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The drive back is surprisingly silent. Enjolras took out his earpiece and stamped it into the gravel before they left, which might explain part of it. Everyone in the rattling van is limp with relief and unexpected success. Eponine says that she has dust in her eyes, and no, she doesn't miss Cosette already, and yes, okay, the Bill being withdrawn makes her happy, why does Courfeyrac want to make such a big fucking deal about it?
When they get back to the base, the noise starts up again. Everyone wants to make a big fucking deal about it. There's a party already brewing in the warehouse, which doesn't seem possible, since half the ABC were on negotiation ground or posted to the perimeter or deep in the code. Courfeyrac, in particular, locus and center of every ABC party like the eye of a hurricane, was driving. His hands were busy.
“Your hands were pretty busy,” Courfeyrac says when Enjolras points this out. His eyebrows do terrible, insinuating things. “Also, your mouth–”
“I will kill anyone who comments on this,” Enjolras says. To Courfeyrac, but also to the room at large. He's still holding Grantaire's hand. He feels shaky. It's partly giddiness, and partly relief, and partly, mostly, the usual adrenaline crash after extreme stress, but there's a certain amount of tension still mixed up in there, too.
“Terrible whirling eyes,” Bossuet whispers, and then shuts up hastily.
“Party,” Combeferre says firmly. “We don't get many victories, so we're going to celebrate this one the way it should be celebrated. Tomorrow we'll do the post-mortem and start working out our new agenda – and that's going to be huge; everything is going to change. But tonight, we're going to enjoy this.”
They party. It's an order. It's a huge shaking sigh of a party, mad and loose around the edges, and it gets out of control fast. Enjolras does his best to do what everyone expects of him and presses arms and pats shoulders and starts sketching out patterns for the open future, despite Combeferre's attempt to ban all mention of everything until tomorrow. Periodically Grantaire squeezes his hand. Perhaps he thinks he's being reassuring. Do boa constrictors think they're lovingly telling their prey that everything's going to be okay?
Alcohol flows, and other intoxicants and stimulants Enjolras usually frowns on. He can't frown on anything tonight. It wouldn't be fair. Grantaire keeps glancing at Enjolras like he needs permission when he finally takes a glass of wine and sips from it, unusually slow.
Enjolras pats shoulders and offers advice and continues to ignore the fact that he's holding Grantaire's hand and becoming more and more unglued with private panic. When he accepts a shot from Bahorel (“It'll put chest on your hair!”), knocking it back without tasting it, Grantaire bolts the remainder of his wine glass, pushes it at Joly, and says “Okay, that's enough. Congratulations, everyone, well done.”
He tugs Enjolras through the room, along into the hall and up the staircase. Enjolras isn't entirely sure where they're going.
Does Grantaire have a room in the warehouse? All the original members have suites, and when Courfeyrac and Jehan bonded they gave up Jehan's old rooms to Eponine and Gavroche. When Musichetta gave up her lease and moved in, she promptly converted an old storage room into a bedroom, claiming that she needed her own space, it didn't matter who she was sleeping with or where she spent most of her nights; Marius slept on Courfeyrac's floor before the bonding, and then took over another unused little room and modified it for his own. There's couple of bunkrooms for itinerants and people who need somewhere to hide. Feuilly sleeps in the bunks, when he's not sharing with Bahorel, not that most of them are supposed to know (or at least, to comment) about that. Enjolras has certainly offered to convert bedroom space for him; Feuilly has always refused in the name of independence, although he's accepted multiple extensions on the cavernous clutch of rooms he works in.
Enjolras can't remember if they ever properly gave Grantaire a room, and when he realises that he feels abruptly terrible. He's seen Grantaire catnapping or outright passed out in the backroom or on one of the meeting-room benches so often, when he's not vanished into the underbelly of the city – because Grantaire maintains an outside life and his own place somewhere else, like many of them do to greater or lesser extents – which Enjolras should put a stop to, it's dangerous, hasn't the past few days proved that –
“Enjolras,” Grantaire says, in the serious tone of voice Enjolras remembers from the heat. He squeezes again. “Hey. Look at me.”
