Chapter Text
The following days were a haze of aggressive painting and Adrien decidedly not avoiding society as a whole. Certainly not. He had simply… come down with something, and it would be incredibly impolite to go out and about while that remained an issue. His social recluse had nothing to do with the Whistledown Expose that had neatly annihilated any sense of control he had kept.
And, tragically, unlike in the days of his youth, where he had men, family, to laugh about the latest scandal regarding his name, there was no one to laugh off this.
Adrien had dealt with slander before. He had dealt slander himself, before. Except before, there was always a justification. A reason. A cause. The vitriol he put to page, harmful though it may have been, fatal in some cases, always had a justification. For the Republic. For France. For liberty.
But this is different. There is no political justification. No chance to respond in kind. Because his past, at least, the public perception of his past, had been published as gossip to be read over morning tea. And that, my dear readers, was so incredibly inconvenient.
That was how, after one particular violent brushstroke, Adrien found himself staring at the covered painting in his studio. The room, generally in a state of controlled disarray, was decidedly not so controlled. The blue ragged jacket hung over the back of a chair in the corner seemed to be an object of accusation, rather than the comfort it has been for the past two decades. Adrien himself was somehow even more disheveled than normal as well, if that can be managed. Shirtsleeves stained and spotted with paint and graphite that not even the most dedicated cleaner could ever remove fully, cravat simply nonexistent, hair tousled in a way that suggested frantic fingers had run through it several times over. Waistcoat not buttoned, letting it hang more akin to a vest then the outer layer of clothing it was supposed to be. If Adrien had looked in the mirror, which he had pointedly not been doing the past days, he would have genuinely wondered if the boy from the Jacobin Club had somehow transported himself into the present. The only difference to let him know that was not the case being the spectacles and silver in his hair, rather than the pure oxblood of the past.
Who was he kidding, Adrien knew full well what this was. This avoidance. This self-imposed exile. He had done it before, and here he was, preparing to do so again. An angry hiss. Except where would he go? Back to France? No, there were too many memories there. There, and the rest of continental Europe. To America? Possibly. There, nobody would know the name Montfaucon, and there would be plenty of opportunities to start again. Stay in England? Well, England had not proven a terrible host, and the company was pleasant- Who is he kidding, Adrien knew exactly why he was finding it hard to simply pack up and leave. Damn you, Benedict Bridgerton.
Attractive aristocrats aside, Adrien didn’t particularly fancy having to uproot his entire life again, especially seeing as nobody was actively calling for his arrest and execution this time. Small mercies.
Perhaps his days of running should be put behind him. Perhaps, perhaps, perhaps.
Which was eventually what got the emotionally constipated artist off his stool long enough for Adrien to go upstairs, sit at the writing desk, pull out a paper, and begin to draft an invitation. Perhaps this time, rather than preemptively relocating across an entire ocean, he would not make the decision alone.
Dear Benedict,
____________________________________________________
The letter, an invitation for Benedict to come to Adrien’s studio, something which had been hanging over their friendship for at least half of it (after all, Adrien had been to Benedict’s, tit for tat, no?) was written in almost sickeningly formal language, folded, and rather than getting tossed to the stack of other unsent correspondence, mailed quite literally posthaste.
This, of course, did not mean that Adrien did not flinch violently when a knock sounded on the door. In his defence, he had never actually had company prior to this day.
Adrien, still a mite ragged, still jumpy, still on edge, peered out of one of the second floor windows carefully, identified the Bridgerton in question, before making his way down to let the guest in.
On the far to short walk down the stairs and to the door, Adrien ran any possible combination of scenarios through his mind, as well as his responses. Perhaps the distance was too far, come to think of it, because the fluttering feeling in Adrien’s gut, a new and unfamiliar feeling that he was not a fan of, was beginning to reach borderline nauseous levels.
He opened the door, not even thinking to bother cleaning himself up, make himself look presentable, because there was one thing on his mind. “You came?” Adrien’s tone is one of mild surprise, and perhaps a little confusion, though that gets swept away as soon as it occurs to him the impoliteness of leaving one’s guest on the doorstep, “Please, come in, come in. You’ll have to excuse the mess-” he steps out of the doorway, letting Benedict enter.
“Are you well?” are the first words to emanate from said Bridgerton, and Adrien, apparently finally realizing that he looks like he’s put himself through a miller, looks down and gives himself a once-over.
He hums, “I am fine. When the muse strikes-” he trails off, before running a hand through his hair again, mussing it further, and humming again. “I am… surprised that you came, I admit. In my experience, generally speaking, folks tend to distance themselves from former revolutionaries.” Adrien ends the sentence with a chuckle, awkward and a little off kilter, hands wringing themselves behind his back as he watches Benedict look around the open space. Professionally, of course. Always professional, yes sir.
Benedict turns from where he’s been gazing curiously at the only covered canvas in the room, hung on the far wall, “Vico- Adrien, I value your friendship, both as a fellow artist and personally. A column in the Ton’s most well known gossip channel is not going to change that. Why would it?” he pauses, before, “Besides, that’s just what it is. Gossip and speculation.”
