Even in Arkadia, there am I

anaeolist: Enjolras cares not for your lonely soul

Wed, 22 May 2013 01:35:20 -0400

anaeolist:

Enjolras cares not for your lonely soul

omfg my dove are you kidding all of us we need this like we need air

Wed, 22 May 2013 01:33:28 -0400

omfg my dove are you kidding all of us we need this like we need air

stepone said: I could read this for /days/, it’s so touching and lovely and right up my alley,...

Tue, 21 May 2013 23:46:02 -0400

stepone said: I could read this for /days/, it’s so touching and lovely and right up my alley, wow.

beeyes said: I can’t wait to read the rest of this, even though it will doubtless break my heart into very many pieces.

let’s do this, loves.

eXr in the post-barricades, surviving.

Enjolras paces in the close confines of their cage. He ruins anything he can grasp. He beats his hands bloody on the bars and bolts. Voices from distant cells, voices perhaps from elsewhere, all manner of voices seek to console him but he is past consolation. He goes to his knees and rocks back and forth until his fury is spent, then loses himself to sorrow.

He counts one day and eleven indeterminate hours before Grantaire is returned to him. He marks the hours on the wall. This time, Grantaire is not tossed down. The door opens to splintery light, and he’s allowed to descend shakily on a rope ladder.

Enjolras rushes to his feet to help, but Grantaire catches his eye and shakes his head. He steps free of the rope and it coils up quickly. The door shuts and locks and they are left in darkness.

“Grantaire —” Enjolras begins, but is again shook off. Grantaire sinks down in his corner of the cell, and rests his head on tucked-up knees, and whispers that he would beg Enjolras to leave him be.

Only Enjolras, having gotten him back again, cannot. Instead he settles a little ways off from Grantaire, close enough to see that he does not appear beaten or bleeding anew. Only his hair is much messier, and there are carved shadows under his eyes.

“Tell me how I can be of aid,” Enjolras implores. He wants to edge closer badly. He wants to pull Grantaire into his arms and ask him what was done. He dreads the answer.

“You can do nothing.” Grantaire’s voice is hesitant, afraid. “Do not look on me. I will always be beneath you.”

So Enjolras moves for him instead of away, though Grantaire seals himself to the wall. Enjolras slips a careful arm around Grantaire’s slumped shoulders. The other hand takes his temperature and finds it cool.

“I like to look on you,” whispers Enjolras.

Grantaire turns wide dazed eyes on him. “Enjolras?”

“I will not let you go again,” Enjolras promises. He hesitates, his arm tightening. “Did they hurt you?”

“Not as such.” Grantaire looks at the wall. “They used me for other amusements. Eventually they grew unamused.” He stays facing away. “I did not know if I would be allowed back. I wondered what you would think of me if I were.”

“I think you the bravest man I know,” says Enjolras. “The rest is just a nightmare that you had.”

To prove it he lies down on the packed earth and draws Grantaire beside him, and shifts Grantaire’s arm into place over him, where it has often lain, like a blanket. They curl up together against the dark, as they are used to doing.

After a long while Grantaire’s breath evens into a mimicry of rest. After a while Enjolras relaxes his muscles, but after that he sleeps and breathes and eats with an eye trained on the trapdoor.

They are close to regaining their rhythm when the soldiers come the third time. They goad each other into exercise and tell tall tales and sleep close and help each other through fraught dreamscapes in the quiet hours. They are practically at ease again when they hear the grating slide of the metal lock.

The sound Grantaire makes is unabashedly terrified, and Enjolras aches, all too aware of his prior failures to protect Grantaire and prevent his removal.

Grantaire flattens himself in the furthest corner, and Enjolras plows into the blinding light, seeking at least a delay, hoping for another chance to split a soldier’s cheek, but there is no bristle of guns to face off against. Instead he squints through the light to glimpse the wavering features of the mustachioed guardsman who took him prisoner in another life.

“If it isn’t the gentleman of the hour,” sneers the guardsman. This time, the hands reach in for Enjolras, and Grantaire’s protesting cry of despair rings out long past the slam of the wooden door closing, the iron bolt grating.

For a moment he is infused with the enthusiasm of taking Grantaire’s place. Then there is the sharp crack of knuckles against Enjolras’s cheek. The national guardsman is speaking. “You will tell of your fair and kind-hearted treatment here. Is that understood?”

