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Simon's chin is buried in his coat as he descends the uneven flight of stairs to his room. The November air has just begun to bite and the chill of the early dark has crept in through his windows - he shuts the door behind himself quickly and does not loosen his scarf. Christophe at his place on the mattress in the corner has surrounded himself with several blankets.
"You're home. It's so late," Simon hears him say as he places a small package on the table. In his voice there are traces of reproach, no more, but the complaint is quite tangible. Christophe is set up against his pillows and the wall, reading, as is his custom, by a candle by now melted sturdily onto the floor; but he has been progressing through his books more and more slowly in recent days. The lines of his face cast into relief by the sickbed lighting are more keen, his fingers tend to tremble when he turns pages.
Simon has not become accustomed yet to the complaints, but so many things have changed that on some nights he finds them soothing. On this night he draws a chair up beside the mattress and sits, and, leaning down, fondly touches his fingers to Christophe's forehead. "I know. I am sorry." He sits back and retrieves the package from the table. "You're feeling cooler, though."
Christophe's irritation under these minor affections is apparent. He seems always on the verge of refusing them, and only shrugs in reply.
Simon pulls the bottle out of its paper, and pours its contents into a glass with a measure of water from the basin sitting at his feet. Christophe takes it with a steady hand, proof that he can control the tremors.
Simon refrains from watching him, as usual. "Do you need a fire?"
"I do not." Christophe sets his glass firmly upon the floor, his eyes sharper now with an edge that Simon knows has nothing to do with the drug. "Nor these blankets, nor your incessant attentions."
"You said yourself it was cold," Simon says in his own defense, but quietly and without very much heart. The conversation is familiar, and he does not wish to continue it. There are things Christophe can say that bring the cold into his chest as though it were the hardest night of winter, that make his face and eyes burn as though beneath a sharp wind, and sober as he is this evening the omens are clear to him.
But Christophe, brooding all day under the light of two small panes and nothing but a candle in the dark, seems rarely able to resist the possibility of a conflagration. Simon blames himself for this: in drink he can never refrain from granting it to him. There is almost always some attempt at provocation: some flaring of the soul must be preferable to none at all. "And if I were cold? The only thing I need it takes you a day at the least to procure, and then nothing but the most vile stuff that you can find. Any child could do what you take it upon yourself to do for me. If it weren't for your cowardice I wouldn't need anyone at all - because of you there isn't anything that I can do."
Simon lowers his eyes to the blankets covering Christophe's crushed and crooked legs, healing awkwardly and splinted hopelessly. "You might beg," he suggests simply, resigned to the flood of regret, "at the churches with the other invalids." He knows well the empty expression that Christophe forces at times like these, and does not look up, staring instead at the tangled covers and loathing his own spite, the new bitterness that revels in that inadequate disguise, a sure indication that he has struck a painful nerve.
Christophe, he knows, is helpless in so many ways - lost to his pain. He himself is too weak to help to guide him beyond it. Love is worthless, he reflects, when coupled with weakness: at the slightest sting he piles upon the object of his adoration more of his own dark thoughts. He fears he will extinguish him, soon.
The days before the doctor - in fact no more than a mere chemist - came were narrow and confused. The heat of fever raged from late afternoon until midnight and into the gray morning. Christophe's pale, taut fingers were snarled in the sheets like claws for two days, and in that black hour before dawn on the third he clutched at Simon's cold and shaking hand, nearly suffocated with despair.
God, he cried, a reverberating prayer that fell like lead before the corners of the dreary room, for him an endless blackness. And when in the early morning his body began to surrender to fatigue the first light swept in through the window to lie upon his golden hair and shining forehead. And Simon feared the worst.
Now in this lonely corner of a wineshop smoke hangs in the air like gloaming. Simon remembers ridiculous stories of country road-ghosts from his youth: to pass through a cold curtain of fog in the twilight marked one for death. The icy spirits followed men on their long walks away from the town, and stole their souls before they reached their doorsteps, unless a stranger with a lantern should frighten them back to the mist. Such a haze of stale, spent tobacco waits at the door here, lurking now on one side, now on the other, glowing paper-yellow over the lamps. But it only guards an exit to the freezing rain, and Simon's will to leave is ebbing with the wine.
