Chapter Text
I am what you want me to be
And I'm your worst fear, you'll find it in me
Come closer, come closer
I am more than memory
I am what might be, I am mystery
You know me, so show me
-- "I'm Alive," Aaron Tveit (Next to Normal)
September
For the first two weeks of college, Éponine made a point of hating a cappella. It was mostly the principle of the matter. If a bunch of obnoxiously attractive rich kids wanted to stand around singing, "do do do," that was their business; but by the time the eighth flier was shoved in her face with a chipper, "do you sing?", she wanted to paste a sticker to her forehead that read, "NO, I DON'T FUCKING SING."
She would have done it, too, but the only friend she had made so far was a foreign breed of college student who didn't like cursing.
That was how she felt about Marius in general, really: he was a foreign breed, more deer than person, all freckled cheekbones and doe eyes and confused smiles. He had the painful earnestness of someone who had never really been disappointed, and the careless sweetness of someone nobody had ever really been mean to.
No one had ever been sweet to Éponine without having a reason.
And that was why, at ten in the morning on a sunny Saturday, she was neither sleeping nor starting her three problem sets. She was standing in a crowded, sweaty gym with what seemed to be half the student population, being herded from one station to another like livestock. Because Marius couldn't find the freshman bazaar without getting lost, and Éponine couldn't pass up an opportunity to stand next to him.
Marius eagerly looked at every card he was handed, because of course he did. Éponine glared and hoped they would be out of the glorified cattle market before brunch closed.
"Why are they advertising the senior all-male a cappella group?" she demanded as they passed to the next booth.
"Early advertisement, I guess?" Marius looked at the flier and looked horrified. "'Whiffenpoof?' Is that a slur of some kind?"
This got a delighted laugh from the boy at the next booth. "You are exactly the kind of person we need," he declared.
Marius looked startled.
The boy stood and clapped a hand on Marius's shoulder. "I'm sure you've been asked many times if you sing, but have you been asked about what you sing for?"
"Um," Marius replied, which was fair.
"Or have you thought about all the paper being wasted at this affair?"
"It is kind of a shame," Marius agreed, looking at the pile of fliers in his hands with big, droopy eyes.
Éponine snorted. The boy grinned at her easily. "And what's your name?"
"I'm Miss Can't Sing."
"All-male group," he replied, like that was supposed to be reassuring instead of obnoxious. "I'm Courfeyrac, and you," he turned to Marius again, "should audition."
Marius's eyes lit up as Courfeyrac described the all-male alternative a cappella group that was apparently called the ABC and focused on “progressive values” and “performing at venues that share our values -- you know, orphanages and all-night sit-down protest things.” Of course, his eyes had also lit up about the two student journals and three improv groups and every. Single. Language. Table. So Éponine didn't think too much of it, yet.
--
She walked him to his audition for the ABC whatever-it-stood-for the next weekend. It was right after brunch, and he didn't seem to mind, so why not.
The most excited person she had met in a long string of excited people ushered them in with remarkable dexterity for a boy with a cane. "Hello, hello! You're here for ABC auditions, right?"
"I'm not," Éponine snapped, because that should be obvious.
"Well, you can stay for moral support if you want! We have so much chocolate, take some chocolate, everyone's going to get diabetes, I'm Joly by the way." He spurted it all out like one sentence. Marius and Éponine just stared.
Auditions were in a courtyard, and Joly wasn't kidding: the members of the group sat behind tables piled with miniature Snickers and Butterfingers and Kit-Kats. She shrugged, grabbed a handful, and dropped onto a foldout chair.
The leader of the group was immediately apparent; he just radiated "everybody look at me!", even though he had the face of a freshman. He was a typical a cappella pretty boy, blue eyes and perfect lips and ridiculous blond hair. They all had ridiculous hair, actually. Marius would fit right in, she thought fondly; he had switched hair gel four times in the three weeks she had known him.
Éponine touched the tattered ends of her long, dark hair. She jerked her hand away as soon as she caught herself, not that anyone was watching her.
The leader sat behind a table, Courfeyrac to his left and--Éponine blinked--a very small Indian girl with shorn hair to his right. "I thought this was an all-male group," she whispered to Marius, who was nervously reviewing his lyrics.
Marius blinked as if he had forgotten she was there. "What?"
