#courfyerac

I'm enjoying myself re-reading all the brainrots I've had with @shamedumpster over the years, and this is one I really enjoyed re-reading, so I'm posting it for you all to enjoy too.

Courfeyrac is a Napoleon fish merman, happily living his life in the ocean with his best friends, Enjolras (a shark merman) and Combeferre (a gray whale merman). Even though Enjolras is very wary of humans, Combeferre thinks they are fascinating -or at least the stuff he finds in wreckages is, he's too big to go near the coast-, and Courfeyrac loves spying them. They are so joyful! And they don't have scales, but they make them, and they change them every day, and-

Meanwhile, Marius is the disowned grandkid of a small bourgeois, and his bad health has gotten him sent to the sea for a few months. Being the pre-goth little sad boi he is, he takes long walks by the beach at night, and there is this kind boy who seems to like going for a swim in the middle of the night, so he sometimes stops by the peer and they talk. He hasn't ever seen him clearly, of course, it being night and all, but it is very nice.

For some reason (maybe Enjolras warns him that it is dangerous to be around a human when they can potentially see his tail?), Courfeyrac goes to the Thénardiers, a family of sea witches, to try and bargain for legs. They give them to him, getting his voice as payement and warning him that if he can't make Marius love him, he will die and turn into sea foam.

That is how Marius, in one of his midnight walks, stumbles upon a naked, mute boy washed up on the shore. Guessing he's probably a survivor from a shipwreck, he takes him home and takes him in.

Meanwhile, the magic of the Thénardiers has transported Courfeyrac directly to the shore, which means he had no way to warn his friends of his decision. This leads to days of frantic search where Combeferre goes through the deep waters while Enjolras scours the coast, as careful as he can while also trying desperately to avoid thinking of how he could have died or gotten captured or- Once he finds Courf, they manage to communicate rudimentarily through vibrations on the water that Courf does with his feet, but it's complicated. Ferre can't even go that close to the coast, so he has to pass all his messages through Enjolras...

Meanwhile, Marius and his knack for languages has started learning sign language in order to communicate with his guest and new friend. They are getting closer by the day. What he hasn't told him, for some reason he can't articulate even to himself, is that he is engaged to a beautiful young lady of the name of Cosette, who is waiting for his health (and his financial situation) to improve enough for them to get married.

All is well, and Courfeyrac's hopes of this foolish deal ending well are high, when Marius haltingly confesses that his fiancée, Cosette, has announced she is coming to visit in a few weeks. And then Courf's heart breaks, because everything he has understood about human society seems to point to the fact that humans mate for life. So he should break them up. But then he meets Cosette, and she's so nice...

And this is where things get interesting. Because there is a part of Cosette's story that has been drilled into her to never tell anyone. Fantine, Cosette's mom, was a mermaid who sold her hair to be with her beloved, Tholomyès. But the deal she made had a problem: it specified that he had to love her, but not how well. So Tholomyès, in his selfish, disgusting way, loved her enough to keep her alive. But only barely. So Fantine had clung to life, knowing that Cosette would be neglected and abused if she left her with her father, until she had met Valjean and he promised to take the little girl away with him.

So when Cosette meets Courfeyrac, it doesn't take her very long to realize what is going on. She confronts him about it, and even offers to leave (no marriage is worth a life), but Courfeyrac refuses, because that's not the dealbreaker, is it? It's whether Marius loves him. And humans mate for life, so he doesn't.

The intended date draws near. Courfeyrac is getting more and more maudlin, Marius answers all of Cosette's questions with a pained "I love you, my darling", and Enjolras is very, very close to committing sea witch-icide. And then it gets to the last day, and the Thénardiers arrive to collect their prize.

But Courf's soul refuses to leave. "Yes, he is going to marry me" says Cosette, "but he loves both of us. And that is all that we need."

And then Enjolras threatens to eat them slowly and painfully if the Thénardiers don't give Courf back his fin to go back to the sea and back to shore at will, and everything is well that ends well.

It's a Pirate AU and probably the closest to a fanon fic I've ever written (among other things, it is Established ExR, when the hell do I do that??), so quite a lot has been changed from canon... but here are a few things that didn't make it into the fic and I wish they had!

Musichetta is not a pirate, per se. She's a back-alley doctor specialized in safe(ish) abortions. Joly and Bossuet meet her when Bossuet gets pregnant on accident.

Valjean got to the Caribbean as a convict. He met Fantine because they worked on a plantation together, but of course being white Valjean got released at the end of his sentence. The exchange of money with the Thénardiers this time is a literal ownership exchange (even if Valjean never enforced it on Cosette).

Marius and Courfeyrac know each other from London. Marius' grandfather is much much lower in the social ladder than Courf's dad, but Courfeyrac likes him and he included him in things (and also was putting his moves on him, not that Marius noticed). They were in a Society for the Betterment of the Common People together. Courfeyrac doesn't know Marius is in Jamaica now. [That subplot was my last cut and it was PAINFUL.]

Bahorel takes a page out of Edward Teach's book when it comes to his appearance for battle. He has a bushy reddish beard that he braids, and he puts bones and sparkling matches in it before combat. During downtime, though, he lets Jehan braid ribbons and flowers in it.

Don’t Ship It

Why don’t you ship it?

Well, honestly, because I haven't seen much of it! I feel like it's a ship from before I was in the fandom (early post 2012 movie, maybe?), and almost every time I've encountered them it has been in the background of a fic for a different pairing. They are also two characters that are both usually used as sunshine supports, which means they don't usually have enough going on to make them interesting to me. They're a little bit the JBM of early Les Mis fics: they're cute, and they're there, but noone ever focuses on them and their struggles.

2. What would have made you like it?

I'm honestly a little bit annoyed that I'm getting this question now that I'm utterly out of my hyperfixation, because my first thought was "fics that center them and their story! Send me fics!!". Also probably making one of them a little more fucked up. They're too chill. I usually headcanon Jehan as coming from a very chill Jewish family and Courf as coming from a pretty conservative Catholic household, so maybe they can clash on that? Courf who has a very strong negative reaction to religion because of his upbringing, that can't understand how Jehan can just follow it even though he doesn't believe in god? I dunno. I'd love to hear other people's thoughts on what the conflict could be with them.

3. Despite not shipping it, do you have anything positive to say about it?

Chapters: 1/1 Fandom: Les Misérables - All Media Types Rating: Not Rated Warnings: Author Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings Relationships: Combeferre/Courfeyrac Characters: Combeferre (Les Misérables), Courfeyrac (Les Misérables) Additional Tags: Fluff, kissing and stuff, idk i wrote this ages ago i can barely remember what happens in it, courf being a fool Summary:

Courfeyrac sat in his bed glancing over to his right where Combeferre lay sleeping and very much naked.

As mentioned, here is the next chapter, on Ao3 and on ff.net! Many, many thanks to Pip who was rather snowed under for the past two days but was still willing to beta for me. And now, at last, the promised pun so awful you will demand Courfeyrac auto-defenestrate once more: 

“There are some early apples-- the type... what are they called?” She had said, “Comment l'appelle-t-on?”

Madame de Courfeyrac lost no time in turning this into a pun. “We la pèle--” or, ‘we peel it’ “--with a knife. Eh?”

Gauvain laughed. Monsieur de Courfeyrac favored the table with a long-suffering glance that showed that Gauvain clearly inherited his sense of humor from his mother.