Chapter Text
Just like any other night, the Musain was electrified with a thrum of energy that came from within, from the students gathered there with their fists raised in protest and eyes affixed upon their leader.
Enjolras leaned against the sturdy oak table, sticky with the residues of spilled beer built through decades that long preceded anyone in the room. From his right came the gentle sound of typing, and he felt his confidence grow with the knowledge every word he said was being dutifully kept by Combeferre, whose typing only stopped periodically to push his eyeglasses back up his nose. At his left, the scratches of pencil lead resonated through the table at unpredictable intervals as Courfeyrac busied himself with mockups of posters to spread around the city, advertising the march that Enjolras spoke about.
Near the back of the room, where the corner was prone to draughts from the open door and littered with cobwebs too high to swat away with the handle of a broomstick, sat Grantaire. It was difficult to tell by his posture, leaning so far back in his chair that even he was surprised he had not fallen, and the bottle in his hand, bearing the embossery of a Spanish beer company although the glass clearly contained some sort of red wine, that he was listening. The only thing to suggest that Grantaire was paying attention was his amber gaze, fixed upon Enjolras at the front of the room. The chair legs underneath him gave a groan as he pushed his luck, feeling the swoop of gravity grip him too tightly by the stomach. For all the noise he was making, he was surprised the leader himself had not shot him a glare—it was just as well, he supposed he was not worth the distraction.
Enjolras spoke with a natural cadence that made him sound almost conversational, talks of protests and strikes and counterterrorism aside. With slender, sinewy fingers, he gesticulated, forming a point with his index finger to accentuate what it was he wanted to emphasize. It was captivating to even the most politically inept of the crowd, to watch Enjolras at work, in his element. Grantaire spared a glance down to his own hands, thick with years of work, yet incredibly precise when he needed them to be, and always bearing smudges of charcoal and oil paint from his time in the studio. Nails picked to expose pink, fresh skin sat in beds of built-up cuticles which slowly faded into knuckles brushed over with coarse, dark hair, interspersed with calluses solely from the act of holding a paintbrush for hours on end, the pressure digging into one spot on Grantaire’s left ring finger where the end of the brush was prone to rest.
A shout of protest, initiated by Enjolras and soon catching on to the rest of the crowd gathered in the Musain, startled Grantaire out of his introspection, although his mouth stayed shut and his tongue still as the shouts grew cacophonous and deafening. The impression began to grow on Grantaire that the meeting had at last concluded, as some of the newer students began filtering out or making their way towards the bar to buy stouts on tap that were too mature for their childish tastes; they drank every last drop anyway, both to impress their friends and to justify their spending of their parents’ money on such sins as drinking. Grantaire had looked upon this scene many times, sipping his own drink with disdain for the rich young brood that were, for some reason, inextricably attracted to Enjolras’ rhetoric and wit. Grantaire hated it; he didn’t see why Enjolras had to prey upon such useless fodder, already knowing that in ten years they’d be living comfortably off of their trust funds with their undergraduate degrees in business, golfing on the weekends and refusing the ten cent donation to hungry children at the grocery store till.
Grantaire himself had come to the city on a different kind of fortune. He did not gain entry to one of the most well-recognized art academies in Paris because he made particularly excellent grades, or because he had the fortune to pay the hefty tuition sums, or even because he was exceptionally good at painting. Rather, his lycee’s headmaster had urged him to apply to scholarships as a means to keep him out of trouble, out of working a meaningless job in a factory and supplementing the depravity in his life with drugs and drinking and sex. Granted, he still did all those things, and what’s more, he put himself at risk of losing his fancy scholarship laden with conditions. He was allowed to be just impoverished and rural enough in manner that the school gained recognition for their inclusion, but not so much so that his ways disrupted the high-class peace and well-to-do nature of the academy. But the city had undoubtedly opened up numerous opportunities for Grantaire that he would have never encountered otherwise: the academy offered a joint program with a university wherein art students could study other subjects in conjunction, and both institutions would benefit in return from this.
As such, Grantaire found himself enrolled in an Intro to Philosophy lecture that he took solely as a means to kill time in a climate-controlled area. If anything else, the professor’s voice was droning and dull enough to lull Grantaire to sleep for the ninety minutes each lecture stole from his Monday and Wednesday afternoons.
His slumbers, however, more often than not, would be interrupted by another voice, lyrical and high, almost like a woman’s except for the soft, undeniable timbre of a man that undercut certain words. Grantaire would have almost found this voice soothing, too, if not for the subject of the young man’s own counter-lectures. Always, he found, there was something to be said, something to be argued against, in the professor’s assertions of moral rights and wrongs. Almost without fail, so routine that Grantaire could nearly predict it, the student in the row before him would stand, golden hair glinting under the buzzing fluorescent lights of the lecture hall, and deliver a response so articulated Grantaire could swear it was almost rehearsed, if not for its incredible specificity of its attacks upon each and every point the professor made. Grantaire didn’t care much one way or the other, and the debates served as amusement for him when they did not serve as lullabies.
