In a World Without Heroes: deleted scene
Author's note: The Saturday morning interview scene between Grantaire and Enjolras in chapter 8 originally started from Grantaire's arrival and was intended to go through the events of the scene that has since replaced it. This scene ended up being replaced partly because the characterizations weren't panning out how I wanted (as you see by the end) and partly because it was dragging the scene/fic. Yes, it was good background for the reader, but ultimately (as Grantaire now comments in the replacement scene) this is the same thing Enjolras would have said in every interview since his release from prison, so it didn't make sense for Grantaire to be acting like he'd never tuned in for any of Best Boy's television interviews.
Anyway, I'm finally sharing it here because it's the backstory behind Mabeuf's Manhattan Autonomous Zone and Enjolras's arrest, and also I've been meaning to for uhhhhh two years. Enjoy.
By the time Grantaire texts that he’s on his way, Enjolras feels very nearly relieved.
He’d spent Friday evening catching up on what little cleaning has been neglected since the last time he had a guest — that is to say, since moving in — specifically in order to sleep in Saturday morning, only to find himself wide awake at 9AM with little to do but anticipate the events of the day.
“Hey,” says Grantaire when Enjolras lets him into the building. He’s dressed down from how he usually is at the correctional facility but up from what he wears at the Chinese restaurant, which makes Enjolras feel better about his choice in clothes today.
“Do you mind walking? I’m on the fourth floor.”
There’s hesitation, and Enjolras thinks Grantaire may be about to protest, but when he speaks it’s to say, “Yeah, sure. I haven’t had a leg day in a while.”
“You work out?” asks Enjolras, surprised.
“Nope. Lead the way.”
The walk occurs in silence except for their heavy breathing and a quick apology when someone coming down from the third floor brushes past, and then they’re at the door to Enjolras’s flat.
“Make yourself at home,” he says, heading for the kitchen. “Would you like anything? Tea? Water?”
“Seltzer if you’ve got it, water if you don’t.”
Seltzer. It’s what Grantaire has ordered both times they were out, too, and Enjolras makes a note that he should pick some up beforehand if they do this again.
There’s no reason for them to do this again, of course: with this past week’s interview completed, they’re over halfway finished with the collaborative part of the book, and there will be no reason for them to be spending time with one another anymore. Even with Enjolras’s resolution not to pursue a relationship with Grantaire, the prospect of their burgeoning friendship coming to a halt with the end of their professional correspondence makes Enjolras’s stomach twist.
He re-enters the living room with two waters, placing one on a coaster in front of Grantaire and sipping the other for something to do.
“Thanks,” says Grantaire belatedly. His eyes have been wandering around the flat since Enjolras’s return, and Enjolras wonders what he’s looking for. At last, his attention falls back on Enjolras. “You’re dressed different.”
Enjolras lets his eyebrows quirk in feigned surprise and glances down at himself as though he hadn’t spent fifteen minutes lingering over the decision that morning. When he was merely a law student and the point person for a far-left branch of a tutoring group, Enjolras had had a lot more flexibility in what he wore; since his release from prison, however, his wardrobe has become a rotation of the same six white dress shirts, three tones of neutral trousers, and the occasional matching suit jacket. Even on days when he isn’t working in some capacity or another, Enjolras finds himself dressing as inoffensively as possible in anticipation of someone’s inevitable recognition and the associations to follow. His attire hadn’t been particularly flamboyant before then, but his use for his green rally shirts and blue cozy clothes has certainly fallen to the wayside since.
Today, after nearly five minutes of deliberation, he had settled on a pair of gray-ish jeans, a pale red undershirt, and a blue fitted shirt he’d nearly forgotten that he owned. At the last second before he’d gone down to meet Grantaire Enojlras had pulled a white hoodie over, but already he feels himself overheating in the extra layer.
“Yes, well,” he shrugs, realizing that he should sit and taking the armchair on the far side from where Grantaire has seated himself, “I don’t need to leave today, so I can dress down.”
“That’s what it is! I haven’t seen you in jeans and a shirt without a collar since you got out.” Grantaire’s eyes suddenly narrow. “You aren’t wearing a collared shirt under that, are you?”
Despite his discomfort, Enjolras snorts. “I’m not.”
“I don’t know that I believe you.”