Enjolras thinks of Grantaire flattened to the wall and wants to lash out at the man with all the fiber that he is made of. But he will solve no problems with his fists, he knows, will only cause new ones. It is a lesson he has learned that once he did not know. He stays silent. Hateful, but silent. He glares straight ahead. He nods.

What proceeds is a farce. He is lead into a barracks room and forcibly bathed and dressed in clean neutral clothes. They cart away the last rags of the last day he shared with his friends. A razor is forced over his cheeks and a comb through his hair, and a strong perfume splashed over him to mask the stench of the cage he and Grantaire have been kept in. Enjolras looks down at his cuffs and sees that while the sleeves are too long, he has ivory fastenings.

He is taken into a bland room, a bureaucratic office, with a desk and many chairs, thick ledgers and spare decorations on the walls. Someone presses a glass of wine into his hand and Enjolras stares at it, dangling on the end of his thin pale wrist. The wine smells alien and unfamiliar as the scent of his own clean hair. He holds it blinking against the painfully bright gaslight. His first instinct is the bizarre notion that he must find a way to save it for Grantaire.

“Drink,” snaps the guardsman, and Enjolras swallows down a burning sip on reflex. Color returns to his cheek as the door opens and his father steps in.

dude, it is all good. if i could write forever for you guys, i would be cool beans. in lieu of...

Tue, 21 May 2013 22:21:00 -0400

dude, it is all good. if i could write forever for you guys, i would be cool beans.

in lieu of this, have some enjolras/grantaire surviving the barricades, because.

They are thrown into a dark hole. To call it a prison would be too kind.

Some days a metal grate bangs open and moldy crusts of bread and tins of foul water are shoved through. That is the only time that they see light. Most days the grate does not open.

The sounds from the other cells around them are worse. Late at night there are inarticulate screams from men being tortured and men who dream tortured dreams. They account it fortunate that they have been left alone in the dark.

Enjolras spends the first few days weeping without shame, until he is drained of all tears. His heart is broken into seven pieces and will never be whole. Yet the failure of the cause, the total failure of the people to rise, wounds almost as much as the loss of all whom he ever loved.

Enjolras had loved the idea of the Republic first and best, had always been devoted to Patria, but Patria had eluded him, scorned him, turned her face away and cast him off.

He has lost everything. He is a ruined man. The tears rise fast and choking and ugly at first, but later they are silent, and trickling, until at last he accepts the square of shockingly pristine pocket handkerchief that Grantaire passes over.

Grantaire has sat silent throughout, on his side of their squat cage, bracketed to the rough stone wall, listening to Enjolras’s grief.

Grantaire says nothing until the third day, when he offers the handkerchief. Denied of alcohol, his hand shakes badly.

“Do you wish to speak of it?” Grantaire asks. His once-fine tenor is a croak. It is laden with unshed tears.

Enjolras shakes his head. He is grateful not to be alone, if he must be kept alive – if this is living – but Grantaire is an uneven comfort, a friend yet never a close one, a cynical cause of frustration Enjolras had tolerated for his good humor.

Grantaire’s bravery at the end was certainly a revelation, and spoke very well, and made Enjolras look at him with fresh eyes when he believed they stood up to face death together. He remembers smiling at Grantaire, and pressing his warm grasping hand, and how Grantaire’s pulse had leapt beneath the skin.

But the guardsmen reversed the order, ordering them imprisoned at the last moment, throwing them into a pit and barring them in; and though Enjolras is glad to have someone near, glad that Grantaire is not dead, he cannot look at him without a hot, unfair build of resentment that Grantaire should draw breath, while such fine men as the world had ever seen fit to shape, Combeferres and Courfeyracs and Feiullys, lie sleeping in forgotten graves.

One twilight evening Enjolras dreams that Combeferre reproaches him for his presumption. Blood streaks scarlet down his face, once so young and so fair.

Combeferre points, and Enjolras looks down at his own hands, and sees that they are horribly bloodied.

“That is mine,” says Combeferre. That is the first night that Enjolras wakes up screaming.

At his side at once, Grantaire does not tell him it is only a dream.

Grantaire says, “It is over now,” and he repeats that until Enjolras breathes easily again. They lie awake together until it is morning, or evening, and the breadcrusts fall through the slot.

