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Chapter Text

Their covert weekly meeting in the back room of the Café Musain is soon to be cut short by curfew. They could meet at the school, perhaps in a disused classroom, but Combeferre fears that there are too many eyes and ears at Beauxbatons, too many people to notice them slinking off and not enough dark corners in which to hide. Seventh years—sixth years, too, after exams have finished—are allowed into the nearby wizarding village on weekends, so they find themselves here week after week. As usual, Enjolras addresses the gathered students, while Grantaire sits near the back with his outstretched legs crossed on the table in front of him and his chair tipped back on two legs.

Enjolras is trying to get out his last few bits of new information when he notices Grantaire stirring, his chair falling back onto all four legs, his eyes locked on Enjolras. This is never a good sign, and tonight, with real muggle casualties near London and the clock ticking off the minutes until they all have to be back in their dormitories, Enjolras knows he has to hurry. He picks up the pace and even raises his voice a fraction, hoping to stave off interruption, at least until the walk back.

It’s too late.

“Why are we getting involved at all?” Grantaire muses, loud enough to be heard over the thrust of Enjolras’s report. “It’s not our problem. We’ve got literal and figurative distance from this whole thing, and you’re asking them to risk their lives?”

Every eye in the room is suddenly narrowed and fixed on him. In response, Grantaire crosses his arms over his chest and shrugs defiantly.

It’s Eponine who takes him on. “Because everyone in this room is committed to doing what’s right. If England falls to dark magic, then it’s only a matter of time before it spreads, and we all know it. I would think you of all people—”

She realises what she’s started to say half a second too late, and stops speaking abruptly, mid-sentence.

“Me of all people?” Grantaire scoffs, raising his eyebrows. “About this glorious equality you’re working towards, does that include half-bre—”

“Enough,” Enjolras says firmly, cutting him off as well. The handful of sixth years they’ve decided to trust and allow into their group look confused, glancing back and forth between Eponine, Grantaire, and Enjolras. The rest know Grantaire’s secret, but still Joly looks uncomfortable and Jehan concerned. “We’re all here because none of us is willing to look away and let it happen. They have a megalomaniac gaining a hell of a lot of traction, and you’ve all heard it—there are some in France who, even right now, think he has the right idea. No one here is comfortable with witches and wizards—let alone muggles and magical creatures—being stripped of their fundamental rights based on mad and archaic notions of blood purity.”

Grantaire, it seems, is in one of his moods. He’s got a clarity tonight that’s unusual for him, given his proclivities. His eyes are burning with some kind of passion, and he is unwilling to let it drop.

“Then why us? Students. More or less children. We’re eighteen years old. Why you?”

Enjolras, who won’t even turn eighteen until the summer holiday, can feel anger beginning to churn in his stomach. “Albus Dumbledore is taking students directly out of Hogwarts into the Order.”

In Britain, the resistance movement calls itself the Order of the Phoenix, but here they are smaller in number and less equipped to fight. They call themselves, simply, discreetly, les Amis. Grantaire’s point stands. None of them is older than eighteen. None of them has even graduated from Beauxbatons, though their exams are behind them.

“Well, why is he?” Grantaire persists. “Surely that’s its own kind of madness, to think that kids barely out of school have a chance against this kind of power, that they won’t be picked off one by one. That we won’t.”

Enjolras has always believed that if the odds are stacked against them, then the act of resistance is only more important. He doesn’t want to hear it. It’s all he can do to keep his voice even, as he bites out: “Dumbledore is recruiting out of school, because we can be certain that Voldemort—”

There is some nervous shuffling at the sound of this name. There are rumors of Taboos and other jinxes, even here, even among the Amis.

“Voldemort,” Enjolras repeats emphatically, “is recruiting directly out of school. We all know that Rosier has a Dark Mark. The threat is real, and it’s here.”

Evan Rosier, a fellow seventh year, and his small gang of purebloods are almost no longer bothering to hide their involvement with the dark arts. The crackling tension at the school is becoming palpable, and no one is unaware—least of all the people in this room, who have chosen to join the fight.

“So that’s what we’re trying for, then?” Grantaire seems almost feverish now, as though he can’t stop himself. “To be no better than Voldemort, fighting a war with children?”

Enjolras reaches his breaking point at last.

“Get out. Get out, then, if you don’t want to fight,” he hisses, not even pausing for Grantaire to leave, knowing in some corner of his mind that Grantaire won’t. “This is coming. Sooner rather than later. France will be swept up in this mania, and he will be murdering and taking wands—including yours. And if you weren’t always off your head on pain potions, maybe you’d know that.”

All of the tension instantly goes out of Grantaire. He drops his gaze and nods once. Most eyes around the room are widened in shock. Marius, one of the sixth years, looks positively frightened at this unexplained outburst from their normally steadfast leader. Enjolras has fallen silent.

None of the seventh years can recall a time when anyone has mentioned Grantaire’s unorthodox use of potions aloud, though they’re all aware of the problem. Grantaire is the first and only werewolf ever to be admitted to Beauxbatons Academy of Magic. As such, he has a very specific system worked out with the school, and this system includes the regular availability of pain potions from the Matron. No one is sure, perhaps not even Grantaire himself, exactly when he started taking these potions to cover pain beyond the scope of the full moon. His friends could all say with certainty, though, that’s been years since he began self-medicating almost constantly, since he became subdued and unreachable, his eyes dull.

Combeferre gets to his feet, taking control in the wake of Enjolras’s outburst. He dismisses the meeting, citing the proximity of curfew, and ekes out a few final thoughts to smooth over the incident. The sixth years—and no one else—appear somewhat comforted.

They walk back, as usual, in small groups, so as not to attract attention. Grantaire pulls his cloak tightly around him and walks alone. When Courfeyrac hurries to catch up and attempts to sling a friendly arm around his shoulder, Grantaire brushes him off.

Enjolras and Combeferre walk side by side in silence as Courfeyrac falls back to join them.

“Maybe...” he begins when he reaches them, hesitating for a moment. “Maybe shouldn’t have said anything.”

All the anger has drained out of Enjolras, replaced by the first stirrings of guilt. It must show on his face, because Courfeyrac gives a trademark smile and hastens to add:

“It’s going to be fine. Just give him some time.”

When they reach their dormitory, the curtains are already drawn around Grantaire’s bed.

Chapter Text

Grantaire had been eleven—at school only two weeks—the first time Madame Maxime led him to the wine cellar to transform. They were both wearing dark cloaks, with hoods drawn up to hide their faces. In Maxime’s case, Grantaire doubted whether it would do much to conceal her identity. The young headmistress was head and shoulders above any other person at the school, faculty or student, and Grantaire suspected that she must have some giant blood.

Not that he would ever tell. One dark creature to another, Grantaire figured. They kept each other’s secrets.

He remembers how much he shivered, despite the warmth of the evening, as she led him out of the gates, through the dark cobblestone streets, and down the back alley beside the Café Musain. The cellar, as he understood, had been quietly purchased by the school from the café’s proprietress, Madame Hucheloup. She had agreed not only to keep silent about the change in ownership, but also to be seen carrying empty boxes in and out a few times a week and, significantly, to keep an ill-tempered, yowling tomcat in the underground room the other twenty-nine days in the month.

The smell of that cat drove Grantaire into a frenzy even before the moon had fully risen, but the cover it provided him—with rumors of a mad feline for whom Madame Hucheloup had an inexplicable soft spot—was more important by far.

On that first night, Maxime pulled open door after door, bolted and reinforced and charmed shut, while Grantaire waited on the damp cobblestones, glancing nervously at the sky.

“Go on,” she said, when it was open at last, and Grantaire held his breath as he descended the stairs, his heart throbbing in his chest.

“It’s been afforded every protection, wizard and muggle,” Maxime said softly, behind him on the steps. “You will be safe here.”

What she meant was that everyone else would be safe from him here, but Grantaire was grateful for that.

The underground room was small and featureless, with stagnant air and stone walls. Grantaire’s head began to reel instantly from the strong scent of cat, so much so that he staggered a bit. Maxime looked wary at this, though his transformation was at least an hour off yet.

“I will lock you in now and come back to collect you in the morning,” she murmured, with pity in her voice. She gave Grantaire’s shoulder a small squeeze with her large hand. “Good luck.”

Grantaire found his throat was too tight to force any words, so he nodded and gave his headmistress a nervous smile, as she turned and closed the metal door behind her.

Now, seven years later, the trip to the dismal underground room is routine. Grantaire no longer needs to be accompanied; he can turn all the bolts and perform all the spells to effectively quarantine himself. The privacy allows him to save his clothing, locking his robes just outside the innermost door. The room itself is more or less unchanged, save for the deep scratches cut into the stone.

Grantaire can already feel the pull in his bones as he walks. He wishes he could take something to numb the sensation, but he never risks potions on the day of the full moon; he may be self-destructive, but he isn’t suicidal. It is a Sunday evening, so Grantaire keeps his head down while he walks. There are other students off-campus tonight, and the last thing he needs is for someone to remember seeing him leaving the grounds but not returning.

The lights are just beginning to come on in the little village before him. Grantaire can still remember the unbridled joy he felt the first time he saw those lights and the gleaming palace of Beauxbatons in the distance. His acceptance at the school had been unprecedented—as Grantaire later learned, a direct response to a werewolf having successfully completed three years at Hogwarts School in Scotland without incident. The Hogwarts werewolf, whose name Grantaire was never told, had faired rather better than him, it seemed. Grantaire was a mediocre student at best. His Transfiguration grades were abysmal, and Professor Magloire never lost an opportunity to comment on his wasted potential. Though he had something of a passion for Charms, especially beautiful charms—going as far as to experiment and create his own—this did not translate to consistency in his coursework. He had only passed the sixth-year exam in Defense because, between Joly, Courfeyrac, Jehan, and Combeferre, his friends had refused to let him fail. His Herbology, Astronomy, and Potions marks were good but not stand-out, especially when placed in the context of the rather spectacular talents in his year.

If he had been normal, human, this might have been acceptable—but Grantaire was an experiment for Beauxbatons, more or less representing an entire species. He couldn’t stand the pressure, couldn’t force himself into the mould of model student and grateful werewolf. He was grateful; he just wasn’t brilliant. And as that realisation sunk in, Grantaire grew desperate for something to take the edge off his loathing. It had been an accident at first. In fourth year, he had taken an extra pain potion five days after the full, when a particularly nasty break in his leg was still aching. He found that it made him feel numb and indifferent and just a bit fuzzy, and that these feelings were not altogether unwelcome. He began to sneak unneeded potions after that, when he was feeling especially unworthy of his place at Beauxbatons. They dulled the voice in his head that screamed that he wasn’t good enough and never would be, that he was doomed to a life of pain and mediocrity—and not just because of what he was, which he might have been able to overcome if not for who he was.

Soon, he couldn’t get through the day without them.

But Grantaire is as sober as ever as he rounds the corner into the alleyway. He does not take chances with his transformations. Pulling out his wand and beginning the tedious process of undoing the locks with shaking hands, Grantaire feels shame burning in his stomach. He had always hoped that his friends didn’t notice. Enjolras’s comments at the meeting of les Amis the previous night had cut like a whip. They knew—Enjolras knew—all of his failings.

When he reaches the cellar at last, he finds the stupid tomcat hissing and spitting at him from the back corner. The shock nearly makes Grantaire fall backwards, but he manages to keep his footing only through an awkward hop-step which no one could construe as graceful. His balance regained, he feels all his senses start to go haywire, his gut instincts caught somewhere between attack and run.

Trying to keep a hold over himself, Grantaire takes a step forward, pinching the bridge of his nose hard and trying to keep his presence of mind. The cat takes a step backward.

“I’m trying not to eat you,” Grantaire snarls.

The cat looks at him with angry yellow eyes and yowls.

Grantaire still has time, but dealing with the devil cat by himself is not a feasible option. He turns away from the scent and makes his way back up toward the café in search of Madame Hucheloup.

This is how Grantaire stumbles upon the discussion already in progress. Stopping in the upstairs corridor of the Café Musain at the sound of a muffled conversation in the back room, he recognises Eponine’s voice and moves closer. When he discerns the word “werewolf,” he positions himself just outside the door, out of sight but in full hearing.

“—We’re all prepared to die but not needlessly and not stupidly. I’m telling you that I don’t trust him,” Eponine is saying heatedly. “We’re letting him sit in on all of our meetings and know all of our plans, knowing full well this is a war with spies. He doesn’t believe in our cause, he’s made that pretty bloody clear. He doesn’t even pretend to. You heard him last night: ‘Why fight it?’ I’m not willing to gamble with my life, or Feuilly’s life or Marius’s or Combeferre’s, that he’s not reporting what he’s hearing among the Amis directly to Rosier or worse. He’s a werewolf—”

“Which—” And Grantaire freezes at the sound of this voice.

If truth be told—and Grantaire will never tell it—Enjolras is the other reason that he started with the potions. Since they were eleven years old, Enjolras was the shining golden boy of their class, everything Grantaire could never be. He was well-spoken, handsome, captivating, and bright, beloved by students and professors alike. At first, Grantaire had tried to hate him, but trying to hate Enjolras had been like trying to hate beauty and light and everything good in his life. Grantaire couldn’t do it. He was drawn to Enjolras, felt as helpless as a moth, dull and ugly, drawn to the brilliance of a flame. When Enjolras gave him attention, even negative attention, Grantaire felt most alive, perhaps simply by association with someone so vibrant.

