[On Teleios: Crossposted at dear-player]

[solo_patria]

I am not sorry, and I mean every word of what I say. Things have, at least, become marginally better, but I still remain trapped in a near eternal Hell where there is no respite, where I am judged wrongly, and unfairly, and expected not only to perform, but to submit to the will of those who are wrong, who call themselves gods but make statements and allegations that are bald faced lies in nearly every instance, where they seek to turn me into nothing but a slave, and where nothing will improve from the way that it is now ever again.

You've helped enough, and Combeferre has helped enough, but this is not a world I wish to exist in, and there is nothing further in it that can move me to stay, or to behave as if I am only your performing monkey. There is nothing in the injustice, the corruption, and the lies, the insults and the perversions of everything I care for that can reconcile me to be happy, or to pretend at happiness here.

I know that you will never listen, and I will forever be trapped, because I do not dare to dream that I might be allowed to escape, but I do not have to like the fact, or anything at all about the place now that so much has changed. I request that you remove me now, but knowing that will never happen, I, at least, request that you leave me alone to die here next time I throw myself at death if you are not willing to free me through more conventional means.

I thought that we had had an understanding, and it seems I have thought wrong.

As you continue to allow this, I continue to lose respect and faith in you.

-A. Enjolras

Comments

[permets_tu]

I would chastise you for thinking the honeyed words of gods were ever to be trusted, for when has honesty ever enticed we poor mortals to their grand causes? I speak from experience and my conviction is something perhaps even you might admire, if I thought myself worthy of it.

(Does the liar care that you call him a liar if he embraces the role?)

I see I must despair at this way you chase after death; I had thought, or hoped (do you see, I am still capable of such whimsical feelings as hope; your doing, Apollo) that suffering it the once would have satisfied your curiosity for it.

[solo_patria]

Ah, even I am not so naive as to trust false promises granted by divine kidnappers, at that.

[There is a hint, just a tiny bit of one but still!, of a snort there. And a liptwitch]

Broken promises seem as though they would fall immediately into place among the corrupt who gangpress men into their services by any means, you are right in that much.

No, the lies that they have spewed at me are those which I know to be untrue, for the sheer fact that I was present, in every sense of the word, for every event that they tell me I am guilty for. How is it that one betrays a thing in which he never believed? Or kills a man whom he never stared down a barrel at? That is what I protest most of all. Seven hundred forty some years of karmic debt that they tell me i have accrued on charges that are falsified.

I admit to near two hundred or so years of other debts accrued, lives I have taken, when there were no other means to move around it in pursuit of what was just, ill treatment of a man who deserved better, as I knew him, then. I failed at understanding much, as it was laid before me then, and I am sorry enough for that, all the good it manages to do me in my current state.

I do not know that I chase death so much as that, but I am...tired for lack of a better way to put it, of being baited with no justification for it, and of nearly every move I make being so easily checked. I do not require immediate and easy justice, but the glimpse of it, if there is nothing left.

[permets_tu]

I am ill suited to hear your confessions, I would not pardon you, not because I find your undeserving but precisely because I am undeserving of the honor. Your modesty makes you untouchable. [A wry smile.]

But may I say I told you so? For what purpose do any of us ever fight, if this is the result? But no, this grim thinking of yours seems too aligned with mine for comfort, I confess I'm feeling overwhelmed and would try to convince you otherwise. You need a glimpse of justice, you say? What glimpse do you require when I had thought it was you who burned brightest when surrounded by the injustices of the world, when it was the smallest slight against the rights of man that set your heart aflame? Who will fight when you bow under the weight?

[He throws his arm out in a grandiose sweep, a harsh laugh escaping his lips.] Puppets, I say -- we are puppets. Life is a joke and not a very good one at that; the cruelties and joys we suffer are beyond our control and set at the whims of beings greater than we. Tell me I am wrong.

[solo_patria]

[That? Garners a little snort in return of the smile. It has been a long few years. Occasionally, Enjolras can find a sense of humor now. Occasionally.]

And yet, I would request your pardon, formally. I was not wrong to ask you to leave our barricade, but the manner in which I did it, and the things that were said have played across my mind enough, and they were...unacceptable as a means to attempt removing you.

That said, I suppose that you were clear enough that it was coming. I contest that we fight, even when it does not benefit us personally, in order to leave something behind. If not a republic, then the foundation for one, and if not that foundation yet, then the hope that we leave something, if only a symbol, to inspire hope in others, to show that the world is not only dark and cruel, and that there are those who know the value of right, and who exist to stand for right. Not only those who die in the pursuit, but those who will live for it as well.

The glimpses of it are, they have been, all too easy, at home, all too easy in the island I've spent time in, before being sent into the current Hell, and there were so many chances to fight, and so many willing to stand. As things are now, I stand alone. A glimpse of justice, and of hope would be...even one other to stand with me, who does not think me insane to try.

The mechanics of the place itself, as they are set up, if I am to delve into speaking of things in "meta", as it were, stand against me themselves. It is very difficult when we are puppets and are presented with such roadblocks at every turn. I have known I am a puppet, for the purposes of entertaining my mundane, and it has never been so bad before, as there were chances.

I would not say in ordinary life that our existence was a joke, but that we linger on, and are presented with challenges and hurdles that we cannot leap is rather a joke. Perhaps it is not so much a death I wish, but something that gives me a fighting chance, and if there is not that, then rest at least, a world with parameters to allow me a chance when my mundane secretary seeks to put me somewhere.

