Les Miscéllanibles

i love you, but do you have legbones? combeferre/enjolras

Enjolras/Combeferre, AU where supernatural creatures (werewolves, fairies, merfolk - take your pick) are real and one of them is a human and one is the creature.

“Sometimes I doubt your commitment to Les Amis de la Mer,” Enjolras says with an annoyed twitch of his tail. Combeferre presses a kiss against Enjolras’s gills and slides his hand down Enjolras’s pelvis, trying to feel for vestigial legbones. “I have no idea what you mean,” Combeferre replies.

tyrian purple looks black at night. combeferre/courfeyrac

Combeferre/Courfeyrac, Roman Gaul.

Courfeyrac drew the purple cloak closer around his body, letting it cling to where he was still flushed and bloody from their battle with the Romans. Combeferre fisted his hands in the soft fabric and pulled Courfeyrac in for a kiss, tasting sweat and the first of many cups of wine.
“You know, more snails were dyed for that cloak than men died today on the field,” Combeferre said.

Chapter 3: she was perfect. enjolras/grantaire

E/R Black Swan.

Enjolras didn’t smile as she settled over Grantaire, her red mouth drawn into the same predatory line as her spine. Grantaire shivered at the touch of Enjolras’s hair against her skin while Enjolras seemed to flay Grantaire with only a look; Grantaire was dwindling to nothing but the feel of Enjolras’s fingers trailing down her body. When Enjolras pressed merely the tip of her tongue to Grantaire’s sex, she knew she would be devoured.

Chapter 4: you have contracted dysentery. bossuet/grantaire/joly/musichetta 

joly/bossuet/musichetta/grantaire oregon trail au

Bossuet and Musichetta’s dysentery had started to put a crimp in their sex life, though it hadn’t stopped Musichetta from killing all the local wildlife every time they stopped so Bossuet could violently void all fluids from his body. Grantaire remained mysteriously unaffected, despite nursing the two invalids to the best of his limited ability and interest.
“There must be some reason why only half our number has fallen to this scourge,” Joly muttered to himself, taking another swig of whisky (he had avoided water ever since Bossuet had fallen ill, since there was no chance of it getting him drunk) to keep his courage up as the wagon turned into a place of pestilence, “some connection between myself and Grantaire; perhaps a freak of constitution, or a similarity in diet.”

3/4 sisters. ant au

les amis d'abc are female carpenter ants

Les Amies des Fourmis were a group which barely missed becoming historic; they were in greater part soldiers on good terms with the workers, and here are the names of the principal ants: Enjolrant, Combefourmi, Jehant Formaire, Formy, Courmyrac, Baformel, Bossuant, Jormy, and Grantaire, although Myrius Pontfourmy was known to occasionally frequent their secret gatherings in remote corners of the nest.
Enjolrant was once again infused with the scent of republicantism, her antennae gesticulating wildly as she released the pheromones of war, forelimbs akimbo and gaster upraised as she declared all ants 3/4 sisters. Grantaire did not stir from her sugary stupor except to lift the aphid’s anus to her lips and declare, “what fine chitin!”


Les Amies des Fourmis
Hey This Chair You Gave Us for the Barricade Has Carpenter Ants

