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Beep. Beep. Beep.
The sound of Enjolras’ heart monitor was a strange kind of comfort R had grown used to over the past few weeks.
It was right to say that he hadn’t been okay for a while; he’d been slower, and R had watched what were once swift and quick reflexes get sluggish and he’d found himself completing more and more tasks for his husband.
Not that R didn’t often feel an ache under his skin these days. Not that the cold didn’t feel just that little bit more piercing, and when wasn’t there a chill?
But most days felt like summer, even in the cold depths of winter, in their home of forty years with Enjolras by his side. It had all been a day dream he’d struggled to wrap his head around, even as he sat now by his bedside, swaddled in blankets himself and lounging in his armchair.
But, he supposed, even that had to come to an end someday. Even now, Grantaire ran from the truth, so he just listened to the heart monitor go and was grateful each time he woke up in the morning to its gentle beeping.
Enjolras himself was refusing to sleep. Even age couldn’t slow him down, and despite the sun having set long ago, he was reading in the dim light of his bedside lamp.
In it, and in watching the way it cast shadows across his face, R felt his heart ache and a memory stir. He easily recalled the first time they’d done this, sat hand in hand with Enj reading and Grantaire pretending not to watch. Back then, his heart was in his throat the whole time, fingers slightly trembling against the other’s, scared to break the tentative moment between them, scared that Enjolras would realise his mistake any moment. Now, presently, it wasn’t because he thought Enj might take it all back at any second.
Now, it was because to look at his husband would be to accept the truth that hung grim in the air, like a shadow that threatened to dip at any second and take everything that made R’s life bright and worth living.
It had already taken his friends over the years, in many different ways, and they’d both mourned and lost so much already. He couldn’t take the final heartbreak he knew was coming.
His hand squeezed the one Enjolras wasn’t using to hold a book, and he pretended not to feel the trembling there, the quake beneath the man’s paler skin.
Yes, Enjolras hadn’t been okay for a while, but then he’d fallen down the cafe stairs trying to balance too many things in his arms whilst hopping steps, as if he wasn’t already harbouring the scars and consequences of several injuries past.
Like R hadn’t seen him get hurt, and vice versa, so many times.
Now here they were, getting old, older still, and R’s heart was still just as fragile as it was the day Enj asked him out.
He ran his thumb over the wedding band around Enjolras’ finger, and though he didn’t look up, it had appeared that Grantaire’s internal musing had been too loud and Enjolras knew him far too well to let it slide.
“You’re quiet,” He said. A hint of a smile lay on his lips, and the lines smiling over the years had stretched with it. "As Courf would say; penny for your thoughts?”
“You don’t wanna know,” R huffed, shifting in the armchair to lean over and press his lips over the back of Enj’s hand.
“You know I always do,” Enj protested, finally lowering his book, placing it neatly on his blanketed lap. “You’ve been worried since I landed myself in here, and it’s been four weeks,”
“Four weeks? Damn, time flies when you’re hooked up to at least three machines,”
That was also true. Grantaire had specifically been avoiding looking at those. The heart monitor was about the only one he could stand seeing there, where the tube to his nose, the various needles and wires - they made his stomach churn.
But Enjolras just laughed. A weak sound, but a sound that made R’s heart flutter just the same, every single time.
“So, that’s what’s bothering you,”
“No, it’s this armchair. I’m getting some major arse cramp,”
The snort that came from Enjolras was a heavenly sound, and in a glimpse of it, R saw the youth still within him.
For a second, he wanted to believe that this had a happy ending, somehow, but his eyes couldn’t deny what they saw.
And what they saw was the coughing fit Enj immediately had shortly after, which shook his body so terribly that R made to stand, clutching his hand tightly. Enjolras raised his own hand, stopping him.
He let him regain his composure a bit, and R looked away, able to feel his heart in his chest as if it were beneath the very floorboards where he sat; a reminder of what was to come, pounding loudly.
“R,” Enjolras began, and his voice sounded hoarse. He lay back at the angle the hospital bed was set at. At least this room was private and they hadn’t been shoved into an overcrowded ward. “We don’t have to talk about it. If...you want platitudes, I can do that. I can tell you that I’m going to be fine, and that I’ll be out in a week. Just like I said four weeks ago.”
“Enj-,” R grimaced. “C’mon, don’t-,”
“But R, look at you. Look at me,”
When R didn’t, Enjolras let out a slow exhale.
“Please,”
When R looked up, Enj took a moment to look into the face of the man he’d fallen in love with so long ago, and who he still loved just as passionately, just as desperately.
It was why he wouldn’t spare him the truth.
