Chapter Text
When Grantaire answers the knock at his door, he finds a young girl waiting outside with a message. She has an old cockade pinned to her shirt, probably dating all the way back to '89—some of the runners have taken to wearing them, as a sign that they're on 'official business.' He hands her a coin, and she hands him a letter—scarcely more than a sentence in length, asking Grantaire to come to the newly-renamed Palace of Liberty. The note is signed with only a capital E, but even that is hardly necessary. Grantaire dons his coat and steps out into the humid warmth of summer.
In the weeks since the revolution, the palace has undergone significant alterations, though traces of its royal origin are still evident in gilt and marble. There are watchmen at the gate, their battered armor a sharp contrast to the shiny brass and peacock feathers of the old royal guard. They nod at Grantaire in passing, and he slips inside just as the rain begins to fall.
Enjolras has taken a former minister's chambers for his office, with a heavy cherry-wood desk whose sturdiness Grantaire dreams of testing. Perhaps today will give them the opportunity.
They have had little time together in the past weeks. A stolen kiss in an empty corridor, a smile across the vast expanse of a meeting room. They all have been busy, even Grantaire—he does not resent the Republic for stealing Enjolras' attention away from him. In the heady dawn after the barricades, Enjolras had asked him to stay, and he means to do so. Grantaire has learned to be patient; this tumult is a temporary thing.
The office door is open when he arrives. Most of the desk's surface is taken up by stacks of books. Enjolras is bent over the only clear space, peering at a letter as he scratches his response on the page beside it. His brow is furrowed in concentration or disapproval—without context, it's difficult to tell the difference.
Grantaire raps on the door-frame. "You called, my lord?"
Enjolras doesn't rise to the teasing title. "Thank you for coming." He finishes his sentence, then lays the pen aside and stands up. But instead of crossing the room to Grantaire, he turns around to look out the window, hands clasped behind his back.
The window overlooks a street that runs alongside the palace, full of people hurrying past in the warm summer rain. Grantaire can barely see Enjolras' reflection in the glass. He couldn't guess at his expression, but nothing about his posture suggests happiness. This is not a social call, and Grantaire reluctantly abandons his ideas about the desk.
"Are you aware of our youngest friend's recent...antics?" Enjolras asks, without turning around.
Grantaire frowns. "I haven't heard anything lately." Which is cause for concern in its own right. Gavroche has been in unofficial training with the Thieves' Guild for more than a year now, in the hopes of earning a scholarship based on his considerable merits. He's good at his work, but there are always dangers involved in such training.
"It seems he was assigned to break into a rival guild's office and steal some sort of identifiable item from within. I was concerned, to say the least, because I'm well aware of how...cut-throat certain of the guilds can be. But I'm led to believe that these exercises are met with less than the typical amount of force, if the apprentice should be caught."
"Interesting," Grantaire says blandly, like he hadn't once been tasked with whacking the leader of the Merchants' Guild over the head with a paint-filled pig's bladder.[1] "I assume he succeeded, or you'd have sent me to bail him out of a watch-house."
Enjolras finally turns away from the window to face Grantaire. "He borrowed an item from the office of the Assassins' Guild. Quite an accomplishment, I'm told."
From the Guildmaster's office? Grantaire fights the urge to grin. Nobody's managed that in living memory. Gavroche will be a master thief one day, if he can manage to avoid making enemies. He makes a mental note to send someone over to headquarters with a discreet sum of money and instructions that will keep anyone from taking out their wounded pride on the kid.
He's picturing the office in his mind's eye, wondering what tome or trinket had snared Gavroche's attention enough to pilfer it, when he recognizes a black-bound book lying closed on the desk in front of Enjolras. Grantaire's heart sinks like a stone in the Seine.
He has the ledger.
"You have the ledger," he says, his throat dry. "I thought that was a myth. A...ledger-nd, if you will."
The pun fails to coax a smile from Enjolras, and that tells Grantaire at least half of what he needs to know.
The ledger has not left the guild office in centuries. It contains page after page of assassins and their assignments, all the way back to the middle ages, each coded in the traditional red ink. The targets are not named; all contracts are given verbally by the guildmaster, to preserve secrecy, and signed by the assassin as their acceptance. Still, the ledger contains dangerous, even damning information, if one knows how to read it. It could throw the city into chaos, to say nothing of what it will do to the people in this room.
"And did you open the box, Pandora?" Grantaire asks.
Enjolras rolls his eyes. "I hardly see how one could be expected to do otherwise. After all, the Assassins' Guild has been responsible for more violence and disaster than every other guild in this city combined. For a sanctioned organization to quite literally set a price on human lives is—"
"A gross oversimplification of their purpose?" Grantaire supplies. It isn't the first time they've had this argument, and by this point he could goad Enjolras in his sleep. "And don't start with that disband-the-guilds nonsense again. It's not a good idea to irritate the people who make a career out of removing irritants with extreme prejudice."
