Chapter Text
He’s probably not even coming today. She’s pretty used to this feeling by now, or should be. He’s probably not coming because he hardly ever comes. Sometimes she thinks maybe she bottled out by not stepping in to make the case for some of Marius Pontmercy’s more bizarre political views, just so that he felt like it was all right to be there. Then she reminds herself of how hard she’d racked her brains trying to find some defence for his weird attachment to the Soviet Union, one that doesn’t involve Marius’ poor idealistic dead dad and the handful of black-and-white photos of him carrying hammer and sickle flags in the eighties. Then she gives up.
Anyway, on the days when he does come, she’s on edge the whole evening. Half of it is wondering whether he even realises she’s there, half of it is waiting for him to say something new to make people’s faces freeze up with confusion. She knows for a fact that Courfeyrac has sat down with him and run through the difference between the workers owning the means of production and a totalitarian state owning the means of production, and she knows for a fact that Courfeyrac was really sweet about it because he always is when he’s not burning things. She also knows that Marius spends far too long alone in his room Thinking to be susceptible to reasoned argument.
And the fact is she finds it really beautiful, the way he sets himself to the task of believing. She’s seen the stack of library books he used to convince himself that every single report of Stalin’s atrocities was the product of biased reporting and capitalist propaganda, and when she saw it, all she wanted was to be inside his reality distortion field. She wanted to see the world twist around her, to feel this gravitational pull that could bend light and time.
She wants that more than anything, but she’s stuck in this reality, this time. And maybe, sometimes, she’s not even sure if it’s him she wants or his crazy, if she just wants to catch whatever he’s got so that she can remake her own world into something close to bearable.
He’s probably not even coming today. She can convince herself of that at least. But maybe not very well, because when he does turn up, an hour after the meeting officially starts, she’s not exactly surprised. What does surprise her is that he’s not alone.
“Hullo everyone,” says Marius, who doesn’t seem to realise that Combeferre was in the middle of speaking. “This is Cosette. She’s really interested in some of the group’s ideas.”
Éponine can see from the little glances everyone’s shooting each other that she’s not the only one wondering what exactly ‘the group’s ideas’ sound like when they’ve passed through the Marius Pontmercy filter. There’s a distinct possibility that the new girl is dangerously bananas.
One thing that’s more of a distinct reality is that the new girl is dangerously beautiful.
She’s blonde (of course she is, thinks Éponine) and sort of soft looking, and her hair’s asymmetric, half shaved half down to her right shoulder, and she has tattoos of butterflies on her hands, and she has this way of moving that’s -
This is a fucking disaster.
The new girl’s politics are surprisingly sound, which is why it’s weird that Marius is agreeing with everything she says. Right now she’s talking about service workers and how old-school Marxism discounts labour that doesn’t have a tangible product and how this leads to a dangerous attachment to the factory-floor model of organising. Marius is just nodding along, and occasionally adding in little arguments of his own, surprisingly lucid arguments considering he must have come up with them in the last five minutes.
It’s not really weird that Marius is agreeing with everything she says. It’s completely un-weird. It’s the least weird thing that has happened all day.
Éponine can’t help the cold in the pit of stomach as she sees this, because naturally she’s imagined herself in that position, except when she imagined it, it was more of a folie à deux, Marius making her believe six impossible things before breakfast, turning her Dad into a real Antifa hero and her Mum into someone who loved more than the idea of daughters and her life into not a fucking joke. This is… not what’s happening to Cosette, she’s pretty sure.
“And if you ignore the reality of emotional labour, which is not a new phenomenon, look at what servants were always expected to do - if you ignore that, then you miss the fact of the workers’ having always been alienated from their own bodies, from their own felt sense of the world around them.” Cosette has a high, quiet voice. Kind of posh, but less rich kid posh than nice girl from the 1950s posh, like she’s stepped out of a very genteel time capsule. She speaks like she’s not trying to make people listen to her, but also like she’s not frightened that they won’t.
