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nonislandI put the latest thing I've posted to the AO3, “Anything That Does Not Harm Others” (1789: Les Amants de la Bastille, as adapted and performed by the Takarazuka Revue’s Moon Troupe in 2015), through enough major changes that it might interest some people to see the revision history, as it were.
The original draft was written on an airplane last October (I find ficlets a great way to occupy my brain and distract from flight anxiety); the first rewrite, during that vacation; and while I made a couple of friends read it and provide feedback I couldn’t do much of a canon check. I’d seen the musical exactly once at that point, a month or two prior, and had neither reliable internet access nor a device larger than my phone with me. I got back, rewatched as part of a final edit before posting, and almost scrapped the entire fic because it turned out I’d completely forgotten a major plot point.
It wasn’t until much later I realized that this could, instead, with some edits, enhance the canonical sequence of events, in the way that gives me—as someone who entered fandom on bad late 00s/early 10s genre TV—tremendous nostalgic satisfaction.
Content notes for the drafts: aftermath of torture (taken only about as seriously as the musical does, which isn’t very); kink discovery that results in a sexual situation nobody participating in it has consented to; painplay. Content notes for the edit notes: also, internalized kinkshaming and emotional infidelity.
Ronan likes Olympe.
At least, aside from her nobility and her passionate loyalty to the queen. But some of his new comrades are highborn themselves, and he thinks none the less of them for it, and loyalty is a virtue regardless, even if she is wrong. And he does like her.
“She had you imprisoned and tortured!” Desmoulins cries. His fine hands are very gentle on Ronan’s arm, the rough bandage he is untying coarser yet by contrast with his fingers.
Ronan is grateful for the kindness, after such a wild and strange day as he has had. “She didn’t intend it. And look, here I am!”
“There you are,” Desmoulins agrees softly, and then flinches back when he unties the last knot and reveals the burn. Ronan thinks he took Peyrol’s brand more easily than Desmoulins takes seeing it on his arm, at least at first. “My God.”
“It hardly hurts at all now.” Ronan exaggerates, to be sure, but the distress on Desmoulins’s face certainly hurts worse than an old burn. “It should heal cleanly, too. The weals are my greater concern. I would rather not fall ill in the midst of our plans.”
Desmoulins sits back, face pale. “You were whipped as well?”
Ronan wishes he could stop Desmoulins looking so worried. “Truly, it was not so bad as you think. It was…” He fumbles for words, and fails to find the right ones. He had thought it would be worse, just as Desmoulins clearly thinks it was worse, and yet. “As you see, I am quite well.”
“Take off your shirt,” Desmoulins says flatly. “Or, no—will you let me?”
Moving his shoulders does hurt, a duller echo of the whip’s lashes. Ronan hardly minds it, giddy as he yet is on adventure and escape. “If it is not too much trouble.”
Desmoulins unfastens his waistcoat and then his shirt, not looking at Ronan’s pitied form as he does. It is truly not that bad, not enough that Desmoulins should need to hold his breath against the wounds. Ronan would certainly know if he had been that badly hurt, or if Peyrol had struck his throat or chest for Desmoulins to look away from.
The shirt is stuck to Ronan’s back. When Desmoulins tries to lift it free it tugs at Ronan’s skin, pain bursting fresh and bright down his spine, and he cries out. Desmoulins goes still as stone behind him.
“I’m fine,” Ronan gasps as the pain ebbs again. “Please, it’s all right.”
“Mazurier…”
Ronan twists around to look at Desmoulins, heedless of the flare of another cracking scab. Desmoulins’s eyes are closed, his lower lip caught between his teeth and bleached with the pressure. He is too soft-hearted, and Ronan would not hurt him further. “I can…tend these myself,” Ronan offers.
Desmoulins opens his eyes, but still cannot meet Ronan’s gaze. “No. I can— You’ll only hurt yourself worse.” With even more care, he begins to work cloth away from skin, going so slowly and gently that it barely even hurts. “This Olympe of yours. She’s pretty?”
“Oh yes,” Ronan says, trying to remember the exact color of Olympe’s eyes. He thinks them to be brown, but they might be blue instead, and poor Desmoulins is surely hoping the thought of her will distract Ronan from the unbearable suffering he must be going through.
With a last tug the shirt comes away, and despite his best efforts Ronan gasps again. Desmoulins swears softly behind him, and Ronan wonders just what his back looks like, how many of the welts have bled. He shivers in the warm air of the room.
“Just—I only want to wash it clean. It will take but a moment.” Desmoulins’s voice is tight as a fiddle string about to snap.
Ronan nods. He hears water splash into the basin, and then feels the press of a wet cloth against his shoulder, above the weals—cool against his flushed skin, soft as Desmoulins’s journalist’s hands. Desmoulins works the cloth down slowly, carefully, but when the water runs across the first of the welts Ronan whimpers anyway, twisting against the sting.
“Sancta Maria, mater dei,” Desmoulins says under his breath.
It should be someone other than Desmoulins, someone who would not mind nearly as much. Ronan likes Desmoulins too much to wish this on him, but he’s selfishly grateful for his kindness all the same.
“I told them nothing,” Ronan promises Robespierre and Marat for what seems like the hundredth hundredth time. “Nothing at all, I only…”
He thinks of the pain that bloomed with every fall of Peyrol’s whip and shivers. He thinks he told nothing. He thinks there’s very little he knew to tell, anyway, even if he had wanted to. Peyrol had been disgusted with Ronan’s stubbornness; Ronan hardly thinks he had had a chance to be stubborn, except maybe the brand, but still—he is a little drunk on his own heroism, perhaps, giddy with it and the thrill of escape, and meanwhile Robespierre is worrying and Marat is fretting.
“You only?” Marat asks.
It takes Ronan a moment to recall his thoughts. “Oh! Screamed, a little, sometimes.”
The warm color in Desmoulins’s face had rushed out again the moment Ronan began to explain. He is still very pale now as he says, “Someone should look at your wound. May I go with you, or would you like us to send for someone else?”
Ronan’s room is Marat’s shop, really, but Desmoulins had asked him, and besides, there really is no one else for them to call. Even if he knew where Solène was, she is probably…working…at this time of night, and certainly still angry with him, and she was never a gentle nurse anyway. She would probably scold him for it, and that would be far worse than Marat’s bother.
Desmoulins is very kind, but Ronan doesn’t want to put him to too much trouble, if he has something he would rather be doing. Still, he is the one who offered. “If you want to,” Ronan says—a compromise, the best he can manage.
“Of course,” Desmoulins says, even whiter. Danton elbows him in the ribs; Desmoulins grimaces, but otherwise ignores it. “Robespierre, there’s no urgent danger regardless of what Ronan could possibly have said. I think we’ve surely interrogated him enough for one night.”
Robespierre nods. “You did well,” he says to Ronan. “Your courage will be an asset to the revolution.”