“You’re tired,” He continued. “I’m tired. That’s the truth, R. I’m so, so tired, and I won’t pretend I’m not. Maybe not now, but...but at some point, we’re both going to-,”
“I know.” Grantaire interrupted, and it felt like his own voice was hoarse now. “I know, look? I know,” His breathing hitched uncomfortably in his throat. “Enj, don’t paint me a picture, I get it,”
“Why do we always have this conversation? I feel like we must have had it a thousand times at this point,” Enjolras said, but he wasn’t angry. When R studied him, he looked weary, but fondly exasperated if anything.
R took the lead like a dog waiting for his master to say it was okay to follow him wherever he went. He smiled softly and brought Enjolras’ hand to his lips, leaning the weight of his upper body against the bed. He felt Enjolras’ hand take a perch in his hair, threading through R’s greying curls.
“You’re smiling, so I’m off the hook.”
“You were never on the hook, R.”
A comfortable pause passed between them, silence a blanket of comfort as they sat there shrouded in it.
“Come up here,” Enjolras eventually broke it, free hand patting the space beside him on what was, admittedly, a large bed. Or maybe he was just small.
A joke played on Grantaire’s mind, but he let it pass by without comment as he, with difficulty, climbed up next to the other man and lay by his side. He pressed his face against Enjolras’ neck, exhaling out air against it. If Enj winced in pain, R pretended not to notice.
He felt so breakable that R wanted to give in to the pressure in his nose that always said he was about to cry, that signalled the panic that he was having internally.
“Do you remember that one time you fell into the fountain in Trafalgar square?”
“What?” R, startled out of his thoughts, responded.
“Well, I say fell, it was more like you kind of...stumbled backwards.”
“Oh...yeah,” R slowly said, letting out a humoured snort, closing his eyes as he leant against his husband. “Shit, you mean the time I pulled Joly in with me and he nearly had a hypochondria induced heart attack?”
“Didn’t he say he was having several heart attacks, all at once?”
“Yeah, and he’s a doctor.”
There was a pause, and R’s smile slipped, just a little.
“Was.”
“Do you remember what happened afterwards?” Enjolras said quietly, and R realised that he’d let his eyes fall shut.
“Uh,”
“Dementia settling in already?”
“Is that a joke, oh mighty leader?”
“I am wild,” Enjolras laughed, eyelashes fluttering, echoing the words R had once said to him.
After his heart had settled, having missed a beat, Grantaire finally continued.
“Yeah, you came over and you offered your hand out to me. And you smiled at me,”
“When your hand was in mine, I just knew,”
Once again, Enjolras had managed to startle R into a moment of silence.
“What?”
“Did I never tell you that?” Enjolras laughed again, the sound getting softer. “When our hands touched, I felt it. I knew that I’d be holding your hand like this, until the moment I die.”
“Hey, I promised that, didn’t I?” R almost laughed with him, but instead, let out another breathless sound instead. He kissed the wedding ring on Enjolras’ finger. “Til death, and all that. You’re never getting rid of me.”
“I don’t ever plan to,” Enjolras hummed, and R could tell that his earlier statement of being tired was true.
He, himself, was exhausted. Late, sleepless and uncomfortable nights had led to his body not feeling up to its usual stuff, and even then, lately, it hadn’t been that great anyway.
So, when he felt Enj’s chest rise and fall slowly, his lips slightly parted in sleep, he let himself succumb to his own aching bones and let darkness slip over him.
----
3:45am.
That was what the clock said in the corner of the room when R’s eyes finally and blearily opened.
He never could quite adjust to the darkness properly, and as he peeled himself from the empty hospital bed, he tried to blink the sleep out of his eyes and looked around for Enjolras. The nearby en-suite bathroom looked empty, so he wasn’t there, nor should he have even been out of bed in the first place.
That was the first murky thought to occur to R in his sleep addled state, as if wading through a dream.
Enjolras couldn’t physically leave his bed - he couldn’t even stand unaided, though in previous weeks, he had certainly tried.
The second thought was the heart monitor. It wasn’t there. In fact, there was no sound at all. The entire space around him was silent. Usually, there was the bustle of nurses trying to be quiet outside the wards, a hum of medical machinery at least.
R moved to his feet quickly, but found that as he started to feel panic rise up within him, it was smothered down by the comforting presence of the darkness around him.
Even so, he could still move. Eerily well, it seemed. Better than he ever had in years.
As it was occurring to him how completely fucked up this was, he caught sight of himself in the mirror of the nearby sink. In it, a younger Grantaire peered back. He even had his beanie on - it was a marvel that his friends had put up with him wearing that so often.
“Ok, so,” He began, and even his voice sounded surreal to him. “Weird dream that I’m an immortal vampire or something, got it.”