“My deepest condolences.” His retort is met with crinkling at the corners of Grantaire’s eyes before they divert altogether as his attention turns to his lap. Enjolras clears his throat. “I’m not sure I’ve ever seen you in purple. It looks nice.”
Glancing back up, Grantaire’s brows furrow as he looks over his clothes.
“The scarf,” Enjolras clarifies.
The outermost layer of the sheer material is picked up and rubbed under close scrutiny between Grantaire’s fingers. “I guess? I thought it was gray when I grabbed it this morning, but in this lighting it looks blue to me.”
The scarf is definitely purple, but it isn’t worth disputing. “It looks nice,” Enjolras instead repeats.
“Well cree, thanks.”
Taking a deep breath, Enjolras decides to put an end to the stall tactics. “The interview, then? How do you want to do this?”
“Uh. I was thinking just kinda like at the facility? You say what you want, and I respond and ask questions as they arise. Obviously no notetaking or recordings or anything, so it’ll pretty much be like a normal conversation that I know some of the answers to already.”
Nothing about it feels like a normal conversation, but Enjolras braces himself nevertheless. “Let’s begin, then.”
“You sure?” There’s a dubious crinkle between Grantaire’s eyebrows. “We can shoot the shit for a while longer if you want, let you get comfortable and whatnot.”
Resting his hands carefully over his knees, Enjolras arranges his features into a neutral façade. “I’m sure.”
Grantaire sighs deeply, a hand skating over his scarf and jerking the front back from his hairline as he scratches the back of his head. “Okay then. Well, where would you say it all started?”
He’s about to fall back on the polite clarifying tactics he’d been drilled on for televised interviews before when he realizes that he doesn’t have to. “Where what all started?”
Apparently Grantaire holds a similar amount of compunction toward his professionalism. “I dunno, whatever you want. The rally? Broletariat? Activism in general?”
Enjolras has managed to avoid shining a spotlight on his childhood this long, and his parents have made it clear that they have no interest in having their names attached to any of this, but beginning at the rally would feel like starting a sentence in the middle of a phrase. “Combeferre, Courfeyrac, and I have known each other since we were young,” he says, finally settling for their indoctrination to the betterment of humanity as a promising starting place, “and we all were accepted to and attended Columbia for undergrad and stayed for our graduate degrees. None of us were from New York City, and while we were studying, we saw a need in the local community for support, and we started up an afterschool tutoring group in conjunction with Barnard College’s urban teaching program. I believe they’re still running, though I lost touch with them while I was away.”
“On the road,” nods Grantaire.
“In jail.” There’s no use dancing around it now: if Enjolras can’t say it in front of Grantaire, who else is there?
“Right, that too.” Grantaire’s body is draped over the corner of Enjolras’s couch casually enough, but there’s a stiffness in his posturing and the way he rubs the tip of his thumb back and forth along the side of his index finger that makes Enjolras think he’s uncomfortable.
“The Broletariat’s inception was nearly accidental,” he continues. “Feuilly worked in the afterschool program at one of the schools we operated out of, and we got to discussing education law one day while he was packing up and I was waiting on a pupil and agreed to continue the conversation as a secondary location at a later date. It was never official, but it did become regular: once work and classes let out, more and more of us met under the guise of lesson planning or studying or spending time with friends, while under it all we were organizing.”
“Organizing what?”
Enjolras shakes his head. “At the time, we’d had no way of knowing. We could feel unrest building toward something, and we made sure that the channels of communication were open and to keep up with the news and share resources and to — to be prepared for any eventualities,” he says.
“Enjolras, I was there.”
“It occurs to me that announcing our weapons stores to the general public may not go over well.”
“Good thing you’re not announcing it to the general public, then.”
Enjolras sighs. “We were ready for anything, and one day, ‘anything’ finally had a name: Jean-Charles Mabeuf.
“Before his arrest, Mabeuf had been a churchwarden at a local church, a respected member of his community. His friends said he had an expansive collection of books and was trying to grow indigo to start a small business.”
“Does indigo grow well in New York City?” This time, it seems like a question Grantaire genuinely doesn’t know the answer to.
“Evidently not. At the time of his arrest, he was several months behind on rent, had nothing in his fridge, and his famous book collection had dwindled to hardly anything: he was destitute.”
“Tough break.”
Enjolras shoots a sharp look at Grantaire. “Do you remember what happened to him?”
