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When Grantaire moves in, it doesn’t click right away. There are weeks, months of dancing around each other and rough edges, like trying to fit a puzzle piece in the wrong place.
He and Enjolras are still tense in extremely domestic situations, unused to not being at each other’s throats, unused to being able to show affection freely. It’s weird the first few weeks when Combeferre’s not around, to the point that when they are just the two of them they either fuck or stay in two different rooms.
Grantaire and Combeferre fit together in many ways, but cleanliness and organisation is not one of them. In general, Ferre keeps his work shit separate from his non-work shit, but other than that he’s a complete disaster. He leaves books lying around in the worst places; he writes down reminders for himself on scraps of paper, things he wants to remember to look up later, and lets them build up and scatter.
Grantaire, on the other hand, has no personal system of organisation - or at least no defined one - but only takes up a small corner of space. He’s spent long enough living at other people’s places (Chetta’s, then Chetta’s and Joly’s, then Chetta’s and Joly’s and Bossuet’s, then Floréal’s, and him and Feuilly shared a flat for a bit which was probably his favorite out of all of those) that he knows not to make too big of a mess of his own things. Instead, he lets Combeferre clutter the entire apartment, and he lets Enjolras’ mess mix with Combeferre’s, but he doesn’t allow his books and sketchpads and dance shoes and boxing gloves to scatter throughout the living room and add to the law textbooks and the philosophy textbooks and the big book of glossy high-res photos of the night sky.
It’s difficult, too, for Enjolras and Combeferre. They’re used to living together, hell, they’ve been doing it for years. But when there was a third person living with them it was Courfeyrac, who’s always thrumming with energy, who is sometimes awake for nights on end, keeping an undercurrent of noise throughout the apartment, who could chatter at a brick wall and elicit some type of response. He’s nothing like Grantaire, who keeps all of his stuff in one corner, deliberately away from their mess, who’s loud and quiet in turns, who sometimes withdraws into himself at the drop of a hat. They’re not used to navigating around someone who isn’t used to navigating around them.
It feels, those first few weeks, like he’s holding back, holding out. Waiting for the other shoe to drop. It’s strange and quiet and so unlike Grantaire that they don’t quite know how to act.
But the other shoe doesn’t drop. Or rather, it does, but not in the way anyone expects.
Cosette asks Éponine out at the end of a meeting late in September, about a month after Grantaire moves in with his boyfriends.
In true Cosette fashion, it’s over the top and completely sappy: candles, rose petals, red wine, Feuilly playing the violin in the background (grinning like a maniac), everything.
Jehan leads Éponine into the back room - after having kicked her out for an hour to set everything up - with tears in their eyes, saying something about how children grow up so fast, and when they were her age-
"Shut the fuck up, Prouvaire, I’m older than you,” Éponine whispers, giggling (giggling) nervously.
“Did I ask,” they deadpan. “Now hush and listen to what Mademoiselle Fauchelevent has to say.”
They fall back, settling on a chair and patting their lap for Marius to sit on.
Cosette begins stuttering her way through a pre-prepared speech, but ends up throwing away the notecards and improvising something beautiful and heart-wrenching. Everyone cries.
They all part ways after that, heading towards the RER, the bus, the metro, the nearest Velib station (except Éponine and Cosette, who link hands and walk towards the Jardin de Luxembourg. It’s still freezing but they’ll be damned if they don’t do something sappy like take a walk in a park).
On the metro, Enjolras is subdued. Grantaire is chattering, full of nervous energy, and Combeferre is doing his best to keep the conversation two-sided.
“I’ll cook,” Enjolras says when they get home, the first words he’s uttered since the meeting. Without waiting for an answer, he escapes to the kitchen.
Grantaire and Combeferre collapse onto the couch, the former taking up as little space as possible and the latter taking up as much as possible. They’re still talking about nothing, both of them humoring Grantaire’s anxiety, letting it run its course. Having someone to talk at helps, he’s found, especially someone like Combeferre who is interested in just about everything there is to know.
