Chapter Text
Grantaire is restless down to his bones. His throat aches and it feels like air is rushing through his veins, and his chest is full of strobe lights, his brain is being gnawed on by tiny rodents. His fingers drum noisily on the desk, his left leg bounces up and down in a rapid vibration, he glances desperately at the clock. He just wants the teacher to shut up, the bell to ring, school to be over so he can get away, so he can wrap his fingers around a bottle, so he can make his traitorous brain shut the fuck up. It's been nearly a year, and this is all he's found that works.
When the bell does ring, he's out in moments, rushing to get away, away from the noise of so many people, away from the pounding demand for work and perfection, away from the stares and voices and laughs that made his dark thoughts whirl madly, away, away, away. His room is a cave; it's covered in sketches and utter squalor, but it's comfortable and dark and safe. He digs at the back of his closet for a shoebox inside a crumpled plastic Macy's bag. The bag is tossed back into the depths of the closet before he opens the box and greedily snatches up one of the bottles inside.
He feels like he needs this most days, after school. Like his brain is just a churning mess of thoughts he doesn't want and aches that make his head hurt and a buzzing that makes no sense. His chest is hollow and empty, like someone has pulled the strings holding his ribs together too tight and now they creak and bend under the pressure. He drinks straight from the bottle, wincing out a breath at the burn, feeling the fire all the way down. This is what he loves about drinking. It dulls the ache, chases away the confused buzz and replaces it with a better one, fills the empty hole in his chest with coals, and makes his head settle down into sluggish snake-thoughts that he can manage.
Except they can't know. They can't know and he doesn't tell them and he doesn't let on. He doesn't take their booze-- that would be too suspicious. He steals. He gets good at stealing. The grocery store down the street, the one across town, the 7/11. He gets a fake ID for fifty dollars from fellow classmate, and it looks legit. He starts using that instead. Anything to hide away from them. It's been a whole year since he started and they haven't noticed; he doesn't want them to see any time soon. He holes up in his room-- and they don't go in there anyway-- or he escapes down to the river, or into the city, or to an alley somewhere. They can't know. So he hides it, and somehow he manages to hide it well. When Charlotte is home, it's harder, so he disappears down to the river more often than not, or finds an overpass to sit beneath, or sits dully in some park, or somewhere else to hide away and hide this shame that seems to save him.
This is what he's doing, curled up at the top of the slant under the footbridge by the river, when a jogger comes round the bend dressed in floppy yellow basketball shorts and a sweat-stained bay to breakers t-shirt. The man slows when he catches sight of Grantaire hunched over like a lumpy black bridge troll, kicking up dust as he skids to stop, hands going to his hips while he catches his breath.
"You okay, kid?"
Grantaire salutes him with the bottle. "Soup of the day. Whiskey. Cheers."
The man watches him take a long, searing pull from the bottle with a concerned expression. "Are you old enough to be drinking that?"
Grantaire smirks, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand. "Never stopped me before."
He turns away, head already buzzing uncomfortably from interaction with a stranger. It feels like he knows, like he could tell. It feels like a finger coming down on a bruise and pressing. He can't decide whether to be annoyed at this guy nosing into his business, or amazed at the fact that someone actually has the capacity to care about strangers without collapsing. Either way, anxiety creeps up along his chest, snaking into his lungs and making his hands shake as he sloshes another mouthful down his throat. The jogger man harumphs once, shrugs, and continues on his way. Grantaire heaves a breath of relief and drinks again. The drink burns away the ice shards of anxiety and the guilt that he's doing something wrong, wrong, wrong.
At night he curls up against the onslaught of dark thoughts that plague him in the silence, little whispers that are covered up by his own voice or other people or the drink in the daytime. He feels guilty, worthless, useless, like he's spiralling down. His skin feels stretched thin over his bones, too tight, and black beetles skitter under the surface, making him itch. He falls asleep fighting against the ache in his throat.
It's as if he's trapped on a rollercoaster, all his limbs tensed, screaming to get off. He's volatile, skittish, full of mood swings he can't predict or control. Grey dejection leaps to anger which leaps to anxiety which leaps to tearful despair which jumps to some sort of bizarre mania which jumps back to the dull melancholy of before. It's not a cycle, it's random, and he can never guess what's going to happen. He's already freaked out in geometry, flinging his things to the ground and screaming out his frustration when nothing in the lesson made sense for the hundredth time and his father was going to lose his job and the dark thoughts were chipping away at him. His classmates give him long, curious looks and whisper when passes in the hallway. He ignores them. They can't hate him more than he despises himself.
And everything terrifies him. Talking to strangers, talking to his parents, going to school. Math, essays, the art he used to love. Driving, getting a job. The thought of not drinking. The thought of his parents finding out; the thought of them caring, the thought of them not caring. The future paralyses him.
When summer comes, there's more time to drink. His parents are at work all day, and Charlotte lives on campus. He has plenty of time to get properly drunk and forget all the shit crowding in his head. He's still wary, still careful, but he cares less about being drunk at home, about acting strange, so long as they don't see or smell it, so long as he can pass it off as something else.
Sometimes he and Eponine get drunk together, passing a cigarette back and forth as they sit in a parking lot somewhere. Her parents couldn't give less of a shit about her, and she laughs in the face of getting caught out. She's not going to say anything to his parents, either. She gets it, she gets the need for relief and for a shield from his thoughts. They've known each other since they were kids, but they don't talk much. There's enough going on in each of their lives that most of their interaction is simply a 'hey, still alive I see' nod in the hallways and sometimes an inquiry of how things are and a tired shrug in response. Drinking together is a mostly silent affair, with self-deprecating jokes and Eponine's insults towards her parents punching loudly into the thick air. It's not better than drinking alone, and it's not worse either.