Ronan beams with pride. To have the leader of the revolution himself say Ronan can contribute—it warms him from top to toe, leaves him thinking again about how very brave and unexpected and heroic he was. This is almost everything he’d hoped for when he left for Paris to seek his revenge.
He realizes Desmoulins is waiting for him. “Oh! This way, please.”
The print shop by night is an eerie place: the great spindly shapes of the presses loom in the shadows, and the paper dust, settled out of the air, lies in drifts like the dust in a room that had seen no use in years. Ronan twists to move between stacks of paper and lets out a startled breath as the skin across his back pulls tight.
Desmoulins, following Ronan in the shadows, clears his throat against the dust. “A moment—let me make an attempt on Marat’s offices.”
It occurs to Ronan that he could fetch a candle. The lamps in the shop are securely anchored to wall and beam, held fast against some moment of carelessness tipping the burning oil into the presses, but a candle might easily move with two people slipping alone through the ghostly emptiness of the place.
He has the candle lit and in his hands by the time Desmoulins returns, carrying a pitcher in one hand and a bottle in the other. Its flickering light tosses their shadows high onto the walls, broken up by the presses and wavering toward the ceiling.
“All right,” Desmoulins says. “Where to?”
Ronan’s room is more an empty storeroom than a proper bedroom, reached only up a narrow flight of stairs that twists sharply in the middle and then through a room of old plates, but it is convenient and very cheap. The bed is makeshift, two pallets stacked atop each other, but it’s quite comfortable enough, and he has a chest for his things and a washstand and a table. And the bed he will replace…someday. Soon, hopefully.
He lights his lamp with the candle. At least it’s night. Daylight is harsh; lamplight is more forgiving, hiding the smaller cracks in the plaster of the walls and the water stains running down from the window, gilding the faded walls even as the flame takes and the room brightens.
It isn’t much—maybe he should have let them try to get Solène anyway, he thinks. He does well enough with this, but a purse that was empty in the country is turned inside-out in Paris. Desmoulins, in his deep-green coat and beautiful silk waistcoat, makes the whole place look like what it is: a room above a workshop that nobody wanted.
Desmoulins sets the bottle on the table and the pitcher on the washstand. His face is pinched as he looks around.
Before he can find fault, Ronan, grasping at the parts of his day that should make for more pleasant conversation, says, “I did quite like Olympe, though.” He might mention the kiss—she hadn’t even slapped him for it!—but he doesn’t want Desmoulins thinking ill of her.
It was conversation, but it isn’t a lie. Ronan does like her, at least aside from her nobility and her passionate loyalty to the queen. But some of his new comrades are highborn themselves, and he thinks none the less of them for it, and loyalty is a virtue regardless, even if it is given wrongly. He can like a girl, even if she is a lady to the queen.
From Desmoulins’s horrified stare, he is not in agreement with Ronan. “She had you imprisoned and tortured!”
Oh…well, there is that as well. “She didn’t intend it. And look, here I am!”
“There you are,” Desmoulins agrees softly. His gaze falls away from Ronan.
It leaves Ronan feeling even more ill at ease than before he’d interrupted. “Do you want the chair?” He can sit more or less wherever, but Desmoulins would probably object to the floor, let alone the bed.
“No, no, I think you should take it.” Desmoulins is still frowning, a little. “I brought a bottle of eau-de-vie I found downstairs, if you need it after…everything.”
Ronan does not think Marat would approve of Ronan Mazurier drinking his eau-de-vie. “It’s all right,” he says. It is all right; he hardly needs the drink’s courage, even though he feels more sober now standing awkwardly in his room than fleeing through the streets of Paris, or kissing Olympe in triumph, or even screaming under Peyrol’s whip.
“All right.” Desmoulins takes a deep breath. “Have a seat, then, and let me see.”
He is looking at the crude bandage over the burn, so Ronan sits slantways to the table, his burned arm free to move. To his surprise Desmoulins kneels at his side, sparing Ronan the strain of lifting his arm and holding it.
The circle of lamplight is clean and uninterrupted, shining on half Desmoulins’s hair and leaving the other half in shadow as he bends his head over Ronan’s burn. Ronan rests his wrist against the table as Desmoulins starts undoing the knots; he notes the slight tremor in Desmoulins’s fingers as he works.
Desmoulins is too soft-hearted for this, maybe, but—there really is no other choice. His fine hands are very gentle on Ronan’s arm, the rough bandage coarser yet by contrast with his fingers. Ronan is grateful for that kindness.
“My God.” Desmoulins flinches back, the untied bandage dropping from his hands to Ronan’s leg. “I thought you only meant— He branded you.” Ronan thinks he almost took Peyrol’s brand itself more easily than Desmoulins takes seeing the shape of it on his arm. “My God,” Desmoulins says again, fainter. His fingers flex helplessly in the air above Ronan’s wrist. He looks sick.
“It hardly hurts at all now,” Ronan says. He exaggerates, to be sure, but the distress on Desmoulins’s face certainly hurts worse than an old burn. “It should heal cleanly, too. The weals from the whipping are my bigger concern; I would rather not fall ill in the midst of our plans.”
Desmoulins sits back, face white in the lamplight. “A better bandage, at least. That you were…”
Ronan wishes he could stop Desmoulins from looking so worried. “Truly, it wasn’t so bad as you think. It was…” He fumbles for words, and fails to find the right ones. He had thought it would be worse, as Desmoulins clearly thinks it was worse, and yet. “A little like being drunk?” he tries, and when he gets nothing but a blank stare in return he gives up. “As you see, I am quite well.”
“You do seem it, miraculous as it is.” Desmoulins pushes himself quickly to his feet and moves to the washstand, pouring the fresh water from the pitcher he’d brought into the bowl. “Do you keep soap in here?”
“Under the—ah!” Ronan, carelessly, tries to point, and loses the sentence in the sting that wells up as he stretches.
Desmoulins’s shoulders go rigid. It had only startled Ronan, nothing worse. Well, and hurt a little, but it wasn’t bad, not like Desmoulins fears. It will probably hurt more than this when it’s washed, and Ronan wonders if Desmoulins had thought of that before, and if he will be able to bring himself to do it now.
Ronan hopes he will. He would rather not be alone with this, twisting himself into wretched knots to reach his wounds. Desmoulins is kind and friendly, and Ronan trusts him. Of anyone of the revolutionaries who gather at the Palais Royal—of anyone Ronan knows in Paris, or maybe even all of France—he’s glad Desmoulins was the one to offer.
“Here,” Desmoulins says, turning at last with the basin and Ronan’s soap and wash-cloth, and setting them on the table. “Just let me re-bandage your arm first.”
Ronan offers him the bandage they had found for him at the Bastille.
