Chapter Text
Monday 26th April - 13:58
The doctors kept saying that she had to be patient. A year was not that long a time. According to them, many people waited years to conceive, but Cosette’s patience was wearing thin and not only for waiting for those two little lines on a pregnancy test.
She could tell that the doctors wanted a family history from her and, though they’d given up asking, there was one doctor in particular who kept saying things like “Well, with the amount of background information we have…” and “We’re working with minimal information” as though Cosette wouldn’t also love to know what the hell was going on with her body. Even when they had finally agreed to start a fertility plan with her, her mind was still stuck on the lack of history.
Her mother was a story in her life that became more and more warped with every telling. She was a deeply sad woman who had no choice but to let go of her greatest joy to give her daughter a better shot. She was a desperate teen who’d left her baby with the first family who seemed willing to take her, leaving her with nothing but a name that wasn’t legally hers and the clothes she was wearing. She was an uncaring lech who had a nasty habit of running away from her problems and not looking back. She was a victim of a lot in life not meant for her. She made mistakes and had no idea how to face up to them.
On any given day, her mother could have been everything wrong with society or a poster girl for tragedy.
The Thénardiers had thrown the phrase “children are a reflection of their parents” at her a lot when she lived with them. She grew up desperate to not become a woman she had never met, a woman whose real personality was a mystery to her.
Hell, she only knew three things for sure about her mother: that her name was Fantine, that she had been arrested once, and that she had left her with a family who taught her how to clean up their messes and wait on them before it even occurred to them that they might teach her how to read.
Before their malicious words had stuck, Cosette had dreamt that her mother would appear, a vision who looked just like her who had all of the answers she needed, ready to whisk her away from her horrible foster home and take her to a magical castle on the coast away from everything and everyone.
Yeah, that didn’t happen.
It didn’t take her long to accept that her childhood would never be the stuff of fairytales, that it would be far from idyllic on a good day and, once she did, her daydreams quickly faded.
Then everything changed. Her papa appeared like the saviour she had wished her mother to be, taking her to her first-ever home and bringing her anything she could possibly ask for. Not her biological father, to be clear. God, no. Her papa. He claimed to have known her mother, if only briefly, and to have promised her that Cosette would be taken care of.
He was kind beyond measure, never asking for anything in return, generous, warm, forgiving to all ends. The ache that had lived in her chest throughout her life that accompanied her earliest memories of a sad smile and short, dark hair began to, not dissipate, but fade. Her papa was all she needed, and, if children are a reflection of their parents, Cosette was determined that Jean Valjean was her one and only parent.
Okay, to be entirely fair, she had been about eight years old at that time, three entire years before her stepfather would appear in their lives. She loved her stepfather, he wasn’t quite as warm as her father, but he cared so deeply for them that she decided she wouldn’t mind being at least a little like him.
Having let go of her mother some time ago, it caught Cosette off guard to be thinking of her so much all of a sudden.
What started as an annoying curiosity into her genetics quickly became a desperation to know that stopped just short of obsession.
It had occurred to her to ask her father for help tracking down her biological mother more than once. He had been a police inspector for many years and she knew for a fact that he had met her bio mother once.
More important than that, though, she just couldn’t bear the chance that she might make her papa believe that he had failed her as a parent in any way. His falling face, taut with heartbreak, had haunted her recent dreams and, no, just no, she couldn’t risk that. Her father, on the other hand, one inquiring mind to another, he would appreciate her need to know, to understand. He had to.
One day, having found herself with the afternoon off and desperate not to think of the rough morning that she’d had at work, Cosette finally decided to ask. It was her father’s day off, too, so he would have the house to himself, probably baking and definitely talking to the cat as though she would respond.
The metro ride to her parents’ house was the longest one she routinely did. Usually, this allowed her to get stuck into a book or answer a few emails. Now, though, her phone was almost dead and she had no book on her and her mind was determined to make her dwell on her long, long morning.
