Archive of Our Own ^beta

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.”

Chapter Text

Monday 26th April - 18:16

When Fantine had taken Enjolras on as a client, she’d been taken aback by his first name.

Felix.

Of course, it wasn’t too uncommon a name, so perhaps she shouldn’t have been quite as unnerved as she had been. And, yet, she’d somehow managed to avoid any and all Felixes since her Felix more than twenty years previously.

Then Enjolras came along. Enjolras with a saviour complex and most likely undiagnosed anxiety and a nose and brow-line that caught her off guard just like his first name. Wonderful Enjolras who despite his given name and insisted on going by his last name. 

Quite by accident, Fantine had become quite attached to him. 

He reminded her a little of herself when she was younger, especially with his activism. He displayed the same fury in his passion for justice that she had spent years in therapy herself learning how to not be consumed by every second of every day. Miraculously for a rich, white guy, he not only very much acknowledged his privilege, but used it to help those who had less. Quite frankly, she didn’t think it would be going too far to say that he gave her hope for the world's future generations.

Through him, she came to know some of his friends, who, like him, all seemed to share a passion for justice and all went by their last names. Combeferre, one of his two best friends, was a doctor who worked too hard and cared so deeply about making sure his friends were okay. Courfeyrac, the other best friend and a lawyer just like Enjolras, sounded like the life and soul of the party with an endless social battery. There were many others, they were fourteen in total if she wasn’t mistaken, and all of them sounded completely wonderful. With one notable exception, of course, but she had tabled the conversation about his contentious relationship with the artist - Grantaire - for a later date.

Don’t get her wrong, she didn’t know all of them by name. In fact, apart from those three, as well as Feuilly, Marius and Gavroche, they were the only ones she could confidently name from memory. But that’s okay, they were more than enough to be getting along with for the time being. 

Feuilly had two jobs, carpentry and something to do with gardening and/or landscaping (Enjolras didn’t really seem to know which and, honestly, Fantine wasn’t sure he knew the difference between the two). Marius was a lawyer with the same firm as Enjolras and also happened to be married to their boss’s daughter - who Fantine could not remember the name of for the life of her. 

Gavroche was very clearly Enjolras’s favourite; she suspected he was everyone’s favourite, with how Enjolras talked about him. He was thirteen and almost unbelievably resilient and wonderfully sarcastic. Enjolras would say he wasn’t sure whether he’d got that from his sister or from Grantaire, who had apparently taken Gavroche under his wing. 

She elected not to mention the way his mouth tugged at the corner when he grumbled about Grantaire. Best leave it for another day, she thought. 

Though, to be entirely fair, they’d been doing much better recently. In fact, they had recently been talking quite frequently under the guise of discussing Grantaire designing a tattoo for Enjolras. Even it was due in part to some serious - wilful, she suspected but didn’t say - misinterpretation of a piece of her advice, it was still bordering on miraculous.

Today, though, their topic was far from the entertainment of watching Enjolras’s willful ignorance about his own feelings for the artist. 

Whenever they talked about his parents, Fantine found herself having to restrain herself from having to say some seriously nasty things about them, his father specifically. Narcissistic to his core, the man seemed to see having a child as a way to have an extension of himself. In his eyes, Enjolras had to be perfect otherwise his name would be ruined forever and, under his definition, this seemed to outlaw everything that made Enjolras Enjolras and he wasn’t shy about letting him know every time he stepped out of line. 

Just thinking about him made Fantine’s skin crawl.

His mother, on the other hand, seemed to be more than content to exist in the detached glamour of their modern high society and ignore the emotional abuse going on under her own roof. From the perspective of a therapist with years worth of training in psychology, Fantine could understand Enjolras’s mother perfectly - or, at least, she could understand the kind of woman she was. When she let it get personal, however, she just couldn’t get it at all. 

In her opinion, her greatest failure as a parent had been allowing her child to fall into the hands of people who would do her harm. When she had found out about the neglect from Jean later, she had been devastated. She’d hardly slept for a week. It was for this reason that she couldn’t fathom how Enjolras’s mother could have allowed such a wonderful child to be bullied so awfully right in front of her. 

“Honestly,” Enjolras was saying, “I just wish that I could forget I’m related to them. I mean, it’s the whole reason I go by my middle name.”

Now, that caught her off guard. “Enjolras isn’t your legal last name?” A feeling of foreboding spread in her chest without warning. The name. The nose. The brow-line. 

Oblivious, Enjolras continued. “I’m Felix Enjolras Tholomyés legally speaking.”

Fantine's heart stopped.

And then he just continued on as though he hadn’t just done the verbal equivalent of tipping a bucket of ice water over her head with no warning. “But since my first and last names are my fathers, going by Enjolras is better.” He paused for a second and then continued with a small huff of humourless laughter. “Even if it is technically still a family name.”

Her heart, which had restarted, was suddenly going a million miles an hour in her chest and, though she would definitely try not to, she wasn’t entirely sure she wouldn’t suddenly begin to projectile vomit out of sheer shock and stress. “Are you alright?”

Right. Enjolras was still here. Professionalism. Got it. 

She cleared her throat, said that she was and, despite the overall horror of the situation, was quite pleased with how her voice didn’t sound like she’d just been strangled, a minor miracle in her mind. “I’m fine thank you. Suddenly desperate for a cup of tea, though. Do you want one, dear?” She was out of her chair before he had the chance to answer, her hands craving anything to do to keep her mind occupied. Euphrasie shared a parent with one of her clients. 

“Uh, sure.” He didn’t sound even moderately convinced. “You’re sure you’re alright?” he asked again. “Because you’re looking a little pale.” His voice sounded slightly strange, as though he were straining upwards from the sofa to get a better look at her.

Barrelling on, she acknowledged his concern with a non-committal hum and a dismissing wave of her hand and continued making the tea, the methodical process just occupying enough to keep her hands and mind busy in the spaces between her panicked thoughts. “Milk and sugar?” Enjolras was Euphrasie’s half-brother.

“Just milk please.”

“Ah,” she said lightly, “a man of taste.” She could handle this.

She brought the tea over and they both settled back down, silence settling over them for several moments. This wasn’t an uncommon occurrence for them. Though Enjolras loved to talk, there would be times during their sessions when he just wouldn’t want to, he’d sit back in his chair and she’d sit back in hers and they’d drink their drinks if they had them until he was ready to talk again. 

This time, though, with the way he was watching her, assessing and with barely concealed worry, she knew it would be up to her to start up the conversation again. Resting her mug in her lap, the picture of compartmentalisation, she thought of their conversation. “Fundamentally,” she began, “names are a tool. You can be more sentimental about it if you like, but, at their core, they are primarily a tool for identification. If your name doesn’t identify you correctly, then it is faulty and you must change it. What do you think about that?”

He nodded pensively. “I suppose,” he said, sounding genuinely thoughtful, but then frowned. “But isn’t it expensive to get a new passport and everything?”

“Not if you use your father’s money.” It came out of her mouth before she could stop it. Perhaps she wasn’t quite as good at compartmentalisation as she’d thought. Or perhaps this entire situation was just insane and yet another point in the column for the theory that the universe was conspiring against her. 

Enjolras made a humming noise as if she’d had a genius idea that he couldn’t believe he hadn’t thought of before, nodding continuously. “I’ll think about it.”

She nodded at his nodding and was infinitely glad that he was thinking too hard to notice the slightly shaky breath she let out at the relief that the conversation had reached its natural end. 

Technically, she hadn’t suggested that he steal money from his father - from Felix - he already had the money at it was just sitting in a savings account, gathering resentment and a rather distressing amount of interest. She had simply suggested that he use money that he had and wasn’t already using, and wasn’t planning on using for anything, for something that would likely do him good in the long run. 

The comfort of that technicality was something she clung to as the session continued. “So,” she went on, once Enjolras seemed more present in the moment, “How have you been sleeping recently?”

Monday 26th April - 19:28

Her metro ride home that night passed in a blur of faceless people and purely mechanical movements that required no real thought. That was for the best, though; her mind was most definitely elsewhere. 

When she had first gone into therapy, she had considered specialising in the field of adoption and its effects on both parents (both birth and adoptive) and the children that go through the adoptive system, but she hadn’t been able to do it. Halfway through the introductory seminar, she’d had to excuse herself to go and throw up and she hadn’t gone back. She couldn’t remain objective and detached when her heart was beating a mile a minute and her mind was conjuring up images of a little girl with golden wisps of hair that she had loved too much to trap with her in the vicious cycle of poverty. 

It had been a very long time since she’d stopped doubting whether she’d done the right thing in giving her up. It took a year for her to stop spontaneously bursting into tears when she heard a baby’s cry that sounded just a little too like Euphrasie and another eight months on top of that for her to stop flinching at any and all baby sounds. 

On Euphrasie’s sixth birthday, she received one of the last pictures of her from Jean that she had. That was her doing, she’d asked him to stop sending them. 

That day, 11th June 2004, was the day she was finally sure she’d made the right choice. In the picture, her mouth was covered in cream from the decimated slice of birthday cake in front of her and she was smiling broadly. There was something distinctly ‘Jean’ in the way she smiled. Fantine recognised it from the few times they’d spoken and the pictures she’d seen of him. He was a good man and clearly a good father. He was doing a better job at parenting than she could have ever done and she wasn’t even jealous anymore. She was just glad.

The pictures stopped before Euphrasie’s next birthday. It was for the best. They could get on with their lives and she could get on with hers.

It didn’t stop her wondering though. She often wondered if Euphrasie had kept the pale blonde hair that had been appearing in silken curls by the time she was a year old, or whether it had darkened as she grew. Now, though, the thought of his hair and his nose and brow-line followed her into her flat and settled around her in a cloud of curiosity as she slumped onto the sofa. 

Would Euphrasie have grown up with the features of a man who neither knew nor cared if she existed? Or would she have taken more after her mother? It hit Fantine quite suddenly that, for her daughter, there would be no difference there. 

It wasn’t a new thought. No great, awful realisation despite its suddenness, but it still stung to know she likely stood no better than Felix in her daughter’s memory. She liked to think that she deserved better than that, but really? She had given up her choice in the matter a long time ago.

Boo - her cat - brushed against her leg, grounding her the way he had done for the past ten years. She’d had him from a kitten, he’d been a tiny little thing, black and white with little white socks on all four legs, like a cat from a cartoon. Privately, in some of her more maudlin moments, she found herself thinking that he was the only man who’d ever truly been good to her. The worst part of it was that even when she had cheered up a bit, she could still see the logic in it. Boo was her longest-lasting relationship of any kind. 

Sure, there’d been people since Felix, kinder people, lovelier people; university had been an educational time overall for her. During her Master's year, she’d gone out with a lovely man named Axel for eight months. He had been lovely. Exactly what young Fantine had thought she’d had in Felix. Handsome, driven, caring and generous. But he wanted marriage and children and a whole life together and, most days, Fantine found herself barely getting by. Not to mention the fact that having another child, if that was even possible for her, made her sick to her stomach.

Axel had loathed to let her go, had said that they didn’t have to get married, that they could just be with each other for as long as it felt right. Then she had asked if he was okay with not having children. They held hands as they let each other go and they kissed goodbye at the doorway and Fantine had barely moved for her grief for two days.

He was married within five years of graduation and she was happy for him. He even invited her to the wedding. His wife, Marin, was lovely and she kissed Fantine on the cheek at the reception, genuinely happy that she was there, and later Fantine had held her hair back as she was sick in the venue toilets and sat with her as they waited for the bathroom vending machine pregnancy test to spit out a result. 

When it turned out negative they took a breath together, hands still clasping each other’s. In the end it was decided that her nausea was the result of all of the excitement and they headed back into the fray of a party fully in swing. Fantine delivered her to her brand new husband with a genuine smile, handed her a glass of champagne and headed home early. 

That night she’d gone home and had her first genuinely cathartic cry in a very long time, mind swimming but, for once, not drowning in memory. She and Axel had the lives they deserved. Axel would have a family and she would have a one-bedroom flat, a therapy practice that she could be proud of, and a mind that wasn't caught in the past.

Well, two out of three wasn’t too bad.

In her armchair, in her one-bedroom flat just across town from her successful therapy practice, she found herself, rather unsurprisingly, thinking about days gone by.

Sometimes at night, if she rested her head just right on her shoulder, in the quiet of her bedroom Fantine thought she could hear her heartbeat out the nickname she had given her daughter in one of the formless, timeless days immediately following her birth. Cosette. Cosette. Cosette. 

Those were some of her darkest nights and they were near impossible to escape from. 

Right now, though, she wasn’t a woman followed by the shame of her past and shrouded in the darkness of her own mind. She was a therapist with a conflict of interest surrounding whether or not to keep seeing a client. This, she knew how to deal with, albeit in a more disgruntled manner than was probably ideal, professionally speaking. 

The email was written quickly and sent before she had a chance to quibble over wording or how to sign it or any number of things she’d definitely have cared a lot more about on another day when her brain wasn’t so dead and mushy. In fact, she only just remembered to remove the ‘Sent from my iPhone’ message at the end of the email lest Enjolras think she’d morphed into a boomer over the course of the forty minutes since he’d left her office. She sat back into her armchair once it was done, an unexpected wave of relief washing over her as Boo settled into her lap.

Acceptance was an incredibly important part of moving on after a trauma, but it is worth nothing if you do not process the pain and resentment, something that Fantine was rather intimately familiar with. Her struggles made her a better therapist, more empathetic to the genuine work that has to go into working through your issues. Acceptance without processing is just thinly veiled repression and Fantine would be damned if she didn’t practice what she preached to her clients.

Of course, knowing all of this did absolutely nothing to make it easier. 

Feeling the way she sank further into the tattered armchair with every tired breath, she sighed and picked up her phone once again and opened the delivery app with practiced ease. One couldn’t simply get up and cook when one had a professional and emotional crisis and a cat in one’s lap. That would be madness. 

Chapter Text

Monday 26th April - 19:39

Enjolras had lived in his and Combeferre's (and later Courfeyrac’s) flat for three years, long enough that he felt he knew the layout well enough to walk around with his nose still in his phone, pondering Fantine’s cryptic message and how one should even reply to something that sounds like your therapist wants to break up with you. He dumped his bags at the door, stepping over them without much finesse, or any at all really, and made his way towards the kitchen. 

God, he was hungry. Lunch at the office had been a light affair, to say the least, given that Marius and Courfeyrac, who usually made sure he stepped away from his desk long enough to eat something warm, had been at a client lunch and he’d had a truly terrible amount of work to get through - even by his standards. If Valjean hadn’t taken pity on him and tossed a sandwich in his direction, he probably would’ve forgotten to eat altogether.

The fridge called to him like siren song as he thought of the leftover sweet and sour chicken he had in there. 

And, of course, that was when the fucking rug moved under his feet and he came crashing down to the ground. It was probably a bad sign that when he hit the ground he just sighed and leant into it. Yeah, this might as well happen. 

As he plummeted to the ground he heard a hushed “Oh shit” and a less hushed and considerable more feminine than he had been expecting “Are you okay?” 

Enjolras frowned. He had only Courfeyrac’s mop of dark curls bent over something on the coffee table when he’d walked in, not that he had been paying much attention to his surroundings, to be fair. “Courf,” he said after a moment of trying, fruitlessly, to sort through his thoughts, “Your Cosette impression has got  a   lot  better since Christmas.” 

