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Feuilly throws knives.
His papa taught him, back in Poland, after France, a long, long time ago.
Feuilly left Poland when he was nine years old and only had his uncle left. They moved to America, and Feuilly continued his knife throwing, kept at it almost obsessively. He taught himself a few fancy moves that were barely even tricks, just stupid ways to throw a knife, but the crowd liked it, once he started performing. It was after his uncle died, and Feuilly had to make money somehow.
So Feuilly’s thrown knives well enough to make money showboating on the streets, though, admittedly, not much.
He wishes he hadn’t been doing it the day they saw him.
He hadn’t even noticed them watching his act--they probably had even watched more than one of his acts--hadn’t noticed that they existed until they approached him just when he’d packed up all of his equipment and was ready to go back to his shitty apartment to count coins.
They’d sidled up to him, and they’d looked like bad news, but hey, he looked like bad news too, so he hadn’t left immediately, walking or running. That was his first mistake.
Madame Thenardier had looked at him like a predator and Monsieur Thenardier had smiled, wide and sleazy, and said, “You’re quite a sight with those knives, Monsieur…”
“Feuilly,” he’d muttered. “Thanks.” He’d continued the conversation, given them his name.
That was his second mistake.
“Feuilly. Well, you must not make much money, begging for coins in this godforsaken place.”
“I’m not begging,” Feuilly had snapped, affronted.
“I’m sorry, darling,” Madame had cut in, practically purring her words. “But I know enough about your type to know that the answer is yes.”
“Fine, whatever.’
“Well, what would you say to a real job? One that gets you room and board and pay?”
Feuilly had shrugged, unaware at the time that they had been lying about the pay. “Are you offering?”
Madame had laughed and said, “We most certainly are! A job at our…traveling circus. We need a knife thrower. Our customers will love it.”
Feuilly’s lips had curled upward at the idea of joining a traveling circus. It had been a dream of his, as a kid, to live free and migratory and make money off of the thing he did best. He almost said yes right away, because Feuilly was reckless and had nothing binding him to this city and even the worst case scenario he imagined (he doesn’t remember what it was, now) didn’t come close to the reality.
He hadn’t said yes, though. Instead, he’d said, “Show me this circus.”
That was the third mistake.
The one that cost him his freedom.
He didn’t know that once he set foot in the dark tent filled with cages—though he would soon learn, peering into those cages, that the Cirque Musain kept no animals—he wouldn’t be leaving.
He knows that now, sure, when he thinks back on that day, but now is too late.
Now, Feuilly throws knives for a crowd, his act housed in a spacious tent, not in the tent that he sleeps in, the one with the cages, that doubles as the freak show, where most of his companions stay even during circus hours.
Feuilly throws knives for the crowd that comes to the Thenardier’s dirty circus, with tents that are always set up in some out of the way place, the kind that can only be found by word of mouth, set up in the same place for months at a time, sometimes. (Some traveling circus.)
Feuilly throws knives for the enjoyment of the scum of the Earth, the kind of men who revel in the grotesque and are always hoping to see Feuilly’s aim waver, hoping to see a knife hit flesh, not just the space right around the body, creating a man-shaped pattern with knives once the not-target steps away.
Because Feuilly throws knives at a person, now. He throws them to miss, throws them at Marius, who used to cry with terror during the acts, but now simply smiles.
Feuilly is terrified of hitting Marius, but he never does. He knew that he never would the first time they practiced the act together, when Marius fainted dead away once it was over.
Because Feuilly throws knives, and he always hits his target.
+
Marius doesn’t cry anymore.
He used to; he remembers that with relative clarity, he guesses, because at the same time all of the things he remembers feel like they happened to someone else a very long time ago.
He’s fine with that.
There’s a part of his mind that knows that he used to see the sun, that once he was a child who played among flowers, real flowers, not the fake ones Jehan wears looped around his hair, that once he went to school, college, even, though by now he can’t remember what he was studying.
