(send me a month and year and I’ll share something I’ve written)
Okay i COULD have given you something serious but instead have a transcript of a brickclub conversation and a mini fic i wrote because of it. (I couldn’t find the original post, but my notes tell me that this was @melle93 and @orestesdreams-pyladesloves talking)
- No one reacts. No one intervenes. Everyone is staring and trying to puzzle the world back together. I guess there was no protocol to follow for situations like that? The beloved mayor of another town crashes a trial to announce that he is the convict they were looking for.
- I’m laughing a little because could you imagine if there was?? Like Madeleine speaks up and everyone just goes ‘oh no, not again’
- Hahah, imagine that it happens so often that someone created special forms for such a situation and every judge has some lying next to him. Long live bureaucracy!
“Wario is clearly the clumsy alias of the infamous ecoterrorist Mario. Look at their histories! Mario hailed from the Mushroom Kingdom; well so does Wario.”
Then after he fills out the forms he goes:
“And so Judge Bowser, you see it’s so: It’s-a-me, Mario!”
@melle93 replied to your post: okay, I'm going to be predictable... Grantaire for...
I love this headcanon. So. Much.
thank you XD
Grantaire is never exactly a Reliable Narrator but when he talks about what he thinks other people think of him he's practically writing fanfic with an OOC tag :P
I love him with my whole heart! My croisson, an absolute unit. Defintely an Avatar of the Web.
When I first finished The Untamed, I wasn’t sure how to feel about how the whole Lan Xichen thing played out, but honestly (as much as my heart breaks for LXC) I Get It. Like what else was he supposed to do?? Let McDimples go through the process of getting punished through a faulty system?? Nahhh
I feel like I understand him more now than I did after my first watch and honestly, if I think about him and Nie Mingjue for too long, I need to lie down and cry. That was true even Before watching Fatal Journey so imagine After.
Les Misérables Character Asks: Feuilly and Gavroche? If you want to =)
Feuilly: What is something that your proud of that you had to work hard to achieve?
Even though I’m a little bit having that Will Anyone Care About My Books crisis, I am really proud of how the pirate trilogy has evolved and turned out. I have worked super hard revising those! And I think I’m a better writer because of them.
I am also lately proud of how my Sister District chapter has grown, and the leadership role I’ve taken. Three years ago I would have laughed if you told me I was going to be a team lead, because?? I had never been an organizer!
Gavroche: Do you trust your instincts?
When I’m not having a bad anxiety time, yes! I have good instincts about things, I think. I’m not ALWAYS right about first impressions of people, but I can often tell if I’m going to like someone when I meet them.
If my anxiety is acting up then I have to question those instincts, cause Anxiety Brain is A Liar.
Les Mis Chara ask (if you are still doing this): Musichetta and Fauchelevent?
Musichetta: If you could ask your future self anything, what would you ask?
I'd ask for the spoilers of my life no okay i know that's a good way to explode the universe. I guess what I'd really want is for the Future Self to tell me that everything is going to be okay? Even if it's a lie, I think it'd be really helpful one. Maybe some kind of hint on the current important life decisions?
Fauchelevent: What has someone (or something) done to make you change your opinion about them?
(nh why are all the most obvious options bad ones? :c)
oh you know what's the nice answer? Discworld books. I read a couple of the Rincewind books first, which... enough said. Then I read a few different ones over several years and they were all over the place in the series, so it took awhile for the tonal difference to sink in (tbf I was still pretty young at the time). It wasn’t until i read Hogfather for the second time... and thought about it a moment... and went back to reread the last few pages for another time.. and then i just sort a sat there and went "wow" very quietly. Never been able to look at these books the same way again. Never been able to look at the unvierse the same way again.
How I feel about this character: I love him a lot. He’s one of the most intriguing characters from this book and one of my favourite characters. Straight from the start of the book, I really loved how sassy and how clever and resourceful he is. He also knows how to deal with people much better than Norrell. He also acquired magic during service with Norrell and had the good sense to keep it hidden from his employer but his magic has proven very useful in the novel. I also love how much the rest of the servants cared about him when he was leaving Norrell’s employ? They all gathered to offer him some kind of comfort, support, help. He cares and looks after people who work with him and under him, which I love. I also love that he is brave– he got shot and also knifed in the face, but he handles it all coolly. I really want a novel about him, his Northern roots and backstory and how he came to be employed by Norrell.
Mostly I love the fact that he and others who are often considered inconsequential characters because of their class or ethnicity or gender by the ‘main characters’ in the novel, are the ones who make any sort of long lasting change. That’s very Les Mis in spirit. The miserables are the ones who are important in this novel. Their story matters.
