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WORD COUNT: 50,000
RATING: T to M
WARNINGS: non-graphic rape/non-con
SUMMARY: Courfeyrac and Enjolras grew up next door to each other, with their families so close they might as well be related at this point. So when Enjolras's older sister gets engaged, Courfeyrac knows he'll be attending the wedding. Not a big deal. It'll be nice to havea rbeak from law school and besides, weddings are fun! When it becomes clear that he's expected to bring a date--no, not just a date, everyone expects him to bring his significant other--to the wedding (and the week long festivities that precede it), everything seems a lot less fun and a lot more anxiety inducing. Not having dated anyone in the years since his last disastrous relationship and unable to tell his mother why he's given up on romance, Courfeyrac does the only logical thing--he brings along his new fake boyfriend, Combeferre.
AUTHOR'S NOTE: This fic is freakishly long and will be posted in 8 parts. The subsequent parts will be up in a few hours. Special thanks to gaddmegan over at tumblr for her awesome beta reading and to cytisus for the art!
Chapter One
The phone call came when Enjolras was still at the law library. He was supposed to be looking up case studies for his Feminist Jurisprudence class, but he was rather distracted by a text he’d gotten from Grantaire an hour earlier saying he was making chiles rellenos for dinner—and while Enjolras knew correlation was not causation, correlation said that if they were having chiles rellenos for dinner then Enjolras was likely to spend most of the night naked in bed with his boyfriend. So when his phone rang, instead of checking the Caller ID, which he’d been doing religiously for the last two and a half months, he was thinking about all the things he wanted to do to Grantaire tonight and he answered the phone.
“Hello?” he said.
“Julien, darling?”
Shit.
“Mom?” He pulled the phone away from his ear to check the Caller ID. It was the Courfeyrac’s home number. His mom was getting sneaky, going over to the neighbor’s like that. Normally she called from her cell phone or from the home number.
He had a special ringtone to warn against her calls.
“I’ve been trying to get a hold of you for ages,” she said.
“Yeah, I’ve been busy,” he said. “Law school and all.”
“I’m glad I got a hold of you, though. We need to talk about next week.”
He pinched the bridge of his nose and wondered if he could just hang up on her and pretend his phone dropped the call. “Courfeyrac and I are driving up next Thursday. We’ll be there in time for the rehearsal dinner.”
“Julien, this is your sister’s wedding! She’s only going to get married once!”
“Statistically, half of all marriages end in divorce,” he said. “Odds are this is just going to be her first wedding. I’ll make it to the other ones. Besides, I’ll be there for the actual wedding. I said I was driving up on Thursday. Ceremony’s Friday. I don’t see a problem.”
“We’ve got so much more planned that whole week,” she said. “We need you here. Your sister wants you here.”
“Mom, I’m in law school and this is my second year—I’m interning with Myriel and Reed, I just can’t afford to take the whole week off.” Not to mention, he thought it was completely ridiculous that he was expected to take a full week off for his sister’s wedding in the first place. The wedding itself was only going to take an hour, tops. There was no reason that he needed to take a week-long vacation from school and his internship and the half-dozen other things he had on his plate at the moment to sit around for pictures and lunches with his new in-laws. “Not to mention, my friends and I are heading up a rally to raise awareness about police violence against people of color this weekend.”
“Don’t give me that, Julien,” she said. “I’m friends with Courfeyrac on facebook, and I follow both of you on twitter. I know that happened last weekend.”
Shit.
“I can’t take the whole week off,” he said again. “I just…I can’t.”
“This isn’t a debate. This is a family event—we want you here.”
“I can’t leave my boyfriend for that long,” he said, shoving his laptop back in its case. He felt a little guilty for using Grantaire this way, even though there was a time in their relationship when he really would have been uncomfortable with leaving Grantaire alone for any length of time—but Taire was doing so much better now and the depression and the drinking were both under control, and if Taire knew he were using him as an excuse like this, well, Enjolras knew how much he’d be hurt by the vote of no confidence.
“Your boyfriend? Since when have you had a boyfriend?”
Shitshit.
“Uhm—”
“Julien? How long?”
“Two and a half,” he mumbled.
“What? Weeks? Months?”
“Years,” he said, sheepishly.
“You’ve been seeing someone for two and a half years, and you never told your own mother? Shame on you! I raised you better than that.”
“It’s not that,” he said. “I wasn’t—I wasn’t trying to hide him from you.”
She tutted him over the phone. “Your boyfriend is coming,” she said, as though the matter were closed.
Enjolras groaned. It had often been said that he got his stubborn will from his mother, and he knew that if she was going to insist on Taire coming, then Taire would be coming. “We can still only come up for the rehearsal dinner and the ceremony,” he said.
“You’re coming for the week,” she said. “Both of you—my son, hiding his boyfriend from his own mother for two and a half years—you’re both coming for the full week, and that’s that. I want both of you in the family pictures.”
“Mom—”
“No, darling, this isn’t a discussion. I’ll see you next week. Oh, and tell Courfeyrac to bring whoever he’s with, too.”
“But, Mom, Fey’s not—”
“Julien, I have to go—your father’s on the phone with caterer right now. I love you and I’ll see you next week.”
The phone line went dead.
Shit.
He stared at the phone in his hand for a long moment before shoving it in his pocket and slinging his laptop case over his shoulder. He needed to go tell Grantaire about their very not-so-exciting plans before he broke the news to Courfeyrac.
~*~*~