Author's Note: This was originally supposed to be ready for Barricade Day, but clearly real life got in the way and that didn't happen. Hopefully people still enjoy it. Each section is exactly 200 words long. Thanks to all who read!
The Things They Carry On
Grantaire draws in every life.
Sometimes he isn't very good. Sometimes his hand isn't steady enough, his eye for colors and contrast isn't good enough, and the drawings and sketches are fit only for family and friends. He hates that the first time it happens, though the others don't let him drown in his misery, coaxing him instead into music and composition, because he has a beautiful ear for sound during that life.
But always he draws, and always he draws the same things.
He draws his friends.
He draws them alone.
He draws them together.
He draws them happy; he draws them crying. He draws them as they change—male to female, dark skin to light skin, children to young adult to the first brush of maturity.
He never draws them old.
(He tries, once, an exercise in imagination, but his tears obscure the lines, and he burns the papers the next morning, never repeating the experiment again.)
He never draws them dying.
(He draws hands, his and Enjolras', but never what they face.)
He draws them as they live, as he sees them and loves them, and trusts the history books to remember the part that is actually important.
XXX
Bahorel always dies first.
They tease him, hesitantly at first, when the memories flood them, binding them and raising them up at the same time, but more jovially as life slides into life. If they want to know when the end is actually coming, when the storm they are riding is preparing to devour them, they have only to watch him and see when he falls.
He encourages the teasing. He uses it to his advantage for as long as he lives—how can they hesitate, how can they be weary, how can they fail to fall in behind him when his presence clearly means there is hope still?
He does all that he can to live as long as possible. He learns a new fighting style during each life, mastering art after art.
He fights with them and he dies for them, not because he intends to but because he is always at the front of the fray, defending his friends and ideals with life and limb.
He never regrets it, because it means he never has to face what they do each time.
He never has to mourn them, and wonder how long before his own death comes calling.
XXX
Joly always studies medicine.
He never allows the advances that medicine has made each time to color the work he has done in the past. What he does take with him from life to life is the confidence to act, even when action is difficult. He doesn't hesitate during surgery—what horrors can surgery hold in a hospital, under anesthesia, when he has cut mens' limbs from them while they scream and plead and curse him? What horror is there in staring at broken bodies when there are miracles at his fingers, magic down the hall?
There are only two things he still fears: I can do no more, and I don't know. The former is helpless, hopelessness; the latter is the terror of the unnameable.
He masters both, having ample practice.
He always studies battlefield medicine. Some of his fellow students accuse him of being a hawk, a war-nut, a military groupie too afraid to join up.
He doesn't correct them. His actions and words all show his beliefs.
He studies what he will need.
He uses it when the time comes.
He always saves enough lives and buys enough time to make it worth it, even if just barely.
XXX
Bossuet is the one who most often studies law.
It is fascinating to watch the laws change, to see their past in the slow evolution of the words, to watch, bit by frustrating, blood-soaked bit, as the world edges closer to true justice.
Bossuet is also the one who does the most work with his and Joly's writing. They are co-creators, co-authors—co-producers, a handful of times—but it is Bossuet who skips classes, who cheerfully contacts publishers, who creates a collage of rejection letters for he, Joly and Musichetta to throw darts at.
There is one book he hunts down in every life. The cover changes, becoming older and more worn with each passing decade despite reprints, the pages turning yellow and old while he continues to die young.
He shows it to anyone who asks to see, gushes with them over the old prose, the poetry of the French words, but only a dozen people truly understand what it contains.
It was not from their first life, but it is something that Joly and he created, as surely as they have created all the tiny changes that he studies in the law books, and he loves it just as dearly.
XXX
Feuilly has a library every time.
It doesn't matter if he is rich or poor, if he is taught to read from a young age or if he wrings literacy from his friends and his memories. He is broad and eclectic in his tastes, giving as much room to illustrated books and chapter books as he does to literature. As the ease of acquiring books grows, so too does the extent of his collection. Poetry, science, speculative fiction, mystery; eventually graphic novels, manga, manhwa and other forms of illustrated, illuminated texts join the stacks.
