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Combeferre, to his credit, doesn't say anything immediately. He Notices during lunch, as is indicated by the furtive glances that dart from where they're both sitting to what Enjolras assumes is Grantaire's seat a few tables over, but he only Addresses the matter (fairly, Enjolras thinks) once they're on their feet again, which provides Enjolras with a perfectly generous option to run away from this conversation.
Their steps echo. Enjolras is very aware that their voices, at a normal volume, could be heard from both ends of the hall.
“And he's not said – anything?”
“Not a word all summer.” Enjolras drops his bag onto a sandstone windowsill: centuries old, dignified, an absolute disaster where insulation is concerned. If disapproval could chip away at it, Enjolras would take the whole building down in a day. “I dare say I'll survive the year without his input; please don't worry.”
“Right,” says Combeferre. He doesn't bother masking his scepticism as understanding. “So does he know...?”
“I doubt it.” Enjolras makes an effort to sound disaffected. “He didn't ask, and I don't think the teachers are exactly keen on feeding the rumour mill. It doesn't matter to me, Combeferre,” he adds emphatically in response to his friend's quizzical look. “Let him think giving up my position as student rep was enough to show me the error of my ways if he likes. That'll give him plenty to feel triumphant about, anyway.”
“Hm. Sure.”
Enjolras sighs. “Noted and filed under responses I absolutely deserve. Christ, I wish this first week were over.”
The self-pity is unwarranted, but he and Combeferre have a long-standing mutual subscription to the worst parts of each other, so Enjolras at least doesn't have to chide himself for letting it show. If anything, it strikes him that he should be glad of the newly freed-up time: his duties as student representative had been in the way of a number of more relevant projects, and he hasn't mourned their loss for a second. It is this first week of re-adjustment that he dreads, the week full of odd glances in the hall and of subtle reprimands from teachers who look at him like he's suffered some sort of irreversible fall from grace.
Grantaire would love that. If anything about this situation is concerning, it's that he's firmly resisted the opportunity to make a comment about Enjolras's burned wings or cracked halo.
Combeferre doesn't add his own pity to the amount Enjolras has piled on himself. “Feuilly came to talk to me during Chemistry earlier,” he offers instead. “I think he feels like quite the usurper. Might be a good idea to absolve him before he asks for it.”
Enjolras buries his face in his hands.
He speaks with Feuilly after class, in the safety and quiet of the library (one of two spaces available for undisturbed conversation which Collège St. Gens, even if involuntarily, offers, and to be infinitely preferred over the bathroom stalls). Feuilly, who is not only more deserving of but also doubtlessly better suited to the position of student rep than Enjolras has ever felt, is painfully apologetic, and Enjolras struggles to stomach all of it. Having suffered paternal hands-on-shoulders and murmurs of reprimand from well-intentioned teachers all day, Feuilly's anxiety to assuage anger that isn't there is something of a last straw.
“How can I make you believe this?” Enjolras feels close to wringing his hands. “You didn't take anything from me, you really, really didn't. Not to be discouraging in the least, you'll be brilliant, but I was more than ready to give up the position when I had to.”
“Why did you, though?” Feuilly watches him carefully. They're – not friends, not quite, but Enjolras always hoped they would be, if Feuilly were slightly less intimidated and Enjolras slightly more gifted on an interpersonal level. “Have to, I mean. What happened? No one wanted to tell me. I don't know what to do with an appointment like that; it feels like they threw the position to me in a panic.”
Ah. Well, that at least, he can dispel. “They didn't,” he says. “They had all summer to deliberate. I've not been student rep since the final week of last year.”
Feuilly's eyebrows climb, but he doesn't repeat his question. Enjolras glances downwards.
“I, uh, got caught smoking.”
“What?”
“Hm.” He smiles wryly. “If that helps, I don't think the chaplain could quite believe it, either. According to the code of conduct, I should have been expelled.”
“Over a cigarette?”
“Wasn't a cigarette.”
“Still, I mean – really?”
“They've done worse.” Much worse, too, which Feuilly will come to hear about as the year progresses. Enjolras doesn't envy him. “It doesn't matter, anyway. What matters is that I wasn't attached to the position – or, rather, if I was, it was for the wrong reasons, and I should have made room for someone who'd do better much sooner. So if anything, I owe you an apology.”
