Enjolras knocks on Prouvaire and Bahorel's door out of long habit. Their old knock, still; it matters far less now, but there's no reason to actually break that habit. But, because it's Prouvaire and Bahorel's door, and Bahorel treats it as nearly an insult of honor for a friend to actually use manners instead of barging in, he also opens the door shortly afterward.

(There is a brief pause, though, just in case a response was going to come. There are things Enjolras has no interest in walking in on, even if the room's occupants -- well, mostly Bahorel -- wouldn't care.)

When you're young, athletic, dead, and bored at Milliways, the available hobbies get surprisingly limited. In other words, for those who enjoy sparring, there's a whole lot of time to practice in.

Enjolras and Chuck Hansen, as they frequently do, have been killing some time this way. So when they come down the stairs, perfunctorily cleaned up but still kind of sweaty, it's in order to head to Bar for something to drink.

"--in case you aren't holding enough stuff," Chuck grouses, as they round a table.

Enjolras returns the mild look of someone who's heard this complaint before, but doesn't entirely understand it. "They are handy," he points out.

The Amis this year are from the same daemonverse AU as last time.

Before, they were coming from the uprising of 1830, which for them was defeat snatched from the jaws of victory. Now, it's a year later, in 1831. They've had a year of continuing to work secretly against the government -- and, thanks to Milliways resources, to work towards things like public health (clean water! washing hands! basic understanding of germ theory!) and education and so forth with rather more knowledge and resources than they had in canon. Accordingly, the group is somewhat more central to the revolutionary scene and somewhat more focused on science and public health than it was in canon.

As before, they're all alive. It's about a year before they die in canon -- but, since this is an AU with some things going differently, there's no guarantee that'll go down the same way either.

Other than that, they're all pretty much the same as the versions you're used to, except that each of them has their soul as an external bird of some sort that hangs around, talks, etc. They've been coming to Milliways for quite a while now. But it's up to you whether they've met your character before.

The Milliways grounds are limited, no matter how much magic expanse of forest they contain, and doubly so to someone who hungers quietly for a city. Still, they're a change of scene, and a way to stretch one's legs. And they're pretty too, which Enjolras is largely oblivious to, but many people including his companion are not.

So: Enjolras and Bahorel are walking, arm in arm, beside the lake.

Bahorel is attempting to explain something about the logistics of television show creation. In the interests of clarity, he's restraining his (strong) artistic opinions to frequent asides.

Enjolras is in his room, settled on the sofa with a book on the history of Thedas that he borrowed from the library. Every so often he makes a note in his commonplace notebook.

Combeferre isn't in, but he left the television playing his favorite channel, one which shows documentaries about the natural world. Enjolras turned the volume quieter and left it at that. Right now a man is enthusing, with measured speech and deliberate enunciation, about the wonders of water in subterranean caverns.

He's spoken to some of the others; the rest aren't answering their watches. Asleep, maybe, or affected by this strange switching of bodies too. Combeferre went in search of anyone he could find a while ago. A pragmatic division of labor, especially since he's still recognizably himself.

This remains weird. Enjolras is doing his best to ignore that, by dint of focusing on immediately practical matters. They're pressing enough that it's working reasonably well.

He turns his watch's hands to the correct number to call the last of their number. "Grantaire," he says into it. "I know I don't sound like myself, but it's Enjolras. Where are you right now?"

Maybe Grantaire will answer, or maybe he's passed out.

Enjolras stands on a street so familiar as to be briefly disorienting: the sharp slope, the clustered houses of red-roofed grey stone, the worn cobblestones and gutters, the Chapel of Saint Michel d'Aiguilhe keeping watch on the city from its lofty summit, the mountains looming beyond. The chipped gutter where a cart of iron bars overturned in '18, the pear tree with the crooked branch overlooking the Reynauds' wall, the closed shutters that old M. Solvain opens every morning to call down to the dairyman on his rounds. Le Puy-en-Velay, and the house of his childhood.

