Archive of Our Own

This is what Cosette has always known: that she is a burden to the family that has raised her, who took her in from the goodness of their hearts and cared for her when her mother could not, when her mother would not; that she is wanted only insofar as her presence brings them money, little envelopes delivered regularly that clink with coins, which Mistress Thenardier tilts into her palm and slides into her pockets, and that crackle with a folded slip of paper, sealed with wax even though the envelope itself was sealed as well, which Mistress Thenardier throws upon the hearthfire to curl and blacken and fall to ash, unopened; that the envelopes stopped coming before she'd even finished her first decade, and when they'd vanished, so too had the Thenardiers' forbearance.

This is what Cosette has always believed, a secret unspoken, tucked close and careful in her chest like a bird cradled in a palm: that her mother loves her; that she will return for her; that she is warm and beautiful and kind, everything the Thenardiers are not.

This is what Cosette hopes, too fragile to be called belief, too delicate even to look at directly: that her mother lives; that the Thenardiers are wrong when they say that she must have succumbed to a pox or the plague or some other disease caught in the gutters of society; that there is someone in the world who loves her.

*

The last letter comes in spring, arriving with sunshine and trees full of fragrant blossoms and gentle breezes that chase away the memory of winter's biting winds. The Thenardiers are short and snappish with her through summer, and in moments when they think she isn't near or isn't listening she catches them trading fierce, furious whispers between themselves. But when they see her there, or know she can hear, their smiles are strained but present, her bowl is half as full as anyone else's but it's placed at the supper table with the rest of the family's, and they only snarl at her a little before they recall themselves and say the same terrible thing all over again, but voiced in tones that are treacle-thick and syrup-sweet, like they think it masks the poison underneath.

When the heat of summer gives way to the biting winds of fall and all the trees sigh and shed their leaves and reach bare, unburdened branches into the sky, Cosette's place at the table is similarly dispatched, and she eats cold, stale bread curled up on her thin pallet while the rest of the family sits around the table before the warmth of the fire, and the only parents Cosette has ever known look at her now with unmasked resentment.

With winter comes the snow, and cold that rakes like dagger-clawed hands, and even the master and the mistress of the house eat only thin soup and old bread, and Cosette most days eats nothing at all. Outside the house, winter is violent, and inside the arguments are just as savage, words wielded like blades over the cost of provisions, which is too high, and the state of their coffers, which is too low.

One day, when one storm has passed and the next has yet to sweep through, and the sky is grey and heavy but not unendurable, they bundle Cosette up in one of her sister's dresses, heavy with ruffles and frills and lined with wool, a finer garment than she's ever worn in her life, and they take her to the temple and tell the priest that her mother has died and she's come to pray for her soul, and the mistress's hand cinches painfully tight around her arm when she opens her mouth to protest.

Cosette sinks to her knees before the candle-covered altar, as they direct, and she clasps her hands and bows her head and she prays, but she prays that they are wrong, she prays for her mother's health, she prays that the Thenardiers will be merciful, or at least pitying, and that the cramping in her belly might ease.

They lead her from the church, when she has finished, but they don't turn towards home. They bring her to the palace instead, sitting glittering and gilded like a diadem over the rest of the city, and they tell an unimpressed-looking servant in the Crown's livery that she is the bastard daughter of a lesser prince, and that her mother is gone and they have cared for her in her absence, but that the winter is harsh and times are hard, and they have brought her now to her last living relatives that they might care for her as she deserves, as they themselves cannot.

The servant looks bored with their claims, but he leaves, and they are left to wait, and to wait, and to wait. And at last, the servant returns and bows in a tall, severe looking gentleman who looks down his nose at Cosette as though she's something the Thenardiers tracked in upon their shoes.

Cosette says nothing, while the Thenardiers weave a story that she's sure must be at least as much lie as it is truth, about a poor woman who came to their inn years before, heavy with child. About a confidence whispered in the night, of who the child's father was, of how the Thenardiers had kept the woman's secret until now, when they couldn't bear the thought of letting a child of royal blood, even an illegitimate one, starve under their own roof.

It's all lies, a ploy to try to trade an unwanted obligation for a pocket full of coin. Cosette waits for them to be summarily dismissed, and tries not to wonder what will become of her when they realize that they can make no more money off of her presence in their home.

But the gentleman listens, and doesn't scoff. He doesn't send them away, despite the deep lines of distaste and reluctance that their story carves into his expression. And when they've finished, bowing deep before him like he's a crown prince instead of a lesser one, he looks Cosette over with an appraising glance and his mouth pinches like he bit into a lemon but was expecting an orange, and he brings up a long-fingered hand to rub at his brow.

"You do have the look of a woman I knew once," he says, the same way one might say, Yes, I suppose that is my dog digging up your garden, like the last thing in the world he wants is to admit it. "You look a bit young, though. How old are you, girl?"

The Thenardiers turn their heads to wait for her answer, and there where the prince can't see, they glare at her as though to warn her not to give the wrong one. But how can she know which answer might be right? So she swallows and clears her throat and tells the truth, quietly says, "I have seen eight summers, sir."

The Thenardiers' mouths pinch like she's said the wrong thing after all, and their glares cut like knives, and the prince sighs heavily and pinches the bridge of his nose and says, "I see etiquette lessons will be in order," like he resents even having to speak the words.

Beside her, the only parents she has ever known preen, their victory in sight. The prince looks her over once more like he's wishing that she would just vanish into the ground and save him the bother, but when she doesn't, he sighs again and makes a gesture with his hand, and the steward comes forward with a small bag that hangs heavily from its strings, and that chimes in a way that makes the Thenardiers' faces shine bright when it lands in the Mistress's outstretched palm.

"For your trouble," the steward says in stiff, formal tones. "And for the service you have done to the Crown."

"And for your discretion," the prince adds, fixing them both with a look that makes their smiles dim a little.

"Of course, your Highness," Mistress Thenardier simpers, as deferent as Cosette has ever seen her. "We would not presume."

He nods his acceptance easily, and Cosette sees the light in the mistress's eyes and the angle of her smile and she thinks that if the prince had seemed even a little bit kinder, if he had smiled at her once, if he hadn't turned his nose up at her manners when she had been as polite as she knew how to be, she might tell him that the mistress was lying, and that she was as likely as not to whisper the gossip to every guest who entered their inn and anyone else who would listen, to try to drum up business or even just impress folks.

But he did none of those things, so she presses her lips together and says nothing at all.

The Thenardiers don't even say good-bye to her when they leave, they just tuck the purse away where it won't be obvious, bow and curtsy again to the prince, and then hurry off together with their heads bowed toward each other, trading quick, delighted little whispers. And the prince doesn't notice the omission, or at least doesn't seem to care, he just gives Cosette another look from head to heels and back again, sighs and waves a hand at his steward and says, "See she's given a room befitting her station, and that she's cleaned up, and that she's taught what she must know to not be an embarrassment."

She knows better than to let her tongue loose, whether to the Thenardiers or to a prince. She bites back her temper and lets none of her insult show on her face, just follows along behind the steward when he gestures to her.

It's hard not to feel small and lost amidst the vast grandeur of the palace. She's good at finding her way, has had to be for all the times Mistress Thenardier has sent her out into the woods nestled up against the outskirts of the city to fetch water or gather firewood, but as the steward leads her through one hall after another after another, she quickly loses her bearings. The palace at once feels as terrifying and claustrophobic as the woods had to her when she'd been a younger child and every shadow had seemed to hide a terrible beast, waiting for an opportune moment to leap out at her. She'll never be able to find her way out of here, not without someone to lead her.

And what does she have to escape to, anyway? Where would she go? Back to the Thenardiers? At least in the palace she has some hope of being fed regularly.

"Come along, girl," the steward snaps at her, when wariness makes her steps slow. And she knows how to do what she's told, she knows how not to anger those whom she depends on. And so she picks up her feet and trots after him, and because she's the daughter of a prince, apparently, even if he's a minor prince and she's an unwanted daughter, she holds her head up while she does it, and tries not to show that she's more afraid of this than she ever was of the Thenardiers.

*

She does eat regularly, and finer meals than the Thenardiers ever served themselves, much less her. And her bed is soft, and her room is her own, with a door that she can lock whenever she wishes, which seems an unimaginable luxury and helps settle the jack-rabbit racing of her heart.

She's given lessons, as her father demanded, first etiquette and courtly manners and then, when it has apparently been decided that she's learned enough to no longer embarrass the Crown simply by existing, on reading and writing and geography and history and all the things, it seems, even a bastard daughter of the royal family is expected to know.

She doesn't eat with the royal family, and doesn't expect to. One of the first things she's taught is that she's never to address them by anything other than their proper titles, not even her father, and she's never to speak of her connection to the Crown. She's never told, but she learns all the same, that she's here on the royal family's forbearance, and that she might just as quickly find herself cast back out onto the street if she ever gives them cause to regret their indulgence.

No one shouts at her. Everyone in the palace is far too civilized for that. But she learns that a threat can be just as terrifying when delivered softly and with a smile as it is when it's bellowed, and even worse when it's never spoken at all, but only implied.

She doesn't learn how to keep herself small and still and unnoticed. Living in the Thenardiers' household already taught her that. But she puts the knowledge to good use in the palace, keeping her gaze down and her voice quiet, keeping to the edges of corridors and the corners of rooms where those of greater station than she can sweep by without even seeing her there.

And so years pass, and she grows, and she comes to think of herself as like a mouse living in the walls of a home, tolerated so long as she remains out of sight and doesn't take more than will be noticed and doesn't make enough of a nuisance of herself to be worth the effort of being rid of her.

For years, she is quiet and obedient and she attracts as little notice as possible from the court. She does as she's asked without complaint, and applies herself to her studies, and on the very rare occasions when her father summons her before him and looks her over with an indifferent and assessing eye, she stands with perfect posture and curtsies precisely and addresses him by his title as she ought to have that first day, and he says, "Your tutors report that you are doing well," almost grudgingly, like he wishes he didn't have to admit it, or maybe just like he wishes he didn't have to speak to her and acknowledge her existence, even here in the privacy of his receiving chamber.

"Thank you, your Highness," she says, and dips into another curtsy, and doesn't let it show that her lips are parched with dread or that her hands, tucked carefully behind her back, are trembling. She feels just like a mouse standing frozen before a cat, except that a mouse could run and find safety and hide, but she must stand straight and tall before him and smile and be gracious and know that if this cat wishes to pounce, there's nothing she can do but let him.

It is an immense relief when she's dismissed with a bored flick of the wrist. She doesn't run from him, but takes her leave as her tutors have instructed her to, and only once she is in her room and the door is closed and locked behind her does she let the breath come shuddering out of her lungs and the trembling overtake her.

She gives herself the evening to shirk her studies and change into a plain woolen gown, more finely-made than anything she ever had with the Thenardiers but almost too plain even for an unacknowledged, mostly-ignored, illegitimate daughter of a minor prince to wear. But she's not planning on venturing out into the halls of the palace again tonight, and it makes her feel sure and steady and like herself, and so she changes into the plain gown and slips beneath the covers of her bed and curls in a ball there, and tells herself that this cat will not pounce unless she gives him a reason to, and all she needs to do is remain unremarkable and to do the work her tutors give her, and in a few short years she will achieve her majority and can leave this place entirely behind her. All she needs, she reminds herself as the sky outside turns dark and her candle burns down to a nub, is to give her father and the royal family no reason at all to take notice of her.

And then, in her fifteenth summer,  the whole of the palace is summoned to the throne room. She keeps to the back of the crowd of courtiers, caught between them and the servants behind her, who look scandalized when she tries to push back into their ranks and urge her forward once more. She can only snatch glimpses of what's happening upon the dais, as the crowd before her shifts about, bending their heads toward one another to murmur speculation, but she sees her father standing there, and a woman at his side whom Cosette has never seen before, in all the years she's walked unnoticed through the palace halls. And then the crowd shifts again, and she loses sight of them, and all she can do is listen as the King and Queen announce to all assembled that Prince Félix has married the eldest daughter of their neighbors in the mountains to the east, and the Crown welcomes his new wife into the royal family, and the court.

There is a receiving line afterwards, of course, so the courtiers may meet their new princess and congratulate them both upon their marriage, and Cosette is ushered into it before she can find a means to slip away. And so she does as she has done for years, as she has always done: she stays quiet and unobjectionable, keeps her gaze down and gives no indication that she is anything more than some minor noble's daughter. When she reaches the head of the line she does not acknowledge the prince as her father, doesn't even meet his eye, just keeps her gaze on her feet and dips a precisely correct curtsy and murmurs, "Congratulations, your Highnesses," and turns for the door.

"Wait," says the new princess, her voice like a whip across the space between them, and Cosette's feet are frozen, her fingers trembling where they're curled around the fabric of her skirt. She waits, her heart pounding like a war drum within her chest, and when she isn't dismissed, she dares a glance up.

The princess would be strikingly lovely, except that the way she stares at Cosette reminds her of the royal family's hunting hounds when they've caught a scent on the wind, too ferocious to be called beautiful. She stares at Cosette with her fingers wrapped around the prince's arm so tight they've gone white as bone, and when she turns the intensity of that gaze from Cosette to her new husband, Cosette feels all at once like she can breathe again. She sucks in great, dizzying gulps of air, as quietly as she can, while the princess hisses fierce, furious questions at the prince, too low to make out.

