Archive of Our Own

THE NIGHT BEFORE

Grantaire was not, as he had feared he would be, alone on Christmas eve. While admittedly it was difficult to gather a group of late-twenties college friends for any occasion and more particularly a holiday reserved for family, enough of his friends had rocky relationships with their parents and were glad for an excuse to skip out on family holiday celebrations, and so Grantaire’s invitation to spend a few days at an airbnb in the foothills of the Cascades was answered with a surprising number of yeses. Not a bad way to spend the Christmas after a breakup, all told.

However.

According to the text Courfeyrac had sent just before his car – and therefore the majority of their friends – entered the pass, they should still be on track to start their movie night at seven. It was now seven-forty-six, and Grantaire and Enjolras were the only people there. Of all the cruel ironies to arise from a post-breakup overture of friendship, this one was surely the most ironic.

“I’m sure they’re fine,” Grantaire said, from his position stretched out across one branch of the L-shaped sectional sofa in the cabin’s large main room, counting knots in the rough-hewn support beams of the vaulted ceiling. The sofa was big enough to seat seven adults if they were willing to squeeze, or, currently, one fully-extended Grantaire. “Probably some car skidded out because they didn’t have chains and the pass is backed up. Always happens to me.”

“Probably,” Enjolras agreed distantly, cross-legged on the carpet before the tv. He was sat perpendicular from Grantaire so it was difficult to read his expression, but he had become ever quieter as the minutes ticked past seven, and now, at the forty-five minute mark, his brow was furrowed so tightly it must have hurt. He rubbed at his temple. “I guess we could get the movie set up while we wait.”

Grantaire shrugged and snuggled deeper into the cushions. “Sure, if you want to. If you keep making that face you're going to get frown lines.”

Enjolras frowned harder.

That plan quickly hit a roadblock in that the airbnb’s aging Fire TV seemed to require an entirely different remote than any of the three immediately locatable in the main room or bedrooms.

Enjolras growled under his breath as he stalked from corner to corner like a lion caged, golden-maned and coiled to snap. “This won’t work.”

To Grantaire’s mind the prospect of missing out on the Princess Switch Cinematic Universe was not devastating enough to warrant that kind of frustration from someone who claimed to dislike Christmas movies on principle, but he sat up anyway to search the cushions around him for any lurking remotes. Finding none, and seeing Enjolras’ anxious frown tip over towards upset, he offered, “what’s it on?”

“Netflix.”

“Is there an HDMI cable here?”

“Maybe. But I don’t have my laptop. My therapist said I should leave it behind,” Enjolras admitted. His frown now spoke of defiance: a vulnerable Enjolras was an Enjolras at his most defensive, prepared for attack from all angles. Particularly Grantaire’s.

A year ago Grantaire would have discarded caution to needle at that exposed tender underbelly, but even little boys had to stop pulling pigtails sometime. Dating Colin had taught him that, at least. “I do,” he said simply. “See if you can find a cable; I’ll try and connect to the wifi.”

Connecting to the wifi was easily done, and once Grantaire had successfully logged in to Netflix, he settled back into the couch to observe Enjolras’ HDMI hunt.

It had been hard for Grantaire to imagine, when he first heard of it from Jehan at the Halloween party Enjolras showed up two hours late to, an anxious Enjolras. Grantaire had always imagined that prickly temperament stemmed from anarchist fervor and not, as Jehan relayed, a severe anxiety disorder. But seeing Enjolras here, three months into therapy and a low dose of Wellbutrin, it made sense. Grantaire had gone through a similar process in his early twenties; Enjolras was just a few years behind him.

So when Grantaire plugged one end of the cable into his laptop and Enjolras plugged the other into the tv and, with a sound like snow cascading off the sloped roof, the room went staticky white, it was perfectly understandable that they both panicked.

***

“What was that?” Enjolras asked, high and frightened.

Grantaire’s heart was pounding. “Probably just snow falling off the roof.”

“My vision went dark for a second. That’s not snow.”

“Mild electrocution?” Grantaire offered, taking deep breaths to slow his racing heartrate. Enjolras glared. “Okay, sorry. I’ll go outside and check.”

Enjolras followed.

No snow had fallen from the roof. There hadn’t really been enough to trigger a slide – although, Grantaire saw, with dawning horror and wonder, the operative word there was hadn’t. He clearly remembered the surrounding cedar grove on their arrival, a light dusting of snow glittering high above in the four-pm sunset. Now, the branches sagged towards the ground under a hallmark-perfect white coating, glittering somehow brighter even though the only light came through the open door.

“What the fuck,” Grantaire said.

Enjolras’ eyes were wide. “We should go back in.”

For once, they were on the same page. But inside was no better; the cabin had rearranged itself while they weren’t looking and now sported a dizzying amount of kitschy clutter, made more cluttered by the fact that the walls now sloped dramatically up into a peaked A-frame roof and every room save the main seemed to have disappeared. At least the wood was still the same cedar-red, Grantaire thought hysterically; that was some comfort.

“Is that the live laugh love font?” he asked. It wasn’t the most pressing question, but the only one he could wrap his head around enough to ask at the moment.

“We’ve traveled back in time,” Enjolras said, apparently better equipped to address the larger picture. “There’s a VCR here.” He stood for a while in silence, breaths quick and harsh, before voicing the thought Grantaire had also landed on. “What are we going to do?”

There was nothing to do at this hour, they decided, except sleep and hope whatever shared hallucination they were experiencing would dissipate by morning. That was until they hit up against the complication Grantaire would have seen coming if he weren’t so focused on the color of the walls.

“There’s only one bed,” Enjolras said unnecessarily. “There were four, before.”

The plan had been for Grantaire to share with Jehan. That would have been fine; this was not. Grantaire briefly entertained the idea that it might instead be the manifestation of his secret post-breakup Christmas romcom fantasies and Enjolras had just been dragged along for the ride, but that was a thought to be dealt with in the morning. If he managed to survive a night in a queen-sized bed beside Enjolras.

STRANDED

Miraculously, Grantaire did manage sleep, and he awoke to winter sunlight streaming in through a window beside the bed that hadn’t been there the night before and Enjolras propped against the quilted headboard watching him.

“I’ve been thinking,” Enjolras said determinedly, like he had been working himself up to the idea, “we should go explore. See if anything else has changed and if we can get in touch with anyone.”

“Did you sleep?”

“Not much. I was thinking.”

Grantaire squinted against the sunlight. Enjolras’ eyes were puffy; Grantaire would wager that not much was code for I closed my eyes for a minute. He chose not to comment; the set of Enjolras’ jaw was just as defiant as the moments before everything changed and Grantaire did not want to start the morning off with an argument over sleep hygiene. “I think that’s a good idea. Also, I don’t think there’s a bathroom here anymore.”

***

Their first stop in town – which was mercifully only a short walk away from the cabin, just as it had been on their last journey through it – was a coffee shop-slash-gingerbread bakery with a restroom where they brushed their teeth side by side in the most public domestic intimacy Grantaire had ever experienced. It was certainly not the hallmark romcom Grantaire might have dreamed up of his own accord: in his experience people only brushed their teeth in movies as a setup for comedic understandings.

They purchased coffee in branded paper cups – Ginger & Joe was exactly the sort of name you might find in a Hallmark movie, Grantaire thought, with a sinking heart – and several assorted dozens of cookies in the likely event that the cabin still wouldn’t have a kitchen when they returned, braced themselves, and pushed back out into the street.

The town and its surrounding foothills were postcard perfect, and Grantaire’s suspicion from the night before, bolstered by the cheery letters advertising the store on the awning above them, returned firmer and more insistent. This snowy little main street with its tinsel-wrapped lampposts and Bavarian-chic shopfronts could have been lifted straight from the set of any Netflix Original Christmas move starring Vanessa Hudgens.

Enjolras walked beside him, stumbling over half-buried cobblestones as he eyed their surroundings, slack-jawed. He tried to articulate the question stopping his downturned lips several times before he landed on, “what is this place? How did this happen?”

“I think,” Grantaire said slowly, “I think we got Knight Before Christmas-ed.”

“We got what?”

“Cheesy Christmas movie also starring Vanessa Hudgens. We were gonna watch it,” Grantaire said, blinking uselessly at the unwavering scenery. At least, he consoled himself, somethings never changed no matter what upside-down Krampus world you tumbled into. Enjolras would always avoid all media associated with Christmas.

“Sure, that’s believable,” he muttered, as he lengthened his stride, putting distance between them. His mulish, scuffing steps kicked grimy snow onto the tips and he stopped, frustrated, to shake it off. “Is the male lead hot at least?”

So Grantaire was on his own in solving this mystery. He shrugged. “He’s my type. Probably not yours.”

Enjolras’ sideways glance told Grantaire that was probably a good guess. He sighed, fishing in his coat pocket for his phone. “We should try calling someone. If we’ve actually – I hate this – traveled back in time, thee might not be cell towers nearby but we could still – where is it?”

“Where is what?”

“Where is my phone?” The tight anxiety from the night before was back, rising as he patted himself down with shaking hands. “I had it in this coat when we got to the cabin, and I didn’t take it out because my therapist said I should try not to check it, and it didn’t fall out or I would have heard it fall, but it’s not here.”

Grantaire did not say that his own phone had not been in his jeans pocket when he dressed before they left the cabin, and that he had assumed from the moment they woke up that they were on their own here. He didn’t think it would help.

Enjolras did not move as Grantaire approached, though his calves flexed like he was prepared to flee if only his feet would lift from the slushy pavement. His fists in their soft grey gloves were clenched.

“Enjolras,” Grantaire said. Enjolras made no sign of hearing. “Enjolras. There’s a VCR. There’s probably a payphone.”

Enjolras, panic momentarily derailed, nodded slowly. Then, as if suddenly released from whatever had tethered his boots to the sidewalk, he strode purposefully and a little desperately away without beckoning Grantaire to follow. Grantaire followed anyway; it was probably best if Enjolras had someone nearby when he too came to the conclusion that there would be no phoning home for them.

“Do you know where you’re going?” he asked conversationally, though he had to jog a little to keep up with Enjolras.

“To look for a payphone.”

Grantaire rolled his eyes, safely behind Enjolras’ back where his exasperation wouldn’t make Enjolras’ mood worse. He looked like he might snap like a twig if Grantaire applied even the slightest pressure. It made Grantaire want to treat him delicately; it was as if the knowledge that Enjolras shared the anxieties that had plagued Grantaire all through his teens had entirely erased the customary urge to needle that had gotten Grantaire into trouble so many times.

