Chapter Text
“It won’t be permanent. I promise you that.”
“Alright.” Grantaire said, still bewildered.
“You trust me, don’t you?”
“Of course.” He returned, because it was the truest thing in the world.
Grantaire had trusted him since the very moment they met. Since that night in that alley, when he’d seen the stranger skid round the corner, hastily making for a strange blue box, so doused in shadow it nearly hadn’t been noticeable before. The stranger had stopped before the door and gazed at Grantaire with fire and ice and madness in his eyes. “You should run,” he’d advised, smile fading to seriousness as he glanced behind him once more. Grantaire looked too, and felt his skepticism waver. “Or...” The man added, “you could come with me.”
It had been giddy and reckless and wild, it had defied all the reason in the world, but he had never felt so free when he’d taken that outstretched hand.
He had always, impossibly, trusted him.
His eyebrows knitted together and he bit his lip, uncertain of being able to shoulder the responsibility. “Do you trust me?”
The Doctor smiled and clasped his hand in answer. And then he tore his hand away, and screams of anguish soon wracked the air.
Grantaire watches him despairingly. The Doctor’s words carry across the room as if they are destined to inhabit clouds. “The oppressed and downtrodden will remain so unless there is change. While society blindly favours the aristocracy, neither wealth nor blood should bind us to the tradition. Do you not think that all people are worth fighting for? I have never met a person who is not important. So there must be change, and we have the power to incite it. We, with the collective voice of the citizens, can rid the government of their corruption, and when we have - when France is a republic - there can be equality. And with equality, there will be peace. With peace, there can be happiness.”
If the world could be changed with words, the Doctor could have done it, a million times over.
Even as a human.
Enjolras. He still stumbles frequently over the name, his tongue and teeth and throat battling over the two ferociously. It has been a fortnight. Perhaps the longest of his existence.
And it had taken him long enough to even find the Doctor. It had taken time just to comprehend when they were.
Where had been simpler to discover. The TARDIS had, apparently, parked itself in the shade of a narrow cobbled street, peeking out of an alcove as though it were just another wooden door of just another building. The street’s name hadn’t been visible, though as soon as he’d stumbled out of the alleyway and into an open square, Grantaire could see that he was right in the centre of a city, buildings clustered across the horizon. Paris, still; the Seine ebbed quietly at his right shoulder. He looked to his left, found himself on the fringe of a swarm of pigeons. The birds fled in a frenzy as he leant down and snatched up a grubby newspaper they’d been pecking at. It must have been a few days old, but he gained a rough notion of the date. May, 1832.
1832. Grantaire hadn’t been able to think what that meant, at first. Nearly two centuries before his time. Even the damned Eiffel Tower wouldn’t be built for another forty-five years.
He’d never paid much attention in history lessons, back in his schooldays that seemed lifetimes away (though they were, quite literally). He’d never paid much attention in lessons, full stop. Certainly, a lot of things were interesting, and a lot of the reading he did was on a fleeting whim, but he didn’t like to be force-fed ideas, and were textbooks and lessons and stilted teaching really much better than brainwashing? Grantaire would have reformed the education system himself, only he was already sure it would make no difference. There would always be a system, and the system would never succeed. And how could it, when absolute success was just a lie, an unattainable ideal (an unreachable green light, to rob Fitzgerald of his famous metaphors)? Even having no system would fail - they’d seen it before, the Doctor and Grantaire, visiting the settlement on a distant planet’s cluster of moons, where education was ‘free’, ‘unlimited’, ‘voluntary’, and no one knew a thing. He’d concluded, quite reasonably, that nothing worked, and that fixing broken things would only break them worse.
Irregardless, they’d missed the Revolution and the guillotine by a close shave, thankfully, and hadn’t ended up during the Dark Ages or a World War, so it had been looking manageable, all things considered. He wouldn’t go so far to say Paris looked happy, for it was rife with ugly problems - people starving in the streets, an unsympathetic elite, a shackled society in more ways than he could count, and a cholera epidemic to top it all off - but he and the Doctor would only be here briefly. Call it a holiday (albeit an odd one: a holiday where you happened to be in hiding, and were supposed to create and adjust to a false new life at the snap of your fingers, of course). But they only had to survive for a month or so, and then they would vanish as suddenly as they’d arrived.