The lamp nearby flickered on.
“Or a haunted house dream?” He wrinkled his nose, brow furrowing.
Just then, the echo of barking wound its way down the hallway, and R instinctively followed it to the doorway, peering round. There was something so familiar in the sound, so innate to him that it made his heart break.
“...Bojangles?” He felt his voice catch in his throat once more, eyes widening. How long had it been since he’d heard that? The sound called to him, and the first few steps he took were heavy.
And then, like the bursting of the organ in his chest, he ran.
He followed the sound down winding hospital hallways, skidding round corners with surprising ease, until he came to a set of double doors.
Palms flat against them, he went to push, but stopped. An ice cold sensation running up his arms and a burst of light blinding him as it peeked through even just the slightest crack he’d made as he’d pushed at the heavy set doors had halted him in his tracks.
The barking stopped, a distant echo of what it was, but he knew it led behind those doors.
Not just that, but whispers. He could feel the vibrations of familiar voices against his fingertips, could sense that the people he’d spent missing for years were right there, so close, because he heard the melodical laugh of Courfeyrac. He heard the ghost of a pun from Ferre, he could hear his friends drinking and falling over themselves in their endeavour to enjoy their lives together.
All of that, like the promise of a great feast, was behind these doors.
But one thing was missing.
“You’re here,” Enjolras’ voice sounded from behind him. “Took your time.”
“My time?” R echoed as he turned, catching sight of the man he’d fallen in love with, looking as he had the very day he had realised it.
“Four hours, exactly. That’s how long you kept me waiting,” Enjolras pressed on, covering some of the small distance between them with his footsteps, which caused the floor to ripple as if it were water.
To anyone else, his words would have sounded cruel, but R saw the smile on his lips, bright and as passionate as he was. He saw the gleam of humour in his blue eyes; he saw the love in the way he brought a hand up to cup R’s cheek, thumb running over his beard.
Then, the hand lowered and took R’s, and suddenly, R was looking at Enjolras as he was forty or so years ago.
He was wearing a suit. So was Grantaire. It clicked to him in one moment.
This was their wedding day. Of course, because R’s suit was white and Enjolras’ black, with red hidden away, as was his signature trademark.
“Remember this?”
“Hard to forget when Marius cried so loud it nearly made me laugh mid-vow,” R grinned, unable to help the way he relaxed a little with his hands pressed into those of his husband.
“Yes,” Enjolras mock pulled a face, before laughing himself. “Doing what Marius does best, I suppose,”
“And me doing what I usually do best - ruining the moment,” Grantaire snorted, before leaning his head in, pressing his forehead to Enjolras’. “You never got taller, huh?”
“Like now,”
Suddenly, they were both laughing, hands raised and fingers linked.
“What is this moment, exactly?” R finally said, quietly, once his laughter had died down. “Did I die and go to heaven?”
Enjolras’ expression softened drastically, looking to R firmly but with a sadness in the deep waters of his eyes.
“I don’t know about heaven, but,”
“Uh-oh,”
Enjolras remained quiet, but the room they were in shifted. The door, with its beams of light fluttering out from under it, stayed, but suddenly, they were back in Enjolras’ ward room.
In the bed, two figures lay there, still. In the quiet, their hands remained together, interwoven. The dark-curled man had his head atop the blond’s chest.
“I didn’t want to go without you,” Enjolras said, glancing towards the nearby door, before back at the two lovers, frozen in time like the people of Pompeii in their own last moments.
“What happened?” R’s mouth opened and closed, searching for more to say.
“It doesn’t matter - we’re here now,” Enjolras smiled, gently, trying even now to reassure the other. “What matters next is that we take our next steps. Wherever they lead us, I want to go with you,”
Grantaire pressed his lips into a thin line, before looking up to Enjolras, able to see that he already knew the answer, and had known the answer, for years and years.
“You know I’ll go wherever you take me, my leader,” He smiled, slowly but surely. He let Enjolras take his hand.
As they approached that door, as Enjolras pressed his hand against it, R felt him squeeze his hand again and saw him look back at him.
“Do you know what’s going to happen?” R began, as their gazes locked. “If it’s like a whole afterlife deal, I wanna be able to high five Diomedes.”
“Of course that’s your goal for the afterlife,” Enjolras laughed, the sound better than whatever angels had in store for him now.
“Or, I get to be reincarnated as Marius’ left toe,”
“Stop.”
But he was laughing - even as he felt Enj pull him through that door, even as he felt every atom of himself connect to whatever lay beyond, he knew that each thread of whatever he was was connected to that hand that pulled him forward.
The knowledge that at every end of their lifespans together, in every world, ended with the touch of Enjolras’ hand would forever be enough for him.