Work Text:
Enjolras wakes up inhumanly early every day for two reasons: the first being that he rarely falls asleep in his own room- he falls asleep at his desk in the Cafe Musain, and so is awoken by the light coming from the large windows. The second is that he wants to watch the sunrise.
Although he constantly tells his friends that he sees no use or beauty in the natural world, the sunrise reminds him of what he’s supposed to be fighting for. The sunrise symbolises a new world, and a better one. Another chance that he can take to truly enact change. That whatever happened yesterday, he still has another chance to put things right today. Opportunity. Expectation. Hope. One day, Enjolras hopes that he and his friends can create a new world that is worthy of the sun to rise upon.
Grantaire drinks himself to sleep most nights and so never wakes up early enough to see Enjolras.
Grantaire, like Enjolras, also frequents the area near the Café at liminal times, but for a different reason. Whenever he forces himself to walk out of whatever gambling table or smoking room he’s visited this time, he stops a few paces outside of the Cafe to watch the sunset. Back when he had a full and happy life, he used to paint sunsets like these. Now, he watches them for a different reason. A reminder that today, nothing has changed. Today, nobody made a difference. Today, the world still hates you, and you hate it as much as you both have in the past week. Today, he still hasn’t seen you. Maybe Grantaire used to think that the next day would be different, better- but he’d lived enough years to know that it would be the same sunset tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow.
Enjolras doesn’t get to sleep until late at night, so he often sees Grantaire looking into the Cafe from across the street. The first few times, he ignored him and carried on with his work. After a week or so of seeing him, he felt as if he should go out. See how he was, what he was looking at. But Grantaire would surely laugh at him again, as he always did, tell him it was none of his business. And so he kept making up excuses to not talk to him, focusing more on Grantaire’s hypothetical reactions than his own suppressed feelings.
Thus, they continued this way. Like two celestial bodies, pulled together by gravity but kept apart by some other unknown force.