Sorry this chapter's so short! The next one will be longer, I promise.
Thank you for all the lovely reviews; they are very appreciated!
Much love,
Unicadia
A sketch of a moth. Not a good drawing, not for Feuilly. But he preferred depicting people over animals, and especially insects, anyway. Perhaps he was trying to copy one of Combeferre's drawings, where the moths took flight from their paper.
The bird lay still and cold in Etienne Combeferre's large, but gentle hands, the last traces of its warmth seeping into them. He stared at it a long time, the sunlight from the window in his room pouring over him, casting the dead bird in gold. Combeferre imagined the light as some sort of reviving spirit, and the bird raised its head, golden with angelic beauty and swept out the window, leaving a tingle in his hands.
But a cloud passed in front of the sun, and the room became shadowy and tomb-like once again, the bird cold and dead in his hands.
Combeferre set the bird on his desk and sat down, studying it. It looked so fragile, so helpless even, despite being dead. Strange, he thought, how only moments before it breathed, it lived. If only he knew more about birds, perhaps he could have saved it. Or perhaps not. He did not pretend he understood death, or really why anything died at all. Certainly, he understood the science behind it, but the fundamental reasons behind the science – what were they? He thought about Enjolras and their Cause, and though no one spoke it aloud, they all knew Death lurked behind them, waiting for them, waiting to devour them. They would all die, on a barricade or in front of a wall somewhere, twenty rifles aimed at them.
Death was a . . . strange thing. It could take something warm, something that moved, that ate, that drank, that thought, that dreamed and talked and wondered and laughed and cried – and transform it into something that didn't. As he gazed upon the bird, he wondered what he would look like as a corpse. He would look like Etienne Combeferre – but gray and limp and maybe even fragile.
The cloud moved by, and the golden light flowed in again, and the bird did not look so gray and limp anymore. The sun made its fragility beautiful, like a bird cast in gold.
Life did not end with death.
Combeferre did not know about birds and moths, but he did know death did not cut off the human soul from existence. It opened out, a door to something else. How would one travel from this life to the next? One needs a door. Death is the door, a gateway which leads to a land bathed in golden light, where a river runs on forever, trees on either hand. Or, it leads to a land cast in shadows, alone and gray and limp.
He stroked the silken feathers.
But all must pass through the gateway.