Snowflakes Beyond the Moon


Part One

Girald stood before the mirror of his room, perfectly still, as he had at the bridge the night he'd met the girl Cosette. He was ramrod straight, and both hands were knotted in the fabric of his shirt over his heart, clenched so that the knuckles were white. His eyes were fixed upon his reflection, upon the face that looked back calmly as though nothing in the world were wrong. His skin was always pale, and no one would ever know he was white from shock. His hair always dripped from the tieback, framing his face in curls. Only his eyes were different now. They had gone dark as night with only stars pricking the heaviness. They held wildness, a trapped look, twisting into some emotion between lost and afraid and horror-struck and lonely and angry all at once.

He put out his left hand suddenly, to stroke his reflection's cheekbone, and the slight movement shifted the mirror. It slid, without warning, from the wall, and fell almost slowly to the floor. He fell with it, allowing his body to collapse, on his knees at the moment it smashed. Slivers flew out to all sides in a spray of glass that looked like droplets of water. He shut his eyes the moment after, from reflex, without thinking of the action, and felt the ripple of hurt within seconds.

He remained like this for what felt like dizzy, spinning, throbbing hours of nothingness. At last he gained the courage to look, and lifted his hands close to his face. They were sprinkled with tiny points of blood, and he understood that his face must look like this too. He understood then that he must stand, wash away the crimson, clear away the glass. But he didn't want to. The last thing in the world he wanted was to move, or make any sign to show himself that he was alive.

"Jehan..."

It was spoken with a soft strain, a note of pleading. It was the begging of a young child for his mother, with an unsaid "Where are you?" after it. It sounded strange to his voice, a word he would not have uttered in that way ever.

And then his fear and shock dissolved into tears, arms around himself, head bowed. The tears made long silver tracks down his cheeks, mingling a little with the blood, and wandered their way to his lips, where he tasted them without realising that he was.

He would have cried forever, were it not for the sudden sharp pain in his eyes. He startled slightly, and quickly wiped his hand across his face, although it only hurt more. He forced himself to stand, and stumbled to his bedside, taking water from the washbasin in his cupped palms, and clearing away the blood. He sat upon the bed and blinked rapidly; trying desperately to remove the glass in his eyes that even the tears couldn't wash away. Finally, he gave up, too weary to try any longer, aching. He lay down, pretending that Jehan slept beside him, and fell asleep.


He walked slowly through a world of snow, barefoot, shirtless, yet he was not cold. A soft wind blew his hair about his face, and the gold interwove itself with the white snowflakes settling in it. There were a few trees, all coated with white, as there were a few hills, and a mountain very far off. There were no houses, no place for any other creature to live, and the sky was a colour of washed-out grey he'd never seen in a sky before.

Not quite on purpose, he took a deep breath of the cool, alive air, and found himself more awake, more alert. He looked around himself, feeling surprised and delighted, turning about quickly as though it weren't quick enough, trying to see everything that one could see in this silent white land.

Daringly, he parted his lips and sang a single note.

The snow world echoed it back, letting it tremble, hanging it on the trees and gilding the snowflakes with it. He felt a surge of wonder, and put out his hands for it, hoping to hold it. It melted through his fingers, but he found he didn't quite mind, watching it drip golden to the ground beneath his feet.

In childish awe, he giggled, and turned his face up to the sky, eyes closed, standing on his toes, the rest of his feet off what felt like snow-covered grass, to lift him closer to the source of the beauty. With his body so white, he looked like a statue of alabaster, save for his hair, too rich and deep a colour to be anything but gold leaf coating on the stone...

He returned to the earth with reluctance, shaking his head to throw off the flakes, beginning to wander again, to see what new beauties the world could hold.


When he awoke, Michel was kneeling by the remains of the mirror, his back to Girald. He had scraped all the pieces into one large mound of glass, and had a handful, watching it sift between his fingers like sand.

"You quite destroyed this, didn't you? Whyever?"

"Jehan's dead..." The words sounded just as twisted and incorrect as they had when they were first spoken to him. "There was an accident... with a fiacre..."

"Jehan Prouvaire?"

Girald frowned. "Did you know him?"

"Of course I know him. He's one of Les Amis."

"Oui... he was the best man there."

Michel looked at him levelly. "Combeferre was far more into the habit of keeping himself applied to tasks at hand. Jehan dreamed too much." But he did sigh. "Poor Prouvaire. The silly child."

Girald climbed out of bed, feeling stiff, and old. "He wasn't. He was a wonderful, brave man. He was... so much..." He trembled.

Michel stood, and rested a hand on his shoulder. "I'm sorry." Though the words were short, with difficult sympathy. "If you'd like" - he paused thoughtfully - "I could take you back with me. To see him again."

Girald felt his eyes widen. "I could?"

"Of course." Michel smirked. "It's only another plane of reality."

"Another dream..."

"Just that." Michel took his hand. "Come with me."

"Oui, lord Apollo..."

"We needn't call me that, for all I look like him. One Grantaire is quite enough."