The back door slams when he comes inside. It's loud and makes him jump, hitting his hand on one of the kitchen chairs as he weaves around towards the stairs. He shakes it out and presses the back of his finger to his lips. There's a mountain of mail on the table and he knocks a few magazines and envelopes to the ground as he brushes by, not bothering to pick them up. The house is quiet, he's not sure where anyone is, but he hopes he can collapse on his bed and watch some mindless television for a while since being home in the afternoon generally means he has to be sober.
It's been a shit week; the stupid blackness that consumes him has been worse than usual. He's been aching and tense for ages, fighting back tears and anger, fighting against the voice that tells him he's stupid, worthless, useless, horrible, an asshole, a waste of space and breath and money. He's been drinking steadily since this morning, but the walk home sobered him up and now all he wants is to drink enough to make the voice quiet down a bit.
"Grantaire." He stops with one foot on the stairs, and it feels like someone has run cold water down the back of his shirt. He turns, and the cold spreads across his limbs.
"Mom, hi." She's sitting on the couch with a sombre look on her face. A shoebox sits in her lap. He stands at the bottom of the stairs and flaps his arms at his sides, head buzzing. "I didn't realize you were coming home early today. I would have gone grocery shopping for you; I went to the store for sandwich bread earlier. Which reminds me, last time she was here, Charlotte was talking about trying to go gluten free. Do you think that's a good idea? I feel like it defeats the purpose of being an omnivore and of all the work so many people have done. I mean, ancient people survived on bread with gluten in it. And like half the stuff made today is made with gluten in it. I don't know. But I suppose if anyone could successfully do something as drastic as a complete diet change, it's here. Though I do suspect she'll miss white bread and cookies and--"
"Grantaire." His teeth clack shut. The toes of his shoes dig into the carpet as if he could wear down the floor and dig himself a hole with his feet. Her voice is soft, confused, worried. "I found this in your closet when I went to look for your old coat."
"Uh. Yeah." He can pass this off, can't he? Curious teenager? Partying it up in private because they want to know what it's like?
"Come here." He obeys, sitting down on the other side of the couch, as far from her as possible. "Look, Grantaire. You're a teenager. I know you're curious about these things. You're experimenting. You're partying. But I want you to be careful and be safe."
"I-- all right. You're...just going to let it go?"
His mother sighs. "Well, I figure if I said you couldn't, you just would do it anyway, and worse things could happen. So we may as well just make sure you're safe."
"Thanks, I guess."
"I'm not going to tell you to stop trying things out, but remember to moderate and to make sure that there's someone around who you can trust."
Internally, Grantaire has to laugh. Someone he can trust. Who does he have to trust? Himself? But he nods and takes the box from her lap. His toes dig into the carpet under his feet. When he speaks, it's like he's listening to a recording of someone else. "Thanks for being so awesome."
"Just trying to be the cool mom," she jokes with a smile. "I'm trying to make sure you do these things safely."
"Uh huh. Thanks." He scurries up to his room, fingers digging into the corners of the box. The bottles feel heavier than usual, but the guilt of the lie of omission just makes him want to drink more.
His room is dark, messy, simultaneously huge and claustrophobic. He drops the box into the back of his closet and flings himself onto his mattress with a bottle of Fireball in one hand. There's no way he can't drink himself into blackness tonight, not after a conversation like that. He drinks a quarter of the bottle, shaking his head at the extra burn of the cinnamon. Laughter bubbles up his throat as he realizes without much regret that he's so far gone he doesn't even react to the ache of cinnamon whiskey searing down his throat. It doesn't matter anymore; so long as it gets him out of his own fucking brain.
Still, he runs from his parents. He pretends he's over at a friends house and drinks under the highway, or he hides away in the library with a water bottle full of vodka, tucked into a back corner and reading the first book his hand lands on. He even tries to avoid Charlotte, though that's difficult because he loves her too much, and sometimes he just needs her. But when she's here, he doesn't drink as much, because if she suspects it's all over for him. And he can't deal with that. He can't.
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It's two in the morning and he wakes shaking his way out of a nightmare that's already vanished by the time he opens his eyes. Still, the shaking continues, and his throat aches, and his fingers itch to curl around cool glass. Except his shoebox is empty somehow.
It's cold out, and cloudy-dark without stars as he slips out the back door and walks through deserted streets. He curls his hands into fists and shoves them in the pockets of his jacket. The familiar feelings of guilt and worthlessness and a hollow chest made of ice are creeping in, and he needs to get rid of them, needs to drown them. The fluorescent lights of the twenty four-hour liquor store hurt his eyes in the night, blinding white overhead like an accusation. He curls his fingers around a few bottles on the shelves and goes to the counter. The exchange is silent, and Grantaire has a moment to examine the clerk's face. He's Asian, Grantaire guesses Vietnamese from his nametag but isn't sure. His face is lined and tired, eyes dull and worn out and red at the edges, and Grantaire wonders how old he really is. The clerk is examining him back, just a little. He can see the man's eyes asking what a kid is doing buying alcohol in pajama pants and a black hoodie at two thirty in the morning, but these people have enough in their lives to bother asking, Grantaire knows.
"Have a good night," the man tells him, and his voice sounds much younger than his face.
"Uh huh," Grantaire croaks. He must sound old. So often he feels too old and at the same time he feels terrifyingly young. He steps back out of the glare of the store and into the inky dark, turning toward home. He stops in the park and drinks enough of his vodka to stop the shakes. The rest he drinks at home, flooding away the painful thoughts and trying not to think of nightmares or his parents.
They catch him twice. The first time, he's thoroughly drunk in his own room, sketching elaborate portraits in between hate-reading Kant. His father finds him this time, coming upstairs because he's being loud, ranting frustratedly at the pages, half his words slurred. He makes some excuse he can't remember thirty seconds later, but whatever it is his father takes it and leaves with a concerned shrug. The second time it's the middle of the afternoon on a weekend, and he stumbles in the back door halfway to drunk to find his parents having lunch together at the table. Stumbling over his words, he makes a harried and jittery escape to his room, making excuses for his actions, but he can tell in their faces that they know, they noticed.
