Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

The meeting of their cell chapter breaks up, and Enjolras waits until most of the ABC have dispersed. A few of them linger in the back room on their way out, drinking, but once the meeting room itself is empty he slips up the back stairs. The staircase is coded to all of them, but Combeferre’s study is locked down more tightly, and Enjolras has to break in to get the door open.

He doesn’t expect Combeferre to be inside already.

“You know, you could always knock,” he says mildly.

Since he seems to be under the helpful impression Enjolras was looking for him, Enjolras shrugs. “It was faster.”

“Do I break into your rooms?” Combeferre asks, then answers himself. “I suppose I do, but I don’t disembowel your codepad to do it.”

Combeferre doesn’t need to. He has an override, which Enjolras reluctantly granted after certain events had made it clear that, sometimes, someone else having access to his rooms was a good idea.

“Was there something you wanted?”

“To talk to you, obviously,” Enjolras says. “I wasn’t convinced by your turn of argument in the meeting, and I wanted to discuss the possibility of another strategic capture if support for the Bill is against us.”

“Frankly, the way most security around political figures has been increased since the uprising two years ago–”

“That's what I wanted to discuss.” It's a subject designed to distract Combeferre, but it's something Enjolras has genuinely been considering of late. He hasn't raised it in a chapter meeting, yet; mooting it to the highest council has to come first. “If our object was leverage, rather than information–”

It takes Combeferre a moment to follow, then his eyes widen behind their frames. “Oh. That's a – departure.”

It's one that would take them over the line they straddle now, an illegal far-left group that's under a certain amount of surveillance, with outstanding warrants out for their three leaders; it would put a price on all their heads, every single one, and it would start an outcry that would be hard for even the most rigorous government intervention to stifle.

It's not a step to take lightly.

“We've never involved civilians. We've never interfered with friends and families.”

“And yet every day they interfere with our friends and families,” Enjolras says. “Have we not all been forced to sever the ties that bind us to them for their own protection? Is there an acquaintance of ours that has not been questioned? On a greater level, is there a single human life not subject to their interference and unjust control?”

“Too far,” Combeferre says critically. “You always drag out the really big rhetorical flourishes when you're reaching.” He straightens. “What's really going on?”

Enjolras glowers. “I'm serious.”

“I'm sure you are,” Combeferre agrees, but he's out of his chair and scrutinising him closely now, and this is exactly what Enjolras didn't want. “You look shifty. And you're tapping your foot, and fidgeting – No, don't move away. What is it this time?”

His surgeon's hands manipulate Enjolras expertly, tilting his head back and forth, checking his pupils in the harsh artificial light overhead. Not satisfied, he palpates under his jaw, checking his glands.

Enjolras glowers harder.

“Hm.”

“Satisfied?”

“Not at all. Your nodes are a little enlarged, your temp is up, and your pulse is too fast. Are you going to tell me what you've done to yourself, or do I have to drag it out of you?”

“It's not what you think,” Enjolras says. Combeferre is still looking at him with that mixture of gravity and disappointment he's perfected over the past decade. It should have lost its edge by now; Enjolras is no longer twelve. “My blockers aren't working very well, that's all.”

Combeferre's look of disappointment deepens, but it's just habit at this point. He lets go, sinking back into his chair and Enjolras rubs his jaw.

“Your bedside manner is somewhat lacking, has anyone ever told you that?”

Combeferre waves a hand, not bothering to respond. It takes him a few minutes to find and access Enjolras's medical records; they're under the highest possible encryption, and it takes time to get in, even considering that Combeferre set it. “We haven't upped your dose for over a year – you've stopped growing, so it hasn't needed adjustment. You've probably just become accustomed to that base level of suppressant.” He pushes his glasses up his nose and reaches for his prescription pad, apparently unaware of Enjolras fidgeting guiltily. “What are you currently taking, 60mg–”

“Eighty five,” Enjolras admits quietly. He walks as careful a line with Combeferre when it comes to medical issues as he does with the activities of the ABC: he may keep information from him, but he never lies.

The look Combeferre gives him this time isn't just disappointed, it's disbelieving, edging into anger. “That's extremely unsafe. How did you – Joly.”

“I didn't say that.” Enjolras watches with some alarm as Combeferre trades his pad for his phone and starts texting. He's been trained to withstand interrogation, has withstood questioning –

“You didn't have to.” Combeferre sends the text. “I can't prescribe you any more, Enjolras. It's not safe.”

“I can't afford a heat, Combeferre. That's not safe.”

“You're already taking as much suppressant daily as someone of your age and weight can. You could push it maybe as much as 5mg more, but that would bring you right up to the line, and possibly over it – and once that's crossed...” He looks serious, but Enjolras has heard this lecture before – heard it from Combeferre every six months since his seventeenth birthday. It no longer has any effect on him.

“I'll chance it.”

“You're not listening to me.” Combeferre does something to his record; red flashes across the screen of his pad. “I won't prescribe you more. It may buy you six months, but if you've already crossed your threshold, where do you go from there? Your hypothalamic system must be under incredible stress, and I'm not sure how much longer you can afford to keep it completely suppressed. If you're coming up to the line, maybe it's time–”

“In six months I could be dead,” Enjolras says darkly. “We could all be dead.”

Combeferre's mouth thins. “Forgive me if I prefer to imagine that you have sixty years ahead of you to worry about.”

Enjolras pushes a hand through his hair, running calculations. He can feel the edges of it already; a faint buzzing in his bloodstream, a tightening of his skin. He's gotten used to the feeling of it coming on, this past year. It's becoming a regular warning signal, telling him when it's time to bully additional suppressant out of Joly – a well that's beginning to run dry; telling him that it's time to dampen it the fuck down and send it away again. He needs it to go away. Combeferre doesn't understand; as a beta, he can't properly understand what it means to be so subservient to your own physiology and brain chemistry, to be threatened with losing all control.

“Maybe – maybe 5mg more would be enough to keep holding it off.” It'll have to be; it could give him weeks, at least, if not months. Six months, if he's lucky. “Fill it for me, and–”

“No.”

“No?” Enjolras narrows his eyes. “I believe that you swore an oath of loyalty to me–”

“I swore an oath to you, yes,” Combeferre says. “I also swore an oath to Apollo the physician, to Asclepius and Panacea.”

Enjolras hates it when Combeferre quotes the Hippocratic Oath at him. He hates it when Combeferre settles immovably at a point from which Enjolras can't shift him, argue him, or outvote him. It doesn't happen very often.

Combeferre stares back at him, implacable. The pad has disappeared into the desk again, behind one of Combeferre's personal palm locks, and without it Enjolras isn't able to forge prescriptive codes that would pass muster with any pharmacy tech –

Without help.

“Fine,” he says tightly, and turns on his heel.

He's half a pace out of the office when Combeferre says conversationally, “I've told Joly not to prescribe you any more blocker, either. On pain of my ingenuity.”

-

Enjolras was willing to bet the threat of his ingenuity against Combeferre's, but Joly doesn't seem to agree.

“I'm much more frightening than Combeferre,” he mutters, and Courfeyrac pets his hair.

“Of course you are, baby.”

Enjolras lift his head off the table and glares at him. Courfeyrac removes his hand with exaggerated caution, grinning,but Enjolras is not in the mood for his antics right now.

“Don't patronise me. If you want to pull that kind of condescending alpha bullshit, you can get the fuck out.”

“Hey,” Courfeyrac says, hurt. “You know I wouldn't – I was kidding.”

“It's not a good time to kid,” Enjolras says, and then sits up straight. “Courfeyrac – you're an alpha.”

“Indeed I am.”

“If Combeferre keeps blocking me, I'm going to need one–”

“Whoa, whoa,” Courfeyrac says. “Stop right there. Right there. I know you don't believe in the validity or innate superiority of pair bonding, which is fine, whatever, but it exists, and I'm taken. Very, very taken. Off the market. Not available. My body is not mine to give to the cause.”

“That's exactly the kind of bullshit we're supposed to be fighting against,” Enjolras says, distracted. “No one's body is anyone's property than their own–”

“Right, right,” Courfeyrac nods, “theoretically, yes, but in practice? This is Jehan's, and as much as you want a taste of this jelly–”

“I will end you–”

“Baby, you can try.” He grabs Enjolras's hand before it connects, presses a kisses below the base of his thumb, and returns it to him. “Still joking, by the way. Protecting you from yourself, getting you to lighten up, all of the above, but no patronising."

“I do not,” Enjolras says emphatically, “want your jelly.”

-

What he wants is to turn his body off and keep it off. It's irritating enough that he already has to waste valuable hours tending to it, eating, sleeping, exercising – he's tried caffeine and amphetamines and fuck knows what else, but eventually there's always a crash, always a debt to repay. The last thing he has time for is a sex drive. Another bodily need to add to the list, another drag on his attention, a dulling of his mind when he needs every wit to survive.

It's getting worse. It's barely been a day since he noticed the first signs; the slightly heightened senses, the sudden awareness of his nerve endings, the rub of his clothes against his skin.

Two days, and he's dealing with things he hasn't had to think about since he went on the blockers. He wakes up hard and grinding against his mattress, and only the application of cold water and the imagined images of the worst things he can think of – cauterised flesh, the time they had to escape through the sewers, Marius eating soup – make it go away.

Three days, and even that doesn't work.

“Please,” he says, taking Combeferre's hands and squeezing them. “I beg you. I'm begging.”

“That's kind of hot,” Courfeyrac says. He sounds a little horrified. “Combeferre, making Enjolras stop being hot.”

“Are you sensing his pheromone levels?” Combeferre asks. “If he's broadcasting that strongly already – his androgens are reasserting themselves faster than I expected, but I suppose, after being suppressed for five years–”

“Yes, you told me so, I know,” Enjolras breaks in.

He hates it when people talk over his head. It's all part of a broader inequality, weighted unfairly on biological lines. He acquits Combeferre of that kind of unconscious superiority, but Courfeyrac is more volatile, for all his stated principles. Enjolras believes him to be completely sincere in his desire for a more equal world, and he's certainly done his best to drop his alpha privileges the way he dropped the 'de' from his name, but some reflexes are more innate than others, harder to shed.

“Mm, a little,” Courfeyrac says, flaring his nostrils and breathing in. The horrified look comes back. “Combeferre, this is deeply disturbing, can I go?”

“You're not a prisoner.”

“Can I go?”

“No, I'm running tests later,” Combeferre tells Enjolras. “Nice try, though. Courf, I'd prefer if you stayed here, we need to discuss what we're going to do, and your insight is invaluable – as always, but particularly in this instance.”

“We,” Enjolras echoes. “We're discussing what we're going to do? I knew you were waiting for me to crumble so you could seize the reins of power–”

“Triumvirate,” Courfeyrac sing-songs.

(In principle, that's what they're supposed to be, the three of them: the highest council of the ABC, an equal balance of alpha, beta, and omega, all working together for a common cause, none superseding the others. A demonstration of the equality they're fighting for, an example of the change they want to bring. Enjolras has always insisted that the balance of three is coequal, but if he takes the lead in private a little more often, well – that's subversive enough in its own way. Besides, it works.)

“I'm starting to think these walls are padded for more reasons than discouraging eavesdroppers,” Combeferre says, looking back and forth between them judgingly. It's a disturbing little room, the bunker under their building, and they weren't the ones who modded it. Enjolras usually tries not to think about its original purpose whenever they meet there. “Seriously, I called a meeting of the high council in here for that reason, but–”

“It's too late,” Courfeyrac says, going serious. “It's not just me, the others are starting to pick it up, too. Not the betas or the omegas, obviously, but Bossuet asked me what Enjolras had done to his hair, because it was extra shiny, and Bahorel wanted to know why he was all weird and twitchy and did someone let him take amphetamines again–”

“One time.” The crash at the end of that sleepless week had been bad enough that he'd decided never to employ it as a tool again, he hadn't needed the lectures. He'd gotten them, though.

“Everyone's still scarred, Enjolras,” Courfeyrac says. “No one's forgetting what you're like when you're on a crazy hyperactive power trip, not ever.”

“We achieved our mission–”

“We kidnapped three politicians–”

“We gave them back!”

Eventually.

“Anyway,” Combeferre interrupts. “We need to decide what we're going to do.”

“Can't you just –” Courfeyrac waves a hand vaguely. “Stuff him with enough suppressant to make it go back to business as normal? I'm taking his side here. This is getting weird.”

“Thank you–”

“Enjolras's norm is not normal,” Combeferre says. “If you don't like him now, imagine him five days from now, and then imagine that that's what he's stuck like every six months until forever, thanks to his abuse of gonadotropin blockers to the point of going over his tolerance threshold.”

Courfeyrac visibly blanches. “Jesus.” He rubs his face with the back of his hand, like he's trying to wipe away the trace of a pheromone trail. “Old-fashioned solution, then? Fuck, that's just not right. It's Enjolras.”

“I'm not any happier about it,” Enjolras says sharply. He's still annoyed at Courfeyrac's imputation about his jelly. He doesn't want anyone, much less Courfeyrac.

He does, however, need this to stop, to the point of being willing to actually entertain the idea. The past three days of escalating torment have had a lot to do with bringing him around on that point. He still can't spare the time, but two or three days to work out the heat the old-fashioned way – possibly they can afford that. If nothing serious comes up. Which it might, no matter what Combeferre says.

It'll give him six months until the next cycle, and by then his blockers might be working better after the break. He could have years before he needs to go through heat again. Combeferre has explained this to him multiple times over the years, and with particular frequency in the past few days, and the logic is inexorable and inescapable.

That doesn't mean Enjolras likes it.

“Right,” Courfeyrac says, and Enjolras can see the change in him again, the moment his brain switches tracks from play to planning. It's something he both envies and doesn't understand about Courfeyrac, his supreme ability to juggle personal and political. “We're going to need a temporary alpha, then. Not me, obviously, and Bossuet's bonded, too; Marius, ha ha, that would be hilarious if Eponine didn't murder us all, fuck. Bahorel and Feuilly aren't bonded, but they've been taking care of business together, I don't know how things stand there – maybe Bahorel would be willing.”

“Mm,” Combeferre says, his eyebrows pulled together in thought. “Perhaps.”

"It's not like he's hideous," Courfeyrac continues, apparently unaware that Enjolras is calculating how best to crush his windpipe. "I wouldn't, obviously, but thousands would, if he kept his mouth shut - I mean, not even counting R's little sketchbooks, Jehan has a whole sideline in poems about his icy and terrible beauty. 'Shall I compare thee to a frosty morning? Thou art more cold and yet more radiant; O, the harsh clear light that comes with dawning' - admittedly, not his best work, I think there's a 'yawning' rhyme somewhere later-"

"Jealous?"

"I'm very secure in my masculine beauty," Courfeyrac says, utterly unabashed. "Also, I have an entire unpublishable private literature dedicated to my attractive person - anyway, to return to my point, we can always troll for stunt dick on Craigslist, if you don't want to keep it in-house.” He snaps his fingers. “Wait – Eponine! Is it a stunt dick we need, or would a stunt cu–”

“Courf,” Combeferre snaps.

He's always tried not to think about the whole messy biological process, so Enjolras consults with himself, checking the vague preferences that were still nebulous when he went on the blockers, and concludes, “Dick."

“Just not right,” Courfeyrac mutters.

There are licenced sexual therapists, obviously, for anyone in need of an alpha or an omega and unbonded. They should be able to organise something, Combeferre argues, if they use enough encryption, if they burn a few more false identities... This can be managed sanely and safely.

Courfeyrac is still broadly in favour of something more anonymous and less official. Not exactly Craigslist, even the a4o section, but they should be able to set something up, if they're slick enough. Trade for it, someone chasing a thrill. This can be sorted, hole-and-corner.

Neither of them are really asking Enjolras what he wants. He doesn't exactly know what he wants, beyond not having to deal with this. If only Combeferre was an alpha –

“Beta,” Combeferre says, when Enjolras voices this thought. “Very, very beta. I would do a great deal for you, Enjolras, but I can't do that.” He glances at Courfeyrac. “I see what you mean, it is disturbing.”

-

The very secret meeting of the highest council breaks up in acrimony, and the door to the small padded room – dubbed the Privy Closet by Jehan, to only his amusement – is slammed several times.

It doesn't really help Enjolras's long-term goals, but he feels much better for the slamming in the short term.

-

They hold the next ABC cell meeting without him. Enjolras keeps to his apartment for the next day or two, staying out of the common areas, and telling everyone who texts him to leave him alone – standard operating procedure for a crash after a period of overactivity. That much, he agreed to.

He didn't agree to meetings being held without him. He would have believed it was postponed, as Courfeyrac had airily promised, if it wasn't for Marius.

Marius: sorry to hear you're sick. feel better!!! :((((
Marius: this meeting feels weird without you :((((

“Enjolras,” Combeferre says, when he staggers to the door of the common area and points an accusing finger, “go back to bed. You're sick.”

“I am not. I am well, and of sound – well, of functioning mind and body,” Enjolras says, and punctures the air with his finger again. “This is mutiny.”

“No, this is Sparta,” someone – Enjolras suspects Bossuet – mutters. It comes from the corner where he's sitting, anyway, and it's more likely to be him than Joly or Musichetta.

That movie is banned from their weekly Popcorn And Movie Night, thanks to its offensive portrayal of pair bonds fighting side by side in service of Sparta, omega shieldbearers in service to their alpha spearcarriers, and Enjolras reminds the meeting of this.

“The point of that movie is Gerald Butler's abs, Enjolras,” Eponine says. She's sitting cross-legged in the corner, clever fingers weaving a cat's cradle out of copper wiring.

“This meeting is about Bill VII A going before the the Senate next month,” Feuilly agrees. “Did you come down to change the conversation to pop cultural representation? Because that's an important issue, of course, bu–”

“He's going back to bed,” Courfeyrac says, distentangling himself from Jehan. “Because, as you can see, he's clearly not well–”

“Go, before Joly strains something!” Bossuet says, and Joly presses himself harder against the far wall. He looks like he's trying to melt through it like a mutant in one of the movies Courfeyrac likes to show on Popcorn And Movie night.

“Feel better,” Marius adds sympathetically, and his face actually manages to approximate one of his sad smiley emoticons.

Enjolras opens his mouth to lay in, and Courfeyrac looms over him, shaking his head emphatically.

Bill VII A is important, it's why Enjolras needs to be present. He tightens his grip on the doorway, and Courfeyrac puts an arm around his waist. To the room it probably looks supportive, but it clamps like iron and forces Enjolras back.

“You can't stay,” he says, his voice dropped to a thread. “I may be a stronger alpha than the others, but if you put another foot over the threshold it won't just be me picking up your scent, and I know you don't want that, Enjolras. God forbid the Fearless Leader should appear less than infallible– Trust me and Combeferre to handle the meeting. Just – let us do this for you.”

Enjolras can't think clearly. He knows what Courfeyrac is saying is true. It's even kind. It's hard for Enjolras to trust anyone, especially an alpha, but trust Courfeyrac he does, however he grumbles. This legislation is too important, though; it's an attack on their civil rights, disguised in platitudes and slipped as a rider into an unrelated bill like a razorblade in candy. “I can't,” he says. “You know what this could mean.”

“I know,” Courfeyrac agrees, but his arm bears Enjolras back, away from the meeting room and their gathered friends, into the passageway. The door shuts behind them. “I've got your back in there, I promise. Can you make it back upstairs? I don't want to leave the meeting too long.”

Enjolras nods, and with a worried glance over his shoulder, Courfeyrac leaves him.

He's careful to secure the meeting room door behind him this time, and Enjolras hears the sound of the deadbolt shooting home. They don't normally lock and code it on that side when they meet. If there's danger, it'll come from the street entrance; if someone has access to the back of the warehouse or the upstairs apartments, the most secured parts, then it's already too late.

Enjolras stares at the closed door. If he goes back to his rooms, Combeferre and Courfeyrac will probably refuse to report back fully. Their focus will be on his problem, and on potential solutions, as if Enjolras isn't capable of dealing with two separate issues at once, biological impairment or not.

He doesn't take the stairs. Instead, he wanders further down the hall.

Another door gives under his hand, and he stumbles into the back room that has served the ABC as their informal tavern since the increase of their activities – and the consequent increase of law enforcement's interest in them – stopped allowing many of them the freedom of the city.

It should be empty. Every member of the ABC who can physically attend the meeting should be present, but there's someone drinking at the bar.

Enjolras tenses for a moment, and relaxes only when a closer glance informs him that it's no intruder, only Grantaire.

Grantaire is an albatross around the neck of their organisation, so his choice of the bar over the meeting shouldn't irritate Enjolras, but it does. Everything about Grantaire irritates him; the way he constantly disrupts meetings to play devil's advocate, the way he's never completely sober, the sloppy way he wears his clothes. The expression of slightly bitter amusement he wears constantly, the way he's always blasé and never sincere. Even his dark curling hair flops irritatingly into his face.

The meeting is probably producing more fruitful debate and more unanimous sense of purpose without Grantaire there to sow discord and distraction, but that's not the point: he shouldn't be in here drinking when he could be in there. If Enjolras was allowed – and it's terrible, not being allowed – there's nowhere else he would rather be. He's here as a last resort, and it's insulting that for Grantaire it's a first.

Enjolras glares at Grantaire's slumped back until another throb of pain lances through his temples and he remembers why he sought this door.

He usually forbids the use of intoxicants – stimulants are one thing, at least they can be useful, but all intoxicants do is dull. But his head hasn't stopped aching in days. Every muscle in his body is tight, quivering with tension.

For the first time, Enjolras thinks he might understand the impulse to indulge.

He makes his stumbling way over to the bar. Grantaire's shoulders stay hunched in whatever black mood has struck him this time, and he doesn't glance up, even when Enjolras leans over the edge of the bar and starts trying to make sense of the bottles.

“Wine! No, something stronger. What's stronger? Grantaire, what do you normally drink?”

Grantaire finally looks up from his tumbler, and his eyes widen. “I heard you were – Apollo, are you okay? You look like shit.”

“I'm fine.” His stupid knees aren't holding him up properly anymore, that's all.

“You don't look fine.”

Grantaire sounds genuinely concerned for once, and when Enjolras teeters forward again he reaches out; his fingers brush against Enjolras's elbow, clearly intending to take it and steady him.

Then he stops short, nostrils flaring.

Enjolras pauses, too, his hand closing around the neck of a promising-looking bottle. “What?”

“Oh.” Grantaire's eyes have gone even wider, if that's possible, blue irises being swallowed up by expanding pupil as Enjolras watches. His nostrils flare again, scenting.

Enjolras has never been particularly physically aware of anyone, thanks to his blockers, and he's never been more than half-aware of Grantaire at all. He has him mentally filed as organisational deadweight, an indulger of intoxicants, someone who has continued access to the ABC only because of his friendships and because Enjolras can't overrule Courfeyrac and Combeferre when they're in agreement.

Right this moment, he can't look away from Grantaire's drowning eyes, fixed on him as if they can swallow him up, too. They're almost all black now, with thin rings of brilliant, brilliant blue at the very edges. Grantaire's mouth, his mobile mouth, red with wine, opens. The tip of his tongue comes out, as if to taste the air as well as smell it. “Oh.”

Something unfamiliar shoots through Enjolras like lighting, and he flinches back. “Don't touch me,” he says, panicked. “Get out!”

He's the one to scramble backwards and away, though, and it's not until he's upstairs, back in the stale air of his own apartment that he puts it together.

It's the onset of heat drugging his brain and slowing his thought processes down to molasses, but it's some satisfaction to know that he's not the only one who was behind on this particular curve.

“I have a solution,” he tells Combeferre and Courfeyrac when they finally come up to report on the meeting. It derails the argument about keeping to his room, at least. “You weren't thorough enough in your accounting of the alpha population. Grantaire's an alpha. Why didn't you know that? Why didn't I know that?”

He'd always assumed Grantaire was a beta, but he can see the alpha in him now: the physical power, the boxing and the fencing, the way he can throw back a handle of vodka and still walk a straight line, albeit with extreme care.

“You didn't know that?”

“Are you saying you did?”

“Um, obviously,” Courfeyrac says, and Combeferre shrugs. “You seriously didn't?”

“I naturally assumed–”

“You and your assumptions - I swear to god, you have the worst fucking instincts of anyone I've ever met–”

“That's because Enjolras has been systematically smothering his instincts in the cradle every time they try to develop,” Combeferre says, and Enjolras divides a baleful glare between them.

“If you knew Grantaire was an alpha, why didn't you suggest him?”

Combeferre and Courfeyrac exchange looks.

“Because you don't like him?” Courfeyrac offers finally. It sounds unduly hesitant, like he could say more.

“Of course not, but he's preferable to a creepy stranger, or to a cog of the very system we're trying to tear down,” Enjolras says, with a glare all Combeferre's alone for his ridiculous licensed sexual therapist suggestion. “It's a good solution; he can be useful to the ABC for once, and since Bahorel has failed us–”

(What Bahorel had done, once approached, was scratch at his sideburns. “Um, this is uncomfortable.” At his side, Feuilly had looked stalwart and brave. “I mean, we weren't looking to put a label on this, or a ring, or anything, and obviously if it's for the cause–”

“Your sacrifice will not be required,” Combeferre had told him kindly, and they'd both practically melted with relief.)

“Did you ask Grantaire what he thought of this plan?”

“No, I only just thought of it,” Enjolras says, waving away this minor point. “Anyway, he also swore an oath to me–”

Courfeyrac makes a noise that sounds a little like “Argh.”

Combeferre sighs.

“I'll talk to Grantaire and see what he thinks. You – try to sleep. And stay in your rooms.”

-

The next day is the worst so far.

