Chapter Text
1.
“Well that was a bust,” announces Grantaire to no one in particular as he closes the door to his flat with a resounding crack. This isn’t how he’d planned to spend his afternoon: today should have been dedicated to getting trashed at some fine alcohol-bearing establishment or another with Joly and Laigle and them, but following their failed event this morning, everyone had been in a sour mood.
“‘Let Dionysus cradle your head,’ I told them.” There should be a half bottle of something potent around here somewhere. “‘Celebrate Ra’s salvation from Hathor’s fury, have a seat with the Æsirs.’
“‘Fuck off, Grantaire,’ they told me. A meager thanks for my troubles! Ah, but I am selfless,” he continues, at last coming across a bottle that isn’t quite so empty as all of the rest and climbing down from the counter. He really should start storing these on lower shelves; it’s not as though he uses any of the dishes currently leasing the space. They’re practically decorative. He should donate them — selfless indeed! “I give and give and give, a good student of Silverstein, and when the time comes my stump shall be offered to weary travellers as they pass me by.”
The day had started early, and Grantaire has been drinking many hours, harder than usual to account for the size of his flask and his sensitive nature to ‘goodness’ and ‘exertion.’ He’s back earlier than he had drank for, though, and with no buddies to buffer his brandy, he already feels his eyelids growing heavy as he settles onto the couch.
A damned shame it was, all that for nothing, Grantaire thinks drowsily as his limbs grow heavy. His friends had worked hard for today.
—
A dull awareness returns to him in very slow waves as Grantaire becomes aware of a thumping. At first he thinks he may be imagining it, perhaps even overhearing it from a fortunate neighbor’s apartment, but it gradually dawns on Grantaire that someone is kicking his couch.
“Find your own driftwood!” he announces in what he’s sure is a very grand manner, cuddling his bottle close as he flips to his other side. A damp patch blooms somewhere around his arm or chest area: a problem for later. Or never.
“Come now, wake up!”
“Leave a message with my secretary.”
“You have none.”
“Then after the beep.” Feigned drowsiness begins to settle back over Grantaire. He can wait this guy out. “Beep.”
“You really are a pitiful fool.”
“And you may join in a long line of those who think so,” he answers blearily. “I will clear my tab once my nap is done.”
“You are asleep, ass of Bacchus.”
“I do my best.” The bottle he so tenderly cradles is suddenly removed from Grantaire’s embrace, its contents emptying over him. With a huff, he at last rolls onto his back and glares at the ceiling. “Can I help you with something, my dear brother? Food, clothing, shelter? Drink?”
“Jean, I implore to get your shit together.”
At his given name, Grantaire pushes himself up to his elbow to look over at his intruder. It’s a mistake — or at least, it should be. There should be a searing headache wreaking havoc over his entire nervous system, but instead Grantaire feels no pain, only a weight to his movements that he hadn’t even realized he’d forgotten the tare of. “Who —”
In front of him stands … well, him. At least, by most accounts: this Grantaire wears his hair shorter, though no more tidy. His collar appears to be better-suited for choking than framing, and there is a handsome (albeit stained) waistcoat open on him that looks as though it belongs in another time.
Grantaire stares at his twin for a long time before he speaks. “Have I been drugged?”
“No,” the other Grantaire answers matter-of-factly.
“Did I intentionally take drugs?”
“No.”
“Have I finally been yeeted from my mortal coil?”
“No.”
“Damn.”
“Jean,” his twin says with a frustrated shake of his head. It’s a reaction Grantaire knows well, though not on his own features. “We have much to do.”
“It would seem so!” Grantaire agrees. “For starters: who are you to wear my face and call me ‘sober’?”
“I have levelled no such accusation toward you.”
“I can think of no other time that such horror might look me in the eye and call upon me for a service in earnest.” He gingerly pushes himself upright, but his state remains the same. Mirror-Grantaire appears to be a liar, or else he is dreaming.