Marius nods. “And of course there’s there are really gendered implications to that, because a lot of the kinds of labour we’re talking about, service work in particular, has so often been coded as feminine. Of course female factory workers were always crucial to the development of the traditional labour movement -”
“- well, yes, look at the matchwomen’s strike and how that led directly to the dockers’ actions a year later and the development of the modern union movement.”
“- exactly. But then if you lose sight of this other side to labour you end up not exploring the connections with feminism and the fact that ultimately bodily autonomy and workers’ autonomy are the same thing and you also break the connection to housework - ”
Cosette’s eyes are lit up. “- as well as losing the chance to organise workers who are female or nonwhite or both, who have always been more likely to be working in way that’s physically diffuse, and then in the twentieth century as the old factory-floor model breaks down even for white men, if you act as if service work isn’t really work then you lose most of what’s currently -”
They’re finishing each other’s arguments. Éponine’s really awestruck by the sheer mind-meld that this implies. Does Cosette know that a week and a half ago Marius was still trying to justify the KGB?
Cosette moves her hands around when she talks, a soft fluid movement, an undulation of the wrists, and it looks like the butterflies have taken flight and are filling the air with wings.
Éponine takes refuge at a table with Grantaire and Courfeyrac.
“How long has this been going on for?” she asks.
“Oh, forever,” says Courf. “I mean, they only actually talked about three days ago but she’s the reason Marius started ironing the shirts he wears to go to the municipal library.”
“Have they, you know -” She shouldn’t be asking this. She really shouldn’t be asking this.
“Nah. I don’t think that’s even on the cards.”
“Of course not,” says Grantaire. “Physical union would debase this marriage of minds. They met each other in utopia - which is to say, the library, that most utopian of institutions - and they’ll live out their lives in the no-place of dreams and pure ideology. The body itself is a political construct, so why would they settle for intermediaries? Why not reach straight for the superstructure itself, for the World-spirit which reaches its consummation in the dialectic of their thoughts?”
“I’m pretty sure she’s a lesbian,” says Courfeyrac.
“Well, fuck,” says Grantaire.
“Some people just like talking about politics without it being code for deep emotional and physical longing,” says Courfeyrac.
“Fuck you,” says Grantaire.
Éponine doesn’t have words.
It’s pretty difficult getting the opportunity to talk to Cosette on her own, because Marius has glued himself to her. He even follows her to the counter to order a coffee, almost making it look natural. When she watches them carefully, Éponine can actually see that yes, all the moving-millimetres-closer and dewy-eyed-gazing is coming from Marius’ end, and maybe Cosette isn’t being prim and proper so much as genuinely, unbelievably not interested.
She takes her chance when Cosette goes to the loo. It’s not particularly smooth but what Éponine’s learned is not to value style over results. She follows close after and catches Cosette before she makes it into the stall.
“Hey,” she says, softly, with a hint of embarrassment but not too much. “I’m really sorry, you don’t have any tampons, do you?”
“Oh,” says Cosette.
“Yeah,” says Éponine. “I know. Stupid of me. And this meeting’s not exactly… well, it’s a bit unbalanced.”
“I noticed,” says Cosette.
“Sometimes Musichetta comes,” says Éponine. “She’s going out with Bossuet and Joly.”
“Both?” Cosette’s smile is a really, really nice smile, goddammit.
“Yeah, they’re a sweet little unit. I don’t think she’s as into this stuff as them, maybe she finds it off-putting, I don’t know. I’m just, you know, I think they see me as one of the guys, at this point, probably makes things less awkward.”
“Anyway I’m really sorry,” says Cosette. “I use a cup.”
Éponine’s lost for a minute, then gets it. “Like, a Mooncup?”
“Yes, only it’s a different brand. They come in all sorts of…” the hands start to flutter again, no doubt illustrating the different sizes and shapes in which vaginas come. Oh god.
“That’s cool,” says Éponine, who could really do with some of Marius’ mysterious eloquence right now. “Less waste. Better for sea creatures.”