Visits were a normal part of social work, you’d be a fool to not at least suspect that going in, but sometimes they really took their toll. Cosette had been handling a case for several months now, a young boy of ten had been taken into care by the Aide Sociale à l’Enfance just before his tenth birthday when his teachers at school called them. Robin was a wonderful kid who deserved so much better than what he’d been given, as were so many of the children whose cases she handled. This morning, though, she’d been called to a police station in the wee hours of the morning - 04:32, if you must know - after an incident involving his biological parents trying to get into contact with him via sending the father’s brother to cause a scene outside the foster family’s home.
God only knows how they’d got their hands on the address. Once Robin was settled and catching up on his missed sleep in a bunk at the station, however, it was quickly revealed that one of the foster parents had, without the other’s knowledge, contacted Robin’s biological parents and given them their address.
Quite understandably, she thought, Cosette had reacted less than serenely. Her manager, though she hadn’t blamed her for the way she had chewed out the foster parent, had insisted that she finish her paperwork and head home before lunch.
Her boss had also instructed her to get herself something comforting to eat, something warm, she’d said with a stern look in her eye that didn’t quite match the motherly words. Usually, Cosette would do so without question; it truly was good advice. Today, though, she was heading down into the nearest metro station before it even occurred to her to do something else.
Still Monday - 14:33
It took around half an hour to get out of the city centre to the closest stop to her parents’ house. There had been an absentminded worry somewhere in her sternum that she would get there and the time it took would steal her confidence and her drive. The less logical parts of her mind worried that she might get so bogged down with the morning’s events that, when the time came to depart the train, she just wouldn’t move.
In reality, however, the weight of her mind had quite the opposite effect. She shot out of the nearly-empty metro, the only person at her stop to move with any sort of haste, and was out in the fresh air as fast as her feet could carry her. Perhaps it was also the hope somewhere in her mind that suggested that if she walked fast enough she could get away from the worry sitting on her shoulders for little Robin.
Whatever the case, it was only when she was out in the fresh air that she found she could breathe once again.
She loved this place. Every corner revealed a memory from her childhood, from the first time her papa brought her here and told her this was their home, to her teen years spent shuttling between here and the city. The memories slung her forwards, through layer after layer of narrow streets until she rounded the final corner and her childhood home, covered in Virginia creeper in greens and golds and reds around the bright yellow front door and windows, appeared.
Even after making her home in the city with Marius and finding her place there, coming here still felt like an exhalation. After many years, the yellow paint that Cosette had picked out herself when she was around nine years old was beginning to flake and peel away. It was still so bright, though. It still put a smile on her face.
As she’d predicted, her father was in the kitchen, he greeted her happily but his hands were far too messy from kneading some dough to hug her, he explained. Fern, their one-eyed, incredibly grumpy cat, watched her as she greeted her father, waiting rather impatiently for affection to wash over her.
“So,” he said, still focussing on his dough. “What brings you here in the middle of the workweek?”
“I had an early start so I’m off for the afternoon.” She took a small pause to gather her nerve. “I wanted to ask you something actually,” there we go, so nearly there! “But it can wait until we’ve eaten.” And she chickened out. Great.
On her father’s part, his eyebrows rose for a second and, if she wasn’t mistaken, his eyes flitted very, very briefly down to her stomach, as if she was about to suddenly announce that she’s pregnant over chicken sandwiches at two o’clock on a Monday when her papa wasn’t even there. And, even if that were the case, what advice would she be asking her father? A man whom she doubted had ever even held a baby, let alone been present and invested in its gestation.
Lunch was a mostly silent affair. Not uncomfortable in the slightest, mind you, but silent in the way that most of her time spent with her father was. He was not a chatty man, to say the least, but he happily accommodated when other people wanted to talk, bringing up recent affairs and international news and how much he hates the current government. However, this was far from his natural disposition. His preferred state was mutual silence and contentment, one that Cosette was more than happy to accommodate while her mind whirred from thought to thought to worry to calamity in every single scenario she thought up in which she asked her father about her bio-mother.
If she caught him off-guard whilst not perfectly content, he’d become defensive and she’d get absolutely nowhere and he’d get upset. If she pretended this was something that had just occurred to her to ask about, he’d call bullshit immediately and no one would get upset but she’d still get nowhere. If she led him into the subject and he wasn’t 100% okay with it, he might shut the conversation down before she could even make her case and then she’d argue and he’d get defensive and she’d get nowhere and he’d get upset. And he’d probably call her papa.
