He Learned to Fight By Getting the Shit Kicked Out of Him
He was the ginger kid, the foster care kid, the kid who was smart enough to look after himself but too dumb for school. He was slapped around by foster parents, bullied at a hundred schools, and beaten up countless times when he was sleeping rough, so he learned to fight. He doesn't pick fights out of sheer boredom like Bahorel, or join in with them to blow off steam like Grantaire, doesn't even start them for a cause like Enjolras; Feuilly fights because he has to, it's an obligation, because bloody knuckles and bruised ribs are all he's ever known. He drags himself through life by his teeth and never holds anything against anyone, because he knows how hard it is to be losing a fight that no one sees.
2. He Isn't Scared of Anything
A few weeks after Bahorel and Feuilly first met the boxer had stumbled into Feuilly's flat at three in the morning with a face covered in blood from a gash over his eye and two teeth missing (it was the night Bahorel's eyebrow piercing had become a scar – an inevitable but lamented loss). He switched on the light and prodded the sleeping carpenter until he cracked open a smoke-reddened eye. To anyone else still lost in the haze of sleep Bahorel would have appeared like some nightmarish phantasm, but Feuilly's reaction was merely to grunt, "Disinfectant wipes in the bathroom. Bleed on the carpet and I'll skin you," and roll over. By the time Bahorel had cleaned himself up and flopped down on the bed beside Feuilly, the carpenter was fast asleep again. Bahorel often cites this as the perfect example of Feuilly's boneheadedness fearlessness. Feuilly picks up spiders in his bare hands, collects the gory warning labels on cigarette packs, and dives headfirst into fights if his friends need him, heedless of knives or brass knuckles, of being outnumbered, or the danger of arrest. He even gets into cars when Bossuet is driving. When he's walking home through the bad part of town after a night shift he carries his keys between his knuckles, but that isn't fear, it's caution. Feuilly can be cautious, but he is never afraid.
3. He Gets Itchy Feet
Feuilly spent most of his youth moving up and down the country, being shunted between foster homes, orphanages, boarding schools, and for three harrowing months a juvenile detention facility. Now he spends his adulthood travelling on his own terms. He used to drive the coast when he was between jobs, until his dilapidated car gave up for the last time and even Montparnasse couldn't hotwire it. Now he hitchhikes, jumps on trains, talks his way onto buses, or simply walks. If he stays in one place for too long he gets cabin fever and it's times like those Bahorel is glad to see the back of him. But he always looks forward to Feuilly's home coming and Feuilly never disappoints, coming home dirty and dishevelled and thin, but always coming home.
4. He Reads the Paper
Feuilly is genuinely interested in the world and its ways. Bahorel thinks that the media is run exclusively by liars and bigots, therefore newspapers are only good for wrapping up fish and chips, and if he's ever watching the TV news it's only because he's too stoned to get up and change the channel. But every Sunday morning, regardless of where he wakes up, regardless of rain, snow, hangovers, or a lack of funds, Feuilly will find a newsagent and pick up his paper. Then he will read it cover to cover while making his way through a pot of coffee and half a deck of cigarettes. If he's working that day he'll leave the flat with a far-off look in his eyes and a crease in his forehead, but if he has a day off he'll walk over to Bossuet and Musichetta's shared flat above the Corinthe bar and spend the morning discussing current affairs with them while sneaking sly cigarettes out the window (Joly flatly refuses to stay the night there if the flat smells like smoke). Bahorel calls Feuilly a fucking freak when he recites names and dates of political movements old and new as easily as Combeferre does, but secretly he admires Feuilly's seemingly inexhaustible thirst for knowledge and his relentless efforts at self-education.
5. He's an Honest Man
Feuilly had a tough childhood and more often than not he had to shift for himself. His hands are just as quick as Montparnasse's, just as subtle, just as talented, but he prefers to use them in honest labour. The dandy's fingers are long and deft, pale skinned, delicate, and soft from never having worked a day in his life. Feuilly's hands are rough and dry-skinned, thick with calluses and cigarette burns, criss-crossed with fading scars and fresh cuts, the knuckles bruised, the beginnings of a nicotine stain already yellowing the skin between his forefingers, and his fingernails bitten short and lined with sawdust and dirt. They look like the hands of an old man, but they are honest hands, and if on occasion they conjure a carton of cigarettes from an inside pocket as he leaves a shop, well, Bahorel isn't going to dispute the fact that all skills must be practised to remain sharp.
6. He's a Brilliant Handyman (Except When He Isn't)
He may be a qualified carpenter but he's a proven jack-of-all-trades. He can re-wire faulty sockets (Bossuet's fault, for spilling his beer while still sober), re-plaster walls (Bahorel's, for putting his fist through it. Repeatedly), re-paint smoke damaged ceilings (Éponine's, for falling asleep with a lit cigarette), re-lay brick walls (Grantaire's, for taking driving lessons from Bossuet while drunk), and re-build broken bed bases (Musichetta's. Obviously.). He's even proven himself adept at helping Montparnasse fix his motorbike, as well as various other vehicles, the providences of which he is too sensible to ask about. He can fix all of these things, but he cannot fix televisions. Bahorel and Feuilly do not own a TV, and this is because Feuilly discovered that he can't fix televisions by breaking theirs. Bahorel still proudly holds this over Feuilly's head as a prime example that the boxer doesn't break all of their stuff, and in fact Feuilly is the reason they don't have nice things. Like a TV.
