[for jyn]

[Around June 10th or 11th? The morning after this.]

Grantaire is drunk. Grantaire is still drunk. Or rather, there were a few hours after he woke up in the orange of late morning on the couch, where he was perhaps no longer drunk, but he'd remedied that as soon as he could scrounge up something, between the lurch of his head and the empty hole in his chest and the memories that kept seeping in, out of order, from the night before.

Shouting outside Marcus's house like a true jackass: he can't remember what he said but he knows how hurt he is, and he knows other times he's drunkenly shouted well enough to know it was probably overwrought, heavy on metaphor and mostly unfair. Neil arguing with him, and -- he doesn't remember falling, but his ass sure as hell does -- Water. Water Neil gave him, for some reason. Edgar, at some point that might have been later, coming in; he'd woken and been upset with, or afraid for him, maybe, he just remembers apologizing and crying and holding onto him. Had he been sick, then? Or at a later time? Or not at all?

It's all a nightmare, and he hates the house right now. It's empty, and the bedroom is full of memories and even worse, full of his own drawings of those memories -- he's ripped up a few of them, though that wasn't last night -- and everything just feels like Neil. And, the more he thinks, the more he feels that this wasn't unsalvagable until he acted a fool last night, not the other way around, even though his few messages back and forth with Neil in the days between, messages he's gone over a million times, seem damning enough.

Does he want it to be salvagable?

There's one person, he thinks, besides Edgar, who always understands him, who understands this, too. Love, this damned invention of the gods or science that masquerades itself as a gift. And will understand, he thinks, learning how to trust, to believe in anything enough to marry someone and having them ripped away.

This time, when he knocks on the hull of the Millennium Falcon, he comes with real alcohol.

[for greta]

[dated to roughly the 20th or so of june? we can move it around, but maybe ~two weeks since neil left?]

There's a part of Grantaire that derides himself, has since the beginning, for not coping better with this. Another one is pretty damn certain the idea of coping well with your husband walking out is a fiction, if it even truly exists at all. He'd told Greta the day after it happened, in vagaries; let her know that Neil and they were taking some time apart and that right now he wasn't well fit to do the job and would need some time, he wasn't sure how much. He's not proud, but it's better that he hadn't tried to keep going. Or forgotten altogether to tell her, the way things have been.

At the time, he might have thought they were taking some time apart, that that was all. Now he knows better. He's not sure if he ruined any chance of that when he showed up at Marcus' house, or if Neil never really needed just space. Since then he's not sure it matters. If they were to try to reforge something, anything, something entirely different even, he's not sure he could trust Neil to stay. Not after not even saying anything to them, not even trying to talk through what was going on in his head. Or, he might believe Neil wanted to be with them, but he couldn't trust himself not to be thinking about it, not to question whether every word or action might be too much or not enough.

Even now, he catalogues it all, goes over every memory in search of something, some proof, the straw to the camel's back. Something to blame, something to carve or burn away so he can be rid of that part of himself, of the both of them. He can't find it, of course. So he drinks, and he fights; he paints and he destroys the paintings; he cries more than he'd like and he clings: all of it with and without Edgar, who weathers this in stormy silences and eruptions of emotion both, whose unstemmed grief makes Grantaire feel even more worthless.

This morning, he sits at the table and pours a shot of whiskey into his coffee, and stares. What just last night had hit him with a sadness somehow even more profound and gutwrenching than it'd been all the time before -- free of anger, full on loss -- has faded to a sort of apathetic, bleak melancholy that feels endless. It isn't a feeling Grantaire's never experienced before; it's just a new, nastier reason for the nothingness.

He passes a hand over his face. He's not sure how long he's been sitting when the knock comes at the door.