Leaning on his arms a little, squinting across the table, past the gentle steam coming up off the mugs of coffee he's ordered for them; black; Combeferre squints.
"Are you listening?"
He doubts it. It's the sort of doubt one learns over time, when dealing with a man like this. Incredibly sharp, absurdly intelligent, and highly selective. He's heard Enjolras call it laziness before, malaise. Combeferre has always thought of it as something far less insidious, and far more childish. His older sister had children, now, they were all getting to be that age, he supposed. Her eldest, at two, would grab a yellow crayon and paint an expanse of notebook paper in lines. It didn't matter that the lines intersected and where previously there was art, now there was just... a blob. Offering her the pink crayon, or the blue one, yielded only an annoyed noise and a more fervent hand with the yellow.
It wasn't that Grantaire didn't know how to focus, or even how to put focus into motion. It was that he only wanted the yellow crayon.
If that was the case, then Combeferre understood he was much more akin to a black marker than anything in Grantaire's little box of colours he'd occasionally fathom outside of yellow. Unfortunately, that black marker had leaked onto his plans about a week ago, when Enjolras had finally asked him to move out, after catching onto the fact (finally, blissfully, maddeningly too-slow) that he was the embodiment of the yellow crayon, and the artist had been sleeping on his couch (or wherever else) for three months. Because Combeferre had told him, in stark, sharpie-outlined terms and inky bullet points.
"All I'm trying to say is that, while Enjolras perhaps doesn't understand fully why you were staying with him, that alone ought to have been enough to make you stop."
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Leaning on his arms a little, squinting across the table, past the gentle steam coming up off the mugs of coffee he's ordered for them; black; Combeferre squints.
"Are you listening?"
He doubts it. It's the sort of doubt one learns over time, when dealing with a man like this. Incredibly sharp, absurdly intelligent, and highly selective. He's heard Enjolras call it laziness before, malaise. Combeferre has always thought of it as something far less insidious, and far more childish. His older sister had children, now, they were all getting to be that age, he supposed. Her eldest, at two, would grab a yellow crayon and paint an expanse of notebook paper in lines. It didn't matter that the lines intersected and where previously there was art, now there was just... a blob. Offering her the pink crayon, or the blue one, yielded only an annoyed noise and a more fervent hand with the yellow.
It wasn't that Grantaire didn't know how to focus, or even how to put focus into motion. It was that he only wanted the yellow crayon.
If that was the case, then Combeferre understood he was much more akin to a black marker than anything in Grantaire's little box of colours he'd occasionally fathom outside of yellow. Unfortunately, that black marker had leaked onto his plans about a week ago, when Enjolras had finally asked him to move out, after catching onto the fact (finally, blissfully, maddeningly too-slow) that he was the embodiment of the yellow crayon, and the artist had been sleeping on his couch (or wherever else) for three months. Because Combeferre had told him, in stark, sharpie-outlined terms and inky bullet points.
"All I'm trying to say is that, while Enjolras perhaps doesn't understand fully why you were staying with him, that alone ought to have been enough to make you stop."