"To our sleeping beauty," Jehan said in hushed happy tones, his chestnut head lolling against Courfeyrac's thigh. He looked at the barricade. They all did while they strived to obey Enjolras's resting orders for the next two hours, aware that sleep, like their magnum opus, would be a bric-a-brac affair at best.

"She's in for a hell of a kiss," was the coarser answer. Bahorel's neck was at odds with his feet, the latter trimly propped on a bit of sofa jutting out from the base of the pyramid, the former twisted in Bahorel's optimistic attempt to pillow it on his own clavicle. The attempt lasted all of forty-three seconds before Feuilly rolled his eyes and hauled him into the crook of his arm.

Bossuet had found Mother Hucheloup's Sunday bonnet, the strings of which he was tenderly knotting under Joly's chin. "There," he said, patting his friend's cheek. "All set against the midnight breeze. Now go to sleep like a jolllly good lad, and I'll poke you when it's time for your...eh!... tonic."

Gavroche had beaten them all to the Land of Nod, his small weight abandoned to a pile of hessian sacks, coiled protectively around his gun. "Lamb led to slumber," Courfeyrac laughed, then shrugged. "Here, 'Ferre, tuck him in my jacket, will you? We'll just have to shoo him off before the wolves croak us all."

Combeferre, his eyes set on the outlet of the barricade, stood up.

"Crocus?" Jehan's ear curled a little in his sleep, and Courfeyrac stroked it with the tip of his finger. "No, no, no, no. Tell Gisquet all crocuses – unacceptable. My love is a red red rose."

"And my friend is talking poppycock. Hushabye, poet."

"Isn't dice," a muffled voice protested from under a canopy of puce and tangerine velvet. "Is very bad form to bention red doses among the thick, you brude."

"Bruder," Feuilly's sigh ricocheted, delivering him to his Utopia of international fraternity, and the rest – beyond the occasional snore or snort – was silence.

Combeferre, in silence, gazed at the loose hieroglyph of legs and arms. It did not take a Champollion to read "closeness" here, and "trust", given and returned, a sunny absolution pressed upon every little fault, every individual nick or flaw, until they were melted into that warm ring of brotherhood. Not even a Rousseau, Combeferre thought as he took his steps to the outpost and its solitary guardian, still as noticeable in his scarlet waistcoat as a redbreast on the prowl. But much too still, Combeferre thought, frowning at the rigid back line, and kicked the nearest pebble pointedly.

Enjolras started at the sound.

"Only me," Combeferre said easily. "I've left the young'uns snug and sleeping."

Enjolras gave an absent nod, half seal of approval, half congé.

Combeferre sidled up to him, letting his shoulder brush against Enjolras's red-coated frame before he leant back against the wall.

"You ought to be with them," he heard next. His friend was staring taut-eyed into the narrow, darkening tunnel that still connected them to the outside world. "What are you doing here?"

Combeferre stared at Enjolras. "Keeping watch."

Enjolras did not speak at once, and when he did, his voice held a touch of hoarseness. "As ever."

In the pulse of understanding that followed, they turned to observe the barricade, now a night sight worthy of Hoffmann's Tales (lying cheek to jowl with Monsieur Champollion on Combeferre's bed, in Combeferre's orphaned little room). A stretch of red cloth still hung at the top of the scaffolding. Enjolras spoke again.

"You won't save me this time. You know it, don't you? That if the worst comes to the worst, and we both know that it has its marching orders, nothing you can do will spare me – a beating?"

They looked at each other, then, as if this was a signal to make good a deep-buried deal between his heart and his arms, Combeferre dismissed the space between them. He felt a shudder, Enjolras's shudder that he knew would never be trusted to anyone else, and, once he deepened the embrace, pressing chests and shoulders together, was given a heart beat to share, hard and excited. Enjolras's heart, unbeaten as of yet.

He pressed his mouth to his friend's temple and said, "Even then, I was given a choice. Spare or share."