Although to be an ant meant to be constantly at work, they did not deny their society enrichment. In the twisting and dark galleries of the fourmilière the scents of long-dead ancestors had immortalized their aspirations.
Familiar as the scents of their comrades, those ancestors warned, inspired, and continued, after the death of their authors, to strive.
 The great scent-trails of Plato-Formicidae recalled the lost scent of Socratant, from a fourmilière of antiquity. These scents said that they were born from the wood in which they lived -- and therefore they loved it; with unutterable loyalty and would die for it and for all their sisters.  Their souls were wood as well, Socratant had said -- the queen had a soul of teak, the soldiers souls of oak, and the workers souls of elm.
In their private meetings, held among the tangled scents of ’93, Enjolrant defied that philosophy: “For we are all made from the same wood, do we not have the same qualities? And therefore if we are deserving according to our nature, do we not all deserve to swarm one another equally, all our ¾ sisters together, when our pheromones call us to the orgiastic ritual of mating?”
A few antennae twitched, signifying interest, at that.
“Brava,” said Courmyrac. “But what’s to be done?”
“Everything depends on the workers,” said Enjolrant. “We must talk to them.”
Grantaire let forth the unmistakable scent of skepticism, and Enjolrant rose, offended.
“Well? You have an objection, that is plain, let us have it.”
“The workers will not listen to you. The workers like the way you look and they like what you have to say, but they’ll never block off our narrow pre-Haussmannt galleries for you; Enjolrant! Be serious.”
Enjolrant raised her forelimbs. “Have you not heard,” she said. “I am Ant-inoüs, farouche.”

 

Chapter 6: unwelcome visitors. courfeyrac/joly 

genderbent amis mermaids vs nightmare space moths thank

Joly could hardly remember the last time she could look out at the stars without fear, without watching for the black shadows of the Visitors; death came on wings thin as paper and delicate as a feather star, and her hand tightened on her spear as she watched the sky. She startled when she heard a splash at her side, but it was only Courfeyrac, come back from her patrol with a brace of severed antennae and long red scratch on her chest from a proboscis, though she grinned at Joly as if she were unharmed.
“Don’t frown, mademoiselle, lay down your spear and dance a spell,” Courfeyrac sang, laughing as she took Joly’s hand and pulled her back into the water, “it won’t do for our merriest to moan at moths – why, you can fly yourself on your four wings!”

Chapter 7: mad about the boy. courfeyrac/marius 

courfeyrac tries to get out of marrying his own sister in hellenistic/roman egypt your choice

It wasn’t that Corfeiranus disliked his sister, or found her unattractive; no, the problem with marrying her was that he didn’t want to settle down with someone simply because she happened to come from the same womb and it would keep all the money nicely in the family.
Naturally, the solution was to convince his family that he was so hopelessly queer there was no chance of grandchildren from the union, and Corfeiranus decided to employ his friend Marius to that end (although he had not yet consulted Marius on the matter, he was sure that Marius would figure it out eventually and would support Corfeiranus wholeheartedly).
Corfeiranus had draped himself over Marius at a family gathering and suggestively eaten a sausage, which left his family sadly unconvinced after Marius made a strange sequence of outraged noises and went pomegranate red; then there was the incident when Corfeiranus almost embarrassed himself by lunging for Marius’s body when his uncle joined them in the baths - Marius foiled that attempt with a girlish shriek and flapping his arms about like some sort of lunatic, knocking Corfeiranus’s head painfully against the tile, which was what finally made Corfeiranus realize that he had a bit of a thing for the boy after all.

Chapter 8: is a man not entitled to the sweat of his brow? enjolras. 

modern au where enjolras reads "atlas shrugged" at college and comments on it

Enjolras entered the Café Musain in a great hurry, his face flushed from the cold and a thick book in his hand. He rushed to the small, barely functional fireplace and threw the book inside with a dramatic flourish that was wasted when the weight of the book put out the meager flame.
“It’s so selfish, it won’t even give off warmth,” Enjolras huffed.

Chapter 9: how do you solve a problem like nuntaire? grantaire. 

grantaire is legitimately a nun. grantaire is a nun c. 1300s England I guess? grantaire is a nun anywhere. any nunnery. just do this.