"I found an ad in the paper for a summer art class, Grantaire," his mother tells him one day. He's sober, lying on his bed with a sketchbook open but blank in his lap and hopelessness chasing itself through his brain. "Do you want to give it a try? I thought it would give you something to do."
Grantaire doesn't look at her. "Ma, summertime is for lazing around, not taking classes. I don't want to."
"Well, all right." But the look she gives him holds suspicion and worry and things he cannot or will not name. He stares at the blank page in front of him. It's simpler, and easier to comprehend, and holds no terrifying emotional association for him.
Half a week later they sit him down at the table. Charlotte isn't there. He wishes she was even as he's glad she isn't. On goes his smiling mask, the one he uses for school and his parents. He could really use a drink.
"Grantaire, we're worried about you." His mother starts. His father nods and taps the table with a finger.
"You've been disappearing an awful lot lately, and coming home late, and not talking to us. And you haven't been talking to Charlotte, either."
Grantaire shrugs. He has nothing to say to that and no excuses. "We noticed you've been drinking a lot lately. You've come home drunk on several occasions and--"
This hits too close to the mark, and Grantaire stand as if hot water had been poured on him, his chair scooting back against the tiles with a painful grating sound. "What?" he explodes. "I'm not allowed to be a rebellious fucking teenager? I'm not allowed to do what you did at my age, I'm not allowed to experiment and mess around and be a reckless kid? Leave me the hell alone!"
Upstairs is safe. Upstairs they'll leave him alone. Upstairs there's a lock on his door and bottles in his closet and sketchbooks on his floor and a bed to sleep in so he can run away from the guilt and, more importantly, the fear that they might take it all away from him. He whirls and runs and slams the door so hard it rattles and shakes the walls. He flings himself down on his bed and curls into himself. He aches. He is a failure and a disappointment and a burden.
He hears them arguing from his bedroom that night.
"We can't just leave him alone and let him keep destroying himself!" His mother hisses, voice choked with tears.
"I know," his father placates. "I know. But we don't have the money for therapy. And you know for a fact he'd walk away from AA whether he was forced to go or not."
"We can't afford to send him away. He needs help." Her voice has a shake to it. Grantaire hears the sound of fabric brushing against skin, like someone is rubbing her back sympathetically.
"We'll think of something."
The something comes in the form of a new neighbour moving in across the street. They have a little seven year old boy named Arnaud who needs a babysitter and who also wants to learn how to paint. And Grantaire is the man for the job.
Arnaud is cute, and sticks out his tongue when his parents call him Arnie. Grantaire has never liked children much, but he has a good idea of how to handle them, so he crouches down and sticks out a hand and calls the kid Arnaud instead of Arnie and the child shakes his hand and smiles. They get along well, and Grantaire teaches the little boy to paint, meaning he gives him paper and paints and happily fingerpaints with him, though sometimes he does teach him proper technique with a paintbrush. But fingerpainting is fun, and he misses it. Arnaud is smart, and funny, and Grantaire finds himself enjoying his time with the kid. But on days when he's not babysitting, there are still bottles in his closet and there are still thoughts of worthlessness chasing themselves around in his head, and shame and a drifting sense of apathy itching under his skin. Arnaud's parents don't notice the way his hands shake, or the bags under his eyes. Much as he likes the kid, he wouldn't care either way. He spends the money they give him on bottles that he hides in his dresser.
It's a bad day. He's supposed to be babysitting Arnaud in three hours and it's a bad day. He can't tell them no, he can't let on. Instead, he swallows down the urge to scream, the urge to vomit, pushes away the dark fog that's collected in his mind just enough to have a proper conversation with Arnuad's mother before he's left in the house.
Arnaud is sitting in his room, playing happily with his toys, and Grantaire doesn't disturb him. The kid is happy in his own little world and who is he to destroy that with the blackness oozing out of his skin? The couch is comfortable and there's a blank wall in front of it and he sits there, limp and tired, staring dully at the olive green walls, the sounds of Arnaud playing in the other room a tiny little echo underneath the cacophony of insults and screams and self-loathing and need to just go that is filling his brain.
"Why are you just sitting, Grantaire?" A little voice asks from the doorway. The words don't penetrate, but the voice does, tiny and drifting and new in the muffled fog.
"What?"
"Why are you just sitting? You look sad."
"There's things wrong with me." Grantaire can tell this to a kid. A kid isn't going to judge him. A kid isn't going to force him to talk to people he can't stand or get help he doesn't want. A kid isn't going to take away the things that keep him sane and happy. A kid is just going to nod his head and understand in that strangely deep, child way.
"What things?"
"There are monsters in my head." Arnaud's eyes aren't scared, just curious. Grantaire looks down at his hands and clenches them into fists. "Or maybe they're me. They sound like me."
"Monsters?"
"Yeah."
"Can you fight them?" His eyes are big. They're talking about monsters, and battles, and Grantaire is like a big strong knight. He's not, though, Grantaire is no knight. He's barely even a peasant.
"I do. I have to poison them every night to make them go away, but they always come back. They're impossible to kill."
"You can't run away?"
"I can try. But they're up here." He points to his temple with a sigh. "Can't run away from your own head." They stare at each other for a moment, and Grantaire wonders if Arnaud has stopped seeing him as this amazing grown-up knight now, and just sees him for the run-down lump that he is. He looks at the clock. "All right, little man. It's your bedtime. Let's go brush teeth. Want me to read you a story?"
Arnaud scrambles up, eager for a story, and Grantaire shoves away the darkness long enough to read. The kid asleep, he's back to staring at the wall until Arnaud's parents get home, thank him, pay him, and go to bed themselves. He goes to the twenty-four hour liquor store. The clerk no longer tells him to have a good night, only looks at him tiredly, like he's a hopeless case that shouldn't even be wished an evening of happiness.
