Read your post about Enjolras in another situation being able to just be. What fics do you know of that express this?
Thanks for asking! Rather than try and make a comprehensive list, I’ll name a couple and explain why I think they handle it well:
Carry On is a wonderful modern AU about Feuilly finding the other Amis and figuring out life in general. While Enjolras isn’t the main character in this, he is a major secondary character, and is excellently balanced, I think. He’s still focused on remedying inequality in society, especially through education, and his political convictions inform all his major activities. He acts through protests and petitions and voting efforts and community involvement and all the other ways a person CAN act, now, that weren’t available in canon era. And while that’s the center and focus of his life, he’s also got time to have favorite restaurants, and hang out with friends, and generally just be a little gentler with himself and the world. Really excellent job of updating the character to change along with the society he’s in.
On the less serious side of the AU spectrum, this chapter of the Babysitter’s Club style AU (The ABC Club) also handles the update well, along with the challenge of writing characters much younger than they are in canon. ABC Club Enjolras is still a serious, earnest, politics-and-history geek of a kid--and yes, those exist, I can confirm from first-hand experience--but he’s a KID, with homework and afterschool plans and memories of hanging out and goofing around, a kid who’s growing up expecting the world to have options for change that even he can access, instead of no options that anyone but the top 1 percent can even get close to without violence, and WOW that makes a difference.
I love both these stories (and ones like them!) not just because they’re fun on their own, but because of the way they reflect and respond to the canon. Peacefully involved, personally happy modern Amis are a vindication of their canon-era counterparts; even just being able to imagine them as a more natural option than armed protests and secret meetings is an indicator of how much society has already changed, how important that first battle of getting a representative elected government in place was.
And now I’m getting sniffly over Happy Modern AUs.