#les mis words

Jehan does not join Grantaire in his nightly battles.

He thinks he might if Grantaire were to ask him--he knows that his mutation would aid in his fight, knows that when he wants to, Jehan can be a destroyer, an unstoppable force of chaos.

(He sees Shiva in his mind, with tree branches for his second set of arms, with roots and vines and thorns sprouting from the ground where he treads. He sees concrete breaking to make room for leaves, pictures roses blooming among the dead.)

But Jehan much prefers being a creator. He has always preferred to breathe life into the world around him. He loves to watch things live, thinks that when there is passion all around him, that is when he feels most alive.

He has been forced to acknowledge that his friends' passions are entirely too perilous for this kind of thing. They all but breathe danger, eat and drink and speak it, live just barely on this side of disaster.

It was only a matter of time before something tipped them over the edge.

Now Grantaire is broken, broken in ways that Jehan cannot repair, broken in ways that he and Courfeyrac and Combeferre cannot even begin to heal. (There is one man who could have put Grantaire back together, but it was Enjolras that tore him apart.)

It broke his heart to see Enjolras cold and lifeless, broke his heart to see Grantaire clinging to his body like he would drown without Enjolras keeping him on the surface, broke his heart to see Grantaire destroyed. For Jehan, Enjolras was a friend, an ally, a comrade, a tremendous loss to everyone, whether they knew him or not--but for Grantaire, Enjolras was the world.

He's been watching Grantaire fall apart ever since. It started when he refused to leave his apartment for days, when he refused even to attend the wake they held for Enjolras, when no one saw him for weeks. And then the next time they saw his face, it was on the news, a picture in the corner of the screen accompanying blurry footage of a very familiar figure leading a pantheon of ink figures (there are eleven, there have always been eleven, but now the group is one short, now there is no Apollo to stand by his side) as they tear through a group of soldiers. Jehan can see syringes full of vaccine being fired at him--they're tiny on screen, no more than a few pixels, but he knows that sound--and he watches as each buries itself into an ink god, none of them coming close to hitting their target.

(He remembers Grantaire lying on a sofa with Bahorel's hands covering his ankles and Enjolras' hands around his wrists, remembers Grantaire screaming as Joly dragged the vaccine out of him. He's learned from that mistake, he's more careful now, he's almost unstoppable.)

The next time Grantaire makes the news, he isn't alone. Two men fight with him. One is dressed in black, almost more shadow than anything else, leaving bodies dropping in his wake like Death himself. He's only met Montparnasse on a few occasions, but he recognizes that mutation. The other he would recognize blindfolded by the sound alone--it's Bahorel smashing his way through a crowd of soldiers, clearing a path for Montparnasse. Jehan can almost hear bones breaking with every one of his strikes.

Bahorel keeps them informed now, tells them that Grantaire is "as alright as he can be--he's still standing, still fighting." Still hurting, Courfeyrac says, and Bahorel nods. They clap him on the shoulder, thank him for standing with Grantaire when the others can't, won't, shouldn't, don't.

"It's the best any of us can do," Bahorel says, and they all wish it wasn't true.

But still Jehan is forced to watch Grantaire fall apart, aches to do something, anything to help.

He curls vines around his arms, coaxes flowers into bloom, but he cannot raise a man from death. No one can.

But he is not completely devoid of options.

Enjolras spoke beautifully. They were always rallying cries, reminders that for all that governments laud speaking, it was action that they needed. Jehan never denied the truth of that statement, but it was the words that stuck with Jehan, long after the meetings. Words have always had power for Jehan, and words are something he has a gift with.

It wasn't long after Enjolras' death that Apollo lives began appearing on walls in blood red ink. It wasn't long before they started getting covered up by hasty paint jobs--government employees who didn't particularly care about this job, not when they knew the words would just reappear. It wasn't long before Jehan couldn't go anywhere in the city without coming across one of Grantaire's marks.

And then Grantaire would walk the streets in the night to find that someone had taken to painting words below his, in green like a forest. The words have a familiar style to them, the letters a familiar curve. He smiles, remembering that even now, even doing what he's doing, he is not alone, not abandoned.

Jehan carves the words into the branches of trees that sit beside government buildings before imploring them to grow, to extend until they crash through windows, sending broken glass and torn leaves flying across desks.