Part Two

Jehan sat quietly in the cafe, looking down at the tabletop. His grey-brown hair was undone, and fell neatly to his shoulders, and his eyes were clouded. He wore a bandage along one arm, wrapped the full length up, and kept that arm flat along the table, fingers settled lifelessly on the wood. His other hand lay in his lap, and his ankles were crossed, and only the toes of his shoes touched the floor. He was motionless, as though sitting for a painting; indeed, posed almost as if he wanted someone to capture him on canvas forever.

But the only person who looked twice at him was Andre, and the corners of his mouth twisted up into a sarcastic smile as he fell into a chair beside Jehan.

"Bonjour, poet-boy. Wherefore art thou sad?"

Jehan turned his gaze up at him in place of the table, purple-blue eyes desperate. "Girald - Enjolras - he is gone."

Genuinely surprised, Andre stared. "I hadn't expected that, to be sure. Gone? How do you mean gone?"

"When I came home from the hospital, he wasn't there. I waited a full day and night."

He understood what those words meant in a way that Jehan hadn't meant them. Girald was gone, yes. But more. Home for the poet was somewhere Enjolras was. He had perhaps suspected this before, and yet... Suddenly, unreasonably, he was shattered, rather as the glass Girald had broken, and angry too, though not so much. Jehan didn't really deserve someone as beautiful and untouchable as the godlike young man, though he wasn't worthy either. He shivered, and quickly asked:

"You were at the hospital?"

"I was in a carriage accident. It... I passed out, and was taken there. I'd only been bruised a little, though, and there was no real injury. That's not the point. Girald is gone. I don't know what I'm to do, Grantaire. I don't know if he's hurt, or if he's gone somewhere, for a - a visit or something, or if he's - I don't know anything!"

Andre propped his chin in his hands, eyeing Jehan. He didn't want to help the boy, but still, he felt a loss at the knowledge that Enjolras was gone. His devotion, he felt, made Girald half his.

"He left nothing?"

"Nothing."

"Took anything with him?"

"No."

"Well, then I don't see what you've to go on. He's probably in a whole 'nother dimension of time and space. For all we know."

"Grantaire, please, please, be serious and help me."

"I am serious! For all we know, he thinks you're dead."

"But why...?"

"You know, you're amazingly dull sometimes."

"Grantaire! I don't want to be insulted, I just want to find him!" Jehan was nearing tears, leaning forward across the table to plead with him, his clenched fist trembling just above the surface as though he meant to slam it down but hadn't the courage. Andre relented.

"I mean to say, little boy, that you were in an accident, and he might have been told you died. If you truly fainted," he fluttered his eyelashes and simpered ridiculously at the word, "then to a spectator, it must have looked rather as though you simply keeled over."

"But if he was told I died, what would he have done? He's not sort who'd kill himself. He has so many beautiful dreams, and he wouldn't leave them for me." Jehan no longer seemed to care if he told Andre that he and Enjolras were lovers, and Andre found himself less worried about that, now that the first hurt was done, than he was amused by the words "beautiful dreams". He himself knew better than Jehan Girald's beautiful dreams.

"We must think of the grieving angel, poet, for that is he. No, you're right, he wouldn't kill himself. Not our Enjolras. Have you ever lost something dear to you?"

"No... I had a kitten, when I was small, and she died, and I remember that I cried for weeks, but... Nothing but that, yet."

"O carefree life! That's why you're a poet. Poets are men who always write about sorrow having never experienced it, so that women of the bourgeoisie can read their scribblings and say, "Yes, this is despair, this is mourning. This is aching. How beautiful it is!" Men who know loss have the sense to not write on it, as it's too stupid and painful a thing to interest anyone."

Jehan rested his head in his arms. "I write about love, Grantaire," he mumbled wearily, the words muffled in his sleeves. "I do know about that."

Andre plunged steadily on, disregarding this. "But loss. Men live it all differently. Me, if I was hurt, should drink absinthe until I was drowning in green fog. I should find myself wrapped in dreams of what I'd lost. Have you ever stood perfectly still in the dark with your eyes open, and felt the world shifting around you? Put out your hands and it looks as though there's some outline of something blacker before you, and you tried to touch it, but you'd made it up? Have you ever felt the pieces of different airs and lifetimes crowding together and running over one another and streaking together, like blood and water and wine? That's your second dimension. That's where you're not quite in this world and not quite in the other. Put your foot down and you'd step into the other. One can easily walk between times. It's not magic, no witchcraft; it's your mind, Prouvaire, it's all your head. But you're really there. Maybe when you were but a little wee child, and you lost that kitten of yours, you cried ever so, and in the night, you'd picture yourself in a place where you could play with the wretched thing anyhow. And if you thought about it desperately hard, you'd be really there, and feel it warm in your hands and so on. When you grow older, that's all childish fancy, of course, and none of it's real. It is real. You learn that when you're often drunk, for drunkenness rids you of the despicable part of your brain that insists it's unreal. When you're drunk, you can do anything. Ant then it's all very simple to live in a world you'd normally call make-believe. And sometimes, boy, you can lose yourself in order to find a world where your lover still exists, in another level of the parallel universes, where accidents happen, but not to you. Where you only dreamed that he died. And - "

"Oh, God, Grantaire, stop it!"

