pro_patria_mortuus | (no subject)

The barricade is breached; the insurgency is fallen, the defense in its last moments. Enjolras has retreated with the others left alive -- few enough they are, stalwart souls, none known to him by name -- to the second floor of the Corinth. The staircase has been hacked to bits. The hole in the floor where it leads is surrounded by corpses, bleeding, sprawled, moaning, dead. The soldiers of the army and the National Guard and the Municipal Guard have the numbers. Many of them have died, many are maimed, but this ending has not been in doubt since it became clear that no reinforcements would come. A barricade cannot hold forever against a pitched assault by superior numbers and artillery. Paris didn't rise, the National Guard didn't turn in significant numbers, the people lie shivering in their bed of oppression. The only gift left to give the future is a brave death.

Courfeyrac is dead. Combeferre is dead. Joly, Bossuet, and Feuilly fell -- they are not here, they must be dead, or will be soon. Marius too. Jean Prouvaire and Bahorel died yesterday, already mourned. All his friends have fallen already. The future will dawn without them, because of them, and they are gone. Enjolras will soon follow.

Grantaire is slumped at the small table in the corner. Dead, no doubt, of a stray bullet, Enjolras thinks with a moment of sorrow. No one could sleep through this. It's a pity; this was never his fight or his dream. He should never have stayed -- but they could hardly spare men to carry him away, and what's done is done; the Republic has lost many of her children today. Around Grantaire are strewn bodies, hacked and bloody.

No more bullets, no more cartridges, no more bottles, no more swords left. Enjolras holds the stump of his carbine's barrel. It served well enough as a canne de combat, but it's shortened now: he broke the stock over the heads of soldiers trying to mount through the stairwell's hole. He shattered their heads, but most of his rifle's length has shattered too. If Enjolras is wounded he feels nothing of it. No one else is alive in this room, and the soldiers are mounting over their comrades' shoulders. They wear bloody masks of savagery; their bayonets are smeared with blood and gore; their rifles are pointed at him.

Enjolras's fingers clench tighter on his wreck of a carbine. Head high, proud in defeat, he waits.

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No one could sleep through this -- ah, but Enjolras always thinks in extremes.

Most people could not sleep through this. The gunshots, the shattered glass and breaking casks, the shouts of fury and screams of despair -- all the tumult of a battle carried out in an enclosed space, with no quarter asked and none given -- most people could never have slept through all this.

But then, most people do not make use of stout, absinthe and brandy to serve them as a night-posset. In combination with this potion, the noise of the battle serves Grantaire as a lullaby.

The soldiers march, and Grantaire sleeps on.

Edited 2013-06-18 19:09 (UTC)

He's outnumbered, twenty to one; one way or another, he'll die here. But they hang back. There's no mercy in this slaughterhouse; it's not mercy that keeps the soldiers encircling him at a distance, the billiard table between them, their muskets aimed at his heart. They're angry -- savagely wounded, bloody, relentless, barbarous.

Of course they're angry. He killed their brothers. They were his brothers too, all of them children of France, but never mind; he killed his share of them and more; and he was a leader of the barricade, and he is one of the last alive. Enjolras waits for the bullet, the bayonet, the soldier to come near enough for him to strike another blow.

"This is the leader!" cries one, and then there's a tumult of words, clamoring above the yells and groans and bootstamps. "He's the one who killed the artilleryman." "Here's the leader." "Let him stay. Let's shoot him on the spot."

Well then.

Enjolras's stump of a carbine is useless. He throws it away.

"Shoot me," he says, and crosses his arms. He stands facing the soldiers' muskets, his chest a clear target.

The soldiers fall silent. One man's weapon drops. The others do not budge. All is hushed.

He feels only calm. Afternoon sunlight streams through the window behind him, golden and pure; it seems he can see the dawn of a brighter future, far ahead, beckoning, the glorious light of a free world. His death is a step towards that dawn. He has lived for nothing else. All his life, it seems to him now, has pointed towards this moment.

Edited 2013-06-20 22:36 (UTC)

There's no noise.

Paris is a city of sounds, the cafe a hive of activity, the Amis de l'ABC a haven of hubbub; Grantaire has snored peacefully among all this a hundred times, as the world around him chattered and clattered its way about its business.

