Okay I see what you’re saying there but WHAT IF WE DID BOTH???  This got so long, I’m sorry, I got overexcited about fairy tales and I wrote 5K in like a day.  (No for real this is almost 5000 words, Jesus, self, what are you doing.)

Enjolras is a wished-for child, and he’s told as much every day by his mother, who bought his life with a few drops of blood on white silk in a gold embroidery hoop.  From the minute he learns to talk, he’s as fair as the sun and as sharp as her needle, and his country adores their young prince with their whole heart.  His mother Queen Lamarque is a good ruler and her Prince Consort is nice enough so all is well, and Enjolras grows up believing passionately in the rights of the people.  His tutors despair of him as a monarch but are delighted with him as a politician—it’s very strange for everyone.

And then the Queen dies, and everything goes to pieces, because the dowager Prince Regent isn’t a ruler by nature and Enjolras is still too damned young to take her place and it’s all quite a mess.  Vital government services are falling through, taxes are going uncollected or over-collected, the generals of the army are making warning noises about neighboring countries taking advantage of their weakened state, and everything is teetering on the edge of chaos.

The dowager Prince remarries when Enjolras is eleven and that seems to solve the problem for a moment or two.  The new Queen is beautiful and tall and proud and everything a Queen should be, and if she isn’t as gentle and steady and brilliant as the late Queen, well…sacrifices have to be made, and the late Queen was one in a million anyway.

That lasts for about a year and a half, perhaps two.  She settles in, sinks her claws in, promotes her own men over the heads of those who served under the late Queen, and it’s ignored because things are finally, finally stable.

Then her eye turns outward and her grip turns cruel.

They go to war, against the mountainous country to the North, because their Queen has a hungry gleam in her proud eye and a taste for blood on her plush lips.  It drags, months into years, and their armies break on the stronghold of the North like water on stone.

The Prince Consort dies in the third year, a wasting illness that the healers cannot help and are at a loss to explain.  Enjolras is the country’s last tenuous connection to their late Queen and their late idyllic country, and he’s sixteen and scared and so angry he can’t breathe.  He starts appearing in the war councils and petitioning for peace, because the North has never done anything to them, and attacking a country just for the sake of the riches in their mountains is downright wicked.  His mother would never have stood for it and neither will he.

The problem, of course, is that his stepmother has very different rules about  what things will and will not be stood for.  A wished-for boy of seventeen standing up with a tongue as sharp as a needle and arguments as strong as silk threads and a mind as bright as gold in the sun is not one of them.  The war ends, yes.  But not in peace talks.

The war ends with the Queen barricading herself in her quarters for three days and three nights, and when she emerges, she sends the captain of her own guard to the head of the army.  Captain Javert is nothing if not loyal, to law and to country and to Queen, and he goes, and he rains destruction down on the North like nothing they’ve ever seen.  

When the army marches back, they bring prisoners of war, and news of a broken kingdom.  Enjolras is standing in the great hall when they arrive at the palace, dressed in his favored red military coat with the circlet of the Crown Prince hidden in his loose gold curls.  The Queen takes the heavy silver chain of office offered to her as a spoil of battle and drapes it around her neck and smiles, lips painted like blood.  Some of the prisoners are furious, angry and spitting, and they die, screaming, under an invisible hand.  The others are quiet, after that.

Enjolras doesn’t hide his disgust, his lip curling every time he looks at her, and when eyes fall on him for orders, he tells them to unchain the prisoners and see that they’re well cared-for.  They are not in the fashion of taking slaves, after all, and this…this is barbaric.

The Queen doesn’t much care for that, either.

It’s another year of precarious politics and silent battles over fine china and jewels before his manservant pulls him into an alcove and informs him that the Queen is plotting his murder.

