Valentine's Day Fest: Gift for bearit
For: bearit
Story by: coloneldespard
Title: June Ghosts
Prompt: Enjolras/Grantaire, an afterlife
Grantaire wasn’t so much surprised by the form of his afterlife as much as he was by the fact that there was an afterlife at all. As a child, he’d been forced to sit through Mass and had been fascinated by a winding staircase that he’d peeked behind a heavily embroidered curtain to the side of the north transept. He’d imagined that was the priest’s secret passage to God, a means by which he could directly communicate with the Almighty for a private tête-à-tête. Finding the door unlocked one day and the woman who cleaned the church nowhere to be seen, he’d crept behind the curtain. Holding his breath, he’d made his way up the narrow stone stair, expecting it to wind on and on.
Instead he found himself, surprisingly quickly, in a small room that bore a resemblance to nothing so much as one of the attics in his home, a dusty storage area.
It seemed the best metaphor for the entire religious experience. Grantaire, when he died, had fully expected to go to exactly the same place a candle flame went when it winked out.
But Enjolras - well, Enjolras was different. Never mind that he eschewed formal religion, Enjolras was the stuff of which Catholic imagery was made of…a strange amalgam of Christ driving out the money lenders in the Temple and St Michael with his flaming sword. His own end he could care less about, but Enjolras’ end Grantaire could not begin to imagine. Not even when he’d woken in the second story of the Corinthe and looked across to see his idol in torn and bloody clothes, defiantly facing down a firing squad.
There had been a moment of sublime release, peace and completion when Enjolras had taken his hand with a smile. He hadn’t even heard the report of the guns, his eyes caught in those of a man whom, in the end, was his friend - just that slow, all encompassing smile and the pressure of his hand.
He would have been content to leave it there, but…well…here they were.
It was hard to explain, and even harder to puzzle out. He wondered sometimes if Enjolras knew more than he expressed, or if he, too, didn’t understand. One moment they’d been hand in hand before the guns, and then the next - this most unexpected sequel. He supposed it was a heaven of a sort, but not many people suggested paradise was coming back to awareness, sitting on the hill of Montmartre, looking down at the city where they could still see the flames, with Enjolras silent and thoughtful beside him, before both had begun to try to puzzle through their curious and unexpected situation.
They’d ascertained a few things very quickly, walking the streets, discovering the limits of their interactions with others and deciding it was not after all, a fantasy one or the other was having the moments before their life was blinked out, a heartbeat between the bullets and the impact as stretched into days, weeks, and finally years. They could neither be seen nor touched, nor could they touch others. They could move from place to place with thought, if they concentrated. There were large periods of time in which they seemed to cease to exist or to be, and then there they were again, together, and moving through their city, together.
And of the other Amis, there was not a sign.
Enjolras seemed calmer with this entire scenario than Grantaire could have imagined. This imposed passivity for a man who was, even at his most self-contained, the most forceful being Grantaire had ever encountered should have been a sort of ghastly hell, but as it was it seemed to be a tolerable purgatory. He still had Grantaire to talk with, and that worked out quite well. Much of that terrible dance they’d been locked in during their lives - or rather, that Grantaire was locked into, with Enjolras hardly an equal partner - might have been eased if they could have talked. If he could have reigned in his excesses and not only curbed his cynicism, but the self-hate that had nurtured it.
Still, purgatory seemed as good an explanation as any, as they had encountered neither choirs of angels nor the white light of Enjolras’ Supreme Being. But still Enjolras sought a purpose and a reason. He had died with the gleam of martyrdom in his eyes, as had his friends, confident of passing on the torch of their belief. But now here he was. And they were, apparently, nowhere.
“Perhaps we are ghosts,” he said to Grantaire quietly as they walked through the streets that bustled on with activity, oblivious to the dead of June. “Some would have it that’s what ghosts are - souls in purgatory. While this land holds the graves of those who have fought for the Republic of our ideals, France unfree will never be at peace.”
“Of all the Amis, you were the one who always had half a foot in the other world.” Grantaire spoke without mockery or irony. “And yet why are they gone, and you still here?”
“I do not know. But here we are, until we must learn or do what it is that we must, so that we too may have our peace.”
“I think you have earned your peace already.” Enjolras smiled at him.
“You, too. But here we are.” Enjolras clasped his hand again, and to his relief Grantaire could feel the touch. At least that much was real.