She couldn’t be too blunt, couldn’t just ask “Where’s my bio-mother?” even in her head it sounded like an accusation. She couldn’t be too subtle, though, either, otherwise he’d be able to play ignorance and sidestep any indirect questions. And she had to pick her moment perfectly. No pressure, then.
Time moved on as they cleaned up from their meal and chatted in brief snippets. He asked about work in a helpfully vague way and she answered in a way that was just as vague and neither of them minded particularly, being as familiar with privacy laws as they both were. She asked about the vegetable patch in the garden and this started him on a five-minute-long vitriolic ramble about parsnips that she only got about two-thirds of and prompted her to make a mental note to ask Jehan about later.
After yet more time had passed - though, to be fair, just a little more than ten minutes later - they were back in the kitchen, her father was hunched over his loaf (she still wasn’t entirely sure what it was) with a piping bag in hand, humming La Donna è Mobile quietly under his breath.
Fuck it.
She took a steadying breath. “Dad?” His humming stopped as he acknowledged her with an absentminded ‘yes?’, the majority of his concentration still, blessedly, mostly on the icing. “You know how you met my biological mother once?” If she hadn’t been keeping a close eye on his body language, she might’ve missed the way his shoulders tensed and his grip tightened minutely on the piping bag.
He took a steadying breath and, terrifyingly, put down the piping bag to stand up straight and look at her head-on. Great. In what might’ve been an attempt to look casual, he leant back slightly against the kitchen counter, hands clasped awkwardly in front of him as though he suddenly had no idea what to do with them. He swallowed, his throat bobbing, and, when he spoke, his voice was strained, not quite hoarse but definitely on its way there. “How do you know that?”
Cosette was suddenly very grateful for the mug of tea she was holding; it gave her something to look at. “I overheard you and papa talking about it when I was like ten,” she said. Then, trying for a joke of sorts, “You were not being as quiet as you think you were.”
A heavy silence descended onto the kitchen. For the first time in a very long time, she found herself not knowing where she stood with her father. Most people, including many of the people closest to her, found her father hard to read; he could be, at times, rather stony-faced. Musichetta had joked once that, if he was ever inclined to join their occasional poker nights, he would make a killing. But Cosette had always thought she could read him better than anyone, even her papa. It had always been easy for her to find the subtle nuances of his face that flitted between emotions, to her the intensity of emotion that lay below the surface was clear and uncomplicated. He was a simple man with a tell just like everyone else. Now, though, she was at a loss. He ground his teeth - usually a sign of anger or frustration - but his eyebrows were furrowed in a way that implied something more akin to confusion or worry. His left eye twitched very slightly and that was usually a surefire way to tell that he was overwhelmed, except she could practically see the cogs turning in his mind as he solved a problem.
A minute passed. Logically it had to have been just a minute, but, if it was, it went on for a fucking eternity and Cosette was beginning to seriously consider the merits of making a break for it out of the window like she was fifteen again.
“Yes,” he said after the longest pause in the history of time, sounding like he was about to say something conspiratorial and dangerous. “Yes, I met your mother once. I, um,” he cleared his throat and reached for a half-empty glass of water that Fern had been eyeing up with a mischievous glare. He took a drink. Seconds ticked by as he stalled and Cosette was suddenly reeling at the possibilities that the beginning of that sentence could lead to. Finally, he put the glass back down. “Yes, she was arrested at a protest that had turned violent in, I think it was 2007?” He looked genuinely thoughtful, as though the year mattered in the slightest.
“You arrested her?” Her voice was unmissably hoarse.
Her father, bless him, didn’t comment on it. “She was…” he sighed and scrubbed a hand over his face. When he spoke again, his words were measured and clearly carefully chosen. “There was a brawl at a protest and, for the most part, it was hard to tell who was actively participated and who was just caught in the crossfire, so to speak. But she was definitely leaning more to the side of participation.”
Her throat was suddenly tighter than she would’ve liked. The image presented was all too familiar, especially in this day and age. And even though she could count on one hand the number of times she’d personally been caught in a protest turned violent, she couldn’t help but be struck dumb, her throat so dry that the only thing she could manage to rasp was a quiet “Right.”