7. He Worries Too Much About Money
Feuilly knows what it's like to be truly broke, to have to choose between paying rent and buying food, even knows the bleak freedom of penury and homelessness, and because he knows all these things so intimately he is generous to a fault. He is generous in small ways, always throwing coins to buskers and buying coffee for people he sees sleeping rough in parks and doorways. He is generous to his friends when he turns a blind eye to Éponine filching his cigarettes at the end of each month when her pay cheque is overdue; when he steals wood paint and sheets of balsa wood from the workshop for Grantaire when the artist is too broke to buy acrylics or canvases or even paper; he always replaces the bandages and disinfectant wipes in the bathroom even though Bahorel uses most of them; and he pays Bossuet's rent every so often to save Musichetta from begging her sleazy manager for extra shifts at the bar. He does all of these things without ever being asked to, without ever expecting any reimbursement, and he does them with easy sincerity. If anyone ever gets maudlin and tries to thank him he simply grunts, "Fuck off," and buys another round to shut them up. Sometimes Feuilly is so generous that come the end of the month he's the one bumming cigarettes and begging for extra shifts, and this worries him Bahorel knows, it dredges up the past, but they always get through it, blowing off the landlord until Bahorel wins a couple of fights, living for a few days without electricity or hot water, and scamming cigarettes and coffees from their sympathetic friends. Feuilly worries, but they always get through it, and Bahorel hopes that one day Feuilly will never have to worry about money ever again because goddamn if the bastard doesn't work hard enough to deserve a break. But Bahorel knows that people like them, boys with black eyes and callused fingers, always have to worry about money.
8. He's Damn Good to Look At
Feuilly is indifferent to his looks, with the exception of his bright red hair and carefully maintained beard, the colour of which he was constantly bullied for as a child and which he now wears proudly as a beacon of defiance. Otherwise all he sees his body as is a tool for survival, his large, work-toughened hands and naturally broad shoulders an asset for employment rather than seduction. Bahorel sees him rather differently… Feuilly is short compared to Bahorel (who isn't?), but still the right height to swing a fist into the boxer's grinning face when he gets too grabby. His ginger hair is matched by the freckles that skitter across his shoulders and down his arms, little sunlit constellations that Bahorel likes to map with his mouth sometimes. His hands are rough but so are Bahorel's, and when they're grappling with one another, spitting blood and curses and throwing drunken punches in alley ways, in gutters, against walls, and on the bedroom floor they are evenly matched, and Bahorel likes not having to worry about hurting Feuilly because he knows that the carpenter's hands are not the only tough thing about him. Feuilly is strong from years of manual labour and although he doesn't have the same bulk as Bahorel's gym-sculpted body, the boxer finds his wiry musculature hugely distracting, especially when Feuilly insists on walking around shirtless during the warmer months, baring his brawny arms, his taut chest, his flat stomach, and the enticing jut of his hip bones until Bahorel just can't take it anymore and they end up a bruised, sweaty mess sprawled over the couch or the kitchen bench or the basin of a public toilet. Feuilly may not think he's anything special to look at, but Bahorel would rather look at him than any of the other shirtless gymrats that he's frequently exposed to in the boxing ring, and he'd sure as hell rather spend a night brawling and bleeding and panting with Feuilly than anyone else.
9. He Doesn't Have a 'Brand'
Feuilly will smoke anything at all. Generally Bahorel can tell the state of Feuilly's bank account from whatever is jammed between the carpenter's lips; the sliding scale generally runs from a triumphant carton of Dunhills on pay day, down to a pouch of stale rolling tobacco carefully rationed into a few crinkled papers and lit with a shaking hand. One month, when everyone had been short on cash and Feuilly had exhausted even this desperate option, he had resorted to Grantaire's drug of choice. Musichetta had been so alarmed by the amount of tequila that the carpenter was throwing back that she'd hurriedly rolled him a 'cigarette' using nothing more than green tea and a thin leaf of paper torn out of one of Joly's more comprehensive medical textbooks. Feuilly had been so drunk by that time that the placebo had worked and he'd spent the rest of the evening sprawled out over a table snoring contentedly, while the more lucid drunks (chiefly Grantaire and Bahorel, aided and abetted by sly Montparnasse) had carefully shaved one side of his head and bleached both of his eyebrows. The next afternoon he'd woken up with the worst hangover of his life and an apologetic box of Malboro taped to his right hand; he didn't yell at anyone for a week.
10. He is Tired
He is always tired. He doses himself up on black coffee and caffeine pills just to get through the working week, and if he's rostered on Saturday and Sunday as well he'll take something stronger. But even when he's sparking on coke he is less energetic than the rest of them, preferring to chain smoke twitchily in a corner alone with his thoughts while the rest of them carouse and brawl and gurn spectacularly. After one night out that begins with a smirk from Montparnasse and a handful of pills, and ends in the Accident and Emergency room, Bahorel suggests that maybe amphetamines are not Feuilly's thing. Feuilly shakily agrees and pulls the drip out of his arm while Bossuet makes a quiet phone call to Joly. Alcohol is not exactly his thing either, as the liquid depressant usually sends him straight to sleep no matter how many energy drink chasers he sculls. Whenever anyone touches on the topic of Grantaire's drinking the artist is quick to point out that Feuilly holds the record for passing out earlier and more frequently than anyone else whenever they drink (which is most evenings for Feuilly and Bahorel, and every evening for Grantaire). Bahorel feels guilty sometimes when he keeps Feuilly up, but the feeling is usually allayed when Feuilly sleeps soundly for the rest of the night, his body exhausted and his overwrought mind disconnected for once.