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The new Ken doll is kind of an asshole.
The second Cosette runs downstairs, her father calling her for dinner, the first words out of his mouth when everyone else starts swarming around to greet him are “I can't believe I have to be owned by a child.”
“You want to be a collector's item?” Jehan asks, utterly puzzled, shaking out his hair, which Cosette was carefully brushing while she made up stories for the new Ken doll. She always likes to have a few stories ready before she properly plays with them.
“I don't want to be owned,” says the Ken doll, with great disdain.
Grantaire, propped up on a few Legos so he can stand properly, snorts. “You're not very long out of the box, are you? Did you just want to live in a toy store forever, never be played with at all? Cosette loves us.”
Ken crosses his arms. “And who are you? She obviously wasn't very careful with you.”
“Cosette's first toy. She wasn't my first owner, though. Third, actually. She got me off a ten-cent table at a yard sale, Ken. You're wanted by your first owner, that means a lot.”
Ken scowls. It looks very weird on his plastic face. “I prefer to be called Enjolras. I suppose you still go by Joe?”
“Grantaire.” Because his second owner had scrawled an R for Robbie on his remaining foot, and Cosette called him Big R and kept him, clung to him even when her father offered to go to a toy store and get her a few other new toys as well. “Cosette's good at knowing what toys want to be called. She listens to us. You probably won't be Ken long.”
Enjolras doesn't seem impressed, just turns to the rest of the toys and lets them introduce themselves to him. If he notices that he stands out a little, all shiny-new next to most of them, who have seen a little wear and an owner or two before Cosette, at least he has the manners not to mention it again. He hits it off well with Combeferre, who sleeps with Cosette in her bed every night because Cosette's mother sewed him for her before she had to go, and Grantaire figures that Combeferre, or all of them, will tell Enjolras that his life now will be much better than in the toy store.
*
Cosette, as it turns out, thinks that Grantaire and Enjolras ought to be friends.
“And then he helps you walk away from the bad guy,” Cosette says confidingly to Grantaire, moving his arm until it can hook awkwardly over Enjolras's shoulder. Bossuet, playing the part of the bad guy mostly because his eyebrows were set oddly in the factory and make him look grumpy, gives Grantaire a sympathetic grimace. “Because you rescued him before so he can rescue you now. And Ken—no, your name isn't Ken.” She frowns down at them. “I'll think of a better name for you. If you're going to rescue my Grantaire you aren't going to be named Ken.”
Grantaire continues moving along where she pushes them, Enjolras absolutely radiating disapproval next to him.
“You got away from the bad guy,” Cosette continues, and then pauses, frowning, considering what comes next. Grantaire is used to this part, so he just keeps leaning and waiting for the next part of the story. “You got away from the bad guy, but his sister is mad!” She reaches out and seizes Floréal, who usually doesn't have to be a villain and is startled when she's grabbed. “Don't worry,” Cosette whispers, “you're not really evil. You're just sad about your brother.”
By the time Cosette is called down for dinner and puts them away carefully in her toy chest, Grantaire and Enjolras have defeated a vast array of villains, including a dragon made out of a feather boa, and in Cosette's mind, anyway, they're the best of friends.
The second the lid on the toy chest is closed, Enjolras goes over to talk to Courfeyrac, and Grantaire sighs and leans on Joly to tell him about all their adventures.
*
“I don't know why you mind being played with and loved,” Grantaire hears Courfeyrac telling Enjolras after Cosette is asleep one night. “Cosette adores you. She got your name right today! I think it will stick.”
“What about the toys who aren't as lucky? You can't say Grantaire was lucky to have been bought. We should have a choice in it—why can't they know that we have minds of our own?”
“Sometimes I think Cosette does,” says Courfeyrac. “That's enough for me.”
Grantaire probably knows better than most, having spent a few days as Cosette's only toy, while they were traveling, before Cosette's father gave her Combeferre to sleep with and confide in. She stared at him for a few minutes, sitting there in the backseat, strapped into a carseat, and said “I know you can hear me,” and he's suspected she's guessed since then that her toys, everyone's toys, are more than they appear. It's why she takes such care with their names when her father asks why she doesn't pick simpler ones.
He could tell Enjolras that, but Enjolras doesn't speak to Grantaire if he can help it, and if he's determined to think the worst of Cosette, Grantaire won't argue with him.
*
“And Enjolras, you fall down the lip of the volcano, but Grantaire catches you!” Grantaire finds himself on his stomach, arms clutched awkwardly around Enjolras's leg. He doesn't know much about volcanoes, but he's pretty sure they would both be doomed. His first child liked natural disasters. “You know you still need to find the enchanted jewel, so you pull him up.”
They find the enchanted jewel and Cosette's father knocks on the door just as they're about to go use it to heal Floréal's pet parrot to take her out for ice cream. Cosette is normally careful to put them away, but today she leaves them scattered on her bed, and Grantaire really hates hopping down from the bed himself and then having to climb back up again before she gets back. He settles on her pillow instead, next to Combeferre, who rarely leaves his appointed place on the bed during the day.
Enjolras, to his surprise, doesn't hop down immediately and start complaining to someone about having to spend his days at someone else's whims. Instead, he comes up the bed to Grantaire and Combeferre.
“Are you okay?” he asks, to Grantaire's surprise. “You almost fell off the bed earlier.”
“Well, so did you, what with the volcano,” Grantaire points out, and then sighs when Enjolras keeps frowning. “She caught me, and I'm made of plastic anyway, you know? Doesn't hurt much, and she always apologizes afterwards. She would have just had you rescue me if I needed rescuing.”
“She does that a lot. Have us rescue each other, I mean.”
