We Only Bloom In The Violet Hour

Title: Wisdom to Know the Difference Rating: General Audiences Fandom(s): Les Misérables Relationships: Fantine & Javert, Fantine/Javert, Fantine & Javert & Jean Valjean Characters: Fantine, Javert, Jean Valjean, Cosette Fauchelevent, Marius Pontmercy Additional Tags: AU - canon divergence, Javert Lives, Ghost Fantine, Slow Build, Work in Progress

Dead doesn't necessarily mean gone. In the ugly morning hours of June 7th, Javert falls over the bridge's edge, and Fantine's ghost pulls him out of the river. Now they'll just have to live with the skeletons in their collective closets - for a given value of “live”, anyway.

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

me: alright i’m not so much concentrating on les mis anymore my new focus is the three musketeers! new interest! we’re broadening our scope! that’s diversification baby!

also me: If I See One More Alternate Universe Where Everyone Lives Except Fantine, Whose Death Apparently Is A Fixed Part Of The Timeline, I’m Gonna McFreakin’ Lose It

chapter 15 for climbing to the light is up!

we’re on a mission from God. we’ve got a full timeline of the beauxbatons au valvertine fic mapped out from january 1971 through to halloween 1981, got fourteen chapters already out, three chapters fully outlined, it’s dark, and we’re wearing sunglasses.

hit it.

I tried to draw Grantaire after a long time… apparently he gets hairier

“you mocked me once, never do it again!” she cried, furious. “i died that day! and you can die too, for all i care!” she shoved him, and he tumbled down the steep slope.

“as you wish!” he called after her.

“westley?” she said -- and stared at the masked man, hurtling downwards. his voice had been familiar, yes, but it was only with the familiar words that she recognized him.

how could her westley have said such horrible things to her?

“why did you say those things?” she shouted down to him, after he had landed.

“what?”

“why did you say all those awful, cruel things to me?”

he stared up at her, a little black figure, and buttercup felt sad for the first time since humperdinck had proposed to her. the blankness of loss was one thing. the cruelty of a loved one was different, and somehow sharper.

“why did you agree to marry humperdinck?” he called. “i told you i would come back!”

“you were dead!”

“death cannot stop true love! it can only delay it for a while.”

“oh! that is easy for you to say!” she cried. “what if you thought i was dead? what would you have done?”

“not gone off and married some princess, that’s for certain!”

“i already told you, i don’t love humperdinck -- and anyway, he would have had me killed if i hadn’t agreed to marry him! would you have rather i died?”

“buttercup --”

“would you have rather i died?”

he paused, and shook his head.

“you knew the sicilian and his gang had kidnapped me. you could have found out why i married humperdinck, couldn’t you?”

“i heard rumors.”

“rumors of what?”

“well, how cruel he is, how his friend count tyrone has a torture chamber ...”

“how could you have thought that i loved him, then?”

“well, i --”

“how,” she continued, even more angry and even more sad, “could you have thought i would love a scheming tyrant like him? do you really think so badly of me?”

“buttercup, i --”

“at least humperdinck has the decency of telling me how horrible he is! but you -- you tell me that you love me, and at the first doubt you turn on me, you call me faithless, you threaten to strike me!”

“humperdinck threatened to chop your head off!” he yelled, indignant. “how can hitting you be even close to as bad?”

“be quiet!” buttercup exploded, and, surprised by such a vehement command, westley obeyed. “i am sick of you telling me what’s good and what’s bad, what’s right and what’s wrong! you have all these pretty words that you use, but none of them means anything! death can’t stop true love -- well, it mustn’t have been very true, if preventing my own death made you stop loving me. or did you ever actually love me at all?”

and for once, westley had no witty, ready-made answer.

That's How You Know

((well this is only perfect. modern!verse because))

It was the little things.

The "good morning ferut"s scrawled in the mirror. The absentminded grabbing of his hand to draw a flower or a heart, pen tickling the skin. The random kidnapping for a picnic lunch between classes. The footsie under the table.

The karaoke night when Grantaire had tugged him onstage to serenade him with "Falling For You" was one particularly memorable instance.

And so it was that, six months after they'd started dating, Joly took him to the park, and every tree they went by had R+J carved in it somewhere.

"Thank you so much, bunny. I love you too."

"But I've never said --"

"You didn't have to."

This website is like a suicide hotline but with text chat instead.  I would appreciate it if you guys helped spread the word.

@fantineweek 2018 - day three: family | friendship.

this is gonna be one part angsty canon meta, and one part angsty headcanon. because, uhhh, because i have a lot of feelings about this.

