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Feuilly sat with his back propped against the barricade, his gun laid across his knee. Courfeyrac paused in his careful scan of the horizon to frown down at him from his vantage point. “Sleep,” he scolded gently. “The People will need you at full strength come the morning.”
Though Feuilly managed a tight smile in response, he knew that no sleep would come, least of all because he knew that not even every man on the barricade being at full strength would be enough come morning.
Still, he knew that his own inability to sleep would inevitably distract Courfeyrac, who would be incapable of stopping himself from japing or trying to keep him amused at the expense of the job he was meant to be doing, and just when Feuilly had resolved to close his eyes and appear to sleep, he heard a curious scraping sound, as if something heavy was being dragged across the stone of the street.
Most curious of all, the sound did not come from the National Guard, huddled down for the night. Instead, it came from behind the barricade.
Feuilly looked again at Courfeyrac, who was frowning. “I hear it, too,” Courfeyrac told him, and Feuilly nodded, resolved.
“I shall investigate,” he said. “And report back if needed.”
Courfeyrac jerked a nod, his expression troubled, and Feuilly squared his shoulders before standing, gun in hand as he crept away from the barricade and toward the noise emanating from the darkness. He braced himself against the corner of a building and peered around, squirting against the darkness to try to make out the large, strange shape he could just see.
He raised his gun to aim it at the figure. “Halt,” he commanded, “in the name of the Republic.”
The figure paused but then continued its lumbering movements, and Feuilly scowled, stepping fully around the corner. “I said—” he repeated, breaking off when the figure half-turned to face him and for the first time, he caught sight of his face. “Grantaire?”
It was Grantaire, but Grantaire as Feuilly had never seen him, and not just because he was dragging what appeared to be a body down the road. Grantaire’s expression was haunted, his eyes wide and wild, and only when he stumbled slightly in his step did Feuilly realize that Grantaire was obviously still drunk.
Then Grantaire spoke, and all but confirmed it. “Ah, Feuilly,” Grantaire said, tripping over the familiar syllables in such a way that Feuilly marveled the man was able to stand upright, let alone drag a corpse down the street. “How does your evening fare?”
Feuilly ignored the question, certain that Grantaire would neither remember nor care about his answer. Instead, he frowned down at the body he was dragging, his eyes widening when he recognized it as the murderer Enjolras had shot earlier. “What are you doing?” he asked, his voice sharper than intended.
“Corpus delicti,” Grantaire grunted, and Feuilly’s frown deepened.
“You know that I am not trained in the law as some of our brethren, but—”
“If there is no body, then a crime cannot be proven to have been committed,” Grantaire told him, with the kind of clarity of conviction only a drunkard could possess.
If Feuilly was merely confused before, now he was much closer to baffled. “I reject your premise that there was any crime,” he said, his voice low. “It was a just death. The man was a murderer.”
Grantaire shook his head. “And to punish him for his crime, Enjolras must too become a murderer,” he muttered.
Feuilly bristled, his loyalty to Enjolras outweighing whatever pity he had for Grantaire. “Listen here, Wine Cask—” he started, but Grantaire ignored him, still muttering to himself as if Feuilly had not even spoken.
“In war, one might say that all deaths are just deaths, if, at the least, the war itself is just. Jus ad bellum, jus in bello. And perhaps even at the hands of the Republic, following the laws as determined by the People, so too might there be a just death. But an unarmed man, no matter what crimes he has committed – how can we consider that just?”
“Such belated conviction, Feuilly said scornfully. “Revolution has made murderers of us all.” He paused. “Save for you, of course. I suspect the only blood you shall find on your hands at the end of this will be your own.”
Grantaire looked at him, his expression suddenly sober. “For him, I would have,” he uttered gravely, and it took Feuilly a moment to place his meaning.
“Surely you don’t mean—”
Grantaire jerked his shoulders in a shrug without lessening his grip on Le Cabuc’s corpse. “Better by far for this man’s blood to be on my hands than on his.”
Feuilly swallowed against the cold conviction in Grantaire’s tone. “Enjolras would not want that,” he said.
A horrible smile spread across Grantaire’s face. “And since when have I cared what Enjolras would want?” he sneered, though his sneer froze in place as he stared at something over Feuilly’s shoulder.
