Fatherhood

[personalmephistopheles]

Fandom: Les Miserables
Rating: G
Setting: 1920s Prohibition au (dw tag)
Characters: Fantine, Cosette Fauchelevent, Jean Valjean
Warnings: Implied forced institutionalisation
Word Count: 968

General Summary: Jean Valjean had never intended to become a father, in fact, he had been set against it from the beginning.

[Takes place prior to the chapter fic The Streets Were Full of Strangers, but ends where the first chapter begins.] 

Author’s Note: A relatively sweet prequel fic that I wrote around Father's Day 2013.


Jean Valjean had never expected to become a father – in fact, he had never planned on it. After their arrival in New York at the turn of the century, he had watched his parents die slowly under poor work conditions in an attempt to keep their family together and fed, and had nearly worked himself to death in an effort to keep his sister and her own children safe after the death of her husband in a factory accident. After she remarried, less for love than for the financial security of her children, he had vowed at thirty to never to father children of his own.

He had not counted on the appearance of Fantine on the doorstep of his cramped apartment one rainy night in 1912. He hardly knew her – she had worked in a dressmaker’s shop with his sister at one point, and had been the envy of the neighbourhood, but beyond that, they had never spoken.


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