Drabbles
[Too close for comfort][The Donation][Impatience] [Grantaire Is Impossible!][Rats With Wings.][The Separation][Beltane Eve (slash!)][Episodes With Virginie (sex!)][Like Mother, Like Son][The Moon Over Monteparnasse][Jehan of the Jungle (slash!)]
ficlets
[New Horizons][The Keeper of the Tower]
She's supposed to be in America, he thinks, recognizing the 'boy' occasionally visible over the barricade. She's supposed to be in America with Michel, safe...
...Heh, safe. Safe with an exiled Marechal-cum-schoolteacher who's supposed to be dead. Safe pretending, as usual, to be a man, knowing Elza.
Who's on the other side of the barricade now, pretending to be a man.
His head pounds worse than the drumroll. He chuckles ruefully and the soldiers around him give him looks of bafflement, in the lull between volleys.
Yes, their relationship is currently on hiatus. But this is not his idea of an acceptable breakup fight.
General Reille calls the retreat, and screams at the addlepated soldiers as they hesitantly pull from the rue de la Chanvrerie. They can go find a god-damned less personal barricade to worry at, by god.
A familiar voice is distinct among the cheering. It cries, "Merci, Honoré!"
*authnotes: Only tangentally related fic: All the chars are historical, practically. Elza is Elzelina "Ida" Saint-Elme, who wrote memoirs of a contemporary. She had a habit of dressing up and pretending to be her deceased brother, Charles Van Aylde. The 'exiled Marechal' is her more-or-less former lover, better known as supposedly-executed Marechal Michel Ney. General Reille is her more-or-less current lover, at the time. I make better use of him in Capitaine Grandeur, though I doubt he'd agree. :)
He sits comfortably in the fiacre. Voices rumble sedition in time with the clattering wheels. They haven't decided if he's a better spokesman dead or alive. At his age, it's all the same to him.
Commotion-- a grubby boy with a cockade obstructs their progress. The lad exhorts them that good republicans walk.
He interjects, "What's this?"
"The revolution's got better uses for cars, Uncle-Granddad."
"Fine!" He chortles and descends. "Donation of M. Lafayette. You boys don't mind, eh?"
His captors shake their heads dumbly. He borrows an arm till he can support himself on his stick. The gamin chirps thanks and flitters off with his prize.
Not a good evening. The night, thick clouds boiling around him, is even worse. The stars make promises they seem maddeningly loath to deliver.
She is coming, they say. Don't you worry about it.
The rooftop's the usual spot for their assignations, and though he's early, he will wait out darkness. There can be no sleep tonight in anticipation of this incarnation of his rosy-fingered mistress, yellow skirts splayed about her in fullness of fog, and the smile of glory and death on her lips.
One day more till revolution indeed, and Enjolras intends to have her before anyone else.
Grantaire smacked the desk with his palm, surprising needle and slipper right out of her hand.
"Mademoiselle Boissy, you call me impossible, but I am incontrovertible. If you think your pretty rebuffs are enough to drive me to jump in the river, you're wrong, and an ingrate to boot. Prettier than you, with eyes more blue, haven't succeeded in getting rid of me. So you will meet me, at the time and place I have said. au revoir.
He jammed his hat upon his skull and stalked out.
"Shameless!" Exasperated the other shopgirl.
"Really!" Irma agreed.
But she met him.
"Je suis petit osieau..." Gavroche sang, then started up at Monteparnasse. "And you're a big old crow. What's 'Ponine, then?"
Monteparnasse dropped a sneer onto Gavroche's head. "Who cares?"
"You're mooning."
Monteparnasse bared his teeth at Gavroche, who gingerly danced away, flirted dangerously with an approaching omnibus, danced back. Monteparnasse had acquired a thoughtful expression.
"A rock dove, I think."
"The devil!" Gavroche cursed gaily, "Rats with wings!"
Monteparnasse began to retort, then suddenly lurched to the side. A great white plop narrowly missed his hat, but splattered on the tip of his boot.
"Ha!" Ejaculated Gavroche. 'Parnasse snarled eloquently.
Takes place at the Inn in Montfermiel, yes yes.
"When will he be back, maman?"
Fantine looks at her daughter and chokes back tears. They'll just make the coughing worse. Thus, she cannot reply, "He won’t be."
Cosette sits on the bed and holds her. It hasn’t been cloud-castles; her, maman, and papa, but this vacation’s supposed to help. One of papa’s surprises. Like the note on the dresser. Like whatever it is that weakens maman’s body now, makes her cough and tremble; makes the sores sprout.
Felix did love his surprises.
"I don't know. I’ll go and... ask the innkeeper.”
Cosette does not ask when she’ll be back.
April starlight, low voices in the streets and gardens merry with life and May Eve laughter. Pretty girls toss flowers to laughing passerby. Arm in arm, a spendthrift gale of two young men shed and radiate love, violence, glee, and song into the sultry night. They are drunken, bruised and happy, they linger on the stop of the apartment and kiss, deeply, in a passing absence of light. Careening upstairs, they collapse in a tangle of sheets and fingers. Quiet, fond curses and breathy admonitions give rapid way to low moans and repeated exhalations of faith, friendship, brotherhood:
"Jean-Baptiste, Je t'aime"
"Jaqcues-Gervais, Je t'adore."