And Grantaire was scared, terrified to explore these feelings more deeply. He didn’t need another reason to be despised and ostracised. He was different enough. Feeling everything less deeply included feeling Enjolras’s presence less deeply. The pain potions left him able to bury his desire, to leave it more or less unexamined.

He hangs back at the door-frame, unsure what Enjolras will say, gripped with a sudden, paralysing fear.

But Eponine’s voice cuts in again.

“No, that’s not what I—” she hastens to add before Enjolras has said more than the one word. She sounds embarrassed but determined. “I care about him, too. All I’m saying is that being a werewolf makes him a person of interest to the Death Eaters, maybe even a victim. Not even you can deny that. We don’t know what advances they’ve made or what they might have offered him. And the fact is, he’s good at keeping secrets. He has to be. He kept a pretty big one from us for six years.”

“From you,” Enjolras corrects dispassionately.

It’s true. Enjolras worked it out early in their second year. He’d noticed Grantaire’s regular absences and cross-checked them with a lunar calendar. One day, he caught Grantaire in private, looked straight into his eyes, and asked. Grantaire, who’d been frightened and overwhelmed and a bit breathless, looked back and found he couldn’t lie to Enjolras.

“I’m not saying that you’re wrong, but I am saying…”

Grantaire chances a glance around the doorframe. A genuinely stupid idea, he realises too late.

Eponine, facing the door, sees the movement and registers his presence immediately. Her eyes go wide with shock. Enjolras turns and sees him, too.

And then Grantaire is running down the corridor, dimly aware that someone is running after him.

“Don’t!” he shouts as he hurls himself down the stairs two at a time. It’s Enjolras poised to follow at the top. “Don’t follow me! It’s too close. I’m not safe.”

Enjolras has no choice but to let him go.

Grantaire’s words are not strictly true. He has time yet, but he flies back toward his cellar. When he reaches it, it’s still occupied.

“Get out!” Grantaire screams so loudly that the words feel sharp in his throat. This time, with a fleeting look of terror, the cat bolts for the stairs. Grantaire chases him as far as the top step and slams the outer door behind him. He rips off his clothing while furiously doing up the locks and aiming spells, adrenaline thrumming though his system, throbbing in his ears and down his arms. Trapped inside the dark room at last, Grantaire sits down, naked and wandless, in the centre, pulls his knees tightly into his chest, and waits.

Chapter Text

Grantaire wakes suddenly to a soft knocking at the innermost metal door of his cellar—the one he must have spent most of the night throwing himself against, given the state of his ribs. He tries to call out, but the pain of it in his throat brings the pricking sensation of tears to his eyes. He tries to stand, and that draws sound from him at last, a horrible, gut-wrenching whimper as he falls back to his knees.

On the other side of the door, Enjolras hears this sound.

“Grantaire?” he calls. “Grantaire? Are you hurt? I’m coming in.”

There is a second of sheer panic, in which Grantaire tries to in vain to cover himself, at least to retreat into the corner where Enjolras won’t be able to see so much of him. Then, he finds himself recoiling helplessly from the bright light streaming in at the door like the creature of darkness he supposes he is.

Enjolras has never been here before. He has never seen Grantaire the morning after the full moon, at least not until after he’s been through a barrage of healing spells and potions, tucked between highly-starched white sheets in the hospital wing, looking exhausted but more or less himself. Enjolras has also never seen Grantaire naked. Graintaire is relentlessly private when it comes to his body, bathing and changing his clothes at odd hours and only when completely alone. Even after seven years sharing a dormitory, none of his friends could say they’ve so much as seen him with his sleeves rolled up.

And now Enjolras can see why.

The sight forces most the air from his lungs at once, as though someone’s kicked him in the chest. It’s almost difficult to make out the shape of a boy at all under the cover of so much blood and so many bruises. As Enjolras’s eyes begin to adjust, he notices, beneath that, a network of twisted, interconnected scars covering almost every inch of Grantaire’s skin—some deep, jagged, and purple, some blade-thin and angry red. His dark hair is matted down. He huddles on the stone floor, curling in on himself save for one leg, which sticks out at an odd angle.

Enjolras wills himself calm, wills himself not to choke on the overwhelming smell of blood.

“Grantaire?” he murmurs soothingly, tentatively holding out a hand. “Shhh. It’s going to be alright.”

At length, a quiet, whispered response comes back to him: “D—Don’t.”

Enjolras feels the shame begin to well in the pit of his stomach. He had no right to come here, no right to expose this part of his friend’s experience to scrutiny. He’s caught himself in the patronising act of seeing only his affliction. If he believes Grantaire is an equal—and he does believe that Grantaire is an equal—then he must treat him like a human being now, not a wounded animal. He, of all people, as the unspoken leader of the Amis, is obligated to see beyond the wolf to the boy beneath.

So Enjolras forces himself to turn, crouch down, and retrieve the clothing he’d seen strewn on the ground outside the door. Wordlessly, he returns and holds Grantaire’s robes out to him.

Grantaire’s cheeks burn. It hurts—Grantaire is almost shocked by how much it hurts to have Enjolras see him like this, more than the breaks and bruises and gashes.

“I can’t—” he chokes out finally. The very idea of pressing the blue silk of his school uniform to his open wounds sends a shiver of dread down Grantaire’s spine—not that he would be able, any time in the next few hours, to flex the muscles necessary to pull robes over his own head.

But Enjolras simply nods and kneels down beside him, reaching out to cup his hand against Grantaire’s chin, turning Grantaire’s face until their eyes finally meet.

“What should I do?” Enjolras asks, his voice strong and unwavering.

Grantaire feels as though his heart has stopped beating. He closes his eyes, takes a shaky breath, and tries desperately not to lean into Enjolras’s touch.

He half succeeds.

“Pain,” breathes. His words are still clipped, limited by the rawness of his throat. “Potion.”

Enjolras glances back towards the door, uncertain.

“Robe,” Grantaire explains, and Enjolras finds the small bottle in the pocket of Grantaire’s uniform, still clutched in his hand.

For all the times Enjolras has wished that Grantaire would stop drugging himself to complete apathy, he hands the small phial to him freely now. He hopes that it will numb him.

But the results aren’t instantaneous, and Enjolras can hardly stand to watch him struggle against the pain. Before he can stop himself, Enjolras leans in and kisses Grantaire gently. Grantaire’s lips part as if by instinct, and Enjolras can taste blood. He doesn’t pull away.

Grantaire does.

“Not like this,” he practically whimpers, his hands scrabbling at Enjolras’s chest.

“What do you mean?”

“Don’t make me—” Grantaire manages. Enjolras, panicked, tries to move back, but Grantaire holds tight to him. “—say it,” he finishes.

Enjolras nods again, chastened, and hands Grantaire his wand.

When Grantaire’s pain potion has finally kicked in and he has murmured enough healing spells, set his leg and closed the gashes along his shoulder, Enjolras helps him struggle to his feet and drapes him in his cloak. They stagger about four steps before Grantaire says, “I can’t go back to school like this.”

Enjolras half-carries him up the back stairs of the Café Musain, the stairs he’d tried to chase him down the night before. In the back room, Enjolras deposits him gently in his usual meeting chair. The potion, while taking the edge off of his agony, is doing little to dull the humiliation. Grantaire buries his head in his hands and groans.

“There’s nothing to be ashamed of,” Enjolras announces. Just like that. As if he’d never kissed Grantaire, as if he’d never seen his deepest secrets.

“For you, maybe,” Grantaire croaks.

This shuts Enjolras up temporarily. They sit in silence for a moment, until Grantaire glances up to find the uneven rectangle of light from the half-curtained window falling directly on Enjolras, catching his golden hair like some parody of a baby angel. Illuminated like this, he seems an unearthly creature. Except, Grantaire reminds himself, Enjolras is human, a talented pureblood with everything to live for; he is the creature.

Grantaire closes his eyes again. “I don’t want you to pity me,” he says.

“I don’t pity you,” Enjolras replies indignantly, hoping that it’s true.

“Then why did you kiss me?”

Enjolras has no response for this. He looks down at his hands, folded neatly on the table in front of him.

“Am I a project?” Grantaire can’t quite manage to keep the fear and the pleading from his voice, though he means to sound bitter. “Are you here because you can’t stand the injustice of a werewolf being relegated to the ‘fringes of society’ or whatever, and you want to counteract all the prejudice? Is this all part of the cause to you?”

Enjolras literally bites his tongue around a response. He doesn’t want to say something cutting just because Grantaire has him on his guard, and he doesn’t want to lie.

“I’m here because I wanted apologise to you,” he asserts, his words measured, “for last night.”

Shaking his head, Grantaire asks tiredly: “Are you sorry for what was said or just sorry that I overheard it?”

Enjolras ignores his question.

“I know Eponine is wrong—not wrong to be cautious, when any one of us could be a spy—but wrong about you. I was going to tell her as much, but then you were there. And…” Enjolras hesitates. “And I’m sorry for what I said to you at the meeting. I was out of line. I have no idea what it’s like to live with your condition.”

“It’s not a condition,” Grantaire says, ashamed to hear his voice cracking. “It’s who I am.”

Enjolras gets to his feet and crosses the room to sit beside Grantaire.

“Maybe. But it’s not all you are.”

It really isn’t pity in his eyes, and Grantaire cannot bring himself to draw back when Enjolras reaches for his hands. He tries to concentrate on breathing in and out, tries to steady himself, hyper-aware of the warmth of Enjolras’s touch against his skin.

“I don’t really think we can change anything,” he mutters eventually. “For a million reasons, but mostly because it’s too engrained; I know how people hate. But I would die before I’d betray you.”

Grantaire doesn’t mean to place so much emphasis on the last word, but it’s already out of his mouth and too late to take back.

“I know,” Enjolras replies softly. “Grantaire, I know.”

Chapter Text

Late in the morning, Enjolras deposits Grantaire at the door of the hospital wing with a handshake. Grantaire has to forcibly restrain a groan of exasperation.

The truth is, though, that there’s a certain dignity to a handshake, and Grantaire is positive that Enjolras knows this, considered it, and chose it deliberately. It’s so very Enjolras, practical and reassuring—effectively “I’ve witnessed the hideous scars along the inside of your thighs and the desperate noises you make when I put my tongue in your mouth, but, on the whole, I’m just really glad you’re part of our resistance movement”—that a small smirk plays around Grantaire’s lips as the matron retraces her wand along his inexpert healing spells and tucks him into a bed in the far corner to sleep it off.

He hasn’t been out long when his friends start arriving in the short breaks between classes. Jehan comes with a bouquet of garish wildflowers for the table by his bed, Bossuet an hour later to knock these flowers and their vase to the floor with a smash, and Joly immediately behind him with an indulgent smile and a whispered “reparo.” This, too, goes some way towards easing the knot in Grantaire’s stomach.

It’s not that he is afraid Enjolras will tell them. Enjolras has always kept his secrets. From second year to the end of fourth, he was the only one to know that Grantaire was a werewolf. He told precisely no one. Grantaire supposes it’s more the fear that things will change. But things are already changing—for months now, there has been an uneasy, electric feeling of change in the air, like the moments before a thunderstorm—and, anyway, the rather obvious acts of wringing his hand and shooing their friends into the hospital wing are meant to tell him otherwise.

By the time the sun begins to set, casting patterns in orange light on the row of little white beds, Grantaire is well enough to hobble to the dining room with a fussing Joly at his side. As he picks at his bourride, he finds his eyes drifting to Eponine at a nearby table. She never looks back, never catches him staring, and when she gets up to leave alone, Grantaire sees an opportunity.

Eponine walks so quickly that Grantaire, still stiff and aching, cannot hope to keep pace. He only just manages to get to the foyer in time to see her making a left toward the corridor that leads to the library. But when he rounds the corner moments later, he nearly walks into her. She is waiting there with her arms crossed over her chest, leaning casually against the wall, and Grantaire stumbles back in surprise, wincing as he feels the break in his leg.

“I don’t like people following me,” Eponine states with an affected nonchalance to let Grantaire know that she isn’t intimidated by him. Her eyes have a kind of fire in them. “As a rule, I don’t take kindly to people lurking where they shouldn’t be and hearing what they shouldn’t hear.”

“About last night…” Grantaire begins, but Eponine is already shaking her head.

“I’ve known werewolves,” she says, “and they lied, and stole, and hurt people.”

From the way Eponine drops her gaze, her eyes still ablaze, Grantaire strongly suspects that she means hurt her.

“And they told me, time and time again, that they were just following their instincts. Just doing what werewolves do. So…” she challenges. “Tell me that I was wrong.”

It’s fairly common knowledge that Eponine had a difficult childhood. Muggleborn, she came to Beauxbatons from a rough neighbourhood in the environs of Paris, having seen her fair share of drug abuse and crime at the tender age of eleven. Grantaire, though, had never known any details. Why her muggle family might have been mixed up with werewolves, he could only guess—the desperation that clung to most werewolves like a second skin might make them easy marks for an unscrupulous dealer or petty criminal, especially one whose daughter’s gifts had introduced him to a whole new world’s seedy underbelly.

“You’re wrong,” he says, his voice firm. When she opens her mouth to protest, he pulls up his left sleeve to the elbow—a sudden, sharp intake of breath, and she goes silent.

There’s no mark there, just the shocking crisscross of scars against his pale skin.

“I never would,” Grantaire continues quietly. “Just because I don't think we can win doesn't mean I don't think we're right.”

Her eyes snap up to his face, and she seems to be looking for something there.

“Why do you pretend like you don’t care?”

“You and me? A mudblood and a half-breed?” he replies bitterly. She is not shocked by his language. “We're fucked either way. They have a chance. What difference do you suppose their deaths would make if this tide is coming as strong as you say?”