The dam crumbles without warning another day. The fleeting thought of Courfeyrac, laughing with mischief, flashes into his mind, and Enjolras starts laughing in sympathy.

Then Grantaire is at his side once more, surely certain that Enjolras has gone mad, but Enjolras turns to him and puts his hand on Grantaire’s wrist, and relates Courfeyrac’s last joke, and then Grantaire laughs too, and they laugh and laugh in the dark.

After that they speak of their friends at such speed their words tumble and run together.

They are full of anecdotes and memories. They are the only people left alive in the world who understand. They share their friends’ stories out between them until their voices crack. They make each other promise not to forget. They know that they never will.

They cannot account for the passage of time, but they have grown weak from the scarce diet, the oily water, the grim, dank cell, with a few square feet to pace and stretch in. Many days have passed. They cease to have shame about the bodily functions that must pass; it is hard enough to coexist with another in near starvation and darkness.

To ease the harsh hours, Grantaire suggests they play at games. Some they draw with a stick on the wall; others they make up between them, word-games and logic-puzzles and questions from the histories of science and mathematics.

When they run out of these, they take turns reciting what poetry and prose they have committed to memory, and find that between them their library catalog is extensive.

They settle into it. They’re able to start rationing and saving bread, so that no day is too hungry. When they wake, they take turns exercising as vigorously as the small space will allow. Then they eat and drink a little, and discourse on politics. After their afternoon meal and more exercise it is time for poetry. Enjolras is well-read but Grantaire is the natural performer. Such recitations can stretch many hours, and other prisoners have taken to listening; these days they hear a clamor on metal bars when they go too long without providing lyrics.

When Enjolras closes his eyes Combeferre’s sorrowful, vengeful face is there to face him. It is worse than being awake and captured like an animal.

“But Combeferre never would,” muses Grantaire, on a night when he offers his accustomed comfort, after Enjolras moans and twitches, running in his dreams. Enjolras tells him a little of what he sees before he can stop himself. “He would be the last to blame you. You see only a cruel shadow of your own devising.”

Enjolras discovers that he makes less noise asleep with Grantaire’s arm flung securely across his chest. Once discovered neither speak of it. That is how they sleep.

They come for Grantaire in the middle of a poem. He falters as the trapdoor jerks open and far too much light spills in. They both blink away from it, as though physically struck.

Cold guns are pointed. Men bark orders, leaning in to haul Grantaire out. There is much talk of shooting if he does not comply.

Grantaire looks once at Enjolras as he moves into their hands, and they tug him up, kicking, toward the light.

Enjolras cries out, lunges after too late. Guns feather the way to Grantaire, and he cannot grab at his feet as they vanish without dying, though part of him wants to try, and thinks that it might be worth it.

Instead they take Grantaire. They kick the heavy door shut and leave Enjolras alone in the dark.

He passes a fitful night first pacing, then tossing on the ground. Surely they must return Grantaire soon. Any questioning, any – he lets himself face it – any torture, even, cannot not last very long. Men, both the tortured and their torturers, have limits. They will ask what they would of Grantaire and return him. It will not be very much longer.

But an agonizing day or more crawls by without Grantaire. Left to his own devices in the lonely cell, Enjolras comes to understand how much the companionship had meant. He wakes frightened and cold, with sluggish, leaden limbs.

He lurks by the food slot, desperate for water and unable to reminisce about the ways they used to slake their thirst at Cafe Musain. Grantaire used to make a toast of their tainted tin, tell Enjolras to pretend it was a fine red from Bordeaux going down, but Grantaire is gone.

The silence stretches on into innumerable hours. At what must be evening many prisoners start to rattle their bars with tins and sticks, hungry for bawdy poetry and stories of great gods and beautiful youths from mythology, only Grantaire is gone. Enjolras, curled up in the closest corner to the trapdoor clutching the square of Grantaire’s pocket kerchief, feels only choking grief in his throat and has no words with which to comfort anyone. All of these nights it had been Grantaire helping to ease the hours.

Enjolras tries to pass another night alone. This time when he closes his eyes, Combeferre has no blood on him. He smiles at Enjolras. “You are so strong,” says Combeferre. “Remember how strong you are.”

The trapdoor is opening. They shout that Enjolras has two seconds before they throw him down.

