#i made this waistcoat in a day with the fabric from the enjolras waistcoat in my production in 2023

[thepiecesofcait]

Ready to completely lose it for the next 3 hours!

[oilan]

“You have an astounding habit of breaking every weapon you touch,” said Courfeyrac, tapping his cane on the wood of his sitting room floor. He had meant his tone to be light, but he could not help his prickle of ire as he looked at the broken walking stick in Enjolras’ hands. It had been one of his favorites. “But I suppose a match of canne de combat would not be as satisfying if one is overly cautious.”

“Perhaps we ought not spar with your good canes,” Enjolras said. And then, before Courfeyrac had to say anything more, he added, “But I am sorry, Courfeyrac. Find me tomorrow morning, and I will replace it.”

---

Any annoyance Courfeyrac harbored was fleeting, though he decided to take Enjolras up on his offer all the same. Getting Enjolras into a haberdashery willingly was a rare treat, and so it was with high spirits that he took himself off to his friend’s lodgings the following morning.

Smiling dispassionately at the elderly landlady, who only ever looked at him with disapproval when he came calling, Courfeyrac mounted the stairs to Enjolras’ floor. He knocked briefly before swinging the door open, but stopped short just inside the room. Enjolras was not alone — he and Combeferre were sitting on one end of the sofa, very close together, and abruptly pulled away from each other upon Courfeyrac’s entrance.

Awkwardness threatened to settle over them, but Courfeyrac waved it away. “Are you still willing to accompany me to get a new cane, Enjolras? I know it’s not your idea of time productively spent, but a broken weapon needs replacing — especially if it is a fashionable one.”

Enjolras gently extricated himself from between the arm of the sofa and Combeferre. “Of course. Just let me get my coat.”

“You might join us, Combeferre,” said Courfeyrac, striding across the room to adjust the angle of his hat in Enjolras’ shaving mirror. “Perhaps you might commission a new waistcoat that isn’t stained with heaven-knows-what.”

“No, thank you,” said Combeferre, putting on his own coat with a slight frown. “I’m expected at the hospital, and I’m already running late.”

“And we are both expected at the law school,” Courfeyrac said, nodding at Enjolras. “But sometimes sacrifices must be made.”

This got the hint of a smile from Combeferre. “Spoken like a true idler. Again, no — but enjoy yourselves.”

Once outside, they set off in opposite directions. Courfeyrac waited until Combeferre was well out of earshot before casting Enjolras a knowing look.

“And what were the pair of you discussing so close to each other?”

Enjolras’ expression remained impassive, though a slight flush rose to his cheeks. “Balloons.”

“I see. Is that all?”

“Combeferre was explaining the general points of construction, and the physics of achieving lift.” He added quickly, as though sensing the ribald comment Courfeyrac longed to make, “Which shop would you like to visit? I cannot dedicate my whole day to your wardrobe.”

“Perhaps Staub’s, since you’re paying,” Courfeyrac teased, though he lead the way to a much more modest establishment nearer to Enjolras’ lodgings. Once inside, he made a beeline to sort through the canes, leaving Enjolras to meander through the other displays while he waited.

He found what he was looking for almost immediately, shoved in a corner as though it had been set aside for him. A mahogany cane, smooth and dark with a fine handle, and as he picked it up to examine it, he noticed something else about it that made excitement race through him. He turned and hurried over to where Enjolras was standing across the room at the shop counter, examining swatches of newly available fabric.

“Enjolras, have a look at this!”

“Hmm?” said Enjolras, not taking his eyes off of the piece of material in front of him. Courfeyrac peered at it, and wrinkled his nose. It was a rather ugly print, in his opinion, full of multicolored round shapes on a blue background.

“Don’t tell me you are thinking of commissioning a waistcoat in that. Look at what I’ve found.” Courfeyrac presented him with the cane, which Enjolras grasped and, realizing what it actually was, unsheathed.

“A swordcane.”

“Fashion hides an instrument of war. You see, Enjolras, beauty has its place in bringing about progress.”

Enjolras merely smiled silently and handed the cane back to Courfeyrac before turning again to the swatch of fabric. “It looks like a sky full of balloons, does it not?”

A little deflated at his find being brushed aside so, Courfeyrac squinted at the pattern all the same. “Not especially.” Upon seeing Enjolras’ thoughtful frown, Courfeyrac sighed and thrust the swordcane into Enjolras’ hands again. “But far be it from me to interfere with this sort of progress. Replace my cane and perhaps between the two of us, we might cobble together a decent guess at Combeferre’s measurements.”