“Enjolras,” she says in an undertone, as though a realisation has dawned.

“Marius?” Grantaire supplies. He’s not even sure he’s hitting a mark, but he’s seen her looking. He usually sees things.

Her face flushes.

“It’s worth fighting. There are more innocent lives at stake than just les Amis. Someone has to stand up before it’s too late,” Eponine asserts, her voice just a little shaky. “But I’m sorry for what I said.”

She leans in, kisses him twice on either cheek, turns on her heel, and walks away.

Enjolras calls an emergency meeting of les Amis two days later. Because it is a Wednesday, and none of them is allowed to be seen creeping into the village at night, they meet in a workroom at the end of the Potions corridor long after curfew. Bahorel stations himself at the mouth of the hallway, tucked out of sight, a lookout for professors and Rosier’s gang alike.

They light the room with only a few candles so that the dim glow might be plausibly dismissed as a student revising late. In the flickering gloom, with shadows moving constantly in the corner of everyone’s eyes, les Amis are tense; they talk in hushed voices, waiting for news they dread to hear

When Enjolras stands to speak, Grantaire finds it difficult to see anything but the dramatic shadow he throws onto the far wall. Even through the haze of his strong post-moon cocktail of potions—or perhaps because of it—he feels his breath catch at the lines of Enjolras’s strong shoulders and slender torso and defiantly-angled chin writ large and dark there, like some avenging angel. Grantaire wonders, just for a moment, if the rest of them see the power he sees when he looks at Enjolras.

Judging by the way they fall silent, they do.

Enjolras doesn’t waste time: “I’ve had a report. Marlene McKinnon is dead. She was murdered by Death Eaters in her home, along with her family, and a Dark Mark set off above the scene. They have every reason to believe that Voldemort was making an example.”

There is absolute, ringing silence following these words. Most of the gathered students look shocked, a few scared. Grantaire clenches his jaw against all the things he wants to say but for which doesn’t have the words. Courfeyrac nods grimly, squaring his shoulders and urging Enjolras on.

“The Order is being threatened in a very real way now,” he continues, sounding brave and strong and unwavering. Of them all, he is the one most impassioned by his grief and his fear, most able to kindle a fire with tears. “Their anonymity is being compromised daily as skirmishes with Death Eaters play out in broad daylight, and they don’t have the numbers to stand alone against the support that Voldemort is amassing. We have to stand with them—and there’s a specific way we can help. They suspect that the Death Eaters, coming off recent successes, are making more forays onto the continent. There’s reason to believe that something big is coming this weekend—whether it’s an initiation or a potential recruiting event, we don’t know. And we need to know if we’re to have any hope of preventing an easy takeover in France. So there’s a reconnaissance mission for one of us at a holiday estate belonging to the Notts, an English pureblood family. It’s going to be brief—I expect less than two days if all goes well—but it’s also going to be dangerous. We will be making one of our number very vulnerable, and I think it would be best if I take the assignment.”

Grantaire’s “no” is caught somewhere between his chest and his lips when Combeferre says it for him.

“No. It’s not a job for you.” He gets to his feet. “It’s a covert operation, and that doesn’t play to your strengths. You’re a leader. We need you to lead.”

“I won’t send any of you on a mission I’m not willing to take on myself,” Enjolras bites out, just this side of petulant.

“But you are willing. You’ve said as much,” reasons Combeferre, gentle but unyielding. “We can’t afford to lose our point of contact with the Order of the Phoenix or the person we all look to as head of les Amis.”

“If not me, then who?”

From the corner of his eye, Grantaire sees Marius standing before the question is even fully out of Enjolras’s mouth.

“I’ll go,” he announces. Marius looks so young in candlelight that Grantaire could almost laugh at the perversity of it.

“No,” says another of the sixth years, immediately getting to her feet. Grantaire has seen them holding hands, though he can’t quite remember her name in his fog. “I will go.”

The room is thrown into chaos, in which no single voice can make itself heard over the others. Grantaire is caught between admiration and nausea as nearly every Ami rushes to volunteer.

Then, Eponine’s voice cuts through the rest. “Enough,” she half-shouts, tearing her eyes away from Marius to fix them on Enjolras. “I’ll take the mission. He—The two of them are not even of age. I’m eighteen, I’m well-suited to a reconnaissance mission—every one of you knows that—and I volunteer.”

No one can find a sound argument to counter Eponine’s, and so she is chosen.

As they file out of the room to creep back to their dormitories in the dark, Eponine stands to consult with Enjolras on the details of her assignment. Marius lingers at the back of the room with the girl at his side until Eponine gives him a wink.

“I’ll see you on Monday,” she says with bravado.

But Eponine doesn’t come back on Monday.

Strictly speaking, this is no cause for alarm. There were no hard and fast deadlines set for her return. Her continued absence might be explained in any number of innocent ways, from a need to keep out of sight to an interesting lead she chose to follow, but the uncertainty wears on their nerves.

If Beauxbatons felt tense before their covert meeting, it is nothing to the way it feels to the Amis now. They jump at loud noises and constantly glance behind them in corridors; Bahorel earns himself a detention for dueling between classes, because someone had the audacity to look askance at him.

Grantaire himself nearly throws a punch when Enjolras, whom he did not see approaching, places a gentle hand on his shoulder in the corridor.

Enjolras ducks slightly, the ghost of amusement flashing in his eyes for the first time in days before he sets his jaw again. “Grantaire, may I speak to you in private for a moment?”

Suddenly, all Grantaire can think of is the gentle pressure of Enjolras’s lips against his own. He hastily averts his eyes from the look of determination on Enjolras’s face. They haven’t been this close since the wine cellar, and if Enjolras wants to talk about it, he has chosen one hell of a time to do it.

All the same, Grantaire follows him into an empty classroom, a new panic—wholly unrelated to Eponine’s wellbeing—gripping his chest. He is caught completely off his guard when Enjolras turns and announces, “One of the members of the Order of the Phoenix is a werewolf.”

Grantaire ogles him for a moment, unsure whether it’s relief or disappointment settling in his stomach. Of course this is about werewolves. He wonders if Enjolras, for all his good intentions, ever looks at him and sees anything other than werewolf.

When he’s actually processed Enjolras’s words, though, he finds himself asking slightly desperately, “The Hogwarts werewolf?”

Enjolras looks puzzled at this. He doesn’t know. Grantaire shakes his head, not up to the task of explaining this stranger who incidentally gave him his life, this embodiment of all he could be if he weren’t so weak, and so Enjolras presses on:

“They’ve sent him as an envoy to the werewolves in Britain.”

“That’s going nowhere fast,” Grantaire scoffs bitterly.

Enjolras ignores him. “We know that the Death Eaters are approaching many different marginalised groups—werewolves, giants, even dementors. We need to be countering their advances. You could—You—” And here he hesitates. It’s an oddity, to hear Enjolras struggling with his words. “Would you consider acting as an envoy to French werewolves?”

Grantaire can believe what he’s hearing, but only just and then only because it’s Enjolras. “What can I offer them? The chance to keep living as they have been? Unemployable? Starving? Relegated to back alleys and remote campsites? I know as well as you that the Death Eaters intend to use them if they can and then kill them off as quickly as possible. But werewolves right now are desperate and miserable, are they are going to take whatever limited power Voldemort is offering as bait.”

“But you're educated. You could show them what's pos—”

Grantaire actually growls with frustration and immediately hates himself for it. “Well then, all the more reason to hate me. Why was I so coddled by the wizards that spat at them? I’m functionally a pet, Enjolras, and they don’t want to be told by me that they can better themselves.”

“You’re wrong,” snaps Enjolras. “And sometimes I think that you’re so self-destructive that you just want to w—”

But Grantaire doesn’t want to hear any more. “Oh really, Enjolras? I’m wrong about the werewolves? Tell me, what do you know about it? You can’t tame all of us!”

And, for the first time in his life, Grantaire turns and walks away from Enjolras’s undivided attention.

When Eponine is still not back on Wednesday, the anxiety among les Amis is almost palpable.

Grantaire sits with Courfeyrac and Jehan on the lawns during a midmorning break. Jehan, busy scribbling in a battered notebook, keeps getting distracted by the clouds. This wouldn’t be at all uncharacteristic behaviour from Jehan, except that there is a nervous energy playing about his hands, and he is continually frowning and crossing out whole lines at a time. Courfeyrac, usually so effervescent, is trying his best to lighten the mood with a litany of reasons why he might someday make an excellent cursebreaker—“I am a counterjinx maverick, I have abs for days, plus goblins love me…” His heart just isn’t in it, though, and he trails off when he sees Eponine’s younger brother making his way towards the greenhouses amidst a crowd of other first years. Jehan and Grantaire glance up at his sudden silence and follow his line of vision.

All of the Amis have caught themselves staring at Gavroche this week. At eleven, he is the second wizard in a family of muggles, something of an anomaly in the wizarding world. He does not particularly look like his sister, but everything about his demeanor calls her to mind. Like Eponine in her first year, Gavroche is too messy and too loud, too confrontational and too crass. Seeing him is like looking into a pensieve, and it makes all of their hearts ache.

This is the reason that Grantaire can’t quite look away from his progress down the sloping lawn, even after Jehan turns back to his notebook and Courfeyrac resignedly pulls out his Transfiguration essay. It is the reason Grantaire’s eyes are still fixed on Gavroche when he walks directly into Evan Rosier and a knot of other-would be Death Eaters returning from Herbology.

“Get out of my way, mudblood,” Granatire just barely hears Rosier sneer.

And, instead of backing away from the looming figure twice his height, Gavroche draws his wand. The other first years scatter in alarm. A classmate with blonde plaits reaches for Gavroche, but he shakes her off, and then he is standing alone before five seventh-years.

Grantaire is on his feet before he knows what he’s doing, sprinting across the grass.

“You don’t scare me!” Gavroche shouts.

Rosier laughs, lazily pulling his own wand from the pocket of his robes, twirling it between his fingers. “Oh, but I should. I have magic coursing through my veins, and what do you have? Filth.”

Gavroche scowls. “I’ll show you filth, you inbred piece of—”

Grantaire is almost there when he literally sees the curse forming on Rosier’s lips.

“Protego!” he yells, and for once in his career as a student of Defense, his shield charm is perfectly timed.

Rosier turns in confusion and sees him. His lips go tight with rage and his eyes are blazing as he raises his wand to Grantaire, and Grantaire knows that he stands little chance in a proper duel against Evan Rosier—let alone the other four.

But then Courfeyrac is there, throwing himself between Grantaire and Rosier’s gang, with Jehan just behind.

Grantaire instinctively lunges for Gavroche and pulls him back. Without really thinking, he curls an arm protectively around Gavroche’s chest and holds him there, just out of the line of fire.

“I really wouldn’t,” Courfeyrac is cautioning, his voice calm and his wand at the ready. He’s top of the year in Defense and, frankly, could probably out-duel all five of them. “Unless you want a great number of things to come to light before the Headmistress, including the reason you tried to hex a first year.”

“Oh, it’s a matter of time before pests like him are no longer a concern at Beauxbatons,” Rosier shoots back in a would-be casual tone. His eyes flick back and forth between Jehan and Courfeyrac.

“Just walk away,” Jehan echoes, ignoring Rosier’s comment. Gangly, dreamy Jehan looks all grown up in this moment, as impressive as Courfeyrac with his wand drawn. “You don’t want to fight this war here.”

Another of the purebloods puts a hand on Rosier’s arm and murmurs, “It’s not worth it, Evan. They’re not worth it. Let’s go. We’ll be late for Arithmancy.”

Evan Rosier snorts, his eyes coming to rest on Grantaire, and says, “You’re right. They’re not worth it.” Then he lowers his wand, gestures to his friends, and sets off toward the palace once more. He deliberately clips Courfeyrac with his shoulder as he passes by, but Jehan holds him in place, whispering something Grantaire can’t hear.

As he draws level with the other two, Rosier leans in so close that Grantaire can feel breath against his ear. He refuses to shiver, setting his spine and clutching his wand.

“Keep a careful eye on him, werewolf, or he'll go the same way as his sister.”

Chapter Text

At their first meeting after Eponine’s death, Enjolras announces another mission. It’s been two weeks, and they have barely had time to process, let alone mourn. Around the room, the Amis stare back him, looking pale and shell-shocked. This time, no one objects when Enjolras says he’ll go.

They do, however, volunteer to go with him. Courfeyrac gets to his feet, and then Combeferre. Enjolras opens his mouth but cannot think of a single reason to refuse them other than the fact that he wants them safe and alive—a sentiment which will not help the already bleak morale. So he simply nods in gratitude, his throat tight.

Grantaire closes his eyes and tries to breathe.

As they make their way back to school, he deliberately falls behind. Grantaire watches the others, little groups of pale blue uniforms bobbing along in the gathering darkness. They look ghostly, and he doesn’t want to think about it. So he focuses on Enjolras, walking ahead between Combeferre and Courfeyrac, talking quietly but urgently. Even from a few yards back, he can see the rigidity of Enjolras’s posture. Grantaire briefly wonders if, like most purebloods, he had been painstakingly taught to hold himself this way, or whether it had come naturally to him, always firm and unyielding.

As they draw near to the Beauxbatons gates, he knows that his time is running out. Grantaire surges forward, takes Enjolras by the hand, and pulls him back.

“I need to talk to you,” he murmurs. Enjolras nods first to him and then to Combeferre, who gives a grim smile, before crossing through the gates and leaving them alone in the shadows.

