clayforthedevil | Other Verses

Bahorel wakes up on the floor in front of the fireplace, caught in a ridiculous multiplicity of blankets, pillows, and Jehan's elbows, which are, in Bahorel's considerable experience, far more omnipresent and wrathful than any God. It's all so far from unusual that he has a rare moment of confusion-- this could be Paris, and his old apartments. He shakes the confusion off, along with several pillows, one of which makes a reproachful yowl as it falls.

Bahorel grins at Marguerite, who blinks at him in offense. "Your pardon, Mademoiselle." He sits up, stretches and yawns in time with the kitten, and looks around to assess the damage of the night before. There's none especially evident; judging from the general scatter of overcoats and waistcoats, they both seem to have managed to get somewhere along the line of ready for bed before getting bored with consciousness. He looks for his coat and grins to see the poppy from the Labyrinth still vibrant in the lapel. That goes on a high shelf, away from curious kittens with unknown opium tolerances.

Jehan, at some point, apparently managed to turn his own shirt into something of a straightjacket, arms pinned to his own head and sleeves knotted. Bahorel untangles him, and lets Jehan thump back down into the pillows with the steady unconsciousness of a naturally deep sleeper who also notably overdid the mead last night.

Which leaves Bahorel free to go about his morning with his usual energy and lack of concern for quiet. By the time Jehan wakes up, Bahorel and the kitten have both eaten, stretched, and aggressively groomed themselves for the day. For the kitten, that means it's time for a nap; for his part, Bahorel is properly sprawled on the couch, reading.

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Jehan blinks an eye open. The kitten is on his chest, purring quietly. "Good morning," he says, picking her up.

He sits up amidst the pillows and blankets, and looks around. He has a vague recollection of seeing this room the night before. Then it was just a blur of red to him, drunk and half-asleep as he was. Now he can see it clearly, in full and elaborate detail, and it is...still a blur of red.

Jehan grins. This is a perfect room for Bahorel. Whom Jehan locates, after some looking about, on the couch off to the side. "And good morning to you as well," he says."

Bahorel's answering grin is amused and unguardedly fond. " Good and morning both, yes. Though time here is a very odd creature, as I'm sure you'll learn. Shower's in there, coffee's still warm there--" he gestures in the general direction of things as he speaks; Jehan can certainly navigate the breadth of an apartment without a map. "--and Bar sent you a set of clothes. Up to you if they're to your taste."

Madame Bar is a fine seamstress, but she's also a bit playful--and then, Jehan's always had his own approach to fashion. Bahorel won't even try to guess if Bar's current approach suits him.

Edited Date: 2015-05-03 12:33 am (UTC)

Jehan sets Marguerite down, gets up, and stumbles in the direction of coffee, which is much more important than clothes. He picks up an odd-looking glass pitcher with markings, full of black coffee, and pours himself a cup.

He downs it in one gulp. He doesn't actually much like the taste of black coffee, but there's something satisfying about the gesture of downing coffee in one gulp.

Jehan then stumbles over to the clothes, which are...a purple velvet doublet and soft leather breeches.

On the whole, he's pleased. "Bar has good judgment," he says.

When dressed, Jehan flops down on the floor-pillow by Bahorel's couch. He can't help smiling: Bahorel, with him, alive-or-nearly-so. "What are you reading?"

Edited Date: 2015-05-03 02:45 am (UTC)

" Good eye for measurements too. I've no idea how she does it."

He leans over to hold the book out for Jehan's view, without actually letting go of it. The Lottery and Other Stories, says the cover in neat lettering. "Shirley Jackson. Brilliant stuff. America finally started turning out writers worth reading; you'll have to read her, sometime. But--!" he lifts Jackson back out of range, and leans across Jehan to pull up a rather thicker book resting against a leg of the couch. "--not today. Today, you're reading someone more familiar."

The book is thick and bound in red. The spine has most of the letters worn off, but Hugo is still legible. Bahorel puts the book in Jehan's hands and taps at a red ribbon bookmark sticking out a little more than halfway through the pages. "Start there; then I'll explain."

Jehan takes the book. Les Misérables. He's never read this work of Hugo's. Curiously, he opens the book to the marked page.

Les Amis de l'ABC, it says. He looks up at Bahorel, eyes wide, and then begins to read.

"Oh," Jehan says, after a minute. "Oh--well, that's true, Enjolras looks like that, and the severity is rather beautiful, like an icy mountaintop...and Combeferre, yes, what an excellent description...though who is Tholomyès?"

