A short little update, but if it got any fluffier it might actually have killed me.

In which Grantaire is Tevye, Enjolras is Golde, and this is possibly the strangest sentence I have ever typed in 25 years of life.

II.

"Do You Love Me?"
(Fiddler on the Roof)

Grantaire had opened the window before they'd gone to bed. It wasn't doing any good. From three floors below, city sounds wafted into the room. Traffic. The rumble of voices from the sidewalk. Now and again the screech of an ambulance tearing down the Rue de Bac toward Pitié-Saltpêtrière. The heat seemed to make the sounds travel farther and more clearly, as though the heavy air were dense with the life of Paris.

The curtain to their bedroom window danced in a slight breeze, one too faint for Grantaire to feel. He sighed and turned over, the sheets tangled in his legs, hair sweat-plastered to his forehead.

Beside him, Enjolras slept. Cool as you please in boxers and a gray tee-shirt, not a drop of sweat on him. How he did it, Grantaire would never understand. It was like sharing a bed with half of Michelangelo's Pietà.

On the end table, the glowing numbers on the clock switched from 3:13 to 3:14 in the morning. Enjolras' alarm would go off in just under three hours, pulling him out of bed and back on the metro to the courtroom, where his latest trial would begin at nine. And Grantaire would still be here. Tired. Miserable. Alone.

And hot.

He turned over again. Then, twenty seconds later, again. Blew out a long breath that ruffled the damp hair on his forehead.

Lying on his back, he heard his own voice loud and jarring through the dark.

"Apollo?"

Enjolras said nothing. He did not move, but his breathing had hitched at the sound, and was now artificially regular. He was awake, all right. But he was doing his damnedest to pretend not to be.

"Apollo," Grantaire said, louder this time.

Enjolras' sigh sounded like an overworked and exasperated god. He did not open his eyes.

"What, R," he said. "What's so important that you have to wake me up. Before the Desjardins hearing. At three o'clock. In the morning."

Grantaire didn't question how Enjolras had known what time it was without looking. He was uncanny that way.

"Do you love me?" he asked.

Enjolras opened his eyes. Sat up. Stared at Grantaire.

"I'm sorry. Do I what?"

"Do you love me?" Grantaire repeated, placid and infuriating as a saint.

Enjolras closed his eyes and raked one hand backward through his hair. It was the physical equivalent of the word fuck, and Grantaire knew it.

"Do I love you," he repeated. "R, it's three in the morning. You're still drunk. Go back to sleep."

If he thought he was getting off that easy. Grantaire, too, hoisted himself to a seated position. He faced Enjolras with his most winning smile, the one he knew was a perennial source of apprehension and exasperation.

"I'm not drunk," he said. "I'm asking you a question."

Enjolras sighed. His eyes did not quite meet Grantaire's. They drifted to a spot on the far wall, where a black smudge discolored the white paint. A scuff mark from when Grantaire had thrown a shoe across the room the year before, while cleaning out the closet with a bit too much élan. It wasn't fair, how beautiful Enjolras was. Grantaire would have woken him up four nights out of five just for the pleasure of watching him in the moonlight.

"Do I love you?" Enjolras said, mostly to the stain on the wall. "We've been together for three years. I pay our rent. I sit through those God-awful house-hunting shows you love."

He was picking up steam as he spoke, a measure of animation entering his words. Or maybe that was just a side effect of waking up.

"I called your bank when a man in Portugal charged 800 euros' worth of lumber to your credit card," Enjolras went on. "I put up with your dog."

Now that was a bridge too far.

"Fuck off," Grantaire said. "You love Matisse."

Enjolras grinned. Fuck, why was his smile perfect? He leaned over the bed toward the floor. Matisse, Grantaire's lazy, imperturbable spaniel, rolled over as if he'd sensed he was the subject of discussion. Enjolras scratched the dog's belly, and the sound of contented panting drifted up from the floor. Matisse always slept on Enjolras' side of the room, even though Grantaire had rescued the dog from the pound. He'd taken offense at first—man's best friend, how about a little loyalty—before realizing that he saw the dog's point.

"OK, I love Matisse," Enjolras consented. "But last week you used my toothbrush to paint the pubes on that nude you're doing."

"I needed the texture," Grantaire said, almost whining.

Enjolras directed his eyes heavenward. At least once a week, they found themselves like this. One of them with their eyes rolled to the ceiling, praying for patience, wondering what it was about the other person that made their impossible levels of nonsense somehow tolerable. Grantaire knew exactly why he put up with Enjolras' quirks. Most days, he had no idea why Enjolras put up with his.

From the thrust of his partner's conversation, it was starting to seem like that bewilderment was mutual.

"I fight with you more than anyone else I've ever met," Enjolras said. "You're stubborn and reckless and you've never taken a piece of advice in your life. You have no understanding of personal space. You spit in the face of individual property rights."

"Vive la révolution," Grantaire said, grinning. "Un pour tous—"

Enjolras shoved him in the shoulder, though he was smiling. "Et tous pour toi."

Grantaire shrugged. As far as mottos went, it wasn't bad.

"And yet," Enjolras said.

He hadn't taken his hand from Grantaire's shoulder. His touch was cool against Grantaire's bare flesh. Grantaire shivered. How in hell did this man not sweat? Perhaps Joly would know. Grantaire had been hungover through an entire semester of physiology.

"And yet?" he prompted.

"And yet I've been here in bed with you, every night, for three years," Enjolras said. "You tell me what that means."

He hadn't answered Grantaire's question. Perhaps he couldn't. Love was like that, sometimes. Ambiguous and nonverbal, hard to touch but easy to feel.

And Enjolras, at base, was not eloquent. Yes, there was no denying his rhetorical power in the classroom. The courtroom. The social justice editorials he wrote for L'Opinion and L'Humanité—a practice that seemed as compulsive in him as shooting up was in a heroin addict. But ask the man to put his feelings into words, and you were left wondering if he'd ever strung together a sentence. It was like watching a four-year-old try to recite Rimbaud.

His answer had been circular to the extreme. Yet, by Enjolras' standards, it had been poetry.

Grantaire smiled. "So you love me," he said.

Enjolras shook his head. Well alive to the ridiculousness of the conversation, but in no mood to shut it down, either. "I guess so," he said.

This man. For God's sake. Why he had to make everything so difficult, the Lord Above only knew. "That's good to know," Grantaire said, and kissed him.

Enjolras wove a hand into Grantaire's hair and kissed him back. In that kiss, Grantaire wondered how he'd ever managed to doubt the existence of this love. It was present in everything Enjolras ever did, ever said, ever thought. His silences, his touch, the tenderness of his kiss, his breath, the beating of his heart. A love so deeply embedded, so much a part of who they both were, that it didn't need to be spoken, that words were redundant.

But. Sometimes.

Sometimes, you just wanted to hear it.

Enjolras gave Grantaire a small smile. He settled back into his side of the bed, curled up on his side again. Grantaire reached over and twined an arm around Enjolras' shoulders. With a sleepy sort of noise, Enjolras settled into the curve of Grantaire's arm. It was too hot outside to be so close, but Grantaire couldn't be bothered to care.

"Now," Enjolras said, already half-asleep. "If you wake me up again, I will kill you."

Grantaire grinned like an idiot. He was asleep in ten minutes.