“She said everyone deserves rescuing to me once,” Combeferre says, looking between the two of them. “She does it with all of us. She's a good child. Fantine talked to me about her after I was finished, when she was waiting to get her. I'm glad she has us.”
Enjolras looks thoughtful, and Grantaire expects him to wander off, but he stays on the pillow with them until they hear Cosette's footsteps on the stair and scramble back into place.
*
Cosette takes Enjolras to school with her a few weeks in, apologizing to the rest of them in the morning and saying there's a girl at school who has a Barbie who matches Enjolras's line and wants them to play. She wrinkles her nose at that when she says it. “I don't know, I think if Enjolras wanted to play with Barbies he would spend more time with Floréal.”
They're off after that, leaving Grantaire to spend the day in the toy box talking to Joly and Bossuet about how to steal some paper and pens so they can write down Cosette's stories (Grantaire is quite sure she'll want them someday, to pass on to other children). It's an enjoyable day, a usual one, and he wonders a few times how Enjolras is dealing with the nightmare that is school, a hundred times worse than the toy store, but mostly he occupies himself well enough until Cosette comes home.
When she opens the lid of the toy box, she's sniffling, eyes red, and Grantaire is instantly worried. Sure enough, when she takes him out, as well as Bahorel and Joly, he knows something happened. Enjolras is on the bed, wearing one of Floréal's skirts pinned shut, a deep scratch in the plastic of his leg and a few pockmarks of the kind Grantaire associates from being ground into the gravel in his side. “I knew I should have brought you along just in case,” she tells Grantaire. “You sit here and keep him company while Doctor Joly makes sure he's okay.”
Grantaire sits there next to Enjolras, who looks a little shocked at his first injury, while Cosette tells Joly about Claquesous at school taking Enjolras and dropping him off the top of the tallest slide she isn't old enough to be allowed on yet and stealing his pants while her father talks in a low rumble to someone on the phone down below. Bahorel, as he always does when Cosette asks, guards the perimeter, sometimes being wound up so he can march impressively along the edge of the bedspread.
When Cosette goes away again, called down by her father, she wraps Enjolras up in a washcloth and puts them all carefully back in the toybox, admonishing them all to look after him and make sure he's okay. “School can be rough,” Grantaire says, with sympathy. He's been with all three of his owners, and it was best with Cosette, but even she got teased for being a girl with a toy soldier.
“She came for me right away, though,” says Enjolras with grudging respect. “She asked how he would like it if someone dropped him off the slide. In the toy store, they never said that the children would defend us like that. I knew some of the returned toys.”
“That's what happens when they love you,” says Grantaire, and Enjolras looks thoughtful the whole time he's telling the others about his day at school, and the little girl who only seemed interested in having him propose to her Barbie, and the Barbie who took it far too seriously judging by her comments during penmanship time.
Grantaire is sure to give Cosette his all when she takes them out to play again the next time, and doesn't mind when this time he spends the whole afternoon rescuing Enjolras from various heights with the help of his friends.
*
Cosette leaves Grantaire and Enjolras downstairs one night, playing with them on the living room rug until she falls asleep and her father carries her upstairs. Her father, when he comes back down, laughs, and sets them sitting up, drinking tea at Cosette's little tea table, where she usually only invites the soft toys who aren't dwarfed by the chairs. “Thank you both,” he tells them, and goes off to his bedroom to do whatever it is he does in the evenings.
“It's probably not worth me trying to make it up the stairs,” says Grantaire when they're alone. “You can go up if you'd rather spend the night in the toybox and then come back before he wakes.”
Enjolras shakes his head. “No, I'll stay here with you. Tell me about how Cosette found you.”
Grantaire tells the story, the detailed version he only brings out for new toys that he's very sure are going to be his friends, and then listens to Enjolras tell the story of her insisting stubbornly that she wanted a Ken who looked like her father and then getting the one farthest back on the shelf instead of the one in front.
“Are you glad she chose you?” Grantaire asks when he finishes.
“You know,” says Enjolras, “I think I am.”
*
(Epilogue)
“They're up here.”
Grantaire knows that voice, even with extra years on it, and he elbows Enjolras just as the attic door creaks open, both of them falling into unfamiliar stillness, everyone else going silent and still around them as well.
“There are some great things up here,” says an unfamiliar man's voice. “A lot to explore.”
“Some of my mother's things are still up here to sort through,” says Cosette. “But this is the best thing, the highlight.” She opens the lid of the toybox, and there's her smiling face, looking down at them. It's been a year since the last time she checked on them, maybe a little more. After a second, she takes Grantaire and Enjolras carefully out of the box, giving a fond smile down at the rest of them. “Come here, Marius, I want you to meet the original Grantaire and Enjolras.”
The unfamiliar man comes to stand over them, smiling at Cosette and then at them. “Hello, you two. It's a pleasure and an honor. I met Cosette because of the two of you, you should know that, she would never have written those stories without you.”
Cosette turns to look over her shoulder at him, beaming, and Grantaire is so glad it hurts a little that she found someone who understands her like her father did, who understands them as well. “I wouldn't have. And I was thinking … another year or so, and maybe there'd be someone who would want to play with them again?”
Marius kisses her, and Grantaire makes sure he's not paying attention, noticing Enjolras trying to look away as well. There are some things that should be private, which is a reason that sometimes he and Enjolras go to stay in a box of linens at night. “You can tell all sorts of new stories,” says Marius when they pull apart, and Grantaire likes him already. “Did you want to go through those boxes of your mother's too? I'll give you a minute.”
Cosette nods, and a few seconds later Marius is on the other side of the attic, pulling down the boxes labeled “FANTINE.” She stays there in silence for a minute, looking at Grantaire and Enjolras, teary-eyed but smiling. “Thank you both,” she finally whispers, and gives them both a little kiss before laying them gently back in the toybox and closing the lid.