If there is any genre that enjoys precedence, it is history.
If there is any rule to the collection, it is a simple one: expand minds, don't constrict them.
He never tries to keep his collection from one life to the next. The others don't ask him what he does with the books they have helped move time and again, or question why books are always what he wants as gifts.
Every time he dies, his collection is bequeathed to the nearest orphanage, in the hopes that one day no child will grow up as he first did, scrabbling for scraps at the table of knowledge.
XXX
Prouvaire writes in every life.
He doesn't restrict himself in form or content—though he learns after the second time he is rescued from prison that pseudonyms are not just for those ashamed of their words.
He writes for their cause.
He writes to educate.
He writes to explore what they are, what their trek through time means for the Amis and the rest of the human race.
He loves what they are—hope in the midst of darkness, life arising time and again from death, the embodiment of the indefatigable and uncrushable, the lie to every governing body that believes enough blood spilled on sand or stone can erase the desire for freedom.
He hates what they are—how it will end, the death he will see, the fact that each life brings them closer but leaves them still so very far away from the ideal.
He never looks for his own work. The others bring it to him, bookmarked, their favorite bits of his surviving and reprinted words a highlighted rainbow for the eyes.
He paints some of the words on his wall, and knows, in the echoes of a half-dozen languages, that what they are doing is worth the cost.
XXX
Combeferre collects knowledge.
He is the only one among them who always attends higher education. Some of the others usually do—there are connections at the universities—but Combeferre is at his strongest when he has access to the very edge of the known universe. He tries many subjects, dabbling in astronomy, mathematics, economics, physics, chemistry, medicine, surprised at how knowledge from a previous life will cross over and help with his new calling.
He quits school, sometimes, before his degree is attained, but not often.
The others won't let him, saying that his happiness and his contributions to science are as important as the little bit of extra time he could devote to the Cause without his schooling.
He rarely publishes, but when he does it tends to be influential. He knows because the others will find the articles and the citations, showing him and sparing him the agony of deciding if he wants to search or not.
He jokes, sometimes, that it is a good thing they always die young, since the young tend to make the most dramatic finds and hypotheses.
They laugh with him, and that makes any ache of missed opportunity fade until it is (almost) unnoticeable.
XXX
Courfeyrac collects people.
They all do, somewhat. They have little idea what controls their dance through time, how it is that their souls and bits of memory will remain intact when the bodies they have worn are torn apart time and again by better and better weapons. They accept what they are because the other option is madness and despair, and that has never been something any of them could willingly choose.
They are not the only ones who fly life to life. There are others that they will meet—Marius, most often, but also Cosette, other fighters from the barricade, other relatives, other friends.
More and more each time.
Most often the others don't remember. Most often the meeting is a moment of bittersweet memory, a brush of deja vu for the other, understanding for them.
It happens most to Courfeyrac, because he collects people with their fragile spun-steel souls as others collect hats.
But they all experience it, and if it is Courfeyrac's arms they fall into, Courfeyrac's voice that whispers into their ears as a thousand shards of too-complicated emotions swirl...
Well, Courfeyrac collects people, and the eight of them are his as surely as he is theirs.
XXX
Enjolras is their leader.
Always, life to life, that is his role, the burden and the honor that he happily accepts from them and for them.
It is never the same. They are products of the bodies they are born into as well as history, and the tactics that worked once—barricades in narrow streets, a call to arms—are not always the tactics that will work again.
He changes as the world changes, as they change, life to life, but always he keeps his core, remains the nexus of their vision of a better world.
He reminds them of what they are fighting for.
He reminds them of how they have fought, though he accepts Combeferre's admonitions for peaceful protest whenever it is possible.
He reminds them of how much they have gained, for though the twentieth century has not been happy, and the twenty-first century has bathed them in blood, things are better now.
Things will continue, always, to improve.
And he will continue to be their leader, staining his hands red when he must, eyes fixed unerringly on the future where he knows, one day, they will be born, grow old, and die by nature's hand instead of humanity's.