Work Text:
1828
When he thinks of Enjolras, he does not think of Paris. It is the strangest of things, for they had found themselves in Paris. It was in Paris that they uncovered their shared machinery-- as though their friendship had been built in some far-distant era, and been lost, had somehow gone unseen, till they found it at last: the two of them, together, and set to work with their excavating. It had already a shape and purpose, their friendship. It was perfect, in every feature complete. Combeferre alone could never have designed such architecture, such elegant interlocking.
When he thinks of Enjolras, he thinks of Aix-en-Provence, and of a late summer evening when they walked through the countryside, slow in the dusk, hardly even speaking. They heard the doves calling in the treetops; heard cowbells, and the rustling of sheep; and the heat seemed to hang like smoke in the air. Enjolras had been very quiet throughout the whole visit. Combeferre's mother had said, "Such a private young man," but Combeferre had thought: that is not it, precisely.
Out in the country there was kind of cleanness. Combeferre noticed it then as never before. He knew Enjolras did too; Enjolras had said, when they stopped for breath, leaning against a fencepost, "You might think that there was no one on earth, that man had been erased from every surface. What a relief it would be, to just start over. Don't you ever think?"
"I think," Combeferre had started-- then stopped. "The houses would still be there; the fields would still be tilled; the roads would still be here, that the Romans built, and so would we ever really start over?"
Enjolras had looked down. "I take your meaning."
"Do you?"
Enjolras had not answered then, but simply walked on. Combeferre was not affronted; their style of conversation did not open or close, but paused for long spaces and then resumed. So they continued, into the stillness. At times the sky contained great flocks of starlings, that rose and fell and swooped; then sometimes an owl would come haunting, after.
So perhaps it was not so startling when they heard, from the fields, the hi-bou! hi-bou! of one such bird, seeming very near them. Enjolras stopped as if transfixed.
"It is only an owl," Combeferre said. "Some of the farm-people think they are very unlucky, but I do not credit it."
"No," Enjolras said. "It is not rational."
"It is Roman, that old belief, I suppose-- one thinks of the sola bubo that called Dido to her death."
Enjolras was looking out into the shadows. It was not quite so dark yet that Combeferre could not see the shape of his face, or the fall of pale hair that framed it; but dark enough that all seemed washed of color, lit only spectrally by the moon. At the horizon, the light was not out yet: the sun had only just sunk from view, and some blue remained, a last trace of brightness.
Then from the far fields came the sound of wingbeats: a great brown owl, heaving itself towards them. Its eyes were fierce circles. Its wings were huge. Combeferre stepped back, meaning to let it pass.
But Enjolras stepped forwards, closer to the creature. He stretched out his arm, with an expression of entrancement.
"Don't," Combeferre said. "It is not a tame bird. It is hunting."
But the owl circled Enjolras once, twice-- an eagle-owl, Combeferre thought, though he could not make out its markings. He waited for it to move out towards the fields, or dive at them-- but it did neither of these things.
Instead it alighted on Enjolras' forearm in one slow swooping movement. Its talons gripped his coat. It folded its wings. Combeferre heard Enjolras catch his breath, saw his wrist sink briefly.
He said in alarm, "Enjolras--"
"No; it's all right. Only it startled me."
They regarded one another: Enjolras and the owl. There seemed to be between them some kind of communion, an intimacy of wild things. The owl tilted its head, adjusted its stance. Enjolras nodded gravely. Combeferre watched with a sensation that he was dreaming. It was almost painful: Enjolras' forearm trembling under the weight; the owl's foreign, predator beauty.
At the last the wind stirred, and the owl, without warning, swept off. It had not made a sound. The shadows swallowed it. Enjolras watching it go unreadably. The sleeve of his coat was badly torn; there was, Combeferre thought, blood underneath. But neither of them spoke for long stunned moments. Even then, it was only to turn their course homewards. They walked together. Silence was on them: the silence of the monastery, where monks held their tongues in some holy presence. Combeferre was not sure he believed in God, but he believed in something, something else, something holy.