But France, unfree, continued. In 1834, the ghosts of June rose again on the scene of rue Transnonain massacre. They found themselves there, in one of those strange, drifting shifts of scenery. Forced to walk unheard amidst the bodies.
And again, and again it happened giving force to the old saying that if was summer in Paris there was a riot, and still Enjolras did not despair. “It will come,” he said, amidst the rubble of another emeute as the paving stones were washed of blood and re-laid. “If one rising is not enough, there will always be those who stand ready to commit a bolder deed, and yet another, until we are free.”
But there were times when they haunted these familiar scenes - familiar and yet not, as slowly the changes came with the years - and Grantaire knew that both missed their lost friends terribly. Where had they gone, those bright spirits? If Enjolras and Grantaire still trod the earth, what heaven could hold Courfeyrac? What part did he have in an unearthly paradise, being so utterly warm and earthy himself? What charms could a heaven hold compared to what he had loved in this world? And Combeferre…how could Combeferre be separate from Enjolras, even in death? Enjolras had told Grantaire of each of their deaths, and Grantaire, loving him so, could see that each was a laceration on his soul.
In February 1848 the people rose. Grantaire saw Enjolras atop a barricade, his hair seeming to be one with the winter sun, his eyes blending with the winter sky, and found that even in death he could fear losing him, consumed like a flame burning high with the revolution that swept the city. But Enjolras turned his blazing eyes on Grantaire, and never again would Grantaire doubt that wherever they went, they were going together.
Then came the bloody June days again, and he thought that these, at last, would break Enjolras’ heart. If not that, then surely the Second Empire that toppled the Second Republic. But still Enjolras held fast to hope. “If not now, then another time.” They still walked the streets, once again barred with the barricades of a desperate people, to see hundreds done to death by the men of General Magnan and Police Prefect Maupas, tools of the coup d'état.
He witnessed a remarkable scene at one of the barricades in Saint-Antoine. Enjolras, his face shadowed, had been gazing down at a young man who wore the bloodied smock of a worker. Grantaire knew that he was seeing, in this crushed and huddled for, the face of another young workingman who had fought on a barricade on another summer day. Even the red hair was the same as that of the fan-maker who had cried out for the universal rights of men, who had striven to educate himself with arduous hard-won learning, who had spoken passionately about the crimes against subjugated peoples in other nations, and who was long dead and possibly forgotten by every living man, but never by the ghost who now leaned over another bloodied form that called him to mind.
Then, to the surprise of both, the man opened eyes that were already unfocused with the approach of death, and looked directly at Enjolras.
“An angel…” he breathed.
Enjolras hesitated - even in these circumstances, his honesty prohibited a lie. So Grantaire, who had no such compunctions, intervened.
“Yes, an angel, come to see you home.”
Enjolras knelt beside the boy and put a hand on his brow.
“Be at peace. You have done valiantly and well.”
He died smiling.
Grantaire waited, wondering what he would see. In all the death they had witnessed, he had seen no souls that lingered as they did. The dead simply winked out of existence - or, if they continued, did so invisible to the two of them. In this case it was no different. One moment there, the next, gone, his half-open eyes empty.
There was more and worse to come. The Siege of Paris, when they saw their beautiful city survive with her spirit just barely intact, Napoleon le Petit, as Hugo had called him, having brought them into a humiliating war with Prussia. The Paris Commune, when Enjolras finally howled his grief and rage as thousands were rounded up and executed in the wake of the fall, his fury such that Grantaire was sure it must break through the glass wall that separated them from the living, and that he would wreak some divine retribution on those who lined up the Communards and gunned them down. It was a seemingly endless echo of their own deaths in the Corinthe, writ large. He could only hold Enjolras - hold him as he screamed his transcendent anger at the wholesale slaughter of Frenchmen and women at the hands of their own people. Grantaire had learned silence in the sober years since his death, not even trying to diminish by words the enormity of what they had witnessed.
And then, for a while, they drifted. Sometimes Grantaire thought they would simply fade out of existence altogether. Perhaps that was what ghosts did. If they didn’t achieve the resolution that freed them from their earthbound existence, perhaps they just finally dissipated with time, like morning mists as the day came. How many Ancient Romans still roamed the aqueducts and roads, after all? How many Bronze Age warriors? But sometimes they were still more present than at others, more aware of the world of the living, as the Third Republic lived out the dying days of the 19th Century and into the 20th. The Belle Époque blazed into life around them, but Enjolras was still more consumed with the injustices of the Dreyfus affair and the corruption that stained the Republic’s name. And then came the conflagration of the First World War, and the horror of shells falling in the middle of Paris. They saw the weary troops with their tales of mud and the muddle of incompetent leadership on the Western Front and a nation driven near exhaustion.
