Chapter Text
Éponine woke to the sense that something solid and heavy had just joined her on the bed. When she opened her eyes, she saw that it was Cosette, perched on the edge of the mattress and smiling apologetically.
“Did I wake you?” she asked. Her hair was tousled like an adorable haystack.
Éponine pushed herself into a sitting position, stifling a yawn. “Maybe. It’s fine, though.” She hoped she hadn’t been doing anything embarrassing like snoring or drooling. A surreptitious hand to her pillow found it reassuringly dry. There were some small mercies in life. “You been up long?”
“Only about ten minutes,” said Cosette.
“Do you want breakfast?”
“Please!” said Cosette, and then frowned. “Well, so long as the kitchen doesn’t still smell like cremated marshmallows.”
The events of the previous evening came back to Éponine all at once. The recollection of her confused feelings towards Cosette seemed so ridiculous by the cold light of day that she had to stop herself from laughing: what had her hormones been doing to convince her she’d developed some kind of crush on Cosette? Sitting on the bed with Cosette now, it seemed obvious to Éponine that her feelings were purely friendly. And that she needed to start getting some non-fake action in her love life – inventing crushes on friends to make up for a lack of romantic fulfilment really was a step too far.
“Let’s go investigate the scene,” said Éponine, extracting herself from the duvet.
Cosette giggled and opened the bedroom door, swivelling to hold it open for Éponine behind her. Then she paused, her gaze caught on something attached to the other side of the door. “What’s this?” she asked.
“What’s what?” asked Éponine.
Cosette pulled a shred of paper from where it had been blu-tacked to the wood. The corners of her lips turned down in a grimace and she handed it to Éponine.
It was a hand-written note: ‘Fuck pussy-munchers’. Probably, Éponine suspected, a present from Fauntleroy to make up for the ruined-bath incident. “How thoughtful,” she said, crumpling it up.
“Don’t do that!” cried Cosette.
Éponine froze mid-crumple, trying to make sense of Cosette’s sudden attachment to the note. “What?” she asked.
“What’re you doing?”
“Um, throwing it away?” said Éponine. “Sorry, did you want to add it to your scrapbook or…?”
“No, I mean, you need to keep it as evidence.”
“Evidence?”
“That’s hate-speech, Éponine,” said Cosette. She looked like she was actually serious.
“It’s just one of my flatmates trying to be funny,” said Éponine. “What am I gonna do, report them?”
“Yes!” said Cosette, voice starting to get squeaky, “Of course you should report them, Éponine! I’m so fed up with the way those guys treat you. It’s not right! We should have done something about it ages ago; I should have done something that first time I met them – something more useful than pretending to be your girlfriend, I mean.”
Éponine made a shushing motion, very aware that they were in the corridor – the last thing she needed was anyone overhearing that the whole girlfriend thing was fake.
Cosette clearly caught her meaning, as she glanced towards the nearest door and lowered her voice to a whisper. “I mean it, Ép,” she said, “this is harassment. You need to tell your RA so they can step in and–”
“And what?” asked Éponine. “Make things worse? I can handle this perfectly fine on my own.”
“But you don’t have to,” said Cosette, reaching over to take Éponine’s hand, still clenched around the crumpled note. “Bullies work by isolating you. Telling someone else is the best weapon you have against them. Trust me, I know.”
Éponine felt a twinge as she caught the image of a younger Cosette, cowering away from playground taunts. If anyone deserved to be bullied, it was Éponine; call it a cosmic comeuppance. But, she realised, the note and the comments from her flatmates weren’t directed only at her: Cosette had stepped in to help, and because of that Cosette made up half of the target. Cosette didn’t deserve to put up with homophobia when she came over to hang out with a friend.
“Okay, fine,” said Éponine, “we’ll go talk to the RA, okay?”
*
Éponine had met her RA only once, in a hall meeting at the beginning of term. He was a Postgrad student of Business or Marketing (or something like that) called Gorbeau. During the meeting, he had laid out a series of hall rules – things like ‘no smoking inside’, ‘no kitchen parties past 2AM’, ‘no illegal substances’ – which had all been broken by week two. So Éponine didn’t have much faith in his ability to enforce tolerance in her flatmates. But she couldn’t back out now, not with Cosette watching her. Éponine pressed the buzzer next to his door.
