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and I swear, there’s a lot of vegetables out there, that crop up for air,
and yeah, I never thought that we were two peas in a pod,
until you suddenly bloomed, and I knew,
that I’ll always love you.
(oh, I’ll always love you, too.)-- Honey and the Bee by Owl City
Combeferre is late to kindergarten.
It’s the second day, so it’s not quite as embarrassing as it could be, but still – Combeferre hates calling attention to himself, and now he will have to march into the classroom ten minutes after first bell, face burning the color of an overripe strawberry. His mother tries to console him, apologizing over and over for the delay as she runs stop signs and speeds through intersections – all to no avail.
He’s still pouting when he peeks his head around the corner of the open door – all the class can see at first is a pair of wide, blue eyes blinking owlishly from behind round glasses.
“Hello, little man,” Miss Fantine says kindly, waving at him from her seat at the front of the room. “Would you like to join us?”
Combeferre nods hesitantly, then inches around the door into the classroom. The other children are coloring, it seems – seventeen heads are bent over white sheets of paper, small, red chairs pushed right up against the short tables. Combeferre scans the room, head swiveling back and forth as he searches for an empty seat.
Finally, he spots an unoccupied chair near the back of the room, next to a small boy with wild, chocolate-brown curls. Combeferre makes his way over slowly, careful not to bump into anyone, then pulls his chair out with a quiet squeal and sits down. He’s not entirely sure what to do – there’s some extra paper in the center of the table, decorated with outlines of suns and beaches and sea creatures, but he doesn’t see any extra crayons.
Someone taps Combeferre on the shoulder. He turns to see the curly-haired boy smiling at him – and something warm uncurls and settles in the pit of his stomach.
“Do you want to share with me?” the boy says.
Combeferre’s eyes go wide. He was late, and – and he took a seat without asking, and yet still –
“Really?” he asks.
“’Course,” the other boy replies. He holds out a handful of crayons in a variety of colors – red, blue, green, pink, orange. Combeferre takes them – and wonders why a strange feeling runs up his arm when their hands touch.
“I’m Courfeyrac, by the way,” the boy – Courfeyrac – adds after a moment.
“Combeferre,” Combeferre replies.
Courfeyrac repeats the name, as though trying it out on his tongue, then returns to coloring. Or – well, not coloring, as Combeferre realizes after a couple of minutes, but drawing his own picture on the back side of the paper.
“What’re – what’re you drawing?” Combeferre asks.
Courfeyrac turns to him, grin wider than before. “I’m drawing you.”
“Me?” Combeferre peers over the smaller boy’s shoulder to find a lopsided oval with crooked glasses, a too-large nose, and a small smile, all done in bright yellow.
Nobody has ever done anything like that for Combeferre before.
“Why me?” he wonders aloud.
“Because you’re my new best friend,” Courfeyrac answers – confidently, easily, as though it’s the most natural thing in the world.
“Oh. Okay.” Combeferre smiles – and he doesn’t feel so bad about being late any more.
twenty years later.
“So, R,” Courfeyrac says, pausing to steal a handful of popcorn from the bowl in the center of the table, “I hear your kid sister just hit the big two-one.”
Grantaire moves the bowl to the left, out of Courfeyrac’s reach (they haven’t even started the movie yet, he can’t eat all of it) before answering. “Yeah, she did. I took her drinking and everything – it’s nice that it’s finally legal.”
“Has she showed you her tattoo yet?” Joly pipes up from the floor beneath Courfeyrac’s feet. All of the others turn in Grantaire’s direction at the notion – it’s been a while since anyone in their group has had soulmate news, so this is exciting.
Unfortunately, Grantaire only shakes his head, saying, “She wouldn’t show it to me.”
“You know what that means,” Bahorel tells him, grinning. “Either it’s teeth-rottingly sweet or horribly embarrassing.”
“Can’t be worse than her brother’s,” Courfeyrac replies.
Grantaire shrugs, the first couple of words of his long, angry speech of a tattoo peeking up above the line of his T-shirt. “I don’t know, I kind-of like mine.”
Courfeyrac snorts and falls back against the couch – he ends up resting against Jehan, who immediately pulls a Sharpie out of somewhere or other and begins to doodle on Courfeyrac’s arm. “I wish I could say the same thing about mine,” he mutters.
He rolls back the sleeve of his shirt to examine his tattoo for the hundred millionth time – “really?” in small, neat script, curled around his wrist.
“I mean,” he says, more loudly than before, “really? Really what? Really why? Really in what kind of a tone of voice? Sarcastic? Amazed? Concerned?”
His friends have all heard this rant so many times, they probably have it memorized; they’re no longer sympathetic, not even a little.
“I think ‘really?’ is a pretty common response to you in general, Courf,” Grantaire tells him in a very serious voice.
Joly nods, then pokes Courfeyrac’s outstretched foot and goes, “Really?” in a high-pitched, squeaky voice.
“Really?” Bossuet adds, in an exaggerated English accent.
“Really?” Bahorel chimes in, in a low growl.
