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Oh, to be in love with his words again.
Grantaire lived in a world blurred at the edges with alcohol and drugs. Mostly pot, nothing hard, but drugs nonetheless, and the fact that he had managed to be both a teenage alcoholic and drug addict at the bitter age of 17 only really got hammered in when he found himself curled in one of the sinks in the most abandoned boys’ bathroom at school, staring at the reflection of Enjolras standing behind him in the dirty mirror.
His expression was one of utmost disdain. And pity, and despair, and so many other things Grantaire was much too inebriated to deal with.
“Did you even come here on purpose?”
Grantaire just laughs sharply, then raises a shaking bottle to his lips and drains the rest of the rose. He’s classy in his alcoholism, he thinks, then giggles.
Enjolras isn’t elated.
“Why do you do this to yourself? You’re… I’ve seen you, be, do so much better. I don’t understand.”
Enjolras’s words were truly puzzled, a deep confusion and hurt ringing clearly and reaching through Grantaire’s haze.
“When have you seen me… better?” He can’t rack up a single image of himself in his brain that isn’t hideously disappointing and a let-down to humanity, but then again, he can’t rack up a lot at the moment. “This is real, this is me…” Grantaire began to hum and Enjolras looked so angry he might’ve exploded then and there.
“When you’re, with some of our mutual friends,” Enjolras is suddenly saying, and Grantaire blinks hard to pay attention. “You’re, you know, happy. You look so happy, and I’d… I’d want to be friends with that you.”
Grantaire is suddenly, bitterly angry with himself and Enjolras and the world and the situation.
Enjolras just looks sad when he curls tighter into the sink and scrabbles in his pocket for pills or something or other. “Look at you. These sinks haven’t been renovated in years, and you can lie down in one - you’re dying, aren’t you, the drugs…”
“Alcohol has carbs,” Grantaire mutters around the three pills he’s just popped.
“Grantaire…”
“Why are you still here?” demanded Grantaire, meeting Enjolras’s eyes in the disgusting mirror. “The sight of me disgusts you. The idea of me disgusts you. Wasted potential, they said he said she said, you said, you’re all the same, you all want me to… to be something else…” He’s mumbling and his head has completely dissolved into soft shards of nausea.
“I’m calling the ambulance again,” Enjolras says quietly, somewhere far away. “I’m calling them, and I’m leaving again, and I’m hoping maybe you’ll learn this time.”
“You never give up, do you?” Grantaire surprises himself with his own cold sneer.
There’s silence, some murmuring across a phone, and then more silence, followed by the clear sound of Enjolras leaving.
Grantaire pukes over the side of the sink, and takes two more pills, before the ambulance arrives.