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She cuts through the crowd in the living room quickly, jerks up the sash on the window and ducks out onto the fire escape. The balcony is just a few feet to her left and full of people, so she climbs up the flight of stairs, her footsteps ringing metallic and harsh in her ears, coming to a stop on the landing outside the apartment above Jehan’s. Thankfully the blinds on the window are drawn. She sinks to her knees, willing the cold night air to clear her head, to wipe away the image of their smiling faces and their arms nestled comfortably around each other that’s become stubbornly imprinted on the back of her eyelids.
The jealousy she expected. She’d been living with that in the back of her mind ever since she first found out about the two of them, and she knew it was going to come surging forward when she inevitably saw them here tonight. What she hadn’t been prepared for was the jealousy to be swept aside almost instantly by a fatalistic numbness that seems to have settled into her bones, weighing her down.
Looking at them together didn’t make her feel like something had been stolen from her. It made her feel like this whole time she had been gazing through a window at something she never deserved to have, and she’s just now noticing the glass separating her from it, and the realization leaves her with absolutely nothing left.
He’s so fucking happy with her. Of course he is.
There’s a quiet clatter below her, and then a voice calls out, “Eponine?”
Eponine doesn’t answer. Cosette’s head appears through the gap in the landing, then the rest of her. The breeze whips her candy blue skirt around her legs. She gets to the top step and then halts, doesn’t come further onto the landing proper, leaving that extra space between them.
The silence stretches out forever. Finally Eponine turns her head and glares. “Fuck do you want?”
Cosette just keeps staring at her. She grew up pretty, all soft angles and shining chestnut hair, a far cry from the pale wisp of a girl who used to tuck herself into corners of their old house trying to stay out of sight. It must have been almost ten years ago. It feels like a lifetime.
“I wasn’t sure I’d recognize you,” Cosette says slowly. “If I ever saw you again.”
“Well clearly you’ve proved that theory wrong. Is that all you came up here to say?”
“Do you mind if I sit down?”
“Yes,” Eponine says bluntly, not blinking. Cosette flinches a little, and for a second that scared girl from ten years ago shows through in the look on her face. Eponine feels a twist of guilt low in her belly that she would ordinarily stomp on, but for some reason the fight goes out of her instead. “Whatever. It’s a free fucking country.” She breaks eye contact, reaches for the Newports in her jacket pocket just to give herself something else to focus on. Cosette hesitates, then sits at the edge of the landing.
There’s one cigarette left in the pack. Eponine had known this when she swiped it from her parents’ room, was counting on each of them assuming the other had smoked the last one. Getting cussed out again for dipping into their “hard-earned” supply was not on her to-do list. She flicks the cheap lighter a few times before a flame appears. “So what,” she continues, still no idea what possessed Cosette to follow her up here, “you felt like reminiscing about the good old days?”
Cosette lets out a little breath of what actually sounds like laughter. “Just curious, I guess. Marius talks about a friend called Eponine and I figured it couldn’t be a very common name, but I never asked him. Probably cause part of me didn’t really want to know. I wasn’t sure how seeing you again would make me feel.”
Eponine takes a long drag of her cigarette. Looking back on it, she knows her parents had abused Cosette -- they were only ever interested in the money they got from the state, the fact that a foster child came along with it was an inconvenience they grudgingly put up with. Eponine was young enough then that she can’t recall specifics, but she knows Cosette was never allowed to play or watch TV with her and Azelma, never ate meals with the rest of them, never had any clothes that weren’t secondhand and threadbare, and her imagination can fill in the blanks.
She was awful to Cosette back then, she knows she was. Mrs. Thenardier always reinforced a sense of superiority in her daughters, and kids don’t need much more of a reason than that to be cruel.
“So, you’ve seen me, how’d it make you feel?”
Cosette twists her ring a few times around her thumb. “How do you and Marius know each other?” she asks.
Eponine doesn’t comment on her avoiding the question. “We were neighbors over the summer.” She leaves out the part where she borderline stalked him that whole time.
Cosette frowns. “You guys moved to the heights?”
“Had to. Couldn’t afford the house anymore.” Normally Eponine would rather swallow live centipedes than give out details of her financial situation -- but she’s hate-browsed Cosette’s instagram more than once since she learned Marius was dating her, which means she’s seen enough pictures of Cosette’s house, and her truck, and her shopping trips to American Eagle. And nothing makes upper-class liberals uncomfortable like their own economic privilege. Eponine wants to make this conversation uncomfortable.