She must’ve sounded suitably wrecked that her father grimaced at her tone and moved over to sit at the table next to her, turning his chair so that they faced each other head-on. He looked so very concerned. Honestly, though, she was mostly worried at what side she’d been fighting on. Perhaps it was a stupid thing to worry about, really it had no effect on her whatsoever, but suddenly she had never been more aware that there were at least two sides to every brawl and she was desperate for her bio mother to not be a terrible person.
As though reading her mind, her father went on. “Cosette, you have to know that I’m trying very hard not to give you the wrong impression of her. She had no prior arrests and the moment I arrested her she was incredibly apologetic for causing any problems. Though, I will say that, when I was transporting her to the station, she didn’t openly admit to punching anyone but she did say that the man I’d had to pull her off was a nazi and that he deserved worse than the injuries he’d got when she was, and I quote, “pushed into him”.” He smiled slightly, amusement clear on his face as the memory surfaced in his mind. “She spent the night in detention and was let go the next morning,” he went on and then, shrugging slightly: “We had nothing on her and, I have to say, there were several officers in the station who were happy to let her go the moment that fascist was walked in behind her, but we had to book her and go through procedure.”
She nodded wordlessly. It wasn’t that much information to take in realistically speaking, but the wave of relief that hit her was unexpected enough that she was finding it difficult to continue thinking coherently. This is why it was such a surprise, even to her, when she heard herself speaking. “So you’d know how to find her? How to get into contact with her?”
He paused minutely. “Pardon?”
Swallowing slightly, Cosette spoke with intention this time and looked him straight in the eye as she did. “I want to find her and I need your help to do it.”
Her words lingered in the air, just hanging there waiting to be judged as her father stared at her with a near-unreadable gaze. He could’ve been assessing the determination on her face or the best way for him to get out of this, but there was definitely something calculating in his eyes. “Cosette…” he started and she knew she had lost.
She begged anyway. “Please.”
He scrubbed a hand over his face. “You know I can’t. I cannot abuse the information at my disposal as a police inspector. I’d expect you of all people to understand that.” She did. Of course she did. Not only was tracking down her bio-mother, a woman who’d attempted no contact with her since she was a baby, ethically dubious on its own but to put her father’s job at risk was about a dozen steps too far.
It was almost enough to make her reconsider this whole thing. Almost. “You’re right,” she said and patted the hand of his that was lying on the table. “Can you…” she hesitated for a moment, hoping she wasn’t being unreasonable because she had to ask. “Can you not tell papa about this? He— he wouldn’t understand.”
He wouldn’t. She knew it and now, with the briefest twitch of her father’s eyebrows and something understanding flashing in his eyes, she knew he knew it, too. “Okay.”
Still Monday - 15:47
She was at The Musain within forty minutes.
It occurred to her that she should probably feel some sort of guilt about immediately going behind her fathers’ backs and finding someone else to help her. She should probably have at least hesitated slightly, but this fact didn’t even occur to her until she was walking through the familiar doors. Her parents were good people and, even as she felt as though she were actively rebelling against them, she didn’t hold their hesitation against them, but her father’s immediate rejection of her request only made her more desperate to know.
One wouldn’t expect a woman with Éponine’s history to be so unerringly reliable, especially when it comes to tracking her down without outright asking her where she is, but that was one of the things that Cosette had liked so much about her when they were teenagers. She was always where she was promised she would be and only once had she let Cosette down (and they didn’t talk about that time, so it doesn’t count). On Monday afternoons, right after she got off her shift at Jehan’s shop, Éponine absconded to the back-left table in the Musain for cheap food and a moment to herself. Here, Cosette felt guilt; if the desperation to know hadn’t been clawing at the inside of her chest, she never would’ve even considered dropping in on her private time to make this request.
At the sound of her heels hitting the flagstones of the Musain’s entrance, Éponine looked up from her book - it looked to be a non-fiction book on some branch of law, but she only got a very brief look at it before Éponine closed it with a snap and laid it face-down on the table at her approach.
