Chapter Text
June, 1832
The bayonet descends three times in rapid succession. The first blow is a startling fiery brand through Combeferre's shoulder; by the third he feels only a sharp rap, like knuckles on a door. Something goes wrong with his breathing.
The national guardsman falls from his arms.
The soldier with the bayonet is a looming shadow--gray mustache, red face, frightened eyes. Combeferre tries to say something, but the soldier runs, and the sunlight falls on Combeferre again. He is kneeling. He was trying to save the wounded guardsman. It balanced nothing; it never balances. Even so, in laying down his rifle and lifting the man, he felt the return of a long-lost peace.
He sways but stays upright on his knees, for a moment. He looks up at the barricade.
Enjolras towers there. He is blurred, but the gold of his hair is sunlit, and his crimson hands are bright and fast. If Combeferre called out, he would turn. Enjolras cannot afford to turn, not with the shots ringing and the men with swords and bayonets cresting the barricade like the spray of the rising tide.
Combeferre smiles.
Then he raises his eyes from Enjolras to the dark blue of the sky. He opens his heart one last time and feels the infinite depths above him and the infinitesimal I am. It is enough.
He makes no sound as he falls.
--
Combeferre wakes half-trampled by fleeing men. His chest is fire. There is blood in his mouth, there is blood everywhere, bubbling as he tries to inhale. The barricade is falling. He is alone. He whimpers, terrified, and hears his voice gurgle.
"Hush now," a man says, very soft. Combeferre feels himself being lifted. "It's all right."
It is not all right. Combeferre is a doctor; he knows. Even so, he rests his head on the man's shoulder and is comforted. White hair brushes his face. He recognizes the old man who slips between bullets like a ghost, who saves lives with rifle shot, who carries the dying to the basement one by one. If he is to have a thought after the sky, he is glad it should be him.
The old man lays Combeferre on the floor between Bahorel's cold body and Courfeyrac's warm one. He will die among his friends. Their company is another kind of peace.
--
He wakes as rough hands move him. It hurts. He struggles. It is hard to breathe. He lacks the strength to struggle much. Someone pries his grip from Courfeyrac's hand.
--
There is a period of shadows. There is pain, a great deal of it. Days and nights are a succession of half-recalled nightmares he never quite wakes between. There are the various indignities of the sickroom and the half-heard voice of his mother.
He learns in time he is in his mother's bedroom, occupying her narrow bed. She is getting older, she needs her bed herself--but no one listens to his arguments. He is arguing badly. He realizes there is fever.
Combeferre loves his mother. They do not get along. Current circumstances are not helping. He tries to be kinder.
He was not meant to survive. He demands to know why he did.
He remembers he was trying to be kinder and resumes trying.
--
He wakes at last with his head clear. He is weak. There are bandages. One can age a sickroom by its strata, like sedimentary rock. He surveys the liniments, cotton wool, and lancet on the bedside table, the lint in a basket in the corner, the discarded sewing and books stacked by the armchair, and the empty bottle of laudanum that has rolled under the table, replaced by another atop it. He has been here a long time. Weeks, certainly, but more likely months.
He asks his mother when she returns. It is August.
He is not certain he is strong enough for the next question. Perhaps he lacks the strength not to ask.
"Have any of them come?"
"Some doctors stopped by."
"Doctors?"
"And very kind of them it was, too. It is not as if we are fine people nowadays, not since your father--"
"What doctors?"
"A couple of old men. I don't know."
Not Joly or any of them. Combeferre subsides against the pillow.
From what she tells him, the story of his survival is something like the following:
A surgeon Combeferre used to work under was an enemy combatant that day. They once saved lives together; such is civil war. Searching for survivors after the fighting, this man found Combeferre.
Perhaps the surgeon thought of some day in the operating theater, some impassioned discussion, some patient they had worked on together--does it matter? Any explanation would sound like madness now, as mad as sparing an artillery sergeant for his blue eye while you gun his brothers down. What constitutes a good enough reason? Either they all mattered or none of them mattered.
The surgeon removed the coat of his own National Guard uniform. He fitted Combeferre's bleeding torso with it and ordered him carried to the infirmary like any national guard.
Combeferre would have fought that surgeon if he could have.
--
When at last Combeferre descends the long flights of stairs from his mother's rooms, summer is gone. Paris looms frightening and alien around him: gray sky, wet and dirty streets, trees clinging to their last leaves, a cold he can no longer tolerate. His mother lives too near the place. There is a direction from her rooms in the little Rue du Cygne he will never walk. He shuffles a slow half block to the busy corner of the Rue St. Denis and has to sit. There is a palsied tremor in what were once surgeon's hands. Passersby only look away. He wonders whether all his friends are dead.
