pro_patria_mortuus | (no subject)

Grantaire ambles after him, and then lets out a protesting noise as he finds himself squinting into sudden brightness. He throws up his arm, splattering wine-drops around, and wheels in a circle to take in the surroundings.

"There's been a mistake," he remarks, after a moment.

Enjolras has been looking sharply in all directions.

"Bahorel? Feuilly?"

Silence. Not even birds; not even insects. Certainly no humans but the two of them.

At least Grantaire's here. He can hope the other two are together as well, though there's no way to be certain.

He pulls out his watch, flicks it open. "Hello?"

"If you're hearing this, please reply."

A single chime from Grantaire's pocket is his only answer.

Grantaire pulls out his chiming watch and blinks at it, as if surprised to find it there. (Probably because he is.)

"Here comes the place which cleaves our way in twain?" he suggests.

"No river nor ramparts," Enjolras answers, absently dry, "and in any case it seems a bit late for that."

Milliways took up their shades, without any forking road.

The question of what comes after is an open one, but he doesn't see any reason to assume just yet that the Labyrinth is a way to be brought there unwilling.

If the great stones are meant as walls, they're mere suggestions of them; a man could walk easily between any two of them. All the same, if they're meant as walls, there is the suggestion of a path. Enjolras is still looking around them, though. It makes no sense that the others would be gone -- and of course, Milliways often makes no sense, he knows that perfectly well, but he's never entirely reconciled himself to that. It seems, irrationally, as if Bahorel and Feuilly might come strolling out at any moment if only he keeps looking around, for all that this is no joke either of them would play.

(Well -- Bahorel might, under some circumstances, although probably not on Enjolras. But not under these circumstances, and Feuilly wouldn't at all.)

What he gets, instead of Bahorel or Feuilly, is Joly's voice emerging from his phone, faintly and with a strange tinniness that the watch-calls have never had before: "--Labyrinth," he says, and then a crackle like somebody wadding up a ball of paper, and then "--apples! It's really quite--" and another crackle, and then silence again.

"Poorly organized, at least," agrees Grantaire, "to an unconscionable degree. Tisiphone ought to have enough bureaucrats among her guilty swarm to know how to employ them."

If there was to be a division, it seems fairly clear, three of them ought to go in one direction together; there's no natural binary that puts Bahorel and Feuilly on one side, and Enjolras with Grantaire on the other.

He looks up from his watch at last to cast a sudden rueful glance at Enjolras. "You've offended some evil-humored Fate, I think," he says, by way of an obscure apology. "Did you happen to turn down any propositions in Paris that might have come from a deity in disguise?"

Somebody with something authority over the division of afterlife labor seems to have an interest in sticking Enjolras with Grantaire, and Grantaire does not particularly appreciate being an instrument of punishment.

Edited 2015-02-02 05:25 (UTC)

Enjolras ignores this sally. (Apology, obscure or otherwise, is not what Enjolras primarily hears in any sentence that makes reference to himself and propositions.)

"Joly," he says into his watch. "Can you hear this? Your message was very indistinct."

There's no reply.

Well.

He glances at Grantaire. "We should wait a little while, I think, but I don't know if there's much point in staying here too long. Our friends seem to be elsewhere. We have this string, for what good it does, and Bossuet did say one passes through many worlds."

And they have the string, although currently its end disappears into midair. If there's any kind of door around it, it's nothing tangible.

Grantaire gestures politely with his bottle: after you.

"Fortunately, one man here -- alas, but only one! -- is a man of noted vigor and direction. As for myself, I am, as we know, gifted with legs, and, granted an aim, shall employ them."

(He doesn't bother to ask for further details on what Bossuet might or might not have said about the multiplicity of worlds involved in ... wherever they are. Apparently he's missed some relevant context, but in a place like Milliways, when has context ever helped to make sense of anything? If that's the aim, alcohol tends to work much better.)

Well, that's about what he expected. Fine; so be it.

Enjolras doesn't bother to say that Grantaire should speak up if he has any ideas, or notices anything. With any of their other friends it would be unnecessary. With Grantaire, differently so. He'll speak up, or he won't, but inviting him to will get no helpful response.

(Enjolras is not, in fact, currently annoyed with Grantaire. He came along to help, and he's more or less on his best behavior right now. It's simply that he isn't going to count on much contribution of any great use, though he'll be pleased if he gets it.)

"Help me make sure there's no door remaining here, then. If not, we'll push on."

"A door: defined as an opening in a wall. Where there exists no wall that may be opened, there can, ipso facto, exist no door. On the other hand --"

As he mulls aloud over the semantics, Grantaire has been backing along up along the length of the string; now he puts out a hand to tug it, experimentally.

He meets no resistance, and, therefore, the action is perhaps more powerful than intended. Either way, the string drops in his hand, the end trailing limply into the dusty ground.

Grantaire stares at it, effectively distracted from whatever incoherent point about doors he was about to make.

Enjolras regards it too, in silence.

Well.

Ariadne's labyrinth, apparently, was a good deal more straightforward.

It's always like this. If you are a certain kind of person, you can't resist a loose end; you see it, you pull, and the whole illusion unravels. Like this, you unmake the world.