“Do you have a room?” Enjolras asks abruptly, and it comes out sounding like the come-on it's not meant to be. Grantaire's eyes widen a little.
“Um, yeah,” he says. “It's not great, I mean – mattress on the floor, sink-attached-to-the-wall kind of deal. I don't want to take you to my room, Apollo.”
“No,” Enjolras agrees. He's still holding Grantaire's hand. He remembers Grantaire taking his hand when the heat was starting to carry them both away, and promising not to let him go. He looks at their hands, and can't look away, and the shot he took is rising up at the back of his throat. “Are we going to my room, then?”
“If you want,” Grantaire says, still studying him. “To talk, maybe. I don't know about you, but I really need to sleep. I spent last night in a chair, remember? My neck's fucked to hell and back.”
Sleep. Enjolras can do that.
“Okay,” he says, and relaxes a fraction.
-
They go to his room. Grantaire takes off first his shirt and then his jeans, looking to Enjolras again for approval, and Enjolras looks at the picture he makes with his fly open at the waist, his hands uncertain on the parting sides of the buttons and the black elastic line of underwear running smooth against his flat lower belly, and nods helplessly.
He undresses himself, quickly, quietly.
Grantaire is already in bed when Enjolras joins him, the covers up to his chest and his teeth in his lip. His eyes are a question. Enjolras doesn't meet them. He lies down, stiffly. He tries to breathe.
When Grantaire puts a hand on his hip through the blanket, Enjolras goes stiffer. “Hey,” he says. “We're only sleeping. We've slept together in this bed before. It's not scary.”
“I'm not scared,” Enjolras says, but it's a lie and they both know it. He hasn't done this – he hasn't done anything like this except when he was out of his mind with a blissful terrifying wash of hormones smothering the thinking, logical, over-thinking part that he can't drown out now, not even with the sharp-tasting-whatever-the-fuck that was in the little shotglass; he should have taken something else, done it thoroughly if he was going to do it. There were other substances. “I know we have.”
“I'm only talking about sleep,” Grantaire says, and rubs a hand over his face. “Jesus. You must – don't get the wrong idea or anything, I know I had crazy superman stamina when we fucked before, but you get that that's heat, right? That's not normal for me, don't expect – fuck. You could order me to make passionate sweet love to you right now, and I couldn't keep it up. I mean, if that's what you wanted, I'd kill myself trying, but.”
He grimaces, wry.
“I don't expect,” Enjolras says, then wants hysterically to laugh. Abruptly, he does. “I don't know what to do.”
It's absolutely fucking ridiculous. He and Grantaire have done everything. In this bed, on this floor, against that wall and also that wall and, briefly, unsuccessfully, the door; he's locked his legs around Grantaire's hips and urged him to go harder, harder, come on, and set his calves high on Grantaire's shoulders and had him fuck him on his back; he's thrown a leg over Grantaire's thighs and ridden him intent on nothing but his own pleasure. Rocked back and forth on his hands and knees feeling the bright thrust of Grantaire behind him, inside him, sparking sensation from a thousand delighted nerve endings.
He just hasn't done it while he was thinking.
“Sleeping? Just close your eyes.” When Enjolras keeps looking at him, waiting for something more, Grantaire adds, “Or come here?” and plucks a little of the blanket away from his chest. It's so painfully hopeful it does something funny to Enjolras somewhere behind his breastbone.
The mattress shifts and starts to dip alarmingly in the middle when they put themselves carefully together, Enjolras's back to Grantaire and their hips snug together and Grantaire's arm settling carefully over his waist. It takes a little work, and some arranging. They don't fit perfectly. Enjolras is taller, and longer in both leg and torso, and Grantaire's face ends up pressed into his back. Really, they should go the other way around, but Enjolras can barely allow himself to be held; he can't hold yet.
“Sleep now,” Grantaire says, and kisses between his shoulder blades.
