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He’s starts with a gasp, pushing up from the stone floor, eyes frantically searching around—seeking Marius, the face he will recognize without a doubt. But Marius isn’t here, only the people who know him but who he doesn’t know—or he knows. But not quite. It’s at the edge of his reach.
A man with dark hair, curling about his ears, embraces him first. His name starts with a C—and Grantaire’s arms wrap around him, reflexively. “We survived the barricade,” he says—he says—Courfeyrac says. (A sharp pain of a chisel chips away at the edges of his mind.) “We survived the barricade but we didn’t.”
“Miracles happen, I’m told,” Grantaire explains.
The poet—whose name he also seems to have misplaced or given away—gets down on his knees next, arms encircling the both of them with a sigh of contentment, of bliss. He doesn’t say anything. None of them do, not really. But it’s a one by one affair—until someone pulls out a stop and there is a pile of writhing bodies, laughing and rolling around (we survived the barricade! They shout, and it echoes, around the inner sanctum of Grantaire’s head, and around the spacious room of the Pontmercy house). Grantaire is at the bottom of this pile.
And he fits there, like a puzzle, he thinks. A place at the bottom of a hill of people—part of the foundations.
(It is, perhaps, one of the first times in his life he’s felt important.)
Grantaire glimpses Enjolras (and there are flashes of colour, of red, of sweat and wine and gunpowder) standing to the side, refusing to act his age (as usual, a voice inside him says, with pain following hot on its heels).
But Enjolras smiles—and when he meets Grantaire’s eyes, his smile grows a little wider.
-
They spend a lot of time with Marius and Cosette, these days. The Pontmercy house has, effectively, become their base of operations before studies start up again. (Though, perhaps, Combeferre says with a wry arch of an eyebrow, hands tucked into his pockets, we ought to rally the people first and join them.
Enjolras is inclined to take this suggestion.)
And while Grantaire spends time with them there, he doesn’t spend much with them. He likes to pace, a glass of wine (watered down to the point where it barely tastes like wine at all) in hand. After he’d spoken about what he knows—“I’d woken up and everyone was dead. What was I supposed to do? It should have been me.”—about what he’d done—“I would do it again, I think.”—he hadn’t wanted to talk much, anymore.
Enjolras finds him pacing, outside, between the east and west wings of the large manor house, glass in hand, the wine still noticeably red—but verging on pink. (The others are inside, Eponine braiding Cosette’s hair in a way they had never gotten to do as children, she says.)
He turns, lazily, on his toes, heading back toward the wing where Enjolras waits, just outside the doorframe, breathing in the air that tastes like sunset. (Sometimes, he thinks, he can still taste blood on his tongue, feel the musket shots sitting in him like a weight.)
Grantaire doesn’t pick up his pace—but his strides get a little longer and he meets Enjolras by the door, canting his head toward him, a smile touching the corners of his lips. “Hello, Enjolras.” (When he says his name, there’s always a jolt of pain that twitches his nose—but it’s gotten better, less frequent.)
“Grantaire. How are you feeling?”
(A common question.)
“Not so terrible,” is the reply he earns. And Enjolras, at this point, runs out of things to say—because Grantaire has already told the story, and he has very little to say about why or how.
And so he swallows, reaching to take the glass from Grantaire’s hand before he places it on the floor, next to the doorframe, before he straightens up and holds out his hands, palms up. (“It should have been me.”)
“You never finished dancing with me.”
Grantiare’s lips twitch at that, his eyebrows bowing under a weight. “Mm. But Enjolras,” and the moment of surprise falls away from his face and he places his empty hands to his chest, “we hardly know each other.”
He doesn’t bring his hands down. Instead, he says, “you remember some things?”
“A little,” Grantaire agrees.
“Then we can start over—where you don’t remember things.”
His eyes focus on Enjolras’ fingers, curled and waiting for his hands to join them there. “I haven’t changed at all. I’m exactly the same—the person who fell asleep when I was needed. The dissenter. I remember enough to know I exasperated you constantly.”
“I’ve changed.” (Blood on his tongue, waking on the street, lined in a neat and tidy row.) “A little bit, I think. And I want to finish the dance we started. And I want to get to know you—all over again. Better, perhaps. I owe you my life.”
“You owe me nothing.”
Enjolras blinks at him and stretches his curled fingers. “I owe you a dance.”
Grantaire sighs.
But he places his hands in Enjolras’.
(And Enjolras swipes his tongue over his teeth, cleaning the taste of blood from his mouth before he smiles, a little.)