"Yes," Enjolras said, when they were back in the city-- abruptly, without preface; continuing the thread of their past discussion. "I take your meaning; only I wish--"
Moths were scudding in darkness about them: Korscheltellus lupulina, looking for their lamp. Moonlight made Enjolras' profile troubled. Combeferre could read most of his expressions. "Yes," he said, "but civilization moves forwards, only forwards, and never, ever back-- not even for you, or for Saint-Just."
"Do you know everything that I wish?" His look at pre-emption was almost a pout; his voice was petulant.
Combeferre had to laugh. It was a good, warm sound, and it swept the wilderness from them. "I am sure," he said gravely, "you are a well of rare wishes."
Enjolras said pensively, "Perhaps I am." His cheeks were flushed, from fading annoyance, or some emotion that he had suppressed. He could have been an emperor, in his haughty grandeur, but he was not; he was only Enjolras, and Combeferre's breath caught just for a moment.
"If it returns your dignity," he offered, keeping his voice light, "I am convinced you know my every wish."
Enjolras frowned at him. "No. How could I? You are quite opaque."
Combeferre sighed rather fondly, and flicked his shoulder. "You know," he said.
Later, he cleaned the wounds on Enjolras' forearm, the marks where the talons had dug in.
"I'm afraid," he said, squinting, "that this may scar."
"It doesn't hurt," Enjolras said. He was sitting quite calmly, without his shirt on. Combeferre could see the marks of his ribs, faint shadows like the strings of a harp. (He did not know why he thought this.)
"Whether it hurts is not the issue."
"I'm not afraid of scars."
"That does you no credit." He wound a bandage about the wounds. The muscle below his fingers jumped and tensed. He kept his touch light. There was pain there, he thought, though Enjolras would not admit it. "You ought to be more afraid. Perhaps of some things."
"Why?" Enjolras tilted his head, curious.
"You could die."
"I think it is very likely."
"Of something trivial, of nonsense. And what if, later, a sacrifice is demanded? Like--" He could not think of a Roman martyr. They had all gone out of his head. "Like Mutius Scaevola."
"He did not die," Enjolras pointed out. "Well-- one supposes he did. But before, during the siege of the Etruscans, when he was brought before Porsinna, he placed his hand in the sacrifice-fire to show that he feared neither pain nor death."
Combeferre took Enjolras' hand and folded it gently, holding it within his fist. "I am not quite ready to call you Left-Handed."
"They released him, though. The Etruscans. He lived."
"Courage does not make you immortal."
"Not courage," Enjolras said. He lay back on the bed where he was sitting, raising his arm over his head and peering at the bandage with clinical interest. "And why should you care so much? After all, it is my body."
Combeferre, still perched on the edge of the bed, watched him: his clean lines, all sharp curves and angles, the cove where the wings of his collarbone met. He had once been as white as a Roman marble, but now the sun had burned him some. A spray of freckles, impish and unsolemn, showed at his cheekbones. His hair, in defiance of natural law, seemed to have darkened; it was gold now, with a fiercer and brighter glow, where once it had been colorless. Combeferre let himself think, He is beautiful. He did not let himself say it aloud. It did not need to be said.
Instead: he said, "Someone must keep your hand from the fire, or patch you up when you have burned it."
He shucked himself of shirt and lay beside Enjolras. It was too hot for them for them to curl together, or even touch skin-to-skin. A lazy wind from off the Arc stirred the open curtains, smelling faintly stagnant. It was a smell, Combeferre thought, of green things growing: of a wet dark aliveness. He shivered abruptly. Again his bare skin prickled. An animal instinct, to ward off death.
Enjolras, restless, shifted. "What is the answer?" he said suddenly, after a moment.
"What?"
"Why do you care how I live?"
Combeferre sighed. "I am not answering that."
"Why?"
"Because you know the answer."
"I--"
Combeferre reached out and drew him close, despite the heat. They were so near to one another: breath to breath in the shadow. Enjolras hmmed, a quiet and comfortable noise.
"You know," Combeferre said.
So now in Paris, the summer gone, when he looks at Enjolras, he thinks back to Enjolras' arm outstretched: the owl settling on it, large-eyed and eerie, an omen that Combeferre could not-- would not-- interpret. He thinks this in Enjolras' study, when they have worked into twilight and are made gaunt by the glow of the lamp. Enjolras, his hair tied back, frowns at a broadsheet. There is ink on his cuff from a leaking pen, and he hums very slightly in hard concentration, and there is nothing fierce about him, not remotely. Yet all the same, the scars remain, where talons gripped him: white marks like scraped letters under his sleeve. Like the stone inscriptions scholars find in Persia, eons old-- a form of writing that no one can read.