He sits in the foliage and watches as officials read his words, look around in fear, try to hunt down the mutant responsible. The leaves close around him when the police approach. They cannot hope to find him in a garden. The plants keep him safe, keep him hidden from those who would have him killed.

Sometimes he writes his poetry in ink--nothing fancy, just a pen on paper, but these he slips under Grantaire's door while he's out making headline after headline. These are apologies and encouragements and love, not the warnings he sends the government.

Tonight, Jehan has a grander gesture in mind. He dresses in green, the color of his strength, and heads to the Complex with branches rippling in his wake.

The Complex has been calm these past few weeks, for Grantaire prefers to keep his fights on the streets these days. (They come to him; he has only to step out of the shadows to find a fight waiting for him.) There is only one door to the Complex, and that is where its guards have their posts. No one sees Jehan walk carefully to the back of the building. No one hears the trees creak in an effort to be closer to him. Jehan is not Enjolras, but to the plants around him, when he is so charged with energy that he can feel it bristling in his fingertips, he is the sun.

He takes a cutting of ivy from his head, where he wore it like a crown as he walked, and lays it reverently at his feet. And then he presses his hands to the wall before him, filling the plant with all the energy it needs to spread. It extends upwards so that there is greenery all around him, coloring the stark white of the Complex.

It's living, breathing poetry, poetry for the broken, for the hopeless, for the desperately clinging to anything that's left, for the man fighting his way toward death because that is where love lies. It grows, because that is what Jehan has always been good at, but he's never shown it this way before. He watches the vines crawl up the wall, twisting around each other, forming curves, resolving themselves into the shapes of letters.

It's graffiti of the best kind, made of creeping ivy that would shatter the walls of the Complex if they let it (they won't, they'll cut the vines down, but Jehan knows they'll have made their mark on the walls by then).

He steps back until he can see the words he's written on the wall, curling across the plaster, far more organic than any of his poems has ever been.

you’ve made monsters out of men you’ve turned mutants into menaces, lives into nightmares, you’ve turned the new dawn into an eclipse you have destroyed the sun. now you will have to watch as the world collapses under our feet.

He sees Shiva again, walking with Apollo, holding tridents and spears made of ink.

Grantaire was lost. He'd been lost for a long time.

His parents had had a very precise path drawn for him, of course. He was to have all of his father's brilliance with numbers, was set out to be a mathematician or an engineer of the finest caliber; he was going to leave as lasting an impression on the world of mathematics as his father had. Then he was going to settle down with a pretty girl--probably blonde--from a white upper-middle class family like their own. They'd have beautiful, intelligent children who would carry on the family tradition of excellence.

When Grantaire was in second grade, he was placed in the lowest math class. When he was in third, he couldn't remember his times tables. By the time he hit high school, he was almost remedial.

Grantaire's father gave up on him, but that didn't make his attitude toward his son any friendlier. His boy did not understand mathematics, so he would never be what his father wanted him to be, but he was still expected to be great.

There wasn't a single part of Grantaire that believed he was capable of meeting those expectations. Moreover, the older he got, the less he wanted to meet them. At the age of twelve he fancied growing up to be a glorious failure in his father's eyes, dreamed of getting kicked out of the house at sixteen, left without saying a word at midnight on his eighteenth birthday.

It didn't help that this image they always fed him of his pretty wife--blonde hair, blue eyes, pretty face, whatever--it didn't do anything for him. Around middle school, he thought he might have an idea of why. By the time he entered high school, he knew he was gay.

He did his research, read whatever crap material there was available at the time, doing everything he could to be sure before ever thinking of speaking to another person about it.

He let a comment slip one night at dinner and spent the rest of the meal listening to his father talk about how "fucking fags are ruining the country." His was the kind of house where fear and silence ruled together. As much as Grantaire wished he could say "You know, I think I'd be great at sucking cock," cowardice weighed down his tongue and stitched his lips together. He took to rebelling in much more physical ways.

He was fourteen and a freshman, but shockingly good at befriending older students who knew where to get booze and cigarettes and were perfectly happy to share--especially since he gave them cash lifted from his father's wallet in exchange.

Sophomore year, he came home one day drunk in the middle of the afternoon and stinking of tobacco, and his father didn't even notice. So he gave up.