Cosette laughs. Her teeth are so small they don’t quite touch each other. And her face is so open and friendly that it doesn’t feel like they’ve just met, not at all.
“I probably should,” says Éponine.
“The coffee here’s nice,” says Cosette. “And I don’t think it’s a good idea to avoid places with a gender imbalance. That way they stay imbalanced.”
“Yup,” says Éponine. “We need to infiltrate.”
“Fuck infiltration,” says Cosette. “We need to stage a takeover.”
Éponine really doesn’t know what to do with Cosette swearing, with that mouth, in that voice.
“Also, I think there’s a machine on the wall,” says Cosette. “Selling tampons. And condoms and - are those toothbrushes?”
“They’re weird little brushballs you chew on,” says Éponine, who should have remembered the machine on the wall in the toilet of this café she’s been a regular in for the last three years.
“That’s a very unnerving concept,” says Cosette.
“Sorry, um, yeah, I didn’t have a pound coin,” says Éponine.
“Well, that’s all right,” says Cosette as a smile brightens her face. “I do.” She looks so incredibly pleased to be able to help.
“I just have my card with me today.”
“You can pay me back at the next meeting, if you like” says Cosette. “Anyway, I’m awfully sorry but I sort of need the loo.”
Éponine buys a packet of three tampons from the machine, because she has to now, and she locks the stall door and sits on the toilet seat and stares at the little cardboard box and thinks, not for anything close to the first time in her life, about the fact that she’s a bad person.
Cosette and Marius come to the next meeting, together, of course.
“Exactly how much have they been hanging out?” asks Éponine.
“A lot,” says Courfeyrac. “Completely chastely, because Marius has no idea how to actually make a move, which means she can’t actually turn him down either.”
“If she’s really not into him -” says Éponine
“I think he’s unintentionally got her backed into a corner,” says Courfeyrac. “Don’t get me wrong, there’s nothing deliberate about it. But he’s so friendly and she’s so…”
“Nice.”
“Yup.”
Éponine’s stomach is turning over for about a million reasons. “And they are, in fact, having proper conversations, which she can’t pretend she’s not enjoying.”
“Yup.”
“And she doesn’t have it in her to make up an excuse to leave or even not turn up to things.”
“Nope.”
“Jesus,” says Éponine. “This is a hostage situation. Why hasn’t she just come out to him?”
“Oh, she has,” says Courfeyrac. “Repeatedly. How do you think I know?”
And Éponine can picture the conversation, the multiple conversations, with horrible clarity. She’s had the experience of trying to convey information to Marius Pontmercy when it was information he didn’t want to have. This is the problem with the reality distortion field. Once it’s in place, it’s fucking impermeable.
Éponine remembers, with a stab of guilt, the long rambling conversation she engineered while Cosette was probably dying for a wee. At least Marius doesn’t mean to do this. He never means anything.
That’s when she realises she has to fix the problem. It’s also when she realises how to fix the problem. And that her motives here are, for once, completely pure. Because she can only think of one way to get Cosette out of this little situation, and it means putting the final nail in a coffin she’d hoped to leave just the littlest bit unsealed. Despite the fact that everyone’s been complaining about the stench of that rotting corpse for oh, about three years.
She has to get Cosette on her own again, which means she has to follow her to the loos again. And since it’s been a week and she doesn’t fancy pretending to have a period so protracted it might be medically dangerous, she has to use a different approach.
“I still owe you that pound,” she says.
“Oh, don’t worry about it,” says Cosette.
“I don’t have it with me,” says Éponine.
“I really don’t mind,” says Cosette. “I’m just glad I could help you out.”
This part didn’t actually need to be a private conversation, and they both know it.
“Listen,” says Eponine. “I don’t like not being upfront.”
This is a bare-faced lie.
“I might,” says Éponine, “know about your uh, the problem you’re having.”
Cosette looks panicked, but maybe she’s just afraid she’s going to wet herself.
“Shit,” says Éponine, “Why don’t you urinate and then we’ll have this conversation.”