He believed in the truth of many things, once. All those things now are--no, perhaps not less true. He is not myopic enough to believe his sorrow eclipses the universe.
But a light has gone out. The truths of the world are like patterns of nerves projected upon a screen through the lens of a magic lantern. When the lamp extinguishes, the nervous system remains as it always has been, but the hanging sheet means nothing.
He rises from the cold step and shuffles back through the wet, dead leaves like an old man.
--
The police come, but the questions are perfunctory. It seems the surgeon who saved his life swore Combeferre was working as his assistant that day, serving his king as a good doctor should. No reliable account contradicts this--which implies the existence of an unreliable one, but the police offer no details. Combeferre's mother begged him to stifle his politics and confirm the surgeon's story, and he has disappointed her so many other times he obeys. The words he swallows burn like stomach acid in his throat.
Letters arrive from his colleagues at the hospital. He answers none of them. He receives a letter from that surgeon and throws it in the fire unopened.
He never precisely decides not to return to medicine. He tells himself he is waiting for his hands to steady, for his strength to return. Those things improve, and still he does not go back. That future hangs empty with all the other abandoned futures.
--
As the days grow shorter, he writes careful letters to addresses he learned by rote, for keeping records was dangerous. He writes to every address to which he can attach even the faintest ray of hope. Some receive answers. The answers break his heart.
In the gray of November, a letter arrives addressed in Courfeyrac's father's hand. Combeferre's letter had been to Courfeyrac. He knows what this means.
He leaves it unopened on his desk. He does not look at it, and the gravity of the room bends around it. It is a hideous, all-consuming presence there, like a gravestone. After a week of this, he realizes his grief in seeing the words cannot be worse. He opens and reads.
Courfeyrac is in prison. Courfeyrac is alive.
Some thumbscrew-tight tension through Combeferre's body breaks apart, and he is sobbing and choking with his face on his desk, and he cannot breathe and he cannot stop. When it releases him, he has sore muscles in his chest and back and fresh aches in his newly healed ribs.
More letters come with news of more dead friends. A wedding invitation comes from Pontmercy; Combeferre is glad to hear it, but he will not attend. Then a letter arrives in Joly's hand, saying he and Bossuet lived. Their letter too speaks of a marriage, this one a fait accompli. They kept it quiet due to the legal irregularities--those being that there are three of them in it. Combeferre smiles as he reads. That is the last good news he receives.
Of Enjolras he hears nothing.
He has read every newspaper article and every account of every barricade that day. He read with anxious suspense of Jeanne on the run and with bitter resignation of Jeanne retaken--but what of Enjolras? Nothing. The Rue de la Chanvrerie seems almost forgotten. Combeferre has read the lists of the dead until the names echo in his brain at night. His dead friends are on the list. His surviving friends are not on the list.
Enjolras is dead as far as he knows. Enjolras is not on the list.
Combeferre does not choose to investigate. Were the ground to vanish beneath him, he would not choose to fall--these things are not choices. He hurls himself at the question with an involuntary focus that feels like madness.
Why is Enjolras not on the list?
Combeferre makes not quite no money at all translating texts from the handful of languages he can read. He learned most of them to follow foreign medical journals he no longer follows. The work engages none of his higher faculties, which is why he took it.
It is not quite enough to live on, he finds, so he steals out certain evenings to a particular corner of a cheap cafe. A man must not starve. He offers free literacy instruction there. He keeps his body from starving by the translating, and he keeps whatever remains of his soul from starving by that.
There must be light, after all. That is the last thing he knows for certain.
After the hours reading and writing and poring over shoddy dictionaries he would once have amended but now only frowns at, Combeferre gets to work. If there is anything on earth he is good at, it is research.
There must be light. And the last light Combeferre can imagine is that maybe, in some impossible place yet unimagined and undiscovered, Enjolras lives.
--
November, 1826
The first time Combeferre saw Enjolras was across the Place du Panthéon in the early morning twilight, breaking a man's nose with his fist. Enjolras had three assailants, dogs ringing a lion, and he fought alone.
One of the men laughed, jeering. "Why, mademoiselle--"
That was the last thing he said before the fist.