A forced laugh frees itself from Adrien, who seems to have adopted the expression of a deer in headlights, not that headlights have been invented yet, but the comparison stands. “Gossip and speculation indeed…” He takes a breath, “About that. There’s…. Always some grain of truth to publications such as Whistledown’s. Sometimes, oftentimes, it’s embellished and overstated but…” he trails off, “not always.”
Silence, before, “Not always?”.
Adrien, preparing for… something. Rejection? Anger? Fear? He’s not quite sure, but he looks at Benedict anyways, and has to blink a few times. None of the three, rather, Benedict has turned from the covered canvas, and closed the distances between the two ever so slightly. And the emotion on his face? Concern. Genuine concern for Adrien, rather than himself.
Adrien took a breath, “Let me preface that I was young. When the Revolution kicked off.” Eyes flickered to the canvas, “It’s remarkably easy to get… swept away by promises of a better world. And Benedict, what a world it could have been-” Adrien stands from where he was leaning, pacing back and forth, “But, like everything, it fell apart. And I have had twenty-two years to think about it.”
Pause, a breath, heavy, “What the Whistledown article exposed. It’s true, all of it, but only in the broadest senses of the word. I was involved in the Revolution, that is true. I still believe in those ideals, that is true. But-” here what seemed like Adrien on a roll quickly turns to Adrien searching for the right words, “but now I have had twenty-two years to consider the consequences of my actions, because, Benedict, and while I still wish that what had happened had not happened, I do not regret them.” He’s rambling, and he knows he’s rambling. Everything in Adrien’s head makes perfect sense, but hearing them aloud, well, without the full story, he’s not going to make any sense.
Benedict, to his credit, simply takes a seat on the abandoned stool, and breaks through the rambling with a simple, “Tell me. The whole story. It’s clearly weighing on you, and I will listen. I promise.”
That is enough to freeze Adrien where he stands. A breath, an exhale, and Adrien sits on one of the few clear spaces on the table, locking his gaze with Benedict’s, preparing to throw that locked basement (metaphorical) of his past wide open.
“I was…. Thirteen? Thirteen when the Revolution started. The only child of the Montfaucon family, raised by tutors and servants and staff, mostly. The usual way of the aristocracy. Normal, but… well, I suppose I’d always been spirited.” A hum, “I found myself outside of, and then rather swiftly, inside the Club.” a pause, “The Jacobin Club. Though its official name at the time was ‘The Society of the Friends of the Constitution’. That changed in ‘92.” He ran a hand over his face. “I stayed, listened to the rhetoric, the speeches, to the members speak. And over the following weeks, I made myself a permanent fixture. And, well, I wasn’t told to leave, so I took that as permission to keep coming back. Eventually, I started participating. It started simple, I kept records of points, of speeches, of ideas. Eventually, some of them, they noticed my talent for particularly scathing artwork.” Here Adrien chuckled, “I was a teenager, and that came with all the angst expected. It just turns out that that could be… molded… in the right direction, given the right instructions.” Adrien’s eyes flicker back to the covered canvas, before he stood.
Walking to the canvas, “I’m sure you are wondering what’s underneath. Why I hide it. And, I suppose, it’ll also answer why, until recently-” He glances at Benedict, “I did not draw people.”
Adrien grasped the cloth, and in one swift tug, pulled it from the canvas.
The painting itself was remarkably well done, lighting and lining and painted in full, vibrant color. A scene from a room, filled with people. In the background, people hunched over tables or close together in chairs, the light shining in. And centered, four men, with one in particular seemingly wreathed in light. And, almost as an afterthought, off to the side, not focused on but so very very recognizable by anyone with eyes, a younger man, a teenager. Adrien himself. There is no title to give explanation to what Benedict has been shown. But one thing caught Benedict’s eyes. The man in the light bore the same jacket that Adrien himself wore daily, down to the shade of blue. But this jacket, the one in the painting, bears none of the raggedness of the one Adrien is so fond of.
“The Jacobin Club, as it was from the view of a younger, more radical, more naive Adrien. Before everything fell apart.” Adrien let the cloth from his hand fall to the floor, and put the other against the man centered on, “Robespierre. Saint-Just. Danton.” a pause, this time accompanied by a grimace, “Desmoulins.” Adrien dipped his head ever so slightly, “I painted them how I remembered them.
Because I could not bear to remember how things ended.” Adrien stepped back, and Benedict was shocked to see a sheen in his eyes.
Adrien turned away from the painting, as if he could not bear to look at it any longer, “I loved them. They had their differences with each other, differences that the younger Adrien was to blind to see.
Even after those differences sent two of them to their deaths.” Adrien tightens his lips, grimacing hard, as if the next words are difficult to say, “And then a few months later, the rest of my family, my actual family, not my parents, met the same fate after the people they fought for turned on them.”