I somewhat fear that I will not find that chance again. Perhaps that terrifies me more than I should like to believe. Our afterlife, perhaps, has become the joke instead, for me. Can you accept that as half agreement, perhaps?

[permets_tu]

Was I? It seems so long ago and my poor memory is reluctant to dwell too long on any of it. You spoke, we listened, and thusly we died.

You made yourself clear when you raised your voice above the people and begged to be heard (if it could be called that, it did not seem as if you struggled to gain an audience) and all who heard you were caught, drinking in your passion and standing beside you even when it was clear where it take us. I never thought you fought for yourself, I know all too well that your hope laid too deeply in the people and whether the people mourned the death of so perfect a symbol, I do not know, but allow me to hate them for it. I know you will not.

And now you say you are in Hell. Hell. If that's how you feel I would beg your puppet master to treat you more kindly, I have no pride where you are concerned and my own mistress cares little for my strings. I am at your whim for you to direct, as always.

[He laughs helplessly before breathing a deep sigh and looking away.]

Can I accept anything? Have I ever been so easily mollified? Perhaps, perhaps; pass me a bottle and promise me a night at the opera, I will agree to anything and forget it all as soon as I am given the chance to sleep. It would be better if you told me you will not stand for it.

(Replying so late. Bad mun!)

[solo_patria]

I spoke, you listened, and I should hope the choices made were of your own volition. You were, all of you, reasoned and intelligent men who I should hope made considerations before acting. I would not wish a man who had not chosen it, for factors of his own free will, to have fought beside me. To hear otherwise would be utmost perversion and...

[He's shaking his head a moment, his gaze hardening at the suggestion.]

I ought to have expected something of that nature from you somewhere along the lines. I have made my mistakes, but despite the regrets of our barricade, the wrongs that I am guilty for, I do not, and I cannot count your deaths among them.

I held myself apart from many of you, there, I did not make my final thoughts clear to each of you, and I fear some died without the knowledge of what they meant to me, but that makes up the majority of my regrets.

[Also the idea that he might have condemned them, along with himself, during the execution he was forced to enact, but Enjolras has been working on that one for a while now. At any rate, he has no guilt for the fact that any of them died. He misses them deeply, and still mourns but...there is quite a difference there. He's jerking his head up a little, closer, at the next of Grantaire's words.]

I need not allow you anything. Man is at liberty to choose his own response, but I will say they do not deserve your hate, for they've done nothing wrong, save for adapting after 1830. I cannot see fit to hate them for the fact they did not come to join us, when, two years before, their hopes were raised for very little gain for themselves in the end.

And what am I but a symbol? If I must take that on, instead of being flesh, I should be glad to be away from flesh, and the pains and horrors that come with it. Better to be purified where my spirit can rest above our country, than to be flesh and fall prey to the horrors I've been subjected to since the day my secretary dragged me here.

Hell is but the only way I can explain the place. We've been given charts of debts, falsified debts, as a way to atone for our "sin" throughout life, and assigned numbers of days, or months, or years depending on just what our sins are worth, and forced to work, under the shadowy reign of those who call themselves agents, who allow no one a chance to even breathe as a free man.

And there is nothing one might do, as no one cares, and all consider my attempts to improve anything as foolish. I can stand and fight many things. I stood in protest for five weeks and did not eat their food, or do their work. I've attempted to engage my fellow sufferers, even Combeferre, who managed to find his way to this place of torture too, in any means that we can find of negotiation, but they all think me quite mad, because it is a prison that is nice.

I can do many things alone. But I cannot deliver a world where no one wishes to be delivered, and where Combeferre, of all people

[There is a hollow, harsh little laugh at that one, broken and not like Enjolras as he was in Paris at all. ]

Where Combeferre, accepts it placidly and is content to do exactly as he's told.

It may not be very much of a Hell, I have not known any other kinds, but, it is too much for one of my stature, weak as I am in the scheme of things, to master. And she especially seems to like that it is happening to me.

I would not have you at my whims, Grantaire, but, perhaps, by my side at times? I did not use you as I should have, then, and I did not really know you either. Would you consider friendship, of the awkward sort, in lieu of orders? I would not have a puppet when I am already one of those.

But no, you rarely have at that. I only wish I could say I won't stand for it, but there is little enough to be done for the situation now, save biding my time and searching for new recruits as they come in, at least.

backtagging! \o/

[permets_tu]

Fair Apollo, you should know us all better than that. Our friends believed every word you said and I, well, I only believed in you and thus met my death gladly. I had thought that was plain enough.

[He heaves a sigh, laughing bitterly.] Oh, well, shame on Combeferre. Can't you see it now? Man kisses his chains, Enjolras. Oh, I don't know why you are surprised, isn't it as I always said? Liberty is too difficult, too painful, why fight when we can succumb to comfort, to shallow beauty? Take what pleasures you can and toss the rest aside, life was a joke, why should death be different?

[But there is something in his tone, some clear lack of pleasure he takes in his own words and he so clearly takes no joy in being right.]

Oh, really, I don't really want to laugh in your face but I will if you make an absurd enough assumption. You knew me exactly as I was, exactly as I deserved to be known, do not doubt yourself in that, of all things. I do not wish to deceive you and make you believe that I have any hidden merits, but I would forever stay by your side, if allowed.

This is terrible, it seems wrong that I would urge you onward in your little task, a you call it, and yet I will do so now; falter not, rally, speak unto the people and the people will rise. Ah, you see? I sound the fool when those words fall from my lips, it's a joke, a poor one, disregard it and pretend you never heard it.