, we will meet periodically both on trial business, and so that I can personally verify your well-being. You'll report any brutality to me directly, do you understand?"

"Yes," said Enjolras. Jarnot stood and stared Enjolras down.

"Consider my offer," he said. "You're a young man. I have and will have no pity for you. I will spend the next month preparing to convince the court to order your execution, and I will succeed. Going to trial might be a sin as far as suicide is. Take the offer and live out your days in prison gratefully, because you will have days to live out." With that, he quickly made his way to the door, with his assistant following behind him like a frightened dog.

When Jarnot was gone, Enjolras expected to be immediately returned to his cell. But instead, he was left to sit there alone for a while until the officer from earlier in the day came and sat in the seat opposite him. Neither man spoke for what seemed to be an eternity before the officer spoke.

"The man who is about to have you sent to the block is proving to be the best ally you have," he began. "Before I came in here, he threatened me with all the wrath of his office that I'm not to harm you in any way. He even said I was to move you to protective custody until the trial. He's a fool with no idea about police work. He should know better than to think he can command me like that and expect me to obey."

"Of course not," said Enjolras grimly, realizing what was about to happen to him.

"He can make offers," said the officer. "And so can I. If you tell me right now something useful, I won't instruct my men to do any of the things we've discussed at length before you were brought in here. You'll be relocated to the low security dormitory just as soon as you're fed. I'd much rather do it this way."

"I'll never tell you a thing," said Enjolras harshly.

"I suspected you'd say something like that," replied the officer. Without saying a word, he gestured to the guards standing behind Enjolras, and soon, rough hands were pulling him from his chair.