Christmas had been a bit weird that year. Grantaire and JBM had invented a drinking game where if at any point you managed to convince someone that you were another member of the group - for example, if you were taking drink orders from the kitchen and heard someone who you would swear was Feuilly, even though you were sure he had gone to the bathroom, request coffee made with a teaspoonful of mayonnaise stirred in and you did it only to be met with sincere disgust and confusion - both them and the person you did an impression of must take a drink. In all fairness, Feuilly had declared that it was probably best to sear the tastebuds off his tongue using Éponine’s cheap ‘bar-cleaner’ vodka after a sip of that coffee.

In what was probably a relief to whoever’s flat they’d end up hosting Christmas at this year, Cosette, in all of her blonde, very much nothing like Courfeyrac, self, stepped into his line of sight doing a frankly subpar job of hiding her amusement. 

In lieu of asking whether he was okay, as one might’ve expected her to do, she simply raised an eyebrow at him and offered a hand to pull him up. When he made no effort to get himself off the floor, she began tugging and pulling at his arm to very little avail. “Jesus, fuck, you’re heavy!” She exclaimed. “How? You’re basically a stick!” 

Courfeyrac, who had apparently been there the whole time, huffed a laugh and said “I know, right?” He paused slightly and, though Enjolras couldn’t see him, he could  hear  the ‘I’m-going-to-cause-problems-on-purpose!’ glee in his voice as he went on. “R says it’s the weight of his moral conviction.”

Cosette’s face lit up and he groaned into the crook of his elbow. “When has he ever let R touch him let alone carry him anywhere?” she asked with the same glee Courfeyrac had in his voice. He needed to get better friends. Friends who would bully him less.

“The other day he…” Enjolras tuned out of Courfeyrac’s second-hand story as soon as he could, tucking his head between his knees and being quite glad that remaining on the floor didn’t put him right in the middle of  this  conversation. He couldn’t quite personally remember all of the particulars of it, but he had retained enough of it to know that he had a tattoo appointment booked with Grantaire for some time in the next two weeks and that it was all, overall, horrifically embarrassing. He didn’t even  like  red wine, for fucks sake!

By the time Courfeyrac had reached his dramatic conclusion, Cosette seemed disproportionately pleased with the outcome of his ill-advised galavant. Blessedly, she didn’t actually say anything. Just grinned a mischievous Cheshire Cat grin that made him quite incredibly nervous. 

Nevertheless, she offered to help him up again and, together, they actually managed to get him off the floor this time. Courfeyrac, very notably, didn’t offer to help. “I really would,” he said when Cosette asked. “But unfortunately I’m simply too pretty.”

“You’re a blight on society, is what you are,” Enjolras accused, brushing the generic floor muck off himself that he'd managed to accumulate during his time on the ground.

Courfeyrac hummed proudly and then looked down at his watch and announced “I should be going actually. Don’t want to keep my date waiting.” 

Enjolras groaned. “Please don’t bring them back here.”

To his credit, Courfeyrac didn’t argue back. He simply raised his hands in the motion of surrender and said, “Not on a therapy night, I know. Don’t worry. See you tomorrow.” And started towards the door. 

Letting out a long-suffering sigh, Enjolras called after him. “I’ll be bringing a spare suit to the office then, will I?”

Courfeyrac smiled in a way Combeferre once called ‘dazzling’ when they were teenagers and bounded back into the room to kiss Enjolras soundly on the head. “This is why you’re my favourite!” He turned to go and, as he went, he kissed Cosette on the crown too before disappearing out of the door, picking a hair off his face and muttering something about blondes.

There was only a moment of silence after the door slammed shut before they erupted into childish laughter. As the giggles subsided Enjolras leant back onto the sideboard and managed to whack his elbow in a truly spectacular fashion which lead to another slew of laughter from Cosette and vicious swearing from him. 

Having made a truly scathing comment about being glad to have her sympathy Enjolras did not proceed to pout, absolutely not. Nevertheless, Cosette sighed and managed to contain her laughter. Just barely. 

A momentary silence descended on the living room, Enjolras waiting to be laughed at again and Cosette trying her very best not to break too quickly. And, his luck being what it was today, of course his stomach had to take that moment to rumble incredibly loudly. 

Cosette let out a quick bark of laughter before covering her mouth with her hand as though to hold in the giggles. For his part, Enjolras just sighed.

Much like her father had done earlier that day, Cosette seemed to take pity on the starving man. “Do you want some soup?”

“Yes please.” And Enjolras didn’t care if he had answered too quickly.

Because she was an angel incarnate, Cosette had brought some of one of Marius’s soup inventions. When he had appeared to Les Amis in his last year of university, Marius had no practical life skills whatsoever, no money and nowhere decent to live and so despite his many, many failings, they took him in. 

Well, Courfeyrac did. And then Musichetta, being their resident chef supreme, taught him that soup was filling and cheap to make and could be made in bulk and frozen and, well, the guy was determined to learn. 

According to Courfeyrac, they’d eaten nothing but soup for months and his colon had been “in disarray” by the end of it all. Bahorel had bought Marius an immersion blender that year for Christmas and the guy had been so pleased that he’d kissed him square on the mouth right then and there. The look of pure horror on Courfeyrac’s face had been equally amusing.

At the time, Marius and Courfeyrac’s flat had been one of the smallest out of all of the houses in their group so it was rare that they’d meet there. It wasn’t until Marius offered to cook for their group lunch on Sunday that it occurred to the rest of them that they might have to eat whatever it was that Marius was producing. 

As it turned out, what Marius was producing was ambrosia. 

All of the fancy meals they’d all been to as a combined table and not one of them had ever had soup that good. Not even Musichetta and her mother was the only outsider Madame Houcheloup would let into the kitchens at The Musain. Courfeyrac had looked queasy throughout and Cosette, who wasn’t even a member of Les Amis yet and had only been going out with Marius for a few months, just patted his hand kindly and pushed some of the bread she’d brought with her in his direction. 

Cosette Fauchelevent, providing Les Amis with foodstuffs made by other people since 2017.

Enjolras dug into the soup without hesitation, barely even savouring the taste he was so hungry. “So,” Cosette began as she started her own bowl, “Rough day?”

Enjolras shrugged. “ Long  day. Rough email.” She made an agreeing noise as if to say ‘I know what you mean’, and it was only then that he really stopped to notice the dark circles under her eyes. 

Marius had told him briefly that morning about Cosette heading out early for an emergency at work. Given her line of work, it’s no wonder she looked so exhausted after an early start. He thought about asking about it, even opened his mouth to do so, and then thought better of it. Privacy laws meant she probably couldn’t even if she wanted to and he couldn’t imagine she’d want to chat at the dinner table about the terrible things she’s seen.

“My therapist has called me in for an emergency meeting saying we need to speak before the next session, and I’m slightly terrified she’s going to say she’s retiring early or something and can’t see me anymore.” 

Cosette looked at him, slightly wide-eyed for a moment at the sudden, entirely unprompted admission. To her credit, though, she got her obvious surprise under control very quickly, schooling her features into something far more neutral. “Wow. Okay. Um, why would you think that?”

Having abandoned his spoon, Enjolras retrieved his phone from his back pocket, unlocked it and thrust it in her direction. Cosette’s lips moved slightly as she read the email, something he had noticed before that Valjean did too, but her expression remained neutral. 

It was a short email, it couldn’t have taken her more than a minute to read it all the way through, but Enjolras watched her eyes reach the bottom of the screen and then dart right back to the top and read it through again. This went on for another minute at least, her reading it over and over again until, eventually, she nodded, set down the phone and said, with an air of confidence that Enjolras really didn’t see the foundation for, “Everything will be fine.” 

“You’re not serious?” he asked incredulously as she calmly returned to eating her soup. “It’s the medical professional equivalent of a ‘we need to talk’ text!”

Unperturbed by this, she continued to eat her soup and slid the phone towards him. “Read the email to me out loud.”

Despite his instinct to argue against the value of such an exercise, Enjolras complied without much fuss. “‘Hi Enjolras, would it be possible to meet up prior to our next session? Some information relevant to our working relationship has come into my hands and it’s necessary that we have a conversation about it before we continue with sessions. Thanks. Fantine.’ Now what?”

“Now,  moron ,” she said with a sigh, “Read it with your lawyer brain.”

Enjolras did as he was told. Several times. He sighed, frustration bubbling away under his skin. “It still sounds like she’s retiring early or something along those lines.”

She nodded sagely, as though this were all a part of her grand plan and not just him not being able to do an alternate reading of the most anxiety-inducing email he’d received in a while - and that was saying something. “That’s because you’re too close to it.”

Rolling his eyes, Enjolras scoffed. “No shit. I have a pretty massive conflict of interest, don’t you think?” She raised her eyebrows at him and said nothing. “What?” She was  looking  at him. Did he have something on his face? “What?” She just blinked at him. “Stop it! What?” Nothing. “What am I— oh.” Conflict of interest. “Oh,” he repeated dumbly. “I still might be losing my therapist,” he felt the need to point out.

Cosette nodded. “She’ll probably leave it up to you, though.”  Oh goody,  he thought bitterly.  At least my inevitable psychological annihilation will be a product of my own decision making.  See, this was why he needed a therapist. 

“I should probably be going too, actually,” Cosette said suddenly standing up and reaching over to grab her bag from the back of the sofa. “I told Marius I’d be home by 8 and it’s currently,” she went on, pausing briefly to check her watch and then grimace, “five past so if there isn’t a search party out there by now I’ll be quite shocked and very offended.” She made her way towards the door, but stopped by the table where they’d been sitting and picked up Enjolras’s hand, holding it gently. “It  will  be okay, Enj. I am certain of it.”

He gave her hand a gentle squeeze and she must have been satisfactorily reassured by it because she pulled away and left through the door in a matter of seconds. Enjolras hadn’t meant for that to happen, to be quite honest. 

If he were being 100% transparent, he had squeezed her hand because had desperately not wanted her to go. Without her there, the flat was far too empty. Courfeyrac was gone on his date, Combeferre was at work, all of his work was in the office, and Cosette had gone home. He was staring down a sleepless night with nothing to do - not for the first time, mind you - and all he wanted was a hug. Fuck.

Tuesday 27th April - 12:23

He was fucking late. The most anxious he’d been for therapy in months and it wasn’t even real therapy and he was fucking late. Well, not yet. Technically speaking he still had two minutes to get there on time but that was somehow worse when the metro just wouldn’t move any fucking faster and he couldn’t message Fantine to warn her that he’d be late because he was under the fucking ground.

When the train finally rolled into his stop, officially making him at least a minute and a half late, he raced out onto the platform and then up and out onto the street, running the whole way, uncaring of the vicious April rain and the way the people he ran past were glaring at him. 

By the time he arrived, he was a soaking, sweaty mess; almost no sleep, near-constant anxiety, rain, and more sudden running than one had voluntarily done in years would do that to a person as it turned out. Favourite, the secretary, assessed him with slightly wide eyes. “You’re late,” she said. “But I’m assuming you already know that given all the—“ she gestured to his general appearance.

“Thanks,” he said dryly. “Do I need to wait or can I just go and knock on the door?”

She raised her eyebrows and asked, incredulous, “Are you sure you don’t want to go to the bathroom first?” 

Looking down at the state of his clothes, he took in the way that every scrap of fabric that he couldn’t feel clinging uncomfortably to his skin hung from his body in a way that make him look approximately twelve years old. “I don’t think a paper towel can fix this.”

She grimaced but nodded and waved him through. “Go ahead.” He vaguely registered her picking up the phone as he walked away, but it wasn’t until he was on the approach to Fantine’s office that he understood why.

Fantine met him at the door of her office with a commiserating look and a towel and he made a mental note to thank Favourite on his way out. With the door shut, he shed his coat and the towel took its place around his shoulders as he sank into his usual spot on the sofa.

Only once he was settled did Fantine take her place in the armchair opposite the sofa. Until this point, they had remained in a comfortable silence that was not unusual for them by a large margin, despite the anxiety that was still more than present in the pit of Enjolras’s stomach. 

What was unusual, however, was the way Fantine was seated in her chair. 

Always she would sit with her legs crossed and a notebook balanced on her knee, she’d shift which leg was crossed over the other but this was always the default position. Not this time. This time she sat on the chair with both feet planted on the floor, posture pitched forward slightly as though she were restraining herself from leaning forward all the way and resting her elbows on her knees, the right one of which was bouncing up and down very slightly. 

It was all incredibly bizarre. He had never pictured seeing her as anything other than perfectly composed and to see her so visibly anxious only ramped his own anxiety up ten-fold.  

“I’m just going to get right into it if that’s okay with you?” He nodded. “When I was younger,” she began, pausing to swallow slightly, “I knew your father.” Everything that Enjolras had been thinking this meeting could possibly be about, this most definitely wasn’t it. “I won’t get into the minutiae of it right now,” she went on, “but we had a relationship, I got pregnant and he left me before I could tell him.” She let the words hang in the air for a moment and Enjolras felt as though he were choking on them.

 “It was only later that I found out that he was married…” she went on and he could already tell where this was going. “And that he already had a child. It’s important to me, Enjolras,” she addressed him earnestly, leaning forward and looking at him intently, “that you know I only found out about your connection to… him yesterday and that had I known earlier things likely would have been very different. 

“With that in mind, if you would feel more comfortable seeing a different therapist from now on I have the contact numbers of a few who I think would suit you well and the number of another oversight clinic that works completely separately to us, if that would suit you better.” Enjolras wasn’t entirely sure what his face was doing, but whatever it was made Fantine concerned enough to very quickly ask “Are you alright?”

He was silent for a few more long moments. Was he alright? So his father was even shittier than he had thought? So what. He wondered if his father knew he had another kid and then very quickly decided that it was for the best that he didn’t. He’d already managed to screw one kid up; he didn’t need a sequel. Besides, he thought suddenly,  he  didn’t even know that he had a half-sibling, so it was probably unlikely that it had even crossed his father’s mind.

Absently, he heard Fantine saying his name and asking if he was okay again. His mouth moved before he even knew what was coming out of it. “I didn’t know you have a kid.”

Surprise took over Fantine’s face. “I don’t,” she said gently, on an exhale. Enjolras watched as she breathed carefully for a few beats, measured and deliberate as though getting through something painful. “I gave her up for adoption when she was a year old,” she said eventually. 

Enjolras nodded. Ordinarily - as though this could ever be an ordinary situation - he would have been happy to move on and stop talking about something so personal, but, suddenly, he found himself incapable of not wanting to know more. “What was her name?” he asked, sitting forward on his chair. 

Fantine swallowed slightly and he was afraid that he had gone too far, but even if he had, she still answered. “Euphrasie.” She said the name as if she hadn’t in a while, all soft consonants as though she were afraid of bruising them. A small smile crept onto her face and Enjolras could tell her mind was elsewhere. If he were to guess, he’d say that she was remembering something sweet and slightly melancholy, if the slight mist in her eyes was anything to go by. “But,” she went on after a moment, head still clearly in the clouds, “she was so little when she was born that I mostly just called her Cosette.”

Enjolras’s blood ran cold.

“Cosette?” he asked, his voice sounding strange even to his own ears. “You don’t happen to know if she got adopted, do you?”

She frowned at him but answered anyway. “I do actually. Yes, a, um, the mayor of the town she was living in with a foster family when she was younger adopted her.”

Enjolras felt himself wince involuntarily. It was getting worse and worse by the second, especially as he remembered that, in her and Marius’s wedding vows, Cosette’s name had been Euphrasie Fauchelevent. Shit. “Was his name Jean Valjean by any chance?” he asked even though, at this point, he neither wanted nor needed the answer.

“No,” Fantine said, concern and confusion taking equal precedence in her voice. “His last name was Fauchelevent.” 

“Shit.”