“When I told you that Eponine was dead, I didn’t—” Grantaire struggles for a minute, wishing that his compulsion to say something, to warn Enjolras, would translate into eloquence. But no such luck. “Rosier knows I’m a werewolf. It didn’t seem important at the time, but…”

This is a lie. The word werewolf from Rosier’s lips had sent panic clawing its way through Grantaire’s chest, so much so that his brain had been slow to process the fateful words that came after. It’s just that it hadn’t seemed like the thing to mention once he had processed them.

“…but he called me ‘werewolf,’ Enjolras. He knows. And he would have no way of knowing. None of the Amis would have given that information to Evan Rosier.”

Grantaire watches as Enjolras frowns in confusion, follows the path of his eyes down to where their hands are still clasped. He hadn’t realised that he was still holding on to Enjolras, and he drops his hand hastily.

“Sorry,” he mutters, off-footed.

“What are you trying to say?” Enjolras prompts. His is expression unreadable. Grantaire cannot tell if he’s wary or annoyed or simply exhausted.

Grantaire presses on: “If they’ve got that much on me, what must they have on the rest of you? We think we’ve been so clever, hiding in the backroom of the Musain. Can’t you see? We’ve behaved like children. We’ve been underestimating them, and—not only that—we’ve been underestimating our importance to them. They knew where Eponine was going to be. She walked into a trap. They know who we are, and what we are. And we’re not safe, Enjolras. You’re not safe. They know everything.”

There is no bite in Enjolras’s voice when he responds, “And what would you have me do?”

Grantaire gapes at him. Enjolras already knew. Grantaire can tell by his tone of resignation, by the look on his face, that he has not told Enjolras anything he didn’t already know—maybe all along.

“Don’t go,” he can’t help saying anyway. “Cancel the mission. Odds on, they’ll be ready to slaughter you, along with Courfeyrac and Combeferre.”

He only just manages to stop himself from adding “please,” but the plea is there in his voice nevertheless. It sounds desperate even to Grantaire’s own ears, and he knows what Enjolras’s response will be before he shakes his head.

The next morning, Grantaire wakes to the sight of Enjolras’s empty bed. Without getting up, he fumbles in his bedside table for a small bottle, drains its entire contents in one, and waits, staring up at his hangings with unseeing eyes, until it takes effect. Only then does he manage to put one foot and then another on the ground. With shaking hands, he finds a robe from his trunk and dresses with jerky, mechanical movements.

At breakfast, he sees Gavroche slip into the dining room, finally back from Paris and Eponine’s funeral. He is sporting a black eye. It provides a moment of distraction, as Grantaire’s chest clenches to see him looking so small and so damaged.

That is, until Gavroche hurries across the crowded room without looking at anyone and throws himself into the empty seat beside Grantaire. Taken aback, Grantaire blinks at the young boy at his side, but Gavroche ignores him. He says nothing, just piles food onto his plate and begins to inhale pastries and fruit and milk as though he hasn’t had a proper meal in weeks. In fact, Grantaire reminds himself, he probably hasn’t.

Feuilly cocks his head at Grantaire from across the table; Grantaire can do nothing but shrug. As he eats, Gavroche subtly shifts his chair closer until their arms are nearly touching.

For the next few days, while he is wracked with worry, Grantaire often notices Gavroche trailing him around the palace him like a small, angry shadow. Once, he turns on his heel to double back for a forgotten book only to discover Gavroche very nearly under his left arm. He is clinging to Grantaire in the way he never clung to Eponine. Eventually, it occurs to Grantaire that he might, however inadvertently, have been the first person to try to protect Gavroche in the eleven-year-old’s living memory.

But while that may have been his instinct that day on the lawns, it was also a fluke. Grantaire knows he cannot be trusted to look after anything, not himself, not his friends, and certainly not a desperate child. Gavroche needs someone—this much is clear—but he needs someone better than Grantaire. The further he can run, Grantaire thinks, the safer he will be. So he continues to say nothing to him, and Gavroche continues to say nothing in return.

On the third night, Grantaire gives up on sleeping altogether. Images of Enjolras’s eyes, dead and half-open, of blood spilling over his lips, of his broken body sprawled out at odd angles keep Grantaire physically moving, twisting about in his sheets in an attempt to block them out until light begins to seep through the dormitory windows. Terror and apprehension and guilt—as if just by thinking these scenes, he is making them true—chase each other around his brain in cycles.

And then, just as suddenly as they disappeared, they come back.

Enjolras, Combeferre, and Courfeyrac file into History of Magic on Tuesday morning with books tucked under their arms and bags slung over their shoulders as though they’d never been gone. Grantaire lets out a shaky breath he didn’t know he’d been holding and feels his body go weak with relief.

The relief doesn’t last the day. There’s another makeshift meeting after curfew, this time just a few of them to avoid being noticed in the corridors. There’s another assignment. Only one person is needed—to serve as a scout, a guide of sorts and maybe a translator, for a critical Order of the Phoenix mission in northern France under the care of Benjy Fenwick. It will almost certainly be risky. Those are all the details Enjolras was given.

Jehan has somehow crept to the front of the room without calling attention to himself. They all notice too late.

“I’ll go,” he says softly. “I speak English.”

And, just like that, it’s decided.

The next evening, Grantaire pulls up the collar on his cloak as he steals across the lawns toward the village and his wine cellar. He passes no one on the Beauxbatons grounds but keeps his head down nevertheless. The nervousness and the ache and the thought of Jehan’s smile all cut more sharply without the potions.

“Where are you going?” asks a cocky voice as he nears the gates. He nearly jumps out of his skin. Gavroche rolls out from behind the pillar flanking the right side of the entrance, smirking at Grantaire’s alarm.

“Don’t do that,” he hisses, inadvertently clutching at his chest like someone’s nervous grandmother. Gavroche snickers at this and repeats his question, and Grantaire thinks: to hell with it.

“To my cellar,” he says, jerking his head to indicate the fading light. “I’m a werewolf.”

Gavroche scoffs again and fixes Grantaire with a look. “Yeah, and I’m Brigitte Bardot.”

Grantaire merely raises an eyebrow at him.

“Where are you really going?” he demands.

Grantaire shakes his head and then keeps walking, leaving Gavroche standing there. “I’ll see you tomorrow, okay?”

“Wait! I want to help.” Grantaire freezes in his tracks without turning around, and Gavroche continues, “I know you’re going on a mission.”

Grantaire wheels around to face him. He looks small and pale, the bruising around his eye so prominent even in the shadowy dusk, but his jaw is set.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Grantaire says with every single ounce of conviction he can muster.

“Don’t lie to me,” he bites out. There is so much bitterness in his tone. “I heard him. When he came to tell my parents—tall, English guy in a loud suit—think he thought he looked muggle.”

He laughs humourlessly. Grantaire stares at him.

“He said Eponine was fighting. He said she died for the resistance. That’s what you’re doing. I know it. And I want to fight.”

He wants to tell Gavroche that he isn’t that brave, that he’s never volunteered because he would inevitably fuck it up and get them all killed, but he doesn’t want to make the bravery of his friends sound admirable—not to this child who wants to be a part of their war.

So instead he says, quietly, “Who gave you that black eye?”

Gavroche shrugs, and it tugs at something deep inside Grantaire. He remembers how it felt to be this young and this alone and this broken. He is struck by the insane urge to wrap his arms around this boy, who would probably black his eye for trying it. All the same, he hikes up his sleeves just slightly and watches as Gavroche goes wide-eyed for a second.

He won’t let it happen. Maybe he’s fucked up and maybe he’s not fit to take care of anyone, but he won’t let this happen.

Even if France fell, he thinks, and they were coming for muggleborns, Gavroche could make it. He could snap his wand, go back to Paris or—preferably—another city and get lost in the crowd, live as a muggle. He’s clever enough and careful, and he’d be fine. Grantaire’s friends are hell-bent on fighting, and he can’t stop them from throwing their lives between the innocent and the inevitable, but he can stop this.

“No,” he says finally, in a voice that brooks no argument. “Sixth year and up. It’s not even our rule to change. They won’t take anyone younger in any capacity.”

Grantaire shudders to think that it might be a lie, that they might take this eleven-year-old if he asked.

“A fourth-year already tried. I’m sorry.” He locks eyes with Gavroche, and then he does place a hand gently on his shoulder. Gavroche doesn’t shake him off, just gapes up at him. Grantaire feels sick. “I have to go.”

He turns again, bites down hard on the inside of his cheek, and hurries off toward the little alley beside the Café Musain.

Enjolras calls another emergency meeting of les Amis the following night. Grantaire feels a serge of anger when he hears. They’re calling attention to themselves, and the last thing they need is more attention. They don’t even know for certain that one of Rosier’s gang didn’t overhear their meeting before Eponine’s mission, that it’s not the reason she’s dead. This lack of caution will get more of them killed. Grantaire wants to shake him.

Until he gets there, and sees how uncharacteristically anxious Enjolras looks at the front of the room.

“There’s something I have to tell you,” Enjoras says gravely the second the door closes.

He tries to speak matter-of-factly, but his tone betrays him. Grantaire can hardly comprehend the words coming from his lips. He feels as though the room is tilting at odd angles. Something is wrong. They were ambushed near Amiens. Benjy Fenwick is dead. And Jehan…

They’ve found pieces of Jehan.

Pieces. Of beautiful Jehan, colorful, tender, goofy Jehan, Jehan who once held Grantaire’s hand in the hospital wing just because, he’d said, he looked like he needed it. Grantaire can feel himself choking.

And then the words are out of his mouth without his making a conscious choice to say them: “I want to go. Send me.”

Enjolras's eyes are burning. Grantaire is shocked to find them brimming with tears as he spits back, “This isn't a game, Grantaire.”

“I know. I want to fight. I want to help.”

“You're not equipped.”

“Send me as an envoy. To the werewolves.” Grantaire doesn't care who knows it now. Marius and some of the other sixth years are gaping at him with wide, shocked eyes. “I’m the only one who can do that.”

Chapter Text

Enjolras doesn’t know—none of them do—that Grantaire has lived among werewolves before, if only briefly.

The summer Grantaire was fifteen, his father had roughly taken hold of his arm the morning after a full moon, twisted it behind his back as he dragged Grantaire to the door and then shoved him through it, snarling: “You’re not my son. You’re the thing that killed my son.”

Grantaire had been eight when he was bitten. His mother had gone blank and unreachable the instant she saw the blood dripping from his torn pyjamas. He’d watched the light go out of her eyes, and she had never come back to him, not really.

It had only taken a few months for his father’s grief to turn to rage. He’d never hit Grantaire—in fact, he had never inflicted any injury directly. It was never that simple. But this was not to say that he’d never hurt Grantaire. After transformations, even as he healed his son, he would deliberately pull at broken bones, press his fingertips cruelly into purpling bruises, and scour fresh wounds. As he sealed gashes, leaving angry scars, he would make sounds of disgust in his throat. Under his breath, he would murmur that Grantaire was a burden and a monster and a waste, until Grantaire cried not just from the pain but from shame and fear. His mother never tried to see him on those mornings. She never stepped in, just stood by, impassive as always, seemingly unable to find the will to care.

Grantaire thought it would get better when he was accepted into Beauxbatons and given a chance at the life his father must have once wanted for him; Grantaire was wrong. The older he grew, the less his father looked at him and the more hate Grantaire saw in his eyes when he did. Each successive summer holiday was worse until he found himself on his hands and knees at the foot of the front steps of his childhood home. At first, as he struggled to his feet, he was happy to go, weary of the sharp pain of his father’s hands on his rib cage and the sharper pain of foolishly yearning—in spite of everything—for his father’s forgiveness.

Grantaire ignored the ache, chose to feel only relief as he limped away from the house. He had not made it very far before his body began to give in to exhaustion, but he had nowhere to sleep, so Grantaire pressed on until he tripped over his own feet and found he couldn’t get up. Shaking violently, he managed to drag himself to the side of the little country lane.

He thought of his friends. If he could owl them, someone would surely come for him, help him. They didn’t know about his family, though, and Grantaire would do anything to keep it that way. They didn’t need to know that he was pathetic, that he let himself be bullied, or—worse still—that he might deserve it. They didn’t need to see him like this.

So he curled up in the dry drainage ditch, on grass that had gone brown with the relentless heat. Even if he could have summoned the strength and presence of mind to perform the healing spells he needed, he was still underage, and if they snapped his wand, then he would have nothing.

As the hours passed and the sky grew dark, Grantaire couldn’t ignore the fear creeping up from his stomach and through his chest. He bit his cheeks against the whimpering sounds his wounds were nearly wrenching from his mouth, afraid of what might come for him, remembering the night, seven years earlier, when something had come out of the darkness for him. He did not sleep so much as lose consciousness just before the sun began to rise.

Grantaire woke to the feeling of a boot tip pressed against his stomach.

“Werewolf,” said a man with a scratchy voice, as Grantaire scrambled to get out of range of his feet. “Just a little one, aren’t you? First full?”

“No.” The answer seemed to spill from his lips unbidden, and Grantaire immediately regretted confirming this stranger’s suspicions, giving him more to go on.

“No,” the man echoed, a smile playing around his lips. “Nor mine.”

Grantaire reached into his back pocket, clutching at his wand. The man was telling the truth, Grantaire knew—his scars were plain enough, prominent on his face and neck, splitting his upper lip and disappearing below the collar of his dirty shirt—but there was something sly and unnerving about him all the same.

“What are you doing here?” he blurted.

“Might ask you the same question,” the man pointed out, running his fingers through his knotted hair, before answering. “Just passing through. I hear there’s a little wizarding town not far from here?”