He went from drinking occasionally with friends to drinking often with strangers--there were a lot of people in sketchy parts of town who were happy to help a teenager out when his fake ID wasn't cutting it. He went to every party he heard about--and god did he hear about the parties--drinking himself past memory during most of them. He celebrated his fifteenth birthday by getting trashed and losing his virginity to someone he'd never met and whose name he doesn't know; he just remembers dark hair, a jawline that could cut glass, a smile that made his stupid teenaged knees buckle, and a tongue that made his stupid teenaged dick hard as a rock.

He doesn't remember the sex, but he certainly felt it the next day.

He barely graduated high school. It's funny--he aced every assignment he turned in, could have aced every test if he'd bothered to show up. There were English classes where he got the top grade on essays the others struggled with, art history classes where he got every question right without staying awake through a single class of the chapter, but he just couldn't be bothered to spend his days in school.

He spent them wandering the streets with a cigarette in his mouth instead.

He still doesn't really know how he spent the year after he left home, after he graduated, because he certainly wasn't in college. He was homeless, he was unemployed; he was resourceful, he called in favors, he stole, he sold, and he got by.

When he was nineteen, he got checked into the emergency room with a broken leg, a dislocated shoulder, and two cracked ribs. He'd asked for one favor too many, and no one could ever say he wasn't a fighter, but four against one isn't anything like a fair fight.

He sent the bill to his rich father, read off the credit card number from memory, and decided it might be time to make a change.

He took out loans, got a job at the only shitty cafe that would take him (christ they had a high employee turnaround, but it was money, and he could take the owners' shit as long as he needed to), and signed up for classes at the community college.

He went for art history and English literature for the most part, because he'd always done well with them, and because he didn't hate them. He figured he'd take one with him to university as a major, he if got in.

A couple of years later, he was transferring into university on a scholarship of all things, one that paid for most of his classes and which he's still sure was meant for someone else.

He was short a few GEs, so he walked into an upper division poli-sci class and made his first real friend.

He was startled by the authenticity with which they spoke to him; it wasn't something he'd encountered very often from the crowd he used to spend time with. But all of a sudden he had friends who not only tolerated him, but welcomed him with open arms and open hearts, who made him one of them without hesitation.

Courfeyrac had a smile that warmed him in a very different way than the nameless, faceless guy who'd fucked him into a mattress all those years back; this felt good and natural, like coming home to a lit fireplace after a cold winter afternoon.

There was Bahorel, who would match him drink for drink before having a good-natured round of sparring with him; there was Jehan, who refused to let a day go by without speaking to every one of his friends at least once; there was Combeferre, who let him borrow as many books from the library as he wanted, even when they had no bearing on the classes Grantaire was taking; there was Feuilly, who understood perfectly Grantaire's enthusiasm for learning outside the classroom because it was how he'd learned everything he knows.

And then there was Enjolras, Enjolras who breathed light into everyone around him, Enjolras who stood like a warrior, Enjolras who said stupid things and had stupid plans that Grantaire would never in his life agree with, but which he goes along with because he knows it's how best he can keep them all--his friends and, to a lesser extent, himself--safe.

Grantaire was lost.

His thumb taps deftly across the screen. He has all of his friends' numbers saved into his phone, and he uses his speed dial when he needs to reach Combeferre or Courfeyrac in an emergency, but he prefers to dial the numbers himself. It's just always felt right.

He hits the numbers one by one, never stumbling over the sevens and nines. He hasn't been in the habit of calling Grantaire nearly as long as some of the others, but he learned these numbers well in that time. The pattern his thumb makes as it crosses the screen is a familiar one, a dance to which he knows every step inside and out.

But now his thumb hovers over the green call button, not coming down for the final keystroke. Instead, he clears the numbers and starts again.

There will be a beep.

Threes and eights blur, but he knows the numbers are right. He doesn't look at the number at the top of his phone, just clears them and starts again.

That's your cue.

Again.

There will be a beep.

Again, again, again.

That's your cue.

His thumb slips on the call button and he drops his phone. There's a recording at the end of that line, but it's not the one he wants, not the one he needs.

The number you have dialed is not in service.

She lives in a small apartment near a few other small apartments. It's a mostly quiet neighborhood--nice houses, nice people. A good place to raise a family, she'd thought. But it isn't always quiet, and those times it used to get loud tended to fall between three in the morning and seven. She couldn't count the number of times she--and everyone else in the neighborhood--got their wake-up call from a certain blonde young man proclaiming his love to the street.

