I Was Looking Around My Old Document Files And Found This, And Thought People Might Like It.

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.