And they had arrived suddenly, just as they’d left. They had barrelled into the TARDIS, Grantaire trying to keep up with the Doctor and what he was explaining; he was speaking in that matter-of-fact stream of consciousness of his, when the words spewed like lava downhill and nearly none of them made sense.
Slow down, he wanted to demand, wait a minute. But if there was one thing he’d grasped, it was that they didn’t have a minute.
“They’ve got the scent -” The Doctor was saying. “They’ve got the scent, which means they’ve latched onto the TARDIS. And they can follow us through time and space, and they’ll never stop.”
“Never stop until what?” Grantaire interjected, stepping backwards as the Doctor lunged in front of him to fiddle with a dial.
The Doctor was still flicking switches, typing into the incomprehensible keypad. Grantaire almost thought he didn’t have an answer, but then the words flew out as fast as before.
“Until they have me.” He sounded impassive. “They’re not, specifically, after me; they don’t know who I am. But they know what I am. They need a Timelord.”
It was as though the Doctor heard Grantaire’s silent why?, the question he had barely had time to ask before he was receiving an answer.
“They need to feast upon a Timelord. The Family of Blood, they call themselves. Parasites, you’d say; leeches. But these creatures are hunters, too. They can sniff out anyone. They won’t ever stop.” Fantastic.
“Luckily, they’ll only survive a short time without me.”
“So we can outrun them, then?” Grantaire questioned.
The Doctor stared at him.
“Did they see you?” He demanded. Grantaire’s brows crashed together in confusion; that was no answer to his question.
“What do you mean?”
“Did they see you?” The Doctor repeated, more harried than Grantaire ever saw him. “Did they catch your face? Would they recognise you if they passed you in the street?”
Grantaire recalled the chase, the race to the TARDIS, and he wasn’t certain. How was he supposed to remember, exactly? How did he know what they’d seen or hadn’t seen?”
“No, I -” He answered finally, wondering if that was the answer the Doctor was looking for. “I don’t think they saw me.” He’d barely gotten a look at them, after all, and surely if they’d seen either of them, it would have been the Doctor they’d taken note of first, as always. Understandably. As it should be.
Why? He thought again, but by then the Doctor had leapt back from the console, was wrestling with controls at one of the outer walls of the central room. Grantaire would help if he was given something to do.
“We can’t outrun them.” The answer to Grantaire’s question came belatedly, abruptly, sharply.
“Then what can -”
The Doctor’s face was taut, his gaze focused upwards, into empty space.
“We hide.” He said, meeting Grantaire’s eyes with an discomforting graveness. “Wait until they die.”
Grantaire frowned. “But if they have your scent -”
“I can disguise my scent. They smell a Timelord, yes. But if I disguise the scent for long enough, they’ll expend the remains of their lifespan eventually.”
“How?”
“I’m going to become human.”
Well, that made utterly no sense.
“There’s not enough time to explain properly. But it all depends on you.”
Well, how? What? But -
“Take this watch, Grantaire.” The Doctor impressed this on him with a solemn gaze. “This watch, my life depends on it. I’ve put a perception filter on it; I won’t look at it. Keep it safe. Don’t open it unless you have to. Don’t open it, except as a last resort. Don’t open it unless they find us.”
He stared at the small circle of silver, pressed up against the Doctor’s palm. Old and scratched and unassuming, suddenly the most significant object in the world. It couldn’t possibly just be a watch.
The Doctor answered again before he had asked. “This watch is me.”
Grantaire could only stand, dumbstruck, uncomprehending.
Something dropped from the rafters of the TARDIS, a helmet, a strange contraption -
The Doctor clicked the watch onto it, and pulled it over his blond hair, metal nodes pressing against his temples.
“Never thought I’d use this.” He mused, with the barest hint of hesitance. “All the times I’ve wondered...”
“What is it?”
“Chameleon Arch. Rewrites my biology. Literally changes every single cell in my body.”
“You’ll be human.” Grantaire couldn’t halt himself in his approach, a half-desperate plea for another option.
The Doctor gave him a look of shivering sympathy, a look that tore through all of Grantaire’s will. “The TARDIS will take care of everything for me. Find a setting, invent a lifestory for me, and integrate me. Can’t do the same for you... you’ll just have to improvise. I should have just enough residual awareness to let you in.”
There were problems, too many problems, thousands of them.
“Isn’t it going to hurt?”