“The prison left him to die of treatable causes, what more is there to know?”
“His landlord took him to court for the missing rent; Mabeuf had already fallen ill and couldn’t make it, and the judge issued a bench warrant. He was arrested for being sick and poor.”
“Well, I’m seeing why I would selectively have culled that bit if I heard it.”
Enjolras feels his nostrils flare at the flippancy, but a small part of his mind reminds him that the Grantaire in front of him is not the Grantaire who drank his way through the entire rebellion and every strategy meeting leading up to it. “I would be surprised if you hadn’t: his arrest hardly made the news. I’m told that his church was in the process of arranging some care package or another for him, but that most likely would have been the end of it if not for the pneumonia.”
Now comes the part that the news and everyone knows: all of the symptoms were recorded upon his intake, but no action was taken to treat him. Mabeuf remained in jail as he waited for his new court date, complaining every day of chest pains and requesting to be moved to the med pod. He was never moved, and on 1 June, at eighty years old, Jean-Charles François Mabeuf was found dead in his cell.
“With the release of the coroner’s report, his church community took to the web for Justice for Mabeuf. The movement against the privatized prison system had already existed and was merely on the backburners, and it seemed like the time for change had finally come.”
“Okay, so wait,” Grantaire interrupts. “I was a bit hazy on the details at the time, but I mostly chalked that up to a whole slew of substances combined with a complete and manufactured sense of total apathy; as it would turn out, I am still just as confused.”
Enjolras leans back expectantly in his seat. “About?”
“A couple of points, honestly, but mostly what an armed splinter from a tutoring club expected to happen.”
A fair question. “I was supposed to go into education law.”
Grantaire blinks. “Okay?”
“There’s no special concentration in legal programs to choose one’s specialization: you take the relevant courses offered, intern with firms that handle the sorts of cases you’re interested in, and once you pass the bar, pursue that area.”
“Got it.”
“Once you start looking into the way the United States education system is set up, it becomes immediately evident how inextricably linked all of these pieces are: children are born in low-income communities. Low income means that the property taxes that fund the schools amount to less, leading to fewer resources and higher drop-out rates. The wages in positions for unskilled labor aren’t enough to live on, so people either pick up more and more jobs until they’ve worked themselves to the bone and, quite often, to the point of their bodies breaking down, at which point the failings of the health system become painfully apparent; are turned out onto the streets, which exposes the failings of our government’s housing system and its rotting capitalist firmament; or turn to more lucrative but less legal job opportunities.
“Two of these are arrestable offenses disproportionately targeted communities of color, and the third skips past those steps directly to killing the dime-a-dozen wage slave.”
Grantaire stares at the coffee table in silence for long enough that Enjolras begins to suspect that he may not have been paying any attention at all before his brows finally furrow and he looks back up at Enjolras. “So what were you expecting to happen?”
He sighs. “I couldn’t rightly say what we expected to happen, but the goal was to draw national attention to any one of these points. If something gave, we thought that the whole system might crash down around it. Exposing the for-profit prison industrial complex as the corrupt, predatory, outdated, inherently racist system it is … it felt self-evident. The whole system is broken, let’s build a new one together that serves all of its citizens equally and doesn’t feature intentional loopholes for legalized slavery.”
Grantaire is quiet for a long time before he finally asks, almost too quietly for Enjolras to hear, “When did you realize it wasn’t going to work?”
‘When’ indeed. Enjolras makes no motion to answer. When had he known? Has he ever known? Perhaps he still doesn’t. “It still might,” is what he finally says. “We haven’t failed yet.”
Grantaire looks affronted. “You almost died, Enjolras.”
“I didn’t."
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I’ve never read or watched bnha (mostly because fanservice give me hives) but I am adjacent enough and have friends who are obsessed with it and. FRANKLY. it is CRIMINAL that bnha has the Most Interesting Character Setup Of All Time and then wastes her.
I am talking about Todoroki Fuyumi, of course. She should, logically, be the main character.