Feuilly appears to be searching his face for indicators that he's joking. The thought leaves a bad taste in Enjolras's mouth.
“All right,” says Feuilly, not without caution. “I'll – well, thank you for telling me.”
“Sure.” Enjolras exhales. A long shot, sure, but he adds, for the sake of having done it, “If there's anything you'd like to know, I hope you'll feel comfortable asking me.”
“Um.” Feuilly looks at the desk between them, and then says, as if a weight has been lifted off his back, “There are quite a few things, actually.”
Something warm spreads in Enjolras's chest. There is, he supposes, more than one way of doing better. He pulls up a chair. “Then let's talk.”
By the time Enjolras makes it to the chapel, the day feels like a week. Officially and on his transcript, he's been assigned menial work for the year, except he hasn't, really, because St. Gens doesn't have the spine to let him clean the corridors. The whole idea is laughable: whatever firm hand the school prides itself in having doesn't seem to extend to sullying the Enjolras family name by making their youngest perform any punishment more serious than some light dusting around the altar. According to the principal, it's meant to renew his appreciation for the space and to set him on a humbler spiritual path. Enjolras had spent most of that conversation clenching his jaw in an effort not to laugh out loud.
Mademoiselle Simplice should have retired ten years ago, and is quietly appreciative, if not openly approving, of his assistance. She points out tasks around the chapel: extinguishing the candles, polishing the altar bells, making sure nothing's out of order in the sacristy, “Everything in its place.” She summarily informs him that she'll be back to check on everything and lock up later, and just like that, Enjolras is alone in the chapel.
He stands on the steps that lead up to the choir. Tentatively, he hums a note, quiet and plain. The chapel is old – pre-dating electronic microphones by two centuries at least, with stunning acoustics. He hasn't wanted to sing in a long while. It's mandatory, during mass, and has little to do with enjoyment then. Now, with nothing else to entertain him as he works, there's some measure of gratification to it again, even if it isn't, in accordance with the principal's wishes, of the spiritual kind. He's always found hymns to be meditative.
Grantaire hates singing, even during mass, when it's enough to move one's lips. Enjolras was tossed this piece of information without warning once, on a short walk between classes, and had thought, then, that a simple factoid like that shouldn't occupy so much space in his brain. Maybe it hadn't been the fact itself, he'd thought later; maybe it had been the tiny snarl in Grantaire's voice as he'd said it, which had been oddly reminiscent of a displeased kitten, or the way he'd rolled his eyes at Enjolras's surprised response, and had said, in a tone that only brushed sarcasm's arm on its way out, “Easy for you to say, voice of a cherubim.”
They were friends, before. Enjolras didn't think, that final week before their summer break, that their fight was enough to alienate Grantaire permanently, but then, they'd never understood one another very well. Maybe he'd underestimated, aside from just how unwanted his interference was, also the worth of their friendship in Grantaire's eyes.
The chapel is small. Tidying it takes next to no time, and when Mlle Simplice returns to look over his work and dismisses him with a curt nod, Enjolras is more annoyed by the punishment's lack of efficacy than by any attached principle. Outside, he hurries along through the drizzle and back towards St. Martin's building to pick up some books left behind, and stops in his tracks at the dark silhouette huddled beneath the bridge that links the laboratory building to the second floor of St. Martin's.
Haphazardly sheltered from the rain, with eyes trained on St. Martin's and its odd spikes and spires, stands Grantaire, his hand skidding and darting across the pages of a sketchbook.
In the past, Enjolras has wondered what Grantaire wears at home, if he's the type for knitted wool or graphic prints. The school's code of conduct allows for minimal creative expression and considers even hoodies the height of disrespect, and in consequence, rebellion looks as exciting as Grantaire wearing all black to school five days a week. (He still did get coded once, and was sent straight to Enjolras for mediation. His nails were painted a lovely shade of teal. The code on dress and appearance did, as Grantaire correctly argued, only include a prohibition of nail polish in the section for girls.)
“Shouldn't you be in independent study?”
Grantaire turns around to face him, eyes wide. He composes quickly, and gestures at his pencil and paper. “What's this look like to you?”
“Skipping.”
“Well, some of us are on humanities pathways. Plus, I've heard any authority you had to report me before has been conveniently shoved over to Feuilly, so...”