The square was chilly in the indistinct gloom, deserted but for Combeferre and the fighters. Combeferre checked his watch. He still had an hour before clinic. It would take most of that time to reach the Necker, which had been his intention. The Hôtel-Dieu was only ten minutes' walk, but being so close to the Latin Quarter, it would be mobbed. Sometimes nearly a hundred students walked through the wards together, straining over each other's heads, trying to hear the instructor. He would need to arrive early if he hoped to see anything, and his chances of examining patients would be slim even then.
He paused in the shadows beside the Pantheon's marble steps, watching the fight and considering. A more reckless man would have joined. A more prudent one would have left. Combeferre sat down on the cold steps and kept watching.
All his sympathies were with the lone figure, of course, a young man hardly more than a boy, tall, with light-colored hair flying, his temple dark with blood, and the skirt of his coat billowing as he spun to face his attackers. Two of the men wielded canes; the young man fought with fists only. By rights he should have dropped under the first blow. Instead, he held them off singlehandedly for a quarter of an hour while Combeferre looked on.
Combeferre had been too often in the young man's place not to sympathize. He had been in it too often to voluntarily return.
In the end, of course, one of the assailants finally landed the right blow, and the young man dropped on his face on the cobbled pavement. They kicked him a few times and cudgeled him with their canes, but Combeferre chose that moment to rise and approach. His hat was straight, and his coat was straight, and he gave the pavement authoritative taps with his boot heels, like a gentleman who dreads no jeering students. He regretted he carried no cane himself, that dual implement of social status and physical threat, but it was too easy to misplace in the rush between clinic, lectures, lessons, visits to the library, dissections, and rounds, and anyway, he too often went home with his arms full of books.
He came with the rising sun behind him, for he had judged his seat carefully. The shadows and the backlight meant they could not see his coat was old, they could not see--anything to make them judge him another target. He dreaded nothing, and if he happened to see three men beating a man on the ground, certainly he would call upon the police without fear. Certainly he was the sort of respectable gentleman the police listened to. The light was behind him. They could not tell otherwise.
The men looked up at the sound of Combeferre's footsteps. Men are stubborn while the fight rages and the blood is hot, but your garden-variety coward is less sanguine about being discovered kicking his fallen victim. One grabbed another by the arm and shouted something, and there was an endless moment's suspense as to whether they would flee or attack. Combeferre strode towards them, neither slackening his pace nor speeding it.
They fled.
Only when they had vanished down a side street did Combeferre run to the young man's side.
Improbably, the young man was already sitting up and feeling his jaw with a grimace, working it back and forth to make sure nothing was broken. He raised his eyebrows as Combeferre dropped to his knees. Combeferre had a distant impression of a face of improbable, supercilious beauty--but his concerns were medical ones. The man's cold expression said he was perfectly aware Combeferre had watched without helping. How he noticed in the fray, Combeferre could not imagine.
"Look up," Combeferre said, and he held up a finger. The young man lifted eyes dark blue under the dawn-white sky. His pupils dilated equally and tracked the motion. "Pain?"
He gave Combeferre a long, cool stare that conveyed with elegant precision how absurd the question was. Purple was blooming over the pale skin of his jaw, and blood ran down his temple, matting his hair. A little more blood crusted at the corners of his lips.
"No," he said.
He got up, and Combeferre followed. The young man gathered his satchel and the law books that had fallen from it, limping but refusing to take Combeferre's arm. They made their slow way to the steps beneath the colonnade, where the man dropped to rest. Combeferre sat a few feet away.
When he had leisure to look beyond the medical questions, it struck Combeferre that the men, though monstrous, had been correct. The face and figure were lanky and angular enough nearly to pull it off, but not entirely.
The young man was a woman in man's clothing.
Illegal without a permit, preposterous, and not accomplished particularly well--no wonder they had singled her out. But for a large and burly man to hold his own against three assailants for so long would have been impressive. For a youth it was almost unthinkable. For a woman--
The low sun was just beginning to creep between the columns and down the steps, and it glowed on the vellus hair of her cheek like an aureole. The law school did not admit women, which meant she was hiding this. To get this far, she must have forged paperwork, broken multiple laws, and renounced more than Combeferre could imagine. She was risking imprisonment for an education when most students of Combeferre's acquaintance could barely be bothered to show up to class.
"May I give you a piece of advice, mademoiselle?"
A hard line formed with the clenching of the bruised jaw. "I am a man. You will address me as one, or you will go away."
"Monsieur, then."
"Well?"
"Shave."
The man--for Combeferre had agreed to that stipulation, nonsensical as it was--straightened slowly and flexed his bloodied hands against the thighs of his trousers. Maybe it was a gesture of calming himself. Maybe it was a gesture of preparing himself for another fistfight. Combeferre waited.