Marius’s unmemories are patchy at best.
Marius doesn’t mind.
He doesn’t really mind about much of anything, anymore.
He used to, he supposes, but that was before he stepped into the dream that he lives in now, the one where he watches Feuilly throw knives at him and doesn’t particularly care if he gets hit or not.
Marius sleeps in a cage (that’s when he has the other dreams, the ones that make him scream but that he can’t remember when he wakes up) curled up against Courfeyrac.
Courfeyrac, who is very real and does cry sometimes, who holds the body that is Marius tightly, tightly enough that Marius feels Courfeyrac’s breath on his cheek and the whisper of pressure of strong, thin arms. He asks Marius to please not leave him, please.
Marius always says okay even though sometimes he’s not quite sure what that word means, but he thinks it makes Courfeyrac feel better.
It’s such a hassle, feeling. Marius is glad that his feelings are more faraway than true, these days.
Marius sleeps on the hard cement floor of his and Courfeyrac's big cage, but the discomfort doesn’t bother him. He doesn’t have to try and get comfortable like he used to, because all those aches, all the aches that the floor makes him have, that the beatings make him have, he doesn’t really feel them.
Everything is very far away, because Marius lives in his head, now, and his head is a dreamland. He moves and talks and smiles like he’s dreaming, even though sometimes he’s aware enough to realize that this isn’t the kind of dream he’s ever going to wake up from.
Marius can’t bring himself to mind.
+
Jean Prouvaire is not a faery.
He is small and slender and lithe and lovely, but he is most certainly not a faery, no matter what he is billed as.
He’s always telling himself that, because it seems like a ridiculous thing to forget, but he might, and he can’t risk that.
Jehan is a poet. He is a dancer, too.
He doesn’t write much poetry anymore, not outside of his head, but he still dances.
Not as he used to, of course. He doesn’t dance for an audience that cares about the dance itself, about the elegance, the story behind the movements. He dances for an audience that only cares about his dancing because they like the way his body looks and moves in the light green tunic that he thinks make him look more like Peter Pan than a faery.
He dances for an audience that wants him, and that gets him, if they’ve got enough money.
The Thenardiers will do just about anything for a quick buck.
Jehan pretends to like it, his act, because he doesn’t want to give any of the men that grab at him, or that try to as he spins away, any of the men who might fuck him after the show, the satisfaction of seeing him unhappy. Of seeing him cry.
They get off on it.
Besides, it’s better to just pretend, to detach just a touch for a few hours and let himself smile as he dances, laugh, flirt, even, like the little twirling doll in the music box that he had as a child.
It’s better to let himself act like he’s alright, try to lose himself as well as he can in the dancing, because he remembers when he loved to dance, though he wants to dance forever, dance until the audience has gone, dance until he drops and dies.
Sometimes, Jehan sees the faces of the men who look at him, who touch him, who fuck him, and he wants to make them bleed.
Jehan used to be gentle, but now there is this violence bubbling below the surface, a change that he embraces some nights when he’s with Combeferre. Sometimes, in their cell at night, Jehan just about attacks Combeferre, because everything’s a mess and they might as well make a mess of each other.
They fuck brutally, because they don’t know if they know how to fuck or be fucked gently anymore.
Jehan used to believe in the term “making love”. Now the idea makes him laugh against Combeferre’s skin as he bites it, hard and vicious.
They always fuck near the back of their cell, behind anything they can find, so that the others can’t see them.
Maybe they can hear them, but they don’t do it often and they all have to hear a lot of things they don’t want to hear. Privacy’s not a luxury any of them have, not when they’re meant to be gawked at.
Jehan knows that he used to be different, but he also knows that he was never a different person. He is not going to detach himself from the life that he used to have, the one that came before this, because it was his life. He existed outside of this place. He was free. His memories of the time before are very clear, because he makes sure not to forget. Not to forget what happened, or how he felt, how it felt to be free.