The shudder bloomed at the words and Combeferre kissed the temple, twice. He pushed Enjolras's mane of hair back and kissed his hairline, catching the mingled tang of sweat and black powder. But when he tried to move his lips further down, Enjolras flinched back.

"Don't. Please."

"Wha –" Gunpowder, Combeferre told himself, and remembered Le Cabuc. "Oh, for God's sake. You're no Cain, my friend, and you flunked Biblical roleplaying a long long time ago."

"I never realised – I never knew what it does to you, killing a man. Yes, even a murderer. He was close, close, when I did it. I told him to pray and he screamed like a pig, then he twitched like one, and he, he – emptied himself out, his brain, his bladder, oh yes, I saw that too, and I made him do all of that. Now I can't unsee it."

"Bullshit." Combeferre kissed his forehead, hard. "Don't slander your retina, man. And don't add injury to insult by keeping us at bay. We're all in this together, Enjolras, all of your friends. We can't afford to have you maroon yourself away from us."

He watched Enjolras's eyes fall shut and waited a few seconds more before touching his mouth to them, one after the other.

"In two hours, we'll kill at your side," he said. "All of us, even little Jehan with his flowerpot ethics. Feuilly, who couldn't flick a fly out of his plate unless it was glued to the jam, and Bossuet, poor devil, bound to shoot his own toes off before he hits anything else. Open your eyes, Enjolras. You're not alone in this."

"What about you," Enjolras said, rubbing furious knuckles across his cheeks.

The dark was everywhere and thickening. Combeferre groped for an answer; found none. "I'll be about my leader's business," he parried, smiling, matching word to gesture as he pulled his leader to him once more. Offering what rest he could before the bells of Saint-Merry began their count of ten with a boom, with an iron clangor that let them know early and exactly what the day had in store for them.

Enjolras died with his eyes open.

He had thought that death would numb him. It did not – if anything, it did the opposite, filling him with a body of sensations that tore at him and blistered him long before the final pelt of bullets. Grantaire's sacrifice came last, a spoonful of honey after all the stings, and Enjolras felt an almost childish gratitude for it. It took his mind off the rush of visions, hot, corrupt, brilliant and fractured, that strayed like angry bees in the periphery of his eyes even as he faced the National Guard with indifference.

Jehan's cry (red red rose). The gleam of silver when he had taken Gavroche from Marius's arms and a brand new five-franc piece had tumbled out of the ragamuffin's shirt (what sort of a god fills a child's pocket, then sends him to his death?). Marius with a torch, Marius with a dead young man in his lap. Courefeyrac in his final hour, munching a ginger nut rebelliously (gingerbread!?). And many more, until the last, unforgiving sight of Combeferre plucking at his apron convulsively, the linen bunched up in his fists, as three bullets pierced it, and him.

There had been no time to free Combeferre's hands and kiss them, and lay them over his heart. There had been no time to untie the traitorous apron, which had not held back the bullets.

But time had let him take poor Grantaire's hand in the end and do his reckonings: six men in a squad, meaning three bullets each, meaning a death that would reach out to Combeferre's with a little of the intimacy that he had so utterly failed to show the living man. Enjolras began to smile.

Then all the bees gathered, and nailed him to the wall.

"Open your eyes, Enjolras."

A hand there was, still close, still in touch. But it was passing lightly over his face and neck, pausing to warm his eyes, to reacquaint him with sensation in small bubbles and prickles. Enjolras, whose notions of the afterlife had been staunchly, virtuously, and a-Grantairely uncarnal, blinked in surprise.

"Come, my friend. At the count of three. You were never one to keep the future waiting!"

And here was his Combeferre, his incorruptible spectacles twinkling in a pool of daylight. He no longer wore an apron. In fact, he no longer wore anything like his previous clothes. Combeferre had always dressed formally but without any salient feature, favouring tobacco-brown and spending his so-called salary as an apprenticed surgeon on books and theatre seats. Now he was still wearing a loose-sleeved shirt, but it was of a blue that put every other blue to shame, down to the late Madame Enjolras's famed Indian turquoise, once the talk of Perpignan. And his trousers were – far, far less baggy than –

"Are you my future?" he asked, blushing, and Combeferre rapped out a laugh, blessedly familiar, taking Enjolras's hand to slip it under his arm and conduct him to the window.