Andre laughed and settled back in his chair. "Pardon, of course. I ramble. Proves I need more wine. Haven't had my daily ration, or some such. --God, boy, you look pale. You all right?"

"You've frightened me."

"Only speaking the truth."

"I--"

"--Don't want to hear the truth? Pardon, again."

"It's the truth? I'm a poet, Grantaire, and that's nothing. I know how to dream, and say things I feel with beautiful words that will always be regarded as just beautiful words, and not the things I feel. I am supposed always to believe in some muse, but I don't know if you're that muse."

"Hell, I'm no one's muse. I'm just some drunk. I read between the lines because I can't focus on them. If you want me to take you to where you imagine your Enjolras to be, I can do that. You needn't if there's a decent, sensible, unskewed explanation to all this."

"Please help me."

"Very well, then. We must needs procure some absinthe. Chowder!"

Part Three

Girald stood alone in a corner of the back room of le cafe Musain, watching those of Les Amis who had come. He leaned against the wall, his hair tangled and falling over his eyes wispily, as well as trailing down along his neck and over his shoulders. His blue eyes were fixed upon the figure of Jehan Prouvaire, laughing softly and talking with Joly, pausing every moment or so to write down something on the parchment before him. His hands were ink stained, in black, and green and red as well, as though he had written with calligraphy inks. They were beautiful hands, Girald thought. The fingers were long and curled around the stem of the quill, calloused from so much writing, and the palm was pale with clear lines. The wrists of his hands were slender, elegant in the way they were held poised above the paper.

This Prouvaire, when Girald looked upon him, wouldn't die in the same lovely manner as his Jehan. There was only blood around his pale throat, in a necklace of crimson. He supposed it meant the poet was dead, but the image kept sliding. It refused to stay fixed on Jehan with blood, and continued to turn back into Jehan smiling at Joly.

He looked away in frustration, and met Michel's eyes.

"He won't see you at all. You'll only just look on him. But he'll be alive, and I imagine that's what you want."

He turned, and silently left, and not one man turned at the door as he opened it and slipped through it.

Jehan shouldn't have died yet. He was meant to die on the barricades. He was meant to die as Girald had always pictured he would, with his flag of dark scarlet and his single bullet wound. It wasn't fair that he should have died now, when his death would mean nothing, and he would be remembered for nothing. He should have been honoured for dying, and now he would never be.

Michel's Jehan wasn't the same. Michel's Jehan wasn't his. It was all terribly different, and no one could ever equal him in any way. Even this Jehan's hands weren't as perfect as his.

Girald trembled in longing, and closed his eyes, allowing the things of this world to go past him and around him. Suddenly, he felt a touch on his shoulder. His eyes flew open as he spun around, and his mind was just as suddenly filled with a glorious, overwhelming image. He had it back. He had back his poet, in all the beauty of that single shot in the heart.

"J-Jehan?"

It flickered.

In a moment, he could see nothing.

Part Four

Jehan gently touched Girald's shoulder, and felt him turn rapidly beneath his fingertips. Girald's eyes went wide, bluer than he remembered, brimming with joyous surprise.

"J-Jehan?"

And then in an instant, that was all gone, and they were blank, faded blue.

He frowned in confusion, and let his fingers trail over Girald's cheek.

"Are you all right? Girald?"

"Jehan, my eyes hurt... there's glass in them... I dropped a mirror, and it broke... in a thousand pieces..." His voice was quivering, unsure, childish. Jehan shivered, feeling an unnaturalness in it.

"Sh, it's all right. I've come to bring you home. This isn't the place to be."

"But I can't see... I can't follow anyone if I can't see," he whimpered softly, showing fear that made Jehan feel ill. This wasn't right for him. It wasn't right for Enjolras, his Enjolras, the leader of Les Amis and the man who would free France, to be afraid like this. He felt tears springing to his eyes once more, and brushed them away on the back of his hand.

"Hush. It doesn't matter. You shall see." He brushed away more tears on his fingers, and pressed them lightly to Girald's eyes.

"Your hands --" Girald caught them, holding them to his chest, and of a sudden, his own tears began. They dripped down his face, and Jehan tried to kiss them away. "The glass..."

"Wash it away," advised a rough voice behind him. "It'll come out if you cry hard enough."

"Grantaire?" He tried to turn, and as he did, he felt a soft pricking at his eyes that trailed down his cheeks with the salt water.

"Ah, now, there you should be able to see again. It's out."

"Why are you here?" A wave of anger passed over him, that Grantaire should have seen his tears.

"To make a nuisance of myself. Come, Prouvaire, it is time we were gone, to quote the man Shakespeare."

"Grantaire, hush." Jehan brushed the glass from Girald's face and flicked it at Andre. "We shall come."

"Of course." Andre thrust his hands in his pockets and began strolling along, ahead of them, casting an occasional look over his shoulder.

"So, I've lost again. And Prouvaire, I've told you how I remedy this. Absinthe, and a good long time inside my head with my mad green faeries. What a life. That's how we live." He smirked. "I expect this means that the comedy has ended."


Chapter Nine.
Back to Chapter Seven.