He grins at Bahorel's paragraph, nods along at Bossuet's and Joly's and Feuilly's, blushes deeply at his own. He can feel his face growing hot. And Grantaire's--well, it's sadly, poetically, tragically true, and as haunting as the unrequited love of any hero from a medieval lay.

Their religion was progress, it says, truthfully. Like so many religions, a harsh one, demanding martyrs.

Jehan is misty-eyed by the time he looks back up at Bahorel. "But I never told Hugo all this," he says. "How could he have known?"

He has other questions, too, such as what the rest of the book is about, and what role he and his friends play in it. But the first and most mysterious one is: how did Hugo know? Jehan had never believed him a seer, for all his literary gifts.

Bahorel makes no pretense of not watching Jehan as he reads; both of them tend to treat it as a group activity. Bahorel shakes his head with a scowl at the mention of Tholomyes-- a slander, that comparison-- and grins at Jehan's blush over his own description, and the reaction to the rest of their friends' small biographies. Bahorel can't consider Hugo's notions of Grantaire's Tragic Love anything but a farce, but Jehan's sensitivity to such things is another matter. There's no mockery in his smile when Jehan turns back to him.

"Ah, that's been a subject of some debate. It's from thirty years after our death; after all, none of us lived in isolation, and that's time enough to gather research. Especially given that he seems to know Pontmercy very well; Marius survived, he might have given some account of some of us--if you can believe that he ever noticed half of those things." Bahorel suspects that Marius being observant may be the most impossible of theories, but it must be allowed to exist.

"Joly suspects some sort of transference of ideas across dimensions, in terms that are doubtless scientific rather than inspirational; Bossuet believes us all to be entirely fictional, except when he doesn't; Combeferre is considering all of it, and at least a dozen other theories, the last I spoke to him." As Combeferre does.

"The only certain thing is that this book is by Victor Hugo--from some world, or maybe in several worlds-- and it's well known over a century later. As to the rest--" He waves expansively. "Your ideas will be as well founded as any, and better than most."
Jehan , at least, is a writer, and a Romantic, and knows something of how that works.

Jehan stares, wide-eyed, a beatific smile growing across his face.

"Yes--he could have spoken to our surviving friends, but he couldn't have gotten all of this detail from Marius. Marius exists in a state of poetic trance. And even from our other friends--" It's unlikely. It's an eerie amount of detail.

Jehan fixes on the first strange theory mentioned, though he's by no means forgotten about the others. "Transference of ideas! You mean--a Victor Hugo in some dimension is a seer of some kind? A visionary, or a mystic? If so, then when I write, perhaps I'm simply sharing the visions I receive. Visions of real people and their stories, all happening in some other world."

This is an idea Jehan has considered before. It appeals to him. His poems and stories all seem so real.

Edited Date: 2015-05-04 03:26 am (UTC)

"That's something like Joly's theory--and you're not the only writer I've heard say so. Do you think it's true of all stories, then, or only some?" It's a familiar topic, but always worth revisiting- and especially now, with all the new evidence offered by Milliways and her strange Library.

"I do believe some are painstakingly constructed, like a fine craft or sculpture, chiseled out of raw material," says Jehan. "And some boil and bubble in the mind before emerging, like the world taking shape out of Infinite. But some--yes, some I do believe are made from sights and sounds drifting over to us from Elsewhere, intelligible only to those who embrace the quiet."

Jehan has given this speech before.

"I always thought of Hugo's work as more the naturally emerging kind, I must say. This makes me regard him in a new light."

"Hah, perhaps it is unique in his works. Or does every story have to come from the same place? A dancer may hear music from an orchestra or the sky, or create it in their own mind, and still be the same dancer. --He did write it in exile; no doubt Guernsey is quieter than Paris."

Milliways is quieter, too; this is a conversation that should have more voices in the back of it, interrupting and agreeing and going off their own way. It could be a melancholy thought, but at the moment it just makes Bahorel laugh. "--Imagine telling everyone back in Paris about this! Telling Hugo alone that he'd end up writing a book where an insurrection against his Louis-Philippe isn't villainous-- oh, yes, we're set off quite well! Hm."