Desmoulins grimaces. “Not that rag again, surely.” Before Ronan can protest that he has nothing better, Desmoulins pulls a clean handkerchief from his pocket and unfolds it. It is bigger than the old bandage, and made of sturdier cloth as well. He kneels at Ronan’s side once more.
Ronan holds his arm out and tries to brace for the sting. He manages to stay silent when the soft weave first settles against the burn, but as Desmoulins wraps the ends of the handkerchief around his arm and gathers them together it presses, and a whimper escapes him as Desmoulins tightens a careful knot.
The room is very quiet, quiet enough that he can hear the sharp breath Desmoulins takes. “Sorry,” Ronan says, a little breathless himself. It did hurt, after all, and he finds it going to his head again even safe as he is now. “I’m fine.”
Desmoulins says something under his breath, too soft for even Ronan to hear, and rises to his feet. “Take off your shirt—or, no.” His voice, already muted, goes entirely flat. “Will you let me?”
Moving his shoulders wakes the embers under Ronan’s skin. If he takes off his own shirt he might yell again, and that will no doubt panic Desmoulins, and besides, other people’s consideration is a rare treat for him. “If it is not too much trouble.”
Of course, it is not. “If you could stand, I think, while I get your waistcoat,” Desmoulins says.
Ronan stands obediently. Desmoulins takes a deep breath and steps closer, face set. His fingers tremble as he sets them to the first of Ronan’s buttons; he works gingerly, the backs of his fingers not so much as grazing Ronan’s chest.
Ronan has no injuries to his chest, of course, only the ones he’d already told them all about, but if it makes Desmoulins feel better to treat Ronan as if he might break, when he won’t, well. It isn’t as if Ronan can stop him. It’s nice, Ronan supposes, to know that someone cares, even if it would be nicer if Desmoulins would trust him too.
When the waistcoat is done, Desmoulins hesitates for an instant, glancing away, before he reaches for the button of Ronan’s shirt. The backs of his fingers just brush the hollow of Ronan’s throat, and then the button pops free and the shirt falls open.
“You will have to raise your arms.” Desmoulins still can’t quite bring himself to look at Ronan.
Ronan feels pitied. He finds he doesn’t like it. “I won’t break, you know, if you’re worried. You can’t hurt me worse than Peyrol did just by trying to help me, and you are trying to help me, so can’t you just…”
Another moment. Paris is silent outside the black windows. Ronan can hear his own heartbeat in his ears.
“Can’t I just?” Desmoulins asks finally. The flatness of his voice is alive now, not placid but taut with strain.
If Ronan knew, he would have said. He gives up. “Help me, like you meant to.”
Desmoulins’s exhale is an unhappy laugh. “Raise your arms, then.”
Ronan does. He can’t help his gasp as the motion tugs at the weals, or the quickness of his breath. If Desmoulins stops to worry again Ronan will yank the wretched thing off himself and damn the pain, it’s as simple as that.
But Desmoulins has listened, at last. He eases the tails of Ronan’s shirt free gingerly, but he does it without grimacing or staring at Ronan in horror, and he doesn’t apologize when his fingers graze Ronan’s waist. It isn’t even as if his hands are cold. He moves behind Ronan, gathering the material, and doesn’t apologize for the way his knuckles press against Ronan’s sides, either. He does take a long breath before he lifts shirt and waistcoat together.
The shirt is stuck to Ronan’s back.
Desmoulins’s quick movement, far from being a mercy, makes pain burst fresh and bright down Ronan’s spine, and he cries out in helpless response.
“I’m fine,” Ronan gasps as the pain ebbs again. Desmoulins is still as stone behind him; Ronan isn’t even sure he’s breathing, but he doubts he could hear Desmoulins’s breath over the ragged sound of his own. “Please, it’s all right.”
“Ronan…”
Ronan twists around to look at Desmoulins, heedless of the flare of another cracking scab. Desmoulins’s eyes are closed, his lower lip caught so hard between his teeth it’s bleached with the pressure. “I’ll tend these myself,” Ronan snaps. It’s just as well he refused the eau-de-vie; he feels half-drunk already.
Desmoulins opens his eyes. For just an instant his gaze catches Ronan’s, then falls again. “No. I can—” His voice catches, and he has to clear his throat twice before the rasp is gone. “You’ll only hurt yourself worse. I can do this.” With even more care, he begins to ease cloth away from skin, his hands impossibly gentle on Ronan’s back. “This—this Olympe of yours. She’s pretty?”
Olympe?
“Oh…yes,” Ronan says. She is, of course, but he hadn’t thought Desmoulins cared, about Olympe or about Ronan’s opinions on pretty girls. Danton is more who he would have expected that from. He supposes it’s meant as a distraction from the pain, though Desmoulins is working his shirt loose with such delicacy that it hardly hurts at all.
What color are Olympe’s eyes, anyway? Ronan thinks them to be brown, but they might be blue. Mostly he remembers the wildness in them as they fled through the Bastille and into Paris, the lovely shock of seeing that she had come back for him after all. Well, a detail like that hardly matters.
With a last little tug the shirt comes away, and despite his best efforts Ronan gasps again. Desmoulins swears softly, his hands flexing against Ronan’s shoulders before he gathers himself and pulls shirt and waistcoat over Ronan’s waiting arms.
Ronan wonders just what his back must look like, how many of the welts have bled and how dark the others are bruising, for Desmoulins to react like that. He shivers in the warm air of the room.
“Sit,” Desmoulins says, voice tight as a fiddle string about to snap. “Please. Just— It will take but a moment to clean.”
Ronan sits. The chair is at angles to the table still, and Desmoulins moves the lamp so that Ronan’s shadow runs in front of him, out of the circle of its light.
Water splashes in the basin, and then a wet cloth presses against his shoulder, above the weals—soft as Desmoulins’s hands, cool against his flushed skin. Desmoulins works the cloth down slowly, carefully, but when the water runs across the first of the welts Ronan whimpers anyway, twisting against the sting.
“Sancta Maria, mater dei,” Desmoulins says under his breath, “ora pro nobis peccatoribus,” even as he grips Ronan’s shoulder with his other hand to steady him.
“It’s all right.” Ronan is breathless, shaking, anchored only by Desmoulins’s hand, but this is important. “Please.”
The moment before Desmoulins moves the cloth again seems unbearably long. He does, though, dabbing carefully at the first of the cuts. Gentle as his touch is it prickles and burns again, and Ronan doesn’t know which way to move, if he even could move, caught as he is. He gasps through it and holds still.
Very softly, as water sloshes in the basin, Desmoulins asks, “All right?”
Ronan nods. The next few weals are only bruises, he thinks—swollen and tender under the cool cloth, but with none of the flaring pain the first had. Every time Desmoulins moves he tenses with anticipation.
Even so, the next cut takes him by surprise, a bright burst that shocks all through him. He whines, arching against Desmoulins’s touch.
“Is—”
“I’m fine.” Ronan sounds like he’s been screaming, he realizes distantly. “Don’t stop.”