Still, his would-be casual tone didn’t sit right with Grantaire. Why would a werewolf have been passing through this remote area, where just a few wizarding homes dotted the countryside? How could he, by pure chance, have stumbled upon the only other werewolf anywhere near this community? Had he been waiting? Watching? And suddenly, something like dread settled in Grantaire’s gut, made him wonder if this was the man who had bitten him. It was only a feeling, but he shivered slightly all the same.

When Grantaire said nothing, the man continued: “This was just a detour, though. I’m really on my way to Lyon. There’s a pack there, underground, near la Croix-Rousse.”

Pack. Grantaire remembers how the word echoed around his mind. He had never heard of such a thing before, a pack of werewolves. To his ears, it sounded animalistic and forced.

“Oh,” he replied lamely, distracted by the way the stranger was looking him up and down.

“You could come, I suppose,” the man suggested as though he’d been waiting to say it all along. “I could make your introductions. It might be good to be among your own kind. Better than sleeping in a ditch, in any case.”

Every part of Grantaire was telling him to walk away, but it was true that he had slept by a roadside. He had no plan, no food, no money, nothing but the clothes on his back. He couldn’t go home. And at the back of his mind—where he couldn’t quite suppress it—a small voice was telling him that maybe he did belong among werewolves after all, that he would spend his life reviled and abused by humans until he finally gave in, that he should stop masquerading as something he could never be.

So, in the end, the man convinced Grantaire to take his hand. He apparated them both to a back-alley and knocked on a nondescript, unpainted door.

Someone growled on the other side.

“Open it,” the man answered in a harsh voice, and, just like that, he dropped the act. In two words, all of the feigned amiability was gone, replaced with viciousness. As the door opened onto what looked like a narrow, stone passageway with an arched ceiling, Grantaire thought of running, but it was too late. The man had him by the front of his shirt.

“New blood,” he laughed coldly, dragging Grantaire with him over the threshold. Then the door was shutting behind them, and Grantaire was struggling in vain to orient himself in the resultant gloom of this corridor with no windows. Before he could see properly or even think of fighting back, two new men were wrestling him to the ground. One held him down, his cheek pressed against the damp stone floor, while the other searched his pockets and, finding nothing else, took his wand.

“You brought us some scrawny pet with no money? He’s a lapdog,” said the smaller of the two, twirling Grantaire’s wand between his fingers. Grantaire staggered back to his feet, panic clawing its way through his chest. The man with whom he had come just shrugged. “Well, we’ll see. Bring him through.”

And after that, they hauled him through the passage, the air growing increasingly damp and stale, until they reached a dimly-lit room. When they stopped walking, Grantaire tried to struggle. They laughed. The largest of the three, the one who had held Grantaire down, came to stand directly behind him.

“You’ve been kept by humans,” he muttered close to Grantaire’s ear. “You smell of soap. You are afraid of your own kind.”

Grantaire could deny nothing; he was terrified.

“You will fight,” he continued nonchalantly, catching Grantaire’s hands with one of his own, holding them fast behind Grantaire’s back, while he gestured to someone in the shadows with the other. A wiry man, perhaps in his mid-twenties, came slinking out of the darkness, cracking his knuckles like some kind of comic book villain. “Fight him, if you want to stay.”

With these words, he shoved Grantaire forward toward this approaching opponent.

“Please, I don’t—” began Grantaire, but his words were cut short by a yelp as the other man moved with lightning-quickness and his fist made contact with Grantaire’s nose. When he bent double, his hands pressed to his face, the man took his chance to knee Grantaire hard just below the ribs. He collapsed, gasping for breath.

“Fight me,” the man laughed, shaking out his hand and spitting on the ground beside Grantaire. “Get up.”

When Grantaire couldn’t get up, the man yanked him to his feet as though he were a ragdoll. Grantaire staggered one step unsupported, only to be punched again, this time in the stomach, and fall back to his knees.

The man crouched down and put a mockingly gentle hand against Grantaire’s cheek, smeared his thumb through the blood pouring from Grantaire’s nose. “What’s the matter, pet? Mummy and Daddy aren’t here to heal you up and kiss it all better?”

And something inside Grantaire, something that had been coiled there for a long time, snapped. He let out a primal yell and threw himself at the man. As they rolled backwards with the force of his attack, Grantaire landed one solid punch. Then the man was slamming Grantaire’s head against the floor, and he was unconscious.

When Grantaire came to hours later, he was surprised to find himself still in an underground hallway, half-propped against the uneven stone wall. As he pushed himself to a sitting position, gasping with pain as his muscles contracted, something rolled off his chest and clattered to the ground at his side. It was his wand.

Clutching it like a lifeline, Grantaire whispered “lumos” and began to move through the low-ceilinged, claustrophobic corridor. Where was he? Grantaire had had no idea that there were twisting underground catacombs like this in Lyon, let alone a pack of savage werewolves using one as a hideout. The echoing sound of his own footsteps set him on-edge. Twice, he spun around to find only the deserted stretch of ground he'd just covered. He didn't really know what he was looking for—a way out, perhaps, or an explanation.

Soon, he found himself in a clearing, a cavernous room supported by a series of stone arches, and was about to turn around when he noticed movement to his left. Standing there, staring at him, was a young woman wearing nothing but a sheer black bra and a mangled half-slip, which fell in tatters to mid-thigh. Werewolf. He could tell immediately. She made no move to cover herself, and Grantaire noticed deep scars running the length of her belly, as though she'd tried to gut herself during a transformation.

“Oh, I know what you’re thinking,” she hissed, and Grantaire was positive that she did not. “But you try something, and you die.”

He muttered a quick apology and stumbled back the way he'd come. It was becoming too much. He’d been beaten and degraded, shoved from brutal stranger to brutal stranger. He’d been frightened and alone. Someone had moved his body while he was unconscious, and then there was this psychological nightmare maze, complete with the distant sound of dripping water and half-naked women who materialised from nowhere. Grantaire wanted to go home, but he didn’t have a home anymore. He swallowed furiously against the choking sensation in the back of his throat.

There were footsteps coming toward him from down the passage. Grantaire pressed himself into the wall, silently willing his body to disappear into the shadows. It was the man who’d stood behind him and held his arms, the one who had pushed him into the fight. For a moment, Grantaire thought he might pass without noticing, but he drew level and turned his head suddenly, raising his eyebrows at Grantaire’s half-suppressed gasp.

“I see you, pet,” he leered. “What’s your name?”

“Bahorel,” Grantaire lied, hoping that this name would give him courage, make him as tough as his friend.

“You got one good punch in, Bahorel.” He repeated the name with such obvious incredulity and fixed him with such an intense gaze that Grantaire began to fear that this man could read his mind, see all of his deepest secrets. Grantaire hastily looked away. “So you get to stay. For now. Cochepaille held up some bakery, so you also get to eat. For now.”

Until these words were out of the man’s mouth, Grantaire hadn’t realised that part of the sick churning in his stomach was from hunger. The man grabbed for his upper arm, and Grantaire flinched, but allowed himself to be pulled. And, though it was bleak, the prospect of staying in this place crossed Grantaire’s mind for the first time—the possibility that he could feed himself and keep a roof over his head, just until term began in September. No one would have to know.

And so he stayed, ate stolen bread, slept on the ground, and learned to be ready to protect his face if anyone drew too close. But after a week of life in the subterranean underworld of Lyon, each day as harsh and violent and extreme as the last, Grantaire didn’t know how much longer he could last.

He woke on his eighth night to a girl—the girl he’d seen in her underclothes in the open room—climbing on top of him. Though disoriented, he moved instinctively, throwing his forearms up to shield himself. From this position, she could easily knock in his teeth.

She prised his arms apart gently and kissed him, leaning down to press her body to his. Grantaire felt as though he were drowning in his own panic. His body went rigid, his eyes wide.

He had never thought about girls the way his friends thought about girls. He’d seen them nervously getting ready for dates, flushing when one of their female classmates caught them staring, but Grantaire had always felt somehow removed from these experiences. For as long as he had felt attraction, he’d been desperate to bury it. There was longing, and there was guilt; that was all. There had never been anything light or free or giggly about it. Grantaire had found his pulse quickening always—shamefully—to thoughts of blonde curls, large hands, a flat chest, and a lithe frame.

“N—No.” The whimpered sound wrenched itself from between his lips as soon as she pulled back to reach for the hem of her shirt.

“What?” She frowned down at him, and Grantaire shook his head. “Just give in to your instincts. That’s all they want from you.”

But Grantaire was struggling on the precipice of helpless tears.

“Did someone…?” she prompted and, in that second, she seemed much older.

“No! I’ve never…” Grantaire could feel his face burning.

“Then you’re nervous,” she lilted, just this side of teasingly, her eyes bright once more. She slid a leg between Grantaire’s. “Just turn off your brain.”

“No,” he repeated hastily. It seemed to be the only word he could recall with any certainty as her warm weight pressed him into the ground. “It’s…not my brain. I can’t—Please.”

Something like comprehension dawned on her face. “Are you—?”

“Don’t!” Grantaire cut her off, unable to handle what was coming next.

She climbed off of him, and she was quiet and serious as she asked: “But it’s girls? In general?”

Grantaire clenched his jaw and looked away from her.

“You have to get out of here,” she whispered urgently. “They’ll just…destroy you.”

The next morning, Grantaire slipped out through the door they’d dragged him through a week earlier. He found a small wizarding pub in a back alley of Lyon and flooed to the first place that popped into his head.

Madame Hucheloup was a fussy but kind woman. She had known Grantaire since he had crawled out of her cellar, bruised and bloodied, two weeks into his first year at Beauxbatons. Well-paid by the school for her cooperation or not, she had looked out for him, helped him to maintain his secret. When Grantaire tumbled out of the fireplace at the Café Musain, she took one look at his black eyes, his split lip, and the prominence of his collarbones and ushered him up the back stairs like a mother hen.

She gave him a job that summer, cleaning tables, hoisting crates of wine, and sweeping up. Each night, she fed him a hearty meal and transfigured a table in one of the upstairs backrooms for Grantaire’s bed. And when term began in the fall, she never—not once—mentioned it in front of his classmates.

She let him do the same every subsequent summer, and Grantaire never went back home.

Chapter Text

But this—this mission Grantaire accepted in his grief—is different than anything he has seen before. The pack he’d fallen in with in Lyon when he was fifteen had been a group of angry young men playing at monsters. The pack he finds in the countryside near Limoges by following Enjolras’s instructions is something else altogether. It is crueler, more savage, and, most significantly, better organised.

By the end of his first day, Grantaire has a split lip, possibly a broken collarbone, and little understanding of the pack’s hierarchy. He isn’t sure why Enjolras trusted him with this. He surely must have known that Grantaire wasn’t capable, and Grantaire, as always, has proven him right. Before he’d had the chance to be subtle, to establish himself as an “itinerant werewolf,” to earn the respect of the pack—any of the things Enjolras explained he must do—he was taken in more or less against his will. One moment, he was entering a copse of trees, squinting in the changing light, and the next he was being grabbed from behind.

“Come to tell us something?” a woman—a werewolf— with short blonde hair laughed, her wand pressed against the base of his throat. Grantaire did not know how she could possibly know, but he could feel his heart racing faster; worse still, he knew she could smell his fear.

She hauled him back to their camp: a smattering of tents and lean-tos and mats laid out on the grass. She took his carefully packed bag, though there was not much inside that could give him away, and then she left him at the mercy of the other werewolves, already circling with hungry, inhuman looks on their faces.

Grantaire winces, shifting his weight and feeling the insistent throb of something badly misaligned near his shoulder joint. He can taste blood on his tongue. The others had grown tired of beating and mocking, and after taking most of what remained of his clothing, they’d let him crawl to the edge of the camp to nurse his wounds. Still, he is far from safe, and he feels naked and exposed with nothing between years of scars and the cold eyes of strangers. He knows that it was stupid to come here. He had known it all along.

When darkness falls, others take up places on the ground around him. There are about twenty-five in all, more werewolves than Grantaire has ever seen gathered in one place before. He is certain that there is some sort of order to the way they choose their sleeping arrangements without any open hostility, but he can also virtually smell a simmering tension in the air.

Grantaire is not sure if he drifts into a fitful sleep or simply loses consciousness.

He wakes from a nightmare he can’t remember screaming Jehan’s name. He finds someone’s hand clamped immediately over his mouth and tries to cry out again, but it’s no use. Green eyes with dark circles beneath come into view, sharp cheekbones, and a wicked smile.

Grantaire panics then, unable to take the gasping breaths he desperately needs and equally unable to separate dream from reality. He finds his teeth clamping down on the hand. Grantaire has never bitten anyone in his living memory. Not as a joke, not in self-defense, not ever. Since he was old enough to understand that his teeth carried a poison that might make others like him, Grantaire has been relentlessly careful. And yet, here he is, instinctively biting down on the hand that’s suffocating him.

He doesn’t have long to consider what he’s done before, with a resounding smack, his attacker backhands him hard across the face. Grantaire, already only half-way to his knees, sprawls backwards with the force of the blow. Then the man is on top of him, knees against his chest, pinning him firmly to the ground. He shudders as the man uses a sharp fingernail to open up a gash across Grantaire’s injured shoulder—a fresh surge of pain and another scar that will never heal.

“Who’s Jehan, pet? The human whose cock you’re sucking?”

“Shut up.” Now Grantaire struggles violently against the man’s weight, filled with a sudden, all-consuming rage at hearing his friend’s name on these sneering lips. He receives another sharp slap for his pains, and this snaps him back to himself. He adds, in a pathetic whimper: “He’s dead.”