The following scrap of parchment was found in the walls of the convent of Chichester. Modern punctuation has been added to ease reading comprehension.
‘To my dear sister in Christ,
I must recommend the relocation of Sister Continentia – she has become even worse since the incident with the communion wine, which she drank after being banned from working in the brewery. She attempted to repent for drinking the wine by leading the evening prayers, but instead of beginning the Pater Noster, she proceeded to recite some obscenity on ‘sol natis’ before vomiting dangerously near to the monstrance and passing out. Sister Continentia tempts her fellow sisters into all manners of vices – or at least she tries, if they would only respond to her constant mooning about. Though she has considerable talent for illumination, her marginalia are perpetually indecent and she is a sloppy copyist. I cannot suggest how Sister Continentia should be put to work, as I have detected no bent towards industry in her, other than towards the consumption of spirits and the representation of genitalia. Nevertheless, please – take Sister Continentia somewhere else.’
Written in the marginalia of the epistle, in a different hand, was the note saying ‘the wine wasn’t even very good,’ accompanied by a picture of a woman in nothing but a wimple.

singlesticks more like rubbin' dicks. enjolras/grantaire 

For someone who claimed to be good at singlestick, Grantaire seemed to be uniquely bad at it; he was, granted, much more nimble than Enjolras had expected and he was quick to use his scarf to deflect a blow, but Grantaire kept tangling their feet together and setting them tumbling onto the floor, offending both Enjolras’s spine and his dignity as Grantaire repeatedly rubbing against his groin provoked a reaction.
Grantaire’s latest misstep had Enjolras falling on his already bruised tailbone, Grantaire’s solid weight pressing him even harder against the floor and Grantaire was already mumbling an apology, incapable even at getting up as his hips jerked once and Enjolras found himself letting out a breath that sounded too much like a moan.
“Grantaire,” Enjolras said, speaking very low and forcing Grantaire to look him in the eye by tugging on his curls, “you are going to finish what you very clearly started and we are never going to talk about this again.”

i got yr cherry bomb. javert/montparnasse 

Javert/Montparnasse, wallsex.

The rough brick of the wall scratches at Montparnasse’s cheek as the inspector fucks him, Javert’s hand on his throat keeping Montparnasse in place even when Javert thrusts hard enough to set Montparnasse on his toes, scraping his lip against the brick and he knows it’s split, he can feel the blood welling up and threatening to spill on his clothes.
“You can do better than that, old man,” Montparnasse says, pressing his tongue into his cut lip.
Javert’s hand tightens around Montparnasse’s throat; at last Montparnasse’s heart beats faster and he can feel the weight of it in his chest, aching more than his own untouched cock as Montparnasse’s head spins and he imagines what a beautiful corpse he would make, laid out in the snow with a crimson smile.

the tongue of saint-simon. combeferre/courfeyrac 

fem!courfeyrac going down on ANY LADY canon or genderbent pLS

“I am not certain that this was what Saint-Simon meant when he spoke of the rehabilitation of the flesh,” Combeferre says, stretching out on their shared bed and opening her legs, letting Courfeyrac trace a path up Combeferre’s thighs with her tongue.
“Both the spirit and the flesh are an expression of Heaven’s love,” Courfeyrac replies, looking up archly before pressing her mouth to Combeferre’s sex, kissing the most sensitive part with her eyes closed in an affectation of spiritual reflection.
Combeferre struggles to keep herself from moaning too loudly as she feels Courfeyrac’s tongue slip inside her, so gentle and quick and eager to please as always, and Combeferre thinks there is much more of the paladin than the priest in her friend.

what goes unsaid. enjolras/grantaire 

E/R Enjolras owes Grantaire money

It was going on the third week that Enjolras owed Grantaire three francs; Grantaire couldn’t even remember what Enjolras had needed, there was only the memory of Enjolras looking vaguely embarrassed when he realized he’d left his wallet at home and Grantaire offering to pay, receiving a ‘thank you’ for the trouble and three interminable weeks of wondering if he would ever see his money again.
“You must broach the subject with him, my friend,” L’aigles said, chewing thoughtfully on the shared lunch they’d brought with them to the Luxembourg, “for otherwise, he will never pay you back – rich people have no concept that money exists, because it is something they never worry about, and I am certain that if you only asked him, Enjolras would erase the debt and likely give you some interest, which you must nobly refuse, because he won’t realize he’s being patronizing.”
Grantaire watched longingly as Enjolras and Courfeyrac engaged in an unseemly bout of wrestling in the grass, hoping that Enjolras’s wallet would accidentally fly out while Courfeyrac struggled to pin him and spare everyone the pain of mentioning the unmentionable.