Enjolras sighs and drops the paper. "I feel like Marat," he says. "Some centuries ahead of my time; less a politician than a mad prophetess."
"Well," Combeferre says gravely, "you are too clean to be Marat. You have spent not one night in the sewer, I would guess; but as for prophetesses, you would make a very fine one. You have just the complexion. Shall you give me a prophecy now?"
Enjolras wrinkles his nose. It is such an unexpected expression, on his face, that Combeferre cannot help but laugh. Enjolras scowls. "I prophesy that you will fall in the river."
"That is very tame, as prophecies go. You ought to consult Jehan; I am certain that he could make it wilder, probably by involving bears in it."
"I find my prophecy perfectly sufficient."
"And what if I do fall in the river, tomorrow or the next day? How will you feel then?"
"I shall set up on the Pont Neuf as a fortuneteller, and profit abominably from my gift."
Combeferre laughs again, enjoying the picture thus painted. "And you will have a dancing bear, which will please Jehan, and a crystal ball, and a little silken tent, and a brazier from which exotic smoke rises--"
"It sounds a most unappealing future."
"Yes. You had better stick with outrageous sedition."
"Mm," Enjolras says, dissatisfied. "If only sedition felt more different from fortunetelling, as an activity."
Combeferre comes to sit close by him. "You do not feel, however, that you are Cassandra."
"No. The reverse."
"Your prophecy--"
"-- is happiness," Enjolras says simply. "And yet no one believes me."
"It is a very curious thing," Combeferre agrees. "No one is happy, yet propose they may be happy-- offer a schematic for their transfiguring-- and they resist. They want nothing of the sort."
"They want a sort of happiness-as-object. An egg they could break, a golden egg from a children's story, and--" he made a brief, explosive gesture. "Out comes happiness. A kind of mist in the air, a humor in the body."
"A city," Combeferre says, "in the geographic conception. A plot of land, a certain number of buildings. Not the city we make."
"The nation of people. No, I know what you will say; you do not like nations."
"A nation is a kind of fiction."
"Perhaps, but necessary." There is starting to be a certain radiance in his expression. Some men shine when they are in love, when they are rich, when their business is flourishing; but Enjolras is like a sword, and he shines in conflict. Combeferre has never quite learned not to be dazzled.
"You are picking a fight," he says fondly. "Very well; shall we argue nations?"
Enjolras tilts his head; looks at him unreadably. "Would you like that?"
"You are the one who raised the subject."
"Yes." Enjolras looks down. His attention is caught by the ink on his sleeve; he rubs at the small dark blot, distracted. "People cannot imagine being happy," he says after a moment. He does not look up. "They have never been happy. How do they know what it is like? They know only desire. And desire is, at least, a familiar thing. How frightened they must be, to think they will lose it, to stretch out their hands--"
"How frightened we must be," Combeferre says. His throat is tight. "We too are people."
"Yes," Enjolras says. "Even you and me."
He glows still, though the fight has gone from him. Combeferre experiences the impulse to touch his cheek. He does, before he can stop himself; he does. Enjolras sighs and shuts his eyes. He turns into the touch fractionally. Combeferre brushes a thumb along his cheekbone, soft. They do not speak. The lamp flickers, light rebounding through the room. Combeferre feels sick with tenderness. He is no fool; he knows that tenderness has no biology; and yet it unquestionably acts as an ailment. It alters the composition of the body. The blood seems to slow; the heart expands, discovering its capacity.
"Perhaps," he says, "this is the problem with happiness: one never knows how large or small it is, how many levels deep. Dig too far, and you may only destroy it. On the other hand, there may be cities-- whole cities!-- underneath the surface, that one has not known. It happens in Rome. A building is demolished, and takes with it half the street, for below will be some vast catacomb, a painted room. Something unseen for centuries."
Enjolras does not open his eyes. "Waiting," he says.
