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When Enjolras spots Grantaire walking toward the converted factory where they rent rehearsal space, talking to some big guy with tattoos and a guitar case strapped to his back, his mind goes white with static. Grantaire’s wearing a knit cap and gesturing at something, his hands making elaborate choreographed passes through the air. Enjolras is across the street, so he can’t hear what they’re saying, but he can see the other guy’s smile. They go inside together, and before the door thunks shut, he notices one of Grantaire’s drumsticks sticking out of the back pocket of his worn jeans.
The band doesn’t have practice today.
Enjolras feels like he’s going to be sick.
Twelve minutes later, he’s at Courfeyrac and Marius’s building — he presses the intercom button of each of their neighbors until someone buzzes him in, and then takes the stairs three at a time.
He bangs the door with the side of his fist out of courtesy, and fishes the spare key out from under the doormat.
The apartment is quiet. Marius has the morning shift at the bookshop, and Courfeyrac’s door is closed.
“Courfeyrac!”
A faint shuffling.
“Courfeyrac, it’s an emergency!”
Low voices on the other side of the door.
Enjolras can feel his left eyelid twitching. He presses the base of his left palm against his eye socket to make it stop.
“I hope you’re holding your face because you’ve been shot,” Courfeyrac says, opening the door a crack. His hair is doing a thing. He’s only wearing boxers. “Otherwise, I’m going to have to shoot you myself.”
“Grantaire’s cheating on us with another band.”
Courfeyrac gives Enjolras a long look.
“I need pants for this,” he says, and goes back inside.
When he comes out, he’s got a pair of jeans on and a t-shirt with the logo of a website Enjolras has never heard of. He says something over his shoulder; Enjolras can’t help but crane his head to try and see who he’s talking to.
Courfeyrac shuts his bedroom door behind him pointedly.
“Don’t even bother.” On any other day, that would be a big red flashing sign for Enjolras to definitely bother, since Courfeyrac subjects his sexual history to the same amount of eager public dissection as an episode of “Mad Men.” (Including the time he told the band about having sex during an episode of “Mad Men,” and Combeferre didn’t talk to him for three hours on principle.)
Today, though, Enjolras realizes he doesn’t give a fuck.
Marius left the coffee pot on when he left, so Courfeyrac pours some for both of them. He sits at their kitchen table, hands around his mug, watching Enjolras pace and explain what just transpired.
“And I mean, what the fuck — he’s just going to start playing with a new band who practices in the same building as us and not tell us?” Courfeyrac plucks Enjolras’s coffee cup from his hands when it threatens to spill onto the tile floors after an especially vehement gesticulation. “What kind of pathological shit is that? Did he think we weren’t going to find out? I knew that drinking impaired your neural faculties, but I didn’t realize anyone could be that stupid.”
“Maybe he thought we were practicing today.” Courfeyrac’s tone does not reflect the gravity of the situation.
“He texted me last night to make sure we were on for Wednesday!” Enjolras snarls his hand in his hair, tugging hard. “I can’t even believe this. How could he just — sit there, every day, and pretend to care about what we were doing, the music and the message and making a difference, when the whole time he was double-timing us!”
“Double-timing us?” Courfeyrac raises an eyebrow, but Enjolras isn’t really paying attention to him. The static in his brain is back, only this time it’s accompanied with a high-pitch whine, like the sound of a dial-up modem connecting or a sliding glass door in the frozen aisle of the grocery that needs to be greased. He thinks about that guy that Grantaire had been talking to. What kind of band did he have, to make Grantaire want to leave? He looked like a younger, skinnier Henry Rollins — is that why Grantaire had a Black Flag decal on his bass drum case? Who did he like more than them?
“Enjolras.” From the way Courfeyrac says his name, he can tell it’s not the first time he’s tried to get his attention. “You’re going to tear your hair out.”
Enjolras forces himself to drop his hands.
“You should talk to him,” Courfeyrac says. “I’m sure he has an explanation.”
“I don’t want to hear him tell us why we’re not good enough. For him of all people,” Enjolras says. The last part doesn’t come out nearly as snide as he meant it to.
“Talk to him,” Courfeyrac repeats. “It’s gonna be okay.”
Enjolras blinks. “Wait. What do you know that you’re not telling me.”
Courfeyrac shakes his head. “You need to talk to him, not to me.” He glances back toward his bedroom, and Enjolras remembers that there’s someone still in there, immediately feels bad about it.
Courfeyrac forestalls any apology with a sound hug. He smells like coffee and someone else’s deodorant.
He pats Enjolras’s shoulder once.
“Get the fuck out of here,” he says, not unkindly.
Walking back to the rehearsal space, Enjolras takes stock. If Grantaire really wants to leave — well, it’s not the end of the world. Band members have quit groups Enjolras was in before. This is Brooklyn; half of the people that Enjolras passes on the street are probably drummers, or know someone who is. And there’s always the old drum machine.
(That’s a lie. Enjolras sold it three days after Grantaire joined the band. He just never got around to telling anyone.)
And maybe Enjolras shouldn’t have been so surprised. After all, it’s not like Grantaire really shared his passion for the revolutionary power of music. Most of the time when Enjolras would start in on one of his speeches after a long night at the Musain — Beatles records and the Prague Spring; Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young and Kent State; hip-hop and apartheid — Grantaire just sat there, nursing a glass of liquor and watching him. Sometimes he’d throw in a sarcastic remark, to rile him up further, but Enjolras always thought he liked listening, despite what he said.
Maybe he’d had it all wrong.