Grantaire has to admit, there's one thing about this place: it has a distinct flair for literalized metaphor. Which doesn't make him feel much better. "Enjolras," he says, helplessly, "I'm sorry."

"If it came so easily undone, it wasn't of use to us anyway."

He stuffs the ball of string back in his back with a decisive motion.

"Better to know that now. Come, let's see what lies ahead."

...and if you're a certain kind of person, a different kind of person, even a world unmade is only an inconvenience to be overcome.

"Well --" Grantaire heaves out a breath. "-- if we're to wander endlessly through an empty landscape, with no discernible exit -- at least the weather's pleasant for it."

It's somewhere between a parody of optimism, and a genuine best effort at it.

...Really, Grantaire?

But yes, really, and the fact is that Grantaire is making an effort; the fact is that he could be saying plenty of other things, and he isn't doing so. He's here, following along, for their friends' sakes, making an effort.

It's that that makes Enjolras's tone patient -- almost friendly -- for all that he doesn't look back. "We'll find an exit."

What lies ahead, apparently, is more of the same, but with the great stones lying gradually closer together. Ahead, they more clearly delineate paths. Even further, it looks as if they might make outright walls, instead of only fence-posts.

Grantaire looks at the walls. The ominous encroaching passages do not, it must be said, hold a great deal of homely appeal.

Still: "Ipso facto - the possibility of a door."

Enjolras nods.

On they walk, and the ominous encroaching passages continue to encroach.

The silence also encroaches.

"I took a visit once to the catacombs," says Grantaire; it's the first thing that comes into his head. He takes a gulp from his near-empty bottle, and goes on, "That was in the halcyon days when any M. Surveillant might bring his private party down for a refreshing dose of ars moriendi. Ah! Now that was a friendly atmosphere; everywhere you looked, a face with a grin. I don't know that I've ever felt so cheered. I don't think much of our current situation by comparison. Not so convivial, nor so instructive. Come, somebody present me with a moral! It's been a good half hour since our last metaphorical interlude."

Edited 2015-02-05 03:22 (UTC)

Grantaire can generally be counted upon to fight back against encroaching silence, whether or not one would prefer him to do so.

Enjolras ignores the call for a moral. Grantaire can also generally be counted upon to provide his own.

"Do you see anything that looks like a door?"

Two stones have fallen against each other up ahead, making an archway, but that seems by accident rather than design. The rock-edged hallway stretches on before and behind without deviation.

(There's a Δ scratched around knee height on one of the rocks.)

"A boundary," returns Grantaire, "a barrier, a portal, an aperture, a perimeter, a threshold -- perhaps, yes. A door?" Grantaire shrugs, eloquently. Each man must decide for himself how wide the definition of 'door' may stretch.

Thank you for your assistance, Grantaire.

Enjolras suppresses a roll of the eyes, and carries on along the path and under the arch.

Having passed through, he stops abruptly, and glances back.

For a moment, it's difficult to see anything through the archway -- but only a moment, before Grantaire comes swinging through. His eyebrows rise as he sees Enjolras looking back at him.

"We may live in an enlightened age, Enjolras, but me, I'm a poor superstitious fellow at heart, and the classicist in me leans against looking backwards when climbing out of Hell."

It's difficult to see for another reason too: there's a roof over their heads now, heavy pale stone quite different from the dark slabs of before. If this is a cavern, it's been worked and expanded by humans; if it's a hallway, it's extremely well-made. A torch is set into a wall sconce a little ways off, and smoke from it coils sluggishly.

"This is neither Hell nor Hades. In any case," he adds somewhat dryly, "neither of us fit the role."

Both of them would make extremely poor Orpheuses, and extremely poor Eurydices, let alone together.

"Apparently that was a door." He's looking around as he says it, at the walls and ceiling and the way the corridor or tunnel curves gradually away.

They still seem to be alone. No footsteps, anyway, and no voices, and no forms or motion to be seen.

He asked Bar for matches and a candle or lantern, and got matches and a little device like a colorful smooth stick with a glass lens at one end and a button set into the side. It takes him a moment of fumbling to turn the thing on.

"You're very certain on that score," says Grantaire -- meaning the first one, and goes on, with virtuous hypocrisy, "For myself, I embrace prudence."

For all Grantaire knows, everything that's happened since the Musain has been Hell or Hades, or some strange variant thereupon; it's never been entirely ruled out.

The light blinks on, and he glance down at it. "Thus armed," he remarks, "you need not wait upon the landscape to generate metaphors, but are perfectly well equipped to supply your own."

Enjolras deems all of this unworthy of response, choosing instead to shine his stick-lantern on the walls.

They're... walls. Nothing especially familiar about them, and nothing immediately alien either.

"We might as well venture on."

There's nothing to tie a string onto. All the same, this corridor is sufficiently reminiscent of a labyrinth that he elects to unspool some to allow the loose end to trail on the ground behind them.

The most prominent distinction between this landscape and the last is a certain musty and faintly rotting smell that pervades it, intermixed with the smell of the torch-smoke. Though they can't see them, it seems evident that they are not the only living things within the bounds of the structure.

"From Eurydice to Ariadne," Grantaire remarks -- though he's careful not to disturb the string as it trails down. "Enjolras, I pray you, at all costs avoid Medea."