And then there was Hitler.
Not since the fall of the Paris Commune had he seen the mask of Enjolras’ stoicism slip so far. He watched in grief as Paris fell, as the Vichy government betrayed their own people, as French Police rounded up French Jews and send them to their deaths, and as their people clung desperately to the hope of freedom.
But Enjolras would not turn his head, and stood witness it all, with Grantaire at his side. More than ever, he embodied the spirit of his people, of the freedom they had fought so long and hard for.
“For all their faults,” Enjolras explained as they stood outside a dingy café, listening as its patrons sang the Marseilles in defiance of the invader and his lethal hand, “and all their mistakes - the wrong paths taken, the waste, the blood and groping in the dark - no one had fought harder for their freedom than the French. And through that struggle I hope we may be a light to others in the world who share our belief in the ultimate freedom and elevation of the human race. This century is not the happy one I thought it would be, Grantaire, but through all these years it has been affirmed to me that humanity will survive, and - not content to merely survive - we will always strive to be free.”
Grantaire found himself believing every word.
On the 21 October, 1945 they joined the milling throngs on the Champs-Élysées, celebrating the elections for the Constitutant Assembly that was to draft the constitution for the Fourth Republic. There was a sense of change in the air, a desire to renew the Republic. For the first time, suffrage had been extended to women.
“Combeferre would have been proud,” Grantaire said, eyeing a group of women who waved tricolours and sang the Marseilles in a joyous triumph that could not have been more different from the furtive defiance of the café goers more than two years before. “Is this it, do you think? Will this Fourth Republic be any more enduring than the others? Or are we due for an Empire again? I lose track.”
He would never quite get used to crowds now that he could not be really one of them - not to the feel of people who walked right through you. He pulled his Enjolras away from the throng a little way to a clear space - it was very disconcerting to be talking with him while someone’s right arm extended through his torso, waving a flag.
“I hope it will endure, but they must honestly address the beliefs that are central to those that we fought for. There are so many matters that need attention - how can it be that Algiers is still occupied? We opposed Charles X’s annexation of it to further his empire building ambitions, and yet it remains a French colony now, more than a century along.”
“But still you have hope?”
“Always.” And he smiled that same warm, encompassing smile that he had given Grantaire on June 6, 1832.
“There you are - at last!” The voice came from behind them, and Grantaire was aware of recognition, and with it, a wave of happiness that brought everything to a sharp focus that he hadn’t realised had been fuzzy around the edges, an immediacy that had been leaching from his consciousness - he knew it…knew that voice. It came from a long, long time ago, but in this strange state, it was no further than away than yesterday. He turned to see several figures emerging from the crowd. The man who had spoken had curling chestnut hair, a broad smile and green eyes that danced with humour and warmth.
“Couldn’t leave while the task was unfinished, could you?” Combeferre said…Combeferre with his gentle humour and kind expression, looking at them with a happiness that he could hardly contain. “Even if you couldn’t affect the outcome, you had to be here.”
“My friends,” was all Enjolras could manage.
And then they were around him - Combeferre, Courfeyrac, Prouvaire, Feuilly, Joly, Bossuet and Bahorel. Young, whole, and full of life and joy. So much themselves that it almost hurt, as if the feeling that swelled up in his chest was too much to contain and must overthrow him. They were embracing with all the generosity of spirit that he remembered - the liveliness that he had never believed even death could extinguish.
“You have been a long time lingering here, Combeferre continued. “But it is time now, my dear friend, to go. We’ve waited long enough.”
“The French Republic can get along without you looking over it,” Courfeyrac laughed.
“You too, Grantaire” said Bahorel, with that ringing good-humour that carried with it so many rich memories. “Although I suppose that doesn’t need to be said, does it - no separating you two now.”
And Enjolras turned and held a hand out to Grantaire, as he had once before.
“Shall we go then?”
Grantaire took his hand, smiled, and said lightly, “Seeing as you permit it…”
And Enjolras, still smiling, surrounded by their friends who embraced Grantaire warmly, pulled him forward into eternity.
