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Chapter Text

In the summer that he turned twelve, Combeferre's mother took him and his sister to stay with her elder brother Auguste. Combeferre's father pleaded pressing business and declined to come, and his wife did not press the issue. Several weeks spent with only her brother and the children for company might not be the most exciting of prospects, but adding a sullen husband to the mix would only make matters worse. Her husband was witty and impatient, a lively conversationalist who expected the same of others. Her brother, on the other hand, had only one topic of conversation, which he was incapable of taking anything but seriously.

It was her sisterly duty, however, to visit him sometimes, and besides, he was a nice enough man, if one was willing to spend an inordinate amount of time smiling and nodding as he went on about worms ("Caterpillars, my dear Marie, caterpillars. The 'worm' in the name is misleading, they are caterpillars"). Come to think of it, she reflected, looking over at her son, who ignored the swaying carriage, his nose buried in a history book, as they jolted along the country roads, Étienne would probably be perfectly willing to listen to his uncle; Marie had yet to find anything that didn't interest him. With any luck, they could occupy themselves with their bugs while Marie and Thérèse amused themselves elsewhere.

Auguste de Severac's house was a large, white building, barely visible from the road through the branches of the mulberry orchard beside it. Inside, Marie knew, it would be a mess of books and papers and inexplicable equipment and mismatched furniture, for Auguste had never cared overmuch for an orderly home, and as a man without a wife, who rarely entertained, was not obliged to pretend to. It was clean, of course; the servants knew their work, but tidiness, with Auguste, might be found in his workroom far more easily than in his living room.

Étienne closed his book and stared out of the window excitedly as they drew up to the house. Thérèse, with the disinterested and self-conscious dignity of a sixteen-year-old doing her best not to be seen as a child, glanced around only to raise an eyebrow at her younger brother's enthusiasm.

Auguste came out to meet them as they pulled up to the house, embracing Marie enthusiastically before moving on to the children, then ushered them all inside, and leaving them to unpack with a promise of dinner in an hour or so.

Dinner conversation proved as awkward as Marie had expected. Auguste was clearly interested in everything she had to tell him about her husband, her children, and her life in Aix, but equally clearly struggling to produce any intelligent response, nodding awkwardly and putting in polite nothings, so that she felt she was bearing the full load of the conversation on her own shoulders. She'd got unused to this, living with two vivacious children and a husband who tended to dominate the conversation, and it was exhausting. Eventually she ran out of things to say, and in slight desperation asked him to talk about himself.
"Himself", for Auguste, had always meant "his projects", and she was promptly treated to an enthusiastic monologue on investigations he had been carrying out into which strains of mulberry provided the best food for silkworms. Marie was more than well enough practiced both in dealing with her brother and in feigning interest in any topic to nod in the appropriate places and pretend that she found silkworms anything other than excruciatingly dull and mildly disgusting. Still, it was only a few minutes before she felt altogether trapped by the conversation, and began casting around desperately for a way to change the subject.

Salvation came abruptly in the form of her son, who put in a genuinely interested question about the timing of silkworm hatchings. His uncle seized immediately on this unexpected audience, and Marie breathed a sigh of relief into her wineglass as Auguste and Étienne sank deep into discussion, ignoring the rest of the room. Marie turned to Thérèse and started a conversation about the novel they had been taking turns reading, and the evening wound comfortably to a close.

In the morning, over breakfast, Étienne excitedly explained that Uncle Auguste was going to show him the silkworm nurseries, and the mulberry orchard, and let him help feed the little worms, and didn't Mother and Thérèse want to come? Thérèse said she was happy to come for a walk around the orchard, but was clearly far less enthused by the idea of silkworm nurseries, with which Marie privately sympathized, and said the two of them could take a walk in the countryside while the boys played with their bugs. Étienne made a face at his sister's disinterest, and she rolled her eyes back at him, until their mother dragged them both off to put their outdoor shoes on.

Étienne spent the rest of the month they stayed with Auguste as engrossed in silkworm husbandry as his uncle, using ferrying leafy branches from the orchard to the nursery as an excuse for tree-climbing, watching the worms eat their way through trays of leaves, building them perches to spin their cocoons in, watching again in fascination as first a few, and then more and more of the silkworms set to spinning, twisting themselves into their cocoons, until the place was festooned with little white capsules, like Christmas ornaments come half a year early.

They stifled the cocoons a week later, baking and boiling them to kill the half-formed insects inside their silky prisons, and over dinner Étienne and Auguste debated the morality of it all; whether it was right to kill the little things for their silk at all, when the hatched cocoons could still be used, if only for cheaper silk; if it made a difference that the creatures were bred purely for this purpose, that they would not have been born in the first place if not for the silk market, or that they could not have survived even this long without their human caretakers, or that the moths, if they should hatch, would only live a few days regardless.
Thérèse claimed this conversation to be inappropriate for the dinner table, and started an argument with Étienne on the basis that if the lives of caterpillars were worth so much debate, why was he eating a dead chicken as he argued?
(Étienne left the rest of his meat on his plate; it was later fed to the household cat.)

A few days before they returned home, the cocoons that Auguste had saved for breeding began to hatch, soft-furred moths creeping out into the daylight, spreading their flightless wings. His uncle showed Étienne how a freshly hatched moth could be enticed to cling to his finger, and he stood there in wide-eyed fascination as the creature, newly freed, clung to him.
"It's beautiful," he whispered, lifting his hand slowly in front of his face to stare at the moth, taking in every detail of it.
"You'll want to put him down," Auguste warned with a wry smile. "There are more hatching, and he'll go a little mad once a female or two is out."
Étienne set the moth down, gently, but kept watching, sitting down with his chin propped on his hands, smiling distractedly as he watched the moths crawl about, the males fanning their wings uselessly as they crept.

