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“long live france! long live the future!”
the gunshot echoes through the streets, worming its way through the woodwork of the barricade, bouncing off the windows. and for a moment, no one speaks. courfeyrac’s heart drops into his stomach and his fingers loosen around the flagpole; his foot stays a step ahead from where he had been about to trench into enemy lines, holding a pole with combeferre’s white handkerchief blowing in the wind, his hand still on his shoulder, enjolras still by his side.
he is saying something. something to the spy. the spy they were going to trade jehan’s life for. (combeferre’s handkerchief is in the mud. he is no longer holding the flagpole.) your friends have just killed you. killed him, like they killed jehan. the gunshot rings in his ears, louder than anything he’d heard that night, or the previous– not even when the barricade nearly went up in flames, not when they had cannon pulled on them. the gunshot echoes and echoes and echoes inside his head, bouncing off the walls of his brain, coming back to a loop of enjolras’ words. your friends have just killed you.
his friends had just killed jehan.
before he knows it he is weeping, clutching at combeferre’s shirt as he tries to get past him, enjolras’ hands holding his shoulders firmly in place; he is reminding them what they already know, they killed him, they shot jehan, and still they won’t let him go.
he doesn’t know what they worry he will do. he doesn’t know what he wants to do. (which is a lie, of course. he knows what he wants. he wants to cradle jehan in his arms and hear anything other than gunfire for the rest of his life.) they don’t understand. they can’t understand, because they don’t let go of him. combeferre is looking at him as if he is some wounded puppy he found on the side of the road, and enjolras’ eyes are furrowed in a way that is almost human. courfeyrac nearly hates him for it, just for a moment, just in this instant.
they leave him, when the world turns to silence. at least, in courfeyrac’s ears. flashes of bullets and dust clouds of gunpowder still erupt around him, and somewhere in the thick of it are his friends; somewhere lost to it is jehan.
there’s a strong hand on his shoulder, guiding him back to the fact that his knees are wet. he is kneeling in a puddle. he can’t feel his toes through his boots.
feuilly kneels right next to him. right in the puddle, his hand on courfeyrac’s shoulder, as if he’s invincible to the rain and the mud and the gunfire. (feuilly has always been the most invincible of them all. he is not surprised to see him here, reduced to wet and muck like courfeyrac, unafraid to brave the dangers of heartbreak right beside him.)
“courfeyrac.”
he says all their names with purpose, always. like they mean something. like they are someone. courfeyrac forgets it on the worst of days.
and then he notices that in his other hand is a bundle of clothing. he glances from his hand to his face– carved of stone, invincible– and back to his hand again. hues of red, white and blue, dirtied from a layer of grime, catch his attention.
“feuilly–”
“take it,” he tells him, leaving no room for argument, pressing the damp uniform into his hands, “go to him.”
all courfeyrac can do is stare for a moment, questions multiplying on his tongue. the main one being where did you get this from but he knows. he knows that somewhere, in their ranks, there is a dead man in his breeches who sacrificed this uniform for him. he was just a man too, once. a man with a family. a man with dreams. enjolras often tried to play both sides; the enemy were just a group of men, too, just as they are, all of them together involved in a battle of the average man against another– but they were also not worth their time. they learned to dehumanize the soldiers that rallied at the barricade, only paying attention to the barrel of their guns, and eventually, instead of men, they became targets.
all of that falls away in the face of death. in death, they were so pitifully human, so broken and raw lining the streets that it was hard to see anything past the face of a man whose life was pried out of his hands. courfeyrac wondered if he had killed him. he wondered if he would know.
instead, he nods, solemnly taking the uniform from feuilly with both hands, wishing he had enough arms to hug him in the same breath. if feuilly can feel his soul reaching out, he says nothing, bracing courfeyrac by the shoulders and nodding once before he is gone, lost to the barricade again.
courfeyrac doesn’t know what he’d expected from the enemy ranks. enemy – such a strong word, one that never seems to fit right in his mouth. he internalizes it all the same, as his stomach turns while he glances upon the faces of men wearing the same uniform as him; they killed jehan. they killed his brothers. they wouldn’t stop until they killed them all.
somehow, it doesn’t help.