Obviously, Enjolras’ first instinct is to declare this publicly and bring her down in dramatic fashion, because he is done watching her corrupt his mother’s legacy and abuse his people.  His manservant, who has served his family for years, since they saved him from twenty years wrongful imprisonment for an attempt to feed his sister, makes the entirely accurate statement that she’ll kill him outright.  The Queen, Valjean reminds him seriously, is a sorceress of not-inconsiderable power, and wished-for Enjolras may be, but he’s flesh and blood and bone, not gold and silk.

Valjean’s suggestion, to flee to the East and seek aid there, rankles.  But it is the only one that Enjolras can think of, to save his people and bring down the Queen.  He is more than ready to die for his country, but if she murders him in the castle and he accomplishes nothing, the people will be in worse straits than before.

So he goes.  He makes it into the great forest twenty miles east of the castle and stops for the night.  

He wakes up to a figure sitting near him, half-illuminated in the rising sun, and Enjolras scrambles back as if burned.

“You sleep like a prince,” the figure says, amused.  It’s a man, by the voice—deep and rich and rough—and he’s toying with something between his hands.  “So unconcerned.  I used to sleep like that.”

“Do I know you?”

“Yes and no,” the man says, rising to his feet.  The thing in his hands flashes—a knife.  His face is harsh-planed and heart-worn when the sun strikes it, framed by wild locks of dark hair, and his pale eyes are as piercing as the glint from the edge of the blade.  His voice, Enjolras realizes with a sick lurch, carries the heavy burr of a Northerner.  He thinks he remembers this man, from that awful day.  He was one of those in front, and he shut down a second uprising, forcing his body in front of a young woman and younger boy who both looked ready to go for the Queen’s throat.  Enjolras had admired that.  “Your stepmother the Queen has ordered me to kill you,” he says calmly, “and bring her your heart as proof.”

Enjolras snarls, the sound bursting out of him like something living.  “Why are you helping her?”

The man stares at him blankly for a moment and bursts out laughing. The sound…hurts, unamused and angry and harsh.  “Your Highness,” the man says, as if the words are bitter.  “What else are we supposed to do?  We are prisoners in your fine country.”

“It was fine, once,” Enjolras mutters, eyeing the knife warily.  “You could do something.  Seek aid from the East.  The North was their ally, before…before.”

“I saw your Queen’s captain use her blood to call down fire and lightning on our citadel,” the man says flatly.  “There is no use fighting against her, all we can do is survive.”

“Maybe that’s all you can do,” Enjolras snaps, and he knows it’s unfair, but he’s weary and alone and afraid and angry, and he has been for so, so long.  The part of him that quietly thinks this man might understand how that feels is muffled and quiet.  “At least I’m trying to stop her.”

The man gives his knife another absent flip and says, “So you want me to let you walk away?  What kind of huntsman would that make me, letting the fox live once I’ve run him to ground?”

“A smart one who loves his people,” Enjolras says, so angry his hands shake by his sides.

The man’s rictus good humor evaporates and he straightens up, revealing that he has a good handspan and then some of height on Enjolras.  “Don’t assume I’m doing this willingly,” he says, and Enjolras blinks in surprise, because he knows that voice.  Not the man, but the tone—it’s the tone of command, and who was this man in the North, anyway? “Your Queen has hostages. Children.  My friend.”

“Then free them,” Enjolras says, thinning his lips.  “Or kill me.  I would rather die knowing that, at the very least, I tried.  This is not my country anymore.  I don’t recognize it, and I won’t stand idly by while she reaches for more power.  I tried to stop the war on the North the right way, the official way, and it did nothing.  If starting a revolution is what it takes to get rid of her, I’ll bring in the Easterners or die trying.”  He opens his arms, offers his throat and his chest, and the man gives him a lingering look that he can’t parse.  It looks almost worshipful.  

“So,” the man says quietly, letting the knife fall to his side. “That’s the kind of huntsman I would be. All right, little fox.  Go fetch the Easterners and bring back a revolution.”

Enjolras doesn’t wait for him to change his mind.  He runs.

