Near the Intersection of Godiva Street and Serendipity Place, Wednesday Evening
Cosette was heading out later this evening to meet her father at the causeway, because there was of course no question as to whether she'd be spending Christmas with him. But since he was helping to serve Christmas dinner at a shelter in Baltimore, it would be another hour or so before he came to pick her up, leaving her to while away the time in a long walk around the island.
Some of the shop windows were dark already, and every now and then the lights in another one would go out; Cosette found the effect rather pretty, and couldn't help smiling.
Then -- maybe it was real, or maybe it was another trick of Fandom's like those ornaments from yesterday, but it didn't matter because one way or the other the effect was the same. One shop, all dark except for one display window up front, festively decorated with a winter tableau laid out to draw attention to the doll, old-fashioned by 2014 standards but contemporary by hers, prominently placed right in the center. Almost before she realized it, she was moving closer to get a better look. It seemed appropriate that she would be seeing her father soon; the first time she met him was on Christmas Eve, not long after she'd seen a doll almost exactly like this one at a merchant's stall in Montfermeil.
Cosette had snuck as many looks as she could at the doll, as had any number of children in Montfermeil. She would have gotten in trouble if Madame Thénardier caught her staring at it, but it wasn't as if she could help it, really; the stall had been directly across the street from the Thénardiers' inn so that any time the door opened anyone within range might glance across the street and catch sight of the doll -- no more than a couple dozen paces away from the door, but, for Cosette, interminably out of reach.
For the first time, she realized that it hadn't just been out of reach for her: there wasn't a family in Montfermeil that could afford the doll until her father came along.
"Why, look at it! It could almost be a sister to Catherine, it's so similar," Cosette murmured to herself, and reached out with one gloved finger to almost but not quite touch the glass. No, it wasn't identical to the doll she'd had for some seven years now and still kept up in her dorm room, but it had the same dark brown hair and the same sort of enamel eyes, and Cosette hadn't yet grown up enough to lose her sense of the fanciful. Maybe that had something to do with the sheer vividness of the recollections, or maybe not. Ever since those odd few weeks shortly after she'd arrived in Fandom, when they all found themselves living a different version of their lives, the long-suppressed memories from her childhood kept coming to the surface, a little more concrete and a little harder to ignore every time until she'd found herself starting to piece them together just so she wouldn't be afraid of them any more.
When she was eight years old, she had to imagine living an entirely different life just to entertain the idea of having something that extravagant, otherwise it seemed like something she had no right to even imagine. Now, looking through this window, it felt like she was looking back on that part of her life like it was a curiosity in a museum, a relic of someone else's existence that she could see but not touch.
It was a very, very strange feeling, and one that she quickly got lost in contemplating.
Éponine was on her way home from work, having taken the long route around the island to admire the Christmas lights on various buildings, when one particularly bright display window caught her eye. Naturally, her sense of curiosity being related to that of raccoons, she had to go closer to investigate.
A doll. A big one, and pricey at that, judging from the elaborate workmanship and the quality of its little doll wardrobe. That was the sort of thing that would ask a steep price, probably more so today, and she hadn’t seen a doll that fine in quite a long time. Years, really.
Not since she was eight years old and watching in horrified disbelief as the man in the yellow coat put one much like it into Cosette’s hands.
She was so caught up in that particularly unhappy train of thought that as she approached the shop window she didn’t notice the figure standing in front of it, just as lost in contemplation.
Likewise, she didn’t notice the small rock by her right foot until her next step sent it skittering over the paving stones with a loud enough noise to have her mentally cursing her own clumsiness.
The sound of something clattering against the ground broke Cosette out of her reverie, and she spun in alarm that didn’t quite abate when the person who’d most likely caused the noise came close enough to be illuminated by the display from the window. That was an unnerving effect in itself; it was dark enough now on this end of the island that it seemed like someone had just materialized out of the shadows. "Oh! Éponine! You're still here," Cosette blurted out in surprise.
Éponine stared at her for a moment, then let out a harsh, disbelieving laugh. "'course I'm still here," she said, and where with just about anyone else she would have just covered up any actual hurt at the question with a nonchalant tone, laced through her nonchalance now was a pointed sarcasm. Of course it would be Cosette, of course it would be here, tonight, and of course this damned island had to rub salt in old wounds once again with its infernal sense of timing. "Where else would I be?"