Any/all the people I ship romantically with this character: I don’t know that I ship him with anyone particularly? He doesn’t lend himself easily to romantic pairings.
My favorite non-romantic relationship for this character: I love him spending time with John Segundus. I want more scenes of them hanging out and doing magic once magic has become popular in England.
My unpopular opinion about this character: I don’t know what an unpopular opinion of him would be? He’s a great character, I don’t think I have come across any opinion about him that I strongly disagree with.
One thing I wish would happen / had happened with this character in canon: I really want more of a backstory or an entire novel around him. Some of the story was left pretty vague after the ending, I want to know how he handles life after Norrell and Strange are trapped in darkness for a hundred years and magic has returned to England. He is not the type to sit idly, he would be involved in learning more about magic and perhaps in popularising magic in England. I don’t like how England in 19th Century is so divided in terms of class, but maybe magic being more popular might change and shift those boundaries in interesting ways since magic is not based on class? And I want that exploration.
Favorite friendship for this character: Besides John Segundus and Mr. Honeyfoot, I like the idea of him helping Mr. Segundus set up a school of magic, with Arabella Strange being involved maybe and/or Emma Wintertowne. Or maybe him hanging out with Vinculus.
My crossover ship: I can’t think of any ship right now because I don’t see him as a romantic character but I would like to see him interact with Les Mis characters in some way, that might be fun to explore.
Hey @melle93 what was that about Valjean actually telling Cosette and Marius everything and all of them being happier, and also about surprise fic being the most fun anyway? (Sorry it took me so long, and also I hope this is close enough to the prompt, I tried to write the actual conversation four times and it did not want to happen,,)
---
Spring comes, and Cosette watches her new garden grow, and has her father help her or just sit with her while she works, and learns, slowly, quietly, about her past.
Not all of it -- there’s parts there that she can’t remember and that are best not to remember, that feel overwhelming and sick-making when she gets too close to them, but they skim over those, skip over them, and she learns context too, learns the other perspective of things, learns her father’s past, and… and she learns about her mother, which is maybe the hardest part.
But she persists.
“Tell me something true about my mother that isn’t sad?”, she says, kneeling in her flower bed with her apron covered in crumbs of rich dark dirt, taking a break taking a breath in between pulling out weeds.
Her father looks at her, is quiet for a moment.
“Her eyes were just like yours.”
The other times she asked this question, what she got was: she loved you very much; you made her very happy. She was many good qualities, Cosette has been told too, but the good qualities only ever come around to the suffering again, which Cosette doesn’t know all about, because her father is careful if truthful in telling her, but it’s also the only thing she knows, because it’s the only thing her father knows, and it’s… it’s hard. To keep in her heart and mind, to hold in her thoughts and not have them flicker away from it.
She knows horrors, has seen what people become when they are cast out, has seen girls and women who had nothing, and she always felt sick to her stomach and alienated from them because her kind of girlhood was never anything like that, not the parts that she remembers, but she knows what the world is, vaguely; to know that it was like that for her mother is a whole other thing.
Of course, of course, she knows her father has suffered, and that too is hard to bear, because she loves him; but she knows the happy parts of his story, too, and she can make sure there are more happy parts, and that makes it easier.
It’s easier when she can do something, say something, ask the right questions and give the right answers; but there are more important things than something being easy.
I have my mother’s eyes, she thinks now, lets it start to settle, and turns back to her work.
She goes on with the weeding, and the checking on her new plants. She stands up, at some point, and walks to the bench where her father sits, and picks up, carefully, the new plants they bought that she wants to plant today.
Her father and she are quiet for a while, and it’s much more comfortable than it was right after the wedding, and Cosette goes back to her garden beds and kneels down again.
“You know,” her father says, when her back is turned to him, “I intended to only tell your husband about my past, that day after your wedding. And sever ties, and not burden your lives with… well.”
He’s still saying this about his own past, too, but Cosette’s past is especially hard to get out of him without a flood of guilt, even though it’s hers, it’s hers and should be hers.
“Well, that would have been very silly of you, and upset all of us,” says Cosette, and digs a hole in the dirt with perhaps more force than necessary.
She knows, is the thing. She knows that her father and her husband both hadn’t told her things that they were ready to tell each other even though they didn’t yet even like each other, she knows mostly it was luck that she ended up knowing, luck that she got up early and was the first to find her father standing forlorn in the leftovers of the celebration, knows, knows, and it still isn’t a pleasant thing to be told, but it also isn’t news, wasn’t news even the first time he told her, though not in these words, and she’s fine, she will be fine, she’s working on it.
“I’m sorry,” her father says, and she feels her shoulders sag, feels some of the hurt not leave but melt, turns around to look at him.