Story by: coloneldespard
Title: June Ghosts
Prompt: Enjolras/Grantaire, an afterlife
Grantaire wasn’t so much surprised by the form of his afterlife as much as he was by the fact that there was an afterlife at all. As a child, he’d been forced to sit through Mass and had been fascinated by a winding staircase that he’d peeked behind a heavily embroidered curtain to the side of the north transept. He’d imagined that was the priest’s secret passage to God, a means by which he could directly communicate with the Almighty for a private tête-à-tête. Finding the door unlocked one day and the woman who cleaned the church nowhere to be seen, he’d crept behind the curtain. Holding his breath, he’d made his way up the narrow stone stair, expecting it to wind on and on.
Instead he found himself, surprisingly quickly, in a small room that bore a resemblance to nothing so much as one of the attics in his home, a dusty storage area.
It seemed the best metaphor for the entire religious experience. Grantaire, when he died, had fully expected to go to exactly the same place a candle flame went when it winked out.
But Enjolras - well, Enjolras was different. Never mind that he eschewed formal religion, Enjolras was the stuff of which Catholic imagery was made of…a strange amalgam of Christ driving out the money lenders in the Temple and St Michael with his flaming sword. His own end he could care less about, but Enjolras’ end Grantaire could not begin to imagine. Not even when he’d woken in the second story of the Corinthe and looked across to see his idol in torn and bloody clothes, defiantly facing down a firing squad.
There had been a moment of sublime release, peace and completion when Enjolras had taken his hand with a smile. He hadn’t even heard the report of the guns, his eyes caught in those of a man whom, in the end, was his friend - just that slow, all encompassing smile and the pressure of his hand.
He would have been content to leave it there, but…well…here they were.
It was hard to explain, and even harder to puzzle out. He wondered sometimes if Enjolras knew more than he expressed, or if he, too, didn’t understand. One moment they’d been hand in hand before the guns, and then the next - this most unexpected sequel. He supposed it was a heaven of a sort, but not many people suggested paradise was coming back to awareness, sitting on the hill of Montmartre, looking down at the city where they could still see the flames, with Enjolras silent and thoughtful beside him, before both had begun to try to puzzle through their curious and unexpected situation.
They’d ascertained a few things very quickly, walking the streets, discovering the limits of their interactions with others and deciding it was not after all, a fantasy one or the other was having the moments before their life was blinked out, a heartbeat between the bullets and the impact as stretched into days, weeks, and finally years. They could neither be seen nor touched, nor could they touch others. They could move from place to place with thought, if they concentrated. There were large periods of time in which they seemed to cease to exist or to be, and then there they were again, together, and moving through their city, together.
And of the other Amis, there was not a sign.
Enjolras seemed calmer with this entire scenario than Grantaire could have imagined. This imposed passivity for a man who was, even at his most self-contained, the most forceful being Grantaire had ever encountered should have been a sort of ghastly hell, but as it was it seemed to be a tolerable purgatory. He still had Grantaire to talk with, and that worked out quite well. Much of that terrible dance they’d been locked in during their lives - or rather, that Grantaire was locked into, with Enjolras hardly an equal partner - might have been eased if they could have talked. If he could have reigned in his excesses and not only curbed his cynicism, but the self-hate that had nurtured it.
Still, purgatory seemed as good an explanation as any, as they had encountered neither choirs of angels nor the white light of Enjolras’ Supreme Being. But still Enjolras sought a purpose and a reason. He had died with the gleam of martyrdom in his eyes, as had his friends, confident of passing on the torch of their belief. But now here he was. And they were, apparently, nowhere.
“Perhaps we are ghosts,” he said to Grantaire quietly as they walked through the streets that bustled on with activity, oblivious to the dead of June. “Some would have it that’s what ghosts are - souls in purgatory. While this land holds the graves of those who have fought for the Republic of our ideals, France unfree will never be at peace.”
“Of all the Amis, you were the one who always had half a foot in the other world.” Grantaire spoke without mockery or irony. “And yet why are they gone, and you still here?”
“I do not know. But here we are, until we must learn or do what it is that we must, so that we too may have our peace.”
“I think you have earned your peace already.” Enjolras smiled at him.
“You, too. But here we are.” Enjolras clasped his hand again, and to his relief Grantaire could feel the touch. At least that much was real.