"Yes; waiting to be known. Waiting to be inhabited." He moves his hand, softly, reassuring, to the nape of Enjolras' neck. He feels he is gentling some wild creature, coaxing it to trust him. Come close; I have neither ill will nor weapons. Carefully, he unties the black ribbon that holds Enjolras' hair back from his face. He cards the flat tangles with his fingers. Enjolras lays his cheek to the desk, allowing him a greater range, then folds his arms and buries his face completely.
"You will have ink on your nose," Combeferre warns. He had not moved the broadsheet.
"I don't care. Prophesying is tiresome work. Please keep talking to me."
So Combeferre smooths out the spill of his hair, and continues to speak: not about nations, nor any agitating subject, but about a proposition to cure all madness with dreams-- "I have heard it from a hypnotist; he was most compelling, and the idea of it is sound, I think--" and a child he encountered with a very pronounced stutter-- "It cannot be physical, but then, what is physical? Is the soul not physical? It must have an energy--" and so on, until he is quite tired of talking, and Enjolras has fallen asleep.
Quietly, Combeferre picks through the room: tidying papers, dousing the lamp, closing the curtains, and curling finally, fully clothed, on the chaise-longue. He has spent so many nights here that one more can hardly figure; and he sleeps easier, he thinks, to know that Enjolras is in the same room, to hear the faint sound of his slow breathing.
He should dream, he thinks, of cities collapsing, of owls descending, of Persepolis. But he doesn't; he dreams warm comforting dreams, of summer and the Pays d'Aix, and wakes very rested, with sun on his face. Enjolras is still slumped over the desk. By the time he wakes, Combeferre has fetched water and washed; his hair is freshly damp.
Enjolras, as ever at morning, looks cross. He scrubs at his eyes with the back of one hand. (Each morning for him is a battle renewed; a war that he fights with day's forces.) "I woke up and I did not see you. I thought for a moment you'd gone," he says.
"What, and leave you alone in your time of darkness?" Combeferre flicks a bit of water at him. "I would never do such a thing."
Enjolras does not try to dodge the water. It glints on his hair, a corona of beads. He is watching Combeferre, sleep-shy and rumpled. There is a smudge of newspaper ink on his chin, yet still dawn is trying to make him glorious. He lowers his eyelashes. "I know," he says.
Winter makes work at the Hôpital Necker. Combeferre leaves every day in the high cold dawn, and sometimes returns to his lodgings near midnight, breathing frost onto the scarf round his neck. His hands cramp from writing notes and holding surgical implements. He often feels that he is walking through water. Perhaps one night out of six or eight, he will find Enjolras waiting for him, or else asleep already: in a chair, on the floor, face-down in a book. Combeferre becomes accustomed to shaking him awake, and tipping him towards the bed, and tumbling after, exhausted. Rarely do they have the chance to debate; Combeferre worries his thoughts will stagnate, like this. And yet, all the same, he likes waking up in that haze of warmth, Enjolras' hand draped across his waist. He likes their drowsy, fumbling talks. Enjolras once drooled all over his pillow, fallen asleep midway through explaining why Protestantism had not liberated England (as Combeferre had been arguing).
The work gets lighter, and Enjolras' visits more frequent. Winter is a season, too, of speechmaking: in cabarets and coffee shops, in dark corners of the city. People are hungry, and people are cold; and they cannot see any reason to believe that they will grow less hungry or less cold. It seems no less likely that they will rise to form a republic, that they will throw off the chains of poverty.
So Enjolras and Combeferre bend their heads together, by the ample fire of Enjolras' lodgings, and for a time it is there that they sleep and wake-- Combeferre first on the chaise-longue, and then in Enjolras' bed, when Enjolras says muzzily, "No-- it is cold without you, and I think... I think I dream less."
When they go to the Musain now, to meet the others, Combeferre is aware of a growing change: Enjolras seems distant, and somehow fiercer. When he enters a room, men stop laughing. Combeferre thinks of the Louvre, where, the previous April, he had chanced to see a statue: part of Bonaparte's spoils. A gladiator, Greek, his arm upheld, with no shield where a shield should be; and on his face, not fear, but a kind of resignation. He was naked, and facing the enemy. He was wild, and alone, and he knew his fate, the fate of every animal thing.
Prouvaire says, after a meeting, "He is grown so solemn, our leader. Grantaire says he is like a marble that speaks."