She should be the main character, for ease of writing and plot, because she is THE CLOSEST to almost all themes while being enough of an outsider to allow for some exposition. She also lives a thematically insane life. And she’s a side character! At best! HOW.
like okay first off: she has been a failure since birth, and not for gender reasons but for OTHER REASONS inherent to her genetics. Fantastic setup to explore parental neglect. She has been the mother figure in a survival mode family since her mother was institutionalized. How old could she really have been, ten? Thirteen at the most? THESE THINGS FUCK PEOPLE UP. You could have explored the ways in which Fuyumi believes that because she is ignored, if everyone else tried they too could escape physical abuse, which is, you know, a fucked up way to think. Eldest daughter syndrome to the maximum. Not only that but she literally knows her father is capable of pushing her siblings so hard they die. This is fucked up knowledge to have. We could have explored atypical responses to abuse.
She has very close experience with the idea that actually not all Heroes are good people, yet still believes in the institution. Incredibly thematically dense there. We can also connect this back to her home dynamic— Heroism isn’t a flawed system, criminals just need to try harder, like her siblings maybe, and Not Get Attention. This could be INCREDIBLY GOOD.
I’m frankly unclear on whether or not Dabi is her twin or not. Either way, what better plot twist is ‘our father’s abuse made my brother a villain and almost killed him’ I think this would definitely fuck her up a little. Or a lot. More than she was already, you see. Also, the sheer amount of parallels you could make in this situation. None of them were ever considered because the mangaka thinks women are ineffective and More Background Of Characters Than Men, but the possibilities are endless. I’m envisioning a situation where she realizes that Dabi does the same shit as her father thus rendering the hero/villain dichotomy essentially meaningless, and/or confronts Either Of Them with this information. That would require Fuyumi to have had character development enough to confront someone, and bc she is Fawn Response The Character, probably unlikely.
I am Very Much Aware that Fuyumi has a quirk and the quirk is Ice, not very powerful, etc. but how fucked up would it be if SHE got all for one and kept it Very Much A Secret. Fuyumi is now pitted against her littlest brother and discovering her Inner Potential For Extreme Violence at the same time, something that has no potential at all for going very very badly. Please picture this with me: Fuyumi is making dinner for the brother who they BOTH know is pitted against All Mights Successor, whoever they may be, and he is telling her all about his quirkless friend who is breaking records at his school etc etc. and she knows that once he graduates their father will put him against her in the publicity battle to the death, which she has decided she is Very Very Mad About. However I honestly think this shouldn’t happen. Quirk transference should be treated like a Later plot twist after you really get Used to the idea that a quirk is Inherent and unchangeable. This should shake her DEEPLY and ideally she should learn About All For One after the Hawks Reveal (child trafficking).
I don’t know if it’s canon whether or not Natsuo has a quirk. If he doesn’t this effectively renders Midoriya’s character moot, because here is a MUCH closer way to talk about quirklessness in this society. What’s Fuyumi’s take on this as de facto mother. What’s Fuyumi’s take on this as abused child? lots to think about.
The whole Eugenics Thing that endeavor is doing is pretty glossed over in the manga to my understanding. It is however SO fucked up, first of all, and second of all. The Implications this has on Fuyumi as endeavors only child (Canonically) capable of bearing children. How powerful is her quirk actually? Is she as powerful as Dabi but with ice? Would she ever let her father know if she was (was she hiding her power deliberately or subconsciously)? Do we think he was arranging her marriage before Shouto was born and he had his own success. What are Fuyumi’s thoughts on this whole Thing. I think Fuyumi would have a VERY nuanced take on abortion rights and no fault divorce.
What does Midoriya Izuku have? Plot armour? The power of friendship? A heroics hyperfixation? Does canon have a singular consistent theme tied to Midoriya, In Particular?
I realize that most of the fandom fucking hates Fuyumi, sometimes more than endeavor (why?), but she seems to be someone both Very selfless (she’s a teacher (I think), presumably salaried, who still lives in her parents house with her underage and severely abused brother and the abusive father, despite having the means and the societal pressure to move out) and VERY aware of the Power Dynamics in that house. Whether or not she genuinely believes that her brothers could manage to make peace with their father or if that is a peacemaking tactic, she’s clearly got Some Thoughts about her duty, responsibility in general, et cetera, that would have been literally fascinating to explore. Storytellingwise, I think it would be fascinating if this started as a genuine beleif that she had some character development about and then began using as a coping mechanism until she got enough character development to actually experience anger.
Just HOW do you accidentally create a character with THIS MUCH potential and then completely ignore her except as (it sounds like) a minor antagonist to a secondary protagonist. When she is SO perfectly placed to be the protagonist, in a fun little antihero type of way.
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