-
In the morning they're closer. They've turned in the night, tangled into each other. One of Enjolras's arms is numb. His leg is trapped between Grantaire's thighs.
“Good morning,” Grantaire mumbles, sounding even less coherent than he did on the edge of sleep the night before. He kisses the corner of Enjolras's jaw, and then the softer skin under it, and nuzzles hazily at his collarbone. “Oh, you smell–”
“Thank you,” Enjolras mutters back, but Grantaire rubs his nose in his throat again, scenting, and makes such a delighted, shameless noise that Enjolras can't even pretend to take his words as an insult. He pats Grantaire's shoulder instead, bare and warm; they're the same temperature, acclimatised together while they slept.
The patting turns into stroking, and while Grantaire does sleepy happy things to his neck Enjolras languidly explores the smooth expanse of Grantaire's back, the dip of his spine and the flat muscle over his ribs, sweeping up and down, up and down.
Eventually, they surface properly into awareness.
“Oh,” Grantaire says, screwing up his eyes and then opening them all the way. They pop wide, a little father than normal. Their exact shade of blue is somehow still surprising when Enjolras hasn't seen them for a while. “Good morning.”
“Mm.”
“If I'm back in the basement and dreaming I'm going to be pissed,” Grantaire says, and the memory of him tied up in the chair, too resigned to even lift his head reminds Enjolras how terrified he was, how close – “Apollo – you really don't want to kiss me right now–”
“I do,” Enjolras insists, but it turns out that Grantaire's right; he doesn't. He screws up his face. “Oh, I don't.”
When Grantaire chuckles, Enjolras feels it everywhere, abruptly aware of the way they're fit together, the way Grantaire is moving gently against his thigh; the way he himself has been shifting reflexively against his hip.
“We've done it without kissing before,” he offers, daring. This, right now, is easy; if he thinks about it too much he'll panic again.
“It's so good with kissing, though,” Grantaire says dreamily, and continues to rock against him. “I can't – if you let me, I'll show you–”
He doesn't show him that time, though. The slow lazy comfort of the morning turns frantic too easily, and then they're gasping against each other too soon.
“I thought, why did that, that was only heat,” Enjolras manages when he can breathe, it was too fast, and Grantaire rubs at a smear of something on his stomach and makes another face.
“What, the whole – no, Apollo, that's normal. I mean, it can be. We can work on it.”
They work on it some more in the bathroom and then the shower once they've brushed their teeth. Kissing really does do interesting things to the act of love, more than Enjolras has imagined. Grantaire gives him direction with his tongue: allegro, moderato, affretando. Crescendo.
“Oh,” he says breathlessly, and Grantaire holds him steady by the shoulders against the tiles and says,
“Seriously, I have no idea why whoever was in charge of modifying this warehouse built you such a big fuck-off shower, think of how it's been wasted–”
-
Technically they don't have to leave Enjolras's apartment and go downstairs for as long as the supply of food in his refrigerator lasts. But unlike their heat, he hadn't anticipated this, and there's not much laid in, and they're supposed to be holding a post-mortem on the special project and its strengths and weaknesses in the meeting room at midday. There were limits to what the ABC could learn over the mic; Enjolras still has to really debrief them on Fauchelevent-Valjean, his measure of the man and the blossoming shape of their new future –
“You're inhuman,” Grantaire sulks, pulling on a t-shirt taken from Enjolras's bureau. "Can't the revolution wait just one day? Incorruptible angel - I hate you."
Enjolras straightens his jacket and says “No, you don't,” with total and absolute confidence.
-
(When they come downstairs Marius is the first to notice the huge red mark on Enjolras's throat that Grantaire had spent that half an hour in bed creating. His eyes go perfectly round, and he splutters on his mouthful of coffee, and Bahorel thumps him on the back and says “What, gone down the wrong – Holy shit.”
“I will kill anyone who comments,” Enjolras says conversationally, striding towards the front of the room, and Grantaire steals Marius's unguarded mug. “Now, to begin–”)