He changes position in accordance with a new thought, sprawling over the couch and letting his head hang off the edge by Jehan's shoulder; a very serious attitude for serious matters. "For the ideas that do come through that way, do you think they need to find sympathy in the writer first? Or is it like being struck by lightning, or those poor doomed prophets forever getting haunted by talking bushes and devouring whales, and the truth comes for its listener , wanted or not?"

Edited Date: 2015-05-04 01:38 pm (UTC)

"Of course, you're right--the same author may have different inspirations, whether a voice from another world or the work of his own mind."

Jehan smiles. "Heroes, are we?" He has no doubt his friends deserve such acclaim. "I wouldn't have thought Hugo had it in him. But as to your last question--if the truth comes unwanted, do you realize what that means?" He tilts his head up to look at Bahorel on the couch, his grin growing wider with excitement.

"We came to Hugo! We persuaded him! Our spirits reached across time and space, without conscious intent, by sheer accident, through the force of our passion, to meet his, and turn him to the truth!"

Jehan is thrilled. He would have loved to be a prophet. Being the spiritual messenger appearing to a prophet is even better.

Bahorel laughs, pleased at the thought. "Why not, hey? Souls clearly work in surprising ways, or we wouldn't be here." He considers it for a little while. "Yes; why not? Every story's a conversation of some sort anyway--or an argument,hah- and who says it has to be all between the living?"

"Indeed!" Jehan makes a dramatic gesture with his arms, and just misses hitting Bahorel in the nose. "And maybe we argued with him even while we were living--maybe our souls reached out to his, without our knowing, and communed with him, and that helped lay the foundations for what he wrote later. We just don't know. Either way, it's an enthralling idea." He pauses.

Jehan pulls his arms back in, huddling. "Of course, the greatest arguments are within the self. Do you know, I once spent a whole day and a whole night wrestling with myself, because two characters in my epic poem were at cross purposes? It was a glorious thing. My soul was a battleground." He smiles at the memory, then returns to the present moment. "And that's Bossuet's theory, you say? We're 'fictional', as you call it--except we can't be, we're real because we feel ourselves to be--but it's possible, so this theory says, that we're created by Hugo, that we and others in this book people the terrain of his mind."

Bossuet might have been shaken by this. Jehan is enchanted. He sighs. "What an exquisite thought."

Bahorel tilts his head to dodge the flailing, then reaches out with rather more coordination to rest a hand on Jehan's shoulder, rubbing idly at the fabric of the new doublet. "--But they were still aspects of your soul, you'd say, those characters." It's a statement, but a questioning one.

Jehan frowns. "I would--at first" he says. "They began as part of me, and I felt them to be so. But as I developed them, they became independent of my will, as if they had wills of their own. They acted and talked without my conscious design. I could still feel and understand all they felt, but I wasn't telling them to feel or do anything. All they did, they did spontaneously."

He looks at Bahorel. "Who's to say they couldn't break free entirely, and do things without my knowledge or volition? Perhaps they would still be part of me then, as we're all part of the Infinite. But the relation between god and human is quite different to that between a puppet and a puppet master, isn't it?"

Jehan is now too excited to rein himself in, if he even wanted to. "Artists are like the Maker, after all, pouring heart and soul into their creation, and finding it good. Am I a god to the lovers and heroes I write of? I create their worlds, their hearts, and let them run free in my fancy. Why not be a god? Not as the Infinite, of course, but as Zeus, or as Gaia, or Apollo."

Jehan smiles, staring wide-eyed at the ceiling, for a long moment, before the present discussion takes hold of him again. He adds, making a face, "If Hugo is our god, I'm glad indeed we broke free of him. As we must have. I will not believe he invented Milliways."

Edited Date: 2015-05-07 04:58 am (UTC)

"Hugo's spawned a veritable army of Athenas, then-- or something maybe stranger." Bahorel rolls over enough to tap a finger against the book's pages. "I had you read that so you'll understand-- the people he names, it's close. I know, just as far as I lived it, and a few other details you'll spot right away, that it's not entirely accurate to the lives we knew. But it's close. And I'm willing to bet it's close for everyone else in there too."

Which makes for complications. "And several of them come to Milliways. The spy Javert, who you had such a charming encounter with last night. Valjean--who goes by Fauchelevent, now-- who came to help the barricade after you and I were dead. Fauchelevent's daughter, Pontmercy's fiancee-- maybe his wife, by now. Their lives are there, too."