School starts up again, and Arnaud goes into elementary school, and Grantaire goes back to his classes. Somehow it suddenly seems easier to hide when classes are happening, but everything is awful. He drinks himself into a stupor every night, silently, hiding in his room under the blankets, curled into himself. Everything seems to get worse when school is in. His brain feels like a blender, swarming with a cacophony of hate and anger and sadness and dark thoughts and the idea, the knowledge that he's a piece of shit, that he's a failure and a disappointment and that no one should even speak to him or look at him ever because he's just nothing. Everything is loud and hateful and it hurts and he can't stand it.
School is a strange phenomenon. He hates people, there's no one at this school he wants to talk to. But the classes break up the monotonous tired days into categories of interest, and school work is the last thing he's good at. So he does his homework, just to find distraction from the muddle in his head. He drinks himself unconscious each night, muddles his way through first period before managing to get a handle on his headache and nausea, and the rest of the the day is an easy distraction from the things inside his head. He is the most attentive student in his classes, and it's all to run away from everything else. The teachers suddenly adore him.
Perhaps that's why his parents don't suspect further. His grades are the best they've been in years, because school is all he has to hide from the mess of his own brain. School is pointless, and he knows he'll do fuck all with his life, but it's a distraction and he throws himself into it with desperation.
Arnaud moves away the next summer; his mother is in the military and the kid has already lived in four separate places. Grantaire spends the first month in bed, staring at the ceiling. It's not that he misses the kid, though he does, it's that next year is his senior year, and people keep asking about majors and college, and he can't do any of that, he can't handle himself, let alone college, and he just wants to sit here and freeze over and never move and never think again.
He feels like he's paralysed, like someone has chained him to the bed and forced him to think of every reason that he is a disappointment and a failure, forced him to relive every mistake he's ever made and every stupid thing he's ever said and every time he's ever felt like a piece of shit. It's like he's seeing the world through a block of cold ice, like everything warm and moving is so far away through layers of freezing solid water, drifting, distant, and he's stuck.
His parents take an axe to the ice and break him from his bed, though his joints still feel pooled with cold water, and the water gets in his eyes and he can't see through the mist and he's shivering and cold because no one is giving him any way to warm up and they pull him out of bed and into the air and outside and drive him to the city where there's a volunteer job at a small art museum waiting for him.
They drop him off outside the building and drive away to work. Sometimes it's his mother, sometimes his dad. Charlotte never drives him. He actually does the volunteer work for the first half month he's there. It's tedious and boring working in the back of an art museum, cataloguing numbers and filing things. He hates it. He stops going.
The city is new and interesting, and hardly any places check for I.D. So he wanders, and drinks, and thinks maybe it would be nice to live up here. The other volunteers his age don't like him very much, and don't give a shit whether he's there or not. He convinces one to mark him in every day; the guy's name is right above his, so he begrudgingly agrees. Grantaire steps in the museum doors and waits for whoever drove him to drive away, then walks out and walks away, and finds himself in this strange limbo of freedom while tethered to home.
He meets Montparnasse in his wanderings of various bars and alleyways. The man is not nice, and far too shrewd to be anything but a criminal, but Grantaire realizes straight away that it would be beneficial to make friends with him, to have him as a contact. It's not hard; Grantaire is charming when he wants to be and can drink his weight in vodka or whiskey or bourbon or whatever the soup of the night is.
"I like you," says Montparnasse's friend Leroy, nodding as Grantaire knocks back another shot and grins. Leroy is nicer than Montparnasse, more hospitable, and far less sinister. He's a punk, the kind that kicks in people's faces and drinks like a fish and probably does heroin and lives in a scungey apartment with barely any furniture, but he's kind to people he likes, and to children, and to animals, and he knows Eponine. Grantaire doesn't ask how; it's not something you do in this circle.
"Yeah, I like him too," Homer nods his head, his thick dreadlocks swinging heavily back and forth. He's bigger than Montparnasse or Leroy, full of muscle, but he's got street smarts more than the others and is quick to grin.
Grantaire spends his days with them, drinking, gambling, doing whatever, but staying out of their way. Montparnasse respects his polite decline from helping out in their endeavours. It surprises Grantaire, he expected to be forced, but he's glad he wasn't. He still does go volunteer at the museum sometimes, just in case his parents start asking. They don't.
Senior year hurts. Everyone is talking about moving forward, about college, about jobs, about being an adult, about growing up. Grantaire feels frozen in place. Grantaire feels terrified. Grantaire feels very very small.
They try to keep track of his drinking, counting bottles in his room and asking questions every time he walks into a room, or comes in the house, or leaves. They try to keep track of it, to limit him, to take care of him because they know he won't go to a clinic. They try, but he has stashes all over the house in places they won't ever think to look, and he lies. He gets good at lying. And he hates it; he gets so good that he feels nothing when he lies, whether it's outright or just a simple lie of omission, or a tiny little tweaking of the truth. How much did you have to drink today? One. Only one bottle of beer? That's good. One mostly-full bottle of whiskey, actually, but he's not going to tell them that. Their denial is perfectly fine with him.
"Grantaire, we're thinking you should try and get a job." Grantaire sits at the kitchen table, spoon full of cereal halfway to his mouth, eyebrows raised. "We think it'll be good for you. It will get your mind off things, fill your time up. And you'll have money."
"You're serious."
His father raps his knuckles on the counter and sighs. "If you won't get a job, we at least ask you to help out around the house. Clean, do laundry and dishes and mow the lawn, that sort of stuff."
"I guess I could try to get a job," Grantaire nods, though he knows that's not going to work out.
It doesn't. No one wants him, and for good reason. And he doesn't try very hard. He doesn't want to work, doesn't want some piece of shit job he's going to inevitably get stuck in, that will make him feel blacker than he already is, that will take away what little is left of whatever the hell passes for his soul. He doesn't help around the house, either. Nothing changes. He only gets worse.
"Grantaire, is it because of the depression?" His mother asks one day, when he stumbles in tired and drunk from the river. "Are you feeling worse? Can we help you?"
