Work Text:
To be honest, this is Feuilly’s fault.
He’s known about the loose step up to his apartment for a while now, but after an initial stumble he’s learned to avoid it. He’d given Eponine a cursory warning on their first trip up, but considering what they’d been doing at the time he’s not all that surprised it hadn’t registered (in fact, he’s oddly proud that it didn’t).
So when he hears Eponine calling up the stairs, followed by a loud, grating squeak , a tumble, and a shout of pain, he rushes out to the landing to see his girlfriend at the bottom of the steps, surrounded by groceries and holding her ankle. He gets her to his car in record time, and breaks several speed limits getting her to the hospital, but it doesn’t matter; since she’s neither bleeding, burned, nor unconscious, she’s automatically placed at the bottom of the list.
Combeferre meets him in the ER an hour later, after his afternoon physics class, and Feuilly’s already late for work, so he leaves her with the guide, kissing her forehead and still apologizing as he rushes out the door. Combeferre probes her ankle gently and doesn’t feel a break, but makes her get an X-ray just in case. She’s finally diagnosed with a bad sprain.
She has her ankle splinted and bound, is warned to stay off it for a week, is handed crutches and a prescription for Ibuprofen, and shooed out the door by harried-looking nurses before her hospital bed is taken by a girl her age whose hands are covered in burns.
Combeferre takes her to her boyfriend’s apartment, since Feuilly’s still at work, she needs the help, and most of her stuff is there anyway—and settles her on the couch with tea, ice and Gavroche to do her bidding. After asking her again if she needs anything, and being pointedly but politely told to bug off, he leaves for an Amis meeting, handing her her phone on his way out if she needs anything. She expects Feuilly home late after the same meeting, so she’s surprised when he opens the door at eight-thirty, right after his shift ends, timidly calling her name.
“In here,” she replies, flexing her toes and wincing. “Haven’t moved.” Her voice is dry.
He edges inside, and she’s surprised to see his left hand occupied with flowers—flowers he nearly drops when Gavroche launches himself at his leg.
“Hey, buddy.” He runs his free hand through the scamp’s hair before gently detaching him, and Eponine can only marvel at the domesticity of the scene. A father (for that’s what Feuilly is, at this point) coming home from work, greeted by son and wife—though to make this truly vintage, she’d need to be on her feet in a frilly apron, with food steaming on the table.
As it is, there’s leftover enchiladas in the fridge, and she’s about to tell him so when he settles on the floor near her head, folding long legs underneath him and resting his forehead on her wrist. Gavroche, having fulfilled his duty as errand boy, has disappeared into the back bedroom with his homework (without being asked; he must actually have been worried about her). She can see the blush creeping up the back of his neck, and it’s a long moment before he finally says, “Hi.”
“Hi,” she replies, grinning. “You brought me flowers?”
“Seemed like the least I could do,” he shrugs, handing her the yellow blossoms. “I’m really sorry, Ep, I should’ve fixed that step months ago. I feel like such an—“
“Shhh.” She pulls him up to her eye level and gives him a quick kiss. “Not your fault. Also, I’m fine, it’s just a sprain. I’ll be up in a day on crutches, and I’ve called in sick to the Corinthe for a few days.”
“I’ll fix the step first thing tomorrow,” he says. “I still should’ve fixed it.”
“Yeah, you should’ve.” He lifts his head from the couch and glares at her. “What? You wanted me to disagree with you?”
“Minx.”
She bops him lightly on the nose with the flowers as she laughs. “Put these in water for me?”
“Certainly.” They don’t have a vase, so the flowers go in an empty coffee can, but he sets them on the counter (they don’t have a kitchen table) all the same. It looks almost intentional, what Cosette would call “hipster charm”. The yellow adds brightness to the dim apartment, not that it needs it—the fact that they move through it, the tiny little family they’ve created in the midst of a larger one, already belies the yellowish, flickery lighting and scuffed linoleum.
Their apartment cannot be called tidy, with Gavroche’s shoes by the door, Eponine’s textbooks on the coffee table, and Feuilly’s toolbox on the kitchen counter, but it’s clean to the largest extent. Feuilly’s relatively neat by himself, but he is—or was—a bachelor, so most of the actual spotlessness is due to Eponine’s influence.
She has a mild obsession with keeping both their apartments clean as a whistle, because, as she’s told him, she hadn’t known what clean was when she’d lived with her parents. Therefore, Gavroche is made to shower every day—sometimes even twice a day, now that his voice is dropping and he’s sweating more—and the trash is taken out as soon as it gets even halfway full. Eponine isn’t high maintenance, not by any means, but bad smells, garbage smells, “homeless smells”, as she calls them, make her upset.
So Feuilly takes the trash out nearly every day now, wipes the sink down after he shaves, and puts dishes in the washer as soon as he’s done with them rather than letting them accumulate in the sink. Otherwise Eponine will do it—not to make him feel guilty but for her own comfort.