[a-wild-rosette]

so for your flannels post imagine les amis wearing each one in their own "style" like maybe enjolras would have the sleeves rolled up, jehan around his waist, courfeyrac around his shoulders, etc

Okay buckle the heck up with another elaborate series of headcanons, thanks to the inputs of my lovely friends in the @rebelredrpgroup 

Enjolras always rolls up his sleeves because he steals his friends’ flannels all. the. freaking. time. He has his own red one, but that has never stopped him from just taking other people’s clothes. And because he is tiny, the sleeves always go wayy past his hands :D 

Combeferre is a very sensible human, he wears shirts like they are supposed to be worn. He prefers plaid shirts to flannels though, because flannel is not really his style. 

Courfeyrac wears flannels with waistcoat because it is A Look (TM). The first time Jehan mentioned flannels, Courf refused to wear them because “They are not fashionable enough Jehan!”. Couldn’t really blame him, consider the monstrosity I have as Jehan’s flannel. Until the next day, Courf rolled up at the Musain in that glittery flannel with fake diamond buttons and a whole waistcoat with black embroidered fleur de lis. “I made it fashionable now,” he said to an excited Jehan. 

Grantaire wears them open, over long sleeves or t-shirts or tank tops, sleeves half rolled up, usually worn quite a bit and covered in paint stains (Hcs by our group’s lovely Grantaire :D)

Joly wears oversized flannels. 

Bossuet’s flannels are always ripped for some reasons. They are patched up with so many different flannel fabric pieces that they are a work of arts themselves.  (Usually it’s either Chetta and occasionally a long-suffering Feu helps him patch it up) 

Jehan wears flannels in multiple ways. Around the waist? Yes. Around the shoulders? Of course. On the head? Occasionally. On the torso like a sensible human being? Eh....

Bahorel has a flannel on his body every. single. day. He either wears it or has it around his waist (showing off those beefcakes in a tank top *wink wink*). Does the weather affects how he wears them? Who do you think he is? Of course not. (It’s also good dating practice because “You cold, take my flannel”) 

Feuilly seems like a sensible human being who knows how to wear a shirt, but he also wears flannels despite the heat. Is Bahorel his bad influence or is Feu Bahorel’s bad influence? No one actually has the answer. 

[damnfinecupocoffee]

The Sun Will Not Rise

(So, I wrote a thing. It’s been too long since I did and I hope I did this some kind of justice, it being my first ever Les Mis thing. 1,675 words of ExR canon era angst, grantaire POV, canon death, no happy ending because We Suffer Like Men here. Read it below the cut or on AO3, tags below.) 

Enjolras.

The heavy footsteps of a dozen men moving around the Musain rattle the walls, the floors, dragging him from his slumbering stupor. Distant screams pierce through the air and all Grantaire can smell is blood and death. He has never been upon a battlefield but he knows now how it feels.

Enjolras.

He knows where he wants to be - longs to be - even as the cold colours of familiar walls around him blur together in his tired haze, all his senses overwhelmed with it, the tang of alcohol soured on his tongue, muted gunfire and death rallies echoing around him. His fingers brush against the worn surface of the billiard table as he stumbles to his feet, the absent and pointless thought crossing his mind as to how old the thing is, wondering whether it had ever seen gunfire before.

Enjolras.

He’s there, right there across the room, like a beacon in his red and gold waistcoat, blonde curls loose about his face and eyes wild; a cornered animal not willing to lay down and die without a fight. His predators surround him and yet his teeth are bared and his expression curbed in such a way that if he feels a single drop of fear, it doesn’t show. Except he’s not fighting, he’s not fighting, and that look upon his face speaks volumes greater than any Grantaire has ever read. It sees the bloodshed and the terror and the war outside in the streets and calls them victory. It sees the death and calls it history. He’s lost - Grantaire knows now that they have lost - but Enjolras knows too that they have won, because his death will mean something. He always knew it was coming, and that it would.

Grantaire’s heart stops in his chest with the revelation. He swears it never beats again.

Absently he wonders if any of their friends have escaped the gunman. They are his only sunlight, his happiness dependent on their presence, their warmth and their laughter. He has known so much despair and yet so little of it in their company, and the thought of them departing permanently from his life brings him an exquisite pain. He has lived years in their orbit now; Combeferre, surely the smartest man he’s ever know. Surely more patience for him than anyone has held in the span of his entire twenty-nine years. Courfeyrac, with all his wit and exuberance and passion. Prouvaire, whose pure and passionate existence alone he knows is enough to keep each of them fighting their battles, and even Pontmercy, with whom he’d shared the pains and promises of the rapture of love. Feuilly, Bahorel, Joly, Bousset… no, if Enjolras is here, he knows it to be over. Their fearless leader is surely the final stand.

