Work Text:
Paris wore an oilskin, and had fallen asleep in the rain. A cab wheeled over the slick cobbles of the square, its horse's clopping hooves given haste by the lateness of the evening, and the gas lamps were more sentinels than guides – tall in their wet uniforms with single, watchful eyes. There was a small cobbler's workshop crouched in the shadow of the church, and under its awning, listening with an artist's appreciation to the morose hammering of the rain, was Grantaire. With him a girl, although the hardship in her face made her a woman, and she lay her head on his thighs as though they were stowaway siblings. But each had chosen to make the other their family, and this was more, somehow, than real blood would have been.
“You think of him.” She did not turn her head, slick as a rat's from rain, but Grantaire was the only one there she could be addressing.
“Of course,” he replied. His baritone was a brother's comfort to her, even more so than the wine she now drank in one quick, grimacing gulp. Then she clarified:
“You think of him, now.” The maintenant's consonants were soft and questioning.
“How did you know?”
She shifted closer, a small and typically demanding movement thanks to a childhood of stealing. “Did you not tell me that you think of him in storms? Well, this is a storm, and you are very quiet.”
Grantaire smiled. “I am a book to you.”
“I cannot read.”
“A bad painting, then.”
Eponine laughed, a somewhat harsh and neglected sound, and Grantaire was reminded of hopeless alleyways with over painted women prowling. His arm tightened protectively around his friend as if trying to ward off that future for her – her hair was cut short like a boy urchin's already.
“Tell me of yours so that I do not think of mine,” she then said, offering the bottle as well. He took it of course, but words were less immediate. Then at last:
“I painted him last week, or at least, something like him.”
“What did you paint?”
“The sky over the Musain. I sat here in fact, and the sun was just coming over the..” he trailed off, hand raised to indicate the falling beams of that day, the warm air rising hopefully into the cloudless early June, the windows shining. Now the Musain was cloaked against the heavy downpour, and Grantaire did not like seeing its windows darkened. It made him think of how the bricks would still stand, leaning a little as they always did, and the gutters would still gush water onto the street below, when young students no longer warmed its rooms once weekly. La vie est ainsi faite, he thought. It is a fact of life.
“I thought you in love when you chased that flower girl. We were children, do you remember?”
They had not, in fact, been children. But poverty and law were not the only time keepers in Paris, and revolution had aged them such that seventeen seemed like infancy.
“Ines, her name was,” Grantaire recalled.
“Did you love her?”
“I did not know love,” he scoffed, before drinking deeply. Then, with the settling wine beginning at last to take effect, he spoke with a voice more emboldened:
“I wonder, Eponine, if there is some society less ignorant than our own, where 'l'amour' and 'la cause' are one word. 'Vocation', I believe, reeks too much of cold employment and the Establishment.”
“If you say so,” she said. “It is the first time I've heard the word.”
“I wish you had not made me think of him.”
Eponine now turned away from the square to face the clattering awning above them, and silence joined them for a while. Then she turned her face to study his, and her look, although never tender, held a deep empathy.
“You must not be ashamed, brother,” she said.
“I am not, sister,” he replied, smiling. “I was never more than an observer of angels, I do not expect a place among them.”
“No man will go to Hell for love.” She considered, then added with a curling lip: “Woman, maybe, but no man.”
“Ah, but this is not love, Eponine,” Grantaire told her, dark curls damp against his head as he looked down at her with his cynic's smirk, as well-worn as his bottle green waistcoat. “Religion does not see this love, c'est une abomination, non?”
“Ce n'est pas juste, Grantaire.”
“C'est Paris.” He drew the line of her cheekbone with his finger, eyes narrowed with artistic thoughts for a moment, full of shades and angles. Then he inhaled and rested his head against the store front. “But no, dearest, you are right. It is not just. Enjolras fights it.”
“He.. he fights for that kind of love?”
Grantaire felt as though his heart were filled with lead, for he knew her true question. His answer:
“God would not have made him with such an imperfection.”
“But you tutoyer, I've heard you both. Surely this does not mean nothing.”
She had to wait for Grantaire to put the bottle down. “I find something of great import to one can mean nothing for the other,” he replied.
“You're wrong in this case, I think.”
“Ah.” He closed his eyes as if to sleep, and Eponine watched his face. A small stream of rainwater broke away from its comrades in the gutter close to them, and it tumbled over itself towards Grantaire's planted boot. He felt it when it divided round the leather, but he didn't stir – his boots were old and unfashionable, and he didn't mind feeling the cold through them.
“Your leader, from what I've heard you say of him, would not..” Eponine paused, wishing not for the first time that she had a more educated grasp of French like her companion, so that she may convince him better, with philosophy and logic. “Would not hate a man who fights for his cause?”
A grin broke across the artist's previously passive face, and he opened blue eyes. “If only our meetings were a place for women, Eponine, then I could show you how wrong you are.”
“Marius says that your presence is valued.”
“Marius believes Napoleon to be a great symbol of France,” he replied.
“I do not understand.”
Grantaire looked down at her, his wet hair leaving his face tear-streaked, almost, as he smiled. “He is often wrong,” he explained, and when he saw a flicker of resentment at the words he added with a little haste: “But forgive me. I have no quarrel with him.”
“He is a good man,” she confirmed, and Grantaire was reminded of a dog that would perhaps begin growling if he took another step toward its master.
“He is, and he calls me a friend, of which I am grateful.”
She nodded, and when she reached for the bottle her temper had settled – they could not afford conflict between them, and had learnt young to forgive the other quickly.
“However,” he continued as she drank. “To say that I am 'valued' is merely a kindness on his part. I criticise, and much of what is said I do not believe. To call my contributions valued would be to call poison as such, merely because it allows the discovery of the antidote. Except, I lack the purpose of poison, and my friend Jean Prouvaire may even say the romance. Yes, they learn to counter my cynicism, and perhaps that strengthens their constitutions, but they would be more effective in their cause – healthier, if you like – if they had never encountered my cynicism in the first place.”
The young Th é nardier disagreed with him deeply, for she knew in her heart that her life had been saved by his companionship, and she could only imagine her friend being similarly essential to all that he met – he was too good, too good in his soul , Eponine thought, for what he'd said to be the truth. However, she did not have the courage at that moment to say this. Instead:
“Then why do you return?”
“Because I am selfish, and there is a certain colour brought to my dear leader's cheeks when he is criticised that I am very fond of,” he replied with ease, smiling at the shadow of the Musain across the square and taking the wine from her. “And besides, where would I be without those meetings? They are my lodestone now – my mind leaps forward to them and reaches back once they have passed. I would not deprive it of such a diversion.”
He tipped the bottle up to his lips, and didn't say anything more.