by Amy
Prologue
6th June, 1832.
Enjolras backed with calm, measured steps across the wineshop's upper room, the hand not occupied with clutching his weapon extended behind him in search of the wall, his fierce blue eyes fixed volitionally on the knot of desperate men gathered around the gaping maw in the floor that had once been a stairwell, fighting a losing battle against an assault from below.
There was little to impede him. Most of the furniture had been carried out the day before and put to a purpose its makers probably hadn't intended it for. A barricade. Nevertheless, something stopped him, a wooden rim that his fingers closed around like the hands of Apollo throttling the Python; a billiard table, wobbling with complacent instability on its rickety legs in the midst of the chaos.
With the lithe, graceful alacrity that marked all his movements he slipped behind it and set his shoulder to it to topple it, sending its red and white balls spinning across the floor like the diverging paths of Fate.
"I've never taken to billiards, anyway," the revolutionary leader thought, his gaze momentarily captured by the tiny spheres, rolling haphazardly beyond his control. The choked off death-cry of one of his few remaining allies recalled him to himself and he ducked behind the unlikely shield, leaving only his pale head visible over the overturned billiard table and rested his gun atop it, pointing it roughly towards the writhing mass of bodies gathered around the staircase.
"Fall back!" Like all his orders, the directive was issued in sharp, clipped tones: short and to the point, resonant with authority. What differed this time was that no one leaped to obey him; they were all consumed by their own futile struggles for life. Biting back a curse, Enjolras drew himself upright again and surveyed the scene with a critical eye that dwindled rapidly into bewilderment.
They'd held their stronghold for roughly a day against assaults from the army, from the National and Municipal guards, against police spies and traitors, hunger and weariness. Twenty-four hours, with no better reinforcements or supplies arriving to relieve them than one white haired, philanthropic old gentleman who had refused to shoot to kill and a handful of cartridges a child had died collecting. Those men who had broken their pledges of support to the fledgling republic were dead to honour; those who had honoured their oaths were simply dead. And now it was over.
Throughout the insurrection Enjolras had remained almost supernaturally calm, any inclination he may have had to panic overridden by the necessity of providing leadership for the men who had followed him here, bound together by a common belief in the French Republic.
But now now there was nothing to do. No orders to be issued, no provisions to be taken, no last minute ingenuity that could keep the barricade from being taken for another hour. Instinct-- or was it pride?-- prompted him to fling himself headlong into the melee, a deranged Mars abandoning all semblance of tactics; reason dictated caution.
"Wait. Choose the moment. If I shoot now, I'm as likely to hit friend as foe."
His lieutenants-- his friends-- were all dead. Not one had made it to the shelter of Corinth, the wineshop that constituted their headquarters; one by one they had died and abandoned him. Combeferre had been the last to go.
It had been outside, during that awful, interminable retreat into the wineshop as the soldiers swarmed over the barricade, uniformed ants attacking a rival nest. A boy who gave the impression of being red haired-- though that might have been the blood-- had replaced Enjolras' shattered weapon with his own, holding it out, looped through his lax fingers as he leaned against a wall, bleeding his life away.
As one they had moved, the captain of the barricade and his dearest friend, to assist the wounded boy, until the latter, his eyes falling on the panicked, milling rebels stumbling back under the weight of the onslaught, caught the former's shoulders and pushedhim away.
"Lucien, go. They need you." The rare, affectionate use of his first name combined with the appeal to his sense of duty had shaken the law student turned revolutionary and Combeferre, seeing him hesitate, had forced him away, moving to lift his fallen comrade alone.
Enjolras, occupied with rallying his disorganised followers and shielding their flight with his own body, had not spared another thought for his mild, scholarly friend, until he observed him flung across the man he had attempted to rescue, his face tilted towards the sky. Then there had been no time for grief.
Laigle de Meaux, ill fated to the last, had caught his feet on a scattering of cartridge cases, and had performed an impossible gymnasts' manoeuvre to land on a gendarme's outstretched bayonet. Neither orders nor pleas had persuaded Joly, armed at the last only with the walking stick he carried, more for the affectation of infirmity than for fashion, to leave his fallen friend's side.
Jean Prouvaire the poet, Bahorel the brawler were long dead; killed in the first assault, Orpheus and Hercules, old shipmates, facing death side by side. Even Pontmercy-- vacuous, romantic Marius, who had descended on the barricade at a crucial moment, like a portent of victory, and afterwards faded into obscurity with all hope, had fallen; Enjolras had observed a guardsman dragging him away, captive. Only Courfeyrac and Feuilly were unaccounted for in their captain's tally.
They had been last seen crouched together, sharing what remained of their ammunition, Feuilly's smouldering passion for liberty kindled to courageous sallies of wit by Courfeyrac's infinite zest. But that was hope without hope. Whatever their fate, neither had survived to follow their leader to, albeit somewhat dubious, safety.