“You don't need authority to report someone.”
“Yes, you do. Go running to the teachers without being head boy, and all you are's a snitch. I'm not going to pretend to get you or anything, but I don't think you'd wear that very well.”
Enjolras has never reported a student in his life: they're both aware of this. He has no idea why Grantaire brought it up, or why he took the bait in return. “No interest in avoiding a second threat of expulsion, then?”
If there was a thing to say that was worse than the other available options, Enjolras senses that he's found it. Grantaire's expression darkens.
“I didn't ask to be bailed out of the first one,” he spits. “We can't all be paragons of virtue, Enjolras. The sooner you make your peace with that, the sooner you can stop nailing yourself to every damn cross in sight for people who are really, really just trying to catch a break from this place.”
“Oh, I'm sorry.” Enjolras furrows his brow in question. “I didn't realise you meant for your future to go down the drain. I should have asked.”
“Yeah, actually. You should have.” Grantaire pockets his pencil; he slapped the sketchbook closed the moment he heard Enjolras's voice earlier. “But seeing as your generous sacrifice has allowed me to stay on for a final year, I reserve the right to spend it being as much of a lazy bastard as I like, thank you very much.” He brushes past him and towards the entrance to the labs. “And take the fucking bridge, Enjolras. It's pissing down.”
Enjolras stares after him, unmoving. Home is a bus ride away, and Enjolras stands beneath the bridge as if glued to the spot, waiting for nothing at all, eyes resting on the distant green where the walk to St. Martin's has become a slow river of sludge.
As the year ticks on and Combeferre watches Enjolras go from sad to stressed, he books it as a success. Their final year offers, plainly put, simply no time to swan around or be upset about anything other than their weekly workload, and Enjolras is doubly hit by his weekly hour-long meetings with Feuilly and his daily chores in the chapel.
Those have halved now, at least. Simplice didn't have it in her to forbid Combeferre to help, solidarity being, after all, very much in the spirit of the thing, and so Combeferre gives up half his independent study time in order to give Enjolras back half of his.
“I hated these things when I was younger.” Combeferre is kneeling on one of the cushions of the choir steps, carefully wiping fingerprints off the altar bells. “Did I ever tell you about the ones at our church?”
Enjolras glances down. He's cleaning the dust-gathering top of the tabernacle with utter irreverence, and blows some hair out of his face. “I don't think so? Was that when you were an altar server?”
“Yeah.” The bells here are pretty, brass with a smooth, round handle. “We had two different sets, one was brass, like these, and the other was copper, cross-shaped without any handle. They weighed a full kilo, and you had to put your fingers into the cross to lift and ring them. Hurt like you couldn't imagine. Every time we served in mass, there'd be a scuffle before about who'd get to use which set.”
Enjolras has stopped his dusting. “You know what I'm going to say.”
“Well, let me continue the story.” The memory still makes him smile. “I had to serve on Corpus Christi one time, must have been when I was – I don't know, twelve? Lots of jobs, too, there were eight of us. We did the procession through town, and then, during the benediction of the blessed sacrament – you know the spiel – four of us were kneeling to ring the bells for the entire ceremony. Normally, we ring them twice, for like, a second. During the ceremony, you can't stop ringing them until the benediction is complete.”
“I don't like this story at all.”
“I was on the horrible bells, that day,” Combeferre goes on. “I was tired, too; it was way too early in the morning. Halfway through the ceremony, I thought my fingers were going to fall off, and just when I was about to drop the bells and be done with it, the server who'd been standing next to me – he was at the front of the procession, so he got to stand – kneeled and took the bells from me, and kept ringing them. I think he was a few years older. Complete breach of protocol, on a holy day of obligation. Took me about two seconds to fall into my first crush.”
In the choir, Enjolras lets out a startled laugh. “No.”
“Cross my heart. I walked out later with a very distinct feeling of being in big, big trouble.”
He'd come to terms with it quickly enough. Back then, getting over a crisis was as easy as having a long conversation with Mum, and he's never been one for self-condemnation to begin with. Most people aren't that lucky.
Grantaire isn't, he's fairly certain. Combeferre hasn't told Enjolras about their conversations, because Grantaire asked him not to, and Grantaire is in rather desperate need of someone he can trust.