Enjolras is twitching out of his skin. All he is has been reduced to base animal functions, a stupid creature ruled by impulse and need. He can't think about anything but the humiliating need to be touched, to be taken. He can't think about anything but release. And nothing works. This is a fact. He acknowledges it, and yet he can't stop touching himself, can't stop trying – Logic has failed.

“I hate this,” he tells Combeferre pathetically when he codes open the door to his bedroom. Well, mostly he tells the carpet he's collapsed upon, but it's meant for Combeferre. “I hate this. Make it stop.”

“Oh, jesus,” Courfeyrac says, recoiling, when he steps through the door. “It smells like – argh.” He breathes in and his expression goes blankly stupid for a moment, as foolish as Enjolras feels, and then he blinks hard. “Again, I agree with Enjolras. Make it stop.”

“I'm working on it.” Combeferre crouches down. “Enjolras?”

“Leave me alone to die.”

“Not on this watch,” Courfeyrac says, rejuvenating. “You're not that lucky. Come on, dude, we talked to R and now he wants to talk to you, and I'm not stepping one foot further into this room. If your ass needs to be dragged out, it's all on Combeferre.”

Enjolras sneers at him elegantly, but allows Combeferre to help him to his feet and straighten his clothes.

-

Grantaire is waiting in the first of Enjolras's rooms, the antechamber he pretends is his only room to those who haven't been invited further into the warren. He looks anxious, and also showered. His hair is still slightly damp, his clothing clean and unrumpled, and it's possibly the most presentable Enjolras has ever seen him. He's even clean-shaven, and that's definitely something Enjolras has never seen before.

Grantaire is staring at his feet, but he looks up the second Combeferre and Courfeyrac usher Enjolras into the room, jerked by some invisible wire.

“Oh,” he says faintly.

Enjolras stares back at him, fixated. It's even worse than in the bar the day before, like all of his attention has suddenly telescoped down to this one person, sensing that he's possible, some instinct already recognising and dismissing Combeferre as a beta and Courfeyrac as bonded –

“Yeah, I'm going to go,” Courfeyrac says, sidling to the door, and Combeferre looks like he wants to follow, but duty and a lack of sensitivity to pheromone exchange prevents him. His face screams I can't leave the children unsupervised!

“I've briefed Grantaire on the situation, and he's said that he's amenable, but I just want to make it very clear that if either of you have any doubts – or if you feel the need for any sort of mediation –”

“Go away, Combeferre,” Enjolras says, still staring.

Grantaire doesn't break eye contact, either. “I think we're good.”

Combeferre still has that look on his face, but after a moment he nods, and leaves.

Enjolras checks the code on the door, setting it to the highest possible security. Then he turns to Grantaire.

“Thank you,” he says stiffly. “I appreciate your – this. I know that – this task goes somewhat beyond the call of duty.”

Grantaire looks uncomfortable again. “It's not a problem.”

“It's an imposition, and I appreciate it.” Enjolras takes a breath. This is so very awkward. He wants – no, he can't want yet. He has to talk. “I have to make some things very clear.”

“Anything you want.” Grantaire turns his palms up, showing that they're empty and unthreatening. “Just tell me, at any time–”

“No,” Enjolras says. “Once my heat's fully – I might say anything, that's why I have to be clear now. I don't know how much of the rhetoric around this kind of relation you believe in, but I'm not your pet, not your lover, and not your slave. Whatever happens–” he gestures between them, a little wildly. “It's a means to an end. It stays in these rooms. You don't discuss it afterwards; not with me, not with anyone.”

“Apollo, I wouldn't.”

Grantaire says it firmly enough that Enjolras is somewhat reassured. He's still terrified; his body might want this with mindless unrelenting intensity, but he feels like he's standing at the edge of a cliff he's been avoiding for a long time, finally pushed to the brink, and he's about to leave solid ground for freefall. It's a battle between mind and body, and the outcome might be inevitable but it still goes hard.

“Okay,” he says, and it's to himself as much as to Grantaire. “I'll accept that, I suppose. I have no reason to believe you wouldn't – that you wouldn't behave as a gentleman.”

Grantaire's mouth twists a little at the antiquated line that makes Enjolras feel stupid as soon as he's said it, or maybe with some private irony.

Enjolras wants to taste it, and the thought is like a spur digging into his side, breaking skin. It's an opening to all kinds of thoughts, giving the mindless shapeless need of the past few days a focal point, and he has to close his eyes and breathe carefully for a few moments to put them aside. He's not done yet; there are other points on the agenda to cover, things he's not sure Combeferre stipulated.

Grantaire is watching him when he opens them, the way he'd stared at him by the bar.

“Birth control,” Enjolras says, and the drowning look drops from Grantaire's face, replaced by blank shock.

Enjolras isn't sure why; it must have occurred to him as a possibility, and from what Enjolras has read, full status disclosure between partners is a necessary prerequisite to sexual activity.

“I've had an implant since I turned seventeen, so that's something you don't need to worry about.” It's a faint rectangle under his skin, set between the bones of his forearm and only palpable when specifically sought for. He touches it sometimes, for reassurance, and when he glances down he finds that he's doing it now. “I know that – I mean, I've read that condoms don't usually – that heat partners tend to be too gone to use them correctly. This is my first time, so you don't need to worry about diseases, either.”

“Combeferre said it was your first heat,” Grantaire says, slowly. “But you've – I mean, you've done stuff normally, right? Like, before you went on the blockers–”

Enjolras grimaces. Full status disclosure, right. He can almost understand why some of the guidebooks suggested it was something some people found uncomfortable.

“I've been on a high dose of suppressants since the day I turned seventeen, without break. That means, in addition to giving Combeferre periodic heart attacks, I haven't experienced any kind of sexual interest or reproductive drive since then, and before– Well, I was below the legal age of consent.”

“No one actually obeys the legal age of consent, Apollo,” Grantaire says, despairing, like that's the only possible thing in that torrent of information he's even capable of answering. His expression is a little wild. “Between peers, that is. Jesus. You've never – you've never–”

He breaks off, and his hands come up to rub at his temples like his head is hurting, too. “I don't know if I'm the right person for this. God, I know I'm not.”

“Obviously, it's not ideal,” Enjolras agrees. “But right now, you're the only person, and.” He pauses. It's almost true: he can make it true. “And I trust you.”

Grantaire looks like Enjolras just pushed him off a cliff of his own, hands frozen in his hair. He doesn't say anything for a few breaths, several long unravelling moments.

Enjolras doesn't have time for this kind of delay. “I believe it's usual to respond to a disclosure of sexual status with reciprocal honesty.”

Grantaire takes a final breath, deeper, and he must get a lungful of pheromones because the shocky look on his face visibly changes into one Enjolras is more familiar with. It's mostly identical to his expression from the encounter in the back room, but there's a touch of something drugged that Enjolras recognises, like his scent is as much an intoxicant as any of Grantaire's chemical sometimes-vices. “I'm clean, too. Combeferre made me pass a whole panel of tests before he let me in here.”

Enjolras relaxes a tiny fraction. “Combeferre is occasionally useful.”

“Yeah.” Grantaire rubs his temples again. “He gave me – look, I want to run something by you, before we – before anything. I want to give you a choice.”

He waits, watching Grantaire fumble in his pockets and then turn his hands out to Enjolras again. This time, there's a small white pill centred on each palm.

“Red pill, blue pill,” Grantaire jokes weakly. It's a reference Enjolras actually doesn't mind; The Matrix is an excellent metaphor for his own purposes, and he uses it a lot. Too much, according to Courfeyrac. “Red pill, I take my next blocker and I stay in control of my own, um, reproductive drive. Blue pill, I bring it on now, earlier than I'm due.”

Enjolras looks at them. They're both rounded, whitish, unassuming – almost indistinguishable, except for their stamped markings.

Should he ask Grantaire which option he prefers? But if Grantaire wanted him to know, he'd have made it clear, surely. Grantaire is offering, and it's a gift; even this far out of his mind, Enjolras recognises that it's a gift, an attempt to allow him to control or choose this much, even if he can't turn his own body off.

He tries to think about the branching possibilities, to weigh the options fairly, running a hand through his hair. “I don't know,” he says finally. “I'm not exactly an expert at this – I don't know. I can't think.”

“Enjolras.”

Grantaire never uses his actual name – it's one of the most annoying things about him, on a long list of annoying things. It's arresting enough that Enjolras stops pacing and panicking and looks at him, and only realises after he's done it that his sudden obedience might have less to do with the novelty, and more to do with his stupid instincts.

“Calm down,” Grantaire says softly. “You can do this. You don't have to make the decision if you don't want to, but I thought you'd like to, that's all.”

It's a good thing that Grantaire is asking, Enjolras tells himself, trying to push away irritation. He's being less overbearing than he could be; it's not his fault that he's an alpha and Enjolras hates him on principle and also wants to do exactly what he says right now.

“Very well,” he says tightly, trying to sound more collected. “Talk me through it.”

“Red pill,” Grantaire says. “I don't start it, I stay about normal – I'm in complete control of myself and my actions, and I can be very careful with you.”

“Will you still be able to perform?”

Grantaire's smile goes crooked. “That won't be a problem.”

“So why ask?”

“Well, it's more equal in a way, maybe. It wouldn't be just you that's out of control if I'm in heat, too. And, um. Endurance. It's a thing. Heat's easier that way, for everyone, less drawn-out – But like I said, I don't know which you'd want. I wanted to leave it up to you.”

“I'm in heat,” Enjolras says, and it's a weak evasion. “Technically, I'm not of sound mind or body right now, and unable to enter into binding legal agreements or operate heavy machinery.”

He's always hated excuses based in shitty evolutionary psychology and a poor grasp of biology, used to justify alpha superiority as something innate, but that prohibition, at least, is making a certain horrible amount of sense. Or is it only making sense because he's not of sound mind? He can't think..

“Enjolras,” Grantaire says, and this time the faint note of command is stronger.

It's not much of a choice: being vulnerable and stupid and out-of-control in front of a self-possessed Grantaire, naked in every possible way, or driving them both to the same level of need, of nakedness. It seems unfair, to make Grantaire go through the same humiliation that's wracking him right now. But equality in everything, even in this –

“Blue pill,” he says. “Start your heat.”

Grantaire nods. Enjolras searches his face for some sign – was that the right choice? Should he change it? Is his desire for approval some side effect of his heat? – but Grantaire's expression doesn't change at all.

His fingers curl over the pill in his right hand, sealing it from sight, and he lifts the left to his mouth and swallows fast and dry. It's quick, too late to take back.

They look at each other.

“Relax,” Grantaire says, and Enjolras tries to untense muscles he was unaware had suddenly tightened. “It takes a few minutes. We don't evolve in two seconds flat.”

“Evolution implies movement from an inferior to a superior state,” Enjolras says automatically. It's a familiar argument, one they've had before, and it helps.

“Only from a eugenicist point of view,” Grantaire says, and he sounds as grateful for the distraction as Enjolras himself. “From a strictly Darwinian position, there's no inherent value judgement with any given adaptation. They're just randomly evolving to fit different niches; there's no master plan, they're not moving towards any particular end goal–”

“Yes, but no one argues pure Darwinian evolution per The Origin of Species,” Enjolras whips back. “It's been impossibly corrupted in pop culture by the slant towards eugenics, particularly given the alpha-omega theory Galton pushed–”

He stops for breath, then stops entirely. Grantaire's scent is changing; the air is thick with it, protean and uncurling, increasing. Enjolras wants to throw himself at him. He wants to unlock the door and start running. Between the two urges he's completely paralysed.

“Relax,” Grantaire repeats, and his voice is slightly deeper now, maybe, or maybe it's just vibrating at exactly the right frequency to make Enjolras's skin prickle. “I'm not going to hulk out, you need to calm down.”

“That's easy for you to say.” Enjolras hates the sound of his own breathless voice, the brokenness of it when it's usually a perfect tool for his use. “You've done this before.”

Grantaire reaches out like he wants to touch him, comfort him, then draws back. It stops Enjolras having to make the throw-himself-or-run decision, at least, but he's becoming uncomfortably aware that both their alternate options are dwindling away, second by second. This is the choice they've made, to go through heat together, and shortly that will be the only choice.

He's breathing faster and faster; heat or hyperventilation?

“I suppose you don't have anything to drink in here.”

Grantaire shrugs when Enjolras looks at him incredulously. He shrugs again when Enjolras asks “Are you sober?”

“Pretty much. It seemed like it would be better. I'm regretting it now.”

“There's a bottle of something in the fridge.” This time it's Grantaire looking incredulous, and Enjolras adds “For Courfeyrac, when we meet in here. Combeferre, too.”

“Well, thank fuck for Courfeyrac,” Grantaire mutters. “Where's the kitchen? How far back does this place go?”

This is why people aren't allowed in his quarters. “Through there.”

Grantaire goes, shaking his head, and when he comes back he has the wine uncapped and he looks like he's been applying it liberally.

His scent is almost a physical thing now, stronger, and Enjolras stumbles across the room towards him. He can't stop himself; he doesn't want to. The minute or two of separation has been murderous.

“Hey,” Grantaire says, and now he sounds breathless, too.

Enjolras presses himself against him, just trying to touch him with his whole body, get as much of Grantaire against him as he can, and Grantaire presses back.

They're locked chest to chest, belly to belly, thigh to thigh, knee to knee. It's not enough. It's not enough. It's better and worse at the same time; what Enjolras needed, but not what he needs exactly.

He shifts his hips against Grantaire, trying to get more of him, and that feels good, why didn't he think of it before? It feels amazing, so he does it again, and again, and it gets better, but not –

“Hey,” Grantaire says, after a moment. “Stop. Enjolras. Stop.”

“No,” Enjolras says, but he's not completely gone. It takes him a few seconds, but he manages to stop what he's – to stop humping Grantaire's leg, fuck, what's wrong with him? No, he knows what's wrong with him.

He pulls away, peeling himself from Grantaire fraction by humiliating fraction.

“Fuck.”

“It's okay,” Grantaire says. “Apollo, look at me. It's okay. I don't have any problem with that – you must have been able to feel that I didn't have any problem with that. I just thought, maybe, it might be a good idea to go find your bedroom. I know this is a heat, but you deserve better than your living room floor with your clothes on, the first time.”

Enjolras recognises this as true. He's just not sure how he's going to last, or how to get there.

“Just – point the way,” Grantaire says. The hand not holding the wine bottle slips down, finds Enjolras's hand and takes it firmly. “I won't let go of you.”

Enjolras isn't sure how they get there – an agony of stumbling, of being tucked against Grantaire's side and kept upright – but they do, eventually. If he was less insane with need, he'd be embarrassed of his room; the bed is unmade, sheets in twisted coils, and it must reek of him, of days tossing and turning in his bed, trying to make the urges go away, or at least satisfy them.

Grantaire staggers when they cross the threshold, and Enjolras nearly goes down with him. “Sorry, sorry,” he mutters. “Fuck. Bed, Apollo. Bed, not floor.”

“And clothes,” Enjolras says, reminded. He's supposed to take them off, that's right. He gets the shirt off easily, but the pants seem unduly difficult, the trick of the fly as hard to crack as some high-level coded government seal. He can do that, why not this?

“I don't know,” Grantaire says. He's staring at him. Enjolras must have said that out loud. “Just, oh, fuck.” Enjolras's pants are finally off, puddled on the ground around his ankles until he kicks them away. “Fuck. I should – my clothes, too.” He gestures with the bottle at Enjolras. “I was going to suggest you have some wine, help you relax, but I don't think it's going to be neces-”

Enjolras takes the bottle from him and swallows. He doesn't need the Dutch courage, but he'd like the excuse of it. It's sharp white wine, thin and astringent, but he gets it down.

“Fuck,” Grantaire repeats.

Enjolras wonders if it's an erotic trigger for him, if his need for intoxicants is hardwired into his entire limbic system. It seems possible. He takes another swallow, testing, and is rewarded by Grantaire's fingers going lax on his shirt buttons.

He sets the bottle down until Grantaire's managed to undress himself. Then he walks back to Grantaire, who is busying himself folding his clothes for some stupid reason Enjolras can't understand – it's not like he bothers with niceties of dress normally, so why now, of all times? – circles him, and drapes himself over his back.

Grantaire stiffens, the shirt crumpling in his hands, and Enjolras rubs his chest against the smooth length of his back blindly, cat-like, trying to know him through the contact. It's the first time he's touched Grantaire fully skin against skin. His nipples have gone hard, seeking out sensation, skimming the flesh of Grantaire's back even as it slips away and Grantaire turns to face him.

Grantaire's hands come up, one settling on his hip, keeping his pelvis angled away; the other cupping the side of his face, tilting his chin forward.

Enjolras doesn't want to look at him. It's easier if he doesn't – how do people do things like this and look each other in the eye? – but Grantaire keeps stroking his cheekbone with his thumb until he does.

“Can I kiss you?” The thumb sinks lower, brushing against the corner of his mouth. It starts to trace the curve of his lower lip. “You've done that, right?”

“Turned off my sex drive at seventeen,” Enjolras reminds him shortly.

“Before, though?”

Enjolras shakes his head, but he doesn't succeed in shaking Grantaire's hand away. “Why do we need to kiss? This isn't romantic, it's not a bonding – it's just a heat, a – a servicing.”

“Well, people tend to,” Grantaire says, but he removes the hand. “I'll try not to, then. I can't promise–” He shuts his eyes as Enjolras puts an end to the careful distance between them.

That's it, the first time: standing together in a puddle of discarded clothing in front of Enjolras's bed, grinding blindly against each other until Grantaire gets a hand between them and oh, that's what Enjolras needed.

He's never really thought about how this sort of thing happens, but Grantaire obviously knows what to do, his fingers closing in a tight circle that slides their dicks together, and Enjolras would be ashamed of how much he's leaking if it didn't feel so good, if everything wasn't suddenly smooth and hard and slick –

“That's right,” Grantaire says, a hot breath at his ear, “I've got you. You can let go.”

Enjolras isn't sure what he means by that, but the next slide is so good, right to the center of him, that he can't completely kill the sound that wants to escape him. Grantaire's hand stutters and suddenly his mouth is on Enjolras's shoulder, wet and open, and at the next sound his teeth sink into the hard flesh there, and apparently that's it, the last barrier –

Enjolras finds himself crying out in a wordless shout, all of it, all of what he's been feeling and has been trying to stifle, and comes in a hot pulse of release that seems to go on and on.

He becomes aware, after a while, that it's only Grantaire that's keeping him on his feet. Grantaire's arms circle him fully now, holding him up while Enjolras slumps helplessly against his shoulder; he's shorter, but he's steadier. Enjolras can feel his heartbeat pressed between them, reverberating against his own chest; it still sounds fast, and in the sudden silence of his own head now that the urge that's been driving him has slackened, it's deafening.

He straightens up, trying to make his knees work, to push Grantaire away.

“There you are,” Grantaire says, sounding a little amused, a little – something else. “I was kind of worried that I'd killed you.”

Enjolras feels more like himself again, and suddenly and tremendously embarrassed. He made so much noise, for so little reason. It's made worse by the fact that Grantaire's still hard, and just watched him come apart. Enjolras can't meet his eyes.

Then he frowns; didn't Grantaire take the pill that would chemically start his heat? Shouldn't he have had as little control as Enjolras himself?

“Well, heat,” Grantaire says when Enjolras mutters something along those lines. “It takes alphas a little differently, it gets – well, you'll see. I wasn't kidding about the endurance thing, and if you come here–”

He reaches for Enjolras again, pulling him back against his chest, and it's with absolute despair that Enjolras finds himself going happily, feels desire stir in his belly again. “I thought it was over.”

“It figures that you'd be as impatient about this as everything else,” Grantaire says, and his hand is on Enjolras's dick again, pad of his thumb rubbing with gentle assurance against the underside, teasing at the head. It should hurt, should be so sensitive that Enjolras can't bear it – he does remember that much of puberty – but the hurt doesn't come, just pleasure, and more pleasure, until he's swelling to fill Grantaire's hand again.

“It's not over?”

“Well, we took the edge off,” Grantaire says, still rubbing, and he makes a pleased sound low in his throat when Enjolras arches his back and presses into his touch. “Ever heard of a honeymoon? Back when they bonded alpha-omega pairs at seventeen – for life, thank fuck that tradition's gone by the wayside – that's what they called their first heat, the first month they were bonded.”

“Not a month,” Enjolras pleads. He doesn't think he can take even a week of feeling like this. He'll die. Days. Combeferre promised him days.

“No, not a month,” Grantaire agrees. “Doubt it was a month even back then. It's just a phrase, Apollo, don't worry. A few days–”

Enjolras barely remembers the second time. It's the third by the time he's on his hands and knees in his own bed, Grantaire fucking him from behind with hard thrusts of his hips, pushing back desperately to meet him.

Enjolras meant it to be impersonal, forced that position for a reason. Still, Grantaire rolls them onto their side after, not bothering to pull out. Enjolras wants to protest the spooning – this is a servicing, after all – but every time he tries to move Grantaire nips at his shoulder and tightens his arm around his waist, and it feels good to keep him inside; it calms some of the urgent need that starts rising up again almost immediately every time Enjolras gets off, holds it off longer.

It also feels good to have Grantaire nuzzling against the back of his neck, muttering nonsense and rubbing tiny circles into his skin.

They move naturally and without effort from that round to the next, to the next. Enjolras loses track after that. It feels like like they're strung out over days, a blur. They drowse and wake to fuck and drowse and fuck again; a week could be passing, locked in his apartment, riding out the heat.

At one point he finds himself on his kitchen floor where they'd gotten distracted while stopping for sustenance, on his back with his legs wide open and Grantaire's head between them, fucking the empty air as he tries to angle his hips back, to get more of Grantaire's mouth on him, inside him. It's the best thing he's ever felt, but eventually it's not enough anymore, either.

“Now,” he orders.

Grantaire makes a pained noise and pulls his mouth away with great reluctance and an obscenely wet sound, and the hard sucking kisses he presses against the inside of Enjolras's thigh are so distracting Enjolras almost lets him get away with it before he has to repeat himself.

Grantaire's quick to put it in, for all his complaining, and they both groan at the feeling of him sinking home; it's smooth and swift now, practiced, Enjolras so open for him that he slides in easily. This time it's slow, long lazy strokes that Grantaire draws out and out and out, not hurrying until finally neither of them can stand it.

“This is probably unsanitary,” Enjolras says some time later, when his mind has cleared a little. He can see right under his fridge from this angle on the floor, a hidden perspective revealing dust and crumbs and a few of the stupid Spock magnets Courfeyrac had bought him. He can't remember if he knocked them off on purpose or not when Grantaire slammed him up against the fridge, but even if it was an accident, it was a good deed.

“If I don't mind tonguing your ass you don't get to complain about that,” Grantaire says, running an idle hand up and down his side. “I'm not going to kiss you, don't worry.”

“Not what I was talking about,” Enjolras says, but he's too tired to explain. He closes his eyes, feeling Grantaire's fingers slowing to trace each individual bump of his ribs, the jut of his hipbone, the long lean muscle in his thighs.

“Love your skin,” Grantaire whispers. It makes him sound like a serial killer, and Enjolras would tell him so if he hadn't been the one trying to wear Grantaire like a coat when his heat hit. “I always thought you looked like you were carved out of marble, but I didn't realise it was true. Can't believe none of this – that you didn't feel – What are you like, when you're not in heat, and when part of you's not turned off? Do you even know?”

“I'm the same,” Enjolras says. “That's the point.” The same as he'd be if he could open his eyes one morning and wake up a beta, with his biology regularised, anyway. He thinks. It's not like he'll ever know.

“Maybe you'd be happy as a giant brain bobbling away in a jar, Apollo, but think of the waste,” Grantaire says. When Enjolras doesn't respond, he drops it, sucking another mark into his shoulder instead.

They fuck until they're sore, then fuck again, and again, in every room and on every surface that Enjolras's apartment offers. There's carpet burn on Enjolras's back and his knees, and his ass is one sore tingling ache, and his dick is no better.

“Can't,” Grantaire groans, much later. “No more. I'm broken.”

“Mm,” Enjolras agrees, “no more,” but he can't help nuzzling at Grantaire's stomach, the crease of his hip. When he starts nuzzling at his dick, trying to bring it back to life, Grantaire groans again, louder, and pushes his head away.

“The spirit's willing, Apollo, but the flesh is tired. I can't.”

“Can.” Enjolras nuzzles again, and Grantaire's hand returns, but his fingers tangle in Enjolras's damp curls instead of shoving him away, and he sighs.

“Fine, but you're doing the work.”

Enjolras is the one who rolls Grantaire onto his back that time, throwing a leg over his hips and sinking down onto his dick. It feels different with this angle, in complete control. He doesn't ride it as much as he rocks back and forth, working it inside him in until it's rubbing at just the right places.

Grantaire lets him do it for a while, getting more and more into it, until finally he can't take the teasing anymore and rolls them over.

The next time they're too sore and fucked out and the heat is coiling up relentlessly again, it's the other way around.

“I can't,” Enjolras says into the pillow. “Not again.”

“Can,” Grantaire says, climbing on top of him, and Enjolras spreads his legs for him helplessly. It's already a conditioned reflex, Pavlovian as much as biological. When Grantaire's heavy on him and nudging between his legs, it's all Enjolras can do, melt and spread, and Grantaire takes advantage of it, pressing his face into the curve of Enjolras's neck and making him take it yet again.

He fucks him like that into the mattress, and it's too much, and Enjolras is so tired, and every bit of him is sore and used and aching. The worst part is that it's still so good and he can't help responding, and Grantaire fucks him through several more wrung-out climaxes before he's done.