m. de dents has cils-ed your fate. enjolras/grantaire 

Enjolras and Grantaire, first meeting

Gros points him out first, the tall young man who stood out from the crowd by the fineness of his clothes and his foppish blond curls, declaring that M. de Dents (for he has truly exquisite teeth when he smiles at his friends, even from the polite distance the Baron and Grantaire are keeping) would be a fine artist’s model only so long as he kept away from the fearsome Mlle de Hors, out for his money and a sprawling country mansion.
Grantaire picks up the narrative, trying to fill in the mysterious past of M. de Dents – oh, there is great tragedy there, for M. de Dents is not only fleeing the Mlle de Hors and the bastard child they had conceived during a night of ill-advised and illusory passion, but also from himself, and his strange, crippling addiction to wheels of brie and its imminent threats upon his delicate figure.
Then Lesgles, of all people, seems to pop up from nowhere at all, greeting M. de Dents as a friend before catching sight of Grantaire and dragging the handsome monsieur over, introducing him with an Occitan mouthful of a surname which sounds like Angel-something or other, and Grantaire bursts out laughing.

the love doctor. courfeyrac/joly 

Joly is checking his tongue in Courfeyrac's exquisitely polished pocket watch. Courf suggests something better to do with said tongue. Things proceed from there.

Courfeyrac was a bit startled when Joly’s hand went sliding into his coat pocket, disappointed when Joly was only reaching for his pocket watch, and bemused when Joly took advantage of its polished silver to check his plump tongue.
“Have you ever considered suffering from a more glamorous illness – say, erotomania – and checking for it orally?” Courfeyrac asked, feeling like the question was hardly unwelcome to the person who had been sitting in his lap and wiggling his arse for the past hour.
Joly snapped the pocket watch shut with a flick of his wrist and after implying that Courfeyrac was some variety of nun (untrue), pulled Courfeyrac into a kiss full of tongue and the taste of shandy.

the ingeNU. courfeyrac/marius 

Courfeyrac has a thing for people taking their clothes off. Marius has no shame.

“Marius, as a guest in my house, I would prefer you spend the evening nude,” Courfeyrac said, because he found himself in a perverse mood and Marius would never fulfill his freak of a request.
“If that’s what you would like,” Marius replied with a shrug, before undressing with more efficiency than Courfeyrac had ever seen the boy display elsewhere.
Courfeyrac had the mind to ask if Marius was coltish because his father was very clearly a horse.

No moaning of the bar when I put out to sea

Courfeyrac adopts Booby!Marius.

