Chapter Text
He could have been lying there forever, or he might only just have fallen down. He does not remember waking up: there is no past, no future. There just... is, just as there is also the blue sky above and the heat on his cheeks and the pain unfolding into razor-edged fractals throughout his body. The sun is playing with the pain, he thinks, contracting and magnifying it with a mischievous frivolity.
His eyes fall shut.
His eyes open again, and now the sun is hotter still but the pain a little less; the curling icy branches have retreated, shrinking back inside themselves. So he stands up, blinking to clear the fuzz creeping around the edges of his vision. Cobwebs. Around him is only rubble: there are no plants, no people, no life left that he can see. Not even a bird overhead.
The street is already a tomb.
He climbs down from the barricade, inching step by step. His feet threaten to rebel with every movement; the structure itself, too, sways like a ship underneath him. So every step is painful, painstaking, until he comes upon solid ground.
Gratefully, he sinks down onto it, glad for the chance to stop moving. Every limb weighs a tonne; his brain seems to have been replaced by a mixture of lead and dense, impenetrable foliage. He is existing at half-speed.
The others will be here somewhere. If they're alive, they will not have abandoned him. If not — which seems more likely — he knows that he must not abandon them. Jehan and Bahorel have fallen, he is certain, but any of the others might still be living. Five more minutes, he tells himself. Then, you must search.
* * *
He walks slowly beside the base of the barricade, leaning heavily into his hand for support as it shakes feebly along the wood. He's not entirely sure what he's looking for: his friends, clearly, but what of them? He recalls shooting, explosions, men inverted and wearing their viscera like a grim parody of a waistcoat. Will he be able to recognise the others at all?
He hopes, he prays that he will.
The street around him is red, brown, grey. The sky above is still blue — too blue — but at his feet, the world is uniformly devoid of colour. He strains and squints towards it, struggling to make sense of what he sees, certain he's missing something amongst the debris. How can it be, that so many people sheltered and fought and died here and yet he can't seem to see a single one of them?
Keep moving, he reminds himself. Keep looking.
And then, out of the corner of his eye, a flash of yellow.
No, not yellow, his painter's brain supplies. It is a dusty ochre at its closest point to him, stained halfway up its length with a sienna red that darkens to the deep, sinister tones of madder. He understands in that moment that the owner of this fabric is dead, that they cannot have survived whatever encounter it was that spilled so much blood, that poured it out onto this corner of cloth until it was permanently changed.
He moves closer, curious and afraid, with the sort of step that implies a battle between caution and vertigo: half-halting, and then a heavy thud. He drops to his knees, a graceless uncontrolled descent, and then he sees that the fabric is attached to a jacket. And that within the jacket lies a chest, and that atop the chest is Courfeyrac's face, the bottom half of it smashed and churned to a pulpy, gruesome mess. Like mashed-up strawberries, some distant memory supplies. A lone tooth, glimmering white, is visible; Feuilly turns away and retches, vomiting onto the cobbles behind. For the first time, he wonders how he himself has come to survive. Physically, he thinks he is almost completely unharmed: there's only this leaden weakness, and a headache pounding and jumping and dancing inside his skull.
Joly would know, or perhaps Combeferre. He'll find them, he thinks, and staggers upright. He'll find them. He'll find — oh.
Two bodies are lying on the path in front of him.
Despite the mud, blood and sawdust, they're still instantly recognisable: Joly and Bossuet. One is half on top of the other; at least they're together, Feuilly reflects.
How had he forgotten? They're dead, all dead, and there'll be no coming back.
They lost.
He's exhausted.
He slumps down beside Bossuet's body, and lets a few loose tears slip from his eyes.
* * *
Gradually, he becomes aware of a pressure on his spine. He moves, trying to alleviate it, and something slips behind him; he feels a weight skid and slither down his back, before thumping down onto the cobbles next to Bossuet's hand. Feuilly looks down: it's a book. A thin one, and fairly nondescript, covered in dusty brown leather and curling at the corners. It could be anyone's — but something in Feuilly tells him to hold onto it, to keep it close.
He turns it over, opens it, flicks through the pages, wonders why he should care. There's an É. C. embossed into one corner, but those initials are common enough: they could have belonged to any number of people on that barricade.
They could have, but they didn't. This É. C. belongs to Étienne Combeferre; somehow, he knows this. Without asking, without thinking, he knows this. And he will keep the book close, because its owner is more than likely dead; unless he can find Combeferre, he's the closest thing this book has left to home.