Even the eventual homecoming, the dry heat of the firegrate and old wool blankets, is bereft of its usual small comfort. He dares not go home. Soon it will be past his usual time, and Christophe will be worried - frantic - bloodshot eyes flickering over words that are little more than a distraction from the rising tide of need - but even in his anxiety there will be the hope that is a part of waiting. Christophe will never despair of relief, however great the pain. The thought of it sends him deeper into his drinking, until the glass has been drained to the last thin film of red. If ever he has had need of another bottle, this is surely the night - and he has money enough, more than enough for a forgotten night of false cheer and slurred conversations, enough even for a companion, if not of the first rate. Money enough for all of that.
And all because the doctor - a very mere man indeed - has raised the price of the drug. (The one thing, Christophe says, that Simon can give him.) But there's nothing to be done - certainly no bargains to be made. Rather than waste a day's wages he resolves that he, for his part, will not spend the dark hours alone and cold in bed. With his last bottle in hand he passes through the veil of smoke and into the night.
He can no longer rely, he reflects, on the very stars in the black - their vast and distant movements, heedless of the most cataclysmic of human events, have left him without point of reference among familiar surroundings. Time proceeds, and what was ordained comes about. This is not, it seems to him, what he believes; but the strange arrangement of stars framed by his window (meager fraction indeed of the tremendous vault visible to those on the outside) is proof enough that there are things beyond the calculations of men. He is in a better position than most, however, to comprehend that in six months' time a man may appear to have been turned upside down, to sit on the other side of the earth; to be able to look directly upon what once was hidden well beneath the horizon.
And these days it is very difficult to tell the time - the dark comes early, the stars are out of line, and Grantaire comes home when he's able, hardly like clockwork. Half a world ago he cared not for time, except that it was fast approaching, and his thoughts were liquid, soaring, encompassing grand spaces in a moment and marveling at the remaining eternity.
Now instead he is reminded of the pocket watch he used to have. The regular wheels and gears and coils counted off indifferently the seconds. A minute passing means nothing to a watch. But with infinitessimal precision it performs the task, apart from everything. That is what time is: time is the absolute. That is what the absolute has always been, and it has always been simple. Winged, far-reaching ideas are incompatible in the extreme with the inevitably limited set of truths that comprise the Truth - it is, in fact, one, and, being all-pervading, has nowhere left to soar. It is stagnant. He is stagnant. Like the hands of a watch, that only seem to move if one looks at them too often.
With the setting of the sun he began to feel the twisting sensation in his bones, and now when he lifts his arm to wipe his cold forehead his sleeve comes away sodden. The chill deepens as the hours pass, sped by his shallow breathing and the old rhythmic prayers he mutters to regulate the seconds. When he's counted the proper number, once Aquila (were it July) would be in the window, he lights his candle and waits. Minutes are shorter once night becomes the first hour of morning - the last time he remembers his breath coming this quickly was a much warmer day, a day in June before his emute was reduced to debris. Grantaire came to him in the evening and told him lies that rang with devotion and trembled in fearful deference, a new disciple of Right who would perish in its service. The words were beautiful and poisonous and false, but Christophe's heart nearly stops in the frigid clutches of shame when he recalls the thrill of flattery that overcame him when the heat was pressing at his throat: for he was never, in fact, deceived.
He has not forgiven misplaced devotion, the willingness to die for a kind word from a mortal man. Nor has he forgiven his own intentional blindness. But in his fever dreams he embraces the shoulders of a fellow soldier, the lone repented sinner who caused to sound the blast of a thousand trumpets and his stainless friends of years to fade.
A thin strip of sky with precious few lights opens into a broad expanse of night at the corner of the boulevard, and behind the rows of townhouses the hidden sky is tinged at its rim with dull steel blue. But Simon lumbers, bleary, along the perpendicular alleys, tenements looming on either side of him, the dark and the fumes from the gutter exacerbated by the lone gaslight. He stops to lean against a thin iron step-rail, waves of sickness passing through him; he shuts his eyes and takes the air deeply, the fetid air, trapped in the city-tunnel by clotheslines and drawn curtains. A moment later the sound of a door echoes a few yards behind. Someone steps into the street.