They'd all grumbled, but no one denied that it was sweet.

She used to watch them. Everyone did--it was hard not to. Enjolras was never quiet about anything, much less his emotions. They all knew the first time one of his petitions got the number of signatures he needed, knew when he aced the final he'd been worried about, knew when the election results in America came in because Enjolras wouldn't stop yelling about it.

And there wasn't a single one of them who would forget the first night Grantaire joined him in shouting on the sidewalk in the middle of the night. Five in the morning, with the first rays of the sun just barely breaking through the night, and Grantaire stood under the streetlight with his hands cupped around his mouth before he yelled.

"YOUR NEIGHBOR IS THE HOTTEST PIECE OF ASS I'VE EVER TAPPED."

She'd heard it while half-awake, and she sat up laughing. She went to the window, as she always did, and got there just in time to see Enjolras leaping across the sidewalk to tackle Grantaire as he took a deep breath to shout again.

From across the street, another voice called "We know you love him, but please go to bed," and then she wasn't the only one laughing.

She loved watching them. There were times she was jealous; she didn't think there was anyone who wasn't jealous of them on occasion. Everything about Enjolras and Grantaire radiated love. It was in the way they held hands when they left the apartment (on days Grantaire didn't insist on keeping his hand in Enjolras' back pocket; she could see him blushing from her window, and it always made her laugh). It was in the way there was never a time one of them wasn't watching the other's face as they talked. It was certainly in their late-night proclamations.

So yes, she was jealous at times. But she has a husband who loves her and whom she loves, so most of the time she was just happy for them. What is there in this world better to witness than love?

Some nights now she sits up at four in the morning with her heart pounding for no reason, nothing but the silence jolting her from sleep. On those nights, she looks out the window at the dark and empty street, remembering nights it wasn't empty, nights when young voices carried through walls to wake sleeping neighbors, nights when she would have sworn the streetlamp wasn't the only light on the sidewalk.

Some nights she sits with the silence bearing down on her and tears rolling down her cheeks until her husband feels her shaking and sits up, wrapping an arm around her shoulder as she presses the heels of he hands to her eyes.

"It's just," she stammers, every one of these nights, "they were so in love. Don't people always say that's the most important thing?"

He can never answer. The only thing they have is the space where voices no longer shout.

Over everything—the sound of vaccine-filled syringes being fired and frantic orders being shouted, above his pulse pounding in his own ears—he can hear Bahorel’s laugh. It’s like a growl, a tiger’s roar, as uncontrollable as the man himself.

And then there is Montparnasse, darting between soldiers like a shadow, smiling as he leaves corpses in his wake. His is not a power he wanted to get much use out of, initially, but when Enjolras fell and Grantaire stepped forward, Montparnasse was there at his side before he could even ask. He uses it effortlessly for something so new.

It’s like a lover’s touch, a gentle caress that leaves the target gasping for breath. They don’t even realize something is wrong until the life is draining from their body and Montparnasse is stepping over their withered shell. Sometimes Grantaire thinks he catches Montparnasse pressing gentle kisses to their foreheads before they fall, and he wonders who he would have been without this curse, this touch of death he cannot control.

The three of them are the Registrar's self-fulfilled prophecy, monsters made corporeal that terrorize the people--but not the people, never the people, they never touch anyone outside the Administration. Grantaire, Bahorel, and Montparnasse are firestarters. Though they don't have the light Enjolras once gave, together they can replicate his heat. But where Enjolras sought to inspire, to encourage, these three seek only to burn.

The Registrar set a curfew, a time after which any mutant caught on the streets is arrested and sent through the system. Grantaire and his men make it a point to be out every night they can. They fight until dawn, when the few men who avoid Montparnasse's touch, Bahorel's bone-shattering strikes, and Grantaire's guardians of ink are called into retreat.

Grantaire never had any illusions about how little they accomplish in these fights. But he needs to do something, and Bahorel and Montparnasse are happy to help him cause chaos.

When it starts to go wrong, none of them are surprised. In fact, they expected it to happen much sooner.

Grantaire has no idea how many men the Registrar has at its disposal. He has no idea how many men he has been responsible for killing or hospitalizing. Combeferre, he thinks, might have those numbers, but he hasn't seen Combeferre since the night he held Enjolras' body--cold, dark, dead--in his arms.