But now, all is silent. When a carbine drops, it echoes painfully in the rafters of the Corinth; when the National Guardsman who dropped it mutters, "it's as though I'm about to shout a flower," no one can pretend that they didn't hear.

In the silence, Grantaire wakes.

Enjolras's fine-boned, bloodied face does not alter; he doesn't sneer, or smile, or look to the man speaking; his cool, indifferent dignity grows perhaps slightly more remote, as he stands with tranquil authority facing down a dozen rifles.

A flower? He hopes their comrades didn't dither so over Prouvaire.

A length of red cloth lies thrown across the billiard table. A flag, makeshift, riddled with bullet holes, stained with blood and powder, its end lost somewhere beneath table and corpses. Enjolras takes the free end up in one hand, and lifts it high.

"Take aim!" cries the sergeant, and a dozen rifles are cocked, but an officer commands, "Wait." To Enjolras, he says, "Do you wish your eyes bandaged?"

"No."

"Was it really you who killed the sergeant of artillery?"

"Yes."

A terrible thing, to shoot in cold calculation a young and earnest soldier, a man doing his duty to his country, a man who might be your brother. A terrible thing -- but a necessary one, and Enjolras has done a worse deed at this barricade in obedience to necessity.

The officer offers no more delays.

Edited 2013-06-21 18:27 (UTC)

"Vive la Republique!"

The shout rings through the room, loud and firm. "Count me in!"

Grantaire's head is ringing with the splitting pounding of a hangover -- hah, but that doesn't much matter now, does it? Or it won't, in a moment. Anyway, it's counterbalanced by the lightness of his heart; it's amazing how easy this is, how clear his course seems.

He'd almost been too late. The terror of it had jolted him straight to his feet, once he'd realized what was happening. Almost, he had been too late, and woken to an empty world -- but he's in time. And it's easy.

"Vive la Republique!" he cries again, almost gaily, and starts to make his way up to the front.

Edited 2013-06-23 03:49 (UTC)

The soldiers are startled; Enjolras little less. A moment ago, Grantaire was one more corpse among many, and the sergeant about to direct his men to fire.

But for Enjolras, at least, the surprise passes swiftly. He watches Grantaire's progress towards him -- with firm strides, and a conviction Grantaire rarely shows for anything.

The deadly muskets might as well not be present, for all Enjolras acknowledges them.

He comes to Enjolras' side, pushing through the National Guardsmen with as little concern for them as if they were so many pieces of furniture. He isn't afraid they'll shoot before he is ready, not now. He is in time. No one is going to interrupt.

"Two at one shot," he declares -- and then he turns to the man next to him, and for the first time a look of uncertainty crosses his face.

Nothing the National Guardsman can do now can stop this, but a word from Enjolras --

"Will you permit it?"

Enjolras, after all, knows better than anyone how little he has earned it, this right of dying in the same breath.

Enjolras knows, of course, what Grantaire is dying for. He's not truly offering up his death to the revolution. He's offering it up to Enjolras. But everything Enjolras has and everything he is has always been given to the French Republic and to a brighter future. That's truer now than ever before.

Besides, permission isn't his to grant. It's the birthright of every man and woman to die for a belief. Grantaire has always had any permission that matters.

In one hand is the red flag of the revolution, battered, bloodstained, held high. With the other, Enjolras grasps Grantaire's hand in answer and in fraternity, and he smiles.

Edited 2013-06-23 04:36 (UTC)

Grantaire knows his hand is sweaty, and his head is still pounding, and he still smells of last night's alcohol --

-- and it doesn't matter. It doesn't any of it matter. Enjolras has never looked at him like this before, like he's someone who is worthy of respect.

He's not afraid, he isn't afraid, death is only a restfulness that he has long half-sought, but nonetheless he finds himself clutching Enjolras' hand like (ironically enough) a lifeline. He is capable of this, he is capable of it; believing, thinking, willing, living and --

The guns go off.

A sensation like being punched in the chest, and then air is rushing past, as if he's falling; his back strikes something, it must be the wall; the sun is somehow in his eyes, golden and dazzling, and all Enjolras can see is dawn, though it was late afternoon only a moment ago, and Grantaire's hand was in his; his eyes are open, and all the noises of guns and shouting men seem far away.

The world turns from gold to red, and then black.

Edited 2013-06-23 06:00 (UTC)