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Giant Impact Hypothesis, he finds scrawled above the line of the skirting board. He spends several moments regarding this with a frown, fingers dragging back and forth along it.
Half an hour later he surfaces from a Wikipedia article (never his first choice – sometimes crises demand compromises) with more questions than he went in with, but of an entirely different nature. He closes his laptop, finds his coat, and goes out without another thought.
He finds her by the Arc de Triomphe, leaning against an expensive car and looking pensive.
“Collision theory,” he says to her by way of greeting. She doesn’t push herself away from the car even as she replies. Her gaze is cool, considering, eyes sea-wild.
“I’m Theia, here.”
He waits. She will elaborate through exasperation. That’s always how it works.
Sure enough, her fingers twist in the front of her coat, her chin jerks up and out, and she sighs this softly aggrieved little sigh.
“You’re proto-Earth. Still forming. Beautiful and full of potential, etcetera.”
“I hate etceteras.”
“I know you do.”
Beat. They stare at each other a little longer. His hands in his coat pockets are itching to free themselves and hold her, to anchor themselves to her waist. He represses them. She shakes her head, shuts her eyes, and he watches as her tongue moves in silence, reordering her thoughts.
“So I’m Theia,” she continues at last, eyes sliding open, “Formed from the same basic material as you, basically. But stealing your orbit. Trojan planet, or whatever. Essentially a thief.”
“Actually a thief,” he replies with a smile, and he does reach for her this time. She lets his hands settle around her wrists as she gazes at him, considering. Then a low chuckle parts her lips, and she pulls her arms away.
“Yes,” she concedes, “Actually. But the point remains.”
He puts his hands back into his pockets and simply watches her for a while. She turns her head to regard the tourists passing. He knows that she is watching targets walk, nothing more. If he wasn’t here he knows at least twelve of them would be walking lighter without their wallets.
“You consider yourself an intrusion,” he concludes at last, drawing her attention back to him with the soft-spoken sentence. “A thief of space in my life.”
Her eyes are guarded, her face still. He has guessed correctly. He takes a deep breath in through his nose and holds it to deliberate. This is one of those hanging moments, where him choosing the right words is what it all depends upon.
He breathes out.
“Eponine,” he says, “Just because Theia came off worse in the impact, doesn’t mean it was worth any less than Earth. It was just… at a disadvantage. Unlucky.”
He uses malchanceux, the simplest way to convey the idea. Her voice is biting when she snaps back, “Defavorisé.”
“We are not having that argument again,” he tells her firmly. He is calm, but the strain is there. She can hear it, of course. She always can.
“Why not?” she demands, and she pushes herself off the car now, angling into his personal space, all red coat fury, “Does my background embarrass you?”
“Nothing about you embarrasses me,” he replies matter-of-factly. He is not conciliatory, but the simple direct honesty deflates her. She turns her head aside, stares at the boots of a woman walking by. The same argument, every time. She is so determined to push him away. This presents a problem: Combeferre has been pushed away so many times in his life that all he knows how to do is cling on with everything he’s got.
“I’m sick of you trying to look after me,” she announces finally, but she can’t meet his eyes, “I mean, I like it, sometimes. But you always – you do the thing with your mouth, when I’ve disappointed you. Disappointed you. Like you’re my father. Boyfriends should get angry. Disappointment’s an adult thing.”
“We are adults,” he reminds her, reaching for her again. She twists away this time.
“Not me,” she sing-songs, and she’s skipping away now, laughing, mood whip-changed, “I’m l’enfant terrible, forever young.”
He follows at a brisk pace, keeping up as she startles pigeons into the sky, the blur of a red coat among the flurried wings. She’s still laughing by the time she stops, halfway up the Champs-Elysées.
“Monsieur Combeferre,” she says to him when he reaches her again, stepping up to pull him close, “You are very good to me.”
“I love you,” he reminds her gently, relieved that she permits him to settle his arms around her back, to enclose her in his embrace. He knows she hates the cage it forms sometimes.
“Tch!” she exclaims, a petulant little noise against the collar of his coat. He lets it float away. Her irritation will pass like cirrus clouds before the sun. It always does, over matters like this.
They go home. She pauses halfway into bed and tumbles to the floor, oblivious to the way her knees bang against the floorboards. He watches in silence, propped up on one elbow, as she takes up a pen and puts a bold line through Giant Impact Hypothesis.
Binary Star Systems, she writes next to it instead.
Combeferre laughs and pulls her back to bed.
……
She’s gone the next morning, of course. He paws at the angry purple mark on his neck as he slumps out of his bedroom and into the kitchen. His flatmate looks up at him from behind his laptop, expression very carefully held at neutral.
