Portrait Sitting

The charcoal stick in his hands made light little movements, chipping out shapes on the page like a sculptor’s tools. The scratching sound had begun to annoy Grantaire, but not half as much as Jehan’s complaining whenever he so much as twitched. For a romantic, Prouvaire found a lot to complain about; from how cold his companion’s room was and his tendency to blink too much to the substandard quality of the wine. (Though that hadn’t stopped him drinking more than his fair share.) His blond head nodded tipsily over the paper from time to time, but the boy seemed perpetually drunken anyhow.

Grantaire coughed discreetly and moved to scratch his throat. Jehan’s head snapped upwards, and he glared.

“Stop doing that!”
“Won’t you be done already?”
“You can’t rush art.”

Prouvaire crushed back a few wayward locks of hair from his face with a swat of the hand. He left a formidable black smear, from eyebrows to hairline.Like gunpowder dust. That lower lip was jutting, and he exhaled his annoyance like a blustering horse. It probably wasn’t as comical as the light buzz in R’s awareness made it seem. An annoying little scoff of laughter came out unbidden. (That couldn’t have been him. He sounded like a twit.)

This only made Jehan baffled, on top of grubby; he set aside his tablet and his tapered bit of charcoal. “Is something funny?”

“You,” Grantaire declared, “have a smudge. Here. Let me get it.”

A handkerchief was produced, and its edge licked, like a maiden aunt ready to scrub off a stray speck of dinner. Jehan squawked and toppled off his chair, square on his rear, scattering his precious books. Grantaire advanced willfully, grinning like a manic.

“Don’t you touch me!”

“Ohoho! Suffering for your art!”

Clutching his papers to his inkstained shirt front like they, rather than his complete sense of dignity, were what was at stake. Like they were something much more important than a bit of artistic dabbling. Trying to conceal their contents? Grantaire did stop, mid-smudge removal, to peek discerningly between a few of the more prominent pages. As expected. Jean pulled back, blanching.

“Don’t look! They aren’t finished!”

“What on earth are you drawing, boy?”

“They aren’t finished!”, he keened, grabbing futilely. Grantaire held the dubious pieces of, ahem, art, out at one arm’s length, while Prouvaire attempted to drag him down onto the floor without actually tearing clothing.

“In the sense that they’re supposed to have clothes on when you’re through? And what are those two men doing?”

Jehan pushed him over, with surprising force for such a little slip of a pornographer. Hauling himself up with a grip on broad shoulders.

“ow. Ow. Let up with your fingernails, that hurts!” Obligingly, Prouvaire did, halting any attempts to kiss him on the mouth in the way of his rather thorny stubble. He came up with blond hair askew out of its tie, over his face, and laughing. (An unkind voice at the back of his mind murmured, “he’s still not Enjolras.” But by far the greater part of him had decided not to care.)