“Ah,” the man leers. “Your first kill, then. Is that it?”

“Wh—No!” Grantaire sputters in horror. “I didn’t—I haven’t—”

Others are beginning to wake up, to circle them. With the weight of the man pressing him into the ground, Grantaire can do little but struggle to fill his lungs.

“Don’t you play innocent with me,” the man snarls close to Grantaire’s face. “Sell that shit to the humans who think they’ve housebroken you. There’s not a werewolf alive who hasn’t thought about it. Ripping someone’s throat out. And they can sense it, can’t they? They’d kill you. Silver bullet, maybe? Right between the eyes.” He laughs humourlessly, pressing two fingers to Grantaire’s forehead.

Grantaire tries not to shiver. The image of Jehan, his chin held high as he volunteered to guide Fenwick swims into his brain unbidden—Benjy Fenwick, whom they’d also found in bits—but this only threatens to make him hysterical. He pushes the thought aside, and deliberately calls up the lines of Enjolras’s jaw and the angles of his fingers. And if he bites his lips where he can still remember the feeling of Enjolras’s mouth against his, then who will ever know? If he’s going to die here like his friends, then he’s going to die remembering this.

But he doesn’t die, and the panic eases just enough to allow him to take one more shaky breath in. Grantaire thinks of their faces again and forgets his pain. He knows he has to try.

“Maybe,” he wheezes, his tongue like lead, “…maybe you just haven’t met the right—”

In that exact moment, Grantaire looks up and locks eyes with the man suffocating him. It sets him off spectacularly. He growls and yanks Grantaire violently upwards, only to slam him back to the ground again. Grantaire cries out involuntarily as searing pain radiates across his chest from what he is now sure is a broken collarbone.

“Don’t you look me in the eyes,” the man spits into Grantaire’s face. His hands wrap around Grantaire’s neck, choking him. “Don’t you dare face off with me. I’ll rip your fucking head off. You don’t look at me, and you don’t challenge me.”

If it was difficult for Grantaire to breathe before, now it is impossible, with the man’s unyielding fingers crushing his windpipe just below the chin. His face turns red and his legs scrabble uselessly beneath him. Just as he begins to see pinpricks of black around the edges of his vision, the man suddenly lets go. He laughs.

Grantaire coughs air back into his lungs, gagging and retching on the ground as the man climbs off of him.

“Don’t imagine that you can convince anyone here to kneel and grovel and beg for scraps from humans,” the man says, getting to his feet and wiping his hands against his thighs. “We’re not all trained lapdogs. Some of us have self respect.”

A few in the gathered crowd make appreciative noises. Grantaire remains crumpled on the ground at his feet.

“They tried to crush us into the ground and keep us from the power that’s rightfully ours. They’re the ones that should be begging for mercy. They’re the ones who should be living in fear. Mudbloods and filth. You! Look at me!”

He kicks at Grantaire’s ribs with a boot tip. Grantaire yelps but tries to stifle the sound with the back of his hand. He glances up at the man but doesn’t dare to look higher than his knees.

“Quick learner. You can call me Alpha,” he says. Grantaire can hear the smile in his voice. Some of the others laugh appreciatively.

Grantaire calls him nothing at all. For the next few days, he drops his gaze and speaks to no one. He knows he’s failing in his mission, failing his friends both dead and alive, failing Enjolras. The knowledge weighs on him, but there is no chance to talk. It takes all his energy to detach himself from his own body, to stop himself reacting when he’s starving to death, when the others spit at him, shove him to the ground, and beat him.

On the fourth day, Grantaire sees the “Alpha” loping toward him with an unmistakably predatory look. He takes a step backwards, then another, and finds his back hitting solid wood, a few posts making up a wall of one of the ramshackle tents. Then the Alpha is on him.

“You're in over your head, pet,” he growls softly, his chest pressing Grantaire against the wall. He dips his mouth, and suddenly his teeth are on Grantaire's throat, forcing his head back.

“I could kill you if I wanted,” he whispers against the delicate skin. The contact is horribly intimate, and each movement of the pack leader’s lips against his neck makes Grantaire shiver. “But I won’t yet. I don’t like to kill our kind, and you are our kind. You would kill and steal and maim for fun. You imagine you are better. You imagine you are human.”

He spits on the ground at Grantaire’s feet.

“Are you hungry?” he asks, moving his mouth so close to Grantaire’s ear that he can feel his words as well as hear them, an uncomfortable clenching at the base of his spine. Every inch of the Alpha’s body still forces Grantaire to the wall and makes him feel as though he’s suffocating. Grantaire squeezes his eyes shut, unsure why he’s now choking back tears. “Answer me.”

So Grantaire nods, and the tears fall, and he just wants this to be over.

“Then try harder.”

And just like that, the Alpha’s gone, and he is melting down the wall into a heap.

Grantaire, who hasn’t had to face this kind of violence or degradation for nearly three years, finds himself finally crumbling under the strain. He remembers how to cower, how to stay quiet, and all the while he knows it isn’t enough just to survive it. But in every new attacker, he sees his father, and he can’t make himself tough, though he knows full-well that they prey on the weak.

At night, he wonders if they’re waiting for him to come back to school. He wonders what he will tell them if he ever makes it back. He wonders how he will face a big mess of heroes, willing to lay down their young lives, with nothing to show for his time but bruises. That’s why, when another obviously low-ranking member of the pack, sleeping near Grantaire on the bare earth at the fringes of the campsite, turns on her side when the others are asleep and asks Grantaire his name, he pushes his luck.

Too exhausted for caution, he tells her the truth, and the scruffy woman’s eyes go wide. Grantaire can just make it out in the dim light of the moon—waxing and making him more anxious by the day.

“You’re the Beauxbatons werewolf, aren’t you?”

“Probably best if that wasn’t spread around,” he murmurs, with a tight smile. “But, yeah. That’s me.”

Chapter Text

Grantaire tells this woman everything he’s supposed to tell her. Things he believes and things he doesn't believe. The truth about wizards, humans, who gave him their trust and their friendship knowing what he was, who would fight to protect him and his rights. Lies about a brighter tomorrow and the stoppable threat of extremism. He does his best to lay a foundation. The words don’t come as easily to him as they would to Enjolras or Combeferre—they’re so good at walking verbal tightropes—but they do come.

She inches closer, and Grantaire notices that she avoids bearing weight on her left forearm.

“Do you have a wand?” she whispers, leaning in.

“Used to. They took it off me when I got here.”

She nods disappointedly.

“I was hoping you knew a healing spell for this.” She holds up her wrist, which bends at a slightly odd angle. “I've never had a wand, but my mother was a healer. Is a healer, maybe. They abandoned me not long after I was bitten, when I was only a little thing. Your parents, they must be so proud of you, eh?”

Grantaire swallows. It won’t do to tell her the truth about this. His story has to be aspirational but attainable—the life that’s been systematically denied most werewolves in the present but which could so easily be the norm in the future, if France can resist Voldemort. So easily. That’s what Enjolras had said. But Grantaire takes no pleasure in lying to her, with her aching wrist and her over-bright eyes.

He gives her a tight smile. “Yeah. I hope so. Wish I could help with that arm…”

As he falls asleep, Grantaire’s mind paints pictures of a lost little girl sitting abandoned in the waiting room at the Werewolf Registry in Paris. In his head, she sits with a bin bag full of meager possessions, the industrial lighting making her look sickly and pale. She is crying.

He’s struck by how bitterly unfair it is that he was given a chance and not her.

The next afternoon, Grantaire is thrown to the ground before he even sees the Alpha coming.

“You've been evangelising,” he snarls. “I warned you, you little fucker.”

“I wasn't!” Grantaire insists from his knees.

“Oh no. Of course not. You’re just an itinerant werewolf.” The phrase sends a jolt of panic through Grantaire. He scrambles to take cover as the Alpha’s hands fumble for something near his belt.

Grantaire is expecting a wand, but what he pulls from his pocket is a piece of crinkled parchment, covered in talking points in Enjolras’s neat handwriting. It’s been ripped from the lining of his pack, where Grantaire had stuffed it partially in case his words failed him and partially, embarrassingly, to have some small part of Enjolras with him. The perversity of seeing that neat script held fast against the Alpha’s filthy hands actually makes Grantaire feel sick. No part of Enjolras, from his handwriting to his obstinate hope, belongs in this nightmare.

“Let’s see here. ‘Stress the possibility of a non-segregated future, in which werewolves and non-werewolves can have meaningful relationships,’” he says mockingly, reading the words from Enjolras’s list. He strikes out suddenly and viciously with his foot, making contact with Grantaire’s stomach and knocking him onto his back. “What sort of relationship are we talking? The kind you have, where you suck them off and they toss you scraps?”

Then he bends down, close and threatening, grabbing Grantaire by the hair. “We’ve had an ‘itinerant werewolf’ already. An English one. Greyback. Do you know what he did?”

The Alpha shakes Grantaire’s head for him.

“He took on our Alpha. Hand-to-hand. Do you know where that Alpha is now? Do you?”

Grantaire fails to answer independently and feels his nose break under the pack leader’s knuckles.

“He’s dead, because Fenrir Greyback isn’t a fucking lapdog like you. He’s strong, and he’s proud, and he has ideas about taking our place since no one is offering. We have an agreement here.”

Grantaire does not know what this means, precisely, but if a violent English werewolf has been here, shaking up this pack, he can read between the lines. And if the other side had sent their English werewolf, why hadn't the Order of the Phoenix? Surely he would have been better than Grantaire; surely he’d be doing more now than shivering and whimpering.

“Put the right people in charge of wizarding France, like they’re doing in Britain—people who understand our power and fear us like they should. People who grew up with that respect, not these fucking mudbloods.”

Grantaire hears some noises of assent. The Alpha’s fingers are still twined in his dark hair, holding him down. He swipes his free hand roughly through the blood pouring from Grantaire’s nose, licks it clean, and then smiles. He leans in closer still. “Perhaps I’ll kill you after all. I wouldn't sleep if I were you. I really wouldn't.”

Then he walks away, leaving Grantaire frozen on the ground, staring unblinkingly up at the cloudy sky.

Grantaire knows when a battle’s lost. He’s known all along, really, and he doesn't want to die like this, so he runs. As dusk falls, he takes off into the cover of the woods, wandless and terrified. He runs until he collapses, then gets up and runs again. Even once he is sure no one is following, it takes him a long time to collect his wits enough to use the rising sun to guide his direction. He arrives in a small wizarding village—not much more than a post office and pub—at the northeast edge of the forest through some vague memory of Enjolras’s briefing and, largely, dumb luck.

As he lurches into the pub in nothing but some torn scraps of fabric, covered in filth and blood and scars, a small bell tinkles over the door. The elderly man at the bar looks up in considerable alarm, but Grantaire crosses the room in four determined strides, clenches his fist around a handful of the floo powder in the two-tone jar on the mantle, and is gone.

When he comes back, Grantaire swallows three pain potions in one go and spends most of the day unresponsive, save when Courfeyrac tries to sling an arm over his shoulder and he pulls back with fear in his eyes.

“Don't,” Grantaire yelps. Courfeyrac blinks at him.

Grantaire is dimly aware that Enjolras is angry, but he cannot understand why, and he's glad that he can’t feel it.

In the afternoon, Enjolras corners him. Grantaire finds that can no longer deal with being cornered. He slips reflexively beneath one of Enjolras’s arms and staggers back before he even registers what he’s doing. On his second approach, Enjolras moves slowly, his hands out in front of him as though Grantaire is a dog that would bite him.

“What happened?” he demands.

Grantaire doesn’t want to have to recount it. His brain feels sluggish and, buried deep somewhere, there is still raw panic. “Wouldn't even hear me o—”

But Enjolras shakes his head. “No. I mean, what did they do to you?”

Grantaire just looks at him, and from the way his pupils are blown, Enjolras can tell that he’s unreachable.

Grantaire quickly discovers that he can’t sleep. Even heavily sedated, he wakes every few hours in a cold sweat, sure that someone is coming for him out of the darkness.

On his third night back, Grantaire wakes from his nightmares to the feeling of hands on his arms. He swings instinctively, and his half-fisted hand makes contact with Enjolras’s face, knocking him back. Grantaire is stunned for a split second, then he flings himself forward to pick him up.

“No,” he whispers under his breath without realising that he’s speaking. He repeats it like a mantra. “No, no, no.”

Just seeing the trickle of red run from Enjolras’s nose as he regains his feet and pushes his hair back from his face makes Grantaire freeze with terror.

“I’m sorry—I didn’t—I wouldn’t—would never—You’re—”

Enjolras holds up his hands, palms out, as though to protect himself from the barrage of barely-started sentences.

“I’m fine. Look.” He pauses, swipes his left hand across his nose, wriggles it experimentally, and grimaces. Grantaire can smell Enjolras’s blood. He wonders fleetingly—insanely—how much that would scare Enjolras if he knew. Taking his wand from the pocket of his pyjama trousers, Enjolras taps it against his face. “See? Nothing to worry about. I should have thought not to startle you, after what you’ve been…”

And now it’s Enjolras’s unfinished thought lingering in the air between them, and that is a strange feeling.

“You were brave,” he says quietly, after a long silence. “And now it’s over.”

Grantaire cannot believe what he’s hearing. “Me? I was brave?” He laughs bitterly and watches as Enjolras sets his jaw. “Jehan was brave. Eponine was brave. You—you, Enjolras, are brave. I’m a waste of...just about everything. You name it. Air, space, education, l—love. I’m weak, and I couldn’t do it. I don’t even know what I am anymore, and it’s never over.”

