Author's Note: I'm here, I'm here. I'm half dead but I'm here. Leave a review, it might resurrect me ;).

December 20th, 1830

Revolutions to be planned – 1

Coughing and sniffling fan-makers showing up at door – 1

Guilty thoughts in regard to aforementioned fan-makers – 35 (approximately)

Feuilly has been ill. No wonder, with the kind of almost non-existent coat he is wearing in this weather. He showed at my doorstep, barely recovered, to personally apologize for not attending the meeting, to assure me of his readiness to fight for the Cause and to ask what he had missed.

I almost kissed him.

Sometimes I feel that if I didn't have him and Prouvaire, I would have given up long ago. They are always my last resort, Fabrice and Jehan. Ever the believers. The world hasn't managed to spoil them one bit. They are the kind of people France will need most after the Revolution. Along with Combeferre, of course. That's what the new world will be built upon. Science and poetry and thirst for knowledge and hard work. And it will be built by the Combeferres and the Prouvaires and the Feuillys of our society. I can only pray that they will survive. I know not all of us will. But let Mother France protect those whom she will need to raise her again from the ashes. The rest of us will burn to light her way and be thankful for it.

But the man sitting on my couch this afternoon seemed barely fit to raise his bag, let alone France at the moment. You could tell he had not been well. His skin had a slight grayish tinge, although some colour had started returning to it now that he was inside a warm room. The hands that were fiddling with his hat in his lap were practically all bones. His wrists were so thin that my thumb and forefinger could have easily met around them.

Was it just from his recent illness? Or had the illness itself been caused by malnourishment and lack of warm clothes? Looking at the paper-thin coat, soaked with snow, which he hadn't taken off despite the fire in the room, I knew which one was more likely.

I hurried to place a cup of hot tea before him. As if that would solve anything. But it was polite.

Hah! That's Enjolras for you. I am only polite when I feel there is nothing better I can do.

The strange thing is that, had I seen him on the street, I might not have noticed there was anything wrong. Fabrice's natural bone structure is such that you can't tell how thin he is by looking at his face. Perhaps that's why poverty has done nothing to diminish his looks. Or so Courfeyrac says. I myself am a poor judge of looks. When I see a starving woman on the street with half of her teeth missing, my thought is that she is ill, not that she is ugly. The ladies Courfeyrac himself is always mooning about are in my eyes only prettier by merit of being healthy and well-dressed. I wonder if this inability to tell beauty from ugliness is what makes me so indifferent to young girls. Naturally, I would call Feuilly handsome but I would say the same about any of my friends. I find it pleasant to look at them – their faces, their expressions, their gestures. So they must all be handsome to me, isn't that so? And they are nothing alike so how can I say if one is handsomer than the others?

Feuilly interrupted my rather directionless contemplations with a scary-sounding cough.

"Sorry." He smiled at me sheepishly. "Still can't get rid of it. So, hm… What have you been up to those last few months?"

I shrugged.

"Nothing of consequence. Studies."

He gave me a half-amused, half-incredulous look.

"I'd say studies are of some consequence. But that's just me."

There was a tiny note of jealousy in his voice and I mentally slapped myself. Of course they were of consequence to someone who could not afford being a student.

"I suppose you are right," I said. "I guess they just seem an unimportant matter when compared to the welfare of the People."

"Ah, naturally," he agreed quickly. "Unfortunately, you can't eat books."

I almost commented that he looked like that was all he had been eating lately.

"What about you?" I asked instead.

"Ah, nothing of consequence. Work."

He grinned and winked at me. I smiled forcefully at the friendly mockery and shifted uncomfortably in my chair.

"But you haven't been going to work in this state, have you?"

"I'm not being unnecessarily proud and refusing to take care of myself, if that's what you mean," he answered with a small laugh. "I took as many days off as I could afford last week. One more and the boss will kick me out. And finding work for fan-makers is not exactly that easy."

"If you need a loan, Feuilly…"

"Thank you but it's not a matter of a loan. If I'm absent too much, someone will replace me and I won't be able to find a new job."