Wonderfully, Desmoulins takes him at his word. He’s more confident now, pressing more firmly against Ronan’s back as he works, and the sting of the soapy water and the blooming hurt of the wound itself twist through Ronan’s body together.
“Two more after this.” Desmoulins’s voice is a breathless whisper. “Next to each other. Still all right?”
Ronan nods, not quite trusting his own voice.
“Ronan.”
“Yes,” Ronan says, pleased with the syllable. “I’m good.”
Desmoulins makes a frustrated sound in response, but he rinses the cloth again and goes back to cleaning Ronan off. He’s working on the bruises again, the places where the skin didn’t quite break and the pain is nothing but a low throb, and Ronan’s breath and heartbeats come quicker with every moment he waits.
This time Desmoulins doesn’t hesitate when Ronan cries out as he reaches the cuts—both of them run together, long searing lines trailing down Ronan’s back. Fresh pain flares with every touch, racing down Ronan’s spine and out all through him. He is panting for breath when Desmoulins finishes, floating on a stinging wave of sensation.
“Almost done,” Desmoulins says hoarsely.
Ronan doesn’t want him to be done, but he can hardly produce another wound now. “All right,” he says instead.
Desmoulins hesitates before going to what must be the last set of bruises. He moves slowly, the water trickling over Ronan’s hot skin, the bruises a deep ache.
The cloth falls back into the basin with a splash. Ronan should…get up, thank him, bid him a good evening.
“There was—” Desmoulins stops again, as suddenly as he’d begun.
Ronan swallows and finds words. “There was?”
“When I studied Latin.” Desmoulins clears his throat. “There was a doctor who washed wounds out with wine, to prevent infection. I don’t…I thought perhaps…”
Ronan has never heard of this, he’s fairly sure. He blinks against the dazzle of the lamplight. “You want to?”
Desmoulins draws a breath sharply enough that Ronan can hear it over his own. “I—there is the eau-de-vie, but I—it will hurt.”
“That’s all right,” Ronan says dreamily.
“It will hurt a lot.” Desmoulins’s voice is shaking. “Are you—are you sure you want me to?”
What, as if Ronan is going to change his mind now? “Yes.”
Desmoulins picks up the bottle of eau-de-vie and almost drops it again; the glass stutters against the tabletop. The cork comes out with a low pop that plucks at Ronan’s nerves.
“It would be—quicker to simply pour it across your back,” Desmoulins says. “But it would hurt more.”
“I don’t mind.” Anticipation tingles through Ronan’s body. “Go ahead.”
“I—” Desmoulins breaks off with another of those sharp inhales, deep enough that it tugs at Ronan’s lungs. “All right. Are you—”
Ronan is strained to breaking with waiting, about to shatter with the pulse hammering all through him. “Do it.”
Desmoulins’s hand settles warm and just too tight on his shoulder again, holding him steady, bending him a little—bending over pulls on the weals, makes bright little sparks of pain that steal even more of Ronan’s breath—and then comes the eau-de-vie: cool at first, and then it lights him on fire.
It bites into the wounds and turns his blood molten, so overwhelming him that he has to scream. His cock is achingly hard. Desmoulins’s hand clenches on his shoulder, bruise-tight, and Ronan moans, dizzy and lost and aflame.
Desmoulins lets go of Ronan’s shoulder and slams the bottle down with such haste it almost tips over. “I—I must be going,” he says, his voice a ruin. “Good night. My regards to your Olympe.”
“What?” Ronan manages to say, but the word is lost in the slam of his bedroom door behind him.
The air is cold against the eau-de-vie drying on his back, soaking into the waist of his breeches. Even the bright heat of his injuries seems dulled. He is very confused, and just as aroused, and suddenly tired, and he wishes that…he wishes something.
Well. No doubt it will be clearer in the morning.
(There were a few things I liked about that that got sacrificed in the rewrite—mostly the setting itself, though I also liked the final time Olympe got brought up, as an attempt to create emotional distance that sailed directly over my narrator’s head.)
Some of the details of Ronan’s injuries are still not quite canon-compliant (insofar as it’s possible to interpret from the Maniaque blocking) because I liked it better the way I originally wrote it, which just goes to show that occasionally making things up with no reference is good, actually.
The original draft was written on an airplane last October (I find ficlets a great way to occupy my brain and distract from flight anxiety); the first rewrite, during that vacation; and while I made a couple of friends read it and provide feedback I couldn’t do much of a canon check. I’d seen the musical exactly once at that point, a month or two prior, and had neither reliable internet access nor a device larger than my phone with me. I got back, rewatched as part of a final edit before posting, and almost scrapped the entire fic because it turned out I’d completely forgotten a major plot point.
It wasn’t until much later I realized that this could, instead, with some edits, enhance the canonical sequence of events, in the way that gives me—as someone who entered fandom on bad late 00s/early 10s genre TV—tremendous nostalgic satisfaction.
Content notes for the drafts: aftermath of torture (taken only about as seriously as the musical does, which isn’t very); kink discovery that results in a sexual situation nobody participating in it has consented to; painplay. Content notes for the edit notes: also, internalized kinkshaming and emotional infidelity.
the initial, untitled airplane ficlet
Ronan likes Olympe.
At least, aside from her nobility and her passionate loyalty to the queen. But some of his new comrades are highborn themselves, and he thinks none the less of them for it, and loyalty is a virtue regardless, even if she is wrong. And he does like her.
“She had you imprisoned and tortured!” Desmoulins cries. His fine hands are very gentle on Ronan’s arm, the rough bandage he is untying coarser yet by contrast with his fingers.
Ronan is grateful for the kindness, after such a wild and strange day as he has had. “She didn’t intend it. And look, here I am!”
“There you are,” Desmoulins agrees softly, and then flinches back when he unties the last knot and reveals the burn. Ronan thinks he took Peyrol’s brand more easily than Desmoulins takes seeing it on his arm, at least at first. “My God.”
“It hardly hurts at all now.” Ronan exaggerates, to be sure, but the distress on Desmoulins’s face certainly hurts worse than an old burn. “It should heal cleanly, too. The weals are my greater concern. I would rather not fall ill in the midst of our plans.”
Desmoulins sits back, face pale. “You were whipped as well?”
Ronan wishes he could stop Desmoulins looking so worried. “Truly, it was not so bad as you think. It was…” He fumbles for words, and fails to find the right ones. He had thought it would be worse, just as Desmoulins clearly thinks it was worse, and yet. “As you see, I am quite well.”
“Take off your shirt,” Desmoulins says flatly. “Or, no—will you let me?”
Moving his shoulders does hurt, a duller echo of the whip’s lashes. Ronan hardly minds it, giddy as he yet is on adventure and escape. “If it is not too much trouble.”
