#writing technically

Grantaire had made a habit of it now, though even he wouldn’t say why, to slouch into the meetings each week and to just sit in a darkened corner of the room, seemingly asleep but for the occasional slurred snort of derision and the occasional twitching of his fingertips as he held his wine bottle. He knew that coming to the meetings was probably the worst decision that he had ever made, and each week he managed to drown his intentions to attend at the bottom of his bottle, to bring back that comforting numbness that had always come from before. And yet, without fail, each week his feet would trip him through the door of the room, and each week his fingers would feel the cold glass of another drink, and each week he would watch from his shadowed corner.

He was far too deep into his drunken reverie to be able to see individual faces, and yet there was always flashes of colours in his mind the next morning- a fist the colour of sun-warmed bronze in the paling light, a few stray golden hairs, fine enough to be harp strings, floating through the air, eyes of flashing silver that could not be said to simply look about the room, for they gleamed like the rivers, sunk cold as the walls, cut deep as the blade, and passed over in gentleness as a cool summer breeze. There was jabbing fire, intruding and sparking, seeming to snap back only to unleash itself upon the room once more as a torrent of words, shifting with every wind that blew through the thoughts in the room, and enveloping those whom it touched in its righteous flames. Those flames, those eyes, were why Grantaire was there, loath as he would be to admit it, and he seemed incapable of pulling away from that room, that column of fire and bronze and gold and silver-flashing eyes. Why? For the simplest reason in existence, and yet for the most impenetrable: because he had spent so much time lighted in the flames of fury that to return to normality, dull normality, grey and black and numb mortality, would be too painful to endure.

Grantaire was such a creature that since he had first entered that room, seen the silver-flashing eyes, the tensed arm of bronze, had heard the phosphorous cries of injustice that emanated from that central creature, he had abdicated all the world’s petty little joys so that he may stand next to this man and see him burn. The man himself was utterly unaware of this, as he had but one thought in his mind; justice, and had but one love in his heart; the right. He did not see Grantaire enter, only felt the icy block in the fires that his words were able to instil, the pond in the centre of a grasslands that will not light, the voice in the crowds that will not cheer. Instead, all that this burning standard of the right, the lawful and the just could feel towards this drunkard, this cynic, this glooming presence, was the upmost disgust.

Grantaire knew this, as did the other creatures who surrounded him, for it is not in the nature of a fire to be discreet, but so long as he could continue to observe, he did not care-he had sacrificed the happiness of society and of friendship for the hurts of the soul that comes from observing a deity, the clenching agony that a pastor may feel as he reconciles with the sins of the earth, the pains that the confessing room may be said to be composed of entirely- the pains of the confrontation of sins in the face of perfect grace. This pain was of the most acute kind when presented to Grantaire, for he was confronted each week with a god that hated him; Phoebus Apollo with his eternally youthful features stretched into a sneer of disgust, the silent vengefulness of Poseidon with a visage that swore to uphold suffering, the roiling fury of Zeus laid plain against him in a hailstorm of insults, and quietly, finally, the madness that flitters behind Dionysus’ eyes which swears to haunting visions of shadows that will encircle his brain as he sleeps. And yet, Grantaire sees so much less than this, and yet so much more; he cannot see the sneer of disgust, for he is tracing the shadows in the planes of the face, he does not see the clenching muscles of fists, for he is watching the shifting golden hairs that coil in the air, he feels the ripping of Zeus’ thunderstorms, and sketches the quicksilver eyes as a lakeside river.