“Are you alright?” Quickly, she stood and moved to sit on the sofa beside him. 

Enjolras looked at the floor, at her desk, at his own hands, his shoes, anywhere but actually at her. “I know her.” His voice was quiet and the words were slightly unclear and mushed together inelegantly but he knew that she’d heard. She wouldn’t have inhaled so sharply if she hadn’t.

A long silence stretched out. He finally hazarded a look at her to find Fantine watching him with wide, frightened eyes, his skin suddenly feeling far too hot and a prickly feeling growing in his eyes that, to his horror, he realised meant he might burst into tears at any moment, and the both of them too stunned to utter a single word. He looked back down at the ground.  

Fantine seemed to come back to herself after a minute or two, but perhaps only halfway, as she cleared her throat, muttered something that sounded an awful lot like “tea”, stood and wandered over to the side of the room where the kettle lived. She made the drinks with her head bowed, not looking at him, and Enjolras wasn’t complaining. The way she looked at him, as though he had the power to take her entire life apart, sewed a deep discomfort in his gut. 

She returned with two mugs. Enjolras took one and held it, grateful for the warmth, but didn’t move to take a sip. 

Fantine took her place in the armchair once more, shifting her posture so that it was straight and moving her shoulders back, legs crossed once more. She took a deep breath in and out. Honestly, Enjolras was just grateful that he wasn’t the only one who was completely freaking out. “She’s in Paris?” she asked finally, voice rather impressively steady. 

Enjolras was less calm in his response. “Paris?” he scoffed, uncaring of how shrill his voice was. “She was at my  house  last night! Feeding me soup and giving me advice about today!” What he didn’t mention was the fact that she would be there yet again at Les Amis movie night tonight and would therefore be sleeping over with the rest of them for their group breakfast in the morning. He’d have at least twelve hours in which to approach her, or else prod her awake, and tell her about what the fuck just happened. 

Enjolras thought he might be sick.

When he looked back at her, Fantine was nodding slightly, eyebrows furrowed as though deep in thought. “I can’t,” she began and then paused, frowned and started again. “This conflict of interest is clearly worse than we thought. I’ll email you the contact information for some other therapists and you can have as much time as you want to think this over.” She stopped and swallowed. “I’m about a million miles too close to this to be giving you advice, so the only thing I’ll say is that when it comes to… Cosette, forget about me. 

“I don’t matter. I’m not in her life and I’d imagine that she probably doesn’t want me there. The only situation in which I am relevant to your relationship with her is if you want her input on whether you should continue seeing me.” She was looking at him intently, the way teachers would at school when they were asking him to make a serious decision about his academic future. “Okay?” she asked, a hint of desperation slipping into her voice. 

“Okay.”

She nodded. There was a beat of intensely awkward silence and Enjolras wondered if it was time to go. He hoped it was, his skin was itching to just be anywhere else. 

Salvation came in the form of a ringing phone. 

Fantine was over at her desk before Enjolras could blink, picking up the phone and talking quietly into it for a minute before putting it back down. What exactly it was she said, he couldn’t tell but Enjolras did manage to catch the words “five minutes” at the very tail end of the call. Maybe God really was merciful after all. Take that Catholic upbringing. 

“I’m sorry, Enjolras,” she said, straightening up and, if she was feeling anything like him, not really all that sorry. “My next appointment is in the waiting room.” 

“Of course,” he said and stood, hoping that he hadn’t moved too eagerly. “I’ll email you when I decide what to do.” She nodded and with that he fled, leaving his cup of tea completely untouched.

For all Grantaire called him their fearless leader, he practically ran out of her office. Even Favourite calling after him with concern evident in her voice did nothing to slow him. 

He called in sick for the rest of the day. 

Chapter Text

Friday 30th April - 16:32

It had been almost three hours since an unmarked envelope containing what appeared to be Cosette’s birth certificate arrived at the café. 

She’d been on her break at the time that it had arrived, so Jehan had delivered it to her in the backroom as she hid the family law book behind her back. Éponine had no idea what Jehan knew, but they had handed it over no questions asked - about the envelope or the book. To be entirely fair, though, they also refused to tell her who had dropped off the envelope in the first place, so perhaps they just viewed the situation with a kind of mutual respect for secrets. 

They had also said that she could leave an hour early despite it being a Friday afternoon and therefore incredibly busy. Honestly, they truly baffled her and the more she observed their behaviour the more confused she became. Jehan Prouvaire would be an anthropologist’s worst nightmare or most exciting project yet and she couldn’t quite decide which. Perhaps both.

She took the offer, though. Gavroche was with Grantaire at his studio this afternoon, hanging out and no doubt learning which needles do what when they are piercing which kind of flesh, so she found herself with a bizarre couple of hours of free time. 

Obviously, with her free time she went to The Musain, it having free wifi and not containing her parents being the main draw. The wooden doors swung open with a familiar heft and Musichetta, who must have only just arrived for her evening shift, greeted her from behind the bar with a shout and a wave as she headed to her usual table in the corner. 

Tapping her fingers on the table restlessly, Éponine debated actually taking some time for herself, then quickly decided against it. In a matter of hours, the backroom would fill up with her friends for their regular Friday night meeting and they’d spend a quarter of the time chatting and catching up, half of the time listening to someone, usually Enjolras, lecture them on the specific branch of The Cause they were working on this month, and then the rest of the time split up between genuine group-wide debate and Enjolras and Grantaire flirting via debate. 

Suffice to say, she’d have free time later.

She pulled the hand-me-down laptop that Jehan had given her when they had upgraded a few months prior, her notebook and the envelope containing Cosette’s birth certificate out of her bag and set her workstation up quite nicely in the corner.

Initially, this project had been extremely frustrating. Cosette had emailed her all of the information she had about her bio-mother, but it was hardly a lot to go on and a first name was still only a first name, even if there weren’t too many Fantine’s around these days. The birth certificate was, quite frankly, a godsend because Éponine was good, but she wasn’t find-your-estranged-bio-mother-whose-last-name-you-don’t-know-and-you-don’t-even-know-where-in-the-country-you-were-born-and-all-you-have-is-knowledge-of-an-arrest-in-maybe-2007-maybe-not-and-even-so-the-records-to-the-arrest-are-sealed-so-bonne-chance-with-that good. 

Now, though, she had Cosette’s place of birth and, more importantly, Fantine’s last name to add to her research. 

This was the part of this kind of detective work that gave her a heady rush of adrenaline. 

Searching for Fantine’s first and last names and Montreuil gave her nothing, so she quickly abandoned that. Instead, she tried just the last name and Montreuil. This was considerably more fruitful. 

As it turned out, Fantine’s parents were the kind of people to announce their daughter’s birth in the newspaper and God only knows why Le Journal de Montreuil was digitised as far back as it was, but Éponine was nonetheless grateful for it. Fantine appeared twice more in the newspaper before the age of seventeen: once when she was eight years old for winning a local gymnastics competition and again when she was twelve for getting second place in a region-wide creative writing competition. She seemed to be the perfect child, pictured smiling around her braces, holding a certificate with her parents behind her proudly, each with a hand on one of her shoulders. 

Then, nothing. 

No new announcements. No university, no achievements, no Cosette. 

Letting out a frustrated sigh, she backtracked and tried a more general search: just first and last name this time. Even though Fantine wasn’t a particularly common name anymore, the search yielded way too many results. She restricted it to French-language results. It didn’t help much.

It couldn’t have been that long into her research, though it was hard to tell when there weren’t many patrons in the café to show the passage of time through their comings and goings, that she heard Musichetta shout another friendly greeting over to the door. Too determined to keep sifting through these search results, most of which were proving themselves to be useless, Éponine didn’t look up to see who had entered. 

And it was a good thing, too. On page fourteen of the search results, she struck gold. According to Facebook, there was a woman with the same name in Paris who looked to be the right sort of age and even, if she squinted, looked a bit like the kid with braces in the blurry photograph. 

Another search with the same name plus ‘therapist’ went even better. It led her straight to her practice’s website and thus to a workplace address. 

As she was writing the address down in her notebook, someone slid into the chair opposite her. “Oh,” Combeferre’s voice said, “Enjolras goes there.” 

“What?” She looked up with a start to find him looking at her with a pleasant smile on his face, completely unaware that he was filling in blanks in the story that Éponine didn’t particularly want to be filled in. Her job was supposed to be simple. Name, contact details, work address. That’s it. Not this. 

“That address you’re writing down,” he clarified, as if it was necessary. “That’s where Enj goes for therapy. Are you thinking of starting?” Tabling the fact that Combeferre could apparently read her handwriting upside-down, she scrambled to find an answer that didn’t broadcast her utter panic to the entire world. 

“Uh… no,” she settled on in the end. Eloquent. “Enjolras goes there? To Fantine?”

Combeferre’s eyebrows furrowed slightly but otherwise nodded placidly. “Yeah, she’s really helped him.” She must have winced because a moment later he was narrowing his eyes at her and asking all concerned, “What’s wrong?”

“Nothing,” she said far too quickly.

He raised his eyebrows at her, clearly unimpressed and unconvinced in the extreme. “What’s this?” he asked, reaching across the table to pull the birth certificate towards himself before Éponine could make a move to stop him. 

She could tell the exact moment he took in what was written on the paper because his face fell and she could see his eyes darting over the page as he went over the words again and again. “Oh… Ép, no…” he said eventually.

“I didn’t do this!” she exclaimed in a yelled whisper, conscious of the fact that Musichetta was watching them curiously from behind the bar.

Combeferre scoffed and replied in the same kind of hushed shouting. “Then explain to me why you have the birth certificate of what appears to be the child of Enjolras’s therapist and his father!”

Her blood ran cold.

“What.” It wasn’t even a question the way she said it, the shock had drained her energy for intonation. Combeferre nodded as if to say ‘Obviously!’ and she shook her head and pointed aggressively to the paper still in his hand. “That’s Cosette’s birth certificate!”

He was silent for a moment. Éponine could only assume that he was doing his very best to not freak out. “Fuck,” he said eventually.

“Fuck,” she agreed.

They were silent for several minutes after that. At some point during that time, Combeferre headed to the bar to get them drinks and came back with a bottle of red wine. They drank in silence for a while because how does one continue conversing normally when you’re aware that you have the power to blow up your friends’ lives? 

At least Cosette had been expecting news. At least she was prepared to be told something that she couldn’t truly prepare for. She knew something was coming, but Enjolras would be completely blindsided by the news and he’d most likely lose his therapist over it. Nothing says conflict of interest like “I fucked your dad.” 

Éponine finished her glass and poured out some more.

It was another minute or two before either of them spoke. They seemed to be in a mutual, silent agreement that they were to get at least halfway through the bottle before any more conversing could or would happen. Eventually, two-thirds of the bottle gone, Combeferre finally said, “Well, you have to tell them.”

Éponine scoffed and put down her glass. “Oh, no you don’t. You’re in this now,” she said, pointing an accusing finger at him. “I’ll tell Cosette alone but we’re telling Enjolras together.”

Combeferre looked positively appalled at the idea. “Ép, I have to live with him after this!”

“Yes,” she conceded, tone careful and clear. “And I have to continue to see him multiple times a week possibly for the rest of my life, knowing that the only two people I’ve  ever  been in love with are his sister and his brother-in-law.”

Blinking at her, Combeferre was silent for another few moments.“We’ll go together,” he said eventually.

“Thought so.” They drank in silence some more, a few minutes passing as they did. 

Combeferre was right, they had to tell them. They had no right to keep this information from either of them, but Cosette’s familial support system was strong, she was sure it could withstand anything. Enjolras’s, on the other hand, was an unknown entity to her. Who’s to say that she wasn’t blowing over a delicately stacked house of cards with all of this? He had never said anything about them to her and, granted, they weren’t that close, but there had never even been a mention of them when she had been in the room. 

She tapped the edge of her wine glass with her fingernail. “I’m not destroying his relationship with his father by doing this, am I?” Combeferre looked at her for a few seconds with a curious expression on his face. She wondered whether he was surprised that this was something she would worry about given his knowledge of her situation; perhaps he was surprised that she cared.

Quickly enough, though, he shook his head and when he spoke his voice was rather uncharacteristically harsh. “Enjolras’s father is a bastard of the highest order and he always has been. The thing that shocks him here won’t be that he cheated on his wife, it’ll be that it’s Cosette that came about because of it.” 

Éponine considered him for several moments. This was the same protective streak she’d seen in him when she’d first told him about wanting to get Gav away from her parents and that Courfeyrac had mentioned having swooned over when they were teenagers. 

It made so much sense why Combeferre had become a doctor when she thought about it. Aside from being very good at the actual medicine part of it all, his goal in life was to take care of people and he put everything he had into doing it. 

If he kept going the way he was now, he'd burn out, and burn out badly, one day, Éponine was sure, but he wouldn’t stop until then and she was grateful for the help and the drinking companion in the meantime. 

She ground her teeth. “You’re sure?” 

He shrugged which didn’t particularly help her confidence. “Well I could be wrong about the second part, but trust me,” he emphasised the last two words and Éponine heard all twenty years and more of their friendship. “Enj harbours nothing but resentment towards his father.” 

She nodded and reached towards the bottle to find it empty, sighed and put it back down with a hollow thud. “We should tell him as soon as possible, right?” The ‘So he doesn’t keep seeing Fantine when he doesn’t have all of the information’ went unsaid, but she was confident that it was heard nevertheless.

Combeferre hummed. “We could go back to mine and wait for him to get back from work and tell him then?” 

Just as she was about to say no, absolutely not, under no circumstances would they ambush him like that, she reconsidered. Whenever they told him he’d feel ambushed and, if they warned him they wanted to talk to him about something beforehand, there’s a not-insignificant chance he’d go off the rails wondering why it sounds like they’re about to announce that Éponine is dying. 

She stood and began packing up her stuff before she could reconsider and Combeferre took that as his signal to go and pay Musichetta for their wine.

Still Friday - 17:24

The rain that had been incessant in the last couple of days had finally dried up and Éponine was incredibly grateful for it; her shoes had only just dried off from the walk home from work the day before. The walk to Combeferre, Enjolras and Courfeyrac’s place from The Musain wasn’t long at all. Well, it was longer than the one to Grantaire’s but he truly did just live around the corner and most of the times that she went from The Musain to his place she was either incredibly tired or quite drunk or some combination of the two.

Walking side-by-side with Combeferre, in shoes that were finally not squelching, with her insides warmed by good red wine, Éponine found she didn’t mind his company at all. Of course, they’d spent quite a bit of time together in recent weeks - he seemed determined to help her with the situation with Gavroche and her parents - but that had always had a purpose. They were in-between purposes now, walking in companionable silence, and yet she didn’t mind.

For a moment she worried that she might be attracted to him, romantically speaking. Really, it would be just her luck that not only had she been romantically attracted to two people in her life and they both happened to be close to Enjolras, but that she may like his best friend now, too? Not to mention the fact that he was the only other aro-spec person she knew. 

She calmed down pretty quickly, though. Logically, she thought, if she  were  romantically attracted to Combeferre, she wouldn’t be so pissed off at the prospect. 

Momentary crisis averted, they stepped over the threshold into the building and started towards the stairs, both familiar with the layout of the place. As the largest flat in the group at the moment, Enjolras, Combeferre and Courfeyrac’s place had hosted many of their group activities that took place outside of The Musain’s back room. Not to mention the number of times that she’d had to come and fetch Gavroche early in the morning to get him to school on time because he’d elected to sleepover on a weeknight. Sure going a place a dozen times you’ll get to know it well enough, but you’ll never truly know a place until you’re trudging up the stairs sleep deprived and as bitter as the coffee you wish you had been able to grab that morning. 

