#anyway. yeah it somehow checks out that he made it into the electoral college in 2020. when he was *checks notes* 23??? fuck it up

[idiopath-fic-smile]

5 conversations had around w.a.r.-era enjolras’s family dinner table, part one

"So, how was your first day of school?" asked Mom.

Enjolras swallowed a mouthful of sweet potatoes and frowned.

"How hard is it to pass the GED?" he said. "Because I think if I studied—"

"That bad?"

"I did pick him up from detention today," said Dad gently, cutting his asparagus.

They hadn't talked about it much on the way home, but Enjolras had known this conversation was coming, and he'd spent most of the ride trying to map out how he'd explain his first-ever detention to his parents, how he'd tell the story and argue his points and hopefully minimize the part where he threw a shoe.

He hadn't thrown it at anybody, he'd just thrown it. He couldn't really explain.

"I got into a fight with my teacher about transgender rights," he said. "He tried to tell me there were no trans kids in our school, and that if there were, any accommodation for their safety was 'special treatment'—"

Mom put down her fork. "What subject does he teach?"

"U.S. History," said Enjolras, and then at her face, "I know."

"Crying out loud," she muttered. 

Enjolras saw his window. "Please," he said. "My whole day was like that. People saying hateful things with no consequences whatsoever. I literally didn't meet a single person who acted like they would even consider wanting to be my friend. I am so, so unhappy here, so why can't I just take the GED and—"

"How many kids go to CHS?" said Dad.

"Twenty-four hundred," said Enjolras sourly.

"And you can already tell that none of them want to be friends? Doesn't that feel like a little bit of unfair generalizing?" 

"But the majority—" Enjolras started.

"The majority of voters picked George W. Bush," said Mom. Enjolras opened his mouth to bring up Gore and the electoral college and she added, "Would you want someone saying that not a single American—"

"Every single kid I saw today," said Enjolras. "The vast, vast majority. Ninety nine percent.”

"But oh, that other one percent," said Dad. He smiled, trying to make Enjolras laugh. It wasn't going to work.

"One percent," Enjolras said, struggling to channel all of his wild, flashing frustration into that single number. "One, dad."

"Okay," said Mom, "let's assume it is one percent," and Enjolras tensed because he knew from long experience that when she started out by agreeing with part of his point, it usually ended with her winning the argument. "One percent of 2400 is twenty-four," she said. "Honey, that's twenty-four people who want to be your friend. I want you to think about those twenty-four kids for a second. You’ve admitted they exist. Think about the kind of people they probably are. What do you think it’s been like for them, going to this school for years?”

“An unending nightmare,” he conceded. It wasn’t as though he didn’t know that others had it worse. He still felt like he had the right to—

“Don’t you think,” she said, “they could use a friend like you? Don’t you think they would all love to know someone so kind and smart and brave? Don’t you think you could make their lives easier just by being you, and being completely unafraid to stand up for what’s right?”

Enjolras frowned. Talking back to Mr. Walker hadn’t felt like bravery. It hadn’t even felt like a decision. He couldn’t imagine not doing it; his mind couldn’t bend that far. It was literally harder to picture than it was to dream up a future in which Enjolras managed to somehow make friends. Still. He hated how quickly she could shut him down. He knew—he knew!—he was right, but he had to watch her pull ahead on her superior arguing skills.

“You want to make a difference,” she added. “Don’t you think this could be a place to start?”

“You didn’t force me to move and change schools so I could help people,” he said waspishly.

Dad sighed. “No, bud. We moved because the economy’s in a slump right now and we had to go where the jobs were.”

Enjolras had gotten multiple versions of this talk already. He understood on some level it was true, and he wished he wasn’t still angry—it made him feel like such a cliché, such a child—but he was.

“We have to make new friends, too,” said Dad.

“That’s easy for you,” Enjolras muttered. “You two have social skills.”

Mom tapped her chin, mock-thoughtful. “Gosh, if only there was someplace you could practice, where you’d be surrounded by people your age—“

“Where 99% of them don’t want to know me,” Enjolras reminded her.

“Then they’re idiots,” she said, so definitively that he had to bite the inside of his cheek to keep from smiling. “Which means their opinions don’t matter, which makes them the perfect people to practice on, so when you do find someone you want to befriend—“

“Meeting people is always hard,” said Dad. “Your mom is joining a Jazzercise group and she doesn’t even like aerobics.”

Enjolras immersed himself in cutting the rest of his asparagus into even pieces. He wasn’t ready to give up being mad, but they made it unfairly difficult.

“They play the cheesiest songs,” she said. “For crying out loud, how hard is it to get some Bonnie Raitt in there?”

“Hey,” said Dad. “Want to catch a movie this weekend?”

“Let me check my schedule,” Enjolras said, and then immediately regretted his sarcasm. “What’s the word for a seventeen-year-old whose best friends are his parents?”

“You mean, a guy with the coolest parents imaginable?” said Dad.

“Don’t hide your light under a bushel,” said Mom.

“I promise you, that’s not what I’m doing,” Enjolras told her. More like burning all his fuel at once, the night exactly as dark as it was before.

Mom and Dad exchanged a look. 

“You’ll find one of those twenty-four by the end of the year,” said Dad. “Faster if you go out of your way to look for them.”

“And you won’t even have to put on a leotard and grapevine to bad country,” said Mom.

A month later, Enjolras noticed that the loud, chatty kid who sat next to him in Pre-Calc quoting from an SNL sketch where George W Bush came off appropriately buffoonish, and after rehearsing an opening line four times in his head, Enjolras managed to start a conversation without sounding like too much like an old person trying to go undercover as a teenager.

“Hey,” said the guy, with infinite grace. “Yeah, Will Ferrell’s hilarious. Really captures the dead-eyed squint.” And, “Are you reading A People’s History of America? Badass.” And, “What do you think of chapter seven?” And, “Are you sitting with anyone at lunch yet? Because there’s some people you have got to meet, okay.”

And, “Oh yeah, my name’s Courfeyrac, in case you don’t remember, which is fair.”

So in the end, Enjolras would have to concede that Mom won the argument anyway. He didn’t exactly mind.

#in which enjolras's parents and whole relationship with said parents is so transparently cribbed from my real life it's embarrassing