he wishes he could say he doesn’t recognize the dead, but he does. even if he only knew them in passing, just a smile on the street or someone who passed him a chair for the barricade, he never forgets a face. he sees them now, standing out amongst the heaps of bodies; he even recognizes some of the soldiers, men he once knew out of uniform who nodded at him outside a capital building. there are so many dead and so many memories and he nearly lurches at it all, spitting up nothing behind a post. he’s barely spared a glance. everyone is sick all around him— if not sick to the stomach then sick to the soul, sick in the heart, or both.
he’s still as lovely as he is cold, when he finds him: red hair matted from the mud he lies in, but the rain washes the muck from his face, and his cheeks still bloom a rosy hue from either the cold or the last essences of life still fighting inside his butterfly-cage chest.
jehan is so out of place here, amongst the mud and the grime and the horror of it all. courfeyrac can’t help but feel like he, himself, fits right in; in a silence that only exists inside his own prolonged heartbreak, all he can do is stare— unmoving, unbelieving. he sinks to his knees, pulling jehan into his lap, feeling his resolve slip through his fingers at the way he lies limp like a ragdoll.
he brushes his hair out of his face, his fingers trailing down the long braid, frayed and falling apart. a visceral urge to coddle him grabs courfeyrac deep in his chest, wrangling his heart out through the spaces between his ribs; he rests jehan’s head in the crook of his elbow and his shaking fingers deftly retie the braid. he wishes more than ever that he had a flower to thread through it, a stark white bloom against the flush of red.
oh, the red. he is covered in it now. his hands, his chest; he doesn’t care so much for the uniform that is now stained, he wishes he could wash it in the blood of the innocent a million times over and shove it at them, ask them if their uniform dye is worth all these corpses. there’s a plume of scarlet across jehan’s chest, a scarlet omen against cream. he was always dishevelled, one way or another, as riches never seemed to teach a man how to dress. courfeyrac doesn’t know if it’s for better or for worse that his disheveledness now has meaning, with the plumes of blood and unruly braid and muddy, cold hands.
and for one moment, for one, lingering moment, he is only sleeping. tucked away soundly in courfeyrac’s arms, the impenetrable rise and fall of his chest only delayed. the rain itself seems to slow, the gunshots quieting to a steady thrum of their heartbeats, intertwined. never slowing. never stopping.
“jean,” he says, the back of his knuckles brushing over his jawline, so scared to disturb him, “ma moitié . . .” (maybe he just wants to see if his lips will form the words. jehan still fits in his arms so perfectly, even in death. courfeyrac imagines his fingertips dancing across his cheekbone, the way he used to smile up at him. his other half. his lovelier half. oh, jean, ma moitié, what did they do to you?)
in another universe, jehan wakes. his face breaks into a smile and he tucks courfeyrac’s hair behind his ear and he echoes, mon rayon de soleil, chastising his soft heart that he loves so much.
in this one, courfeyrac raises his head to find a man— a boy — younger than himself, the shaky barrel of an unsteady gun pointed at his head. he is trembling, his hair spilling out from under his hat in ringlets, swallowing a lump in his throat. go home, courfeyrac wants to say, you don’t belong here.
“you knew him?” the boy says, his gun lowering slightly as he motions to jehan, and when courfeyrac looks down again his lips are turning blue, unsaid verses turning him to stone. he wishes for death.
he passes his hand across his head again, red hair soft against the inside of his palm. only sleeping. he is only sleeping. soon they will all wake up. “yes.”
the boy nods slowly, glancing between them. “he is dear to you?”
he feels the press of cold metal against the back of his head, his hat knocked off by an unseen stranger. the boy is looking over him now, to someone standing behind. the wind whistles through his curls and he can feel raindrops on his head, piercing through his skull during the end of all things, the end of all he’s ever known.
courfeyrac curves his hand around the back of jehan’s cheek, lifting his head so that his lips may brush over his forehead one last time. he holds his peaceful face close to his chest as if the faint thrumming of his heartbeat would be enough to revive him, as if his warmth would be enough for the both of them.
“dearer than anything.”
the last thing he hears is not jehan’s voice beside him as they grow old. it is not a child clinging to his arms and asking to be lifted to the skies. it is not even enjolras’ voice, rallying the insurgents after they have won. it is a gunshot; one that echoes through the streets, worming its way through the woodwork of the barricade, bouncing off the windows. and for a moment, no one speaks.