As soon as the front door was unlocked and the lights were turned on, they both made a bee-line for the sofa. 

“So, when do you think he’s going to be back?” she asked as she shrugged off her coat and threw it onto the back of the sofa.

Combeferre sighed and shrugged listlessly, taking off his own outer layers and throwing them across the barely-used armchair. “Apparently he went in late today, so it should be any time now.”

Settling onto the sofa, she couldn’t help but let out an exhalation of incredulous laughter at the thought. “Enjolras voluntarily went into work late? Are we talking about the same Enjolras?”

Perhaps she had misjudged the tone because Combeferre just grimaced at that. “He’s been a little, well,  off  since… Tuesday I think?” He rubbed a hand over his face and sighed before falling back into the sofa next to her. “Courf says he went to meet with his therapist and then called in sick for the rest of the day.”

Éponine turned to face him sharply. “You don’t think…?”

“Maybe,” he said, nodding thoughtfully. “I mean, finding out your therapist fucked your dad is bound to put you off-kilter for a few days at least.”

There was silence for a minute or two. Éponine closed her eyes against the warm glow of the lights, felt the sting of a tension headache welling behind her forehead and resigned herself to lean back into the sofa. Combeferre was watching her, she could feel it, and she was waiting for the inevitable ‘Are you okay?’ and the way he wouldn’t believe her when she said she was. No one ever did. 

It didn’t come, though. 

Eventually, she heard a tired sigh and opened her eyes to find Combeferre mirroring her position, leant back into the sofa cushions with his eyes closed. He’d taken off his glasses and was holding them in his lap as though about to put them back on any moment despite looking, for all the world, fully comatose. 

The silence continued for a few minutes more, only broken when Éponine, more to herself than to Combeferre, asked “Is it bad that I’m relieved to maybe not be the one who has to tell him?”

She didn’t open her eyes to look at him but she knew he’d heard her; they were sitting close enough together that she had felt some ambient, mindless fidgeting that his hands had been doing as they rested next to her leg halt when she spoke. The next thing she felt was yet more movement, more major this time and she opened her eyes to find Combeferre looking at her, shoulders having shifted and all. 

If you would have asked her to make a bet, Éponine would have put a not-insignificant amount of money on this being Combeferre gearing up to saying something meaningful and significant that Enjolras would eventually paraphrase in a speech. Instead, he just looked at her for a moment and said, voice barely above a whisper, “I won’t tell if you won’t.”

A second before she could respond with a ‘deal’ and an offer of a handshake, the sound of the lock turning in the front door rang through the room louder than a shot. They both shot up from the sofa, facing the door expectantly.

Unsurprisingly, Enjolras entered. He looked exhausted. Haggard. Just plain done with everything. Éponine found herself wondering if he’d have to put on a façade for the meeting that night to avoid everyone’s worry, whether he’d not have the energy to try to hide it and wear his fatigue blatantly and uncaring, or whether he’d simply not show up. Once upon a time that last option would’ve been the work of fantasy and illogic, but Enjolras had sacrificed his precious work-life already for whatever was eating at him; there was no telling what he would do. 

Seeing Éponine and Combeferre, registering that they were standing around in the living room and staring at the door expectantly, and trying to figure out what was happening seemed to be a series of mental processes that Enjolras’s tired mind struggled with. He stood there for several moments, work bag trailing in his hand and coat lazily slipping off his shoulders, silent. “Oh,” he said eventually, manners slowly seeming to catch up with his mind. “Hello.” 

They returned their own hi’s and hello’s and, though it was all pleasant enough on the surface, Enjolras’s face morphed into a set of utmost suspicion. “Éponine are you coming to the meeting with us today? Did I forget something?” 

“No. We’ve come to talk to you, actually.”

Enjolras’s eyes shifted between them a couple of times in a span of a few seconds. “‘We’?”

The time had come to explain and, yet, when she opened her mouth, nothing came out.  Of course , when it came down to it, the words would get stuck in her throat. Just her fucking luck.

“It’s about your father and Fantine and Cosette.” It was easy to let Combeferre take over. Perhaps worryingly so. She didn’t dwell on it. 

Enjolras gaped at them both for a moment. When he finally spoke, his voice was barely a rasp. “What—“ he began and then cut himself off and then, for a terrible moment, Éponine thought they may have made an awful miscalculation. He cleared his throat and tried again. “How do you know about that?”

Éponine swallowed her relief and did her best to speak as evenly and calmly as possible. “Cosette hired me to track down her bio-mother and, in the process, I found out about it.”  It.   Nice. Good way to skirt around the issue, Ép, well done,  she scolded herself mentally.  You’re blowing up his life and you can’t even say what  it   is. 

“Wait,” Enjolras said frantically, “You’re not going to tell her, are you?”

“I have to.”

He barked out a humourless, incredulous laugh. “No!” he burst out and Éponine did her best to avoid flinching at how her headache throbbed at his shout. “No,” he went on quieter, “You don’t. I’ll do it!”

“Really?” she exclaimed disbelievingly. “Because you’ve known for four days and seen her twice—“

“Three times,” Combeferre cut in to say.

Éponine pointed at him, filled with a kind of gleeful vindication that didn’t make her feel good in her chest but that she didn’t have time to sit and analyse. “Three times!” she exclaimed. “Three times in four days and you haven’t told her!”

“How can I?!” Enjolras suddenly exploded. “What?” he shouted at their shocked expressions. “Am I supposed to just go up to her and say ‘Good morning, Cosette! How are you? Oh, by the way, not only have I been seeing your mother as my therapist for over a year, but we share a biological father! Happy Monday!’” His voice rang out in the room and Éponine could’ve sworn it was echoing as though he’d been yelling in an empty cathedral. 

Maybe that was just her headache. 

Or, perhaps the sudden presence of Jehan and Courfeyrac standing in the doorway right behind with shocked expressions Enjolras was making her ears ring. 

She and Combeferre must have both been staring very obviously behind him because, very quickly, Enjolras snarled out an annoyed ‘What?’ and turned on his heel. 

It was easy to pinpoint the exact moment that he saw them and processed what that meant because his entire body froze. Éponine wasn’t even sure he was breathing. “How long have you been there?” he croaked out after a moment or two of silence in which he gaped at the two and Courfeyrac gaped back and Jehan’s expression had been cooled into something as serene and inscrutable as always.

Jehan took half of an elegant step forward, just enough that they were half-covering Courfeyrac’s gaping face. “Long enough to know that everyone here should probably sit down and have a nice cup of tea, okay?” The way they spoke, it sounded like a question, but, from years of experience, everyone in the room knew it was an order.

Still Friday - 17:59

Jehan moved about the space with familiarity, seemingly completely unbothered by the fact that they had no help with the drinks whatsoever. Two-thirds of the people that lived in the flat were caught in some kind of stand-off by the front door, either unable to move from the shock of it all or unwilling to, and that the last third (Courfeyrac) was offering just standing around, listening to Jehan hum absentmindedly and watching them produce a truly huge teapot from points unknown. If she wasn’t stressed out of her goddamned mind, Éponine would’ve called it domestic. 

Eventually, though, the teapot was brought out and Courfeyrac helped to carry out plenty of mugs and Combeferre’s mind seemed to kick back in long enough to usher everyone to the rather cramped dining table that definitely wasn't designed to have both more than three people seated at it at a time  and  room to breathe. 

Shoulder to shoulder they sat, sipping their tea, and Jehan hummed with obvious displeasure. 

“Courf, Ferre,” they addressed suddenly. “Would you be dears and move to the sofa, I think this situation requires slightly more space for flailing, don’t you?”

Whether they agreed or not, they moved and Éponine found herself, not for the first time, particularly envious of Jehan’s quiet power and command. 

The two men slouched over to the sofa without complaint and Éponine was able to shake her shoulders out slightly. Suddenly, Jehan was gesturing for her to move her chair around the table. They did the same for Enjolras until they were sitting almost directly opposite each other and Jehan sat in the larger of the two gaps between them, putting themselves closer to the two of them than they were to each other - not that there was much in it. 

Thankfully, at least the table was large enough that she didn’t have to worry about an accidental game of footsie. 

“Éponine,” Jehan began, diplomatically and far too serenely for someone anywhere near this situation. “Why do you think you should be the one to tell Cosette?” Hands folded in front of them, Jehan had immediately settled into the perfect mediator persona.

Taking a breath, Éponine hoped her voice came out as calmly as she intended it to, otherwise, she was fucked. “Because that’s what she hired me to do and she’ll be expecting it from me.” Jehan nodded and Éponine swallowed the lump in her throat.

“Enjolras,” they asked, turning to him, "Are you opposed to this?”

“Yes!” he exclaimed followed by a long moment of silence. He sighed deeply and rubbed his eyes as though he hadn’t slept in a year. “No…” he said eventually, immediately followed by a frustrated, “I don’t know! I found out and then I freaked out,  have been  freaking out ever since, and I just don’t want her to feel like that.” His tone by the end was so goddamn earnest that it hurt. 

Éponine looked at him for a moment. And then another. She catalogued the exhausted details of his face once and then once again. Dark circles sat under his eyes along with heavy bags that, for the first time since she’d met him years previously, made him look older. Contrary to what he may think, he was terrible at hiding the fact that something was going on with him. “You want her to be able to go to you to talk,” she stated. It was an unequivocal fact. He nodded. “Then I should be the one to tell her.

 “I’ve known her longer than possibly anyone in my life that I’m not related to,” she went on, “So you can trust me when I say that she will not want me to stick around once I’ve dropped this bomb on her.”

Enjolras was looking at her, appalled. “But you wouldn’t just leave her after that, would you?” As though the mere idea of such a thing went against all of his ideals and causes.

It was so Enjolras and he, as usual, just had no clue at all and Éponine couldn’t stop herself. She laughed dryly and said, “It would hardly be the first time, but at least this time it’ll be a mutual decision.” The words were out of her mouth before she could stop them and a momentary silence descended on the group.

Oblivious, perhaps willingly so, of the regret curling in Éponine’s gut, Courfeyrac was the first to speak. “I have to know your tragic backstory someday,” he said lightly and maybe he wasn’t all that oblivious if the way he was grinning jokingly was anything to go by. 

Éponine let out a small, shaky breath. “Tell you what,” she said, matching his light tone, folding her hands on the table in front of her and hoping they weren’t shaking, “I’ll reveal my tragic backstory to you on my wedding day.”

Enjolras frowned. “I thought you’d sworn to never get married.”

Courfeyrac nodded and pointed at Enjolras, shifting his pointing finger around to Éponine and wiggled it slightly as if to say ‘gotcha!’ Because sometimes Courfeyrac was a scoundrel from 1940s America. “Nice try, though.”

“I’ll take that bet,” Jehan’s thoughtful voice came.

“Ép’s marital status aside,” Combeferre cut in, ever-present patience seeming to fray slightly at the edges, "Who’s telling Cosette?”

Courfeyrac frowned. “I think Cosette already knows Ponine’s tragic backstory.”

Éponine could practically  hear  the way Combeferre rolled his eyes. They hadn’t been together since they were teenagers and, yet, those two always managed to play the long-suffering spouses.

Enjolras cut in, ignoring them. Not from any kind of irritation, Éponine guessed, simply from years and years of the same kind of thing happening over and over again. After all, she’d seen it herself an uncountable number of times and she’d only known the pair a fraction of the amount of time that Enjolras had. “You go,” he said with finality. “I’ll talk to her later if she wants to.” 

She was tempted to push, to ask ‘Really?’ and probe about the reason for this sudden acceptance. Not that it mattered, in the grand scheme of things, but Cosette would probably care. When she found out, she’d probably care quite a bit. 

Shit. When she found out.  Shit.

“I have to go and talk to Cosette,” she said, back suddenly ramrod straight.

“What?” Courfeyrac asked just as Enjolras exclaimed, “Right now?”

Éponine scoffed, hoping that the panic she was feeling wasn’t quite as obvious to the others as it felt as it clawed up her throat. “Five people know who her bio-mother is and she doesn’t. Yeah. I’d say I should probably go and talk to her now.” She rose from the table and ignored the way the others watched her with a variety of confused and worried looks. 

She hadn’t realised her hands were shaking as she packed her bag until Combeferre appeared in front of her and held them still. “Do you want company?” he asked quietly. She shook her head and he nodded and took a step backwards, squeezing her hands gently before dropping them.

Chapter Text

Friday 30th April - 18:56

First, Cosette had shown up out of the blue, completely unannounced for the second time in a week mind you, and now Éponine. Neither of them minded having the house be a refuge for their daughter and her friends when they needed somewhere to go, but, really, it was starting to get a little worrying. 

At around half-five, Cosette had turned up saying she’d had an argument with Marius and just needed to let the air clear before she went back home. Javert’s immediate reaction had been to question her and then, finally, be vindicated in his belief that Marius - that muppet - wasn't good enough for his daughter, but his husband had held him back and Cosette had quickly disappeared into her childhood bedroom for a lie-down. “She’s been very stressed lately, you know that,” Valjean said placatingly once she had disappeared. “This is probably just the pot boiling over, so to speak, and they’ll be fine once they’ve talked everything through.”

Javert waved it all away unhappily and went back to making dinner. There was so much that Cosette wouldn’t - or, much worse, felt that she  couldn't  - talk to them about at the moment. Partially, it was fertility stuff and, honestly, thank god she didn’t want to talk to them about that; they would have nothing to contribute other than awkwardness. 

The rest of it, Javert suspected, was his own fault. He had turned her away when she had come to him for answers and, though he was still sure he’d made the right choice, the guilt ate away at him ruthlessly. Undeniably, that was what had compelled him to rifle through the filing cabinet full of important documents and sneak Cosette’s birth certificate away to Éponine. 

Oh, yes, Éponine. 

It hadn’t been difficult to determine that she would be Cosette’s next port of call about this. Beyond their…  complicated  past together, Éponine was a gifted investigator and someone that Cosette had, for better or for worse, always trusted. 

Javert himself had a pretty conflicted opinion about the young Miss Thénardier. On the one hand, he admired her immensely for her strength. It was no mean feat to refuse all of the easy options life handed you and by not going down the same path as her parents, Éponine had proved she had a desire to do the right thing and true robustness of character. In Javert's opinion, it would be foolish not to applaud such a thing. 

On the other hand, she made his daughter experience her first heartbreak and, for that, she could never truly be forgiven.

Now, though, she too had turned up out of the blue. She needed to talk to Cosette, she had said. So, they had directed her to Cosette's room. Not that she required any direction, which was something he and his husband had made eye contact about and decided not to even mention in passing. The two had been in there ever since.

Fern was also in there, having scratched at the door long enough to be let in, but since Valjean kept saying no to his request to bug the cat, he still had no idea what they were saying. Valjean had also rejected the old ‘Empty Glass Against The Wall’ trick. Apparently, their daughter deserved privacy in her own home. 

He had ignored Javert when he pointed out that, technically speaking, Cosette didn't live with them anymore. 

It wasn’t that he actually felt a need to know what they were talking about. After all, it didn’t take being a detective to realise that Éponine, being as good as she was at what she did, that almost certainly enough time would have passed for her to find out the truth. Yes, even the part about Fantine being Enjolras’s therapist. Something akin to guilt crept up Javert's throat as he remembered deciding with Valjean to not tell anyone they knew about that. He pushed it away, ignoring that it might be shame. 