“Really?” Eponine contributes, in a whiny, nasally voice.
Soon enough, Courfeyrac is surrounded by a chorus of “really?”s from all directions – even Marius is pressured into joining (by Cosette, the evil witch) and leans over to shout it directly into his ear, which hurts, thank you very much. And then, recovering from that traumatizing experience, he discovers that Feuilly has stolen Jehan’s Sharpie and scrawled, “really?” on Courfeyrac’s shin, which is honestly too much.
“All right, that’s enough!” he shouts. He grabs a pillow and starts beating them off one by one – it’s a hard fight, impossible odds, but he is a fighter and he will not be defeated by shrieking “really?” demons – he fought off a dog that was trying to steal Marius’ wallet once so he’s basically invincible – he pushes back first Grantaire, then Bossuet, then –
Crash!
Oh, shit. That was definitely not a person that Courfeyrac just hit.
“What’s going on in here?” Combeferre asks, coming into the room with the second bowl of popcorn (they usually need at least three.)
“Um, Courf broke a lamp,” Joly replies nervously.
Combeferre raises a single judgmental eyebrow. “Really?” he says. (And something about that “really?” – perfectly bland, perfectly callous, perfectly Combeferre – echoes in Courfeyrac’s mind and makes his heart beat double time.) “The first time I convince Enjolras to host movie night at our place, and you break a lamp?” He shakes his head. “Truly astounding. I should have you kicked out, Courfeyrac.”
Courfeyrac pouts and flails dramatically, careful not to hit any lamps this time. “But Feeeeerre!” he protests. “You love me!”
And once more, the eyebrow performs its sacred duty.
“Somehow, I doubt that very much,” Bahorel says, laughing.
“But it’s true!” Courfeyrac turns to him, hands on hips – the love between him and his two best friends is a fact that should not ever be disputed, ever. Ever. “He’s loved me ever since we met in kindergarten.”
“Kindergarten?” Eponine asks. “He’s put up with you for that long? I’m impressed.”
“On the second day of school, he came in late and I shared my crayons with him,” Courfeyrac explains. “So he basically owes me a lifelong debt.”
Combeferre rolls his eyes, deposits the popcorn on the table, and is about to go search for his roommate (last seen working on a paper definitely not as important as movie night) when Joly gasps.
Joly gasps – and all eyes in the room turn to him, as though a spotlight has suddenly been switched on above his head.
“Combeferre,” he says, “Combeferre, your tattoo – isn’t it about sharing?”
And the world stops.
Courfeyrac thinks back, and – he’s in that classroom again, he can see the bright colors and the posters on the walls and a shy boy in glasses who looked so nervous, why is he so nervous, he has nothing to be afraid of, he should be smiling.
He should be smiling, Courfeyrac realizes. He should always be smiling.
Something clicks into place. Courfeyrac takes a shuddering breath, and the world starts turning again.
He stands hurriedly – knocking into several of his friends in his haste to get his feet on the ground – then crosses the room to Combeferre, one step at a time. Combeferre is standing frozen, blue eyes wide behind black-framed glasses.
“Kindergarten,” Courfeyrac says. “You came in late, you didn’t know where to sit –”
Combeferre nods so quickly, his glasses almost fall off. “And you let me sit next to you, you gave me your crayons –”
“You looked lost, and I didn’t want you to be lost –”
“Do you want to share with me?”
“Really?”
Combeferre pulls down his shirt to reveal a short string of words trailing across his collarbone, letters in messy block print, almost as though written by a child’s hand. Courfeyrac has seen it before, of course – he’s seen all of his friends’ tattoos – but it’s something else to realize that it’s for him, that those words are something he said, twenty years ago – now written in ink on Combeferre’s skin, for all the world (or only Courfeyrac) to see.
He reaches out a hand and traces across the words – lightly, delicately, but Combeferre gasps all the same.
“Courfeyrac,” he whispers. And it sounds different from how anyone’s ever said Courfeyrac’s name before – it sounds awed, amazed, reverent.
“Combeferre,” Courfeyrac replies. His hand stops, resting on Combeferre’s heart.
“We’re idiots, aren’t we?” Combeferre asks.
“Yeah,” Courfeyrac says. “Idiots.”
He leans in – closes the distance. It’s easy, it’s natural, it’s what they’ve been waiting for all their lives.
They break apart, both of them beaming uncontrollably. Courfeyrac doesn’t think it’s physically possible for him ever to be sad again.
“Do you want us to wait for you to start the movie?” someone calls from the other side of the room, accompanied by hoots and raucous laughter.
Courfeyrac holds his breath.
“No,” Combeferre says. “Don’t bother.”
He grabs Courfeyrac’s wrist – the really? beneath his fingers suddenly the best tattoo anyone could ever wish for – and leads him out of the room.
a couple of hours later.
“I’m in love with you,” Courfeyrac says, breathless.
Combeferre grins and presses their foreheads together. “Really?”
Courfeyrac can’t decide whether to hit him or kiss him. (Luckily, Combeferre makes the decision for him.)