He walked down those same stairs some quarter of an hour before, heavy with the not unpleasant guilt of obscenity - heavy also with too much wine on a stomach too empty, and reeking of tobacco. He has not traveled very far.
A man in a long coat passes him by, heading for the boulevard. Through the smoke he can sense a type of cheap cologne. What close inspection Simon's tired eyes can manage reveal that he is not well dressed, though likely he has spent some money trying.
Simon needs no more than this thought to begin to follow him. He is not quiet, nor very brave, nor even of one mind, and it is not until a few feet from the corner that he seizes the man's elbow and forces him around with one violent tug. "Stop," he stammers, fighting an unresponsive tongue and a brain too muddled for its own ambition, and the man looks frightened for a moment. A dark figure springs up from the ground behind the gentleman and, profiting by Simon's hesitation, slits his throat.
Simon lets the body drop, stunned. He comes to himself only when the murderer begins digging through pockets, kneeling on the road. "You there," he says, finally, shocked sober, "Stop that. He was mine." He pushes at the man's shoulders, his own brute strength not amounting to much, but more than the thief is prepared to handle: he falls back, a watch in hand. But again he jumps to his feet, as Simon is tentatively sinking to the ground. He shoves him off balance and returns to his rewards, examining a purse while Simon's head swims and the sickness begins again. When the nausea abates he stands, slowly, no more than a nuisance to his quick-fingered assailant until he deals him a sharp kick. They grapple with each other; Simon pushes him face-first against one of the walls and holds his arms fast. He feels weak with the effort, but the man struggles to no avail.
"He was mine." His voice is hoarse with disuse and desperation. The thief seems to appreciate the tone.
"You may have half," he replies, reasonably enough, ceasing in his attempts to break free. "You'll admit I did half the work, will you not?"
It is a young voice, its proper accent at least partially affected. Simon allows him to turn around, and takes a quick step backwards, startled by the deep eyes that shine unnaturally blue in the lamps, and by a mouth and nose cast from familiar molds indeed. The drink and guilt hit him again with the inevitable force of a pendulum.
"And half of the rest," the strange creature continues, straightening his coat, "If you'll come with me for a few more. We'll be quicker that way, won't we?"
There are beggars congregating at the steps of the church visible across the wide and ever-lighter street; repressing a seeping regret, Simon changes course and follows his false prophet back through the narrow, darkening maze.
He struggles through thin, dry branches, dead vines and leaves drifted knee-deep below the evergreen winter canopy. The wood stretches for miles in every direction. The air is close and thick with the smell of decomposing foliage and earth, and the lonely rustle of his slow, hard journey, a sound answered by no other. He falls to his knees in fatigue under the ageless branches, looming, swaying on in the blank twilight.
He kneels at the edge of a pond, a very small pond, and stares in wonder with his back bent. The water is the deep, dark silver of the sky and like the sky it reflects nothing. He alone rises from the depths; his portrait gazes back at him from a treeless void. The leaves that float across that dead calm float unsupported by their mirror opposites. He puzzles over his solitary likeness.
He wastes away, captivated, like the beautiful boy in the myth.
It is a dream he's had before - this time he wakes in an unfamiliar position, dangling from Simon's careful arms, his head on his shoulder. A bottle he does not remember emptying is sitting on the table.
Simon is setting him back on the bed when their eyes meet, and Christophe is startled by the deep, dull, enthralling grey. The pain from his jolted legs comes slow and unimportant, from a distance, like echoes under water. He takes a slow breath, relishing the dim sensation. "Where have you been?"
"I had to find work again," answers Simon, who looks unsettled and is probably lying. Christophe forces a completely unnatural sneer.
"How is it that you are able to lose work at the docks? Even the stupid beasts they use earn at least their oats. And yet you are turned away." He pauses. "You smell like wine."
Simon looks at the floor, rubbing at his rough face with one shaking hand. "The bed is new," he offers, quietly.
It is - a short, distasteful glance reveals an improved pile of bedding, infinitely more comfortable than the previous linen and straw. A pile of blankets is folded to the side.
Moved and thoroughly unhappy with himself, Christophe spits back at him: "Why is it that you are so intent upon waste?" He wishes he could taste Simon's mouth again, mingled with the bitter opiate.
