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It has been years since Grantaire had found the first tattoo on his skin, appearing shortly after his sixteenth birthday. First, he had thought he was seeing things when he stripped his pyjamas off to change into street clothes in the morning.
There was paint running along his right side. Literal paint. The tattoo formed intricate splashes that ran from his neck, dripped over his collarbonne and continued in splashes over his ribs and hipbone like a Jackson Pollock painting.
He ran his fingers over the dark green spots, wondering what they meant.
Most people got tattoos, these days.
They appeared on their own, and nobody had figured out why, or how. Or how to stop it from happening.
Only that they often appeared at significant times in people's lives. They all had a meaning, but people needed to find that themselves.
There came no manual with the tattoos, even tough most were obvious enough, like Grantiare's, but he still found himself mezmerized by the dribs of colour, somehow resembling the floor around him after art class. He loved painting, so this particular tattoo was really no surprise.
He just started to wonder, what role that would be playing in his life.
The next one crept up at him.
He'd just been thrown out by his dad, who was absolutely furious because of his son failing his a-levels. Really, it had only been for his scores in math, which he had never really understood. The rest had come to him easily, but math... well it was needed to pass. Grantaire didn't.
He was still sure that his father would calm down in a day or two, he would just crash on a friends couch for the time being, when he felt the familiar itching, this time on his forearm.
Grantaire dropped into an alleyway, wanting at least a bit of privacy for discovering a new tattoo.
A ship, a magnificent three-masted sailship in front of a compass- curiously enough pointing south, and a scroll proclaiming: "Give me a place to lay my head to rest."
Weeks later, when he still hadn't gone home, had travelled first around the city, then the country with only his backpack and found that it was a life he liked better, he was told the ship was a symbol for the rovers, the ramblers, and he found he quite liked that new tattoo as well, even tough he did not understand the scroll, contradictory to the symbology as it was.
The ring of poppy flowers around his wrist was a surprise he woke up with one day, and he couldn't understand what it was for.
Nothing had happened to him. The day before had been like every other day, occassionally selling a painting on the city's streets, scraping barely by with a bottle of wine in his hands.
He stared at the blood coloured flowers, and anxiousness hit him like a brick wall when he remembered something.
His sister used to make bracelets just like this one from the flowers in their backyard when they were young.
Grantaire's first call home since he had left years ago just confirmed what the heavy feeling in his gut had foreshadowed.
His little sister, five years younger than him, had been hit by a car.
The doctor's hadn't been able to pull her through.
The funeral was a quiet affair.
He finds a permanent residence in Paris, renting a one room apartment he only ever uses to sleep in, when he's not crashing at a friend's.
He's always on his feet and moving, needs to feel the city vibrate with life, needs strangers bumping into him to know he's still there.
He wanders until he know every street by heart, the little nooks and secret ways not many people have knowledge of. Over time, he gets to know some people better.
Eponine, with her wolfish smile and her heavy boots becomes his best friend, but even she can't keep him away from the drink and the drugs.
He works odd jobs, still selling paintings when he can. People approach him now and then, to paint them, but he most often declines.
He's not one of the art students who try to sell their talent for money.
He paints what catches his fancy, and then shares it with his world. Slowly, the parisian skyline appears, wrapped around his calves like an architect's concept sketches in sharp, angly lines.
Grantaire has become one with the city, and even tough he never quite settles anywhere, the city has pulled him into its magnetism, given him a foundation.
The drinking and the drugs had never been areal concern before, even tough he started early.
This changes. Slowly at first, and then he's in a downward spiral he can't seem to escape off.
The friends he's made in Paris aren't to be called that, and when Eponine finds him, Grantaire's already far gone.
When he wakes up in hospital, Eponine curled into her chair and glaring silently at him, some lanky freckly dude he doesnt know next to her, he thinks he has hit rock bottom.
That night, he searches for new tattoos, but there are none.
Only when he drains all his bottles of whiskey down the drain, hands his last drug stashes over to Eponine who disposes them, and decides to accompany her and freckly dude who listens to the name of Marius to one of the protests they seem to frequent, theres the itchy sensation in the palms of his hands.
A wolf in each, seemingly chasing after something, and he knows who they are.
Hati and Skoll, mythologic wolves, chasing after sun and moon, and Grantaire knows that he will always be haunted by two of his vices.
But he will do everything to be faster than these wolves.
After some thinking, Grantaire decides to add some tattoos himself.
They all hurt a damn lot more than he thought they would, but then again, he's had worse.