For God's sake! Talking to Fabrice somehow always leaves me feeling guilty. I wonder if he occasionally thinks I am presumptuous – speaking of things I have seen but never really experienced. Who am I to speak of poverty? I, the rich boy who came to Paris to study. On occasion, I catch his eyes across the room at the Musain and I find myself amazed at the fact that he is listening to me. Listening and believing. What right do I have to lead him to his possible death? While he was teaching himself how to read and write, all alone in some dark corner with an empty stomach, I was probably whining to my mother about raspberries and complaining of the boringness of my private tutors. I look back at the child I was and I don't know if I should feel tenderness or resentment.

I got carried away by my thoughts again. My guest had been saying something and I hadn't been listening at all. I tried to tune-in and realized that the subject was Greece. Hardly surprising. If it's not Greece then it's Poland. How does he do it? I'm barely managing to inspire the men of this country to care about our own people and he doesn't even need me to inspire him to care about all the peoples of the world. Anyway, I think France has more than enough problems of her own. Of course, after the Republic is established, it will need ambassadors to the rest of the world. And, hopefully, our dear fan-maker will be one of them. Well-dressed and well-fed and charming and important and without that constant shadow that just barely darkens his smiles. But that will be then. All I have energy to think about now is France and… oh dear, that law essay that still needs to be finished, despite its unimportance in the grand scheme of things.

In the next twenty minutes or so, Feuilly continued making small talk or at least what passes for small talk between two people who know little of each other, other than that they share common political convictions. I should have probably tried talking about something different for a change but, apart from the fact that I was distracted by his constant rather worrisome coughing, I could not for the world of me invent a suitable topic. We hardly ever see each other without the others there and I'm too preoccupied with plans to pay personal attention to anyone. So what could we possibly talk about? His work? Fans? Girls? Girls with fans? What do I know of either?

Although, wait! I remember now that we did talk about that once! That one time when he first joined us.

I had just given a speech to a group of workers. My speeches were pretty bad back then – not keeping to a point but wandering all over the place. On one occasion I had a person ask me if it was really true that he would get a heart sickness because he had eaten from the rotten cabbages grown at Waterloo. We ended up blinking confusedly at each other for quite a while before I finally figured out that he was actually mixing together four separate points I had been trying to make – about Napoleon's broken promises of a republic, about the rotten government, about the people starving on the streets and about the fire that I thought should be in every man's heart. But the poor man had found it hard to keep track and I couldn't really blame him.

After one of those speeches, I was approached by a young man. He seemed remarkably well-kept, regardless of his humble attire. He was impeccably clean. The straw-coloured strands that showed underneath his cap were cut neatly, if not exactly fashionably and there was something in his lively brown eyes that you don't often see in a workman. A certain kind of intelligence that belongs in a lecture hall. I also noticed that he smiled a lot. It wasn't the same carefree smile that could be found on the face of Courfeyrac, whom I already saw a lot at the time, but it was still a very positive expression and I found myself smiling back.

At first we started talking about the speech and it quickly became evident that he had not only been able to keep up with the mad twists and turns my mind had been taking but he was, without a doubt, one of us. Then I noticed the small paint stains on his fingers. Soap had not been able to wash them off completely. I asked if he was an artist. I knew he was a worker as he had been pointed to me by some of my acquaintances in the proletariat but I wanted to flatter him. He laughed out loud and told me that he only painted fans. Then for some reason the conversation stayed on art rather than politics. He proved an interesting interlocutor and he seemed pleased to have someone to discuss certain artists, paintings and symbolism with. I could see why such persons would be scarce around him. We were talking about things that would mean very little to most workers. We both agreed that beauty was nothing when there was no substance behind it and that every painting should tell a story. He admitted he attempted to do that with his fans too, to keep his work from becoming routine. He said he amused himself by imagining what kind of woman would pick a certain fan. When we parted, he walked away with the date and time of the next meeting of Les Amis and I walked away with the feeling that I had just met someone who would become very dear to my heart.

He is to this day. Even if we interact so little.

After he was gone from my apartment, I suddenly wished I had kept him away from the cold for longer and offered something more substantial than tea. Too late, always too late! Why do I always wait until the right time to do something has passed? And who would have guessed that Enjolras, the man who is always delivering speeches, can't come up with the phrase 'Would you like to stay for dinner?' until the person he should have asked is out the door.

I hope he is all right.