Chapter Text
Monday 19th April - 17:34
“You know, Enjolras,” his therapist – Fantine – had said in that soft, thoughtful way that only therapists seemed to have truly mastered, “You don’t need to be afraid of letting loose once in a while. You have people who love you, who would never judge you for lowering your defences. Besides," she had said with a kind smile, "it’s not your job to protect others from your emotions. As long as you’re having fun and nobody’s getting hurt, there’s no reason to feel any amount of guilt for letting go of your responsibilities, even if it’s just for a while. What do you think about that?”
And what did he think about that? Everything she said had made sense, and yet Enjolras just couldn’t piece together the whole picture in his mind. Not for him. Not surrounded by his friends, regardless of their inherently supportive nature.
The mechanics, otherwise, seemed simple enough from what he could guess. How did his friends let loose? Broadly unclear, but alcohol seemed to be involved a decent proportion of the time. In Grantaire’s case, all of the time.
That - the actual figuring out of how exactly to "let loose", as Fantine had put it - was the easy part. The tricky part came in trying to find a bar in Paris that fit his very specific criteria for drinking establishments:
- The drinks are reasonably priced – even with a trust fund, rent in Paris isn’t exactly cheap.
- The bar isn’t seedy or tacky enough to be full of creeps or tourists – so no Irish themed pubs that’s for certain.
- Not one of the bars frequented by his friends – there’s no way he’s risking running into one of them while intoxicated, god knows what they’d think.
So, that left about two bars in the entirety of Paris.
One was two metro rides away, a station on which route had three flights of stairs and Sober Enjolras didn’t think Drunk Enjolras would appreciate that… perhaps he was overthinking this. The point is, he had his bar, and it was only one metro stop away. And the stairs were minimal. Can't forget the stairs.
***
Thursday 22nd April - 22:29
He'd always liked the soft, golden lighting the Musain had; a combination of the old lighting fixtures on the walls and the chandelier-style lights hanging from the ceiling – early 19th century, perhaps earlier, Feuilly and Grantaire had conspired to ensure everyone – and the streetlamps that flooded golden light into the café after dark.
Yeah, this was nothing like that.
The lighting was low and moody, and the music seemed to lean to the irritatingly pretentious side of depressing pop songs of days gone by. The Musain didn’t have music. Well, except for when one of his friends brought their instruments or, on one memorable occasion, when Grantaire, thinking everyone had already left, tried his hand at the old piano in the corner. The piano itself was dusty as all hell and probably incredibly out of tune, but the sounds Grantaire made with it? That music was so beautiful it made Enjolras’s own fingers itch to play for the first time in years. Fantine had once asked if that had been the moment when he’d realised he liked Grantaire as something other than a friend.
He would have walked out of the session right then and there if he hadn’t been too struck with realisation to move.
For all his apparent eloquence most of the time, Enjolras had only managed to string together some indignant objections before sighing and asking a listless “What am I supposed to do about it?” Well, of course, Fantine had been encouraging him to communicate his feelings ever since and Enjolras was beginning to feel sorry for the poor woman; he was obviously never going to talk about his feelings, certainly not these feelings.
“Oh god,” he accidentally groaned aloud, earning a couple of raised eyebrows from others sitting at the bar. Who knew drinking would make him maudlin like this?
Perhaps it was more what he was drinking. What did Grantaire usually drink? Being able to string together beautiful concertos while drunk seemed like a better state to be in than sentimental and, god forbid, pining.
Wine. Red wine, to be specific.
It wasn’t as strong as the vodka lemonades he’d made his way through so far – he’d started with a shot of straight vodka for the sake of efficiency but the taste made him want to vomit and so lemonade had been quickly added – and so he took his gauge for how much to drink from remembering Grantaire’s habits. A bottle seemed like a good place to start.
***
Still Thursday - 23:09
A bottle had not been a good place to start. Nope. Not at all. Within two glasses his legs had started to feel like jelly, though that hadn’t immediately been obvious until he had slipped off his stool in a graceless heap. Halfway through the bottle, his head was swimming and after three quarters it began to ache.
He stopped right after that, but the damage was done and the more he drank the more he started to think about how he got here. His therapy. Fantine. Grantaire. God, he was never following Grantaire’s example again. No matter how pretty his eyes were and how wonderful and talented he was at the piano and dancing and fencing and boxing and, oh, his art! Wow, his art was so wonderful. Sometimes, Enjolras almost wished he were jealous of Grantaire’s skill; it would make his growing interest in the man more emotionally manageable. But, sadly, he wasn’t jealous. Instead, the few times he’d seen the art he produced he felt something akin to both pride and curiosity and would’ve gladly stared at it for an hour if he didn’t think that it’d make him look intensely creepy.
God, he must have been losing his mind. Maybe this was just what he was like while drunk; pining and over-emotional. Probably time to leave, then.
Standing up was… an experience. He didn’t fall over this time, though - no matter how much he swayed at first - so Courfeyrac would say to count that as a win. Courf would also count it as a win that he managed to get off the metro at the right stop. Wow, Enjolras’s evening was just full of victories!
The metro station’s exit – and entrance technically, Enjolras was sure that if Jehan were here and equally as hammered they’d make a surprisingly intellectual comment about multitudes and the duality of man and refer to someone they called Uncle Walt (though when Enjolras had looked into it he’d become pretty certain that ‘Uncle Walt’ was actually poet Walt Whitman and that they had been referencing some angsty 1980’s film about poetry or something, god, Enjolras should talk to Prouvaire more often; they were always so fun) – came out just down the road from his and Combeferre’s place and right next to the tattoo parlour R sometimes worked at.
