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The first time it comes up, it’s in a moment of frustration.
It’s about two o’clock in the morning when the late-night study session in Courfeyrac and Combeferre’s living room mutates into a discussion of things that are most definitely not studying. When Courfeyrac’s last joke elicits a particularly raucous round of laughter, there’s a tap and a cleared throat from Enjolras’ textbook garrison in the corner.
“Ah. I see that we’ve erred.” Grantaire tips his bottle toward Courfeyrac, but his eyes are fixed on the way Enjolras’ brows have drawn together. “Our fearsome leader would never sully himself with something so base.” He leans forward and adds, in a conspiratorial stage whisper, “We may have to consult with Joly. I fear that he may be allergic.”
Enjolras doesn’t look up from his Western Enlightenment textbook. “The term is asexual.”
“What, so you reproduce by -- ow!”
Grantaire takes his foot off Courfeyrac’s. He may be drunk, but he’s not stupid. Needling is one thing. This would be another.
Luckily for all of them, Courfeyrac takes the hint and segues into the one about the badger and the parachute instead. Grantaire listens and he laughs, but his mind is somewhere else.
- - -
The second time, though, he’s drunk and stupid.
It’s been a few days. Ostensibly, he is writing an essay for his Romanticism midterm; mostly, he is staring aimlessly into space. That space happens to be occupied by the top of Enjolras’ head, which is also currently occupying his thoughts, but the point remains.
The point also remains that he’s a drunken trainwreck hopelessly -- and, if the last three years are anything to go on, permanently -- in love with someone who shouldn’t reciprocate, even if he could. Which he can’t. Which isn’t doing wonders for Grantaire’s mood, that’s for certain. Or his sobriety.
Eventually, Enjolras looks up from the stack of notes he’s spent all evening rereading. “You’re staring at me.”
.
“I was having a lovely moment with the wall, Enjolras. You merely happen to be in the way.”
Enjolras gives him a Look. Grantaire ignores it.
“It was quite a touching scene. If you hadn’t been so absorbed in your revolutionary theory or whatever it is you’re reading, perhaps you wouldn’t have missed it. I doubt even one such as yourself could go unmoved.”
Enjolras’ expression goes from his standard ‘Grantaire, seriously?’ to something colder. “One such as myself?”
Shit.
“Yes. You. Enjolras the untouchable. Enjolras the marble god, the single-minded, undeterred by the distractions of us mere men.”
There’s an uncomfortable silence before Enjolras closes his book and stares at him. It’s the intense gaze he usually reserves for arguments, and Grantaire shrinks a little despite himself. “Is this about what I said the other night?”
“What you said? You said nothing. I remember nothing. Not a word.”
“Grantaire.”
He breaks. “No! It’s... it’s not. Honest,” he says, and he hopes it’s enough and knows it won’t be. “I... I looked it up, you know.”
Enjolras raises an eyebrow.
“It’s... it’s fine,” he says. “It makes sense, you know? You never were like us, like that.” And then, against his better situation, tries to salvage the situation. “Guess we had the wrong twin, then, Artemis?”
Enjolras looks at him for one long second, and then he reopens his book. He doesn’t say a word for the rest of the evening, and Grantaire goes digging for his flask.
- - -
His essay is long since failed and he’s had quite some time to stew in his own idiocy when it happens for the third time, which begins when he’s woken up by his phone ringing rather insistently in his ear.
“What the hell?” he mumbles into it.
“...Were you asleep?”
It’s Enjolras. Grantaire nearly drops the phone.
“You’ve barely talked to me in a week, and you’re asking if I was asleep?”
“Irrelevant. Are you sober?”
The questions are becoming frustrating. “As I ever am.”
“Then I would like to talk to you.”
“You’ve been--”
“As it’s three o’clock in the afternoon, I didn’t expect to find you asleep. Also, I’ve been under the impression that you were avoiding me,” he says flatly. Before Grantaire can answer, he continues. “This is not a conversation that I want to have whilst you’re inebriated, so now seems like as good a time as ever. I’ll be there in ten minutes, then.” He hangs up, and Grantaire is left to force himself awake, out of bed, and into pants.
He is vaguely presentable by the time his doorbell rings -- teeth brushed, headache ignored, t-shirt with acceptable levels of wrinkles pulled on, hair still a huge curly puff but it’s not like that’s going to change -- and he shuffles over to the door and tries not to think too much.
“I figured you might want this,” says Enjolras, pushing a cup of coffee (organic, fair trade, three sugars and two creams, which means it was ordered for him since Enjolras takes his black) into his hands and walking past him to sit on his couch. Grantaire sits on the other end of it, stares at the coffee, and tries to brace himself. This can end no way but badly.