Instead, he trailed Enjolras the length of the main street until they reached what seemed like a less kitschy part of town. Or at least a part of town pragmatic enough to contain an Albertson’s, even one with wood siding and a sloped, festively adorned roof. But the roof and its wire reindeer were not the main attraction, though Grantaire made a note of the Albertson’s as a possible foodstop before they returned to the cabin after dark.

At the corner of the block, nestled beside the empty cart return station, was a payphone.

It looked just like the payphones Grantaire remembered seeing on streetcorners in the real world over a decade ago, and he obligingly handed over his laundry quarters to Enjolras – which were still in his pocket – and stood back to think over what he would do when Enjolras discovered they were well and truly stranded.

A ROYAL MESS

Reassurances were no good, Grantaire decided. The situation was what it was and Enjolras was an adult; he would probably respond poorly to the kind of well-meant lies that still sometimes worked on Gavroche but never on Eponine. So then he was left with only what did work on Eponine: distraction.

Enjolras was visibly frustrated on his return. “I don’t know anyone’s cell phone numbers and the only one I have memorized is my dad’s old home phone but he’s on vacation and I don’t want to call him anyway and – “

The snowball took him by surprise. He staggered back, clutching his bicep where bits of hard-packed snow clung to his woolen sleeve, and opened his mouth to scold only to be hit with another projectile.

“There will be a way to get out of this,” Grantaire told him sternly. “Don’t let yourself spin out over one disappointment.”

Of course, Grantaire had to acknowledge as he hefted another snowball in preparation for Enjolras’ nex protest, he would probably be spinning out too if he wasn’t just that much more genre-savvy than Enjolras. Everything about this place felt wholesome. Even the shift here from the real world had been only frightening, not painful. Grantaire knew it in his bones: they were going to be fine.

He cocked his arm.

Enjolras stomped like a petulant toddler, boot squelching on the salted street. “Stop it. I’m trying to have a serious conversation with you.”

“Then you’ll have to defeat me first,” Grantaire said, and let fly.

***

It was hard not to enjoy yourself at least a little bit in a snowball fight, and even slow-to-thaw Enjolras was laughing by the time he tackled Grantaire into the snowbank standing in for a sidewalk. Their fight had ranged down several blocks, as Grantaire saw from his horizontal vantage point, and their snowbank butted up against a shop they had passed on their way to the Albertson’s. Grantaire had taken note of it at the time because it had felt significant: a used electronics store, a relic of pre-Amazon times and slightly out of place among its souvenir-peddling neighbors. That was why he was relatively certain the handheld video camera sitting pride of place in the display window had not been there before.

Someone could have placed it there during Enjolras’ phone call or their fight. But the sign on the door said was flipped to closed, and the display itself seemed too centered around the camera to have only just been altered.

Worth a shot.

“You know what I said about getting out of here?” Grantaire said, watching Enjolras’ smile dim as the reality of their predicament set back in. “Hear me out: you know how in Elf there’s that snowball fight?” Enjolras shook his head, but that didn’t matter. Grantaire was firming up the theory in his head as he went and growing surer of its truth with every word. “What if there are like, steps? Like – look. That camera? Wasn’t there before. I swear. And then we did this cliché holiday movie thing, and it was. Seems too much like a coincidence.”

Enjolras was quiet. He hadn’t released Grantaire from his victorious hold, and though ice was slowly creeping under the hem of Grantaire’s coat and up his spine, Enjolras’ warm weight pressing him firmly into the snowbank made it difficult to think about moving.

Finally Enjolras laughed, halfway between derisive and disbelieving. “So we’re trapped in a Christmas romcom?”

“One point of data does not a conclusion make,” Grantaire said. He himself was willing to stake their eventual return to reality on that one data point, but he still didn’t like the idea of some supernatural screenwriter forcing Enjolras closer to him when nearly a decade of friendship hadn’t been able to manage it naturally. It didn’t matter how right it had felt to wake up next to Enjolras if that wasn’t Enjolras’ choice.

Enjolras dropped his head to Grantaire’s chest for the briefest second and huffed an incredulous breath. “Better that than It’s a Wonderful Life, I guess,” he said, pushing off Grantaire and offering a hand up. Grantaire took it, feeling the stiffness of Enjolras’ fingers even through their gloves.

“Your media references never cease to fascinate me,” he said.

Enjolras smiled crookedly at him. “So what’s the next step?”

***

The shop sign had flipped itself over from closed to open while Enjolras deliberated, but Grantaire chose not to call attention to it. The coincidences guiding them creeped him out; no need to stress Enjolras out any further. Enjolras managed to haggle the camera down to thirty-five dollars and a few spare video cards tossed in while Grantaire, once again, stood back and thanked whoever’s strange pocket world creation this was for sending them back to a time when credit cards still worked.

Taking action seemed to calm Enjolras down, and the success of this first step buoyed his spirits enough that he handed the camera over to Grantaire with a smile once they were out of the store and on their way back towards the town’s main drag. Grantaire gave a prayer for his already-frozen fingers and removed his gloves to test out the camera. It was in good condition and worked exactly like the last digital camera Grantaire remembered operating, which was either a lucky coincidence or not a coincidence at all.

“Do you actually know how to use that or are you just fucking around?” Enjolras asked. He sounded curious rather than annoyed, so Grantaire shrugged and moved on to test the zoom function.

“I used one like this in film class like a decade ago.” Grantaire shrugged again at Enjolras’ questioning noise. So far he hadn’t realized that he himself was the subject of Grantaire’s test recording. “Arts high school.”

“Can I try? We used to film Christmas morning when I was little. Opening presents, whatever. A lot of the cat.”

It was rare that Enjolras spoke about Christmas at all, and even rarer that he spoke about it fondly, so Grantaire obligingly hit stop and handed over the camera. It felt somehow unfair that Enjolras immediately turned it on him.

MOVIE MAGIC

The problem with next steps was of course that they weren’t at all obvious. Filming each other quickly lost its novelty and, without a direction to look, Grantaire and Enjolras were left wandering aimlessly through the little downtown area once again. Finding food should be their first priority, in Grantaire’s opinion, but Enjolras was so focused on finding solutions that Grantaire didn’t think he had even realized the light was fading and their last meal – which had consisted of coffee and cookies – had been six hours ago.

“Okay, so what are holiday movies?” Enjolras said, fiddling with the camera. He had taken to it easily and proceeded to film every shop and shopper they passed, to the consternation of all. Grantaire didn’t have the heart to tell him to stop. “I don’t really watch romcoms.”

Grantaire knew that; everyone knew that. Surely he could have a little fun with this. “Love Actually, Die Hard, Sleepless in Seattle – “

“Sleepless in Seattle is a Christmas movie?”

“It starts on Christmas eve,” Grantaire said, outwardly absent while internally he had to pat himself on the back for startling Enjolras out of his single-minded focus on the camera’s viewing screen. “You objected to that but not Die Hard?”

“Die Hard is a Christmas movie,” Enjolras said, like that was a ridiculous question. Grantaire couldn’t quite hide a grin.

“So is Sleepless in Seattle.”

He wished he could have filmed Enjolras’s rolled-eye returning smile.

***

No further steps made them apparent as evening faded into true December darkness, so a dejected Enjolras and contemplative made their way back to the cabin after stocking up on deli sandwiches and bottled water at Albertson’s.

“The least they could do is make sure we don’t starve,” Enjolras grumbled.

“Who is they?”

“Whoever’s behind this; I don’t fucking know.” Enjolras was as hair-trigger irritable as ever, but Grantaire thought perhaps his sharper moods were more forgivable under the current circumstances than they otherwise might be. He therefore allowed himself to feel only fondness at Enjolras huffed, righteous frustration. “I don’t even know what questions to ask. What’s the date on there?”

Grantaire paused in his fiddling with the camera’s night settings. “December thirty-first, 1999.”

“Of course it is.”

“Watch what you say, or Y2K’s gonna get you,” Grantaire sing-songed, relishing Enjolras’ unimpressed grimace and his reluctant smile when he caught sight of the camera pointed at him. Grantaire chose to count both of them as a victory.

They deposited their plastic grocery bags just inside the door and halfheartedly poked around the outside of the A-frame cabin, visible only so far as the radius of the charmingly incandescent porchlight stretched. Grantaire’s car was nowhere in sight.

“I think I found an outhouse,” Grantaire called.

“There’s probably an axe murderer inside,” Enjolras called back.

Grantaire jogged back, guided only by Enjolras’ voice in the dark. “Nah, this isn’t that sort of movie. If anything we’ll get trapped it under comedic circumstances and bond over childhood outhouse memories.”

“Do you have any childhood outhouse memories?”

“No, but I’m sure I could make some up.”

***

They ate their deli sandwiches – or a chicken caesar wrap, in Enjolras’ case – at the small table nestled into the overhang of the slanted walls and the lofted sleeping area. There was still no kitchen or, for that matter, furniture besides the table, chairs, and bed.

“The bed was definitely on the floor this morning,” Enjolras said conversationally. It was an admirable attempt at calm which Grantaire tried to honor with his own measured response, though he struggled to think of any bright sides to offer in return.

“Heat rises?”

Enjolras looked like he’d just had an epiphany, which was confirmed quickly as he groaned and said, “I take my shirt off in my sleep when I get too warm.”

Grantaire barked a disbelieving laugh. “That’s our next step? Sleeping together?”

“It’s as good a guess as any,” Enjolras said defensively. “We’re flying blind here.”

Enjolras was trying, Grantaire realized. While Grantaire could rely on his knowledge of cinematic tropes amassed over twenty-nine years of existing as an incurable romantic, Enjolras really was flying blind. And he was doing his best to figure it out anyway. Grantaire didn’t have to rely entirely on his instincts to get them out of this; Enjolras was clever enough to make up for his own ignorance and dogged enough to push forward when Grantaire felt ennui begin to stall his own drive to escape. Enjolras was being brave for both of them.

He at least deserved Grantaire’s support.

So despite Grantaire’s reluctance, he abandoned his sandwich wrapper on the table and followed without protest when Enjolras suggested they turn in early to get it over with. The phrase get it over with admittedly didn’t inspire much eagerness in Grantaire, but Enjolras once again seemed more settled with a plan in mind and so Grantaire shoved his doubts regarding the nature of free will aside in the hopes that he would be able to fall asleep in the time it would take them to crawl back out of the deep corners of his brain where they had been banished.