The first moths to hatch had laid their eggs and were dying, by the last evening they spent at Auguste's house, and in the evening Auguste found Étienne sitting quietly in the circle of light cast by a single candle, staring at a feebly moving and elderly moth, and looking on the verge of tears.

He set a hand on the boy's shoulder, and Étienne looked up, startled, and clearly trying desperately to compose himself in front of his uncle.
"There's no need to cry for them, they're only insects," Auguste said, discomfited by his nephew's misery.
"They're beautiful, though," Étienne replied, tentatively, barely daring to contradict his uncle, "and they're alive for such a little time, it doesn't seem fair."
"They live a moth's lifetime, we live a person's. If you were a moth, it would seem like a good long life. Everything dies sooner or later."
"It just seems such a waste, for them just to be gone. And I know there'll be more of them soon enough, but we're leaving and I won't see them."
"You can remember them, can't you?"
"Not that clearly, though. Memories go fuzzy round the edges, you remember what you did but not quite what it was like, being there."
Auguste thought for a moment, then seized on an answer.
"You have to learn them by heart, boy. If you know what a moth looks like, you can fill the details back in."
"How, though?"

That was a harder question. Auguste glanced around the room for inspiration, until his eyes landed on a sheaf of papers abandoned on a shelf; drawings he had made of his worms and his moths, along with notes comparing their sizes and colours and rates of growth under different conditions (he was working on a book). Striding across the room, he pulled the papers down, and drew out a few sheets, setting them down on the table in front of Étienne.
"Draw them. Draw them until you know how they're made, and if you forget, you can always look at the picture to remind yourself."
Étienne smiled, taking the papers and holding them tightly.
"I'll try that, then."
"And I have some specimens preserved and pinned, in my study, if you'd like to take one of those with you."
"May I?"
(Auguste felt grateful to be blessed with the kind of nephew who was enough of a kindred spirit to consider dead moths a wonderful parting gift)

The next morning, Auguste saw them off, with a promise to Étienne to send him a copy his monograph on silkworms as soon as he had it printed. Étienne spent the drive home scribbling moths in a notebook, filling page after page and annoying Thérèse thoroughly by making irritable noises every time the jolting of the vehicle ruined his lines.

Chapter Text

It was late in the evening, and the back room of the Café Musain was emptying quickly, its denizens trickling out into the streets, until the room was almost deserted. Courfeyrac, among the last to leave, scooped his hat up from where it had been drying on a table by the fire – it was raining outside, and Courfeyrac, as always, was without an umbrella – and waved farewell to Enjolras, to whom he had been chatting. Enjolras was left alone in the room, aside from Combeferre, who sat at a table in the corner, scribbling in a notebook, as he had been all night. He had come in late and damp, with an air of weariness about him that Enjolras knew him well enough to know meant he would rather not make conversation, and indeed, he had barely said a word all night, and Enjolras had not pushed him to.

Now, though, in the quiet, he walked over and stood behind him, laying a hand softly on Combeferre's shoulder. Combeferre looked up at him, blinking as if startled out of a reverie, and smiled, setting his pencil down to put his own hand over Enjolras's.
“My apologies, I was...occupied.” He waved his free hand at the notebook open on the table.

Enjolras took the notebook and glanced for permission at Combeferre, who nodded. He leafed delicately through it – annotated anatomical sketches, notes beside them in Combeferre's neatly slanted handwriting, the drawings themselves in the same careful, thorough hand. A mouse's eye. A diagram of a steam engine and one of a percussion-cap rifle; several flowers, lovingly drawn and labelled in Latin, though Enjolras recognized neither the names nor the blossoms. Lists of names and chemicals. Some assemblage of lenses, though what purpose it was designed to serve, Enjolras couldn't tell. A strange abstract swirl that he eventually realized to be a cloud formation. A woman's hand. Beetles, blown up to full-page size. And repeated again, sometimes doodled in the margins of pages of writing, sometimes taking up whole pages to themselves, himself and his friends – Feuilly's hands clasped on a table, paint ground under his fingernails and a thread fraying loose from his shirtsleeve; Courfeyrac's smiling face; the ridiculous hat Prouvaire had worn last Thursday (until Bahorel had whipped it off his head and threatened to throw it in the fire – they had chased each other around the café for a good ten minutes, knocking over chairs and jostling bystanders, until Bahorel had finished by sitting on the thing); the light catching on the polished head of Joly's cane as he touched it to his nose; and Enjolras himself, from the outside as he had never quite seen himself – the set of his face caught up in a passionate discussion; the line of his shoulders silhouetted against the map of France on the wall; candlelight catching in his hair; his blonde head and Feuilly's dark one bent together over a table strewn with papers.

Each one was dated in tiny letters, and several of them recurred repeatedly, in more or less fragmentary form – Enjolras indicated one of these recurring images (Courfeyrac standing behind him, an arm tossed over his shoulder) and raised a quizzical eyebrow to Combeferre, who shrugged.
“It fixes them,” he said, and seeing Enjolras didn't take his meaning, elaborated, “They're memories, each of these. Drawing them once pins them down; drawing them again means I won't forget them.”

He flipped back to the newest page, tracing his fingers over the outlines of a male silkmoth; traced in loving detail down to the hairs on its spread wings, and smiled. “And once they're there, I can call them back whenever I need them.”