“You are dreaming,” the other man says, as though in answer to his thoughts. “We are one and the same, and we have limited time together, so I do ask that you not waste it inventing lewd images for me to see: nothing under the sun from your mind shall shock me.”
It doesn’t stop Grantaire from continuing his test of the claim, though his clone remains, as he’d declared, disappointingly unfazed. “Can we at least horrify my weaker-willed peers by buckling down on my clone-fucking stance?”
“Maybe later,” says Grantaire-2 dismissively.
“My memory is short.”
“Your attention is shorter.”
“Touché.” Interlocking his fingers behind his head, Grantaire leisurely leans back on the sofa. “What is it that you have to address that is more important than turning Pontmercy scarlet?”
“A noble cause,” his twin agrees, “but I’m afraid this is a touch more serious. We need to discuss the events of today and what we might do in the future.”
“Events of today?” Grantaire repeats. “What events? There was no drink, no debauchery, no heresy or flagrant disregard toward the fragile hearts of onlookers of any kind. Why, the future is my canvas!”
“The rally, Jean.”
“Ah, yes, there was one of those. Well, there was meant to be, at any rate.” This is boring, Grantaire decides, annoyed as he pushes himself to his feet. “Drink?”
The other Grantaire looks tempted — aha, they are made of the same stuff after all! — but shakes his head. “Jean, I need you to listen. Your friends’ cause, it is a good one.”
“Hah! Yes, as was Marxism in Russia, until man got its clutches into it.” Is that port in the back? Port could be nice. “The cause is good, it’s the people who sully it.” Ugh, a Merlot. Well, still better than this conversation.
“Have you stopped to consider why?”
A scoff escapes him as he rifles through the junk drawer for a corkscrew. Bahorel must have stolen his again. Or perhaps hidden it. Again. “Because the corporations have the power and the government is corrupt and the people can’t do anything. I mean,” bingo, “Vietnam, anyone?”
“You weren’t alive for Vietnam.”
“No, I used to read. Terrible habit, can’t recommend taking it up.” The bottle’s got a screw-on cap. Grantaire really needs to be paying more attention to his work.
“So you’ve never tried.”
“‘Do or do not,’ the old master tells us. Hope is a thing with feathers, and I am Diogenes’s man.”
“Do you make your friends to be fowl, then?”
“Cocks, all of them! Fat on their own plumage. They will meet with Mrs. Tweedy soon enough.”
“If Enjolras is to be cast as Ginger, then they might yet succeed.”
Grantaire sighs, at last liberating the bottle of its cap and taking a swig. It burns the way it should, but his system takes no hit, and he finds himself unsurprised when it doesn’t.
This is no good, he thinks, wiping the residual wine from his upper lip. This conversational partner follows all of his leaps and jumps and is capable of catching his fallacies and half-baked propositions: there’s no chance of dancing around or losing him, and his doppleganger is too uncharacteristically determined to bore into disinterest.
“What is it you want?” Grantaire says at last, returning to the sofa and clunking the bottle onto the coffee table between them.
“When the time comes,” his double tells him slowly, “you must join them.”
“The time for drinks, the time for cards, the time for brawls and bar crawls alike, certainly.”
“That is not what I mean, and I know you know it.”
“I don’t know that you do.”
“I do.”
“Balls,” Grantaire dismisses, growing increasingly irritated. “Look, we’ve tried, and you know what we’ve learned from trying? That it only brings strife when it doesn’t work out. You know what doesn’t bring strife? Giving up. In fact, I have succeeded in giving up every consecutive day since I started, and I feel great.”
“But —”
“More of a tits man m’self,” Grantaire interrupts, “though who could say ‘no’ to a nice pair of thighs?”
It’s the end of the discussion, and Grantaire wills his doppleganger to understand this. The other man stares at him for a long minute with an expression Grantaire cannot hope to decipher before finally sighing, reaching over to grab at the bottle between them. “I don’t suppose you have a domino set around?”
2.
Enjolras’s number rings, rings, rings, before going to voicemail once more.