Combeferre looks across the choir to Enjolras, who has visibly cheered up. If there were a way of reaching them both at once, he could save them all a world of trouble.
St. Gens students in their Terminale are traditionally encouraged to take part in a monastic retreat. Enjolras doesn't go. Combeferre does. The year is moving too quickly, and he's made his mind up about nothing; the time away is meant to dispel doubts and help align their priorities – spiritual or otherwise. It figures that the others don't see much of a purpose in it.
It figures, anyway, that Enjolras doesn't.
While on their retreat, Combeferre reads, he studies (in secret – school isn't meant to be on their mind, here), and he prays, and returns after a week without having gained anything other than a new appreciation for the Chartreuse Mountains.
Enjolras – to his credit – didn't comment before he left, and only makes a gentle attempt at gauging the outcome afterwards. “Did you find what you were looking for?”
They're hiding in the library after a deliberately fast lunch. Independent study times, these days, are too precious to spend chatting. “Still looking,” he says with half a smile, and then decides to call out the elephant in the room. “You've not been sleeping.”
“Feuilly came to me with something last week.”
That's not news – Feuilly has been coming to Enjolras, and vice versa, all year. They're both uniquely gifted at backhanded diplomacy, and have put out more than one fire between the student body and staff in the past few months. So, if this is an occasion worth losing sleep over...
“Grantaire?”
Enjolras's shoulders curl inwards. He went through a phase, when they were still in Séconde, where he'd tackled the correction of his horrible posture with the same single-mindedness as he did the school's various injustices. It's never a good sign when he reverts into slouching again.
“You can sympathise a little bit, can't you? He's a boarding student,” attempts Combeferre. “At least you and I can go home at the end of the day. Imagine living in this place.”
“I know. It's not that I – I don't think there's a more reasonable response to St. Gens than breaking the rules, I really don't, but he could at least be smarter than this. You should have seen him last year. He was asking to be caught, and I just don't – ” Enjolras exhales. “It was just a few sketches this time, at least. Feuilly couldn't have helped if they'd caught him with alcohol again.”
“Sketches? What was wrong with those?”
“Feuilly didn't say, but I don't think it helped that he was working on them during Math revision,” says Enjolras dryly. “It's literally two more months. I don't know why he won't keep his head down.”
“Come, now.” Combeferre can't help his frown. “You've never kept your head down in your life. You'd hate it if he did. Sometimes I feel like you think I'm keeping mine down too much.”
Enjolras looks up, sharply. “What? I don't think that.”
“Good.” Combeferre stares down at his own hands. He's not sure why he brought it up. “Sorry. I'm not – I might be a little touchy about that.”
The weight of Enjolras's gaze on him becomes uncomfortable quickly.
“Combeferre,” Enjolras says. When Combeferre looks up, the hurt on Enjolras's face makes his chest seize up with guilt. “Do you think I judge you for having doubts?”
The prompt to honesty is a strange relief. “No,” he says, and finds that he means it. “But I think – I might judge me, actually.”
“Well, don't,” says Enjolras, so plainly that it startles a laugh out of Combeferre. “I mean it. I'm sorry if I've made you feel like you had to justify what you believe to anyone, especially yourself. You don't owe anyone an excuse for that. Least of all me.”
“That's what I tell myself.” It's good to say it, but it's also awful. Enjolras never means to, but he's good at making people feel inadequate. “It's not the most rational thought process, but, well.” He nudges Enjolras's shin with his foot under the table. “We all do stupid things, I suppose.”
Enjolras's smile is pale. Combeferre watches him, and thinks of how he'd waited for him in the dark corridor before the principal's office last year, how he'd been prepared to storm in there and get himself expelled on principle the moment he'd seen Enjolras come out with that same pallor on his face.
“I think I was in love with him,” says Enjolras, a confession to himself, for them both.
Combeferre reaches down to press his shoulder. It shakes under the touch. “I know,” he says, and he does. He knows; he knows so well.
He knows what he needs to do, too.
His opportunity comes the Friday before the Pentecostal weekend, when he runs into Grantaire and his roommate outside St. Martin's. He's not seen much of Bossuet, who's on the same pathway as Enjolras, but Grantaire never talks about him without smiling, which is, considering Grantaire's general disposition, a glowing assessment.
