Title: Wisdom To Know The Difference Rating: General Audiences Fandom(s): Les Misérables Relationships:

I was looking around my old document files and found this, and thought people might like it.

Bahorel/Prouvaire pre-slash fic beneath the cut.

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It started out very slow.

Jehan appreciated art in all its forms. The glow of a sunset, the trill of a flute, the aroma of a bakery. So it was not surprising that, one day at the Musain with friends, he happened to notice the articulation of Bahorel’s wrist and fingers.

The man had been mid-gesture, talking with Joly about – oh, probably Joly’s mistress – and Bahorel was prone to magnificent gestures with his hands, he was probably part Italian somewhere. But for some reason, one hand landed in a beam of sunlight that had snuck through the window, and the modelling of bone and muscle and skin had drawn Jehan’s eye like one of Joly’s magnets.

They had known each other long enough that, after the meeting, when Jehan went over to Bahorel and said, rather absentmindedly, “I like your wrists. And your fingers. Reminds me of Michelangelo,” Bahorel merely laughed and ruffled Jehan’s too-long hair.

And Jehan had gone home, and sung to his violets, and written a poem about a girl that he saw in the street, and that was that.

Except that it was not.

The two of them went drinking together on occasion, and would get into ferociously animated discussions about life and death, and the afterlife, and the judgment of men. And if the flash of an eye and the curve of a smile managed to leave an after-image on the insides of Jehan’s eyelids, he certainly didn’t remember it in the morning, in the aftermath of a most excellent debate, complete with Byronic skullcups and bloodred wine.

It was during another meeting at the Musain some months later, when Jehan was in the middle of expounding upon the poetic merits of pagan mythology, that he overheard a snippet of conversation.

“ – And you never quarrel!”

“That’s part of the treaty we have made. When we made our little Holy Alliance, we each assigned our own boundary that we’d never cross. The part to the north belongs to Vaud, the south to Gex. Hence our peace.”

“Peace is happiness digesting.”

Ordinary conversation on an ordinary day, but it snagged Jehan like a splinter on a stocking – tore a tiny hole, just large enough to grow, and grow it did. Weeks afterward he found himself muttering aloud: “Happiness does not come from a social contract.”

He wondered, briefly, if the nature of romantic liaisons had any bearing on Locke’s theory.

Envy is a tenacious seed, but it was not envy that took root in Jehan’s mind. Rather, it was something else, which sprang from conversation, smiles, and the model of hand and wrist, -- and became ideas, and the flash of eyes, -- and became, over the course of slow months, something that Jehan was not entirely familiar with.

He had been in love before. The girl had been his neighbor when he was a small child, and his playmate, and they chattered about the shapes of clouds and lullabies and flowers, and made mud pies, and collected crisp fall leaves. That girl had had the clearest blue eyes, and that was why Jehan loved the sky, still: it reminded him of that first love, pure and honest as only children can be.

This was something different. This was wanting.

So I’m still going through most of this blog, archiving the old rp stuff offline and deleting the posts themselves. If anybody who I used to rp with here (when this blog was still called ask-the-hypochondriac) wants any of those screenshots, you are more than welcome to contact me and I’ll send copies of them to you.

But yeah, if anybody’s been paying attention to the change in url, this is now gonna be my fic and sketch blog. So I’m going to be rebageling drabbles and fics from my other rp blogs here, dumping original stuff here, posting sketches, that kind of thing. Probably mostly going to be centered on LOTR and the Silmarillion since that’s mostly the fandom I’m in right now.

Rilwen I wrote more of the thing and I decided to dump it here because it’s too big to dump on Skype

and probably knowing me it’ll end up being a series of minifics that I dump here based on the same reincarnation au

oH WELL ??

under a cut, because it’s gotten damn long (cries)

Sobekhotep and Nastasen.

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@fantineweek 2018 - day one: youth | childhood.

going off the hapgood translation available online here.