“Oh, yes. I expect so.”
“But you’ll turn back, when they’re gone?”
The Doctor assured him with a single nod.
“It won’t be permanent. I promise you that.”
“Alright.” Grantaire said, still bewildered.
“You trust me, don’t you?”
“Of course.” He returned, because it was the truest thing in the world.
Grantaire had trusted him since the very moment they met. Since that night in that alley, when he’d seen the stranger skid round the corner, hastily making for a strange blue box, so doused in shadow it nearly hadn’t been noticeable before. The stranger had stopped before the door and gazed at Grantaire with fire and ice and madness in his eyes. “You should run,” he’d advised, smile fading to seriousness as he glanced behind him once more. Grantaire looked too, and felt his skepticism waver. “Or...” The man added, “you could come with me.”
It had been giddy and reckless and wild, it had defied all the reason in the world, but he had never felt so free when he’d taken that outstretched hand.
He had always, impossibly, trusted him.
His eyebrows knitted together and he bit his lip, uncertain of being able to shoulder the responsibility. “Do you trust me?”
The Doctor smiled and clasped his hand in answer. And then he tore his hand away, and screams of anguish soon wracked the air.
--
Of course it would have been too much to hope for that the Doctor - Enjolras - could keep himself out of trouble. Where else would Grantaire have found the Doctor in nineteenth-century Paris, but protesting for the people’s sake? Friends of the ABC... The Doctor fits in far too well, down to the last terrible pun.
Grantaire doesn’t, so much. He probably wouldn’t, not even with a falsely-created backstory, with a ‘life’ here before 1832. It doesn’t really matter when this is, or where, the very fact they are fighting for the impossible is explanation enough.
He falls into the group surprisingly easily, despite the way his very skin squirms under the pretence of believing in it all. He doesn’t manage to pretend for long, but he has had vague familiarity and acceptance from Enjolras since finding them - they are students, acquaintances or somesuch - and all the others have grown to like him a startling amount despite his general uselessness. Their meeting-places, a cafe and a wine-shop most regularly, are flooded in warmth and conviviality; the haze of fluid friendships and free-flowing laughter do their best to mask the cutting graveness of the group’s objective.
They are readying themselves for revolution. Every day that passes is another spent rallying people to the cause, chafing at the bit under the severe reins of those in power. Every day sees the Doctor dig deeper and deeper into the raging heart of the time, and every step in that direction is just asking for disaster, and Grantaire knows it. He’s supposed to be keeping the Doctor away from any pivotal events that the students dream of, things that might alter history, extraordinary moments or movements that might alert their pursuers to their presence.
He spends plenty of time trying to dissuade them all, but he is finding he is failing.
The most he can ever do is interject and argue, hum some temporary friction into being, be the herald of distraction. Most of the men just laugh him off.
Enjolras’ patience is the shortest.
There had been enough residual awareness to let him in, just as promised.
Enough to let him in. But not enough to actually like you, Grantaire, he ought to have warned.
--
He doesn’t have a home, here. He’d passed through restaurants and cafes, boxing rings and fencing clubs, museums and libraries - half of Paris, really - in his initial search for the Doctor, but since then, he’s barely left Enjolras’ side. He is discreet, of course, and the group is together enough hours of the day that his presence is not especially noted.
This afternoon, they are giving speeches in the street. The crowds have formed a heavy cluster, and it is Enjolras who seizes their attention. Grantaire stands against a wall on the opposite side of the street, gazing at him from a distance.
He is so much the Doctor, though he doesn’t know it. He has all the Doctor’s passion, all that empathy that extends the nature of humankind, never mind the rest of the universe. He is strong and centred and absolute in his beliefs, with every ounce that knowing righteousness, the manner of a judge who might march in, hand in hand with the apocalypse. He has seen him at moments of such warmth, taking comfort from the goodness of the men around him, but now he is bellowing fire, all a Timelord’s fury confined to a man. Enjolras’ voice is surging over the heads of the people and echoing in their fervent whispers, flowing in slow exhalations, summoning a shared sentiment in sudden rousing shouts.
Grantaire can’t bring himself to even blink. As long as he does not, he can fool himself, fool himself that it is the Doctor he sees, not a fleeting shadow on a cave wall, a pale imitation of the true form.
“Gavroche,” someone reproaches nearby, pulling Grantaire reluctantly back to earth.