He stands and stares. The light is clear and golden: early morning, with the crispness of fall. The far-off fields are a patchwork of green and brown: harvest time. He would have had to think to list these details, if asked, but with them spread before him he knows their meaning in his bones. No one is in sight, not even any neighborhood cats patrolling garden walls, but from other streets comes the rattle of cartwheels, the steady plodding of hooves, the susurration of voices just out of earshot. The city's life, just beyond where he stands. But everything is stillness on this street.

He takes a few steps forward, hearing his own footsteps loud in the morning air, until he can touch the familiar wall. He isn't sure if he'll even be able to; perhaps his arm will pass through the wall like any ghost. Perhaps all of this will melt away like mist. But it's solid, and so is he. The rough scrape of mortar and stone against his fingertips is viscerally familiar. Auvergne has its own stones; they aren't the same as those of Paris. He'd nearly forgotten that difference. Slowly, Enjolras brings his hand away, and rubs his fingers together.

All of this feels real.

The creak of hinges is another sound he wouldn't have been able to remember so clearly unprompted, but when it comes he finds his head jerking toward it before his mind has quite caught up. So he's looking right at the door when it opens to show an old, tired man, limping heavily.

No. His father.

For an instant, all he can do is stare. He doesn't know what his own face looks like, except slack and blank with shock. He doesn't have the time to wonder if his father can see him, because that dear, grave, scarred face (and was it always so lined?) goes abruptly grey and awful. His father staggers on his bad leg, clutching at his cane and the doorway, and it's that that frees Jean-Sébastien from his paralysis; he can't just stand here and watch his father stumble, he can't keep watching his face with that expression on it, and he's rushing forward to catch his father's arm and steady him even as the old man rasps in a terrible voice, "Bastien?"

It strikes his heart -- that, too, he'd nearly forgotten; his father hasn't called him that nickname in years, not since he was a young child, and rarely enough then -- and there's a tangled moment as the two of them try to catch each other by the arms at once, Jean-Sébastien to support and his father to seize. Then his father is pulling him close in an embrace too fierce for awkwardness, even though they haven't hugged in years either, and Jean-Sébastien is supporting him with arms around him, and looking over his father's shoulder into the entryway of the house he grew up in. Thank God he's solid enough for this, too. His father's cane goes clattering off the stoop. "Father," he says, and a roughness catches in his throat.

His father's hands clutch tighter at his shoulder and the back of his coat. "Jean-Sébastien. Am I dreaming?"

Jean-Sébastien closes his eyes at the naked emotion in that voice, usually so calm, and at the answer he knows he has to give. Whatever this is -- however real it is -- Milliways is real too. So was dying.

"I think I am, at least," he says. "Maybe you are too. There was no mistake."

The silence that follows is terrible, even though it's brief. But he can't lie.

His father pulls back. He stands on his own balance again, though his leg must be paining him on a cool morning like this, and clasps his son's shoulders. Jean-Sébastien's arms fall to his sides. He lets himself be looked over, and scrutinizes his father in turn.

His father's hair has been more than half silver for years now. His limp has always been bad, since it was broken by grapeshot at Albeck months before Jean-Sébastien was born. His back is still straight, his hands steady. But now there's no red at all left in his white hair, and the lines in his face are graven deep. The hands on Jean-Sébastien's shoulders are an old man's, paper-skinned. Has it been so long, or did his father age so fast when his only child died? Or had he only not noticed, before? He's afraid he knows the answer, and it's not that he missed anything.

"Father," he says, low. He takes one of his father's hands, pulls it gently away from his shoulder, and kisses it: a gesture of deep respect, as unprecedented as the embrace his father pulled him into a moment before. But what's normal about a dead son standing on his living father's doorstep? "I'm sorry."

His father seizes his shoulders with both hands again, and the glare that fixes on him is full of sudden and real fury. Jean-Sébastien meets it, unflinching. "Never say that," his father snaps. "Not for France. You did -- my son, my boy, you chose death for the greatest of causes. I won't hear anyone cheapen a martyr's name."

