A/N Merry Christmas and Happy New Year Insanemistosingsmore. This is for your request where Jehan goes home for Christmas. As it hasn't come up in the series yet, I'll clarify that my Jehan comes from a rather complicated background... so enjoy and I hope you like Jehan as this is his very first piece!

Christmas was an occasion for celebration, for remembering the past and rejoicing in the future. Noel, Noel, Noel – thus sing the angels gathered in stone around the crowned heads of our churches, and thus should sing our hearts in response. Noel and Joy to all mankind.

Jehan kicked the snow off his boots and stepped into the small church, bowing his head and crossing himself as he did so. It was silent – a serenity he had been hard pressed to find anywhere in Paris. Paris was a glory of sights and sounds, a bouquet perhaps of every flower except the small wild flowers that grow at the side of the country roads. He had always preferred those best. In fact, during spring this year, he had pined for them on his daily walks. The Parisian flowers were haughty, their colours gaudy and gilded when compared to the faint gentle blush on the petals of a primrose stuck in a carriage rut, her head unbowed although her leaves were gilded with mud instead of gold.

Even the churchyards in Paris offered no sanctuary, graves were too often used as tables, chairs or beds for those with no other furniture – or, worse yet – those with nothing better to do. The idle rich. The stagnating wealthy. The debauched and the careless, those who cared nothing for the dead, and little more for the living.

He had once been able to find such peace in the cool avenues lining a graveyard, or the pews of a church. Not so in Paris. He found he could barely attend a Mass without feeling enraged.

Where was the joy in that? Surely in a city so fine and big there had to be some kernel of faith, even if it were as small as the smallest mustard seed.

No, there was little serenity in Paris. Though he found much else to marvel at and write about, indeed nowadays with Enjolras and Les Amis to focus his attentions on, he barely even felt the lack of solitude, of the sheer sweet silence where he could look into his very soul and agree that all was well.

But now, for the Christmas season, he was home. Before greeting his mother, he had stopped in the church to say hello and feel a little peace. There would be no peace at his mother's house, that was certain. There would be more trouble remembering not to discuss Hugo at the table and explaining his cravats and his clothes than there would be holiday spirit, of that he was certain. Of course, in many ways the church was like a home in itself. He knew it, the old wooden benches – each seat and the dips that had been worn slowly into the wood by faithful parishioners since it had first been built. It was a grand old church, one which had survived king and revolution and king again, and still stood. Its roof was simple, and at the front stood nothing but a plain pulpit and a figure of the Christos on his cross, looking down on the congregation with suffering and glory in his eyes.

Jehan could remember sitting in the front row when he was a child, listening to the sound of the people singing – all the people singing as one voice a low deep hymn in strange old words that even their fathers would barely recognize, and looking up at the Christos and seeing his face shining in a beam of light from one of the lamps.

It had been beautiful, and liquid like poetry – like seeing a run of music play down through the fingers of a musician and out into the air again, like a flock of birds taking wing into summer air and everything more.

This was where he felt the most at peace.

So he sat alone in the church and breathed in dust and old incense and the faint hints of smoke and sweat and the paper of prayer books. He pressed his palms against the wood where his father used to sit – just here in this very pew, just here at the front. His hands here and his feet here and his whole person kept right here in exactly the same space as where Jehan himself was sitting now.

He closed his eyes to savor the moment, and – as usual – his mind wandered. He thought of his mother, her thin smiling lips pinched down in the corners and her hair so brown and grey like it had been combed through with winter and age. She would shake her head at him, like she always did, and touch his eye and laugh a little.

Already, Jean? She would say.

Already, maman. Already. You remember the boys in the town – the bigger ones with the fierce dead eyes. I never much cared for them. They could not have ever learned to see the beauty of the world. You remember, maman, when the pastor taught me to fight and you remember the cuts and bruises. Who better than a mother, for her hands soothe the wounds of a country with a touch…

And I'm getting carried away again. You always knew that, too.

Then she would kiss his cheek and tweak his hair-ribbon in her usual teasing way, and call him her daughter until he blushed and then laugh some more.

And then – of course – there would be dinner. Her and M. Prouvaire Himself, the Head of the Household with his biting ways and his impossible standards. Here we are, father. An Heir to wealth and opportunity, wouldn't you say?

A poet, a dreamer, a revolutionary. A believer still in the sanctity of truth and freedom and love for all men.

Jehan sighed and opened his eyes. It was getting dark and he was expected. So he rose and left the church and walked out through the graveyard, only stopping to pause next to a particular stone in his way.

"I know you wouldn't blame her, after all you've been dead a good long while now," he said awkwardly, never quite certain what one should say to one's own father when one was currently on the way to have dinner with one's new and rather less proud father.

The stone made no reply, and for a moment he imagine a long and complicated conversation with at least three verses of twelve stanzas each. He frowned. "I know you would enjoy them, at least," he said with more than a hint of a pout, and continued on his way.

Merry Christmas, father.

Merry Christmas, and peace to all mankind.