He runs until he’s breathless and aching with it, then walks until his legs ache and every bone screams with each step.  He’s never wished he was gold and silk more.  He walks until he’s blind with it, until he doesn’t remember how many days it’s been since the huntsman let him go, until he puts out a blind hand for support on his shaking legs and tumbles through a door.

“Well, that’s new,” a dry voice says.

“Shut up, Courf,” another voice sighs.  “We can’t just leave him there.”

“He’ll clutter up the floor,” yet a third voice jokes, and the second voice makes a frustrated noise before arms scoop Enjolras up like a child. He slips away into some deep, soft darkness as the floor falls away, either sleep or unconsciousness, and at this point he doesn’t know if there’s a difference.

After he wakes up, he meets his saviors.  There are seven of them, all male and more-than-tangentially humanoid, but even Enjolras, who has never seen a being of magic descent in his life, can recognize the obvious.  Combeferre, Bahorel, and Bousset refer to themselves as stonefolk, what most people know as dwarves, although they’re all taller than Enjolras.  Jehan’s announcement that he’s the hamadryad of the forest is less than shocking, with the green sheen to his skin where the sun touches it and the wreath of oak in his long hair.  Courfeyrac is a windwalker, he says, a spirit of the air, and when he laughs his form blurs just a bit around the edges, as if he’s about to blow away.  Joly and Feuilly are both water spirits, although of wildly different type—Joly, with his easy smile and cheery manner, is creeks and streams, small and glad and clear, while clever, steady Feuilly is deep water, calm on the surface and unstoppable beneath.

Enjolras, the wished-for runaway prince of a country under the thumb of a sorceress, feels very small indeed, in front of these people of wind and rock and trees.  That has never stopped him before, though.  

He spends a week recovering from the damage he did in his flight, and discovers that he has desperately missed having friends.  Combeferre and Courfeyrac, already close, fall in with him like long-missing limbs, Combeferre’s steady presence at one shoulder and Courfeyrac’s bright smile at the other.  On the fourth day, he tells them everything, the whole messy tale of his country, and all seven of them listen solemnly, attentive.

It’s not a surprise that it’s Courfeyrac who smiles and offers a solution.

“Actually, I may know someone who can help.”

“Courf knows everyone,” Jehan confides, weaving out-of-season mistletoe into his copper-chestnut-umber braid.  “He gets bored and goes and makes friends with people on the other side of the world, but he always comes back eventually.”

Courfeyrac makes an offended noise and says, “He said he wanted to seek help in the East, I’m not planning to smuggle him across an ocean, Jehan.”

“You have contacts in the Eastern court?” Enjolras asks, seizing on the scrap of hope.

“Contacts,” Courfeyrac repeated with a snicker.  “I can take you to the prince.”

Enjolras tries really hard not to let his jaw drop.  He does not succeed.

He’s been gone from the palace a month and a half when he and his newly-acquired cohort fetch up in the great hall of the Eastern court.  His friends look as they always do, a strange mixture of wild and elegant, but he knows that he doesn’t exactly look the part of the Western prince after a month of travel.  Courfeyrac blurs to the front of their procession and cries, “Marius!”

“Courf!” the Easterner prince yelps, like an elated puppy, and pounces on the windwalker so abruptly that he falls right through.  It takes Courfeyrac a moment to reform his body solidly enough to give the prince a hug, and in the meantime Marius gleefully introduces himself to the rest of them, blithely declaring that any friend of Courfeyrac’s is a friend of his, and of course they’re to use his familiar name rather than his title, and would they like anything to eat or drink? Enjolras is boggled by how much the man rambles—it must make holding court a nightmare.

“And who are you?” Marius asks, smiling his wide, honest smile at Enjolras.

“Enjolras,” he says, offering a hand to shake.  Marius takes it.

“Ah, the Western prince, I should have recognized you.  It’s a pleasure.  What can my court do for you?”

Enjolras takes a deep breath and lets it out and says, “I need your help.”

Marius, it turns out, is both remarkably well-informed about goings-on in the West and North, and a bit of a soft touch.  He hears out Enjolras’ case, nodding solemnly, and announces that, as a gesture of alliance, they will assist in the removal of the Queen. It’s almost appallingly straightforward.