"I only meant --" Cosette, chastised, ducked her head and out of some deep-seated instinct flinched as if expecting a blow; the words had sounded awful as soon as they were out of her mouth, and she really did feel badly about it. Where could Éponine go, as if she’d want to go home to that family for Christmas even if she could? She was stammering a bit as she went on, still looking at the ground, "Forgive me, I -- I didn't think. Forgive me."
Well. Now it was Éponine's turn to feel badly. She had seen that reaction from Cosette so many times before, when they were little girls and her mother had found some flimsy excuse to start berating Cosette, but of course tonight the one incident that came to mind was that last Christmas Eve in Montfermeil.
The cistern was empty and a guest wanted his horse watered, so their mother sent Cosette off to the spring to fetch water and gave her fifteen sous to buy bread on her way back, never mind that the bucket was so big that even empty it took an eight year old girl both hands to carry. She returned late, in the company of a man in a hideous yellow coat who wanted a room for the evening, with a full bucket of water but no bread.
"Have you lost it, the fifteen-sous piece?" screamed their mother as Éponine and Azelma watched through the doorway. "Or do you want to steal it from me?"
And there was Cosette, even paler than usual, frantically searching the pockets of her torn and threadbare apron, even turning them inside out, but to no avail. Madame Thénardier made an abrupt move toward the corner near the fireplace. Éponine knew there was a leather strap hanging there, and knew what would be happening next.
So did Cosette, who had already flung herself to the floor by the fireplace and tried to curl up into a ball in some vain attempt at self-defense. "Forgive me! Madame! Madame!" she wailed. "I won't do so any more!"
She and Azelma had always watched those incidents with a kind of fascinated horror, but that had been the moment when Éponine understood for the first time that the horror came from how easily it might have been one of them in Cosette's place, and as such stood out with particular clarity in her memory.
It was the same sort of chill as the one that set in now, knowing that this time that she and not her mother had evoked that reaction, and there was a funny taste in her mouth.
"Forgive you?" She laughed again, incredulous and bitter and just a touch hysterical. She was dimly aware on some level that she ought to be reassuring Cosette that she'd done nothing wrong, but she couldn't quite bring herself to that point yet. Whatever uneasy truce they'd worked up over the past couple of months had only been a bandage atop years of festering hurt and resentment, and that simple request had ripped it away. "Me, forgive you?"
Cosette frowned and shook her head. “Yes, for saying something so thoughtless. I didn’t mean to imply . . . But that isn’t what you mean, is it? I don’t understand.”
Éponine turned away and took a deep, shaky breath. “’Course you don’t. You wouldn’t. None of that stuff’s happened to you yet, not this you, and it’s stupid, it’s completely stupid, it’s useless to want to know since with you being here -” she had to stop and rub a hand across her eyes, because she wasn’t going to cry, she wasn’t, but no matter how resolute she was on that point her voice cracked anyway - “it probably never will.”
Did that mean that in some other version of her life, with Cosette out of the picture, Marius might -
No, that was stupid, and she knew it, just like she’d always known that with or without Cosette there, he’d barely remembered she existed. To be fair, the boy was such a head-in-the-clouds sort that he barely remembered anything at all existed, but might as well admit to herself now that Cosette’s absence would have made no difference. Might as well let go of the last remnants of that irrational hope. She’d managed to get away from it all in the end, and she hadn’t needed him for that, though she supposed she owed him some small gratitude for the stupid, futile act of self-sacrifice - that was what it had been, she understood that now - that nearly killed her and brought her to this place instead.
Yes, some gratitude, leading him there to get him killed in the first place, and leaving him to that fate. She couldn’t help thinking of the lonely light in the upstairs window of that house in the Rue Plumet that she’d watched for so long, and the other Cosette who might still be there waiting for someone who’d never return, all because of her.
Cosette stood in silence and listened to Éponine’s half coherent rambling, confused and frankly a bit unsettled. Even with her back to Cosette, Éponine was drawn in on herself like a wounded animal in a display of vulnerability that unsettled Cosette as much as it made her heart hurt. For all Cosette’s overtures of friendship and the diffident cordiality Éponine managed in return, neither of them had ever acknowledged the years they’d grown up together.
Neither of them had dared, and while Cosette suspected Éponine’s reasons differed from her own, maybe it was time they did dare.
She stepped forward and put a hand lightly on Éponine’s shoulder. “If that’s the case, then it hardly matters at all, does it?”