Grantaire would come to find out that this charming young man was called Enjolras.
He did not find this out until what must have been months of relentless drunken badgering, all of which had to be shouldered by his friend Joly. The two were different in many ways: Joly was a sober hypochondriac who could almost always be found with his nose buried in a medical textbook when he wasn’t completing residency work at the metro hospital, coming from a respectably middle-class family who wanted what was best for their only son, so bright and dedicated to his schooling that the medical institutions of Paris had nearly no choice but to accept him into their finest programs.
Joly had been the first to hear, by word of Grantaire, the legends of this golden-haired, silver-tongued man who, according to the drunkard, had once argued with the professor for so long and with such frequency that the midterm exam had to be postponed until the class could get caught up with the curriculum that had been neglected. He knew who this man was, by virtue of knowing people—namely, Combeferre, who had confirmed at first that this mythical creature was indeed Enjolras, his good friend of many years—but refused to tell Grantaire. Grantaire believed this refusal to be purely selfish, masochistic, as a means to make him personally miserable, but Joly saw the withholding of information as motivation for Grantaire to quit being such a recluse and make friends with people who didn’t have anatomical exams to study for.
So Grantaire would, on more instances than could be considered coincidence, wind up a few beers deep in the back of the very same dimly lit student pub that Enjolras held meetings in as the leader of a radical political society. He found a certain fun, a fitting role, in leaning his chin into his palm and scribbling on a cocktail napkin while Enjolras’ words of revolution and utopia washed over him in time with the alcohol flooding his system. At the meetings’ conclusions, he’d find somebody’s arm to latch onto and stumble out into the cool Parisian night, the amber din of cheap booze wrapping him up in its soft cocoon which made the whole world feel like an Impressionist painting.
Grantaire was never one for Impressionism; he didn’t see the point in blurring the harsh realities and contours of the world into hazy brush strokes and pastel oil paints. The real world was never so soft and inviting, especially not to the kind of person that Grantaire found himself to be: a skeptic, some would say, but he would argue, ‘no, not a skeptic, a realist ’. Somebody who takes the world at face value, nothing more. Somebody who never had water lilies to look at as a child. Yet, seeing Enjolras from the back of the bar, several neat whiskeys in, made Grantaire feel as though he could reason with Monet himself, for he could finally see the appeal of looking at a world through half-lidded eyes and hazy morning lights. Enjolras lived in Grantaire’s mind as little more than a conjuring of swirled colors, vivid maroons and dazzling golds, the sort one might expect to find in a Klimt rather than an idyllic landscape. But to Grantaire, whose hands were forever covered in charcoal and calluses, that was who Enjolras was to him: a subject, detached, distant, whom Grantaire observed for art without getting bogged down in the heavy unpleasantries of real life. The Musain became Grantaire’s studio and Enjolras his muse, with drink as his easel and palette.
“You’ve got to stop overdoing it, man,” Joly said with a soft disdain that felt oppressive upon Grantaire’s ears.
The room was bathed in sunlight, Grantaire could tell upon his first inspection through one barely-opened eyelid, and the brightness of it sent searing pains through his temples.
“I think it’s wonderful that you’ve found a place within our little group,” Joly continued in his placating tone, which only gave the effect that he was lying through his teeth for Grantaire’s appeasement, “But getting hammered and sleeping until noon isn’t going to advance our cause.”
“You don’t know that,” Grantaire attempted to say, albeit heavily slurred and muffled as his head rested in the cradle of his folded arms upon his desk.
Joly drew the blinds, admitting defeat. “You have paint in your hair.”
Grantaire barely stirred at Joly’s decisive parting blow, and had little time to react before the prospective doctor went out the door and into the too-bright day. Miraculously, in his intoxicated state, Grantaire had managed to stash away a leaflet from the prior night’s meeting, hand-written with a meticulous script in confident, boasting red marker. The letters swam before Grantaire’s eyes; he hardly bothered to read any of them, but staring at the vague shapes allowed him to conjure up an even vaguer memory of nearly half a day before. Grateful, at least, for Joly’s benevolent darkening of the room, Grantaire managed to haul himself up from his desk, fighting inertia, gravity, and his raging hangover all at once.