But he is still standing.

“Take aim!”

Grantaire can’t tell which of the guards speaks, which is the sergeant, but a dozen rifles raise in unison, their butts held firm against uniformed shoulders.

They haven’t seen him. They’re fixed on Enjolras now; a promise of death. And Enjolras is fixed upon them too. The staircase is mere metres to his left and Grantaire could easily pass behind the billiard table and escape down them, slip away unnoticed.

“Vive la Republique!” The words have left his mouth in a powerful cry before he knows it. “Count me in.”

There are eyes on him now, but he notices only the fierce gaze of Enjolras as he strides forwards towards the firing squad, away from the staircase. In a million lifetimes, he would not take it down. His eyes stay fixed on his Orestes as he passes through the enemies lines. More words exit his lips with equal ferocity, but Grantaire himself does not hear them as he falls in line beside Enjolras in front of the muskets.

You’ll see, say the echoes of his memory.

“Will you permit it?” He asks instead. He’s asking with every unspoken feeling he has ever spared for the man beside him, with a swollen heart. The pain of the loss of their friends is harrowing, even excruciating, but a life without the sunlight would be the death of its worshipper. He had been a blind man for so long, but it was fully realised in that moment: he needed Enjolras as violently as his lungs needed air. He loved him. He would rather die here.

Their eyes remain locked, turned away from the guards. Enjolras reaches blindly for his hand and grasps it in his own, something new in his expression as their fingers entwine, a smile upon his lips both resolute in its anticipation of what followed and fulfilled all at once. Grantaire thought himself stood across from a saint in that moment, or perhaps a god, a heavenly glow expressed from behind his Apollo’s golden curls.

If this was to be it, then so it would be. This was all he needed.

He hears the gunshots fire and feels Enjolras’ fingers tighten even further around his own. The pain is searing like fire within his very soul, his knees giving out beneath him, his head finding the floor of the Musain in moments, and then its over.

Until it isn’t.

Grantaire can’t say how much time has passed when he comes too, only that his once barraged senses are shaken instantaneously by the silence.

No footsteps. No screams.

No gunfire.

His arm aches where it hangs limply above his frame, supported by something he’s gripping so tightly like it's the only thing keeping him hanging on to life.

There’s no way he should be.

Enjolras.

Feebly he squeezes the hand clasped so tightly in his own, acutely aware of its limpness in response. Grantaire gasps like he’s taking his first breath as he shifts from the floor onto his elbows. His body is trembling and the pain in his chest is no less severe than it had been the moment the bullets tore through him. The dust has settled around him, coated him, and his gasping turns to choking as he reaches his knees. Blood has soaked his shirt, right through his waistcoat; three puckered holes in the fabric mock every breath he takes. He must be dead, he thinks, because there is nothing logical that explains otherwise.

But if death is feeling the pain of dying forever more, he wishes he had known. He would have tried harder to live.

He keeps his hand in Enjolras’ as he stands up, rasps his name. Squeezes again, once more to no response. In the back of his mind he already knows what this means, but it doesn’t bare thinking about.

The tears streak his dirty face as their fingers finally part, only for his to find Enjolras’ shoulders, trying to gently wake him from his slumber. He’s stood almost perfectly where he had been, a marble statue but for his head tilted down. His chest is littered with holes that match Grantaire's own.

He does not move.

Knowing he would find it makes it no less painful to bear. Grantaire grits his teeth against a desperate scream of pain and devastation. He takes Enjolras’ face in both palms, trembling as his fingers brush away those heavenly curls in a way he’d never have been permitted, and raises it to meet his eyes once more.

They are open still, but the light has gone out. The sun has gone out, Grantaire realises all at once.

The silent tears on his face turn into a sob that racks through his whole body. The motion shakes him like an earthquake, swaying Enjolras from his crucifixion against the wall and his limp body falls forwards into Grantaire’s arms. He sinks to his knees, sinks both of them down until he’s cradling Enjolras in his arms and staving off the panic rising in his chest by clutching his hands so tightly into Enjolras’ clothes that all the men in the world would not be able to rip him from him.

No logic can make sense of why and how he’s still alive, but he wishes it weren’t so, wishes their roles could be reversed so that the sun could shine on in endless day and he would sweep away the darkness as his own memory sunk into obscurity.

Even now, he knows in his heart Enjolras would never let that happen. Even for him. No death in the face of adversity deserved to go unrecognised and no lost life should go uncelebrated. Every person alive or dead was owed more than that - Grantaire feels the tethers of his earthly doubts start to loosen as he clutches that cold body to his own, as if his own warmth could revive it. He stays there for as long as there is silence in the Musain, cursing existence, cursing love, and cursing that in death, Enjolras had made Grantaire see at last. Made him believe.

