Chapter Text
November, 1917
He sat on the ground behind the French brick building, having gotten away, momentarily, from the main encampment of soldiers.
Grantaire’s pencil scratched against the paper.
Enjolras,
I’ve landed in France, though I haven’t joined combat yet. How are
He frowned, erased.
Dear Enjolras,
Not dead.
Have you done anything stupid? Please work on not breaking the espionage act.
Another frown. Grantaire flipped to a new page in the notebook and scrawled.
To: My Friends of the ABC
“Writing to your secret girl?” someone asked from behind him. Grantaire tilted his head back to find himself looking up at a lanky, dark-haired boy.
“Shut up, Montparnasse,” Grantaire said, closing the pad of paper with an audible snap.
“So you are,” Montparnasse said with a smug little grin, “Whatever. I have news.”
“News?”
He waved for Grantaire to follow him. Grantaire rolled his eyes and flt rather like a duckling as he got up, gripping the notebook, and followed Montparnasse. It wasn’t like he had anything better to do, other than start and scrap letters to his friends that he was not even sure he would send.
“Are we being deployed?” Grantaire asked after several moments.
“No,” Montparnasse replied, “God, no, do we look battle ready to you? My news is much better than that.”
Grantaire made a ‘hmn’ sound and dug his thumb into the cover of his notebook. “What is it then?”
Montparnasse winked, and then spoke with the sort of voice he used when he was saying something he found spectacular: “There are new nurses here. And Red Cross volunteers.”
Grantaire snorted.
“Come on, let go of the secret girl,” Montparnasse said, “Drink wine and chat up pretty girls. Have fun. Christ.”
Grantaire rolled his eyes, this time, but tagged along anyways. Because Eponine was in the Red Cross, and because he wanted to see someone he knew even though she probably was not there, and because it was not like he had anything better to do here.
He did not end up seeing her.
December, 1917
Enjolras strode into the Musain, five minutes late and full of purpose. All eyes in the room fell upon him, and he stepped onto a stool and then onto table covered in faint paint marks.
“The Espionage Act is smothering, vague, and unconstitutional,” Enjolras said from his table, eyes alight, “But it is not the end.”
“Rumor has it that the Espionage Act will be followed up by yet another act, in this coming year. But we will not stand for that. We will lobby against it. We will berate lawmakers. We will write to the Supreme Court. And we will not - cannot allow yet another unconstitutional allow to be passed in the name of continuing this awful, catastrophic, war.”
Enjolras stepped down from the table. After a moment, Courfeyrac followed him up.
“Enjolras is right,” Courfeyrac said, “The Espionage Act damages us. Another law would damage us even more. But in times like these, we must not only think about what this law means for us, but what it means for the rest of the people. We forget that progressives are not the only people. We forget that there are people who cannot afford to be progressive, because of their circumstances or because of their employers - we fight for them, too, and we are not the only people who would suffer because of this law. So we cannot back down. We must be proactive. For ourselves, and for the people.”
Joly and Feuilly and Gavroche applauded. Musichetta was grinning ear to ear, and looked almost sharklike.
Combeferre was up on the table as soon as Courfeyrac had clambered back down.
“Musichetta, I want you to talk to the Muckrakers,” Combeferre said, “Get them mobilized, talking to each other, signing our paperwork. Writing in their magazines, if they haven’t been silenced. Joly - see if you can get ahold of any of Debs’ people here, see if they’re up to anything. He has to be just as irritated about this as we are. Cosette!”
Cosette saluted him from the back of the room.
“Make fliers. Get your father to print him, if that man is leaving him alone. Marius! Peruse the constitution. Look through precedent cases. The more legal talk that we fill our letters with, the less likely it will be that anyone will take it on. Feuilly - talk to the people. You know what to do.”
Feuilly nodded.
“If Jehan was here, I’d have him go to his legislature contacts with Enjolras and I. But he’s not. So - Bahorel?”
Bahorel grinned.
“We’re going to talk to the legislature,” Enjolras said, cutting in but not really interrupting. This was how they worked. “And we’re going to make this work.”
Cosette - who had always worked with Grantaire on the posters, when she was home from school and when he was not too drunk to be useful - settled into talking excitedly about the campaign with Enjolras and Feuilly. Marius slipped out to go to his afternoon class after saying goodbye to everyone, and soon Musichetta was next to Courfeyrac and looking over a room of mobilized activists.
“Where is Jehan?” she asked.
“Sabattical,” Courf said, “He does this, you know. He’ll be back full of ideas, with information from other activist groups. I expect we’ll see him again before the New Year.”
Musichetta nodded. “Didn’t he meet Teddy Roosevelt, once?”
“Brightest moment of his young life,” Courf said agreeably, “Jehan loved the Bull Moose Party.”
“Things are quiet, without him,” she said.