Within the year, an army is ready to move.  It’s speckled with stonefolk whose homes were destroyed during the Queen’s march on their mountains, with dryads and hamadryads whose forests were ravaged for wood, and Courfeyrac really does appear to know everyone, because the Easterners’ fragile spy network has been replaced with an airtight (Joly’s words) umbrella of windwalkers.  They report that the Northern prisoners are growing fewer, that a man, a young woman, and her brother appear to be smuggling them out of the castle and hiding them among the population.

The description of the man—angry, dark-haired, pale-eyed, and under the direct eye of the Queen—makes Enjolras smile.  He’s glad the huntsman appears to have done something useful with himself.

“You have a messenger,” a servant says, three days before the army is due to march west, meeting Enjolras on the field in the grey and blue Eastern dress uniform.  Marius arranged for a Western uniform to be tailored for Enjolras, and the fitted red jacket rests across Enjolras’ shoulders like the arm of a friend.  

The messenger is Javert, and the only reason Enjolras doesn’t call for one of the windwalkers on the spot is because he recognizes the ring on Javert’s hand.  It’s his stepmother’s, and he’s seen it call fire out of thin air.  In the camp they’ve set up to prepare the army, a wildfire would be deadly.

“I’ve come on command from your mother the Queen,” Javert says, holding out a letter with the traditional Queen’s seal on it, a stylized apple with a single curling leaf.

“She is not my mother,” Enjolras says, and doesn’t take the letter.  “She is a usurper and a tyrant, and you know this.  Tell me why I should read what she has to say.”

Javert is not a cruel man by nature, from what Enjolras knows about him, but he is loyal, too loyal, and so his face does not twitch when he says, “Your mother the Queen has two thousand Northerners held captive, in addition to the families of the servants in the palace.  If I do not return on the appointed day with news that you have read the letter, she will execute one of them daily until I do.”

Enjolras feels his face pale and a weight settle into the bottom of his chest.  He takes the letter.

As he slides a finger down the seam to break the seal, the crack is far louder than it should be, and Enjolras winces, feeling the skin of his finger part.  His blood stains the paper, smudges across the broken seal to give the apple an eerily real shine, and prickling cold creeps up his hand.

“Magic,” he says numbly, staring at the blank page as his hand convulses around it.  “She put a curse on the seal.”

“My apologies,” Javert says, and Enjolras tries to take a step toward him, only to crumple to his knees.  Javert doesn’t collect the trick letter before he leaves.

By the time Combeferre finds him, Enjolras is lying on the ground as one dead, eyes closed and bloodied page still clenched in his fist.

“What can we do?” Courfeyrac demands anxiously, and Combeferre and Joly check their fallen friend over carefully.  His heart beats, but he doesn’t breathe.  Finally Joly sighs, sitting back on his heels.

“This is blood magic,” Joly says quietly.  “He can’t hear us, can’t see us, can’t even dream.  He won’t wake, unless we break the curse and…”  He shakes his head again, raking a hand back through his hair—it flows like water, inhuman, because he’s never quite mastered the texture of hair.  “He won’t wake,” Joly repeats.  “Not without a miracle.”

“And without him to help us get into the West without being caught or reported,” Jehan says, uncharacteristically serious, “the army can’t march.  I could get us through my forest without being seen, but this many soldiers will be sitting ducks once we’re on the field.”

“So we need a twofold miracle,” Feuilly says, frowning.  “Marvelous.  Finding one of them would be difficult enough.”

“Actually,” Courfeyrac says after a long moment, “I may know someone. The latter, not…”  He gestures helplessly at Enjolras.  “I don’t know what kind of miracle you’d need to help Enjolras, but I know someone who can help us get into the West.  I’ll need a couple of days and money to buy a horse.”

“You need a horse?” Combeferre asks skeptically, folding Enjolras’ clenched fists over his chest and brushing a hand over his hair.