That he may not be free now, but he is not anybody’s possession.
If he starts to feel like his old life wasn’t really his, starts to ignore it and see it as something that happened, maybe, but not something that he really experienced, he knows that the lines between reality and other people’s fantasy will start to blur, and he can’t afford that.
Some nights, Jehan recites poems, because he has a good memory and poetry is one of those things that he has not lost and will never lose. Everyone’s got their favorite poem, ones Jehan’s repeated over and over again and that he will never stop repeating when he’s asked and even when he’s not asked, because poetry is one of very few things that keeps him sane, and he will share it with his companions and hope it does something for them.
When Jehan dances, he pretends, he plays a role, but there’s always a string of words crawling through the back of his mind, a reminder that he is afraid he’ll need someday:
My name is Jean Prouvaire. My friends call me Jehan. I am not a faery, and I belong to nobody but myself.
+
Bahorel thinks, when he’s feeling particularly confident in his strength, that he could bend the bars of his cage just far enough for Feuilly to get through and unlock the padlocks on the rest of the cages.
It’s wishful thinking, obviously, because he’s not quite strong enough to bend the thick, solid iron bars of the cage, not enough, and they’ve got nothing to unlock the cages with.
Bahorel wouldn’t try it anyway, even if he could, because when he threatened it, back when Madame and Monsieur didn’t quite know the extent of his strength and thought that maybe it was something he could do, Madame had said, “If you try that, I’ll kill him,” and she’d pointed at Marius, who’d blanched and hidden in face in Courfeyrac’s shoulder.
Bahorel had been new, hadn’t known any of the freaks around him, and he’d snarled, “Why do I care?” all false bravado.
Madame Thenardier had smiled wickedly and asked, “I don’t know, do you?”
And he had. He’d backed off because he wasn’t a killer and after Madame and Monsieur realized that he didn’t care if they beat him but couldn’t stand the sight of one of his companions being beaten, he’d stopped threatening or doing anything that could get one of his friends hurt.
By now, Bahorel would do anything to protect the other captives, even if that’s not doing any fucking thing at all.
So Bahorel stays trapped, because he’s strong, but there are things he just can’t do.
He shares a cage with Feuilly, who’s small and aggressive, and Bahorel could snap him like a twig if he felt like it, but he doesn’t, he might be violent but he’s not the type to hurt people he loves, he’d just never loved anyone before now. He lets Feuilly use him as a punching bag because it doesn’t really hurt, teaches Feuilly how to fight because it’s something to do, wrestles with Feuilly using a fifth of his strength because, well, that’s something to do too.
Bahorel attacks the metal he’s given to bend and the things he’s meant to break and tear apart, makes himself feel the rage that he slips into easy when he’s doing his act, because it’s better to have rage attacks when he’s doing the act than when it’s night time and he can frighten everyone.
Bahorel doesn’t hurt people anymore, and there’s a part of him—the snarling, animalistic part that was always getting him arrested, way back when—that really fucking misses that.
It’s enough, he guesses, to attack inanimate objects and ram himself against the cage, but he dreams about fighting, killing, bashing in skulls and making people scream, even though he’s never killed anyone before.
He has to do with it, anyway, he has to deal with only attacking things and himself, because there’s no one to fight that won’t get his friends hurt or him killed.
To tell the truth, Bahorel doesn’t mind the idea of getting killed much. He could kill himself with his bare hands, easy, if he tried, he knows how to do it quick and clean, but he knows that he’s not going to.
He can’t really protect his friends, not when he’s separated from most of them, but he can try, and anyway, they love him and he’s not going to hurt him more than they’ve already been hurt. They’re the only people he’s ever loved, and he can’t leave them behind.
So he pushes the violence down, lets it out in ways that won’t hurt anyone, feels the veil of blood red rage drop in front of his eyes often enough, but he doesn’t take it out on anyone, he takes it out on purpose when he’s doing his act to get rid of it for a while.
