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He awoke with incredible pain. When he opened his eyes, he saw a gray sky directly above and the heights of the barricade dimly around him. As soon as he tried to free his shoulders from the rough hands that grasped them, he heard someone call loudly, "Over here! This one's not dead!"
At first, the pain so filled him that he could not think. Then Enjolras remembered why he was lying on his back on the front of the barricade. His injuries pinned him in place until another set of hands joined the first on his shoulders, and he was pulled free of the barrier.
Somehow he tangled with the flag, and together they fell the several feet to the ground. He managed to reach his hands and knees but did not have the strength to gain his feet. He'd spent the last of it waving the flag. Under his palms, the red cloth was stained darker with blood, his own. He found that less frightening than Marius' had been.
With an effort, Enjolras raised his head to see the ring of National Guardsmen who stood around him. None were officers, and they didn't seem to know what to do with a rebel who wasn't a corpse. Intending to die on his feet, Enjolras forced himself to crawl to the barricade. Why wasn't he dead already? The soldiers parted around him, and one of them tentatively aimed a rifle at him.
Using the timbers of the barricade, he pulled himself to his feet and turned to face his captors. He hoped to be executed on the spot. Even with his eyes wide open, nothing could erase the memory of Marius sprawled lifelessly at his feet. He'd led his friends, all of them, to their deaths. Another rifle took aim. He lifted his head higher and prepared to join his comrades.
"Hold!" an officer shouted as he rounded the end of the rampart. "Arrest that man. He's one of the leaders!" He approached Enjolras and met the blue eyes of the young rebel. "You were the leader of this barricade?"
"Yes, I was," Enjolras said.
"Then you're under arrest for treason." The officer motioned several of his men to restrain him. Enjolras stepped forward to meet them, his head unbowed, but already feeling dizzy. The soldiers shrank away from touching him, but they closely surrounded him.
"Guard him well and escort him to the prison," the officer said.
Enjolras didn't hear him. The dizziness had filled his mind with a buzzing that only the remembered explosions of cannon and rifle penetrated. He shook his head, but the clarity he sought remained out of reach. Someone grabbed his arm and jerked him forward. He shook his head again and pulled free. He could still hear the echo of rifle fire.
Were he and his friends still fighting? Was he abandoning them to danger? His confusion receded enough for him to see his own hands, stained with gunpowder and blood. He could now hear the shouting around him. "You heard him, rebel. Move!"
Without really seeing who touched or shoved him, Enjolras fought back. The buzzing crescendoed to a roar as one of the surrounding shadows punched him in the back. Another swung something hard that connected with his head. He hurt only for one blinding instant, like when he'd been shot, then everything went black again.
The following time was only an anguished blur to Enjolras. His next clear memory was of being shaken. The agony of a strong hand gripping his wounded shoulder shocked him awake. When he opened his eyes, he recognized the man standing above him.
"It is he," the officer said. In one fist, he brandished the shreds of the rebel's bloody vest.
"What incompetence brought him here?"
The doctor, thin and barely past his own student days, flinched. "The warder brought him to me. He was carried in unconscious." He stood defiantly between his patient and the officer. "I don't ask who they are. I only treat them."
The officer nodded and sighed. "Has he spoken to anyone?"
"Nothing coherent. This is the first time he's been awake."
To the two men who had followed him into the crowded infirmary, the officer said, "Get him to a cell. See that he speaks to no one."
"May I ask now who he is?" the doctor asked. He seemed worried that his patient, still so weak, was being removed from his care. "I know he came from the riots. I cut the sash from his body and extracted the bullets myself."
A pair of soldiers pulled Enjolras to his feet. He gasped and swallowed a short scream at the painful wrenching of his torn muscles. Only the grip on his arms kept him from falling.
Looking at Enjolras instead of the doctor as he answered, the officer said, "I can't tell you his name. Yet. He was one of the barricade leaders. I saw him shot."
Hearing that, Enjolras fought past his growing dizziness to ask, "Did any of my friends survive?" He had only the slimmest hope that he was not the only one.
"No one else was found alive at the barricade de la Chanvrerie." The officer frowned at his men, "Now get--"
Enjolras' voice was quiet, but it penetrated. "Why didn't you kill me?"