Cosette lowers her gaze while she's able to and doesn't try to make out what the princess is asking of her new husband, or how he is answering, because eavesdropping on the royal family is not how one avoids attracting their notice. Cosette waits, wishing for her small, plain room and her small, plain bed and her small, plain life. If she never had to stand before another courtier again, she'd call herself happy.

Eventually, the prince's voice reaches her, clipped and tense. He says, "You may leave," and when Cosette darts a second glance up, the princess is staring at him like they've had a whole argument in the few hushed words they've traded, and like she doesn't like how it has resolved. She stares at him like she's furious, and like she's betrayed, and Cosette knows that she must have somehow guessed what Cosette is to him, even though she's spent half her life learning how to look and act as though she isn't anything to him at all.

"Your Highnesses," she whispers through numb lips, and curtsies once more. And she's been dismissed, so there's nothing to do but to leave, and count herself grateful for it.

She can count on one hand the number of times she has seen her father since the Thenardiers brought her here to him. She can't do anything for the fact that she is a living reminder to the princess of her husband's past indiscretions, but she can do what she's always done: stay quiet, and avoid the royal family whenever possible, and perhaps if the princess never has to see her again she can forget that Cosette exists at all.

*

It's a fine plan, and it might even have worked, except that in her seventeenth summer, fever sweeps through the city, and then, despite attempts to prevent it, through the palace. By the time it passes, a quarter of the city is dead, and nearly as many of the court. Cosette takes ill at the same time that it seems much of the palace does and spends three weeks in a haze of fevered delirium. And when her fever breaks and she comes to herself again, the halls of the palace are draped in black and everyone she sees is dressed in it, the whole of the city in mourning for the losses the royal family have suffered.

The queen is dead, and her eldest son with her, and her remaining son lies sweating in his sickbed and isn't expected to last the week. Nobles and courtiers and servants alike have perished from the sickness, and by the time autumn nears and the fever releases its grip upon the city, Cosette's father is a minor prince no longer. He is only a nephew to the queen, but he's the eldest surviving son of the royal family. Someday, Cosette's father will be king.

For nine years, Cosette has kept quiet and kept to the edges of palace life and she has said nothing about the connection between her and the prince, and it has served her well. Now, she does precisely the same and yet somehow, within weeks of Prince Félix being named Heir Apparent, Cosette finds that she cannot enter a room without the servants there, who have been the only companions she's known since she was dropped at the prince's feet in exchange for a bag of coin, dipping into curtsies and bows, and averting their gazes.

The first time one of them addresses her as "my lady", Cosette recoils so violently she nearly trips over her own feet.

"I'm not," she says. "I'm not."

The servant gives her a look of such scornful disbelief, like she tried to just tell him the sun didn't hang in the sky and the grass didn't grow from the ground, that she swallows down everything else she wants to say and covers her face with her hands.

She doesn't know how anyone in the palace found out about her connection to Prince Félix when no one who knew of it was keen to have the information come to light, but she knows what her duty is. No matter how others address her, no matter how their interactions turn deferential instead of familiar, she quietly and steadfastly insists that they are wrong, that they must be mistaken, that she is only Cosette, the same as she has ever been.

It becomes difficult to maintain her conviction in the lie when a fine gown is delivered to her room without warning one day, and with it, an invitation to dine with the royal family that evening.

She feels ill. She wonders, briefly, if she could throw the letter on the fire and pretend she never received it. But she knows better than to imagine that an invitation sealed with the king's own signet is anything less than a summons.

She dresses in the fine gown and feels like more of an imposter than she ever has in her life. She lets herself be escorted to the king's private dining chamber and greets everyone she is announced to with the same precise etiquette that has been drilled into her for the better part of half her life.

Her father is there, and his wife with him, of course. Cosette can scarcely bring herself to lift her gaze from her dinner plate throughout the entire meal, but every time she does, she finds the princess's gaze is on her, as heavy as an anvil, as sharp as a whetted blade.

Her plate is filled with the finest food she's ever been served in all her life, and every bite tastes like dust.

She shouldn't be here. As a daughter, and illegitimate, they should have no interest in her at all and certainly no duty to her. She should be exiled from the city for daring to sit at the same table as the king. She should be as insignificant to them as an ant crawling beneath a stallion's hooves.

But while the fever may have left the city, it has not left it unchanged. Families have been decimated, lines of succession severed, the old traditions that have always been relied on suddenly revealed to be tenuous and fragile. No one's yet certain of how things will settle out, and so long as it's uncertain, it seems the Crown is determined to leave nothing to chance. If a minor prince, the king's distant nephew who never expected to achieve much more than the title that he was born into, might suddenly find that he stands to inherit the throne, then why might not the heir's bastard daughter someday find herself in just as unlikely a position?

It's not that any of them bear any warm feelings towards her at all, that much is obvious. The king seems determined to have a hand in shaping the path of her future, that he might direct it to a place that suits him. The prince seems resigned to it the way anyone might resign themselves to an unpleasant but unavoidable task.

The princess hates it with a fury that seethes and roils like a pot of water on a fire, ready to spill over, and it seems so obvious to Cosette that she can't fathom how the prince and the king can eat their supper at the same table as the two of them, and discuss matters of state, and seem not to notice how the princess's knuckles are white where she grips her knife. They stay that way through the whole meal, and through every meal that Cosette is summoned to.

Cosette hates the dinners just as much, though the feeling is more despairing than violent. She wishes she had some way to assure the princess that she wants nothing to do with the Crown, or the royal family, or the throne.

It wouldn't matter, though, even if she could figure out a way to say it. She ought to be used to it by now, when it's been that way all her life, but in the end, just as it's ever been, what she wants doesn't matter at all.

Weeks into it, Cosette leaves the king's dining chamber with her stomach clenched into knots, and thinks its just anxiety from the tense, horrible dinner and hours of sitting under the princess's baleful glare.

She wakes in the night, retching violently, and barely manages to hang over the side of the bed and grab her chamber pot before she empties her stomach all over her bedding, or the floor.

She gets little more sleep that night. Every time she thinks she might be able to doze off again, she's woken moments later by her stomach's seizing. Even once there's nothing left in her to bring up, it continues cramping and convulsing, and she spends the night shivering miserably under her blankets with her chamber pot close at hand.

In the morning, one of the chamber maids comes and gives an alarmed exclamation at the sight of Cosette, and no doubt the smell of sick in the room, and Cosette is only pathetically grateful that it's one of the maids she's known since she first was brought here, and she brings her some water to sip once she's cleaned out the pot, and brushes the hair back off of her brow and doesn't even call her 'my lady' while she does it.

For three days, she can keep nothing down, and when the illness finally eases its grip on her she's weak, and her limbs shake so badly when she tries to stand that her maid clucks her tongue and shoos her back into the bed, and brings her a bowl of broth, even though she's ravenous and begs for something more.

"Keep that down for a while," the maid murmurs to her, stroking her sweat-damp hair, "and then I'll have the kitchen send you something heartier."

Cosette is too weak to protest, only nods and lets herself be tucked back into bed, and finally manages to sleep without interruption, until the maid returns with some stew, filled with beef and barley and vegetables, and she eats it so quickly she scarcely pauses to take a breath between bites.

The maid waits while she does, and watches her indulgently, and takes the bowl back when Cosette has emptied it. "There now," she says. "Do you feel better?"

Cosette nods gratefully. "The—the royal family. Have they recovered as well?" And she's ashamed that she hopes the answer is no, and she might have a reprieve from these horrible family dinners.

The blank look that the maid gives her, though, sends a tendril of cold curling through her stomach. "You're the only one in the palace who's taken ill, so far as I'm aware. Praise be it's not another plague, when we've only just started recovering from the last," she says with a shudder.

"Oh," Cosette says, very softly. "I thought--" But that has the maid looking at her, curious, waiting for her to finish, and Cosette doesn't know what it means if this sickness wasn't just a case of spoiled food, if the royal family ate the same food she did but didn't take ill, if there's no one else in the palace who she might have caught a sickness from. She knows better than to say any of that, even to a maid who she's known for half her life, and so she gives her a wan smile instead and says, "Forgive me, I lost the thread of my own thoughts."

The maid smiles at her sympathetically, and pats her shoulder and says, "You rest now. I'll bring you up some supper tonight, and you'll feel better with a few good meals in your belly."

Cosette lets herself be tucked in and tries to sleep, tries to rest. She's always been good at doing what she's told, but for once, she can't manage it. Her thoughts are spinning too wildly to grant her any peace at all.

*

She still doesn't know what it means that she fell ill when no one else did, or at least can't quite bring herself to think it plainly, but there's a restlessness stirring in her even if she won't give it a name. And the first time she encounters the princess in the palace corridors, after she's recovered enough to leave her chamber, the expression on the princess's face makes the loose, frantic feeling in her chest twist up into something cold and hard and resolved.

There isn't a moment of precise clarity where she thinks to herself, I have to leave. It's just a slow certainty that comes upon her like a sunrise until she finds herself with a small parcel, packed with only what's essential or irreplaceable, and a second parcel stuffed with food that she was able to persuade the kitchens to part with, and she's standing in front of the palace kennels with her shoulders squared and both her packs gripped in her hands.

She steps inside and she's braced for the earthy smell of so many dogs in such close quarters, and the baying that one hound starts at the sight of her and that the others take up in an ear-splitting chorus. There's a figure at the end of the kennels -- a woman, she thinks, crouched down and running her hands along a hound's foreleg like she's checking for injury, and she looks up when the other dogs raise the alarm, and Cosette is completely unprepared to find herself confronted by a face that's been changed by the years but that is horribly, horrifyingly familiar.

She'd planned what she meant to say, how she meant to ask for assistance. But now all her words vanish and her voice dries up and chokes her, and she can do nothing but gape.

Éponine straightens, one hand dropping down to scratch at the dog's head. She watches Cosette, waiting, and says nothing. Her expression could mean anything at all.

"I--" Cosette takes a step back, and then another. "I'm sorry, I-- I shouldn't--" She spins around and gathers herself to flee.

"Cosette." The sound of her name, spoken by a voice that's somehow both familiar and strange, keeps her frozen where she stands, trembling like one of Éponine's hounds waiting to be loosed. "Wait. What--" Éponine clears her throat, and that at last pulls Cosette back around to face her, drawn despite herself because for all the years Cosette knew her, she can't remember a single time she sounded like this. She can't remember a time she looked like this, discomfited and awkward and maybe, if it's not Cosette's imagination running wild with her, a little chagrined. "What did you need?"

Cosette swallows once, though it does little to make speaking any easier. "I shouldn't have come," she says, barely more than a whisper. "I didn't know."

That makes Éponine's expression turn wry. "That I'd be here? That Mother and Father would have used the Crown's gratitude and their desperation for discretion to buy me an apprenticeship, and try to advance their station by advancing mine" She continues before Cosette can stammer out an explanation, to try to stave off offense. "Obviously you didn't. Still. You're here now." She takes a step toward Cosette, cautious, and Cosette isn't sure if it's because she thinks she'll bolt like a spooked horse, or bite like a cornered dog. "What do you need?"

Cosette shuts her eyes. She can't go back. Even if she's wrong about that supper and the nature of her illness. She can't go back. She can't bear the thought of another one of those horrible suppers. She doesn't even have the distant promise of reaching her majority to cling to, because she's no longer a ward of the crown, she's a potential heir, and they'll never let her walk away from that, even if the princess would rather they did. "I need to leave," she says, and opens her eyes to find Éponine looking at her in surprise, like it's the last thing she expected. "I meant to ask the huntsman if he could arrange it, if he could take me out as part of a hunting party--"

"He's already on a hunt. He won't be back for a few days yet," Éponine says, and Cosette feels the weight of the palace's trap crushing down on her, gilded manacles snapping shut just when she thought freedom was in reach. "It's just me left here, to tend the hounds he left behind."

"I'm sorry," Cosette says, though her lips feel numb and the words sound stilted. "I'll-- I'll come back." And somehow, maybe, she can think of a way to avoid the king's suppers until then. Perhaps she can plead ill, or--

"You can't go like that," Éponine says, and she's looking her over critically. "Anyone will take one look at you and know you're a lady."

"I'm not," Cosette snaps, the reaction automatic, and bristles because she's wearing the plainest gown she owns, the simplest one they left to her.

The corner of Éponine's mouth quirks with amusement. "Well, we'll have to make you look it. Come with me," she says, and drops her hand from the hound's head to turn and start walking away. "I've a spare change of clothes that should fit you well enough, if we roll up the cuffs and cinch it in with a belt."

It takes Cosette a long moment to realize what Éponine means. By the time she does, and manages to make herself stumble after her, dumbfounded, Éponine is nearly out of sight. "Why-- why would you help me?"

Éponine stops. Tension ripples across her shoulders. When she speaks, it's so quiet that Cosette nearly misses it. "Because I didn't before," she says without turning, and then she's moving again, walking off with quick strides, and Cosette has to hurry to keep up.

*

In the space of a few hours, Éponine has Cosette changed out of her plain woolen dress and into trousers (rolled at the cuff, and belted at the waist, as Éponine had predicted), and a loose shirt beneath a jerkin made of worn leather, as might befit a huntsman's apprentice. She gets Cosette to transfer everything in her parcels into a proper rucksack, too, and Cosette hesitates halfway through the parcel that holds her belongings, her hands lingering on a small pouch that she'd tucked in there carefully just that morning.