He scoffs. There's nothing left to be helped anymore. He's an empty balloon full of booze and hate. When he laughs, it feels like someone else is laughing. "Is it because of the depression?" He mocks, anger bubbling up from somewhere strange and empty in his belly. "It's because you don't have the fucking money to give me the fucking medicine I need. It's because nothing ever works because I'm a goddamn hopeless case. It's because your genetics fucked me over and made me like this! You fucked me up and gave me all these problems!"
There are tears in his mother's eyes, she's trembling minutely. "Grantaire, you need to stop this! We want to help you."
"Fuck you! I'm sick of this family, this shithole, all these fucking useless words. What right do you have getting in my business? Leave me the hell alone, bitch!"
He slams the door to his room so it shakes in the frame, locking it and shoving headphones on to muffle the screaming in his head. He hates himself, he hates himself, he hates himself, and they're only getting in the way and he can't stand it and he can't stand himself and it's all just shit.
"Hey," Charlotte knocks on his bedroom door a few days later, after he's spent the past half of the week either avoiding them or screaming at them. "Can I come in, Grantaire?"
"Fuck off."
"Come on, kiddo. I just want to say hello. I just want to talk."
And because it's Charlotte, and he can't deny her anything, he drags himself up off his bed and unlocks the door, not waiting for her to come in before sprawling back down again. She sits at the foot of his bed, wrapping one hand around his ankle.
"Hi, Charlotte." He feels like a child again, like he did four years ago when they first found out, when he cried against her stomach with his hand fisted in the knee of her jeans.
"Hey, you." She smiles at him, but it's sad and tired, and he knows that he did that, and suddenly he hates himself even more. "What are we going to do with you?"
"Please don't." He wants to curl up in her lap like he used to, but he can't bring himself to. He doesn't deserve to.
"Grantaire, I know your hurting." He squeezes his eyes shut as something like a whimper catches in his throat and he swallows it down, nodding. "I know things are fucked up and you're trying to deal with them. But Grantaire, you're hurting yourself. You're hurting them, too. You have to try and stop, please."
He kicks out with his foot, dislodging her hand and wrenching himself upright with a snarl. "I can't! I can't fucking stop. Why should I stop if this is the only thing that helps? It's not like I go drinking in bars and knocking up girls or whatever. It fixes me! It gets rid of all the shit inside my head and isn't that what you were all hoping for? Isn't that what you wanted when you told me to tell them about it, when they brought me to the doctor?"
"Listen to you." Her voice is soft and sad, and her hand goes back around his ankle but he doesn't try to shake her off this time. "You weren't like this before. Grantaire, it's killing you. It's hurting you as much as it's hurting us and I don't know how you can't see it. Please, just try to stop. For us, for me. For yourself."
She looks so sad, staring at him with her brown eyes wet, her hair falling in waves out of its bun. He gives in to the urge and curls in her lap, fingers clenching the knee of her jeans the way it used to be, when all this started and she was his rock. She hesitates, then her arm slips around his shoulders.
"I'll try," he tells her, voice muffled against her body. "I promise I'll try."
As soon as she goes, he stops trying. He drinks until he's no longer shaking, until his brain has stopped repeating the mantra of self-loathing over and over again. He falls back into the routine, into the hiding, into the lying; not even she was enough.
His parents again try to lecture him into listening. They talk about hurting and addiction and consequences and being tired of this and that. He tells them that he hates them, that they should fuck off and die, that they're the ones to blame for all of this. Then he goes upstairs and wants to punch himself in the face because what the fuck did he just say but he can't apologize because he just can't, he just can't. He hates them. He hates himself. He feels angry and ashamed and has no idea what to do anymore.
They're frustrated with him, he knows it. He overhears a conversation in the night and it makes him ache.
"I'm scared for him," his mother says. "What happens if he gets worse than this? What do we do?"
"We send him away, I suppose. He needs to be away from us, away from this."
"I don't know. I just want to help him."
His father sighs. "I don't know what to do. I'm tired of dealing with him. I'm disappointed that it would even get this far. We can try to convince him to stop, but if this keeps going, we're going to have to try something else."
So he hides. He goes back to his old tactics, drinking in private by the river somewhere or with Eponine, making sure to be sober or mostly sober when he's at home, or at least when everyone else is awake. He sees the pity on their faces and the disappointment and he ducks his head and won't look. He can't look; it only makes it worse. He takes advantage of the fact that they're convinced, takes advantage of their denial, takes advantage of everything. They are happy to believe that he is getting better. They are happy to give in to every lie. He feels like he's swallowed something rotten, and his skin feels tense with the aching guilt.
Grantaire doesn't go to his graduation. Why sit in the hot sun for three hours watching people walk across the stage when you can sit in the shade behind the 7/11 and drink and smoke your life away? All graduation does is force you to think of the future. It forces you to think about what you're going to do with the next however many years of your life until you die, about all the years ahead of you that you don't know or understand and aren't ready for. It forces you to decide what sort of miserable fate you're going to choose. And why the fuck would he want to think about that? The future is huge and wide and full of unknowns and everything is a mystery and it’s too enormous to even grasp and how can he think about years in the future because it’s the future and that’s fucking terrifying. He can barely even think about the next six months without shaking and wanting to curl up in a ball and scream, wanting to drown himself in alcohol until everything is a giant smear of colour and noise.
The thing is, nothing drastic actually happens. He's graduated, it's summer, he's got nothing to do. Home is a whirling nest of tension and worry and a feeling like he's constantly being watched and it makes his stomach clench and his fingers twitch and his throat ache for a drink. He can't deal with it. He can't deal with it and he doesn't want to walk through the house and see the pity and concern on his parents' faces because most people feel ashamed after they've been drinking but Grantaire, he drinks to keep the shame away, to dull the feeling that he's let everyone down with what he is, to cover the perpetual sting of humiliation at even existing. He drinks to forget the fact that he's a disappointment, a burden, that he's fucked the family over and failed them. The drink calms the buzzing in his head, fills up the empty spaces between his organs, the cracks in his chest, hides the bite of embarrassment and shame, and makes him forget and disappear.