"It is amazing that, in a room with Grantaire, anyone gets a chance to speak. Much less a marble." Combeferre is tidying up; he is drinking the last coffee. Most of the Amis have gone by now. In the doorway, Enjolras speaks with Feuilly.
Still, Prouvaire lingers. "Do you think a man could turn into stone? Trolls do, of course, but perhaps only in stories."
Combeferre sighs. "Are you asking my medical opinion?"
"I don't know. I suppose I am not clear on the distinction. Have you not a sort of holistic opinion? Can I ask your opinion as a human being?"
Prouvaire has this disingenuous habit of not quite looking at you while speaking, but instead lowering his eyelashes as though he is shy, or perhaps just very meek. You are not meek, Combeferre thinks, so say what you mean.
"I know of no case in history," he says, and drinks the rest of the coffee: down to the dregs, grainy and black.
That night, he lies beside the fire and watches Enjolras read-- not law books, but a letter from a dissident acquaintance, who has had to flee overseas.
"He reports that Americans eat only sweetcorn," Enjolras says. He makes a face. "Surely that cannot be."
"No; surely not. I believe they also eat potatoes."
Enjolras makes an even unhappier face. Despite his republican principles, he is a man who likes delicate things; Combeferre pictures him in a cabin, eating sweetcorn and bear-steaks, as he is given to understand that Americans feast, and he immediately chokes with laughter. Enjolras scowls, and kicks one bare foot at him. Combeferre seizes his ankle and pulls. Enjolras tumbles to the carpet, protesting indignantly.
They struggle, laughing. Combeferre pins him by the wrists in a moment, straddling his waist. Enjolras' breath heaves. His hair is a current of bronze on the rug, in the dark and light of the fire's moving. Combeferre looks at it in wonder, and at Enjolras: at the fair lashes, the fine high bones of his cheeks, and the pale skin that once was marred by freckles-- now perfect, all of it, perfect, a piece of perfect beauty.
He bends and kisses Enjolras urgently on the mouth. He has no thought to expect anything; what he wants is to mar its perfect bow, to leave a mark. He does not expect, certainly, for Enjolras to return the kiss, savage, gasping, straining till Combeferre releases his wrists. Then his hands are tangled in Combeferre's hair, pulling him down, and Combeferre's own hands make fists in the rumpled cloth of Enjolras' shirt, pushing it up until Enjolras sheds it. Now Combeferre can wander the lines of his body, that perfect set of harp-string ribs-- how could he not have wanted, before, to spread his hands across them? He leaves bruises in untidy patterns, a scatter-spray down to Enjolras' hips; and then lower, as Enjolras kicks off his trousers. He knows how to do what it is he wants to do; he knows how to touch Enjolras' prick, so that Enjolras, already hard, cries out and digs his fingers in the carpet. He knows how to make him keep crying out, using his mouth and his fist, and he does, until Enjolras' body is shaking, muscles quivering at his abdomen; until Enjolras says brokenly, "Oh, oh, please," and comes, biting down on his own lip.
Combeferre swallows, tasting only the taste of the body. He rests his forehead against Enjolras' stomach, feeling the breath shudder in and out. His palms are damp on Enjolras' hipbones, fingertips pressed into soft bare skin. He is still aroused, and yet content to lie here, listening to Enjolras make noises of soft amazement-- or he thinks this, till Enjolras shifts him over, tipping him on his back, and kneels over him.
"I have never," Enjolras says, and looks almost frightened. His cheeks are flushed, his hair disarrayed, little bruises blooming red across his skin, and Combeferre gazes at him wonderingly.
He says, "You are perfect."
Enjolras undresses him carefully, serious and breathless, then touches him in the same way. "Oh," he says, when Combeferre makes noise, as though he was not expecting it.
There is something dreamlike about his hands on Combeferre's body, his long fingers wrapped around Combeferre's prick, the flicker of his tongue against Combeferre's chest, tasting, marveling. Combeferre cannot keep from thrusting upwards, from grabbing hungrily at him. At last Enjolras settles against his body, an unbearable press of skin to slick skin. Enjolras' hand is still working between them; it is achingly slow, and delicious, and every stroke make Combeferre shudder. Above him, Enjolras looks wide-eyed with wonder, and flushed with a kind of happiness. Combeferre blinks at him, dazed, made stupid with pleasure, and in a voice of revelation, says, "I, I have always-- always-- oh!"
