let me tell you about the amazing potential of Cosette and Feuilly as foster siblings opening a coffee shop together
It has a large counter in a U shape, and one half of it is decidated to the coffee and the other to the tea; there are plants and dainty tea cups and feature art and crafts from local people, which Cosette and Feuilly still personally pick and they have impeccable taste
it’s all open space and large tables, there are workshop organised every week – first it’s their friends teaching whoever wants to come about skills, relaxation techniques, or discussions about what’s happening in the world, but it ends up being so popular they have an actual schedule and a website to book your place in one of these workshops
they have poetry nights, too
Cosette makes the sweetest hot chocolates and chai lattes and Feuilly’s so good with latte art
they hire pretty much anyone who needs a job, no matter what their pasts or experiences are – that’s how Marius ended up learning how to make pastries, and he’s good at it
they have a suspended coffee system that never go under a dozen suspended coffees available
because Valjean’s not getting any younger, he feels bad about not being able to do as much as before, and Cosette and Feuilly know he’s getting a bit lonely, so they 100% include him in their venture and he works there part time and he loves it and he meets people and talk to them and I’m so happy guys I just want Jean Valjean to be happy that’s the only thing that matters
Tag: *flails*
Then Obi-Wan reached out his hand and pressed his palm briefly to Anakin’s cheek. Ahsoka saw his lips move. Saw him say: Well done.
And the look on Anakin’s face, at those two small words, brought her treacherously close to tears.
cosette visiting courfeyrac’s grave and thanking him for taking care of marius bye dudes
Oh wait I’m not sure any of the amis had graves. Because they all died and there was no one left to bury them (except marius who was unconscious for like two weeks afterward) and even if they did leave people behind (like muschetta) who was going to come claim the bodies of the people the government had just killed as dangerous radicals?
I suppose the national guard (or whoever cleaned up after them, I don’t know) would have piled all the bodies on a cart and dumped them in a pauper’s grave somewhere. There probably wouldn’t be a marker, and marius wouldn’t have been able to find out where they were put since it’s not like he could go up to the police station with a month-old bullet wound in his shoulder and ask about the students who had been killed in last month’s rebellion.
marius goes back to the musain for empty chairs at empty tables because there are no graves to visit.
ah yes you make a fine point
honestly when i’d said “grave” i was thinking along the lines of “the general area of wherever his body would have ended up” but “grave” just sounded nicer, ha
but yeah i hadn’t thought about marius not knowing where they are hm i must fix this now
let the change be noted, then: cosette visiting the decrepit remains of the musain and thanking courfeyrac for taking care of marius
yes i think that’s sadder thank you friend
She stepped down from the carriage several streets up from the corner she wanted. The driver raised his eyebrows when he saw the direction she was going, but she paid him no mind. She knew these streets well, had spent many hours on them with her father. She knew the people here and she knew how to carry herself to blend in with them. She was wearing the plain dress (a faded gray that might once have had aspirations at black) and headscarf she saved in the back of her wardrobe for occasions such as this.
Such opportunities were few, and they would be rarer still in the days ahead, with her husband’s sweet concern added to her father’s watchful eye. But today her father was out “seeing about a few things” and her husband-to-be was sleeping–a peaceful, though exhausted sleep, at long last–and she had seized on the chance to get away, to lay eyes on the place she felt needed to see in order to begin to understand what her beloved was going through.
She had never been to the little cafe, but she found it easily enough (how could you not, when the bloodstains that still streaked the paving-stones all pointed to it, like fingers of infection spidering out from a wound?). The sign was gone, probably carted away with the rubble of the barricade, but a ragged, singed scrap of red cloth still fluttered from the hinge of an upstairs window.
Inside, the rooms were bare, the walls marked with gunpowder and blood. Broken bottles and trampled leaflets were scattered over the floors. In one corner, a neatly-stacked pile of fabric strips stood at the ready. The unused bandages were the cleanest thing in the room.
She took the stairs carefully, testing each creaking step before putting her weight on it, wondering what she would do if she could not reach the top room. (She would climb the alley wall to the window; she knew she could do it–her father, for his own mysterious reasons, had trained her in all manner of unusual accomplishments–although it would be difficult in long skirts.) But the stairs held, and she made it to the upper room, where the stains were everywhere and where, despite the open windows, the smell of smoke and blood still hung in the air.