“Cosette,” she greeted, tone very deliberately neutral. “This isn’t your usual Monday afternoon haunt.” The question ‘what the hell are you doing here?’ was left unsaid but very much implied.
She cleared her throat. She could lead with the whole ‘I need you to track someone down for me’ thing, but it was probably better to start simply.
“Rough morning,” she summarised. “My manager gave me the afternoon off.” Éponine nodded. That was one of the many things she loved about her friend; she never asked for details that were not freely given and understood, perhaps better than anyone else she’d met, the value of allowing people to keep things to themselves. The dish of chips was pushed towards her wordlessly and, together, they ate in silence.
The silence itself wasn’t particularly comfortable, it never was when it was just the two of them. Awkwardness had settled itself around them like a particularly persistent mist for years now and it would take an event of some magnitude to dissipate it now.
If someone were to ask Cosette to briefly describe her relationship with Éponine, she wouldn’t hesitate to call them friends. They were friends. They were just friends with a lot left unsaid. Éponine had been one of the most painful parts of her early childhood, the constant comparison and competition forced on them from long before they could remember otherwise, and it was only later in life, when they re-met for the first time, that she realised that the Thénardier’s cared for Éponine about at much as they’d cared for her and they’d both been far too young to realise that neither of them had deserved what they’d had.
They’d forgiven each other when they re-met as teenagers, the apology igniting a closer friendship that very quickly became something more. Now, that relationship was something she still couldn’t quantify to this day. (If anyone were to ask, not that they would, considering the only people who knew about it were her parents, she would call Éponine her first love. No one had asked.) They had fallen apart as quickly as they came together and it was another two years before they saw each other again, this time with Éponine pushing her towards the love of her life.
The point is, their relationship was far more complicated than it appeared on the surface. Cosette hadn’t told a soul about it and she doubted Éponine would have opened up in that way to anyone other than maybe Grantaire. As a result, their silences weighed rather heavily whenever they occurred.
Ten minutes or so passed before either of them made a move to say anything. On her part, she simply had no idea how to begin. On Éponine’s part, she expected it might simply be stubbornness to not be the person who speaks first.
Eventually, though, Cosette couldn’t take it anymore and despite the way her skin was beginning to crawl and the way she had begun to pick her fingers, she spoke. “If I asked,” she swallowed slightly, “would you help me with something?”
There was yet another - though, admittedly, this time, smaller - stretch of silence where Éponine just raised an eyebrow at her, assessing. “Probably,” she said eventually with a small shrug. And then, a look of mischief in her eyes, “I’ll help you hide a body, but I’m not helping you practice kissing. You’re a grown woman with a whole ass husband to practice with.”
With a groan she slumped her head down onto her folded arms, hiding her heating face. “Are you ever going to let that go?”
She couldn’t see her face for obvious reasons, but, by God, she could feel Éponine laughing at her. “Not for at least another six years. So?”
Unlike Javert, Éponine was not the kind of person content to spend her day off waiting for Cosette to figure out how to ask for this. “Right,” she said, fully intending on carrying on with a strong argument. “Okay,” she went on, less sure. “Well, um…” she ground to a halt. She twirled her wedding and engagement rings around her finger and focussed on the grain of the table, her mind whirring at a thousand miles an hour. “Basically,” she tried again, finally managing to tear her eyes upwards and away from the table, “I would like, if you’re okay with it, of course, you’re obviously well within your rights to refuse and I absolutely will not hold it against you if you do, seriously, it’s okay, I probably shouldn’t even be asking, really—”
“Are you approaching a point any time soon?” Éponine cut her off bluntly and, for some reason, this was exactly what Cosette needed to hear.
Letting out a sigh, she nodded. Bluntness had always been something Éponine appreciated, beating around the bush very rarely did anyone any favours and quite often strayed a little too close to lying for her liking. Just say what you mean and, good or bad, it’ll be over soon, she thought to herself. Okay. “Yes, right. Could you track down-” she paused for a moment, the words she had meant to say caught somewhere in her windpipe. She cleared her throat, cleared her mind, and forged forward, looking at Éponine head-on. “Could you track down someone for me?” Another pause, this one brief. “My bio mother.”
