oh, it REALLY is
like, everyone knows Combeferre is ridiculously knowledgeable about everything. And of COURSE Grantaire can do quotes and citations from every book and article he’s read since he was 12, it’s kinda spooky.
But everyone forgets about Bossuet. Everyone forgets he can and does engage everybody in conversation all the time about whatever they’re into, he’s an easygoing guy, he lets other people go on about their interests, and he listens, and he remembers, and now he’s kicking everyone’s ass at this game by your powers combined.
They’re doing it in teams, and somehow they all end up on the same side. It’s a bloodbath.
it happened once. ONLY ONCE. Now they are Not Allowed to be on the same team, and also they have to have on their team at least one (1) of the following players, for balance : Enjolras, Feuilly, Marius, or Joly* (who are of course all terrifyingly smart, but with a much narrower focus of interests than the game really rewards)
Also, following the Great Boardgame Bloodbath of 1829, Joly and Bossuet are Not Allowed to be on the same team, in any game, ever.
*Joly WOULD have a much wider range of interests, but : Med School. He weeps for all the popular entertainment he’s not having time for these days.
Tag: i would read the hell out of this
can we take a moment to just think about how incredibly scary magical healing is in-context?
You get your insides ripped open but your friend waves his hands and your flesh just pulls back together, agony and evisceration pulling back to a ‘kinda hurts’ level of pain and you’re physically whole, with the 100% expectation that you’ll get back up and keep fighting whatever it was that struck you down the first time.
You break your arm after falling somewhere and after you’re healed instead of looking for ‘another way around’ everybody just looks at you and goes “okay try again”.
You’ve been fighting for hours, you’re hungry, thirsty, bleeding, crying from exhaustion, and a hand-wave happens and only two of those things go away. you’re still hungry, you’re still weak from thirst, but the handwave means you have ‘no excuse’ to stop.
You act out aggressively maybe punch a wall or gnash your teeth or hit your head on something and it’s hand-waved because it’s ‘such a small injury you probably can’t even feel it anymore’ but the point was that you felt it at all?
Your pain literally means nothing because as long as you’re not bleeding you’re not injured, right? Here drink this potion and who cares about the emotional exhaustion of that butchered village, why are you so reserved in camp don’t you think it’s fun retelling that time you fell through a burning building and with a hand-wave you got back up again and ran out with those two kids and their dog?
Older warriors who get a shiver around magic-users not because of the whole ‘fireball’ thing but the ‘I don’t know what a normal pain tolerance is anymore’ effect of too much healing. Permanent paralysis and loss of sensation in limbs is pretty much a given in the later years of any fighter’s life. Did I have a stroke or did the mage just heal too hard and now this side of my face doesn’t work? No i’m not dead from the dragon’s claws but I can’t even bend my torso anymore because of how the scar tissue grew out of me like a vine.
Magical healing is great and keeps casualties down.
But man.
That stuff is scary.
shit just got creepy
Or maybe magical healing doesn’t leave scars or damage. It is magical, after all.
So after years of fighting, your skin is still perfect. Unmarred. In fact, you’re actually in better shape than regular people who don’t get magical healing when they fall out of trees or walk into doors or cut themselves while cooking dinner. You’re in such good shape that it’s unnatural.
And the really good healing magic takes away more than just the obvious injuries. You first start noticing it after about ten years when you go home and haha, you look the same age as your younger sibling, that’s funny.
Not so funny ten years later when they look older. Or forty years later, when you bury them still looking like you did at twenty. When do you retire from this gig anyway? How much damage is too much damage?
How many times do you glimpse the afterlife, or worse, how many times don’t you? What do you live through, get used to, show no outward sign of except a perfectly healthy body, too perfect for any person living a real life.
How many times are you sitting in a tavern with your friends and you hear the whispers, because the people around you know. How can they not know? Your weapons shine with enchantments and your armour is better than the best money can buy and there is not a damn scar on you. You hardly seem human to them.
How long before you hardly seem human to yourself?
And you find yourself struggling to remember the places where the scars should have been, phantom pains that wake you screaming, touching all the old injuries and finding nothing there. It’s all in your head. Was it ever anywhere else?
How long before you’re fighting a lich or a vampire or some other undead monster and you wonder…
…what makes me so different?
Here we go someone who GETS IT.
im tired of “psychic powers misdiagnosed as psychosis” stories instead i want actual psychotic characters with psychic powers being constantly irritated as fuck because they cant tell whether their visions are prophetic or hallucinations and if the chosen one thing is a delusion of grandeur or not
They have a portal that leads to a fantastical world in their closet, but they don’t know if it’s real or not. It could be, but it could also be their brain screwing with them by taking forgotten bits of that one time they read Narnia. They low key sometimes throw trash through it and it seems to disappear but also sometimes it comes back like wtf is this, make up your mind fake portal.
their best friend comes over and is like holy FUCK dude narnia’s in your closet and they’re like lmao i know and the best friend is like what?? and they’re like i told you about that hallucination right?? and the friend is like no narnia is literally in your closet and they’re like SHIT DUDE I’VE BEEN IGNORING IT FOR MONTHS BC I FIGURED I JUST NEEDED TO ADJUST MY ANTIPSYCHOTICS
They go to their doctor and say “yo I don’t think my meds are working, cuz a giant black wolf is following me around and crowd keeps appearing????” Their doc just looks at them. “So that’s not your dog then?” “Oh shit, it’s real !? So it HAS been stealing the food from the fridge!”
i’m so here for a psychotic chosen one who ignores all budding signs of magic because they’re just like “yeah, same shit As Always”
Les Amis Demigods AU (2/?): Combeferre – Child of Prometheus
Prometheus is the Titan god of forethought and counsel. He is the creator of mankind as he moulded the first humans out of clay, as well as their greatest benefactor teaching them the arts of the gods such as astronomy, navigation, medicine, metal working, mathematics and more. He further stole the fire from Mount Olympus against the will of Zeus and gave it to the humans for which he was punished to endure generations of suffering before the great hero Herakles released him from his torture.