"Part of it, hopefully. The rest is outside, waiting for you."

Only then did Enjolras realise that they were no longer in the Corinthe, but in the Café Musain. Or in some version of the Musain – because the old Regency mirror was still there, with its double pane of glass pockmarked by the years, but the chairs and tables looked changed, and instead of Daumier's caricatures of rotund bourgeois, there was a portrait of a half-naked grisette holding up a bottle. The artist, Monsieur Coca (or Cola? He seemed undecided) had signed in the top corner and a flourish of red letters.

Combeferre opened the window. The growl of the street rose to them directly, another well-loved sound, and Enjolras saw a flurry of young people marching down the Boulevard Saint Michel waving flags and placards. Some had bright-coloured flowers in their hair, matching their garb. Most of them seemed to have long hair.

"Just so you know," Combeferre said, smiling, "the ladies are in, now. And you'd better not call them if you want them to take you seriously. It's les filles, and no, no offence meant these days."

"There's a red flag!" Enjolras exclaimed, his blood soaring at the view. There were, in fact, several red flags. Combeferre coughed.

"Ah, yes. That. It's Chinese now. Though Feuilly says they really borrowed it from us in the first place. You'll have to ask him, he's our honorary Trotskyst. Little Jehan is with the flower children. Bahorel works at Renault's now. Grantaire, I'm glad to say, went straight to Heaven."

Enjolras frowned.

"So this is not Heaven?"

"We-ell, not quite, though I dare say to you it will soon be. This is a second try. I think. We all killed people, after all. Grantaire mostly tried to kill time."

"You never killed anyone. You wanted to cure pulmonia and invent a horseless omnibus."

"Someone beat me to it," Combeferred said rather forlornly. "But you have no idea how much we've evolved in a hundred years. Blue-jeans! Hoola-hoops! The Fermat theorem! I always said progress was a fact, and - "

"You stayed for me," Enjolras cut in, looking straight at him.

"I can't very well let you enter a stage unsupervised, can I? But the Fermat theorem is really a bonus. And this is a much funnier revolution in many respects. Workers, students, yes, but...remember your speech on love, not war, being tomorrow's goal? That's bang on, man. You might have to do some kissing, though. They don't kill much here, but, dear Lord, they do kiss a lot. Good old Courf' is having the time of his new life."

"Is that what we're fighting for?" Enjolras asked sternly, but his mouth, for the first time since he'd counted rifles in another life, was twitching. "For boys to kiss girls in the open street?"

"We-ell, not quite. According to Philippe Guy, we're also fighting for boys to kiss boys in the open street. Though that might take a tad more time."

"Oh," said Enjolras. He frowned, thinking. Then he nodded to himself, angled his face with his usual nervous precision, and kissed Combeferre decisively. It was a peck of a kiss, and Combeferre winced a little. "Sorry," Enjolras said. He tried again. This time it went better, because Combeferre tilted his own face, making it possible for Enjolras to target his lieutenant's cheeks rather than the branch of his glasses.

Practice did not make him instantly perfect, but his third gave him a taste of Combeferre's lips, and the fourth led to the discovery that Combeferre's neck, much like the man himself, was a pillar of supple strength.

They caught their breaths in each other's arms, both of them needing the contact, the tight have-and-hold, the warmth of reunion.

"You all right?" Combeferre asked quietly after a while.

Enjolras pulled back gently. He adjusted the headband on his curls and stretched his arms, marvelling at the elastic feel of his red jumper. He searched for Combeferre's hand and raised it to his lips.

"All set, comrade. Come, let's go find that Guy guy. And if your brave new day doesn't do it – now we know there's always another time."

FINIS

[A/N : Philippe Guy tried to introduce the rights of homosexuals into the May 68 revolution. He had limited results, but his influence was seminal to the Mouvements de Libérations Homosexuelle that blossomed in the 1970es.]