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Jean Valjean has been many men - convict, thief, mayor, gardener, brother, father, gentleman - he has worn and discarded so many faces, letting them fall behind him at need, shattered and useless. Of them all, the one lost furthest in the shadows of the past is that pruner boy from Faverolles, the terse boy who worked the long daylight hours in the orchards under the pale leaves. That boy had known by the flicker of a glance or the brush of a shoulder which man wanted him to linger into the dim early summer evenings, to have him lift them, press them bodily against the boles of the trees, fuck them until they gasped and stammered for release. The few sous he earned by it bought scraps of bread; the acts themselves bought scraps of power.
Until this night, he had thought that boy long gone; until this night, returning from the chapel to the new house on the Rue Plumet, when he stops to give a coin to a beggar and glances up to find a beautiful young man watching him with a sharp, intense stare. Recognition, sympathy lances between them, and for a moment he is back in the orchards. Valjean drops his head and turns away.
Again, a few nights later, on a similar errand, Valjean sees him: a flash of pale blond hair, a stern gaze with something else lurking behind it. He presses his handful of coins into the surprised palm of a ragged child and begins again--
“Your charity is done well enough,” the young man says, behind his shoulder, closer than he had been a moment ago, “but what of the people you do not see in the streets?”
“I have only two hands,” Valjean says mildly, closing the door on memories of Montreuil-sur-Mer as he turns.
A folded, close-typed pamphlet is pressed into one of those hands as soon as he turns. “As do we all; but together, they are stronger.”
It is some time before they meet again: Valjean, on some errand for Cosette which Toussaint had not been able to complete before nightfall; the boy, coming alone out of a wineshop and into the street with the clear-eyed serendipity of the passionate.
“Ah, citizen - It is you,” says the boy, then, not waiting for Valjean to acknowledge him, “the pamphlet I gave you - you have read it?”
“Yes,” Valjean says, having felt obligated to do so.
“Would you care to discuss it? Here--” the boy glances over his shoulder, brow furrowing in slight irritation as a burst of muffled, drunken song trails from the window of the wineshop, “--or perhaps somewhere quieter? My rooms are not far.”
“I could.”
And so it is that they are walking some blocks away and up the stairs of a neat house in a neighborhood Valjean has never had occasion to visit, entering set of rooms that is a mix between barrack and clerical library. The boy locks the door again behind them, turns back to him, and catches Valjean’s gaze. His breath, calm and precise the whole way back, catches ever so slightly: a sound Valjean has not heard in decades, one that heaps kindling on the low flame that had caught those few weeks ago when he remembered - this- for the first time.
“Citizen--” the boy says.
Valjean does not think he is wrong in this, in his assumption. And yet, to take without asking - perhaps he was that man once, when this role sat him better, but he has been seeking for so long to be someone else. “Do you- wish to speak of the Republic, then?” he asks, fumbling the dangerous pamphlet from the inner pocket of his greatcoat, where he has kept it, perhaps unwisely, on the off chance of returning it.
The boy reaches to take it; their hands brush, and whatever the boy had meant to say is frozen on his half-parted lips as he looks down at the folded paper, then up, quickly, into Valjean’s face, his eyes gone startled and fey.
“Or do you…” Valjean says. He does not know how to finish that phrase; they had never spoken much back then outside of the language made up by furtive touches at wrist and shoulder, rough, casual brushes as workingmen passed one another in the orchard lanes. That language he does recall, through the haze of memory; he sets his hand on the boy’s shoulder, sees those clear blue eyes darken suddenly as the pupils blow wide, wanting. Valjean leans in and kisses him.
It is rough, almost clumsy, and for long worrying moments the boy doesn’t move at all, still and cold as a statue beneath his touch before - finally - a tiny noise escapes the press of their lips and he is leaning forwards slightly, his hand relinquishing the pamphlet to clasp Valjean’s wrist instead. The kiss lingers, a slight clashing of teeth, the awkward rasp of lip over stubble; he could imagine that this beautiful boy is as unpracticed as himself. “Do you,” he says again, and again runs out of words for what he wishes to say.
“Yes,” the boy says, “I--” and here he seems also to lose his way; only slowly, almost tentatively raising his free hand to set it on Valjean’s shoulder, mirroring him.
Valjean understands from this the impossible: he is as unpracticed as Valjean himself - more - as Valjean himself had been so many years ago, that almost-forgotten first night. Very well; he knows how to take the lead, more or less, had been expected to do so even then: he kisses him again, more firmly now that he knows he is welcome, pushing him back into the door, pressing another soft, vulnerable noise from rosy lips.