The officer smiled, showing sharp teeth. "You're to be tried before a criminal courts. The King wants no more political martyrs." Enjolras felt the bite of the man's fingernails on his skin when the man placed one hand on his chest. "But if you happened to die of your wounds before the trial, it would not matter much. You are not important."
Enjolras longed to throw off his captors and knock the officer to the ground. As it was, he couldn't carry his own weight. When his guards dragged him into the heart of the prison, he had no choice but to let them.
Later, when he was alone on his pallet with nothing to do but to lie exhausted and think, Enjolras admitted to himself that the insult, no matter how it hurt, had been fair. His friends' deaths had been his fault, and he hadn't died with them. All of their faces haunted him now, not just Marius' -- many of them as he'd last seen them, fighting for their lives.
In the darkness, Enjolras wept. Why had he not died with them? He hadn't flinched from a single bullet. Had he carried some secret doubt within himself? Grantaire's accusations, both silent and spoken, came to memory. He realized, with a shock that brought fresh tears, that his last sight of Grantaire had not been at his favorite spot in the shelter of the barricade, but had been Grantaire anxiously peering down at him from the summit, reaching out to him as the light faded.
Enjolras regretted the clarity of hindsight. He had known that even the drunkard had a cause that was worth his life -- every man did. What he had not known before now was that Grantaire's cause had been him. He had only seen the cynical lack of faith, not the conflicting love and fear that had powered it. Grantaire had died trying to save him, only him, not the world. Perhaps he had even succeeded. A second man atop the barricade would draw more fire than the one who had already fallen.
The guilt followed him into his fevered dreams. While his wounds festered in his damp and filthy cell, Enjolras relived the deaths on the barricade in countless nightmares. Time after time, he found himself waving a flag that weighed more than he remembered, and felt sick with the knowledge that he would fail. He wanted nothing more than to drop the flag and beg his friends to save themselves from his folly, but he was never able to change events enough to save a single life. Every time he faded into the black agony of his own fall, he slipped a little deeper into the final sleep from which some small part of him hoped he would never awaken.
Finally the darkness didn't come. He lay on his back a long time, wishing the pain would go away as the world grew silent around him, but the misty dawn never came to the sky above him. He struggled to his knees, then he pulled himself to his feet using the barricade as he had that June morning with the soldiers around him, only this time he stood precariously on the ledge where he had fallen, not on the ground. His pain faded eerily away as he gained his feet. His shirt was still drenched in blood, but he felt nothing. He climbed up to the top of the barrier and looked down over the carnage that he had caused. He'd never seen it, but he couldn't imagine the actuality being worse than what he saw now.
Most of the bodies were twisted in pain and covered with gore. A few he did not recognize. He saw more than one young woman who'd refused to abandon her brother or lover and died with him.
Almost against his will, he looked behind him to where Gavroche lay on the street. The boy had died before his eyes, and he'd been unable to stop it. Grantaire's reminder of his responsibility hadn't been necessary.
He remembered how the horror that the soldiers would murder a child had filled him with an anger so terrible that he hardly knew how he had kept any shred of sanity. Perhaps he hadn't. What had followed certainly seemed like the nightmares of the insane.
His thoughts turned again to Grantaire, so he looked for him among the dead. He didn't need to look far. The body was only a few feet below the summit. This man should never have been here. He'd not believed in their Cause, but Enjolras had never been able to drive him away from his circle of friends.
"I'm sorry," he said to the corpse. "This was never your fight." Uncomfortable with his guilt, Enjolras climbed down to search for Marius among the dead on the ground, when he saw a movement.
Grantaire stood before him. Since Enjolras could still see the corpse out of the corner of his eye, he wasn't very surprised by the light filtering through the figure, as if it were made of stained glass. The spirit took a swig from an equally transparent bottle, then shook a fist at Enjolras.
"Butcher!" Grantaire screamed. "Your impossible dreams doomed us all!"
Enjolras repeated what he had said to the corpse.
"I don't want your sorrow. Why are we all dead while you're still alive?" There was a dangerous expression in the ghost's luminous eyes, but he didn't move from where he stood.
