Great Deeds He Has Doneart by nisiedrawsstufffic by  etvlamaculotteSummary: Locked into the u

Great Deeds He Has Doneart by nisiedrawsstufffic by  etvlamaculotte Summary: Locked into the upper room of the Corinthe, Enjolras is searching for something - and Grantaire is not helping.(warning for alcohol use)***** Chowder was the one gawking from the stairway as Enjolras rummaged through the cold feathers of ashes in the fire grating – and so Chowder was the one he turned on, jabbing with one grey hand at the door. “You – the key.  I’ll have the door locked.  No one’s to come in until I’ve said so.” Turning slightly to his left, he added, an afterthought: “You can go.” “That’s very kind of you.”  Gawking was too energetic a word for what Grantaire was doing, but all the same he decided he would rather not miss the show.  He tipped out another half a glass from his bottle, and slumped with a certain resolution back in his seat.  "I find I’m quite comfortable, however.“  And he had, as was so often the case, been here first.  He had no intention of vacating the premises on his own two feet.  It would have been unorthodox. Enjolras shrugged, Chowder scattered, and soon the two men were locked in the upper room.  The sun hadn’t yet set, but the neighboring buildings looming in like crooked trees cast the room in a sleepy sort of murk, and blocked all but a sliver of the yellow evening sky from the dusty window.  Enjolras made a strangely sinister figure in the light of the candle he was clutching.  His shadow stretched and snapped across the walls as he stooped beneath a table, peered under a chair. "What is it you’re looking for?” Grantaire neither expected nor received an answer.  He contented himself with watching, and guessing – surely there were only so many things that could take Enjolras to his knees, and they all had a similar character – and providing his usual form of encouragement. “Ask and you shall receive, at any rate – seek and you shall find.”  He drank.  Even with the rustle and clatter of Enjolras’ search, the room was far too still.  He had come here anticipating more company, the usual morass of noise into which he could sink like a sodden rag.  Absent that, however, he could make his own cacophony.  Unaided, unadulterated, unmitigated.  "Awful lesson, I always thought – ask and you shall receive.  That Christ fellow was overbold.  Not so great a sin when one’s the son of God, of course; men no doubt expect to be put upon by such as that.  But parables have consequences, and an entire humanity has been raised up to think it’s godly to go knocking on their neighbors’ doors at all hours of the night begging bread.  Or was it fish?  Ask and it shall be given to you.  The last time I went knocking at my neighbor’s at midnight, all he gave me was two good earfuls, and I was lucky to get that much.  I was miserably confused.  I thought his door was mine.  I’m afraid it took quite a while to sort out.  But there was no bread, no fish forthcoming – nor any snakes or scorpions, for that matter.  No Christ in Paris after dark.“ No reply.  Enjolras was stalking the baseboards like a cat after a mouse, and Grantaire struggled with the disconcerting impression of ridiculousness.  Stooped and a little flushed, under tables, over chairs, poring over every nook in the mantle as though it were an impenetrable text – even a man like Enjolras might look more than faintly absurd.  There wasn’t much nobility to be gleaned, it seemed, from combing the floor of the Corinthe for – what?  A note, he supposed.  A communication from some confederate.  No doubt coded and obscure, a list of names of any number of men leaping to get themselves shot, or an accounting of the guns they’d do it with, all done up in a proud schoolboy’s perfect execution of Augustus’ silly code.  The sort of thing that might have been just as safely nailed to the wall, and better still never written in the first place. "I’ve said a prayer to St. Anthony for you,” Grantaire lied, and drained his glass.  When he attempted to refill it, the bottle came up too light in his hand, and only a couple of mouthfuls tumbled out.  He should perhaps have taken Enjolras up on his invitation to leave; he was ill-equipped for a long hunt.  The prospect of a locked door standing between himself and either of the women who supplied him with drink was unsettling, unpleasant. But given a choice between talking himself thirsty here and pickling elsewhere, he’d take the former.  ”He’s never answered me before, of course.  Probably he can tell I don’t much respect him.  I don’t blame him, and I doubt you do – would you help me?  But this time it’s for your sake – we can hope for an exception.  Saints help one another.  The fortunate always do.  Intercessions beget intercessions beget –” “I am not a saint.” Grantaire thought that a funny thing to say, coming from a man kneeling with his head bowed to the cracks between the floorboards.  The candle Enjolras had set beside his knee was helping not at all. “Not yet, anyway,” Grantaire replied, lifting his empty bottle.  "If you’d like a head start on the road to veneration, I could use some water into wine.  I know those sorts of things are usually reserved for spectacles, big, ostentatious to-dos sure to make it into the papers, but I’ll be your vouching witness.  Frankly, I think they’re better done in private.  What is it they say?  Don’t blow a trumpet before you.  Rend your heart, not your garments.  That sort of thing.  Of course, that’s all best taken with a hefty rock of salt – how on earth do you take it seriously when it’s from the mouth of a man who cured a leper and told him not to say a word about it?  Please.  False modesty is even less attractive in gods than it is in women.  Don’t blow a trumpet before you, He says, and then it’s loaves and fishes for five thousand.  