Chapter Text
The world is flickering like the view of a street through the spokes on a rolling carriage wheel when Grantaire is hauled out by his ear through the door of the Corinth by the very beautiful, very angry barmaid in the green-brown dress. He’s been referring to her as “Floreal” for the past three hours. This isn’t her name. When she get him outside, she releases his hot, sweaty ear and gives him a shove that she relishes.
“Oh, such cruelty I suffer!” Grantaire cries out as he tumbles to the cobblestones. Even as marinated in absinthe as it is, his body falls with an instinctual fluidity—he’s alley cat-like. He has an arm out in her direction, palm upturned like a Shakespearean actor. In his better moments, although she’d never admit it, the barmaid who isn’t named Floreal sometimes, disturbingly, finds him alluring.
“And yet at your hands I would suffer any cruelty—yes, your disdain bests any caress, ma chѐre—” Grantaire is purring.
But the barmaid snaps, “Home, mon pitre,” and slams the door, the welcoming yellow light of the Corinth disappearing with her.
Grantaire slumps back onto the street, disappointed. The stars in the sky, while he lies here on the cobblestones, are swimming, certainly, reeling even, but they haven’t gone out yet, and this means that he is still awake. He resents Floreal for this.
He doesn’t know how long he lies there, halfheartedly wondering whether someone will gallop down the empty street on horseback and perhaps do him the courtesy of putting a hoof through his head before he can haul himself up, stumble home, and do a less effective, less permanent job with the bottle of brandy he has waiting—but eventually someone does come. He hears the clicking of their shoes and their cane before he sees them.
The man is a long, black shadow. He wears a top hat. His coat is cut in clean around his trim waist, but billows behind him when he walks like the train of a bride’s gown. His cane is white-tipped. This is how Grantaire remembers him later, anyway. He’s never sure, after this, whether this image stuck in his mind isn’t something from an illustration he’s seem; something from the cover of cheap paperback thriller, perhaps.
Something happens, then. Something strange. Maybe the man in the top hat with the long, billowing coat takes one stride forward and time and space adhere themselves to his will, bend around him, and bring him to Grantaire’s side in the span of a moment. Or maybe Grantaire just blacks out. Either way, the man is knelt beside him now, the soft silk of his glove, one finger, running down the side of Grantaire’s throat like a drop of water. And, for some reason, Grantaire doesn’t move, doesn’t say anything. His eyes are fixed, squinting, at the dark space where the man’s face is cloaked in shadow, the space under his top hat.
And then the man leans down and bites.