Only after two hours, which time he has spent feigning sleep, riding the slow current of the drug, does Simon lay himself carefully out beside him. Christophe takes pride in the control that allows him to do away with any outward sign of pleasure as he basks in the unlooked-for comfort of his resting place, and of the hand that dutifully cools his forehead even though its owner despairs of his attentions ever being noticed.
"Grantaire!"
Who knows his name? Who knows his name and cares to call it, cutting that grey velvet figure edging through the sleepy market crowd? His name is like his shirtsleeves, now. Only at home. Only in that half-buried room with a half-buried man, all littered with stiff water-marked paper fallen from the windows.
The hora prima is coming to a close, and he is tired. Tired. The night was long, longer for the boundless energy of his accomplice. Relentlessly fresh and eager; and the pleas, the cheerful coaxing when Simon said he was too tired. The soft, inhuman persuasion that keeps him out past sunrise every night. He's like Christophe in an old mirror, hair like rubbed bronze and eyes like wet slate, dulled in the glass and obscured by years of dust. A beautiful shadow. A shadow.
"Grantaire!"
At his shoulder now. He steps to the side of the road, and turns.
Marius Pontmercy, in a grey velvet coat, with a portfolio and a stricken expression. Is it the shock? Or has he changed so little that he can still walk the streets looking awed? He still walks the streets; he still walks. A velvet coat. What is its worth in silver? Simon stares.
"Grantaire." Marius' voice is breathless as he catches Simon by the elbow. "I could hardly believe - but here, to see you here! We must speak."
Dragged into a quiet alleyway, as quiet a one as can be found. He feels the silvering behind the city has begun to fade. The colors are washed drab.
"Half a year," the urgent voice continues, "And not to have seen you ... is there any news? Who else remains?"
Simon swallows into a dry throat. "Enjolras." He hasn't said that name in half a year. He has never called him by name, he realizes. Not since he carried him out from under the broken beams and debris. "We stay together." He feels he should add some pleasantry. It has been months since he has spoken to anyone who might stop to take offense. "He'll be pleased to hear I saw you well."
"I am well. Very well - save one thing. How pleased I am to see you! You'll answer my questions. I'm in great debt -"
"He doesn't have any money," Simon breaks in, Judas ringing in his ears. "Enjolras. It's all been lost. It isn't -"
"I don't mean to ask for any! No, far from it - I fear I owe a great deal more than I could ever pay in that fashion. Someone spared me." He was nearly whispering. "Someone brought me from the barricades, when I ought to have died. I don't know his name, Grantaire. I haven't the faintest picture. I remember - smoke. And nothing."
Simon is already nodding. This is how the silver debt will be repaid, if he isn't dreaming. From the living back to the dead, or he who ought to be dead. He will collect for Christophe, who could not escape from Marius' rashness with mere burns, which seem to be Pontmercy's only lasting scar from the occasion - the strangely colored marks that seep out from beneath his hair. It must be a wig. The lies come out easily. "Enjolras carried you. He carried you out - I saw him." He closes his eyes. "He hasn't spoken of it."
When he does look up at Marius, he almost flinches. His eyes are shining. Light like the powder-fire seems to radiate from him. He fumbles beneath the lapel of his coat, and extracts an engraved card, presses it into Simon's hand. "Bring him to me. Let me thank him. I beg of you."
"Yes - I will. ... He is much changed, I think you'll find."
"I can only imagine."
Simon smiles, though it feels like his skin is creasing. He will collect. The avatar, the imperfect beauty of the night, will help him.
Christophe has come out of the same drugged sleep countless times, but he has never felt so distinctly uneasy before today. The weight of the past has always lain upon him, sluggish and smothering; today the future seems heavier. The change, unexpected, makes him feel more awake than he has in months.
His books, four or five volumes stacked beside his pillow, interspersed with loose pages and folded papers, are out of order. The book on the top of the pile is a blank journal he has kept religiously hidden against the floor. He takes it in his hands and lets it fall open - to that blank page where now there is only a phantom gap, a tell-tale curve in the binding. The papers he has kept tucked into this forgotten diary are nowhere to be found. He feels a cold sinking in his chest as he closes the book and lets it rest against his thigh.
