clayforthedevil | And now we turn to my beautiful city

One minute Bahorel's in the treetops, working on his ongoing project, and the next he's in Feuilly's room, reading.

And utterly crammed into one of Feuilly's chairs in a ridiculously formal posture. He'd at least expected Feuilly to see the practical side of sprawling--

he realizes that this means we're all back in the same moment his watch (Feuilly's watch) starts to chime.

"Enjolras?--No, just now. Asleep? How--Right, I'll be there."

He's not sure how he's dressed, he's not sure what Feuilly might have been doing-- but he's already out the door and running downstairs to meet Enjolras, with whatever news he has from the other side of the door.

Paris.

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Bahorel nods-- outside, if Enjolras is up to it, and doesn't need to sit somewhere and recover. (For himself, he's fine. If Feuilly managed to give his body some bruises in sparring while they were switched, it's nothing more than what he usually has.)

No; whatever Valjean was doing, it wasn't anything strenuous. And he seems to have remembered to eat, or at any rate Enjolras doesn't feel faint or ravenous. There's nothing to recover from.

Outside they go, then. It's starting to get chilly with the approach of winter, but it's not so bad yet for men in waistcoats and wool jackets, especially with far more important matters than a little cold to preoccupy them.

Enjolras waits before they're well away from the building, and anyone who might overhear, before he begins. First, the most important part: the notes and letters sent, messages passed on, the updates on contacts and work, what word he passed to whom in Montmartre and in Paris's heart, and what he heard and saw back.

He'll backtrack after that. But first, the business: second, anything Bahorel wants to hear. (He expects anything and everything.)

Edited Date: 2015-11-15 02:03 am (UTC)

Bahorel listens intently to the details of the work, interrupting only to ask for detail or offer some stray bit of information in assistance. His impatience is gone; this is Doing Something, really doing something, for almost the first time since he's arrived, and there's no reason at all not to be thorough.

Still, it's only a few days' work, and they've soon discussed it all, or as much as they can without the others. Which leaves the huge question of everything else about Paris, their Paris.

There's one obvious place to start.

"--Did you see the Corinthe?"

Enjolras breathes out. "I did. --Well."

A small gesture. "It's been rebuilt, not exactly to the same plan. It's not the Corinthe any more. Mme Galopin was out on her stoop, I asked about the old café as if from curiosity, she told me Mother Hucheloup sold it and moved away, she thought to a cousin's. She said some of the old staff stayed, but I couldn't find out who exactly. I did go in. It was very different. I recognized some of the clientele, but no one we knew well."

To see it was surreal. To see the Corinthe no longer a ruin of blood and splinters and acid, but no longer either the old familiar café with Matelote laughing back and forth with drinkers, Gibelotte benevolently half-dozing over plates, Mother Hucheloup coming and going, Courfeyrac's irreverently scrawled advice over the door -- to see instead a new building, all changed, all new, that was deeply and disorientingly strange.

And himself in Fauchelevent's body, with Fauchelevent's face, and an old man's aches and a convict's hidden scars, only added to the disorientation. He hadn't stayed long.

Bahorel nods, trying to picture it. "Then she did get out and clear of the law; I'm glad. Hah, had they put the street back in its bed? --Wait, did you go to the Musain, were there any of our crowd there?"

He asks a fleet of questions, details about old streets, old buildings, places they both knew. Every answer prompts another question. He's aware that he's rather interrogating his friend; he'd feel sorry for it, but...

But he doesn't, and that's all there is to it. This is likely the last he'll ever hear of their Paris, from someone who knows it in at all the same way he did. He wants to fix every word of it while the memories are fresh.

Enjolras would never expect him to be sorry for it, nor wish him to be. He couldn't bring his friends along, and that's a heartbreaking unfairness; he can't see Paris as Bahorel would, nor any of the rest. All he can do is offer up everything he did and saw to them, in as much detail as he can, and let that be as much as any vicarious sight of home can be.

He answers: yes, he went to the Musain. The street, yes -- it was spring of '33, the newspapers gave the date -- this street, that corner, he didn't go by that building but this is what he saw at the next, that person, a crowd there, a deserted evening there.

Paris.

No longer quite theirs. He walked those streets months after his death, not only a visitor but in another face, another body, the Parisian breeze touching different skin and inflating different lungs, a strange and nagging dislocation; they died, and their blood watered her mud and gutters, and Paris went on. And yet: all the same, their Paris. Their blood sank into her soil, only months before.

Edited Date: 2015-11-16 05:48 am (UTC)

Finally Bahorel starts to ask a question, and stops himself, and laughs. He walks in silence for a few moments.

"I almost asked if you'd noticed what plays were showing." He looks down at the path. "The histories never mention them all, you know. Not the little shows, with the cheap posters, that run in the theaters were you can bring in half your neighborhood for half a franc--" He scrubs a hand over his eyes; not to hide that he's started crying, but just to keep his sight clear enough to keep walking.

He laughs again,too soft and almost silent. Enjolras wouldn't even have known where to look for those posters. Still. Bahorel reaches over to press his shoulder. "I'm glad you went--that it was you. If it was to be any of us."

Edited Date: 2015-11-16 05:55 am (UTC)

"It was Halévy's Les souvenirs de Lafleur by the Bourse," he says quietly, "and Auber's Gustave III at the Opéra. Those were the ones with posters I saw."

These aren't the theaters Bahorel's talking about. He's right: Enjolras has no idea where to look for those posters, and didn't notice any if he passed them.

But for his friends who care about theater, who weren't there to see -- for them, when he happened to pass the posters he did notice, he tried to remember what the titles were.

"I wish you all could have come." He's said this. It remains true. "I can't see her with your eyes, my friend, but..."