“Headed home for the weekend?” he asks the two of them, both laden with bags.
“Eagle's flying home to Meaux,” says Grantaire with a wry grin. “I'm just the porter.”
“Long trip,” says Combeferre. The mere thought of a seven-hour drive following a nine-hour school day makes him wince in sympathy.
“Ah, I'll take it over staying here another three days any time,” says Bossuet, and puts his arm around the shoulders of a reluctantly permissive Grantaire. “This one amounts to roundabout everything I'll miss.”
“So you're staying put, Grantaire?”
Grantaire answers with his best attempt at a nonchalant shrug. “Dear mum and dad are on vacation, anyway. Not much of a point in swinging by an empty house.”
That's that, then. Combeferre sizes him up, makes a decision, and says, “Come with me to Avignon.”
Grantaire does.
Combeferre loves the plain little house he grew up in, with its red roof tiles and crumbling garden walls, like it's family. They're some way away from the city, nestled between fields and greenhouses, and May is a stunning month in the countryside. In the shaded garden, Combeferre reads Milton, and Grantaire curses his science revision and spends a good amount of time on the internet. Now and then, he draws. On Saturday evening, he helps them light the firepit by their porch, and they grill a cobbled-together dinner of fish and vegetables over it.
“This isn't so unlike Lourmarin,” Grantaire says, once Combeferre's mother has gone to bed and the fire is burning low. “I mean, not that my family were the type for campfires or anything growing up, but, you know, the whole...”
“Backwardness?”
“Well, you said that.”
“I know how it looks. Nothing ever happens here.” Avignon is close enough and has good schools, which helped, but before he came to St. Gens, Combeferre felt the pull towards the cities just like every other young person growing up around here. “I don't mind, though. It's what I'm used to.”
“I don't think I can live with what I'm used to,” says Grantaire plainly. Combeferre wants to agree, and can't quite bring himself to.
“You want to tell me about those scandalous drawings that got you in trouble?” At Grantaire's surprised expression, Combeferre smiles into his glass of tea. “I hear things.”
“Apparently so,” mutters Grantaire. He shrugs. “It was pretty harmless, actually. There wasn't anything in the code of conduct that forbids students from drawing Jeanne d'Arc carrying a trans pride flag, last I checked.”
“Do you still have the drawing?”
“Nope.” Grantaire places emphasis on the final consonant. “Confiscated, presumably burned. Or, I don't know. Wouldn't put it past the principal to have a little folder of blasphemous drawings in his desk somewhere. In any case, Feuilly did his best, but the whole thing kind of sucked.” Combeferre can see him, in the dim light of the fire, bite down on his lip. “It was meant for a friend.”
Combeferre hums quietly.
“Okay, so, in exchange,” says Grantaire, shifting in his seat, “I think you have to tell me what happened at the monastery, now. You've been off ever since you got back.”
“I have?”
“Uh, obviously.” Grantaire gestures. “Milton? With your bac coming up? Why the hell aren't you studying? Even Bossuet's been buckling down, and I'm only half sure he even wants to graduate.”
“Ah.” If there's one thing Grantaire makes easy, it's being honest. It's not a generous thought in itself, but it is, in a way, that Grantaire manages to be so unabashedly himself that it's hard to feel shame or self-consciousness around him. Most other people Combeferre is close to simply make him feel insufficient in comparison. “It's – it's pretty silly, I'll say this in advance.”
“Oh, well, in that case I'm very sorry to inform you that silly things are beneath me, so...”
Combeferre laughs softly. “I don't think this was the best moment to lose the last few remnants of my faith, you know? But it still happened. I grew up in the church; it determined so much of my life when I was young. And, I mean, you've met my mum.”
Grantaire nods quietly. Combeferre knows the effect his mother has on people – she's unbelievably warm. Combeferre gets his tendency to take in strays from her. Her faith is an unshakeable edifice that shelters without imprisoning.
“And then – I suppose you know how this sort of thing happens. You get older, and you become critical of this institution that's meant so much to you, so... I used to think I loved the church, and then I thought, no, I don't love the church, I love God. And at the monastery, there was this night where I suddenly realised that I'm not even – that –” He drifts off, but Grantaire says nothing to fill the silence. Combeferre exhales, and says, “I don't love God. I love my mother. Those are two different things.”