Only one man can have taken them. Why? His printed leaflets - few but much-read in their day - and his private notes even he felt were too heated for publication - what use can they have for anyone? Grantaire used to laugh at them openly, launch into sickening parodies and tiresome diatribes; why steal these away now? Not to read them. To discard, them, perhaps. Even this seems unlikely.
It hardly matters. The last time he so much as glanced at them was the night he had word of the funeral. He remembers words and phrases composed by the light of his clean-burning wax candles, so far from the amorphous yellow stump of tallow he now lights on occasion. One part survives entire in his memory, a coherent fragment he cannot forget; it recalls too many bitter images.
Grantaire quoted him, in earnest, only once; and on that night, hours after General Lamarque had drawn his last breath at approximately six in the evening, there was a knock at his door. He was still dressed, too agitated to begin to contemplate sleep, and answered without a moment's hesitation.
Instead of one of his fellow conspirators - for that was how he had begun to think of himself, though he knew more would be required of him than a surreptitious blow with a dagger - there, standing at his threshold in a red waistcoat and looking very tired, was Grantaire. He was unshaven, his clothes were out of order, his hair, lusterless and the color of old leather, had come partially out of its ribbon, and his sunken, unremarkably grey eyes were bloodshot: he looked quite himself. He was certainly the worse for drink, but there was a nervousness about him, a certain uneasy timidity that Christophe had never before observed.
"What is it, Grantaire?" He saw him then for the first time outside of either the Musain or the Corinthe, and the effect was unsettling on this night that had so far been dedicated to breathless meditations on success.
"I would speak with you - only for a moment." Christophe knew that this was a physical impossibility for Grantaire, but ushered him through the door after only a short pause. It would be easy enough to send him on his way.
"Speak, then."
"I have heard things," he began, standing in the middle of the small sitting room, his hands clasped anxiously in front of him. Christophe leaned against his desk and folded his arms across his chest, wishing to appear critical. "There have been goings on. Earlier this evening, as I was taking advantage of the weather on the Place Saint-Michel, I noticed several groups of your acquaintance - a few of the young gentlemen from the Glacière, three or four I couldn't place, and a portion of the band led by that peculiar what's-his-name, the very tall fellow - walking by and all looking very serious, as though they had somewhere to be. A rare enough occurrence. They blatantly ignored me when I asked where they were headed with their heads held down so gravely, and so I followed them: it's true. Deplorable conduct, but I have a certain interest in these matters, as you yourself may have noticed. I followed them, and very soon they entered an establishment not unlike our own meeting places, ascended a staircase into a private upper room, and would not admit me. I realized at once that they were discussing sensitive matters and that they were of an urgent nature - serious stuff, I fear. I've come to ask you what's happening. I know you witnessed the meeting, as I followed you home, for which I apologize - but it seemed necessary. When in such incendiary company you tend to reach conclusions that demand action, and I am afraid that whatever you've thought up tonight may be especially upsetting, judging by the tone of your latest sermons. It concerns me. You may also have noticed that I harbor some doubt as regards your activities."
"You have nothing but doubt," Christophe responded, severely, "Which is why you were not admitted. You have a reputation." He was annoyed that he had been followed for such a long way and had not perceived it. "And for the same reason, you may expect nothing of me. At this juncture I do not have time for unbelievers."
"But, Enjolras, 'the converted unbeliever is the very flame of the liberation. Paul of Tarsus made to spread like wildfire the words of Jesus of Nazareth, converting the peoples of Asia and Greece; and indeed without the conversion of the peoples the liberation cannot be hoped for. This is the problem that Paris presents: the people are as green fuel. They are unbelievers. They must be made to believe, or they will never burn for the revolution.' Is that not so?"
Christophe looked at him sharply, recognizing his own words.
Grantaire pulled from his pocket a leaflet, carefully folded. "I took this from one of your criers on the street - or, had a boy take one for me." He smiled, in his oddly charming way, displaying a flash of his usual confidence. "Courfeyrac refused to give me one, calling it a waste of paper."
