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“Which one is he?” Jehan leans over to whisper in Courfeyrac’s ear.
Courf is too distracted by the other boy’s proximity, by the way he smells like roses, by how very blue his eyes are up close, to realize immediately that a question has been asked of him.
Eponine sighs and points to the golden-haired male dancer to the far right of the stage, the one talking to a pretty blonde girl, who laughs at something he’s said (the manner of the laugh suggests that it’s at least half at his expense).
“Oh,” Jehan breathes, and leans forward in the theater chair, wide-eyed. He’s in lavender jeans, flowered Docs, and an oversized sweater in a heinous shade of yellow with a daisy screen-printed on the front.
“That’s pretty much the standard response,” Eponine says dryly.
She’s got her notebook open in her lap, and is trying without much success to make comments on her workshop group’s short stories before her class at two. It doesn’t help that Jehan has taken her pen and her left hand to draw a careful constellation of black stars on her palm.
“Now you understand why I’ve been telling R all week he doesn’t have a shot in hell,” Bahorel says, grinning, while Courf is busy trying (and failing) not to be depressed by Jehan’s reaction to seeing the now-infamous Enjolras.
“I don’t know,” Jehan says, thoughtful, as he folds his arms over the back of the seat in front of him and watches the assorted dancers warm up on the stage. “Grantaire is sexy, isn’t he? In that bohemian, ‘I-don’t-shower-very-often’ sort of way.”
Eponine grins over at Courfeyrac, who looks like he’s wishing mournfully that he hadn’t showered this morning, and pats him on his knee. Courf has been besotted with the little poet since they’d first met at one of Bahorel’s terrifyingly loud parties last month.
Courf knows Eponine through philosophy class, and Eponine knows Grantaire because he’s Courfeyrac’s roommate, and everyone on the floor knows Bahorel because, since he’s a junior transfer and two years older than the rest of them, he always has alcohol crammed into his mini-fridge and is more than happy to share it around. Quieter Feuilly is Bahorel’s roommate, which could have ended in disaster but has resolved itself into a surprisingly easy friendship instead.
The five of them—Courfeyrac, Jehan, Bahorel, Eponine, and Feuilly—have snuck into the campus theater, where various productions are staged on weekends, with the sole purpose of tracking down Grantaire’s latest crush (because Grantaire’s descriptions were mostly metaphorical and therefore deeply unsatisfying).
Eponine already knows Enjolras, of course, but Eponine is a bad person and therefore all too happy to enable the others in their enterprise.
Now they’re hiding in the back of the theater, in the plush red chairs, while the dancers do simple practice steps and some of them sit on the edge of the stage with paper cups of coffee and the girls tug on leg-warmers and lace up their pointe shoes.
“Stupid phone,” Courfeyrac mutters, fiddling with the camera of his iPhone. “It won’t zoom in enough. Bossuet wanted me to take a picture.” Lesgles, who has class until five on Mondays, had been deeply put out to miss out on their stalk-Enjolras campaign.
“Try the video setting,” Jehan advises.
“So does R have this locked down, or what?” Courfeyrac asks as he lifts his phone up to record the movement going on onstage. “Because seriously, damn.”
He may be infatuated with Jehan but he is, after all, still Courfeyrac.
“Hardly. He didn’t even get a phone number,” Eponine says, making a derisive sound low in her throat. If she was going to lie to a friend and miss out on piano practice, she’d expected concrete results.
“We don’t even know if this guy likes boys,” Feuilly points out. He’s sitting with his legs crossed in the seat, head bowed over the sketchbook open in his lap.
Feuilly hadn’t shown the faintest interest in finding Enjolras, but Bahorel (who cared less about Enjolras himself and more about finding new and exciting ways to torture Grantaire) had dragged him along all the same.
Feuilly and Grantaire are in a lot of the same classes, though fortunately not Art Practice 103: Advanced Painting, which is going on right now and is the only reason they’ve been able to pull this bit of espionage without Grantaire’s knowledge.
“He’s a ballerina,” Bahorel hisses back to Feuilly. He’s slouching with his battered combat boots up on the back of the seat in front of him, all jeans and red t-shirt and black leather jacket. “He is wearing tights.”
Feuilly opens his mouth crossly to retort that tights-wearing does not necessarily correlate to one’s sexual orientation, when someone interrupts.
“Excuse me,” a calm, deep voice comes from the aisle, and all of them look up guiltily.
A tall boy wearing black sweats, a white undershirt, and thick-framed round glasses is standing next to their row, arms folded over his chest. His eyes travel over them one by one, and then he asks calmly, “Are any of you actually in the dance department?”
The question is several steps past hypothetical. It’s abundantly clear, looking at all of them, that no, they are not in the dance department. Courfeyrac shakes his head slowly.
“I didn’t think so,” the boy says. “Given the lack of tights.”
It’s damn impressive, because there isn’t a trace of mocking in his pleasant voice but still the five of them are left without any doubt that he’s making fun of them.
Bahorel flushes and is suddenly very interested in his hands.
“We were just visiting a friend,” Jehan pipes up. Courfeyrac notices that Enjolras is looking towards the back of the theater, presumably to find out where his friend has gone, and slides down in his seat.
“Oh?” the boy asks politely. “Who?”
“Enjolras,” Eponine says, “but…”
To all of their utmost horror, the boy turns, cups his hands to his mouth, and yells in a clear, carrying voice, “Enjolras! Visitors for you.”
The very white smile he gives them before he walks away is both serene and oddly terrifying. They all stare after him in shock.
“I think I just fell in love,” Eponine says.
“Get in line,” Courfeyrac tells her.
Enjolras has come down off the stage and is making his way up the aisle towards them with a quizzical, just-this-side-of-annoyed expression.