Éponine flinched away from the contact, but turned halfway, just far enough that she could see Cosette out of the corner of her eye. “You’ve no cause to ask for my forgiveness,” she finally muttered. “Seems to me I’m the one ought to be asking.”
So they’d both been thinking it.
“You never laid a hand on me, or made me go without warm clothes in the wintertime,” Cosette said, pointedly emphatic even if she had to fight off a surge of residual terror from putting those long repressed memories into words. “Neither you nor Azelma did. That was only ever your parents, and how could you be expected to learn any better from that example?”
Éponine laughed, but it was a strangled, pained sort of sound, and turned the rest of the way to face Cosette. “And all the times we told Maman you’d done something wrong, just because it suited us? Well, it’s all the same, I’ve been punished enough for that one way or another. S’pose it’s only right, you ending up with everything and me nothing, after all that, and then to find out it was your father giving us money out of pity! And you coming into our miserable little hole with him, dressed up all fancy, seeing to Azelma’s arm after Father made her hurt herself on the window! That was punishment enough, only I’m glad, I am, you never caught on to who we were.”
She must have been talking about the other her, Cosette realized.
“And it doesn’t matter,” she said firmly. “We would have helped you even if we had known, or at least I’m sure Father and I would do the same, so the other ones of us would have, too. I’m sure of it.”
Éponine huffed and looked away again. “What a good person you are! That oughtn’t be possible, anyone being that good.” She slipped a hand into her pocket to touch the coin she always kept there: five francs given to her by Cosette to carry a letter to Marius, a letter that she’d planned to intercept in order to drive him to join his friends at the barricades in a scheme her father would have been proud of. Abruptly she blurted out, “D’you remember how you used to put your shoe in the fireplace every year at Christmas, even when you never found anything in it when you woke up?”
“Those awful, broken wooden things?” It felt like a surprising relief to laugh about it, Cosette thought. “I do remember it now, yes.”
“Maman mocked you for it, but every year you did it just the same.” Éponine shook her head. “You might say you got years’ worth made up all at once when your father showed up.”
“On Christmas,” agreed Cosette, her tone a bit distracted as she stared at the doll thoughtfully.
Éponine was staring at the doll too. “And Maman was shouting at you for picking up our doll, Azelma’s and mine, because I caught you at it and showed her,” she half mumbled. “So he walked out and came back in with the one for sale that no one could afford, and gave it to you, and then took you away with him . . . d'you know there were times I wished he might have taken me along too?”
Cosette thought about the life that other version of her had spent growing up in the Thénardiers’ dubious care, and said, softly, “I can imagine there are. Well, you aren’t there any more, are you, and that’s something, isn’t it?“
“We take what we can get, some of us,” Éponine said dryly. “But look here, I still don’t see why it matters to you.”
“Because -” Cosette took a deep breath and raised her head to look Éponine squarely in the face. “Because I know what it’s like to be treated as you were, don’t forget. I would not wish that on anyone, and - oh, you’ll think this is silly, but it’s as if after I went away with Father you took my place in a way, and I’m sorry for that and glad you got out of it, truly I am.”
Éponine laughed mirthlessly. “Too late to do me any good, I’m afraid.”
“Of course it’s not too late,” insisted Cosette.
“D’you know,” said Éponine, “there’s got to be something very wrong with you, to insist on believing that?”
Cosette’s eyes widened in feigned shock, but she assumed her most stubborn tone and replied, “That’s as may be. But I do know one thing: not once have you defended what your parents did, so you can’t possibly be as terrible as you think.”
“You only say that because you don’t know otherwise,” scoffed Éponine.
“And I’ll thank you to let me make up my own mind on the subject,” Cosette shot back. And then, because she should have thought to ask in the first place: “Perhaps over dinner, because you are coming with me to Father’s - no, don’t argue, it’s no use, I’m quite decided about it. It’s utterly ridiculous for you to be alone on Christmas and I won’t have it.”
“You’d talk a statue into lying down to take a nap, you would,” Éponine grumbled, but the tiniest hint of a smile was starting to form at one corner of her mouth. “Very well, I’ll come along to dinner, if only to stop you from going on about this nonsense.”
“Oh, I will, but only for tonight. Consider it a Christmas present, if you will,” Cosette said, smiling slyly. “I’ll get you to believe it yet. Now come on, Father ought to be at the causeway by now, and I think he'll be happy to see you, and it won’t do to keep him waiting.”