Nothing happens. It's just that three weeks into summer he can't take it anymore. There's nothing to distract him from the screaming hammers in his brain, the shame from every look, the need for drink clawing at his throat, and even though he knows he can just hide from them to satisfy the cravings, he just can't take the feeling of being trapped here anymore. So when his parents are at work he digs his father's backpacking bag out from storage and fills it full of things, just tossing them in no particular order to crumple together at the bottom of the pack. Clothes, pens, a sketchbook, a toothbrush. He doesn't have much, and it's mostly booze anyway. He steals cash from his mother's dresser and his father's bowl of change and walks out the door without looking back. The house is a sucking trap, a room with tendrils to hold him in. He runs.
-----------
Leroy is surprisingly generous when it comes to donating his flat. He'd hardly even blinked when Grantaire had dropped his backpack full of stuff down on a barstool and ordered a fifth before turning to him and asking for a place to stay.
The apartment is run down, and mostly bare except for a mattress and a coffee table and a dresser with most of the drawers missing. The kitchen is grimy and most of the food in the fridge has gone off. Leroy gets the mattress, and the only thing left is a pile of ratty blankets in the bare second room. Grantaire doesn't give a shit. He just needs a place to sleep and drink.
An arrangement is quickly made, offered up drunkenly by Grantaire one August night, and readily agreed to by Leroy. It's good enough for both of them, to get some stress out, to have a last resort when all the attempts to hit on people at bars fail. Grantaire is glad he's already come to terms with his sexuality, and anyway it's not like he can hate himself anymore for letting his roommate fuck him instead of paying rent. And they're friends, sort of. It's not horrible, just slightly shitty. Things could be worse. They could.
"Where the fuck did you get so many quarters?" Grantaire asks incredulously as Leroy dumps a grocery bag full of change onto the floor. It's almost Halloween, and they've been living together long enough to be casual. Grantaire takes a fistful of the coins and drops them through his fingers onto the floor. They make a nice sound, and feel cool on his skin, but there's an itch there.
"Fuck if I know." But the grin on Leroy's face says he robbed some parking meters or a gumball machine or a newspaper stand or something.
"What do we do with them?"
"Vodka, what else?"
"Sounds good."
They manage four bottles of cheap vodka and Grantaire has a bottle of Fireball still unopened in his backpack. It's a quick slide down to shitfaced and that's what they want. They drink on the fire escape, yelling their conversation back and forth despite being six inches from each other. Then it all quiets down and they sit there staring out at the street. Grantaire coughs drily and stands up, leaning over the railing with the metal digging into his palms.
"I wonder-- I wonder what it'd be like." He mumbles. Somehow Leroy catches it through the rushing sound of the cars whipping away his words.
"What what'd be like, man?"
"What it would be like to jump off of this. What it would be like to fall and hit the ground. Would I feel it? Would it feel strange? Would it be nice, like a roller coaster or something? Would it make it all stop?" He dangles a foot off the edge. "Would I be scared?"
"R, you're drunk as fuck. Sit down."
He sits. He sits but it really doesn't help because he leans over his own knees, head hanging down, arms half-poised as if he's preparing to dive into the cement. He feels Leroy's fingers curl into the back of his sweatshirt and leans forward even more. It's dizzying and beautiful and for a moment everything feels sharp and what if--
"Jesus." A sharp yank flings him onto his back on the grating of the fire escape and Leroy stands up above him, pulling him inside by his arms and dropping him down on his mess of blankets. "Stay there. Jesus. When you said you were fucked up I didn't think it meant that much. Jesus."
"Sorry," Grantaire mumbles into the sheets as he twists them around his body. "I'm sorry."
"Fuck." Grantaire hears the shuffle of his roommate's feet moving away. He closes his eyes and buries himself under the blankets. They smell rank but he can't bring himself to care. There are sounds from the other room of Leroy messing with stuff on the counter, the flick of a lighter, the sigh and thud onto a bed. Leroy's a junkie, but he does it infrequently enough that Grantaire isn't bothered. And right now, the little itching demons are back in his mind, and he wants nothing more than to drown them, so he gropes about the floor for a bottle until his hand hits cool glass. The tequila burns down his throat but he's too far gone to care; he only wants everything to go black.
After that, Leroy is a little more wary around him for a while, until they both forget or stop caring and it doesn't matter anymore. They fuck, they go out and get in fights, Leroy blisses out half on and half off his mattress, then gets up the next morning and goes to work, and Grantaire stays passed out in his nest of sheets or lies on the floor with a growing collection of bottles around his head. They leave each other alone in their drugged out states, unless they're drunk together. Leroy doesn't ask about Grantaire's fucked up ramblings and Grantaire doesn't ask Leroy about his dealings with Montparnasse. It's an ideal setup.
For the better part of a year, he lives with Leroy. Sometimes he sees old classmates on the street and he has to laugh. It's so fucked up, that they're off doing great things and he's stuck here trying to drink himself out of his own head. He laughs for a long while, then proceeds to go and do just that.
One time, he gets locked out of the apartment for a whole week in May. Leroy is off with Montparnasse's crew doing some job outside of the city and it seems he's forgotten Grantaire also lives there. He waits for a day, asking people to help him, to let him into their apartment so he can just climb the fire escape. They won't listen to him, don't care, nobody gives a shit about a nobody. The landlord doesn't know he lives there; he's not paying rent, so he can't ask.
He finds alleys to sleep in with heaps of trashbags that are at least sort of soft, and steals bottles of whiskey tucked under his leather jacket so he can pass out before he realizes how shit this all is. He feels like a pathetic idiot, waking up at ten in the morning to some stray dog licking his face where he's vomited all over himself in the night. He shoves the mutt away and finds a McDonald's to piss in and wash his shirt clean in the sink.
But a week later and Leroy is back, apologizing with an only slightly sincere grin and a few bottles of expensive scotch and a condolence prize chance at topping. They drink together and Grantaire takes the offer and falls asleep with his pants half-on in Leroy's bed and it's pretty much okay again.