“All of you shut up and let me handle this,” Eponine hisses at them a second before she pops to her feet and greets Enjolras with a smirk and a, “Hey, Baryshnikov.”
The annoyance on his handsome face vanishes as he recognizes his friend. “Eponine,” he says, pulling her into a brief one-armed hug and glancing back towards the stage, “not that I’m not happy to see you, but what are you doing here?”
His gaze strays to the four boys still seated, all of them attempting to look innocent and mostly just managing to appear deranged.
“Sorry to bug you in the middle of rehearsal,” Eponine says, inventing wildly on the spot. “We’re…headed out to lunch. I just wanted to say sorry again for bailing on Thursday.”
“Oh,” the blonde man says, running his fingers idly through his hair. At least three pairs of eyes track the thoughtless motion. “Don’t worry about it. Like I told you, it was fine.”
“Was it?” Courfeyrac asks, because he can’t help himself, and Enjolras gives him a startled look.
Eponine glares at Courf. “Enjolras, this is Courfeyrac. Ignore him, he’s got a condition.”
Courfeyrac waves cheerily. Enjolras smiles back at him, albeit a bit uncertainly. “Are you feeling better?” he asks Eponine.
Eponine gives a too-bright laugh and assures him that yes, she’s feeling much better, thank you.
Jehan giggles nervously and pulls the neck of his sweater up over his chin. Enjolras looks downright alarmed now as he glances over at the poet.
Even when he’s acting normally (well, Jehan’s version of normally) Jehan is startling. When he’s overexcited or uncomfortable, it’s a lot to handle, especially on a first meeting.
“Enjolras!” someone calls from the stage. “Waiting on you, sweetheart.”
It’s the blonde girl who’s spoken this time, standing with one hand on her cocked hip, next to the boy who’d called Enjolras over in the first place. They’re both grinning.
Enjolras makes a rude hand gesture in their direction, says goodbye to Eponine, and heads back to the stage at a jog.
Eponine snaps her fingers at Courfeyrac, who looks like he might be inclined to spend a few more hours in the theater watching attractive people in tights leap around the stage.
“Up,” she says, leaning over him to collect her things and pull Jehan from where he’s folded himself into the seat. “We’ll be late for philosophy.”
Courfeyrac’s phone rings while they’re slipping out of the auditorium, and when he looks at the number a truly wicked grin spreads over his face. “Grantaire, darling!” he answers jovially. “I’m glad you called, I’m very angry with you.”
A pause, where Eponine can hear Grantaire asking why.
“In all your talk of marble statues and ancient deities you failed to mention your ballet dancer’s truly spectacular ass.”
There’s only silence from the other end of the phone, and then Grantaire demands something else.
“Maybe I’m in the music building and maybe I’m not,” Courfeyrac says with great dignity. “It’s none of your business. You do not own the campus, Grantaire.”
“I told you not to stalk him,” Grantaire yells so loudly on the other end that all of them can hear it clearly. Eponine grins.
“Because that’s so much worse than begging Eponine to play sick so you could be alone in a room with him,” is Courfeyrac’s huffy response. “If you really didn’t want us to try and find him, you should have been more careful with your information.”
And while this utterly fails as a defense, it is completely true.
“Tell him to relax, we played it totally cool,” Bahorel says. “Except for Feuilly. He embarrassed himself, really.”
Feuilly levels a withering look at his roommate.
There’s a burst of unintelligible noise while Grantaire yells something at Courfeyrac.
“That is no way to speak to a fine lady such as myself,” Courf replies with a sniff. Then Grantaire says something else and his eyes go very wide. “You wouldn’t. No, R, baby, you don’t mean that.”
Whatever Grantaire says in response, it makes Courfeyrac make a strangled sound of horror and hang up his phone. “He’s going to spray-paint my new boots,” he wails, throwing his arms around Jehan’s neck even though the other boy is several inches shorter and nearly topples over at the sudden weight of him. “They’re too young to die!”
“I’d say you deserve it, but…” Eponine pauses, then shakes her head. “No, you really just deserve it.”
They aren’t even out of sight of the music building when Jehan spots Grantaire striding across the quad towards them, and for once he’s managed to put on a real button-down shirt that doesn’t even have that much paint on it (Grantaire is careless with his clothing, like he’s careless with everything, and it’s rare that anything will escape his studio classes unscathed).
The first thing he does is lunge for Courfeyrac, but Bahorel knows this drill and he steps in to grab the painter by the waist, hauling him easily backward (because Grantaire’s got muscle on him, but Bahorel is a boxer).
Grantaire still has a grip on Courf’s striped v-neck, though, so the latter yelps as he’s dragged a step forward, shielding his face.
“Just let me hit him once,” Grantaire pleads, and Bahorel appears to be considering it but Eponine steps in between them. “It wasn’t just Courf’s fault,” she tells Grantaire. “Calm down.”
Grantaire doesn’t let go of Courfeyrac’s sweater, despite Courfeyrac’s whining that he’s going to damage the cashmere. He’s got his mouth open for an angry retort when his eyes slide past Eponine to a point over her left shoulder, and he goes very pale.
Jehan and Eponine turn as one to see Enjolras, standing behind them in his black leggings and loose white t-shirt, pink spots of color in his cheeks and Eponine’s creative writing notebook held in one hand.
“You forgot this,” he tells her evenly, clearing his throat, and Eponine accepts the notebook wordlessly. The blonde man turns around and heads back towards the building he’s just come out of.
There’s dead silence for a moment, and then:
“Well, that was awkward,” Courfeyrac says gleefully.
Bahorel lets go of Grantaire. Courfeyrac screams.