Of the political society, the brotherhood Les Amis de l'ABC, only Enjolras remained, watching strangers grapple with strangers, independent of anything he might do or say. Soon, they too were gone.
It was at this moment that he noticed that his 'weapon,' a carbine, was nothing more than a broken stump; what had happened to the rest of it he couldn't have said, even if it would have brought victory. For a moment he stared at it with horrified incomprehension, then he flung it disdainfully away and folded his arms, meeting the eyes of the guardsmen who rose through the floor like vengeful sprites with the only weapon that remained to him. His pride. "He's the leader. He's the one who killed the artilleryman. Well, he's set himself up for us. He's only got to stay there and we can shoot him on the spot."
"Shoot me" snapped Enjolras, fighting to keep his voice steady.
At this there was a pause, a heartbeat while destiny wavered, undecided, looking between the radiant young man boldly facing his executioners and the weary, furious soldiers who stared at him, half entranced by his nobility, half savouring their chance to massacre a scapegoat.
"Take aim!" The balance tipped and the silence was broken; the soldiers hefted their muskets.
"Wait. Would you like your eyes bandaged?"
"No."
"It was really you that killed the artillery sergeant?"
Enjolras blinked. Had he? Someone had. Perhaps it had been him. That had been-- a long time ago. Hours ago, maybe even yesterday. It didn't matter, anyway: if he hadn't killed him, one of his men had and he was responsible. "Yes."
Another pause followed, somewhere between the length of an indrawn breath and an eternity, and then an officer cried, verbatim:
"Take aim!"
"Long live the republic! I'm one of them."
Disbelieving, every man conscious turned at the interruption; Enjolras, the guardsmen, the dying rebels scattered by the stairs.
A plain, awkward young man lurched to his feet.
"Grantaire." Reluctantly Enjolras acknowledged the impossible: the cynic, the drunkard who believed in nothing and dogged the heels of the man he referred to as 'Apollo' for the purpose of amusing himself by mocking him, who had collapsed in a drunken stupor at the beginning of the insurrection, standing and committing himself to the vanquished Cause.
"Long live the republic" Grantaire repeated firmly, and moved to stand beside the captain of the barricade. "Might as well kill two birds with one stone. Unless you mind?"
Mind? Enjolras contemplated this a moment, took in the earnest expression welling out of the cynic's eyes, the deferential inclination of his head, the helpless shaking of his half clenched fingers that betrayed his fear, so well concealed by his set jaw, his controlled voice.
This-- this was something. Not much, perhaps, but a small victory.
Lucien Enjolras shook his head a little, coaxed his companion's bleary brown eyes up to meet his blue ones, took the hand in his own, stilling its trembling with a gentle pressure, and smiled. Both men's lips trembled on the verge of speech, one final, heartfelt cry: vive la republique.
It never came. A stentorian rattle issued from the other side of the room and Enjolras was flung back against the wall. Something heavy fell across his feet and his hand lost Grantaire's. There was-- a frozen sensation to his limbs and torso, a constricted feeling at his throat as breath refused to come, a flash of colour behind eyes he hadn't realised he'd closed.
And then...
Chapter One
7th June, 1832.
Paris bustled.
A goddess' sleep is seldom troubled by the tribulations of her disciples: Athens donned no mourning garb for Pericles, Rome heaved no sigh for Caesar, London scarcely bothered to wipe the spilled blood of Charles I from her slippers; and Paris has long grown accustomed to the flash and fire and song of insurrection.
So it was that though through two days previously her citizens had variously cowered in their abodes, wreaked havoc in the streets or gone about their business with one apprehensive ear attuned to the rebellious tolling of a bell that heralded the re-emergence of the alternately lauded and reviled republicans, on this peaceful morning she drew the contented breath of the well rested, stretched languorously and performed her toilette, draping herself in a gown of summer sunshine.
The golden, intangible fabric slid easily over her frame, lighting the faces of shopkeepers regarding their broken windows and detached doors with resigned despair, of small regiments of soldiers pursuing the scant handful of remaining fugitive rebels through the streets, of their already captured brethren, glaring or weeping at those who held their chains as their natures dictated, of the ashen faces of doctors bending over the still more pallid visages of the wounded and finally crept over a structure insurmountable to those not armed with muskets or the strength of a god and cascaded into the Rue de la Chanvrerie.
It lit faces there, too. Youthful, noble faces, aged, roughened faces; some merry, some frightened, some determined, some blank. All fixed, bloodless and cold.
All dead.
These were the defenders of the barricade; schoolboys, gamins, aristocrat and proletariat banded together to liberate their country by piling the furniture from a neighbouring wineshop in the street and defending it against oppression with their bodies, their blood and their futures.