 
The bird had large blue feet, a wide and maniac stare, and an awkward way of moving that was not suited for land or sea. Its disposition was frantic. It struggled to wander off, but Courfeyrac set it on the table.
Joly, who had only just arrived, regarded the bird shortly, and said: “How diverting, a cormorant with a circulatory disorder, but what is its purpose?”
“Diverting,” Courfeyrac said, drawing himself from his chair and into an oratorical pose, “would be bringing the seabird — not a cormorant, but Sula aubreyi, the blue-footed booby — to the café to say, I have a new and exotic pet. A laugh would be for me to introduce him. Thus: Please make your acquaintance with Marius, inverted comically from Mamurius Veturius. But a true joke — one to send to the lists, to bet on, is also his purpose: I have through art I dare not reveal (for I hold the lady in great esteem) enrolled young Marius in the law school.”
“You haven’t,” said Joly.
“And yet, I have. He’ll be a plaignant in a month if he’s studious, and as I confidently expect him to be studious, we shall have our own man before the bar, though he is a perfect booby.”
Bahorel laughed, and as he was drinking wine, he choked. He recovered himself and drew a hand across his mouth. “You’ve gone through days of toil to lay the groundwork for ‘though he is a perfect booby’? I applaud you, Courfeyrac, I drink salutaria to you. I venerate and revere you — with fearful worship. I couldn’t waste so much time if I labored at it, and I have trained in the very field this young booby is to enter! So I shout bravo, and I admit I am a dilettante where you should be a doctor of loafing.”
“Trained in the field,” said Courfeyrac, trying to pet the bird on the face and getting his gloves bitten continuously. “That is one thing. But only if you work at it every day, and combine practice with study, can you reach distinction. “
“Where did you even find this creature?”
“It could be said that he has been kidnapped,” said Courfeyrac, with speculative length to his words. “Or even stolen. But it would be affirmed that he once gave his address as the menagerie at the Jardin des Plantes, and now he shares my lodging. Though I am positive that at some point he was refuged at Minturnae in Latium — I pray that you have not forgotten his name is Marius. “
“You can’t care for a seabird,” said Joly.
“The devil,” said Courfeyrac. “He is quite content. He does rather clutter the place with law books, but that’s the condition to which he’s promised himself and can’t be helped.”
The booby had at this point fixed his shocked stare on the map of France.
“He has quite an interest,” Bahorel observed.
“I should mention that his inclinations make him something of a Bonapartist,” said Courfeyrac. “There’s no doubt he’s gazing in rapture at the borders of empire. But then he’s in a good position, for I will indulge him in anything.”
“Except the appropriate diet,” Joly was heard to mutter.
Courfeyrac ignored him coldly, and went on: “For isn’t it just nearly that parody Combeferre sings of Alcest: If Caesar had given me glory and war, I should say take your scepter and chariot! J’aime mieux mon oiseau de mer, ô gué! J’aime mieux mon oiseau de mer.”

1. Sorry not sorry Tennyson
2. Canon and backstory stolen from Carmarthen's amazeballs O Sula Mio - The lady Courf' mentions is of course Cosette, whom Booby!Marius met at the zoo ;)
3. Okay so the backstory on Sula aubreyi is that the blue-footed booby needed to be discovered way earlier than Darwin (which wouldn't have been reported until like 1836?) so obviously the answer is that Stephen Maturin discovered them and named them after Aubrey. Every kudo on the planet to Carmarthen for Making it Work.
4. Not sure how booby jokes and oiseau de mer can work in the same fic (two jokes in two different languages) so
(looks around furtively, backs toward the wall and crashes through the window)

the booby chamber. prouvaire+marius

Jehan attempts to introduce Actual Booby Marius to poetry.

“I do not think this booby knows anything of poetry,” Prouvaire said, observing how Marius looked askance at the Purgatorio, but he could not blame the bird terribly for it and found himself stroking Marius’s neck feathers, ignoring for the moment his inability to scan lines or read Italian.
“This is what you get for trying to teach a lawyer immensity – it will shit on your efforts, make a sound like a piping kettle, then waddle on the destruction (I recommend you take Dante away from his feathered backside) – lawyers are of the lineage of Gilles de Rais, and this one is no exception, but with blue feet in place of a blue beard,” Grantaire replied, contradicting his avowed sentiments by feeding Marius jarred anchovies.
“His dancing is entirely disruptive to my melancholy; I can compose nothing in the face of – well, in his ridiculous face,” Prouvaire said, avoiding the earnest bird’s worshipful gaze to glare at Courfeyrac’s latest letter, begging Prouvaire’s pardon for extending his trip in the country to wring money from his relatives and never once acknowledging that Marius was too perfect a booby.

Our Lives (Thy Song) 

For the adorable Kinkmeme prompt: "Some years on, bluestocking 30ishCosette is making a living writing; her elderly pet seabird always sits on her writing-desk to keep her company."
(The title is a little tribute to my college, where I've made friends with way too many winged fauna. Plus, bluestockings were very common here back in the day.)