He tucks it into the waistband of his trousers and hauls himself back up and over onto all fours, preparing again to search.
* * *
He is methodical about it, tracing an ever-widening spiral on his hands and knees, nudging carefully at the debris and rubble underneath him. He checks and checks again, combing every log twice over just in case there's something he missed. Nothing. There's nothing at all.
But there has to be something. Courfeyrac, Joly and Bossuet are here. Why not the rest of them?
He keeps going, patting painstakingly through the wreck of the street.
And then something shifts underneath him and he slams his hand down to keep from falling and it lands in something sticky, something warm, and when he looks he sees dark skin ang broken glass and thin gold wires and the noise — the painful sickly surge of disgust pouring through him — is cut off into a trembling, truncated sob. Two notes. Combe-ferre.
* * *
Feuilly does not want to leave him. The notebook is forgotten for a moment, discarded on a nearby timber, as he clutches Combeferre's hand in a blood-slick grasp, thoughts pouring into and out of his head. Names and numbers, echoes, noises half-forgotten and half-remembered; through it all a litany, a drumbeat, Bahorel Jehan Courfeyrac Joly Bossuet Combeferre, Bahorel Jehan Courfeyrac Joly Bossuet Combeferre, over and over and over. Names and numbers, echoes, noises, snatches of conversation, snippets of song, cracks of gunfire, booms of cannon, screams.
Scared screams, happy screams, frustrated screams, passionate screams, passionate speech, speech, speech, speech speech speech! Stumbly speech — stammers — can you read? I can read — read. Read.
Read.
The notebook is open in his hand.
Read.
He is sat down again.
Read.
There are no corpses here.
Read.
Read.
Feuilly reads.
Thursday 3rd May, 1832
Bahorel's nose isn't set right. There's no blaming anyone, this time: after the last few mishaps, it's nothing but scar tissue now. There was no hope at all for an accurate set. At least it has actually healed since the last breakage, for once.
The protest today felt explosive. It's hard to describe, but there was something about it — I felt I was sat in a power keg at the centre of a narrowing ring of fire. I doubt we will escape so lightly from the next; it is solely through luck that only Bahorel was injured today. Luck, and Feuilly's quick mind pulling Courfeyrac out of the way of a Guardsman. I am so incredibly thankful that he was there — I don't doubt that our situation would be far worse had that truncheon met its mark.
Perhaps it is just that we are fortunate to have each other, all of us.
Of course it is.
We are l ucky, so lucky.
I must remember that.
He finds himself sat on the stairs leading to the top floor of the café, choking back tears. He does not want to cry now, to dampen and damage these precious words of Combeferre's. He remembers that moment, in the fury of the protest last month: Courfeyrac had been pulling him into the heart of the crush — look, through here, there's a way. We'd better stay together; it looks like things are going to get violent! — and his eyes had been fixed entirely on Feuilly's face. He hadn't seen the soldier behind them, seen him raising his truncheon to strike. Feuilly had. He'd yanked Courfeyrac to safety, and they'd found another way round.
He hadn't realised Combeferre had been there; hadn't even realised that he kept a diary at all. His chest seizes, because it's too late, too late now. Too late now to ask anything at all.
He can't read any more right now. There's too much of Combeferre in that notebook; he cannot continue, not with his friend's blood still clinging darkly to his hands. So he gets to his feet and turns around, leaning on the wall as his vision clears.
Step by step by painful step, he makes his slow progress into the room. The weakness had almost left him between the barricade and café; it's come back now, returned with a ferocity that makes his head spin like a carousel and drags his knees deep, almost beyond the stairs altogether. Stumbling, falling, he drags himself onto the landing and into a chair.
Time goes by, and he looks up. For a moment, he barely registers the pair of corpses across the room. But only for a moment — the red and the green and the gold suddenly ignite in his head and he pushes himself into the room as fast as he can, tripping over himself as he does so and cursing his feet's reluctance to obey.
Enjolras.
Grantaire.
Until this moment, they had completely slipped his mind.
He stands perhaps six feet from the window, supporting himself on a chair and a table, and looks. The world seems to be shaking, no matter how hard Feuilly tries to force it to still: there are two bodies there, collapsed against the wall beneath the window, one of whom he could almost have sworn was immortal. Enjolras is too bright, too full of life, to die — and yet here he is, sitting in a cooling pool of blood, his blood, Grantaire's blood, even through Feuilly can't see any wounds. He thinks that that might be him, though, just as he knows the room is not shaking. The room is shaking, and Enjolras and Grantaire are not even injured.