"Why?" He bit out the word with a hard look, like this was a test Combeferre might pass, or more likely, fail.
"You're young, but you're not young enough for your cheeks to be as downy as they are."
"Ah."
The man stared out across the square, cold as the marble figures in the shadowy bas-relief high above them. Some moments' icy silence elapsed, and Combeferre grew by degrees uncomfortable.
"Or perhaps I overstep," he added.
A pale eyebrow rose fractionally. "Perhaps."
"I apologize."
The man turned to regard him, and his stern gaze seemed almost to glow. It put Combeferre in mind again of a lion, or perhaps the sun. The man held out his hand.
"Enjolras."
"Combeferre," Combeferre said, and shook it.
"Since you have begun, however," Enjolras said. "What else?"
He turned his face for Combeferre to examine. Combeferre considered in silence.
Enjolras was lucky, in his way. He was tall, even for a man. His eye commanded a withering glance; his full lips were severe. His face had the sharp harmony of the marble busts of antiquity. If not for the modern frock coat and the blood, Combeferre might have half-fancied him escaped Galatea-like from among the statues within the Pantheon.
"Hairline," Combeferre said. "Especially the temples." He touched his own whiskers. "It should transition to the coarser hair of a beard. Yours tapers into wisps, like women's hair."
"False whiskers and spirit gum should not be difficult."
"The boyish look suits you--a mere rearrangement of the hair might suffice. I fear false hair could look--"
"Like flax glued on the face of a child. I am aware of it."
His bitterness made Combeferre fall silent.
The morning's first students, professors, and workmen were trickling through the courtyard. The noise and the brightening daylight reminded Combeferre of the hour. His early start had slipped away, and he was certain to be trapped in the back. It was time to leave.
"You are a student?" he asked.
"Law."
"Medicine. Your first year?"
Enjolras's mouth tightened, and he did not deign to respond. It was, then.
There was a mystery here, Combeferre felt, in this apparent woman who claimed to be a man. Oh, perhaps there really was some mundane explanation: a high-spirited whim, a desire to learn unencumbered, flight from unwanted marriage--nothing so grand as to flip the world on its head.
But Enjolras's vehemence did not, to Combeferre's ear, bespeak fear of being caught. It seemed something more desperate and wild. Combeferre sensed dimly a wrinkle in the order of natural law, and he never looked away from that. On meeting a fact that could overturn the universe, how could one not wish to know?
"Why do you do it, monsieur?" he asked quietly.
Enjolras's thin figure went taut as strung wire. "Say what you mean."
"Well. Dress as a man."
"Why do you dress as a man?" Enjolras snapped.
Speaking metaphorically, it is a different moral act to strike a man than it is to strike a man where he is wounded already. No doubt Enjolras felt the same way. No doubt Combeferre, having asked first, was highly at fault.
Even so.
Combeferre's paternal grandmother had been a slave in the colony of Saint-Domingue. His grandfather sold her but kept her son, and having no other heirs, he had the boy educated in France. As an adult, Combeferre's father had spent the bulk of his blood-soaked inheritance trying to learn his mother's whereabouts, or the whereabouts of any family still living. He traveled back to search, to the bloody tumult of newborn Haiti and to Caribbean islands where slaves had not won their freedom. He made forays into the vastness of the ever-slaveholding United States, where a free man of color is viewed with far more suspicion than in France--what hope had he there? He spent much of Combeferre's childhood overseas, but he never learned anything. He lived until the day he died under the shadow of that horror.
People are cruel even in France. For Combeferre's own part, there was no academic record he could achieve so perfect other students would stop implying him to be less human than themselves.
Combeferre's face showed no expression. He was well-practiced in that. He rose. "I hope I have been of some assistance. Good day."
He strode away across the square.
Rapid footsteps echoed behind him, and a moment later Enjolras fell into step at his side. Whatever bruising Enjolras's ankle had undergone, it seemed, unfortunately, to be not that bad. Combeferre would have had to jog to lose him, which would have marred his dignity and probably still not have worked.
"Monsieur," Enjolras was saying, "I did not mean to say--"
"I trespassed first," Combeferre said without turning, "for which I apologize. No more need be said."
"Please stop walking."
They had turned onto a narrower street and reached the shadow of a building, cold and damp-smelling from the night. Combeferre stopped and waited, expressionless.