Grantaire is silent for a moment. Then, softly, “Fuck. I'm sorry.”
“It's fine, really. Something of a relief. The thing that upset me was that I couldn't tell Enjolras.” Even now, it makes him cringe to admit. “He wouldn't react badly at all, I know he wouldn't, but I was so ashamed, and he's –”
“Oh, trust me, I get it,” says Grantaire with an odd smile in his voice. “Enjolras wouldn't know doubt if it punched him in the eye.”
“He knows what he believes,” corrects Combeferre. “He'd never judge me, but sometimes I just feel – like I've failed, next to him. He's known where he stands for years, and I'm still neither here nor there. I don't even – I doubt I'll ever be anything but in between.”
“Well, you know. Sith, absolutes, and so on.”
Combeferre raises an eyebrow that says Really?
Grantaire grins. “I'm just saying. I don't think I've ever met anyone who questions as much as you do. I guess that kind of means never arriving at an answer for a lot of stuff. Isn't that a good thing? Better than giving up on finding answers altogether, anyway. Or thinking you already have all the answers.”
His mind running in circles, Combeferre stares into the fire. “Enjolras isn't that confident, you know,” he says after a while. “He worries a lot.”
“Yeah, well.” Grantaire pulls in his legs. “That's for him to deal with, then.”
“I think he really just wanted to help. He didn't expect to lose your friendship over it.”
Grantaire huffs an unhappy sort of laugh, and looks into the night sky. Smoke curls between olive trees and loses itself before the black and blue above them. “I don't want to be his friend.”
I know, thinks Combeferre. He says, “I think he deserves some honesty about that.”
Next to him, Grantaire closes his eyes. “Okay,” he says.
Combeferre hopes that it really is.
When Grantaire was younger, he drew saints. The fact remains slightly ironic and testifies, if nothing else, to the lack of access he had to other art as a child growing up in a deeply catholic streak of the southern countryside, but he doesn't begrudge those beginnings. They taught him enough.
Light, colour. The strength of a symbol. The aesthetic value of things that are worth nothing else: wounds, martyrdom, sacrifice.
Grantaire steps into the chapel. It took him two and a half days to figure out Enjolras's new role at the beginning of the year – according to whatever absurd codex of morality St. Gens operates by, time cut out of a student's independent study hours can only be spent here. It's lucky enough, Grantaire supposes, that it's spent carrying out the sacristan's more menial tasks and not – oh, he's not sure, doing penance by kneeling on stone steps or whatever it is the school abandoned in the late eighties, if only under strict state insistence.
Combeferre is wrong: Grantaire owes Enjolras honesty, but he owes him a hell of a lot more, too.
In the choir, Enjolras is a silhouette extinguishing lights, the candlesnuffer held up like a sword. The light of dozens of small flames catches in his hair. Grantaire feels utterly wretched.
“So do they give you, like, a torch to find your way out in the end?”
Enjolras turns. Grantaire, to his credit, does not turn into a pillar of salt on the spot.
“Or are you allowed to use the light switch? Never sure how far these punishments go. For all I know, you could be forbidden from using electricity to assist in your, uh, sacred duties.”
Enjolras stares at him. Grantaire stops, some far steps away from the choir, and lifts his shoulders. He doesn't really have anything to say for himself.
“Combeferre?”
Ah. “Yes. I mean, I'd have – written to you, maybe. Of my own accord, I think. Definitely within the next – five to ten years.”
“You're under no obligation to talk to me.” Enjolras turns back around. He snuffs more candles. The cloud of light around his hair dulls. “I thought you knew. You certainly managed fine all year.”
“I – well. Ah, fuck.” Grantaire drops onto the front pew. The wood has no cushions. “Would you believe me that I felt guilty? I still do. I'm fucking ashamed of myself. It's a bad reason – I know it is, I know it was childish and stupid, but I just... I couldn't look you in the eye.”
“It was childish and stupid.” The last candles around the altar go out. In the back of the chapel, smaller lights are still burning. Enjolras walks down the two steps, over to where Grantaire is sitting. He crosses before the tabernacle without bowing. Grantaire stares. “I thought we were friends. You could have talked to me.”