Desmoulins unfastens his waistcoat and then his shirt, not looking at Ronan’s pitied form as he does. It is truly not that bad, not enough that Desmoulins should need to hold his breath against the wounds. Ronan would certainly know if he had been that badly hurt, or if Peyrol had struck his throat or chest for Desmoulins to look away from.
The shirt is stuck to Ronan’s back. When Desmoulins tries to lift it free it tugs at Ronan’s skin, pain bursting fresh and bright down his spine, and he cries out. Desmoulins goes still as stone behind him.
“I’m fine,” Ronan gasps as the pain ebbs again. “Please, it’s all right.”
“Mazurier…”
Ronan twists around to look at Desmoulins, heedless of the flare of another cracking scab. Desmoulins’s eyes are closed, his lower lip caught between his teeth and bleached with the pressure. He is too soft-hearted, and Ronan would not hurt him further. “I can…tend these myself,” Ronan offers.
Desmoulins opens his eyes, but still cannot meet Ronan’s gaze. “No. I can— You’ll only hurt yourself worse.” With even more care, he begins to work cloth away from skin, going so slowly and gently that it barely even hurts. “This Olympe of yours. She’s pretty?”
“Oh yes,” Ronan says, trying to remember the exact color of Olympe’s eyes. He thinks them to be brown, but they might be blue instead, and poor Desmoulins is surely hoping the thought of her will distract Ronan from the unbearable suffering he must be going through.
With a last tug the shirt comes away, and despite his best efforts Ronan gasps again. Desmoulins swears softly behind him, and Ronan wonders just what his back looks like, how many of the welts have bled. He shivers in the warm air of the room.
“Just—I only want to wash it clean. It will take but a moment.” Desmoulins’s voice is tight as a fiddle string about to snap.
Ronan nods. He hears water splash into the basin, and then feels the press of a wet cloth against his shoulder, above the weals—cool against his flushed skin, soft as Desmoulins’s journalist’s hands. Desmoulins works the cloth down slowly, carefully, but when the water runs across the first of the welts Ronan whimpers anyway, twisting against the sting.
“Sancta Maria, mater dei,” Desmoulins says under his breath.
It should be someone other than Desmoulins, someone who would not mind nearly as much. Ronan likes Desmoulins too much to wish this on him, but he’s selfishly grateful for his kindness all the same.
notes to self before the first rewrite
- rip out the whole structure tbh
- fic becomes: mutual accidental kink discovery
- I think I do need to keep Olympe but I should probably also mention the, plot,, (unless Ronan just wouldn't lmao. yeah he got tortured for information but he didn't say anything so it's nbd)
- location: a room above the cafe? the print shop? ground it in place and time, late night intimacy/ possibility + somewhere Camille can just Flee after (so not his own rooms)
- play around a little with Ronan's state of mind—giddy earlier, softer now. endorphins go brr
- a little more emphasis on Camille Not Looking as he undresses Ronan, maybe Ronan trying to reassure him about it?
- Camille pushing a little harder with the soapy cloth (and getting a reaction, make it as unsubtle as I can with an idiot narrator) before he suggests the alcohol
- look up what eau-de-vie is [edit: yeah it's brandy]
- tfw you absolutely fucking bail before you trip and fall on your coworker like the monster you are (tfw you are absolutely gagging for it but your coworker flees and you feel like you fucked up by thinking it was hot)
- Olympe again no problem. I mentioned her twice and that's either one too many or one too few so ending on her solves that. it's fine. everyone is heterosexual and vanilla here. oh my god should I mention Camille's poor fiancée too. like when he flees.
- Ronan has no idea it's mutual
the second draft, which I called “le douceur de la doleur”
“I told them nothing,” Ronan promises Robespierre and Marat for what seems like the hundredth hundredth time. “Nothing at all, I only…”
He thinks of the pain that bloomed with every fall of Peyrol’s whip and shivers. He thinks he told nothing. He thinks there’s very little he knew to tell, anyway, even if he had wanted to. Peyrol had been disgusted with Ronan’s stubbornness; Ronan hardly thinks he had had a chance to be stubborn, except maybe the brand, but still—he is a little drunk on his own heroism, perhaps, giddy with it and the thrill of escape, and meanwhile Robespierre is worrying and Marat is fretting.
“You only?” Marat asks.
It takes Ronan a moment to recall his thoughts. “Oh! Screamed, a little, sometimes.”
The warm color in Desmoulins’s face had rushed out again the moment Ronan began to explain. He is still very pale now as he says, “Someone should look at your wound. May I go with you, or would you like us to send for someone else?”
Ronan’s room is Marat’s shop, really, but Desmoulins had asked him, and besides, there really is no one else for them to call. Even if he knew where Solène was, she is probably…working…at this time of night, and certainly still angry with him, and she was never a gentle nurse anyway. She would probably scold him for it, and that would be far worse than Marat’s bother.
Desmoulins is very kind, but Ronan doesn’t want to put him to too much trouble, if he has something he would rather be doing. Still, he is the one who offered. “If you want to,” Ronan says—a compromise, the best he can manage.
“Of course,” Desmoulins says, even whiter. Danton elbows him in the ribs; Desmoulins grimaces, but otherwise ignores it. “Robespierre, there’s no urgent danger regardless of what Ronan could possibly have said. I think we’ve surely interrogated him enough for one night.”
Robespierre nods. “You did well,” he says to Ronan. “Your courage will be an asset to the revolution.”
Ronan beams with pride. To have the leader of the revolution himself say Ronan can contribute—it warms him from top to toe, leaves him thinking again about how very brave and unexpected and heroic he was. This is almost everything he’d hoped for when he left for Paris to seek his revenge.
He realizes Desmoulins is waiting for him. “Oh! This way, please.”
The print shop by night is an eerie place: the great spindly shapes of the presses loom in the shadows, and the paper dust, settled out of the air, lies in drifts like the dust in a room that had seen no use in years. Ronan twists to move between stacks of paper and lets out a startled breath as the skin across his back pulls tight.
Desmoulins, following Ronan in the shadows, clears his throat against the dust. “A moment—let me make an attempt on Marat’s offices.”
It occurs to Ronan that he could fetch a candle. The lamps in the shop are securely anchored to wall and beam, held fast against some moment of carelessness tipping the burning oil into the presses, but a candle might easily move with two people slipping alone through the ghostly emptiness of the place.
He has the candle lit and in his hands by the time Desmoulins returns, carrying a pitcher in one hand and a bottle in the other. Its flickering light tosses their shadows high onto the walls, broken up by the presses and wavering toward the ceiling.
“All right,” Desmoulins says. “Where to?”
Ronan’s room is more an empty storeroom than a proper bedroom, reached only up a narrow flight of stairs that twists sharply in the middle and then through a room of old plates, but it is convenient and very cheap. The bed is makeshift, two pallets stacked atop each other, but it’s quite comfortable enough, and he has a chest for his things and a washstand and a table. And the bed he will replace…someday. Soon, hopefully.