“Good,” she says, firmly but without meanness, and he nods.
Her husband, her Marius, comes into the garden not long after, the way he always does, with the slight confusion of not knowing where to step among garden tools and strawberry plants and joyful productive mess, awkwardly and a bit wonderingly, and he smiles at her, and she smiles back.
And he stands for a moment indecisive, and then he brushes dirt off the bench and sits down.
He’s no help in the garden, but her father is, so it’s really alright, and today she doesn’t need their help anyway, but she does like to have both of their company.
“What would you like for dinner,” Marius says, to her father, and she can feel that he will start to protest before he does.
“You don’t have to--”
“You didn’t have to save my life.”
“I didn’t save your life to earn anything by it.”
“And you do not have to earn this.”
“It’s only dinner,” Cosette says, over both of them, laughing in part to disperse this still ever-present tension of owing and knowing and perceived worthiness and in part because they’re both ridiculous, “Make a decision about the food, he won’t and grandfather has terrible taste.”
She meant her father, meant her father to make a decision because he has more need of choosing nice things for himself, but they both splutter.
They’ll have this conversation for a quarter of an hour at least, and it will be entertaining, but not enough to keep her plants waiting.
She leaves the two of them to it to go find her watering can, and when she comes back from that little quest, which was a quest indeed because she found the watering can inside the house, when she comes back, her father and her husband are still in conversation, though they seem to have moved on to another favourite topic now.
Marius is gesturing, tensely.
“Imagine if I hadn’t accused you of being at the barricades for, for…”
“Are we having the Conversation again,” Cosette says, trying for amused and mostly succeeding, and sits down next to Marius on the bench, where there is just enough space for her, and he makes more space, and they both turn towards her, include her.
They’ve had this conversation, in various constellations, all three of them, and Cosette and her father in the garden, and her father and Marius with the door open, and Marius and Cosette when they should have been asleep, the conversation of how many things could have prevented the first conversation from happening, wrapped around the working-through-it still.
Sometimes, too, how many ways the first conversation could have been less painful, less full of assumptions, less time-consuming and hurtful and confusing, or how it could have occurred earlier, avoided having to happen the morning after the wedding with everything being revealed and everyone being accused and Cosette having to ask many, many questions louder than she would have liked to.
It wasn’t a pleasant conversation, that first one, but it set them on the right path.
The conversations they have over and over are familiar, getting more familiar and softer, and comforting if not entirely comfortable.
If you had only answered when I alluded to, well propriety, but still, if you had asked outright, oh how easily it could have all gone wrong -- they have to go through it again even though there’s no sense in what if, even though it all turned out right; they come back to it a lot, all the ways in which only luck and a certain stubbornness on Cosette’s part prevented them from a future that would have been terrible.
They come back to it a lot because they need to, need to unknot the last bits and clear up what remains.
They come back to it a lot because again: comforting if not comfortable yet.
They come back to it a lot, mostly, because it’s a miracle and because possibly they will never entirely comprehend it, all the things coming together to have her father say to both of them I am a former convict and not run away and not run them off, to have Marius burst out with the accusations that would make things more clear, to have Cosette ask the right questions and demand answers stubbornly enough.
There are so, so many ways to imagine it going wrong, and Cosette knows that Marius does, knows that both her father and her husband are more anxious than her even though they would have had more control than her over most versions of the story, and she doesn’t like any of what she feels when she thinks about it, but it didn’t go wrong. Whatever dark path there is, that is not the path they took, and here and now, they are going to be happy, and there will be no more secrets, and maybe someone will make a decision about dinner before dinner has to be served.
For the nick name ask: My Love, Cutie and Princess? Have a nice evening! =)
princess - if you could live in any other time period, which would it be?
oh damn that’s harddd, as a history nerd there’s so many time periods I find interesting but I guess I’d choose 19th century? I basically just wanna wear a Victorian dress or 1930s (Les Mis) fashion tbh
but then again I also wanna live in Ancient Greece
cutie - what’s your favourite fairytale?
I was obsessed with The Little Mermaid and Beauty and the Beast as a child but I actually grew to love the more dark ones as I got older aka The Snowqueen, The Goose Girl and Brother and Sister I just love them
my love - what would your dream home be like?
I’d live in a cottage in Ireland somewhere for sure! I’ll have some sheep and tons of cats and I’d grow my own vegetables and herbs and only once in a while I’d appear in town so people’d make up strange stories about me. And I’d have lots of old and eclectic furniture and collect cool stones and sea shells
Basically I just wanna become a cryptid and hide from society and expectations and just grow plants in peace lmao
thank youuu, I hope you have a nice evening too hon <3