The room is not shaking, and they are dead.
* * *
Slowly, his vision clears; equally slowly, he becomes aware that the blond man is somehow still breathing, chest moving shallowly up and down. He lowers himself onto hands and knees and crawls across the floor of the room towards the window. If he got any closer, he thinks, he might misjudge his descent — and he does not want to fall on top of either of them.
"Enjolras?" he asks, knowing full well it's futile. The word tastes wrong, ashy in the back of his throat. He counts: one, two, three, four bullet holes in Enjolras' legs. Five, six, seven in his arm and torso. Eight embedded in the brass buttons of Bahorel's too-bright xylophone vest. Eight? Feuilly drags an arm across his eyes, certain he's seeing wrong, seeing double. No: one, two, three, four; five, six, seven; eight.
If anyone could take eight bullets and survive, even for a short time, it would be Enjolras, Feuilly thinks. He inches closer, his hand slipping in the pool of blood beneath Enjolras and Grantaire's bodies. "Enjolras?"
Still, of course, useless. He peers over at Grantaire, resting a hand on his chest, making sure — but there is no life there, and a crimson hole directly over his heart. Feuilly must focus on Enjolras. He reaches out and shakes his shoulder: "Wake up."
His voice sounds unnaturally flat even to his own ears, as brittle and smooth as glass. And there is no response, save for Enjolras slipping a little further down the wall.
Feuilly stretches up, reaching blindly as a child for the windowsill. He drags himself to his feet with it, the wall supporting him as he journeys back upright. There's black-grey-black speckling his eyes again — but he holds himself there and screams for help until his voice flakes, cracks, snaps, disappears.
The silence rings back out around him, and Feuilly feels a powerful urge to sit down right there where he's stood, in the middle of the blood on the floor, and give in to his tight throat and burning eyes.
He looks at Enjolras, half-dead on the floor, and knows that he cannot. He looks at his trembling hands, and thinks: am I really going to do this?
He already knows the answer: he has no choice.
Even crouching down, all the muscles in his body quiver in complaint. No choice, he reminds himself. No choice. He slips his arms beneath Enjolras' shoulders and instantly feels himself tipping forwards under the weight.
What's happening to me? he wonders. He might only paint fans for a living, but usually, he is strong. Years of boxing with Bahorel have shaped him. He closes his eyes and heaves himself upright, fighting the weight and the desperate, pervasive weakness that surrounds him. If he does not get Enjolras outside, into a position where they might be noticed, Enjolras dies. It's simple. So he will get them outside, no matter how it costs him.
And how, how it costs him. Every step feels like he is trudging through a swamp, the air around his feet turned to mud sucking and squelching at them, pulling him down. Descending the stairs, he thinks vaguely that the way he's dragging Enjolras, his legs bumping against the steps, must be aggravating his wounds — but it's a single flicker of clarity amidst a smoky haze of pain, and he ignores it. He fights the sucking muddy tug down the stairs, through the café, onto the cobbles and beyond the barricade scarring the street — and then, in the middle of the road, the mire suddenly surges upwards and stops up his ears, his eyes, his mouth and his nose.
Exhausted, Feuilly doesn't even try to fight it.
Friday 30th July, 1830
I do not think I have slept in a week. Three nights of planning, three of fighting, and the last and most recent a hospital shift: what little sleep I have caught has been in patches, in freckles, with fear nibbling constantly at its edges. Of my friends, only Bahorel has been seriously hurt, with a broken nose and a dislocated arm: there have been scratches and scrapes and Jehan very nearly took a bullet, but other than that we are well. Bossuet's ridiculous luck even saved him for once — quite how he tripped and ended up head-first inside a barrel we'll never know, but I'm glad it happened nonetheless.
Small mercies.
I have been sent to take a break because my hands are shaking so badly that I spilled laudanum over a man's bedcovers, and now they are ruined beyond easy repair. I doubt very much if this will even be legible tomorrow, but writing has always stilled my mind.
So write I will.
I am not a fighter at heart. This week, I have seen more wilful destruction of other men's bodies than I ever wished to, and I am terrified that it will break my mind. I can't stop replaying each death, can't help but consider how I might have saved each person we lost, given another chance.
It is ridiculous.
I can't keep myself from thinking.
(N.B: perhaps we all ought to be a little kinder to J.)
Regardless, sitting here and moping will help nobody. Perhaps later, I will come back and explore my thoughts more clearly. But until then, I must return downstairs.