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It was not what he meant to do.
“It is not what I meant to do,” Robespierre said, his voice clipped. “Pardon me.”
The color on Saint-Just’s face was high on his cheeks. It was scattered along his nose, dusted like the expression man’s horrible workday in the gutter. It was deliberate, he really did not meant to do it. They were in a church, Robespierre reasoned. It wasn’t meant to have any meaning.
“You needn’t worry, citizen,” Saint-Just stretched his hand just enough, out of reach. “I understand that all preliminary actions are devoid of reason.”
It shouldn’t— didn’t mean anything at all.
Robespierre choose to ignore the man, the red, the parted lips, whichever. “We are in a church, it is only normal that I needed... to make,” he stopped, breathed, “some, ah, considerations.” As in taking in your hands in a moment of panic those of your colleague, but he was digressing.
Saint-Just nodded, wondered around and about, the tricolor on his waist flowing with his every steps. They echo in this empty place of worship, his boots, the heels. Blue and red and white to the black of the religious. An aristocratic plot, he said. God. I know you as I know him. Saint-Just walked some more.
Robespierre stood there. A statue would be more entertaining than me, he thought. But statues aren’t meant to be touching other people’s hand without permission.
“It is alright, really.”
Robespierre made a sound, and it was silent once again.
The cathedral shone, and he felt small. Sometimes, he asked himself if whomever that command there and here would be selfish enough to let him do nothing at all. Absolutely nothing at all.
“Les sans-culottes,” Saint-Just’s voice rang loud and clear in this godforsaken dorm. “They will destroy it.”
We. They. Destruction. Quick, quick. My kingdom for an I.
He laughed, and he hoped damn well that it seemed like one, “Isn’t it why we are here today? To grapple with what has left us, and what we willing leave out of this new age?”
“The Bastille fell too,” Saint-Just pointed out, his lashes making a trailing shadow against his cheeks. Half-blind, half-idealistic, Saint-Just walked back to him like a drowned man reaching the shore. It was funny, he thought, he never felt he would be home for someone else, “We are here to gather and to collect the remains.”
And then he opened his eyes, wide and unflinching, to his. Something godless in there. Something about preaching. Robespierre backed a step unconsciously, fearing the intensity. Fearing the adoration. He was never one to welcome praise nor disdain. He was not a martyr. He was not a monk.
He was not god.
Robespierre’s lips trembled despite himself. The abbey shone. Too much, too much. “You sound like those who treasure anarchy and disorder above their spouse.” It was too much, it was stupid, it was inconceivably stupid.
“You forget that those who built this church are the ancestors of those who raved about and ravaged the Bastille. Luther used to be a great orator,” Maximilien added, because he needed to be more stupid. “We are at the end of the circle, Saint-Just. This cycle of vengeance and violence and needless action. It ended from the principles from which it began, it is over.”
Saint-Just’s eyes fell to the ground. Proud in his stature, small in his position, Saint-Just had never been humble. Louis-Antoine Saint-Just, Voltaire turned in his grave. I would have another fairy tale to sneeze out of my nose. Candide would have never said that.
“Truly, the best of all possible worlds,” Saint-Just said, his bangs falling over.
And with his head held down as if in prayer, Robespierre noticed his hands. He looked back at his own, calloused and frail. Dots and freckles and contemplations.
“Pardon me,” he said again, thought he has said it once more, and held his hands tight in his. It was disconcerting how well they fit each other like a mold, just like the first time. There was no meaning, he reminded himself. It was like having a bruise on your forehead, it only meant something for the one looking at it, all blood and blood again. It has never bore a meaning.
Like god, his mind supplied, and shut it down with the warmth of Saint-Just’s fingertips just beneath his. It was almost as if they weren’t touching at all, because his friend’s head still fell along the smooth curves of his palm. Guillotine, he thought, as his hands tightened a little more, saving because he was a little pathetic.
“Forgive me,” he said, knowing that it was unnecessary. Saint-Just just shook his head.
“I wondered,” Saint-Just said.
“What?”
“If,” Saint-Just began. He talked with his hands a lot at the tribune. His hands firm on the wooden surface. Now he was trapped, and if he felt like it, he didn’t show it. “If I weren’t in the military. A small artillery, I mean, maybe I would have been investing my life and soul not to what is to come, but here,” his hands moved a little, wanting to gesture whatever he wanted to, but stayed. “Here.” He said again, and it was enough.
“A clergyman,” Robespierre said, every syllable stopping cold at the implication. What was a revolution more than a gyre turning and turning in and around themselves? “Devoting yourself to god.”
“To power,” Saint-Just replied. “To nobility. To aristocracy.”
“You don’t believe in god,” he said. It was not a question.
Saint-Just tilted his head as if it were one anyway. His smile was one of contempt, toward him or himself or whatnot, but he was smiling. Saint-Just was never known to be beautiful, and his smile less so. His eyes flickered, and this time it was not Robespierre’s knees that buckled, but he felt weak. He had never felt weaker than this instant at this sight.
Saint-Just on his knees, murmuring a lost tread of latin to their intertwined hands.
Vox Dei, he whispered to his fingertips. Imago Dei, Lux Dei. I know you as I know—
“Saint-Just,” he warned. He shook their hands away, Saint-Just had now his hands clasped softly on his thighs, putting his head on Robespierre’s breeches. He squirmed, The other backed down, his curls falling to the ground.
“I am not what you think I am, Saint-Just,” he said. It was odd, how his countenance remained proud and defiant even if he was almost prostrating himself to the floor. The building shone, and the light was only a trick.