Still, he knows they've made quite a dent in that number.

So when Grantaire, Bahorel, and Montparnasse step out of the shadows to meet at least three times the troops they normally face, that surprises them.

The first volley of vaccine-filled syringes hits a wall of ink. There are no gaps for strays to fly through; Grantaire has learned from his mistakes. The wall moves with them as the mutants run forward, reforming into the familiar pantheon only when Montparnasse is close enough to lay his hands on his first targets with a grin. Bahorel sends men flying as Zeus and Athena sweep through the crowd, pushing soldiers aside.

These gods fight for Grantaire, but they do not grant him their infallibility. When he hears Montparnasse shout, a shiver runs down his spine.

He knows what the end sounds like, and this is how it starts.

He sends Ares to Montparnasse, but he knows it is too late. Grantaire can see Montparnasse where he kneels, body weakened by the vaccine that courses through his veins; he can see Montparnasse trembling as they jam another needle into his neck, and Grantaire knows they don't need it, knows they only want to hurt him. He can see Montparnasse fall to the ground before the soldiers close in and block his view, but he is nowhere near close enough to hear the message Montparnasse has for him before he loses consciousness.

It falls instead to Hermes to bring the message to Grantaire. The figure made of ink speaks with Montparnasse's voice, but the sound is small, distant for how close Hermes stands. Grantaire winces; these are Montparnasse's last words to him, and he couldn't even hear them spoken.

"I think it's time for you to leave."

As soon as the needles prick his flesh, Montparnasse resigns himself to death. He knows it better than anyone else at this point. Death, he thinks, must be his most trusted companion. So he doesn’t fight back when they beat him, revenge for his kills now that his skin isn't fatal. His wrists are manacled behind his back and his powers are gone, so what can he do? But he keeps his eyes open, watches for his chance, and takes it when it comes. They think they’ve made a terrible mistake when he’s on his feet as fast as lightning, and he’s chest-to-chest with one of his guards and looking him dead in the eye like he’s got all the control—because even shackled Montparnasse never relinquishes that—and they think for a moment that they’re all going to die.

But he only steals a kiss—a proper one, like he hasn’t had since he was a teenager who didn’t know he could kill with a touch—and then they’re pulling him back with a strike to the head. They spit on him and call him a freak and a fag and an abomination, and he’s laughing all the way to the gallows.

They broadcast the execution because they’re so afraid of the mutants now that they don’t think for a second what this tells the world about them, and this boy with a beautiful face that’s bloodied and bruised just smiles as they put the gun to his head.

Two weeks later it's Bahorel on his knees before the firing squad, and Grantaire stands before his television, safe at home with his fists clenched and ink mixing with tears as they roll down his cheeks. There are chains around Bahorel's calves and Grantaire knows it's because that's the only way they could have made him kneel, knows that if he still had his mutation he'd have torn the metal apart and fought his way back to freedom.

But they'd loaded him with vaccine and Grantaire could only watch because when Bahorel realized they'd lost, he'd picked Grantaire up and thrown him, and by the time he looked up from the ink that cushioned his fall, Bahorel was surrounded, collared, and cured.

And now through the grainy lines of his cheap TV Grantaire can see Bahorel's smile--and he's powerless and this is the end and they all know it but still he smiles like he's just biding his time--he laughs when they raise the gun, laughs as they place it against his temple, winks at the cameras and laughs.

They pull the trigger and the laugh, cut off, echoes around the room.

And then Grantaire is standing alone in front of a table that used to hold his television, which now lies on the floor, the shattered fragments of its screen stained with ink.

Three martyrs for the cause.

One more, he thinks, no more and no less.

There's a backpack full of explosives under the counter, with notes on use scribbled in Montparnasse's hand. There's a map of the Complex on the table, stolen from Combeferre's rooms by a tendril of ink that moved silent in the night.

There's Enjolras' face gazing at him every time he closes his eyes, and even the weak memory looks at Grantaire with disappointment.

He opens his eyes to find a statue of ink has formed before him, a cheap imitation of Apollo looking at him--past him, through him--crestfallen.

Grantaire turns and hears the statue collapse into a puddle, splashing the walls as it falls apart.

I wouldn't be doing this if you were here, Grantaire thinks as he shoulders the bag. It's heavy with ruined plans and weak hopes and last words.

But this is all I can do now.