“I hate you,” Enjolras tells him grumpily, letting Grantaire cuddle him closer. It's comforting now, and he's so used to it he almost can't remember what it's like not to be touching Grantaire. It feels like an eternity ago that he resented the cuddling. Now it feels like the boundaries where he begins and Grantaire stops are uncertain, like they're two people wrapped in the same caul of skin.

“I know, kitten,” Grantaire mutters, kissing his shoulder. He pauses when Enjolras stiffens. “What's the matter?”

Enjolras's voice has gotten progressively more wrecked over the past – however long it's been; he hasn't seen a watch. He's moaned and shouted and begged and his voice is as used as the rest of him, but he manages to grit out “Not your pet,” anyway, and feels Grantaire tense around him in sudden understanding.

They lie there pressed together, suddenly awkward where moments ago they'd been loose and melting. It's strange to feel so uncomfortable when everything has been so mindless, so easy.

“I know,” Grantaire says finally. “I do know, I just, you know how I – fuck, if I say I like giving people petnames, that's going to strike exactly the wrong note, isn't it?”

Enjolras almost laughs, and from the way the tension in Grantaire's body loosens behind him, he can tell. “Really, I hate you.”

“Maybe stop purring this time, and it'll be more believable.”

“I'm not pur–”

“Are,” Grantaire contradicts him. “You make this lovely little noise in your throat after I've fucked you. It's darling. Didn't you notice?”

“There's nothing to notice,” Enjolras protests, but now Grantaire's pointed it out he can hear it too, the low hum of contentment he can't quite stop.

Grantaire kisses his shoulder again, chuckling. He's been careful, despite the wilder promptings of his heat; he hasn't kissed Enjolras's mouth once. Enjolras has allowed kisses on other parts of his body – they don't seem to count – but with Grantaire curled around him like a comma, laughing in his bed and calling him stupid nicknames, it feels too intimate.

His head feels clearer than it's been since this began.

“Not your lover, either,” Enjolras says, and the reminder is meant for both of them.

Grantaire's hold on him slackens, and they fall apart naturally. Still touching – not touching is agony too terrible to court – but only connected now by the tuck of their knees together, Grantaire's hand loose on Enjolras's hip.

“I know,” Grantaire says finally, when Enjolras has almost forgotten the thread of the conversation. “Believe me, Apollo, I do know.”

They lie quietly together for some time, and when the heat starts up again, it's less urgent. “I think it's getting better,” Enjolras says wonderingly, shifting his hips until they fit back into the cradle of Grantaire's, and Grantaire makes a considering noise.

“The downtime's been getting longer, and the heats've been getting further apart. Didn't you notice?”

“Almost over,” Enjolras says, and he welcomes the familiar spike in arousal this time, now that he can tell it's less heightened, now that its barbs don't prick quite as sharply. He rocks back against Grantaire in a slow tease, enjoying it, until the heat builds and builds and starts to bite, and then Grantaire's pulling away.

“Back on your knees,” he says, and slaps Enjolras's hip roughly. “Last time.”

-

Combeferre's the one who estimates downtimes and uptimes and metabolism rates, and he's the one with the override to Enjolras's most private locks, so he's the one who cautiously opens the door.

Chapter Text

Enjolras takes stock of himself in the shower before Combeferre has a chance to do so. It's one of the few places in his apartment he and Grantaire didn't fuck. There are no memories to confront.

He's sore in places he barely knew existed; muscle groups he wasn't aware of are reminding him loudly of their pains. There are red-purple bruises on his hips, his wrists; there are redder marks left by Grantaire's mouth and teeth all over his neck and shoulders and thighs and stomach. The carpet burn is a whole separate agony.

When Enjolras finally turns off the hot water and steps out of the steam, wrapping a towel around his hips, the only other person in his apartment is Combeferre, who has stripped the bed and remade it with fresh sheets.

“Ah,” he says. “Are you going to let me run a physical on you now, or are you going to insist on sleeping first?”

“Food.”

It's only when Combeferre's face lights up that Enjolras realises how much worry has been sitting heavy on it, and for how long. “We can do that. I've got soup sitting in the kitchen for you, and you should drink some water, and I have a vitamin booster to replace any nutrients you've, uh, expended.”

Enjolras nods his thanks; that's about all he can muster. He dresses, trying to ignore Combeferre's cataloguing eyes running diagnostics. What he finds must be good, because he smiles slightly, and the corners of his eyes crinkle when he watches Enjolras inhaling his soup.

“I haven't seen you genuinely hungry in years. Not since you stopped getting taller.”

Enjolras is too busy eating to respond, but he rolls his eyes and trusts Combeferre to take his point.

“I'm not going to say that I told you so,” Combeferre says. “It's enough for me that you're in one piece and you seem well. Nod to confirm lack of lasting pyschological damage?”

Another eyeroll.

“I'll take that as a yes.” He walks around the bench and carefully puts his hand on Enjolras's shoulder. “I am very, very glad that you're okay.”

Enjolras tries not to shudder at the press of someone else's body. It feels wrong to be touched by anyone who isn't Grantaire.

-

After that, things go back to normal.

Enjolras doesn't see Grantaire for a week or so, but that's not unusual: of all their members, Grantaire is the least regular. Either he haunts the back room and the meeting room for days on end, waking to join in discussions and then sleeping again when he's drunk enough to pass out, or he vanishes for days and weeks, until they're worried enough to start circulating his description through nets of contacts in case he's been taken by the authorities.

Not that it's likely that Grantaire would be connected with the ABC by anyone working for the government or for law enforcement; it must be patently obvious that no activist group that's gone as thoroughly to ground as they have would associate themselves with a drunk who rambles like a sieve – or, no, that's not fair. Grantaire is a talker, but when it comes to the important things he never breathes a word where it could cause harm. His rambling is a smokescreen that spins the casual listener in circles and sends them away still confused.

Enjolras tries not to think about Grantaire mumbling nonsensical things into the back of his neck during the heat; endearments and philosophical dissertations, snatches of poetry and broken strings of Greek. Men say foolish things in the midst of sexual congress.

His absence is a blessing. It bothers Enjolras constantly the first few days, like he put down something important somewhere and can't remember where, or what; but by the time Grantaire surfaces again – dark hair in wild array, unshaven and decidedly unsavoury, with the black circles around his eyes that only show up after a particularly terrible jag of drinking and drugging – it's faded away.

Things are back to normal. Which is not good enough; Bill VII A is slowly grinding forward, inevitable as a glacier, and crushing everything in its path. Their usual tactics – petitions, graffiti, a veritable flood of letters to various office-holders – aren't working.

“That's true,” Bossuet agrees, a frown pressed between his eyebrows. “But picking off senators' families still seems–”

“Extreme.”

“Unfair,” Marius suggests. “Just because one member of a family holds a radically conservative political position doesn't mean that his wife or childen agree–”

“Or her husband and children – or her wife –”

“Thank you, Enjolras. Pontmercy, we are aware,” Courfeyrac says. “We're not going to torture them or anything. No bamboo shoots or death of a thousand cuts – we don't need information, just leverage.”

“Anyone living in the household of a senator benefits from the privilege of the system–”

“When you take someone captive to force another's hand, you necessarily imply that harm will come to the hostage if your demands aren't met,” Bahorel says, interrupting Feuilly in mid-flight, and somehow it's always a surprise whenever he reveals that he paid attention in his legal studies. Bahorel usually plays up his slacking, and his physical power is so obvious and useful that sometimes the reminder of that veiled intellect is necessary.

“Where is our line? How far are we willing to go?” Joly, looking concerned, in the slightly disturbing way that means he's also running calculations on maximally effective, minimally damaging strategies.

“If we're going to do it, we need to have a plan,” Eponine breaks in. She never sits still in meetings, and today she's sharpening a knife. The faint scraping sound makes an effective counterpoint to her words. There's no doubt on her face; just fierce determination. “What we can't do is make threats and then fold when someone calls our bluff.”

Jehan look ill, and Courfeyrac actually moves out from his position at Enjolras's left shoulder to circle the benches and touch the side of his neck.

Enjolras takes a breath. The meeting's moving faster than he or Courfeyrac had anticipated, but Combeferre had warned him.

They're all looking at him: Eponine, Musichetta, Feuilly, Bahorel, Marius, Gavroche, Bossuet, Joly, Marius and Jehan. The only ones not fixed on him are his coequals – Combeferre is analysing the group, face by face in turn, and Courfeyrac is still focused on Jehan.

Grantaire, of course, has his head buried in his folded arms, hasn't moved or looked up or spoken since the meeting began. It shouldn't be a surprise, but Enjolras is faintly disappointed in him anyway.

“The triumvirate has considered this carefully,” he says. “Eponine is right: whatever we threaten, we must carry through, or we'll end up defanged. No one will ever take us seriously again, and we'll lose all political capital. But, as Joly mentioned, there's a line. I'm not willing to push it, not yet. Not with civilians.”

There's a lessening of tension throughout the room, a faint uncoiling of muscle. Marius looks almost winded with relief, and Enjolras tries not to be irritated; what did he imagine, that Enjolras was going to suggest lopping off ears and fingers?

Combeferre steps forward. “The effectiveness of our threat depends on the psychology of our target. Obviously, our target pool has been narrowed to those with security we can break.”

It's been a busy week. Enjolras slept off the effects of his heat and woke ready to resume work, and promptly received a list from Combeferre detailing senatorial homes with security they couldn't touch. Since then, they've been narrowing their focus, sending Gavroche and Eponine out to reconoiter, weighing up options and considering all sides of the question.

Finding the right target has been difficult. So many of their traditional enemies are too well-prepared, inured after years of siege as the ABC worked their way up from pranking to sending a message to outright sabotage.

Finding the right target, too, means finding someone whose change of opinion might sway others; either through fear, if they were worried their own families would be next, or through example. Bill VII A only needs a simple majority to pass, and the ABC would need to peel away at least ten votes to block it. Ten families, ten senators with unguarded weaknesses willing to follow orders.

Combeferre leads the others through his logic, pausing for questions; Courfeyrac jumps in occasionally to explain the pyschological profiles they've worked up on their most likely ten, because he's good at that, at finding the weak spots in people that transform into jagged cracks when pressured. He gets people at an emotional level Enjolras doesn't, and Combeferre is able to reason people through difficult decisions in a way Enjolras sometimes can't, however fiery he gets. Enjolras sees an end and chooses the straightest, fastest path to it, always, and counts the collateral damage as necessary.

They work well together, a perfect one-two-three punch.

“What we're hoping, of course, is that we won't need to stage ten kidnappings,” Combeferre says. “The best case scenario is that we only need to get to one or two senators to scare enough of the others into following suit and changing their votes, or simply staying home. Staying home is good enough, if every one of the votes against the bill that we're counting on show up. We just need to reach that majority before the Girondins do.” He looks at Enjolras, and Enjolras nods, taking over now that the hard ground has been covered.

“We'll still be staging the traditional intimidation campaign,” he says. “We've all done that before; letters, emails, presents on the front door, quiet whispers in ears in the middle of a crowd. The split is different on this bill than our usual conservative-progressive, Girondin-Montagnard delineation; because the physiological pre-testing rider was tacked onto an unrelated issue by the fucking Girondins, some of their mainstays will be voting against the passage of the bill because of the increased benefits and rights it offers to the poor, and some of the Montagnard progressives usually on our side will be voting for it.”

“That's where we've put our focus,” Combeferre says, clicking on the screen. The hundred and fifty seats of the lower Senate appear on the screen in coded reds and greens. At the click of a button the image divides into two, one plan superimposed one above the other. “At the top, you can see the traditional voting lines; on the bottom, the way they seem likely to go for this particular vote.” Another click, and the plans recombine: the votes that have changed colour between plans now stand out in the red and green sea in bright, screaming yellow.

Courfeyrac takes the control from Combeferre, flashing him a brilliant smile of possession and receiving a slight eyeroll in return.

When he presses the control, the yellow seats get tagged with the official profiles of their sitters, smiling uncomfortably for their Senate headshots. “As you can see, not too many of our old friends in this crowd – this is the middle ground on this issue, the swing votes. Some of these people have decided that it's more important to keep taxes high on the poor than it is to tighten restrictions on vulnerable omega youth: we dislike these people, obviously, but they're not the ones we're most interested in right now.” A click, and those faces vanish. “Here we go. These seats belong to our nominal allies: they may not like us, but most of the time they vote the right way on issues, and we approve of them. In this case, though, they've made the decision to barter omega rights in favour of tax reform.”

“I don't need to remind you why this bill is important,” Enjolras says quietly, but he does anyway. “As you're aware, physiological orientation only becomes determinate at the point of full sexual maturity, roughly around an individual's seventeenth year. There is testing that can pinpoint likely future orientation before that – expensive, difficult, and rare – but otherwise, until late puberty, all children are brought up on similar lines, receive similar education and opportunities, are treated with similar respect. Bill VII A will release funds to start physiological orientation testing on a mass scale before puberty; at birth, potentially, but certainly before the fifth year.

“The ramifications for this go beyond the extension of the systemic inequality adult omegas suffer – and the systematic privilege alphas receive over the heads of betas as well. It matters deeply. Francis Xavier once said that the first seven years of youth were the most important for the development of the adult soul; give a child into his keeping until the age of seven, he said, and he will give you back the embryonic grown man.

“Raise a child from birth with the belief that he or she is biologically inferior or superior – raise a child to accept that the world is simply constructed on certain innate, ineffable lines – and you constrict that child's brain from birth the same way Peruvian tribes once shaped infant skulls with bindings. You do damage that can be permanent, that might never be undone; you raise a generation of people who never question the system that contains them, who never learn to look outside their epistemological certainties, who believe that the construction they live within is the way things should be, have always been, is predetermined in the very cells of their bodies.”

This is usually the point where Enjolras would insert a Matrix reference, but he doesn't need to bring in pop culture to connect to his friends today. They're listening; the doubt and unease that had started creeping in as soon as he raised the question of targeting families has eased.

“Some of you will remember the shock that happened to your world when you reached the age of seventeen and presented as omega,” Enjolras continues, finding certain faces in the crowd – Feuilly, Jehan, Musichetta.

It was a shock to his own sense of self; he'd never thought much about how he would present. Sexuality hadn't been something that was interesting to him, but he'd vaguely assumed beta. Betas were most common, alphas and omegas rather rarer; and you simply didn't tend to see omegas taking significant roles in society in politics, in education, in the arts – even the lesser arts. He'd never thought, and then he'd been assigned a fate and a bundle of assumptions that fit him poorly, that cut off his exits and constricted his futures, and he'd realised that this was happening to everyone, in various ways, and that it was wrong.

“For some of you, it was different; presenting as a beta removes that immediate shock, and you imagine you can go on much as you did before.” This time the faces he picks out belong to Combeferre, Joly. “It would have taken time for the inequality to confront you personally, before you realised that when competing against alphas for spots at university, for internships, for job interviews, for romantic partners, you were always going to be overlooked, or expected to give precedence.

“For most alphas, the shock never comes.” He meets Eponine's fierce dark eyes straight on, holds her gaze. “For a woman who presents as alpha, it may come when she realises her list of compatible partners has shortened dramatically, when she realises that she will never bear children. For male alphas, well. To present as alpha is to have your path smoothed out ahead of you, to have the wind at your back, to never feel any invisible barriers in your way. That some of you realised this was unfair is a testament to your critical thinking and to your empathy.” This time he looks at Courfeyrac; at Bahorel, at Marius, at Bossuet.

Briefly, at Grantaire's bent dark head.

Does Grantaire deserve credit for that leap? It's impossible for Enjolras to imagine Grantaire exerting that necessary clarity of sight and strength of will. Marius, in his muddled, emotional way, had made a deliberate disavowal of everything life had handed him. There was fine material in Marius. Part of the reason Grantaire frustrates Enjolras so much is that he sometimes catches flashes of a similar potential. Grantaire hasn't rejected the opportunities others would literally kill for; instead he gratuitously wastes them, as though they mean nothing. Is that even close to the same thing?

They're with him now, everyone in the room; joined together in the same purpose and to the same end, straight and sure as a notched arrow.

“What we cannot allow,” Enjolras says quietly – he's noticed that lowering his voice instead of raising it is a useful oratorical tool, causing everyone to lean in and pay more attention – “is for future generations to lose that moment of fracture. Some will always be blind, some will always see further; but if we allow this bill to pass the lower Senate, we increase the number of the blind. We can't let that happen. We owe it to these children, born and unborn: they deserve at least the opportunities we've had, as well as the increased rights we're fighting for.”

He nods at Combeferre – the usual signal that a speech is over – and steps back, ceding the floor. Combeferre doesn't step back and start speaking again, though. He inclines his head in acknowledgement and stays where he is. There are tears standing in Eponine's eyes, and her hand is tight on Gavroche's thin shoulder.

There's a long, deep silence.

“What we need, mon capitaine,” Bossuet says from the corner, from his usual tangle with Joly and Musichetta, breaking in when it's dragged on, “is for you to join the Senate and deliver that speech on the floor. We could kill Bill VII A dead without needing to kidnap any husbands or wives or children.”

“Shame about the Fearless Leader's criminal record,” Bahorel laments with obvious insincerity.

“They wouldn't listen to him,” Courfeyrac points out. “No omega has held a seat in the lower Senate – fuck, only one or two omegas have been elected even at local government levels.”

“If only we could transplant Enjolras's brain and tongue into your magically acceptable body,” Eponine says, sharp as one of her own knives.

“Filthy,” Courfeyrac says, “filthy, Mlle. Jondrette. Enjolras's tongue in my mouth! I'm shocked that you even suggested such a thing!”

Grantaire makes a groaning noise against the table, like someone coming out of a coma, and there's laughter among the benches.

“That would wake R from the dead.”

“If you're quite done,” Enjolras says, dividing a glare among the guilty parties. “We're agreed on the necessity of action, then? This is probably going to be a turning point for the ABC. After this, government interest in us is going to increase. They'll be afraid for their own, now. The triumvirate has already come to an accord, but we won't force anyone to participate. If you want to leave the group, this is your chance.”

He doesn't mention that no one who chooses to give up their ABC membership will be allowed to leave headquarters until the vote on Bill VII A is done, for good or ill; he doesn't need to. They've done this before.

He scans the faces of his friends, the core group who have held together and clung on while others, weaker, fell away. There's indecision on Marius's face, a touch of concern on Musichetta's, but no wavering anywhere else. Neither of them speak.

“R,” Courfeyrac says, pulling away from Jehan and moving down the bench. He puts a hand on Grantaire's shoulder and shakes it gently, until Grantaire's groaning again and the loose unconscious slump of his body starts to resist. “R, wake up. We're voting.”

When Grantaire's head lifts and his eyes crack open, Enjolras looks away, but not fast enough not to see their reddened whites, the black rings beneath. The blue irises are more shockingly brilliant than ever.

Not fast enough not to see Grantaire's mouth twist into its habitual bitter curve.

“Voting?”

“Another action against Bill VII,” Courfeyrac says. “Everyone else is in agreement, and we're waiting on you before we can go ahead. Leave or stay, in or out.”

“I don't suppose it matters what I do, but thank you for the consideration,” Grantaire says. Did Enjolras ever pay attention to how aggressively cynical he was, before? No, of course he did. It's one of the reasons he didn't like him. “In, of course. If the ABC and the Fearless Leader have decided, who am I to dissent?”

There's more laughter. Grantaire is always willing to dissent if he finds fault, even if the whole ABC is otherwise in agreement; he's their wild card, unpredictable and contrary, and sometimes clever enough with his own tongue to change the flow of argument entirely, singlehandedly swing things about.

“Then we're all in agreement,” Combeferre says decisively, and it's one of the things Enjolras most values in him; he may quibble in private, when it's just the two, the three of them, but once he's given his support to a motion he's an infallible public bulwark. “Now that that's settled, we can move from the general to the specifics. Courfeyrac?”

Courfeyrac bows, grinning, and wanders back from the benches to the area in front of the screens. “I get to introduce Target Number One? You honor me.” He takes custody of the control, blows a kiss to Jehan, and clicks the screen back on.

The ten seats highlighted in yellow and their sitters' profiles come back up. Another click, and nine disappear, leaving only one face.

“Ultime Fauchelevent,” Courfeyrac says. The face looks as uncomfortably posed as any of the senators', but it's a good face. Middle-aged, with intelligent and intent dark eyes and hair starting to salt-and-pepper. “We have no usual quarrel with M. Fauchelevent. His voting record is almost impeccable. He's a middle-bencher among the Montagnards. He was elected to the senate five years ago, and was fairly quiet at first, but in the past year or two he's started pushing for economic reform.

“We've selected him for several reasons. He's not accustomed to much attention from activist groups either from the left or the right, so he still lives simply, and with minimal security. He hasn't used his position to enrich himself, and he doesn't live in one of the gated neighbourhoods, but in the rue Plumet. His house is secured fairly well from the front, but the back garden is protected only by a high fence and a few cameras, and we can disarm those. There's only two guards on the exterior of the whole property, and they seem to spend most of their time patrolling the front entrance.

“Those are all factors that put him on the short list, but the most important one is he's the senator who sponsored and drafted the bill this rider is attached to. He doesn't seem to have any particular fondness for the rider – in fact, his voting record seems to suggest a certain amount of support for increased omega and beta rights – but he hasn't withdrawn the bill.

“He's the pressure point. Get him to fold, and we're home free: some of his Montagnard and centrist supporters should melt away, and that's all we need to get the majority. If we can get him to withdraw Bill VII entirely, we don't even need to do that. This is our man.”

Grantaire squints at the screen like he's trying to backtrace the discussion he slept through, and he doesn't seem to like the conclusions he's drawing. “We're kidnapping him? Didn't you learn anything from last time–”

“Not him,” Enjolras says, and nods at Courfeyrac, who clicks onto the next slide obediently. “His daughter, Euphrasie.”

The image on the screen now shows a young girl with two long fair braids hanging under a straw hat, above the dark sailor-suit collar of the local convent school uniform. Her face is sweet and untroubled and very, very young.

“It's not a recent photo,” Enjolras says. “It was taken two years ago – she should be about sixteen now. M. Fauchelevent may be careless about his own security, but he guards his daughter's better. She has a bodyguard whenever she leaves the house, and her online records are sealed. Our only chance of access is through the back garden.”

Grantaire hisses between his teeth. “Please tell me you're not planning what I think you're planning.”

It's the wrong moment to interject, and Enjolras is so fucking thankful Grantaire slept through the initial briefing: everyone's already made up their minds, and his objection doesn't have the power it would have if it had come earlier.

“It's already been decided,” he says dismissively. “If you don't like it, you're welcome to stay in the bunker until the mission is complete, but we're not changing the plan now.”

“It's a stupid plan,” Grantaire says, equally mulish. “This guy – he's one of your allies. Potentially, at least. It's not like he's some hard-core Girondin who won't back down even with a pistol to his head. This guy could be reasonable. If you take his daughter, you put that pistol to his head, and you don't just alienate him, you alienate even the Montagnards who like you, even if they claim not to in public.”

Enjolras sets his jaw and tries to stare Grantaire down. Grantaire stares back, his bloodshot gaze never wavering, and after a moment Enjolras becomes aware of the desire to look away, to lower his eyes and twist his neck to bare his throat.

He may not be in heat, but he's not back on his blockers yet, either, and his instincts are still humming away in the background. They recognise Grantaire as an alpha, his alpha, and they want Enjolras to submit.

Enjolras has always vaguely assumed that Grantaire pitched himself into arguments with him because he enjoyed being contrarian. A little because, as the beta Enjolras assumed he was, he didn't truly respect any omega leadership. It was of a piece with the constant lack of seriousness, the mockery, the intoxicants, the stupid nickname.

He's never fought with Grantaire while so fully aware of their biological disparity. It's unfair and it makes him furious to think that maybe Grantaire is doing this to him deliberately, that perhaps he's always been arguing from the perspective of alpha privilege, that perhaps he's never taken Enjolras seriously at all – not because of his own strange bent of mind but because of his birthright.

He fights to keep his eyes fixed and level, and beside him Combeferre clears his throat and steps into the breach again.

“We considered that, R, believe it or not. Fauchelevent has been fighting for this bill ever since he entered the Senate, and even with the rider tacked on, he's not willing to surrender it. There has been pressure from our allies among the Montagnards to withdraw it – people he'd be much more willing to listen to than he would to us.”

Grantaire nods, but he doesn't look away from Enjolras, whose eyes are starting to water with the effort of not blinking. His neck hurts with the effort of holding it straight.

“It's possible that he'd listen if it was you – if it was the Fearless Leader making the point. Fuck, even if you put an actual pistol to his head while you did it. But you can't involve his daughter. We don't target civilians, and we sure as fuck shouldn't start with the minor children of Montagnards.”

“We?” Enjolras asks, and if he sneers it, well.

Grantaire's eyes finally drop. “I am a member of the ABC.”

“Do more than argue against our every action, and I'll start counting you as a member,” Enjolras snaps, carried away with his own invective.

“That's enough for today,” Combeferre says. “We'll meet tomorrow to start aportioning tasks between our two projects, the usual and the special, and finalise the details of lifting our target.”

The meeting breaks up, and if it's slightly more dampened than usual, that has nothing to do with the sparring between Enjolras and Grantaire; that's expected, and it's been far worse in the past. It's apprehension about Bill VII and the special project that's causing that flatness, making the usual joking that little bit forced.

Combeferre and Courfeyrac are a separate category, of course, and it's under the weight of their reproachful glances that Enjolras steels his spine and catches Grantaire's wrist when the room's almost empty and he's making his way to leave.