“What I am then?” A sound. Saint-Just’s hand closing in once again. “What I am if you are not what you are?”
Robespierre understood the question. For the first time, he wished he didn’t. He braced himself. The breeches were loose. Saint-Just’s lips were wet.
“Satan,” he said, then, in one breathless wonder at Saint-Just hollowed cheeks, the warmth of his lips. And for a moment, that freely they stood who stood, and fell who fell.
Better to reign in Hell, than to serve in Heaven.
Robespierre only knew that he liked the glistening lips, and the rest mattered more to the prayer than to the object of praying. Skin hovered on skin, the sound of it a sin.
Saint-Just stood, woolly. He didn’t bother to clean his mouth, but he wasn’t as disheveled as Robespierre. His perruque was in the wrong place behind his ears. Saint-Just helped him to adjust it, his thin fingers brushing past the lobe.
It stayed there for a second too long and Saint-Just blinked, said, (his breath tasted like himself), “Take me.”
Robespierre staggered. “Uh,” he said helpfully. The celling was too big and too much for both of them.
“Take me, citizen,” Saint-Just repeated with the same fervor and confidence in the Convention, unwavering in his beliefs, bold in his proclamations. “Tell me who I really am.”
And this was a lie, he knew. What he meant was, take me, I will show you who you are, let me take you apart and destroy you. Let me. Let me.
“There is nothing holy in here,” he said, and let his lips taste himself along the way. Let me, he said, and Robespierre let him. He will always let him.
Saint-Just’s back was on the floor, gold lines beneath him. His high cravat discarded on the floor. Everything had fallen back to where it had begun. He kissed him on the collarbone, then deeper, then farther, then more. Saint-Just was that sea-wine he would gladly drown into, and Robespierre never could handle alcohol more than a one at a time.
“Who am I,” Saint-Just asked, the commanding tone in his voice almost thoughtless. “Tell me.”
“Louis-Antoine de Saint-Just,” he said, his judgment clouding his voice. He kept kissing down on that one spot beneath his neck, it distracted him.
“Without the prefix,” he breathed around the word. A moan.
“Without the prefix,” Robespierre answered, and he suddenly realized. The church. The light. The kiss. This was more than intimacy. It was a declaration in everything that was alive and spiritual in this abbey. It was a warning. An insult.
This was a political act.
Saint-Just wanted to spit on god, so he kissed him instead.
And he let him. He will let him wherever he need. Saint-Just will always get whatever he wants, and it was okay, he thought. I will let him.
“I know you, Maximilien,” Saint-Just said when they were some tangled limbs and wasted desire, he looked comfortable beneath his weight, not it was a lot. “But you are too quiet.”
“I am used to quiet,” Robespierre said, his glasses a little fuzzy. He buried his head in the crook of his neck. “I am not used to this.”
He sensed nails softly scrapping his back. It tickled. “I never liked my name,” a whisper, “I never liked yours as well.”
“Because of the prefix?”
“The distinction,” he said. “The differences.”
“We are in a church,” he hinted. Saint-Just laughed, a broken cord from a broken chorus. “You can change it. What do you want me to call you?”
“Citizen,” his tongue tasted like blood. He wondered if he had bit on it or Saint-Just did it himself. Saint-Just always bleed some place or another. On the fingertip, near the eyes, unnoticeable. He had a face of self-contained pain, as if he was facing death at any minute. Robespierre flushed and blushed again. He was going mad.
“Citizen, then,” Robespierre complied. And he took him.
“All men are equal by nature and before the law,” Saint-Just recited, his pupils blown. The last word swirled and straightened around like a whiff of a grapeshot. “And, ah.” He closed his eyes, gasping.
“Law is the free and in detriment the righteous expression of the general will—“ he provided.
“Solemn,” he said. “Law is the free and solemn expression of the general will.”
“You’re silly.”
The sweat made his hair look like a ruffled cat, an untamed beast. “I wrote it.”
“These scared and inalienable rights,” Robespierre said, “—citizen.”
Saint-Just arched and sighed and loved. He was reburied and reborn, Robespierre thought, scared at the sole reminder. He was providing sanctity of his name to his deity. It was a holy act. It was a political statement, and with skins slapping against each other, it sounded like commitment, sin, and revolution.
It was an armistice. A treaty to be burned into flesh, territories to be claimed, and signatures to seal into law.
And he let him, surrendered in unconditional terms. Robespierre was never a soldier.
“I devote myself to the Revolution,” he said, his tongue suddenly spontaneous and loose. “I plan on marrying Élénore.”
Saint-Just sat, folding his shoulders. He talked, too. His words bouncing and shaking, “These two don’t have any substantial bind between them, citizen,” he smiled, soft, with uneven teeth. “But it is not unheard of, what you just said. Paris is very curious about you.”
“They are curious about a lot of things.”
“They are,” Saint-Just said. His naked shoulders touching his. It was a mess. “They are.”
“What do you mean?”
“It doesn’t mean anything.” The shoulders. Bodies. It was not what he meant to do. Their hands touch. And this, maybe this was something.
—Absolutely nothing. The entwined limbs. I would give for having absolutely nothing. His hair trickling his cheek. I stay, I stay, I stay.
“You’re not apologizing now,” Saint-Just said, amusement in his tone. He lifted his head, showing the bites on his neck. Are there blood?
“Not this time,” Robespierre answered. Someone kissed another. He relaxed into it, just for a moment, and thought he meant it, a little.
The army had taken over, it was never a battle to begin with. He lost, and he stayed.
I stay.