Sure enough, Cosette squirms a little and twists her ring again before she laces her hands together in her lap. Another silence unfolds between them. Eponine wishes she could go back inside, but she has to finish this cigarette now. Besides, she tells herself pigheadedly, she was out here first and she’s staying.
“I’m sorry.”
It’s spoken so gently Eponine thinks she must have misheard at first. She stares at Cosette uncomprehendingly. “For what?”
Cosette’s shoulder twitches awkwardly, like she’s trying to shrug but can’t manage to make it casual. “I mean… I got out, right? They weren’t my parents. It was never going to be permanent for me.”
Eponine keeps staring, but it’s suddenly become hard for her to breathe. Because that’s really what this has been about, after all. It was never about Marius. He was just a symptom, not the cause. No, what she’s really been angry and frustrated and resentful about is that Cosette got to grow up and have a perfect father and a perfect house and a perfect wardrobe, and then she gets the perfect boyfriend as the perfect cherry on top of her fucking perfect life, and Eponine gets exactly shit. Eponine gets the deadbeat criminal parents and the roach trap apartment with the electricity that’s about to be shut off for the third time this year.
And she wants to hate Cosette for it, but she just ends up hating herself more for being so mean-spirited and ugly, and Cosette is still talking. “And it’s been long enough for me that when I try to remember it it feels like it didn’t really happen to me, like it was someone else’s life, you know? But you were stuck with them, I can’t imagine what it’s been like for you for the last --”
“Wow, you haven’t changed, have you?” Eponine cuts her off, because if she hears one more word she’s gonna lose her mind. And it’s true, Cosette hasn’t changed. She’s never had a malicious bone in her body. “My family was terrible to you. I was fucking terrible to you, and now you’re gonna sit here and apologize to me? Who does that?!”
Cosette gets a little wrinkle between her eyebrows. “We were children, Eponine,” she protests. “None of it was your fault. It took me a while to see that, but look what kind of influence you had, it’s not like --”
“Goddamn!” The word explodes out of Eponine in a sort of strangled half laugh, half sob, and she’d be screaming right now if there wasn’t a balcony full of partygoers one floor beneath them. “Why do you have to make it so fucking hard to hate you? Why can’t you just be bitter and selfish like the rest of us?”
She’s breathing harshly, and Cosette is just watching her, stunned into silence. Eponine feels sick. Nothing is fair, and Cosette being so forgiving is the most unfair part of all, and all she wants to do right now is cry except that’s not something she does. She presses her forehead hard against her knees, focuses on keeping her breaths even, tries to shut out her surroundings as much as she possibly can. Maybe if she just sits like this for long enough Cosette will finally go back inside.
Cosette doesn’t go back inside. She waits motionless while Eponine breathes for what feels like hours. When she speaks, it’s careful and quiet. “You’re about to burn yourself.”
The neglected Newport between her middle and index fingers has smoldered all the way down to the filter. “Shit.” Eponine flicks it away hurriedly. The thought occurs to her that now on top of everything else, she’s just wasted her only cigarette. “Shit!” she repeats helplessly, empty fingers flexing in the air.
And it’s so stupid, but she’s already on the edge and at this point that one cigarette might as well be the fall of human civilization. She can feel tears start to burn her eyes, threatening to spill over, and she bites her lips with the effort of holding them back. Blood tingles in her mouth.
Cosette moves. She leans toward Eponine and slowly extends her hand, palm up, fingers slightly splayed. It hovers there in the gulf of space between them. An invitation.
Eponine wonders how the hell two people who by all logic should hate each other on sight ended up here.
She grabs Cosette’s hand with an involuntary fierceness that surprises her. Their fingers lock together, and Cosette squeezes back just as tight, despite how her ring digs into both their skin. Eponine swallows hard around the golf-ball sized lump in her throat, blinks repeatedly to force the tears out as fast as possible and wipes them away quickly. She feels a brief flare of humiliation at the display of emotion, but Cosette doesn’t make it awkward, doesn’t offer half-assed platitudes or do anything other than sit there with her eyes respectfully lowered, maintaining her steady grip on Eponine’s hand.
The feeling passes, and Eponine exhales heavily. She sniffs a couple times, clears her throat, and turns to look at Cosette. “How’s my makeup?”