Eventually Grantaire trails off, no longer grasping for things to say. His fingers are still tapping the couch cushion, but he’s slowed down a bit, his brain finally catching up with his mouth. Combeferre reaches out to tap his foot, opens his mouth to ask if he’s feeling better, when Enjolras bursts out of the kitchen without warning, causing them both to jump.
“What’s going on?” he demands. “Why are you like this? It’s like you’re…” Enjolras pauses, waving his hand around as if he could pick the right words out of the air. “It’s like you’re not all here,” he says finally. “Are you not comfortable with this? Because we can figure something out, I’m sure we can, if we-”
“Enjolras.” Combeferre’s voice is quiet, but it draws Enjolras out of his panic-infused rambling. “Let Grantaire speak.”
“Right.”
Grantaire, with his partners’ faces turned expectantly towards him all of a sudden, feels a rush of anxiety again, followed by a burning in the back of his throat.
Don’t fucking cry don’t be ridiculous just calm down why are you so upset about this.
He coughs.
“I…fuck.”
Combeferre moves closer to him. “Take your time,” he soothes, voice still soft.
Enjolras comes around so that he’s facing both of them, lets his hands hover about Grantaire’s waiting for permission. His boyfriend nods once, breath hitching in his throat.
“It’s just,” he begins. “It’s. I know it’s stupid. It’s unfounded and unreasonable but. Do you really want me... living with you?”
“What?” Enjolras breathes.
“It makes everything so final, I guess. It’s like I’m not giving you guys the chance to back out if you want to. And - and I know you’re used to it just being the two of you, or the two of you and Courfeyrac. I’m not Courf.”
“Of course you’re not Courf,” Combeferre murmurs. “We know. And we know you have different habits, that you don’t do everything he does, or that you don’t work with everything we do.”
And that’s okay,” Enjolras cuts in seamlessly, “because it’s like a whole new adventure, for us and you. We can learn to work with each other. Besides,” he adds, “why would we want to back out? We asked you to move in, why would we have done that if we didn’t want you?”
Grantaire presses his lips together for a moment, gathering his thoughts.
“I know that,” he says after a moment. “I know that, logically, of course. But…fuck, I’ve never really stayed in one place and expected it to be permanent before. I don’t know how to do that.”
He sees Combeferre’s mouth tighten, and the little wrinkles forming at the edges of Enjolras’ eyes, and rushes to explain.
“It’s nobody’s fault, really, I just. I kept anticipating what would come next. Childhood in Quimper will lead to adulthood in Paris. It was always just...one after the other.”
There’s another moment, Enjolras running his fingers up and down Grantaire’s palms, Combeferre’s hand still heavy on Grantaire’s foot, and Grantaire biting at his lip, searching for something else to say.
“We can help,” Enjolras whispers finally.
“Huh?”
“We can help,” he says again, louder. “We can...we can show you. If you’d like.”
“Show me?”
Combeferre picks up the thread, following it to its end. “How to really live somewhere. How to leave a mark in the place you sleep.” One corner of his mouth quirks up in a half-smile, like he does when he gets a particularly good idea. “Grantaire, mon cœur , have you ever had the pleasure of unpacking?”
Grantaire mirrors his boyfriend’s grin, albeit with a little more confusion.
“After dinner,” Enjolras says, eyes sparkling. “I made carbonara.”
And just like that, all the tension in the room dissipates, gone like it was never there.
“A man after my own heart,” Grantaire says dramatically. Enjolras and Combeferre finally see a bit of the usual Grantaire show its face.
They stand up, together, and make their way to the kitchen, Grantaire carrying Enjolras on his back, and Combeferre trying to lift up both of them. They fall into the table, laughing away any residual heaviness, and there is an overall mood of this is the way it’s supposed to be. Everything is right.
If their relationship is a jigsaw puzzle, the piece that brings it from a bunch of colors to the beginning of an image has just been fitted into place.