"I have--" She turns towards Éponine, clutching the pouch. "I have a little jewelry. It's not very fine, but I meant to offer it to the huntsman in exchange for his help. But you're helping me, and you--" She holds the pouch out, towards Éponine. "I could hardly offer you less. It's yours, for doing this for me."

Éponine gives the pouch a long look, and Cosette an even longer one. The corners of her mouth pinch in a way that Cosette doesn't know how to read. "I don't need your jewels," she says. "Keep them. Hide them, or we'll attract every bandit in the kingdom, but keep them." Her expression softens a little, and Cosette doesn't know how to interpret that, either. "You'll be glad to have something to trade for coin, or food, or shelter at some point, I imagine."

Cosette sets her jaw. "You're doing me a service," she says. The Thenardiers that Cosette knew, growing up, would have taken any payment offered to them and then wheedled for more. Cosette remembers how they'd pull their daughter aside and teach her how to put water in the wine, and sawdust in the bread. The Éponine that Cosette had known, when they were children, had taken to those lessons as readily as Cosette had absorbed her own, about how to be quiet and unnoticed and unobjectionable. But now Éponine pulls back from the offered pouch as though Cosette were extending a blade toward her, and the more she insists the darker the unhappiness in Éponine's eyes grows.

"I'm seeing to the hounds," Éponine says, just as firm. "I get a stipend for that, as an apprentice. I don't need more. And I won't take your jewelry. Put that somewhere safe, and be quick about it. We need to leave before midday or we won't make it into the forest before you're missed."

The prospect of still being on the palace grounds when her absence is noted is incentive enough to get Cosette to tuck the pouch away.

As soon as she has, Éponine nods once, like she's satisfied. "Come on," she says. "I'll introduce you to the dogs properly, and teach you what you need to know so you don't completely give away that you've never trained a hound in your life."

There's a part of Cosette that wants to protest that Éponine doesn't know what her life has been like at all since the Thenardiers left her at the prince's feet, and who is she to say that that life hasn't been one that's included dogs? But Éponine is helping her, and inexplicably is helping her without any apparent interest in or desire for payment. And so Cosette knows how to do what's smart and what's safe, and to hold her tongue. She follows after Éponine, back to the kennels, and does her best to impress the dogs' names into her memory, and to learn what Éponine teaches her.

And with that, before the sun has even reached its full height in the sky, they set out with just the two of them and the pack of dogs surging and shifting around them like an ocean current. They leave the kennels behind them, and the palace grounds and head out through the city proper, to make their way to the forest beyond, and Cosette doesn't look back, not once.

*

They walk for hours, leaving the city far behind and tracking deep into the forest, and for the most part they don't speak except when necessary. Éponine talks more to the dogs than to her, giving them quiet commands or just a gentle greeting whenever one runs back to lean in against her thigh and pant up at her, but Cosette doesn't need to be corralled the way they do, and she follows readily enough where Éponine leads, even if she isn't quite as easy with the pace.

Éponine glances back towards her once, when the sun is starting to graze the treetops and the air is already getting cold. She quirks one eyebrow up as she watches Cosette carefully extract her foot from a root that nearly tripped her. "Tired already?"

Cosette is, but she notches her chin up and says, "I'm fine. Are you?"

It makes Éponine laugh, soft and almost beneath her breath. She doesn't resume walking when Cosette reaches her side. "We should find somewhere to make camp soon. It gets dark fast in the forest."

"I remember," Cosette says softly, and Éponine gives her a swift look that makes her feel pinned in place. She still doesn't know what to make of any of the other woman's expressions. They all seem fearsome, the sort that would have made her cower and cringe if they'd come from Éponine's mother. But Éponine gives her those looks like she's angry and then helps her anyway, and Cosette doesn't know what to do with that but accept it, and hope that it continues.

"It looks like the trees thin out up ahead," she says, pushing past Éponine through the underbrush. "We're not likely to find a proper clearing this deep in the woods, but there might be space enough for a small fire and a few bedrolls."

For a moment there's only the sound of her own footsteps, crunching through the undergrowth. But then there's a rustling sound, Éponine's quieter steps following after her, letting her lead. Cosette squares her shoulders and pushes ahead to find a suitable place for their camp.

*

Cosette knows how to find to find dry wood that'll burn without smoking, even if she doesn't know how to make a campfire. It's been years since she's had to, but it's not that difficult a skill to remember.

Éponine crouches, building a fire out of the sticks and branches that she brings back, and watches her every time she returns to their campsite with that same narrowed, speculative gaze that Cosette doesn't know what to make of. She doesn't say anything, though, no matter how much she looks like she might want to, so Cosette keeps her peace as well, until the fire is going and they've got enough wood set beside it to keep it smoldering through the night, and Cosette has scratches across her palms and her back aches from all the bending and crouching, and there's a spot on the back of one heel that feels like it's working up to a blister. Then she drops her last armful of firewood onto their pile, and drops down herself to sit cross-legged on the little pallet that Éponine has built, laying down grasses and pine boughs to insulate them from the cold and damp of the forest floor.

It's not very large, and so there's no way for Cosette to sit on it with Éponine without sitting very close. Their shoulders almost graze, and their knees would bump if she didn't pull her thighs up to her chest and wrap her arms around them, and Cosette can feel the warmth coming off of Éponine almost more than she can coming off the fire.

"Why?" she asks very softly, gazing at the fire and watching the flames lap at the logs. She's not even sure which why she's asking. There are a hundred of them, all spinning through her thoughts like a maelstrom.

She can feel Éponine's gaze on her, but she doesn't turn to meet it, just waits, watching the fire until the brightness of the flames make the rest of the forest turn black behind it.

"I told you why," Éponine says, but it's said gently, it's not harsh. There were so many times that Mistress Thenardier screamed I already told you-- at her, so many times that the screaming preceded a blow, that Cosette can't help the way she jumps, or how her breath hitches. She stares into the fire and tries to ignore the way her heart pounds against her breast, tries to focus on Éponine's words instead.

There's no point in playing disingenuous about what Éponine means. "It wasn't your responsibility to help me, back then." It isn't now, either, but Cosette can't quite bring herself to say that, not when Éponine's sense of responsibility is the only reason she's sitting here around a campfire, instead of at the king's table pushing rich, decadent food around her plate and wondering if any of it is going to make her ill again.

"Like hell it wasn't," Éponine says, a sudden, furious burst, angry now where she hadn't been before, and Cosette startles, her gaze flying up to her. "I saw how they treated you, I heard what they said to you, and I held my tongue because I was grateful it wasn't me, and afraid it would be if I crossed them. But I should have."

"You were a child," Cosette says carefully. It only makes Éponine's gaze flash up to hers, and her eyes are blazing.

"You were a child. I should have at least been kinder to you."

Cosette can't speak, can't say yes, you should have but can't quite bring herself to offer absolution, either. She stares at the dancing flames of their campfire and swallows against the thickness in her throat.

Éponine is quiet for a moment, too, nothing but the sound of the crackling logs between them. "I thought-- When you left, I told myself it would be better for you. That you'd have money and fine dresses and servants to wait on you, and a father who's a prince, and it would be better and you'd be happy, and so it didn't matter that I'd never spoken up for you when Mother and Father had been terrible, because it had all worked out for you in the end." She reaches out to their little pile of firewood, grabs a branch and snaps it in half like she's wishing it were something else gripped between her hands, and then sighs and throws both halves onto the fire. "But you came to me and asked to leave, so I was wrong after all, it seems."

"It wasn't good," Cosette says softly, watching Éponine's fingers curl against her palm like she wants to keep breaking things. "But it was better, mostly. Until-- Until the end."

Éponine turns, then, and slants a sidelong glance her direction. The set of her mouth is grim, and the corners of her mouth are pinched, and Cosette tugs at a loose thread in the hem of her borrowed shirt and tries not to squirm beneath the weight of her consideration. At length, she asks what she hasn't yet, what she should have by rights asked hours ago, before they'd left the city far behind them, before they'd ever left the palace grounds. "Why did you leave?" Éponine asks her, quiet and like she genuinely wants to know the answer. "Why like this, smuggled out like a convict on the run?"

It makes Cosette choke on bitter, twisted laughter. A convict would be better than what I am, she thinks, but can't find the words to say it. It's treason, to speak the truth and state it plain, and there's a part of her that still somehow feels like silence might be the surest path to safety.

It's foolishness, that's all it is. It's treason to accuse the princess of wanting to kill her, of trying to, but holding her tongue won't make the princess want her dead any less.

"My father's wife tried to kill me, I think," she says, softly, as though if she speaks too loud it might carry on the wind back to the palace. A shiver courses through her -- voicing the words makes them real in a way she can't avoid like she could when it was just her own privately-held suspicion, vague and amorphous and unacknowledged. "I'm older than any child she could bear him, and she must think me a threat to her own children's inheritance. I don't want it, but she didn't stop to ask me that, so..." She trails off, and shrugs helplessly. "It seemed expedient to remove myself from the line of succession before she could do so for me."

For a long moment, all Éponine does is watch her, expressionless. Or, Cosette thinks she's expressionless, at first, but as time stretches and Éponine keeps staring at her and Cosette says nothing because she's not sure what else there is to say now that she's confessed her suspicions, she realizes that there's a thunderous sort of fury building across Éponine's face, like stormclouds stacking up on a distant horizon. "You--" Her voice is choked, strangled. "You can't tell anyone that, Cosette, not anyone."

Cosette shuts her eyes and lets out a carefully-measured breath. "I know. It's treason, I know—"

"No, it's— Gods. Were you going to tell the master of the hunt this?"

Cosette opens her eyes to look at her. Éponine's staring back at her, like somehow this answer is important, more important than any of the others even though it doesn't matter because the huntsman isn't here and Éponine is. "I don't know. If he'd agreed, maybe. If he'd asked, like you did."

Éponine tips her head back and passes a hand over her eyes, her lips moving to shape soundless words. Cosette thinks that maybe she's glad she doesn't know what it is Éponine is saying to herself. She doubts she'd like it.

"What?" she demands, pulling herself up straight where she sits. One of the hounds, the littlest one, and she thinks she remembers his name is Chou, comes over and lays his head on her knee, like he can tell she's upset, even though Éponine is the one being more obvious about it. "What is it? I've said something wrong, I can tell. Just tell me what it is."

"You're lucky the huntsman was out and there was only me left behind in the kennels. If anyone heard what you just told me, they'd drag you in front of the Crown before you'd even gotten the words out. The huntsman would probably have cut out your heart and presented it to the princess as a gift, and no doubt been rewarded handsomely for it. Times are hard for everyone these days, and there's few who'd turn down the chance to secure their livelihoods, and no doubt an advancement as well. There's lots of good the gratitude of royalty could do to reshape the life of a humble hunter, or one of his apprentices." Her voice turns wry, just for a moment. "I should know."

Her words make Cosette's blood run like meltwater through her veins. Her fingers clench tightly around the strap of her pack, where she has nothing at all that she might use to protect herself. The hound shifts beneath her other hand and whines quietly, nosing up against her palm.

She knows what it's like to be hungry, knows the lengths that desperation might drive a person to. And Éponine's parents already dragged her before the court once to profit off of doing so. Why shouldn't she believe Éponine capable of doing the same?"

"There." Éponine leans forward and catches Cosette's hand, her fingers like a manacle around her wrist. "Whatever's put that look onto your face, hold onto that thought. Remember it, and let no one know how the princess feels about you, or you're not likely to make it through the spring."

Cosette swallows down the bitter taste of fear and pulls against Éponine's hold on her wrist. Éponine releases her at once, and must have said her piece, because she doesn't protest when Cosette slides out from underneath the weight of the hound's head and moves to the other side of the fire, putting a little more distance between them even though it means moving off the pallet and sitting on the cold and damp of the ground.

They stay like that as the fire burns down and the forest turns black beyond the dancing shadows cast by its light. Éponine sighs when the fire's down to embers, glowing barely bright enough to see by, and looks across the coals at Cosette. "You'll take a chill if you try to sleep on the ground. Come over here, there's room enough for us both. If you don't mind sharing."

Cosette watches her across the firepit. The flickering flames had made her face difficult to read before. Now, scarcely illuminated by the red glow of the coals below and the faint light of the stars above, her face is nearly all shadow, and reading it's impossible. Cosette can't know if Éponine's coaxing her close to make it easier to cut her throat in the night and earn the princess's gratitude for herself, or if her concern is genuine.

It had seemed genuine, earlier, when Éponine's hand had clenched around her wrist and her face had been alight with urgency, when she'd insisted that Cosette tell no one else what she'd told Éponine. But Cosette would have trusted the huntsman, too, most likely, and Éponine says he would have cut her heart out for it. She's not sure she can trust her own judgment.

But she must sleep sometime, after all. And it's not as though a few feet of distance between them will prevent Éponine from harming her, if she has it in mind to do so. And the ground is cold -- it's already stealing the warmth from her just sitting there on it, enough to make her shiver beneath her cloak.

She has to sleep. If Éponine means to kill her, then she'll kill her, and there's little Cosette's capable of doing to stop it, whether awake or not. But if she doesn't, the princess surely does, and Cosette needs to be rested so they can continue tomorrow, so she can put more distance between them, so she has any chance at all of escaping.

She rises from her seat slowly and moves around the campfire to settle down on the edge of the pallet, tense, like she's expecting the blow to come now. She can feel the weight of Éponine's gaze on her back for a moment, and then Éponine snorts, like Cosette's said something funny, or something stupid.