It didn’t work. Neither, it seemed, had Enjolras’ plan to fall asleep early. The moonlight came and went behind partial clouds for what felt like hours while they lay side by side. Grantaire had strategically shifted onto his back once he realized neither of them were going to sleep anytime in the immediate future precisely in anticipation of the moment Enjolras spoke; he did not want to share a whispered conversation facing Enjolras in the half-darkness of a shared bed, next step be damned.

“What the fuck are we doing to do?” Enjolras said to the ceiling, the words settling heavy across the mere inches of space between them.

“Sleep,” Grantaire whispered back.

HELPING HANDS

When Grantaire woke the next morning, it was because Enjolras was stretching and his arm was trapped beneath Enjolras’ shoulder. He rolled, freeing the arm, and blinked sideways at an Enjolras who looked much better rested than he had the morning before.

“You know I’ve never met someone who ever sleeps on their stomach,” Enjolras said on a yawn, voice as languid as his limbs. “Doesn’t it hurt your neck?”

“I had sleep paralysis a lot as a kid,” Grantaire said. “I used to see things at the foot of my bed, so now I sleep where I can’t see them. Shadowy figures and stuff.”

“I didn’t know that about you.”

“I haven’t had them in years,” Grantaire said. He rarely thought about them at all, in fact, and it felt strange to offer up knowledge of them to Enjolras when that admission was usually reserved for people whose beds he shared on a regular basis. Which did not and likely would never include Enjolras.

The cabin was still without a bathroom, so once again they grabbed their toothbrushes and headed for Ginger & Joe. The walk was pleasant, though cold, and they made idle conversation to distract themselves from the uncertainty of what the day might have in store.

“So what would a holiday movie have?” Enjolras asked.

“There’s always a kid.”

Enjolras nodded thoughtfully before his eyes went wide and he made a sound of anguish. “Oh god, what if it’s one of those movies with like, a kid with a corporate woke disability? If we ever tell anyone what happened we’ll get canceled.”

Hearing Enjolras say what happened as if making it back to their own reality was a given was a good sign, Grantaire decided, but he wasn’t going to look too hard at it for fear that Enjolras would yank it back like a snail retreating into its shell when approached too quickly. “I don’t think you and I would collectively hallucinate something corporate woke. Knowing us it’ll probably be like, a dog with a mobility device.”

Enjolras shot him an odd look. “That’s ridiculous,” he said after a pause, “but you’re probably right. So we agree: anything that seems cliché or ridiculous, we go for it. Sound like a plan?”

Grantaire could think of no better option to agree, and that was the last either of them had to say on the subject.

***

Once again they emerged from the single-stall restroom side by side, toothbrushes hand, only this time to run head on into the shop’s owner. Her harried apology cut short when she noticed the toothbrushes.

“Oh, you poor things!” she cooed. “Is there no running water where you’re staying?”

“You could say that, yeah,” Enjolras said, blinking.

The owner – she could only be that, in this Christmas-cliché world they had found themselves in – was a short, older woman with greying auburn hair in two short braids. Straight out of central casting, Grantaire thought, with the lower half of a frilled apron just visible below the hem of a homey red-and-cream sweater. She probably spent her spare hours saving horses from glue factories.

“I know exactly where you are,” she said, favoring them with an apple-cheeked smile. “The Honeymoon Hideaway, right? Those pipes are always freezing.”

Grantaire nodded acknowledgment, because Enjolras was busy closing his eyes in resignation. The owner – presumably the eponymous Ginger, if Grantaire knew his cliches at all – hummed sympathetically then clapped her hands, all business, startling Enjolras back to wakefulness. Perhaps he hadn’t slept as well as Grantaire had thought. “Well, maybe this will cheer you up. We’re hosting a couple’s cookie decorating competition in a few minutes and I’m sure we can squeeze you in.”

There was no room for argument, so Grantaire and Enjolras pocketed their still-damp toothbrushes and trailed her meekly back out into the main storefront. “Anything cliché and ridiculous, huh?” Grantaire muttered for Enjolras’ ears only. Enjolras stepped on the back of his snow boot.

***

The gimmick of the competition only escaped being cliché by virtue of the fact that it was so ridiculous Grantaire had only ever seen something like it on Whose Line is it Anyway: only one of each pair of contestants could decorate the cookies, and that contestant was blindfolded – the “arms,” as Ginger cheerfully described it. Their partner was to be the eyes.

“You’ll be the arms,” Enjolras said. “I can’t draw.”

“I can’t draw either with my eyes closed.”

“Trust me,” Enjolras said bracingly, advancing on Grantaire with the blindfold, “I’m really good at giving directions.”

“Yeah, but I’m really bad at following them.” Nevertheless, Grantaire folded under the weight of Enjolras’ certainty as he always did and allowed Enjolras to tie the blindfold over his eyes. Nothing for it, and nothing to lose, really.

Piping icing with your eyes closed, he soon learned, was almost a zen activity. He only had to listen for Enjolras’ muttered instructions – left, or now a smiley face, up like two centimeters for the eyes – and trust his own muscle memory to judge spatial relationships for him. If there were winners they wouldn’t win, but that was never the point of Christmas competitions anyway.

Grantaire reached up with icing-sticky fingers to remove the blindfold as soon as Ginger called out time’s up, but Enjolras gently stilled his wrist. “Wait, wait, let me – okay, now.”

Of course Enjolras was going to document his reaction; Grantaire should have thought of it himself. He blinked, adjusting to the light again, and looked down at their workstation.

“It’s atrocious,” Enjolras said, gleeful.

Grantaire stared at the travesty before him with incredulity. “Two centimeters up?”

Enjolras shrugged. “I’m really bad at distances.”

They definitely wouldn’t win, but Grantaire couldn’t say it hadn’t been fun. Enjolras filmed Grantaire licking frosting off his fingers, and then Grantaire filmed Enjolras neatly decapitating all the spare gingerbread men. Mostly they filmed each other falling into giggles over their masterpiece, which Enjolras declared himself unable to eat and instead foisted off on Grantaire.

***

“That must have been one of them,” Enjolras said, once they had escaped Ginger’s sympathetic clutches and washed the smears of electric-blue frosting off Grantaire’s hands and wrists. He blinked several snowflakes off his eyelashes. “It’s too ‘Whose Line Christmas special’ to really just happen.”

“You’ve seen Whose Line?” Grantaire eyed the darkening sky. Enjolras’ snowflakes looked to be merely the forward guard of the coming deluge.

“I was a theatre major; of course I’ve seen Whose Line,” Enjolras said. He, too, watched the clouds rolling in, faster than the slight breeze dictated they should. Like a time-lapse of a storm. “That’s a bad sign.”

“We passed a thrift store yesterday. Let’s try on ugly sweaters until it passes,” Grantaire said.

Enjolras frowned. “Will it pass?”

The breeze had picked up after all, and Enjolras’ words were almost entirely lost to Grantaire’s ears. Grantaire turned heel and started off in the direction he remembered from the day before, braced against the sudden sideways-driving wind and swirling flurries. Cold air slammed into his lungs and filled him with a wild, electric determination. They would get out of this, and Enjolras would enjoy himself in the process if Grantaire had any say at all in the trajectory of his own life.

He turned his face into the driving snow and grinned at Enjolras’ greying outline. “Everything does.”

SWEATER WEATHER

The thrift store, when they found it, was more like a Goodwill than Grantaire would have expected out of a town so picturesque, but it meant he felt less guilty about stomping the snow off his boots onto the brown linoleum than he would have in a slightly more mom-and-pop establishment. The distant Christmas music was appropriately poppy and generic for a big-box chain like this one, though to the ears of someone who had worked customer service for a decade like Grantaire had, it grated no matter how quietly it was played.

Enjolras’ hair was soaked through and dripping rivulets down his neck. “I feel like I’ve been here before,” he said, head cocked to survey the clothing racks.

“Yeah, because it looks like every small-town Goodwill ever.” Grantaire wasted no time venturing into the racks in search of the promised sweaters, beckoning for Enjolras to follow with an absent hand.

The Christmas section was easy to find, guided by flashes of red between the aisles of houseware and children’s toys. The pop rendition of The Little Drummer Boy grew clearer as they approached, to Grantaire’s audible resignation.

“That’s every retail employee’s least favorite Christmas song,” he said in explanation when Enjolras raised questioning eyebrows at him.

“Really? Mine was ‘I Saw Three Ships’.” Enjolras shrugged out of his black wool peacoat and traded it for a gaudy gold cardigan festooned all over with small aluminum jingle bells. “No one else is here, and I didn’t see any changing rooms. You’ll have to be my mirror.”

“You are the fairest in the land. Especially in that,” Grantaire deadpanned. His mouth had gone suddenly dry. This felt like a movie; this was far more romantic in its way than waking up beside Enjolras had been. He didn’t know how to handle this.

At least they had chosen it. The store hadn’t appeared to them in a time of indecision; it had been Grantaire’s idea – a whim, really – and Enjolras had gone along with it for fun. Maybe that was why it felt different.

To be contrary, and to disguise the fact that he thought Enjolras looked good in any outfit no matter how hideous, Grantaire vetoed every sweater in Enjolras’ size until they reached the very last. Enjolras had obviously been avoiding it, and with good reason: it was a sickly Grinch-green knit featuring a distressingly realistic reindeer corpse, complete with little knit tire tracks. “Have you ever seen Grandma Got Run Over by a Reindeer?”

“Vehicular ho-ho-homicide? Really?” Enjolras said, pained, as he put it on. It fit perfectly.

Grantaire held up his hands in mock-defeat. “Magic mirror says you’ve never looked hotter; you have no choice.” He accepted Enjolras’ retribution – a crimson Grumpy Cat-branded sweatshirt with the slightly-less-imaginative tagline of ho-ho-humbug – with good grace.

***

The snow flurries had slowed by the time they exited the faux-Goodwill, having found a single disinterested employee to pay for the sweaters. The breeze was still biting cold, but they could see well enough to duck into a small Chinese restaurant just before the turnoff onto the road leading to the cabin and pick up dinner. Things were looking up.

Until they returned, laughing and shivering in their ugly sweaters, to a cold, silent cabin.

“Well, fuck,” said Grantaire. “Ginger wasn’t lying about this place being dodgy.” The absurdity of the situation hit him all at once, staring at Enjolras in his stupid reindeer carcass sweater, and he laughed. “Guess it’s a good thing we bought these sweaters.”

“I’m gonna commit a ho-ho-homicide,” Enjolras said. He shivered, a single, wracking shutter.

Grantaire shivered in sympathy. Or maybe shivers were contagious, like yawning. Either way, he wasn’t about to stick around to find out. “Early to bed again, I guess.”