But.

(Her: la ville de Paris, la France. Either, both.)

The noise Bahorel makes is almost something like a laugh. "Wish for the others. I'd have been useless." He's grinning now, but his voice is serious.

"No--I envy you, and it had to be done, and it's a wonder the chance came, and I'd have given everything to go--and it would have killed me. I'd have come back to my body and dropped like a stone. I've barely been breathing here as it is; if I'd had a chance for real air I'd have gone under for good as soon as I was back here." He looks at Enjolras with a touch of real concern. "I don't know how you're up and walking."

There's no stumbling or stammering as he says any of this; it's just the truth. And it's absurd, in its way, and he knows it. His smile is real, even if he's still a blink away from crying again.

At the noise that isn't quite like a laugh, Enjolras reaches out to press his shoulder, in turn.

And then -- well.

"It was so strange, being in Valjean's body. His body! -- to be in Paris, and yet not myself, and reminded of it every step, every time anyone looked at me. In a way I suppose that helped."

"The door let me out into his garden, behind walls. Thank God it wasn't on a street corner. I don't know what anyone would have thought -- that the old man was having an attack of some sort, probably. But then there was work to be done. And I could do it."

There still is. Telling his friends; this conversation, right now. It's something to do that's worth something -- real work, even only a few days of it. Something to do, in Paris, for the cause, even if only in small ways. A burst of water, to sustain him in the drought of Milliways.

(His friends are water, too. They're only the reason Milliways isn't the hell it could be; the only reason he could tell his father in a dream, I'm very well, I swear it, and mean the words. But it isn't the same. Nothing like the same.)

Edited Date: 2015-11-16 07:23 am (UTC)

He smiles a little at Enjolras' description of the odd experience of a changed body, and frowns a moment at his mention of the strangeness of Paris.

"I wonder whose Paris it was...yours, mine? Another one as little different?" Work to be done, either way--it's a reminder.

"I saw my mistress-- Sophie, who had the print shop? -- back during Halloween. It seems that happens here sometimes, the living and dead talking somehow." He shrugs. "You might remember she shared our sympathies, more or less." Well. Not enough that they hadn't quarreled; but enough to risk her freedom and livelihood in the cause. "I told her what I could--I hadn't known you'd have the chance to visit yourself, then-- and anyway there's some things she can act on that we can't from here."

He frowns a little, thinking. "--It changes things, we know that. Even if it's not by much. It changes the history."

He walks quietly for a moment, not through, but thinking. This is not the sort of political conversation that had much practical use, when they were alive.

"Hard to say. I've wondered that."

In a way, it doesn't matter. Not enough to ask Valjean the detailed questions that might (or might not) clarify things. Work to be done, either way, indeed.

His face clears into recognition at had the print shop; yes, that he remembers, Bahorel's mistress with the print shop that would print seditious material sometimes, and her own convictions about republicanism and the relative priority of certain causes, who was involved in her own groups and activities. There's a great deal about Bahorel's love life that Enjolras neither knows nor cares to pay attention to, but the print shop and his long-term mistress's connection to it, yes.

"Yes. I dreamed of my father."

There's not really a lot more to say there. Though if Bahorel wants to ask any questions now or later, he'll readily answer them.

Anyway, he nods, at the end of all this. Yes -- one way or another, however the universe (or universes) work, they know this: in acting from Milliways, beyond the grave, with the right information given to the right living people, they can change things. At least a little, and maybe enough.

"--It all changes a little. Maybe a lot. From what Joly and Combeferre said, the Paris they saw, where it all went right for our fight--not much changed, and then everything did."

It's not idle philosophy. "How long--if everything we do has an effect, any effect-- how long before the Paris we might sometimes reach isn't ours at all anymore? Before our information becomes useless? And how would we know?"

He's not being rhetorical, and he doesn't expect Enjolras to have an answer, either. But it's something to consider.

"Before," Enjolras says thoughtfully, "I asked Bar for newspapers of my world. French histories of my world, specifically, and she gave me a call number for the library, when I read of France's later years."

That will always be bittersweet, and always complicated. The happiness of later centuries, and the horror and the grief.

That was only a minor strangeness of Paris, but it was there: to walk down a street, every inch of it so familiar that it made his heart ache, and to think sometimes in fifteen years this will happen here, in forty this, in a hundred and five that. But that was a Milliways perspective, that layering of history upon history, and it largely receded before the overwhelming immediacy of truly being in France.

"She might be able to do the same if we ask precisely enough."

"It's worth trying to find out. --Our networks won't last. Something like this--I know we all had people we were reaching to. If it had been next year, even later this year, some of them would be gone; will be gone. And we may not even know who."

And maybe not the same ones he'd guess, with them shifting things around. "It's not as if the people we know are the ones in the papers day to day; that's the problem." On a lot of levels.

Enjolras nods. He's thought about this, to some extent, though he's thinking more deeply now; it's always different to hear someone else's thoughts moving in parallel with your own, or along different lines.

And Bahorel's right. Some of them will be gone -- to prison, to exile, to cholera or duel or injury gone septic, summoned home by family need, any of a dozen fates that could strike without warning, and often without the slightest note in a newspaper or history book.

"Even without that... The codes will change. Soon enough our ways of making sure a message goes to the right ears will only be enough to say the writer of this knew something in '32."

That may be an entirely moot point. They may never get another chance like this. (He may never see their own France again. He moves on from that thought; he knows, he's known with every breath of Parisian air and then Milliways afterwards, but it's for later.) But if they do, if they get any kind of chance to do real work in Paris again -- then what month and year it is, in which world, will matter deeply to what use they can make of that chance.