"Here," Éponine says, and Cosette twists enough to look at her -- and her heart jolts, because she's extending a knife towards her, and she has a moment of wild panic and terrible disappointment before she realizes that Éponine is offering it to her, hilt-first. "Take this, if it'll help you sleep easier. Just sleep, for goodness' sake."

Cosette reaches out across what little distance lies between them and clasps the knife's grip in her hand. It feels warm, and solid, and grounding, and it's not as though a huntsman's apprentice would be likely to venture out into the woods with only one knife on her, but having it in her hand makes it a little easier to breathe, all the same. It makes it easier to slide up to the edge of the pallet, so there's room left for Éponine behind her, and lie down with her head pillowed on her pack, and her cloak pulled close around her, and the knife gripped tight between her hands.

She shuts her eyes against the distant starlight and the fire's dying glow and listens to the movement and the rustle as Éponine settles down behind her. It only takes her a moment, and then she's still and her breathing is even, and Cosette thinks that a huntsman's apprentice must be accustomed to falling asleep quickly and easily on even the most uncomfortable of surfaces.

Cosette grew up in the Thenardier's home, with the thinnest, lumpiest pallet they owned for her bed. She knows how to sleep despite discomfort, and not even her years in the palace have taken that from her. She sleeps -- not soundly, but she sleeps all the same, and only wakes once in the middle of the night, when the fire has gone black and cold and not even the moon shines through the trees, to whisper-soft rustling behind her and then warmth and a slight weight settling onto her. Éponine, laying a blanket over her, she realizes, and she doesn't move a muscle but her heart kicks hard against her breastbone.

Sleep pulls her under again moments later. But she thinks that if she hadn't learned the Thenardiers' lessons quite so well she'd be awake long into the night, thinking about that quiet, almost covert act of charity.

*

In the morning they find water and stir up the coals until there's heat enough to cook a thin gruel on for their breakfast, and then Éponine shows her how to break down their camp, how to bury their ashes and scatter what they won't be taking with them, how to sweep away any sign of where they lay or where they walked so that no one will know that anyone but the forest's beasts have been there.

And then, with that done, they shoulder their packs and resume walking. Cosette's feet ache, unaccustomed to the borrowed boots or the uneven surface of the forest floor, or to having such demands placed upon them for two days in a row, but she says nothing, only grits her teeth and keeps pace with Éponine, who strides through the forest's underbrush as easily as the palace's courtiers glide through its stately halls.

They walk mostly in silence, broken only by the occasional "Careful," or "Watch your step here," and without a conversation to focus her attention, Cosette finds it drifting off on its own meandering paths, following thoughts like rabbit trails through the wood. She wonders if her absence has been noted yet, if they're searching for her, if the princess has suspected the reason that she fled. She wonders when the huntsman is due back, when Éponine will be missed, how long it might take people to connect the two.

They stop at midday to eat, and Cosette thinks Éponine is taking pity on her at least a little bit and giving her an excuse to rest her feet, and she pushes aside the thoughts that have been building up in her until after they've eaten and they're sitting side-by-side with the hounds sniffing through the undergrowth around them and she can't hold them back any longer, and says, very softly, "You should, you know."

She doesn't look at Éponine, but she can feel her turn, feel her attention on her like the warmth of the sun on her skin. Éponine waits, and Cosette can't dam up the flow now that she's let it loose.

"You said the huntsman would cut my heart out and present it to the princess, to curry her favor. You should do it."

Éponine is very, very still. When Cosette turns and looks at her, Éponine is staring at her with as grave an expression as Cosette has ever seen. "I will not kill you." Her voice is so tight it's almost shaking. "If you think--"

Cosette blows out a sharp breath. "If I wanted to die, I'd have stayed in the palace. But I don't want to spend my life looking over my shoulder, either. If she wants me dead, then let her think she has it. How likely is a princess to be able to tell a woman's heart from a boar's, or a doe's, anyway?"

Some of the tension eases out of Éponine, but only a fraction of it. "If I leave you on your own in the forest, I'll be killing you as surely as if I cut your heart out myself. And the forest won't be as merciful as I would have been."

There's a bit of crumb on the knee of Cosette's trousers, from the bread they ate with their meal. She plucks it off and tosses it away, into a shadowed patch of ferns and stones where it won't be noticed by anyone who might follow after them, searching for signs of their passing. "Have a little faith," she snaps, staring off into the woods instead of at Éponine, a futile attempt to hide her temper. A palace trick, but she doesn't harbor any illusions that it'll work on a huntsman's apprentice the way it'd work on a disinterested courtier. "I am not the child you knew me as."

"The child I knew," Éponine says, each word chosen carefully, like a knight selecting his arms before a battle, "I'd have worried less for. You are many years out from the days when you were sent to brave the woods on your own."

Am I? Cosette thinks, and wants to cry but doesn't. Then why am I here again, sitting in them?

"Palace life might not have been the easy sort like I'd imagined you'd have," Éponine says, filling the silence that Cosette leaves between them, "but it doesn't do much to teach you how to survive on your own."

"Does it not?" Cosette's voice comes out sharp, edged like a blade. "I have lived these years in a nest of vipers, surrounded by those who would be glad to see me gone. I have survived a princess's assassination attempt. I am not soft."

"No," Éponine agrees softly, after a long moment in which Cosette's words sit on the air. Even the dogs lift their heads from the scents they're exploring and turn to look at Cosette like they can sense the weight of her words. "I wouldn't have ever called you that. But the hazards of the woods aren't the same as the hazards of the palace."

"Then teach me."

Éponine laughs. It's not mocking, but it's not joyous, either. "I have been years learning at the huntsman's side, and I have more yet to learn. How am I to do both, teach you how to live and carry word of your death back to the palace?"

One of the hounds, Chou, comes trotting out of the undergrowth like he's had his fill of exploring, and flops down onto the ground with his head on Cosette's knee, panting up at her. She strokes her fingers through his fur, just behind his ear, and speaks towards him, though her words are meant for Éponine. "How long do you suppose you have before the huntsman returns and finds you missing from your post? How long, before he realizes you don't mean to return. And how long after that before someone connects your disappearance to mine, and they realize where I must have fled, and by what means?"

Éponine looks at her like Cosette is asking her to cut her own heart out of her chest and offer it up. It makes no sense. "I can't leave you out here to die. I won't."

And then suddenly it does. "You do not have to atone for being a child, or being frightened. You don't have to atone for them, Éponine."

"The hell I don't!"

The dog lifts his head from Cosette's knee, alarmed by Éponine's outburst. Cosette urges him back down with her fingers pushed deep into the fur along his ruff and is glad for the excuse to take a moment to compose herself. "You will do me more good by going back and telling the princess I'm dead," she says carefully. "If that's what you're concerned about."

Éponine looks mutinous, and like she's half a moment away from protesting. She opens her mouth but snaps it shut again without speaking, her expression eloquent with frustration and unhappiness. Cosette waits, the dog's head a heavy reassurance on her leg, and after a moment Éponine's mouth flattens and her face sets with resolve. "We'd best be on our way, then," she says, and gets to her feet. The dog rouses as well, and the others come out of the brush and mill around them without her having to even voice a command. "I have too much to teach you as it is, and nowhere near enough time to do it." She looks Cosette over as she gets to her feet as well, half a beat behind. "I hope you're a quick study."

"I am." Cosette shoulders her pack and squares her shoulders beneath its weight. "I will be."

Éponine nods once and sets off, leading her deeper into the woods.

*

This time Éponine speaks while they walk, speaks almost without stopping, her voice low and urgent. She tells Cosette about the berries that will just be coming into season, and where the best places to look for them are. She points out mushroom caps growing in loamy earth beneath the shade of a log, tells her they're good for eating and shows her how not to mistake them for the ones that aren't, the ones that will kill her swifter than the princess's poison. She teaches her how to see the rabbit trails that cut through the low brushes and ferns, and how to tie a simple snare from a green branch and a bit of twine, and her mouth presses thin and her expression is bleak as Cosette's hands echo hers, practicing the motions.

Cosette doesn't ask her what's wrong. There isn't time to spare for it, and she can guess well enough, besides. She must be thinking, same as Cosette is, that a day's practice isn't enough to survive on, that when Éponine turns back to the palace and leaves Cosette behind, she'll be leaving her to die.

Cosette isn't thinking that last part, but Éponine has made it obvious that she is. And Cosette doesn't want to hear it, so she doesn't ask, just bites back an oath that would've drawn gasps in the palace when the knot of her snare falls apart beneath her fingers, and sets her jaw and tries again.

When they stop for the evening, Éponine doesn't make a pallet like she did the night before, but stands back and watches as Cosette does, and corrects her when she makes mistakes. She does the same while Cosette struggles to start their campfire, and smiles like Cosette has passed some sort of test when the kindling ignites and the branches begin to smolder.

"Good," Éponine says. "Sit. Eat. You're going to need your strength."

In the morning, they break the camp down together until there's no sign remaining that they've even passed through, and then Éponine stands with her fingers curled around the straps of her pack looking like she thinks that maybe if she just doesn't go, she can keep this from coming to a head.

"Thank you," Cosette says softly, coming to face her, and Éponine's shoulders drop like with that, she's admitted defeat. "For everything."

Éponine's throat works for a moment. "I put the tinderbox in your pack this morning, and the flint. And the blanket."

Éponine is going to need those, too, for her trip back, but Cosette just nods and doesn't protest. She has the knife, too, that Éponine gave her that first night and never asked her to return, and a handful of other useful things that have somehow migrated from Éponine's pack to hers over the past day.

"And--" Éponine takes a breath, then squares her shoulders and stoops a little, to pet Chou's head and ruffle his ears. And then she says something Cosette doesn't hear to him, and gives him a brisk pat on the shoulder as she straightens, and he breaks off from the group and paces a circle around Cosette before he comes to a stop at her side, leaning in against her thigh. "Take him, too. He'll take care of you, if-- Well. He's a good dog. He'll do well with you."

The bottom falls out of Cosette's stomach. "The huntsman will notice he's missing."

"He had an infection in his paw, before the huntsman left. It's improved since then, but he doesn't know that. He won't be glad I lost one of his hounds, but he won't doubt it."

"Éponine," Cosette whispers, scarcely able to make a sound. "No. You'll suffer for it."

Éponine smiles at her, and it's the saddest expression Cosette has ever seen. And Cosette knows what she's thinking then, that Cosette suffered during her years in their home, that somehow she can make up for what her parents did, and what she didn't do. Cosette's voice is dried up and she doesn't know how to tell her that Éponine suffering now won't do anything to change the fact that Cosette suffered then. It won't fix anything, it'll only mean that now there's more suffering to go around, instead of less.

"It's spring," Éponine says, like Cosette's silence has spoken for itself. "The forest's bounty will be able to sustain you for a while, maybe even into autumn. But you can't survive out here on your own forever. Get as far away from the palace as you can and find a village somewhere, too small for anyone from the court to ever bother visiting. Don't trust anyone, but find someone you think might be worth it, if you can." Éponine's voice goes bleak at that last, like she isn't sure that person exists. Like she doesn't realize that person is standing right there in front of Cosette, giving up half her possessions and most likely her prospects to try to help her. "Still don't trust them, even then, but you're going to need people you can depend on if you're going to make it through winter. Trust your instincts, they've kept you alive this far. And trust his," she adds, with a nod to the hound, still leaning in against Cosette's leg like he needs comfort as much as she does. "He'll serve you well, like I said."

Cosette nods, because there isn't anything else left to her to do and her throat is too thick for her to speak. Éponine looks at her for one last moment -- and Cosette tries not to think that she's looking at her like she's sending her off to her death -- and then turns on her heel and gives a sharp whistle to the dogs, and they all set off through the forest together, back the way they'd come.

Chou whines quietly and quivers where he's pressed to Cosette's thigh, but he doesn't move from her side, not until she sighs and drops a hand down to pet his head and says, "Well. We'd best be going, then. I imagine we'll both want breakfast soon enough, and it's going to take me longer to find it for you than it did her."

He looks up at her and gives a little wag of his tail, like he's tentatively glad to be there with her, even though Éponine just walked off with everyone he knows in the world. She pets his head again for that, and when she turns her back to the path that Éponine took and starts walking the other direction, deeper into the woods, he falls in at her side without protest.

I am glad to have you here, she thinks as she watches him lope ahead to sniff at a half-rotted log that's caught his interest, and doesn't dare speak the words aloud for fear that it might invite the universe to take this last, meager comfort from her. So she just follows along, keeping the rising sun to her shoulder so she can be sure they're heading the right way, and keeps her eye turned to the bushes and shadows around them for anything they might be able to make a breakfast out of.

*

Three days later, Cosette has nearly grown accustomed to her hunger. It's a familiar companion, a reminder of her childhood with the Thenadiers. But it's easier to bear this time, knowing that its source and its solution lie in her own hands, her own skills. It's easier, knowing that food isn't being withheld out of malice or petty spite, but simply because the forest expects more of her. She doesn't have Éponine's knack at foraging, not yet, but she finds enough to keep them from starving outright, even if they do go to bed with their bellies grumbling most of the time.

On the fourth day, clouds stack low and heavy across the sky, and Cosette stops only a few hours into the morning and gives the dark clouds hanging overhead a baleful look, and stops walking to search instead for a place to build a shelter.