Perhaps he kept suggesting they listen because he didn’t want his husband to be out of the loop anymore. It would be ten years since their civil union next year and the year after that it would be ten since their wedding and, in that time, they’d stuck to their vows to have no secrets from each other. Well, mostly. Cosette seemed to be the breaking point for both of them, but that was a truth that was acknowledged and accepted quickly and wordlessly.

Still, it hurt to be kept out of the loop. 

Speaking of exactly that, Cosette’s voice suddenly rang shrilly out from behind the closed door. “Does  everyone  but me know?” she exclaimed sounding so distraught that, in a bout of almost instinctual movement, Javert and his husband gravitated across the kitchen to each other. Moving as though to anchor each other to the spot, kept where they were by the paradox of their mutual knowledge that they might be needed elsewhere at any moment.

Several moments later, Éponine exited the room carefully. She shut the door without any force, making almost no sound as she did, and sped to the door as though she was something after her. Throwing a quick apology over her shoulder, she was gone faster than she had appeared. 

“Do we brace for impact now?” Javert found himself asking as the silence emanating from Cosette’s room felt more and more oppressive as the moments went by. Despite her room being in the old cellar of the house, which had been renovated to suit her for her fourteenth birthday, it was hardly what one would call soundproof. The entire house was like this: a creak in the living room could be heard in the attic. But only silence came from her room now and he couldn’t take his eyes off the door that led to the stairs.

Valjean hummed. “I think,” he began quietly, letting out a sigh and reaching over to grab hold of his husband’s hand, “Perhaps the impact has passed and we are to deal with the aftermath.” Valjean squeezed his hand, providing a comforting weight.

“Cleanup crew,” Javert mused, finally tearing his eyes away from the door. “I’ll put the kettle on.”

He put the kettle on and, while it boiled, weighed up his options as to whether it would be worth it, at seven in the evening, to make some strong coffee and just accept the lack of sleep as it came. It took less than a minute in total for him to decide and then prepare the cafetière. 

Valjean went back to the book that he had been reading before Éponine had arrived but could not have more obviously been paying absolutely zero attention to it. 

The dull thudding sound of someone making use of the staircase was the only warning they got before Cosette slunk into the room wearing an entirely unreadable, stormy expression.

She slumped towards the table and took an empty seat, remaining silent throughout. 

 Valjean watched her carefully for several long moments and, usually, in situations like this, Javert would have happily left them in their own little bubble. Now, though, the coffee was finished brewing and Javert was willing to take his chances with it doing everyone some good to have at least a small distraction. "Jean," he said quietly, getting his husband's attention as he held the two mugs out towards him. Valjean took them wordlessly and placed one in front of Cosette.

Cosette stared at the mug for a moment, eyebrows furrowed. “Papa," she began quietly, her voice measured yet strained as though this was the last straw on an incredibly stressful day, "You  know  I can’t drink coffee while Marius and I are trying to have a baby.” In all fairness, Valjean probably had known that. Javert hadn’t and he’d finished the last of the tea the night before when he couldn’t sleep. Going by the more than obvious sincere unhappiness in Cosette’s voice by the end, he figured, in hindsight, that may have been the wrong move.

How Cosette - with the hours that she kept - had been coping without coffee, Javert had no idea. By the time he’d entered their lives, she’d been eleven years old and already grabbing a latte on her way into school in the morning. At least he could chalk up some of her unhappiness to a sudden lack of caffeine and not his failures as a parent. And if this thought made him feel better enough that he clung tightly to it, then so be it.

While Javert was stuck to the spot looking at their distraught daughter, mentally doing as much gymnastics as it took for his chest not to ache with guilt, Valjean moved quickly about the kitchen. 

Practically since he had moved in with them, the kitchen had been Javert’s domain. The room itself was the heart of the home, sure, but cooking was something that seemed to default to him more often than it didn’t. This, though, the way that Valjean moved about the space without looking where he was going or what he was doing… it was as though Javert were looking at one of the practised rituals they had, just the two of them before he arrived. This dance happening right before his eyes, from the fridge to the counter to the cooker to the counter and back to the fridge and all over again, it was a relic of Cosette’s childhood.

Sensing that hovering over her would only make everything worse, Javert took the chair opposite her. Moments later, Valjean brought over a truly intense smelling mug of hot chocolate, placed it in front of Cosette, and took the seat beside Javert. 

Cosette looked at the mug in front of her for a minute or two, silent and eyebrows furrowed in what appeared to be intense concentration. Eventually, she looked up and spoke, voice surprisingly steady despite the shock still radiating off her in waves. “Éponine found my bio-mother.” 

There was a short intake of breath next to him and Javert didn’t need to look over to know that Valjean’s entire frame would have tensed over by now. “Okay,” Javert said neutrally, a hope forming in the back of his mind that she wouldn’t find it bizarre that he wasn’t as shaken as his husband. 

“She’s a friend's therapist,” she went on slowly, carefully, as though afraid to pick the wrong words. Javert’s eye twitched and he clenched his jaw. Cosette’s eyes darted from him to Valjean and back again. And again. And then once more. If Javert were a gambling man, he would have put money down that Valjean was avoiding eye contact like it was his sole mission in life right at that moment. Cosette’s shoulders slumped. “You knew,” she said accusatorially. “All this time, you knew she was in Paris and you knew Enjolras was seeing her.”

“Only since the wedding,” Valjean cut in, his voice hoarse, as though using it was a chore. “He mentioned his therapist’s name and I thought I’d look her up just in case.” He shrugged listlessly. “There was just never a right time to tell anyone.”

“Anyone other than dad, you mean?” Her tone was harsh and rightfully so. She laughed humourlessly and Valjean’s eyes dropped to the table. “There’s never a right time to tell someone something like that!” she shouted, pushing back from the table, standing, and scrubbing at her face. “What?” she went on. “Did you know he was my brother, too? Did you just keep  that  to yourselves?”

Several beats of silence passed in the wake of her tirade.

Javert could hear his heart pounding in his ears.

Out of the corner of his eye, he could see Valjean openly gaping at her. 

Cosette looked back at them with eyes widening by the moment. 

“You didn’t know?” she asked, her voice suddenly small and guilty. More silence. They hadn’t. “He’s my half brother,” she offered, sitting back down. “Same father.”

“Tholomyès,” Valjean said darkly.

“What?” Javert asked, bewildered, at just the same time that Cosette did, though her tone was more stunned.

“When Enjolras applied to work for me he applied under the name Félix Enjolras Tholomyès. On your birth certificate, your father’s name is listed as Félix Tholomyès,” he explained, his eyes unmovingly focused on the table in front of him.

Cosette stood once again.

She gathered herself together without speaking. Javert’s heart ached and similar pain was more than evident on Valjean’s face. The longer the silence went on, the more it became evident that they had made a truly grievous error and his hands itched to reach out and find any way to make everything alright for her again. In reality, he did nothing of the sort. 

Halfway to the door, she stopped and turned. The turn itself was unsure, all of her body language screaming ‘I hate this and I don’t know what I’m doing’. From where he was, Javert could only see half of her expression, but it was enough. Her emotions were worn on her sleeve more often than not and this one, clear as day, read as confusion and hurt. “I need some time.” Her voice was barely a rasp, but it cut him to the core.

The moment the door was shut behind her, Valjean scraped his chair back, leant forward and placed his head in his hands. He wasn’t crying. When he cried, his shoulders shook with the force of his sobs and the gasping intakes of breath that he took were as plain as day. This wasn’t that. 

He stayed in that same position for several minutes, silent and unmoving. Eventually, the need to move began to crawl up Javert’s spine. Clattering around, he cleared up the mugs and the cafetière, ignoring the way that every single noise that the crockery made sounded like it was echoing inside an empty church. 

He finished cleaning and looked back to find that Valjean had shifted slightly. Now, he had lifted his line of sight from not looking at anything - except perhaps the floor - to gazing intently over at the door where Cosette had disappeared. His back was straight now, his arms hanging listlessly in his lap, palms upturned. “We should call Marius,” he said suddenly, his voice quiet but clear. 

And they did. They called him to warn him that Cosette was heading his way and that they didn’t know what state she’d be in by the time she got there. They said that they’d screwed up and that he’d have to pick up the pieces. 

Well, Valjean did. Javert was a silent presence throughout the conversation not unwilling but unable to say a thing. 

Marius, for all that his reputation was as the most tactless man in Paris not pursuing a career in politics, didn’t ask for any specifics or attempt to chew out either of them for what they had, or rather hadn’t, done. He accepted their words with increasingly worried hums of acknowledgement and, at the end of the phone call, promised to ask her to talk to Enjolras and update them when he could. All in all, Javert supposed, Marius was a good man.

From the moment Valjean put the phone down and looked towards Javert with a ‘what do we do now?’ look on his face, it was obvious that the only option left was to give Cosette any and all of the time she asked for.

Chapter Text

Saturday 1st May - 10:56

May had dawned with a kind of determined almost-summer in the air that frustrated hay fever sufferers and those determined to be unhappy alike. Clouds were scattered across the blue sky, almost cartoonish in their fluffiness, and the sun shone down almost entirely uninhibited. 

The cool breeze that grazed over Cosette’s uncovered arms was the saving grace of what would have, otherwise, been a badly planned outfit. She’d considered several of her dresses for the day - and she had many - yet they all made her feel far too vulnerable on a day that was already making her want to hide from the world.

Sleep hadn’t come easily to her the night before. Between the hot-flushes that her fertility treatment had been causing and the constant, boiling pit of anxiety rolling away in her chest, she’d spent three-quarters of the night sweating and worrying and the other quarter sweating, worrying and glaring at her husband’s tranquil face for somehow managing to sleep through it all. 

At some point, she must have fallen asleep, though. She knew this, as was always the case, because she had suddenly woken disoriented and groggy and wishing against all of the facts of reality that it could just be okay for her to cancel on Enjolras at the last minute and stay in bed with Marius and pain au chocolat and espresso forever. 

This, of course, couldn’t be. Not for several reasons. She had sworn off caffeine entirely while they were trying for one thing - as she, wincing, remembered practically screaming at her papa the night before. For another, even in her fantasy, one of them would have to exit the bed eventually to go and fetch the pain au chocolat from the boulangerie considering they had none in at the moment.

And there was no world, fantasy or not, in which she could realistically be content with letting Enjolras down. Even if, right now, the concept of him scared the ever-loving shit out of her.

Hence why she found herself situated at an outside table at a café she was sure neither of them frequented, sipping her tea and ignoring the way the minutes ticked down to the hour. 

A text came through on her phone from Marius. It read ‘You’ve got this!’ followed by about a dozen love-based emojis and, despite the anxiety still churning away in her chest, she couldn’t help the way a smile tugged at the corners of her mouth. At a nearby table, somebody’s watch signalled the hour and Cosette’s head jerked away from her phone at the sound, the traces of a smile slipping off her face. 

As though he had been waiting around the corner for the right time, Enjolras and that distinctive red coat of his appeared, made eye contact with Cosette, immediately lowered his gaze, and began to approach the café. If it weren’t for the honestly impressive velocity with which he was speed-walking towards the café, she would have guessed that he was as nervous as she was. 

He slowed noticeably as he approached the table, in the end stopping a little ways from it to wave at the free chair opposite her awkwardly. She gestured for him to sit down and readied herself for the world’s most awkward conversation.

Except he didn’t sit down. 

Instead, he put his bag on the chair - god only knows what he had in there (if he produced a PowerPoint during the conversation she would do something truly heinous) - and practically ran towards the entrance of the café throwing a word that sounded vaguely like ‘coffee’ at her over his shoulder.

Resigned to yet more waiting, she slumped back into her chair and sipped at her tea, determinedly ignoring the anxiety that was graduating to full-blown nausea the longer she waited. 

Enjolras returned eventually and finally - finally - took his seat. 

It wasn’t as though she had been expecting the conversation to immediately flourish once they were face-to-face, but it would have been nice if either of them would say anything. Really, anything at all would have done as she stared down the dregs in her mug and contemplated whether it would be inappropriate to fake a medical emergency so that she could leave. 

A small inhale cut through her determination to stare into her mug and she looked up to find Enjolras obviously in the throes of having opened his mouth to say something and then decided against it at the very last minute. 

Call it anything between pity or weakness if you will, but, after a minute or so of this, Cosette couldn’t take it anymore. “How are you?” she asked. It came out a tad too stiffly, but she doubted that Enjolras noticed given the immediate, obvious relief evident on his face when given an out.

“Alright,” he said after a second of silence, shrugging a little, then added a rather commiserating, “All things considered.” He grimaced slightly and Cosette couldn’t help but copy the expression. “You?” he went on.

Cosette sighed. “I’ve been better.”

Just for a second, Enjolras looked as though he were surprised by the honesty. Perhaps he had expected slightly more small talk, but, right at this point in time, Cosette had no idea if she was even capable of such a thing. She was on a hair-trigger these days. 

Enjolras, to his credit, seemed to adjust quickly enough. “Not quite the news you were hoping for?” he asked after barely a moment more of silence. Perhaps he just couldn’t bear any more awkwardness. 

The question swam around nebulously in Cosette’s mind. “To be completely honest, I have absolutely no idea what I wanted,” she admitted. “Okay, yeah, medically history,” she allowed, feeling the words begin to build up behind her sternum. “But I’d kind of forgotten that there was a whole, complex person attached to that medical history and then suddenly I was being hit in the face with the knowledge of the people attached to her and I just—“ she cut herself off and scrubbed a hand over her face. “God,” she groaned. “This is going to sound terrible,” she looked up at Enjolras, expecting judgement but finding none, the creases on his face were that of a man paying honest and sincere attention to something he cared about, “But I don’t want her to be a whole, complex person.” She buried her head in her hands. “I must be losing my mind.” Or at least my grip on reality, she thought bitterly but kept to herself.

There was silence for several moments in which Enjolras tapped the edge of his mug with his fingernail and scowled pensively at nothing in particular. “I don’t think there’s anything strange about not wanting to feel guilty about resenting someone,” he said eventually. “She is the root cause of so much trauma in your life. If you didn’t resent her at least a little bit, I think I’d be more worried. But that doesn't mean that guilt suddenly stops sucking.”

“You know,” Cosette began, feeling a smile tug at the corners of her mouth, “I wish I didn’t resent her. If only because then I could be far more appreciative of how much good she’s done you as a therapist.” Enjolras smiled shyly at that but didn’t say anything to refute it. 

Silence stretched on once more. Several moments passed not entirely uncomfortably; more akin to having a small, smooth pebble in your shoe on your walk home: uncomfortable but not actively painful and it should all be over soon enough anyway.

It was around two minutes before the silence was broken. “I never realised how similar we look,” Enjolras spoke quietly and, just for a moment, Cosette thought that perhaps she’d imagined it entirely. Then, he went on, voice louder and huffing a laugh that sat on the border of containing any humour whatsoever. “It’s like the universe gave us all the clues and we still didn’t get it until it was literally shoved in our faces.”

Cosette nodded emphatically. “I know exactly what you mean. I mean, do you remember R joking about painting us as Apollo and Artemis a couple of years ago?”

Enjolras looked at her aghast. “No? He said that?”

She couldn’t help but laugh at his expression, some combination of hope and horror. “During a meeting, yeah. It was right after I mentioned that I used to do archery.” And then, despite the anxiety that was still determinedly present in her chest, she smirked mischievously. “You were probably preoccupied.” Enjolras’s spluttered partly-words-mostly-indignation response wasn’t really comprehensible but Cosette got the gist: ‘fuck off you’re the worst and I hate you, you’re so embarrassing.’

With a pang that shocked the smile from her face, she realised that, were they so inclined, they already had the sibling thing down pretty well.

