FIC: Debts
Sep. 20th, 2005 06:34 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
mharificTitle: Debts
Fandom: Les Misérables and Westmark
Pairing: Courfeyrac/Cabbarus. ...no, really. I'm sorry!
Rating: PG-13. Soft R?
Words: 532
Summary: Blood and rhetoric without the love.
Warnings: Bad language. Character death.
Disclaimer: Courfey is Vic's. Everything else is Lloyd's. Sorry, Lloyd.
Notes: Oh my God oh my God oh my God I'm sorry. ...Birthday fic for![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
kaliscoo. OMG.
This is like some drama of the ancients, Courfeyrac thinks: the aging tyrant, the slide into ruin, the outwardly respectable citizen plotting treason, abetted by his foreign lover. Except that he's not in this for love. It would be hard to conceive that sort of passion for Cabbarus, a thin gray man with a thin gray voice and the personality of an accountant.
Granted, he's surprisingly good in bed -- at least if one has no illusions. It's a cold, fierce, dogged business, but Courfeyrac doesn't care. Delight is a thing of the past. It died in Paris, in the muddy street, with blood soaking its shirt.
He's here to pay his debts.
He learns the language that reminds him of Pontmercy, with his English and his German. He wears the clothes, outdated by twenty years. He does the work, minor, meaningless, that Cabbarus finds for him to do. He blends in, and he waits.
It will be bloodless, when it comes. There will be no glory in it, no courage, no daring, and it will not be his country. Courfeyrac doesn't care. He thinks of Combeferre, with three bayonets in his back, and he goes on with his work.
He moves through the Old Juliana like a ghost.
Sometimes he overhears things: sharp things, whispered things, reckless things. No one notices the Frenchman in his rusty black, or, noticing, supposes he can understand. He passes it all on, indifferently. Sometimes, after that, there is an arrest, or simply an absence.
Courfeyrac doesn't care. Nothing is quite real anymore. There are dreams -- dreams of love, dreams of laughter; dreams of friends, of brothers, with searching eyes. There are nightmares, thick with blood. And sometimes, in the hard bed, in the gray room, in the dark, there's a kind of savage comfort, a night's relief. Nothing more.
He's here to pay his debts, that's all.
That's enough, until the doctor's departure. Nothing that forthright man does is done in silence, and the rumors begin to fly. Courfeyrac's neighbor hears from his sweetheart whose sister is a chambermaid whose roommate knows a guardsman who heard it all. The old man dismissed, exiled, jailed; the Queen locked in her apartments, hysterical -- prostrated -- under guard, at all events. The Minister, who would set himself up as king.
It may be no more than the choice of words; it may be the memory of the Queen's well-meant "Bienvenu". Something small and treacherous, like Bluebeard's key.
It will be bloodless.
Courfeyrac's heart overflows. The taste of blood threatens to choke him. But he is an educated man; he knows his Greeks and his Romans as well as his modern melodramas; he is prepared for this twist in the tale. He goes about his business as usual.
And in the gray room at the end of the day, half-reclining, stripped to his old-fashioned shirt, he reaches for the cool strong hand of Cabbarus, and meets his dispassionate eyes.
"Fuck your court intrigues," Courfeyrac says, and with his free hand reaches for the knife. "La République--"
Whereafter, in a remarkably short time, his debts are cancelled permanently. He has no time even to laugh, let alone to despair.
Fandom: Les Misérables and Westmark
Pairing: Courfeyrac/Cabbarus. ...no, really. I'm sorry!
Rating: PG-13. Soft R?
Words: 532
Summary: Blood and rhetoric without the love.
Warnings: Bad language. Character death.
Disclaimer: Courfey is Vic's. Everything else is Lloyd's. Sorry, Lloyd.
Notes: Oh my God oh my God oh my God I'm sorry. ...Birthday fic for
kaliscoo. OMG.This is like some drama of the ancients, Courfeyrac thinks: the aging tyrant, the slide into ruin, the outwardly respectable citizen plotting treason, abetted by his foreign lover. Except that he's not in this for love. It would be hard to conceive that sort of passion for Cabbarus, a thin gray man with a thin gray voice and the personality of an accountant.
Granted, he's surprisingly good in bed -- at least if one has no illusions. It's a cold, fierce, dogged business, but Courfeyrac doesn't care. Delight is a thing of the past. It died in Paris, in the muddy street, with blood soaking its shirt.
He's here to pay his debts.
He learns the language that reminds him of Pontmercy, with his English and his German. He wears the clothes, outdated by twenty years. He does the work, minor, meaningless, that Cabbarus finds for him to do. He blends in, and he waits.
It will be bloodless, when it comes. There will be no glory in it, no courage, no daring, and it will not be his country. Courfeyrac doesn't care. He thinks of Combeferre, with three bayonets in his back, and he goes on with his work.
He moves through the Old Juliana like a ghost.
Sometimes he overhears things: sharp things, whispered things, reckless things. No one notices the Frenchman in his rusty black, or, noticing, supposes he can understand. He passes it all on, indifferently. Sometimes, after that, there is an arrest, or simply an absence.
Courfeyrac doesn't care. Nothing is quite real anymore. There are dreams -- dreams of love, dreams of laughter; dreams of friends, of brothers, with searching eyes. There are nightmares, thick with blood. And sometimes, in the hard bed, in the gray room, in the dark, there's a kind of savage comfort, a night's relief. Nothing more.
He's here to pay his debts, that's all.
That's enough, until the doctor's departure. Nothing that forthright man does is done in silence, and the rumors begin to fly. Courfeyrac's neighbor hears from his sweetheart whose sister is a chambermaid whose roommate knows a guardsman who heard it all. The old man dismissed, exiled, jailed; the Queen locked in her apartments, hysterical -- prostrated -- under guard, at all events. The Minister, who would set himself up as king.
It may be no more than the choice of words; it may be the memory of the Queen's well-meant "Bienvenu". Something small and treacherous, like Bluebeard's key.
It will be bloodless.
Courfeyrac's heart overflows. The taste of blood threatens to choke him. But he is an educated man; he knows his Greeks and his Romans as well as his modern melodramas; he is prepared for this twist in the tale. He goes about his business as usual.
And in the gray room at the end of the day, half-reclining, stripped to his old-fashioned shirt, he reaches for the cool strong hand of Cabbarus, and meets his dispassionate eyes.
"Fuck your court intrigues," Courfeyrac says, and with his free hand reaches for the knife. "La République--"
Whereafter, in a remarkably short time, his debts are cancelled permanently. He has no time even to laugh, let alone to despair.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
(no subject)
Date: 2005-09-20 04:45 pm (UTC)But thank you.