Grantaire winces, and when Enjolras releases his grip he sees the reason for the wince; it's not the simple touch, but the ring of bruises circling the skin, the scabbing crescent marks left by fingernails pressed between his wristbones.

Grantaire hastily pulls his fraying cuff down over the marks. “It's okay,” he says, obviously finding something in Enjolras's face that requires the reassurance. “Standard wear and tear.”

Courfeyrac has hustled everyone out, and now he's looking back over his shoulder at them with blatant curiosity written all over his face. Enjolras narrows his eyes at him, and Courfeyrac shrugs one shoulder unashamedly, but he does leave.

Enjolras returns to staring at Grantaire's sleeve like he can still see right through the worn cotton. He still has his own marks, but they're fading fast and almost gone, hidden under the long buttoned sleeves of his shirt, the red scarf around his neck. He was swabbed and balmed and bandaged by Combeferre wherever necessary. It hasn't occurred to him that Grantaire might not have had a Combeferre to patch him up.

“I'm sorry,” he says uncomfortably.

Grantaire tilts his head. The side of his neck is still faintly marked, too, yellow-brown bruises under his jaw. His eyes are a question. “What are you apologising for?”

(Enjolras hates that he notices those fainter bruises. He's not aware of other people's physicality normally. He doesn't search their faces for reassurance, doesn't look at their stubble and remember it scraping against the inside of his thighs. Doesn't trace the line of their throat with his eyes and remember tasting the bump of their adam's apple, remember pressing his lips to their beating pulse, remember licking the notch of their collarbone.)

“The marks,” Enjolras says, tearing his gaze away. He will meet Grantaire's eyes like an equal. “I didn't – I didn't mean to hurt you.”

The question fades. Grantaire's mouth twists again. “It was nothing. Forget it.”

“It wasn't nothing.”

“Forget it,” Grantaire repeats. “I certainly plan to.”

He's gone before Enjolras can reply, a wisp of smoke; Enjolras should feel reassured by the exchange, but he still feels unsettled, some faint guilt wrapping his chest tight.

-

“Combeferre,” he says, finding him in his office again. “Did you attend to Grantaire after– After?”

Combeferre raises martyred eyes to the butchered codepad, but doesn't say anything about knocking this time, just shakes his head. “I offered, but he insisted on leaving your rooms as soon as possible, and he assured me he was well enough.”

“He's not.”

“And you know this...?” Combeferre trails off invitingly. Enjolras shrugs. “I'll try to catch him and run a physical. He's been gone all week, or I would have tried already. I'd hoped to catch him after the meeting, but it seemed more important for you to talk to him.” He pushes his glasses up his nose. “Courfeyrac said you apologised.”

“Courfeyrac has no sense of discretion,” Enjolras says, frowning, but the way Combeferre is looking at him is approving, and that makes him uncomfortable somehow.

-

It's not the only time he finds Combeferre in his office over the next week, in the spaces between frantic planning and mapping for the special project. Usually Combeferre has to drag him there by his hair to run the panel of testing and checkups he deems necessary – he's no Joly, but in some ways he's worse, because Joly's fussing can be dismissed, laughed off. Comebeferre doesn't fuss. He's simply an extremely competent engineer, checking on the running of the human machine. When he urges action, it's serious.

When Enjolras seeks him out instead of having to be hunted down, they're both aware it's more serious still.

“I think there's still a problem,” Enjolras says after another meeting where he found himself staring at Grantaire too frequently. He says it quietly, in part because he's terrified of the answer, and in part because admitting it means that Combeferre is right, has been right all along.

It is a credit to Combeferre that he doesn't show any sign of triumph. Instead, the strained look he's gotten for years whenever Enjolras's hypothalamic repression is brought up comes back, the look that had lifted for a while after Enjolras had passed safely through his first heat. It makes him look several years older than his twenty-three years. “Oh, Enjolras.”

“I know,” he agrees tiredly. “You told me.”

“I did.” Combeferre takes his glasses off and polishes them on his shirt. It gives them both a moment to regain composure. “Tell me what's wrong.”

Combeferre has been his best friend since they were respectively twelve and thirteen, and this office is their confessional. Still, Enjolras finds it difficult to put it into words. “It's not – I'm still feeling – the heat's coming back, I think.”

“You're not supposed to show signs for another five months and twelve days,” Combeferre says. “And you were supposed to be safely on the blockers again in time for that.” He sighs. “I warned you so many times about abusing your medication, permanently damaging your tolerance and your cycles–”

“I know.”

At Combeferre's gesture, he unbuttons his shirt and lets him start the familiar motions of a basic check-up: staring into his eyes, checking their reaction to light, testing his glands, taking his pulse.

“It's not going away. I still think about – It's beginning to interfere with my objectivity and my judgment again. And when I try to – to manage it myself, it's not – I obtain relief, but it doesn't last.”

“Courfeyrac would be retching loudly into the sink if he was here,” Combeferre remarks, and puts his cold fingers in Enjolras's armpits, testing the nodes there. Enjolras hisses, and he withdraws them, frowning, but with the sharp alarm dialled down a few notches. “Nothing's popping up immediately, but if it's early onset – I'll run a full panel.”

“Wonderful,” Enjolras says, heavily sarcastic, but he bares an arm for the needles and sets his teeth into his lip against the bite.

-

The usual project – the slightly euphemised name they give to what is nothing less than a campaign of intimidation waged against their Girondin foe for a week before every important vote – goes off without a hitch. They've all gone through the motions often enough to have it down pat, like dancers at the end of a ballet season. The voting lines are a little different this time, which means tweaking the plan just slightly: certain Girondins voting against Bill VII receive bouquets of flowers and boxes of chocolates with the ABC's compliments instead of the usual threats and roadkill and small doorstep explosions.

“Just imagine their faces,” Bossuet cackles, and Joly gleams.

“They'll be tearing the flowers apart looking for asps and bugs and concealed messages–”

“Think of what they'll do to the chocolates!”

“I don't see the point of this particular exercise,” Enjolras says, going through the reports Gavroche has just brought back on the extension of the usual campaign to the Montagnards voting for the bill. “Just because their intended votes serve our purposes this time doesn't mean that they deserve cookies. They're not even doing it for the right reason – they hate the poor so desperately that they'd rather take the opportunity to grind them and their champion into the dust than pass their beloved anti-omega legislation. They deserve nothing.”

“That's the best part!” Courfeyrac ruffles Enjolras's hair. “Fucking with their heads, baby. They'll be all creeped out and paranoid, trying to figure out where we put the sting, and then they'll probably feel all gross and dirty when their security clear the presents and they realise we approve of them. We're touching them in bad places without even trying.”

“The traitors took it badly, too,” Gavroche pipes up, Courfeyrac's tiniest disciple in the art of terrorist mischief. Sometimes Enjolras remembers to be concerned about the example they're setting for him. Gavroche is so exponentially useful to their cause that they forget he's still a child, nearly half his lived lifetime away from having the cause become personal on any level. Eponine fights for them, and Gavroche fights for her. And he does it well; when some of their faces are too well-known to escape attention, Gavroche slips through day and night like mist, passing below the radars of both technological and human surveillance. “I took the long-range goggles and watched them receive their parcels. Some of them exploded.”

“The parcels or the traitors?” Bahorel asks interestedly.

Gavroche grins. “Both.”

“Oh dear,” Marius begins, and Joly stops his inventory of their ammunition long enough to look deeply concerned.

“There shouldn't have been enough charge in any of the gunpowder packets to wound–”

“I imagine the explosions Gavroche refers to are metaphorical,” Combeferre puts in. He looks over his glasses at Gavroche, and Gavroche shrugs with undampened glee.

“Only human casualties were eyebrows, cap'n,” he says. “The paint bombs got a couple of 'em right in the mouth, though.”

“Actually them, not their security?”

“That's awesome,” Courfeyrac says. “They totally weren't expecting it!”

“Of course they weren't,” Grantaire says from his corner. It's the first thing he's said all morning, and one of the few things he's said all week. He keeps his eyes on the stunners he's assembling by Joly's side, quick fingers checking settings and clipping in batteries. They're not shaking yet; he must have begun drinking with his breakfast. “They're your nominal allies. They weren't expecting the ABC to start attacking them, especially when they know that you know why they're voting for this particular Bill. They see it as a matter of principle, and a duty to their constituents to keep fighting for their betterment against the worst the Girondins can do, and that includes tacking on the rider to scuttle it. It matters to them.”

“What would you have us do instead?” Combeferre asks. “We started with letters. They chose not to listen.”

“Don't bother with Grantaire,” Enjolras says sharply. “He's been at the wine already, and he has nothing useful to contribute.”

“Enjolras,” Courfeyrac says, reproaching. The others continue with their tasks, ignoring the usual byplay, and Gavroche hops around, showing clips of turncoat Montagnards opening their doors to mayhem.

“Oh, don't worry,” Grantaire says. “I know the score. I know what my contributions to the ABC consist of.”

That draws a few looks; the bitterness in those words is raw and unsheathed even for Grantaire. Enjolras can feel himself flushing, hot colour rising from his collarbones to his ears, and finds himself unable to speak.

Grantaire goes back to assembling stunners without waiting for a response.

The others are looking, though, back and forth between black-humoured Grantaire and scarlet Enjolras, and it's a good time for an interruption. That it happens to be the moment Eponine strides in is good timing and an incredible relief.

When she takes off the disguise of her civilian coat and scarf, she's stripped down for action underneath, in close-fitting black. Her hair is drawn back in a businesslike ponytail, and the wide belt tightly encircling her waist has twin sheaths through which her stunner and her gun are holstered, crossing at the small of her back.

She's the last one to report back from the morning's activities – the usual project was planned for the morning before the vote on Bill VII, and the special project for this evening – and Enjolras has been waiting for her.

“Eponine,” he says, and she gives him a bright smile.

“Mission accomplished.”

Courfeyrac grins. “Did you bring back video?”

“What do you think I am, an amateur?” she asks, and it's true; she's a highly skilled saboteur, and this particular job was nothing but child's play for her. It wasn't the job itself, but the target, that made it the most important part of the morning festivities.

She takes the long-range goggles from her head and fiddles with the settings, and everyone's phone beeps on cue.

“Look on my works and despair, assholes.”

“Thank you, Mlle. Jondrette,” Enjolras says, and Grantaire snorts. The room fills with the sounds of the ABC pulling out phones and tablets, and then with the uneven grey noise of the same video cueing up on a dozen devices at just slightly different times.

The footage is poorly rendered on a screen this size, but it's hardly their only material on the Fauchelevent residence. Eponine had done several circuits of the property, checking for any increased security, and then taken out the security cameras on the front gate before making her way up to it. She'd set the package down, rung the intercom three times, and then vanished.

The camera jolts choppily as she makes her way to the bolthole on a neighbouring property, one less tightly secured, and picks up again from underneath the camouflage cloth that dampens down her lifesigns on any nearby infrareds.

“Twelve seconds,” Bossuet says, sounding deeply impressed. “Nice.”

Eponine waves him off, jerking her head at his phone, and on cue, on their screens the front gate of the Fauchelevent property opens slowly, and then the senator himself appears, flanked by his guards. It's clearly amateur hour up in there: none of the Girondin politicians they usually hassle would have only two personal guards, much less draw them both from their posts to check the front entrance together; much less accompany them.

“Weak,” Bahorel says, cataloguing vulnerable points with eager eyes, and there's a chorus of agreement.

“Shut up, it's happening.”

“This had better be good,” someone else grumbles, and is hastily hushed.

On a dozen tiny screens, almost in unison, Guard Number One approaches the parcel, and after prodding it gingerly with a booted foot –

(“What the shit, were these guys trained in clown college?”

“Shut up.”)

– he picks it up. When a cautious shake yields no results – (“Oh no, he didn't!”) – he brushes the dust off the brown paper surface and smoothes out the dents, and then turns to hand it to Senator Fauchelevent.

“What the fuck,” Courfeyrac breathes, and it's an incredulous mix of delight and fervent prayer. “He didn't. Holy shit, it's like taking candy from a baby.”

“We could kill him,” Marius marvels in his breathy boy's voice. When twelve pairs of eyes jerk away from the amazing spectacle of Senator Fauchelevent carefully unwrapping the first layer of the parcel to stare at him, he flushes a more violent crimson than Enjolras could ever manage. Eponine looks like she could eat him alive with a side of whipped cream, more fiercely wanting than usual. “I don't mean actually kill him. I don't want to kill him! But if it had been a real bomb, if we had a remote trigger–”

“If only he was your enemy, and not one of your allies,” Grantaire says with lazy disdain, and Marius ducks his head.

“I set this one with a remote trigger,” Feuilly says. He's their chief engineer, the one whose clever brain and cleverer fingers construct the most interesting mechanisms. “I wasn't sure if we'd get it past the gates, and if there was a good moment for it to implode, I wanted Eponine to be able to take advantage of it.”

She smirks. “And I did.”

On screen, Senator Fauchelevent removes the protective swaddling and examines the carved wooden box, looking bemused. He turns it over, then slowly opens the lid, and that must be the moment Eponine presses the button, because all of a sudden there's a fine red mist and the pale stone of the front gate is covered with brilliant incarnadine, the scarlet of fresh blood.

“We could have killed him,” Feuilly says. “And now he knows that.”

“I always think the colour's so important,” Jehan says dreamily, staring down at the screen cradled in his hands. “It's so crucial to pull the right psychological triggers.”

“Better watch your boy,” Musichetta tells Courfeyrac, sounding amused. “He's getting a little creepy.”

“He's being poetic,” Courfeyrac says, pretending offense, and kisses the crown of Jehan's oblivious head.

Everyone else is silent, transfixed on their screens, watching as the mist clears. The guards are panicking, scanning the perimeter for an intruder they're far, far too late to catch. Ultime Fauchelevent stands there still holding the box, a pale silhouette of his body on the wall behind him. Eponine must have changed some settings and tried for even closer at that moment, because the blurry image of him standing there, covered in paint and holding the empty box, zooms in.

“Ooh, moneyshot,” someone says.

It's not uncommon for targets to look stunned. From this distance and at this resolution it's difficult to be certain, but Fauchelevent doesn't look shocked as much as he looks incredibly weary. There's something vaguely obscene about the bright childlike colour streaking his features.

“Well done, Mlle. Jondrette,” Enjolras says, tearing his eyes away, and there's a smattering of applause and cheering, wolf-whistling from the more irrepressible. “Full marks, in fact.”

Eponine shrugs. “It wasn't difficult,” she says. “Anyway, it had the effect you wanted. He'll feel like delivered our message to him by route like we did to the other traitors, and he'll be off his guard now; he won't expect the raid tonight.”

“Fuck,” Bahorel says. “Did you see those clowns? This is going to be pie.”

-

Despite that jinxing, for which Bahorel is duly punished with by being sent into the hallway to touch wood, turn around three times, and spit, the kidnapping of Euphrasie Fauchelevent that evening runs on rails. It's smooth and happens almost exactly according to plan.

“Fearless Leader,” Grantaire says, plucking at Enjolras's sleeve.

The others are gathering in the front room, ready to move out. Combeferre, Feuilly and Musichetta are staying behind to hold their building; Joly, Bossuet, Marius and Gavroche are manning the outer perimeter around their target on the rue Plumet in the boltholes they've already established; Courfeyrac is driving the van and Jehan is riding shotgun. Eponine, Bahorel and Enjolras are the team going over the wall.

Enjolras hasn't bothered to assign Grantaire a role in the mission he so clearly finds distateful. If it were up to him alone, he'd have put Grantaire in the bunker until it was over, just in case, but the other triumvirs don't seem to consider it a necessary precaution.

“What do you want?” he asks, sliding one of his knives into his tall boot and checking the stunner at his hip. He should be in the room with the others, not standing in the hallway with Grantaire. “If you want an active part–”

“No,” Grantaire says. “I want you to change your mind. Call it off. There's still time.”

“It's happening in thirty-five minutes and fifty-four seconds – no, fifty-three. The passage of the Bill means nothing to you, weighed against appeasing the useless cocksuckers who pretend to be on our side but still won't help us? I know it's not you it'll affect, but it matters to me.”

“It matters,” Grantaire says. “But you matter – you all matter more. It's going to change everything for the ABC, you know. You already live your life mostly confined to the house, but your life is the cause, so you don't mark the restrictions. The others won't be able to handle it. And that's if they don't get caught. That's if you all somehow manage to stay off the radar for the rest of your lives. That's if the senator does exactly what you tell him to, and doesn't tell the entire world and all the authorities he can lay hands on that you've got his daughter. Do you have any idea what they'll do to you if that happens, if there's no one left on your side?”

“That's not a good enough reason to do nothing.”

“Apollo, I haven't asked you for anything. I'm asking for this.”

Enjolras looks at him, and this time Grantaire is looking back. The black circles are still there, stark against his pallid skin, but the blue eyes are no longer bloodshot, and they stay level. Level, and direct, a quiet order disguised as a plea.

Enjolras still wants him, which means he's fucked. His body is fucked, maybe forever, because he looks at Grantaire and wants to push him back against the wall and press against him again, feel the warmth and weight of his body, the way they slot together. He wants to put his leg between Grantaire's and hold him by the wrists and – and kiss him, maybe. He wants to be close enough to scent him again, to close his eyes and rub his face against the prickling regrowth on Grantaire's throat.

He takes a deliberate step away, towards the half-open door. They're standing by the hinges, not the jamb, just out of sight if not completely out of earshot. There's enough noise happening inside that they might or might not be overheard, people checking weapons and earpieces and jammers, but it's a slight risk Enjolras will take over the very real risk of throwing himself at Grantaire.

Grantaire steps after him. “Don't do it.”

He's close enough now that Enjolras can hear the sound of him breathing, and his scent is familiar and intoxicating. Enjolras hasn't been close enough to pick it up in the past fortnight, and when he was in heat his brain wasn't working well enough to sift through it, quantifying. Grantaire smells of cigarette smoke with a hint of hops, a measure of red wine, and underneath that lower notes of blackcurrant and – burnt sugar?

He smells wonderful, and Enjolras wants to sway towards him and let gravity do the rest. He wants to bury his face in his neck and never ever stop breathing him in. He closes his eyes.

“What makes you think you have the right to ask me anything?”

“I know I don't have any rights,” Grantaire says. He sounds tired now, as tired as Senator Fauchelevent had looked. “I'm still asking.”

There's a species of carniverous orchid that lures flies to it with its scent. Enjolras is not going to blindly follow some biological current into madness. He has a compass and a map; he has a plan, and his plan doesn't involve this sort of weakness, and never has.

He opens his eyes and lifts his chin, and before he even speaks he sees defeat blooming in Grantaire's eyes. “We still have to try.”

“Try not to get yourself caught, then,” Grantaire says, stepping back. His smile is slightly less bitter than it's been for days and days, but it's sadder, like he just lost more than a battle.

-

Euphrasie Fauchelevent has a pink-and-white bedroom as frilled as the inside of an expensive chocolate box. There are painted screens and silk hangings and lush white carpet, and the windows are covered with metal lacework. It's the most elaborate cage Enjolras has ever seen.

They remove the pretty window bars silently. Eponine's the first one inside, and Enjolras follows precisely ten seconds afterwards, leaving Bahorel waiting by the windowsill.

Eponine already has her stunner to the head of a girl in a long silk robe. Her eyes are almost perfectly round above Eponine's hand clamped over her mouth. They look ridiculous together. Two young girls nearly the same age, one sleek and deadly in black, the other as threatening as vanilla pudding.

Enjolras raises an eyebrow, and Eponine grimaces. The grimace is unexpected; it means their target took slightly longer to neutralise than expected.

Eponine leans forward to whisper something in the girl's ear. Whatever it is makes her eyes go even wider, and when Eponine removes her hand she miraculously doesn't scream.

They stay in their frozen tableau as Enjolras creeps behind them and binds the girl's hands neatly and tightly with duct tape. He tapes her mouth shut, too, for good measure, and both he and Eponine relax slightly once that's done.

He tilts his head back towards the window, and Eponine pushes Euphrasie forward with a knee at her back.

Bahorel's there to help lift her out, and between the three of them they get her over the wall, and then Jehan is holding the back of the van open for them. No guards impede their progress; either they're oblivious, successfully bamboozled, or the outer perimeter is keeping them distracted.

Courfeyrac could floor the gas and get them away from the rue Plumet as fast as humanly possible, but the reason he's sometimes the only cool head in the highest council shows in the way he drives; the van purrs quietly into life, and moves with nonchalant ease down the road, and then with unremarkable speed down the next six or ten blocks until it's safe to move fast.

Chapter Text

The first thing Euphrasie Fauchelevent tells them, back at headquarters, is that she prefers to be called Cosette, thank you. No, she doesn't know how the contraction from one to the other happened – but is that important, Courfeyrac, Enjolras asks with exasperation, pulling them back on track.

The second thing is that she won't tell them anything.

“Slight logical flaw there,” Combeferre says, head tilted in appraisal. “Perhaps you should have started with that.”

The sweet pink colour in Cosette's cheeks heightens, and although her hands are still bound behind her back, she lifts her chin and tries to stare them all down.

“Also, that's not why you're here,” Enjolras says. “We don't want you for information – and I highly doubt you know anything we could use, anyway.”

“I wouldn't tell you anything if I did!”

“But you don't,” Combeferre says, with the neat precision of someone closing a file. He looks around, catching first Courfeyrac's and then Enjolras's gaze, and nods. “We're done here.”

“Are we just going to leave her down here?” Courfeyrac, slightly uneasy.

It's just three of them and Euphrasie-turned-Cosette down in the bunker; Enjolras had refused to remove the tape from her mouth in the house itself, where it was possible neighbours and passers-by might have heard the screams. There were no screams, it turned out, but the padded walls of the Privy Closet have held a lot of secrets (and several politicians), and will hold this one.

“Where else do you think we should put her?” Enjolras asks. “Should we let her run freely through the house, do you think? Should we give her a bedroom upstairs, and ask her to join in on meetings, and play devil's advocate–”

“Isn't that what you keep R around for?” Courfeyrac says, because clearly he's courting death. “No, wait, it's something else–”

Combeferre coughs. “I thought we weren't discussing–”

“I'm sorry, sensitive subject, whatever, but the statute of limitations has passed, and if you think I'm just not going to tease Enjolras about it ever–”

“I'm not conservative,” Cosette breaks in. The word seems to pinch her rosebud little mouth. “I'm a Montagnard, like my papa.”

“Better not to bring that up,” Courfeyrac counsels with careless kindness, and Enjolras stops pretending to ignore everyone in the tiny room long enough to say,

“According to our standards, the Montagnards' pretended progressiveness is almost as backwards as the centrists, as the Girondins themselves–”

“Ahem,” Combeferre says. “Courfeyrac has a point. Are we keeping her in the Closet entirely? It's six days until the vote, and we might have her on our hands until the last deadline. Bathroom amenities aside–”

“I wasn't going to make her use a bucket,” Enjolras says with exasperation. Cosette watches them and has the sense not to speak up this time, huge blue eyes flickering between each of them in turn. “I thought, if we had two Amis down here at all times, she could knock and be guarded on the way to the bathroom–”

“One of them should be female, then,” Courfeyrac says. “But if Musichetta and Eponine are pulling twelve-hour shifts apiece–”

“Should we be discussing this in front of Mlle. Fauchelevent?” Combeferre asks.

“Oh, I don't mind,” Cosette says, with faultless politeness. “I'm sorry if my presence is causing you any logistical problems. If it's too much bother, perhaps you could return me?”

“She stays in the bunker,” Enjolras says, ending the discussion, because he never calls it the Privy Closet if he can help it. “Combeferre, unbind her hands.”

Combeferre is as careful with the tape on her wrists as he was with the tape on her mouth, applying a mild solution to stop the adhesive sticking before removing it, and afterwards, moisturiser for any irritation left by the residue. If it was Enjolras he'd just rip the tape off and be done with it, but he's impatient and occasionally careless, and there's a reason they don't let him run the ABC unilaterally.

-

Cosette is only in the bunker four hours until Musichetta comes storming up to Enjolras in the room where the ABC are planning their first message drop to Fauchelevent to announce terms.

“It's getting creepy,” she says. “That little room is what, two meters square? It might suit you three fine when you do your cloak-and-dagger highest council thing, double double toil and trouble, whatever, but the air filtration sucks, and there's only the one gloomy little lightbulb, and the padding on the walls is stained in weird places.”

“Water damage,” Courfeyrac says smoothly, but he tilts his head, clearly listening. None of the others are even pretending to be performing their assigned tasks anymore.

“She stays in the bunker,” Enjolras repeats. “Jehan, what about sending it over one of the AdSLM channels? No one's used them in decades, they wouldn't expect it until the data package arrived–”

Musichetta puts her hands on her hips and raises her voice half an octave. “Look, if she was a screamer, that would be one thing, but she's quiet and well-behaved and more than willing to give us her parole. Let her come upstairs, Enjolras, for fuck's sake.”

“It's a logistical issue,” Combeferre says, since Musichetta's clearly on a tear. “We have a lot to do over the next few days, on multiple fronts, and we need to be able to do it undistracted. We can't have Mlle. Fauchelevent getting in the way or distracting us from our tasks.”

“So give her a room upstairs,” Musichetta says – shouts. “Code the door, make sure she has no access beyond that room, and give her an intercom channel to contact us in case of emergency. That way you get back two people's manpower and I get to go back to coding. And make it a room with an ensuite, or I swear to god–”

The room breaks out into discussion, considering possible problems, pros and cons, which room to give their guest, are there any bedrooms unoccupied, can Marius room with Courfeyrac and Jehan – well, of course he can, but should he –

“How much damage can one sixteen year old girl do?” Courfeyrac wonders, and nods at Musichetta. “I say, do it.”

