It’s a pure day – beautiful and linen-white, and as Grantaire tastes the cleanness of it on his lips, it’s difficult to think of anything that is less than sublime, less than crystal-perfect.
Perhaps difficult is the wrong word – everything wrong is still there, after all – but it’s much easier than usual to ignore that, soften his own soul to the world, empty away all dreams of anger and frustration and despair into the November sky.
Strangers glance past in their own chrysalides, one an old man of burnt clay with a black folder – a notebook, perhaps; one a father with his child, moss-eyed with crumbling fingers; one a tall woman smiling into the air, hair richly coiled around her head. People-watching is, after all, a parisian sport, and one Grantaire loves to indulge himself in, to create mythologies of the mundane, to find his own heavens in what he knows of heathenry. Ah, for that is what he used to do with Enjolras, of course: Grantaire, the conjuror, who fell for the stars themselves, the sun, who forged such majesty the real thing could hardly live up to it.
And in many ways, he didn’t. Enjolras is warm, yes, vast and broiling with ardency and cunning in every way, and yet awkward, and yet funny, and yet ridiculous in his own self. Enjolras is the man who speaks of love with more conviction than almost any other, and yet blushes to say it, and yet giggles at Grantaire’s words with more youthfulness than anything else he does.
Oh, Enjolras, that gorgeous man.
Expectation fidgets inside Grantaire, melts him to champagne. Enjolras texted him five minutes ago to say he’s on his way, and he can hardly blame Paris itself for its own traffic catastrophes. He looks at his watch. Enjolras is two minutes late – a feat for a man as painfully punctual as him.
Fuck the traffic.
When Enjolras does arrive, five minutes late, he appears as a smudge of red against the buildings, hair hung in coils around his head a bleached-blond dream. His eyes are dark and charming, and the edges of his cheeks are dusted with ink-smudges.
He takes Grantaire;s hands as soon as he gets close enough – his are cold and needle-sharp – and Grantaire laughs when he pouts: “How long have you been standing there?”
“Aeons. Millenia.” He wiggles his eyebrows. “You’ve been taken by the fae and returned to a different world.”
Enjolras rolls his eyes but tucks himself under Grantaire’s chin all the same. Something like home flutters in his chest at the warmth.
“Cold,” Enjolras mutters from the spot in front of Grantaire’s heartbeat. “Warm me up, R.”
The cold air glints off the bones in his hands, wrapped around Enjolras as they are. “If you want to get warm we need to move, mon ange. And we were supposed to leave ten minutes ago.”
“Cold,” Enjolras insists, lifting his head up so that that shock of blond hair glitters around him and the softness of his cheeks darkens to ochre. A bruise deep inside Grantaire bleeds and heals all at once. “Warm me up, Grantaire.”
And Grantaire does what he knows, and he talks, and he wreaths promises from the air the way Enjolras does at protests, uses that hurt isolation, uses that bleakness of the mind he’s so determined to destroy, uses every time he waxed lyric on his now-boyfriend’s beauty, kindness, passion. “You have every star inside you, Enjolras – Jove would quiver and fear your revolution. You could be Odysseus, the king, cunning Odysseus made immortal, made into the sky himself. There may be nothing in you that is not imperfect and fallible, but there is also nothing in you that is not sublime in every way. I say I love you it is to say I know you and that there is nothing in the world more beautiful than that.” The words render themself a dark watercolour, vibrant and divine.
And then Enjolras is kissing him, and he’s not all that good at it but he’s learning, and everything cold becomes him, becomes Enjolras deified and Enjolras humanised and Enjolras laughing into Grantaire’s mouth. Hot breath, sweetness.
“Why are you laughing?” he asks, silken-voiced in love.
Enjolras grins up at the sky, heart alight, and cries out softly: “It’s snowing, Grantaire!”
Snowing, yes – shadowy silver flakes cutting down from the clouds in a sudden gasping that makes marble of the world around them. Perhaps they won’t get to the museum exhibit today; perhaps they just let themselves be in love in the first snow of the year, perhaps they just defy Jove for such a thing as happiness.
They become art there in the mirror-shard winter, and they kiss and hold each other until the world is a masterpiece, too.
The Cold on Your Cheeks – Enjoltaire
Published
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