Cosette raises her head and studies Eponine’s face. “Looks good,” she says without hesitation. “It didn’t smudge at all. What kind of eyeliner do you use?”
She manages to sound like she’s sincerely interested, rather than just trying to change the subject, and Eponine feels oddly grateful for it. “Urban Decay 24/7. It’s nice when waterproof liners actually do what they’re supposed to.”
“I’ll have to remember that.”
The air around them feels lighter, easier to breathe in. “So what, does this mean we’re gonna be friends now?” Eponine remarks, inspecting her shoes rather than look at Cosette as she says it.
“I don’t know.” Cosette’s voice is casual, but there’s a note of something that sounds hopeful underneath. “Do you think we could be?”
Her right shoe is covered in traces of cigarette ash. Eponine dusts it off. “I think the only other person I’ve ever cried in front of is Grantaire, and he’s practically family, so. Makes this whole thing pretty embarrassing if we’re not.”
Cosette nods. “I’d like that,” she says after a moment. “I think it’d mean a lot to Marius.”
“How so?”
“Well, I know you two haven’t really been in touch, and that’s probably cause of me, right?” Cosette takes Eponine’s silence as an affirmative. “So if this makes things less awkward between you two, then great, because I think he really misses you.”
God. For a second Eponine debates coming clean and telling Cosette the whole truth about why things have been so awkward between her and Marius, but she decides against it. She’s already overfilled her quota of emotional vulnerability for the night.
Turns out it’s a good thing she didn’t confess, because exactly then they hear somebody else climbing onto the fire escape. “Cosette, are you up there?”
It’s Marius, of course. Cosette sticks her arm through a gap in the railing and waves. “You found me!”
Eponine’s not sure why, but she grabs Cosette’s shoulder. “Can we not tell him?” she says in a whisper. “Like, all the backstory, I mean.” Whatever just happened here feels too private to share with anyone else just yet.
Cosette breaks into a shy smile. “I was gonna say the same thing,” she whispers back.
Marius climbs up onto the landing looking thoroughly frazzled and clutching a beer in one hand. “I can’t believe you left me in there,” he whines.
“Aww, babe.” Cosette frowns sympathetically. “You had Courfeyrac.”
“Courfeyrac left after like, three minutes to go make out with some girl in the bathroom.” Marius sits down opposite them and crosses his legs. “What are you guys even doing up here?”
Eponine glances over at Cosette, who glances back at her. They hold each other’s gaze for a second. “Just hanging out,” Cosette says breezily. “Getting to know each other.”
“Yeah, all that good shit,” Eponine echoes.
Marius gives them a suspicious squint, or what would be a suspicious squint coming from someone more intimidating than Marius. As it is he just looks slightly constipated. “And you had to come out here for that?”
“Like we didn’t give you a convenient excuse to ditch the party yourself,” Eponine replies, reaching over to pluck the beer can out of his hand. “You should really be thanking us.”
Marius huffs and leans back against the railing, tugging at a lock of his hair. It’s a nervous habit he has. “You could have brought me with you in the first place and saved me the trouble.”
“Where’s the fun in that?” Eponine smirks and drains the rest of the beer.
Cosette catches Marius’ eye and brushes her bangs to the side, like some kind of signal. Marius lowers his hand from where it’s still tugging at his own hair. “Do you want to leave?” she asks him.
“No, it’s okay,” Marius sighs. “We just got here. But some of Grantaire’s friends are crazy, seriously. One of them was lighting shots on fire.”
“For what it’s worth, most of those people aren’t really his friends,” Eponine says. “He doesn’t even know half of them.”
Marius doesn’t seem overly reassured by this knowledge. “He also chugged an entire measuring cup full of beer.”
“I’m actually a little disappointed I missed all this,” Cosette says.
“I’m sure he’d do it again if you asked him nicely.” Eponine stands up and stretches, popping the joints in her shoulders. “I probably should head back and make sure he’s not blacked out somewhere, though.”
“We’ll see you inside,” Cosette calls after her. Eponine pauses in the middle of descending the stairs and tosses a cursory wave over her shoulder at both of them.
It feels weird as fuck. It’s probably going to feel weird as fuck for a while, she thinks. But it’s got to be better than the alternative, right?
She rubs her left thumb where where Cosette’s ring had pressed into it, thinks about how she can count on one hand the number of people who have ever given her something without any reason to or expecting anything in return. Yeah. It’ll be better.