He lights his lamp with the candle. At least it’s night. Daylight is harsh; lamplight is more forgiving, hiding the smaller cracks in the plaster of the walls and the water stains running down from the window, gilding the faded walls even as the flame takes and the room brightens.
It isn’t much—maybe he should have let them try to get Solène anyway, he thinks. He does well enough with this, but a purse that was empty in the country is turned inside-out in Paris. Desmoulins, in his deep-green coat and beautiful silk waistcoat, makes the whole place look like what it is: a room above a workshop that nobody wanted.
Desmoulins sets the bottle on the table and the pitcher on the washstand. His face is pinched as he looks around.
Before he can find fault, Ronan, grasping at the parts of his day that should make for more pleasant conversation, says, “I did quite like Olympe, though.” He might mention the kiss—she hadn’t even slapped him for it!—but he doesn’t want Desmoulins thinking ill of her.
It was conversation, but it isn’t a lie. Ronan does like her, at least aside from her nobility and her passionate loyalty to the queen. But some of his new comrades are highborn themselves, and he thinks none the less of them for it, and loyalty is a virtue regardless, even if it is given wrongly. He can like a girl, even if she is a lady to the queen.
From Desmoulins’s horrified stare, he is not in agreement with Ronan. “She had you imprisoned and tortured!”
Oh…well, there is that as well. “She didn’t intend it. And look, here I am!”
“There you are,” Desmoulins agrees softly. His gaze falls away from Ronan.
It leaves Ronan feeling even more ill at ease than before he’d interrupted. “Do you want the chair?” He can sit more or less wherever, but Desmoulins would probably object to the floor, let alone the bed.
“No, no, I think you should take it.” Desmoulins is still frowning, a little. “I brought a bottle of eau-de-vie I found downstairs, if you need it after…everything.”
Ronan does not think Marat would approve of Ronan Mazurier drinking his eau-de-vie. “It’s all right,” he says. It is all right; he hardly needs the drink’s courage, even though he feels more sober now standing awkwardly in his room than fleeing through the streets of Paris, or kissing Olympe in triumph, or even screaming under Peyrol’s whip.
“All right.” Desmoulins takes a deep breath. “Have a seat, then, and let me see.”
He is looking at the crude bandage over the burn, so Ronan sits slantways to the table, his burned arm free to move. To his surprise Desmoulins kneels at his side, sparing Ronan the strain of lifting his arm and holding it.
The circle of lamplight is clean and uninterrupted, shining on half Desmoulins’s hair and leaving the other half in shadow as he bends his head over Ronan’s burn. Ronan rests his wrist against the table as Desmoulins starts undoing the knots; he notes the slight tremor in Desmoulins’s fingers as he works.
Desmoulins is too soft-hearted for this, maybe, but—there really is no other choice. His fine hands are very gentle on Ronan’s arm, the rough bandage coarser yet by contrast with his fingers. Ronan is grateful for that kindness.
“My God.” Desmoulins flinches back, the untied bandage dropping from his hands to Ronan’s leg. “I thought you only meant— He branded you.” Ronan thinks he almost took Peyrol’s brand itself more easily than Desmoulins takes seeing the shape of it on his arm. “My God,” Desmoulins says again, fainter. His fingers flex helplessly in the air above Ronan’s wrist. He looks sick.
“It hardly hurts at all now,” Ronan says. He exaggerates, to be sure, but the distress on Desmoulins’s face certainly hurts worse than an old burn. “It should heal cleanly, too. The weals from the whipping are my bigger concern; I would rather not fall ill in the midst of our plans.”
Desmoulins sits back, face white in the lamplight. “A better bandage, at least. That you were…”
Ronan wishes he could stop Desmoulins from looking so worried. “Truly, it wasn’t so bad as you think. It was…” He fumbles for words, and fails to find the right ones. He had thought it would be worse, as Desmoulins clearly thinks it was worse, and yet. “A little like being drunk?” he tries, and when he gets nothing but a blank stare in return he gives up. “As you see, I am quite well.”
“You do seem it, miraculous as it is.” Desmoulins pushes himself quickly to his feet and moves to the washstand, pouring the fresh water from the pitcher he’d brought into the bowl. “Do you keep soap in here?”
“Under the—ah!” Ronan, carelessly, tries to point, and loses the sentence in the sting that wells up as he stretches.
Desmoulins’s shoulders go rigid. It had only startled Ronan, nothing worse. Well, and hurt a little, but it wasn’t bad, not like Desmoulins fears. It will probably hurt more than this when it’s washed, and Ronan wonders if Desmoulins had thought of that before, and if he will be able to bring himself to do it now.
Ronan hopes he will. He would rather not be alone with this, twisting himself into wretched knots to reach his wounds. Desmoulins is kind and friendly, and Ronan trusts him. Of anyone of the revolutionaries who gather at the Palais Royal—of anyone Ronan knows in Paris, or maybe even all of France—he’s glad Desmoulins was the one to offer.
“Here,” Desmoulins says, turning at last with the basin and Ronan’s soap and wash-cloth, and setting them on the table. “Just let me re-bandage your arm first.”
Ronan offers him the bandage they had found for him at the Bastille.
Desmoulins grimaces. “Not that rag again, surely.” Before Ronan can protest that he has nothing better, Desmoulins pulls a clean handkerchief from his pocket and unfolds it. It is bigger than the old bandage, and made of sturdier cloth as well. He kneels at Ronan’s side once more.
Ronan holds his arm out and tries to brace for the sting. He manages to stay silent when the soft weave first settles against the burn, but as Desmoulins wraps the ends of the handkerchief around his arm and gathers them together it presses, and a whimper escapes him as Desmoulins tightens a careful knot.
The room is very quiet, quiet enough that he can hear the sharp breath Desmoulins takes. “Sorry,” Ronan says, a little breathless himself. It did hurt, after all, and he finds it going to his head again even safe as he is now. “I’m fine.”
Desmoulins says something under his breath, too soft for even Ronan to hear, and rises to his feet. “Take off your shirt—or, no.” His voice, already muted, goes entirely flat. “Will you let me?”
Moving his shoulders wakes the embers under Ronan’s skin. If he takes off his own shirt he might yell again, and that will no doubt panic Desmoulins, and besides, other people’s consideration is a rare treat for him. “If it is not too much trouble.”
Of course, it is not. “If you could stand, I think, while I get your waistcoat,” Desmoulins says.
Ronan stands obediently. Desmoulins takes a deep breath and steps closer, face set. His fingers tremble as he sets them to the first of Ronan’s buttons; he works gingerly, the backs of his fingers not so much as grazing Ronan’s chest.
Ronan has no injuries to his chest, of course, only the ones he’d already told them all about, but if it makes Desmoulins feel better to treat Ronan as if he might break, when he won’t, well. It isn’t as if Ronan can stop him. It’s nice, Ronan supposes, to know that someone cares, even if it would be nicer if Desmoulins would trust him too.