Little phrases slipped through Grantaire’s mind like sand across glass as he went about his routine as usual; the biweekly sculpting seminar was a lost cause, it ended an hour earlier, when Grantaire had still been dead to the world. It was all the same, he supposed, the clay had a way of drying his hands out and getting in his mouth, and he could never quite get the hang of throwing on the wheel the way some of his classmates could. If he could sculpt, though, Grantaire knew exactly what he would make: Enjolras, in contrapposto, perfect proportions and meticulously-laid curls (and it wouldn’t be an exaggeration) casting him as a god in porcelain or marble or bronze. Enjolras’ voice, sweet like honey and still all at once as burning and bitter as whisky, pervaded Grantaire’s daydreams as he wriggled into a pair of trousers that bore less paint stains than most others. Full words or sentences Grantaire could not yet make out, but the cadence that thrummed pleasantly against his skull in contrast with the ebbing headache felt almost like a song, a stirring symphony that always seemed to decrescendo before reaching its next great orchestral cue.
His eyes finally had rid themselves of their bleariness enough to clearly read the pamphlet, now crumpled and smudged, red marker blurring into pink and blue ink.
MARCH AGAINST GUN VIOLENCE, the text said, standing out against the white computer paper that Grantaire can only imagine Courfeyrac took straight out of a printer in his university’s library, the little sneak. The handwriting styles varied across the pamphlet; the title written in capital scrawl, the date and location printed neatly in a clean hand, the contact details of the organizers in nearly illegible cursive that Grantaire could only interpret because he already knew such information. He’d been handed several—probably over a dozen—of these pamphlets at various meetings, and somehow he’d always ended up losing them. Or throwing them away discreetly.
Political rallies weren’t much of Grantaire’s scene, after all: too much shouting and police presence and being outdoors. He’d been fine with watching Enjolras’ little acts of protest over the past months, the unnoticed rallies that went unprotected, uninterrupted, from the philosophy lectures to the front of the Musain, to listening to him argue with Courfeyrac about what to paint on protest signs. Even Enjolras’ quiet existence seemed to Grantaire to be a form of protest, the way he carried himself radiant with silent power and defiance, no matter where he went (no matter where Grantaire followed).
So, it seemed to Grantaire, this particular pamphlet having survived this long in his possession was surely a sign of something. To his dismay, when his vision grew slightly clearer, begrudgingly sidling up to a light source to read despite the pain caused by the radiance, Grantaire saw that the march was slated to happen that very day. 16:00, the time read on the paper, and thank God it was written by somebody with passable handwriting, although Grantaire still had to stop and think of what that time would be in a twelve-hour format, squinting at the watch on his nightstand. After minutes of adding in his head, and then deciphering Roman numerals in his state, Grantaire realized he may not be so fit to go to the march in… however many hours it was—he couldn’t stand to do the necessary thinking to figure it out.
Noon came and went in its solitary way, the sun finding once again its customary tilt after an hour in perfect alignment. Similarly, Grantaire slouched as he stood in the kitchen of his flat, the nausea of the past hours abating and turning into gnawing hunger. He rifled through the pantry, coming up mostly empty, dismayed at the collection of bland, overpriced health food: Joly had been on a gluten-free kick lately. All Grantaire wanted was real bread. He’d have to settle for crackers and cheese again.
When his flatmate did return from class, bearing the exhaustion Grantaire could only imagine must come with anatomy lessons, Grantaire felt the urge to hide the pamphlet, to hide himself, and to go back to bed. Still, against his instincts, he managed to ask, as Joly was reorganizing his day’s notes, “Are you going to the, uh, gun rally?”
“The anti gun violence rally?” Joly responded, correcting, shooting Grantaire a glance over the wire frames of his spectacles.
“Whatever. It’s today, right?”
Joly nodded. “In two hours. Why? Do you need me for something?”
“No,” Grantaire replied, indignant that Joly would assume he had needs. “I… I guess I might as well go too. See what it’s all about.”
“Really?” Joly raised his eyebrows, nonplussed and failing to conceal it.
“Yes. I’m a part of the group, right? I get to go to these things.”
“Everyone does. We encourage outside participation.”
“Yeah, but,” Grantaire crossed his arms, “I get to go too.”
“Sure. Do you want to borrow some earplugs?”
Grantaire pulled the corners of his mouth downwards. “Nah. I’ll pop an Advil before we go.”
“Does Enjolras know that you’re coming?”
This question caught Grantaire off guard—further, it caught him on a sluggish sip of now-room-temperature water, post-emptively trying to hydrate his headache away, and he nearly choked—he couldn’t help but bristle.
“Why? Does he need to?”
“No, he doesn’t,” Joly raised his hands in an attempt to placate. “Just curious.”
“Okay. Two hours, you said?”
“Well, an hour and forty-seven minutes, now. I’ll want to get there early, help them set up and all.”
“Right,” Grantaire said, stretching out on the sofa, jumper riding up and exposing a sliver of his stomach. “Wake me up when you wanna leave.”