Even without turning, Feuilly knew who it must be, knew who else would be roused by this conversation, and he acknowledged Enjolras when a nod when he felt the man briefly touch his shoulder. “Return to your rest,” Enjolras ordered quietly, and Feuilly hesitated. “This is a conversation best had with just the two of us.”
Though Feuilly again nodded and stepped away, he found he could not force his feet to return to the barricade. Instead, he ducked around the corner, close enough still to observe as Enjolras approached Grantaire, his back straight and his shoulders set.
“Leave him,” Enjolras said quietly, in a tone that brooked no argument. “It is over.”
For the first time, Grantaire released Le Cabuc, dropping his body and straightening to meet Enjolras’s eye, his horrible smile for before long gone. “You commanded before that I not disgrace the barricade,” he said, his voice a broken whisper that Feuilly had to strain to hear. “Leaving him would.”
Enjolras swallowed. “So you think it a disgrace, then?” he asked. “What I did?” Grantaire did not answer and Enjolras was a silent for a moment before saying, tired more than anything else, “So be it. I have told you before, many times over, I am but human.”
“And never have I doubted it,” Grantaire told him quietly. “But I could not bear if this man’s corpse ended up buried with Jean Prouvaire, or any of our friends who may still fall.”
Enjolras winced at the mention of Prouvaire. “Who told you?” he asked, and Grantaire lifted one shoulder in a sort of half-shrug.
“My slumber was not absolute.”
Something flickered on Enjolras’s face. “Grantaire—”
“Please.” Grantaire’s voice was soft, but determined. “I have failed you so many times, in so many ways. Let me at the least do this, so that when you too are cut down, you might not go to eternity thinking that I did nothing for the Cause.”
There was a brief pause before Enjolras repeated, “For the Cause?”
Another brief pause, then— “For you,” Grantaire whispered.
Enjolras shook his head. “I have asked nothing of you,” he said, his voice low and strangely urgent, as if he sought to convince Grantaire of the same. “Nothing – save that you leave.”
Grantaire bowed his head. “And in that, too, I have failed you.”
“You need not fail in that,” Enjolras said, and Grantaire lifted his head, searching Enjolras’s expression. “If you are taking that body from the barricade, you need not return.”
Grantaire smiled again, but it was a soft sort of smile this time, nothing like the grotesque facsimile he had worn earlier. “You know that I must,” he said gently.
Enjolras did – Feuilly could see his resignation in every line of his body. And still, Enjolras asked, “Why?”
Grantaire shrugged, something almost helpless in the gesture. “For the same reason that I must remove this corpse.”
It was Enjolras’s turn to bow his head. “I have not asked this of you,” he said, his voice low.
Grantaire shrugged once more. “Some things are offered freely.”
“And if I refuse?” Enjolras asked sharply.
Grantaire’s smile widened. “It would hardly be the first time you have refused me.”
Something like a smile tugged at the corner of Enjolras’s lips. “And yet still, here you are.”
“Here I am.”
Grantaire said the three words simply, plainly, and Feuilly could not help but feel that they were substitutes for three other words that Grantaire would much rather say. He suspected Enjolras knew it too, and was unsurprised when Enjolras sighed, resigned. “Then I shall wash my hands of it. Do as you must.”
“I shall,” Grantaire said.
He turned to take up his burden once more, to continue his plodding journey into the night, but Enjolras caught his hand. “Grantaire—” Enjolras’s voice trembled, just slightly. “Fail me once more.”
Grantaire’s voice was impossibly gentle when he responded, like the caress of a lover instead of a broken whisper amongst the wreckage of dreams. “I always do.”
He twisted his wrist to raise Enjolras’s hand to his lips, bestowing a fleet kiss against the pale knuckles, the gesture more tender than any Feuilly thought he had witnessed.
Feuilly knew that he could not bear to see anymore, and so finally followed Enjolras’s command, retracing his steps back to the barricade. Courfeyrac tensed when he spotted the movement, relaxing only slightly when he saw it was Feuilly. “Well?” he asked, his call quiet so as to not disturb the rest of the men. “What was it?”
“Nothing,” Feuilly told him, knowing in his heart that he would never speak a word of what he had witnessed, and he settled down again in his spot from before, resting his back against the barricade and closing his eyes before adding, more to himself than to Courfeyrac, “Just someone saying their goodbyes.”