Enjolras balked at getting crumbs on the sheets, so they stripped the heavy quilt from the bed and huddled together beneath it on the floor with their takeout, backs against the double-stacked mattresses. The loft was warmer than the main floor of the A-frame, but not by so much that Grantaire wanted to eat dinner outside the warmth of their blanket cave.

Enjolras poked morosely at a piece of carrot with his chopsticks. His good mood from earlier had vanished. “It would feel better if it wasn’t so… cold.”

“It’s probably just until we do whatever it is we’re supposed to do,” Grantaire said. It was not as reassuring as he had intended it to be.

“I mean cold as in… impersonal,” Enjolras said. He was carefully arranging grains one by one into the shape of a Christmas tree. “Like it doesn’t matter if we’re uncomfortable or creeped out, so long as we do it. Like, what if we don’t want to cuddle for warmth?”

“Do you not want to?” It didn’t hurt, after so many years knowing it instinctively, but there was a new ache pricking Grantaire’s chest: the possibility that they were in this situation because Grantaire wanted to. He didn’t like to think about the implications of that.

“I don’t want to be forced into it. I don’t like being powerless.”

Grantaire ate his dumplings. He himself tended to take solace in having their path decided for them; it was reassuring to be told they were on the right track. Enjolras, always a trailblazer, of course would find that constricting, and Enjolras raged like a wolf in a trap when he felt shackled by any institution, societal or supernatural.

“They can’t force us to cross our own boundaries,” Grantaire said, half to himself, though he expected in sleep he would seek out any source of heat without care for Enjolras’ boundaries or his own. “We won’t freeze just because we don’t cuddle.”

“Don’t be stupid,” Enjolras said, shoving his food away with a sigh. “I just wish it was my choice.”

It was his choice; he hadn’t taken the out Grantaire had gallantly offered him through gritted teeth. But Grantaire understood. Their manufactured meet-cute pressed uncomfortably against his ribcage, acid like heartburn. For Enjolras, who felt nothing but friendship for Grantaire, it must be nauseating.

He stacked his takeout boxes with Enjolras’ and stood, taking the quilt so that Enjolras was forced to stand with him or lose its warmth. “There’s still no trash can, but I bet those’ll be gone by morning anyway."

Enjolras rolled his eyes instead of scowling, which was progress. "I'm going to have aged at least two decades by the time we get out of this. We'll get back to the present and boom, late forties."

"Very The Santa Clause of you."

"You know I don't know what that means," Enjolras said as he reluctantly kicked off his jeans. "I can feel my hair going grey as we speak."

Grantaire looked away. Enjolras' hair was mussed and staticky and as gold as ever. "Stop fishing; you've still got your looks. I'd card you at a bar."

"My cross to bear," Enjolras said wearily. He tugged the quilt out of Grantaire's hands and spread it over the bed again, slipping beneath it to watch idly as Grantaire stepped out of his pants as well.

They kept their sweaters on for added warmth and Enjolras did make a solid attempt at cuddling, stiff and sullen though it was. Grantaire held him tighter. “If it helps,” he murmured, when he felt Enjolras’ shoulders sag dejectedly in his arms, “this is my choice.”

Enjolras groped for Grantaire’s hand and squeezed. “It helps a little.”

Slowly, his body relaxed, and by the time Grantaire finally felt sleep overtake them both it almost seemed natural to be holding each other like lovers.

SPONTANEITY

Grantaire’s first thought when he woke was that the heat had come back on in the night. His second was a memory: Enjolras’ warning that he removed his shirt during the night when he got too warm. His third and final thought was that Enjolras was a great cuddler when he didn’t know he was doing it.

Grantaire took the chance to watch him. Enjolras had always been lovely, but up close, face peaceful in sleep, Grantaire could catalogue the ways Enjolras had changed in the nine years they had known each other – the nine years Grantaire had been pining for him, if he allowed himself to be honest in this brief moment of privacy.

He had never felt that strongly about Colin. He felt no guilt in sharing a bed with Enjolras so soon after the breakup, only guilt that the situation was forcing Enjolras into something Grantaire had wanted for nearly a decade and Enjolras didn’t want at all.

Enjolras’ brow furrowed and his eyelids fluttered, the first signs of wakefulness. He had crow’s feet at the corners of his eyes, Grantaire realized.

Enjolras blinked awake, eyes crinkling on a yawn, and stretched. Grantaire watched as he experienced the same three thoughts Grantaire had, ending on a grimace not unlike the one Grantaire was sure he himself had worn. “I guess this is probably what they wanted,” he said, flashing Grantaire a crooked smile. Grantaire smiled back, and for just a second Enjolras’ eyes tracked it with something like wistfulness before he looked away and pulled himself out of Grantaire’s arms. “But that’s probably not.”

It was quiet, spoken with his back to Grantaire as Enjolras stood to pick up his tangled shirt and sweater, but Grantaire heard it. Whatever Enjolras had seen in that returning smile had brought him back to reality – not the manufactured world they had found themselves in, but real reality where Grantaire kept his wistful thoughts to himself and Enjolras didn’t think such thoughts at all.

Grantaire remained in bed while Enjolras puttered around the lower level of the cabin searching for any other changes. Too soon – it was not, after all, a large cabin – he was roused by Enjolras’ sing-songed call of, “guess what I found.”

“A bathroom?” Grantaire levered himself out of bed and slouched over to the railing of the loft, looking down into Enjolras’ mischievous, laughing face.

“Actually, yes. But more importantly: our next step.”

***

Ginger was happy to give them directions to the local skating pond when they stopped by Ginger & Joe, though the price for her help was two hot chocolates for the road, free of charge, and a chat.

“Water back on today?”

“Yeah, although our heat was out for part of the night,” Grantaire said. Enjolras pretended to drink his hot chocolate. He had silently assigned Grantaire the task of interacting with Ginger the day before, and it seemed he was continuing his vow of silence this morning.

Ginger clucked her tongue. “I should talk to the property manager; you two have had to deal with so much there. At least you’re in the honeymoon phase. Any excuse to cuddle; I remember how it is.” She winked. Enjolras accidentally inhaled his whipped cream.

***

The twin pairs of ice skates Enjolras had found hanging from a nail beside the front door of the cabin were, of course, perfectly sized for their feet. They took turns with the camera as they tightened their skates at the edge of the pond, shaking through bouts of laughter over Enjolras’ struggle with the stiff laces.

Grantaire leaned back as best he could while balanced on two blades and raised arch brows. “You tie up your docs every day, what’s so hard about this?”

“My fingers are cold! These gloves kind of suck.”

Enjolras waited until he had successfully double-knotted both pairs of laces and they were balanced on the edge of the pond before he asked, barely waiting for Grantaire’s head-shake of no before he continued, “can you skate? Great, me neither.”

Even if that was true, Enjolras took to the motions unfairly quickly. Before long he was gliding confident circles around Grantaire, bombarding him with questions for the camera.

“We’re here on the ice with this season’s hottest new rookie. R, do you have any hopes for this season you want to share?”

“A media blackout,” Grantaire grumbled, out of breath. “How are you so good at this?”

“I was really into roller blading in elementary school. Now, you had a pretty nasty fall in the first period; how are you feeling being back on the ice?”

Since he couldn’t catch up to Enjolras to trip him, and because tripping Enjolras would jeopardize the camera, Grantaire gave in and only scowled at him. Even that he couldn’t maintain for long; it wasn’t a hardship to watch Enjolras skate rings around him, laughing face flushed with cold. It was the most carefree Grantaire had seen him since the onset of their predicament.

“Come on, skate with me,” he called, cajoling. “Who cares if it’s romantic; it’s just fun.”

Grantaire suspected that much of the fun was in watching Grantaire struggle, but he made his way to where Enjolras waited anyway and accepted the hand offered to him. To Enjolras’ credit, he held himself to a slower pace than he had before, though with all Grantaire’s concentration fixed on not pitching forwards and bringing Enjolras-avec-camera down with him, he couldn’t spare much thought to gratitude.

He was starting to get the hang of it when Enjolras turned to grin at him. “See? Totally romantic. This is definitely it.”

The turn was Grantaire’s undoing; the swing of Enjolras’ arm had thrown off his hard-won balance and he went down. He quickly made the decision to stay down. If Enjolras was right then they had done what was asked of them, and unless a portal home was going to open itself up in the ice – unlikely at best – there was no reason to keep courting a sprained wrist.

Enjolras had skated a few strides ahead to wait for Grantaire to struggle feet, camera cradled safely against his chest. Grantaire had underestimated his stability on his feet. Instead of making a further fool of himself for the camera’s eye, he starfished himself across the ice and cried, all breathy dramatics, “Jo! Jo, Laurie, help!”

Enjolras’ face lit up. He tucked the camera into his coat pocket and began an exaggerated, slow-motion reenactment of Laurie’s mad dash. “Amy! Amy, hold on!” He was laughing too hard to continue.

Grantaire resisted all attempts to help him up, so in the end Enjolras dragged him by his shoulders all the way to the edge of the pond where he could clamber onto the bank on hands and knees. Upright once more, he inspected his hands. His left glove had caught a rough patch of ice on one fall or another and torn across the palm, which was scraped red and stinging lightly.

“I didn’t take you for a Little Women fan,” he said absently.

Enjolras was struggling with his laces again, frowning at his uncooperative fingers. “It’s my mom’s favorite movie.”

“My mom’s too.” Grantaire rubbed his palms together, and as he did so, saw that Enjolras was doing the same. “You want to go look for gloves? I fucked up mine and yours suck.”

WHATEVER YOU WISH FOR

Without much direction in mind they turned off onto a wide street perpendicular to the main row of shops which opened up into a little town square. They had walked past it on the previous two nights and seen it empty, but today it had been transformed into a small Christmas market.

“How convenient,” Enjolras said dryly.

Buying gloves could wait, they decided, in favor of wandering through the stalls and soaking up as much of the Hallmark atmosphere as they could. They bought small cups of cider to warm their hands as they poked at handmade ornaments and stockings, avoiding the eyes of the vendors and their cash ONLY signs.

Enjolras stroked the sleeve of a child’s cashmere sweater, avoiding Grantaire’s eyes as well. “Is it weird doing this with me, since you just got out of a relationship?”

Grantaire thought about it before answering. In truth, he hadn’t thought much about Colin at all since they had arrived; even his thoughts that morning had been more about Enjolras. They had broken up in the first place because neither of them could imagine a couple’s Christmas together. If Grantaire was honest – which he owed to himself after that morning – the only person he had been able to imagine a couple’s Christmas with for years now was Enjolras.