Enjolras smiles like a summer unfolding. "I know," he says.
"Citizens," Enjolras addresses the assembly. "The Bourbon lily has long proved a root of corruption that spreads its vices throughout our clean soil. That is, I say to you, the soil of France-- the soil that for so long sustained our forefathers, the soil that honest men till with their hands. Has the Bourbon defended it? No! He has fled it! And now his poison penetrates the land. What nation can be a nation under such a tyrant, a king who desires not to spill his blood for the land, but to suck from it the lifeblood, the livelihoods of others?"
"No nation!" a man in the crowd cries out, and is echoed.
Enjolras affirms it: "No nation. No garden can flourish, that shelters such a lily. We must uproot this root, this poisonous plant; and we will have no more leeches draining our soil, no more tyrants who leach the soil of France! we must do as you would do in your very own gardens, we must tear out this weed with our own bare hands!"
Enjolras, Combeferre supposes, has never had a garden. He does not look prepared to uproot weeds with his hands; he looks slender, fierce but very small-boned, his hair shining, his coat immaculate. Only-- there is a certain wildness to his eyes, a remote look, like marble, cold and very clean, which makes you think that he could, if he so chose, uproot anything, anything. He stretches his hand out, leaning towards the crowd, and for the space of a heartbeat Combeferre thinks of dark wings beating the air into shadows, of welling blood. He forgets to breathe.
Later, they lie in bed together: Enjolras draped on Combeferre's chest, Combeferre sifting fingers through his hair, idly talking nonsense. "But could an animal ever be a citizen? I have known some geese of very great intelligence. Or ghosts, say... I do not mean to endorse ghosts, for I am flummoxed by their mechanism of existence, but should one appear--mmph." His words are muffled by Enjolras' fingers, fumbling up to cover his mouth.
"No," Enjolras declares to Combeferre's clavicle.
"Well, as you wish." He subsides, and instead devotes his attention to the anatomy of Enjolras' ribs. He maps their muscles, then those of the shoulder joint, then from the triceps down to the tendons at the wrist.
"I am not an anatomical model," Enjolras announces without lifting his head.
"Hush." Combeferre's fingers find the scars, thin little marks raised against the skin. Four and four. He traces them with his thumb. He feels a brief shiver of dread.
Enjolras shifts in dissatisfaction. "You are unhappy; I can sense it."
"No," Combeferre says immediately, and then, unable to resist, "How?"
"I do not know. It is a kind of stillness. You have a taxonomy of stillnesses. Taxonomy, is that the word?"
"Almost."
"At any rate, a stillness. I sometimes feel--" he is interrupted by a yawn-- "that you are a house I used to live in, years ago, perhaps when I was a child, or even before then, and I can almost remember the shape of the rooms, even as I am discovering them, of perhaps you owned the house and brought me to it, and now you are leading me through it again, or..." He stops, and Combeferre thinks him asleep. But after a moment, he drowsily says, "And I have always known you. And always wanted to know you. It resists logic."
"I am not reassured; you suggested once that you would like to sweep the earth clean of houses."
"Not personally. Only-- if there were to be a disaster."
"Ah. Now I am reassured."
"I would rebuild you," Enjolras says. "I would rebuild your house. It is the only... the only thing." He spreads his one hand in an expressive gesture.
"I scarcely know how to interpret that."
"The only thing large enough to contain me." Enjolras sighs, and presses a kiss against Combeferre's shoulder. "You are pleased to be obstinate. You know, and you have always known what I mean."
Combeferre wants to say, I do not know if I know. He wants to be more obstinate. He wants to say, Please, explain it to me, in mechanical terms. But he see the problem: there are things that one can't ever say. There are things one can barely understand. There is, he thinks, a taxonomy of love, a taxonomy of happiness; there's a language of nerves and skin, of self. They have scarcely begun exploring it. He wraps his arms around Enjolras. Embracing, sheltering, holding him in.
"Mm," Enjolras says, half-asleep. "Yes, I mean I..." He does not finish the sentence.
"I know," Combeferre says.