“I don’t need a horse, but our miracle might.”

Combeferre watches for a moment, remembering Enjolras’ desperate passion as they built the army and planned their attack.  Then he unclasps the gold pin of office that Marius granted Enjolras and hands it to Courfeyrac without a word.

“Be quick,” Bahorel says seriously, and Courfeyrac flashes a tense imitation of his usual grin before he blurs into the wind.

He returns a full month later with a man on a horse as fine as any in Marius’ stables.  The man is dressed in the worn clothing of a servant and a woodsman, ragged from travel, his dark curls wild around his face, but he rides like an expert horseman, as fluid as a dancer.  He dismounts and turns over the horse easily, and Courfeyrac shimmers solid beside him, clapping him on the shoulder.

“Everyone, this is R, a Northerner.  He’s been smuggling prisoners out of the castle, and he’s as good a tactician as I’ve ever met.  He’s agreed to lead our army.”  He looks over Marius’ shoulder to Combeferre, his smile fading.  “Enjolras?”

“No change,” Combeferre says quietly.

“The prince?” R asks, his eyes snapping to Combeferre.  He is shown to a crystal casket crafted by the stonefolk, holding the golden-haired Western prince laid out inside in his red military coat as if in state for a bier.  R rests his hand on the cover and no one questions the look of genuine grief on his face as he murmurs, “This is not how I hoped we would meet again, little fox.  But you tried to save my people, so now I’ll save yours.”  He looks up at Marius.  “We’re bringing him back to the West.  He should be with his people.”

“He lives,” Joly offers.  “He may yet wake if we can find a way to break the curse.”

“We can start with executing Her Majesty,” R snarls, stepping away from the casket.  “And go from there.”

The army marches out.  The casket is borne easily by Combeferre and Bousset, with Bahorel among the soldiers, and R rides in the lead on the high-crested horse he arrived on. He turns down Marius’ offer of a Northern military uniform and instead requisitions a simple but fine green waistcoat and a handful of plain white shirts, and integrates himself into the seven who traveled with Enjolras easily, until he seems inextricable.  He teaches Joly a drinking game that manages to render even the water spirit tipsy and giggling, and allows Jehan to weave crowns of holly and rowan into his dark curls.

He takes to sitting against the crystal casket at night, when he can’t sleep—and the army learns quickly that their ad hoc leader often can’t sleep.

“Were you two friends?” Joly asks quietly the fourth time he finds R there.

R shrugs vaguely.  “He didn’t know me as anything but another prisoner of war.  I lived in the palace for a year under the Queen’s thumb, though, so I knew him.  I watched him fight for the Northern prisoners every day against that woman.”

“And you fell in love with him.”  R doesn’t answer that for a long few moments, then he sighs and shrugs out of his shirt, showing Joly his back.  Joly’s fingers are gentle across the scars.  “You were…flogged?”

“I was sent to kill him after he escaped,” R says, pulling his shirt back on.  “I let him live and brought back the heart of a deer.  She couldn’t kill me, so instead she made an example.”

“Couldn’t kill you?” Joly repeats, shrewd.  “Or wouldn’t kill you?”

R grins a little, unamused.  “Does it really matter?”

“No,” Joly says quietly, settling back against the casket beside R.  “I suppose not.”

They are met, at the western edge of Jehan’s great forest, by a grand total of four hundred hardened Northern escapees, led by a thin young man with dark hair and the look of someone who once dressed elegantly.

“Montparnasse,” the man introduces himself.  “Eponine sent me to meet you.  And these,” he says with a broad sweep of his arm to the field, “are the free Northerners.  We’re here to fight.”

R grins and shoulders past Marius.  “’Parnasse.”

Montparnasse makes an aborted motion, something that might want to be a bow.  “Yo—R. I’ve brought as many of our people as I could.”