Enjolras gets back to the building in rather more time than it took him to leave it. He realizes he has no idea where Grantaire’s new band might be. A century ago, it used to manufacture iron fittings for plumbing, but the new owners had carved up the open plan space into a warren of smaller studios.
He’ll just keep walking until he finds Grantaire, he decides. And then he’ll ask him to explain, and if Grantaire really does want to go, he’ll wish him well, and go home and start planning the band’s next step. It’s fine. This band is bigger than any one member.
He starts on the third floor, just because he’s never been up there before. He hears music from down the corridor and follows it. Most of the doors he passes are closed, but through the open ones he can see the big old factory windows with their truncated slices of the city skyline.
The last door on the right is closed. Back here, the music’s so loud it makes his gums ache. He opens the door. Hopefully Henry Rollins-lite won’t punch him for interrupting their —
A cassette boombox in the corner, Radio Raheem-style. A bottle of Jack Daniels sitting next to it. Canvases stacked on tables, leaned against every inch of wall space, even spread out over the floor. Enjolras doesn’t know much about the visual arts, but the bold sweeping brush strokes, the colors so bright they nearly dare you to look away…. Grantaire stands in the middle of the room, his back to the door, and Enjolras knows instantly that one else but him could have created these.
In his hand, a paintbrush, its handle the same size and color as a drumstick.
Paint streaks mark Grantaire’s jeans. His shirt is so old it’s almost translucent across his shoulders. He’s barefoot, and he sways in time to the music as he attacks the canvas in front of him, his body twisting on its vertical axis. Enjolras can’t look away.
The tape runs out. The crunch of the mechanisms grinding their gears. Enjolras realizes a second too late what that means.
“Holy fucking shit!” Grantaire screeches when he sees Enjolras. He leaps backward, nearly colliding with the canvas. His hand flies up to his throat like a Victorian lady. A red paint smudge bisects his cheek like a scar.
“I’m sorry,” Enjolras says. “I didn’t mean to scare you.”
Grantaire takes several quick breaths in succession. He wields the paint brush like a knife. “What the fuck are you doing here?”
Enjolras doesn’t have an answer to that question. “I — I saw you come inside.”
“So you just followed me?”
“No! I mean, yes, but it’s not like that — “
“Not like a fucking stalker?” Grantaire’s voice climbs on the last word, hysterics creeping in. “Seriously, what the fuck, why were you even — “
“I thought you were leaving us to join another band!”
It’s only saying it aloud, with Grantaire staring at him, that Enjolras realizes how ridiculous he sounds. It’s almost funny — Enjolras stalking (okay, yes, that’s the right word) through the halls of the building like a jealous boyfriend.
Grantaire’s not laughing. He’s looking at Enjolras, the same way he’s been looking at him a lot the last few months. Like Enjolras is a puzzle he bought at a garage sale with some of the pieces missing, and he can’t quite figure out how it’s all supposed to fit. Enjolras doesn’t know what to do when Grantaire looks at him like that.
“I’m not,” he says simply. “I had some money saved, and after we found out they were discounting studio rates, I called them…. Eponine banned me from painting in the apartment. She said the fumes were getting her high, and not in the good way.”
Enjolras can understand that — the sharp, clean smell is a cross between mowed grass and car exhaust. He’s feeling a bit dizzy-headed himself.
“You’re not going to get rid of me that easily,” Grantaire says. His tone is light, but he’s not smiling.
A dozen answers come to mind, but they crowd one another out and Enjolras can’t figure out how to say any of them. He just nods, and hopes Grantaire gets it.
“I didn’t know you still painted,”he says instead.
“Yeah, well.” Grantaire runs a hand through his hair, heedless of the paint that smears into the dark curls. “I figured you didn’t need another reason to think I wasn’t committed to the band, what with my self-indulgent, self-destructive habits and my general disregard for the time and effort of others.”
The way Grantaire says it, Enjolras knows that those are his own words being quoted back at him. He can’t remember saying them, which somehow makes it worse.
“I didn’t meant it like that,” he says, but he had probably meant it at the time. Grantaire is all of those things, and sometimes Enjolras looks at him and just — he gets so tired, running through all the ways things could go wrong; wrong for the band, sure, but also wrong for Grantaire, who forced Enjolras to worry about his well-being by never worrying about it himself.
He looks at the canvas over Grantaire’s shoulder. It’s not abstract, he realizes: the lines and shapes coalesce into the silhouette of a person, almost lost in the colors of a sunset. “These are really, really good.”
Grantaire looks at his hands. He thumbs at a smudge on the back of his palm. Enjolras realizes that the paint on his fingernails is actually black polish. Somehow it makes his fingers look longer, more tapered. “It’s just fucking around.”
“It’s not.”
Grantaire blinks. He rolls his shoulders, transfers his weight from one bare foot to the other, as if trying to get the compliment to fit him right. Enjolras wonders how many times he’s complimented Grantaire.
“You should do the cover for our EP,” he says.
Grantaire’s smile sneaks up on Enjolras, whiplash quick. “You mean, ‘The ABCs sing the Alphabet Song and Other Naughty Nursery Rhymes?’”
Enjolras groans. “For the millionth time, veto."
Grantaire throws his head back and laughs. There's another splotch of paint on the corner of his jaw, just below the curve of the bone, balanced like a bruise.
Enjolras swallows. The paint smell is clearly affecting his breathing pattern, sticking to the back of his throat. "I should probably go," he says. "I didn't mean to interrupt."
"Such a polite stalker." Grantaire clasps his hands over his heart, fluttering his eyes winsomely.
Enjolras waves a hand at his antics.
"I'll see you on Wednesday, okay?" Grantaire says. He's still smiling.
"Yeah."
As Enjolras walks away, the music starts up again.