CROSSPOSTS |FROM MY AO3|

WE PUSH AWAY THE UNIMAGINABLE | LES MIS

1832~

Grantaire opens his eyes, feeling them sticky with sleep. The last night was a blur- he can barely recall it. He shifts himself from his uncomfortable position on the Musain floor, wondering why the window is shattered-

Oh. Oh.

He sees Enjolras hanging out the window. Something hard and hot rises in this throat, and all he can do do was run down the dented stairs as fast as he is able, which isn't very. Because Enjolras couldn't be dead, he was incapable of death, wasn't he? The idea of him being able to die was as foreign as the sun disappearing. Until it wasn't.

He stumbles across pavement, into an alleyway, unable to look any longer at the reality. It slowly comes back to him, everything, all of it. And him, the drunk fool who slept through the battle. Perhaps it is fate's will that now he goes to drink more. He buys a cheap bottle at a shabby pub- not the Musain- before running back into a street corner and pouring the bitter stuff into his mouth. Maybe if he's lucky, it'll knock him out and he can get some rest. It's not like he cares about his health, but his head hurts like hell and he'd rather it not.

His dreams are full of smoke and screams and Enjolras and a white flag dyed red with blood. Waking up is both a relief and a curse.

And so he begins his half-life, not living anymore, only surviving. He sleeps on the streets, wears his same old clothes, day after day, stealing what he can get and begging for what he can't, each day another reminder of the shell of a human he's become. He's always on the edge of a hangover, swimming muddily through alcohol-induced confusion, unable to do anything but empty his head of all thoughts. It hurts less than the alternative. Believing in things just gets you killed.

He visits the cemetary... sometime. Catches Joly and Bossuet up on the gossip, complains to Eponine about unrequited loves, apologizes over and over again, never able to stay more than an hour, sometimes less. It hurts too much. Carrying on one-sided conversations is hard on the converser, and Grantaire has never been one for challenges. The one person he never mentions, never looks for, is Enjolras. Because he can still remember the last conversation they had- him half-drunk on wine, Enjolras half-drunk on the revolution. Enjolras had said he was incapable of living and breathing and willing and dying. And he was right. Grantaire couldn't even die when he was supposed to. Always out of sync with the universe, wasn't he. In love with the one person who hated him more than anything else, and not even able to tear himself away. He was a moth to a flame. Enjolras was perfect because he was untouchable, and untouchable because he was perfect.

Enjolras may have been an Icarus flying too close to the sun, but Grantaire was Perdix, who fell because of him. Daedalaus's guilt over Icarus drove him to shove Perdix off the tower, and as for Grantaire, he is both the murderer and the murdered.

One night, however, a few months into this torture called existance, he gets himself drunk- well, drunker than usual, to the point of complete incoherancy. He remembers being forced roughly out of the local wineshop, feeling his vision go fuzzy, stumbling his way to the one place he could think of- the cemetary where he should've been to begin with. He leans against a gravestone, not knowing or caring whose it may be, feeling his consciousness dip to black just like it had that night...

Incapable of living and breathing and willing and dying...

Incapable of dying...

Of dying...

The words are the only thing ringing in his ears and in his mind, like a sadistic bell chorus, and he feels the hot hatred and anger flowing through them, twisting into a chorus of hateful Apollos merging through his skull, and Grantaire deserves every bit of it, every single bit, because he is a failure and a mistake and a useless gutter rat, and in a spiral of thoughts like sharp rocks or metal bullets, he passes out, likely a result of the absurd amount of alchohol he had consumed earlier.