-

There's a reason they don't let Courfeyrac run the ABC unilaterally.

Partly it's because he's an alpha, and having an alpha run a militant political group currently trying to force an anti-alpha political agenda would play into the hands of those who'd call them hypocrites, and only please the assholes who'd take it as evidence that betas and omegas can't even run their own resistance movment. It's also because he's the most emotional of them all. Not necessarily the most kind – Combeferre is one of the most decent people Enjolras knows, but his kindness will always be governed by his intellect. He may wish to keep Euphrasie Fauchelevent in better quarters, but wisdom whispers in his ear about everything that may go wrong, and he listens. Courfeyrac listens to his heart first and foremost, and his heart is usually true, but not always wise.

Unfortunately, by bringing the question up before the gathered ABC, Musichetta has gone over the heads of the highest council and brought it to the floor. It comes to a general vote, sponsored by Courfeyrac, and when the consensus is for giving Cosette room within the house, Combeferre raises his eyebrows at Enjolras and sided with the majority. If it was still just the three of them, Enjolras would have had his support, but Combeferre doesn't like to vote against the expressed will of the group when it's so decisive.

“I still have the veto, and I say no,” Enjolras says. He never uses it, and he doesn't like to mention it, but this is a necessary moment. “We can't allow a hostile stranger access to our headquarters–”

“She's a frightened little girl,” Grantaire says wearily from the corner. “Let her out of that hellhole.”

He hasn't joined in the general debate, apparently engrossed with drawing something on his tablet. Enjolras remembers him in the corridor, saying so quietly it seemed to make everything else go silent so it could be heard, Apollo, I haven't asked you for anything.

“Fine,” Enjolras says at last. “But when this blows up in your faces–”

“You'll tell us so,” Bossuet says cheerfully. Joly, who, with Eponine, is almost the only hold-out still on Enjolras's side, sniffs.

“Sixteen year old girl,” Courfeyrac reminds them all, magnanimous with victory, and goes downstairs with Musichetta to effect that girl's limited liberation.

-

A sixteen year old girl can do a lot of damage, it seems, but no one but Enjolras (and Joly, and Eponine) seems to be able to perceive it while it's happening. Her concerted effect on the ABC over the course of her captivity is akin to water wearing through stone, or a determined vine creeper pulling apart a brick wall. As Combeferre had predicted, she doesn't stay in her room.

“It can't hurt to let her have some exercise around the house, if one of us is with her and we don't let her into the rooms where we're planning,” Jehan pleads. “She's lonely, and she's so sweet. Please let me walk her around? I'll be so careful!”

“Courf, beware, this is the kind of tack he'll take when he wants you guys to get a kitten or a puppy,” Bahorel says, grinning. “Or a baby.”

“Jehan doesn't need to specially plead things with me,” Courfeyrac says, and makes exaggerated and ridiculous soft fluttering eyes at him. “He knows I can't say no to that face.”

-

“Technically, solitary confinement is torture,” Courfeyrac defends his actions later. “We said we wouldn't hurt one little hair on her pretty little head, and technically–”

Enjolras snarls wordlessly, and Feuilly shrugs, endlessly pragmatic.

“The horse has already left that stable, Enjolras. And besides, she has such small hands–”

Cosette demurely continues to help him, doing some tiny readjustment to a tangle of copper wire before Feuilly solders it in place.

“Just don't solder any of her fingers,” Joly says, glaring suspiciously. Enjolras is thankful for Joly. “We don't want to have to send them back to her father in a box.”

“Or do we?” Bossuet asks. “No, actually, on second thought, we really don't. No non-consensual cybernetic enhancements, Feuilly! Keep your hand steady!”

-

“She needed real clothes,” Musichetta says, and she's not defensive at all. “You didn't expect her to wear that frilly nightie and her silk dressing gown for the next few days, did you?”

Cosette's wearing black leggings and shiny leather boots that come up to her knees, both clearly borrowed from Musichetta's arsenal, and a white man's shirt that falls shapelessly almost all the way to meet the boot tops, and which is probably Bossuet's. Her hair has been tightly rebraided, and she looks almost like one of them. She spins in a small circle, and most of Enjolras's gullible troops applaud.

“Did you leave any knives in those boots?” Enjolras looks approvingly at Joly for the question until he continues anxiously, “She could hurt herself, she's not trained–”

“I could train her,” Bahorel says, enthusiastic. “What do you say, princess? Want to learn?”

Cosette nods eagerly. “Oh yes–”

“Um,” Courfeyrac says. “Look, far from me to ruin anyone's party, but that's a bad idea. Maybe? Just possibly?”

“You're right,” Bahorel says, nodding, “I should start with staffs and shortstick first, R can help–”

-

“You're a child of privilege,” Enjolras says, when Cosette interjects a quiet point during a discussion. “Every kind – wealth and education and class, and physiological orientation, too, I have no doubt. You have no idea what you're talking about.”

“Actually, I'm an orphan,” Cosette says, huge sad eyes going even huger and sadder. Eponine, Enjolras's only remaining ally against the massive reverse Stockholm Syndrome that's taking place, flinches slightly from her watchful position by the wall. “I'm not sure who my father was, and my mother died when I was small. Papa adopted me after I'd been in foster care for a few years.” She looks down at the floor, and is Enjolras the only one who can see the obvious tactics she's employing? “They weren't very good years.”

There's a general clucking and awwing from Cosette's adoring court of worshippers.

“She's not locked in here with us, we're locked in here with her,” Enjolras says, later, and Courfeyrac claps his hands.

“A new pop culture reference! We're all very proud of you for branching away from the Matrix.”

“The Matrix?” Cosette asks, and Courfeyrac pats her fondly on the head.

“Something before your time, princess. Enjolras is stuck in a time warp, and that's why he gets a special gold star every time he mentions something that came out in the past five years.”

“I've been somewhat busy during the last five years,” Enjolras points out, through his teeth. “Busy leading an underground resistence cell against the oppressor–”

-

Marius goes one further than all the others, of course, because Marius always goes half a step too far. He's enthusiastic about everything with the full-tilt confidence of youth, the kneejerk rebellion of a young man who's decided everything he knows in life is wrong, and he announces melodramatically to the entire meeting room on the second day of Cosette's almost-freedom that he's in love.

“I knew it the first moment I set eyes on her,” he says, trembling slightly with the force of his emotion.

“She was fourteen in that photo, dude,” Bossuet says, sounding disturbed.

Marius gives him a quelling look of outrage. “Not the photograph,” he says. “I barely looked at the photograph. When I met her – not even when I returned from the mission and came into the house, and saw only a flash of her hair as Bahorel carried her like a doll down into the dungeon – but when she was allowed upstairs and into the light, and Musichetta led her by the hand into the hall, and I saw at last the sunshine on her beautiful face–”

“Love built on beauty,” Jehan says, a line appearing between his brows, as though trying to remember a quote, “dies as soon as beauty itself. Do you love her for her looks?”

Marius looks deely hurt. “I thought you, at least, would understand,” he says. “It wasn't her face, it was her beautiful soul, perfectly clear in her eyes.”

“It sounds like a fairy-tale,” Grantaire says, and takes another swig from his flask. He's drinking as he hasn't been for several days, as if even watching the special project unfolding required him to toe a careful line between the slight inebriation he functions best at and the sloppy intoxication he too often indulges in. Enjolras hadn't been certain Grantaire even recognised that line. “Bonded lovers meeting in a dark wood wandering! Except for the part where we kidnapped her and put her in the basement, of course. Does the princess return your love?”

Marius blinks at him for a moment, suspicious of mockery from that particular source, but Grantaire just continues to look benignly interested and more than a little intoxicated, and the irrepressible desire to talk about the beloved object wins out.

“We spoke yesterday when I brought her meal up to her room – I stayed outside, of course, and we spoke through the half-open door. She's an angel! I do think she's my bond – my soul's bond.”

“Oh, for fuck's sake,” Enjolras says. “Can we stop talking about your soul and get back to what actually matters? I know you're all enraptured with Mlle. Fauchelevent, but if we don't get her father's vote changed, we'll have exposed ourselves to no purpose.”

“That's what I wanted to say,” Marius exclaims. “We shouldn't have taken Cosette! We can still return her to her father, and perhaps she can persuade him on our behalf–”

“Did she suggest that? She's very clever, but if you're too stupid to see what she's playing at–”

“I wouldn't expect you to understand,” Marius says, drawing himself up to his full and not inconsequential height.

“Of course he doesn't, Marius,” Grantaire says, taking another deliberate swig. “You can't talk of love to Enjolras. You might as well show a Picasso to a blind man. He doesn't have the receptors.”

“Total Tin Man,” Courfeyrac puts in cheerfully, but beside him Combeferre has tensed. “Do you get that reference, mon capitaine?”

What Enjolras is getting is a headache. His temples feel too tight, like there's a metal band wrapped around his head and slowly squeezing. “I'm trying to hold a meeting. Fauchelevent received our first communication, definitely, although he hasn't replied yet. We told him not to contact law enforcement, but Gavroche's most recent reports–”

“Not the Tin Man.” Grantaire shakes his head with deliberation, and he's dangerously drunk. They've always had their worst arguments when he's like this, a pet tiger off his leash. “The Tin Man didn't have a heart, but he wanted one, you see. He knew what he was missing.”

“The Tin Man was an idiot,” Enjolras says tightly, because this is so familiar, and he's never quite able to resist rising to Grantaire's bait. “He didn't know how fortunate he was, but that was because he also lacked brains. And you see where that kind of idiocy leads, we're standing around discussing Marius's incontinent emotions when we should be talking about the project–”

“Oh, that's a good one,” Grantaire says, but it's bitter, bitter. “All emotion is just so much waste product to you, isn't it?”

“It is when it gets in the way of what needs to be done,” Enjolras grits out, and he feels – he doesn't know what he feels. The sort of blind, shapeless frustration that needs a target and can't find it. Marius is standing there with his mouth a little open, looking lost, and Combeferre and Courfeyrac are united now in a sort of onlooker's frozen horror, and even the others are starting to look more than interested, they're looking like something's beginning to make a certain and terrible amount of sense. “It's useless, and, and distracting, it's pointless–”

“This isn't about Marius anymore, is it?” Jehan says hesitantly.

Eponine has been lurking in the doorway like a dark and sinister shadow, her face an expressionless mask as Marius rhapsodied, but now she stalks forward into the light and says, “Well, it took you long enough to figure out how R felt about you, Blockheaded Leader, but if this is your reaction–”

Courfeyrac stops trying to signal subtly across the room and covers his face with his hands.

“How he – what,” Enjolras says blankly, and the sudden pin-drop silence holds, lingers for a few moments, and then breaks up into pandemonium.

“He didn't know?!”

“Fucking fuck–”

“Well, it's time someone–”

“You shouldn't have said–”

“How stupid can you be–”

“Clearly, much stupider–”

Of them all neither Grantaire or Enjolras speak. It takes effort not to look at Grantaire and see the effect of the past few moments on him, and then it takes more effort to bring himself to look.

Their eyes meet, and it's with a click, like something just snapped into place. Things Enjolras has been missing, references that passed over his head. The look Combeferre and Courfeyrac exchanged when he asked them why they hadn't nominated Grantaire as a potential alpha. Grantaire's hands gentle on him, and then rough. The marks he'd clearly intended to keep as long as he could. The question in his eyes when Enjolras had caught his wrist, and his question in the hallway, then the sheer and total defeat in his face.

Enjolras isn't sure what recognition or dismay is showing on his own features, but Grantaire's mouth quirks. Across the mass of their arguing friends, he lifts his flask in some ironical sort of toast, and then throws it back and swallows long and hard.

Enjolras can't look away from the moving line of his throat, and when Grantaire's drained it all he wipes his mouth with the back of his hand, but not fast enough for Enjolras not to see his lips wet and a little open, to feel –

Grantaire gets to his feet unsteadily and heads for the door, the one into the main hallway that feeds into their street entrance, and no one seriously tries to stop him.

-

The next few days are full of tension and plotting and absolutely no thinking about Grantaire, still gone on one of his periodic absences.

“The return of the mad martinet,” Bossuet whispers slightly too loudly as Enjolras tears through two separate plans for handling Fauchelevent's response and his police officer contact and finds them wanting. He's trying to pace it out, think through it, and Bahorel's interjection comes at precisely the wrong moment.

“Would you like to handle this?” he demands.

Bossuet shrinks back a little. They've all been doing that since the blow-up in the meeting room and Grantaire's exit. “Er, no. But, dude, your eyes are getting kind of scary – are you gobbling amphetamines again? I mean, no judgment, this is a no-judgment zone–”

“Yes judgment,” Joly interrupts shrilly, fishing in his pockets for something. “Let me check your pulse–”

“I'm fine,” Enjolras snarls, and goes back to pacing, but the exchange reminds him that Combeferre still hasn't gotten back to him on the labs he ran.

-

What Ultime Fauchelevent had done was reply to their data burst with a terse few lines. Enjolras has to wonder if the policeman he contacted had helped him construct them, or dictated them over his shoulder, because they give no quarter and little hope.

Under no circumstances will I withdraw my sponsorship of the bill in question. My daughter's wellbeing is pre-eminent in my life, but I have obligations to others I must consider part of my duty, and I do not believe you would harm one so helpless, who has done you no wrong.

Replying to it is something Enjolras enlists Combeferre and Courfeyrac's help for. He would, anyway, because they are a triumvirate of coequals, but they'll know better what to say than he does. Courfeyrac has a knack for handling emotional issues, and Combeferre has the restraint the two of them lack.

“Is it just me, or does this seem str–”

“Oh, it's not you,” Courfeyrac agrees, “but congratulations on picking up emotional nuance, Enjolras, well done. It's definitely weird. Our profile on this guy suggests that he should be ready to do anything to get Cosette back safe and sound, so this stone-walling–”

“It's too confident,” Combeferre says, frowning. “Something's off.”

“He brought in professional help,” Enjolras says, flicking through his tablet to find the photos Gavroche had taken. “High-level law enforcement. It's possible he's just taking his cue from him.”

“Yeah, but bringing this hardass – what's his name, Javert? Not one of our regulars – bringing this guy in suggests that he's exactly the kind of desperate doting dad we had him pegged as,” Courfeyrac points out. “I've been chatting with Cosette, and she won't answer anything she thinks will help us, obviously, but the guy clearly loves her a lot. From her stories, he's the kind of father who should be willing to throw everything on the table. And he's not doing it.”

“We could try sending him proof of life, and see what response that gets,” Combeferre suggests. “– 'No, Enjolras, we're not sending him her braid. You don't mean that, it's not funny, and it's the pattern of bluff and escalation we specifically set out to avoid.”

“I could mean it,” Enjolras argues, but Combeferre's right, he doesn't; it's frustration talking, and when they both frown at him he drops it.

Courfeyrac snaps his fingers. “Hey, idea. You know what tonight is, right?”

“The fourth day we've held Mlle. Fauchelevent captive?”

“Two days and a half days until the vote on Bill VII?”

“Ugh, boring,” Courfeyrac says. “No, I mean, you're both right, but more importantly, it's Thursday, and that means it's Popcorn And Movie Night.”

“You have got to be joking,” Enjolras says, and it's not even angry or sarcastic. He trusts Courfeyrac not to be that stupid.

“Patience, mon capitaine,” Courfeyrac counsels, steepling his fingers. “Allow me to unroll my logic. We have nothing set up right now, right? The usual project's on hold because of the danger while the special project's in play, we're basically just down to holding fort here and dickering with Fauchelevent. If we take the night to enjoy a little routine, a little bonding, a little relaxation, it'll be good for everyone, and it won't get in the way of anything.”

Combeferre opens his mouth, and Courfeyrac holds up a hand and steamrolls on.

“It's also, a little bird has informed me, our visitor's birthday. She's keeping it quiet, because she's a shy and retiring violet – don't sneer like that, Enjolras, it does nothing for your pretty face – but her government records don't lie. We should celebrate.”

They both look at him, and Courfeyrac sighs.

“No one appreciates my genius,” he laments. “Look, you send Fauchelevent a box of his daughter's hair and you're a crazy asshole and you put the figurative gun to his head, just like R said. People with guns to their heads do weird, terrible things. You send him another data burst and include pictures or video of his beloved daughter happily celebrating her birthday, and you melt his stony heart, and he unbends enough to negotiate. Also, you remind him his hardassness is making him miss that birthday, and you remind him how much he wants to get her home, and you do it without pissing him off more. No escalation. Everyone plays nice. And we get cake.”

“Well, if cake's involved,” Combeferre says, and his worried expression lightens slightly.

-

The cake comes from a box, because none of them are any good at baking. Actually, it comes from several boxes, not all of them the same type, so the effect is strange and marbled: chocolate and vanilla and some abomination called Rainbow Party Chip.

“I wanted it to be a big cake,” Bossuet defends this particular inspiration, “and I added a ton of sprinkles to the mix to make it match – well, kind of–”

Cosette's expression when the giant cake is brought out at the end of the movie by a beaming Bahorel is worth all the effort, and Courfeyrac laughs joyfully behind the camera he's holding.

“I didn't tell you!” Cosette says, one hand over her mouth and eyes huge again above it.

Enjolras has watched her cut her way through the ABC like a hot knife through butter, turning tigers into housecats, but it's only now he feels like he's seeing her genuinely happy. It transforms her face, the composed china features glowing from within like candlelight through wax.

“Like it, princess?”

“Surprise!”

“Happy birthday!”

“Don't let anyone sing,” Musichetta advises. “It's terrible, that's not somewhere you want to go.”

There's singing anyway. Despite Joly's concerns about the smoke alarms, the candles are blown out without any sirens or any singeing of hair, and the cake is cut, knife slicing through pretty pink icing to reveal its strange and vaguely leprous innards.

“Seventeen claps, for luck!” Bossuet demands, and Enjolras frowns suddenly, looking at him.

There's clapping, and cheering, and the lights that were dimmed for the candle ceremony come back on.

“Happy birthday,” Marius says, staring at Cosette with dumb adoration, and goes to his knees to deliver a slice of cake on their best and most unchipped plate to her. With Cosette sitting in her chair and Marius kneeling beside her like a knight-errant, she has the height advantage for once, the length of his gawky limbs made less obvious.

Cosette goes shyly pink when she takes her plate from him, lashes dropping to fan against her cheeks, and then rising again, and when their fingers brush they both startle and nearly drop the plate. She goes pinker when she meets Marius's gaze, and perhaps Enjolras owes him a slight – a very slight – apology.

Cosette may have an innate dissembler's adroitness that lets her carry off kidnapping without losing her composure, and which probably will make her an excellent politician one day if she decides to follow in her father's footsteps, but there's a certain type of innocence that can't be faked.

Courfeyrac takes charge of the party, and the music, and despite all the stress and fear of the past few weeks, and the deadline bearing down on them, the ABC celebrates – perhaps because of the stress and fear. There's a slightly madcap edge to the fun, a slightly wild touch, and once the alcohol starts to circulate Courfeyrac switches the camera off.

“R should be here,” he says, then winces. “Sorry.”

Enjolras stares stonily ahead, and tries to pretend he wasn't just thinking the same thing. “Handle this,” he says. “I have to consult Combeferre.”

-

Combeferre, pulled aside and drawn into the safety of his office, has apparently been thinking along similar lines. “Believe it or not, Enjolras,” he says, “I thought of it. She's seventeen, her physiological orientation should become obvious soon enough, if she has one, but you know it's not a clockwork thing. It doesn't happen on the stroke of midnight, it can happen weeks early, or late – and we have time and supplies, if she turns out to need them. It's as simple as writing her a prescription.”

“Do you think she'll present?”

“How should I know? I can't tell these things. That's the point of what we're doing, isn't it? Evolutionary-psych ideas of biological determinism are nonsense. Odds favour beta, like with everyone else – although her father's an alpha, so she must have a slight genetic lean–”

“She's adopted,” Enjolras reminds him. “That wasn't in her file, what we could access of it. No birth certificate, no adoption papers.”

“Don't worry about it. It's not going to be our problem.” Combeferre frowns. “It might be Marius's, though, if his heart is truly engaged.”

“If I hear anymore about Marius's wretched heart,” Enjolras begins, but he takes Combeferre's point. “It could be Eponine and Marius all over again?”

“The shoe would be on the other foot.” For a kind person, Combeferre sounds oddly pleased at the thought. “Marius can't imagine loving another alpha, so he can't understand Eponine's interest in him; but he thinks he loves Cosette, and if she turns out to be an alpha, too – even a beta, it's still not quite comfortable or even acceptable to form an alpha-beta pair–”

“I no longer care,” Enjolras informs him. “I didn't come up here to gossip.” He taps two fingers against his knee, jittery. Too much caffeine, not enough sleep, always. “Those labs you ran on me. Did they–”

“Ah,” Combeferre says, and sits back. Under the bright artificial light, gold glints from the frame of his glasses, tiny golden threads standing out in his fawn hair. If he was Courfeyrac, he might be steepling his fingers. “I wondered when you were going to ask me.”

“Don't be an asshole. How are my markers?”

Combeferre looks at him a moment longer, and Enjolras tries not to twitch or fidget. “Normal,” he says at last. “Remarkably and incredibly normal. Whatever damage you've been doing to your body, letting it have a chance to breathe has brought it back into balance. It's all in normal range.”

“Run them again. That's not right. You know it can't be right.”

“Enjolras,” Combeferre says, and his voice has gone mild and careful. “It's not much of a baseline, but do you remember puberty?”

“I try not to,” Enjolras says darkly.

“You felt attraction then, didn't you? You felt – things, and you wanted to act on them, even if you didn't.”

“That was puberty.” Everyone knows the years between thirteen and seventeen are rocky, full of hormonal stupidity. “That wasn't – I don't want things, normally.”

“You don't want things when you're chemically suppressing them. But right now we're working on establishing that unmedicated mature baseline, and what you're feeling now – that is normal for you. Or it should be.”

“I hate it when you talk at me like a doctor,” Enjolras says, and puts his face in his hands so Combeferre can't keep reading him. They've known each other too long for him to be anything but an open book.

“Sorry.” There's a little respectful silence, and Enjolras focuses on keeping his breathing steady, on the blooming red-and-black pressure patterns against his eyelids. Then, because Combeferre has known him so long, he says “Is it that bad? Knowing you're physically attracted to R even when you're not out of your mind with heat?”

“Yes.”

“Because it makes you feel weak?” Combeferre asks, and it's still careful, but it's probing. “Or because you don't think you should be? Because of the cause, because he's alpha and you're omega, or because – do you find him such an unworthy object?”

Enjolras parts his fingers and glares out at him through their cracks. “We should go back to the party,” he says, ignoring the sudden hail of scalpel-precise questions. If any of their points find flesh, he's not going to give Combeferre the satisfaction of knowing it. “Someone needs to take the camera off Courfeyrac before he destroys it, and we should prepare our response to Fauchelevent now we have our proof of life and health and even happiness.”

-

Courfeyrac finds them on the stairs making their way down, and he's surprisingly – and disturbingly – both sober and serious.

“They sent us another data burst,” he says.

Enjolras's first thought is that Fauchelevent has done more than involve a single officer; he must have roused the authorities and the news outlets and both political parties, done exactly what Grantaire had been afraid he'd do and loosed the dog-pack of the world on them. That's how bad Courfeyrac looks.

Courfeyrac's eyes skitter back and forth between them, though, and he's not just grim, he's worried. That worry looks to Combeferre for support and then fixes steadily on Enjolras. “You should see it,” he says. “It's not – they sent us our own proof of life.”

Combeferre's fingers tighten on Enjolras's arm, but Enjolras is still trying to put the pieces together – trying not to –

Courfeyrac hands him the burner tablet they've been using to communicate with the senator without saying anything else, and the still picture on the screen is bad enough. It's paused on Grantaire's face, and Enjolras stares dumbly until Courfeyrac reaches over and touches the screen.

The face flickers into life slowly, wincing, and the eyes open. They're still blue, violently blue: the pupils are pinpricks.

The camera zooms out, and then away, and a face Enjolras doesn't recognise fills the screen. A man of middle years, with a pugnacious look that seems habitual; a thrust-out chin, a short beard more silver than brown, a once-athletic man beginning to run to fat. He looks like he could go ten rounds in the ring and not flinch, but there's intelligence in the faded eyes. This must be Fauchelevent's police officer.

“Messieurs and mesdames de l'ABC,” he says, staring out through the screen as though this is a live feed, not a recording. “My name is Javert. You have something of ours, I believe. We have something of yours.”

The camera pulls back far enough to let Grantaire in the frame again, and he's gone back to sleep, or unconsciousness. The latter is more likely. The man Javert glances towards the lens, then slaps his face, one hard ringing sound.

Enjolras nearly drops the tablet.

“Don't,” Combeferre says, and his arm steadies it for them, steadies Enjolras too. “It's still going. Look at the bar.”

“Careless,” Javert remarks, as though joining in their conversation. “To abduct the daughter of a senator, and then allow one of your little criminals to wander around the city. I will grant that you've trained him well, and that little resistence to chemical interrogation – was that deliberate, or is he a habitual abuser?” He shrugs, dismissing the point. “Careless, though.”

Grantaire makes a small sound from the chair. His eyes are open again, wincing, and his lip has been split. A thin stream of blood and spit is leaking down his chin.

Javert doesn't bother to look in his direction. “If you care about this little fish, I suggest a trade. The details are included in this data packet. If you do not–” He shrugs again. The screen goes black.

Enjolras continues to stare down at the tablet he's holding. Funny; his knuckles have gone the yellow-white of candlewax. So have the beds of his thumbnails.