“Hey,” Courfeyrac says, “you haven’t answered any of my texts, please call me back to let me know you’re okay. We’re all in this together, bud.”
She ends the message with a sigh. When everyone dispersed earlier, it had seemed like a good idea to give them their space, but now that Courfeyrac has had some space, she’s doubting the wisdom of this decision. With a shake of her head, she grabs her keys from where they’re clipped on her belt loop and unlocks the door to her apartment. She opens it and freezes.
Pontmercy is here.
Until now, she’d been too upset to even think of the specifics of who hadn’t shown up: the idea of no one in the entire city attending except themselves had been so all-encompassing that there was no room for any specifics. She knows she’d told Pontmercy to come if he could, but seeing him in their flat making, what, pancakes? It seems like his schedule was flexible enough.
Whatever. He probably forgot.
“Hey!” he says cheerfully, looking up from stirring the batter. Courfeyrac realizes that she is still standing in the doorway and lets herself in, allowing the indulgence of shutting the door more loudly than she normally would. “How was the rally?”
Ah. So he had remembered. “You wouldn’t have to ask if you were there.”
His stirring falters. “Are you – I thought.” He frowns before putting down the mixing bowl. “Are you mad at me?”
Well, if nothing else, she can always trust Pontmercy to cut to the chase. “I’m not thrilled with you,” she responds, enunciating each word crisply as she sits on the sofa with a huff.
She feels bad about it when he finally sits down on the other side of the couch from her, a careful gap between the two of them. His hands are shaking, but he looks her in the eye when he asks, “Can we talk about it?”
Her huff is accompanied with a bitter laugh; still, he seems genuinely contrite, and even a moment’s reflection makes it abundantly clear that this isn’t really about Pontmercy at all. “Do we have any eggs?”
They have eight, and she and Pontmercy pick up three dozen more at the store before they begin their search for an adequately abandoned-looking lot.
The one he finally pulls into is farther outside of the city than Courfeyrac would have bothered with on her own, but apparently Pontmercy is familiar with the property and its owners.
“They probably won’t notice,” he explains, “but if they do, they won’t care. And on the off-chance that they do, they deserve it.”
Perfect.
It’s been a while since Courfeyrac has done this, but she remembers enough to know not to aim too close to her feet when she hurls the first egg at the ground. It gives way with a satisfying splat, fragile shell splintering in all directions in a way that the hardy shells of Prouvaire’s hen’s eggs would never.
Pontmercy isn’t the old hand at egg-throwing that Courfeyrac is, and his first egg gets lobbed several yards away. It also breaks on impact, but there’s none of the satisfaction of breaking something at such a distance and with gravity doing all of the work.
“What are we doing out here?” he asks as Courfeyrac proceeds to dash three eggs into the earth in quick succession.
“Breaking eggs.” She’d explained it in the car, it feels pretty self-explanatory.
“Well, yes, but,” his shoulders raise up to his ears, “why?”
Picking up another egg and weighing it in her palm, she sighs. “The rally was a bust.” Splat.
“Oh.” Even without looking at him, Pontmercy’s tone is plainly contrite. “Were there counter-protestors? Is everyone okay? What happened?”
“Counter-protestors would mean that anyone showed up.” Splat.
Pontmercy lobs another egg, this one very vertically. It lands much closer than he last one, and the blast radius is noticeably wider than the others. “I mean, surely some people showed up.”
“Bahorel brought along some old classmates.” Splat.
“And … no one else?”
Splat. Splat. Splat. “No.” Splat.
There’s a long silence after that, and Courfeyrac is reaching for the carton when her hand is caught in Pontmercy’s. She tries to yank it back, but he holds fast, and at last she finally has to look at him. “Oh Coco,” he whispers, and suddenly they’re embracing. The dams have broken, and the shoulder of Pontmercy’s shirt quickly grows damp against her face. “I am so sorry.”
He should be, but so should everyone else. Instead of saying this, she hugs him tighter.