Enjolras shakes his head. "Not that. I don't regret my death." In spite of everything, his father's face twists the slightest bit at the word. "But I'm sorry to have left you alone."

One hand moves to the side of his neck in a rough caress. "You're with your mother now."

Jean-Sébastien doesn't know what his face shows, but he knows even a moment of having no idea what to say is too long. And he has no idea how to answer that, none at all.

"--What?" The deflated half-whisper is awful. Jean-Sébastien's eyes, which had dropped for an instant, jerk back to his father's face, and he grasps his father's shoulders in return with an unthinking, impetuous fervor.

"I'm very well, Father. I swear it. The world beyond is stranger than I ever imagined -- I don't know how to describe it to you, it won't make sense if I try -- but I'm with my dearest friends, all of us together. I'll see her someday, surely, but it's good, where I am. You mustn't worry about me. I died for the Republic, with the bravest comrades anyone could ask for, and the Republic will come, France will reestablish liberty and fraternity and equality on her soil. I give you my word that I'm well."

"Ah!" It's a sigh, and his father's pale blue eyes close on a damp glitter.

For a long moment they only stand there, on the stone threshold, in the early morning sunlight of an Auvergne that may or may not be a dream. Then his father's eyes open again, and he gazes upon Jean-Sébastien with a loving sorrow that is, he thinks, a little lighter than it was.

"You're not here for long, are you?"

Jean-Sébastien shakes his head regretfully. The regret isn't only for his father: this isn't Paris, but it's France, and waking up will feel like wrenching himself away from his own heart. Already he knows that. "I don't know how long. But I know that."

"Will you come in? I may be dreaming, but I want to know everything. You must stay a little while, my boy, please."

"Of course." His heart hurts. There's no other answer he could ever, ever give. "Of course I will."

His father's cane lies still on the front walk. Jean-Sébastien draws away only long enough to stoop and pick it up, and then they go together into the Enjolras house, into the tidy quiet and the rooms inhabited by memories. He doesn't know how long this will last, but he'll stay as long as he can.

Bahorel was volubly gleeful at the prospect of learning swordfighting from a genuine medieval English knight who lived and made war with his longsword, and equally gleeful at the prospect of teaching him canne de combat. Enjolras isn't surprised at all by this; it's why he felt comfortable making the offer to Harry Percy in the first place.

This would probably be true even without Bahorel's current level of boredom. As it is, he'd probably leap at the chance to teach canne de combat to a dressmaker's dummy.

(A poor analogy. He's probably already done that, too.)

At any rate, the idea being mutually agreeable and their schedules being largely free, Enjolras and Bahorel and Harry have made their way together to the practice room upstairs.

Whether Enjolras has been asleep for a night, or a week, or some other and less easily definable stretch of Milliways time is a matter for metaphysical speculation. Not his, however. So far as he's concerned, he went to bed last night; now, slowly, he wakes.

The sunlight is bright on his face. There's a faint background noise of gurgling from Combeferre's copper still in the bathroom. The sheets are twisted around his feet, and Jeanne is--

No. There's no eagle on the bedpost, and why would there be?

Enjolras rouses himself enough to sit up, and scrub his hands over his face and through his tangled curls. That dream was not only long and extremely vivid, but it seems to be persistent. Scraps and shreds of it still hang about the morning air. One moment he's entirely present in the moment of this morning, and the next moment he's nearly convinced that Jeanne is a flash of white in the corner of his eye.

(The eagle -- the soul-birds that followed around each of them -- is obviously some unfathomable construct of dream-logic. But the rest of the dream is easy enough to account for. A vivid dream of coming from 1830 along with several of his friends, with action and anger fresh in their hands, with the Milliways library at their fingertips, with the ability to bring home notes and facts and forewarning and even microscopes and water filters -- it's easy enough to see how his mind manufactured such a thing. Even now he aches with the fierce urge to be doing something about it all. That's nothing new that this dream brought; every single day at Milliways he's felt that fierce aching frustration, and every day he's set it aside.)

He scrubs his face again, and extricates his feet, and goes to start the coffee and wash up.