And then it's September and it's getting cold and Leroy needs to work more because heating and food are expensive and Montparnasse has more jobs to set up and Grantaire is still being a useless moocher curled up drunk in his blankets. He doesn't know how to do anything except drink and go to school, and he can't find the willpower in himself to do anything, and he hates himself, and he can't move, and all he wants to do is blur the world into nothing so he doesn't have to think about it all.
Montparnasse shakes him out of the tangle of blankets, jerking him upright from his fetal position on the floor. Grantaire stands, stumbling over his feet and the mess on the ground, knocking over a few mostly-empty bottles with a cacophony of glass.
"Wha?" He blinks awake and shakes his head until he can actually focus. For a moment he wishes he was smashed, because Montparnasse is looking at him in a way he's not sure how to take, but then in the next moment he's far too glad to be mostly sober.
"You're going to help us out."
"With what?"
"Our next job. You don't pay rent to live here, so you're going to help us out instead. You've been using Leroy's shit for long enough. He thought you'd get a job or something by now. So you're gonna help us."
Grantaire shakes his head, untangling himself from the blankets. "No. No, no, no. I don't-- I don't do that stuff. I don't do that."
"Then leave."
Grantaire blinks. "What?"
Montparnasse shoves him, and he stumbles against the wall, watching as the other man grabs his backpack from the corner and tosses it at his feet. "Take. Your shit. And go."
Grantaire does. He packs his backpack under Montparnasse's watchful eye, though the man doesn't blink when he stuffs one of Leroy's blankets into the bag. He walks out of his room, barely glancing at Leroy doped up on his bed. It's cold out and he has nowhere to live. He goes to the bar.
Living on the streets is shit. He spends his days bar hopping from place to place where it's warm and dry and there's stuff to drink. He steals quarters from newspaper stands the way Leroy taught him and sleeps in doorways or alleys and feels like a stereotype. The network he's built up over the year is gone, broken now that Montparnasse has decided he's too much of a piece of shit burden for even his crew. He tries not to utilize the shelters because they don't let him bring his booze inside.
In October he finds he's forced to the shelters by the cold and by a lack of money. He takes to joining the ranks and rows with signs and a styrofoam cup for change, or stealing money from parking meters and newspaper stands. He feels like he's in over his head. The world is bleak and dark and everything screams despair and worthlessness and hopeless bullshit at him.
After three weeks it feels like he needs to destroy himself. He's itching to just feel bruises, to feel pain, to feel anger or hysteria, to feel anything but cold. He picks some fights with teenagers on the street and wins easily, kicking one in the ribs with a sigh before running away. Something screams in his head that he's so fucked up, that he's so far gone, that he's not himself anymore and hasn't been for far too long.
It's almost November and he walks in the park at two in the morning. It's lonely and dark and he's drunk and tired and the backpack on his back is lighter because he keeps losing things and he almost misses the way he used to be before all this shit started and he just wants everything in his head to shut the fuck up for maybe five seconds so he can have some peace and quiet because even when he's drunk and everything is blurry and faded it's still not enough anymore, it's still not enough. And sometimes it almost feels like the drink is making it worse, like the drink is yelling at him too, like everything is against him and is ganging up in his brain to jeer at him and whisper things and pull it all down in the dark. It feels like it's taken over and nothing is the way he wants it to be and all he wants is to drink even though he can't enjoy it anymore. He walks across the expanse of grass, uncaring of getting his feet wet, and drops his backpack so he can fling his arms wide and scream wordlessly at the sky.
It's almost November and everything is out of control.
---------
He wakes up cold and curled into the fetal position on a bench. He wonders if maybe he fell asleep in a park again; it wouldn't be the first time. It hasn't snowed yet even though it's almost December; he's been able to hunker down on benches and in doorways until he can't take it anymore and has to find a shelter.Waking up with chattering teeth isn't a surprise anymore.
The sound of a telephone ringing and a man's nasally voice answering it prompt him to sit up on one elbow and look around. He's in a small room with beige walls and a metal toilet, the front wall a cage of bars so he can see into the rest of the office. He's in a holding cell, and the realization is enough to bring him fully awake. Or, at least, as fully awake as he can get at the moment. He's definitely still drunk. He probes his memory for anything that will clue him in, but all he can drag up is having the first of many drinks four whole days ago. Total blackout. Makes sense; it was his birthday yesterday, and he's always hated birthdays. He can't remember the last four days. It makes his stomach twist.
The sound of a siren starting up slices through his head, and he groans as he realizes it's not the worry making him feel nauseous. He stumbles pathetically over to the metal basin of the toilet to vomit, misses for a moment and splatters the knees of his jeans. He's been this pitiful before, just never in a police station. That seems to make it worse. He spits and leans his forehead against the cool metal of the bowl, heedless of the smell. He's shivering, his face hurts like someone punched him, his head aches, his stomach is gnashing, he just wants to disappear. He hates himself.
"Think you're gonna live, kid?" The nasally-voiced police officer asks, now standing outside the cell with his hands in his pockets.
Grantaire groans. "Gimme about half an hour."
The cop sighs. "All right. It's a good thing you don't have a record, kid."
"Why? What'd I do?"
"Nothing. Apparently you tried to start a fight with some brute but the guy refused to hit you even when you insisted that he beat you up, so you punched yourself in the face, then left the bar and wandered down the street before lying down in the middle of the sidewalk and singing loudly. Apart from the lying in the street and the singing, the rest was told to me by the patrons of the bar."
"Wonderful." He coughs, spits into the toilet, then drags himself back up to the bench. "I've always wanted to be a performance artist."
The cop chuckles. Grantaire is glad he got the nice one somehow. It's a surprise. He really doesn't deserve it. "Well, you got your wish. How about I leave you to sober up for another few minutes, then you can go."
"I can go?"
