He Is Blindfolded. That Is The First Thing He Registers. Then:

Finduilas is in the habit of keeping things in her pockets for her children. There is almost always a biscuit with jam at the center for Faramir, and a new stone she’s found for Boromir, and silly drawings with riddles she’s made for both of them, just like the ones her grandfather made for her and her siblings when they were young.

The riddles are a delight to the pair of them, and it is one time when there is sure to be no quarrel between them, since they love to solve them together, and Finduilas has crafted them to ensure there are parts to suit both of them well.

The most sacred rule of the riddle games is that no one is supposed to help – a rule she has especially impressed upon her notoriously clever spouse.

But one day, the riddle is particularly challenging to the young pair, and Denethor finds their pleading eyes just ever so persuasive, and before he truly realizes what he’s done, he’s told them which of the Citadel’s many wall carvings will hold the answer they seek.

And so Faramir and Boromir eagerly bring the next riddle to him straightaway, and Denethor is torn. He tries to shoo them off, but catches a glimpse of the paper they hold and curiosity gets the better of him.

When Finduilas runs into the three of them attempting to scale the garden wall at the back of the Steward’s House – and quite by her design is the encounter – there are several moments where all three feign innocence before realizing they’ve been caught.

Because of course she’d known that he helped them before, and had designed her next riddle carefully to see if she could entice him into doing so again.

For the answer to this riddle was indeed over the garden wall, but it was not the expected solution (which involved one of her favorite blooms, called seregon in Sindarin, and a rather clever play on words requiring a nuanced understanding of Steward Beregond’s politics that should have instantly made him realize she knew he’d be helping).

Rather, it was quite a splendid little ‘just because’ picnic waiting for the four of them, with all the jam biscuits Faramir could dream of, and at least four and twenty other lovely things one only discovers on warm afternoons in the presence of those one loves best in all the world.

finally pruned this blog down to less than 100 posts. I feel so clean and shiny and new.

published the first new chapter of my ghost fantine fic in four years🎉

more ghosts whaaaaat

will never actually ''officially'' participate in nanowrimo because who's got the time. however, want to get back in the habit and therefore have made a little spreadsheet with graphs, and am actually writing again for the first time in months. numbers go up, brain goes wheeeee, story gets progress. feels good.

HAPPY EPONINE PROMPTS!: Eponine and Cosette being friends and getting into gardening-related shenanigans together in whichever happier AU setting you prefer (post-barricades? Valjean adopts everyone? Fantine raises Cosette in Paris? Anything!)

I don’t know that there’s enough Shenanigans here, but there IS gardening, and it’s post-barricades, and I hope I did this prompt justice even a little, because it’s a very very good prompt.

—

It took days and days, of Éponine’s wounds healing, of everyone waiting for Marius to wake up, of Cosette holding herself very straight and speaking very steadily while her hands shook, of Éponine raising her chin and sneering and then again flinching every time Marius’s horrid grandfather raised his voice, it took days and days, for the two of them to decide that they didn’t have to be enemies, at least, and then more days for them to figure out what that meant, and then.

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I was looking around my old document files and found this, and thought people might like it.

Bahorel/Prouvaire pre-slash fic beneath the cut.

--

It started out very slow.

Jehan appreciated art in all its forms. The glow of a sunset, the trill of a flute, the aroma of a bakery. So it was not surprising that, one day at the Musain with friends, he happened to notice the articulation of Bahorel’s wrist and fingers.

The man had been mid-gesture, talking with Joly about – oh, probably Joly’s mistress – and Bahorel was prone to magnificent gestures with his hands, he was probably part Italian somewhere. But for some reason, one hand landed in a beam of sunlight that had snuck through the window, and the modelling of bone and muscle and skin had drawn Jehan’s eye like one of Joly’s magnets.

They had known each other long enough that, after the meeting, when Jehan went over to Bahorel and said, rather absentmindedly, “I like your wrists. And your fingers. Reminds me of Michelangelo,” Bahorel merely laughed and ruffled Jehan’s too-long hair.