Grantaire feels like he’s choking. Tears are dripping into the neckline of his pyjama shirt, and he turns to hide his face. He can’t bear to look at the softening expression on Enjolras’s face, can’t bear to have Enjolras see him like this. He’s pathetic.

But Enjolras merely sits down beside Grantaire on his mattress, close enough that their arms are touching lightly above the elbow and far enough that Grantaire can breathe.

He means to let Grantaire cry, allow him the time he needs to break down, but it slips out, just quietly: “Who told you you were a waste?”

Grantaire shocks even himself when he whispers, “My father.” He looks at Enjolras with wide, scared eyes and lets out a small sob. He feels painfully exposed, as though he’s torn himself open and shown Enjolras his beating heart. He hastens to add, “This pack, the one I lived with three years ago, professors. You. No one has to say it. I know.”

And suddenly Enjolras’s hands are on either side of Grantaire’s face, a steadying presence but gentle. He swipes a thumb beneath Grantaire’s left eye, brushing at the wetness there.

“The pack you lived with three years ago?” Enjolras presses. He needs to know. He can feel a roiling anger with himself building low in his stomach. How could he have sent Grantaire without knowing, without checking? But he knows he can’t let this selfish anger show now, not with Grantaire in this state, with his face cradled between Enjolras’s hands. It would crush him.

“Yes. In Lyon.”

“Because you couldn’t live at home? Because you don’t?” And suddenly it’s all horribly clear to Enjolras. “Because he hurt you, didn’t he? And made you leave?”

Grantaire nods without looking him in the eye.

It takes a long time for Grantaire to collect himself, a long time of Enjolras wiping his tears with a heavy weight in his chest. When he does, his words come in a rush: “They’re monsters. They kill and destroy, and I’m a monster. I just—”

Enjolras knows he can’t fix this—not with his words, not with scraps of affection —but that has never stopped him before.

“I don’t know who you met out there, but you are not a monster. I should never have—” Enjolras stops himself. This isn’t about him. Not now. “Being a werewolf doesn't make you a monster. Being cruel and vicious makes you a monster. Grantaire, believe me, you are not that. And you are not a waste. If I’ve ever made you feel—feel that, then I’m ashamed. You’re beautiful.” Grantaire shakes his head. “Beautiful and gentle.”

Enjolras’s hands slide down to wrap almost protectively around Grantaire’s upper back. Grantaire can’t believe Enjolras’s words, but this he is unable to reject. His body relaxes into Enjolras’s touch, and he doesn’t know why he trusts him so implicitly, so instinctively.

At length, Enjolras pulls the silky curtains around the bed, eases Grantaire down, and wraps himself around him. Enjolras holds him there in the darkness with an arm across his chest. “I’m here. I’ll be right here.”

“Everyone else will think—” Grantaire whispers intently.

“I don’t care.”

When Grantaire begins to tremble, Enjolras strokes his hair. Grantaire knows he should be ashamed, but he is too weary even for that. He craves it so much, this gentleness and reassurance.

Perhaps he is a pet after all.

Chapter Text

Grantaire stirs with sunlight illuminating the backs of his eyelids. He should know from this alone that the curtains have been pulled back and that Enjolras is gone, but Grantaire still spends several disoriented seconds reaching for him among the twisted blankets. When he fully comes to, it is with a sinking feeling that is almost too much to bear.

He lunges for the bedside table, yanks the top drawer, and pulls out two phials. The first he pockets for later, and the second he uncorks and downs immediately. Grantaire sits with his fingernails digging into his palms and his eyes clenched shut until the potion forces his muscles to relax of their own accord.

Grantaire doesn’t want to think of Enjolras holding him, and he doesn’t want to think of the Alpha holding him down. And if his fingers fumble with his bootlaces, lacking the dexterity to perform even basic tasks, then it’s a sacrifice he’s willing to make.

The panic still rises, tight in his chest, every time one of the amis gets too close. It’s not that he doesn’t trust them. He does. Beyond knowing that they would never hurt him, they have had the power to destroy him—spread his deepest secret, have him removed from school and the possibility of a life afterward—and never once used it against him. But the fear of their proximity is instinctual, and he can’t help the way his body reacts. When he sleeps through most of his morning Transfiguration class and Joly tries to wake him with a soft nudge as Professor Magloire approaches, Grantaire reels back with so much force that he falls out of his chair. He flinches so visibly when Joly moves to help him up that Joly instantly pulls back, alarmed.

But then Enjolras is there, his hand gentle on Grantaire’s lower back, guiding him back into his seat and restoring his parchment to the desk.

“It’s okay. You’re okay,” he murmurs, and it does actually ground Grantaire for just a moment. As Enjolras returns to his place, he adds, much more loudly, “Sorry, Professor.”

Grantaire, his face burning and his heart racing, chances a glance up at Professor Magloire. Her eyes are narrowed at him.

“Unprepared as well?” she snaps. “Where is your wand?”

Grantaire stares blindly at his own hands, in which, of course, there is no wand. His wand is with a pack of werewolves near Limoges. He knows he can’t say this, but his mind feels foggy and slow to process. It’s as though he can’t quite clear the haze between himself and a reasonable lie.

“Please, Professor,” says Joly determinedly, though his hands are twisting under the desk. “It’s broken. It—We were practising the knockback jinx, and Grantaire’s wand snapped. It was an accident.”

Courfeyrac, two seats along, nods almost imperceptibly and looks pointedly at Grantaire. Catching his meaning, Grantaire jerks his head mechanically in agreement.

“Well,” says Professor Magloire, searching his face and then knitting her brows. “If that is the case, then you will need a replacement and soon. For now, you will pay attention in my class or you will leave.”

Grantaire drops his gaze apologetically, and Professor Magloire turns back to the board. He has no hope of getting a wand, especially quickly. He hasn’t got the money for it. He had spent all but the very last of his summer wages on his schoolbooks for this term. To ask the school for help would mean explaining to Madame Maxime—or, at the very least, a Professor—why it is that he can’t write home for help. No one at school knows, save perhaps Enjolras now. Grantaire wonders briefly whether his parents still get his marks and his book lists, whether they toss them into the fire unopened. No one can know. Grantaire can’t do it; they’d make him face his father, and he can’t. Even if he could explain, he’s not sure he would be allowed to remain at Beauxbatons without parental support given his circumstances.

In a way, it feels like the logical next chapter in his story. Grantaire has spent seven years playing at wizards, and now he has no wand. Just like other werewolves. The classes have always been out of his league. His classmates have always been miles ahead of him. It’s been a sham. And that he can sit here now, in seventh year Transfiguration, unable to cast a single spell for want of the one thing that separated him from the girl whose wrist he couldn’t mend, suggests that maybe the packs have been right after all. Maybe he doesn’t belong here.

Grantaire feels himself getting to his feet before making a conscious decision to stand. Every eye in the room turns to him, some worried, some accusatory, some exasperated. Then he’s running, and someone—maybe Courfeyrac—is shouting after him, and Professor Magloire is giving him detention, and he doesn’t care.

He doesn’t stop running until he reaches a disused broom cupboard on the third floor, where he spends most of the afternoon. Grantaire hates himself a little for hoping that Enjolras will come for him. He doesn’t. No one does.

Grantaire only makes it about ten steps out of his hiding place, though, before Gavroche materializes inches from his side.

Grantaire’s initial reaction is to flatten himself against the stone wall, gasping for breath and holding his hands up to shield his face. Gavroche doesn’t laugh this time.

Instead, he waits for Grantaire to lower his arms, looks into his eyes, and clenches his jaw. “I won’t—” he begins but seems unable to complete that thought. He takes a deep breath. “I’ve been looking for you. And you’ve been, apparently...in a closet?”

Grantaire runs a shaky hand through his hair and lets out an even shakier laugh. “You have no idea.”

Gavroche raises an eyebrow, and Grantaire has exactly eight seconds to panic, before a wand is being pushed into his hands.

“If you needed a wand, you only had to ask,” Gavroche says. “Take it. I heard Magloire wants your guts for garters.”

“How did you—?”

“Word gets around.” Gavroche shrugs. “Keep it.”

“Where did you—Did you—?” Grantaire stutters, taking a step forward, closer to Gavroche.

“I didn’t steal it!” Gavroche spits. “You were on a mission. I know it. And you lost your wand. Just take it. I...She’d want you to have it.”

Grantaire glances around the deserted corridor then back at Gavroche, who won’t quite look at him now. “Is this Eponine’s wand?”

Gavroche nods at a spot to the left of Grantaire’s elbow.

“Why do you have this?”

“They were going to sell it.” Gavroche scuffs the toe of his beat-up school shoes against the floor in frustration. “That guy, the English guy, he brought her wand back to us. My dad—My parents, they were going to sell Eponine’s wand. To some thugs. To make a profit. It wasn’t theirs to sell. She wouldn’t have wanted—I took it back. My dad, he must have suspected, but he couldn’t find it—I have hiding places—so he...he…”

Gavroche trails off, and Grantaire supplies the words. “He hit you,” he says softly. “He blacked your eye.”

“Whatever. The point is, it’s mine now, and I’m giving it you.”

Grantaire feels dangerously close to tears.

“You should hold on to it,” he manages. “It was your sister’s, and I don’t...You wouldn’t want me to have it if you knew…”

“If I knew you were a werewolf?” Gavroche asks nonchalantly, looking up at long last. “I know you’re a werewolf. I thought you were joking that time, but then I realised. I don’t care; they were probably going to sell it to a werewolf anyway, and not one like you.”

Grantaire stays completely silent, fear and adrenaline suddenly throbbing in his temples.

Gavroche goes on: “If I knew you were a pouf? I’m not an idiot. You’re in love with that boy, with the hair.” He makes a vaguely squiggly gesture. “So what? Pouf, werewolf, mudblood. Isn’t it all the same? Isn’t it?”

“No,” Grantaire answers quietly.

“Yes!” Gavroche insists. “You’re in les Amis. You’re fighting, like Eponine was fighting. You need to take her wand and keep fighting. Besides, I owe you one. Rosier and his idiots would have had me that time.”

“You don’t owe me anything,” Grantaire urges, desperately. “I only stood between you and Evan Rosier because it was the right thing to do. Anyone would have done it and done it better.”

“Exactly! You did it because it was right? Are you thick? No one does that! No one. People do things because it gets them something, because it gets them money, or power, or drugs, or a girl. You’re not like everyone else! You’re...better.”

“I’m not,” Grantaire says, sliding down the wall to sit on the floor. His voice wobbles. He hesitates for a second and then pats the space next to him. “I’m really not.”

Gavroche sits.

Grantaire takes three deep breaths, and then says it. “My dad hurt me, too.”

Gavroche’s eyes snap up, all fear and defiance.

“I never told anyone. Who’d care, right? And maybe life isn’t fair, but that doesn’t make it right.”

Grantaire walks away later with Eponine’s cypress wand in his pocket and a small, angry shadow still trailing him. When he comes banging back into his dormitory, it’s to meet a sight that makes his blood run cold. Everyone is gathered around Enjolras, looking grave.

Enjolras won’t even look at him.

“There’s another mission,” he says.

Chapter Text

“When?”

Enjolras ignores him.

“When?” Grantaire repeats, slamming his hands down on the trunk Enjolras is trying to open. Enjolras gives him a warning look, but Grantaire isn’t running this time. It’s a suicide mission, sending them all into the night to recover some kind of weapon the Order learned about through reconnaissance. They are walking into a trap. But everyone nodded grimly, signed away their lives without so much as an objection. Grantaire’s not having it.

“The end of the week,” Enjolras snaps. He’s not looking at Grantaire anymore. “Saturday night.”

Grantaire actually reels back a step or two. He sees Combeferre cast a doleful glance at him from the corner of the dormitory. Joly shakes his head and pushes out the door, followed by Bossuet. “You’re not—You can’t be—That’s—”

“Yes,” Enjolras interjects quietly but firmly. “I know.”

Of course he knows, knows it’s a full moon and that he’s put Grantaire’s only hope out of his reach. He’s going to leave him here all alone deliberately. Grantaire has a sudden desperate urge to throw himself at Enjolras’s feet, weeping and begging, but he glances around the still only semi-deserted room and finds himself unable to move. Straight-backed, Enjolras forces his trunk open, retrieves a few books, and sets off for the library with Combeferre following silently. Grantaire wants to scream. Instead, he lunges for his own bedside table, retrieves two bottles, drains them both even as Courfeyrac starts to object, and loses consciousness in his four poster.

From there, the days begin to slip through his fingers. The harder he tries to grip them, the faster the hours fly. On Friday night, he manages to catch Enjolras alone in the corridor after dinner.

“You can’t go,” he says.

“That’s not helping, Grantaire.” Enjolras turns to walk away.

"I..." The words catch in Grantaire's throat. Enjolras stops walking. If they are going to kill themselves in a fruitless resistance movement, then he might as well say it. If there's no future and no saving Enjolras, then he might as well throw away his dignity and tell the truth, just this once. "I love you."

Enjolras turns and stares at him.

Grantaire can’t let those words hang in the air between them, so he presses on recklessly, “Please. You don’t have to do this. You’re a pureblood. Just walk away.”

Enjolras is already shaking his head. “What kind of man would I be if I walked away?”

“You’re not a man. You’re seventeen years old!” There is no heat behind Grantaire’s words now, just desperation. “This is a school full of children! It’s not your battle to fight.”