Theres a crowned skull set into ivy on his left shoulder blade, and an X-Wing fighter over the ribs on the same side.
He lets Eponine chose one, and he ends up with a pin-up girl wielding a bullwhip that suspiciously looks like her on his upper arm.
They both still laugh about that one.
It takes some time for the next one to appear.
They have settled in a sort of routine.
Grantaire works, and Eponine and Marius make sure he's alright.
Occassionally, they'll drag Grantaire to stuff they find interesting, be it a concert in the middle of the city or a protest or one time, some sort of medieval festival.
When they decide to take him to meet their other friends, he expects a small gathering of people.
What he gets is a crowd of people in the backroom of a café, and apparently this is not just a gathering of friends, but also a meeting of that social justice tomfoolery Eponine had been talking about.
Of course. Grantaire decides to make the best of it and humour Eponine, who introduces him to people.
At least, Eps friends are a decent bunch. Eventually, he finds himself a place to sit, a bottle of beer in front of him, He never really recovered from his alcoholism, but the few bottles in between are now enough to keep him grounded, he won't ever drink too much, won't do that to his friends again.
He looks up, and suddenly, his chest feels like it's burning, boiling all the air out of his lungs.
Grantaire's hand shoots up to reach for the pain, but then stills as his eyes meet those of the man who had just stepped in front of the room, sees the other man's eyes widen a fraction, standing motionless for a second before he turns to the whole room and begins speaking.
That is the moment Grantaire knows he is fucked.
He desperately wants to know what is going on, why his skin is feeling like it's scorching a way through the layers of fabric over his chest, why one glance of the blond man in front, who has Liberté, of all things, tattooed into the inside of his wrist, can send his mind reeling.
When he comes home that night, he needs to keep himself in place in front of the mirror, startled by all the red.
His chest looks like someone opened his ribcage, right over his heart.
In fact, the image of his heart is inked into the skin, and there's a lance struck into it.
No, he thinks as he inches closer to the mirror.
That's a banner pole, and the red flowing from its top, around his heart and out of the painted ribcage, makes the red flag look like blood.
He is not sure if that is a good sign or not.
The first time Enjolras sees the tattoo over Grantaire's heart, he stops dead, Grantaire's tshirt still in his hands.
He has of course seen the poppies, the pin-up girl, the wolves and the ship, and on an especially warm day even the skyline winding around Grantaire's legs, but ever since the heart turned up on his skin, Grantaire has stopped to take off his shirt when someone could see him.
It feel just... weird, he thinks.
That people can see and interpret what the pierced heart means, and he doesn't want to feel the stares when he's working on a mural, or sparring in the gym with Feuilly and Bahorel.
Enjolras is, apart from Eponine, the first person to ever see it.
He carefully traces the black banner pole, the question apparent in his eyes.
It's usual, after all, for lovers to know the story behind the tattoos of their partners.
Grantaire has always thought it rather funny, to think that asking for a story would be more intimate than sex, but he thinks he understands it now. He doesn't flinch back from Enjolras and regrets that he won't be able to explain it to him completely. The others were never a secret, but this one....
Enjolras' tattoos are fewer.
Of course, there's liberté, for him, where Combeferre's and Courfeyrac's wrists show the words egalité and fraternité.
Those had appeared at the same time, the day they decided they could no longer stand idly by while the world went worse with every day.
That was also the day they decided to seek likeminded people, the day Les Amis was born.
There's also a pair of scissors, cutting through golden ropes around his wrists, from the day Enjolras had broken off all contact to his parents, who were the exact opposite of who he wanted to be.
And then there's the one that had appeared seven months earlier, the same day they had met, as Enjolras had explained and Grantaire knew without asking at which exact moment.
Enjolras life was cut much straighter than Grantaire's, the three tattoos he had weren't much in contrast to the multitudes of colour under Grantaire's skin, but apparently, he was important enough in Enjolras' life to be honored with the handprint that covered the blond revolutionary's hipbone on his left side.
Even if Grantaire hadn't identified the colour as the same shade of green his own splashes of paint were, he would have found that his right hand fit perfectly onto the print.
He has no clue what that handprint was actually supposed to mean, but he is... he is important to Enjolras, and that's enough for him.
So he reaches up to kiss Enjolras and then leans back, pulling the man against his chest to tell him about all of the tattoos, to take a guess at what the pierced heart means, after all.
And if the phrase that runs around his compass,
"Give me a place to lay my head to rest"
suddenly doesn't feel so omnious anymore, he doesn't comment on it.
Not yet.