“They want us to drop Cosette at a third location tomorrow,” Courfeyrac says, and he still sounds like he's braced for something terrible. “Enjolras – Enjolras, I know the cause is important, you know I do, you know I believe in it, but you can't let them have R. Even if it means that fucking Bill passes. Even then. I don't care if I have to tear down the whole balance of power, I don't care if I have to rip apart the ABC itself, but I'm not letting you do it.”

“Courf,” Combeferre says quietly. Courfeyrac shuts his mouth on a further burst of sudden passionate pleading, but his fists curl. “I don't think that'll be necessary.”

Enjolras has systematically pruned most of his weaknesses away from himself, like someone grooming a bonsai tree. He hasn't seen his parents since he was seventeen. At first that was his choice, an angry furious boy's decision, but as his political activities stepped up, as he stepped further away from the model of a decent omega male, it became their choice as well. He's always told himself he didn't care, and if he didn't always succeed in making himself believe it, he's also always known that their distance and disavowal protected them. Them, and every aunt, uncle, cousin, school friend, neighbour, acquaintance he's ever had, clipped cleanly away.

Emotional connections are a weakness, the same kind of weakness they tried to use against Fauchelevent. Enjolras didn't ask for another.

It's not as simple as being attracted to Grantaire. He's fought recognising and admitting that as long and as hard as he could, but there's nothing Enjolras can hide behind to ignore that fact now: he wants him. But knowing that Grantaire's in danger, seeing him hurt – it hurts him. He doesn't want to have to recognise that, or assimilate what that means, but it seems like the whole fucking world is conspiring to make him face it.

“I can't,” he says, and it comes out in a gasp. Courfeyrac opens his mouth again. “If I vote – if I side with you, that's the high council majority, and I– I can't judge this clearly.”

“You abstain?”

Enjolras is not going to say it out loud, because that means the most profound betrayal of their cause, the Bill, everything he's tried to do and be, the personal standards he's set for himself. But he can't condemn Grantaire. And he won't make the decision to surrender for everyone because of his own bias. He nods, helpless.

“Holy shit,” Courfeyrac says, dark eyes wide. “Wow. Um, so we're decided? Just like that? I guess we should go tell the others about the exchange–”

Combeferre and Enjolras look at each other almost ruefully.

“We're deadlocked,” Combeferre informs him. Courfeyrac looks horribly betrayed, but Enjolras knew it was coming, and he doesn't take it personally. “I can't conscience a unilateral abandonment of our plans without consulting the others, not with Enjolras abstaining.”

Combeferre has always been the most loyal of them all to the spirit of true democracy. Personally, Enjolras admires the principle, but in practice people are misguided and vote for incredibly short-sighted and stupid things, and existing methods of selecting government representation are lacking: until both things are fixed, groups like the ABC need to exist. That's why the three of them exist within the ABC. Courfeyrac, on the other hand, truly believes that he believes in true democracy, but when it's personal, principle goes out the window. Combeferre might feel a similar urge, but principle must be weighed against it. The scales must balance.

-

They return to the party.

It's winding down, and most of the cake is gone. In Courfeyrac's absence, someone let Joly and Bossuet pick the music, and whoever did that made a serious error in judgment. There's popcorn and dirty plates scattered everywhere, and a few drooping balloons bobbing along at knee level, and no one's dancing anymore except for Joly and Bossuet; people are flopped on sofas and the floor and in piles.

Marius and Cosette are sharing a sofa, and he's biting his lip and saying something – Enjolras doesn't need to hear them to know that it'll be something heart-breakingly earnest – while she peeps shyly at him and whispers responses. They're completely and utterly enrapture with each other, and while everyone else tenses to attention when Enjolras strides in with Courfeyrac and Combeferre at his heels, grim as hell, it takes them a few beats longer.

Eponine uncoils from her cross-legged pose. “What is it?”

The music stops.

“Marius, see Cosette to her room – securely,” Enjolras says. He might as well remove all the deadweight at once. If he knows Marius, he'll linger to bid her goodnight, but he can be trusted to keep the line, not to put one toe across the invisible barrier that keeps Cosette safe from any accusations of being harmed in their custody. Not that Enjolras should respect that line, since Fauchelevent and Javert haven't kept it with Grantaire, but the thought of putting her in a chair and slapping her around to exact vengeance makes him feel even sicker.

Marius doesn't ask questions. He offers Cosette his arm, and although she looks back over her shoulder, she lets him escort her out.

“What is it?”

“You're kind of freaking us out,” Bahorel says, and tries to chuckle.

“The eyes,” Bossuet whispers. “The terrible whirling eyes!”

“Courf,” Jehan says, and for all the nervous joking, he seems to understand how serious this is; almost grasping what it is, the way he's looking at them. At Courfeyrac. “What is it?”

Courfeyrac just shakes his head, and Combeferre says, clipped, “Meeting room. Five minutes. If any of you need to take anything, take it now. We need you as sober as we can get you.”

Eponine won't be dissuaded, or consent to wait for the rest; she follows them down the hall and into the larger common area. Jehan follows, hand already tucked into the crook of Courfeyrac's arm, not truly trying to hinder him but hanging doggedly on.

“Are we showing them the video?” Courfeyrac asks. “I mean, it's addressed to us all–”

“Show it,” Combeferre says. “They deserve all the facts.” He glances at Enjolras. “If you need to step out–”

Enjolras shakes his head tightly, and takes up his position, folding his arms and leaning back against the projection wall. He might not see much of it, but he'll hear.

After a moment, Courfeyrac joins him. Jehan squeezes his hand and lets him go, taking up a space on the benches.

Marius returns, touching his mouth like someone just kissed him goodnight, and slowly but surely, the others file in, and if one or two of them look like they've just tossed back bad-tasting shots of iomazenil or dunked their faces under the cold faucet, well. If Enjolras had thought of the cold faucet, he might have used it too.

“We received a communication from Cosette's father – well, from the special forces police officer he seems to have hired,” Combeferre says, and dims the lights. The projection starts, and Enjolras makes a small choking sound. Fucking fuck, it's Thursday: it's Popcorn And Movie Night, but everything is fucked to hell.

Courfeyrac touches his elbow, and then, emboldened by Enjolras's failure to flinch away, pats his shoulder. When the patting stops, he doesn't take his hand away. As the recording plays on, Enjolras even leans slightly into it, though it means Courfeyrac must be able to feel him flinch when the slap happens.

The lights come back on. Everyone looks shell-shocked, but a few of them are already thinking ahead, seeing the ramifications.

“What are you going to do?”

“We're trading her, right?”

“The Bill,” someone says, anguished. “All our work–”

“But R, fucking hell, we have to get him back–”

“The kids–”

“Those fucking bastards–”

“You fucking bastards,” Eponine says, stalking up to the front. “Why are you showing us this?”

“We're putting it to the vote,” Combeferre says steadily, but he winces a little under her stare. “Since the high council is deadlocked–”

Eponine dismisses him in favour of cornering Enjolras, stopping about a foot away from him, too close to comfort. The tip of her nose only reaches his chin. “Tell me why I shouldn't slap you like that asshole just slapped R.”

“Hey,” Courfeyrac says. “Ep–”

“This is his fault,” she says, not looking away. “Tell me they wouldn't have him if this dick hadn't acted like an asshole, why make a giant fucking deal about the fact R has bad taste in men–”

“It wasn't about that,” Courfeyrac breaks in. “Seriously, Ep, that fight was about something else, and–”

“She's right,” Enjolras says softly.

Eponine steps closer to him. “I'm glad you admit it,” she says. “Now take some fucking responsibility, and if you dare, if you dare try to argue that we should leave him there if it means killing the Bill, I'll k–”

“Ep,” Courfeyrac repeats, sounding martyred. “Enjolras abstained. That's why it's going to the floor.”

She pauses, but doesn't yield. “So what was the fight about?”

The others are silent, but Enjolras can feel the weight of almost a dozen curious stares. He can feel colour creeping up the back of his neck again. “It's not important,” he says. “What's important is the vote, settling this–”

“I want to settle this first,” Eponine says, and she sounds dangerously calm now. “You abstained. You never abstain, you always have an opinion – if I thought it was basic human decency and some actual sense of guilt at work, I'd get it, but that's not you, Fearless Leader. That's what makes you such a good captain, and such a terrible human being.”

“Ep.”

“No.” She regards Enjolras, and the effect is now less laser cannon and more pitiless spotlight. “What did you do to him.”

“That's not actually a question,” Courfeyrac says, distracted, and adds hastily, “Look, whatever happened, the point is Enjolras is on Team R and I'd like to run a show of hands and see who agrees – oh, don't glare at me, Enjolras, I know, you're technically not on any team, you're Switzerland, but R's your – your thingy, you know what I mean.”

“Thingy.” Eponine raises her eyebrows and the clarity of her voice. It's still not actually a question.

Everyone is silent for once. There's something about seeing one of your number tied to a chair getting slapped around the face that puts a damper on all the usual catcalling and snickering and suggestions, and it's terrible that Enjolras has at last discovered the secret to an orderly meeting, and it's something he'll never be able to replicate.

Courfeyrac looks like he wants to smack himself in the face before he says anything else stupid. Combeferre looks – watchful, ready to move, to speak and interject much more successfully than Courfeyrac if Enjolras needs him to. He's waiting for a signal.

Eponine's just waiting.

“Lover,” Enjolras says precisely, taking care to enunciate clearly. “Grantaire is my lover.” He may not have been entirely aware of the fact at the time, but their relation had been more than passing a heat together.

“Since when?” someone – Bossuet, maybe Bahorel – exclaims, then stifles himself. It opens the floodgates, though, and there's a cacophony of noise; it sounds like a flood of bees unleashed at once.

Eponine looks almost satisfied, but her sharp intelligence is still working itself out. “Since nearly three weeks ago,” she says, but it's lost in the general mayhem. “Right? When Enjolras said he was sick, and walled himself up in his rooms for days, and R disappeared, too – but he didn't come back for another week after that.”

She divides a glare between the three of them, Combeferre and Courfeyrac and Enjolras, the ones close enough to hear. “Whose idiot idea – which one of your braintrust decided that getting R to partner him was a good idea? Idiots!” Her gaze settles on Combeferre. “You're supposed to know better. You knew how he felt. How could you use him like that?”

“The vote,” Combeferre says weakly. “The drop's set for eight in the morning, if we're going to make the exchange. Which we – we need to settle.”

“Yes!” Courfeyrac, clearly desperate to be useful rather than bumbling. He puts his fingers to his mouth and whistles, long and sharp and shrill. “Messieurs, mesdames, your attention, please!”

“They won't kill him,” Enjolras says as the discussion begins, still standing against the wall with his arms wrapped around himself. He's saying it to himself as much as to Eponine, now standing beside him. “However it goes. That's not their game.”

“No, their game is forcing your hand,” she agrees, equally quiet. “If we don't trade Cosette for him, you might get your Bill withdrawn, but they won't let him go, you know. Not ever. He's a member of the ABC, and we just abducted the minor daughter of a senator to try to subvert the democratic process. It doesn't matter how fucking stupid it is – you know I'd torch the whole shitshow if I had the chance. Some of the others might not, but I would. If you ever lead that charge, I'll follow you in a heartbeat. But there's still a price to pay for fucking with it, and it's all going to fall on him.”

The voting and the discussion continue, and under the noise they continue to talk.

Chapter Text

At seven forty-five on Friday morning, Enjolras goes out to meet Fauchelevent and Javert at the drop point alone.

Under his red jacket, he's wearing a Kevlar vest fifteen layers strong, with ceramic plating over his most critical areas. It can't compensate for the fact that he's bare-headed, or empty-handed; he's going out to fight with his phone zipped in an inside pocket and his tongue in his head, no other weapons.

“Also, they could kneecap you very easily,” Joly says through his earpiece. “And if they shot you in the thigh and nicked a femoral artery–”

There's a muffled noise.

“Sorry about that,” Bossuet says chirpily. “The bird of ill omen has ceded the mic. Can I put you on speaker? I think I will, anyway.”

“Don't distract me,” Enjolras says, folding his arms, but it's not a no. He has at least ten minutes to wait, and his friends' chatter in his ears makes him feel less lonely. “Go to single mic at 7.55, or when you get a line of sight on their approach.”

7.55 comes and goes, and at 7.59, with almost military precision, an SUV draws up. The windows are too tinted to see through, but Enjolras holds up his hands, showing their emptiness, and after a moment the driver's window rolls down.

Inside is Fauchelevent's police officer, regarding him, and it's an effort to keep holding himself loose and relaxed and unthreatening when Enjolras wants to lunge for the car and throttle him with his bare hands.

“M'sieur,” Javert says, and his voice is a low gravelly purr. “You seem to be alone.”

“I want to talk,” Enjolras says, keeping his chin high and eyes level. “We're willing to make the trade, but there are things to negotiate first.”

Javert continues to regard him, but Enjolras is only a few hours out from being pinned like a butterfly by the augers Eponine calls eyes, so it doesn't have the effect he probably intends it to. “Talk.”

“Not to you,” Enjolras says, and if it's tightly contemptuous, well. “Take me to your leader.”

-

It's a surprise when the car pulls up to a familiar gate. A strange choice, returning to the rue Plumet, when Javert must know that the ABC have cased it thoroughly and have established bases in the area. There's significantly more security now; more cameras, and four more guards, ones that seem to know what they're doing. Two of them approach the car, and Javert rolls the window down again.

They check the car, clearly ensuring that Javert is still in charge, not currently driving a Trojan horse inside with a gun to his head. Javert taps two fingers against the steering wheel, impatient – interesting, he's wearing leather gloves; an affectation? A desire for anonymity? – and the guards step back and let him pass. The gate opens.

Enjolras takes notes, but doesn't speak. He's not interested in antagonising this man, who patted him down with ruthless efficiency, finding and removing both earpiece and phone before binding his hands behind his back with PVC tape.

They pull up to the house, and Javert doesn't bother calling over the guards flanking the doors themselves – and that's an impressive level of security, setting guards inside the estate. Too bad for Fauchelevent it's so much after the fact.

He half-shoves, half-carries Enjolras inside, down the hall, and pushes him into a room Enjolras recognises from the blueprints as the senator's study.

The senator is inside, head bent over his desk, and he looks up from whatever he's writing to regard them mildly. The lines on his face seem to bite more deeply than they had just a week earlier.

“Javert,” he says. “A surprise guest?”

“He says he wants to negotiate,” Javert says, with considerable contempt. “I told you it wouldn't be as clean or simple as you thought. These revolutionaries are fools. Too dishonourable to deal straight, and too stupid to realise they simply increase our hand from one to two.”

Enjolras raises his head, wincing against the hand twisted in his hair. “I knew when I walked out to meet you that I would just be increasing your pawns.”

Fauchelevent puts down his pen, mild gaze shifting to Enjolras. He regards him for a long moment. “I don't play chess with people's lives, young man.”

“You play politics,” Enjolras says. “Isn't that the same thing?”

“Chess is an unemotional game, and it's an intellectual one. If you want a metaphor for the senate, go with cards. Poker, that's a good one. The raising of stakes, the trading of cards back and forth, the bluffing with an empty hand–”

If his hands weren't bound behind him, Enjolras would hold them out palms upward, the same way Grantaire had done when they'd laid down terms for sharing their heat, trying so hard to be careful, and – Enjolras can't think about that right now. He has to get Grantaire safe and clear first.

“My hands are empty,” he says steadily. “I have nothing to trade. I threw the game by turning up at all. But I hear you're a reasonable man, Senator, and I want to talk to you. I start with outright surrender.”

“A good start,” Fauchelevent agrees. “Where's my daughter?”

“She's safe, but first – I'm here to offer myself in exchange for the man you have,” Enjolras says. “Let him go, and then we'll talk about Cosette.”

“What would we want with you?” Fauchelevent asks, and he sounds weary now. “Why shouldn't we just insist on the original trade?”

“He's not involved in this,” Enjolras says, and he meets Fauchelevent stare for stare. “Honestly – he didn't like the plan. He argued against it. He's not – I'm the one who pushed for it, and I'm the one you should be dealing with. If there's to be any sort of reprisal – if there's to be legal punishment, or – or non-legal punishment, I should take it.” He draws a breath. “I lead the ABC. I take responsibility for their actions.”

Javert, who has been standing with his hands folded behind his back, snorts. “You? An omega pup, and a boy besides. I should cuff you for your impudence.”

“Yes, he's very young,” Fauchelevent says, and he rises from his desk and walks over to peer at Enjolras more closely, dark eyes assessing. Enjolras knows what he sees: the fine-drawn features he finds weak and wanting when he sees them in his mirror, the stupid yellow hair that curls no matter what he does to discipline it. The soft mouth; the straight nose. “Younger than the other one. What are you, eighteen?”

“Twenty-two,” Enjolras says through his teeth. His age isn't the point.

“Twenty-two,” Fauchelevent says, pensive. “How long do you claim you've led the ABC? They started up, what does the file say, about five years ago–”

“I'm aware,” Enjolras says, and this time he doesn't suppress the irritation. “I was there. As I started it.”

“So you claim–”

“No, I think he's telling the truth,” Fauchelevent says, cutting Javert off. He continues to circle Enjolras. “That would have made you – all of seventeen? Only a boy, really.” He sounds almost admiring. “ABC – that's the sort of pun boys like.”

“It's not about the pun,” Enjolras says, because sometimes it seems like he's never going to stop explaining their name to people. He hadn't been aware of the double meaning when they'd settled on the name; if he had been, he would have ruthlessly squashed them right then and there, teenaged Courfeyrac and Bossuet and Joly and Jehan all bright with apparent inspiration, and even Combeferre grinning a little like Enjolras wouldn't eventually figure it out and exact revenge. “It's about the letters. It's about the connotations the letters carry.”

Words and letters always carry more significance than they seem to on the surface. ABC is a clean and simple acronym, and it's a pun, and it's a manifesto in a few characters: an argument for a return to another order, to the beginning. To the long-unused Roman alphabet in place of the Greek one used day-to-day, its alpha, beta, omega weighted with connotations Enjolras wants to tear away. There's no undue meaning to A, B, C. There's no Ω at all.

“I want my daughter home, and I want her safe, and I'm not willing to negotiate for anything less.”

“We're giving her back,” Enjolras promises. “That's what I'm here to do. You can do what you want with me later. But first – let him go. I swear, he's not involved in this.”

It seems to be the right thing to say. Fauchelevent nods at Javert. “Unbind his hands.”

“There's no need for us to bargain with this would-be terrorist at all,” Javert says, not moving. “Let me spend some time with him, and he'll tell us where she is fast enough. No need for this farce.”

Enjolras stiffens.

It's not the reference to torture or interrogation. He has an artificially-induced allergy to most of the chemicals used in standard interrogation, thanks to Joly proving amenable when Combeferre wouldn't; the worst Javert can do to him with truth drugs is kill him outright, but he can't make him talk that way. Pain Enjolras can take, too. He's been caught by police before, much earlier in his career, and he hadn't cracked. The government damage waiver they'd been issued hadn't allowed them to go beyond a three on the scale – and his parents had still been invested in his well-being back then, and they'd brought in their lawyers and gotten him released before the authorities had been approved to go higher. They won't lift a finger now, even if this was a clean-cut official capture – and it's not. These are all things he knew when he decided to change the stakes and go in alone. He accepts them.

It's the reference to Grantaire that makes him pull his focus from Fauchelevent and level it at his leashed hound, the fragile entente he'd been building with the man exploding into fury. “As you did with my – with the man you hold? That worked out well for you, didn't it? You got all the information you needed. Oh, wait. You didn't.”

Javert's jaw tightens, and his fingers twitch. Enjolras waits for the slap across his own face to connect, but nothing happens.

Fauchelevent's hand is on Javert's arm, and his metaphorical grip must be tighter on the man's collar than Enjolras had supposed. “Careful.”

“Do you even know the name of the man you have in the basement?” Enjolras says, turning back to the senator. Names can be dangerous in the wrong hands, but when there's already so much in jeopardy, they can strike a necessarily humanising note. Show your captors that you're a person, not a problem. “It's Grantaire. Your daughter knows it. He was teaching her short stick, did you know that? Messing around in the practice room teaching her to block with those stupid sticks with a fucking pillow stuffed down his shirt, helping Ba– another of our friends teach her the forms – she wanted to fence with real swords, but I didn't think giving her sharp pointy things was a good plan, even if she didn't use them against us, because believe it or not, I thought she might hurt herself. We've treated your daughter with respect, although that doesn't seem to be something you believe in.”

“Liar,” Javert grinds out, and Fauchelevent's hand on his sleeve curls. “She's a helpless child, not a deliberate criminal, she must be terrified–”

“I wasn't talking to you–”

“No, I didn't know his name,” Fauchelevent says over them both. “He hasn't chosen to give it to us. Something about supplying handles to fascist alpha oppressors?”

“Grantaire said that?”

“He did.” Fauchelevent looks almost amused at Enjolras's surprise. “Isn't that his usual rhetoric? He's been spitting nothing but defiance and far-left rallying cries–”

“You gigantic fucking torturing asshole,” Enjolras says. Fuck negotiating. He doesn't have a weapon and his hands are tied behind him, and Javert is armed, his hand going to his hip as Enjolras tenses in his seat; Enjolras is going to disarm him and strangle them both with his bound hands anyway, if he has to break the laws of physics to do it–

“No one's been torturing anyone,” Fauchelevent says calmly. “I wasn't there when he was caught, and Javert was a little rough – but since he's been a guest in my home, no one has harmed him. We tried a few chemical methods, but sodium thiopental doesn't hurt anyone.”

It's Enjolras's turn to hiss “Liar.”

“A slap is the least he deserved,” Javert says, and Enjolras tenses in readiness to murder again.

“Stop this fighting,” Fauchelevent says, weary again. “Javert, is he armed?”

“Do you think I would allow him in here with a weapon? I took a bug and a phone from him, but he came up clean on my scanner –”

“Unbind him.”

“There's no need to play his game – we have him, we have the other–”

“We don't have Cosette.”

Javert's face darkens. A moment later, there's a knife roughly severing the tape at Enjolras's wrists and then at his elbows – no careful anti-adhesives here. His shoulders scream in sudden sharp relief, layered over the ache from being twisted in their sockets so long.

That's – surprising. Fauchelevent is clearly calling the shots, but Javert is less obedient than a proper hired hand should be. That he's been called in not as part of an official enquiry but on private contract is obvious by the way he responds to Fauchelevent, and also from the fact that Cosette's disappearance isn't blowing up on a million channels and frequencies, public and private: not even the government can keep that sort of knowledge locked down so deeply their best coders can't backtrace it. But there's a personal edge to it, too; the mention of Cosette is apparently a magic talisman, and it had been the thought of her fear that had caused him to speak out of turn before.

Enjolras has been sharing quarters with Cosette for nearly six days, and even he's not immune to her mixture of sweetness and spirit. She's a lot harder to disdain in person than she is in the abstract. He can't imagine how she managed to win this bull mastiff of a man over, but whatever it was, it worked.

Enjolras turns that problem over, concentrates on massaging feeling back into his tingling hands. When he speaks, it's to Fauchelevent again, ignoring the other man. “Thank you.”

“You're welcome,” Fauchelevent says. “Javert, take him downstairs to see his young man for himself, and then bring him back to me for our discussion. Take the other young man – Grantaire – back to the drop site. I'm sure their people are still monitoring it.”

Javert doesn't move.

“Javert.”

“I won't.”

“Please.” A silence, which Enjolras is wise enough to leave unbroken. Then, softly, “For Cosette?”

The man snarls wordlessly, but he moves, helping Enjolras from his chair and pulling him past Fauchelevent the way he dragged him inside. Now that Enjolras is untied, he could put up a better show of resistance, but like before, he doesn't fight; Javert is taking him exactly where he wants to go, after all.

-

Grantaire doesn't look up as Enjolras stumbles down the stairs into the basement, the stunner in Javert's hand a cold point against the back of his head.

He's still sitting in the chair Enjolras had seen on the vid, his head lolled to one side as though he's asleep. His hands are tied behind him and his feet are tied to the legs of the chair, and Enjolras's shoulders wince just looking at him.

“Don't try anything,” Javert says gruffly, and hands him a very small knife. It's about as threatening as a plastic spoon compared to the stunner in Javert's hand and the heavy gun at his hip, but he still watches Enjolras like he's a serious threat, although the only thing Enjolras does with the pathetic knife is go over to the chair to cut through Grantaire's bonds.

He thinks about doing more, though. For half a moment, when the knife hilt fits into the palm of his hand with Grantaire sitting there slumped in front of him, all Enjolras can think about is whirling around and stabbing the man who did this to him, who dared to touch him –

But Grantaire's sitting there in front of him, and his shoulders and his elbows must be strained and screaming, so Enjolras pushes down hot murderous rage and goes to him. He cuts his hands free without getting any reaction, but when he goes to his knees in front of Grantaire's chair and starts sawing through the restraints on his feet, Grantaire stirs.

“What do you want now?” he asks tiredly, not bothering to lift his head. His hands twitch in his lap, and then he seems to realise that they've been unbound because they twitch again, convulsive, and then go extremely still as if all the blood is rushing back into them.

The bonds shouldn't have been tight enough to stop circulation. If this asshole has done anything to seriously fuck up Grantaire's hands, Enjolras will kill him, stunner or not.

“R,” he says softly, taking them in his own. He rubs them briskly, trying to restore anything that might be missing – feeling, blood, oxygen – and they twitch again.

When Enjolras looks up from them, Grantaire is looking at him.