The patrons like it.
Bahorel indulges them.
He’s got a lot of rage to spare.
+
Combeferre tears his skin and watches himself bleed.
It was for his act, at first. The things that he did—making things appear and disappear, pulling things out of his sleeve or mouth, standard stuff—they were not enough for the crowd he entertained, and he knew that early on.
Madame and Monsieur told him that he had to do something to make his act more interesting, even if he had to die to do it. They beat him because he wasn’t as good as the others, and he got tired of it.
So he did what he had to do to make his act interesting.
He made it grotesque.
He only needs a few signature tricks. He’s not an act that people watch for long.
And people like him better when the things he seems to pull out of thin air—or, better, seems to pull out of his body—are bloody.
His most popular trick is the illusion of pulling a long string of handkerchiefs from his throat, handkerchiefs that are saturated with his own blood.
He knew that the tricks would be more dramatic with the blood, so he cut up his arms and soaked his equipment with it, and he still does it.
Only, the truth is that he doesn’t really need to anymore, not nearly as much as he does it. The truth is that it only started out being for his act.
Now, slicing his skin open is just a thing that he does.
It makes him feel good, gives him a rush better than any drug. It helps him forget about any feelings he can’t afford by focusing on the pain. The only thing that helps him as much, or almost as much, as the cutting is sex with Jehan.
Jehan started it because he needed it, and Combeferre went along with it, because Jehan really does need to fuck somebody, to dominate somebody after days and nights of no control. At first, Combeferre had just indulged Jehan to be helpful, but after a time he’d realized he liked it too.
Because Jehan helps Combeferre let go, even for just a little while.
Combeferre isn’t so focused on the sex itself, has never really gotten off on it, and he doesn’t like hurting other people like Jehan does, but he likes getting hurt, which makes them a good team. He likes being under Jehan’s control, because it’s the only time that he’s able to almost relax. He likes letting Jehan take care of things when it comes down to just the two of them.
Because Combeferre always has to take care of everyone else, as well as he can despite any distance. He has to, because he hasn’t got much else to do, and he’s terrified of somebody getting hurt in a way he could have prevented.
He is terrified, always, except for when he’s with Jehan, or cutting.
Sometimes, when most everyone’s calm, Jehan sits with Combeferre quietly and watches him run broken glass across his arm or thigh or ankle.
Jehan watches Combeferre hurt himself with this look of sadness on his face, a look that Combeferre can barely stand.
On these nights, when Combeferre finishes up, it’s Jehan who wipes away the blood with a towel, who cleans his cuts with iodine.
On these nights, once they’re done and lying tangled together, not sleeping, Jehan always asks the same question. “What would you do if I told you to stop?”
And Combeferre always answers with the same word: “Don’t.”
And Jehan doesn’t.
They’re both too afraid.
+
Courfeyrac bends over backwards, quite literally.
He’s always been flexible—mentally and physically, but especially physically. There’s a medical name for the way he can move, but he doesn’t remember it and doesn’t care about it either.
Once, he thought of his flexibility as a gift, because it was one of those things that made him instantly popular. There’s no cool way to be a freak as a small child, unless you’re a contortionist.
It helped, of course, that Courfeyrac was always charming, the kind of person who could make a friend just by flashing them a smile.
He made friends with Marius, after all, without even trying, which was a true feat. That was on their first day of college. They were assigned roommates, and hit it off, which wasn’t weird for Courfeyrac but was definitely weird for Marius, who had never hit it off with anybody in his life.
To tell the truth, it was less his flexibility and more his inherent ability to get people to like him that got him places in life. Good places, at least.
It was purely his flexibility that got him where he is now.
Sometimes, he dreams about the night that was the night before he and Marius were captured.
He was drunk and at a nightclub or something, and one of his friends had yelled, Dude, do that…that fucked up thing you can do! Elastic man!
