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shitpostingfromthebarricade · 2 months

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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."

#in a world without heroes #shitposting sometimes writes #you can see why it got cut/rewritten #and I'm all for an iceberg #but it did annoy me that I couldn't find any natural way to explain how the MMAZ worked #oh I guess it still isn't addressed here #but there were a couple of meet-up points around the island that people were gathering #and they were all going to meet and converge on the [courthouse?] way way south of the island aka the location of MMAZ #but riot police and national guard ended up heading off all of the routes (I had a specific choke-point noted in my outline somewhere)#so the crew that was already at MMAZ ended up getting strangles without reinforcements or resources #and then the waves of tear gas and rubber bullets started #and the rest is IaWWH canon

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