All credit to Éponine, if she was surprised by the revelation, she certainly didn’t show it. In fact, the only reaction she visibly had was the most minute of eyebrow raises. More like a twitch, really. “You’ll pay me?”
“Of course. By the hour or the day?”
Éponine made a vague shrugging motion and leant back in her chair, languidly comfortable with a subject she knew well. “Hour’s fine, but an estimate and deposit depend on what you want from me. Just a name? Background? A location? I kind of need more information to give you a figure.”
And, wow, wasn’t that a question she hadn’t even thought about. How much could she stand to know? Her mother was a complex person with a complex life and for years she’d known that as the purely objective fact shared by everyone, but knowing the particulars of that was an entirely different ball game. Did she have a nickname she went by? A café she frequents right by where she works? A dog? All those little things that made a life personal and unique scared the shit out of her.
And what did it say about her that she was so scared of her mother being humanised in any way? That she was happy to have all of her information but only if it was on her terms? God, she so needed to get back into regular therapy sessions. Maybe she should ask Enjolras about his therapist, she sounded cool whenever he mentioned her.
“Uh… just a general background, maybe?” She lowered her head into her hands. “I don’t know… I don’t think I thought this far ahead? Fuck.”
She hazarded a look upwards and Éponine just nodded as though everything she had just said made perfect sense, or, at least, something approaching it, and pushed the mostly empty plate of chips towards her. “Chip?”
Leaning back in her chair to mirror Éponine, Cosette sighed, scrubbed a hand over her face and took one, ignoring the way the salt just made her more thirsty. “Do you think Madame Houcheloup would make me a milkshake if I asked?”
Once again, one would be hard-pressed to find a tell on her face that suggested she was even slightly caught off guard by the sudden subject change. “A milkshake?” she asked, taking another chip herself.
“God,” Cosette groaned. “It’s all I can think about.”
For a moment there was silence as Éponine took a moment to ponder. “No,” she said eventually.
“Shame.”
“We could go to McDonald’s though.”
Cosette hardly needed a moment to think. “Yeah okay.”
Still Monday - 16:31
Though they had spent most of the metro ride in silence, this Monday was probably the most time they’d comfortably spent together since they were teenagers. The awkward fog hadn’t fully dissipated, but Cosette was long past being uncomfortable with the way it clung to her skin when their legs brushed on the metro or their hands brushed while reaching for a chip. When they’d had their thing when they were younger, every touch had been statically charged and full of wonder and warmth. At the time it had been so profoundly necessary to them both that Cosette suspected that the cool, heaviness they felt now was simply the absence of it.
It was with a strange mix of relief and loss that Cosette realised she was getting used to this absence. The shitty milkshake helped, though.
The smell of grease and the sounds of a busy fast-food chain filled the air as they returned to the issue at hand.
“What is it you actually want out of this?” Éponine asked around a mouthful of Cosette’s fries. “Because if this is some kind of quest to find out who you are before you have kids, I don’t think I can help with that.”
“It’s not,” she said quickly. “It’s not that.” But where to begin on what it was? “Did you know that in many countries it is illegal to donate sperm or eggs illegally?” Éponine nodded silently and Cosette could feel the way she was watching her, waiting for her to continue with some semblance of sense. “Not here, unfortunately, but it’s not really that relevant to me personally. But I really empathise, you know? I have no medical history, Ponine. Both my parents have met my biological mother and she knew my biological father and yet none of them have anything to offer me…” She faltered. If it was just that, Cosette wondered if she might be more able to just let this go, but it wasn’t and she knew Éponine could tell.
She took a steadying breath and carried on. “It’s not just that, though. Gav is such a lively and inquisitive kid and if I get lucky enough to have a kid who asks as many questions as he does, I just… I want to be able to answer them. Is that so bad?”
The moment she looked back up at her, she knew Éponine understood. Maybe she wasn’t Gavroche’s parent, but she was as good as - better, even - and she knew better than many twice her age and older that not being able to give your child the answers they need is a special kind of guilt and pain. They had been sixteen when Éponine had told her about the first time Gavroche asked why their parents had to be so awful. It was his seventh birthday. She didn’t have an answer that made sense and any excuses she could make for them would be weak enough that he would see through them in an instant. That night he went to bed without an answer and she crept to the other side of town and into Cosette’s bed.