Before midday, the skies open up and rain pours down in sheets. Cosette's pine-bough-thatched lean-to can only withstand the onslaught for so long. Within an hour, she's soaked to the skin; not long after that her teeth are chattering, and even the warmth of the hound pressed against her can't protect her from the storm's winds.

The clouds are too thick and low overhead to allow enough sunlight through to give any indication as to the time of day, or the passage of time. Eventually, when the storm shows no signs of relenting and Cosette's clothes are heavy with water, her hair dripping unrelentingly across her face, she sets her jaw and pulls her cloak tight about her shoulders and ventures out into the rain. It's not as though she can get any more wet than she already is, she figures. And if she can just figure out how to shore up the leaks in their shelter, they might stand a chance of weathering the storm before it turns them both into sodden prunes.

The rain leaves her gasping as soon as she steps down beneath the full force of it, and the wind steals any remaining warmth from her bones. But she tightens her jaw and sets about trying to find anything she might be able to use to strengthen their shelter, anything that isn't already too soaked to be of use.

She finds an old, fallen branch that managed to avoid most of the rain where it fell beneath the overhang of a stone, and she adds it to those already making up the roof of their shelter. There's moss, too, which is soaked through but she tears it from the trunks of the trees and stuffs it by the handful into the spaces between the boughs, then comes around to the front of their lean-to to squint inside and assess whether it did anything at all to help stop the drips that have been coming through, soaking their space inside.

She thinks it helped. She thinks it looks like it's dripping less than it had been, but perhaps it's only because she's standing out in the torrent now, and anything looks like an improvement by comparison.

Still, she swipes the rain from her eyes and goes back out to find more moss, and some grasses that she rips up to lay over the top, to try to help direct the rain down rather than through. And then her determination gives out beneath the unrelenting cold and wet of the storm, and she declares it good enough -- though there's no one but herself and Chou to hear -- and takes shelter beneath its low roof once again.

The ground is wet, and she huddles into herself with her knees pulled to her chest and her arms wrapped around them, because she doesn't dare lean against the side of the shelter and risk making it shift enough to start leaking again, and the branches she made it out of are wet besides. Her cloak is heavy with the rain it's soaked up, dragging at her shoulders and sticking to her skin. Chou comes into the shelter as soon as she does and flops down at her side with his head pressed against her leg with a heavy sigh, as though he's as disgruntled by their circumstances as she is.

She works one hand out from beneath the cloak and pets his head. He's as drenched as she is, his fur soaked with it, but Éponine was right. He's a good dog, and she's glad for his company. She's glad to not be alone as well as miserable.

She wishes she hadn't been so hasty to send Éponine away, even though she knows it was the only choice. But she can't help but think that Éponine would have put up a better shelter, and in a fraction of the time, and they might all be at least dry right now, might even have a fire going to warm their fingers on.

But Éponine's surely returned to the palace by now, with a heart cut from some animal she hunted, and has carried word of Cosette's death and no doubt been rewarded handsomely for it, and there's some satisfaction to be had in that, at least. In knowing that the princess will have no more reason to look for Cosette, and in knowing that at least some good will have come from it all, perhaps enough even to counter the huntsman's displeasure at Éponine losing one of his hounds.

It's not much of a thought, to keep her warm against the downpour. But it's better than nothing, and Cosette clings to it desperately as the storm rages around them.

*

Night's arrival is marked only by the dark forest around them becoming completely black, without even a hint of star- or moonlight to see by. Cosette and Chou shiver against one another, huddling close together to make a smaller target for the wind. Cosette can't speak for the hound, but she doesn't sleep a wink, and when morning comes with the same faint light and the storm still shows no signs of wearing itself out, Cosette sighs and wrings what water she can out of her cloak, and then shoulders her pack and ties the cloak around them both, so their provisions might stand some small chance of staying dry. And then she says to Chou, "All right, then, come along. We're going to have to find someplace better to wait this out, or we're both likely to drown before it's through."

Chou gives a long-suffering sigh, but drags himself up and settles in at her side as she starts off through the woods, leaving their meager shelter behind.

It's not long before her boots are caked with mud, each step a struggle as it clings to her soles and weighs her down. Chou is looking forlorn at her side, his head hanging down and his tail kept low, the picture of unhappiness. Cosette scratches her fingers through the fur at his neck. "I know," she murmurs. "But there must be a nice cave or overhang around here somewhere. Someplace that'll keep us dry, instead of just drowning slightly slower than we were back there."

Chou huffs a breath, but otherwise doesn't respond to her reassurances, just pauses to sniff at a puddle on the ground as they skirt around it, and then picks up his pace to return to her side.

Their progress is slow, and their search yields little that's promising. Once, she thinks toward evening, Chou veers off into the brush but then doesn't return straightaway, and she can hear him snuffling at something over the sounds of the pouring rain.

She follows after him, pushing through bushes and sapling trees that slap her face with their wet branches, and finds Chou digging at a bit of earth at the base of an oak. When he hears her coming behind him, too wet and too weary to have any thought of trying to keep her approach quiet, he looks back at her over his shoulder, and spits a mushroom out onto the ground with the guiltiest expression that Cosette has ever seen in an animal.

Oh please, don't be the poisonous ones, Cosette thinks, as she drops to her knees beside him and reaches for the half-eaten one he spat out. It's too mangled for her to have any hope of making a confident identification, but there's more growing in a cluster between two of the oak's roots, so she reaches out and plucks one from the earth, and turns it over to look for the frills beneath the cap that Éponine had pointed out to her.

It's dark, and everything is wet, and rain water keeps dripping into her eyes no matter how deep she tries to burrow in her cloak or how much she wipes her hands across her face. But it looks like the ones Éponine showed her, she thinks, the ones that were good to eat. She said the others would kill you quick if you ate them, in minutes or less, so she sits down next to Chou, heedless of the mud, and pets his back and talks to him quietly, and waits, and prays to any god that will hear her that she hasn't just lost the only companion she has left to her.

Chou whines and pulls away from her, trying to reach the mushrooms that are left, but Cosette hooks her fingers through his collar and holds onto him. "Not yet," she says. She can scarcely hear her own voice over the sound of the rain, but she's fairly sure it's shaking. "Wait a minute, until we're sure it's safe." But she knows he must be hungry -- she is, a sharper, fiercer hunger than she's known over the days since they parted with Éponine -- so she pulls her pack off of her back and onto her lap, and digs through its contents until she finds a few handful of berries she'd been saving for a time when their foraging turned up nothing, and they needed the energy boost and the edge taken off of their hunger.

They were half-dried before, but they're sodden and a little mushed now. Still, at least they're not poison. She cups them in her palm and holds them out to Chou, says, "Go on," when he whines again and looks at her like he's not sure he has permission.

Chou eats them carefully, certainly with greater patience than Cosette could have managed had their positions been switched, and he keeps glancing up at her before bites like he's waiting to be scolded. It makes her heart hurt a little to see it, makes her want to go storming back to the city and the palace's kennels and demand of the huntsman that he treats his dogs better. She knows that fear too well, the terrible certainty that good things just don't happen and gifts must come with a price, or might be snatched away just as soon as she's let herself believe that she can have them.

She lets him eat all the berries, and then scratches behind his ears until he loses that worried expression and his tail thumps against the muddy ground. And it's been long enough, she thinks, that the mushrooms would have started to show their effects if they were going to, so she pulls up what ones are left and takes a few for herself, but offers the bulk of them out to Chou. He found them, after all, and he's doing a better job of keeping them both fed than she is. It's only fair.

Her stomach cramps a little around the mushrooms as she eats them, but she thinks it's only because of her hunger, because it's so terribly empty.

When they've both finished, she drags herself up out of the mud and wipes what she can of it from Chou's fur, and they continue on their way, searching for anything that might provide them some meager shelter from the storm.

It's nearly night again, the darkness of the forest closing in around them until she can scarcely see five steps in front of herself, when a darker shape resolves itself out of the shadows to be a looming rock formation, too high to climb even if it were dry, with moss growing on its stones and narrow, scraggly trees growing out of its cracks, halfway up.

Cosette turns to walk along its face, where the angle that the rain's coming down means that it's shielding them from some of it, and just as its getting too dark to walk safely and she thinks they'll have to settle for sitting with their backs against the stones and only getting rained on half as much, there's another, darker shadow that proves to be an overhang, the space beneath it worn out by water or weather or perhaps just luck, into a shallow, low-ceilinged cavern, a place they might be able to squeeze themselves into and escape from the rain entirely for the space of a night.

Cosette falls into it, almost ready to weep with gratitude, and would gladly forego any concerns about making pallets or fires and just lie there and sleep, but a gust of wind from the storm whips through and sends a chill through her, and she knows that if she sleeps like this, wet and unprotected and without even a meager fire to warm her fingers on, it won't do her any favors at all.

She scrounges around on the floor of the little cavern, searching almost entirely by feel in the thick darkness for any twigs or sticks that might be lying in there, and have managed to stay dry through the storm.

She finds a few. It's not much, not enough for a fire to last the night, but it's mostly-dry wood in the middle of this deluge, and it feels like a miracle. She peels the bark off of one stick with fingers that are clumsy and painful from the cold, and works that into shreds for some meager attempt at kindling, and stacks the other thin twigs and bits over it, and then roots through her pack for the flint that Éponine left her with.

It takes far too long to get the kindling to take even a spark, longer than it should even considering the rain and the wind. But Cosette's teeth are chattering and her hands shaking from the chill, and the wood is mostly dry but not entirely so, she doesn't think there's a single thing in the whole forest right now that could possibly have managed to escape the storm's rage and remained comepletely dry. But eventually, finally, when she's nearly ready to give up and just curl against Chou and take what warmth they can in each other, a tiny ember begins to glow deep within the little pile of kindling.

Cosette doesn't dare breathe. She knows how to start a fire, knows that smoldering kindling should be blown on to feed the flames and build them up properly, but this little spark is so small and so fragile, and the wind is gusting so hard outside that she doesn't dare, for fear of putting it out entirely.

And so she waits, feeding the thinnest, tiniest twigs into the parts of the kindling that seem to be glowing the brightest, the hottest. It smolders and glows and smokes and grows, and finally one of the twigs catches, a proper tongue of flame dancing at its tip and burning rapidly up its length, towards Cosette's fingers.

She drops it onto the kindling and moves to better position herself in the cavern's opening, her back getting wet and working the chill even deeper into her bones, but better that she get wet than her fire.

It seems to take forever, but eventually the fire takes and burns strongly enough that she can breathe again without fear of inadvertently blowing it out. It glows like a miniature simulacrum of a proper campfire, scarcely big enough to even warm her fingers on, but it shines bright against the darkness and Cosette holds her hands out towards it and sighs as the warmth of the flames begins to take the edge off the chill cramping up her hands.

Eventually, when she can bring herself to move from the fire's side, she uses the light it casts to better search the cavern for any other bits of twig or wood that she missed in her first search, and begins to make a small stack of wood beside the fire to feed into it.

She doesn't sleep well, that night. She's too anxious about tending to the fire to do more than doze intermittently, and even then, she's still cold and wet, despite digging through her pack for the least-damp woolens to change into, and every time a wind blows through their little shelter it makes her shiver terribly.

Chou sleeps better than she does, though he'll still open an eye at a strong wind, or to track her movements when she shifts about to put more wood on the fire, or to arrange damp twigs around it to dry out for later. But he sleeps pressed to her side and half-curled around her back, and she's sure it's at least as much so he can share in her body heat as it is so that he can share his own, but either way she's grateful for it.

By the time dawn comes, heralded by the ability to see just a little bit beyond the radius of the firelight, rather than not at all, Cosette is shivering almost without cease, and Chou keeps whining softly and pressing in harder against her. Whether it's because he's as chilled to the bone as she is, or because he's concerned for her, either way she doesn't think it means anything good.

She pets his head, then sets about hiding any sign that they'd been there, and wrapping a coal up from the fire so that it'll keep smoldering, and they can bring it with them and hopefully have an easier time lighting another fire tonight.

It all depends on whether they can find wood dry enough to ignite, in the end, but she can't think about that right now.

Right now, what she can do is this: shoulder her pack, call Chou next to her side, and put one foot in front of the other until her strength or the light gives out.

She's hungry in a way that goes beyond the painful cramping of her stomach, in a way that has her curling her hands around the straps of her pack so she can pretend she hasn't noticed the way they're shaking, in a way that sees her attention veering off when she needs to be sharp now, and focused, and smart.

You've known hunger before, she tells herself sternly, and keeps trudging forward through the rain and the mud and the litter underfoot. You've known it worse than this.

But there was the hunger of her childhood, which she had had no control over, and there's her hunger now, which whispers insidiously that there's a whole forest full of things to eat around her if only she strayed from her course and went looking for it.

A full belly will do me no good if I drown getting it, she thinks, and marshals her flyaway focus and continues onward, the palace at her back, putting distance with every step between herself and the family that would see her dead.

By late afternoon the rain seems to finally be lessening, from the relentless downpour of the past few days to a miserable drizzle. A few distant, scattered bits of light even work their way through the clouds to illumine the woods around her. The wind, though, seems only to grow in fury now that the rain has vented its own, and it whips through the wood with a force that makes the trees creak and groan and the canopy sway above her, that seems to scream through the branches overhead now that the rain isn't drowning it out.