Courfeyrac knows for a fact that the Marius Pontmercy she met three years ago would have said something before their return home. He would have pushed the subject or kept apologizing or tried to fill the silence with inane chatter. The Marius Pontmercy of today helps her empty out the remaining two cartons of eggs before wordlessly driving them back to the flat.
It isn’t until they’re in and Courfeyrac is about to excuse herself to her room to listen to angsty rock music or make passive-aggressive comments on instagram or something that either of them finally speaks.
“I did want to come,” says Pontmercy quietly. His hands are clasped, and he’s sitting on the couch with his elbows resting on his knees. His eyes are downcast. “I really thought about it.”
Throwing eggs had taken the heat off of her anger, and now Courfeyrac is just tired. “Why didn’t you?”
He looks up at her. “I guess I was afraid? You guys, you … you know so much. You’re always going back and forth on current political issues, these topics I never even realized were contentious – forget that I never seem able to see the correct solutions until you all point them out to me – and … I suppose I was intimidated.
“That’s not to mention that it never even occurred to me that no one else would show up or that my presence would matter,” he continues, slumping back into the couch. “I mean, I’m one person, and not even a particularly well-versed one. I assumed that you all would probably get along better without me.”
Courfeyrac looks away, feeling her mouth twist. “Doesn’t really work when everyone feels the same.”
“I guess not,” responds Pontmercy with a weak chuckle. “God, Enjolras is gonna hate me.”
With a sigh, Courfeyrac collapses over the couch; her head, as calculated, lands on Pontmercy’s thigh, making both of them flinch. “Enjolras doesn’t hate you.”
He gives her a dubious look.
“He doesn’t!” she insists. It reminds her that she hasn’t checked her phone since they left, and she digs it out of her pocket. Combeferre made it home okay, Bahorel managed a cheesy selfie, and she needs to call her parents back at some point, but nothing from Enjolras yet. If she doesn’t hear back before the end of the day, she decides, she’ll go over to check on him. “I think we’re all just bummed with the world right now.”
“And the arts fest, probably.”
She frowns. “The arts fest?”
Pontmercy shrugs. “Everyone on facebook is posting about it, I assume that that’s where they went instead. Not that arts fests are more important than social justice!” he quickly adds. “But a lot of the people I’ve seen around your meetings before and at your other events were talking about it, so I assume …”
She barely hears the second half. The arts fest! How could they have forgotten? “Of course, oh my God.”
Above her, Pontmercy frowns. “Is something the matter? I mean, besides the obvious.”
Courfeyrac sits up, leaning over earnestly. “Of course we didn’t get anyone, the annual arts fest is only here one weekend. No one ever misses it.” Or its coinciding festivities
“I’ve never gone.”
“We’ll go tomorrow,” she tells him dismissively.
Her mind is still working through this – the implications, how they could have missed this, the idea that maybe the work that les Amis does isn’t all worthless – when Pontmercy speaks again.
“I think I want to do more with the ABC.”
“Hm?” Now that her head is more clear, she feels bad for ever having been upset with Pontmercy: he shows up to meetings, but she knows that it’s moreso for company than out of dedication to their convictions.
“I want to do more with the ABC,” he repeats, this time more firmly. He pushes himself upright and twists to face her. “I know I’ve always seemed a bit lukewarm to all of this, and I guess some of that is from having been lukewarm to all of it for a long time. I’ve been thinking about it since we were out in the lot, though. I assumed that everyone else would step up to do what needed to be done, or that someone else had already told you guys about the arts fest, and apparently everyone else did too. Not anymore, Courfeyrac: I want to try being one of the people who can be counted upon to do something, even if no one else does. Especially when no one else does.”
Courfeyrac stares at him a long beat before kneeling to pull him into another hug. “Ponpon, you big loser, you’re gonna make me cry again.” Pulling back, she holds him by the shoulders. “You’ve gotta tell Jojo, he’s gonna be ecstastic.”