(J-B is Courfeyrac, J-G is Bahorel)
The moment they see her, they need-- simply need to claim her. She is most obliging. The first visit, it's one at a time, one after the other. The next, modesty has gone the way of patience, and they nearly crawl over each other at her suggestion: Why not all at once?
From then on, that's how it is to be, for all time. What sensual indulgence! Eight healthy, (well, save one, whose ardency and cute spectacles more than make up for his cholera) young men, sixteen hands raking her ivory skin, tangled in her sunrise-hued hair, murmuring passion and grunting glory each in their own octave, harmonizing with her own pretty exclamations and sighs. Never, in her eighteen years, has she felt such wholeness as with this fine troupe, passion for her and love for each other blotting out all reason, all else. She revels in their lust and devotion, and mourns the brevity of their times together, though eight surely beat one for staying power, that's true.
And best, at the end of each visit, they humbly leave their louis each on the bedside table. Leaving the brothel, turning their eyes from her beauty, they promptly forget her.
In retrospect, Ignace-Etienne Grantaire marveled at how artfully the scene was managed. Uncannily, the boy fought like his mother.
When the two girls arrived at his son's apartment, he'd been prepared to absent himself politely, and visit another day. Then he saw Valencie's eyes in the face of the one all in white, and horror spread like typhus to every expression.
"Arture? The Devil!"
Layers of white chiffon wheeled down the stairs, pursued by the pretty friend and a hurricane of curses, threats, oaths. But, alone in the apartment's deadly silence, he left ten louis.
The resemblance was painfully uncanny.
Overgrowth concealed a lovely white form in a torn shift, straining desperately against hempen bonds, gagged by a shred of said undergarment. Her gown reclined on the garden bench, swaddling a thin, dark person, rouging his features. Turning a diabolically pretty face to the moonlight, likewise dark eyes glittered.
"How do I look?" Soprano tones laughed, tenor menaced. "Don't wear yourself out, cherie."
Weeping, she jerked in sudden horror. Someone was come through the gate.
"Cosette!" came the cherished whisper, horrid to her wretchedness.
Her captor smiled sweetly.
"I'm here. Come closer."
Cosette whimpered helplessly. Her beloved did as bade.
Lost in a jungle of limbs and a tropic of sweat, Jehan marveled at the heat under his tongue and feral growls of his friends and lovers, engaged in their sub-equatorial maneuvers. He watched, fascinated as Shoulderblades undulated with the grace of Bengals through the exotic canopy of tangled sheets. Savage teeth and nails raked him deliciously, moving him, of course, to verse.
"Ah, the Tigers come at night," He murmured, winced, and arched, "And their voices-- soft as thunder, as they..."
But his subjects claimed his mouth, his senses, and his mind before he could formulate the next verse.
Ficlets
(Survivalfic, and Victorious!Barricade future. 200 words.)
The rocking, rolling dinghy is barely big enough for the lot of us, without Jehan's merry English sailing ditties-- from 'blow boys, blow' to 'the saucy sailor boy'. Remnants, doubtless, of his and Courfeyrac's adventures in Anglophilia, which may or may not have coincided with the docking of the Fleet.
I am being uncharitable, I know. The others are all enjoying it hugely. The salt spray, the obtuse English punnery, the sense of adventure. The fact that we maybe have three days water and rations left. But Enjolras has called, so we have rallied.
A merry idea, for a rag-tag bunch of revolutionaries grown restless in the prevalent contentment. As Enjolras said when sounding me, "This too, Combeferre, shall pass. We've made it good, and for a while, made it lasting. But nothing good lasts forever. Our time will come again. I won't waste the intervening hours in idleness!" And we made plans-out into the ocean to find lands in darkness and illuminate their peoples with liberty. Merry.
So I've come, to the salt, to the sea, to the familiar rise of spirits at the possible horizons, and the rising bile as I am seasick, again, into the waves.
The knight rides up to the castle to free the girl from the Ivory Tower, the Witch within, and all of that rot, in the way that knights are supposed to. And he is a good knight and noble, a baronial prince; his sword is sharp and the lady loves him.
But the Witch-- an old bent enchanter man-- has come down to meet him, carrying a key in his hand and his heart in his mouth.
"It is like this, young man-- if you can guess my name, you shall have the Princess."
the Prince reaches for the handkerchief he carries as a favor in his helmet, but truly, he knows better than that.
"Your name is Jean Valjean!"
With a sigh, barely even that, the key is won, and the Prince is the master of the tower now. The old Enchanter shuffles off into the darkness, where another witch has been waiting in his big, black cape, for the old man to step out of the castle, just once...
There are prisons and prisons, you see, and there must always be a tower.
Upstairs, in her little, locked room, the Princess waits and wonders what is going on.