She's worn, and hungry, and half-drowned, and hasn't slept to speak of in days. She's weighed down by what feels like twice her own weight in water, soaked into her clothes and her cloak and her pack, and she's wearing borrowed boots that squelch with every step, and so perhaps it's inevitable. Perhaps it was only a matter of when her foot would find a patch of old, fallen leaves as she picks her way down an incline, and and her weight would land on it at just the wrong angle and the wet leaves would slip out from beneath her as though she'd stepped out onto the surface of a frozen lake, and she'd crash down onto one hip with a force that knocked a cry from her and go skittering helplessly down the slope she meant to climb carefully. And perhaps this was inevitable, too, or perhaps it's only ill luck: that just as the ground leveled out before her, her foot would slip into the gap between two stones as she tried to dig into the mud beneath her and slow her fall and it would lodge there, and the rest of her would continue on as it had been going and wrench her leg around, and something would snap, and Cosette would scream, and the next thing she'd be aware of was lying flat on her back as Chou licked her face and whined softly above her.

The pain is so intense that Cosette wants to retch from it, and the only thing that gives her the strength to fight through the impulse is knowing that it would just make everything so much worse. She breathes careful and deep, and even the slight motion of her chest rising and falling shifts her enough to make bolts of agony shoot through her leg.

She doesn't dare look at it, not only because of the movement that doing so would require. She doesn't need to see to know that it's terribly broken, and that it's not the sort of break that she can limp along on. Seeing it twisted and broken and maybe bloody would only make her want to cry, and she already wants to do that as it is.

She's not stupid. She knows what this means. The princess didn't kill her, the storm didn't drown her, but this is going to be the death of her. She should have stayed in the palace, should have let the princess have a second try at poisoning her. It would have been a swifter, kinder end than starving to death with a broken leg in the middle of the woods.

The cold and wet is seeping into her back, making shivers steal through her, which sends fresh waves of agony washing over her. And she doesn't want to die like this, on her back in the mud, so she steels herself for the pain and the sight of her leg, and braces her hands in the muck beneath her to push herself upright.

She doesn't make it even halfway, gasping and sobbing through it but doing it anyway, when her stomach roils in desperate response to the pain she's inflicting on herself, and then revolts, and there's nothing in her stomach for her to bring up anyway, but the violence of the retching jolts her leg and her strength gives out, her arms collapse beneath her and she falls onto her back again with a scream that's equal measures pain and rage.

Chou whines pitifully and noses at her cheek like he thinks he can get her on her feet just with his urging, and she wraps her arms around his neck and cries furious, frustrated tears into his fur.

When she has no more tears left and the crying has left her feeling wrung-out and hollow, she pushes Chou back and covers her face with her hands and says into her palms, "You have to go. You have to go back."

Chou doesn't react, just keeps nudging at her and making that worried sound, and then pawing at her when the nosing doesn't get the reaction he's looking for, because of course he doesn't, he's a dog, and she's an idiot. He's a very clever dog and she's been glad to have him, but he still only knows what he's been taught.

She spends some time running through every possible combination of commands she can think of that a huntsman might teach his dog when he wants him to return to his kennel, but nothing gets him to leave her side, even though staying with her just means they'll both starve to death together, and he deserves better than to suffer for her stupidity.

Eventually, he must decide that she's talking to herself, because he drops down at her side with a heavy sigh, pressed in against her along his whole length, and lays his snout along his paws, and stops paying attention to her at all.

Cosette stops trying, after that, because her voice is raw from it and the drizzle of rain that's still coming down isn't near enough to soothe her throat, and she's not gaining anything from it anyway, and she's so tired. So she slowly, carefully reaches one hand down to Chou's head, bracing in anticipation of the knives of pain that stab through her at even that slight movement, and lays her hand on his head and pets him a little, and tries to think of nothing at all.

*

She wouldn't have guessed she'd be able to sleep, between the rain and the mud and the pain of her leg, and perhaps it's not sleep so much as drifting in and out of consciousness. But it's at least a reprieve from the discomfort and the direness of her situation, so she doesn't fight it and lets herself drift. She blinks the rain out of her eyes and opens them to see the sky gone dark overhead, night nearly upon them, and the warm pressure of Chou at her side is gone, but she can hear a snuffling sound nearby that must be him, rooting through the underbrush for something to sate his hunger.

She tells herself that it must be him, because if it isn't, if it's some creature of the forest come upon her-- Well. There's nothing she could do about that, anyway.

The next time she comes aware of anything, the sky overhead is a solid black, unbroken even by star- or moonlight, but the rain's stopped at last, and there's a warm weight on her stomach. She creeps her hand across to it and finds the soft shape of Chou's ear, follows it up to the arch of his brow and the spot just behind his ear that all dogs seem to love and she pets him there for a while, glad for the little bit of warmth shared between them, and selfishly glad not to be alone.

It's light again when she next comes back to herself, and there's no weight or pressure of Chou next to her, no sound of him nearby in the brush, and she cranes her head about as much as she's able but she can't see him, either. Hunting, maybe, she thinks, or maybe he's finally given her up as a lost cause and taken himself back home, and she feels a mingled rush of relief and despair at that thought.

The angle and low intensity of the light makes her guess it's early morning, but despite that and the rain and the breeze that blows through the woods and lazily sets the canopy swaying above her, she feels flushed and overwarm, rather than cool.

She lets herself drift. It's better than dwelling on the prickling heat of the sun on her face, or her parched mouth, or how wretched it's going to be to die this way. She shuts her eyes and tries to ignore the buzz of the insects around her and the itch of her skin and the way her whole body aches with the need to move from this position she's laid in for what must be days now. She feels too hot, sweat breaking out across her skin and only adding to her discomfort. And then she's cold enough that shivers steal through her no matter how she tries to force them off, because it jostles her leg and makes her cry from the pain. And then she's hot once more, and the sky above her is like a signal being flashed from a hooded lantern, dark and then bright and then dark again, seeming to change every time she blinks her eyes.

She hears movement in the woods, and this time, she hopes it is a beast, hopes that it will end this swiftly instead of leaving her to wither, waiting to see whether her hunger or her thirst will do her in first.

The sounds get closer, and louder, and whatever it is, it's something big. And then there's a wet nose pressed to her cheek and she flinches in surprise, and then cries, and she couldn't say whether it's because of the pain caused by even that brief motion, or relief that Chou has found his way back to her and at least she's not alone any more, or despair, because it wasn't something that might kill her and end this after all.

But there's still the sounds of something in the brush, even though Chou is right there next to her, licking all over her face, and then the sound stops abruptly and there's a voice, a human voice, soft as it mutters a brief oath.

And then there are cool hands on her cheeks and a face above her, and it's all she can see, and she's saying something that Cosette can't make sense of, and she thinks this must be a dream, or perhaps a vision, sent by the gods to soothe her and give her some relief from the bleak reality of her situation.

Cosette tries to speak, but her lips are chapped and her mouth is as dry as parchment and her head's still swimming, the woman's face above her distorting like a reflection seen on the surface of rippling water, and she doesn't think she manages to make anything sensible come out.

And then Cosette blinks, and the bright sky has turned shadowed overhead. She blinks up at it for a few moments but it doesn't change, and she can't tell whether it's dusk or dawn. But there's the soft sound of breathing nearby, out of rhythm with her own, and the press and warmth of Chou lying at her side. It's uncomfortable, when she's already too hot to begin with, but she's glad to have him with her, glad to know he's there.

There's sounds in the brush again, and the sky above is a little brighter, and she's distracted for a moment wondering whether that means it had been dawn before after all, or if it had been dusk but night has come and gone without her noticing.

She's pulled from those thoughts by the abrupt appearance of faces above her again, two of them this time. A woman again -- perhaps the same woman, but she can't be sure, her thoughts have all gone fuzzy around the edges and no matter how she blinks, she can't seem to make her eyes focus -- and a man with a beard. The woman's hand on her face is cool and gentle, and if she's not a blessing sent from the gods to soothe her, she certainly feels like one. She speaks again, and this time Cosette's startled to realize that she can understand her with only a little bit of effort spent focusing on her words.

"Rest easy now, child," the woman is saying, and she holds the mouth of a vial to Cosette's lips, "and drink this."

Cosette is so desperately thirsty that she drinks without hesitation, but the vial's contents are too thick to be water, and the first drop on her tongue tastes foul and revolting. She flinches back as much as she can with the unyielding ground beneath her, and turns her head away from the vial. She tries to spit the substance out, but it clings to her tongue and seems to coat her mouth, and all at once she thinks that she was a fool to imagine any gods might care enough about her to send her a vision of peace. Isn't it far more likely that the princess's reach has somehow found her even out here, lost and broken in a patch of mud in the middle of the woods? This man above her, mightn't he be the huntsman that Éponine warned her about, who would kill her for the princess's favor? And the woman-- she's not the princess, Cosette doesn't think, even though she can't focus on her face clearly, the princess never spoke so gently, certainly not to Cosette -- but she might just as easily be someone else the princess hired, to finish what the princess had been unable to accomplish herself, and they might be trying to tip poison down her throat right now.

The man leans over her and lays his hand on her brow. His fingers are rough where the woman's were soft, but it's not an unkind touch, and he says to her, "Drink, girl. You won't want to be awake for what comes next," and Cosette shuts her eyes and indulges in a moment of crushing despair. And then she thinks, At least it will be faster than starvation. At least it will be less violent than being mauled by some animal. At least this will be over, and she opens her mouth and lets them tip the contents of the vial in, and she swallows down every vile drop.

And then blackness overtakes her, and she knows nothing at all.

*

The first surprise is that she wakes up at all. For a few moments she stays in that darkness and thinks she's reached the afterlife; but she can feel the rise and fall of her chest as she breathes, and make out light shining against her eyelids, and there's an itch on her cheek that begs to be scratched. So she opens her eyes, blinking against the sting of the light, though it's hardly bright.

The second surprise is that there isn't sky and treetops above her, but the peaked rise of a thatched roof. And the light, when she turns her head to see, is coming from a hearthfire and a few burning lamps set about a small cottage. She's on a bed, covered with blankets, and it's nothing compared to the one she had back in the palace but she squeezes her eyes shut against tears that she refuses to shed and thinks it's the finest accommodations she's had.

She must make some noise, because even though she hasn't moved except to turn her head a bit, there's a sound of movement from not too far away, and then footsteps approaching, and she can sense a presence near her beside the bed.

"How are you feeling?" a voice asks in hushed tones, like that might pain her the same way the light from the fire and the lamps did.

She works her jaw for a moment, and then opens her eyes again to a man at her side, crouched down next to the bed. She can see him clearly now, and she thinks it's the same man from before, the one she thought meant to kill her. "Who are you?"

He gives her a smile that makes his whole face crease up. "You may call me Valjean."

She wants to sit up, but doesn't dare, not after the disastrous time she had of it the last time she tried. "Why am I here?"

At that, the man's expression transforms with surprise. "You'd have died if we left you where you were. We thought you might die all the same, the way the fever had taken you, but you're strong. You've a determined spirit, I think."

She cannot reconcile any of the things he's saying or the way he speaks to her with the idea that he's the huntsman Éponine warned her about, who wouldn't have hesitated to cut out her heart to please the princess. She turns her head enough to frown at him. "Who are you?"

He smiles again, not quite so broad but, she thinks, sincere all the same. "Just a simple man. We built this house here, my friend and I, and gather what we need from the woods around us. You're lucky we caught your dog rooting through our rubbish heap, or we'd have found your body, rather than you."

That makes her bolt upright without thought, her heart thundering all at once. "Chou. You haven't-- Where is he?"

"He's outside. We thought we might have to leash him to keep him from running off, but he hasn't gone beyond the trees, not even once since you've been here. That's a very good dog you have there, miss."

"I need--" She'd be off the bed in a heartbeat, except she realizes belatedly that she's upright, that it didn't hurt, that it should have hurt. She hesitates, looking down at where the blanket is puddled around her lap and covering everything below her waist, and hesitates, dread curdling in her throat. "I-- My leg--"

"I splinted it, best I could," Valjean says. "I'm no physician, but one has to know at least a little about these things, to survive on our own out here the way we do. And we've been giving you a tonic, for the pain."

She swallows down her fear and nods. Whatever he's done, it's better than it had been. Perhaps a proper physician might have done a better job, but perhaps a proper physician might have brought word of her back to the palace, as well. And if the bone doesn't heal clean, and she can't walk, or can't walk without support -- well, it's still better than dying in agony in the mud. So she squares her shoulders and lifts her gaze to Valjean and says, "Thank you. You saved my life, the both of you. I can't ever repay that."

He makes a face like she's said something distasteful. "We didn't do it for repayment. You needed  help, and we had it to offer."

"Still. This can't be an easy life, out here on your own, and my presence won't make it any easier on you, not when I can't do anything even to help. I'm grateful. And, if there's anything I can do, mending or cooking or--" She eyes the small room around her, and considers how much she might be capable of without undoing all the good that Valjean and his splint did her. "Or, I could manage a little cleaning, I think--"

Valjean makes that face again. and is shaking his head before she's even finished speaking. "You can rest, and heal, is what you can do. And if there's anything we can do for you, you'll let us know. Are you hungry? Thirsty? We were afraid to give you too much water while you slept, in case you choked."

She's both of those things, but neither are her most pressing need. "Please, can I see Chou? I need--" To thank him. To see for myself that he's all right. To hold him close and cry a little into his fur, maybe. "I need to see him."