"As well he might," said Christophe, cautiously now, stepping forward to further inspect the sheet. It was without doubt his own publication. "You are no converted unbeliever. You are beyond reach. Give that to me; I have misplaced my copy."
Grantaire kept hold of the paper. "Beyond reach! You don't believe that. Not so very long ago you sent me to do your work, do you remember? To the Barrière du Maine, to test the waters for you. You thought me worth the trouble then."
The note of desperation in his words surprised Christophe, and saddened him - Grantaire, the lonely but supremely convivial skeptic, was only days away from being left behind by every one of his companions, faithful to the last of them, and he knew it. More than likely he thought they would die, but Christophe knew that success would also bring a separation. Drunk, feeble, and weak of conviction, Grantaire could never take part in the ushering in of the new world upon which his friends would spend their lives. He was perhaps the most human, Christophe reflected, of all of them, a representative of the people - deaf and blind, but still to be cherished - if ever they were to be represented among those he knew. For the first time he felt genuine pity for him.
"Every man is worth the trouble," he said, and he meant it then. His voice was gentle. "If only he can be made to apply himself to the best of his abilities. You have such abilities, Grantaire, but I think belief is not among them. I don't know if you are capable of the conviction that is required. You are not to be faulted for it."
"You know nothing of my abilities." This gruff rebuttal startled him - Grantaire, for all his rough manner a man good to his friends, had never failed to bow before the gentle touch. Christophe instantly regretted the wasted suavity.
"I know your idea of 'spreading the word' is playing dominoes away from your usual crowd. I know that wine and worse things have softened the parts of your brain that were not rotten with skepticism at birth. And time after time you have made perfectly clear that you have nothing but contempt for a cause that requires the most unwavering faith, a stout mind and a brave soul."
"The cause requires nothing. The allegorical personifications you all so enthusiastically endorse have led you quite astray. Liberty is no goddess, any more than Christ was a god. You require those things, and somehow you receive them - in some way I've never seen before, you lay bare the best in everyone who follows you. Whether or not it's because they wish to please you I don't know. My faith lies with that miracle of yours, not with a cause. You're more of a saviour than any ancient prophet -"
"Hush, now." Christophe frowned, beginning to feel uncomfortable. "This is sacrilege."
Grantaire ignored him. "You deliver men to their own heights," he went on, stepping closer. Christophe remembers looking down, just slightly down, into his ash-colored eyes that seemed to be swimming with fever, like the air above a stove. "I don't know how you do it, but I think you must be the equal of those great leaders and heroes men have worshipped for thousands of years. Those who follow you discover what they are capable of. You are upright, hard-forged, sure, true, beautiful and without fear, and those who would emulate you, and who are lucky enough to be strong, achieve what they have only heard of in legends." Grantaire took his hands. The sensation was startling - Grantaire was burning, and Christophe unaccustomed to physical affections. Then he bent and kissed them, and Christophe was reeling, confused and astounded; the lips against his skin took him completely off-guard; it must have been half a minute before he attempted, flustered and fighting against something within himself that he could not recognize, to pull free.
But Grantaire kept on, crushing Christophe's hands to that shabby red waistcoat with surprising force. "Let me die for you," he said. Christophe remembers the feeling of his mouth moving against the side of his face, Grantaire pressing too close to him, the fear that bloomed and then ebbed away like a shadow shrinking before a powerful light. "It's a humble request, I know; more humble than the promises the others will make you - but it is ... the best of my abilities."
When Marius Pontmercy lit the powder keg two days later and Enjolras was buried under his own fallen mountain, as he lay in quiet torment he was not visited by visions of dead companions or fiery explosions. He saw the arch of Grantaire's back, the slope of his trembling shoulders. He felt the way Simon drew the heat right through him, like oil through a wick, felt ghosts of the hunger in which his own lips had closed over Simon's mouth, the corner of his jaw; knew again the holy sense of patience, the ecstatic waiting for the divine moment, that had overwhelmed him as he collapsed, his chest heaving with spent effort, against his new apostle's back.
He loves Simon for the sole reason that Simon loves him, and before this morning his only consolation for such despicable weakness has been the knowledge that he has ceased to believe in anything like love, faith, or honor. This comfort, like Simon's unreliable opiates, has run out absolutely without warning.