The nerve of it.“ "Instruction is not the same as boastfulness.”  Enjolras shoved himself to his feet with an exasperated noise.  There were light patches of soot and dust on the dark of his trousers.  He spared Grantaire an irritated glance before crossing to where a shelf was propped against the wall, and wedging his foot behind it.  "Miracles make points.  They win men over.  Like any great act, they mean more than they are – the substance is often secondary.  Private virtue is one thing; private virtue is right, while a public announcement of the power of right is quite another.  There’s no hypocrisy in spreading good news.  It takes a truly hard heart to cast the feeding of the hungry as an act of self-congratulation.  Help me move – no, never mind.  Stay where you are.“ Grantaire would have been on his feet in half a second, if not for that order – might have been even so, had it not come on the heels of an insult.  He wouldn’t have called himself proud – who would, indeed – but his heart he felt should remain unquestioned. "Or a hard head,” Grantaire suggested, a shadow of wounded displeasure moving across his face.  It dissipated in the space of a breath, however, passing by in no more than the time it took for Enjolras to grind the shelf across the uneven floor.  Grantaire stubbornly refused to be touched.  A soft heart absorbs arrows, after all.  "Well.  So perform for me this modest miracle – I’ll run right out into the street and tell everyone at once.  Think of all the men who’ll come running then, will you?  You’ve been trying to sell the wrong goods.  Give the thirsty to drink.  A claret, if it isn’t too much bother.“ "You haven’t any water,” Enjolras pointed out, running his hands along the back of the shelf. “That, I can provide.” With a huff, Enjolras shoved the (sadly empty) furniture back against the wall, and rounded on him.  ”The real miracle would be if you would get up and walk.” Grantaire laughed.  ”Later I’ll fall down and crawl.  No thanks to you.”  He rattled the empty bottle against the table. The search continued, progressing to the window frames.  Even the pale glaze the glass had half an hour ago had faded away – now it was simply dull with twilight.  The room was beginning to feel closer, the city outside melting into one black mountain against the sky.  A shiver worked its way down Grantaire’s back; a draft, perhaps.  But the flame on the candle was steady.  There was no wind.  Nor was there any noise aside from the sound of Enjolras’ search, which began to seem thunderous to him, like winds in the distance or waves on the hull of a ship.  It went on and on, longer than he would have believed possible in a room of that size. “What is it you’re looking for?” he asked again, mostly to hear his own voice.  "What could be so important?  You need – what?  Men?  Weapons?  Intelligence?“ "A mutual faith,” Enjolras murmured absently, feeling under the leaf of a rickety table he’d already inspected. “Surely the faithful don’t get so frenzied –” Enjolras’ hand came down on the table with an unimpressive slap.  ”Will you be quiet?” Frenzied may have been the wrong word; but there was fear in him, Grantaire thought.  Or it may have been no more than frustration, impatience.  All enemies of faith, at any rate – all strange to see on that face, even for a man who made provoking impatience something of a specialty.  If they hadn’t been so very different, he might have thought he simply saw his own fear reflected back to him – because he was afraid, if that was the feeling, like seasickness, like something peeling away inside of him like the red residue flaking into the empty pit of his glass.  But – happily to say – he saw nothing of himself in Enjolras. Enjolras turned away again.  Grantaire’s mouth was dry; acidic.  When Chowder’s voice came through the door, annoyed, sharp, griping to someone that no, he’s not finished yet, doing I-don’t-know-what, he jumped at the chance – again – to chase away the silence.  Pounding his fist on the table, sending his glass and bottle bouncing toward the edge and sending a shudder through the floor, he shouted: “Knock, and it shall be opened!” A slip of paper fluttered to the floor.  From where, Grantaire could not have said; by the time he thought to look up, it had settled already by his chair.  His first thought was to put his foot on it. But Enjolras had already seen it, and picked it up as blithely as though he had expected to find it there all along.  He unfolded it and spread it out across the table, smoothing away the creases; it was a jumble of letters, as expected, a wordless string of meaningless signs. “Well, there you are,” Grantaire breathed, his toes twitching belatedly inside his booth.  "Your invitation to the ball, is it?“ Seizing a stub of pencil from a windowsill, Enjolras flipped the paper over and scrawled something equally unintelligible on the back.  He rolled it up into a frayed little scroll, took Grantaire’s empty bottle by the neck, and dropped the note inside.  When he raised his eyes to Grantaire, whatever desperation had been written on his face before had disappeared entirely – how nice, Grantaire thought, to be able to wash oneself so clean so quickly. "As good a hiding place as any,” Enjolras said pointedly – and then he turned and went to the door.  As he was going out, Chowder was coming in, looking harried and busy with a short broom in her hand. She glanced down at the bottle Enjolras was holding, and then at Grantaire’s table.  ”You’ll be wanting another one.” “No need,” Grantaire said, lifting his glass and regarding it with a bitter sneer.  It remained stubbornly empty.  No wine forthcoming; nor bread, nor fish.  "I am a worker of miracles.“ She fetched him one regardless.   -- source link

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