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Every once in a while, Marius and Cosette spend entire days in bed. They press their bodies close together and stare up at the ceiling and, occasionally, they stare at each other.
Cosette feels like she knows Marius better than she knows herself, and like Marius knows her better than he knows himself, and once that would have seemed romantic but it’s not. They are strangers to themselves and open books to each other, and in the end they really don’t know how to be apart because they don’t know how they’re supposed to act when they’re one without the other. They don’t know how to be themselves because they’re not their own people anymore, they’re each other’s.
Their friends say they’re cute.
Their friends say they’re perfect.
Their friends marvel at the way that they love each other because they think it’s something sweet and strong and comfortable. They don’t know the truth, they don’t know that their love is something desperate and sharp and painful. Cosette's love for Marius is everything and it's too big for her body and it keeps trying to burst out and tear her apart. She always thought that it would be wonderful to find somebody she couldn’t live without, but instead it just terrifies her because she knows that if she loses him she'll be nothing, she'll waste away.
“I don’t know how to breathe anymore,” Marius says one day. He says it urgently, earnestly. “I mean, I don’t know how to breathe when I’m alone.”
Cosette just nods because she understands, she understands perfectly. She can’t feel her own emotions, but she can feel his so she understands.
They can’t breathe without each other because he has her lungs and she has his.
At Amis meetings they hold hands and they smile fondly at each other and Courfeyrac laughs and says they’re sickeningly adorable.
Nobody notices the way that their smiles flicker into something troubled for just a second when he says that, because they’re not sickeningly adorable, they’re just sickening.
Or maybe they’re just sick.
One day, Marius looks at himself in the mirror and gets distressed, tears at his hair and scratches at his skin, because he doesn’t recognize himself, he’s ugly and his hair is greasy and his face is a stranger's, and Cosette leads him to the couch and sits him down and gives him some water and he says, “At least I recognize you. You’re always real.”
Cosette smiles like he just said something sweet and runs her hand through his hair. “I love you,” she says.
“I love you too,” he says back automatically, staring into space, staring at something she can’t see.
When Cosette passes by the mirror she averts her eyes.
Cosette cries in her sleep and when she wakes up, Marius is holding her. She pushes him away because she can’t stand anyone’s hands on her, not now, and she turns her back to him and stops crying but she shakes and shakes hard.
Eponine is jealous of Cosette because Eponine has a crush on Marius. Cosette knows. Everybody knows, really, except for Marius, and Cosette protects him from ever finding out because she knows he’ll never be able to love Eponine back and he’ll just feel guilty and he’ll ask her over and over again if he’s a bad person and never believe her when she says of course not, honey, of course not, even when she starts to cry.
Actually, when she starts to cry, he’ll say triumphantly, “I am bad, I am, see?” and she’ll want to scream because he is not the bad person in this relationship. He is something pure and shining and he doesn’t know, he thinks that she’s the pure and shining thing and he refuses to understand that he’s looking at it the wrong way, that he is the one who is right. She killed her mother because she could not take care of herself and never knew her enough to miss her and her papa’s lost so much weight because of her and he could never trust her and she cries and cries and feels a guilty kind of pride when people comfort her because they’re noticing her and she spent so much time without anyone paying attention to her.
She craves attention, she wants it more than anything in the world. She wants people to look at her and think she’s beautiful and good and that she deserves a boy like Marius even though if they knew how her mind worked they would be horrified. She feels a strange triumph when they think she is this ladylike, perfect creature, too good for this sinful Earth, but she wishes that Marius knew how awful she was so that he would suffer less because he’s always suffering and she hates it, she ought to be able to suffer for the both of them.
She spent so many years dirty and it never washed off. She tries to wash it off all the time, but it doesn’t work, the water scalds her skin and turns it painfully pink and some of it scrapes off from the bath brush and it doesn’t work, the only thing that escapes down the drain is water and sometimes just a hint of blood.
Marius’s skin is very clean, and she is relieved when she looks at it because at least he is not tainted like her, he doesn’t pretend to not drink alcohol and then lock himself in the bathroom and relish the taste of the vodka under the sink that’s hidden behind the cleaning supplies, and he doesn’t have a smoking habit that he pretends he’s never had, and he doesn’t fake his laughter to make it sound bell-sweet, not that he laughs very much anymore.
One day Cosette feels like all the oxygen in the world has been replaced with cotton, and she smashes every plate in the apartment because the sound of shattering pierces the heaviness that she’s trying to breathe in, and she starts sobbing when Marius comes in and he cries too because he can’t stand seeing her cry, and besides, besides, he cries all the time anyway, lately he cries over anything.
Cosette starts laughing wildly through her tears, and it’s her real laughter, which is high and piercing and free, and she says, “We’re such a mess, fuck, we’re such a mess.”
And Marius has started laughing too, but it’s more like hyperventilating, and he says, “Fuck, we are,” and neither of them swear when they’re around their friends because, oh, they’re too sweet for that, but they can’t hide anything from each other, to each other all of their jagged and dangerous parts are laid bare.
They have x-ray vision when it comes to each other, and they’re twenty two and engaged and next year they’re going to be married and Cosette can’t really see the rest of their lives stretching past the next five years. They are going to die together and Cosette bets it's going to happen soon and they're going to be buried next to each other and maybe in Heaven they’ll be able to love the way that everyone around them thinks they do, maybe they’ll be able to love gently.
Maybe they won’t move around like ghosts and grip each other so tightly they bruise, maybe they won’t watch television with empty eyes and be unable to talk about the show after because they weren’t paying attention, maybe they won’t eat dinner together and ignore how they’re barely eating anything at all and how they spend three weeks trying to finish the leftovers for one meal.
Maybe they’ll be able to be apart for a while without panicking, without falling apart.
These are the years of their youth, these are the glory years, Marius and Cosette have their shit together and their biggest secret is that they absolutely don’t.
They’ve clasped hands so tightly that they can’t let go anymore, they've fused together and it would kill them to detach.
But they love each other, they can’t live without each other, they can’t ever stop thinking about each other, and their devotion is burning and absolute.
They really are the perfect couple.