Not a minute later, a boy approaches him, dragging his feet in dramatic reluctance.
He holds out a small, grubby fist, tightly clenched.
Grantaire eyes it, extending his hand warily.
A glint of silver greets his gaze and his intake of breath is unusually sharp.
"Nice watch, mister," the boy says, his tone airy but his brown eyes strangely serious. Is there a touch of fear there? As the watch drops into his palm, he thinks he feels a flash of that same fear, too.
The child, street urchin - Gavroche? - scampers off as Grantaire gets nudged idly in his side.
“You’d better watch out,” Bahorel advises, his tone as casual as his stance, leant against the building wall. “Head in the clouds, making an easy target for these pickpockets.”
Before even the dust of that message settles, Grantaire raises his eyebrows at the shadow slinking around the corner. The same scruffy boy offers Grantaire’s companion a grin and a cocky wave of the pinched coin, before taking off at a lively pace.
"Oi, you," Bahorel intones boisterously. "Little rascal! Give that back!"
It is an amusing sight, watching the relative giant, burly and broad-shouldered, bound off down the street after the sandy-haired gamin, the two strangely matched in nimbleness of step.
Grantaire sinks back against the wall, his laughter at the chase fading as his heartbeat slows to its normal rate, the watch sitting precious in his pocket.
--
It is evening, and Enjolras is talking about the future again.
“For all that is sacrificed in the nineteenth century, the twentieth century will be happy -”
“It won’t be,” Grantaire interjects, his dark undercurrent cutting in expertly whenever Enjolras is at his heights of pure naive idealism. He snorts. “It definitely won’t.”
Grantaire’s seen the twentieth century - and even if he hadn’t, he’s still from the future beyond it, so he’s obviously better placed to pass judgement on this - and happiness sounds a moronic contradiction to events like oh, two world wars and genocide, and that’s just for starters. The good might increase, certainly, but so will the bad. Society might as well be on a baggage carousel or terrible merry-go-round through history: every step forward - Grantaire won’t deny that there have been a few - or stumble backwards really means nothing at all, because everything is stuck going in circles anyway. Could you tell the difference between Ancient Rome and a civilisation from the 74th century? Hardly. Slavery, war, poverty, inequality; it is everywhere and always. (He’d say it’s human nature, only he’s seen the similarities on other planets and in other species, so... it’s just nature.)
“You’re right, it will never be, if everyone is simply too afraid or too apathetic to act! What have indifference and idleness ever done for you, Grantaire?” Enjolras retorts, contempt in his glare. “If the world were full of people like you, what change would ever be accomplished?” He is near in danger of spitting on Grantaire’s forehead, one of his hands in angry collision with the surface of the table.
“For one thing, alcohol would be free,” He returns, ducking for the wine bottle before it can smash to the floor. It is a joke, and desires laughter. Only the faintest chuckling comes; it seems the others are, at least tonight, reluctant to invoke more of Enjolras’ wrath.
The Doctor would have laughed.
Enjolras narrows his eyes and deliberately ignores his presence for the rest of the evening.
Grantaire retreats to a corner. Whilst the others are deep in serious debate, Enjolras and Feuilly’s voices loud and harmonious, Jehan, Joly and Bossuet sneak back to him, evidently to estimate how well he is faring, how much damage has been done.
He thinks he does well to seem unperturbed.
“He is unusually choleric tonight,” Joly assures him, as though it can’t be helped or avoided, as though Grantaire does not knowingly provoke Enjolras.
Bossuet chuckles quietly at everything Grantaire says, pours them all more wine in an effort to remain good-humoured.
Jehan just sits in companionable silence, and Grantaire can’t tell whether the poet is listening to Enjolras or scrutinising him instead. Both, most likely.
“And I am disturbingly gloomy tonight.” He offers in fairness, trying not to sabotage everyone’s mood tonight. He shifts his chair slightly, avoids their prolonged stares by focusing on the sky outside.
“It’ll get easier,” they say.
“No, it won’t,” he answers, with a shrug. Enjolras’ ideals won’t be changed, and Grantaire won’t begin pretending he can’t see the flaws in them. It is the way they’ll always be, that much is clear, and Enjolras cannot even bear his company as the Doctor does. And with the task Grantaire has, trying to keep him out of trouble, he can only foresee things getting worse.
“Thank God I’m not staying.”