I really, really couldn't have, thinks Grantaire, because if he'd talked to Enjolras then, he'd have said out loud what they both probably already knew, and the thought alone made Grantaire cringe with shame. It has to be said now, because Enjolras deserves to know, but part of his mind is still too hung-up on the minor act of sacrilege he's just seen committed to open his mouth.
“If I understand you right,” continues Enjolras, and sits down next to Grantaire, “you thought I was trying to moralise by lying to them. That I let myself be punished in your place as a way of – one-upping you, is that it?”
“Uh, not really.” Even at his most viciously bitter, Grantaire didn't think that lowly of Enjolras. The opposite, if anything. “And that wasn't it, anyway, was it? You weren't trying to show off, you were just trying to do what was right. Look, I don't –” Grantaire scrubs a hand through his hair, and looks firmly forward. In a roundabout way, it's still easier to stare at the altar in all its guilt-trippy glory than to risk even a glance at Enjolras next to him. “I don't have a lot in the way of, like, personal faith. So I didn't understand it. Hell, I still don't think I can, but I could have at least tried. I know this stuff matters to you.”
He doesn't understand why, though. Enjolras is brilliantly righteous, and everything about his defiance runs counter to the perfect record he held in this place before he took the fall for Grantaire's self-destructive little spiral. Grantaire has never been able to figure out which of St. Gens's tenets Enjolras embraces and which he condemns, but he supposes if self-sacrifice, however small, comes with Enjolras's faith, it's not Grantaire's place to be dismissive of it, no matter how much the idea offends him.
(Except it is his place, isn't it? A little bit. When it's being done for his sake, without his permission, with no outcome except harm to Enjolras. Shouldn't he have a say in whether he's worth that or not? Shouldn't he get to be angry?)
Enjolras's eyes rested on him while Grantaire was speaking; now, Enjolras stands up again. He walks up the two steps to the choir, slow and careful, his steps not making a sound on the smooth stone. Before the tabernacle, he stops. He looks down at where Grantaire is sitting, and nods. “Come up.”
Grantaire does. The impulses don't go away, really; he'll never be able to walk around an altar like it's just stone and gold, with nothing watching or waiting or feeling.
He would have been expelled, last year, if Enjolras hadn't taken the blame. He'd have been expelled from St. Gens and moved back home over a bottle of vodka and some weed, and he'd have been happy to, because he has read the school rules a dozen times over and been morbidly delighted by their stupidity every time. He has an annotated version of them, scribbled full of increasingly vulgar jokes, printed out and tucked away in a drawer of his room.
Even in his rebellion, he's a coward.
Enjolras stands before him, innocent and terrible.
“They can't do anything to me, you know?” There's a key in Enjolras's hand, and he unlocks the tabernacle like he's opening a wardrobe.
“Enjolras.”
Enjolras reaches inside and takes the monstrance, heavy and golden, into a careful, steady grip. He weighs it in his hand. He turns it for Grantaire to see. It's a work of art, with intricate embellishments and a ring of gold spikes sharp enough for Grantaire to prick a finger on. Enjolras places it on the altar, and opens, with what looks awfully like a practised twist of his hand, the little glass round that holds the Eucharist host.
“Enjolras.”
“They'd never have expelled me,” he says, in a strangely remote voice. “Too rich, too well-known, too representative of St. Gens. Imagine them having to dismiss in disgrace a star pupil who had their fullest confidence for two years.” The host, smooth and flat as paper, snaps easily beneath his fingers. “I knew nothing bad was going to happen to me. The only thing I had to let go of was this – and feel free to laugh at me for this – this whole narcissistic fantasy I'd been preparing for, this ridiculous idea of my graduation speech as student rep. I've been keeping a record, you know? Every time a student came to me with a grievance and treated it like a confession, every time someone's come to me scared or upset, every inordinate punishment for a trivial transgression. The principal took a ruler to my hands, that time last year. I was going to read it all out. I was going to come out, too, there and then. What were they going to do? I told myself I was playing the long game so I'd get my moment of triumph on the final day.” He turns the host in his fingers – Grantaire pictures them bruised and red, and has to look away. Enjolras takes the holiest thing in the chapel and puts it in his mouth, quick and thoughtless. He swallows, and says, “You can eat it, Grantaire. It's just... it's just bread.”