This was it. This was where they had made their plans together, laughed together, sung together. This was where they had died–all those hopeful, hopeless boys who still haunted her husband’s dreams. The room was empty, stripped of all furniture and bottles and papers, of everything but the blood, but she could feel their presence still.
He had told her, finally, last night. Not about the fighting–that, he had recounted freely, first in gasps and incomprehensible cries as he burned with fever, then later, after he had awakened, more clearly. But always the fighting: the rush for the barricades, the noise of the rifles, the rush of excitement and fear, the way the gunpowder flashed in the darkness, the pain of the wound. It had terrified him–terrified him still, in his dreams–but it wasn’t the part that had truly broken him.
It was his friends. The passionate, generous, impossible students and workers who had taken him in when he was alone in the city and given him a cause to believe in when the old causes were dead, and a family to love when his own family cast him out. They were all dead now, every one of them, and last night he had told her about them for the first time over a candle and a cup of cool water, in that darkest hour of the night when his pain would not let him sleep. His voice was so faint she could barely hear him, and it broke when he whispered the names: Combeferre. Enjolras. Jehan. Lesgles. Joly. Feuilly. Grantaire. Bahorel.
Courfeyrac.
Once he had started, he couldn’t stop, and he talked for hours about them, tears running down his cheeks as he told her how they’d met, how they’d wandered aimlessly through the city laughing at things chalked on walls, how they’d stayed up far into the night talking of France and the glory that could be hers, how they’d breakfasted by the Seine on day-old bread and cheap wine. She had cried with him when he’d awakened screaming, when he told her brokenly of the guns and the chaos and the fear, when the pain was too much for words–but now she sat silent and dry-eyed, feeling too much even for tears, as her beloved poured out to her the men who still filled his soul. They had been so much to him, and now they were gone.
The tears pricked at her eyes now, as she stood in the middle of the room and listened for the echoes of their laughter. She imagined them sitting there, in that very room, at tables littered with maps and pamphlets and lukewarm wine. She imagined them teasing Marius for blushing about her, some of them pestering him for details of their first meeting, others groaning and rolling their eyes fondly at his head-over-heels love. She imagined them dying.
The wooden pillars that held up the ceiling of the ramshackle room were pitted and scorched, as everything else was, but on one of them, another kind of mark caught her eye, and she stooped to examine it. Five letters, blocky capitals, had been carved messily into the wood: COURF.
They were about waist-high, at just the right height to reach easily when sitting at a table. She thought of Courfeyrac sitting there in the middle of a meeting, listening but never content to have his hands still, scratching his name into the column. It was unfinished–had he broken off to poke Marius in the ribs or clap his friend on the back? Or had he never intended to carve more, content to leave this shortened version of his name, the way he was known among his friends? He had–they all had–left so little behind.
“Thank you,” she whispered, brushing her fingertips over the letters.
this is the fic i followed you for ❤
yessss i saw the first line of the post and I was like THIS IS IT THIS IS WHEN I MET JULIA
it’s our old urls and everything wow
(but ugh how awkward i didn’t know how to talk to people on tumblr i just reblogged some stranger’s post and crapped all other their idea oops. it’s a miracle we ended up friends tbh. well not a miracle more it’s thanks to you being a kind and easygoing person.)
I just finished reading Re-Entry and honestly it’s amazing. It’s probably the best Star Wars story I’ve read and you’re an amazing writer. Do you have any idea when then next part will be up?
No idea yet–April has been a weird fuckin’ month guys–but I thought I’d toss up a snippet to prove that yes, there IS a next RE chapter coming down the pile:
@killiandonnelly Incredible day teaching for @MasterclassNI with @frafee. Wonderful talent in Belfast.
Do you have any tattoo headcanons/concepts for modern AU Feuilly?
Feuilly probably hasn’t thought much about getting a tattoo, since they’re expensive and who has the money for that? He’d been living hand-to-mouth for so long he sort of missed the point when he could start to afford luxuries. But when the thought does occur to him that this IS a thing he could do, he could go out right now and get a tattoo on his body, he quickly falls in love this the idea.