He's blinking like he's not sure what he's seeing, and his pupils aren't the tiny crazed dots they'd been on the video. He's still there behind his eyes, whatever Javert gave him – or whatever Grantaire took himself – and he's looking at Enjolras like he's a very confusing vision.

On his knees in front of Grantaire, holding his hands, it's so easy at last to do what he's wanted to do for weeks and sway forward like gravity itself is pulling him closer. Enjolras leans forward, surging up a little on his knees, and kisses Grantaire's mouth, enormously careful of the split lip.

It's fragile, momentary, and where their lips brush, his mouth burns with feeling.

“Okay, now I know I'm dreaming,” Grantaire says when Enjolras draws away again. “Hi, dream-Enjolras. I've heard the great god Apollo himself visited chosen mortals in their sleep–”

“I'm sorry,” Enjolras says helplessly. He means for the kiss, a little, but also for everything. When he wets his lips he tastes blood; rock and scald.

“I'm pretty sure you should be naked,” Grantaire continues, blinking again. “I mean, the ready-for-action ninja outfit's always been one of my favourites, with the boots and the tight pants and the holster and all the knives in various places, but you should really be naked.”

“We have an audience,” Enjolras says, glancing at Javert's silent bulk over his shoulder. He doesn't have time to indulge himself with Grantaire, as much as he wants to kiss him, and to check his eyes for concussion, and to kiss him, and to run his hands gently through his hair looking for sore spots, and to kiss him – or possibly just to rest his head in his lap and cry. “How's the feeling in your feet? Can you stand? We don't have much time.”

Grantaire swallows. “You're really here.”

“Your feet, Grantaire.”

“What the fuck are you doing here? You can't – you're our captain – you know what they'll do to you, are you insane?”

“But they won't do it to you,” Enjolras says, and stops absently rubbing Grantaire's hands to get to his feet; gets an arm under Grantaire's shoulders and hefts.

Grantaire sags against him obediently, but uses the closeness to whisper fiercely “What the fuck are you even doing?”

“We don't have time to talk,” Enjolras repeats, and helps Grantaire across the room to where Javert is standing. He suspects that after the first step or two Grantaire is actually pretty steady on his feet, but playing up the staggering for their audience. “I'm sorry – you're going to have to go with this asshole again, but he's going to take you to the secondary location that our people have eyes and cameras on, and then he's going to leave, and they're going to come and get you and take you home.”

“Are you serious?”

The last thing Enjolras wants to do is turn Grantaire over to Javert again, but this is the way to get Grantaire home, and he does trust Fauchelevent, somehow, so he nods at Grantaire reassuringly even as he glares at Javert. “He'll see you safe. Go with him now.”

“I have promised,” Javert says stiffly, taking the knife back from him. “You're staying down here until I've put this one in the car and dropped him off, and then I'll see you back to the study.”

Enjolras nods, but Grantaire is looking at him wildly now. “You're staying here? There's no fucking way I'm leaving you, don't be stupid–”

“You don't have any choice in this matter," Javert says, and Grantaire twists around again, his bright bright bright blue eyes wide and horrified.
Grantaire is still shouting as Javert pushes him up the stairs, stunner at the back of his neck, stupid things like not worth it and not for me, and when the door slams and the lock shoots home, the faint whir of a code resetting, Enjolras sits in Grantaire's abandoned chair and tries to believe that this is going to work.

-

When Javert comes back for him Enjolras has perfected his Negotiation Face.

He tries it on Javert, and Javert responds to his blank and emotionless stare with one of his own. “Upstairs.”

“I want proof he's safe.”

“You'll get it. Upstairs.”

Back in the senator's study, Fauchelevent invites him to sit, and this time not in a spindly chair by the wall, but in a solid armchair drawn up in front of his desk. On the desk are Enjolras's confiscated earpiece and his phone. “Javert, thank you. I think the young man and I will be fine by ourselves.”

“Jean–”

“Please.”

Javert gives Enjolras another furious, frustrated glare, and draws his finger slowly across his jugular in silent threat when he's out of Fauchelevent's line of sight. Enjolras is still within it, so he contents himself with lifting his chin haughtily and moving his gaze pointedly back to Fauchelevent.

The door slams.

Enjolras sits. Then he leans forward to rest his arms along the edge of the desk, turning it from a podium to a bargaining table. “My proof?”

“If I know Javert,” Fauchelevent remarks, “he'll be right outside. I understand the temptation, but if you do anything foolish he'll make us both very sorry.” He gestures at the things lying between them. “I'm assuming they're important to what you plan to discuss; you wouldn't have brought anything unnecessary. You can take them.”

He guessed well, but not perfectly; the phone is crucial, but the earpiece is a security blanket more than anything else, a last line to his friends. Enjolras had half-expected it to be crunched under an uncaring boot heel, but it's miraculously whole, just clicked off. The phone seems to be unmolested and unforced.

He stashes the phone inside his jacket for later, and picks up the earpiece between his finger and thumb. “If I turn this on, I'll re-establish contact with my people.”

“These are the people holding Cosette? Right now?”

Enjolras thinks about equivocating, but there's no real point. “Yes. You're okay with me bringing them online for our discussion? I'll ask them not to interject or interrupt, but you have your witness–” He glances at the closed door.

“I'd like to keep this off the record. If and when we reach an accord, you can re-establish contact and bring them online. Get your proof,” Fauchelevent adds almost kindly. Enjolras has done something to win that measure of kindness since first being shoved into this room – with his youthful face, or his speech, he's not sure. “Just reassure me that the phone's not stuffed with plastic explosives and it's not the triggering mechanism. I have some little experience with your ABC's tactics–”

Enjolras flushes, vaguely ashamed of the thing with the paint bomb. It was a childish tactic, something from their old bag of tricks that they haven't quite retired as they've moved deeper into extremism. “No explosives.”

The earpiece clicks on, and he puts it back in his ear. The line is fuzzy with sound for a moment, and then someone – Courfeyrac – says “Shut up, everyone, we just got speaker back – Enjolras?”

It's a cautious question, in case of enemy contact, but it's so hopeful Enjolras shuts his eyes for a second. “Lieutenant.”

“Thank fuck – shut up, people, I have to – mon capitaine. Are you alone?”

“No,” Enjolras says. “I'm in negotiations with the senator. When we come to an agreement I'll contact you again, but right now – did you, is he –”

He doesn't finish the sentence, but Courfeyrac says instantly, “R reached base five minutes ago. He showed up on the cameras about twenty minutes ago, and I sent Bahorel and Marius out to collect him. He's safe, and Joly and Combeferre say he's fine. Do you want to speak to him?” A pause. “Um, he's being kind of shouty.”

“No,” Enjolras says, going a little limp with relief. He has to focus; he can't be distracted by argument with Grantaire. It'll only throw him off his stride. “I have to turn this off again now, but thank you for letting me know.”

“D'accord,” Courfeyrac says, and Enjolras switches off. At the senator's raised eyebrow, he takes out the earpiece and sets it back on the desk, and when his fingers leave it he's truly alone again.

“My turn,” Fauchelevent says, and Enjolras nods.

He puts his hand inside his jacket and takes out the phone, slow and deliberate, and sets it on the surface between them. A flick of his fingers opens the screen, a complicated mnemonic algorithm and a thumbprint scan later opens the phone itself, and he scrolls through his vid list to find the file Courfeyrac loaded.

He cues it up, turns the phone around, and pushes it in Fauchelevent's direction. “Proof of life,” he says flatly.

Fauchelevent looks at the paused blur of image on the screen for a moment, and then his eyelids come down briefly; thin worn translucent skin, a poor barrier between his sharp eyes and the world. They press tight for a moment, slacken, and open, and Enjolras realises when Fauchelevent reaches out to play the video that that tic had been a moment of prayer, a gathering of energy against a potential onslaught. For all his talk, the man is still terrified for his daughter. Terrified that Enjolras is about to play him the same sort of video Enjolras himself received the night before, or worse.

The sounds of young voices fill the room, magnified and slightly tinny: laughter and whispers, layered over the faint noises of the movie they'd been watching. Courfeyrac had started to record before the cake appeared, because this is Popcorn And Movie Night rendered on a tiny screen, and this is not what Enjolras had ordered him to do. Enjolras wanted maybe thirty seconds of video focused on Cosette as they sung happy birthday and she shone with joy over the glow of her candles, but this is something longer.

This is nothing more or less than a consummate PR spin director's masterwork, and it shows Cosette curled up on one of their strangely lumpy couches against Musichetta's shoulder, the end domino in a tilted row of young revolutionaries. Musichetta's leaning on Joly who's leaning on Bossuet who's leaning on a martyred Combeferre, still checking messages on his phone; and Jehan is perched by Cosette on her end of the couch, braiding her hair into something more complicated than the simple loose plait that's been hanging over her shoulder.

They're mostly quiet for a few minutes, some shifting and nudging and giggling as the movie casts blue and black shadows over their faces. Then the camera twists to one of the adjacent couches, and into a hail of popcorn, and the frame starts to wobble.

“Help!”

“Treachery!”

“Sparta!”

Courfeyrac records the major actions of the popcorn-tossing like it's a theatre of battle and he's a war correspondent, and if the camera snags and lingers on Cosette in particular he records them all, from Bossuet turning on Joly to Cosette's handful of popcorn down Musichetta's neck to Feuilly's use of the cushions to build a barricade to Eponine's surprise surfacing from behind the couch to dump the full bucket over Marius's head and decisively win the engagement to Marius stumbling around the room with the bucket over his eyes and a grinning Gavroche dancing around him like a tormenting wasp.

Then it breaks up into something more like the footage Enjolras asked for: Bahorel bringing out the cake, still enormous even in his big hands, and the happy birthday wishes, and the joking, and the singing. The terrible, terrible singing, that begins with the traditional Happy Birthday and gets distracted into For She's A Jolly Good Fellow, equally traditional since they first adopted it for Joly's birthday (“He's a Joly good fellow, do you get it?!”).and breaks up with the Communist Hymn. Then there's clapping, and cheers, and Courfeyrac making awful suggestions about birthday spankings from behind the camera and being shouted down, and the frame finds and fixes on Cosette as she stares down at the candles before blowing them out.

There are happy tears standing in her eyes that Enjolras hadn't been looking closely enough last night to see, but the reflected light picks them up.

Then it's the actual party, and Enjolras had grabbed Combeferre and ditched it not long after it started, but bits of it are familiar. Marius dancing carefully with Cosette, stiff as a tin soldier with a china ballerina. Musichetta dancing between her boys, spinning out of the way to grab Jehan when Bossuet decides to dip Joly, Gavroche moving around the room steadily pilfering cake from abandoned plates, unaware of the camera following him like a spotlight. Bahorel, who'd been pulling night shift the previous night, sleeping on the couch with his mouth open, and Feuilly leaning back against his shoulder, apparently one hundred percent invested in doing things to the technical specs on his tablet, but occasionally smiling fondly to himself.

Eponine watching Marius dancing with Cosette, a look on her face Enjolras has never seen. Before last night and this morning, he'd imagined the way she watched Cosette was hostile, for obvious reasons; her own poorly-directed attachment to Marius, and her professionalism, which wouldn't let her relax her guard and accept Cosette into their midst as easily as the others had. Enjolras has always appreciated that about Eponine. But as Cosette spun under Marius's arm, blooming with delight like some sort of midnight posy, there was no real jealousy or dislike on Eponine's naked face. She looked wistful, a little bitter, fond, and more than a little haunted.

The camera shifts guiltily, as if it knew it shouldn't have lingered there, and finds Combeferre supposedly back on his phone. He's watching Eponine watching Marius and Cosette, too, and the camera shifts again.

Enjolras's own sullen face fills the screen, arms folded tightly across his chest – god, is that what he looks like to other people? No wonder he doesn't get enough respect. He thought he looked sort of stern and remote and forbidding when he stood like that against the wall, watching, but the boy on the screen just looks cross and a little forlorn, and he's not staring at nothing, he's eyeing Grantaire's empty usual spot.

Fuck Courfeyrac for catching that, standing safely behind the camera like a recording angel and picking out a thousand criss-crossing lines of affection and fondness and friction and humanity and weakness running between them all. It's not fair, not for any outsider to see, not even for them to see –

The camera tilts lopsidedly and finds Jehan beaming at close quarters, blue-green eyes sparkling and the light turning his hair the ridiculous indecent colour of new-cast copper. “Put the camera down and dance with me,” he says, low and intimate and sweet, and Courfeyrac laughs – his laugh is something beautiful in itself, the happiest sound in the universe – and obeys.

The screen goes black.

There's a long silence.

Fauchelevent looks up across the desk at him, and his whole face has lightened with relief. He's smiling, and it looks good on him, like that's the expression he's supposed to wear, not the grave detached look or the tightly strained emotion. “We've always kept her a little too close,” he says, and touches the screen with a gentle fingertip like he's touching his daughter's check. “She's never had a real party.”

There's a loud cough through the door that sounds like “Stockholm.”

“It was the other way around,” Enjolras says, and if it's still a little grudging, whatever. The original plan for Cosette and her father had been so neat and clean. It should have worked. “It didn't get her, she kind of – got us.”

“That boy,” Fauchelevent says, and now he sounds sterner, “The one she was dancing with...”

“Oh, he's an idiot,” Enjolras says; he's not going to lie. “He thinks he's in love. Love makes you an idiot, I suppose, but he wasn't exactly a genius before – he's a good person, though. A nice person. A kind one.”

These aren't usually things he offers as compliments, qualities he finds useful, but they're true. Fauchelevent should be able to see them for himself: Marius's face has always spoken for him, open and freckled and noble. His wide blue eyes and wider mouth and aristocratic cheekbones reflect everything that passes across his mind, semaphore signals of passion and earnestness and awkwardness.

At that thought, Enjolras's hand twitches towards the earpiece. “I asked for just a clip from the birthday singing. I didn't want the others' faces to be – look, this is about you and me, don't do anything with that. Don't do anything with them.” Fuck Courfeyrac.

“I have a very bad memory for faces,” Fauchelevent assures him, and the sternness lightens a shade. “He has a good one, though. Young, of course – all of you, so young."

“Twenty-two,” Enjolras reminds him with lessening patience. “He's nineteen. Both grown men. Does that evidence satisfy you?”

“It does,” Fauchelevent says, and touches the screen again. “More than. Let's discuss my daughter.”

Enjolras leans forward; this is the moment he's been waiting for, come at last. Courfeyrac may be reckless and disobedient, but he knows what he's doing when it comes to his areas of speciality. Sometimes Enjolras just needs to sit back and let him do it. Fauchelevent has definitely softened.

“I'd rather discuss Bill VII A.”

That earns him a frown and a slight drawing back. “That's not what's important right now.”

“How can Bill VII be a lesser matter when there are so many more lives at state?”

The look Fauchelevent gives him for that comment disturbs Enjolras slightly. It's tired and infinitely knowing, as if he understands how Enjolras sees the world; as if he envies him, a little, but more as if he pities him. It's beginning to truly unsettle Enjolras how well this man can read people. “You're so young,” he says. “I remember what that was like. Are you sure that's the path you want to take? We can still conclude this cleanly: first your young man for you, and now you for my daughter. It can end there.”

Enjolras can't imagine this man ever being young. “I can't,” he says, the same way he said it when forced to make a decision between Grantaire and the Bill.

Both alternatives had been impossible, and the only way to deal with it had been to step back and let the others take over instead; and then, when he'd caught his breath, to forge a third way. This is his third.

“I have to – when I surrendered to you as the head of the ABC, I meant it. Do what you have to, but if you want your daughter back, we negotiate for the Bill, not for me.”

“You didn't surrender to me,” Fauchelevent says, and spreads his empty hands. “I serve the government, but I don't prosecute the law. If you surrendered to anyone, it's to Javert. I don't control him, young man, and if you're betting on that – I can suggest, and I do, but when the law presses, he doesn't always listen.”

Enjolras has a senator sitting down to talk, and Enjolras is good at talking to senators. The problem is just getting access to them in a way that doesn't involve locking them in the Privy Closet and getting Feuilly to stand over them with a taser.

This time he had to take himself captive to do it, that's all. If that's the price –

“Bill VII,” Enjolras says, and his voice is clear and certain. This is right. “How can you allow it to pass? I've seen your voting record. You're meant to know better than that. You're meant to be better than that.” He doesn't say, traitor, but he thinks it.

Fauchelevent looks at him a little longer, then folds his hands together. Exits closed. “If you've seen my voting record,” he says “you must know that I agree with you on principles that far. I'm not disparaging your very real frustration in any way. But it's not actually a bad bill, young fire-breather. It's what I went into politics to do, and this is the first bill of my own drafting I've managed to bring to the lower senate in all my time in office. Do you know how much time and care it takes to get something like that through the process of democracy? The mills grind slow, and exceedingly fine. I had to steer my little bill past all sorts of hidden rocks and dangerous passages that would scupper it, and now they've dumped so much ballast–” He sighs. “We both want to help those who have had their power to help themselves stripped from them for reasons they had no hand in. In this bill, that's what I was trying to do.”

“You're an alpha,” Enjolras says, with considerable bitterness. “You say that, but I doubt that you really – Do you have any idea what it feels like to constantly come up against invisible walls that won't let you past? To be laughed at for even protesting their existence? Do you have any idea what it's like to have people constantly talk over your head, and assume that you're too emotional, and therefore your opinions count for nothing; and you can't be trusted, and you shouldn't hold any sort of power; you have no logic or reason –”

He takes a breath. It's so easy to let passion take over and feeling spill out of him, when he opens his mouth on this issue. But that's not something he's ever been allowed to get away with. If Enjolras wants an alpha to listen to him, he has to be as reasonable and logical as he can possibly be; emotion must be mastered and put away.

“I hate evolutionary psychology,” Enjolras says. “I've never believed that that's what Darwin originally intended in his post-Galapagian treatises. What popular culture has done with the theory is worse than everything the Church tried to lay down for centuries before. And it's as baseless in the face of anecdotal evidence as any generalisation. It claims all these things apply to certain swathes of the population; it claims that everyone who shares an orientation thinks, feels, behaves and reacts in the same way. It doesn't treat us as people: it treats us as herd animals. If you let the Bill pass with the rider about physiological pre-testing attached to it, you might as well brand us from birth.”

It's easy, from there, to segue into something approximating the speech he gave the ABC back when the special plan was developing. Enjolras knows what to say: the only problem is keeping his voice level and even, holding back all the passion that wants to burst out of him.

When he finishes, the senator is smiling at him sadly. “I agree,” Fauchelevent says simply. “I may argue with your methods, but I agree. I have a great deal of empathy for you, and the prejudice you face. You know, your whole affect changes – Allow me to give you a fatherly word of advice. Don't play the game by their rules. Don't set out to be the most unemotional person you can in the name of proving them wrong. That hurts you, not them.”

“We're getting away from the point again,” Enjolras says sharply. He doesn't want paternal input from the senator. He wants answers; he wants action. “If you don't withdraw the bill – if you vote for it – you'll be buying your tax rebates at the expense of a small and vulnerable population already struggling to have a voice. It may have been a good bill,” he adds, “but it's been twisted against you. However pure its conception, the product is corrupted. In ancient Rome, children born too hideously deformed to live had their throats slit by their parents to put them out of their suffering. Do the same.”

“It's clear from the way you talk that you're not a parent,” Fauchelevent observes, a touch of his original dryness returning. “I can't imagine that any Roman parent did that with steady hands and clear eyes. I don't want to restrict omega rights, but you constitute a very small portion of the population, and I was elected by Montreuil-sur-Mer to support all their interests. I can't be a single-issue politician; if I do that, I let down the people I serve, and I serve a great many. The burden of taxation is currently grotesquely heavy on the people who can least afford to meet it, and by lifting some of that weight – which is what Bill VII A is intended to do – I can change a lot of lives.

“You've come from a wealthy background, I imagine. You might be playing revolutionary, and I'm sure you live hard now, you and all your friends, but you don't have any idea what that life is really like for those born into it without a choice. Life becomes a battle. Everything is harder than it should be. The problems of the world keep stacking up; people can't fight for their lot to improve, because they're so busy fighting just to live, and because too many of the people in power have a vested interest in keeping them misinformed.”

Enjolras blinks. That turn of argument is unexpected and he doesn't quite know how to answer it. And it strikes home. The ABC live simply, but with a solid base beneath them. If they've acquired members from other backgrounds, their original core was a group of overeducated students. And they own their warehouse outright, under an obfuscating winding trail of shell companies and false names, bought with the last of his parents' money before they cut access. A few of the others had provided money for the necessary conversions needed to turn it into their headquarters, and it fits them as perfectly as a well-worn shoe.

Deflecting to surer ground, he says, “That's exactly what concerns me. Choice. Choice is the most important thing in the world. That's what I'm – what the ABC is trying to do, to give it to everyone. Everyone deserves to start from the same equal place. You say that poverty binds some people from birth – well, this would add to their bindings.”

“I know,” Fauchelevent says, and at last, Enjolras doesn't see just the same resigned patience in his face, but something closer to despair. “I don't know how to reconcile that with what I meant to do. I only meant to help, not hurt.”

They both look away from each other. It's worse than Enjolras had anticipated: he can't change Fauchelevent's mind by educating him. He already knows, and he's made his choice, even if it torments him. And Enjolras can't feel as purely driven as he did when he began this conversation: he sees the senator's point now, and he understands it.

Enjolras started the ABC when he was freshly alight with outrage and fury at the way the world worked. The battle for equal rights chose him eight days after his seventeenth birthday, clamping down like an iron vice, and it's a fight that's bigger than him; he will never, ever be done fighting it. It will take more than his lifetime to win. And he hasn't looked away from it to other causes because he doesn't have more of himself to spread further. There are other battles in other fields, but there aren't enough people fighting this one, and it's his.

If this matter wasn't so utterly personal to him, he might barter the few for a greater chance to help, too. Fauchelevent is fighting his own battle, and it's not a lesser one. On his field, Enjolras is the one who's doing the wrong thing.

Politics is a filthy business, and it corrupts everything it touches. Eponine's right; he should stop trying to manipulate political players from the sidelines and just tear the whole rotten enterprise down from the top. Enjolras understands now why Fauchelevent advised him to take cards as his metaphor. Chess is simple, clean, clear – black and white. Card games are games of collusion, and the lines between players smudge. How do you live in that sort of world without growing cynical?

Is that how Grantaire sees the world all the time, and why?

“So,” Fauchelevent says, regarding him sadly again. The indecision on Enjolras's face must be easy to read. “You see my point, and I see yours. Now where do we stand?”

Enjolras is silent for a few heartbeats. He can't give up now. He may have to break Fauchelevent to do it, and that hurts a little, now.

But he's been holding a card or two back. He has to make his cause personal for Fauchelevent.

“There's something you should be aware of,” Enjolras says, and takes up his phone again, navigating away from the bright shiny faces frozen on the screen.

Files. He pulls up Combeferre's contribution to their bargaining package, highlights a few passages, and sets the phone back down, turned towards the senator.

“Cosette turned seventeen yesterday. And this morning, before I came out to meet you, I had one of my people run physiological orientation testing on her. The exact kind of test the assholes who attached their rider to your tax bill want to make all children grow up with, hanging over their heads and defining their potential.” He lifts his chin. “The results are here, and I promise you they're real. We may stoop to some tricks that are beneath us, but not about this. If you find this information changing your mind or limiting your options now, remember that this sort of testing and type-casting will have a similar effect on everyone subject to it. Does it change things for you?”

Fauchelevent is looking desperately tired again. He doesn't take the phone. “Omega?”

“Omega,” Enjolras confirms. “Which is a loss to the world, because Cosette would make a good senator herself one day, you know. Better than you, perhaps, even.” Better than even Enjolras had thought; the whirlwind of planning after the voting had brought more surprises than just her test results.

“Oh, I know.” Fauchelevent closes his eyes again. Old eyes; older eyelids. There's a lot of grey at his temples and glinting in the rest of his hair.

When he opens them he looks resigned to his fate.

“Call your people, then. We have your accord. Return my daughter, and I'll withdraw your bill.”

Enjolras tries his best to hide his triumph. “Thank you, sir.”

He doesn't let the features of his face alter a fraction, but it must shine out of him anyway, irrepressible as the sun, because the corner of Fauchelevent's mouth actually softens, like from the jaws of defeat he can still find a spark of young and brilliant hope to carry him forward.

“Congratulations,” he says, and it's only mildly ironic.

-

When they're waiting at the drop point, Javert stroking his holster gloweringly further downwind and just out of earshot, Fauchelevent turns to Enjolras.

“You know, I don't even know your name. A name may be a handle for a fascist oppressor to use against you, but–”

“Enjolras. It's the only one I use. The rest doesn't matter.”

“A name for a name,” Fauchelevent says meditatively. “May I presume to tell you a story?”

Enjolras looks at him sideways, but he nods. It's not like there's anything else to do but wait.

“Once upon a time, there was a young man – let's call him, oh, Jean Valjean – and like you, he thought he was a grown man, and he had no idea how young – how achingly young he was then. Young men never do. Young men too often see the world in black and white and assume every hand is turned against them; they don't see the subtleties, and they don't understand how people work, the beautiful and interesting muddles they all are, every one. They don't understand the quality of mercy, and the possibility of redemption. They think, once damned, they are damned forever.”

The only thing Enjolras has less time for than evolutionary psychology is religion, and for much the same reason: it's used too often to justify how the world works, to claim that everything exists as it does as part of God's order, unchangeable. He nods impatiently again, and Fauchelevent smiles.