“It is a little, but it’s not too bad,” he said. “I wasn’t looking forward to spending Christmas alone.”

“Is that why you suggested the cabin?”

“Kind of, yeah.”

“You don’t need an excuse to hang out with us, you know,” Enjolras said, his eye caught by something over Grantaire’s shoulder. “We all missed you. Oh, we have to.”

Following Enjolras’ pointed finger, Grantaire saw what had made his eyes light up with a passion Grantaire had almost thought only injustice could spark: a small red shed and three smaller, disinterested reindeer.

“There’s a petting zoo here?” he said, letting his bafflement mask his actual primary emotion, which was pity. The animals had been given a patch of the square that must be grass when not covered with snow and didn’t seem to mind being pet by sticky-fingered children, but it still seemed like a sad way to spend a snowy day as a small ungulate. But Enjolras was delighted and Grantaire was not about to rain on his parade after he’d just said he had missed Grantaire, so bafflement it was.

Enjolras was ignoring him anyway, moving ever closer to the makeshift paddock with a hesitant but purposeful stride. “I’ve never seen a real reindeer before. There was this movie I saw as a kid – Annabelle something. It was about a reindeer who wanted to fly with Santa.”

“She was a cow,” Grantaire said. “And she could talk.”

Enjolras flashed him a smile so bright and joyful that Grantaire was momentarily dumbstruck. “Yes. And the boy who owned her couldn’t.”

“Corporate woke,” Grantaire said, to make Enjolras smile that crinkled-eye smile at him again. After that admission, there was no way they weren’t going to pet the reindeer.

***

Pity or not, Grantaire had also never seen a real reindeer, and he had to admit the child in his rejoiced at the feeling of a soft nose under his palm, lipping gently at his other hand in search of more of the carrots he had shelled over the only cash in his wallet to purchase. He supposed it was worth it.

What was worth more was Enjolras’ obvious delight. He was nearly in raptures over the smallest reindeer, and he kept a wistful eye on it even after their fifteen minutes in the paddock was up.

“I watched that movie constantly,” he said, once the animal was fully out of sight. “That’s kind of why I said yes when you asked. I wanted to recapture whatever it was that made me love it so much.”

Grantaire didn’t ask why he’d stopped. He stuffed his cold left hand into his pocket. “I was kind of lonely even before I broke up with Colin. He ran in different circles than all of my friends and I felt like I was drifting apart from all of you. And I think it’s cool that we’re all still friends even though we’re basically thirty, and I wanted to celebrate that instead of being sad on Christmas.”

“Excuse you, I’m only twenty-seven.”

“An infant.” Grantaire dodged Enjolras’ attempt to step on his boot again. “The light’s going. We should probably buy gloves before the vendors start to pack up.”

“I always thought it was unrealistic that she gave up her wish so the boy could speak again. Kids are never that selfless,” Enjolras said thoughtfully, scanning the stalls for gloves.

“You wouldn’t have done it?”

“I would now. Back then I would have gone with what I wanted for myself.”

They had walked the length of the market in their hunt, and Grantaire finally spotted the main attraction, seated on a throne of plastic candy canes and drooping pine wreaths. He nudged Enjolras. “Well, now’s your chance to wish for someone else’s happiness.”

The teenager posing for pictures with dubious children was the least convincing Santa Grantaire had ever seen. He was in the throes of puberty and hadn’t had a chance to fill out after what looked to have been a very recent growth spurt, and his coat continually slipped down his narrow shoulders. Still, a mall Santa was a mall Santa.

“Go on, tell Santa what you want for Christmas,” Grantaire said gleefully. Enjolras, perched precariously on the teen’s lap, looked suddenly sad.

“I want,” he said, slowly, with an indecipherable look at Grantaire, and then he shook his head and turned to speak lowly to the teenage Santa. The boy frowned in confusion, glanced at Grantaire, snorted and pointed back the way they had come.

Enjolras hopped down with a cheery “thank you!” but by the time he reached Grantaire he was troubled again.

“What did you ask him?” Grantaire asked, falling in beside him.

“Where we could find gloves.” Enjolras stopped, unimpressed. “Do you really think I’d spill my secrets to a sixteen-year-old in a party city Santa suit?”

Grantaire wasn’t entirely sure he hadn’t.

ROCKIN’ AROUND

Back at the cabin once the light had fully faded, Grantaire noticed yet another anomaly.

“That shed wasn’t there this morning.”

“Probably an axe murderer,” Enjolras said.

There were no axe murders when they poked their heads in the door, though with no light inside it would have been difficult to spot anyone lurking in the shadowy corners. The shed was filled nearly to the top with unlabeled cardboard boxes, perfect cover for unsavory persons wielding axes. Grantaire gave the boxes a wide berth, choosing caution over curiosity when the slam of the door behind Enjolras rattled them into ominous precarity. He stopped back directly into something bristly and plastic.

“A bit obvious,” Enjolras said.

“And everything else hasn’t been?”

They lugged the tree into the cabin with relatively little effort, and once it was propped upright in the conveniently-cleared corner where the dinner table had sat the night before Grantaire saw it was only four feet or so tall. Enjolras set about to standing it up properly in a complicated three-legged basin with too many bolts for Grantaire to understand but which Enjolras seemed confident around, so Grantaire left him to it and returned to the shed to hunt for the decoration that must be lurking within the avalanche-in-waiting that was the box stacks.

In the end there were three small boxes and one large, placed mercifully close to eye-height. Grantaire hefted one box under each arm and returned to the cabin. The tree was standing proudly if crookedly in its corner, and Enjolras was inspecting a stack of CDs before the ancient tv. Grantaire thought nothing of it except to wonder if the CDs had been there before.

On Grantaire’s second trip in, Enjolras was dancing. He was also untangling a string of lights, but the dancing caught Grantaire’s eye first.

Enjolras was not a good dancer. Grantaire had, in fact, never seen him dance until this moment, and now he understood why: Enjolras was always in control of his body, and this goofy, uninhibited kind of movement was not something he would ever feel comfortable doing in public. Enjolras danced like a dad at a bat mitzvah, and Grantaire found it adorable.

The song, though, was laughable.

“Why, Prime Minister, I didn’t know you had moves like that,” he said, loudly enough to cut through the final few repetitions of jump, jump for my love.

Enjolras startled and whirled, caught mid-shimmy. The lights hung limply from his hands. “Grantaire. I didn’t know you were there.”

“Yeah, clearly. Did you pick the CD?”

“No, I just grabbed the one on top and this was the first track. Not very Christmas-y if you ask me.”

“I know you don’t watch Christmas movies, but the fact that you’ve never seen Love Actually is still astounding to me,” Grantaire said with a shake of his head. Astounding, yes, but also a little charming. Grantaire was in too deep. He waggled his eyebrows suggestively to cover for it. “Put on something more seasonally appropriate and I’ll show you my moves.”

Enjolras did not dance with as much fluidity or abandon now that he had someone else in the room with him, but he did bop around as he zig-zagged the Christmas lights across the front of the tree, and he tapped his feet along to Jingle Bell Rock while they unboxed the motley collection of ornaments and stale popcorn strings Grantaire had ferried in from the shed.

***

“It’s a little Charlie Brown Christmas,” Grantaire said, standing back to view their lopsided creation, “but I like it.” Maybe it was the Vince Guaraldi playing softly in the background making him poetic, but their little tree seemed like a perfect metaphor for the situation they had found themselves in: a plastic imitation of the real thing, but still beautiful when they put a little work into it.

“We haven’t even plugged the lights in yet,” Enjolras said.

Grantaire elected to take the stacked boxes back to the shed while Enjolras attempted to crawl under the tree without disturbing any ornaments to reach the outlet. He knew that once the tree was lit and glowing incandescent gold in its corner he wouldn’t want to brave the cold outside, and someone needed to shut the door to the shed before any small critters with sharp teeth decided it was the perfect place to keep warm for the night.

He was halfway to the shed when Enjolras screamed. It was not a startled scream or even a pained one – it was a scream of terror. Grantaire left the shed to whatever critters might make use of it and raced back to the cabin to find Enjolras standing, stock still and eyes wild, staring at the bed. On the ground floor.

“I’m not hurt. I didn’t see it,” he said faintly. “I plugged the lights in and my vision went white and fuzzy like the first time and then – it was like this.” He scrubbed his hands over his face and lowered himself shakily to the floor. “I guess we were both supposed to go out to the shed.”

“Yeah,” Grantaire said. He felt shaken – not as shaken as Enjolras looked, but enough so that it was difficult to sound reassuring. He had been so sure that the power controlling the situation was benevolent, and Enjolras was fine, but he was scared, and in Grantaire’s mind that did not count as fine. Grantaire had spent so much time trying to coax Enjolras out of his fear; this felt unfair.

Enjolras watched him, waiting for Grantaire to say more, and when nothing more was said his brows came down in concern. “I’m not hurt. I’m okay,” he repeated.

Grantaire breathed deeply. “Right.”

“It was an accident. You didn’t know.”

Grantaire blinked at Enjolras. Of course it was an accident, and Grantaire didn’t blame himself for leaving Enjolras to face it alone. Enjolras didn’t need to take care of him. But then, one could say Grantaire didn’t need to be taking care of Enjolras, and he did it anyway because that was what friends did. Grantaire had just forgotten that in recent months.

“I know,” he said. “But I’m sorry you had to go through it.”

“At least now we know not to play with electricity unless we’re really sure we’re ready for it,” Enjolras said, with a conspiratorial grin.

After the fright the abrupt remodel had caused – and despite it – falling asleep with the glow of the tree to serve as a gentle night light was comforting, and so was the way Enjolras unhesitatingly curled under Grantaire’s arm even though there was no need to share warmth. It was nice to be cared for.

SANTA’S HELPER

The next day dawned sunny and bitterly cold, which put Enjolras in better spirits. In the bright light of morning it was easier to look back on the events of the night before as a harmless accident, frightening but no one’s fault. The cold made the world feel sharper, realer than it had in the hazy glow of the Christmas lights.

“See? Serendipitous that we bought gloves yesterday,” Enjolras said, though his gloved hands were shoved in his pockets.

“Serendipitous?”

“Well, we have to assume at least some of our choices are our own.” Grantaire couldn’t fault Enjolras’ chagrined insistence on the existence of free will; that was his coping mechanism too.

Enjolras’ cheer was infectious, and they were soon jostling each other companionably as they walked and admired the town in the sunlight. It was doubly magical today without the dampening grey of clouds, and the decorations glittered as brightly as the snow-coated roofs.