“My, um,” she began, taking a moment to swallow her nerves, suddenly incredibly aware of herself. “My parents told me a little about her - as much as they knew, at least - and I’m—“ she cut herself off, feeling her throat begin to close up and her eyes sting. She cleared her throat and forged ahead despite every instinct inside her screaming for her not to. “I don’t want to know everything about her, but I guess I’m worried that I can’t tell whether I’m imagining all the similarities because I want to see them, or because they’re actually there.”

Enjolras was watching her intently by the time she finally finished speaking. “Are you okay?” he asked carefully, as though worried about scaring her off.

Not that that was a risk.

It wasn’t.

She was okay. 

Was she okay?

Her throat was only getting tighter.

She wasn’t okay. She could feel her chin wobbling and her hands shaking and her eyes were rapidly filling with tears. “I’m so sorry, I don’t—“ she began but cut herself off. She was about to say that she didn’t know what was going on with her, but she had a fair idea. The doctors had warned her that the fertility regime she was on could have some side effects when it came to mood and stability. They could have warned her that, when they said mood swings, what they were actually referring to was the mood trebuchet she currently lived in. 

Really, after that, the bio-mother stuff was just the icing on the cake. 

As ever, knowing the logic behind why one is feeling a certain way, rarely manages to stop one from feeling it, or even really helps to truly understand it. Often, it was just more information piled on top of the rest of the already-overwhelming piles of information that you wished weren’t there. 

This Cosette knew for certain as tears streamed steadily down her face and sobs suddenly racked her body. 

There was movement around the other side of the table, obscured to her view by her tear-filled eyes, and, barely a moment later, she was being pulled into Enjolras’s chest. This unprecedented display of affection was enough to shock her out of two seconds of sobbing at least.

It wasn’t that she had thought Enjolras incapable of such warmth, it’s just that usually the warmth was directed to Truth, Justice, Courfeyrac, Liberty, Combeferre, Equality, and, very occasionally when he thought no one was looking, the back of Grantaire’s head. Enjolras was a man who expressed his love through meaningful action, not hugs. Except, apparently not.

Despite his stiff shoulders that betrayed his unfamiliarity with this, Enjolras’s hand was stroking her hair and he was gripping her tightly as she pressed further into his chest, sobs now making her shake from head to toe. 

Minutes of crying, muffled even to Cosette’s own ears by Enjolras’s fierce grip, passed and, eventually, the sobbing subsided and only her stuttering breaths were left in their stead. At any point, Enjolras could have let her go, but he didn’t and Cosette was, perhaps slightly disproportionately, touched by the fact. 

At one point, when her breaths were still the nasty side of frantic and her face was still stinging with the saltiness of her tears, she felt the reverberations of speech in Enjolras’s chest. Shifting her head slightly, she listened as he spoke. “We have the same nose,” he said, tone quiet but sure. “Which means we’ve both got his nose,” he went on and she could practically hear the frown in his voice at that. Nevertheless, he continued. “We’re both blonde, but he hasn’t been naturally blonde since he turned thirty-five.” An amused kind of satisfaction had tinged his voice then and Cosette couldn’t help the smile that twitched at the corners of her mouth. “You’ve got his chin. I don’t. I’ve got his weird pointy elbows. You don’t. That’s about it. 

“Honestly, when you told us you were adopted I was so surprised. You look so much like Valjean. You smile like him, you’re strong like him, you do that weird, wiggly shrug thing with your shoulders when you’ve been sitting down for too long like him,” upon saying this, he shifted slightly and Cosette had to imagine that he was imitating this ‘weird, wiggly shrug thing’. “And you frown like Javert, which is fucking terrifying by the way.” He paused and Cosette looked up at him. He was smiling at her the way she’d seen him smile the very few times she’d seen him nervous before a speech.

As speeches go, she supposed, this one was pretty good. 

She smiled back and shifted so that she was no longer fully leaning on him and was, instead, resting her head against his shoulder. The angle was slightly awkward seeing as he had just under an entire foot on her, but he didn’t seem to mind. After a moment, he opened his mouth as though he was going to continue but, then, seemed to stop himself. “Do you want to go on a walk?” he asked instead. 

Cosette looked down at her empty mug and still-shaking hands. “Yes.” She would have happily waited for Enjolras to finish his coffee in his own time and was about to tell him so when he picked up his mug and downed the entire thing in one go. 

“Shall we?” he asked, shouldering his bag and holding out his arm for her to take. They headed in the direction of the river, Cosette’s arm in his to keep him and his gangly legs at a reasonable speed, talking lightly as they went. “How did you find out?” Enjolras asked at one point.

“I hired Ép.” He halted in his tracks and looked at her with furrowed brows. “What?” she asked, baffled at his reaction.

“Nothing,” he said, shaking his head and taking his phone out and typing something out. “It’s just I should probably mention to Courf about her pressing pause on the investigation side-gig until this all blows over.” And then went on, waving a hand about as if anything he had just said made sense, “You know, given that she’s not licensed.” 

He tried to start up their walk once again but Cosette stood her ground and tugged at his sleeve harshly until he ground to a full halt. “Until what blows over?”

He grimaced. “You missed the meeting last Friday, didn’t you?”

Still Saturday - 11:32

“I cannot believe she took my case in the middle of all of all of that!” Cosette didn’t care that her shriek was attracting glares from the people around them. They’d found a place to sit on some steps by the river as Enjolras explained everything, which led to Cosette’s current position: elbows resting on her knees and head in her hands as she reassessed the true implications of skipping meetings occasionally. 

Enjolras, on the other hand, seemed to be far more relaxed. He was leant back leisurely with his legs stretched out in front of him. Perhaps the few extra days he’d had to ponder over the situation - and now Éponine’s situation, too - was the exact amount of time required to accept it all and move on. 

God, Cosette hoped that was what it was and he hadn’t just decided to borrow some of Grantaire’s nihilism. 

The silence continued for a few minutes longer as the sounds of people and tourists alike going about their business and birds shrieking on the Seine created a hubbub of soothing background noise. Enjolras seemed quite at home here, Cosette noted. They were a while’s walk from the office and from his flat, but something about the familiarity with which he spawned his limbs out on the steps spoke to having been here countless times before. “What are you thinking?” he asked suddenly before she could open her mouth about this usually calm demeanour.

She shifted her eyes back to the river. There were all manner of thoughts thrumming underneath her skin, things that she’d been wondering about for days and for years now. Some for her entire life. 

Somehow, being so close to having answers now, Cosette could feel herself wanting to flinch away from the possibility. When she was younger, the things she’d wondered about had been whatever she’d needed them to be exactly when she’d needed them. The possibilities had been endless. They still were. Something she’d learnt a very long time ago was that the truth is uncompromising and sometimes completely vicious and there are few ways to escape it when it comes knocking. 

And that is truly terrifying.  

“What if I’m like her?” she asked, her voice quiet even in the relative solitude of their place by the water.

Enjolras furrowed his eyebrows and sighed as he pondered the question, not to come across as unkind or put upon, Cosette thought, but rather as though he were truly determined to say the right thing, as though he were acutely aware that every word he said mattered to her. 

“I have got my mother’s cheekbones, eyes, jawline and chemical imbalance,” he said eventually with a kind of clinical detachment that somehow managed to not be cold or unemotional that she recognised from countless meetings and the few times she’d encountered him in a court setting. “I don’t know what you got from your mother,” he went on, and then quickly added, “And I’d never hold it against you for wanting to find out.” 

He paused and looked right at her, speaking softly and genuinely, "But parents give us a lot of things and I don’t know what proportion of them actually matter, but I’d be willing to bet it isn’t very high when you’re as strong as you are.”

Cosette watched him with a slightly stunned expression, silent for a long moment. “R was wrong,” she said eventually, much to Enjolras’s immediate confusion. “You’re not just the spirit of righteous anger stuck in a marble sculpture. There’s a soul in there, too.” She poked him on the upper arm and he playfully shoved her back. 

They both returned to looking over at the midday sun reflecting on the river, smiles lingering on their faces. Suddenly, a thought occurred to Cosette, sharp and unpleasant, dropping the smile from her face. “What if this matters to me more than I thought it did?”

Enjolras watched her carefully for a long moment, eyebrows furrowed slightly. “So what if it does?”

She sighed, frustration eating away at her patience. “I don’t want it to...” She had to express that as an exclamation, but, in the end, it came out more like an admission. Enjolras shuffled closer to her on the steps, mirroring her more drawn-up position and ready to listen. “I was a year old when she gave me up and I know she had her reasons, but that doesn’t mean that now that I’m curious about her I suddenly need her to be my mother. I have a family. She was part of it and she opted out and that’s okay because I don’t need her.”

“Okay.” Enjolras’s tone was soft and placating and, if Cosette wasn’t mistaken, a tad dejected. Without another thought to discourage her from it, she reached over and took his hand in hers and squeezed it tight. Enjolras still didn’t look at her. 

“Just because I might not want her, doesn’t mean I suddenly don’t want you, Enj.” She watched him intently, squeezing his hand “Look at me,” she said, feeling more sure than she had in a week. He finally met her eyes. “With or without the blood, we’re family.”

Enjolras continued to look at her for a long moment, his eyes searching. “There is blood, though,” he pointed out eventually. His voice was even and careful and it wasn’t that he sounded unhappy but rather that even his tone seemed to be stepping from one thought, one worry, to the next.  

Cosette took a moment before saying anything, hazarding a glance down at their still joined hands. The veins in her wrist leading to the way she grasped him and the veins in his hand holding hers in return. “There is,” she agreed.

Enjolras’s eyes dropped back to the concrete. “His blood,” he said emphatically.

She squeezed his hand again. “Yeah,” she sighed.

A span of silence stretched out, not uncomfortably, as Cosette waited. Whether she was waiting for Enjolras to say something or for inspiration for something to say herself, even she wasn’t sure. Either way, she came up with nothing. A seagull squawked in the background - at least someone felt like they had plenty to say. 

After several moments, Cosette decided that, whatever it was that was said next, it had to come from Enjolras. She resigned herself gladly to wait however long it took until he was ready.

It took around five minutes.

He spoke quietly at first, not unsure, by any means, but quiet. It felt like an admission, something hard and scary to talk about. 

Cosette's heart splintered for him. 

"I’ve spent my life trying to be as far away from my family as possible because," he began and stared down at the ground, eyes determined but slightly misty, "Cosette, I cannot stress this enough, they’re awful.” She squeezed his hand as firmly as she dared. He took a shaky breath and continued. “I met Ferre and Courf when we were kids and we’ve hardly been apart since. They’re my family. Les Amis are my family.” He paused momentarily, looking over at her intently. “You’re already my family, Cosette. But I’d be honoured if you’d be my sister. Officially, as it were.” He was smiling at her almost sheepishly - which was about as bizarre as being hugged by him.

Still, she couldn't help but risk a smile in return. “Even with his blood?”

Enjolras huffed a laugh and some tension immediately drained out of Cosette’s shoulders at the sound. “Especially then.” He sighed. “It’d be nice to have someone who I know really gets that.”

“And I wouldn’t have to speak to him?” she asked, only mostly joking. 

Enjolras scoffed. “As long as you don’t make me speak to him.” 

Cosette lifted the pinky finger of her free hand up to him. His eyebrows shot up and his face morphed into an incredulous “Really?’ expression. “Come on!” she goaded him, kicking his shin lightly with the toe of her shoe.

Put upon, Enjolras sighed and wrapped his pinky around hers for a few seconds. When they dropped their fingers, Cosette finally felt it was safe enough to let go of his hand.

In the background, the seagulls remained vocal but they sank back into a comfortable silence after that, basking in the midday sun and watching the water lap at the edges of the river. 

It was Cosette who, after several minutes, finally broke the silence, a mischievous grin tugging at her lips. “Does being your sister mean I get to bully you for your obvious crush on R now?” she asked, elbowing him lightly.

Enjolras visibly blanched. “My what?!”

Chapter Text

Monday 3rd May - 13:56

The day had begun drizzly and unpleasant - a bad omen, Fantine couldn’t help but think as she had opened her curtains that morning. The sky had been so monotonously grey that one couldn’t pinpoint where one cloud ended and another began and rain pattered down in bursts, coinciding beautifully with every time Fantine had to pop out of her flat to run an errand. 

It was like the universe had heard her say “Could this day get any worse?” and took it as a challenge. 

Despite this conspiracy, Fantine had tried to look toward her meeting with Euphrasie with as much optimism as possible. The rain petered off just before midday and, by the time she had picked up the flowers she had ordered for Euphrasie, the sun had come out. That, accompanied by a gentle breeze that warmed and dried the pavements and roads of the lingering dampness, had made a truly beautiful day. 

It was a shame, Fantine thought, that she was spending it so goddamn nervous. 

The café that Euphrasie had picked wasn’t five minutes down the road from Fantine’s work and the thought of whether that had been intentional had been plaguing her all day. 

If it had been intentional, it could go one of two ways. 1. It was an olive branch; a way for Euphrasie to subtly say ‘Look, I’m meeting you in the middle here.’ 2. She’d picked this lovely, little Italian place familiar to Fantine and her after-work drinks to subliminally prove how much information she had on her. 

Admittedly, Fantine doubted that it was either one of those options. It was far more likely that Euphrasie had picked somewhere that would be convenient for her to get to while not being one of her usual haunts just in case everything went wrong.

Or, maybe, Fantine was, as ever, just a chronic over-thinker. 

At around three minutes past the hour - Fantine knew because she couldn’t help but check her phone every two minutes for the time - a blonde woman, just slightly shorter than her, approached the table. Her round face was the picture of nervousness but something about the set of her brows said that there was a lot of anger beneath her sundress-ed, cardigan-ed, bright-looking exterior.

Something that struck Fantine immediately, so much so that any words she had thought to say got caught in her throat, was the immediate relief that washed over her. Sure, she was blonde and she was classically beautiful, but she looked nothing like Felix.

For one terrible moment, Fantine worried she might cry. 

The woman, unmistakably Euphrasie, shifted her bag on her shoulder uncomfortably under her gaze and Fantine jolted back to herself. “It’s nice to meet you,” she said and then, remembering herself, grabbed the large bouquet of flowers and gestured them towards her. “These are yours,” she went on. Then, when Euphrasie didn’t immediately take them, earnestly added. “I won't hold it against you if you decide to destroy them the moment you get home.”

Fantine waited with bated breath as Euphrasie looked at the bouquet for several long moments.

The flowers had been an idea that had come to her whilst out on a walk that took her past a local florist’s the other day. The person that ran the place - she couldn’t remember their name for the life of her, really she should work on being better at names - had listened to her brief description of the situation with wide, fascinated eyes and non-judgemental sympathy. Very quickly, when she had finished talking, they had assured her that they would put something together and all she had to do was pick it up. 

True to their word, when she had walked into the florist’s that morning, they had produced the most beautiful bouquet and handed her a little card full of meanings. 

The bouquet was colourful and bright without being over the top or showy. Pinks and purples and blues and yellows surrounded by the deep green of oak foliage and the delicate white flowers of both Lily of the Valley and Queen Anne’s Lace made the thing look almost cloud-like. Amaryllis in pink, carnations in oranges and yellows, and rue, heather, and bluebells in their classical colours provided splashes of colour that looked decadent interspersed with the white and green of the rest of the bouquet. 

It was wonderful and, yet, Fantine couldn’t help but hope that Euphrasie would wait to notice the little explanation card until she got home. 

It was all laid out there, you see. All of her wishes and regrets in a beautiful presentation. That florist was extremely good at their job. 