"Yeah, we just didn't want you to get worse than you already were. This isn't an arrest. Just holding you until you're sober enough to walk out the door."
"Oh."
"But just this once. So you gotta make it count."
"Uh huh." Pulling off his sweatshirt despite the shivers, he rolls over onto his back and shoves the wad of fabric under his head as a pillow. The fluorescent light overhead flickers weakly, and he stares at it, concentrating on the tinny buzz coming from the light. Everything is so fucked up. He's in a holding cell and he can't remember the last four days and he has nowhere to live and he's freezing and his stomach feels like a storm and he's still drunk and his chest feels hollow and cold and his brain feels like a tar pit and everything screams at him that he's worthless and useless and stupid and a piece of shit and it's all just so fucked up.
The cop hands him back his backpack and gives him a pitying look as he walks away. He must look pathetic, walking away from a police station in a threadbare sweatshirt and a backpack that's grimy and falling apart, with vomit on his jeans and a swollen cheek, hair matted and skin grubby and sticky from not showering for days. He certainly feels pathetic. The road ahead just looks like a long streak of grey. His body aches, his mind feels like it's in trembling tatters, he wants to cry. Maybe this is what it feels like to hit bottom. He has no options. There really isn't anywhere for him to go. Something clenches in his chest, like some has grabbed his ribs in both hands and squeezed. The thought that passes through his mind is terrifying, but it might be his only choice, because there's nothing else for him here, and if he stays he might fall down a hole even deeper than the one he's already in. Because even when you hit bottom, somehow you can always conjure up a shovel.
-------
The door he's standing in front of terrifies him. It's white, pristine, a little fan-shaped window at the top covered by lace curtains. It's too familiar and too strange after over a year and it terrifies him. He knocks anyway.
His mother answers the door, and he can't look her in the eye, can't look at her face, so he looks at the skin of her neck and shrugs one shoulder shamefully. He can tell she's staring at him, taking in his stringy hair, the bags under his dark eyes, his drawn features, the way his shoulders curve toward each other under his baggy black sweatshirt. He can't tell what she's thinking.
"I came back." He feels rather than sees her nod. God, he sounds broken. "I think I want to get better."
She sighs, and it sounds almost as exhausted as he feels. "Come on," she murmurs, but there's no reproach in her voice, no anger, no disappointment or relief, only tiredness. "Let's get you cleaned up."
He nods and steps over the threshold, still unable to look her in the face. He shoves his hands deeper into his pockets as he steps further into the house, curling into himself as if trying to shy away from the walls. His mother leads him into the bathroom, taking his backpack from him and turning on the shower. He unzips his jacket and struggles sluggishly out of his clothes.
He's shaking, standing in his underwear, dotted with scars and dirt, elbows pressed together, bare feet pushing into the tile floor, folding his limbs in as if to hide his vulnerability. He chews at a ragged, grimy thumbnail as he contemplates the steaming cradle of the shower. Pulling his gaze away, he manages a glance up to his mother, who watches him with too many emotions in her face for him to be comfortable. He pulls his hand away from his mouth.
"Charlotte?" His voice sounds small, croaking and rough.
She places a hand on his shoulder, guiding him towards the shower with a tiny smile. "Get in. I'll call her."
Grantaire nods weakly and steps under the spray, the curtain shielding him from view. He forgets to say thanks until he hears the door close.
He hears the door open again and close, and manages a weak thank you, to which there is a wordless hum of an answer. He cleans himself, rinsing the grime away from his skin and scrubbing into his hair, then he curls up on the floor of the shower and lets the hot spray tumble over him. It is January third, and his bones feel brittle and his throat hurts but it feels like a novelty to be both warm and clean. He's exhausted and scared, and it's comforting.
When he steps out of the shower, he's trembling and on the verge of tears, but he feels clean for the first time in over a year, dressed in old clothes he had left behind, a mug of mint tea in his hands as he sits hunched over on the couch.
"Oh," Is the first word out of Charlotte's mouth when she steps through the door and sees him huddled there. Grantaire has just enough sense to put the mug of tea down on the coffee table before she flings herself down beside him and pulls him into a hug. "Grantaire."
He wraps his arms around her, the back of her sweatshirt bunched in his fists, clinging to her. He opens his mouth to say hello, to say he's sorry, and a gasping sob breaks free instead. He buries his face in her neck and she rubs his back as sobs wrack his body; it's the first time he's properly cried since he left.
"You came back," she says softly once his crying has calmed to little jerking hiccups and he's curled up on the couch with his head in her lap and a hand on her knee, looking out. "You came back here."
He nods against her leg, his fingers tightening fractionally against the fabric of her jeans. "Yeah," he whispers hoarsely, as if speaking any louder will break him. "I did."
She runs her fingers through his hair, and he resists the urge to stuff his hand in his mouth and stifle the sounds that want to come out. Instead, he sits up a little, just enough to lean his forehead against her collarbone, so he won't have to look her in the eye and show her how broken he really is, or see how hurt she is. He squeezes his eyes shut, sniffs pathetically, and her hands rub his shoulders in comfort.
There's a moment of silence, a moment where terror seizes him and he wants to bolt but her hands gentle on his arms hold him back. There's a moment where everything tips, teeters, trembles on the barely-there foundations, the knife-edge it's balanced on.
He could leave. Right now, he could get up and walk out the door and never bother them anymore. He could relieve them of the burden of his sad little self, his stupid addiction, his depressed and useless brain, his pain that becomes everyone else's pain. He could walk away and go get drunk in an alley until he blacks out and doesn't remember any of this exists. He could go and leave them and let them be happy and live with his pain and his miserable stupid existence. He could.
He sits up and looks at her. His own face is gaunt, hollowed out and ashen, already full of lines and eyes hidden in the dark. She looks tired and hurt, he looks exhausted and tortured. It's been a year. More. There's a rock on his chest, aching. He can't breathe.
"Grantaire?"
He takes a breath. He takes the plunge. "I want to get clean."
It should feel like a relief. It doesn't feel like anything.