(extra long post too, whoops.)

friendship first.

okay. as much as i really, really do want fantine to have a whole bunch of friends who love and support her, and as much as i would love for favourite / dahlia / zéphine to belong to that category --

she really doesn’t have any friends at all. especially not the rest of the paris quartet.

believe me, i want favourite to be fantine’s best friend. i want dahlia to be the one who taught her which particular type of maroon made her blonde hair glow best. i want zéphine to have sat up with fantine during those restless nights when cosette was an infant and helped her with all the small important things involved with caring for a child of that age.

but while canon gives us not very much interaction between these ladies at all, it does give us just enough to say “uh-uh. the only reason these people spend any time together at all is because their boyfriends are best friends.”

from “tholomyes [sic] is so merry that he sings a spanish ditty” :

all received, to some extent, the kisses of all, with the exception of Fantine, who was hedged about with that vague resistance of hers composed of dreaminess and wildness, and who was in love. “You always have a queer look about you,” said Favourite to her.

okay, but just because hapgood has this translation, that doesn’t necessarily mean that’s what hugo originally wrote. (i parsed a little of this with the quartet last year here on my fantine blog.)

“tholomyès est si joyeux qu’il chante une chanson espagnole” :

toute recevaient un peu çà et là les baisers de tous, excepté Fantine, en fermée dans sa vague résistance rêveuse et farouche, et qui aimait. -- Toi, lui disait Favourite, tu as toujours l’air chose.

“avoir l’air chose” can be read as “you’re always daydreaming” or “there’s something peculiar about you” -- or any other number of ways to tell someone that they’re the odd one out.

fantine is the only one vouvoied by the entire party, except for tholomyès who of course tutoies her. we see why in this section -- because even though this is only one afternoon, and only one of the three ladies talking to her, we can reasonably extrapolate that this is how the dynamic has been between all of them for at least the past two years.

fantine is the only one who doesn’t want to play their game of exchanging kisses indiscriminately. the only one she’s in love with is tholomyès, so the only person she wants to be kissing her is tholomyès. meanwhile, the other ladies aren’t actually in love with their gentlemen: they see them as hobbies to drop when one or both parties get bored: of course they don’t care who kisses who.

the oldest, favourite, is twenty-three; the youngest, fantine, is twenty-one. that’s the same age gap between me and my sister. hugo treats this like an insurmountable distance. but it isn’t the age gap which isolates fantine from the other three ladies. it’s simply that she sees the world so differently than they do.

how could such different people be real friends?

in fact, the only person who extends a hand of friendship -- and i mean that in the sense of providing warmth and kindness in her life, out of no sense of obligation (*cough* valjean *cough*) -- is marguerite, her elderly neighbor.

from “madame victurnien’s success” :

She began to make coarse shirts for soldiers of the garrison, and earned twelve sous a day. Her daughter cost her ten. It was at this point that she began to pay the Thenardiers [sic] irregularly.

However, the old woman who lighted her candle for her when she returned at night, taught her the art of living in misery. Back of living on little, there is the living on nothing. These are the two chambers; the first is dark, the second is black.

Fantine learned how to live without fire entirely in the winter; how to give up a bird which eats a half a farthing's worth of millet every two days; how to make a coverlet of one's petticoat, and a petticoat of one's coverlet; how to save one's candle, by taking one's meals by the light of the opposite window. No one knows all that certain feeble creatures, who have grown old in privation and honesty, can get out of a sou. It ends by being a talent.

[...]

The old woman who had given her lessons in what may be called the life of indigence, was a sainted spinster named Marguerite, who was pious with a true piety, poor and charitable towards the poor, and even towards the rich, knowing how to write just sufficiently to sign herself Marguerite, and believing in God, which is science.

this is where the angsty headcanon about family comes in.

hugo does nothing by accident. except for his math, which he does badly on purpose, because he hates math.

in one of the earlier drafts of les misérables, he gives fantine the name of marguerite louet. he scratched this out later, of course; he gave her a diminutive instead of a proper name, to show better how much of a street urchin she was.

but he kept the name marguerite, and he gave it to the elderly spinster neighbor who helped fantine.

marguerite is a type of daisy. it is also the french version of the name margaret, which ultimately derives from the greek word margaron, meaning pearl.

y’all know where i’m heading with this.

it would be too much of a stretch to headcanon that marguerite is fantine’s mother. marguerite is probably too old to be her mother -- and she takes a grandmotherly sort of role, anyway.

more likely that marguerite is the older aunt to a niece she did not even know existed.

maybe fantine is the spit and image of marguerite’s youngest sister. maybe fantine has the same nose that their dad had, the same high forehead as her brother, the same smile as the one she sees in the mirror (the same pearls).

or maybe it’s cosette who embodies those things, and if marguerite saw that little girl, she would be struck with a living image of the past.