– He has a crazy good memory. He knows his birthday, even though he shouldn’t know it. His parents died when he was four, an age at which not many children know about calendar dates. Plus, the birth dates of many children of poor families at the time were simply lost and not officially recorded by the government. But his parents gave him a gift for his third birthday and told him what date it was, and he was able to remember that.
– He swears a whole lot, much to the chagrin of Jehan.
– Although he doesn’t have a formal education, he is very much an autodidactic. He taught himself Polish and even some mathematics.
– Him, Jehan, and Joly look pretty similar to each other: short and skinny with longish hair. They kinda look alike in a “fraternal triplets” sort of way.
– Needs glasses but doesn’t wear them.
– Can’t sing.
– In modern AU, he still has a flip phone. Bahorel teases him about his “Flintsone phone” all the time.
– Sad headcanon: his body was never identified after the fall of the barricades. The coroners trying to identify him thought there was nothing particularly remarkable about him. He clearly
didn’t come from a wealthy or well-known family. He was just
so…average. He could be anyone. They thought that maybe he was alone and had no
family. Or maybe the only people who knew who he was were dead
themselves. Feuilly was eventually given an unnamed grave with an approximate date of birth.
Why must you hurt me with words? I was floating around in modern AU shenanigans and then
She is founded on softer things, pink and cream and sugar and silk, pastel fragility steeped in a tender, sun-striped melancholy. She is founded on love – every type of love, all of its variations spun together like lace, woven in the manner of the complex flute melodies that she so adores. She wishes that she could play the flute, and she has tried to learn a few times, though the nuances of it always slip from her mind, in the end. Her delicate fingers are better suited to tracing pipes and braiding hair, in any case, than to any rougher task; she is crafted as carefully as the breath of a rainbow, and it is there, in her shivering opalescent colors, that her strength resides.
Tholomyes, of course, draws more from her – and she does not hate him for it, though it hurts a little and the fleeting trembles of pleasure don’t quite redeem the unpleasant twists in her stomach. He asks her again and again with his smooth rich word, and she grows to accept the faintly sick chill that enclasps her whenever she detects that certain glint in his eye.
“You do not love him!” Zephine exclaims one day with a hand across her parted lips. The four of them sit with their legs long across the grassy slope of a hill in a park, flowers scattered around them, eager light dancing behind all of their eyes.
“Oh, but I do – it is only the action that I rather… well, it’s no better with him than it would be with any other man, that is all. The pleasure is fine enough, but – oh, this talk is not proper. Must we dwell upon it?”
And the topic is washed away with laughter and sunlight and sweet spring scent. Fantine is content. And later, when she begins to feel a deeper twist and stir in her belly, she is touched with relief. It is worth it, she thinks as soon as she knows. It is worth it, when she can’t breathe through the hurricane of tears that comes with his departure. It is worth it when she holds the child, kisses the cloud-and-cream softness of her daughter’s forehead for the first time.
It is worth it, in an alley populated by two dirty girls and their flame-haired mother.
It is worth it, with locks of shorn golden hair painting the dirty ground.
It is worth it, a dull ache spreading through her iron-stained mouth until she can feel naught else.
It is worth it – on the sailors’ beds, against alley walls, drowning in snow heaps. It is worth it, even in the end, cradled in sheets and doused with the calm of the hospital that she will never depart. Because Cosette is alive, and Fantine has made it that way, and surely there is no purer act of love in the whole of the world.
a male character you see as asexual // jean valjean
He used to think that it would happen eventually. He gave it time—nothing but time. He didn’t seek anyone out. He didn’t ever wish for more; only expected, in an odd distant way, that it would sometime reach him. After all, he was far too familiar with the words from his sister; she promised him that, as soon as he discovered true pleasure, he would never breathe carelessly again. She promised him that love was his purpose, and she, even after everything that had happened to her, did not know how to differentiate between love and the actions that she presumed to go along with it.
Yet he was far too often panting and sweating under the strain of his aching life to crave any exertion more. Love, surely, would best be the opposite. Something cool and gentle, something without passion, without flame.
The chains that ate away at him for nineteen years solidified his surety. They were not made solely of metal. There were men there, men with wild eyes, who saw him as prey. And he endured it, because he had no other choice. Only after years, when he let himself grow truly strong, was he able to fight back; until that time, he allowed his jaw to clench and his eyes to leak, and cast his thoughts out to the raging sea as it battered against the exterior of their fragile, salt-encrusted wooden bunk.
And when he saw Fantine—oh, Fantine, the purest and sweetest woman who would ever grace his presence, with a shining copper core that even starvation and disease could never dull—when he saw what it had done to her, he learned to hate it. It had ripped her apart. For him, for her, there was no pleasure, and it was then, with her cold and trembling in his arms, that he accepted it. He would not fear the action that had poisoned her, not forever, but he had no desire for it. His wants, his needs were broader, more ambitious, silver and less flowery.
Soon enough, he was old. No one expected more of him. He was content to be precisely what he was, and so he spent his life with the love he desired, awash in soft colors, covered in the kisses of old book pages and pressed flowers and the soothing glow of the stars.
you mean how he was careful not to let any part of his body touch me and kept leaning away and nearly choked when I leaned across him slightly to ask Joly something and accidentally leaned my hand on his thigh? I don’t think that means he likes me, maybe he just hates my cologne or something
Should have seen the ride home. If we were in a musical he would have broken out into I Can Hear The Bells
“Courf his hand is so strong but it’s also soft can hands be strong and soft certainly I’m not going to be prejudice about hands because one can be strong and soft but Grantaire’s hands were also rough with work and maybe it’s because he grips bottles so hard but clearly he’s very good with his hands and—-“
¯_( ಠ_ಠ)_/¯ 