Courfeyrac had never been able to resist making a spectacle of himself, and he’d done what could pass for a less clean, more intoxicated, somewhat prettier version of the act he performs now.
He always wakes up sweating, with this feeling of shame and anger in his chest that just grows and grows when he feels Marius pressed against his side.
If he hadn’t been such a fucking show off, if he hadn’t used the thing that ruined his life as a cheap trick, if he hadn’t been off getting drunk on a school night, they never would have seen him.
Courfeyrac hadn’t seen them, of course, but he knows the Thenardiers must have been at that club that night. Why, he can’t figure out.
They’d seen him, though, that’s what matters, they’d seen them and that had been the end of his free life.
And not just his free life.
Marius’s too.
It kills Courfeyrac to see Marius as he is today, a ghost, a hologram, because it didn’t have to be this way.
It was Courfeyrac that pushed Marius into the line of fire, even though he didn’t mean to, because Marius—
Marius isn’t like the others at the Cirque.
He’s not special, not like they are. He’s not the stuff of sideshow attractions.
He was a linguistics major.
There was no reason to target Marius, and that’s why he wasn’t targeted. He was just there. He was there and he tried to stop them from taking Courfeyrac, who went down in about two seconds because he hadn’t been paying attention to his surroundings.
Courfeyrac remembers very little from that night after the moment that he was incapacitated. All he remembers before slipping into unconsciousness is darkness and the sound of Marius screaming, muffled, Don’t hurt him, don’t hurt him!
After that, nothing.
Courfeyrac wishes that Marius had just run away.
Courfeyrac wishes that he’d never discovered the thing that used to be a gift in his childhood, wishes he’d been walking home alone that night, wishes and wishes and wishes but none of it means anything because whenever he wakes up he’s still in a cage and Marius is still next to him, sometimes in body only.
They’re in hell and Courfeyrac knows it’s the Thenardiers that are the devils, but he’s the one that sinned.
In his past life he was too carefree, too stupid, too flirtatious, too much, and so he got himself noticed and he got himself damned and dragged down an innocent with him.
So Courfeyrac bends over backwards and folds himself into boxes and smiles emptily at an audience he hates beyond measure and is treated like an animal and fucked like a doll, and through it all he tries to stay cheerful for the others and tries to stay relatively sane, because they’re all a little mad but they really can’t afford another major crack-up, and he watches Marius live life half-conscious and thinks to himself, Courfeyrac, you bastard, this is all on you.
+
Joly is a healer.
It’s for this reason more than any other one that it’s such torture, being here.
Because the truth is that he can’t heal anyone, not in the ways that matter, and every time he doctors one of his friends, his family, he wonders if he’s really doing the right thing or just prolonging their suffering.
The Hippocratic Oath says to first do no harm, but that went out the window the day that Joly realized exactly what he’d gotten himself into.
It was a day pretty soon after he got this job, to tell the truth, when he realized that his patients lived in fucking cages.
It was then that he’d realized that he wasn’t ever going to leave this place, not of his own volition and certainly not by himself.
Not just because he wouldn’t be allowed now, not anymore, not after seeing what he’s seen, but because Joly cannot leave them behind.
He is responsible for them.
He is a healer.
He cannot heal himself, but he’s the least of his worries.
His heart is broken, always, has been for a very long time, and it’s gotten to the point where it’s not even in pieces anymore.
It’s been crushed into a fine dust, a constant aching just dull enough to allow him to function.
It hurts so much, to clean Combeferre’s deep cuts, to stitch up the even deeper ones. To fix up Jehan’s twisted wrists and ankles and watch him continue to torture his body because there’s no way he can take a break from the dancing. To shove a feeding tube down Enjolras’s throat while Enjolras screams and kicks and looks at him with wide, blazing, streaming eyes, tied to a chair, and at that moment Joly knows that he’s torturing him, but if Enjolras doesn’t eat he’ll just get beaten again, and there’s no way to win.