When the waistcoat is done, Desmoulins hesitates for an instant, glancing away, before he reaches for the button of Ronan’s shirt. The backs of his fingers just brush the hollow of Ronan’s throat, and then the button pops free and the shirt falls open.
“You will have to raise your arms.” Desmoulins still can’t quite bring himself to look at Ronan.
Ronan feels pitied. He finds he doesn’t like it. “I won’t break, you know, if you’re worried. You can’t hurt me worse than Peyrol did just by trying to help me, and you are trying to help me, so can’t you just…”
Another moment. Paris is silent outside the black windows. Ronan can hear his own heartbeat in his ears.
“Can’t I just?” Desmoulins asks finally. The flatness of his voice is alive now, not placid but taut with strain.
If Ronan knew, he would have said. He gives up. “Help me, like you meant to.”
Desmoulins’s exhale is an unhappy laugh. “Raise your arms, then.”
Ronan does. He can’t help his gasp as the motion tugs at the weals, or the quickness of his breath. If Desmoulins stops to worry again Ronan will yank the wretched thing off himself and damn the pain, it’s as simple as that.
But Desmoulins has listened, at last. He eases the tails of Ronan’s shirt free gingerly, but he does it without grimacing or staring at Ronan in horror, and he doesn’t apologize when his fingers graze Ronan’s waist. It isn’t even as if his hands are cold. He moves behind Ronan, gathering the material, and doesn’t apologize for the way his knuckles press against Ronan’s sides, either. He does take a long breath before he lifts shirt and waistcoat together.
The shirt is stuck to Ronan’s back.
Desmoulins’s quick movement, far from being a mercy, makes pain burst fresh and bright down Ronan’s spine, and he cries out in helpless response.
“I’m fine,” Ronan gasps as the pain ebbs again. Desmoulins is still as stone behind him; Ronan isn’t even sure he’s breathing, but he doubts he could hear Desmoulins’s breath over the ragged sound of his own. “Please, it’s all right.”
“Ronan…”
Ronan twists around to look at Desmoulins, heedless of the flare of another cracking scab. Desmoulins’s eyes are closed, his lower lip caught so hard between his teeth it’s bleached with the pressure. “I’ll tend these myself,” Ronan snaps. It’s just as well he refused the eau-de-vie; he feels half-drunk already.
Desmoulins opens his eyes. For just an instant his gaze catches Ronan’s, then falls again. “No. I can—” His voice catches, and he has to clear his throat twice before the rasp is gone. “You’ll only hurt yourself worse. I can do this.” With even more care, he begins to ease cloth away from skin, his hands impossibly gentle on Ronan’s back. “This—this Olympe of yours. She’s pretty?”
Olympe?
“Oh…yes,” Ronan says. She is, of course, but he hadn’t thought Desmoulins cared, about Olympe or about Ronan’s opinions on pretty girls. Danton is more who he would have expected that from. He supposes it’s meant as a distraction from the pain, though Desmoulins is working his shirt loose with such delicacy that it hardly hurts at all.
What color are Olympe’s eyes, anyway? Ronan thinks them to be brown, but they might be blue. Mostly he remembers the wildness in them as they fled through the Bastille and into Paris, the lovely shock of seeing that she had come back for him after all. Well, a detail like that hardly matters.
With a last little tug the shirt comes away, and despite his best efforts Ronan gasps again. Desmoulins swears softly, his hands flexing against Ronan’s shoulders before he gathers himself and pulls shirt and waistcoat over Ronan’s waiting arms.
Ronan wonders just what his back must look like, how many of the welts have bled and how dark the others are bruising, for Desmoulins to react like that. He shivers in the warm air of the room.
“Sit,” Desmoulins says, voice tight as a fiddle string about to snap. “Please. Just— It will take but a moment to clean.”
Ronan sits. The chair is at angles to the table still, and Desmoulins moves the lamp so that Ronan’s shadow runs in front of him, out of the circle of its light.
Water splashes in the basin, and then a wet cloth presses against his shoulder, above the weals—soft as Desmoulins’s hands, cool against his flushed skin. Desmoulins works the cloth down slowly, carefully, but when the water runs across the first of the welts Ronan whimpers anyway, twisting against the sting.
“Sancta Maria, mater dei,” Desmoulins says under his breath, “ora pro nobis peccatoribus,” even as he grips Ronan’s shoulder with his other hand to steady him.
“It’s all right.” Ronan is breathless, shaking, anchored only by Desmoulins’s hand, but this is important. “Please.”
The moment before Desmoulins moves the cloth again seems unbearably long. He does, though, dabbing carefully at the first of the cuts. Gentle as his touch is it prickles and burns again, and Ronan doesn’t know which way to move, if he even could move, caught as he is. He gasps through it and holds still.
Very softly, as water sloshes in the basin, Desmoulins asks, “All right?”
Ronan nods. The next few weals are only bruises, he thinks—swollen and tender under the cool cloth, but with none of the flaring pain the first had. Every time Desmoulins moves he tenses with anticipation.
Even so, the next cut takes him by surprise, a bright burst that shocks all through him. He whines, arching against Desmoulins’s touch.
“Is—”
“I’m fine.” Ronan sounds like he’s been screaming, he realizes distantly. “Don’t stop.”
Wonderfully, Desmoulins takes him at his word. He’s more confident now, pressing more firmly against Ronan’s back as he works, and the sting of the soapy water and the blooming hurt of the wound itself twist through Ronan’s body together.
“Two more after this.” Desmoulins’s voice is a breathless whisper. “Next to each other. Still all right?”
Ronan nods, not quite trusting his own voice.
“Ronan.”
“Yes,” Ronan says, pleased with the syllable. “I’m good.”
Desmoulins makes a frustrated sound in response, but he rinses the cloth again and goes back to cleaning Ronan off. He’s working on the bruises again, the places where the skin didn’t quite break and the pain is nothing but a low throb, and Ronan’s breath and heartbeats come quicker with every moment he waits.
This time Desmoulins doesn’t hesitate when Ronan cries out as he reaches the cuts—both of them run together, long searing lines trailing down Ronan’s back. Fresh pain flares with every touch, racing down Ronan’s spine and out all through him. He is panting for breath when Desmoulins finishes, floating on a stinging wave of sensation.
“Almost done,” Desmoulins says hoarsely.
Ronan doesn’t want him to be done, but he can hardly produce another wound now. “All right,” he says instead.
Desmoulins hesitates before going to what must be the last set of bruises. He moves slowly, the water trickling over Ronan’s hot skin, the bruises a deep ache.
The cloth falls back into the basin with a splash. Ronan should…get up, thank him, bid him a good evening.
“There was—” Desmoulins stops again, as suddenly as he’d begun.