#combeferre#my love#demigod au#photoset#my edit#alright and now for you interested souls#quick mythology excursion#yeah there are children of titans that are called demigods too#like helios and eos and selene had like… so many children#also the obvious choice would have probably been athena#but athena was literally as ace as artemis#but she was like super good friends with prometheus#like prometheus helped her to be ‘born’#and athena taught him everything she knew which he then taught the humans#she also helped him create the humans by breathing life into them#like prometheus created them and athene gave them mind and reason#also i’d like you to imagine the possibilities of demigod combeferre son of prometheus#‘so… you’re a demigod huh? what cool things can you do?’#*combeferre deadpan* i have a knack for pottery#also#combeferre: I’m not particulary fond of eagles#*affronted bossuet noises*#i feel like i should write a fic
tell me more about this canon-era soulmate au???????
OKAY so this idea started bc I’m all about soulmate aus and all the different ways they can be done, and I can’t remember if I was just thinking about it or a tumblr post got me started, but I was thinking about how the existence of a soulmate system would have affected history as we know it (I’m also all about worldbuilding), and in order to try and fit it into the way our world is now, I thought okay, maybe for a start, soulmate isn’t the word used. It’s something like your ‘intended’ or whatever. It’s not viewed as romantic, bc same-sex pairings would obviously be happening, and that would need to be explained away in a homophobic society, so it’s just seen as ‘this person is destined to have a really big impact on my life, not necessarily in any particular way’.
So, canon-era, I figured that male same-sex pairings would be seen (at least in the upper classes) as intellectual pairings, maybe even brotherly (whether they really are or not). Female same-sex pairings would be pure and chaste and all that stuff. Because of the big gender power divide, the bonds of women would have less value than the bonds of men. Example: in my SUPER ROUGH plan for this potential fic, I had Grantaire come from a fairly well-off family where his father is unmatched, and his mother’s soulmate lives with them, basically as Grantaire’s second mother. She’s unmarried, but her bond to Grantaire’s mother connects her to that household, so she’s provided for at Grantaire’s father’s discretion. The men still hold all the power, so if he wanted to, he could throw her out, and she wouldn’t have any real legal defence if he decided to treat her as a second wife, though any children from that union would still be illegitimate because they’re unmarried.
I’m rambling, whoops. The basic point boils down to soulmates (or whatever I’d end up calling them) DON’T have the life-changing status they do in most aus. It’s not a huge deal if you have one or not, it isn’t necessarily romantic (in fact at this point in history, what with the strict social classes, I’m thinking they might be thought of as generally platonic). I’m thinking you only get one or two, two maximum. It’s also not something that necessarily happens the first time you see your intended. It might happen then, or it might happen later. There’s no hard and fast rule. You might look at your friend one day, and just KNOW.
The proof of a bond’s existence (I’m thinking) would be a mark on the skin. Some sort of abstract pattern, not a name or words. Not even necessarily like a tattoo, though I’m still see-sawing on that. The mark only appears when the paired couple are touching skin to skin. In this au, soulmates are required by law to register their bond, so their names will be logged along with a description/drawing of their shared mark. This would be ostensibly for the same reasons marriages are recorded – for law when it comes to stuff like children, inheritance, etc. Soulmates would have some definite rights, especially men, though I’m still pretty fuzzy on the details.
All of this (dear god) to say that there is loads and loads of room for misunderstandings and terrible communication in this au, which as we all know leads to pining, which is always always good. Basically, Enjolras and Grantaire meet, and soon after that realise they’re intended. Grantaire is cautiously delighted, Enjolras tries to be polite but is kind of like wtf why this wine-cask. They try to get to know each other, Grantaire is terrible and comes off like a massive dick, Enjolras is supremely unimpressed, they don’t talk to each other much after that. Enjolras pokes at the problem from a distance, not understanding at all how this outwardly unsavoury man is going to impact his life in any positive way, and Grantaire continues to be a boor while despairing simultaneously about his inability to make anything even resembling a good impression. It’s dreadful, they’re both dreadful, and in the end Enjolras gets the papers together to lawfully divorce Grantaire (which is a thing that can be done, because what if – god forbid – you were rich and ended up with a lower-class soulmate? Such a situation could not be allowed to stand, so soulmate divorces are rare, but exist). Grantaire is very upset and refuses, and they try to get to know each other properly.
I’m thinking this will come with a side-order of printshop!Enjolras, the two of them singlestick fighting, and possibly closeted Grantaire who is Not Okay with his own gayness.
But honestly if I ever write this, it’ll be a miracle, because a) canon-era fic is difficult, historical fiction is DIFFICULT and b) god, just look at the length of this ramble, imagine how long writing an entire FIC would be. Urgh, I do want to do it, but it’s a sad fact that it might take literal years for me to do it justice.
Ok but for real
Why isn’t Jean Valjean and his semi-delinquent adopted teenage son Montparnasse a Thing in fandom? Victor Hugo practically gave us that AU trope option on a platter.
#if Eponine + Grantaire can be a fandom Thing#why not Montparnasse making late night calls to his dad to tell him he’s staying out late#and getting epic disappointed speeches#that he tries to pretend don’t bother him but they do#they bother him so much (via @aporeticelenchus)
i did color it lol
Oh no I love the idea of this crossover! They’d get along so well. And the lighting in this feels so open and natural!
eirenical17 