And Jehan had gone home, and sung to his violets, and written a poem about a girl that he saw in the street, and that was that.

Except that it was not.

The two of them went drinking together on occasion, and would get into ferociously animated discussions about life and death, and the afterlife, and the judgment of men. And if the flash of an eye and the curve of a smile managed to leave an after-image on the insides of Jehan’s eyelids, he certainly didn’t remember it in the morning, in the aftermath of a most excellent debate, complete with Byronic skullcups and bloodred wine.

It was during another meeting at the Musain some months later, when Jehan was in the middle of expounding upon the poetic merits of pagan mythology, that he overheard a snippet of conversation.

“ – And you never quarrel!”

“That’s part of the treaty we have made. When we made our little Holy Alliance, we each assigned our own boundary that we’d never cross. The part to the north belongs to Vaud, the south to Gex. Hence our peace.”

“Peace is happiness digesting.”

Ordinary conversation on an ordinary day, but it snagged Jehan like a splinter on a stocking – tore a tiny hole, just large enough to grow, and grow it did. Weeks afterward he found himself muttering aloud: “Happiness does not come from a social contract.”

He wondered, briefly, if the nature of romantic liaisons had any bearing on Locke’s theory.

Envy is a tenacious seed, but it was not envy that took root in Jehan’s mind. Rather, it was something else, which sprang from conversation, smiles, and the model of hand and wrist, -- and became ideas, and the flash of eyes, -- and became, over the course of slow months, something that Jehan was not entirely familiar with.

He had been in love before. The girl had been his neighbor when he was a small child, and his playmate, and they chattered about the shapes of clouds and lullabies and flowers, and made mud pies, and collected crisp fall leaves. That girl had had the clearest blue eyes, and that was why Jehan loved the sky, still: it reminded him of that first love, pure and honest as only children can be.

This was something different. This was wanting.

There was an angry mob in my notes demanding an enemies to lovers design 

see the others x x x

|| The "noot noot" thing!

pop into my askbox with ‘noot noot’ and I will put my iPod on shuffle and the fourth song that comes up I will write a drabble with our characters based on the lyrics

"Rainbow Tour" - Ensemble, Evita (2006 London)

There you are, I told you soMakes no difference where we goThe whole world over just the sameYou should have heard them call our nameAnd who would underestimate the actress now?

Okay but AU where Sauron gets captured and taken to Valinor along with Melkor.

—

Newly renamed (though echoes of other names still linger), Mairon has been reclaimed by Aulë, and spends his time among the Noldor, teaching them the lessons he himself has learned. He is reticent, almost shy; but as soon as he is in the forge, he glows with contentment, and will chat about nearly anything. He is friendly and polite, if distant, and many of the Noldor are fond of him.

Fëanor cannot trust him, or his master, no matter how much faith the Valar have in their repentance. For that matter, he cannot quite trust the Valar for allowing them to walk free once again.

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this morning for the first time I got up from my bed and I shucked off my nightclothes and I looked at my body in the pale morning light, and I saw that the body I was in was good. I saw the softness of the dimples in my elbows and my knees, and I saw the fall of hair neither really brown nor really blonde, and I saw the muscles beneath the padded softness of my waist and hips and I saw that the softness was also good. in the pale morning light my body was not something to be ashamed of. the next time I stumble bleary-eyed from bed I hope I will take that short time to look in the pale morning light, and remember that moment as clear as water when I knew that I loved the house I had made for myself.

to me: letters, ii.

Modern AU GrantairexJoly~ Engagement.

Years of dating went by before Grantaire finally asked Joly to marry him. It took all the courage he had shockingly, especially since he asked Joly out. 

Grantaire: Philippe Joly, will you marry me? *Grantaire was even down on one knee*

Joly: *Pulls in a sharp breath* Yes of course! 

2015 -> 2018