Jehan Prouvaire

Jehan and Bahorel make their way into the forest.


Bahorel's wounds are fresh and bright and wide, his skin pale as it never was in life, and when his shoulder brushes Jehan's, it's strangely cool.

Jehan is silent. His outer vision is fixed on the dark woods ahead, lit only by a small flashlight and the moon; his inner vision sees Bahorel dead on the paving stones, looking just as he does now.

Jehan's eyes open and shut again, and he turns over and stretches.

He's slept for a long while, he thinks. But he still doesn't want to get up. He curls onto his side, reaching for Melpomene--

But who's Melpomene? And how could he even ask that question?

Jehan sits upright suddenly, utterly bereft and not knowing why.

Jehan stumbles through the passageways of the island temple, a cat on his shoulder and four at his heels. He doesn't know where he's going and he doesn't care, because he knows it will be better than glorious. He's never felt this exalted before. No wine or opium or companion has ever done this. It's nothing like the haze of liquor or the ugly hot rush of a fight.

He doesn't even remember what, precisely, he's been doing. Bast had led a dance of some sort, and then there had been comets and starbursts in the sky, and then...

Cats. Many cats. There had also been people, but their faces were blurry in his mind.

There's a shift of some sort--a tremor in the ground, a shimmer in the air. There's a change. Before, the air had smelled like grass and trees and musty, ancient stone. It had been the air of a ruin reborn as an unspoiled paradise.

Now it was, distinctly, the air of a city.

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“Fire!” Enjolras says.

Jehan Prouvaire raises his gun and fires. Combeferre is to his right. A warm, solid presence, in the midst of the thunder and the fire, the blood and the smoke.

A presence soon lost as Jehan advances into the unearthly chaos, into the men turned demons and beasts. But still men underneath it all, still flesh and bone and tears. Another shot fired, and another. A clang of gun against gun, and Jehan can’t go farther. There are hands on his arms, there’s a blow to his head—pain, flashes of light, but he’s still conscious. His feet drag without his volition. Forward, forward, through a gap in the barricade, away from his friends.

At first he can see very little, but then the smoke clears. He’s surrounded by guardsmen, and their bayonets.

They shove him into a wall. It’s firm and rough against Jehan’s back. He can feel its bumps and ridges through his shirt and waistcoat, and on his palms as he presses his hands against it for balance.

Jehan no longer sees the guardsmen’s faces, just their guns, raised and pointed at his heart. His world has narrowed to steel and fire, to cold and burning.

It’s a fitting end to his world, he thinks. A suitable apocalypse.

But there’s still more to Jehan’s world, even though he can’t see it anymore. There’s the side of the barricade he came from, the poem he recited there. And there is what the barricade is for. There’s the future, even if it’s slipped out of his reach.

“Do you want a blindfold?” A soldier in front barks out the question.

“No,” says Jehan. He will not be absent for his own death.

The soldier turns to his men. Before he gives the order, Jehan thinks again of the other side of the barricade, of each of his friends in turn. Of Combeferre clutching his hand, and Enjolras clutching a gun, of Courfeyrac and Feuilly, Jolllly and Bossuet and Grantaire, and of Bahorel. Bahorel, charging ahead, where Jehan would now follow.

Jehan cries out, loud and deep, so his friends defending the barricade can hear him:

“Vive la France! Vive l’avenir!”

And then—light, and pain. Blazing violent light, fiercer than lightning, light that seems an outgrowth of the pain ripping him apart.

More light, more dazzling, and then dark, a dark that seems to gleam.

A picture blossoms before him: paving stones, with grass growing between them, and stone walls on either side.

Jehan looks ahead, and sees a path of twists and turns, hemmed by the stone walls. He looks behind, and sees the same thing.

Labyrinth, he thinks, and in spite of all that has happened, his mouth twists into a melancholy smile.