[OOC: Reiterating the cut text for the sake of layouts that don't have it any more: content warning for discussion and a brief depiction of child abuse in this post. Dialogue in the flashback bit is taken from the Wilbour translation of Les Misérables, and I have been waiting to do this post for a goddamn year.]
Some of the shop windows were dark already, and every now and then the lights in another one would go out; Cosette found the effect rather pretty, and couldn't help smiling.
Then -- maybe it was real, or maybe it was another trick of Fandom's like those ornaments from yesterday, but it didn't matter because one way or the other the effect was the same. One shop, all dark except for one display window up front, festively decorated with a winter tableau laid out to draw attention to the doll, old-fashioned by 2014 standards but contemporary by hers, prominently placed right in the center. Almost before she realized it, she was moving closer to get a better look. It seemed appropriate that she would be seeing her father soon; the first time she met him was on Christmas Eve, not long after she'd seen a doll almost exactly like this one at a merchant's stall in Montfermeil.
Cosette had snuck as many looks as she could at the doll, as had any number of children in Montfermeil. She would have gotten in trouble if Madame Thénardier caught her staring at it, but it wasn't as if she could help it, really; the stall had been directly across the street from the Thénardiers' inn so that any time the door opened anyone within range might glance across the street and catch sight of the doll -- no more than a couple dozen paces away from the door, but, for Cosette, interminably out of reach.
For the first time, she realized that it hadn't just been out of reach for her: there wasn't a family in Montfermeil that could afford the doll until her father came along.
"Why, look at it! It could almost be a sister to Catherine, it's so similar," Cosette murmured to herself, and reached out with one gloved finger to almost but not quite touch the glass. No, it wasn't identical to the doll she'd had for some seven years now and still kept up in her dorm room, but it had the same dark brown hair and the same sort of enamel eyes, and Cosette hadn't yet grown up enough to lose her sense of the fanciful. Maybe that had something to do with the sheer vividness of the recollections, or maybe not. Ever since those odd few weeks shortly after she'd arrived in Fandom, when they all found themselves living a different version of their lives, the long-suppressed memories from her childhood kept coming to the surface, a little more concrete and a little harder to ignore every time until she'd found herself starting to piece them together just so she wouldn't be afraid of them any more.
When she was eight years old, she had to imagine living an entirely different life just to entertain the idea of having something that extravagant, otherwise it seemed like something she had no right to even imagine. Now, looking through this window, it felt like she was looking back on that part of her life like it was a curiosity in a museum, a relic of someone else's existence that she could see but not touch.
It was a very, very strange feeling, and one that she quickly got lost in contemplating.
Éponine was on her way home from work, having taken the long route around the island to admire the Christmas lights on various buildings, when one particularly bright display window caught her eye. Naturally, her sense of curiosity being related to that of raccoons, she had to go closer to investigate.
A doll. A big one, and pricey at that, judging from the elaborate workmanship and the quality of its little doll wardrobe. That was the sort of thing that would ask a steep price, probably more so today, and she hadn’t seen a doll that fine in quite a long time. Years, really.
Not since she was eight years old and watching in horrified disbelief as the man in the yellow coat put one much like it into Cosette’s hands.
She was so caught up in that particularly unhappy train of thought that as she approached the shop window she didn’t notice the figure standing in front of it, just as lost in contemplation.
Likewise, she didn’t notice the small rock by her right foot until her next step sent it skittering over the paving stones with a loud enough noise to have her mentally cursing her own clumsiness.
The sound of something clattering against the ground broke Cosette out of her reverie, and she spun in alarm that didn’t quite abate when the person who’d most likely caused the noise came close enough to be illuminated by the display from the window. That was an unnerving effect in itself; it was dark enough now on this end of the island that it seemed like someone had just materialized out of the shadows. "Oh! Éponine! You're still here," Cosette blurted out in surprise.
Éponine stared at her for a moment, then let out a harsh, disbelieving laugh. "'course I'm still here," she said, and where with just about anyone else she would have just covered up any actual hurt at the question with a nonchalant tone, laced through her nonchalance now was a pointed sarcasm. Of course it would be Cosette, of course it would be here, tonight, and of course this damned island had to rub salt in old wounds once again with its infernal sense of timing. "Where else would I be?"
"I only meant --" Cosette, chastised, ducked her head and out of some deep-seated instinct flinched as if expecting a blow; the words had sounded awful as soon as they were out of her mouth, and she really did feel badly about it. Where could Éponine go, as if she’d want to go home to that family for Christmas even if she could? She was stammering a bit as she went on, still looking at the ground, "Forgive me, I -- I didn't think. Forgive me."