Enjolras stopped abruptly before a tinsel-strewn storefront that had, as usual, not been there the day before. “Well, you don’t have to tell me twice.”

The shop, once they were inside, was at once cozy and disconcertingly deep. The aisles blurred as they stretched towards the back of the store, like a cartoon whose background animators had taken a few shortcuts. There was no one else in sight – no shopkeeper, no store associates, no browsing customers – which gave the place an eerie, echoing feel, so Grantaire and Enjolras stuck close to the cheery window display with its model trainset and tiny Christmas village.

“I remember these,” Enjolras said, picking up a fuzzy rabbit figurine in a train conductor’s overalls and striped shirt. “Calico Critters. My cousin had tons of them. I was always so jealous.”

Grantaire examined an orange-and-white cat seated on the train platform’s single bench. It was oddly textured when he stroked a finger between its ears: soft, but the softness was only a thin layer atop its hard plastic skull. “They’re cute. Wanna fuck them up?”

Enjolras frowned. “Is that what we’re supposed to do?”

“Think about what Christmas movies are set in toy stores,” Grantaire said. It was a futile request, but he was curious what off-the-wall answers Enjolras would come up with.

“Miracle on 34^th Street?” Enjolras said, which was a good start until he followed it up with, “Carol?”

“Okay, you and I are going to have a movie night. Just the two of us. I’ll show you some real Christmas movies,” Grantaire said, muscling down any fondness that might otherwise have bled into the words.

“What, like Sleepless in Seattle?”

“Yes. Now trust me on this one.”

It turned out that Enjolras did not have the temperament needed to play with dolls. That was alright; Grantaire still had childish imagination enough for the both of them, and Enjolras did his part by supplying different squeaky voices for each doll handed to him. He complied easily with the gruesome bent of Grantaire’s invented storyline, which was unsurprising considering Enjolras’ savage political philosophy.

***

Some indeterminate amount of time later, they were engaged in an elaborate re-enactment of the Christmas Truce when the bell above the shop door sounded and a family of four bustled in with a burst of sudden chatter and a swirl of cold air. The adults and the smaller of the two children soon disappeared into the indistinct recesses of the store, but the older, a boy of about ten, made his way toward Enjolras and Grantaire. Enjolras’ high-pitched attempt at a French accent squeaked into silence.

The boy stopped in front of him, scowling. “Are those rabbits dead?”

“No,” Enjolras said.

“Dying,” said Grantaire.

“Can I join?”

Grantaire would have said no, because he dealt with enough petulant preteens in his real life, but Enjolras was a softer touch. He handed over the French combatant and picked up one of the dying rabbits, offering the boy an inviting grin. “Sure thing. Can you do a German accent? Mine is terrible.”

The boy, Liam, took to Enjolras quickly. He was dismissive when asked about his parents and bitter about being in the store at all, since it was his sister’s narrowly-averted tantrum that had brought them there instead of the comic book store he had wanted to visit. But he shook his head when Enjolras offered to change their game to something with superheroes, a light in his eyes Grantaire recognized from years of taking care of younger siblings: a kid with an unconventional interest who has found an adult to share it with.

“Did you know that the during the siege of Stalingrad the German soldiers celebrated Christmas even though they were trapped and going to die?” he asked, settling in cross-legged across from Enjolras within the oval confines of the train tracks.

Grantaire left them to it. Enjolras was good with disaffected youth; Grantaire would only get in the way. Instead, he took the opportunity without Enjolras by his side to venture slightly deeper into the store – not deep enough for the fuzzy edges of the shelves to make him dizzy, but far enough to find the arts and crafts section. He had a plan in mind.

***

It was easy to steal a pack of permanent markers and a stack of posterboard since there was no one around to pay for them, and even if there had been the theft would have been worth it for Enjolras’ shock when Grantaire rapped on the display window to get his attention, posterboard held up to the glass.

Liam mouthed the words as he read, either to himself or aloud. “For now let me say…”

Grantaire flipped to the next sign. “Without hope or agenda…” Enjolras was shaking his head, uncomprehending, as from the looks of it Liam explained the cultural context he was missing.

Liam was laughing too hard to keep reading as Grantaire flipped through just because it’s Christmas – (and at Christmas you tell the truth) and landed on the piece de resistance: thanks for being a rein-dear friend. He had doodled two reindeer skating in the bottom corner – he would have gone for another ho-ho-homicide joke, but there were limits to how gory he was willing to be around children.

Enjolras, now informed enough to laugh along, rolled his eyes and unfolded himself from the chaos of the Christmas village. He had a shifty look to him when he and Liam met Grantaire outside, which was explained when he pulled several rabbits out of his pocket and handed them to Liam.

“You didn’t pay for those,” Grantaire said, to keep up appearances in front of an impressionable young mind.

“There’s no one to pay.”

“You’re a good artist,” Liam said, unbothered by his new status as a criminal accomplice. “Can I have the one of the reindeer skating? I want to give it to my sister. She’s five so she can’t read, so it doesn’t matter what it says.”

Grantaire tugged Enjolras closer to murmur under his breath, “kids are never that selfless, huh?”

Five minutes later, having bid farewell to Thomas and his stolen rabbits and safely out of earshot, Enjolras barked a triumphant ha. “That definitely counted. Teaching a child the spirit of giving?”

“It was the signs,” Grantaire said.

“It was not the signs.”

It probably wasn’t the signs, but they had made Enjolras laugh and so Grantaire didn’t care.

GHOSTS

That night, full up on pancakes and fake syrup, they returned to the cabin to find it had sprouted a small kitchenette.

Enjolras groaned. “You’re telling me we ate Denny’s and we didn’t have to?”

“But The Santa Clause,” Grantaire said, though he too felt vaguely sick and Enjolras wouldn’t get the reference anyway.

As it turned out they did have to eat Denny’s, because the only edible thing in the kitchenette was a tub of Swiss Miss mix and a packet of marshmallows. Still, real food or not, it was a clear indication that something had gone right during the day.

Grantaire grinned. “It was the signs.”

“It was not the signs.”

The other addition to the cabin was a spacious, plush loveseat piled high with knitted blankets and throw pillows. There was plenty of room for two grown men once the pillows were shifted out of the way, but without any discussion Grantaire and Enjolras decided not to move them once they had migrated to the couch with their mugs of hot chocolate. The furniture clearly wanted them to sit close together, and neither of them wanted to break their streak of good luck by defying it.

Grantaire tucked his feet beneath him, knees pressed against Enjolras’ thigh. “So how’d you change his mind? I know it wasn’t your extensive knowledge of Soviet military history.”

“I was a pretty disaffected ten-year-old. I know how they work,” Enjolras said with a shrug, blowing on his hot chocolate.

“You? Disaffected? Color me shocked.

Enjolras pressed his thigh against Grantaire’s knee in a chastising motion. His posture had gone smaller and he stared into his mug, hands wrapped around it for warmth or, perhaps, courage. “I spent a lot of time bouncing around relatives’ houses while my parents were divorcing. I was kind of angry all the time.”

Grantaire had known Enjolras’ parents were divorced, of course, and that it was an aspect of Enjolras’ life that he didn’t like to talk about, but he hadn’t realized that Enjolras’ childhood had mirrored the childhoods of so many people Grantaire cared about. Grantaire had been that refuge for Eponine and Gavroche and had seen firsthand how it hurt them.

“I never talked about it with you, or, you know, Eponine, because of Gavroche, and because… I always thought it wasn’t a big deal. But I’ve been learning recently that it kind of was. And that Christmas doesn’t have to be a painful thing.” Enjolras looked up from his mug, gifting Grantaire with a smile both wry and grateful. Grantaire’s heart turned over in his chest with an overwhelming desire to protect the child whose unpleasant memories of Christmases past had put that wryness into Enjolras’ smiles. “It’s been a really long time since I’ve had a Christmas like this. So thank you. And thank whoever’s in charge of this,” Enjolras added, with a glance skyward.

“I thought it was me,” Grantaire said, without thinking too hard about the consequences. Enjolras had trusted him, and if there was any time to be honest about his own feelings it was now, in a situation literally designed for Grantaire to confess, even if it ended in embarrassment.

Enjolras laughed in disbelief. “What? This is clearly my wish fulfilment, why would it be you?”

“Because it’s a romcom,” Grantaire said, “and you’re here with me. I would have thought it was kind of obvious.”

For just a second, Enjolras’ wide-eyed gaze said that he understood. Grantaire swallowed his anxiety and didn’t look away; they were on the precipice of something and he’d be damned if he turned away from it before he figured out what it was.

But before either of them could say anything, there came a sound that made Enjolras jump, sloshing hot chocolate over his hands – a sound like snow falling off the roof, or something heavy landing on it.

Enjolras’ eyes were even wider and filled with something worse than rejection, breath coming quickly as he set the hot chocolate on the floor and wiped unsteady hands on a crocheted blanket.

“Saint Nick?” Grantaire tried, but it fell flat as the wind kicked up into a scream. He didn’t know what to do in the face of Enjolras’ panic in a situation where that panic looked to be entirely justified. The only thing he knew was that in every situation where Enjolras had panicked before, what had helped was having things to do. Steps to take.

***

Step one was to barricade the door. If there was something outside besides the wind, Grantaire was not about to let it in.

It was only when Grantaire had picked up their small dining table with the intent to wedge it under the door handle that Enjolras spoke. “What are you doing?”

“I know you haven’t seen Home Alone either, but trust me on this,” Grantaire said, breathless with the strain. “Nothing is getting in this fucking door.”

There was not much in the way of furniture, which suited Grantaire perfectly. It let him choose the least applicable objects he could find for his barricade, which kept Enjolras distracted with questions about why Grantaire had chosen to point a whisk attached to an extension cord directly at the door.

“For intruders,” Grantaire said. “Obviously.”

Enjolras had gathered every pillow within arms’ reach onto his lap during the first gust of wind. Slowly, as he directed Grantaire in the placement of the coatrack, shoe stand, Christmas tree, and assorted kitchen implements, he began to extricate himself from his protective heap. By the time Grantaire had found a purpose for everything in the cabin that wasn’t tied down, he was sitting upright again.

As he did so the wind died down, and the murmur of an ordinary snowfall brushing against the cabin walls resumed. The tension in Enjolras’ body uncoiled and he blinked, for the first time seeing what a Rube Goldberg contraption Grantaire had constructed. “This is what Home Alone is about?”

“You have no idea,” Grantaire said.