"That strengthens all of our speculations, then. Either Hugo created our own world--living in a Paris of his own, of course, because a Hugo could only grow in a Paris, but he's created a separate world with its own Paris--or else his mind and soul connected with those of people in our world, somehow. Not just ours, but everyone you listed."

No matter which is true: Jehan is enraptured.

But he still scowls at the mention of the spy. "Yes--the spy's alive, in a material sense. How did that come to be?" Jehan can't imagine Enjolras or any of them allowing it, unless perhaps Combeferre urged mercy for some reason.

"And it would be good to meet Pontmercy's wife! She must be a sensitive soul, to be a match for him."

Bahorel laughs. "Oh, she's a bright young soul; a far brighter and bolder spark than him! It's well; she'll keep him living in the world. Give her a few years and she'll have a fine little circle in Society."

He frowns, mood shifting. "But that's in a few years. Right now, damn! She's a convent-school girl, and as innocent as any nun could want her to be. And her life's all laid out inthose pages-- hers, and her mother's. There's not a godforsaken thing wrong in either of them, nothing that should shame any honest soul. But for a young lady in Society, just starting up-- it's ruin enough to know that her mother was never Madame Fauchelevent, isn't it."

It's a bleak certainty, not a question. "Enjolras spoke to her father. She might at least be forewarned. But Monsieur Fauchelevent--" Bahorel shakes his head. "He helped at the barricades. He's the one who saved Marius. But he's also the one who saved the spy." Bahorel shrugs. Fauchelevent had taken no oaths of loyalty to the cause, after all. "I don't believe it was for any gain; he stood to lose by it more than anyone. Hah, he hardly had reason to expect any of us would be troubled by it later!"

But now: Milliways.

Jehan is, perhaps, more sensitive to the morbid young Pontmercy than Bahorel. But even he must acknowledge that it doesn't take much to be brighter and bolder than Marius Pontmercy.

"I hadn't considered that aspect--but you're quite right, yes, if Hugo wrote of any scandal attached to someone's name--that might do her no end of harm."

Jehan frowns. "Why would her father save the spy, then? If not for gain?"

Surely it wasn't for liking. The spy was repulsive.

Edited Date: 2015-05-12 02:43 am (UTC)

Bahorel shakes his head. "Morals. The man's out to save lives at any cost, if his story there's at all accurate."

At any cost, even the risk of other lives. But Bahorel recognizes that that's not a sort of math that comes naturally to everyone. "He doesn't have any killing in him; some men just don't. If you asked him, I don't think he could give you any reasons beyond that. Let it be--the spy lives, we don't; we know about this story, and he, at least for now, doesn't. Hiy!"

The last is in response to little Marguerite leaping from under the sofa to seize his coat-sleeve, and landing claws-out on his hand. He scoops her onto the sofa-cushion and grins as she attack the Terrifying Giant Hand again. "You found this one at the Temple of Bast?"

"He sounds like a saint," Jehan muses. "Exceptional purity of heart, which can't suffer any taint, regardless of the circumstance--" Saints aren't always helpful, but they are admirable.

He smiles at Bahorel playing with Marguerite. "Yes, the Temple of Bast--I believe she's a gift from the goddess herself. A good luck token, or perhaps a protector."

"Good luck telling him that--truly, I wish you the highest success if you try. The man is suffering from a crushing humility. I expect he'd hide from a thank-you." Bahorel knows that humility happens to some people. It seems horrible.

Marguerite, like all cats, knows nothing of such human frailties and has begun her attack on his entire arm, without regard for it being several times her length. Kitten claws won't get through a suit-coat; still, he appreciates the effort, and makes encouraging noises at her attacks. "--Joly does swear by cats as guardians in the Labyrinth." And in everything else. "Or is she meant to be your guardian here? She's rather permanent, if her work was meant only for that maze."

"Humility is a curse," Jehan says, dreamily. "It's ignorance of one's nature as part of the Infinite, that's all--such a sad thing."

"I rather think she's my guardian here, or else why would Bast have sent her with me from her Temple, and even from the Labyrinth? There were other kittens there. But none of them came with me. Just her." Jehan runs his finger over the top of Marguerite's fuzzy head.

"That's promising, then. It's been appallingly safe, so far. Police and cannibals regardless. "

Come on, kitten. Turn up an eldritch horror.

"Well, you're here," Jehan points out. Bahorel is almost an eldritch horror, after all. Especially now since he's dead. "And I'm here. So it can't be too safe."

Possibly Jehan overestimates his own dangerousness.