She was born at M. sur M. Of what parents? Who can say? She had never known father or mother. She was called Fantine. Why Fantine? She had never borne any other name. At the epoch of her birth the Directory still existed. She had no family name; she had no family; no baptismal name; the Church no longer existed. She bore the name which pleased the first random passer-by, who had encountered her, when a very small child, running bare-legged in the street. She received the name as she received the water from the clouds upon her brow when it rained. She was called little Fantine. No one knew more than that. This human creature had entered life in just this way. At the age of ten, Fantine quitted the town and went to service with some farmers in the neighborhood. At fifteen she came to Paris “to seek her fortune.”

this is the only paragraph we have that describes anything of her youth. as far as hugo is concerned, her story begins in 1817, when she is 21 years old and two years a mother.

fantine, as in (en)fantine - childlike. the obvious connotation there is innocence.

it is pretty much implied that fantine grows up on the street much the same way that gavroche and the mômes did. and yet hugo spends so much time after this telling us how much she is naively in love with tholomyès; how young she is, how sweet this first love is, even if tholomyès does not requite it.

that naïveté might be solely attached to her romantic inclinations, though, i think.

fantine survives a childhood in the gutter. yet hugo only devotes two sentences (two! out of this enormous book, only two!) to her rise from gamine to grisette.

she is clever enough to realize that she will not be able to get anywhere in life if she stays where she is. hugo says she quits montreuil-sur-mer at the age of ten. ten years old. what on earth was i doing at the age of ten? pretending to be a gargoyle at recess? reading books about talking owls? fantine volunteered to work at a farm; she worked there for five years; and when she wanted more out of life, at the age of fifteen (only two years younger than cosette in 1832!) she walks to paris.

four years later she becomes a mother.

when we first see fantine in “double quartette” and “four and four”, she is young; she is quiet, prone to melancholy daydreaming; she is in love with tholomyès.

(side note: digging through “four and four” for quotes, i found this:

Listolier and Fameuil, who were engaged in discussing their professors, explained to Fantine the difference that existed between M. Delvincourt and M. Blondeau.

blondeau, that old rat! eleven years from now we’ll be hearing your funeral oration courtesy of bossuet! it’s little nuggets like these that keep me in love with this book, dammit.)

fantine wears fashionable if modest clothes, and hugo takes great care to describe not only the curve of her throat and the dimple between her shoulder (uh ... thanks, buddy) but the type of fabric that she wears, the particular color of the muslin, et cetera. fantine is a pieceworker at this point -- she clearly knows what she is doing, even if she is less coquettish about it than the other girls in the quartet. this gives us an inkling of what she spent her time doing from the age of fifteen onward. though, really, this is only a different venue for what she had been doing ever since she was ten.

she spent her time climbing up the ladder. she found a new skill, and she learned it, and she made herself useful. i don’t call that particularly naive.

she got out of the gutter, and the horrors that this entails. she made herself a comfortable life away from the constraints of what she was born into.

contrast this with the stories of valjean and javert:

valjean did not start in the gutter. he was forced into prison, and he was forced into the abyss that is being an ex-convict. only the grace of m. myriel allowed him to climb out of that pit -- not just his kindness, but his silver. ( “i have bought your soul for God.” )

javert started in the gutter, but unlike fantine -- let’s be honest here -- given the social and historical context in which hugo was writing, the terms with which he describes javert can easily be interpreted as javert being part romani -- javert does not have the same options to rise from his horrible circumstances. he has no miraculous donor to give him money. and he is not a blonde white girl.

so fantine and valjean get out. there is a catch; of course there is.

it is valjean’s history which is the pitfall waiting for him. as long as someone knows who he is, and will take advantage of it, he will always have the specter of the bagne lurking over him.

and fantine’s fate? well, by the time we meet her, as young as she still is (21! by God, she’s only twenty-one years old!), the trap has already been baited and set for her, and she’s already been caught in it. tholomyès has made her the mother of his child, but he has refused to make her his wife.

i don’t believe that fantine is so innocent she cannot comprehend it is only tholomyès’ whim which keeps her, an unmarried mother, out of the yawning abyss. i can’t believe it. she must have seen enough of life, both in paris and in m-sur-m before that, to know how society devours unmarried mothers.

i can, however, believe that it is her innocent love which blinds her to the fact that he is willing to condemn her to such despair.

im crying over javert getting stuck in the corner with grantaire he’s just like Why

The first time they kissed was completely by accident.

Joly was mildly drunk, and Grantaire was sober for once, and Grantaire had just finished saying something about -- oh, he didn't remember, but it was nice, it was the kind of thing Joly certainly agreed with, and it was sweet.

He remembered that Grantaire had said something sweet, because that was why he went to kiss his cheek.

But Grantaire had turned his head at the very last moment, so there it was: a vaguely wine-tasting, awkwardly executed kiss.

They stayed there like that for a few moments, both nonplussed, before Joly pulled back and, blinking rapidly, took off his glasses to clean them.

"I was planning on doing that differently."

" ... Were you?"

"... I was."

"Then, here," said Grantaire, and he kissed Joly, and this time wasn't quite so awkward.

We’re Hugo nominated authors y'all. We did it.