Enjolras was still reluctant to leave the couch, so Grantaire moved their mugs to the sink and pulled the heavy quilt from the bed. The handmade blankets were conveniently full of enough holes that they wouldn’t be warm enough cover on their own – probably so that the idea of sleeping separately was too unappealing to attempt. Grantaire didn’t mind. At this point he had resigned himself to sleeping next to Enjolras every night, even if his unanswered confession still hung awkwardly in the air between them.

Once again they fell asleep in the glow of the Christmas lights which still blocked the door, surrounded by Grantaire’s improvised traps and Enjolras’ mountain of pillows. Grantaire woke once in the night to Enjolras’ head on his chest, breaths even and calm.

DATELESS

Despite how peaceful he had been in sleep, Enjolras was quiet and drawn in the morning when they made their customary stop to see Ginger. She clucked over them with her usual sympathy at the sight of Enjolras’ pale face and dark circles. “That windstorm last night must have kept you up; the wind goes right through that place. Sounds like a banshee.”

The snow glittering on the roofs of town didn’t look disturbed at all. Enjolras looked miserable. He did, though, exchange a knowing glance with Grantaire at Ginger’s cheerfully familiar, “well, maybe this will cheer you up.”

Unfortunately it did not. Enjolras grasped Grantaire’s hand tightly enough to rearrange bones as Ginger explained that the runners-up of the cookie contest had apparently won a couples’ gift basket put together by all the stores on the block and, apparently, Grantaire and Enjolras were the runners-up.

“Guess it was too unbelievable to make us the winners,” Grantaire muttered. Enjolras didn’t laugh.

“You two deserve it,” Ginger said, handing over a large wicker basket with a sprig of mistletoe tied to the handle. Grantaire tried unsuccessfully to take it one-handed and still keep hold of the camera, since Enjolras had not let go of his other hand. “I’ve seen you with that camera; I think it’s such a sweet way to document your honeymoon. Oh, and with the mistletoe, wouldn’t this be a lovely scene to capture? Here, let me – “

She pushed the basket into Grantaire’s hand and made a grab for the camera, and Enjolras dropped Grantaire’s hand so quickly that it spasmed with the sudden release of pressure, turned heel, and fled. It was more of a dignified stalk than a mad dash for the door, but it was definitely flight. Grantaire had no idea why.

He stared after Enjolras for a moment before turning to offer Ginger a sheepish smile and handing the basket back. “He’s not used to being out in public like this,” he said, the most believable cover he could think of on the spot. It was probably somewhere in the realm of 2005 here; Ginger would understand.

With a sympathetic nod and a cliché “go to him,” Ginger ushered Grantaire out of the shop to where Enjolras was turning up snow on the sidewalk outside with his pacing.

Grantaire approached him carefully. “What was that about?”

“We shouldn’t talk about it. I don’t want to talk about it,” Enjolras said, shaking his head with a vehemence that took Grantaire by surprise. A mistletoe kiss was a step up, sure, and Enjolras had every right to resent having his choice taken from him, but Grantaire wouldn’t have thought it would incite this sort of panic. More likely Enjolras’ it and Grantaire’s that were not the same thing.

He kept his tone gentle and his footsteps light. “Talk about what?”

“Us. It’s a bad idea.”

That hurt. It had seemed in the moment that Grantaire’s confession had gone over well, and that Enjolras might even make a confession of his own before the screaming started and everything got put on hold. Of course it hurt to hear that Enjolras wouldn’t entertain the thought at all in the light of day. But the part of Grantaire’s awareness that had been attuned to Enjolras’ moods all throughout their stay in romcom hell heard the certainty in Enjolras’ words as something different.

“There is no us outside of this,” he said firmly, hoping firmness was what Enjolras needed. He couldn’t make the lie sound gentle. “you’re single, I’m single, and we both needed a magic-of-Christmas spiritual journey. That’s all. There’s a million movies like that. They don’t end up together in Last Christmas. I mean, he’s a ghost, but –”

“This isn’t what you were saying last night.”

“What I feel doesn’t matter if you don’t – “

“I said I don’t want to talk about it.”

And then Enjolras was gone, striding away down the street with a pace close to panic. Grantaire didn’t follow.

Each store he walked past seemed to be playing the same song, a mournful rendition of The Holly and the Ivy that did nothing to make Grantaire feel better. He didn’t particularly want to hear about sweet Jesus Christ on Christmas day in the morn. He wasn’t even sure there would be a Christmas morn for the two of them. It had been Christmas eve when they arrived, but no one they encountered had so far shown any signs of Christmas being over, or even near. It was if they existed in a perpetual state of almost-Christmas.

***

Time passed oddly without Enjolras, almost like the script was just skipping over the hours until they were together again, whenever that might be. Grantaire hoped it was hours and not years; he didn’t think he could take years of eternal Christmas. Not even he was that romantic.

Without Enjolras there to worry over and take care of, Grantaire couldn’t keep the bleak unreality of their situation away. Caring for Enjolras gave him something to do, like Enjolras’ steps did for Enjolras, and he had no clue how else to keep the hopelessness at bay. He tried to window shop, but he kept losing time and even if he had been thinking clearly enough to buy anything there was no saying it would come with them when they returned home.

Only one moment in that time stood out clearly. Grantaire had stopped before the window display of the toy store, watching the model train run its little circling course with a melancholy not especially warranted by the few hours he and Enjolras had been apart. Dusk had fallen and the fairy lights glinted in the window, blurred by the glass into little balls of warmth. It was very Carol or Miracle on 34^th Street, which only skewed Grantaire’s sense of time further.

Beyond the trainset, before the shelves faded into nothingness, Enjolras stood before a wicker sleigh pulled by eight child-sized stuffed reindeer. Grantaire watched him through the glass until Enjolras felt his gaze and turned, meeting his eyes for a moment. He looked away.

Grantaire followed Enjolras back to the cabin at a safe distance, only to find when he arrived that the couch had vanished during the day and there was once again no choice but to share the bed. Enjolras lay more stiffly than he had their first night together, staring determinedly at the ceiling.

“I’m sorry I pushed you too far,” Grantaire said, unable to think of anything else.

Enjolras turned his face into the pillow. “I don’t want to talk about it. Please.”

I GIVE YOU MY HEART

Grantaire slept poorly, waking up several times in the night out of worry that he might be cuddling Enjolras in his sleep. No need to put Enjolras through even more things he wouldn’t consent to if they had a choice. He needn’t have worried; Enjolras had curled himself into a tight ball with his back to Grantaire well out of cuddling distance, small and dejected even in sleep. In the morning, he wouldn’t look Grantaire quite in the eye.

“I’m sorry,” he said, hunched over his morning hot chocolate. “I know yesterday sucked. I just think – we did things out of order. You were going to say something to me but it wasn’t the right point in the story, so the story punished us.”

“The windstorm,” Grantaire said, realization dawning. It made sense, and the thought that Enjolras’ flight had been not to do with Grantaire’s confession at all but instead his fear of the higher power that guided their actions – which Grantaire considered entirely reasonable after losing so much time the day before – soothed the sting of rejection enough that Grantaire could concentrate on the actual situation at hand.

“Not a windstorm,” Enjolras said.

Grantaire nodded slowly. “We hadn’t had our third-act misunderstanding yet.”

“Exactly. Sorry about that.”

“Had to happen, I guess. Could have been worse,” Grantaire with a shrug. “So what’s next, O genre-savvy one?”

***

The obvious thing to do was to seek out an over-the-top apology, and the obvious place to do it was Ginger & Joe. When they got there, however, Ginger apologetically informed them that after their exit the previous day she had given the basket to the second- runners-up, putting them back at square one and dampening Enjolras’ spirits, which had just begun to recover on the walk over.

“At least Ginger was nice about it,” Grantaire said. Enjolras stopped walking.

“You think her name is Ginger?”

“Yes? The shop is called Ginger and Joe; it’s obviously her name.”

“It’s Mabel. It’s on her nametag.” Enjolras started up again, shaking his head. “You seriously thought her name was Ginger?”

Grantaire tried to think back and see if his memory of Ginger-slash-Mabel included a nametag, but for the life of him he couldn’t picture it. He chalked it up to a glitch in the matrix and shrugged. “Well someone made me do all the talking, so I’m not surprised you had more time to read name tags than I did.”

“I’ll do the talking for the next person we meet, how’s that?” Enjolras said, and they trudged on.

***

They were wandering aimlessly through town, poking into side alleys in hopes of another Christmas village, when they spotted Liam. Grantaire made a significant face at Enjolras when it looked like Enjolras might step back and leave the conversation to Grantaire. Enjolras made a face back.

“How did your sister like the drawing?” he asked, bending with hands on knees to speak to Liam face-to-face. His entire being had softened at the sight of the boy in his puffy red coat stomping down snow much like Enjolras had been all week.

Liam shrugged. “She liked it, but she’s five so my parents took it so she won’t mess it up.”

“Sensible,” Enjolras said. “Where are your parents?”

“Over there,” Liam said, pointing down a cul-de-sac that did not contain a Christmas village but did house a small stage draped with holly branches and tinsel. The faint sound of holiday remixes over cheap portable speakers reached their ears. “My sister’s choir is singing. I’m supposed to watch.” He stuck out his tongue in disgust, surprising a genuine laugh out of Enjolras.

A holiday concert seemed as good a place as any for a grand gesture, so they left Liam to his boredom and went to inspect the stage. There were no onlookers or children in sight, rendering the ambient music more eerie than festive, but there was a microphone center stage placed so perfectly that Grantaire was almost offended at how obvious it was.

Enjolras had seen the hint too and was eyeing the microphone dubiously. Grantaire nudged him. “Speech, speech, speech,” he chanted under his breath. Parents and siblings were gathering behind them. “You have a captive audience.”

Enjolras snorted. “Are you kidding?”

“You’re a speechwriter. Should be a piece of cake,” Grantaire said with a shrug. There was something familiar about the opening chords of the song just starting up, but he couldn’t put his finger on it.

“Speechwriter,” Enjolras said. He too had his head cocked to listen, and to Grantaire’s surprise his eyes lit up with recognition the moment before Grantaire placed the song. “Hold that thought.”

Enjolras vaulted onto the stage, to the murmured confusion of the audience and Grantaire’s shocked silence. He grinned down at the crowed and winked at Grantaire. “Remember the dog with the mobility device?”

“What?”

Of course Grantaire remembered. His confusion was more to do with the fact that he had spent the morning under the assumption that it would be him up on that stage. He was the romcom expert, after all, and Enjolras would never go so far out of his comfort zone as to sing in public. He couldn’t even dance in front of just Grantaire.