It seemed Éponine’s mind had strayed down a similar path as she was quiet for several long moments. They didn’t look at each other during this stretch, down at the table or across the room at the multitudes of people milling around and eating, but not at each other. “I’ll do a basic background,” Éponine finally said, standing from the table but still not looking at her. “That should be enough to get into contact if you decide that’s what you want.”
“What about payment?” At this point, Cosette wasn’t even sure that Éponine would answer her, she was physically backing away from the conversation and only faltered slightly as her question registered.
Éponine sighed and stopped, now more than a metre away from the table. “I’ll text you the details, I just, I have to— yeah.” Before she had even finished speaking, she was turning and leaving and Cosette was left behind, alone with a shitty McDonald’s milkshake and a portion of fries that were beginning to make her feel quite ill.
Not five minutes later, her phone, which was just barely holding onto life, notified her of a message received from Éponine with the deposit and payment details. Without thinking, she opened her banking app and was just about to send the deposit before something stopped her.
Usually, being as short as she was, it would take her at least five minutes to get to Marius’s work from around here. It took her three.
Her papa had funded the founded of a free legal clinic in the building called Bienvenue Justice when they first moved to Paris and then when she was a teenager the funding finally came through that would allow the clinic to graduate to a fully-fledged law firm as long as it continued to offer 50% of its cases pro bono. Marius had only been working in the building for four years, it’s how they’d met, but she’d been floating in and out through the lobby for more than fifteen. She had no way of knowing the emotions that were showing on her face as she walked through the lobby just then, but if the concern looks from the familiar faces at the office were anything to go by, she must look pretty wrecked.
Marius greeted her with as bright a smile as always and a kiss on the cheek. Pottering to the corner of his office where he kept his drink making facilities, he talked about his day so far, his morning meeting and the lunch he had with one of his clients. He didn’t ask about her work, just mentioned that it might be nice for them to have an early night given how early their morning was as he made her some tea.
Five minutes passed like this. Him gladly filling the static space with comforting, light chatter, her perched against the desk, only ever responding monosyllabically. Eventually, he came and perched next to her. “Ponine texted me. She told me you might drop by unannounced.” Cosette just nodded. Of course Éponine had foreseen this; sometimes she wondered if Éponine was secretly the smarted person she knew, then she remembered. It wasn’t a secret. “She also said you might not be 100% okay when you got here. Is something going on?”
Looking up into his eyes, so open and attentive, she almost forgot why she hadn’t told him about this in the first place. Of course, they’d discussed it at length when it’d first occurred to her that this might be something she’d want to do, but it’d been months since then and they had far more important things to be worried about. She thought that maybe he thought It seemed ridiculous now that he was in front of her looking so earnestly concerned, but a part of her was worried that he’d think she was silly for wanting the know. She let out a breath that was only slightly shaky. “I’ve asked Ponine to track down my bio-mother.”
Marius nodded. “Okay.”
“But,” she went on, turning her shoulders to face him properly, “I didn’t want to send her the deposit until I talked to you first.”
Smiling, he took her hand and pressed a gentle kiss to her knuckles. “I’m sure whatever it is we can afford it, don’t worry about that.”
She hadn’t realised how much tension she had been carrying in her shoulders until it dropped out of them all at once. Letting out a huff of laughter, she shook her head. “That’s not what I meant.” Marius made a small ‘oh’ sound and sat back, making a gesture for her to explain with his free hand - his other was still holding hers. “I mean obviously it’s great that you have my back financially, but I wanted to make sure you’re okay with this whole thing. I know you said you were before, but now it’s more real and,” she paused for a moment, thinking how to continue, and he squeezed her hand encouragingly, “And we need to be ready, I think, for it to not go the way we want it to. She might not even be able to find her.”
He was silent for several moments and Cosette could practically see the cogs turning in his mind as he figured out the right thing to say. Eventually he settled on: “Ponine can find anyone. It’s her superpower.” He spoke with such a sure smile on his face that it was hard to doubt it. “Seriously!” he went on, squeezing her hand again. “She found you.”