“No,” says Cosette, very firmly. “What problem is it you’re talking about?”
“The - uh- look, you need to know something about Marius. He really is that oblivious. He’s really sweet, he just lives in his own little made-up world pretty much all of the time.”
“Yes,” says Cosette. “I think I’ve realised that.”
“And he is never - I mean never - going to give up on this if you don’t send him an incredibly clear signal.”
The pain on Cosette’s face is awful to look at. “I thought I had!”
“You probably have, look, this is really not your fault. ‘Incredibly clear’ just doesn’t mean quite the same thing where Marius is involved.”
“So what am I supposed to do?”
“The way I see it you have two options.”
Cosette nods, looks attentive, and Éponine suddenly has this really clear mental image of Cosette in school, solemnly taking notes, handing in all her homework on time with the title underlined twice in contrasting pen.
“The first option,” says Éponine, “is to sit him down and tell him that you understand, although he has never explicitly stated it, that he is sexually interested in you but unfortunately you are not in the same position vis-a-vis him, making it impossible for any physical or indeed significant emotional connection between the two of you to take place.”
“Ok, ok, right.” Cosette looks miserable. They probably both know that this conversation would most likely end with Marius doing something idiotic, like sitting with his head propped up against a tree for four hours, or running away to fight for the Zapatistas.
“The other option is to be in a relationship.”
Cosette goes really quiet. Then she says, “Oh.”
“I’m sorry,” says Éponine. “I’m just being straight with you, here.”
Cosette starts to giggle. Éponine takes a minute, then starts to giggle. For a brief time it seems like the funniest joke in the world.
Then Cosette says, “Look, I’m seriously likely to wet my pants, here. Can you wait a minute?”
Éponine waits, tries not to listen like a weirdo. In the end she washes her hands, just to have something to do.
When Cosette comes out she’s become very solemn again. “From what you say,” she says, “I’m royally fucked.”
“I’m just laying it out like it is,” says Éponine.
“Because I don’t know whether I’m even capable of the first thing.”
“Yeah,” says Éponine. “The first thing is kind of hard, and he’s not going to make it easy for you.”
“But the second thing - well, the problem is that I’m not in a relationship.”
“Right.”
“Not even for want of trying,” (which, Éponine thinks, seriously? How is that possible?) “just, I’m not seeing anyone at the moment and I don’t see that changing quickly, particularly with a guy following me around who thinks we’re maybe married now.”
“You raise genuine concerns,” says Éponine.
“So what do I do? Really, what do I do?”
“You could disappear off the face of the planet,” says Éponine. “But then again, maybe don’t do that. I think he might call INTERPOL and then jump off a bridge.”
“Is he not going to do that if I’m in a relationship?”
Éponine doesn’t know how to explain how she knows that Marius will react differently if Cosette’s in a relationship. She just does. “He’ll take it better,” is all she can say.
“Oh god.”
Éponine lets the silence hang between them before she makes her final move, the one she’s been maneuvering towards since before this conversation even began. “Thing is,” she says, “you don’t need to actually be in a relationship. He just needs to think you are.”
“Like, a made-up person? Someone he’s never met?”
“I think he’d need to meet them. Just so that he couldn’t convince himself you were using an especially elaborate metaphor.”
“Well, how am I going to find myself a pretend girlfriend? That’s probably harder than finding a real one!”
And Éponine still cannot believe that Cosette finding a girlfriend isn’t somewhere around the falling-off-a-log level of difficulty, but she doesn’t have time for that argument right now. Right now, she has an agenda.
“I’ll do it,” she says.
“What?” asks Cosette.
“I volunteer,” says Éponine. “I volunteer as tribute.”
“Oh my goodness,” says Cosette, “Why would you do that for me? You’ve only just met me.”
“I literally owe you.”
“You owe me a pound.”
“Yeah, well, compound interest. Capitalism’s an awful thing, someone should do something about that. Also, Marius is my friend and this situation is literally painful to watch. I think fake going out with you is the best way for this to end with minimal pain to all parties.”