But France, unfree, continued. In 1834, the ghosts of June rose again on the scene of rue Transnonain massacre. They found themselves there, in one of those strange, drifting shifts of scenery. Forced to walk unheard amidst the bodies.
And again, and again it happened giving force to the old saying that if was summer in Paris there was a riot, and still Enjolras did not despair. “It will come,” he said, amidst the rubble of another emeute as the paving stones were washed of blood and re-laid. “If one rising is not enough, there will always be those who stand ready to commit a bolder deed, and yet another, until we are free.”
But there were times when they haunted these familiar scenes - familiar and yet not, as slowly the changes came with the years - and Grantaire knew that both missed their lost friends terribly. Where had they gone, those bright spirits? If Enjolras and Grantaire still trod the earth, what heaven could hold Courfeyrac? What part did he have in an unearthly paradise, being so utterly warm and earthy himself? What charms could a heaven hold compared to what he had loved in this world? And Combeferre…how could Combeferre be separate from Enjolras, even in death? Enjolras had told Grantaire of each of their deaths, and Grantaire, loving him so, could see that each was a laceration on his soul.
In February 1848 the people rose. Grantaire saw Enjolras atop a barricade, his hair seeming to be one with the winter sun, his eyes blending with the winter sky, and found that even in death he could fear losing him, consumed like a flame burning high with the revolution that swept the city. But Enjolras turned his blazing eyes on Grantaire, and never again would Grantaire doubt that wherever they went, they were going together.
Then came the bloody June days again, and he thought that these, at last, would break Enjolras’ heart. If not that, then surely the Second Empire that toppled the Second Republic. But still Enjolras held fast to hope. “If not now, then another time.” They still walked the streets, once again barred with the barricades of a desperate people, to see hundreds done to death by the men of General Magnan and Police Prefect Maupas, tools of the coup d'état.
He witnessed a remarkable scene at one of the barricades in Saint-Antoine. Enjolras, his face shadowed, had been gazing down at a young man who wore the bloodied smock of a worker. Grantaire knew that he was seeing, in this crushed and huddled for, the face of another young workingman who had fought on a barricade on another summer day. Even the red hair was the same as that of the fan-maker who had cried out for the universal rights of men, who had striven to educate himself with arduous hard-won learning, who had spoken passionately about the crimes against subjugated peoples in other nations, and who was long dead and possibly forgotten by every living man, but never by the ghost who now leaned over another bloodied form that called him to mind.
Then, to the surprise of both, the man opened eyes that were already unfocused with the approach of death, and looked directly at Enjolras.
“An angel…” he breathed.
Enjolras hesitated - even in these circumstances, his honesty prohibited a lie. So Grantaire, who had no such compunctions, intervened.
“Yes, an angel, come to see you home.”
Enjolras knelt beside the boy and put a hand on his brow.
“Be at peace. You have done valiantly and well.”
He died smiling.
Grantaire waited, wondering what he would see. In all the death they had witnessed, he had seen no souls that lingered as they did. The dead simply winked out of existence - or, if they continued, did so invisible to the two of them. In this case it was no different. One moment there, the next, gone, his half-open eyes empty.
There was more and worse to come. The Siege of Paris, when they saw their beautiful city survive with her spirit just barely intact, Napoleon le Petit, as Hugo had called him, having brought them into a humiliating war with Prussia. The Paris Commune, when Enjolras finally howled his grief and rage as thousands were rounded up and executed in the wake of the fall, his fury such that Grantaire was sure it must break through the glass wall that separated them from the living, and that he would wreak some divine retribution on those who lined up the Communards and gunned them down. It was a seemingly endless echo of their own deaths in the Corinthe, writ large. He could only hold Enjolras - hold him as he screamed his transcendent anger at the wholesale slaughter of Frenchmen and women at the hands of their own people. Grantaire had learned silence in the sober years since his death, not even trying to diminish by words the enormity of what they had witnessed.
And then, for a while, they drifted. Sometimes Grantaire thought they would simply fade out of existence altogether. Perhaps that was what ghosts did. If they didn’t achieve the resolution that freed them from their earthbound existence, perhaps they just finally dissipated with time, like morning mists as the day came. How many Ancient Romans still roamed the aqueducts and roads, after all? How many Bronze Age warriors? But sometimes they were still more present than at others, more aware of the world of the living, as the Third Republic lived out the dying days of the 19th Century and into the 20th. The Belle Époque blazed into life around them, but Enjolras was still more consumed with the injustices of the Dreyfus affair and the corruption that stained the Republic’s name. And then came the conflagration of the First World War, and the horror of shells falling in the middle of Paris. They saw the weary troops with their tales of mud and the muddle of incompetent leadership on the Western Front and a nation driven near exhaustion.