Pontmercy’s eyes widen. “I – I really don’t think –”
“He doesn’t hate you.”
He maintains the eye-contact, expression contorting for several long moments before he finally sighs. “Fine. But only because you said to.”
Courfeyrac beams at him. “That’s the best possible reason for doing anything.”
3.
“So you were visited in a dream by a spirit guide, who was you.”
“That’s right.”
The boba in Combeferre’s tea jostles as her metal straw slowly drags across the bottom. “And you were aware that you were dreaming the entire time?”
“I was.”
Combeferre adores Enjolras, but she dearly wishes that something this interesting could have happened to a friend of hers with an ounce more imagination. “And your guide had you talk with us?”
“Yes and no,” he tells her. Enjolras had brought his own reusable water bottle but has yet to touch it. “I didn’t speak with any of you, you were only there in glimpses. You were there coming up with plans for next time with Joly.”
“Oh?” She straightens. “Our brains often use dreams to work out problems we encounter in our real lives: were they actionable?”
Enjolras stares at her for a beat, expression blank. “No.”
“Well, it’s still a running theory,” she shrugs, refusing to overthink it. “Our brains’ solutions for things don’t always start out practically.”
Even as she says this, though, Combeferre sees Enjolras’s brow furrowing as he frowns at the table. “No, he knew things I didn’t know.” Combeferre continues watching him until Enjolras looks up at her. “What are your thoughts on Grantaire?”
“Grantaire?” To be frank, she hardly has any. “Seems intelligent enough, but not particularly … self-motivated.” Enjolras nods, almost distractedly, and Combeferre decides to be blunt. “He’s a disinterested drunkard with a lot of common friends. It might be that he has the same values, but it’s impossible to tell, and if he does, he’ll never admit to it, much less act on them.”
“I agree,” Enjolras answers, looking perplexed. “My guide, though … he said Grantaire would come around.” He shakes his head. “I wouldn’t think anything of it, except that it is not a thought that has ever once crossed my mind, and my guide seemed so … certain. He said it, and I knew it to be true.”
“You can be rather persuasive,” Combeferre allows, taking a sip of her tea.
Enjolras’s nostrils suddenly flare. “He’d said he’d give me time at the end to test out lucid dreaming physics for you.”
“You failed me, Enjolras.”
“He didn’t give me time!” Enjolras protests. “He said he’d make time specifically for this, and then he ignored the schedule.”
“I don’t imagine your many missed calls and texts from concerned friends had anything to do with that,” she suggests dryly.
“He told me to wake up, and suddenly I was awake!”
Combeferre shrugs, smiling. “I don’t know what to tell you. It sounds like a very interesting dream.” She takes another sip, this time capturing a boba and chewing on it slowly. “Did you learn your lesson?”
Enjolras frowns. “Lesson?”
“You said you had a guide, you said he walked you through a series of tasks and people, and you’ve now indicated that there was a definitive end to your dream: did you learn your lesson, do you think?”
Enjolras’s features relax as they turn pensieve, his focus no longer on Combeferre but something past her, if anything. “Yes. Yes, I believe I did.”
Combeferre nods. “I’m glad to hear it.”
He honors her with a smile before glancing at his watch. “I have to be meeting with Pontmercy now, but I’m glad we were able to link up before then.”
“Of course. Good luck with —” She waggles her fingers vaguely. “— that.”
“I think Pontmercy may begin impressing us in the very near future.”
“Oh?” Combeferre asks, smiling. “Did your guide tell you that?”
“No,” he tells her. “Just a hunch.”
He leaves, and while Combeferre chews on two more boba bubbles, she pulls out her phone.
[15.23] You: Enjolras’s dream-guide was judging our list Apparently
[15.24] Joly: rude
[15.24] Joly: sounds liek jojos dg has no taste
[15.24] You: My thoughts exactly
[15.25] You: Anyway if u realized you were lucid dreaming what would u do?
[15.25] Joly: omg what wouldnt i do