There’s never any way to win, in this place.
Joly lives a nightmare and doesn’t dream at all, instead he just curls up against Bossuet, who huddles against him and whispers, Joly. Jolllly, don’t worry. Don’t worry, you’ll be okay. You can fly on four ailes. You can fly away, while Joly weeps.
He is surrounded by suffering and he’s not strong enough for it.
He was always nervous, always barely competent because he was too busy trying not to have panic attacks, terrified of every illness he came across, staring at himself in mirrors for hours trying to find lumps and discolorations that were never there.
That’s why he didn’t think too hard about being asked to be the on scene doctor for a traveling circus, no matter how creepy the Thenardiers were, because he was just so glad to get a job after he’d been fired from his last one at a free clinic because he’d missed too many workdays, busy locked in his house panicking.
But once he’d gotten to the Cirque Musain, once he’d met his patients and realized just how much danger they were in all the time, he threw himself into his work with passion. He’s always done that, when he’s not freaking out. The truth is that Joly may not be good at it, but in the end he is a doctor, and there’s nothing else he can dream of being.
Joly isn’t brave, but he can pretend to be, for the sake of his patients. He can hide away somewhere where nobody but Bossuet can see him to have his panic attacks, he can cry himself to sleep every night just as long as he’s able to splint Bahorel’s broken fingers and pop the more stubborn of Courfeyrac’s dislocated limbs back into place and dab antiseptic onto the wounds everyone acquires from beatings.
He can be the person everybody thinks can fix them, and he can pretend to believe that too, even though they’re all irreparably broken and he can’t even fix himself.
He can do all of the ugly things that he has to do to keep his patients alive, no matter how ethically questionable those things are.
He can pretend to know what he’s doing, that he’s not just a scared little kid like the others.
He can do that, because he loves them all too much to do anything else.
+
Bossuet has always wished he could fly.
L’aigle, they called him, back in college, before he dropped out, and college feels like such a long time ago. It was a long time ago for all of them, if it happened at all.
Despite being ridiculously clumsy in everything else, Bossuet was always graceful when he didn’t have to touch the floor.
He still is.
Now, though, the stakes are higher. It’s really important that he not touch the floor for a while almost every day, because if he touches the floor he’ll be dead, or useless, which is good as dead.
Bossuet performs without a net.
He knows that because of it, he’s already half gone.
Bossuet has always been ridiculously unlucky, and that’s going to be his downfall. Even lucky people can’t always manage to perform complicated tricks up in the air without once losing their grip on the trapeze.
Bossuet is afraid, all the time.
He tries his best to hide it, because he shares a cage with Joly, who is beautiful and intelligent but always visibly terrified, and so Bossuet doesn’t have the luxury of being frightened, because Joly’s already got that covered.
Bossuet has always been the one who laughs even when the situation isn’t quite appropriate, because the truth is that there’s always a time for laughter.
Joly laughs too, and smiles.
Bossuet can tell that there was a time when Joly, despite the panicking, was a cheerful person, and he wishes he could’ve seen that instead of this parody of happiness Joly puts on for everybody else’s benefit.
It breaks his heart that he didn’t know any of the people around him—his family—until they were captured.
Sometimes he looks at their faces and wants to reverse time, wants to press rewind and go back and see Joly when his smiles didn’t always have a hint of terror, when Combeferre’s skin was unmarred, when Marius’s eyes weren’t so far away, when Enjolras didn’t scream like he was being torn apart when he got overwhelmed.
Bossuet knows that that’s just a silly dream, and he doesn’t really have time for that.
He spends most of his time trying to survive, just like the others. He tells jokes, and funny stories, and isn’t too discouraged when all he gets are tired smiles, because no matter how much he and Joly and Courfeyrac try to laugh, laughter will always be in short supply, here.