Valjean glances over his shoulder, toward the cottage door. When he looks back at Cosette, there's a small, crooked smile pulling at the corner of his mouth. "He'd be glad to see you, I think. Fantine didn't want him inside the house, but we can't have you hurting yourself trying to get to him, can we? And she's out fetching water, besides." He rises from Cosette's bedside and moves across the room to the door, opens it and leans his head outside and says something too muffled for Cosette to make out. And then he steps back and swings the door wide, and Chou comes barreling through.

Cosette tenses, expecting to find her lap full of dog all at once, and Valjean calls softly to them, "Careful there now, pup," but Chou only hurls himself down at the bedside with his head on the blankets beside her, straining towards her and panting joyfully, his tail wagging hard on the floor and thumping rhythmically against the leg of the bed.

Cosette laughs, giddy and relieved, and twists so that she can pet him with both hands and breathe a litany of praise to him as tears drip unrestrained down her cheeks.

It seems like a miracle, like more than she deserves and far better than she'd have dared to hope for, to live and to not hurt and to have Chou here with her, safe and happy and not starving in the woods with her while she waited to die.

"Thank you," Cosette whispers, lying back down in the bed so she can press her face to Chou's neck. He licks all over her face and whines as he strains to get closer to her. "The woman-- you said her name is Fantine? When will she be back?"

Valjean hums thoughtfully, and pulls a chair from the small table over toward the bedside, so he can sit and converse with her. "We've a few more to fetch water for than we're used to, now, so she'll probably be a little longer than usual, so we won't need to make the trip again in half a day. I expect she'll be back in perhaps an hour or so. Maybe longer, if she finds something worth foraging along the way." He tips his head towards Chou, the corners of his eyes creasing with a smile. "You can keep him in here for a while yet, if that's why you asked."

It isn't, really, though she's relieved not to have to let go of Chou just yet. But the woman's the one who found her, the one who followed Chou in the first place and who went back to get Valjean to help. She deserves Cosette's thanks at least as much as he does.

"Can I--" She hesitates, fear stealing her voice. But she has made it through all of this, hasn't she? She's survived two things that ought to have killed her. She can do this, too. "Can I see?" she asks, with a gesture toward her legs, still covered by the bed's blankets.

Valjean's expression goes thoughtful, and perhaps a little clouded. His gaze follows her gesture, down to her leg and then back up to meet her gaze. "We washed you, best we could," he says. "Well, Fantine did. She didn't think you'd appreciate a strange man taking the liberty. It's not gruesome, if you're worried about that. You can look, of course, if you don't think it'll upset you. If you won't try to move it, or pick at the bandages."

She nods her understanding, and lets go of Chou so she can sit up, marveling anew at the novelty of being able to do so without it being excruciating. She hesitates only for half an instant, then grasps the edge of the blanket and pulls it back so she can see her leg.

She's most surprised, at first, to realize that she's not wearing much in the way of clothing on her lower half. Valjean must have known, or expected it, because he's turned his gaze away, and of course it's not as though they could have washed or bandaged her over her mud-soaked trousers, and of course they wouldn't have wanted to put her back into them, once they'd got her clean.

The bandaging on her leg is thick and heavy, and covers her from her toes all the way up past her knee, like a boot. There are strange lumps along the sides of her legs that she assumes, after a moment's consideration, must be splinting to help support it and keep her leg from moving in a way that will damage the cast or undo Valjean's work setting the bone. He'd seemed deprecating about his skill at it, but the bandaging is clean and neat and her leg is straight, instead of twisted impossibly like it had been after her fall, and all at once she doesn't have words for how grateful she is.

She rubs her fingers along the edge of the bandaging, lightly so he won't think she's picking at it like she promised not to, and it looks like cloth but it feels waxy and hard. She makes a soft, surprised noise and looks toward him.

He glances at her at the sound, though his gaze keeps skittering away, like he fears she's going to be embarrassed to be revealed to him up to mid-thigh, when she must have been more so before, in order for him to set the bone and make the splint. "They're soaked in beeswax," he says, without her having to ask the question. "It'll do well enough, to keep your leg in place so it can heal, so long as you don't fight against it and try to move."

"I won't," she promises softly, and pulls the blanket over her lap again, so he can stop fretting about her modesty. "Could I get some of that water, actually?"

He startles like he'd forgotten, though she's the one who never answered his question, and bustles about getting her a plain clay cup and pouring water into it. He has to tip the ewer almost upside down to do so, and the cup's only perhaps a little more than half full when he brings it to her, and she feels at once guilty for asking for the last of their water when the woman hasn't returned with more to replenish it yet.

"There'll be more for you soon enough," he says apologetically as he hands it to her, and doesn't let go until she's wrapped her hands securely around the cup. "But hopefully that'll do you until Fantine gets back with it, at least. Are you hungry?"

She considers it for a moment. "I will be, once I'm done being thirsty, I think."

He nods once and moves off again, to the hearth and a pot of something hanging over the fire, and ladles its contents into a bowl that he brings back to the bedside, though he waits with it cradled in his hands until she's finished with her water, and trades the cup for the bowl. "It's simple fare," he says as she blows on it, to cool it so she won't scald her mouth. "But there's enough of it to fill your belly, and I daresay you could use something that'll stick to your ribs a little. How long were you there in the woods before we found you?"

She eats a bite of the stew, though it's still a little too hot for her preference, but it gives her an excuse to delay answering for a moment, to think back to the cycle of dark and light overhead that she'd been too muddled to count or pay much attention to, when the pain of her leg and the prospect of a lingering and unpleasant death had seemed so much more pressing. "A few days," she says at last, quietly, and eats another too-hot bite and pretends she doesn't see the horror that washes over Valjean's face at that. "Maybe more. I-- I wasn't very...present for a lot of it. Long enough to turn feverish. Not long enough to starve."

"I am very glad we found you," Valjean says, soft and earnest. "Or, that Fantine did."

Cosette glances up at him long enough to flash him a brief smile. "As am I, believe me." She blows on the stew for a moment longer, then sets in to eating it. All at once, the hunger that has been little more than a whisper in the background of her mind since her fall roars back to life, and she thinks she could eat the whole pot of stew, if given the chance. "I'll be glad to be able to thank Fantine, as well. You both have been far kinder to me than you've had any reason to be."

Valjean gives her a soft look that's a little sad. "We learned pretty quickly, the two of us, that the only way to get by out here is to help one another. You needed our help -- of course we provided it. Who would we be if we'd left you to die?"

Cosette hears Éponine's voice, like an echo from across a vast and distant chasm. You can't survive out here on your own forever, she'd said. Don't trust anyone, but find someone you think might be worth it.

She'd also said to get as far away from the palace as she could, and Cosette's not sure how much distance she and Chou had managed to cover after they parted ways with Éponine, before the storm made traveling difficult, and then her fall made it impossible. She's not sure if Éponine would count this as far enough, but-- Well. She has gone as far as she can, like she was told, and there's little to be done about that now until her bones have had time to heal.

Perhaps afterwards, once she's recovered and she can walk again (if she can walk again, whispers a small, traitorous corner of her mind, but she squashes that down and pays it no heed) she'll continue on. Or perhaps time will prove these people to be the sort she thinks might be worth being trusted.

But that's a consideration for later. For the moment, she has very little choice in the matter, and she can only pray that they are.

*

Cosette sleeps a little longer, once her hunger and her thirst have been satisfied, and wakes with her heart racing to the sound of footsteps crunching through the undergrowth outside the cabin. Before she can do more than turn her head toward the sound and start to brace herself to sit, though, Valjean is lifting his head from the book he's reading at their little table, a smile already stretching across his face. "Ah," he says, "that would be Fantine," and he marks his place in the book with a scrap of cloth and rises to go to the door.

He opens it just as a thin, pale-haired woman drops a pail of water down on the planks of wood that seem to serve as the cabin's front step. She looks weary, the hair at her temples wet with sweat, but she offers Valjean a smile and jerks her head over her shoulder toward the woods behind her as she says, "The other's back there just a ways. I didn't want to lose my footing over those rocks and spill all my hard work into the ground."

"I'll go get it," Valjean says, and squeezes her arm briefly as he slides past her and out of the cabin. "Our guest woke while you were out, you should go make yourself acquainted." He turns back just outside the door and catches Cosette's eye, gestures to the woman and says, "Cosette, Fantine. Fantine, Cosette. She's a delightful conversationalist, it turns out, when she's not insensate with fever."

Cosette stares at Valjean for a moment, taken aback at being described in such a way, before she recalls herself and turns her attention to Fantine, who's stopped halfway through the doorway and looking back at Valjean, perfectly motionless, and whatever it was that made her react so, Cosette must have missed it while she was trying to reconcile herself to the idea of being described as a delightful conversationalist, especially when she and Valjean discussed little more than what had happened to her in the time she'd been unconscious, and how Fantine might feel about Chou being in the house. Cosette can see Valjean's expression, though not Fantine's, but though he meets her eye with a look that seems to communicate volumes, in the way of people who have known one another for so long that sometimes words aren't necessary, it's not anything that Cosette knows how to decipher.

Before she can wonder too much about it, though, the stillness breaks and the woman says, all at once, "I left the other just beyond the bend in the path. You know the one, right where that rock trips us every time we walk over it," and turns forward again, to face Cosette and come into her home.

"Hello," she says quietly, and Chou's tail thumps on the floor like he doesn't know that she's the one who doesn't want him in here. Still, Fantine approaches Cosette's bed without seeming to give any indication that she's noticed his presence, or that she minds it. "You are looking quite a bit better than you did a few days ago. I'm glad to see you awake. Are you comfortable?"

Cosette pushes herself up to sit in the bed. "I am," she says. "And I've you to thank for that, I'm told. For finding me, and for bringing him." She tips her head towards the now-empty doorway, where Valjean stood just a moment before.

Fantine's smile is gentle as she sits on the edge of the bed, careful not to disturb Cosette's leg. "If there's anyone to thank, I think it's that dog of yours. He found us. He led me there."

He'll serve you well, Éponine had said, and for a moment Cosette's throat closes up with emotion, choking her. "Thank you," she manages eventually, and it's said to Fantine directly. Chou will appreciate a pet or a scratch more than he will her thanks, but she thinks it's important that Fantine hear it, when she's saved her life.

Fantine's gaze drops a moment, and then she murmurs, "I am very glad we found you in time," which Cosette supposes is as much of a you're welcome as she's likely to get. "How did you come to be in this part of the woods, and take such a fall? We don't see many others out here, this far from the main roads. It's part of why we chose to settle here."

Cosette takes a moment to sort through all the things that are true, but that she can't say. Fantine watches her through it, and a small frown starts to gather between her brows, though Cosette supposes that's fair. It shouldn't take so long to answer a simple question, ordinarily.

"I think we got lost in the storm," she says at length, which isn't even a lie. "And I suppose we should have waited to venture out until it had dried a little, but we hadn't been able to hunt much while it came down, and we were hungry." And that's the hard part, the part that she has to be careful about to make a lie but also the truth, so she breathes a little easier when Fantine doesn't immediately call her a liar, and she tells the rest more plainly: about picking her way down an incline, and the wet leaves slipping out from beneath her feet, and her foot getting caught and wrenched about as she tumbled down the slope. And she begins to tell her about the days of lying in the mud expecting to die, too, but Fantine looks so pained that Cosette breaks off at the start of it, and grimaces down at where she's twisting the edge of the blanket between her hands. "I'm sorry," she says softly. "That's grim. And it's not worth dwelling on, because you found me and I'm here and awake and not hurting, when I didn't expect any of those things. But perhaps now you'll understand how deeply I mean it, when I say that I'm grateful to you."

Fantine's mouth pulls tight, and she reaches for Cosette's hand -- to stop her from torturing the blanket's edge, Cosette thinks, but Fantine takes it in her own and then covers it with her other hand, clasping Cosette's between them. "I am very glad to see you awake," she says, with a little bit of a husky edge to her voice, like she really means it. "We were afraid we'd found you too late, and the fever would take you."

Cosette swallows down the fear that sits like a lump of stone in her throat, threatening to choke her with the knowledge that she'd been closer to dying than she even realized. "You won't make Chou leave, will you? Valjean said you didn't want him in the house, but he's a good dog, he'll behave himself, I promise. He wouldn't leave me after I fell, even when I told him to, even though he would've starved right there with me if you two hadn't been here for him to find."

Fantine drops her gaze a little bit, and a hint of a smile pulls at the corners of her mouth. "Well," she murmurs. "He did save you, at least as much as either of us did. I suppose I can make an exception this once." She reaches one hand down to pet Chou. He pants happily up at her and noses against her palm, and her smile stretches. "He is a very good dog, I'll allow that."

Cosette would thank her, profusely, but she rises before Cosette can start, and shakes out her skirts. "I'll get you some more stew, and some more water, now that we've more than enough to go around."

"I already had some of both. You needn't trouble yourself on my account."

Fantine turns enough to give her a smile over her shoulder, but crosses to the hearth all the same, and begins to ladle more stew into a bowl, steaming and fragrant enough to fill the whole little cottage. "More water will hardly do you ill. I know how much we had remaining when I left, and you couldn't have had more than a swallow." She scoops water up from the bucket, too, and carries bowl and cup both back to the bedside. "And you've more than a few meals to make up for, besides. More food won't do you ill either."