“You’re going to get hurt,” Enjolras warns him without preamble.
“I know,” he says simply, flopping into a chair, “So’s she.”
“She loves Marius.”
“I love her.”
“She’s crazy. She doesn’t know the meaning of the word law. She’ll be in prison before she’s –”
“She’s too smart to get caught.”
“Combeferre,” Enjolras says, and it sounds uncharacteristically like pleading, “Please. Listen to me. Cut it off, really. It’s only going to end messily, and I will not see you hurt.”
Combeferre sighs and presses his face into his hands.
“Neso and Psamanthe,” he mutters, and when Enjolras questions that, raises his head again. “I didn’t mean for it to happen,” he explains, “But I can’t give her up. I rely on her. She – balances me.”
“No,” Enjolras corrects, and his eyes are soft as they rest on Combeferre, “I balance you. Courfeyrac balances us both. Eponine unsettles you. You’re the scales, she’s the hand that overloads the weights.”
“She needs me,” he argues, but the will is draining out of him.
“Yes,” his friend agrees, and his voice is infinitely sorrowful, “That’s the problem. She is not somebody who is willing to need anybody else. That’s why she’ll hurt you.”
Combeferre feels like crying, but suppresses it.
“Why does everybody refuse to be needed?” he inquires of Enjolras, indicating that the question is rhetorical by the carefully nonchalant shrug of his shoulders, “Can’t somebody, just once, let themselves need me?”
Enjolras’ tone is firm, his gaze direct, “Courfeyrac and I need you. We are not the same people without you.”
“Cross your heart?” he manages to tease, gentle mocking Courfeyrac’s favourite phrase.
“Cross my heart,” Enjolras replies, and he has never looked so serious in all the time Combeferre has known him.
……
He does not end it.
The relationship limps on, in fits and starts, agonising and shamelessly destructive. The fights come every day. She lashes out endlessly, disrupting the calm he needs to be able to work. He is gentle, patronising, infuriating. They always end up in bed after their worst fights, pressing their anger into each other’s skin, hating how alight they feel at the other’s touch.
It sets his whole friendship group on edge. Enjolras’ jaw is constantly clenched, Courfeyrac wasting hours making jokes and then worrying when he cannot even raise a smile. Jehan writes four poems for him and then subsides in a fit of melancholy that Combeferre hates himself for rousing. Even Grantaire picks fewer holes in their arguments than usual.
In the end, it’s a simple break. He wakes up one morning and she is simply gone. Her number is erased from his phone, her scattered belongings vanished, not a trace of her left.
He half-falls out of bed to find the skirting board. Nothing. She’s even painted over the series of crossings-out and replaced terms. She has, however, left a post-it note in the very corner of the room. Her writing is messy, childlike, and she still joins up carefully.
Destruction mutuelle assurée, she’s scrawled.
Combeferre pins the post-it to his notice board, and crawls back into bed. He finds, as he draws the covers over his head, that it hurts a great deal despite the mess the relationship had become. He’s almost surprised.
……
Six years later. She has slipped back into their friendship group little by little, brought along by those she knows well, insistent on not losing touch with her simply because she and Combeferre could not persist.
Throughout the four years since she stopped avoiding him completely, they have not been alone together.
That changes on the evening of Enjolras and Grantaire’s wedding.
He finds her on the roof of the magnificent house the reception is being held in, the party booming below. She offers him a bottle of wine in silence, and he takes it.
“I know you know the Turner heist was me,” she announces after a long quiet. Combeferre finds that all he wants to do is smile, so he does.
“I only know one part-time art thief who’d go for a Turner when there was a Delacroix for the taking.”
“I’d never steal a Frenchman’s work,” she shoots back, sounding faintly scandalised. Combeferre laughs, and takes a long gulp from the bottle of wine.
“So how much did you get for it?”
“No lecture?” she demands instead of answering.
He shrugs. “I’m not as fond of them as I used to be.”
She drops her eyes, and the quiet is church-strict.
“I got a lot,” she announces finally, and suddenly her hand is in his, “I’m going to put some of it towards fees. Grantaire’s gone to teach art at the university, so I figured it wouldn’t be so bad to take a course there. If he was there to hang out with, you know?”
She takes the bottle off him to drink.
“What will you study?” he asks her quietly. His heart is thundering for some reason he’s misplaced – pride, perhaps? Or annoyance at himself. He should have known the only person who could ever save her was herself.
When he looks at her, she’s grinning broadly. “Astrophysics,” she announces.
“Giant Impact Hypothesis,” he replies. She laughs.
……