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He sits and stares out the window sometimes, gone to a place where she cannot follow. Other times, late at night, he wakes in terror, with a grip like iron and a cry that never fails to jolt her awake. There are those nights when he apologizes, kisses her brow and goes back to sleep. There are those nights when he weeps, and though she holds him as tightly as she can and strokes his damp hair and rocks him as he shakes, still he chokes out names familiar in their repetition but utterly unknown to Cosette, and she cannot help but cry, too, to see him so in pain.
And then there are those nights when he leaves her to pace in the garden.
“Go back to sleep,” he whispers, or “I’ll be back in a moment” and she lets him go, because he is her husband and she his wife, and he must do what he feels he must do.
But she watches from the window, nonetheless, aching and guilty.
When her father died, she had been so lost. She had gone to bed and stayed there after the funeral, curled under the sheets for days on days, paralyzed with grief. It hadn’t been very becoming; she doesn’t like to think of the sight her mirror had presented her after nearly a week of such excessive mourning, or of the way the household had whispered and tiptoed around her for what felt like an eternity. But through all that, Marius had stayed by her side, reading to her or bringing her little trinkets or just sitting beside her, filling the silence with his presence when she could not muster the strength to raise her head. He’d had to beg to get her to eat, she remembers. She still winces at the hazy memories from that time and seeks every day to make up for it in some small way – a kiss on the cheek while he works, murmured endearments when he least expects them. She never wants him to doubt that she loves him.
He shudders awake, gasping, but she hadn’t been asleep in the first place, and so she is ready for him. He pushes away her arms, however, sitting up with his back to her, and she pretends that this instinctual rejection doesn’t hurt her as much as it does. She hesitates but cannot help but curl a hand around his ribs, not as thin as they were, but she worries, oh, how she worries. It’s been half a year. The nightmares still haven’t stopped. She is beginning to suspect that they never will.
He bows his head.
“Go back to sleep, Cosette,” he says quietly, standing, and her hand slides off. She sits up as he pulls on his robe, watching, her knees drawn to her chest. “Go back to sleep,” he says again, not unkindly, but she cannot bring herself to lay back down tonight. It feels too much like abandonment, what he is doing, what she is doing, and Cosette thinks she has had enough abandonment to last a lifetime.
“I would like to walk with you tonight,” she attempts. “If you wish.”
“You need your rest,” he replies. “I wouldn’t want you to catch cold.”
“I don’t mind,” Cosette insists, curling her toes into the sheets.
“Cosette,” he sighs and her heart squeezes tightly.
“I want to help you,” she says after a moment, ashamed. “I want to help you and I do not know how. I feel useless, Marius. You needn’t be in pain alone - ” He turns to her, a dim silhouette in the darkness of the room. She bites her tongue, waits, but he only looks down and away.
“I’ll be right back,” he says, and then she is alone in their bedroom, their quiet, still bedroom.
She waits, because this is something she can do, stay awake and wait until she knows he’s returned to her, but it feels like hours and hours, and she finds herself fumbling for her own robe as the sky outside their window starts to glow with a pearly grey almost-dawn. She still gets lost in this house – so much larger than the house she had shared with her father, larger even than the convent – but she can make her way to the garden easily. Cosette has always loved gardens, loved the scent and feel of them. She’s barefoot now, and the earth is warm between her toes. If she doesn’t breathe, she can almost hear her father’s laugh.
He’s sitting on the garden bench, under a tree not unlike the one they’d kissed under for the first time and many times after, sometimes lazy, sometimes playful, always a little awed at each other. She watches him for a moment, half-unsure if she’s made the right decision in following him out here after all. But then he looks up, and she supposes she doesn’t really have a choice.
Neither speaks, but she approaches him firmly, if carefully – Cosette has never been one to balk. She starts slowly, just a hand in his hair. She lets it fall to his cheek, her thumb perusing the corner of his eye, smoothing his eyebrow. He doesn’t pull away from her touch now, and so she gently levers herself onto the bench beside him, one leg curled up under herself. There you are, she thinks, and presses a kiss to his temple, his shoulder. She laces her fingers with his and brings his hand up to kiss it, too, and he holds on to her so tightly she cannot help but suck in a breath.
“Don’t,” she warns him as he tenses, releases her. “Don’t you dare.” She takes his face in her hands and forces him to look at her. His eyes, wide and frightened, meet hers. “My father kept so many secrets from me,” she whispers. “I do not want there to be any secrets between us, Marius, never, never, never.”
He doesn’t say a word, just closes his eyes and presses his forehead against hers.
She leads him back to bed eventually, exhausted and sick at heart. A day passes, then a week, and though he tosses and turns at night, he is her Marius during the day, her smiling, laughing Marius who never mentions what passed between them on the garden bench at dawn. She accepts it, because she has pushed enough. He will tell me when he is ready, she thinks, until even that fades, until she wakes up one morning and decides that secrets or not, he is hers and she is his, and this is something she can live with.
She’s reading in the garden one day, lying in the grass amongst the flowers and the bees, a habit left over from childhood. She sits up when he joins her, setting her book aside, but when he only gives a nervous shake of his head, she lays back down, her head in his lap. For a while, she turns her face toward the sun and drowses, his hands idly playing with her hair. It is hard to believe, in moments like this, that they are Baron and Baroness, or even husband and wife; they are simply Marius and Cosette in the garden, and the thought of growing old seems hazy in the distance.
“His name,” Marius remarks at length, “was Courfeyrac, and he was, for a very long time, my only friend in the world.”
She listens.
The birds chatter to each other, the breeze stirs the leaves, and Cosette listens, learning the names and the lives of the boys who died where Marius did not. They are there with them in the garden, these boys Marius still grieves. She can feel them, and her father, and her mother, so near that she is sure that if she only opened her eyes, there they would be, smiling and vibrant and startlingly real.
She takes Marius’ hand, squeezes it. She opens her eyes, but there is only him and the sky behind him, clear and serene and so blue it makes her chest hurt.
“They never really leave,” Marius says, and Cosette thinks, I know.