Notes: Thank you so much for the follows and the favorites, and special thanks to Phoenixflames12, Joly's Witty Girl, and the Guest who reviewed!:) I hope you all enjoy this next chapter (you'll get to meet the Amis—the party has arrived whoop whoop) and please don't forget to review.
BARRICADE
CHAPTER II
The upstairs of the Café Musain is busy that night, filled with students from the University of Paris, who crowd the place with loud, drunken voices. Usually Enjolras towers over them all, orating dramatically over the din, about subjects from how Christian Fouchet, the head of the Ministry of Education is an illusionist who does nothing, to the bourgeoisie and their penchant for sitting idly as the students suffer.
Today, though, he sits alone in a corner with only the shadows for company.
Without Enjolras keeping control, chaos rules in the Café Musain. His friends (left-wing radicals who call themselves Les Amis de l'ABC) seem to have elected Grantaire as their temporary leader, probably owing to the fact that Grantaire, due to his alcohol-impaired judgment, is more than willing to supply the booze for all of them.
Grantaire—an art student who doesn't study much beyond the art of alcohol—takes a swig of beer and raises it towards Enjolras. "Apollo!" he slurs. "Why so silent?"
Courfeyrac—technically de Courfeyrac (he renounced his nobility years ago)—staggers over to Enjolras, and flops into the wooden seat beside him. "Enjolras! Where is your usual, ah…" He waves his hands in flamboyant motions, hunting for the right word.
"Speech?" asks Enjolras, slightly amused by the extent of his friend's drunkenness.
"Yes!" Courfeyrac practically shouts, pointing at Enjolras with such force that Enjolras flinches backwards to avoid being stabbed. "Yes, exactly. Where, Enjolras, my friend, is your usual rambling speech of inspiration, you know—" Courfeyrac stands up on his chair, teetering a bit. "Fellow students and countrymen, lend me your ears! The right-wing has once again ignored our voice. Will we allow this to happen? Will we let the administrators at the university walk over us like we are nothing?!" His uncanny imitation of Enjolras earns him a round of rousing applause from the rest of Les Amis, all crowded around Grantaire. "Thank you, thank you," Courfeyrac takes a sweeping bow and careens off the wooden chair, hitting his head and immediately passing out.
Two of Les Amis—Courfeyrac's best friends, Jehan and Combeferre—carry Courfeyrac's unconscious body away from the center of the Café Musain and push him beside the wall. They proceed to pour a bucket of water onto him, and he comes to shouting curse words to the ceiling and flailing wildly.
Enjolras observes the chaos surrounding Courfeyrac as he shouts at Jehan—calling him by his full name Jean Prouvaire you bourgeois pig and "accidentally" smacking Combeferre's glasses clean off his face. At that moment, Grantaire settles comfortably into the seat beside him, cradling his glass bottle of beer in his arms. "So, Enjolras," he says conversationally, and Enjolras merely glares.
"What do you want, Grantaire?"
"No need to be hostile, Enj," he says, his lips practically glued to the neck of his bottle. "I'm just trying to be a good friend."
"Don't call me Enj." With that, Enjolras turns away from Grantaire, who has always irritated him the most out of all Les Amis, with his cynicism and constant sarcasm and dispassion for their cause. That, and his fondness for idiotic pet names.
Grantaire laughs. "I was just wondering why our dear leader is being so sullen tonight. Courfeyrac makes a good point. No rousing speeches, no passionate shouting…why, it's just not like you."
Enjolras turns and looks at Grantaire, marveling at his capacity for speaking coherently under the influence of so much alcohol. "How are you still even functioning? With all that alcohol in your system, you should be dead by now."
Grantaire shrugs. "I've learned to hold my alcohol. Ask Joly, he probably can come up with some morbid disease that is the cause of my capacity for the stuff." The medical student turns upon hearing his name, and sits down across from Enjolras, his usual cigar permanently clamped between his teeth.
"Did someone mention me?" Joly grins, happiness being his permanent emotion. "Enjolras! You're behaving very strangely today. Have you fallen in love?"
Enjolras knows that Joly asks arbitrarily, by rote, rhetorically—but all the same he blinks at the question and thinks of the girl from the bookshop that afternoon. Grantaire catches the look on Enjolras's face and he grins. "He has, hasn't he? What's her name?"
Éponine, thinks Enjolras.
"No one," he says.
Notes: Thanks so much for reading (and again, thanks to the reviewers from last chapter...and to the lurkers too:P) I hope you all liked the Amis, and please review!