He hadn’t known how much he had missed this until now, the feel of another man’s body under his hand, the taste of another’s lips with just a trace of wine. It is so much it feels like everything; he breaks the kiss suddenly, leaving the boy to gasping, and buries his face into his throat instead, tugging away a loosely-tied cravat and pressing hard, biting kisses over the pulse of his throat, trailing quickly-darkening marks and the beginnings of bruises behind him. The hand on Valjean’s shoulder has slid to his back; he can feel the tremor in it even through his coat.
In Paris they wear more, and more fashionable, clothes than they had in the alleys and orchards of Faverolles; it is more delicate work than Valjean expects, unbuttoning the jacket and waistcoat, pushing them down from his shoulders and into an untidy heap on the ground, but finally, finally it is done. He pauses, looks up. The boy’s eyes are half closed, a dreamy, dazed look to them that looks at once out of place and terribly suited to his fine features, his mouth still open in a distracting moue. Valjean kisses him again, more gently, on his collarbone where it peeks out from his shirt, then unties his cravat and drops it atop the rest.
The hollow of his throat is pale, shading to pink and scratches of harsh red where Valjean’s whiskers, lips, teeth have marked him. Valjean slides his hand there from his shoulder, laying the flat of his palm along the boy’s neck, tilting his head up with his thumb. If this were Faverolles he would fuck him here, against the door, slamming his weight into it - but this is Paris, and in Paris there are always too many ears. “Where is your bed?” he asks, startling himself with the hoarseness of his own voice.
At first the only answer he gets is “Mmmh--,” a shattered, shivering noise that sends tendrils of lightning down his spine. A long moment passes before the boy manages to put together an answer, as if he is in some deep, far away place. “There,” he says finally, flicking a look over Valjean’s shoulder deeper into the room. “The door…”
A longer pause, until it almost seems that is all he’ll manage to say, before he adds “...Monsieur,” in a soft, choked, disbelieving breath, a blush seeping up his cheekbones.
His hand is still wrapped around Valjean’s wrist, but it’s the work of no more than a second to reverse that and pull him across the room towards the indicated door, half-stumbling as if in his cups, though Valjean had only tasted the hint of wine on him before.
The bedroom door opens to reveal a small room furnished like most of the rest of the flat, in books, papers, pens, and firearms. Moonlight falls through cracks in the shuttered window onto a surprisingly narrow bed, making the boy’s skin gleam like marble as Valjean pushes him down to it. “Take them off,” he says briefly, gesturing at the shirt which hangs open and askew on one shoulder, the trousers still neatly fastened but tented now at the front placket.
It is easy, somehow, to stand and watch his orders followed. First the shoes are kicked off, then slow, still-trembling hands go to the buttons of his trousers, followed by an uncertain glance up to him as he waits. Another silent, encouraging nod and the trousers are off as well, leaving the boy disheveled and blushing again in his shirtsleeves atop his own sheets.
That’s a beautiful sight, if an unfamiliar one. It doesn’t follow the script, the pattern Valjean has for this, but something in him tells him to reach out, run his roughened hand over a smooth cheek, press his thumb against those lips until they part for him, until a tongue flickers over his skin and he thinks of things he has heard of but never yet done.
The boy swallows when Valjean pulls his hand back, throat bobbing, and touches his fingers to the hem of his shirt, then pauses as if shy - no, Valjean realizes a second later, as if awaiting an order.
This is further still beyond his experience. To buy himself time to settle his thoughts he busies his fingers with his coat, with the fall of his own trousers. Only when he has shrugged out of the coat and lain it over the back of a nearby chair, when his trousers hang open, does he say “Off,” again. He cannot manage the command of an order, but his voice is at least steady, and the little skip in the boy’s breathing, the hint of tongue at his lips, say that he has not entirely missed the mark.
The shirt comes off with surprising grace, revealing a lithe, lean form and tousling his blond curls as it falls to the side, sliding slowly off the bed. By the time it hits the floor, Valjean has control of himself again; he steps out of his own shoes and joins him atop the bed, kneeling astride his thighs. His own hands look rough as they slide up that pale, smooth stretch of skin, along the boy’s sides, up to the muscle of his chest where the bitemarks stop, where the skin had been hidden by his shirt; his finger brushes carelessly over a nipple and the boy moans, quiet, fresh, new.
Valjean leans down and catches his mouth again, tasting it. At the same time he reaches down with his other hand, stroking along the boy’s cock for the first time. He’s hard already -- beyond hard, he must be aching for it already; Valjean’s hand slips easily along the shaft, thumb and forefinger sliding over the slick wet tip of it.
He gets a quiet “Please,” for that, spoken against his cheek in a hushed, broken whisper, a word that would have sounded like shameless begging if it had been said with any less solemnity.