How did you get here? Joly asks into Bossuet’s neck one night when they’re huddled up together, like he’s trying to hide that he’s asking a question, like he’s not sure he actually wants an answer.
Bossuet answers anyway.
He was the last person to get here, almost a year after the first three, which, as far as he can tell, were Combeferre, Enjolras, and Grantaire. (Bossuet keeps a history of this place in his head, because somebody has to do it and maybe someday it’ll come in handy.)
The circus he worked for had just shut down, he was desperate for a job, and he fell for the Thenardier’s bullshit hook, line, and sinker.
The part that surprises Joly the most, that Bossuet thinks would surprise any of the others the most, is that Bossuet was actually a circus performer before all this, which makes him a rarity in this group.
Bossuet is always wondering how he was foolish enough to fall for the Thenardier’s tricks, but sometimes he’s almost glad that he did. If he hadn’t, he would never have met his family, would never have met Joly.
He guesses that’s just the way he looks at the world, the way he always has: glass half full. It’s a coping mechanism, he guesses, to deal with all the shit that’s happened to him.
They need an optimist around here anyway, and secretly, he still believes, almost as fervently as Enjolras does, that they’re all going to get out one day. That one day, they’re going to be okay.
He believes, but mostly he just tries to keep everybody’s hopes up.
It’s all he really knows how to do.
+
Grantaire is a fuck up and he’s always been a fuck up. Terrible shit’s happened in his life, and most of it’s been his fault.
Maybe, if he was the type to blame his problems on anyone but himself, he’d blame them on being born deformed.
But it’s not like his birth defect ever really mattered to him, until he ended up shoved in a freakshow because of it.
He always used to use beanies to cover up the spikes of bone and flesh that poke painlessly but noticeably from his head of unevenly chopped off hair. Grantaire resents that, the fact that they took away his black, curly hair. He always liked it.
The tail he was born with has been removed since childhood, and Grantaire is vindictively glad—it would just be another thing that would draw customers.
He remembers that he only ever took off his hats when he was drunk (but he was drunk all the time) and his inhibitions were as low as they could go, and he would make jokes about being a devil or a demon.
He discovered alcohol in middle school, but didn’t get addicted—and he knows he got addicted, the DT that occurred when the Thenardiers pulled his alcohol once it started making him seriously sick confirms it—until high school, until he started feeling like drowning in alcohol was the only thing keeping him from drowning in fucking numbness only broken up by restless anxiety and the more pleasant numbness brought on by cheap whiskey.
And then he was twenty-one, an art school dropout too wasted to ever really wonder where the fuck his life went, and that’s when the Thenardiers saw him take his hat off.
Devil horns, ha. Just a roll of the genetic dice, really.
He still doesn’t remember how he actually ended up here. The only reason he knows the Thenardiers saw him take off his hat was because they must have.
“You were screaming when they brought you in, saying they couldn’t do this to you. You passed out pretty quickly, though,” the most beautiful boy Grantaire had ever seen had told him.
Enjolras does look like an angel, though now that he’s stopped eating he’s got this fragility about him that scares Grantaire. He’s delicate and tall, with long fingers that sometimes curl tightly around Grantaire’s wrist (I’m taking your pulse, he’ll say, but he’ll never mention why), long golden hair that curls gently, and glassy blue eyes with a fury buried deep within them. Grantaire is always itching to draw him, paint him, carve him in stone even though he was never much of a sculptor, but he hasn’t got the means to do that.
It’ll be a tragedy, he thinks, if someone who looks like Enjolras isn’t captured in some way that’ll live even after he dies.
But then again, it’s just a tragedy all by itself that Enjolras looks the way he does, because if he didn’t maybe he’d be out changing the world (once upon a time, Grantaire’s been told, Enjolras was involved in social justice), beautiful but not so beautiful he turned the Thenardier’s heads.
Maybe he’d be alright.