Ronan swallows and finds words. “There was?”
“When I studied Latin.” Desmoulins clears his throat. “There was a doctor who washed wounds out with wine, to prevent infection. I don’t…I thought perhaps…”
Ronan has never heard of this, he’s fairly sure. He blinks against the dazzle of the lamplight. “You want to?”
Desmoulins draws a breath sharply enough that Ronan can hear it over his own. “I—there is the eau-de-vie, but I—it will hurt.”
“That’s all right,” Ronan says dreamily.
“It will hurt a lot.” Desmoulins’s voice is shaking. “Are you—are you sure you want me to?”
What, as if Ronan is going to change his mind now? “Yes.”
Desmoulins picks up the bottle of eau-de-vie and almost drops it again; the glass stutters against the tabletop. The cork comes out with a low pop that plucks at Ronan’s nerves.
“It would be—quicker to simply pour it across your back,” Desmoulins says. “But it would hurt more.”
“I don’t mind.” Anticipation tingles through Ronan’s body. “Go ahead.”
“I—” Desmoulins breaks off with another of those sharp inhales, deep enough that it tugs at Ronan’s lungs. “All right. Are you—”
Ronan is strained to breaking with waiting, about to shatter with the pulse hammering all through him. “Do it.”
Desmoulins’s hand settles warm and just too tight on his shoulder again, holding him steady, bending him a little—bending over pulls on the weals, makes bright little sparks of pain that steal even more of Ronan’s breath—and then comes the eau-de-vie: cool at first, and then it lights him on fire.
It bites into the wounds and turns his blood molten, so overwhelming him that he has to scream. His cock is achingly hard. Desmoulins’s hand clenches on his shoulder, bruise-tight, and Ronan moans, dizzy and lost and aflame.
Desmoulins lets go of Ronan’s shoulder and slams the bottle down with such haste it almost tips over. “I—I must be going,” he says, his voice a ruin. “Good night. My regards to your Olympe.”
“What?” Ronan manages to say, but the word is lost in the slam of his bedroom door behind him.
The air is cold against the eau-de-vie drying on his back, soaking into the waist of his breeches. Even the bright heat of his injuries seems dulled. He is very confused, and just as aroused, and suddenly tired, and he wishes that…he wishes something.
Well. No doubt it will be clearer in the morning.
(There were a few things I liked about that that got sacrificed in the rewrite—mostly the setting itself, though I also liked the final time Olympe got brought up, as an attempt to create emotional distance that sailed directly over my narrator’s head.)
notes before the second rewrite
- instead of a report and an interrogation it's, hm. Ronan stumbling into the Palais-Royal shortly after dawn and meeting Desmoulins and Danton?
- hit the class differences harder from the very start and keep hitting them: Danton has been out whoring, both of the others have bought food, their clothes; the difference between Ronan's old rooms which he couldn't even afford and Desmoulins's; the fact that Ronan could not have afforded first aid this good/this comfortable; Ronan's ruined clothes that were no good anyway, his calluses, etc
- oh God I'm going to have to dig into the Olympe thing more. [as you can see, I ended up doing the exact opposite of that]
- I handwaved the "Olympe is rich" last time and I think it would be much stronger if it was much more obviously Ronan trying to convince himself
- the fact that this is a Situation needs to become much clearer to Ronan early enough that he can be consciously displeased by the very mixed signals Desmoulins is giving off, and indeed also aware that the signals are mixed at all
- I hate French. Camille.
- I'm actually not sure, running back through this, what the best way for Ronan to realize that he's Having An Effect is, while still managing to misread "Camille is holding on to his self-control by one fingernail" as "Camille is annoyed by his attraction to me"
- Camille deflecting the conversation back to Olympe at least one time (the final time?) in very clear response to something Ronan said might be good, a clearer reminder to Ronan as well as himself. possibly also actually mentioning Lucile?
- (GOD EVERY TIME I AM SO FUCKING SORRY TO THE HISTORICAL LUCILE DESMOULINS. madame i promise i am just borrowing a guy who shares a name and a few facts with your husband)
- anyway the point is: Ronan is emotionally vulnerable, learning some stuff about himself, (also physically vulnerable), and he keeps getting shut down hard by his rich benefactor with the pretty suit and soft hands who is, in spite of that, still touching him and hurting him and telling him he's doing so well
- the lighting change + drums kicking in when "Pic et Pic et Amstramgram" start live in my head RENT FREE. you and i, as brothers?!
- conflict points:
- Danton and Camille having a silent conversation without Ronan (the silent conversation is more or less Danton saying “you want to fuck him so bad it makes you look stupid” and Camille saying “PLEASE SHUT UP” there is an extremely good reason Ronan has not been invited to participate in this conversation)
- then what looks like them each trying to make the other take care of Ronan/the situation (actually the first instance of Camille trying very hard not to be weird about it) / deciding without consulting Ronan to tell Marat he won’t be in to work, which he pushes through bc they’re right but also. shouldn’t they ask? he is right there??
- god the problem is. tipping a water-bearer is Very class issues but SOME OF THEM JUST TOOK THE WATER FROM THE SEINE. I guess Camille could bring that up? the water’s clean, he fetched it himself (well how else would anyone—oh. Oh)
- anyway the difference between one flight of stairs and four flights of stairs, a single room and a spacious salon + kitchen + bedroom with clean uncracked windows. it’s bigger than the house Ronan shared with his family in Beauce.
- books. like honestly. the books. a writing desk.
- more Camille trying not to make it weird, making Ronan twitchy and self-conscious in the process—hesitation over offering to get water for a bath, enough that Ronan is like No Thank You I Will Not Get Dirt In Your Bathtub (Your Bathtub!!!) Then; hesitation over offering his own room, where the washstand lives
- Camille lights? candles?? nice ones??? during the DAYTIME?????? just so he can get a better look at the injuries???????????????
- the soap is all fluffy and smells like herbs. the towel is fluffy. the handkerchief Camille offers as a bandage for Ronan’s arm is nicer than any piece of clothing he owns.
- asdlkjfjsjdklfj i’ll work out exactly what goes wrong with the actual wound-tending later
- I gotta send Ronan somewhere afterwards and I do not know where. to Solène maybe??? or does he just. leave? for multiple reasons he can’t stay and I can’t let Camille or even Danton—probably even Danton—pay for new lodging. maybe Danton actually? that’d also explain some things about Pic et Pic. does Camille just kick Ronan out (and call for backup who doesn’t, in fact, want to fuck him so bad it makes them look stupid, BUT WITHOUT EXPLAINING THAT, ON ACCOUNT OF. THE STUPID).
Some of the details of Ronan’s injuries are still not quite canon-compliant (insofar as it’s possible to interpret from the Maniaque blocking) because I liked it better the way I originally wrote it, which just goes to show that occasionally making things up with no reference is good, actually.