It’s an easy request to follow; Valjean sits back again, spits into his hand, slides his fingers down again, between his legs this time, presses one slowly in as he pins his hips to the bed with the other hand.
”Hah--” the boy gasps, arching up against the restraining grip, more pre-come beading slowly at the tip of his cock. Valjean pushes deeper, presses his finger upwards, and the boy comes just like that, without a hand on him, spurting over his chest. “Please,” he says again, and this time he is begging, his face gone dazed and open, hair fallen disheveled across his forehead, and once more, as if he has only that word in him, as if he doesn’t know what to ask for: “Please!”
Valjean pulls free just long enough to swipe his fingers through the mess of come covering his belly, rucking up his shirt enough to spread it over his own cock, and then he’s on him, easily lifting slim hips up and knocking his legs apart so that he kneels between them.
He is tight, so tight, even with his own come slicking the way. It takes every last shred of control Valjean has not to just drive into him, to hilt himself fully with one strong thrust. He forces himself to slowness instead, piercing him one aching inch at a time, until finally he’s taken it all. “Good,” he says, shortly, almost involuntarily.
That’s answered by a shudder, a low moan with only a trace of pain in it, with hands that run up his arms and fist in his shirtsleeves, with the boy slowly, uncertainly pushing back against him; with the sharp inhale of a breath as he draws back no more than an inch or two, then thrusts home again.
The boy is growing stiff again already, his cock flushed rosy pink, and it twitches, bobbing against his taut, come-smeared belly as Valjean repeats the slow, shallow thrust. He likes it, then, even if he’s too quiet to say so, and that’s enough, that’s all he needs.
His next thrust is harder, deeper, pushing them into the bed and punching a gasp out of him so sweet that he does it again immediately, the start of a slow, pounding rhythm that sinks into him with aching familiarity, that shakes his own breathing into jagged irregularity.
He hadn’t known how much he had missed the close press of another man’s body against his, or the odd wordless intimacy of how he drives broken gasps, soft whispering moans out of the boy’s throat as he works inside him. There’s only pleasure in his voice now, only pleasure blurred across his face, even as Valjean shifts his hold on the boy’s hips and knows from the tightness of it that there will be deep bruises there by morning. The thought drives him on; he fucks him faster now, each thrust just as deep.
The shattered gasps blend together into a desperate, needy moan and the boy comes, pulling at his shirtsleeves until the threads strain and pop. Valjean bends under the pull, leaning down, kissing and biting at the unmarked flesh of his chest, and doesn’t stop, just fucks him through it and keeps going. The spasming clench of his body is so tight it nearly hurts.
By the time Valjean nears his own peak, the boy is moaning again, tiny, half-swallowed senseless sobs breaking it up, and one hand has dropped from Valjean’s shoulders to slide between them, closing over his own cock and touching himself slowly. There is a tiny furrow between his brows, sweat or tears beaded on his flushed cheeks, his eyes half-closed, and he is the most beautiful thing Valjean has ever seen.
A few more quick, stuttering thrusts, and he is coming, burying himself deep, the pleasure tearing at him. For a moment he surrenders to it, gasping through it. When he recovers, he closes his fist over the boy’s, tightening their grip around his cock. It takes only a few rough strokes before he’s trembling below Valjean again, a scant few spurts spilling over their joined fingers, and falling stunned and insensible back to the bed.
With an unsteady hand, Valjean smooths the hair back from his face, skimming along the length of his cheekbone, across his slack lips, feeling the soft, unconscious puff of his breath against his hand. A long, silent moment passes like that, in this unfamiliar calm.
Eventually, he gets up, crosses the room to the desk and chair, retrieves his handkerchief from the pocket of his coat. He dries the boy’s face first, then takes the slightly dampened cloth to the smears of come on his chest and stomach. When he cleans his fingers and limp cock, the boy sighs once, a tiny, soft, sound, but doesn’t stir; nor does he move as Valjean moves about the room, redressing himself, moving the discarded clothes to the chair where his had been.
There’s nothing he can do for the patchwork of bruises and scrapes marring that fair skin beyond drawing the quilt at the foot of the bed up to cover him; nothing at all he can do for whatever else has taken place here beyond pressing one gentle kiss of an apology to his temple.
Now that the tranquility has faded, the worries of the world begin to creep back in its place. It is late; Valjean has already been away far too long, and his original errand lies yet undone. He cannot reclaim who he he once was, who he might have been: too many dangers lie in the gulf between then and now. If he changes the paths he takes to the church, there should be - there can be - no more chance meetings with young revolutionaries in the street.
Valjean closes and locks the door after himself as he steals silently out of the apartment, leaving nothing behind but the pamphlet and the ashes of that strange peace.