"I don't know." He had no idea why he was so afraid. He backed away from the ghost, nearly tripping over one of the bodies.
"This is what you wanted, isn't it?" The ghost gestured, sweeping back with one hand to indicate the barricade, then pointing to one corpse. Joly, lying so very still, almost childishly small, his pale hair stained with dried blood. "A pile of heroic corpses ... a dramatic statement in one explosive package. Tidy, isn't it?" The ghost stepped closer, but Enjolras edged backwards.
The ghost smiled. "It won't be long now until you join us. Not a hero's death for you. How ironic." Grantaire stepped forward again, closer than ever before. Enjolras felt his back press against the barricade. "No, not long now," the ghost repeated.
"What do you want?" Enjolras asked.
Not much," the ghost whispered and took one more step. He was almost close enough to touch. "Just your stupid noble heart. It might make up for the one you stole from me!" The ghost lunged for him. Enjolras turned to flee as the darkness sprang up to surround him.
He ran for an impossibly long time, until he could see a wooden door ahead that seemed vaguely familiar. Before he could reach it, hands grabbed him from out of the shadows and tried to hold him still.
You can't go in there!" someone said.
"It's too late," said another voice.
Like the door, the voices seemed familiar. Although the light was still dim, he could see that he was now in a hallway with a faded woven rug. He recognized the door now. With a shock, he realized that he was outside his mother's room, and she'd only just died. With strength he had not had when he was fourteen, he wrenched free from the well-meaning servants and pushed open the door.
The room was not quite as he had expected. The delicate furniture was frighteningly bare of the perfume bottles and flowers of which his mother had been so fond. Somehow he'd always envisioned these few moments after her death as more serene. Two maids and the laundry girl were gathering up dirty linen from the otherwise bare floor, and the family doctor was putting instruments and bottles back into his case. He slowly remembered that dust and strong scents had tortured every one of his mother's last breaths.
The area directly around the bed was quiet. His father knelt with his face buried in the bed clothes while he clutched the still hand of the dead woman. No one seemed to notice Enjolras, but before he could step closer to see his mother clearly he saw another ghost walk out of the shadows from behind the wardrobe.
Remembering the experience with Grantaire, Enjolras flinched, but then the dead woman called out to him, "Michel, my child! Don't run away."
He stopped and looked at the ghost. The blonde woman who held out her hand to him looked glowingly healthy, unlike the pale, thin wreck who lay dead in her husband's embrace. "Please don't come closer," he said and was ashamed of the words as soon as he had said them.
"I don't mean to frighten you. Just let me look at you before you have to go."
The spectre smiled gently at him through a sunlit glow. "You're a man now, and I've waited so long for a chance to tell you how proud I am of you."
"Proud?" he asked. His voice was trembling. He didn't feel very much older than the grief-stricken boy who had struggled so hard to get into this room and been denied out of pity. "How can you be proud of my failure?"
Shaking her head, the ghostly woman said, "You haven't failed. It simply isn't time." She frowned for the first time and reached out both hands to him, a silent appeal for him to come closer.
He banished his fear. This was his mother after all, and his love of her was far stronger than any fear. Her arms felt solid and real around his shoulders. "My strong, brave son, this isn't your time. Your fight goes on, and you need to stay in the world with it."
He couldn't tell his mother that he knew he was dying. Even if he lived, he knew that he'd never get out of prison. What good did that do anyone?
Eventually, she released her embrace, and stood back. There were tears her eyes. "Please, Michel," she said, "go back where you belong. I'll be looking for you when your time truly comes." He watched as the small patch of sun and the spectre faded from sight.
The activity in the room had continued around them. The doctor was already gone, and the maids and the girl were just preparing to depart. At the door, the girl turned to look back at the deathbed. There were tears in her eyes too. She paused a moment and looked right at the place where Enjolras stood, almost as if she could see him. Then she turned and followed the maids.
Somehow the darkness that rose to envelop him didn't seem as deep or as cold as before. Enjolras felt that something had changed. He didn't dare hope it was for the better, but even to know hope again was an improvement. As restful oblivion ate at his awareness, he whispered a promise to his dead comrades. "I swear your deaths will not be wasted."
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