"Never mind." She looked away from him and inspected the other members of the group who were present--a balding African-American boy who sat beside Joly and periodically leaned to talk to him, and a boy with greasy black hair and a big nose. The latter sprawled on a chair with a lazy half-smirk and watched the leader instead of the auditions. If he hadn't been beside one of the chocolate-piled tables and wearing a green version of the group shirt, she would have thought he was a random student who had stolen one of the chairs.
The leader's pretty face stayed as still as marble as several nervous freshmen falsettoed through the same vaguely stalkery song about how alive they were, but he did sigh heavily after one had left. The short girl poked Leader-boy with a pencil.
She thought Marius gave a good audition, but she was a little biased. He definitely gave an earnest interview, lighting up and talking passionately about social justice issues that made Éponine roll her eyes. The boys asking the questions were obviously rich. Leader-boy's skin was too smooth.
Greasy-hair caught her eyes as they were rolling. He winked. Éponine's instinct was to scowl--boys never winked at her unless they wanted something--but his eyes immediately went back to Leader-boy, so her scowl would probably have been misplaced.
"Well, it looks like the next two people didn't show up," Greasy-hair remarked. He looked too cheerful about it. "Not surprising, since it's the two Bald Eagle signed up."
"Yeah, that sounds right," Bald Eagle, as Éponine already knew she would be calling him forever, said. He also sounded cheerful. Maybe it was all the sugar.
Leader-boy frowned at Greasy-hair. "At least he bothered to ask students to audition."
"It's a good thing," Joly said quickly. "We've been out in the sun eating all this sugar, I think I'm going to be sick--"
Éponine wasn't sure why they needed to be here for this talk, but Marius was just standing around fiddling with his hair, so she stayed seated.
"I needed the sugar to sit through eight attempts at 'I'm Alive,'" said Greasy-hair.
"That's actually what the song is called?" Éponine asked, appalled. Greasy-hair grinned at her. She didn't grin back, but she didn't scowl, either.
“It’s because our glorious leader here sang it when the fetuses were visiting”--it took her a moment to realize he meant the accepted-student visiting days of the year before, which she hadn’t attended because she could afford neither the transportation nor the time off work--“and all the wee freshman boys want in his pants.”
Marius looked appalled. Courfeyrac, Joly, and Bald Eagle looked like they agreed with Greasy-hair. The tiny one (who Éponine had gathered was a trans boy named Combeferre) put his head in his hands and sighed deeply.
Leader-boy frowned. “It’s a lack of creativity and blatant pandering. Furthermore, it isn’t how the song sounds.”
“Well, give us a demonstration, then,” Greasy-hair proposed, lip tilting into a smile. “Impress the wee freshling and his angry friend.”
“Gender-neutral descriptors are less useful for an all-male group,” Combeferre informed him. Do people actually talk like that? Éponine mouthed at Greasy-hair, who did an impressive job of replying, I know, right? using only his eyelids.
“Not trying to be PC here,” Greasy-hair drawled. “He just reminds me of a fuzzy little duckling.”
Marius looked uncomfortable.
“Between the two of you, we’re going to scare off all our freshmen,” Courfeyrac said, in what he clearly thought was a lowered voice. Éponine didn't scare easily, but she supposed she didn't count.
“I’m not scared!” Marius assured them quickly. “I would love to hear your song,” he told Leader-boy politely.
“I’m not sure it’s appropriate,” Combeferre began, in the tired voice of someone who already knew his argument would be ignored, but felt obligated to object anyway (Éponine knew because it was the same voice she had used when trying to tell her little brother not to do something.)
“Oh, come on, the duckling already said he wanted to see. Didn't you?” Greasy-hair asked Marius, who bobbed his head in something that looked less like a yes and more like a maybe if I move my head, people will stop looking at me. Indeed, Greasy-hair immediately turned to raise his eyebrows challengingly at Leader-boy, who sighed and stood up. Greasy-hair whooped, “yeah, take off your shirt!”
Leader-boy glanced at his red shirt before jerking his gaze forward and breaking into something that barely resembled the nervous renditions Éponine had suffered through. He didn’t sound like an awkward stalker; he sounded like a serial killer whose crooning “come clo-oser” could charm victims into the path of his bullet. Everyone in the courtyard stopped what they were doing and turned into a captive audience.
Éponine preferred Marius’s shakier but much sweeter vocals to Leader-boy’s powerful ones, the same way she preferred his gawky prettiness to leader-boy’s marble-statue good looks. But it was fun to watch Greasy-hair's breath hitch when Leader-boy sang lines like, "I own you."