He never wants her uncomfortable around him. The dishes stay clean.
He takes out the enchiladas from the fridge and slides them into the oven, pulls down a bag of chips from the pantry, dumps them in a bowl, and snags salsa on his way past, returning to the living room and Eponine as he waits on dinner to heat. She’s struggling to sit up without bumping her foot, and he sets the food down long enough to brace her back as she moves upright, then reclaims his spot by her hand. She runs her fingers through his hair, stopping as she reaches a sweat-soaked snarl.
He’s suddenly conscious of how bad he must smell—of salt and dirt and oil and metal—and how much she hates things that don’t smell clean.
“I’m going to shower,” he says hastily, but is given pause by Eponine’ s hand on his shoulder and her quick “No, stay.”
“Ep, I know you don’t like it when I smell.”
“I don’t like it when you smoke, or smell like booze,” she corrects him. “It smells like my dad.” He cringes internally, and she must notice because she continues, “sort of. Never that bad.” She’s stroking his hair again. “But I don’t mind when you sweat, Gael. It smells like you. It smells like you’ve been working hard, and I like that. You don’t smell nasty, you smell like you work with your hands.”
At that, he relaxes into her touch. “You’re sure?”
“Gael, you don’t have to change for me.” Her fingers still. “God, you don’t. I’m already blessed just to have you, I couldn’t ask for more.”
He laughs. “You see, you’ve got it wrong. I’m the lucky one.”
“We’ll have to agree to disagree, then.”
“All right,” he smiles. He’s not argumentative by nature, not one for passionate discourse—that’s Enjolras’s, Combeferre’s, even Grantaire’s domain. Feuilly is a workingman; he shapes his world by doing, by pushing and turning and fitting round bolts into differently-round holes. He lives his life that way, tactile, touching to show affection, shoving to show anger (though never around Eponine—it’d terrify her, though she’d never let him see, and he’d sooner shoot himself in the foot than make her nervous). But he touches things to understand them—it’s why he’s able to fix more cars than two mechanics combined, because he can feel problems before he can see them. In another life, one where he’d gone to college and gotten a high-end job, he thinks he’d have made a good engineer. His hands are moving now, one rubbing up and down his knee and the other lightly encircling Eponine’s wrist.
If he’d been an engineer, though, he would never have met his friends, would never have met Eponine. He can’t say he regrets it.
The oven timer goes off and he straightens. She admires the way the muscles in his back move as he stands without the help of hands—her working man has the musculature of a statue, and it’s not from juicing or working out obsessively but just from slinging metal and pushing engines all day. Therefore, his musculature is not perfectly symmetrical or even, but instead bulges slightly where he uses muscles and dips where he doesn’t. As he walks into the kitchen, she muses on what she’d planned for him tonight—plans that must now be postponed, thanks to that dratted step.
When he brings her dinner, though, she insists on a kiss, one that starts out chaste but morphs into something decidedly less so until she shifts to get a better angle and instead lets out a huff of pain. He detaches with a gentle peck to her lips—now shifting into a pout—and calls Gavroche in to dinner.
They eat around the coffee table, Gavroche and Feuilly seated cross-legged on the floor and Eponine fully upright on the couch. They talk, Gavroche about school and Feuilly about work, regaling each other with stories of classmates and customers respectively. Gavroche brings her ice for her elevated ankle, and the cold sinks pleasantly into the swollen joint as she finishes off her dinner and hands the empty plate to her boyfriend with a grateful smile. He washes and sets it in the dishwasher, not leaving it in the sink to bother her, and she smiles wider at the considerate man she calls her own.
After that, they sit together around the couch, Feuilly in his claimed spot by her head and Gavroche leaning on him, eventually ending up in his lap as he falls asleep. They watch NCIS and are halfway through NCIS: LA when Gavroche starts snoring, and Eponine gets another shot at her boyfriend’s musculature as he carries the twelve-year-old to bed. He won’t be able to do it much longer; Gavroche is getting long and lanky in the way of teenagers, and he overflows Feuilly’s arms even now.
He insists on carrying her to bed next, ignoring her protests that she can walk, and carefully, minding her foot, sets her on the bed. He strips as he heads for the shower, giving her a look at his back without cloth to cover it, and she changes carefully into one of his shirts that’s lying in a neat, folded pile by the bed before snuggling into her pillow.
He comes back out, smelling of her body wash and grumbling that she’s used all of his, but wraps her up anyway, her back against his front, stroking her hands as he carefully avoids her feet. They fall asleep like that, having set their alarm for six AM (work and school), and drift off with only the smell of Eponine and Feuilly around them—no garbage, no homeless, no Clorox, but only the reassuring aroma of each other. Each of them know, without a doubt, that they are home.