“Ok,” says Cosette. Then she visibly girds herself up and says, in her best fifties schoolgirl voice, “Well then, how do we do this?”
“To be honest,” says Éponine, “We’ve been in here half an hour. They probably already think we’re either having sex or we’ve died.”
“So, what? We come out holding hands and kissing each other?”
“I think that should do it,” says Éponine. She feels oddly cheery. She’d thought this would be a harder sell.
“All right,” says Cosette, and takes Éponine’s hand. Cosette’s fingers are very, very soft, and Éponine looks down to see the butterflies and up at Cosette’s face and as they stride out of the toilets and head straight for the kiss she comes to a horrible realisation.
She should never, ever try to convince herself that she’s doing something genuinely selfless. Not even when it looks, on the surface of it, like that’s the only possible interpretation of events. Because Éponine’s badness is a deep thing, it’s been bred and trained into her, and it acts without her even knowing it. It’s hungry and horrible and fucking hell, she’s kissing Cosette and Cosette’s mouth is small and sweet and gorgeous, and Cosette’s making these little quiet squeaks, and Éponine thinks from the corner of her eye she can see that Marius is maybe crying but she just. Doesn’t. Care.
Not even a tiny bit.
Because that’s the way she is. She’s not a good person. She should remember that.
They walk to the station together.
Cosette kisses Éponine, just in case anyone’s still watching, then says (which, it was coming, it was inevitable) “So, how long do we need to, er,”
“Keep this up?” says Éponine, like a terrible autocomplete.
“Yep,” says Cosette. “I should have asked this before, right? When we agreed to do it?”
She should have asked a lot of things, thinks Éponine, not that she’d have got any truthful answers.
“I don’t know how long,” Éponine says, honest for once. “I didn’t think that far in advance.”
“Gosh,” says Cosette merrily. “We’re terrible revolutionaries, aren’t we? We couldn’t organise a pissup in a brewery.”
Éponine’s not really in the mood to laugh about this. She’s done a terrible, awful thing and she needs to go away and think about what she’s done for a long, long time. Or get drunk. Probably that second one.
“When I’ve worked that one out,” she says, “I’ll tell you. And I will work it out.”
“I should probably get your phone number,” says Cosette.
“Yeah, otherwise it’s going to be a pretty thin ruse.”
“Well, yes,” says Cosette, “and also, we should probably arrive together, next week. And maybe see each other in between. Otherwise it’s really not going to be convincing.”
Éponine types her number into Cosette’s phone, while screaming inside her own head. She watches Cosette walk down the steps into the tube station, while still screaming inside her own head.
“Wait,” says Cosette, halfway down, “Aren’t you coming?”
“I just remembered,” says Éponine. “I have stuff to do.”
The stuff she has to do is call Grantaire.
“I have done a really bad thing,” she says, “and I need to get pissed. I ran through my friends mentally and you seemed the right man to assist me in this endeavour.”
“Is this the bad thing I know about?” he asks.
“No,” says Éponine. “You do not know about this bad thing. This thing is much badder than you can even conceive.”
“Child, I can conceive of badness beyond the ability of your mind to endure.”
“This badness, Grantaire, this is beyond the ability of my mind to endure. If I don’t get completely ratarsed my mind is going to completely rip itself apart. I’m depending on you, here.”
“Give me five minutes,” he says, because somehow Grantaire is never more than five minutes away from anything. It’s something to do with his ridiculously central flat, his constant peregrinations, and the fact that he knows London as well as a taxi driver, and not one of those bullshit GPS-using amateurs either. If he hadn’t lost his licence in a series of unfortunate incidents a couple of years ago he could probably be a taxi driver, for real. Actually no, that’s a terrible idea. The fact that it’s not even the worst idea she’s had today is an indication of how bad things are.
She paces, waiting for him, thinking about Cosette’s hair and the way the long part falls over the left side of her face, and the way her right ear sticks out, and the way her neck…
“Penny for them,” says Grantaire, and she jumps about a thousand miles into the air.