Eventually, after an eternity, Euphrasie took the bouquet, shifted the weight of the stems around in her hand, and nodded, smiling slightly. It may have been more a grimace than a smile, to be honest, but Fantine was willing to take that. In fact, as more and more seconds ticked by, she only became more willing to take whatever Euphrasie would offer her.

Finally, Euphrasie spoke. “If I was going to destroy them the minute I got home, do you really think your approval would matter in the slightest?” It might have been a jab, it might have been an attempt at establishing some kind of rapport. 

“Touché,” Fantine said, hedging her bets slightly. Perhaps Euphrasie just had a particularly blunt sense of humour. “Can I get you a drink?”

“Ginger tea if they have it and English breakfast tea if they don’t, thanks.” Ah. Euphrasie looked away from her the moment she was finished talking - earlier even - as though just looking at her was something to be limited as much as humanly possible. Her tone wasn’t cold, not exactly. Strained, maybe. Unhappy, certainly.

Perhaps Fantine was over-reacting.

She mulled it all over as she waited for the tea, drumming her fingers on the counter as Silvia - the teenage daughter of the owners who was working behind said counter - glared at her as she poured the hot water. She contemplated asking her how school was going, but that scowl was nothing to mess with on a good day and today was shaping up to be a hard day, to say the least. 

Silvia placed the mug down in front of her with a blunt “What’s up with you today?” 

Just for a moment, Fantine contemplated telling this fifteen-year-old everything, even if only to be vindicated as her face morphed into a sincere expression of ‘Hey, Fantine, what the fuck?’ Eventually, though, she settled on the far more tasteful “I’ve got a lot going on right now.” Followed by a hasty “I hope your art thing goes well on Friday,” as she took the mug - which was a lot hotter than she had anticipated - and headed back to the table. 

 Euphrasie was staring down at her phone as she approached the table and Fantine watched for a moment as her shoulder shook, jostled by her bouncing knee. 

Quite unintentionally, it occurred to Fantine that Enjolras shared that nervous tic. 

She waved the thought away and sat down, placing the tea in front of Euphrasie.“So,” she began with a pleasant smile that she hoped didn’t betray how badly she was suddenly convinced this was going to go, “You’re a tea drinker?” Euphrasie just raised her eyebrows at her as if to say ‘So?’ “I only mention because I am, too.”

She looked at her for a moment and Fantine got the distinct impression that Euphrasie was deciding whether or not she was making fun of her. “I’m off coffee at the moment,” she said finally, tone careful and clipped. “So there’s not really too many other alternatives, are there?”

Fantine nodded and tried not to take it personally, although it almost certainly was. “Good point.” 

An uncomfortable silence followed as Euphrasie sipped her tea and Fantine stared down at her own empty mug, suddenly regretting not getting herself another. 

Despite the fact that Euphrasie had been the one to suggest this meeting - Fantine never would have been the one to take that step; she was determined to work at her pace whatever that was - Fantine couldn’t shake the feeling that Euphrasie seemed like she would rather be anywhere else. 

She couldn’t blame her. Literally, she couldn’t. Any apprehension Euphrasie felt was entirely Fantine’s fault and she knew that. 

“Is it nice then?” Fantine asked purely to break the silence. “The tea?”

Euphrasie did something that was half nod and half-shrug. “It’s calming and it’s good for nausea so it does what I want it to do.”

“Oh, I’m sorry. Are you alright?”

She shrugged listlessly which didn’t really help the sudden growing anxiety in Fantine’s chest. “Fine. Just a lot going on right now.”

Fantine nodded, thinking of all of the times she’d found herself almost compulsively making a hot, comforting cup of tea when stressed. “I’ve always found chamomile pretty good for that.”

“My papa gave it to me when I was a teenager when I was sick and it never helped much.” Fantine deliberately ignored the way it felt as though Euphrasie were pointing out and emphasising every little thing that exemplified Fantine’s absence in her life and how much she’d missed. She was aware enough without saying it out loud.

“Oh, yes,” she agreed pleasantly, “I find it doesn’t help me with nausea much either, but I was so irritable and so stressed for the first few months of being pregnant - hormones and morning sickness and all - and since I was working retail full-time then I needed to not burst into tears or bite the head off of every single rude customer.” Much to her surprise, Euphrasie actually smiled at that. Okay, maybe it was more of a mouth twitch, but still. 

Just for a moment, it was definitely there. 

Fantine couldn’t help but let out a small sigh of relief. She even felt bold enough to hazard a more potentially difficult question. “How are you feeling? About all this, I mean.”

Any pleasantry fell from Euphrasie’s face at that. “Look,” she began, coldness evident in every syllable, “Enj might think you’re God’s gift to therapy, but I don’t care. You’re not my therapist and I’m not your client, so stop treating me like one.”

Fantine gaped slightly for a moment - more at her own ability to have somehow screwed up this quickly than at Euphrasie. Hastily she leant forward slightly in her chair and tried to make it right. “I know,” she said carefully. “I didn’t mean—“

“Let me be very clear about what I want from you,” Euphrasie cut her off. Finally, she sounded actually angry. Not frustrated, tired, or sad. Angry. “I want answers. I want to know where I come from, I want to know why you didn’t put me into the foster system, and I want to know my own goddamn medical history!”

The bottom dropped out of Fantine’s stomach, her chest lurching viciously. “You’re— You’re not having medical problems, are you?” She swallowed her anxiety and watched Euphrasie’s face intently for any sign of an explanation. 

Euphrasie looked down at the table for several long seconds, shifting the weight of her mug between her hands every other moment. Fantine saw the way her mouth twisted and her eyebrows furrowed, as though even the question caused her pain.

“We—” she began before cutting herself off with a small wince, almost imperceptible if Fantine hadn’t been watching her face so closely. She swallowed. “My husband and I are trying for a baby and we’re struggling to conceive.” The words came out quickly, economically, not quite in a rush but definitely manoeuvred in such a way as to cause minimal pain on the way out. 

Around a minute and a half of silence passed. It took around half that time just for Fantine to process the cruel reality of her words. The other half she spent wondering if there was any way she could possibly respond without throwing up out of sheer guilt.

Taking a shaky breath, Fantine swallowed down her own feelings and spoke. “When I was sixteen,” she said, “I was told that I was functionally infertile. Which, ironically, is how I ended up accidentally getting pregnant. Is that… helpful? In any way?” 

Euphrasie nodded slightly, a faraway look in her eyes as she stared straight ahead. “Tell me if I’m overstepping,” Fantine added quickly, “But have you been told anything like that before?”

This seemed to jolt Euphrasie back to reality somewhat. Shifting slightly awkwardly in her seat, she cleared her throat and shrugged. “I have a couple of cysts on one of my ovaries but apparently it shouldn’t harm our chances too much. We just need to be patient, according to them.” Those last three words were said more to herself than to Fantine - though she heard them anyway - and the bitterness radiated off her in waves. 

“I’m sorry.” It was all Fantine could think to say. 

Euphrasie shrugged again. “Nothing to do with you.” Her voice wasn’t accusing, just honestly stating the facts. It wasn’t Euphrasie’s fault that the facts hurt.

Fantine frowned. “Genetically, it might be.”

“Well,” she said with a small huff, “It’s not your fault.” 

“I’m still sorry it’s happening at all.”

Euphrasie nodded sedately and seemed to accept that she was getting Fantine’s apologies whether she wanted them or not. 

It had been a long, long time since she had felt so selfish, but Euphrasie was right there. She was the living embodiment of Fantine’s ineptitude and neglect and she was suffering through the consequences of Fantine’s actions, consequences that she hadn’t even properly considered. The guilt was unavoidable. 

Fantine leant forward towards her, skin crawling with the need to apologise again and again. “Euphrasie—“ she began only to be immediately cut off.

“It’s Cosette.” Her voice was simultaneously cold and tired, as though all of the effort to appear to be pleasant had drained out of her with the use of that name. 

Fantine cleared her throat and nodded. “Right, of course. Sorry.”

But it seemed that Cosette wasn’t done. “No one’s ever called me that. Would you like to know why?” she asked, the challenge evident in her voice. Leaving no time for Fantine to answer - even if she hadn’t been too stunned to do so - she forged forward. “I’ll tell you,” she said with a glare. “It’s because we only managed to track down my birth certificate two years ago and my birth mother dropped me off in front of a random church with nothing but the clothes on my back a note that called me Cosette.”

Fantine could feel a few passing pedestrians and other people at the café staring, but Cosette was glaring at her so intently that to look away from her would feel like giving up. “There’s nothing that I can say that will justify that—“ she said carefully only for Cosette to cut her off again, this time with a humourless huff of laughter. 

“No!” she exclaimed around that laugh. “There isn’t!”

There was a beat of silence and Cosette’s words rang in her ears. Fantine dropped her gaze finally and out of the corner of her eye, she saw Cosette’s shoulders sag in her chair. After a moment, Fantine eventually spoke, voice quiet. “I’m going to regret it for the rest of my life.”

Cosette sighed tiredly. “Don’t bother,” she said around a grimace that, just for a second, Fantine thought might be halfway to a sardonic smile. “My real parents found me in the end.” 

With a small sincere smile, Fantine could only nod for the first couple of seconds, the truth of the statement overwhelming. After a moment or two, she cleared her throat. “I’m glad,” she said. And she was. Still hurt, though.

Cosette nodded, seemingly more to herself than to Fantine and several moments passed in which neither of them said a thing. It wasn’t that there was a shortage of things to talk about. 

Far from it. 

The longer this woman sat before her, the more certain Fantine became that they could talk about anything at all - from happiness to pain, from nonsense to the weather - and she would still be filled with all of the love that she had stored away for that little girl for so long as her chest ached with guilt.

It was awful and Fantine suspected, if she could, she’d do it forever. 

Cosette sipped at her tea - which surely must have been cold at that point - and checked her phone once when it buzzed on the table, mouth quirking up at the corners slightly as she read her notification. Fantine wondered if it was a message from the husband that she’d mentioned before and tried not to dwell on the fact that her daughter was old enough to have a husband. 

“My dad arrested you once,” Cosette said, breaking the silence after a while. 

Fantine frowned. “I don’t think so? I feel like I would have remembered re-meeting your dad.” Then added with a small huff of laughter, “And if he was suddenly police.”

“I mean my stepfather.” Fantine didn’t miss the undercurrent of a challenge to her statement. For a moment she wondered whether it would be appropriate to mention the relatively long-term - long-term for her - girlfriend she’d had during and just after her Master's year. No, she decided. Or, at least, not yet. 

“Oh,” she exclaimed in the end, “Jean got married! Good for him.” She kept to herself any thoughts she had about Jean apparently marrying a policeman - even one that was nice to her - though thought scathingly to herself ‘Really, Jean? Police? You were already on thin ice as a politician!’ “And you?” she asked instead. “Is he good to you, your stepfather?”

Cosette smiled a warm genuine smile and, despite her better judgement, any principled criticisms she might have had about Jean’s choice of partners melted away. “He’s great.”

“Good.” Fantine nodded resolutely. “So, your stepfather must be Inspector Javert” Cosette nodded at that and Fantine sat back in her chair. “Wow. Small world.”

Cosette shrugged. “Not really.” 

“How do you mean?”

Cosette looked at her for several moments, eyebrows slightly furrowed as though she were trying to figure something out. “He was looking for me,” she said eventually, almost as though explaining something she was expecting Fantine to have remembered. “You mentioned me to him and he came and found us.”

Huh.

A cruelly truthful voice in the back of Fantine’s head whispered that Cosette had always deserved people who would go looking for her. She’d deserved better than Fantine.

“Good,” she said thickly, pausing for a moment to clear her throat. “I didn’t actually know him but I spent enough time with him to realise that at the very least he was a person with a great deal of integrity. Even if is police.” It didn’t quite occur to Fantine how much of a gamble saying that was until it was already out of her mouth, but Cosette, thank God, huffed a laugh at it, nodding as if to say ‘fair enough’. “I’m happy Jean has someone. Between you and me, I was always worried that he was lonely.”

Hurt flashed across Cosette’s face and Fantine’s stomach dropped at the sight, cursing her tactlessness. “He had me,” she said, tone immediately defensive.

“And I couldn’t be happier about that, believe me…” Fantine couldn’t help the deep sigh that escaped her chest.

“What?” Cosette prompted, leaning forward against the table.

“It’s just— You deserve to be taken care of and to be surrounded by as people that love you as possible. You always have.”

“You don’t know me.” It wasn’t accusatory, defensive, or sad. Her tone was a plain and simple statement of fact, not untinged by emotion but unburdened by it.

Fantine said the only thing she could think to say. “I’d like to.”

She hoped that Cosette could see how sincere she was in that admission. For all that she had told herself that she would do this at Cosette’s pace, even if that meant not doing it at all, there was something powerful in her chest that was determined to reach out to her. It was desperate to understand her, not to make up for lost time but for each of them to come to know the person the other has become in their absence from one another. 

As Fantine looked at her, she noticed some extremely faded pink in the ends of Cosette’s hair and a nose piercing with a silver stud in it so small that it was almost unnoticeable. 

“Can I ask you something?”

“Anything.”

“How did you meet my papa?”

For a couple of awful moments, she thought she might have meant Felix. If she truly wanted to know about him, Fantine would tell her what she knew without complaint. That, of course, didn’t mean that she wouldn’t go home and sob into Boo’s fur and a bottle of wine interchangeably. 

But Felix had never been anyone’s papa, not really. Even Enjolras hadn’t called him papa since he was around eight years old.

Jean had been a single parent - Fantine assumed - until Inspector Javert came into his life and if Fantine was doing the maths correctly that was for around five years. He had sent her one grainy video during that time, right before she asked him to stop sending them. It had been of a small blonde child sleepily pulling her thumb out of her mouth and asking someone behind the camera “Papa, when can we do the fireworks? I’m tired.” The response had been muffled but the child had nodded tiredly and put her thumb back in her mouth, eyes quickly drifting shut. 

She thought to the times she had met Jean Fauchelevant - Valjean, rather, she supposed, now. In-person, they had met only once, but he had felt like more of a friend to her in those few hours than anyone had in years. “I knew him very briefly when you were little,” she said eventually. “You were five at the time if I’m not mistaken.”

“I was with the Thénardier’s then.” Cosette’s voice was quiet but the statement was clear and frank. 

Fantine could only nod. “I’m sorry.”

She looked up at her sharply at that. “You know?” she asked and Fantine had to swallow down the urge to burst into tears right then and there.

“Finding out how truly bad they were was the reason I asked Jean to stop sending me pictures of you.” When she thought back on finding out about them, Fantine was surprised at the lack of clarity she had. Really, all she remembered was the all-consuming guilt and spending hours hugging her toilet.

“So,” Cosette’s prompting voice mercifully cut through her hazy memory. “How did you meet him?”

“Yes, right. Um, at that point, any money I didn’t spend on the bare essentials and sending to the church to give to your foster parents, I saved so that every month or two I’d be able to buy a bus ticket to go to the church and maybe see you. Your foster parents almost never took you, though. Couldn’t have been more than once a month and I think that was probably so that they could keep getting payments from the church.” On the other side of the table, Cosette gave a resigned sigh and a small shrug as if to say ‘well, what can you do.’

 “One time I went,” Fantine continued, ignoring the way her heart had begun to quicken with anxiety, “It’d been almost a year since the last time I’d been able to, I heard that the town had a new mayor that everyone loved called Jean Fauchelevant and that he’d come to the service I was at. 