After a while Gorbeau emerged, bleary-eyed and pyjama-clad.
“Hi,” said Éponine. “I’m Éponine” – she didn’t know if he’d remember her from the hall meeting – “from the third floor?”
“Oh, right. Anything the matter?”
“Uh, yeah, I want to complain about my flatmates, I guess,” she said, feeling her vocabulary start to dry up. This always happened to her around authority figures – even puny ones like RAs. They always gave her the the sense that she was the one in trouble.
“Noise, is it?”
“What? Oh, no, they’re, uh–”
Cosette nudged her with an elbow. “Why don’t you show him the note?” she asked.
Éponine nodded gratefully and held out the note to Gorbeau. “This was on my door this morning,” she said. “They’ve – some of them, I mean – have been making comments like that since I came out to them. I wouldn’t mind,” she hurried to add, anxious not to seem like a tattle-tale, “but it’s not nice for Cosette when she comes over. This is Cosette. She’s my girlfriend.”
Gorbeau examined the note and rubbed at the stubble on his cheeks. “Well,” he said at last, “that’s not very nice of them, is it?”
“No,” said Éponine.
Cosette snorted. “‘Not very nice’? It’s hate speech, is what it is.”
Gorbeau looked at Cosette, blinking slowly as if he couldn’t quite wrap his head around her words. “I suppose,” he said.
“Right,” said Cosette, “so what are you going to do about it?”
“Well, do you know who wrote this?” he asked, gesturing with the note.
“I can guess,” said Éponine.
“But you don’t know?”
“She just told you there are a few of them who’ve been saying things like this for weeks,” Cosette said.
“If you don’t know who it was,” Gorbeau said, “I don’t know what I can really do about it. I can’t go about accusing people of things they haven’t done, can I? Sorry,” he said, with a half-shrug.
Éponine made a noise of resignation and prepared to retreat – she had known it would be like this, but she still felt let down. She held out her hand to reclaim the note.
Cosette, however, wasn’t ready to give in. “Are you serious?” she asked.
“Pardon?”
“My girlfriend has just told you she’s a victim of homophobic bullying and that’s your response? ‘Sorry’?”
“Cosette, it’s fine,” said Éponine.
“Not, it’s not fine,” said Cosette. She turned back to Gorbeau, “You’re her RA; it is literally your job to make sure that halls are a safe environment for her.” Her voice was getting squeaky again, and her cheeks had flushed like blooming roses. “If you’re not going to stand up for her, who is?”
Gorbeau’s expression settled into something a little less amiable. “Look,” he said, “being rude to me isn’t going to help you any.”
“You think it’s rude to demand that you do your job?” snapped Cosette.
“Cosette, let’s just leave it,” said Éponine. She was normally all for standing up to assholes, but it certainly wasn’t worth Cosette getting into trouble over something as insignificant as Éponine’s flatmates. Even if righteously-angry Cosette was kind of hot…
“Look,” said Gorbeau, “I won’t be spoken to like this. I’m going to shut my door and if you don’t leave, I will call the security team out. If you have a more definite complaint, and if you can be polite, then you can come and talk to me again, but for now, as I said, there’s nothing I can do about it.” With that, he shut the door.
*
Cosette was still fuming when they met up that evening for an ABC meeting.
“Listen to this,” she said, reading from her phone as they waited at the bus stop, “nowhere in the halls Terms and Conditions does it mention any kind of policy on hate speech or discrimination or bullying. Nowhere! All these rules about noise levels and appropriate use of fridge space, but nothing about something as important as protecting the most vulnerable students!”
Éponine stooped to rest her chin on Cosette’s shoulder, breathing in the comforting smell of her perfume. “Stop stressing over it,” she said. “You don’t need to defend my honour, babe.”
“I can feel you talking when you do that,” laughed Cosette. “It’s weird. Anyway, it’s not about you–”
“Oh, charming.”
“I mean it’s not just about you. Gorbeau’s an absolute joke. What if it wasn’t you, and it was someone less tough? The whole point of people in authority positions is that they’re supposed to look out for the vulnerable.”
“I don’t think an authority figure has ever looked out for me in my life,” said Éponine.
“Yes, but that’s not how it should be. They should–”
She broke off as she noticed Courfeyrac, Marius, and Jehan approaching at a trot.