“Oh, for fuck’s sake, R,” she says. “Not tonight. Just, no.”
“Not deliberate,” he says. “What kind of drunk do you want to get?”
“I want to get stupid drunk,” says Éponine, “by which I mean I want to get drunk on completely idiotic cocktails, the kind where it’s like, rum, glitter and turkey gravy, served in a doll’s head.”
“I know just the place,” says Grantaire, because of course he does.
The place is perfect.
“Ok, so how about this one next,” says Grantaire. “It’s a bowl of cereal, except the milk also has vodka in it. And cardamom.”
“That’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard,” says Éponine.
“Ah, but the clincher,” says Grantaire. “Actually two clinchers. Firstly, you have to eat it with a spoon. Secondly, the cereal is Lucky Charms.”
“Bring me one,” says Éponine, waving an imperious hand. While he orders, she starts thinking again, which is a mistake. She’s not nearly drunk enough. Her mind keeps flashing back to that sudden moment of realisation. Or, and this is worse, to the moment before, the moment when she thought she was actually doing something good for once.
Grantaire comes back with two bowls.
“Don’t imagine,” he says, “that your hyperbolic generalisation has passed me by. I was simply waiting for the time it would take to pick it apart piece by piece. Is this the stupidest thing you’ve ever seen? I think we can both agree that it is not. You have, for example, seen the Central line at eight thirty in the morning. You have seen the jumpers of Jehan Prouvaire. You have seen the arrangement of my face.”
“I said the stupidest thing I’d ever heard,” says Éponine. “Not seen. That’s, like, a whole different sense.”
She takes a spoonful. It’s horrible and amazing, and her hand-eye coordination is incidentally completely shot. Her chin is covered in vodka milk.
“In which case,” says Grantaire, “I would counter that you have heard the political speeches of Marius Pontmercy, the sneezes of Enjolras, and - please pay attention, because I think this is another clincher - you have presumably heard the words that come out of your own mouth.”
Éponine shakes her head. “Nope,” she says. “You’ve got me wrong. I’m not stupid. I’m fiendishly clever. I’m just. I’m bad. I’m a bad person.”
“Is it not a bourgeois reification of the self to assign moral categories to ones very existence? Is this not this search for an inherent character merely the fossilised husk of the economic need to categorise individuals and corporations by their credit risk, by their employability, by their net worth? Is it an accident that we are naturally drawn to metaphors of wealth when we attempt to describe character, that we reach for the words such as ‘worth’, ‘value’, ‘use’?”
“Honestly I just, sometimes I forget that I’m this bad and it all comes crashing down on me. I’m really evil. It’s in my blood, it really is, and I’ll never get it out.”
Grantaire’s starting to look less convincingly jolly. “‘Ponine,” he says, “believe me when I say this is not a helpful or productive way to think.”
“Right, but sometimes reality’s not helpful and it’s not productive and you just have to accept that you’re really, really horrible.” She’s very drunk now, and all it’s done is focus her mind on this one point.
“Ok,” says Grantaire. “How long has this been going on?”
“I mean on the one hand my whole life and on the other hand since the end of the meeting.”
“Not longer than that?”
“No.”
“Do I -” he looks uneasy. “Do I have to worry about your safety?”
“About my… oh Christ, Grantaire.” She realises, too late, that she picked the wrong person to vent her self-hate to. “I’m fine,” she says, because she really is. She’s just pissed off with herself. It’s nothing really new and nothing this bowl of ridiculous vodka cereal won’t fix.
“Because melancholy isn’t a humour you want to fuck around with, ‘Ponine, really.”
“I don’t think melancholy’s my problem,” she says, because she’s pretty sure it isn’t. “My problem is a lack of self-knowledge combined with an excessive talent for scheming.”
“That doesn’t sound terrifying at all,” says Grantaire, and they get back to working through the stupidest drink in the stupidest bar in this whole stupid city.