“I have no idea how it happened, but I ended up striking up a conversation with him. I think he could tell I was struggling with something and offered to talk about it.” Cosette smiled at that. Fantine couldn’t help but smile too and some of the anxiety dissipated slightly. “So we did. After the service, we talked for a long time. He’s a good, kind man, your papa, and I’m sure you know that, but not a day goes by that I’m not endlessly grateful to him.” Cosette nodded and blinked more rapidly and Fantine couldn’t help but across the table to pat her hand comfortingly.

Getting slightly emotional herself now, Fantine took a steadying breath. “He asked how often I came to the church and I told him as often as I could, but that it would probably be the last time for a while because I’d been fired from my job and my union refused to help me.” In a second Cosette’s face transformed into a picture of righteous anger and, just for a moment, she looked so very like Enjolras. 

Deciding at that moment to abandon that particular branch of the story, Fantine waved it away. “That’s a different story and it is relevant, but I doubt you’d want me to go off on a tangent more than I already have done.” Cosette smiled and seemed to let it go for now. “Basically though,” she continued, “I told him why I was there, he asked who you were with, I told him, and then he informed me that there were… rumours about the Thénardier’s and the way they treated the children under their care. I panicked. He saw me panicking and told me he’d fix it, that he promised he’d get you out of there.” Fantine sighed, the exhaustion and guilt suddenly catching up with her. “I was on the bus out of town before it even hit me what had happened.”

“You left.” 

It wasn’t an accusation but Fantine felt that perhaps it should’ve been. “Again,” she confirmed, “Yeah.”

Cosette sat bonelessly back in her chair, body language reflecting the emotional exhaustion Fantine was feeling in waves. What a pair they must have looked. On what had become a fine late-spring afternoon to be so wiped out at a lovely family-run Italian café and bistro and not a glass of wine in sight. 

When Cosette spoke again, she didn’t move from her laid back position, she just shifted her hands to rest in her lap. “Why did you leave me in the first place?” 

It wasn’t that it was a question she hadn’t been expecting. And, really, it hadn’t even come out of the blue. Yet, it caught her off guard all the same. “You said anything,” Cosette pointed out after a moment too long of silence.

“I did.” Fantine nodded. “I didn’t give you up easily if that’s what you’re asking.”

Now, it seemed, it was Cosette’s turn to be caught off guard. “It— I wasn’t,” she stammered despite it very clearly being what she had been asking - she hadn’t even needed to engage her therapist brain to figure it out. 

“I don’t say this to get myself off the hook, I think it’s important that you know that. You… you were just so easy to love… and I thought that, because of that, everything else had to work out okay in the end, no matter what. I was naïve. I ended up keeping you for just over a year before I just couldn’t anymore.”

“Then, what happened?”

“Reality caught up.” Bills caught up. Her own mind had caught up. “We spent your first birthday at Le Musée du Travail. It was so dull, my god,” she said, huffing a laugh as Cosette watched her curiously, “But there was a huge statue of a workhorse and you loved it so much, you’d scream every time I tried to take you to the next bit of the museum and I’m sure you would’ve screamed all the way home if I hadn’t given in and got you a little soft toy horse from the gift shop. It was so expensive that it wiped out a couple of days worth of food money, but you slept soundly all the way home and all through that night with it tucked under your arm. Worth every cent, that thing.”

An unhelpful, invasive voice in her head reminded her that she still had the toy in a box somewhere. She’d found it under the table after she’d given Cosette up and wept with it in her arms for hours only to shove it into a box a day later and ignore it every time she moved house.

“But you still haven’t said why you left me.” Cosette’s voice brought her back down to earth, desperation tinging the edges of her tone. 

Fantine clenched her jaw, determined not to cry. “I was seventeen when I got pregnant with you. When you were born, I’d only been a legal adult for a month. I just barely finished school what with childcare and working every hour that I could and moving away so that you were away from my parents. Then, once school was done, I was working full time and it was only barely enough. 

“My landlady, Madame Posey, looked after you when she could and she was happy to rent me the flat for a pittance, but I was still barely keeping our heads above water. You didn’t take well to the formula the food bank gave us, so I had to eat so that you could eat for at least six months and then it became a matter of finding a way to afford food for both of us.” Fantine rubbed a hand over her face, she could feel the stress from her memories bleeding into the line of her shoulders. “In terms of food insecurity,” she went on, “The only thing worse than not knowing where your next meal is coming from is not knowing where your child’s next meal is coming from. 

“It’s not like I could ask Felix for help,” she couldn’t help but spit his name, the trip down memory lane playing havoc with her ‘accept and move on’ strategy for dealing with her past. “The only time I saw him after he just up and left, it was when I was six months along, very clearly showing, and he was at a bistro sitting across from a woman and bouncing the most cherubim blond toddler you’ve ever seen on his knee. Oh, and he was also wearing a wedding ring.”

Cosette made an ‘ugh’ noise from her chair, her face full of genuine, incredibly vindicating disgust. “And you didn’t go over and confront him about it,” she wasn’t asking a question, she had to know that she hadn’t, but Fantine continued anyway. 

She sighed. “Sometimes I look back and wish I had, but I was seventeen. I was seventeen and pregnant and he was in his late twenties and a respected member of the community with a picture-perfect family.” Cosette’s face twisted with disgust once again and, once again, Fantine felt quite grateful for it. “When you turned one,” she continued, “I looked at you and you had started to look so much like that toddler – like Enjolras, God I’m so old now.” 

Cosette laughed at that. “You’re what? Late-thirties?”

“I’m forty-one next month.” Cosette just looked at her. “Anyway, at that age, you were both all blonde curls and chubby cheeks. Seriously you were basically identical, it was almost creepy. No offence.” 

Cosette waved it away with a laugh. “None taken. I work with kids and they can definitely, 100% be creepy sometimes.” 

There was a beat of silence then, the unexpected pleasantness of the conversation caught on something. Itself, perhaps. Fantine was struck by a sudden awareness of her situation, of where she was and who she was with. This was the kid she’d held in her arms for a whole year, the baby with wisps of blonde hair and the brightest gummy smile she’d ever seen.  

“You were such a great kid,” she found herself saying more to herself than to Cosette. “God,” she went on without much of a plan of where she was going. “But it had been in the back of my mind since I saw them that day that I would never be able to give you the kind of life that that child would grow up with, but it was only after a year of constant struggle and wondering in my darkest moment whether I could be so selfish as to just give you up that I realised that it was more selfish of me to keep you.”

“It wasn’t,” Cosette cut in, tone adamant. “And it wasn’t selfish to get rid of me either. You just… felt like you couldn’t win.” She was looking at Fantine with such imploring eyes you’d think she was the one begging for forgiveness. 

Fantine smiled ruefully. “Being raised by Jean has made you wise. And kind.”

Cosette shrugged. “It’s the truth.”

“The truth for me at the time was that by keeping you I was dooming you to a lifetime of struggle and hardship,” Fantine went on with a tired sigh, “But there was a way out of that for you. I thought you’d have your best chance at a good life if I left you at that church. A life where you didn’t have to go through what I was going through.”

Cosette nodded thoughtfully and Fantine couldn’t decide whether she wanted to know what was going through her head. “Why the church?” she asked suddenly, sitting up slightly more in her chair. “Why not drop me off with social services?”

Ah. And wasn’t that the question Fantine had been asking herself for the last twenty years.

Logically, she knew why. Logistically speaking, giving her to the church had done what she had wanted it to do: it had given Cosette a good home - in the end - and kept her safe from her parents. The lack of a paper trail had been appealing, not to mention that they didn’t share the government’s predisposition to want to reunite biological family as a matter of priority regardless of parental wishes. Despite knowing that it would cause problems for Cosette in the future, she was willing to take that risk. 

But, in the end, it hadn’t kept her safe.

That’s always the thing with being a parent, isn’t it? You want your child to be happy and healthy, but you will settle for them to just be safe. Fantine had felt like a failure for the last two decades because of this and now she had to explain her logic to the very child that it had hurt. 

“I needed to keep my parents away from you.” Saying it felt insufficient. Pathetic. It was an excuse where Cosette didn’t want one and she knew that. Fantine took a breath and looked down at her wringing hands. “When I got pregnant,” she continued, not even really sure where she was going herself, “They, my parents, that is,” she clarified with a shaky breath, “They gave me an ultimatum. Either I leave their house and don’t come back, or I remain confined in the house for the remainder of my pregnancy and allow them to raise you as theirs.” 

She hazarded a looked up at Cosette and was relieved to find a kind of sad curiosity on her face rather than the anger or, perhaps, disgust that she had been expecting. “And then,” she went on, speaking on a shaky exhale, “When I started packing up to leave, they tried to trap me in the house saying that you were rightfully theirs.”

Fantine watched as Cosette swallowed and nodded sedately. Then, in what must have been a stroke of either madness or pity, she placed a hand on top of Fantine’s, patting them slightly awkwardly. Despite the awkwardness, Fantine was grateful for the comfort. 

“Why didn’t you just let them raise me? Wouldn’t it have been easier?” There was no blame in her voice anymore and, yet, Fantine couldn’t be relieved; the blame was replaced by a kind of earnest confusion that broke her heart maybe even slightly more than if she was still blaming her. 

Ease hadn’t factored into it at all. All that had mattered - all that still mattered - was that Cosette grew up knowing exactly how loved she was. “It took me a long time to realise the extent of their emotional abuse,” she said eventually, memories coming at her from all angles. Her own childhood. The early days of Cosette’s. The exhaustion at having to constantly having to be perfect that had hit her like a tonne of bricks during her mid-teens. “But, even then, it made me physically sick to think of you growing up the way I did. I figured that even if I had no money and no idea what to do, I at least knew better than them what not to do.” 

A beat or two of silence passed in which Cosette watched her carefully with sad eyes and slightly furrowed brows and Fantine had to fight to not squirm under the scrutiny. “Thank you for telling me,” she said finally, voice quiet.

“As you said,” Fantine said, shrugging far more casually than she felt, “It’s where you come from. You have a right to know.”

“Still,” Cosette emphasised.

Shooting her a smile, Fantine took a breath a sat more upright in her chair. “Right,” she said with as much finality as she could muster, “Now I’m done talking about myself, tell me about you. Your job, your life, this husband of yours?” 

At the mention of her husband a smile blossomed over Cosette’s features and her shoulders noticeably relaxed. “His name is Marius,” she said, warmth, familiarity and love almost palpable in the way she said his name. “He’s a lawyer and we’ve been together for almost four years and married for just over eighteen months now.” Fantine deliberately ignored how old that made her feel. “He’s… he’s just so kind and so, so loyal. He’s funny, too. Even if he doesn’t always mean to be.”

“Is he cute?” 

Laughter bubbled out of Cosette’s mouth at that. “Of course. Wait,” she said picking up her phone, “Here.” 

On the phone was a picture of a redheaded man, his grinning face covered in freckles. He was handsome, though not ruggedly so. More in a goofy, rakish kind of way. “Oh, he is cute!” Fantine exclaimed, handing the phone back just as a thought occurred to her. “Wait, his name’s Marius?” she asked thinking back to a colleague that Enjolras had mentioned.

“Yeah?” Cosette said somewhat sceptically 

“I’ve heard of him,” Fantine said, nodding to herself, “But I thought he was dating… Oh! He works for Jean?” 

“Yep,” Cosette confirmed happily. “That’s how we met actually. Bumped into each other in the lobby.” 

“And you met Enjolras through him?” Fantine could tell she was on thin ice once again but she was too curious to not ask.

“Yeah. They invited me over for a group meal and I basically never left.” She laughed, probably remembering something about the meal - from what Fantine knew about what went on when Les Amis all gathered together to sit down and have a meal it was probably quite the learning curve for her. 

Relieved at Cosette’s lack of negative reaction at her prodding, Fantine smiled contentedly. “That’s wonderful.”

A moment passed and Fantine watched as something flitted across Cosette’s face, a thought, an idea perhaps, and settled in the crease of her brow. “Are you going to keep seeing Enj after all this?” Ah, how the tables had turned. In a way, it was nice to know that she wasn’t the only one feeling as though she had to tread carefully here.

Fantine sat forward properly and crossed one leg over the other. “We had a phone call this morning and he told me to tell you if you asked that he won’t decide anything concrete until you tell him what you’re comfortable with.” Cosette’s face contorted into a picture of surprise at that. “That being said,” she went on, “The tentative plan - which he also told me I could tell you about, by the way - is for him to see someone else primarily, but, if you’re comfortable with it, he would continue to see me on a supplementary basis.”

Nodding slowly, Cosette hummed slightly. “Sounds good,” she said after a moment. Then, slightly quieter, “You’ve really helped him.”

“He helps himself. I just show him how.” It was true, for all that the man was truly abysmal at self-care, he was surprisingly capable when it came to keeping himself on track to reach certain goals they set together. “And,” she allowed, “I help to filter his freaked out brain into common sense.” Cosette laughed a little at that. “Really,” Fantine emphasised, “It’s all him." Cosette nodded, seemingly satisfied with that answer.

Her phone vibrated again and she looked down at it, frowning. "I have to go," she said, concern undeniably tinging the edges of her voice as she stood from her chair.

"Are you alright?" Fantine asked, standing with her.

She nodded entirely unconvincingly. "I've been working on a favour for a friend at work and someone's finally got back to me. Do you mind if I...?" she trailed off, gesturing over her shoulder with her thumb. 

Fantine waved her concerns away. "Do what you have to do."  

Shouldering her bag, Cosette nodded and moved as if to turn away but stalled halfway through. Turning back to face Fantine, her expression was suddenly nervous once again. “Thank you for answering my questions,” she said. “And for, you know,” she went on, not meeting Fantine's gaze, “Being here.”

Fantine had to huff a sardonic laugh at that. “Better late than never.” Just as Cosette began to turn away again, she added quickly, “And I will be, by the way.”

“What?”

“Here. Whenever you need me. Even if it’s just to email me a list of medical questions, I’m at your disposal.” Cosette watched her for a moment or two, indecision written all over her face. "Cosette?" she prompted after several seconds of silence. 

“Would you want to meet my parents?" she burst out suddenly and Fantine's stomach flipped uncomfortably. "Again?" Cosette went on with a nervous chuckle. "Is that something you’d be interested in?”

It very, very much was but the sudden screaming panic in Fantine’s head put her thinking brain offline for a few moments. She snapped back to reality several seconds later when she registered that Cosette was looking at her with an expression that was very clearly half-alarmed-half-regretting-asking. “Yeah, um, I’ve taken this week off work so, really, whenever works for you probably works for me, too.”

The words might have come out in a rush, but Cosette didn't seem to mind; she wasn't exactly stealthy with the way she breathed a sigh of relief. “Cool. I’ll, uh, email you, then.” And with a small wave and a shy smile, she was gone, walking away from the café with her bag slung over her shoulder and her phone in her hand.

After a few moments of watching her retreating figure, Fantine turned away too and started the journey home.

Of all of the things that she had expected to walk away from this meeting with - seriously, a black eye had been considerably higher up in likelihood - she hadn’t even considered the possibility of a second meeting, let alone one with her parents. It was an olive branch that a nasty little voice in her head was convinced she didn’t deserve, but Cosette wouldn’t have offered it if she hadn’t wanted to, if she hadn’t wanted to see Fantine again.

When Fantine had got into university, it hadn’t felt like the universe had given her a second chance. It had felt like what it was: her demanding a second chance and working for it until she got it. Since then, she’d been hesitant to believe that the universe, God, whatever, would give her anything.

But Cosette had.

Cosette had given her a second chance at the worst mistake of her life.

Cosette had given her a way to not regret so much and to heal some of the hurt she had caused.

Cosette had given her everything.