“We haven’t missed the bus?” puffed Marius, his face the colour of beetroot. “Phew!”
“Someone,” wheezed Jehan, gesturing at Courfeyrac, “had to change his outfit three times before–”
“I wasn’t the one ironing creases into my jeans!” said Courfeyrac, cutting them off.
A quick scan of the three pairs of legs before Éponine revealed that it was Marius who was responsible for this heinous crime. The creases were immaculate, which made it worse. Luckily for him, the bus pulled up before she had a chance to start mocking.
*
All the people from the original meeting – well, all the ones who hadn’t been scared away in the first ten minutes – were back again, Éponine was pleased to find; they were a fun crowd to be around. Once the initial chatter was done with, Enjolras took charge.
“Welcome back, everyone,” ae said with a smile. From the outside, ae seemed so stern that the warmth of aer smile surprised Éponine every time. “It’s great to see you all back again for our first campaign meeting. For you new members, I’ll just explain that we normally use the first meeting of term to vote on a specific campaign area and strategy for the rest of the term. Obviously, we used the first meeting this time for introductions, so we’re a little behind schedule right now.
“How it works is that each member can put forward one idea for this term’s goal, and then we’ll take a show-of-hands votes to decide which to pursue. We’ve found it’s more effective to concentrate our efforts on one thing at a time than to split our resources over several fronts. So, have a think about whether there are any LBGT-specific issues you want to address, and in the meantime I’ll hand over to Combeferre to recap what we did last year.”
Unlike Enjolras, Combeferre didn’t bother to stand up – unlike Enjolras, he was tall enough not to need to.
“Ah, the fun job!” said Combeferre. “So, what did we achieve last year? Well, in first term we started a weekly afterschool programme in two local secondaries, offering resources, support, and an LGBT library service. Which is still on-going, by the way, so if any newbies want to get involved then come to talk to me about it.
“In second term we organised a speaker series, which was pretty successful. We had four events, and sold something close to two hundred tickets between them – all proceeds going to a local LGBT charity, of course.
“And then in third term – this is my favourite one, to be honest – we pressured the SU to make its single-stalled toilets gender neutral. They made the change over the summer – I don’t know whether you’ve seen them?”
“I love it!” called out Bahorel.
Combeferre gave a thumbs-up in response. “So with those victories to inspire you, does anyone have any of their own suggestions? Newbies, the floor is open to you, too, please don’t be shy!”
A handful of ideas were put forwards – Courfeyrac wanted to put on a fashion show fundraiser; Joly had an idea about petitioning the local health centres to give out free condoms; Grantaire wanted to go to the pub once the meeting was over, which Enjolras said wasn’t a valid campaign strategy, but was added to the meeting minutes nevertheless.
“Ép, what about your thing?” said Cosette.
“What thing?” asked Éponine.
Combeferre caught their conversation from across the room. “Did you have a suggestion?” he asked, eyes darting between Éponine and Cosette.
“Yes, actually,” said Cosette. “Something that happened this morning made me realise the halls Terms and Conditions don’t offer any kind of protection against discrimination…” She proceeded to give a condensed explanation of the morning to the group, leaving out certain things like Éponine’s fake relationship, and – at least in Éponine’s opinion – exaggerating Éponine’s situation to make her look far more hard-done-by. She caught some pitying looks from a few ABC members and had to grit her teeth.
When it came to the vote, Cosette’s proposal won by a wide majority.
“Congratulations, everyone,” announced Enjolras, “we have our first campaign issue of the year! Now, we’re going to need a pair of volunteers to be in charge of coordinating it.” Ae turned to Cosette and Éponine. “I don’t suppose you two want to have a go?”
Cosette glanced at Éponine. Do you want to?
Éponine chewed at her lip, considering it. Of course she wanted to help, and it was always good to have an excuse to spend more time with her new bestie, but was she up to the challenge of coordinating a term-long campaign?
“Of course, all the rest of us will be here to support you and guide you the whole way,” Combeferre added.
Éponine met Cosette’s eyes. Here was a girl who had been bullied throughout childhood, willing to stand up for her, Éponine, one of the kids who had treated her so badly; willing to spend her free time working with Éponine to help protect her. Éponine owed it to her to agree. She nodded, feeling a spreading warmth in her chest that told her that – oh no – she did have a crush after all.