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He was out of ammunition. Nothing in his gun, nothing in his pockets, nothing scattered around him on the planks and wheels and stones jutting haphazardly from the barricade. He was out of ammunition, being attacked by three National Guardsmen at once—all practically bristling with sharp, cold steel—and, for as far as he could see across the street, the same situation was playing out over and over again.
And even if the revolutionaries survived these encounters, what about the rest of the evening? Tomorrow? The days after that?
They were all doomed: unless he died first, Jean Prouvaire knew he'd have to watch his friends being killed in front of him. There would be no escaping into dreams today.
One of the guardsmen surged up towards him. He squeezed his eyes shut before lashing out with the barrel of his gun, watching painfully as a crimson tulip bloomed along the man's neck. It was a very different type of flower to the ones Jehan usually loved to grow—but he knew there would be no irises, no gerberas or sunflowers today. Only tulips, poppies, roses: fields of blood-red blooms, their deadly blossoms drowning the cobblestones of Paris. Yet somehow, even they had a sort of sinister charm.
However, his friends did always say that he'd be able to find beauty in anything, even in sewage where it spilled into the Seine.
One down, two to go.
The soldiers were looking away, distracted for the moment by their fallen comrade. Knowing it wouldn't last, Jehan seized the opportunity: he grimaced but swung his gun again, hoping to disable the second guardsman in the same way as the first. This time, though, the final soldier noticed. He grabbed the barrel of the gun and pulled it over his shoulder, out of the way of his colleague—nearly out of Jehan's hands. The movement wasn't particularly forceful, but it was effective: Jehan stumbled, letting go completely as he attempted to catch himself on the edge of the barricade.
The gun fell, bouncing off the depressions and protrusions in the slope of the defence.
He followed it down, mind completely consumed by the tiny pocket of cells screaming that he needed a weapon! Something! Anything! Although one guardsman seemed to be—what? Unconscious? Dead?—there were still two left, and even a gun that didn't fire was better than nothing.
But suddenly, he felt a choking pressure on his neck and glanced up to find one of the soldiers grasping the collar of his coat, holding it a little higher than was comfortable off the floor. No, he thought, no. He could not be captured. Capture, torture, unwillingly divulging the Amis' secrets: those ideas terrified him. Death, he would welcome when it came. But he could not be taken prisoner, not for all the gardens in Paris. He would not let it happen. So, "Feuilly!" he yelled, scrabbling for purchase with his feet on the barricade as he contorted his chest to rid himself of the coat, using everything else he had to try and unbalance the guardsman. "Pontmercy!" They'd both been near him, he thought—with their help, he might be able to escape, to continue the fight.
He needed to continue the fight.
However, the soldier was strong, and his coat was buttoned. Nothing Jehan tried was working. What was Pontmercy's first name again?, he wondered. Marc? Matthieu? No—Marius. Jehan hadn't really called him that before: they weren't close, and it felt a little too personal for his liking. But maybe Marius would be more likely to respond to exactly that. He tried again: "Marius! Feuilly!"
Try as he might to prevent it, his voice cracked slightly on the last syllable of his friend's name.
And the soldier was nearly throttling him, and neither of the others seemed to have reacted to his cries, and his fingers were beginning to slip and stumble over the buttons on his coat—buttons he'd been given by Feuilly on his twenty-first birthday, made by the fan-maker from the wood of a buddleia bush that grew outside the Café Musain.
At least, it had grown there until a drunken Grantaire had stumbled into it one night, killing the bush and covering himself in a catastrophe of scratches. He loved those buttons, beautiful buddleia buttons reclaimed from a beautiful buddleia bush that told such a story.
He loved those buttons.
He loved those buttons.
* * *
Jehan woke up on the pavement outside the barricade, hands and feet tightly bound. His throat hurt. His head was spinning. Someone had removed his coat; maybe that was why he was cold. Above his head, the smoke from the torches that had illuminated the battle had given way to stars, scattered in the pitchy sky like tiny flakes of ash. It was almost poetic, he thought, smiling bleakly: his friends had deserted him, the revolution was doomed, and he would not live to see another flower, another sunrise, another little child's happy smile. But he still had his verses, his first and most faithful friends. A few lines had drifted into his head as he lay there on the stones; he mouthed them to himself, lips curving softly upwards as he did.
Youthful, bloodless bodies, wrapped in thin blankets of night.
Frozen-hearted friends, content to leave their own to die.
Souls swiftly extinguished—no more joyful, burning light.
And the cold gaze of death's dealers under starlit summer sky.
He wasn't scared. Maybe earlier, being choked by that guard, he had been, but not anymore. He couldn't be, not when the sky looked so beautiful and so welcoming; not when his idols rested there, calling him up to join them.
Except Enjolras. That particular idol—his friend and leader—was still firmly tethered to the ground. How strange, Jehan mused. In Enjolras, there existed a man too bright, too ethereal, even for the sun. Was it any wonder that wherever he went, people were drawn towards him like bees to a flower?
And just like that, he wasn't angry either. He couldn't be. His friends were good people, all of them: they would never willingly have abandoned him. In the middle of a fight, Jehan had found that it was hard to single one noise out from the crowd—it had been so loud as to be almost unbearable. He could not have expected anyone to hear him. The fault was his, and his alone, for allowing himself to be captured. There was a proverb, beginning "never fall asleep while angry:" Jehan thought that was especially true tonight, with the knowledge that this sleep would be one from which he would not wake.
A sharp kick in his neck interrupted his reverie. "On your feet!"
On your feet. Such a strange saying. What other feet would you be on? And why say "on your feet" at all? "Stand up" conveyed the same message in fewer words: far more military. Far better. It sounded prettier, more lyrical, as well, Jehan thought.
Or did it?
On your feet.
Stand up.
On your feet.
Stand up.
On your—
"—feet!"
The boot hit his neck again.
Oh, Jehan realised. That had been a command. But his hands were tied behind his back: how was he meant to move?
With difficulty, apparently.
He wriggled and squirmed until the soldier standing over him lost patience and dragged him upright, before forcing him to shuffle-march over to the opposite wall. The air seemed to have thickened around him, moving like water past his ears as he turned, stepped backwards, took in the night sky one last time.
As he caught sight of a single light still burning, burning on the barricade at the other end of the street.
Something about that light awoke him more than the chill, the pain, and the soldier's kicks combined. He flinched, shaking himself out. He, Jean Prouvaire, was a revolutionary fighting for a freer France! He would not die a broken man.
So as the soldiers lowered their guns, he called "Vive la France! Vive l'avenir!" in a voice so clear and ringing that his words trembled in the air. They were echoing, multiplying until all of Paris was cheering along with him—from the Guardsmen in the street to his friends at the barricade, from Louis-Philippe in his Tuileries bed to the gamins sleeping under the stars. From the past he so adored to the future he strove to save, the entire city seemed to join him in his call to revolt.
Prouvaire closed his eyes and smiled.
A bouquet of scarlet flowers slowly blossomed on his chest.