Only when he finally hears movement in the streets does he move again. He makes to stand, but can’t bear to part from the body in his arms, not yet.

Sitting Enjolras back against the wall where he had been pinned, right beside the window, Grantaire holds his face one more time. Brushes perfect curls back from his delicate features, mapping small details to memory that he’d never been able to perfect in all his paintings over the years. It feels treacherous to complete the task now, but someone has to turn Enjolras into history. He cannot die merely a man.

He closes his eyes, once he’s sure he can bear too. It’s easier to look at him with them closed, if he avoids looking at his blood soaked chest; it’s almost as if he’s sleeping peacefully.

Finally, Grantaire leans forward. He’s on his knees on the floor beside him, face still held delicately and helplessly in his hands, and he closes the space between them to press one chaste, anguished kiss to Enjolras’ lips.

After a moment’s deliberation, he carefully removes Enjolras’ waistcoat and takes it with him.

[adamsvanrhijn]

@revolutionarypoodle made a post a while back & so this is for her. :-3

“Ah - I had been wondering where I’d left it,” said Combeferre brightly, pulling a bundle of beige and navy from a heap in his armoire. Enjolras saw it only out of the corner of his eye, but paid little mind.

Then he set his focus upon the book in his hands – Mémoires sur la guerre de 1809, among those of Combeferre’s which he could “take what he liked” — its worn, bent corners and its messy penmanship inscription in the inside cover.

Unfamiliar penmanship, at that, addressed to an unfamiliar nickname.

“You have found something?” returned Enjolras finally, supposing that perhaps he had, too.

When he turned around, Combeferre was staring at him with widened eyes. His spectacles slipped down his nose; by the time pressed them up again with his thumb and forefinger Enjolras suspected his vision had been altered for several stupefied moments.

“No.” A pause. Enjolras looked at the bundle critically. “Well, yes, but it is of no consequence, and was not really lost. Of course I kept it.”

With one hand Enjolras set the book beside his small chosen pile, and with the other he supported himself from sitting on the floor to kneeing. As tall as he was he could see the floor around Combeferre, then - or, could not in fact, because it was covered in old smocks and trousers and waistcoats. “A coat, is it?”

As amusing as it was, despite all instinct, to see Combeferre flustered upon the most basic of questions, it was less so to feel insatiably curious: about the friend, and about the finding.

“Rather - ,” began Combeferre, as he pulled garments from the bottom of his wardrobe with increased pace, tossing them about his little corner with vigor, “rather a particular one. Alas! I needn’t bother to try it to suppose that it no longer fits, of course. I should like to be rid of it in such case, but the - the fashion has changed, as so many things must, over the years.”

And yet Combeferre, who seemed to have but few new garments each year, had changes of fashion strewn about his rug as though he had never rid himself of anything.

Perhaps to him ‘progress’ was better realized if one clung to what had come before.

“Your uniform?” said Enjolras, setting another book gently atop the military volume and then both in his pile, intrigue getting the better of him.

Combeferre smiled, sheepish, and gave a nod of his head. “I oughtn’t keep anything from you, Enjolras” – and he rifled through fabric before pulling the bundle up again, and this time unrolling it from itself.

“Nearly fashionable,” he said, holding the navy coat by the shoulders. That, Enjolras had no idea, but he could note that when Combeferre shook it, gold buttons shimmered.

Whatever his feelings upon the institution, Enjolras was struck by the image of Combeferre – a little younger, with a less distinguished countenance - dressed in such a uniform, and moreover what he must have looked like upon the day he quit the Polytechnic, if he had removed it sadly or with a flourish, or…

He looked away from his friend, feeling suddenly as though there were less air in the room to breathe.

“With all that it represents I would feel no qualms over burning it. Surely some of our friends wouldn’t loathe to provide assistance - what do you say? Shall we choose a Wednesday, and dispatch invitations?”

Combeferre smile for once did not make Enjolras feel any happier, for there was something else he could not take his mind from.

And no longer was it the mystery of the book note.

“I,” managed Enjolras. “Perhaps, Combeferre, you might keep it.”

“Why! That I did not expect. But you are right - I must not run from this, and although it may not be useful again it - it does have a sentiment. Pray I do not find any other sentimental coats or I shall not be making any more room in this apartment at all.”

Enjolras was not a man to pray, but even had he been he could not have promised to do so in such a case as this.

And if the disarray persuaded Combeferre to spend more time at Enjolras’s own flat once more, so be it – for such company Enjolras would never again mind the mess.