Courf looked bemused, for a moment - it was very loud, even when Enjolras was not talking and just watching, and Bahorel had just let out a boom of laughter.
“I know what you mean.”
December, 1917
To: My Friends of the ABC,
Hello! The war is progressing As Expected; by which I mean we have not entered the trenches yet and I have made friends. They’re sort of the worst, but that was to be expected. I would draw France for you all if I had enough space in an envelope; instead, picture a quaint town with many stone buildings and an abundance of French women who glare.
How have you all been? Keep our precious general from doing anything too stupid. Write me back with tales of your adventures; you really have no idea how boring training can be.
As Usual,
Grantaire
March, 1918
American soldiers were starting to enter the theater at a very fast rate, and Bossuet was one of them.
He had hated boot camp. He did not like being overseas. He was getting regular letters from Musichetta and Joly and the rest of the gang, though - and that had been enough to maintain his spirits. But now he was in the trenches.
The soldier next to him was smoking a cigarette and Bossuet had a steady grip on his rife. He still hadn’t quite trained himself out of flinching every time a bullet whirred overhead, but it wasn’t that hard to get used to living in the dirt.
“Do you think we’ll advance today?” Bossuet asked the smoking soldier next to him, for the sake of some sort of conversation. He fired a bullet over the trench, quickly, and tried not to think about where it was going.
“I think we’ll advance never,” the soldier said, blowing out a ring of smoke.
“Mmn,” Bossuet said, shifting in his position to glance over the trench again. He ducked as another bullet whirred, not hitting anything but making a lot of noise. Ineffective; like a lot of the war was.
“I heard that they might use Chlorine gas,” the other soldier said, after another exhale.
“That’s the one that -”
“You can survive that one. It’s just - well. Can’t be good for you even if you do, can it?”
“No,” Bossuet said, shaking his head and firing another bullet. “No, it can’t.”
He had luck, from Musichetta and Joly. He would get through this. This is what he vowed to himself, even though every puff of mist on the horizon seemed to be a cloud of gas now.
March, 1918
To: Grantaire
Hello! We’re good. We’re currently fighting a certain law that may or may not be signed - Enjolras is, as you likely guessed, far too into that. Everyone wishes you well. We send our love, and Feuilly wants you to know that you were right about your flat being comfortable. Try not to make any of the French women too angry.
No one has been arrested recently. We’re all very proud.
Your Friends of the ABC
April, 1918
“I think Enjolras may actually be losing it,” Cosette said as she slid into the seat across from Courfeyrac. It was clear from her tone that she was not being entirely serious, but Courf could not help but agree with her to some extent.
Enjolras was perpetually incensed, and had started to talk very seriously of actually [i]going to Washington[/i] to argue against the new legislation. As noble as that was - and Courfeyrac did agree that it was noble - it was not by any means something feasible for Les Amis as a group; Combeferre could not abandon his studies for that long, and Enjolras wasn’t a lawyer. He wasn’t even in law school. Marius could fake his way past a few police officers but not the courts, not congress, and he could not leave New York, either.
Enjolras had also started to talk very seriously of riots. Seeing as that was a much more reasonable course of action - one that they were having an increasingly difficult time arguing against - Courf was willing to bet that that was what had Cosette worried.
“He’s been like this before,” Courfeyrac said, though in truth he was not sure that Enjolras had ever been like this.
Cosette raised an eyebrow.
“I miss Jehan,” Courfeyrac said, “Jehan would know what to do.”
Cosette considered that for a moment.
“Well, someone has to talk him down,” Courfeyrac added, “Short of getting [i]Teddy Roosevelt[/i] or [i]Eugene V. Debs himself[/i] to come talk to him, I don’t know what we can do without Jehan. Who could probably get one of them to come talk to him. Probably.”
Cosette gave an emphatic sigh. “Have any of us talked to his parents?”
“Ferre did. His sister said that he said he was going to California.”
“Lovely.”
They sat in silence. Courfeyrac ordered a cup of coffee from the boy behind the counter - he was not any of their friends - and Cosette twirled a strand of hair around her fingers.
“I miss Ep,” Cosette said after a few minutes, “We weren’t even really friends, before Sarah Lawrence, and… I keep thinking of things I want to tell her, the way she’d screw up her face at Enjolras or roll her eyes at Combeferre or elbow Marius, the way she and my Father would always be waiting at the breakfast table by the time I got down. I miss her every morning.”
Courfeyrac got the sense that Cosette was not done.
“And I can’t help but think that she could fix this, too, just by screwing up her face whenever Enjolras said something - well. But she’s not here. And neither is Grantaire, and neither is Jehan, and neither is Bossuet. But sometimes I think that we’re giving our friends too much credit.”
Courfeyrac frowned at her, just slightly.
“He’s never been like this.”
“Jehan could still help.”
“I know.”