And then there was Hitler.
Not since the fall of the Paris Commune had he seen the mask of Enjolras’ stoicism slip so far. He watched in grief as Paris fell, as the Vichy government betrayed their own people, as French Police rounded up French Jews and send them to their deaths, and as their people clung desperately to the hope of freedom.
But Enjolras would not turn his head, and stood witness it all, with Grantaire at his side. More than ever, he embodied the spirit of his people, of the freedom they had fought so long and hard for.
“For all their faults,” Enjolras explained as they stood outside a dingy café, listening as its patrons sang the Marseilles in defiance of the invader and his lethal hand, “and all their mistakes - the wrong paths taken, the waste, the blood and groping in the dark - no one had fought harder for their freedom than the French. And through that struggle I hope we may be a light to others in the world who share our belief in the ultimate freedom and elevation of the human race. This century is not the happy one I thought it would be, Grantaire, but through all these years it has been affirmed to me that humanity will survive, and - not content to merely survive - we will always strive to be free.”
Grantaire found himself believing every word.
On the 21 October, 1945 they joined the milling throngs on the Champs-Élysées, celebrating the elections for the Constitutant Assembly that was to draft the constitution for the Fourth Republic. There was a sense of change in the air, a desire to renew the Republic. For the first time, suffrage had been extended to women.
“Combeferre would have been proud,” Grantaire said, eyeing a group of women who waved tricolours and sang the Marseilles in a joyous triumph that could not have been more different from the furtive defiance of the café goers more than two years before. “Is this it, do you think? Will this Fourth Republic be any more enduring than the others? Or are we due for an Empire again? I lose track.”
He would never quite get used to crowds now that he could not be really one of them - not to the feel of people who walked right through you. He pulled his Enjolras away from the throng a little way to a clear space - it was very disconcerting to be talking with him while someone’s right arm extended through his torso, waving a flag.
“I hope it will endure, but they must honestly address the beliefs that are central to those that we fought for. There are so many matters that need attention - how can it be that Algiers is still occupied? We opposed Charles X’s annexation of it to further his empire building ambitions, and yet it remains a French colony now, more than a century along.”
“But still you have hope?”
“Always.” And he smiled that same warm, encompassing smile that he had given Grantaire on June 6, 1832.
“There you are - at last!” The voice came from behind them, and Grantaire was aware of recognition, and with it, a wave of happiness that brought everything to a sharp focus that he hadn’t realised had been fuzzy around the edges, an immediacy that had been leaching from his consciousness - he knew it…knew that voice. It came from a long, long time ago, but in this strange state, it was no further than away than yesterday. He turned to see several figures emerging from the crowd. The man who had spoken had curling chestnut hair, a broad smile and green eyes that danced with humour and warmth.
“Couldn’t leave while the task was unfinished, could you?” Combeferre said…Combeferre with his gentle humour and kind expression, looking at them with a happiness that he could hardly contain. “Even if you couldn’t affect the outcome, you had to be here.”
“My friends,” was all Enjolras could manage.
And then they were around him - Combeferre, Courfeyrac, Prouvaire, Feuilly, Joly, Bossuet and Bahorel. Young, whole, and full of life and joy. So much themselves that it almost hurt, as if the feeling that swelled up in his chest was too much to contain and must overthrow him. They were embracing with all the generosity of spirit that he remembered - the liveliness that he had never believed even death could extinguish.
“You have been a long time lingering here, Combeferre continued. “But it is time now, my dear friend, to go. We’ve waited long enough.”
“The French Republic can get along without you looking over it,” Courfeyrac laughed.
“You too, Grantaire” said Bahorel, with that ringing good-humour that carried with it so many rich memories. “Although I suppose that doesn’t need to be said, does it - no separating you two now.”
And Enjolras turned and held a hand out to Grantaire, as he had once before.
“Shall we go then?”
Grantaire took his hand, smiled, and said lightly, “Seeing as you permit it…”
And Enjolras, still smiling, surrounded by their friends who embraced Grantaire warmly, pulled him forward into eternity.