Grantaire is one of the few in the group who knew Enjolras before he started losing his mind, the passionate, fierce, lucid young man who would pace like a caged animal and argue politics with Combeferre while Grantaire watched, stunned. Now, Enjolras is still passionate and fierce—he never won’t be—but he’s much less lucid. Now, he hears things that nobody else hears, sees things that aren’t really there, gives speeches that make little sense to anyone but him.
They all try to remind Enjolras that the gods and monsters he communicates with aren’t real, that they may say he’s angel, the men who take him away from Grantaire sometimes and send him back utterly silent and bruised, but he’s not, and that’s good.
Grantaire does his best to take care of Enjolras, to listen to what he has to say and parse out the parts that don’t make sense from the parts that do, to coax him to eat something without saying that a hunger strike isn’t really going to move the Thenardiers to do anything but hurt him, to bite his cynical tongue when Enjolras talks with certainty of when we leave, and wonders when he fell in love.
+
Enjolras can’t always be certain of who he’s speaking to. Sometimes it’s one of his friends, sometimes it’s one of the voices. The voices have names, occasionally faces. None of them are friendly.
Enjolras’s friends so often say that the voices are not real that it seems true. Enjolras trusts his friends. He does not trust the voices, does not trust the Thenardiers, does not ever trust the visitors, especially those that take him away.
He hates being taken away. Sometimes he screams as he is dragged away, before they do something to make him shut up, pitching his voice as high as it can go as God judges him for soiling his purity, yelling How dare you, how dare you.
In another life, reality was simple. In another life, Enjolras—he did not speak to gods, he did not see wicked creatures from hell hiding in the corners of the room (Just close your eyes and I’ll protect you, Grantaire says, holding Enjolras because they can’t run away). In another life, Enjolras was going to make the world a better place.
This is what he remembers: knocked out at a rally, next moment he’s in a car with Combeferre, who mouths Enjolras, but he goes to sleep and wakes up in a cage and is called angel.
Enjolras used to be free, and he shall be free again. This he tells the voices, this he tells his friends. None of them believe him, but he will not give up.
He’s on strike, lately, hunger strike, or so he says. Really what he wants is to get thin enough to slip between the bars of his cage. He dreams of it.
They call him beautiful, those who take him away for a while before bringing him back aching all over, bruises most evident on his wrists. Enjolras thinks it has always been that way, that people have always called him beautiful.
Sometimes some voice, some true angel—because Enjolras is just pretending and he knows it, sometimes he forgets he is not fallen but fundamentally he knows it—tells him that the way out of here, the way out for all of them, is to destroy himself, destroy that beauty people gawk at. That’s when he will rake his fingernails down his face, trying to tear the skin away, turn himself into something pure and good and unspoiled. (You’ve gotten full of yourself, Raphael says critically. They call you beautiful and you believe them, don’t you?)
Grantaire always holds him back, says God and the angels are voices in his head, remember? and that he’ll just make the Thenardiers mad if he hurts himself.
Enjolras doesn’t care, but he always stops quickly anyway because he remembers it upsets the others. (It’s for their own good, Gabriel reminds him.)
Enjolras doesn’t even believe in god, which should make it easier to not believe the voices in his head, but sometimes he talks to them for hours without noticing they don’t exist.
He knows he’s gone mad, has known it for a long time, but he also knows that he and the rest of his friends will go free eventually, and that that conviction is not a product of his madness.
They do not live in a just world, but they live in a world where it won’t do to give up hope, so Enjolras doesn’t, simple as that.
“We are the abased,” he tells the others solemnly, voice ringing clearly against cement and dirt. “And we will rise against the tyranny of our captors. We must. We are strong enough. My friends, if you believe my words to be the raving of a madman, you are gravely mistaken. We have all thought of leaving before, we have even tried. We must try again. We cannot live this way.” (Stirring, Uriel whispers. But they won’t listen to you any more than Grantaire does, and he was a cynic from the start.)
Distracted, Enjolras repeats himself: “We cannot live this way.”