Well. Now it was Éponine's turn to feel badly. She had seen that reaction from Cosette so many times before, when they were little girls and her mother had found some flimsy excuse to start berating Cosette, but of course tonight the one incident that came to mind was that last Christmas Eve in Montfermeil.
The cistern was empty and a guest wanted his horse watered, so their mother sent Cosette off to the spring to fetch water and gave her fifteen sous to buy bread on her way back, never mind that the bucket was so big that even empty it took an eight year old girl both hands to carry. She returned late, in the company of a man in a hideous yellow coat who wanted a room for the evening, with a full bucket of water but no bread.
"Have you lost it, the fifteen-sous piece?" screamed their mother as Éponine and Azelma watched through the doorway. "Or do you want to steal it from me?"
And there was Cosette, even paler than usual, frantically searching the pockets of her torn and threadbare apron, even turning them inside out, but to no avail. Madame Thénardier made an abrupt move toward the corner near the fireplace. Éponine knew there was a leather strap hanging there, and knew what would be happening next.
So did Cosette, who had already flung herself to the floor by the fireplace and tried to curl up into a ball in some vain attempt at self-defense. "Forgive me! Madame! Madame!" she wailed. "I won't do so any more!"
She and Azelma had always watched those incidents with a kind of fascinated horror, but that had been the moment when Éponine understood for the first time that the horror came from how easily it might have been one of them in Cosette's place, and as such stood out with particular clarity in her memory.
It was the same sort of chill as the one that set in now, knowing that this time that she and not her mother had evoked that reaction, and there was a funny taste in her mouth.
"Forgive you?" She laughed again, incredulous and bitter and just a touch hysterical. She was dimly aware on some level that she ought to be reassuring Cosette that she'd done nothing wrong, but she couldn't quite bring herself to that point yet. Whatever uneasy truce they'd worked up over the past couple of months had only been a bandage atop years of festering hurt and resentment, and that simple request had ripped it away. "Me, forgive you?"
Cosette frowned and shook her head. “Yes, for saying something so thoughtless. I didn’t mean to imply . . . But that isn’t what you mean, is it? I don’t understand.”
Éponine turned away and took a deep, shaky breath. “’Course you don’t. You wouldn’t. None of that stuff’s happened to you yet, not this you, and it’s stupid, it’s completely stupid, it’s useless to want to know since with you being here -” she had to stop and rub a hand across her eyes, because she wasn’t going to cry, she wasn’t, but no matter how resolute she was on that point her voice cracked anyway - “it probably never will.”
Did that mean that in some other version of her life, with Cosette out of the picture, Marius might -
No, that was stupid, and she knew it, just like she’d always known that with or without Cosette there, he’d barely remembered she existed. To be fair, the boy was such a head-in-the-clouds sort that he barely remembered anything at all existed, but might as well admit to herself now that Cosette’s absence would have made no difference. Might as well let go of the last remnants of that irrational hope. She’d managed to get away from it all in the end, and she hadn’t needed him for that, though she supposed she owed him some small gratitude for the stupid, futile act of self-sacrifice - that was what it had been, she understood that now - that nearly killed her and brought her to this place instead.
Yes, some gratitude, leading him there to get him killed in the first place, and leaving him to that fate. She couldn’t help thinking of the lonely light in the upstairs window of that house in the Rue Plumet that she’d watched for so long, and the other Cosette who might still be there waiting for someone who’d never return, all because of her.
Cosette stood in silence and listened to Éponine’s half coherent rambling, confused and frankly a bit unsettled. Even with her back to Cosette, Éponine was drawn in on herself like a wounded animal in a display of vulnerability that unsettled Cosette as much as it made her heart hurt. For all Cosette’s overtures of friendship and the diffident cordiality Éponine managed in return, neither of them had ever acknowledged the years they’d grown up together.
Neither of them had dared, and while Cosette suspected Éponine’s reasons differed from her own, maybe it was time they did dare.
She stepped forward and put a hand lightly on Éponine’s shoulder. “If that’s the case, then it hardly matters at all, does it?”
Éponine flinched away from the contact, but turned halfway, just far enough that she could see Cosette out of the corner of her eye. “You’ve no cause to ask for my forgiveness,” she finally muttered. “Seems to me I’m the one ought to be asking.”
So they’d both been thinking it.