After a blatantly show-offy riff of “I’m a-li-i-i-I-IVE,” Leader-boy shot Greasy-hair a sour look. “Happy?”
Greasy-hair abruptly switched his expression from the wide-mouthed, glassy-eyed stare of a toad watching a bird fly to the look of lazy insolence he had worn before the singing started. “I dunno, wasn’t there supposed to be a pole involved? It’s not a proper performance without pole-dancing.”
Leader-boy turned to Marius. “I apologize for him. We’ll let you know our decision within a week.”
--
The next time she saw Greasy-hair, he was drunk out of his mind, which was ridiculous because it was 7 PM on a Wednesday.
He greeted her on the sidewalk with a sloppy grin and a near-stumble. “Hey! Angry Girl, right? The Duckling’s friend?”
“My name is Éponine.”
“Oh, names.” He waved a hand. “Who needs ’em? We all use our last name, ’cept Jehan, but his name isn't actually Jehan anyway. And Bald Eagle calls himself, like, a nickname from high school French class, but that’s just ’cause he was afraid me calling him Bald Eagle would catch on. Which I call him anyway. So.”
She spent enough time listening to drunken rambles that it was easy to guess that Bald Eagle's real name probably sounded like 'eagle.' “And your last name is?” She couldn’t even think of him as Greasy-hair at the moment, because his hair wasn’t greasy, just a wild mess of dark curls.
“Grantaire, but call me R.” He flopped onto the sidewalk as smoothly and easily as if it were a couch. “You smoke?”
“Not right now.” She smoked a lot, but she planned to drop by Marius’s suite to go over a chemistry problem set that she knew neither of them really needed help with, and he didn’t like the smell. Grantaire shrugged and lit a cigarette. “Why R?”
“It’s a French pun. My whole life is a French pun. Or a Greek pun. Or sometimes even an English pun! Those are always refreshing.” He kept right on babbling things she didn’t understand. She got the vague impression that he was very smart--of course, everyone who went to this school was smart, even if Marius had been shocked that majoring in Linguistics wouldn’t just mean learning all the languages he wanted--but mostly she got the impression that he was going to have a terrible hangover in the morning. The cigarette glowed in his hand as he waved his arms.
“You were a Classics major?” she hazarded.
He laughed. He either smoked much more or much less than she did, because he didn’t break into a hacking cough. Éponine always did, when she laughed while smoking. “Sure. Classics major, poli sci major, history major. Comp lit for like two weeks. Came in planning to be an art major, but I kept getting distracted--picking apples instead of painting the apple tree, that sort of thing. So much for me.” He blew a puff of smoke and Éponine inhaled instinctively, before remembering she was supposed to be meeting Marius.
She scowled. “Don’t blow smoke at me.”
“’Kay.” Unbothered by her scowl, he turned his face away. “Philosophy major now.”
“Wait. You were too lazy for art, so you switched to philosophy.” Éponine wasn’t afraid of difficult majors; she was a Mechanical Engineering major, for crying out loud, and damn proud of it, but she had visited one philosophy lecture for one day and gotten a terrible headache from the first half-page.
Grantaire turned back to her with a lopsided grin. “Sure. All philosophy requires is reading and bullshitting. I happen to be a master.” He took another puff of smoke and turned his head again to blow away from her. “Duckling’s in, by the way. Don’t tell him I said that. Big secret.”
“Are you going to keep calling him that?”
“I’m sure not going to call him Pontmercy.”
He had a point.
“So I guess I’ll be seeing a lot of you?” he asked, facing her again.
“I don’t like a cappella.”
He shrugged. “Me neither.”
“You’re just really dedicated to the cause?” she asked wryly.
He turned away. “Just really dedicated to something.” He stood as abruptly as he had sat, and stumbled again. Éponine had to consciously stop herself from catching him by the waist. Touching rambling, drunk men was a bad instinct. Showing up to Marius’s suite smelling like smoke and sweat didn’t sound great, either.
Grantaire dropped the cigarette without putting it out. “Is that a fire hazard?” Éponine asked, less because she cared and more because she wasn’t sure he remembered she was there.
“You can’t light concrete,” Grantaire tossed over his shoulder. He took a step forward, stopped, and knelt to pick the cigarette up. “Wouldn’t want to litter,” he explained, sounding defensive for no clear reason.
But then, Éponine thought as she finally resumed walking to Marius’s suite, it was hardly the strangest thing about the conversation.