Work Text:
Sometimes at night, Cosette still smelled the metallic tang of blood. She could still see her dear Marius fighting for his life in the dim light of the doctor’s office after the massacre. She could even hear the night terrors that periodically plagued him afterwards, names whispered and shouted, people long dead that somehow she wished she had known if only so Marius wasn’t the only person bearing this burden.
When the National Guard had declared Paris’s independence, she had been so hopeful that maybe life would get better for them all. Nearly fifty years after Marius and his friends rose up against the French regime, the people of Paris would finally get justice and equality.
Her hope had died the day the National Guard began massacring hostages in the Madeleine.
Now, she sheltered in a run-down apartment listening to the constant gunfire on the streets below. Perhaps she should flee somewhere, but a part of her didn’t want to leave the place she had grown old with Marius in.
The night after the military had begun fighting the communards in the street, she nearly hadn’t noticed him in her apartment. The man was nearly completely shrouded in black and stayed in the shadows, just outside the reach of her lamp.
At first, when Cosette had seen the man’s eyes and how they nearly glowed in the dark, she had been sure he was an apparition. An apparition born from an old woman whose time was quickly coming to the end. But then, she drew closer to him, shedding more light on his body, and as he shrunk away from the light, she could tell he was only just a man. A man wearing a black mask covering his entire face.
Had Cosette been younger, she supposed she would have felt fear at the prospect of an unknown man completely covered in black being in her home. She asked, “What is your name?”
“Erik.”
Cosette said, “Just Erik? What brings you to my house, young man?”
“They took my home and drove me out.”
“Ah. Where was it?”
He was silent for a moment and then said, “Why aren’t you afraid?”
“You’re in need of a safe place to spend the night, just like me.”
“And what if I told you I was the Angel of Death?”
Despite herself, Cosette laughed. “I am an old woman. I have married the love of my life, grown old with him, and then watched him die. I’m not afraid of death. Are you?”
He grew silent again. For Cosette, his silence was telling. She smiled knowingly. “Sit with an old woman for a while. We’d fare better together than alone right now, anyways.”
She sat on the couch, and he took a seat in the chair opposite her. “I live in the construction of the opera house,” he said. “Does that shock you?”
“Desperate people will do desperate things in order to feel like they belong somewhere.”
Erik said, “I don’t care to belong anywhere. I just want to live my life separate from other people.” He chuckled bitterly. “People have hated me wherever I go. Can you blame me?”
“So you have no friends? Not even one?”
“I lost the only friend I’d ever had years ago.”
“And no one else who will love you.”
He snorted and gestured towards his face. “No woman could ever love this.”
“So, then, you’ve lost your hope.”
“You say that as if I truly ever had a hope in the first place.”
Cosette said, “Surely, at some point, you were a child who thought he could be loved, or a young man who thought he could find a place in the world.”
“If I ever did, then I was a fool.”
“You may think it foolish, but hope is never going to leave you. One day, you’ll see again the kindness in another person’s eyes, and you’ll want to find your place again. It’s not a bad thing. Maybe next time, you will find what you’re looking for.”
He made no reply. They sat in silence for a few more moments before Cosette said, “Let’s rest. Maybe things will look better in the morning.”
By the time she woke up, though, he was gone.