But it made sense, too. It had to be Enjolras this time, because it had been Grantaire all the other times. That was how movies worked. There was an excitement lighting up Grantaire’s veins, a knowledge that this was it. They were close.

Liam had snuck through the crowd and now stood at Grantaire’s elbow. “What’s he doing?”

“A grand gesture,” Grantaire said.

Enjolras stumbled on some of the verses but he had the choruses down, and his voice, slightly pitchy though it was, came through clearly on I know why we’re falling for each other; I know why everybody loves Christmas.

“I’ve seen every Cinderella adaptation ever,” he called as the song faded out, grinning widely. “I broke my Christmas movie embargo for this one.”

Grantaire realized he’d completely forgotten to film.

THERE’S ONLY US

Enjolras jumped down, winded, to a smattering of baffled applause and an unimpressed, youthful drawl of “that was really embarrassing to watch.”

Liam looked vaguely nauseated, in the way children do when confronted with displays of romantic feeling. Grantaire grinned at him. “So is being a surly ten-year-old.”

Liam wrinkled his nose in the approximation of a sneer he would wear quite well in a few years. Then he rolled his eyes, relenting. “I guess it was kind of sweet.”

The chatter of many young voices made them turn. A gaggle of very small children were making their way onto the stage in a staggered line, directed by a harried young woman in a lopsided Santa hat. They arranged themselves into two rows, with much shuffling and whispering. The speakers crackled as the music cut out.

The woman in the Santa hat – the conductor, or more likely a kindergarten music teacher who had been strongarmed into organizing the concert – raised her hands, nodded conspicuously at the children, and took a deep breath.

It was not a good concert. That was to be expected from a choir of five- and six-year-olds, but it only served to firm up Grantaire’s resolution to never teach art to children. Enjolras, of course, was delighted.

After excruciating renditions of Jingle Bells, Santa Claus is Coming to Town, and the unexpected inclusion of I Saw Three Ships, the choir kicked off into the song Grantaire least wanted to hear in seven different keys at once. He turned to Enjolras with the intention to drag him bodily away from the racket if necessary, but the look on Enjolras’ face and the caterwauled words from the stage stopped him.

“On the third day of Christmas my true love gave to me…”

Enjolras met his eye. “Oh my god.”

“Oh my god what?” said Liam, but Enjolras and Grantaire were moving too fast to hear him, pushing past children in strollers and their irritated parents and breaking into a run by the time they had reached the end of the cul-de-sac and skidded onto the main street.

They couldn’t maintain their harried pace forever, but Enjolras picked back up into a power-walk once they were in sight of the cabin. “Fuck,” he said. “How many have we done? What counts?”

Grantaire stopped in his tracks. “The camera. Mabel said it. We’ve filmed everything we do.”

***

The moment they stepped inside, they set about to ransacking the cabin for anything that might allow them to watch their own footage, though neither of them was entirely sure what they were looking for. Just before frustration could set in, Grantaire found it: in the bag with the spare video cards, unnoticed before, a small coiled cable that must connect the camera to the tv somehow.

While Enjolras paced, Grantaire fumbled for the right port on the back of the tv in an inverted mirror of the night that had brought them to the cabin, half-hoping the spark of connection would fling them home again and half-regretful that they might not get to resolve the narrative on their own.

Finally, and anticlimactically, he managed to plug the camera in and extricated himself on hands and knees from behind the tv to find Enjolras sitting on the re-emerged couch, tapping his feet anxiously. He smiled when Grantaire sat down beside him. “Seems like electricity wasn’t the culprit after all. I’m glad; I would have been sad not to watch this.”

There were hours of footage. Grantaire supposed it was to be expected after six days of filming each other, but it made counting clichés a difficult task. The task was made even harder by the fact that they had forgotten to grab food on their dash back to the cabin and the kitchen cupboards still held only marshmallows, which they ate like popcorn as they watched.

It was not hard to be in love with the Enjolras on tv, a man who loved reindeer and conducted hockey interviews with a mimed microphone in his extended hand. It was just as easy to be in love with the Enjolras on the couch, laughing at Grantaire’s alarm at being licked by a reindeer and his growled interview responses. The two of them were one and the same.

Except.

“You look happier,” he said.

Enjolras stopped laughing. “Yeah. I do.” It was an admission so great Grantaire didn’t know how to answer it until Enjolras continued. “You film me like you’re in love with me.”

“I thought you didn’t want to talk about it,” Grantaire said carefully. They were at ten or eleven, by his count, and when it came down to it he didn’t really want to hear any sort of return confession from Enjolras’ lips if it was only for narrative satisfaction.

Enjolras muted the tv but left the footage playing in silence, a backdrop of poignant vignettes as he turned sideways on the couch to face Grantaire directly. “You’ve been taking care of me ever since we got here,” he said seriously. “I knew you were doing it. And I really appreciate that. But sometimes you have to jump on stage and face your fears yourself.”

“It’s what any of your friends would do,” Grantaire hedged. Enjolras had sidestepped the issue of love confessions and Grantaire didn’t want to bring it up again until they were both ready. In that way he supposed he was still taking care of Enjolras.

Enjolras smiled like he knew. “Yeah. I’m learning to let myself accept that.”

The Enjolras on TV was cloaked in tinsel and stale popcorn, shimmying to an unheard cover of some avant garde Christmas song. In the moment, Grantaire had been proud of him for it. Now that pride felt invasive.

“Jehan told me,” he said. “I’m sorry if you didn’t want me to know.”

Enjolras waved him off. “I’m not hiding it. It’s just sort of a weird thing to make a public announcement about. ‘Hey everyone, I love Cinderella and I have anxiety.’ Kind of weird.” He took a breath, then, and looked Grantaire in the eye more directly and solemnly than he maybe ever had. “But I owe you an apology for all the times I was harsh to you because you were saying all the things I was afraid of out loud.”

“Like what?”

The Enjolras on tv was holding a plastic raccoon aloft, roaring a silent battle cry. Real-life Enjolras stared at himself for a moment as if taking courage from his onscreen counterpart. “Like that we were wasting our time and nothing would ever change. I was mostly arguing with myself.”

“Yeah, well, I was clinically depressed so I guess we’re even,” Grantaire said. He grinned, suddenly, overcome with a buoying relief. Even if this was all the happy ending they got, that would be worth it in the end. “Look at us. Our very own Christmas Truce.”

“I don’t think we ever got to the truce part of it,” Enjolras pointed out. The image on the tv shook jostled as the camera was handed off to Enjolras, and then it panned dramatically across the carnage of the Christmas village to focus on Grantaire, slowly dragging an injured mouse through No Man’s Land.

Grantaire winced. “It’s about the journey.”

“Well I’m glad we made it,” Enjolras said, with a smile as bright as the snow.

The world went white.

BACK TO THE FUTURE

When the snow-falling-off-roof sound came this time, Enjolras jumped. Grantaire raised an eyebrow and he grimaced.

“Reflex. Guess we should go see what it wants.”

They unplugged the camera before stepping outside, and Grantaire removed the video card to carry with him. Just in case.

Just before the threshold, Enjolras paused. “I’m still scared of ruining our friendship. I’m afraid if we make it to the happy ending here and don’t work out in the real world you’ll vanish again.” Grantaire was preparing himself to say that he could respect that, and that Enjolras’ friendship meant too much to lose to him as well, when Enjolras looked at him again, eyes bright and determined. “But I’m tired of letting my anxiety run my life, so.”

So.

“I promise I won’t,” Grantaire said. Enjolras had already said his piece on that stage, in front of dozens of onlookers. That was his fear to overcome. Grantaire’s was this moment of honesty, after so long of hiding for Enjolras’ sake and for his own. He met Enjolras’ eyes. “And I am. In love with you. I kind of always have been.”

The sun had gone down during their hours-long movie marathon, but the golden porchlight perfectly illuminated the mistletoe hung above the door.

“I guess this is the final step,” Enjolras said. “But I don’t want to kiss you just because –”

“No.” Grantaire understood Enjolras’ concern, after everything they had been through, but the same certainty that had told him they were going to be alright on that first day now guided him to say, “that back there, us talking? That was the final step. This is just the happy ending.”

Enjolras nodded, dubiously hopeful. “If you’re sure.”

“I’m sure.” Grantaire hesitated. “This is my choice. It has to be yours too.”

He held his breath as Enjolras stepped closer, guiding Grantaire back until his shoulders hit the doorframe and the mistletoe brushed the back of his neck. Enjolras was smiling, a conspiratorial light in his eyes. “You know what I wished for?”

Grantaire swallowed. “Not gloves, I’m assuming.”

“Not gloves,” Enjolras confirmed. He leaned in, white breaths ghosting over Grantaire’s cheeks like firelight. “If none of this was real –”

Grantaire gripped the video card tight, tangible and sharp against his palm. “I’ve wanted to kiss you forever. I’m not going to stop.”

“Good.”

Enjolras’ eyes crinkled on a smile as he leaned in, revealing his crow’s feet to be laugh lines. Grantaire had a moment to think that and Enjolras with laugh lines was the most beautiful version of Enjolras he could imagine before Enjolras’ mouth met his.

***

With his eyes closed Grantaire couldn’t see the change, but he heard it: a rumbling, whuffing crash like snow cascading from the treetops, and the sharp slam of a car door.

“Some idiot eighteen-wheeler didn’t put their chains on before the pass,” Courfeyrac said. “It’s like these people have never driven in – woah. We’re only an hour late; what happened?”

Grantaire opened his eyes. It was still dark, but they now stood on the flat pavement of the airbnb’s covered porch instead of the rickety steps up to the A-frame, and the harsh illumination overhead came from floodlights on automatic timers. He pulled back to grin at Enjolras, who grinned back, and shouted over his shoulder to Courfeyrac and the rest of their friends as they clambered out of Courfeyrac’s van one by one. “What day is it today?”

“It’s Christmas eve,” Courfeyrac said, perplexed. “Are you guys okay?”

“We’re fantastic, actually,” Enjolras said, slipping his hand into Grantaire’s. His eyes went wide. The video card, slimmer and more compact than it had been just minutes ago, nestled between their clasped hands. “Can’t get Netflix to work, though. There’s something weird with the tv.”

They shared a grin as their friends trooped inside. When it was only the two of them left outside, looking out across the patchy snow towards the lights of the nearby town, Enjolras tucked his head into the crook of Grantaire’s neck and laughed.

“I can’t believe we did it. Merry fucking Christmas to us.”