Still, life trudged on around these corpse-monuments to a daydream that had been conceived on the wing of scholarly rhetoric, soared aloft on the fury of musket fire and slipped into silence as quickly as the stilling of a dying man's heart.
Amidst the carnage soldiers moved, and with them workmen recruited from the streets to haul the bodies of the rebels to the morgue for identification. Hands that had unloaded apple crates a week ago now hefted bloodied young men, capricious souls who had born muskets in 1830 against Charles X- and who might well take up arms again when next the populace revolted- flung crude jests at the gallant souls whose husks they bore in their arms.
"Look at this poor devil! I'd say they plucked him clean and used his head to blind the fellows coming at 'em over the barricade. Not a hair on him!"
"Now why'd this one want to put the king off his throne? Looks like he might be the crown prince!"
"Lord! This one's had his arm taken right off."
"Eh? Think I've found it, then."
"No, Louis, this one's missing his left arm. That's a right'un. Ignorant bastard."
"You can bloody well find it yourself, then, for all I care. Can't have some old dame tripping over it next week and mistaking it for her lapdog."
"Wouldn't 'appen. Never saw one of those dogs that didn't weigh twice as much as its owner, and there's no meat on these political brats. All skin and bone from sitting about thinking their high thoughts all day."
This macabre jocularity resounded through the street, warding off the breath of Thanatos that was exhaled from every corpse's frozen lips to taint the flesh of those who handled them, but nothing as yet disturbed the battered buildings which lined the Rue de le Chanvrerie, some of which had harboured dying rebels in their last extremity, in their doorways, on their window ledges, in their interiors turned fortresses. These cloaked their dead in a respectful shroud of silence, broken only by the occasional unearthly drip of blood.
It was this haunted quiet that was abruptly shattered by a choked, gurgling wail.
To a man the workmen paused, the soldiers reached for their weapons.
Superstition, scoffed at in this modern era even by soldiers, notorious for embracing its doctrines, nevertheless regains its power in the presence of the dead. He who is apathetic to a corpse, who fails to quiver at the sight of blood and gore is no less susceptible to a fear of those who have returned, against all custom, from the undiscovered country.
Efficiency dictated that this cry must be investigated, and soon. Fear, most democratically, elected to procrastinate. With gruff bravado one man announced that vampires only emerged at night. Another declared that he didn't at all believe in ghosts. Still a third proclaimed his intention to shoot anything that moved, without mercy. No one approached the building, the wineshop known to have been the insurgents' headquarters.
Lots were drawn and redrawn. Orders were issued and ignored. Bodies were heaved away and a few preliminary attempts were made to dismantle the barricades themselves, returning the street to some semblance of order.
It was midday before the wineshop was approached, and then by a team of six men, not one of whom would be separated from the others.
Inside proved to be worthy of the most grisly gothic house of horrors. Blood drenched the floor and walls, and not a single corpse, be it guardsman or revolutionary, retained all its limbs. Broken glass crackled menacingly underfoot and dead eyes still directed primal expressions of terror at the faces of those who carried them out into the sunshine.
Mid afternoon had rotated the looming shadows to peer over the labourers' shoulders before ladders were obtained to allow access to the tavern's upper floor, since the stairs had been hacked down and now lay in whimpering splinters on the floor. During the interim the workers studiously avoided lifting their eyes to that battered hole in the ceiling that had once supported a perfectly civilised flight of stairs, and now hosted a cluster of the dead, their pale hands hanging down; so many harpies, banshees and fetches straining to catch a living man and haul him to Hades after them.
In juxtaposition to the floor below it, the upper room was oddly bare. Stripped of all furniture but a much abused billiard table and a scattering of stools, it resembled a tavern as the tombs of Egyptian pharaohs resembled the halls they had inhabited in life; a still and ghastly parody.
Most of the dead had been gathered around the stairwell, piled together in a sort of rough slaughterhouse last stand, leaving the majority of the room untouched. The billiard table had been overturned, its balls and cues appropriated as weapons, broken glass and the spilled brandy the insurgents had flung upon their defenders was as prolific as everywhere else, and that was all.
All but for one corner of the room, obscured from the vision of those entering the room by the fallen billiard table, which held an odd scene.
A blond youth, still on his feet, as if to belie the stiffness of rigor mortis that proclaimed him dead, stood propped against the wall; a sort of latter day Leonidas, crucified by bullets. At his feet there sat another, dark, coarse and haggard, his body wet with his own blood, his hair and face drenched with that of the man who loomed above him. One hand was pressed absently against his shoulder, in a futile attempt to stop the flow of blood that welled between his fingers, the other was suspended above his head, its fingers linked through that of his companion.
Brown eyes, open, stared fixedly, observing no more than any other corpse oddly propped in a lifelike position, but now and then his chest heaved treacherously in breaths that indicated life.
This, then, was the man who had screamed.
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