It was an odd settlement, all the ladies of the Bas Bleus agreed. Mmselle. Fauchelevent was, even at 35, an attractive woman with excellent taste in fashion and in planning soirées of any type (when she chose to throw them, that was...).

Why on Earth, then, did she devote herself to a ridiculous seabird?
*****

“Marius, do you like that line?”  Cosette asked with a giggle as the awkward bird titled his head and shifted from one blue foot to another.

“And so the young man strode on to the apple field, knowing that living through the here and now was to be in a greater war than any his father had fought in.” At the sound of her voice, the bird squawked and opened his wings a bit, prompting Cosette to laugh again and give him a little pet on the head.

“Be careful, mon cher!  You aren’t as young as you were, now!”  she scolded, reaching for a tea cracker in the drawer of the newspaper-covered table next to hers (“Marius’s desk” she called it fondly) and held out her hand to the bird.  Marius quickly snatched the treat out of her hand and gobbled it down as Cosette smiled.

“My, I’ll have to go to the market tomorrow to get you some fish...you’ll grow fat if all you eat is tea crackers!” 

Cosette calmly turned back to her writing again, pen and inkwell hard at work while Marius continued to snort and squawk softly, watching his mistress with utmost devotion.  

*****

A quarter hour had passed in relative quiet when Cosette heard the chiming of the bells and straightened up.

“Ten o’clock, Marius!  Come here, mon cher, and let me put you back into your cage-we don’t need another 5th of Junr, now do we?”

At this, Marius quirked his head and stomped his feet, seemingly ready to do battle. 

“No, no, Marius, you’re right,” Cosette amended quickly, “I shouldn’t be trivializing that...what a horrible day!  You new to the Rue Plumet and a revolution breaking out!  Dear Papa, chasing you through the streets and coming home half...”

Cosette felt her eyes burn, and quickly turned away from her pet, who immediately waddled over her papers to curl by her side.

After a moment, Cosette recovered herself enough to speak again. “Or do you simply not want to go to bed?  Silly thing,”  she inquired fondly as she stroked his sleek feathers, calming herself with the mindless motion.  “You’ll be right next to me, like always.  You know that.”

Seemingly satisfied with Cosette’s answer, Marius allowed her to lift him into his cage and carry it with her into her bedroom, making happy noises all the way.

Les amis des homards 

Combeferre and foil of your choice, lobsters and mechanical flight, go!

“I dreamt of flying,” said Combeformard, when someone asked what he was contemplating. He made a gesture with his maxillipeds that described an upward motion. “I wonder if it is possible -- what art or mechanism could take us from the sea, from our caves and crevices? The world is vast.”
“To what good?” said Grantairephropsis. “Like that seabird you met on a rocky shoal one day said. Lobsters are admired by all. A gilded race, Titans who can conquer the world twice, by force and by dazzling, to be a lobster is to be sublime! And you wonder about flying. What noise.”
Grantairephropsis had only one chela, the other having been left in the sand some thirty years ago after a vicious duel. His carapace was a mottled brown; he was unbeautiful, but he was also rude -- anticipating the reaction he caused, this made him a cynic. If he believed in one thing, it was Chelaenjolras, who said often and beautifully that their own nature did not permit death — aside from accidents, to be a lobster was to be eternal. It was the same philosophy that had appealed to Combeformand so many years ago.
“I wonder about flying,” said Combeformard, “because I wonder about being free.”
They were grouped inside one of those undersea structures that appeared often enough. Seeing it, Chelaenjolras had let a current carry him inside to inspect, and the rest had followed.
As Grantairephropsis prepared his reply, they unexpectedly shifted, falling against the walls.
“Is this moving?” said Jolobster. “It is moving.”
The structure was being lifted from the sea floor, and accelerating. The floor was a hash of metal wires; their legs and maxilipeds fell through and they struggled to right themselves.
“Well,” said Grantairephropsis. “You have your flying mechanism! Now let us see if the result is that you shall have freedom!”

Note: It was a lobster trap.