Enjolras, shaking off sleep, scrambles into the light. A blunt heavy weight hits him and he falls, doubly weighted. His body screams in protest from the ground and his mouth opens but the door is already swinging shut.

Grantaire is breathing in his arms.

He is breathing, and his eyes struggle to open, but it looks as though it hurts to breathe. Red and purple bruising spreads meanly across his face and underneath his collar, which is the starched brown of dried blood. Enjolras’s eyes have adjusted to the dark: he can see the hurt against pale skin.

The same maroon color is under Grantaire’s nose; one eye has been made more blue than the other, and black too, beaten and swollen. Marks and bruises lace all the rest of him that Enjolras can see. But Grantaire is here, is back, is still breathing.

Enjolras pushes Grantaire’s hair away from his eyes, and tips the half-inch of water from the tin over cracked lips. Grantaire splutters but drinks, and Enjolras knows then that he will live. The sight of Grantaire drinking anchors him back in their shared reality.

Enjolras props Grantaire in his arms, starting to check for broken bones. Grantaire groans when he prods, but not with the desperation of a dislocation. Even so, they have cut him in many places, cruelly, and he hisses too often at the touch.

Enjolras tries to show that he is glad Grantaire is so responsive and has avoided a debilitating injury. Inside he is fuming and full of anguish that Grantaire has been made to suffer so badly, and toward what end? What news could they have had from Grantaire, never a devoted revolutionary, who frequented Les Amis because his friends were there?

What agonies had Grantaire suffered when he could not tell them the intelligence they sought? Why had they not taken Enjolras, tortured Enjolras, who had carried the torch, who had attempted to set Paris ablaze from the inside out? They knew Enjolras was the leader, but they dragged Grantaire away instead, and threw him back in bloodied, for Enjolras’s crimes. Why?

“They believe that we are lovers.” Grantaire speaks in a whisper, speaking voice long since broken. “That is why we are alive. The army officer who – apprehended – us recognized your face from youth and knew you to be of noble birth. They interpreted my actions in such a way, and preserved us both, to fetch a high price from your father, for his complicity, and their silence.”

Enjolras flinches in amazement. Grantaire drinks more water, the overrun dribbling down his chin. Enjolras soaks it up with the square of pocket linen.

Grantaire explains, “I hope you will not mind if I furthered the fiction. I did not protest it. It became apparent that our seeming deviation was the reason that we live at all. The head army officer is a…clever man, in his way. He intends to sell you back at cost.”

Enjolras blinks. “I do not follow.”

“I expect that you do not.” Grantaire lets out a weary breath. “It will go like this, from what I was made to understand. They will contact your family, and say that you were found amidst the company of dangerous revolutionaries.” Enjolras feels his spine straighten but Grantaire talks on. “They will say that you had no part in the treason, that instead you are guilty of a lesser crime than civil agitation, namely, criminal pleasure, your reason for being on the premises ” Grantaire’s chin juts. “And that is me. They imagine a tempestuous affair against God. I could but laugh along with them.” He cannot laugh now. His ribs have been badly impacted, perhaps broken. Enjolras shakes his head, but stays crouching with his arms around Grantaire.

“They will release us to my father?” It is too much to hope for in their forgotten hole in the ground, their unique purgatory.

“Perhaps.” Grantaire swallows thickly. “Is it truly you, Enjolras? I thought I saw you yesterday, but it was not you. Dreams are often cruel.”

“They can be.” Enjolras feels Grantaire’s forehead with the back of his hand and feels him burning with fever. “Rest easy. I have you now.”

“Rest easy!” laughs Grantaire, like Enjolras has made a witty jest. “As though you or I ever should again.”

Enjolras eases Grantaire down upon the mound of cloth and earth they’d made for a pillow, moving to fetch the reserve water. “True,” he allows. “Let me have this watch, at least.”

Grantaire’s nod then is minute, and he relaxes, and seems nearly asleep. Enjolras bathes his wounds and binds them best he can, which is poorly. He covers Grantaire with the tattered remains of his red coat and watches him sleep. The mottled colors of pain on Grantaire’s face are terrible but to have him here again is the most profound sense of relief Enjolras has ever felt. Even the reprieve from death, unearned, had not felt like this.

He maintains watch a very long time. When the slot bangs mercifully open, Enjolras is there to receive their crusts of bread. He begs openly for more water, and behind the wall some kind soul provides it.