“You prove my point, and you don't even know you're doing it. It's not much of a story, I'm afraid; this young Jean Valjean did something foolish and a little criminal, and the weight of the world came crashing down on him in retribution. His story could have stopped there. But a wiser man took pity on him, and he took another path, and decided instead of fighting the world, he would try to slowly work within it to change it for the others after him.”

Enjolras frowns into the distance, still looking for signs of his approaching friends. “I'm not sure what sort of response you want from me.”

“Nothing,” Fauchelevent says, opening his hands. “It's only a story.”

There's dust on the road, and then the van approaches, a tiny toy car growing larger and larger. When it stops in front of the three of them, Enjolras scans the tinted windows for signs of life; when the doors open, he's relieved to only see Courfeyrac and Bahorel, but a little disappointed all the same. It's a good team, one he would have picked himself. Eponine and Bahorel are his favourite close-action fighters; Courfeyrac is a good negotiator.

“That one at least is no boy,” Javert mutters, gesturing at Bahorel like he's continuing an argument they've been having for hours, and Fauchelevent smiles but does not speak.

They're waiting, the two of them, and while Courfeyrac comes forward to shake hands, Bahorel circles the van and opens the sliding door.

Cosette's golden head peeps out like a buttercup unfolding its petals, and both of the men standing near Enjolras change tension slightly. He's not sure whether they loosen or tighten, but they change.

She's smiling bravely as she steps out of the van, and squeezes someone's hand – Eponine's. Eponine follows her, and then someone else gets out of the van, and Enjolras closes his eyes - because of course Grantaire insisted on coming. There would have been no one left on base strong enough to argue him down if he really insisted, even though they just got him home safe, even though this could still go wrong –

Even though it'll fucking tear Enjolras apart to have to say goodbye to him again if this last piece of the plan doesn't work out. Courfeyrac is supposed to know people; he should have known better.

He opens his eyes and Grantaire is looking at him like he wants to storm across the six or so feet of gravel separating them and reach for him, intense and half-hesitant and wholly fixated. Enjolras looks away.

“Papa!” Cosette says, letting Eponine's hand go, and throws herself at Fauchelevent.

He gathers her to him and kisses the top of her head, and then Javert is tearing her from him and embracing her even more convulsively.

Then Fauchelevent puts his arms around both of them.

“Um,” Courfeyrac says, blinking. He glances at Enjolras. “Were we aware they were a family?”

“Our intelligence on that point seems to have failed,” Enjolras says, with an equal lack of expression.

Behind his eyes he's suddenly running sums.

Grantaire and Eponine are both still standing near the van, and Courfeyrac is standing between them and the Fauchelevent-Javerts like a mediator, and Enjolras – Enjolras is still standing behind the senator and his dog and his daughter, because he's not done yet.

None of the press from the senator's office had mentioned a partner. The birth certificate they'd been able to trace for Cosette – censored already, with no mention of her adoption – made no mention of a second father figure. That could be for security reasons – Javert has a high-profile position too – but the man is a beta; Enjolras's instincts had told him so on meeting, and when they speak loud enough to be heard, he listens.

Alpha/beta relationships aren't quite comfortable or socially acceptable even yet. For a man in a position of political power, or a man who worked for special forces, such a relationship being public can do a great deal of harm, and they clearly know it. The senator lives such a quiet, private life, away from the usual high-security gated compounds where everyone knows everyone else's business and everyone's entrances and exits; and Cosette, too, living so quietly under the double clamp of her father's senate-necessitated security escort and his secrets that she's never had a real birthday party –

There isn't much else to do but think, waiting for the hugging to stop. Watching Cosette breaking into little relieved sobs against Fauchelevent's chest brings home to Enjolras for the first time how terrified she must have been in the beginning, if not all along, for all her apparent self-possession and spirit.

When the family group finally breaks up, Fauchelevent looks over at them and nods gravely. “Thank you, messieurs, mademoiselle. Our part of the deal should be going through momentarily.”

“Acting Leader,” Courfeyrac says, putting a hand to his ear. “What have you got for us?”

Enjolras's earpiece wakes into life with a sudden muted beep. The others change posture, too, all coming to attention to the same sound.

“We're still working on it,” Combeferre says over the comm. “Musichetta and Jehan are in the system now–”

“Got it,” Musichetta breaks in. “It's just hit the internal parliamentary servers.”

“Private communications are blowing up,” Jehan says, sounding abstracted, the way he does when he's deep in the code. “There's – oh, it's going out now. The Bill's been officially withdrawn, rider and all.”

That's it: the end. There's no way to fake the official notice of a bill withdrawal, and once withdrawn, it can't be presented again without starting from the bottom of the system once more. If Fauchelevent wants to push it back up the hill – and if the man has taken Enjolras's measure, Enjolras has taken his: Fauchelevent will – it may take years and a great deal of effort and influence to regain that heart-breaking lost ground all over again, but he can do it.

The open comm line fills with cheers (“We got them!” “Yes!” “Victory!” “Oh, thank fuck –”), and Courfeyrac is grinning suddenly, ear to ear, and Eponine looks brilliantly happy despite herself. Her suppressed dimples have popped out in her cheeks.

When Enjolras chances a brief glance, Grantaire is smiling a little too, sweet-and-sour, and it's that that brings home to Enjolras that they've actually done it. Just this once, they've won.

“Yes,” Courfeyrac says, to Fauchelevent. “It's been withdrawn. Our bargain is complete.” He offers his hand again, and Javert steps forward; not towards Courfeyrac, but Enjolras.

“The deal is done, then. You're under arrest for criminal espionage, criminal conspiracy, domestic terrorism, intent to–”

From his earpiece, a cacophony of outrage crackles. Grantaire takes half a step over the invisible line dividing the two sides. “What?”

Javert has a pair of cuffs. The PVC tape must be specially reserved for his unofficial captures: this one is going on the record. The record that will show Enjolras's apprehension under the nebulous list of charges already attributed to the ABC, but won't mention the events of the past week. As far as the official record is aware, Euphrasie Fauchelevent never left her bed on Monday evening, and the other members of the ABC are untraceable, unknown, even to the police hound who cunningly brought down their leader.

“It's the deal,” Enjolras says, holding out his wrists obediently. “They gave you up, and in return, they got me. I'm the one with the warrant on my head; I'm the prize.” He tears his eyes from Grantaire to Courfeyrac. “You shouldn't have brought him.”

“But,” Grantaire says wildly, and gestures at Cosette. “They got her back!”

“That was the bargain for the bill,” Enjolras says, still staring Courfeyrac down steadily. Don't argue. The handcuffs close around his wrists, cold metal. “This is a separate deal.”

Courfeyrac is looking desperately grieved, but not surprised, and the others are better trained than Grantaire; Bahorel's hands are fists, but he doesn't pull his stunner or his gun. Eponine, who had been expecting it, is ready.

“Father,” Cosette says, lifting up her voice.

-

“I'm going upstairs to speak to Cosette,” Eponine had said, as the debate about what to do with Fauchelevent's offered bargain went on, no one willing to leave Grantaire to his fate, but no one eager to give up their work or the Bill.

Her voice was iron, and Enjolras had been surprised at himself when he said, “Don't hurt her.” He bit his lip. “They'll take it out on Grantaire.”

The look Eponine gave him was irritated. “I'm not going to hurt her. I'm going to talk. She'll listen to me.”

Enjolras hadn't understood why, unless it involved threat or force, but up in Cosette's room – the room that had been Marius's, a simple room that oddly suited her – Eponine uncoded the door with a practiced hand and said, “Lark?”

Eponine had tried desperately hard to get out of guard duty back when Cosette had been in the Closet; why did she now know the code to her room by heart?

Cosette uncurled herself from the lotus pose Enjolras was more used to seeing Jehan or Eponine holding and came over. “What is it?”

“Your dad's got Grantaire,” Eponine told her, tight with tension. “We need him back. You're going to help.”

“Of course,” Cosette said, with equal solemnity, and Eponine relaxed a fraction; the smile she gave Cosette was one of her rare dimpled ones.

“Wait, I thought you were on my side,” Enjolras said, looking at the supposed last holdout against the Cosette offensive. “Since when – why are you – are you friends?”

“Since we started holding meetings behind your back to talk about boys,” Eponine said, sarcastic. “Is that important right now?”

“Since we were children,” Cosette said, serious. “Well, we weren't exactly – but we are now.”

“Children?” Enjolras raised his eyebrows, and Eponine shifted a little, guiltily.

“I didn't know she was 'Euphrasie Fauchelevent' until I was in her room pulling her from her bed,” she said. “I mean, that's a long polysyllabic name for some spoiled princess, and Cosette wasn't – but as soon as I got inside I knew the girl was familiar, just – a look, a scent, something –”

Enjolras remembered Eponine whispering in Cosette's ear with a stunner to her head, and Cosette's eyes going wide; Eponine taking her hand away and Cosette forbearing to scream.

“I knew Eponine wasn't going to hurt me – well, I hoped,” Cosette said, and Enjolras spared her a brief reassessing glance before looking at Eponine again.

“And you didn't think this was important information?”

“I thought it was private,” Eponine said, but she was shifty again. Enjolras would have enjoyed exacting a little revenge for his own suffering a half hour or so ago under her onslaught of questions, but Grantaire was still tied to a chair somewhere being slapped in the face for the sake of the girl Eponine has been holding back about. “And Gavroche didn't remember, he was a baby.”

“A dirty baby who cried all the time,” Cosette agreed, a line forming between her perfectly arched golden brows. “That can't have been – oh, no one cared for him–”

“No one cared for you,” Eponine reminded her, and when they looked at each other there was still something there Enjolras couldn't puzzle out. He didn't have time for this, and he abruptly didn't care about going deeper. If this shared background gave him a handle to use for Grantaire's sake, he'd take it.

-

“Father,” Cosette says, and everyone turns to look at her. Javert's face doesn't soften, but she has his attention. “Please don't arrest Enjolras.”

“Cosette,” Javert says gruffly. “You've been through a great ordeal, and you're confused.”

“I don't get confused,” Cosette says, and the little line is back between her brows. “I want you to take the bracelets off him, please.”

“When we have you home, you will forget whatever bond captivity has formed between you and this villain,” he assures her, with a savage sort of fondness.

The look on Cosette's face at that word is almost amusing. If it wasn't below her teenage dignity, she might have made a face. “I'm not bonded with him, Father. There's someone I do like – but not Enjolras.”

“Javert,” Fauchelevent says quietly, “I really wish you would reconsider, as I asked. These young revolutionaries have done no real harm, and are capable of doing a great deal of good–”

Javert is looking long-suffering now, but unmoved; even water can't do as much to granite as it can to sandstone. He ignores Fauchelevent. Whatever argument he's offering, he's already heard it. “There's a name for what you're feeling, and it goes away, Cosette. You're confused–”

“I'm not,” she says, jaw setting. For a moment, they resemble each other curiously.

Then her face softens, eyes going huge and imploring in her heart-shaped face, and is Enjolras really the only one who can tell when her tactics become deliberate? Not that he'll protest when it's being used to his advantage, but –

“I know you must have been worried, but it wasn't bad at all. I had fun, actually. I learned how to make a solar battery out of CadTe film, and how to solder, and how to fight with short sticks, and with staffs, and how to break a man's nose if I – oh, I learned how to hit people properly – ”

Eponine scuffs a toe in the dirt and gravel, and Cosette stops rhapsodising about whatever Bahorel shouldn't have taught her and returns to her objective.

“They were kind to me, and they didn't need to be. I'm not hurt. Don't arrest him because of me.” Tears start to form in her beautiful eyes. Javert looks martyred, but he also doesn't show any signs of changing his mind.

Fauchelevent seems to feel the weight of Enjolras looking at him, and meets his gaze. They stare at each other for another long measure, and at last Fauchelevent nods very, very slightly, giving him permission of a sort.

This could go very badly. The potential for pyrotechnics is high; Enjolras might be wiser just leaving it for Cosette. It may take some considerable time and painful pleading, but she'd assured him she could bring her father around eventually, and he believes in her estimation of her abilities. Granted, at the time, he'd thought they were talking about Fauchelevent, but now he doubts that she was.

She would have made such an excellent politician. Maybe she still will. At least this way, she can save her best powers of persuasion for whatever mobilised deployment it's going to take to persuade her father(s) to let her see Marius.

Enjolras chances a look at Grantaire now, allowing himself the luxury. The drama between an intense Cosette and her adamant parent is still going on, but Grantaire's not watching them. He's looking at Enjolras, and the moment Enjolras looks back he's caught and fixed.

Grantaire's eyes are so blue, and the look on his face is infinitely confusing. Steady. Worried. Determined. Desperate. Unsure. It's the sort of look someone wears as they're making up their minds to do or say something calamitous, breaking into a scene to make a loud noise and throw the dice up into the air, and Enjolras decides abruptly to speak before Grantaire can do or say anything stupid.

The words are a passport, handed to him by Fauchelevent, but it was Javert himself who gave Enjolras the key, back in the study. Fauchelevent's name on his government records isn't Jean, but Ultime; and yet that's not what Javert had called him.

-

When Enjolras says the words Jean Valjean, everything stops.

He hadn't understood the story at the moment Fauchelevent was telling it to him, but it fits into place when he needs it, little pieces coming together just a moment or two before it's too late. He can even understand why, now, Fauchelevent chose to tell it to him.

Enjolras had missed that detail of the name the first time, but he's not quite stupid enough to miss a slipped card being passed to him under the table, not when Fauchelevent did everything but cough and step significantly on his foot.

The magic of those words makes Javert stiffen and freeze, hands still clasping the metal of the bracelets around Enjolras's wrists. He looks at Enjolras in disbelief, faded blue-denim eyes horrified, and then glances at Fauchelevent – with worry for him, not accusation.

Fauchelevent looks opaque, and if the senator's not going to tell his partner that it was his quixotic sleight-of-hand that passed that information on himself, Enjolras isn't going to give him away.

He's not sure what the man's story is, but Enjolras is an orator; he doesn't need more than the bare hinted bones to weave a damning rope of conclusions and wind it around Javert's neck like a noose.

(He doesn't mention the forbidden relationship. He could, and maybe Javert could shoot him in the head to shut his mouth, but it would still be too late because Enjolras is still online and it's not just the people here who can hear him. The members of the ABC back at headquarters are watching through the cameras and listening through the mic, able to hear his every pause of breath –

Enjolras won't draw on that particular thread of persuasion. It would tarnish the cause. Also, when and if he ever returned to headquarters, Combeferre would string him up personally and invite Joly in to help flay him.)

He has more than enough material to barter with without stooping to that low, and with Javert's stony eye on him he tightens his metaphorical rope just a little; it feels good to have power again, when he's – when Grantaire's – been at this man's mercy.

“Enjolras,” Cosette says, the same way she said father, and Enjolras blinks, breaking the silent deadlock and letting the rope go slack. Right. Negotiation.

“You don't really want to make this arrest, officer,” he says. “Under interrogation, I'll talk. I don't know if I'll be able to stop.”

“Not necessarily,” Javert grits out, and Enjolras actually feels – empathetic. Emotional leverage is a utilitarian and powerful tool, but after this is done he's not going to wield it any more. It seems too prone to snap back and catch him in the recoiling edge of his own trap, sink screaming metal teeth into flesh. It was intellectual, before.

Enjolras doesn't like understanding this man. It's easier to see him as a sadistic oppressor, the human embodiment of a mechanised fascist regime, than as a father whose child has been threatened, whose partner has some lurking dark past waiting to claim him – interesting, that he knows about it. A month ago, he wouldn't have seen deeper.

“If you'll allow me,” Fauchelevent-turned-Valjean says, stepping forward into the détente like he's been waiting for this moment since they arrived, like he knew it was coming. “I think, M. Enjolras, as you said, we have a common enemy. And possibly some common goals.”

“I agree,” Enjolras says instantly.

Javert breathes in, the muffled, difficult breath of a bulldog. Suspicious, suddenly, of collusion. “Pray tell.”

Fauchelevent gives him a small smile, and then meets Enjolras's eyes again and begins to lay his proposal out in the gravel-covered ground with the toe of his boot, a gift – a bridge.

-

In Fauchelevent's office, Enjolras had felt as much regret as triumph when he won, because it meant taking something away from a man he respected. Bargaining with him again in the dust with manacles on his wrists and a forbidden name on his tongue, Enjolras feels nothing but a sweeping and sweet victory that leaves no bitter aftertaste left in his mouth, although this time he's the one giving ground.

Bill VII A is dead, but there's more work to be done. There's always more work to be done, but for the first time Enjolras feels like it might be possible to effect change without resorting to desperate measures.

He knows a senator, now. He has a senator listening to him, and he has a senator promising him his and his allies' support within the Montagnard party, in exchange for the ABC's broadening of mission to the cause of poverty and other social injustices; their changing of tactics. He has a high-level contact within the authorities now, as little as Javert likes him: as little as he likes Javert. They can work together, if Fauchelevent harnesses them. Certain records might disappear into the same abyss that swallowed up Jean Valjean.

They have a chance. Both of them.

-

When the dust kicks up behind the distant and dwindling SUV, Enjolras staggers, knees going slightly weak at last.

It's the same pattern he's always followed: work hard, throw everything he has into what he's focused on, and then when the moment or the project has passed, and only then, allow all the stupid human weaknesses and needs and limits and pains to catch up with him.

Courfeyrac is closest, so he's the one who puts a hand under his elbow. “Okay?”

“Fine,” Enjolras says shortly, and at last looks across the short expanse of barren, rocky ground to Grantaire. Eponine and Bahorel are there, too, but he's not looking at them.

Gravity stops working. He lurches helplessly forward, a puppet with his strings cut propelled across the breach by some stronger force. Grantaire catches him before he can stumble again, which is good, because Enjolras doesn't actually have any back-up plan in case he doesn't.

Enjolras kisses him, and he means to be careful of the healing split in Grantaire's lip, to go slow and careful, but his heartbeat is throbbing in his ears and the late afternoon sun is white-hot on the back of his head and his neck and his shoulders, right through his hair and the thick cloth of his jacket --

– and they're pressing together body-to-body and tangling helplessly closer, and Grantaire turn his head a little into the kiss, and then his tongue is probing at the line of – Enjolras doesn't even know what to do with that, his only experience is a butterfly moment of infinite hesitation that left the taste of iron and burning on his lips when he pulled away. In the end he just opens his mouth, fists the back of Grantaire's shirt in his hands, desperate, and holds on.

He's dizzy with sensation when they finally come apart, and the whooping and ringing in his ears that he's been assuming was an auditory hallucination resolves itself abruptly into the ragged cheering and mocking and clapping of his friends, both in person and through the treacherous little piece of plastic and wire and ceramic nestled in his ear.

The ABC have cameras on the drop point, covering the whole bare stretch of ground. Enjolras knew that, he just didn't –

“You can still probably wave your hand and convince them that didn't happen,” Grantaire says quietly, studying his face, “maybe the senator and his man drugged you too, it's not your fault, mind-altering substances and everything–”

Enjolras frowns at him for that piece of idiocy. They're both still wired onto the open line, which means that everyone has heard and can hear everything. The embarrassed and mortified part of him almost wants to jump on the excuse. The stupid sounds he just made when Grantaire put his hands under his shirt and slid them up his back –

“I'm going to give you a 4.5 out of six,” Courfeyrac says critically, grinning. “What you lack in technique you make up in passion, but I've got to leave you room for improvement or you'll get sloppy –”

Enjolras takes a threatening step towards him, and Courfeyrac shuts his mouth hastily. He seems to have forgotten that Enjolras is necessarily and tragically unarmed, and once he's appropriately cowed Enjolras lifts his eyes to wherever one of the cameras must be and glares at that, too.

The clamour in his ear quietens back into static.

Then he looks at Grantaire. The urge to kiss him again is strong, but now that there's time for it at last, Enjolras remembers that he's furious with him, and not just for suggesting that they could just pretend that the last few minutes didn't happen.

“You idiot,” he says. “We were in the middle of – why would you leave headquarters to go wandering around the city? You could have locked yourself in one of the rooms – the Closet, if you wanted – and done your sulking there, but –”

“Pardon?” Grantaire says, and takes a step back. “Hello, hypocrite. You surrendered yourself to the authorities–”

“At least I had a plan!”

“Well, your face,” Grantaire says, like that's an explanation. “I wasn't sulking – I was dealing with a great deal of – I wasn't going to stay anywhere you were, although I can't say wandering the streets helped as much as I thought it would, because whenever I closed my eyes there you were–”

“My face,” Enjolras says flatly. “My face drove you away.”

“Your terrible, terrible face,” Grantaire says, nodding, like that actually should explain everything. “You looked like a severe angel about to exact divine punishment, austere, untouchable – god, how did I get to touch you? – and so horrified – and I knew you didn't want, I knew you wanted something simple and unproblematic, and I should have – I know I should have mentioned the 'madly in love with you for four years' thing – god, don't know how you didn't know – but you were asking me to – and I'm not a saint, Apollo, even if you are.” He stops nodding maniacally and rubs his knuckles over the line of his cheekbone, the part of his lips. “The whole self-abnegation thing – it's not really me. Not when it comes to you.”

Grantaire looks like he's expecting Enjolras to suddenly shout something to match his original awkward line about expecting Grantaire to be a gentleman. You took advantage of me! He hasn't moved closer again; he's still standing a short distance away, and his arms are crossing and then unfolding and then crossing again, foot tapping.

He looks braced for long-withheld righteous fury, and the truly ridiculous thing is that when Eponine had stalked forward at the meeting and yelled at Enjolras for overreacting to a fact he didn't know yet, that interpretation had never occurred to him.

Enjolras sighs. “Why would I tell everyone you were my lover if I was angry about that?”

“Um,” Grantaire says, going still. The wind ruffles through his dark and untidy hair; he swallows, and for some reason Enjolras is reminded of the blank look on his face when he told Grantaire that he trusted him, heat-drunk and desperate to push him over the line and not entirely certain he was telling the truth when he said it. “You – told everyone I was your lover?”

“He did,” Bossuet confirms over the earpiece, because he's never been able to leave a moment alone without interjection. “It was excruciatingly embarrassing for everyone. Who says 'lover' these days?”

There's frantic shushing, online and off.

Enjolras glances at his feet. His boots are thick with the fine grey dust that's covering everything, under the loose metallic rock. “It was true.”

“That's not what you told me.”

And that's true, too. Enjolras had him in his bed, on his floor, up against every wall in his apartment; tangled in his arms, covered with the thousand visible and invisible marks of his mouth and hands, and said: This is just a servicing. Don't feel anything. I don't want anything from you but your body, and when I'm myself, I don't even want that. Consider this your contribution to the ABC. Don't mention this to me again.

“Well,” he says, helpless again, “things – they change.”

Somewhere an imaginary Combeferre is looking at him approvingly, and an imaginary Courfeyrac – not the flesh-and-blood one currently peering at him with an intense curiosity being kept painfully in check – is ruffling his hair and saying 'Congratulations on picking up emotional nuance, Enjolras, well done.'

“I think you need someone's permission before you claim them in public as your lover,” Grantaire says, meditative. The tone of his voice has altered along with his posture. “It's a two-way thing, you know. Both parties have to agree to it.”

Enjolras looks up from his study of the gravel to find Grantaire giving him a strange little smile. It takes a moment to interpret it as a considerably gentler form of his usual mockery. “You asshole,” he says. “What if I don't ask? What if I just tell you?”

Grantaire shrugs, head tilting. The line of his body is uncertain again. “I'll probably roll over and accept it?”

“I don't want to make you,” Enjolras says, in case there's any more confusion, and at the betraying hesitant desire in his voice Grantaire's face finally stops doing strange and terrible uncertain things and splits into a grin brilliant as a slice of sun.

Enjolras has heard all the stories about bonded pairs, but he's always dismissed them as propaganda. Half the work is already done for the oppressive system when they can package your commodification as a fairy-tale, make you kiss your chains.

He hates the biological determinism the stories imply: two lovers looking at each other and then fitting as seamlessly together as pen and cap. He doesn't want that sort of relationship, and he's always been scornful of the idea that there must be someone out there who fits him like that, so easy, someone who Enjolras will have no choice but to roll over and take.

Enjolras wants choice. He always wants choice. If he ever met anyone who looked at him like they owned him, he'd put a gun to their head and tell them very quietly to walk away, and keep the sight levelled on the back of their neck until they were gone.

Grantaire doesn't own him. He's alpha to Enjolras's omega, but in the midst of collapsing, claustrophobic walls and Enjolras's own prisoning body, he did what he could to give Enjolras something to exercise choice over, even at his own expense. He touched Enjolras like he was precious when he forgot that this was supposed to be just a servicing, and roughly when he remembered that that was what Enjolras wanted from him; his hands shake when they make contact. He makes Enjolras laugh and makes him furious and tilts his chair back in meetings when he doesn't sleep right through them, and still manages to gleefully drive armoured tanks through the holes in his plans. He is the opposite of easy, or seamless.

He wanted Enjolras to reason with Fauchelevent when Enjolras couldn't imagine finding any sort of common ground with the man that wouldn't mean yielding any of the absolute principles that governed his life; but when Enjolras had done it, he hadn't lost anything. The future had opened up wider instead.

If Enjolras stops struggling against the chains he's been born with and accepts this much of what comes with them, maybe the same principle will apply, and he'll find the key on his tongue like an unexpected present. Maybe he already has it, and didn't notice.

“Then I guess you should ask,” Grantaire says, running a hand through his hair like the statement is entirely nonchalant, like Enjolras can't see the flicker of his throat moving or the tiny shift of his tongue, nervous, between his lips.

"You asshole," he repeats, and when he crosses the negotiating ground to kiss Grantaire this time he has a better idea of how, and he tunes out the noise rising up in his ears.