But instead of arguing the point, Enjolras just sighs. "Well. I suppose you would know better than I," he says.
"Pardon?"
Enjolras gives him a hard look. "You can keep playing coy, or you can tell me the truth. It'll come out the same in the end, it's just a matter of how frustrated we'll both be when it happens."
"What's the point? If you already know, then I fail to see why you need me to say anything at all."
He shakes his head. "I saw your name, Grantaire. Or your...code-name, I suppose. But I would know the flourish on that R anywhere."
"Yes, I expect you would."
Silence settles around them. Perhaps Enjolras expects something more from him, some explanation or apology, but Grantaire is already standing on thin, creaking ice. He's not about to test another step.
"You lied to me," Enjolras says at last. "You told me you'd trained at the Fools' Guild."
"I told you I failed out of the Fools' Guild, and that's true. I had all the makings of a court jester, but I couldn't get the hang of gentle mockery. Grantaire, they said, if you're going to use your wit as a razor, you might as well find someone to hone it for you. So they sent me over to the Assassins' Guild just to see if I'd make it. Heard it cost the Head Fool a fortune when I actually graduated."
He's rambling, and he knows it, but every moment he's speaking is another moment that postpones the inevitable.
"You're an assassin," Enjolras says. "At first I couldn't guess why you hadn't told us. You always claimed to want to help, yet you hid your greatest skill. But then I deciphered the notations in the ledger. You're listed as on assignment."
"That's what the ledger's for. Recording who's busy and who's available to take on a contract."
"And according to the ledger you're busy. Doing what, exactly?"
"It's a guild of assassins. I should think the answer to that is self-evident."
"Did you kill the king?"
"Thought that was a suicide."
"And couldn't any assassin worth his training make a death look that way? But if that was your assignment, then the ledger would show that your work was completed. And it doesn't."
"Behind on their paperwork, I imagine," Grantaire says lightly. "It does pile up, you know." Lots of things pile up at the Assassins' Guild. Bodies, for instance.
"Is that so? Or were you assigned to kill someone else?"
Grantaire is not brave. His people strike from the shadows and fade away again. Discretion is the better part of valor, after all, and assassins are very, very discreet.
So when Enjolras meets his eyes, Grantaire wants nothing more than to run. To crawl under the heavy desk, or into the blown-glass depths of a bottle—anywhere he can escape that look. He cannot lie to Enjolras, but to tell him the truth is an impossibility.
"Who was your target, Grantaire?"
He closes his eyes. "Don't make me say it."
"Grantaire—"
"You already know. You just want a confession."
"I want the truth. I need to hear it."
"You," Grantaire says, the word scarcely more than a breath. "The target was you." He opens his eyes in time to see Enjolras' expression crack, an echo of the hollow ache in Grantaire's chest. There's no coming back from this.
"And how long have you had this contract?"
Maybe Enjolras was right to ask for a confession. Now that Grantaire knows that everything is ruined, the words come more easily. "From the start," he says. "The contract was what brought me to the Musain that first night."
Enjolras betrays himself with a flinch. "Then none of this was real. Nothing we said to each other, nothing we did. Your very presence among us was a fabrication."
"No. That isn't true." He's lost Enjolras and he knows it, but he refuses to let him believe that everything was a lie. "I gave up every intention of fulfilling my contract a week after I started coming to your meetings. I was in denial, of course—telling myself that I was protecting my cover, waiting for an opportunity. But I swear to you, I'd given up on the Guild, long before we ever kissed."
Enjolras arches a brow, the only sign that he hasn't turned to stone. "You'd given up on the Guild? Judging by the ledger, you seem to have neglected to mention that to them."
"Of course I didn't tell them. They might have assigned someone else to the contract. Someone who didn't—care about you. And then I would have had to kill them, which is considered very impolite."
"It would be nice if I could believe that. But how can I? How can I trust anything you say, when you've been lying to us—to me—all along?"
"What will it take for you to believe me? Name it, and I'll do it. Anything. Because I lov—"
"Don't say that." Enjolras' voice snaps, brittle to the point of breaking. "Not now."
Grantaire swallows the rest of his protest. He drops his gaze down to the floor. The boards are darkened with layers of varnish, paler in the center where some plush rug must have once lain. "What happens now?" he asks, not daring to look up. He's all but confessed to regicide, so imprisonment and hanging isn't entirely off the table, but that doesn't even matter to him now.
Enjolras sits back down at his desk and picks up his pen. "I don't know. I need to think. Will you go? Please?"
The dismissal somehow hurts more than anything else. There's nothing left for Grantaire to do, so he leaves.