An extra tin, crisp and cleaner than usual is passed through. Then the grate slams closed. Someone on the other side shows mercy, and holding the precious liquid that will help to preserve Grantaire, Enjolras blesses his brothers and sisters in humanity who may be counted on in the darkest hours.

In the days after that he nurses Grantaire back to a fitful health. As soon as he is strong again, and walking a little, they take him.

This time Enjolras fights. A guardsmen loses his gun and falls shouting into their hole. Another gets the wooden butt of his weapon exploding wine-red across his cheek. The third narrowly misses Enjolras’s grab and knocks him backward with an impatient kick to the head. After that Enjolras still struggles up to fight, but they still take Grantaire.

This time Enjolras is angry. He is so angry. He has only just retrieved Grantaire from a fever-dream of fear, saw his bruises start to fade and wounds close, grown used to the sound of Grantaire cautiously asleep in his arms, and they dared. They dared.

Enjolras paces in the close confines of their cage. He ruins anything he can grasp. He beats his hands bloody on the bars and bolts. Voices from distant cells, voices perhaps from elsewhere, all manner of voices seek to console him but he is past consolation. He goes to his knees and rocks back and forth until his fury is spent, then loses himself to sorrow.

They dared. In spite of him, they still dared.

Photo

Tue, 21 May 2013 17:30:00 -0400

Photo

Tue, 21 May 2013 16:52:41 -0400

yourfriendlyneighborhoodsatan: I really want there to be like a proper bad guy movie. Like where...

Mon, 20 May 2013 17:30:26 -0400

yourfriendlyneighborhoodsatan:

I really want there to be like a proper bad guy movie. Like where the bad guy wins but not like megamind where he turns all soft but one where the hero dies or something and the bad guy actually takes over the world and enslaves the human race or whatever their plan is and nothing else

leviwarren: lalondes: hewkfuehwkgfuhwefhqkufh

Mon, 20 May 2013 00:36:14 -0400

leviwarren:

lalondes:

hewkfuehwkgfuhwefhqkufh

thegrlnxtdoorandhergingerfriend: My AP euro teacher wouldn’t...

Mon, 20 May 2013 00:18:21 -0400

thegrlnxtdoorandhergingerfriend:

My AP euro teacher wouldn’t let our class watch Les Mis so we barricaded the door and screamed “VIVE LA REVOLUCIÓN” when he tried to get in.

tennantarse: Into the Darkness: 2013//The Wrath of Khan: 1982

Mon, 20 May 2013 00:13:19 -0400

tennantarse:

Into the Darkness: 2013//The Wrath of Khan: 1982

Photo

Sun, 19 May 2013 17:30:41 -0400

He repeated: ‘Long live the Republic!” crossed the room with a...

Sun, 19 May 2013 15:28:51 -0400

He repeated: ‘Long live the Republic!” crossed the room with a firm stride and placed himself in front of the guns beside Enjolras.

perplexingly: In which Grantaire gets inspired by The...

Sat, 18 May 2013 17:30:32 -0400

perplexingly:

In which Grantaire gets inspired by The Canterbury Tales

Mark Ruffalo on the set of Can A Song Save Your Life? (July 27,...

Fri, 17 May 2013 17:30:17 -0400

Mark Ruffalo on the set of Can A Song Save Your Life? (July 27, 2012)

readmeyourwrites: me packing for a trip

Fri, 17 May 2013 12:33:52 -0400

readmeyourwrites:

me packing for a trip

evil forces have been conspiring to keep me from my tumblr beloveds but i promise to be back soon...

Fri, 17 May 2013 12:25:47 -0400

evil forces have been conspiring to keep me from my tumblr beloveds but i promise to be back soon and i’ll bring some sort of porn

Photo

Thu, 16 May 2013 17:30:34 -0400

zstephanie: Captain America & The Winter Soldier

Wed, 15 May 2013 17:30:24 -0400

zstephanie:

Captain America & The Winter Soldier

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Tue, 14 May 2013 17:30:26 -0400

sassylemur: jackiecello23: But when I was doing the scene,...

Mon, 13 May 2013 17:30:36 -0400

sassylemur:

jackiecello23:

But when I was doing the scene, [director] Alex Graves said “When you say that last line, ‘I can be your family,’ say it like ‘I love you.’” And that’s the take that they used. (x)