He looks sidelong at Enjolras anyway, follows the tilt of his profile, the way his fingers tap on his leg. There’s a long, painful silence, and then Enjolras looks straight at him and says the one thing that Grantaire couldn’t possibly have been prepared for. “I’m sorry.”
Is he hallucinating from the lack of alcohol? Is he mishearing things? Is he still asleep? “What?”
“I’m sorry,” says Enjolras again, his voice a little less steady.
Okay.
This is actually happening, and Grantaire has no idea what the hell to do.
Ramble, apparently. “What the hell for? I’m the one who should be apologizing. I was an absolute ass last week, and I should never have said any of the things I did. I took it to mean more than it did, and...” He doesn’t mention what he’s thinking, how he had let it feed his own pessimism until it hurt the last person he wanted to. He hates himself enough for that already. “You told me something personal, and I was an asshole.”
“You were rude, but I dealt with it -- and you -- badly.” He’s about to protest that when Enjolras continues. “That’s not what I’m apologizing for. Grantaire.” He hesitates. “I’m sorry that I can’t give you what you need.”
Grantaire chokes on his coffee. When he stops coughing, he manages, “You... know.”
“I can’t exactly take the credit for picking up on it myself, but yes.”
They both stare straight ahead. Grantaire’s pounding headache is overcome by the sensation that the pit of his stomach’s just dropped out. “It’s not your fault,” he says, finally. “And even if it was, how could I hold it against you? I’m a fucking walking drunken disaster, and you’re...”
When he trails off, Enjolras goes quiet again. Grantaire sneaks a glance over and finds him staring at his hands again. “You said, last week, that you had done research.”
“Yeah.”
“How much?”
“...some?”
“Did you come across the word ‘aromantic’?”
He had, and now the word settles on him with a heavy, awful sort of finality. “Yes. You’re...?”
“I don’t know,” says Enjolras, and hearing him give an uncertain answer to anything is a shock unto itself. It would be almost unfathomable if the situation was less strange and terrifying and new. “I thought I was. I might still be.” He pushes his glasses down and rubs the bridge of his nose. “It’s never been part of my life, and I was fine with that.” Grantaire refuses to let himself read too much into the past tense. Enjolras presses on. “I’m not sure I know what romantic means, really. What is it, flowers and sentimental poetry and mooning over someone?”
Grantaire can’t stop himself. “No, that’s Jehan.”
Enjolras laughs -- Grantaire remembers why it’s his favorite sound -- and then, suddenly, he’s even more serious than before. “That’s not me in the slightest. And maybe that’s not what it is, but whatever it is, it doesn’t mean that I don’t care. And you -- whatever’s there, it’s somehow different.”
Grantaire thinks, briefly, that he might pass out. Instead he settles for flat-out gaping at Enjolras, who plunges on ahead, intense as ever.
“Not talking to you was strange. It was uncomfortable. It wasn’t right. I wasn’t right. Ask Courfeyrac -- apparently I was insufferable without your influence.”
He finds his voice. “Influence?”
“Yes.”
“What, no outlet? No devil’s advocate? Nobody to fight every idea you have?”
“No. No you.”
For the first time he can remember, Grantaire is struck completely dumb, and a few moments later when Enjolras touches his hand, he nearly jumps. When his hand stays there, he maybe starts to hope.
It’s still a while before he speaks. “You were wrong, you know.”
“About what?”
He turns Enjolras’ hand over in his and runs his thumb over the creases in his palm. “I don’t need what you can’t give me. I... it’s not that I don’t want it,” he allows, because he does, because he’s imagined it more times than he can even think about, but because it’s overwhelmed by different sorts of need. He’s seized by a crazy impulse to tell him all of it, to tell Enjolras every ridiculous different way he’s been in love with him for years, to tell him something stupid and embarrassing about how he thinks he might explode just from sitting here holding his hand. He wants, of all things, to babble endlessly about the fall of his hair and the sharpness in his voice and the way he looks in the middle of a speech and the contagion of his devotion. “It’s that it’s... it’s not just that, what I think of you. It’s not about that more than it is about anything else about you.”
He nods, and Grantaire knows that it’s meant to reassure him, to keep him talking. So he does.
“When I was awful last week, I was so sure that I never could be anything to you. I was still awful, and I’m sorry. I really am. Meaning something to you is more than I deserve.”
Enjolras is quiet for a moment. “You mean more than you think you do.”
He can’t help but grin. “If only the cynic would believe you, he’d have a much better time of it, I’ll tell you that. But I’m sort of...” He swallows hard. He’s too sober for this. “Does what I mean to you, or what you mean to me -- does it need to have a name?”
Enjolras closes his hand over Grantaire’s. “Well, since I still don’t know, I hope not.”
“It would be a privilege to be your I-don’t-know,” he says, and he means every word of it more than anything he’s ever said.