Grantaire used to make an obsessive study of Enjolras's features, even before they were friends. All that time trying to read Enjolras through stolen glances in class or long conversations in the library, of catching the clear tenor of his voice during mass, and he's never been so close to him as this, in the half-dark of the choir with Enjolras plain and unconcerned before him, the host a simple offering.
Grantaire opens his lips. It's familiar, the flat taste and the sticky feeling at the roof of his mouth, but still new. Enjolras smiles. “If I'd known you thought it was a matter of faith, I'd have been more insistent in trying to talk to you. I've been an atheist for a decade.”
Were his mouth less dry, Grantaire would whistle. “Loss of faith at the tender age of eight, then?”
“Geography class. And I may have some ethical standards, but I hope they don't dictate a saviour complex, and they certainly don't factor in God's approval. I don't care about any of it, Grantaire; I care about you. I'm sorry I made you think differently.”
“But then–” The apology barely makes an impact. Grantaire wasn't looking for one, and can't very well accept it now. “If you – so why –?”
Enjolras's smile tenses at the edges. “Call it – a selfish impulse, if you like. I didn't want you hurt, but almost in equal measure, and I am ashamed of that, I didn't want you to be expelled. Dare say I shot myself in the foot a little, there.”
Grantaire stares at him. Enjolras holds his gaze, expectant, until his expression shutters with something hurt and dark. He takes a step back, and when he reaches for the monstrance, Grantaire grabs hold of his hands.
“He really –?” Grantaire's voice wavers. “With a ruler?”
Eyes wide, Enjolras looks from his hands to Grantaire's face and back. “I didn't say it to –”
“You almost didn't say it at all,” Grantaire says. He feels dizzy. “Christ, Enjolras.” He lifts Enjolras's hands and bows to kiss his knuckles, each in turn. Beneath his lips, Enjolras's fingers are whole and warm, but they come away stained with salt, and Enjolras puts a palm to Grantaire's cheek and kisses him hard.
It shouldn't surprise Grantaire that Enjolras kisses with fierce determination – he doesn't do things by halves, and Grantaire has always been helpless in the face of it, but like this, with no warning or precedent, his knees still buckle. Enjolras breaks away to hold onto his elbows, drawing him close, and laughs, lips brushing against Grantaire's temple.
“I've missed you,” he says, and moves to hold Grantaire's face in his hands. “I've missed you so much.”
“Sorry,” says Grantaire, breathless. It's been almost a year since they've properly talked, and Enjolras is still the most stunning thing in the world, only he wants Grantaire, which is as hard to believe as it is, now, impossible to ignore. “God. Enjolras, you should have heard the shit I put Bossuet through. I haven't shut up about you in two years.”
“Two years?”
“Yes, well.” He covers Enjolras's hands with his own, and thinks, wildly, that he'll never let any harm come to them again. “You, uh, you make an impression. What in the world did you say to your parents?”
“Hm?” Enjolras blinks. “About last year?”
“Yeah. I couldn't stop wondering. I was so sure I'd get you kicked out, end your parents' marriage, I don't know. What did you tell them?”
“The truth, that I lied to impress a boy I had a crush on and that it backfired spectacularly,” says Enjolras. “They know me. It wasn't too out-of-character.”
Grantaire has to kiss him again. He feels Enjolras smile against his lips, and thinks he finds some kind of sacredness in that, too, in the plain honesty of being held close. When Enjolras lets him go, gently, Grantaire remembers where they are, and can't find it in himself to feel ashamed.
“They'll murder you over that missing host,” murmurs Grantaire. Enjolras shakes his head.
“We'll replace it.”
“What?”
“The sacristy's the back of my hand, now. I know where the hosts are kept. We'll put a new one in.”
The mad simplicity of it makes Grantaire feel drunk with affection. “But it won't be –”
“Grantaire.” Enjolras has shut the glass round of the monstrance with a click, and turns to him again. He leans in, a hand resting gently on the side of Grantaire's neck. His lips press softly to Grantaire's forehead in irreverent benediction. He whispers, against Grantaire's skin, “There are worse things.”
At the back of the chapel, candles are burning low. Around them, statues look down silently, peacefully, and Grantaire swallows around the tight feeling in his throat. Yeah, he thinks, as Enjolras kisses his forehead again, fingers tangled in his hair. There really are.