Work Text:
Paris always feels the most honest in the rain.
It’s always a city of blurred lights, of cigarette smoke humming, and of strange lives that crash around Cosette’s own like copper wire. Stepping along the pavement, she can feel the rain slipping over her eyelashes and running down the sides of her nose. The buildings flicker warily.
Honesty isn’t always kind, she knows.
Now is not the time to run home. Of course, she has plenty of university work to be doing, but she can’t feel that it’s a priority with this feeling inside her right now. She’s hovering in the space next to sleep, and she wants to chase that, to hold on as long as she can to that serenity. Cosette is kind by her own design, but that doesn’t mean she never feels hopeless. The cuffs of her cardigan are soddenwhere she presses them against her cheek. She wants to breathe the water into herself, cleanse herself inside out.
She wants the rain to devour her, but the sky must be too merciful for that right now. The trees on the other side of the road gasp in humidity above her, and the sky could be molten glass beyond that. Everything rewrites itself into bleak greyness. She’s not sure if she loves or hates it.
The park shimmers itself down when she steps in. It’s empty, and the oak trees are a pearlescent green in this weather. The winds are changing; a few leaves run themselves down into the earth beneath.
Cosette fells like she’s caught it in the middle of some unreality, and it’s hidden itself away again. Maybe she’s not magical or imaginative enough. She’s sure she used to be.
Some curse in the clouds howls open. What was a steady fire-weeping of rain becomes tempestuous, and it lights new energy in her muscles. Cosette finds herself running, heels now in hand, through the grass which twirls around her ankles, through the trees. Hot breath. Footsteps suddenly loud as chasms.
There, the tallest tree in the park. She grabs her phone, then leaves her handbag, shoes and jacket, and strips off her socks before climbing.
Her feet remember this. Childhood has crystallised this longing for freedom into her very bones. Up and further, into the heart of the sky. Her feet catch and bruise on splinters that could be iron, but she climbs unsheltered from the rain and uncaring of it. Higher!
“Hey! The fuck?” a voice drips from the spine of the tree, and Cosette freezes.
Looking up, nestled in the bough to her right is one of the most incredible women she’s ever seen, she’s sure. Cosette falters, thinks she can feel her pulse in her throat, and grabs at the feathering bark of the tree trunk.
“I’m sorry,” she responds, voice turned hoarse. “It started raining and I panicked.”
The stranger frowns, eyes smudged charcoal like a rockstar. That’s the only makeup she’s wearing, and she looks gorgeous. Her hair’s in black velvet dreadlocks, tied up so they fall around her cheeks. “You panicked by climbing a tree?”
Cosette tries to smile, but her lungs seem so small and the air seems so thick. “Yes, I suppose.”
“I’m Éponine,” she laughs, and the laughter is soft with rain-voice, “I’m a woman, in case you were wondering. You doing okay, ma petite fem?”
Cosette’s blushing, she thinks, but she smooths the jagged corners of her lips and pulls herself up onto the bough next to Éponine. “Cosette, and a woman too.”
Éponine smiles in a way that reminds Cosette a little of heartbreak. It seems rather appropriate, in this weather, though she doesn’t seem fazed by her own melancholy. Her cheek bones are fine and sharp, but her lips look fruit-soft and sweet. Her face reminds Cosette of the carvings she’s seen visiting ancient temples: those ancient faces, serene and powerful and somehow more real than most of the people she meets.
“I’m okay, by the way,” Cosette runs the words over her lips as gently as possible, “since you asked.”
Éponine nods, then turns her face upwards to take in all the vast rainstorm. “I did. Not that I believe you, though.” The world splits itself apart around them, and something bitter bites into the wind. Cosette ignores it, and takes Éponine’s hand as slowly as she dares. Her fingers curl into moon-crescents in hers.
“What brings you here?” Cosette asks, gulping down timidity and panic at once. “I mean, do you come here often?”
Éponine considers for a moment, and rolls the thought around in her mouth. Cosette’s staring at the clenching of her jaw, and doesn’t try to hide it. There’s a hint of glitter near her hairline, and the echo of neon lights around her hands. She wonders where this urban nymph goes the rest of the time, who she is.
“I wanted to move, I guess. Those lot – down there, in the city – they get all caught up on everything. I couldn’t move back, so,” she answers, fragmented, and traces the odd buttons on her waistcoat. When she leans back over the branches, she kicks her boots up, mud threaded around her ankles.
“We keep going forwards.”
Around them, the sky fractures into emerald and shadow. The trees hum a work song above their heads. When Cosette, finally leaves, sodden through and with dreams written all over her skin and something that must be desire gaping in her bones, she’s smiling. There’s a number written on her arm in green ink, from the self-titled Butch Queen of the Trees.
She laughs, turns around, and opens her arms wide enough to embrace the whole vast sky.