backdated to June 5th

[pylades_drunk]

It's almost an obscenely beautiful day, Grantaire thinks, but then it wasn't a particularly miserable June when they'd put up the barricades, either. A little warm, and the middle of a cholera epidemic, but the weather hadn't been ugly.

This, though, is something else. Lilac scents the air; the weather might be described as perfect. Fruit ripens early on the branches of trees he wasn't even aware had ever borne fruit.

In the past, he'd celebrated the anniversary of their deaths with friends who had been there, drinking and vacillating between a hedonistic revelation of the shortness of life and a somber acknowledgement; in the more recent past, since he'd stopped drinking and some of them had disappeared, it'd been a smaller, sort of private reflection.

Today, he wanders in the park with a friend who knows what he's thinking of. They talk about other things, and they talk about their friends, and they let the specter of mortality wander into their conversation as it wants to, for there's no stopping it.

"Do you ever think about what happens if we disappear?" Eponine asks. Grantaire doesn't keep such close tabs on her that she feels smothered by it, but she's grown to enjoy that he texts to check in from time to time. When she was first here, she thought he might be using her as a stand-in for her brother. Now, it's just good to have someone who knows Paris, who has anything in common, on days like today.

"I try not to," Grantaire rejoins, picking a plum off a low branch. "I've only just started thinking in future tense. At any rate, that just calls up questions of the afterlife, and most of those possibilities are ridiculous or awful. Probably, nothing. We just --- stop. It'd be worse for the people here."

They ponder that for a moment. "Let's not do it, then," she says a little over-brightly, and holds up a hand. "Plum?"

"Certainly," he says, and throws her one.

Smirking, she steps back to catch it, right into the middle of the path.

Comments

[nextchance]

Walking Sprinkles in the park is always a bit of a gamble. The dog is so easily recognized, something Jyn finds amusing only when she doesn't have to deal with it herself. She can play it off or deny it easily enough, and has on a few occasions switched mid-word and called Sprinkles by a different name, but she still doesn't want to have it acknowledged that the famous dog belonging to a dead pop star lives with her and her husband. Neither of them does particularly well with a lot of attention, and they would probably get it.

It's worth the risk, though. Sprinkles could probably use a change of scenery from their yard, anyway, even if Jyn is eager to do some work in the garden. She's still not really sure how she picked up such a habit, but it's been nice to have the weather so well-suited for it after a long winter.

The dog realizes a friend is approaching before she does, yapping and tugging ahead on her leash a little. Jyn looks up and smiles, walking in Grantaire's direction. "Someone wanted to come say hello," she says, nodding down at Sprinkles. "Well, and me, too."

[pylades_drunk]

"Hello there," Grantaire says just as though Sprinkles has addressed him personally, and leans to ruffle the teeny dog's ears. He's fond of the infamous Yorkie, but between his rather large cat and Yona's Fred, Sprinkles almost seems like another species more than a dog. He gives Jyn a little smile. "Hello to you too, then."

Eponine, a little ways back, gives her a wave as well, brightening to see Jyn. She's talking to another friend, though, so it's a natural time to diverge. Grantaire thinks it's actually a rather good coincidence that they've stumbled into each other. Jyn can probably understand the strangeness of celebrating the several-years' anniversary of one's own death in a rebellion better than anyone.

Not that he's going to lead with that, per se. "How've you been?"

[nextchance]

"I've been alright," Jyn says with an easy shrug. It's true enough, as much as it ever is around here. She isn't sure she'll ever stop finding it strange, how simple things can be here, calm and still, but at least she doesn't try to fight it. Trusting it is another matter entirely, something she would probably be crazy to do when she knows it wouldn't last anyway, but she's learned to enjoy it while she has it. That has to count for something.

At a time like this, when the weather is so beautiful and she has the company of a friend, that's easily done, too. Taking a moment to return Eponine's wave and smile, the latter stays in place as she turns to Grantaire again. "Nothing outside of the usual, which I'll take as a good thing. And you?"

[pylades_drunk]

"It's true," he says, "unless a run of good weather can be viewed as unusual, around here. I didn't even know some of these trees were fruiting." He points at the plum tree he's just discovered. "Have you ever had a fresh plum?"

"It's an odd day," he admits. "The anniversary of the barricades, back home. Eponine's the only one left here who'd remember," he adds with a nod to her. She had been the first of them to die, though she was plucked from before that attack. Even Grantaire remembers that senseless death, before he got himself booted back to the Musain. "This year, it's just striking me as incredible how very different my life is." He smiles: it's somewhere between fond and wry. In a few months, he's going to be married. It makes the thought of those Paris streets both far away and a little painful with all those who will never see this.

[nextchance]

"Not this fresh," Jyn says with a shrug, eyeing the tree before she pushes up to the balls of her feet and picks a plum off the lowest branch. Some of the fruit here overlaps with ones she knows from various planets she's stayed on and some doesn't, just as there are fruits she had before that don't seem to exist here at all. Plums are one that exist in both places, but it's hard to beat getting one right from the tree like this. Usually, before, if she ate anything fresh, it was only because it was easier to steal from a market than anything more substantial would have been.

She bites into it as Grantaire continues, her expression thoughtful. She knows what that means, after all. It's hard to get the dates lined up, but she tends to get a little somber when the anniversary of her arrival here rolls around for the same reason. Being aware of having died is always a strange thing, but all the more so with reminders of when it happened. "Things really have changed, haven't they?" she replies, her voice low and understanding. "It's a lot to carry."