Wait. Ooh, maybe the maudlin stuff had been vodka residue. Maybe, this was how he reacted to red wine. With fantastic, brilliant, never-before-seen genius ideas just popping into his head without warning. And, wow, was this a fantastic idea!
***
Still Thursday - 23:48
The journey to the parlour was a bit of a blur, one moment he was loitering at the metro station exit and pondering how great his friends were and the next there was a bell jingling over his head and a woman behind a desk was raising a perfectly maintained eyebrow at him. “Can I help you?”
He nodded eagerly. “I want a tattoo of my friend’s artwork,” he had thought he’d spoken clearly and confidently, but either he was wrong about that, or the woman saw through him in a heartbeat anyway.
“What’s your name?” she asked, picking up a pen to write it down but very deliberately not taking her eyes off him for a moment. Rather belatedly he thought, Enjolras realised he’d forgotten that he was a tall man, visibly drunk on a Thursday night alone in a room with a woman and standing between her and the only visible exit to a well-lit area. If any of his female friends were here, they’d kick him so fast for not going in with that already in mind.
As quickly as his still rather jelly-ish limbs would allow, he shuffled over to sit in one of the waiting chairs opposite the door, leaving a clear path for the woman who was still watching him closely. “Enjolras,” he said with a smile that he hoped came across as more polite and friendly than creepy like he feared it would. A flash of realisation sped across her face and suddenly she seemed to relax, even looking as though she was having to school amusement off her face.
“Enjolras,” she said, smiling as she put down the pen without writing his name in the book on the desk in front of her, “Unfortunately I can’t tattoo another artist’s work without their permission. I assume it’s R’s you want?”
Enjolras nodded quickly and looked towards the designs covering the walls. Some of them, he recognised the style of from Combeferre’s gradually growing sleeve, others not so much. A couple, though, were so clearly Grantaire’s work that it took his breath away and he was speaking aloud before he realised. “I wish R was here. He’d understand. I should text him. Should I text him?” he turned to the woman again. “What’s your name?”
“Floréal. R’s my friend actually." She paused for a moment, smiling kindly. "Ferre too. I know he’s your emergency contact, would you like me to call him for you?”
Enjolras thought for several moments. On one hand, Ferre coming here would mean he could go home and his head was really beginning to ache and the nausea and dizziness were no joke. On the other, though, that would mean Ferre would see him drunk and ask questions about it and how it happened – though Enjolras could feel himself getting prematurely sarcastic about how it was fairly obvious how it’d happened – and he wouldn’t be able to get his tattoo. He really wanted that tattoo and now the idea had formed in his mind he couldn’t just let go of it! But… god he was tired and he really had to pee and no matter how many times Gav joked that only a stuck-up rich boy would refuse to go to a public bathroom like the common man, the idea of peeing in a tattoo parlour bathroom was still not particularly appealing.
“Yes please,” he said eventually before quickly following it up with “I still do want a tattoo! But you’re right. It’s not ethical to do it without the artist’s consent.” He nodded seriously as he spoke, and Floréal laughed with the phone already to her ear.
“Only you’d talk about the ethics and importance of consent in art while completely sloshed. Well," she huffed another laugh, "that’s not true,” she corrected, “R frequently does.
“Really?” he asked, unable to keep the smile off his face. Maybe he and Grantaire had something in common after all. And maybe, just maybe, Grantaire actually cared about what they talked about in meetings! Wow! Oh. The way Floréal was smiling at him still while talking quietly on the phone said he may or may not have said all of that out loud. God, he wished Grantaire was here. Grantaire would understand and then he’d be able to ask about the ethics of the art world and could ask him to let Floréal put one of his pieces on him. That would be nice. Then, he’d be able to stare at it for hours and figure it all out and ask R about it later. Yeah, that’d be nice.
Wow, he was suddenly very tired. “Don’t worry dude. Ferre’s on his way and you’ll be able to go to sleep in a bed soon.”
Enjolras hummed sleepily. “Taire never calls me dude. He calls everyone else dude, but not me. Actually, he doesn’t call Jehan dude either but that’s because it makes them uncomfortable.” Then, looking at Floréal with a concerned crease between his brows, “Does Grantaire think he’d be making me uncomfortable if he was friendly with me?”
Floréal laughed low and patted his shoulder comfortingly. “I can’t answer that, kid. But, maybe you’d like to ponder over it more in the back? There’s a sofa there that’s comfier than these shitty, old chairs.”
“Yeah,” Enjolras agreed, moving sluggishly towards the open doorway she’d gestured to, only stopping once he reached the door in order to turn back to Floréal for a moment, a thought having occurred to him with a kind of sudden, awful clarity. “Does Grantaire even like me?”
“Kid…” she began, not quite pitying but definitely sad for him, Enjolras hated how broken he had sounded, and, in that moment, he vowed never to drink red wine every again. Never. Again. The ideas were not worth it. “Kid,” she said again, more firmly this time, once again having seen right through his mental tangent, “You have no idea how much R likes you.”
He sighed, frustrated. “I know,” he mumbled as he turned back towards the couch waiting in the backroom, “That’s why I asked you…” And then he collapsed onto the couch without another word.