“It is,” Enjolras says firmly. “If not me, if not us, then who? The resistance movement is gaining traction nowhere but here. They’ll take over. They’ll come for muggleborns, then half-bloods, and blood traitors, and...and you. What am I supposed to do, Grantaire? Stand by and watch it happen, because my blood status protects me? You know I can’t. This mission is important. There is talk that he’s after something, some dark magic, that will make him impossible to destroy. I—All of us are willing to stand up and fight, even if no one will stand with us.”

It’s a lost cause. Grantaire can’t help himself. He buries his face in his hands. Enjolras has the sheer nerve to put a gentle arm around his shoulders and walk him back to their dormitory.

In the end, Grantaire doesn’t say goodbye before he leaves for the cellar the next evening. He tried three times to write a letter, and three times he ripped his parchment in half and tossed the pieces into the fire. Twice he had his hand on the doorknob to their dormitory and turned around. He couldn’t do it. He couldn’t look into their eyes knowing he might never see them again. He was a coward, and he’d fled.

He feels oddly detached from his own body as he moves silently through the village streets toward the Musain. Though he couldn’t have said whether the night was hot or cold, he pulls his cloak more tightly around himself as the alleyway comes into view. At the last moment, he almost turns around to look back up at the palace but decides against that too. Without them, it’s just a building. His friends had made it a home—the only one he has now—and he can’t bring himself to say goodbye to that either.

He locks the doors, one by one, without really seeing them. The cat is nowhere to be found, and Grantaire barely registers the scent. In the darkness, he finds himself running his hands over the scratches in the stone walls. His heart is racing like there’s a choice to be made, though he knows full well that he doesn’t have one. When the transformation begins to take his body, he screams even before he feels the pain.

Grantaire staggers up the back stairs of the Café Musain at dawn like a man possessed.

There is only one thought in his head: They might be dead already. You might be too late.

“Shut up,” he hisses aloud.

“What?” asks a voice sharply from a room on his left. Grantaire twists painfully and throws himself back into the doorframe. Madame Hucheloup sits next to the fireplace in the empty room, looking slightly dazed, a jar of floo powder sitting in her lap. When she sees Grantaire, she moves to hide the container out of sight beneath her chair.

She isn’t fast enough.

“Where are they?” he demands.

Madame Hucheloup pretends not to understand.

“Please, madame.”

“There is nothing there for you,” she pleads.

“Please.” His voice breaks as he takes her hands in his own.

She closes her eyes. “Very well. I will take you, and then we’ll come home together.”

With jerky movements, she steps into the fire, gestures for Grantaire to join her, and wraps her arms around him, letting the powder slip from between her fingers behind him. No one has ever held onto Grantaire like this after a moon before—like a parent. He doesn’t have room for it in his overfull heart and his overfull brain, and he shakes his head against the feeling. Her chin resting on his head, Madame Hucheloup mutters something into his hair and does her best to shield his broken body from the spinning and the ash.

They emerge in the back bedroom of a small, dilapidated cottage in the countryside. Everything is grey and shadowy, barely discernable by the light of the misty dawn through a single window. Grantaire pitches forward onto his knees and begins vomiting, while Madame Hucheloup draws her wand and looks around in terror.

“You see?” she whispers when he is done, trying to pull him to his feet. “There is no one. We must go back now.”

“No,” Grantaire chokes, gasping for breath. “I’m not going back.”

He is trying to wrench his arm out of her grasp, when a loud crash from the next room makes them both freeze, eyes wide.

“They are coming,” Madame Hucheloup breathes, backing up into the fireplace, dragging Grantaire with her. “Quickly, before it’s too late.”

Grantaire manages to get free and stumble across the room, out of her reach.

“Please,” she practically whimpers. They can hear movement outside the door. He can see her hands trembling with fear as she reaches into the pocket of her robes for a handful of powder. “Please don’t do this. Come with me.”

“Go!” Grantaire shouts, as the door creaks open, and with a flash of emerald green light, she does.

There’s no one there.

Grantaire hurries to his feet, pulling Eponine’s wand from his pocket. He doesn’t want to die on his knees. The silence stretches, as Grantaire stands there, tense and motionless, knowing that he’s no use in a duel.

Then a tiny figure emerges.

There is a second of bone-deep relief before he feels his heart drop into his stomach. Gavroche looks even younger than usual framed in the wooden doorway.

“What are you doing here?” Grantaire hisses.

“I thought someone was attacking you.” Gavroche shrugs, coming closer. “I tried to scare them off. Worked, didn’t it?”

Grantaire reaches out and puts a hand on Gavroche’s shoulder. The fact that he’s solid and real and there only intensifies the feeling of dread. Grantaire shakes his head again, trying to think clearly.

“How did you get here? Who let you come?”

“I trailed them when they left school. That bartender lady dozed off around three,” Gavroche says. “I told you. I want to fight. I want to be in the Amis.”

Grantaire wants to wail with the pain of it. He wants to let his aching, exhausted body collapse. He wants to drag this little boy, kicking and screaming, back to safety before it’s too late. Now he knows what he’s done to Madame Hucheloup.

“You have to go,” he tries, but Gavroche is already hopping back, out of his reach.

“I’m not going anywhere,” Gavroche asserts, hand on his hip, stubborn. Just like Eponine. Just like his sister who is no longer here because of their resistance movement.

“Gavroche, I’m begging you—”

But Gavroche has already turned, heading for the bedroom door. He gestures for Grantaire to follow. “Come on, you’re wasting time. They all left out the back door ages ago.”

Gavroche leads him into a dark hallway with peeling paint. Grantaire thinks about grabbing hold of Gavroche’s arm and Apparating them both back to the Musain, license be damned, but he doesn’t think he has the strength for it. He knows he has to save this child somehow, but no solution presents itself. His mind races.

They emerge into a shabby living room, and while Grantaire looks around wildly, trying to cover them both with his wand, Gavroche bangs through a white metal door to the yard. Grantaire has no choice but to follow. He throws himself past Gavroche and flings out an arm to catch him at the chest and stop him going any further. There’s no need. Gavroche is momentarily frozen, his eyes wide with shock.

Grantaire turns slowly on the spot.

He is completely unprepared for what he sees in the meadow beyond the cottage. It’s a battle, like something out of film. Masked figures dart back and forth, the bright blaze of spells cutting through the early morning fog. There are bodies on the ground, and the air smells of smoke and blood. The fear drops all the way into the base of his spine, and Grantaire thinks he might be sick again. It was a trap after all.

“Come on! They’re outnumbered!” Gavroche shouts, pushing past him and setting off at a run down the sloping path toward the field. “Can’t you see they need us?”

Grantaire reaches for his shirt too late. He’ll never catch him—not on his newly-healed legs, not this soon after the moon.

He has to try.

Grantaire takes off stumbling down the rocky path. As he aims a stunner at Gavroche, his foot catches on a stone, and he goes down hard onto his hands. He tries to push himself up and falls, feeling all the breath forced from his lungs at once as his chest makes contact with the dirt. From the ground, he can see that the tiny figure hurtling toward the battle has not gone unnoticed. Gavroche is dancing around jets of light, laughing as spell after spell fails to make contact, firing back a few of his own.

The sight gives Grantaire the strength to drag himself to his feet. He is up just in time to see a disarming spell hit its mark. Gavroche’s wand flies out of his hand and arcs skyward, back along the path to the cottage. He doesn’t even break his stride. Running completely unarmed now, Gavroche is still laughing, still dodging. Grantaire lurches forward, his throat dry.

Gavroche reaches the field and throws himself flat-out beneath a killing curse. He shoulder-rolls and regains his footing in the blink of an eye.

“Missed me,” he taunts, and Grantaire can hear his giddy defiance even from the distance. Gavroche is zig-zagging around bodies now, and it takes Grantaire a moment to realise that he’s looking for a wand. Grantaire pushes himself into a full-out sprint, trying to ignore the searing pain slicing up his right leg. He sees Gavroche pause over a body, sees his him squint and lunge. Grantaire is almost there.

Gavroche has just managed to pull a wand from the outstretched hand of the masked figure lying prone on the ground when something hits him from behind. There is still a smile on his face and mischief in his eyes as he falls forward across the body of the Death Eater. He doesn’t get up.

Grantaire hears a primal shout of pain, and it takes him a moment to realise that it came from his own throat. He runs on shaky legs toward Gavroche, toward his body and throws himself protectively over it. He’s too late, and he knows it. He yanks on the back of Gavroche’s shirt to turn him over, but his whole frame is limp. He’s so small. Grantaire chokes, and his eyes blur with tears. He should have run faster, reached sooner. He was eleven. Everything around him is just noise and flashes, and the whole world is this dead little boy in his lap. He doesn’t know how long he kneels there, with the battle raging around him, clutching the body to his chest.

He is broken out of his trance by the shout of a familiar voice. It’s Courfeyrac.

Grantaire looks around wildly until he finds the source.

It’s Courfeyrac surrounded. He’s in his perfect defensive stance, the one he was once asked to demonstrate for the class. He fires off stunner after stunner, and Grantaire sees some of the Death Eaters go down, but there are too many. Courfeyrac dodges one spell. Two. The third jet of green light catches him squarely about the middle. His body crumples.

“No!" Grantaire screams so loudly that he’s sure his throat must be bleeding. Setting Gavroche down gently, he begins to stagger toward the place where Courfeyrac fell. There is movement on his left. A spell whizzes past so close that he can feel the heat of it. He doesn’t care.

And then there’s a masked figure directly in front of him. Grantaire skids to a halt as the Death Eater takes aim. He doesn’t stand a chance, his wand arm still slack at his side. He’s going to die like this, but then there’s someone hurtling toward him, and a flash of light, and the Death Eater goes down.

Grantaire sees the blonde curls and lets out a strangled cry. He’s alive. He’s still alive.

He’s covered in blood. Grantaire registers a tear in his shirt, an open wound near his left shoulder.

“Enjolras,” he sobs. He takes a shaky step toward him, but his legs collapse beneath him.

"Stay down," Enjolras whispers fiercely, smearing Grantaire's face with his own blood, his pure, uncontaminated blood. He pushes Grantaire to the ground and takes off running.

For a moment, Grantaire does lie there on his belly, stunned. He sees several pairs of feet hurry past. No one notices that he is still alive.

He takes a ragged breath, and then it becomes clear what is most terrifying. He can hear their footsteps. The rest of the battlefield is growing eerily quiet. Grantaire doesn’t want to think about what it means.

He pushes himself up slightly and turns to see Enjolras reaching the crest of a grassy slope to his left with several Death Eaters in pursuit. Paradoxically, the sight stills the chaos inside him. Grantaire’s disjointed thoughts and jerky, out-of-control body movements cease, all bent to one single, all-consuming idea. He has to reach him.

The figures disappear over the top of the hill. Grantaire grits his teeth and stands. Walking—or rather limping—because he can no longer run, he still moves with determination and purpose. He doesn’t look around at the figures on the ground to his left and right. He can’t. He clenches his fists. The climb is torture, but it barely registers.

What Grantaire sees when he stumbles onto the hilltop, though, makes his whole body seize with terror once more. Enjolras is surrounded in the small valley beyond. His wand is gone, and he holds his empty hands out in front of him as the five Death Eaters circle.

“Tell us, pretty boy,” one of the masked figures sneers. He reaches out with one hand, and Grantaire’s heart nearly stops, but he only smears the blood from Enjolras’s split lip with his thumb and laughs.

“We know you’ve got the inside info,” another begins, twirling his wand lazily and leaning in. “So spill, or I’ll make you spill.”

Enjolras stands rigid and silent. Fury thrums through Grantaire, and he lurches forward down the hill.

"He won't tell you anything," Grantaire shouts, staggering up behind the group. They are momentarily shocked by his appearance, and he manages to disarm just one of them before he feels Eponine’s wand leave his hand. It’s caught by one of the others, who tosses it to his companion. They all chuckle. Enjolras alone remains wide-eyed and frozen.

"Won't he?" spits the nearest Death Eater, grabbing Grantaire violently by his dark hair and forcing him to his knees.

Grantaire just has time to look Enjolras in the eyes and shake his head before the Death Eater shouts, “Crucio!”

The pain erupts from every joint and every muscle in his body. It feels as though he is being ripped apart. He tries to scream, but no sound comes out. For a moment, Grantaire is sure that he will transform, that his human mind will be overtaken and he won’t have to remember this agony. But it doesn’t happen, and Grantaire finds himself with his forehead pressed into the damp grass, twitching and gasping for breath.

He can hear Enjolras struggling from somewhere above him. He is trying frantically to wrench his arms free of the Death Eaters on either side of him, but he hasn’t uttered a single word. Grantaire smiles savagely and tastes blood on his tongue. The sun just is beginning to crest over the hill, burning off some of the early-morning mist in the valley.

“It’s getting light,” says one of the Death Eaters, stepping away from Enjolras. There’s a definite anxious note in his voice. “Let’s just get rid of him and have done with it.”

A murmur of assent follows his words. They begin to position themselves, take aim. Five wands and nowhere to run. With the last of his strength, Grantaire pushes himself up from the ground.

"Let me?" Grantaire pleads, placing his body between Enjolras and their raised wands.

He feels Enjolras's hand reach for his from behind, pulling him backwards so they are level. They stand side by side, their hands still clasped, pressed together at the knee, the hip, the arm. There are tears on Enjolras's face, but also a small smile now.

"Vive la résistance." Enjolras's voice does not waiver. He sounds righteous and defiant as ever. Grantaire squeezes his hand. "Someone will stop you someday."

The jets of green light come from all around, and they fall.

Somewhere across a sea, a baby with untidy black hair wakes with a wail.