Adrien sits down abruptly, both hands running over his face and through his hair. He exhaled harshly, “9 Thermidor, Robespierre and Saint-Just, as well as several other of his supporters, were arrested and housed in the Hotel de Villa. I was not among them, I had been elsewhere, drowning my sorrows maybe, I don’t remember. But I remember…” a hitch, but the sheen in his eyes did not spread, “I was not on the list. So I went there. To visit them. I don’t know if, in my mind, maybe, I was hoping for some… something to make the inevitable not so.” Adrien took a minute to compose himself, “Saint-Just…. Antoine. He pulled me aside. He fixed my cravat. Gave me this jacket-” Adrien motioned towards the ragged blue jacket on the chair, “his jacket, and he told me to leave. To leave France. To leave… leave them.” A shaky breath, “And I did. But not before, on the day I entered adulthood, became a man, I watched the men who raised me, and the man I loved, murdered before a cheering mob.”
Adrien’s eyes went heavenward for a moment, before turning and facing Benedict fully, the Englishman speechless, “Montfaucon at the Scaffold might have been embellished, but… it is not wrong. I loved them, I loved him, but he, Louis-Antoine de Saint-Just, did not love Adrien-Henri de Montfaucon the way that he wanted. He loved him the way he needed. It was a… familial relationship that the grief captured in that painting represented, and society took that and turned it into something that never was.” Adrien sighed, and Benedict was struck by just how much it looked as if a weight had been taken from the man.
Looking down, “So, with the tale told, I can fully understand why you may want to distance yourself, for as much of your own safety as mine.” Adrien finishes the exposition, and ever so slightly, angles himself to see the other, a mix of emotions unhidden on his face.
A pause, then, “Adrien-” Benedict looked conflicted, though if Adrien were in a calmer, more sensible mood, he would have realized that conflictedness was not about whether to remain in close proximity to the Frank.
Instead, our emotionally constipated artist hopped up from where he sat, began to pace, and began to speak, almost as if he had forgotten that Benedict was even there. “Twenty-two years. I have survived twenty-two years. When something comes up, I pack and go. It’s fine, this is just another one of those times-” he’s rambling, justifying, because though he can fully admit that he has fallen in love again to a woman who will never read it, actually admitting it to the subject is apparently too complicated.
“Adrien!” Benedict interjects, stopping the other in his tracks. Adrien turns, hands fiddling behind his back, expression so very nervous, with a hint of…. Earnest? “Adrien. Stop. Please.” and he waits until the fiddling, the nervous pacing, “I came here today because you asked me to. So what if you’ve got some hidden revolutionary past, which is insane, but again I ask, so what?”
Adrien stalls, mouth slightly agape for a moment before he closes it with a snap, but otherwise stays rooted in his place. Clearly, that was not the response he had been expecting.
Taking this silence as the go ahead to continue, “You claim you’ve up and left time and time again, and if it were so simple, you would have done so again. But it's been a week since the publication, and you are still here. Nobody has come kicking your door down. Society has moved on-” Benedict is on a roll now as well.
“Because they don’t know it’s true!” Adrien shoots back, pulled out of his stupor by the one thing he does know how to do, and that my dear audience, is argue. Not maliciously, but in the spirit of debate, which in this case could be considered malicious towards himself, but that would require a level of self-reflection that Adrien decidedly does not currently have. “If they did, they would be. Not just for the revolutionary aspect, either. England as a whole still criminalizes-” Adrien waved at himself haphazardly, “so if they” he put emphasis on ‘they’, “somehow can’t find enough evidence against Citizen Montfaucon, that is certainly still a very easy path to go down.” he exhales. Benedict opens his mouth to respond, but gets cut off, “And you should be worried about yourself, if not for the danger to your reputation, then for fear of the rope!”
“Then I should be given the choice to decide for myself whether or not I should take that risk!” Finally, Benedict gets a word in, “Has it occurred to you that I am also an adult, with the ability to choose for myself? If I didn’t want to associate with you, why would I still be here, debating with you for my right to take that chance?”
Adrien, seemingly unthinkingly, responds almost immediately, “I cannot be responsible for the destruction of another whom I love-” and then he stops, eyes widening, voice cutting off abruptly, as if he had not meant to voice that particular line out loud. Then, quieter, and to himself, “I love you. And I can’t be responsible for whatever scandal, whatever… hurt, is destined to befall you because of that.”
Silence. The kind of silence where one could hear a pin drop. The kind of silence that is somehow heavy, despite no physical weight being present. Adrien, with that deer in headlights look, tinged with slight betrayal at himself for letting that particular reason slip, Benedict in a similar state of surprise, but notably not as frozen.
Benedict mouths Adrien’s confession to himself, letting the words repeat over in his brain, then, “And so I say again, why not let me choose what risks to my health I take?” He makes the move, stepping closer to Adrien.
Adrien, eyes finally processing that, a confession in of itself, locks his gaze on Benedict’s, as if he could find the answers to life in the other’s eyes. But, he does not attempt to make space between them. If anything, he steps closer, one hand raising ever so slightly, as if to reach out, before stalling, morphing into an open hand, palm facing the Englishman.
“You- Benedict…” Clearly, despite the past as a pamphleteer and propagandist, words have all but abandoned him at this point. He exhales, then, in a fit of courage, or perhaps stupidity, he closes the distance, wraps one hand in Benedict’s cravat, and captures his lips with his own.
And what follows, well, that dear readers, is between Adrien, Benedict, and nobody else.