It is a cryptic statement and he knows it, but he ignores Joly and Bossuet’s confusion expertly, and Jehan’s expression is unfathomable, in any case.
He lets them begin to converse about inconsequential matters, his small half-smile the only indication of his paying attention.
A flash of light pierces the sky, drags him out of his melancholy reverie. It is green, searing through the grey and black, in a startling arc over the city. He follows it down, down, out of sight.
“Did you see that?” He exclaims abruptly, no thought spared to what he might be interrupting now.
“See what?”
“That green light. Did you see it? Out there?”
Bossuet looks amused, but gestures through the window lazily. “It’s cloudy. You can hardly make out a constellation, let alone a shooting star.”
Grantaire doesn’t refute the term shooting star; whilst he is miserable at holding his tongue, he does know better than to bring up spaceships.
“It looked like it was landing. Across the Seine,” he muses.
“I don’t think shooting stars land like that, Grantaire,” Joly informs him.
“I saw it,” Grantaire repeats, making no effort to eliminate the serious tone from his words.
A different voice joins the fray.
“You’re drunk.” Enjolras says, disgusted.
“I may be,” Grantaire admits righteously, “but I still saw it.”
Out of the corner of his eye, he sees Enjolras exchange disapproving looks with Combeferre and Courfeyrac. His closest friends seem to leave the task to him.
And the next moment, he barks, “Grantaire. If you have nothing else to contribute, perhaps you’d best go home for the evening.”
“Fine.” He stands, agreeing, too distracted to put up a proper fight.
Enjolras’ blue eyes mark his surprise at the unexpected surrender, his full lips parted in a breath intended to precede a gasp. He holds this back, just, pursing them instead and acknowledging the exit with an almost-apologetic nod.
Grantaire, for perhaps once in his life, doesn’t waste much energy noticing this.
He’ll need to be back in time to see that Enjolras gets home soundly - not that Enjolras is aware that this is Grantaire’s nightly ritual, but nonetheless - but he and the others will be debating for at least another hour.
He could loiter outside. But he could also use this opportunity to investigate.
He shrugs his coat on as he descends the stairs, fastening the buttons absently in his hurried walk, exiting into the street with a strange sense of purpose.
He doesn’t have the Doctor to help him here. It is all up to him.
--
He can’t find the spaceship. He searches high and low, but there is no trace of a crash, no sign of a ship, no flash of that green light again. Perhaps he is that drunk, hallucinating even without the help of absinthe tonight.
There is time, still, to waste. His feet carry him to the TARDIS, hibernating in its hidden corner of the street.
His limbs are only a little shaky when he is standing in as close a thing he has to home, when he is sheltered in this secret ship, its heartbeat guiding his. He stumbles closer to the centre, fingers caressing the walls like a blind man, throat aching in a silent hello. It is as lonely as he is. Neglect swells over them both.
Nothing has changed in here. The TARDIS is a constant.
Grantaire turns on the message the Doctor had left for him. He hangs onto the words he recalls the Doctor saying in his head every day, because those instructions are the last threads of the only lifeline he has.
Instructions. He is trying his best, but following none of them well.
He dreads hearing the last of them again.
“And you. Don’t let me forget you.”
You.
The word can send a shiver wracking his core from head to toe, can sober him faster than a bucket of ice-cold water. It does, too, even when it is Enjolras who utters it. It shocks him, that electric current sparking the image of the Doctor, the Doctor thinking of him, caring. Enjolras is nearly always accusing him, employing the direct address as a call to combat or perhaps a rebuke, but that doesn’t matter, Grantaire doesn’t care. Because he remembers the way the Doctor says you, like he attaches importance to the word, and importance to the human being behind it.
It is ridiculous.
Of everyone - in the world, in the universe, in all of time - the Doctor could have held out his hand to, why had it been Grantaire?
“I don’t know,” he tells the TARDIS helplessly, fiercely swallowing the bitterness. “I don’t know what to do.”
--
Four have already wandered across the path of the Family of Blood. A Father, a Mother, a Sister, a Brother.
A police inspector. A working woman. A little street girl. A National Guardsman.
They watch the door of a small blue box swing shut, watch a dark-haired man tuck the key strung around his neck back under his shirt, and watch where he goes the rest of the night.
They turn their heads and sniff the air.
The Doctor, they whisper. The Doctor is here.