CROSSPOSTS |FROM MY AO3|

YOU AND YOUR WORDS OBSESSED WITH YOUR LEGACY | LES MIS SONGFIC

Song is Burn from Hamilton. All rights go to Lin Manuel Miranda, I'm not profiting off this song, yada yada all that copyright jazz.

I saved every letter you wrote me...

Montparnasse's apartments have little in them. Better to be able to pack and go at a moment's notice, always on the run from the law. On his (illegally gotten) writing-desk, he keeps three personal posessions. The first is a small knife, easy to conceal within a coat or cravat, which has served him well in the more... delicate cases. The second is a gold chain taken from a bourgeois- Tholomyes, his name was, or something like that- which has become a sort of twisted good-luck charm. The last thing is a stack of letters- written on the expensive paper that the rich schoolboys use- stuffed inside a mahogany lockbox.

From the moment I read them, I knew you were mine, I thought you were mine, you said you were mine...

He used to look at them often, smile his rare smile, hope he didn't turn pink in the face. The writer was a wealthy young boy, the kind of person Montparnasse and his gang of thieves generally stole from. In fact, that was how they met, late at night, him watering his garden and Montparnasse looking for something to plunder. It was the sort of connection that formed, inexplicibly, in an instant.

Do you know what Angelica said, when we saw your first letter arrive? She said, be careful with that one, love, he will do what it takes to survive...

His name was Jean Prouvaire, but he called himself Jehan, stating that there were too many Jeans around anyways. It had become a bit of a laughing subject around the Patron-Minette, stone-cold Montparnasse and his petit fleur, and Clasequous and the others had warned him not to get too attached to him, that Romantics rarely turned out any good, and that it was better to rob them than court them, for his family had a pretty penny. Flighty student, from one lover to the next.

You and your words flooded my senses. Your sentances left me defenseless, you built me palaces out of paragraphs. You built cathedrals...

A poet. That is what Jehan was. A poet. Twisting and wrapping words like vines around his fingers, carefully weaving them in a net around his heart. Letters full of sultry love declarations, witty notes and satire, and haunting, lyrical ballads, all tied together with the brush of ink and the flourish of a pen. He had swept Montparnasse in with his trawl of phrases and prose. And even if he had wanted to escape, he would not have been able to. He had shone rosy light on his dreams, his fantasies of a beautiful world, where people like Montparnasse's- not friend really, more like assistant- the Thenardier girl, would not be left to starve, where everyone had a voice, and flowers grew freely in the streets of Paris.

And when you were mine, the world seemed to burn...

This small-statured boy, who was almost birdlike in his build, had flipped Montparnasse's world upside-down. He was no longer simply living day-to-day, aiming to survive, nothing more. He had something to live for, in the stolen moments. Like the silly girl's fixation on that dumb Pontmercy boy, only Jehan was intelligent, and attractive, and seemed to match Montparnasse toe-to-toe, line to line.

You published the letters she wrote you, you told the whole world how you brought this girl into our bed...

He was an idealist, that was for sure. A member of some group who spent time in the backroom of an old cafe, writing and speaking and discussing politics and ethics and all sorts of things Montparnasse didn't have time to care about. Oh, if only Montparnasse was richer, or less wanted by the law, perhaps that could've been him. Or perhaps not. He was not, in general, a firebrand. More like a shadow in the night, that's there for a minute and then gone with the day.