“You did well, ‘Parnasse,” R announces, clapping him on the shoulder. He smiles at the assembled Northerners and straightens until his broad shoulders cast a heavy shadow on the ground.  “Welcome.”  The newcomers join the army at once.  No one presses for knowledge about their time as prisoners, and only a few notice their attitude of deference toward R.

It’s not so much a war as it is a triumphal march.  The army is welcomed through the country like a savior, and in every town they pass, more Westerners join their number. Enjolras’ crystal casket becomes a rallying point, every newcomer crying for revenge for their cursed prince, and R’s quiet nights beside the crystal come to an end.

They march into the capital, where they finally meet organized resistance, and the casket falls during the battle.  It shatters on the stone like glass, spilling the cursed prince on the steps of the palace as they surge forward, and R is there in a heartbeat, gently lifting Enjolras out of the shards.

He brushes a kiss over Enjolras’ lips, barely a touch of skin to skin, and wishes desperately for a moment that the other man was here, to see them enter the palace.

Enjolras gasps awake as R’s lips leave his, eyes flying open and cursed letter fluttering to the ground, just as Bahorel and Feuilly march the Queen out, her hands pinned behind her back and a sneer twisting her proud face.

“Your Highness,” she says, looking down at the two men on her steps, R kneeling with Enjolras in his arms.

“Your Majesty,” R says, managing every ounce of proud disdain she did, and helps Enjolras to his feet.

A dark-haired young woman with a blonde boy in tow bursts from the door, shoulder-checks the Queen harshly into Bahorel, and flies at R.

“Grantaire!” she shouts, and he barely manages to catch her before she bowls him over.  It’s been one of those days, he thinks vaguely.  “You never said you were bringing back an army, you bastard!”  She punches him in the arm, hard, and he doesn’t even flinch, too high on the victory and the elation of Enjolras’ waking.

“I didn’t really think it through,” he says with a shrug and a grin.

“Grantaire?” Enjolras repeats, voice hoarse with lack of use.  “The prince of the North?”

“Sorry?” Grantaire offers, nudging Eponine off to the side where she introduces herself to Bousset.  “The deception was unintentional, little fox.”

“Enjolras,” Combeferre says, pulling the blond into an embrace. “R—Your Highness, what did you do?”

Grantaire gestures awkwardly.  “I…kissed him?”

“We should have thought of that!” Jehan says, delivering a sharp backhand to the closest person.  It’s a soldier, who seems boggled by the sheer strength in Jehan’s strike—or possibly too winded by the blow to respond.  “We love him, that would have worked from any of us, we’re idiots!”

“We’re not even human, Jehan,” Courfeyrac says, rolling his eyes.  “Crossing magics is finicky business.  We’re all just lucky R’s human and smarter than us.”

“So,” Enjolras says quietly to Grantaire, who looks like he’s seriously debating bolting.  “You love me.”

“Yes,” Grantaire says reluctantly after a long moment.

“You tried to kill me.”

“I was ordered to kill you,” Grantaire protests.  “There’s a difference!”

“I don’t love you–”

“I don’t expect you to,” Grantaire interrupts, but does a poor job of masking the sharp flash of pain on his face.  

“Let me finish. I don’t love you,” Enjolras repeats, and offers a small smile and a hand.  “But I might like to.”

Grantaire stands there for a long moment, in shock, before he reaches back and smiles, almost shy.  “All right.”  They don’t know whose countrymen start the cheer that goes up as they stand there, surrounded by the sun-struck shards of the crystal casket, with the sorceress-Queen held tight between Bahorel’s immovable stone and Feuilly’s unstoppable current.  

“I suppose we both have countries to rebuild, don’t we, huntsman,” Enjolras says, looking out over the whooping soldiers clustered in the palace square.

“Yes,” Grantaire says, looking at Enjolras, fair as the sun and bright as gold.  “Although…I imagine my people could stand for a stronger treaty with yours.”

“A personal attachment between leaders, perhaps,” Enjolras muses.

Grantaire smiles and Enjolras feels something in his chest tighten at the sight.  It makes the Northern prince beautiful.  “Something like that, little fox.”