"I know what I said." Enjolras gazed at him with earnest conviction, like he meant to make this right. "It was the answer I would have given any man who asked, but that is no matter--it was you to whom I spoke, and what I said was obscene. Monsieur Combeferre, I apologize. It will not happen again."
It was not clear to Combeferre why they should salvage a relationship born half-strangled. He was offended at Enjolras's blunders and mortified at his own. The whole thing was intolerable.
Enjolras bowed. "That is all I wished to say. I wish you good--"
"Wait," Combeferre said.
When Combeferre said nothing else, Enjolras turned a little aside, looking down the street towards the busy thoroughfare. Combeferre folded his arms and frowned up at the gray masonry and the sky beginning to blush with blue. He scrutinized everything Enjolras had said and everything he himself had said. He neither hurried nor hesitated.
As he was thus considering, a gaggle of young men streamed past in a tumult of laughter and noise, and Combeferre and Enjolras stepped to the wall. A few men jeered at them, and one swung his heavy satchel with feigned casualness as he passed, barely missing them. Out of the corner of his eye, Combeferre saw Enjolras silently adjust his stance and ready his fists. Combeferre knew such precautions well, though he generally hid them better. When they were alone again, he met Enjolras's eyes.
"Vir and homo," he said quietly. "The world impugns your maleness and my humanity. I should not have assumed I had a right to your answer. I apologize as well."
On Enjolras's face dawned a slow, startled smile. It was the most alarming smile of Combeferre's life.
When Enjolras smiled, all that cold marble became breathtaking. His radiance had an almost physical force, of propulsion and forward rush. It felt like a river sweeping on towards Niagara or the steam locomotives Combeferre had read about, hurtling into the future with a force that could crack the world.
"Let me buy you a drink," Enjolras said.
Combeferre snorted. "You're aware it's barely morning."
"Coffee, then."
Such was his power that Combeferre, who was going to have to sprint to avoid missing clinic, who had lectures and rounds all morning and after that lessons and dissection and studying and half a dozen books to read and a lecture on geology he planned on attending if he possibly could and another on mathematics he hoped to catch at least part of, forgot all of it for an instant as he teetered on the brink of agreeing. He was never going to play truant. But he wanted to.
"Tonight," he said, barely. "Buy me a drink tonight."
--
Walking the long, vaulted wards between the rows of beds, struggling to hear the instructor from the back of the crowd of young men, Combeferre began to think his early morning encounter absurd. Agreeing to meet Enjolras had been a mistake. It would not go well. It had not even gone well that morning. He hardly knew what madness had made him say yes.
It never went well.
As far back as Combeferre could remember, he had alienated every person with whom he had ever earnestly spoken. He loved too many subjects and knew too much about all of them. He grew heated elucidating details and the connections between details, the minutiae no one cared about that transformed the heart of the thing. Details are never small. It is only the minds of men that summarize in broad strokes what they cannot comprehend.
He would grow too engrossed to modulate how much he was talking, and there are limits to what people tolerate. He learned to throttle himself with succinctness. By crafting the perfect sentence, he stoppered the torrent of words.
That is to say, he only ever spoke too little or too much.
Combeferre spent the day in dread. When the time came, he went to the appointed cafe. The dread lasted him through the door, up a staircase, past candlelit tables full of the hum of men conversing. The dread intensified when he sighted the back of Enjolras's frock coat and blond head. Enjolras gazed abstracted at the table and his untouched glass of wine. Combeferre approached.
Enjolras turned and smiled, and the dread eased a little. Combeferre pulled out the other chair and sat, and it began.
Enjolras was a torrent of words without restraint. He awed Combeferre with his brilliance, his hope, and his passion sharp and clear as chiseled ice and catching as forest fire. When, haltingly, blushingly, Combeferre allowed himself to speak, Enjolras did not look annoyed.
He looked spellbound.
Talking to Enjolras, one felt the French Revolution was only caught in a momentary lull, like an eddy in a river. That night, Combeferre felt the roar of the surrounding current and the inevitability they would reenter it. He wanted that as much as Enjolras did. He agreed about oppression, injustice, and tyranny--but he could not condone war.
The work of his life was saving lives, not cutting them short. He contested the point. They could not agree.
Long after midnight, when the room was near deserted and most of the candles were extinguished, when the cafe staff were sweeping the floor and the last patrons were hauling themselves up and stumbling outside, Combeferre said what he had to say. The heaviness in his chest was not only the weight of truth. This had been the best conversation of his life. All the missteps of the morning had not ended their incipient friendship.
This would.
Combeferre straightened his shoulders and sat back in his chair, gazing into Enjolras's ardent, eerie eyes.