It takes him forever to decide what to get, though, and it’s a running joke in the group that he’s never actually going to be able to go through with it, because he won’t be able to decide. At one point, Bossuet and Bahorel both offer to pay for an additional tattoo (for some reason, Bossuet has some disposable cash at the moment), just because they’re afraid if he has to narrow it down to one thing, Feuilly’s never going to do it. But he doesn’t want to get the words unless he really loves them enough for them to be the only ones he ever gets.
Because of course it’s going to be words, what else could it be? He goes back and forth between a lot of things. At first, it’s quotes from the people who inspire him, words that keep him going and give him the strength and courage to dream of a different world: “Be the change you want to see in the world.” “It is in giving that we receive.” “What gives light must endure burning.” Then he thinks maybe that’s too holier-than-thou, to put these words on his body as if labeling himself as a perfect representative of social change or something. (He admits this worry to Enjolras, late at night–only the fact that it’s 2 am brings it out–Enjolras trips over his tongue trying to find the words to convince Feuilly that he so does not need to worry about people taking it that way. Feuilly’s still not sure.)
So then he goes to words that are just beautiful, things that have stuck with him, lines from poems his friends have shared with him, scraps of stories that meant a lot to him. He flirts for a few months with “There is a crack in everything / That’s how light gets in.” Then he considers “Made weak by fate and time, yet strong in will / to strive, to seek, to find / and not to yield.”
But there are so many beautiful words, and it’s hard to pick between them, to say THIS one, this is so beautiful I want it with me forever. And in the end, they’re just words, and maybe theyre reaching for the beauty that fills the universe, but they can’t ever really get there, and after all there are more important things than beauty.
When the right idea comes to him, he sleeps on it barely three weeks before he finally gets the tattoo: A very small cluster of stars on his left shoulder. They’re simple and really pretty, like a little scatter of freckles, but everyone’s a little surprised that he didn’t go with words, like he’s been planning to for ages. Enjolras asks him one evening, and Feuilly explains that the stars stand for a story–something he wants to remind himself of, that can’t be summed up well with words.
He was 17 and in 10th grade–and just barely so. This was right around the time he started to realize that the one he was hurting the most with his bad choices was himself–but he wasn’t there just yet. He was still really angry, just at everything in general; he was fighting a lot; he was skipping a lot of school. He ended up staying after school for this science expo not actually because he was interested in science but because he’d pissed off a kid in gym that day and was avoiding him so he didn’t have to fight (because his foster parents were going to take away his phone if he fought any more that month).
But the old dude at the astronomy table didn’t know that. He looked at Feuilly, slouching around between the exhibits, and he didn’t see the three-inch-thick disciplinary file, the foster care paperwork, the scars on his left shoulder from his stepdad. He looked at Feuilly and saw a potential future scientist. And that’s how he talked to him: He showed him photographs of Jupiter and the craters on the moon and Saturn’s rings; he explained the data from the state university’s most recent experiments; he pitched the local observatory’s summer camp for young astronomers. At the time, Feuilly was laughing inwardly at this clueless old fart who actually thought that he was interested in this nerd stuff … but afterward, it stuck with him. The old man thought he was the kind of person who could be an astronomer. And who said he wasn’t?
It wasn’t life-changing–at least, not in a big dramatic way. He didn’t break down in tears or discover some long-suppressed dream of becoming an astrophysicist. But he did start to question some of the assumptions people had about him–things he’d come to believe about himself. When he took the end-of-year exams, he asked himself who said he would never pass a final, and he sat up straight and actually read the directions (he still failed, but with much higher score than he’d ever gotten–enough to convince him to do summer school and try again on the exam in August). When he saw posters around school about college applications and the FAFSA, he asked himself who said he was the kind of person who couldn’t go to college?
And that’s what Feuilly wants to remember every morning when he sees those stars in the mirror: How much it meant to have someone look at him in a different way. He wants to remember how far he’s come, and how lucky he is that his life turned around the way it did. He wants to remember that people really can change. He wants to remember that the same thing that was true of him is true of the people he works with every day: No matter how they seem on the outside, everyone has incredible potential inside them–to love, to hope, to grow–and that they deserve to have other people recognize that in them. He wants to remember to see everyone around him the way that old man saw him that day.
It takes half an hour to tell Enjolras the whole story and to explain exactly what it means to him. Much easier–and less painful–Feuilly says, laughing, to get seven little stars than to try to get all that down in words.
eirenical17 