“You never laid a hand on me, or made me go without warm clothes in the wintertime,” Cosette said, pointedly emphatic even if she had to fight off a surge of residual terror from putting those long repressed memories into words. “Neither you nor Azelma did. That was only ever your parents, and how could you be expected to learn any better from that example?”
Éponine laughed, but it was a strangled, pained sort of sound, and turned the rest of the way to face Cosette. “And all the times we told Maman you’d done something wrong, just because it suited us? Well, it’s all the same, I’ve been punished enough for that one way or another. S’pose it’s only right, you ending up with everything and me nothing, after all that, and then to find out it was your father giving us money out of pity! And you coming into our miserable little hole with him, dressed up all fancy, seeing to Azelma’s arm after Father made her hurt herself on the window! That was punishment enough, only I’m glad, I am, you never caught on to who we were.”
She must have been talking about the other her, Cosette realized.
“And it doesn’t matter,” she said firmly. “We would have helped you even if we had known, or at least I’m sure Father and I would do the same, so the other ones of us would have, too. I’m sure of it.”
Éponine huffed and looked away again. “What a good person you are! That oughtn’t be possible, anyone being that good.” She slipped a hand into her pocket to touch the coin she always kept there: five francs given to her by Cosette to carry a letter to Marius, a letter that she’d planned to intercept in order to drive him to join his friends at the barricades in a scheme her father would have been proud of. Abruptly she blurted out, “D’you remember how you used to put your shoe in the fireplace every year at Christmas, even when you never found anything in it when you woke up?”
“Those awful, broken wooden things?” It felt like a surprising relief to laugh about it, Cosette thought. “I do remember it now, yes.”
“Maman mocked you for it, but every year you did it just the same.” Éponine shook her head. “You might say you got years’ worth made up all at once when your father showed up.”
“On Christmas,” agreed Cosette, her tone a bit distracted as she stared at the doll thoughtfully.
Éponine was staring at the doll too. “And Maman was shouting at you for picking up our doll, Azelma’s and mine, because I caught you at it and showed her,” she half mumbled. “So he walked out and came back in with the one for sale that no one could afford, and gave it to you, and then took you away with him . . . d'you know there were times I wished he might have taken me along too?”
Cosette thought about the life that other version of her had spent growing up in the Thénardiers’ dubious care, and said, softly, “I can imagine there are. Well, you aren’t there any more, are you, and that’s something, isn’t it?“
“We take what we can get, some of us,” Éponine said dryly. “But look here, I still don’t see why it matters to you.”
“Because -” Cosette took a deep breath and raised her head to look Éponine squarely in the face. “Because I know what it’s like to be treated as you were, don’t forget. I would not wish that on anyone, and - oh, you’ll think this is silly, but it’s as if after I went away with Father you took my place in a way, and I’m sorry for that and glad you got out of it, truly I am.”
Éponine laughed mirthlessly. “Too late to do me any good, I’m afraid.”
“Of course it’s not too late,” insisted Cosette.
“D’you know,” said Éponine, “there’s got to be something very wrong with you, to insist on believing that?”
Cosette’s eyes widened in feigned shock, but she assumed her most stubborn tone and replied, “That’s as may be. But I do know one thing: not once have you defended what your parents did, so you can’t possibly be as terrible as you think.”
“You only say that because you don’t know otherwise,” scoffed Éponine.
“And I’ll thank you to let me make up my own mind on the subject,” Cosette shot back. And then, because she should have thought to ask in the first place: “Perhaps over dinner, because you are coming with me to Father’s - no, don’t argue, it’s no use, I’m quite decided about it. It’s utterly ridiculous for you to be alone on Christmas and I won’t have it.”
“You’d talk a statue into lying down to take a nap, you would,” Éponine grumbled, but the tiniest hint of a smile was starting to form at one corner of her mouth. “Very well, I’ll come along to dinner, if only to stop you from going on about this nonsense.”
“Oh, I will, but only for tonight. Consider it a Christmas present, if you will,” Cosette said, smiling slyly. “I’ll get you to believe it yet. Now come on, Father ought to be at the causeway by now, and I think he'll be happy to see you, and it won’t do to keep him waiting.”
[OOC: Reiterating the cut text for the sake of layouts that don't have it any more: content warning for discussion and a brief depiction of child abuse in this post. Dialogue in the flashback bit is taken from the Wilbour translation of Les Misérables, and I have been waiting to do this post for a goddamn year.]