Brienne-le-Château, June 1779
He started with Davout, because Davout was the one who never laughed.
It took three days of watching to be sure of it. Every time Verrier found some new small cruelty to visit on somebody, a stolen page of notes, a mocking impression of a stammer, a boot planted just so in someone's path. Napoleone watched the rest of the dormitory the way he watched everything now, cataloguing reactions instead of just enduring his own. Most boys laughed because laughing was safer than not laughing. A few looked away, which was its own kind of safe. Davout did neither. Davout watched with a flat, unreadable stillness that Napoleone recognized, because he'd worn the same look himself more than once without knowing anyone could see it.
He found him alone by the woodpile behind the stables, where Davout went most evenings before the bell, apparently for no better reason than that nobody else bothered to.
"You don't laugh at it," Napoleone said, without preamble. "When Verrier does his tricks. Everyone else does. You don't."
Davout looked at him for a long moment, unhurried, the way a man sizes up a horse he isn't sure he wants to buy. "Should I?"
"No. I'm only asking why you don't."
"Because it's stupid." Davout went back to what he'd been doing, which was nothing much turning a piece of kindling over in his hands like it required his full attention. "Doesn't cost me anything to think it's stupid. Costs plenty to say so out loud."
"That's true of most things worth saying." Napoleone sat down on the edge of the woodpile, uninvited, and Davout didn't tell him to leave, which he'd learned by now counted as an invitation from a boy like this. "I want to ask you something, and I want you to actually think about it before you answer, not just tell me what you think I want to hear."
"Go on."
"How many boys in that dormitory get treated the way Picot does? Or Rocher? Or me?"
Davout considered this with the same unhurried care he'd given the kindling. "More than get treated the other way, probably. Just not all in the same way, so nobody notices it's the same thing happening four times over, instead of four different things."
Napoleone felt something settle into place, quiet and certain, the way a lock clicks when you've finally found the right key. "That's exactly it. That's exactly the problem."
"Problem for who?"
"For them. Right now. For anyone Verrier decides to bother with tomorrow, if nothing changes." He picked up a piece of bark, turning it over the way Davout had turned the kindling, buying himself a second to choose the next words carefully. "I'm not going to ask you to be my friend, Davout. I don't think you'd believe me if I said it, and I'm not sure it'd even be true yet. I'm asking something smaller. If four boys who all get treated the same way started looking out for each other not fighting, nothing that gets us kneeling in the chapel just watching each other's backs the way you watch everyone else's without saying anything, do you think that would actually change something?"
"Might. Might just get four boys in trouble together instead of one boy in trouble alone."
"Maybe. But one boy alone loses every time. Four boys who talk to each other first might not."
Davout didn't answer right away. He set the kindling down, finally, and looked at Napoleone with something that wasn't quite trust yet but wasn't dismissal either, the particular careful look of a boy deciding whether an idea was worth the risk of being associated with it. "What would this actually look like? Not the idea of it. The actual thing."
"Small. Nothing anyone could point to and call a conspiracy." Napoleone had been turning this part over for two nights already, the way he used to turn over a schoolyard scuffle before it happened. "If Verrier corners Picot in the yard, one of us finds a monk to walk past at the right moment not to tattle, just to be there, because Verrier doesn't do his tricks in front of an audience that might report it. If someone takes Rocher's things, one of us happens to know where they ended up and happens to mention it loud enough for the wrong person to overhear. Nothing that gets any of us punished. Just enough that being cruel to one of us stops being free."
"And what do you get out of organizing it?"
The question didn't sting the way Napoleone half-expected it to. It was a fair question, the kind a careful boy asked before agreeing to anything, and he respected it too much to answer it with anything but the truth.
"The same as you. I'm tired of being the only one who notices when it happens to me." He met Davout's eyes squarely. "And I'd rather be the one deciding how we answer it than keep waiting to see what happens to me next."
Davout was quiet for a long moment, turning something over behind his flat, careful face. Then he nodded once, the way he seemed to do everything, without any wasted motion.
"Picot won't trust it easily," he said. "He's been burned trying to make friends before. You'll have to go slow with him."
"And Rocher?"
"Rocher will join the second you ask, and probably talk too much about it after, which is its own problem." A faint, almost invisible thing that might have been the start of a smile crossed Davout's mouth and was gone again before Napoleone could be sure he'd seen it. "You'll need to tell him what not to say before you tell him what to do."
"Noted." Napoleone stood, brushing bark dust from his knees. "I'll talk to Picot first, then. Tomorrow, somewhere quiet. You don't have to be there for it better if it doesn't look like the four of us suddenly appearing together all at once."
"Careful," Davout said, and there was nothing unkind in it, only the same flat honesty he gave everything. "Men in a hurry get caught."
"I'm not in a hurry." Napoleone looked back toward the dormitory, where the bell would ring any minute now, calling all of them back into the same room where Verrier and the tall one who'd invented his nickname would be waiting with tomorrow's version of today's cruelty already halfway planned. "I've got years left in this place, Davout. I intend to spend them building something Verrier can't see coming until it's already finished."
Davout picked the kindling back up, apparently satisfied that the conversation had reached wherever it was going. "Four boys isn't much of anything yet."
"No," Napoleone agreed, and there was something in his voice now that hadn't been there a week ago, back when he was still just the boy kneeling alone on the chapel floor. "But four is more than one. And one was all I had a month ago."
The bell rang across the yard, flat and indifferent as always, and the two of them walked back toward the dormitory a careful distance apart, not together, not yet, nothing anyone watching could point to and call a plan, just two boys returning from the woodpile at roughly the same time, the way boys who happened to occupy the same evening sometimes did, and nothing more than that at all.