"The good must be innocent," he said. "I can fight with fists when I must. I will never touch a gun. And if that means--what I suppose it means." He shrugged and gazed at the table. "You should know I enjoyed talking with you very much."
Enjolras leaned nearer, close enough to make Combeferre look up. His eyes were half lit in the uncertain candlelight, one a light, leonine gold and the other gray with shadow. He stared into Combeferre's face.
"People are already dying," he said. "The difference between the deaths of the poor and the deaths of the brave is that ours win a future where they need not die. I fight for a world that has no place for men of violence and therefore no place for me. I live with my eyes dazzled by the coming dawn. How could I fail to esteem a man who sees past me to the broad day?"
The brilliance of his smile hurt Combeferre's eyes.
--
June, 1832
Enjolras has watched it all unfold, all the versions, the good ends and the bad, the outcomes of all the maneuvers on his side and theirs. He has seen the end of the story where the people rise and the end where they do not. The lives of the best men he has ever known are at stake, and he holds the terrible weight of that, always.
They have pledged themselves to it. By their lives or deaths the sun will rise, if not today, then tomorrow, if not tomorrow, thereafter.
On that rainy morning, he believes they might dismantle tyranny. Men, women, and children flow into the funeral procession around him. With every street, more come. He feels the people rising like a flood to break the flimsy bulwarks constructed against the future. He is only a drop of water in that tide--they all are. Drops of water do not fear to die. And if the stone hand of monarchy crushes this rebellion, the reverberation of his death will echo. One day there will be other drops of water but the same flood.
When the pistol shot recoils up his arm and Le Cabuc falls dead begging for mercy, death becomes the only end. Summary execution has no place in the future he fights for, and neither does the man who performed it. It was necessary, but it can never be right. He surveys the stain on their enterprise with sorrow, but the death to which he condemns himself is a smaller matter. It will not hold the future back nor dim the light he sees.
It is different when they start to die.
Enjolras stops thinking then, he does what is needed, he loses himself in perfect action and frenzied movement and the maps of tactical positioning in his head. He does not look down. He looked down once, and he saw the child Gavroche looking up dead, and--he does not look down.
At last he stands backed against the crumbling plaster in a corner of the upstairs room, alone against the soldiers. Their bayonets are bright and sharp in the dim light through the distant window. He flings away the stump of his carbine and folds his arms.
"Shoot me."
As the soldiers ready their weapons, he does not think of the faces of his friends. Dawn must come, if not today--of course he thinks of them. They are clearer in his mind's eye than the soldiers. All else is dark. He made of their meeting place an abattoir. He raises his chin and stares into the face of death and waits.
"Long live the Republic!" cries a voice. "I belong to it."
Enjolras turns.
It is Grantaire, the bitter drunk. Grantaire, who only ever came to mock him. Grantaire, who claimed in the same breath to believe in nothing but Enjolras and to doubt Enjolras's literal existence. With a perversity bordering on vengeance, Grantaire sensed the light Enjolras saw in him and set himself to disproving it. He was successful; Enjolras all but gave up on him long ago.
Grantaire reaches Enjolras's side. "Two at one shot," he says to the soldiers.
He turns to Enjolras, and his smile is the gentlest thing Enjolras has ever seen. Because Grantaire in the moment it matters is extraordinary, Enjolras will not die in the cold and dark. He will die beside his last friend, remembering dawn.
"Will you permit it?" Grantaire asks.
Enjolras clasps his hand, and Grantaire's face is suffused with a wholeness Enjolras has never seen there. Enjolras thinks about the people he loves, Grantaire among them. All their memories are made of light. A death like this is a gift he did not look for. A death like this is a gift.
The report resounds. Grantaire hits the wall and slides down it, leaving a long, dark stain. Enjolras remains standing, unmarked, still breathing, his smile not yet finished.
The sun he spent his life following winks out. The tomb flooded with dawn slams shut in his face. On its door are the names graven in marble of everyone he ever loved.
Leaders are useful. The officer decided to take him for questioning.
He does not fight. He hardly knows what is happening. The realization he is not shot strikes with bewildering violence, and he is stupefied and stupid with it. His body remains tensed for the impact of bullets, painfully, long after it is clear no bullets will come.
He is led past corpses. The faces are not accusing. They are not anything. There are no more meanings. He glimpses Courfeyrac laid out, limp and motionless. He sees Combeferre, empty and bloodless and soaked in blood.
He must pass scenes after that. He sees nothing.
He never imagined outliving them.