It feels gluttonous when she's just had a bowl not an hour before, when for days she counted herself grateful to have a few mushrooms or a handful of berries, when food at the palace was rich and abundant but she always ate what was put before her and contented herself with that, because to ask for more would have drawn attention onto herself that she didn't want and couldn't afford. When, before even that, she was lucky to get a stale crust of bread or thin, watered-down soup from the Thénardiers. She can't remember a time when she had leave to eat freely, as much as she wished, and to be invited to do so here with these people who clearly lived modestly and worked hard for everything that they had -- it makes her stomach churn just a little bit with guilt.

Perhaps some of the war within her shows on her face, because Fantine places the bowl into her hands and then pats her shoulder -- carefully, like she's afraid of hurting her even now, even with her leg splinted and the pain held at bay by their tonic. "Eat, child," she says gently. "There's more than enough left to fill both our bellies, too. And your body will need its strength, if it's to mend itself. You'll only suffer longer if you try to give it short rations."

Even with a bowl of the stew already in her, the memory of bone-deep hunger is too raw for her to turn the second serving down, especially when Fantine is so insistent upon it. Cosette gulps the water down first, though, and then turns her attention to the stew. This time, at least, she eats more decorously, and less like a ravenous wolf who hadn't spent half her life learning manners fit for royalty.

She doesn't think Fantine or Valjean are going to care if she doesn't hold her silverware at the precisely-appropriate angle, but she imagines they'll probably both appreciate it if she at least stops long enough to breathe between bites.

"Valjean--" she starts, when she's a few bites in and Fantine looks a little mollified that she's not going to take it in her head to protest the food again. "He said you two built this house. Why would you choose to do it so far out here? Not that I'm not grateful that you were in a position to find me, but I didn't expect there to be anyone out here, not this deep in the woods. The nearest village must be days away."

Fantine's smile is a little lopsided, and a little sad. "Well, for one," she says, "he's being overly generous if he said that I had a hand in building the house. I've helped with additions and repairs and things over the years, but he built it himself, the bulk of it. As for the rest of your question--" She fusses for a moment with smoothing the blanket out over Cosette's lap. "I was terribly ill when he found me, perhaps as close to death as you were, and he took me in and cared for me until I recovered, and I wasn't in any better of a position to split hairs about where that happened than you are now. Once I recovered, I stayed because I was grateful and I felt I owed him, and then because we'd become friends and grew to care for one another, and I couldn't bear the thought of leaving him here to do all this work alone. I couldn't say why he chose this place in the first place, or why he'd wish to be so far away from other people. You'd have to ask him." Her smile stretches just a fraction wider, just a shade brighter. "Perhaps he'll tell you."

Guilt settles all at once into Cosette's stomach. She freezes with her spoon halfway to her mouth, and sets it back down into the bowl again before staring at Fantine, stricken. "I'm imposing," she breathes, all the food she's eaten turning at once to lead in her gut. "I shouldn't-- Here you both are out here wanting your solitude, and I-- I just crashed into your garden, practically--"

"Don't even think it," Fantine snaps, all at once fierce, her hand going tight on Cosette's, at the same time as the cottage's door swings open and Valjean shoulders inside with the second bucket of water, frowning deeply enough that Cosette knows he must have heard.

"If you wish to go," Valjean says carefully, leaving the bucket beside the hearth and coming to hover a few strides away from the bedside, "we won't keep you here." Fantine sucks air through her teeth like she means to protest, but Valjean slides her a sidelong glance and continues speaking before she can interject. "You're not a prisoner. We can get a sledge, perhaps, and a horse, to get you to the nearest town big enough to have a physician, or a coach to wherever else you might wish to go. It'll take a few days to arrange, though, and longer to get you there, and I can't say it'll be a pleasant journey, with all the jostling your leg will be bound to take. But I'll be damned if I'm going to sit back and watch you limp off into the woods on a broken leg. You might as well ask me to slit your throat there where you lie."

Cosette sets the bowl of stew back, balanced on her knees, and swallows hard. She doesn't want to try to walk, or even hobble, on her broken leg. She's not that stupid. And as bad as she feels for being an imposition, for taking their bed and their food and offering nothing at all in return, she can't bring herself to take him up on his offer to take her to a town, either. A town big enough to have a physician or a coach would surely be big enough to pose the risk that a passing courtier might recognize her, or that gossip might spread well enough and far enough to bring word of her back to the castle.

"I don't want that," she says softly. "I'm grateful for your generosity. I only wish there was a way I could repay it."

"Rest," Fantine says, interrupting whatever answer Valjean had been about to give, "and heal, and don't put our hard work saving you to waste. That'll be repayment enough for now. Once you're strong enough, then perhaps we can have you help with cleaning up or cooking meals, if you're set in this idea of being useful to us. But for now, that's all we'd ask of you. Just rest."

Cosette acquiesces because there's not much else that she can do, and takes the bowl up again to finish her stew. Fantine, at least, looks satisfied by that and moves off a short distance to help Valjean with the water.

She's done little more in the past few hours than sit up and talk and eat, but with a pleasantly-full belly to ease her hunger and water to slake her thirst, exhaustion descends upon her as quickly as night comes to the forest. She tries to fight it off, to stay awake and learn more about these people who found her, who saved her. But her head keeps drooping, until finally Valjean notices and clucks his tongue, and comes over to urge her down onto her back and tug the blankets up close around her.

"Sleep now, child," he murmurs, and Cosette is already drifting, feeling warm and safe for the first time in longer than she can remember.

*

It's days of regular, hearty meals before her stomach stops cramping up every few hours, as though now that it's been starved once it can't quite bring itself to trust that it won't be again. And it's not much longer than that when Cosette starts to go stir-crazy from being trapped in the bed for so long with little to distract her and nothing at all to do.

Early on, Valjean fashioned her a crutch from a fallen branch that she could tuck under one arm and use to hop and hobble her way outside. It's not easy, and every movement makes spikes of pain shoot through her leg, but she can at least get herself outside and use the privy in peace.

And if she sometimes lingers while she's out there, tilting her face up to the breeze and inhaling deeply of the scent of pine and dirt and leaves, watching the sun peek out at her through gaps between the forest's branches -- well. If she does, that's no one's business but her own, and she'd defy anyone to blame her for it, when all she's seen in days is the inside of Valjean and Fantine's cottage.

"Please," she begs, when days have passed and she's had nothing at all to fill them with but eating and sleeping and occasionally breaking up the monotony with the long, arduous effort of getting herself outside and then back again. She's talked with Valjean and Fantine, when she can, but they're both busy with the endless work involved in surviving out there on their own. Busier, now that Cosette is there, another mouth to be fed and allowed to do no work at all to make up for it. "Please, can't I have something to do? I'm not asking you to let me haul water or chop firewood, but there must be something. Surely there's mending to do? It's not my arm that's broken, and I can do that well enough from bed."

Fantine looks none too pleased with the idea, even though Cosette knows well enough how to ply a needle, and how to mend a tear. But Valjean gives her a considering look, and then brings a bowl over to her to set in her lap. "You can sort through the lentils for tonight's supper, if you're that determined to be of use," he tells her, not unkindly, and brings a smaller, empty bowl over to her as well. "It's tedious work, but we'll all of us be glad not to risk our teeth on pebbles hiding in our supper, I daresay."

Fantine sucks in a sharp breath of air, like she's going to say something and it's not going to be anything like agreement. Cosette takes up a handful of the lentils, feeling them slip between her fingers like sand on a river bank, and begins to sort through them, plucking out any stones or stems or dried bits of pod that found their way into the bowl. If Fantine means to voice a protest, it never comes, and Cosette's on her second handful of the lentils when she hears Fantine's steps -- lighter than Valjean's, so Cosette can tell them apart just by the way they sound across the cottage's floor, though today they're heavier than usual -- move across the room, and then the cottage door swing open, admitting the breeze from outside and the smell of sun-warmed greenery with it. The door swings shut again, almost immediately, and closes more forcefully than Cosette has heard either of them be with it in the days she's spent in their company.

She glances up, hesitating halfway through sifting through the lentils cupped in her palm, and catches Valjean grimacing at the closed door as he pulls a hand through his hair.

"Is she angry with me?" Cosette asks quietly. She closes her hand around the lentils, feels their small, round shapes pressing into her palm like stones. "Just because I'm weary of idleness, and wish for something to occupy my time?"

Valjean looks startled for a moment, though Cosette couldn't say whether it's because she spoke at all, or because of what she said. "No, child." He comes over to her bedside and smooths a hand over her hair, like she needs soothing. "No, not at all. She's only worried for you."

Cosette pulls her shoulders back and lifts her jaw, as much as she can when she's bedridden, tucked up securely in a nest of pillows and blankets. "Sifting lentils is not going to injure my leg, or strain my constitution. I like being useful."

And that makes Valjean grimace like he's pained, which makes no sense at all. But he doesn't protest the way Fantine has over the past few days, like somehow he's seen through her hunter's garb to the woman underneath, the one who spent the better of her life wearing dresses and walking lightly through gilded halls and being shaped by her father's tutors into the sort of fine, delicate lady who probably would turn her nose up at mending, or sifting lentils, or sweeping floors.

Cosette spent too many of her earliest years as the Thénardiers' ward, being expected to work hard and earn her keep for even the meagerest of scraps. Idleness and frailty were the few of the palace's lessons that she didn't apply herself to, and had no wish to excel at. Perhaps that's why the princess's poison didn't work, except to make her ill for a few days.

It has served her well, and kept her alive thus far. She doesn't mean to forget that part of herself now, just because her leg is broken. Just because Fantine thinks she'd heal better if she were idle than if she were content.

"I'll speak with her," Valjean says gently, and strokes his hand over her hair again. And he's the first person she can remember in too long, in maybe forever, to touch her gently and like he means it to be a comfort, so she doesn't shake him off but just gets back to her sorting, and the cottage is quiet as she works but for the quiet sound of lentils and stones and bits of debris dropping into the smaller of the two bowls.

*

She dozes once the sorting is done, because her body is weary, and she knows she ought to listen to it and give it what it needs, while it's healing. And, too, it's not likely to make Fantine any more inclined to let her do tasks that'll keep the idleness at bay, if she sees Cosette worn out by the job but struggling against the urge to nod off.

So once she has a bowl full of clean lentils, she hands them off to Valjean and slides deeper beneath the blankets, lets the warmth of them and the sounds of Valjean moving about near the hearth, readying their supper, and the comforting scents of cooking food lull her off to sleep.

She dreams of the forest, of it coming alive around her, branches reaching like impossibly-long fingers to grasp at her, of roots rising up to catch her ankle like a snare and drag her into the loamy earth, of storms and lashing rain that bite at her face and arms like stinging insects.

She rouses, a little, to the sound of the cottage door and a low murmur of voices, but sleep and the dream have too firm a grasp on her to let her go completely. She flounders, struggling up out of the deep, but sleep is like a fog around her and she can't find her way out.

The murmuring voices should soothe her, she thinks. They should be familiar. And they're not harsh, like Mistress Thénardier's always was, or an elegant but sharply-honed knife, like conversation always was at the palace. She's safe, she tells herself, even though she feels the forest closing in around her. She lets herself drift, a little, caught halfway between sleep and wakefulness.

"--can't just--"

"--how can I not--"

"--give it time--"

"--it's her, Jean. It's her. How can it be--"

The cold of the fog and the forest seeps into Cosette's chest, crystalizes like ice there and she stops trying to fight it off, lets it envelop her and hide her, lets it drag her back down into the forest, into the dream.

*

She wakes slowly, to sunlight dancing across her face through the cottage window, dappled through the branches of the trees outside and making a shadow play against the insides of her eyelids. Her body still feels heavy and slow from sleep, but her heart is pounding harder than it should, and it takes her a moment to think of why.

And then, all at once, she remembers the snatches of conversation she overheard while sleeping, while half asleep. It's her, Fantine had said, and cold washes through Cosette even though the blankets are piled high over her and the hearth is lit to cook their supper.

She's no one. She's a perhaps somewhat-inept hunter who got lost in a storm and injured in a fall. She's no one to them, or she shouldn't be.

Unless...

It's her, Fantine had said, and Valjean had looked at her like he saw fine gowns and palace manners beneath her borrowed hunting garb.

Don't trust anyone, but find someone you think might be worth it, Éponine had said. Still don't trust them, even then. And now Cosette understands, too well, but it's too late.

How could she be anything to these people, these strangers, unless somehow, impossibly, they knew? If they know who she is, if they know the princess wants her dead, if Éponine's ruse somehow failed and word has spread this far already--

A touch on her shoulder makes her jump, gasping. The slight weight of it disappears almost immediately, and her eyes fly open. She sees Valjean at the bedside, standing over her, his hand hovering mid-air as he looks down at her, chagrined.

"I'm sorry," he says, and sounds like he means it. "I didn't mean to startle you. I'd have let you sleep, but supper's ready, and goodness knows you've missed enough meals as it is."

Cosette scrubs her hands over her face and pushes herself upright to sit against the bed's headboard. "It's fine," she says, but it's just palace manners, just lies masquerading beneath pleasantries. Nothing is fine. She's in the home of people who know who she is and what the princess wants of her, and who could only benefit from the gratitude of the woman who will be queen someday. And her leg is broken, so she can't even leave before they decide the potential reward is worth more to them than their conscience. "I was halfway to awake already."

Valjean looks mollified, and serves her up a bowl of lentils. He spoons it from the big pot over the hearth, the same pot he dishes his own out of a moment later, and she makes a show of blowing on her first spoonful to cool it down, so he won't realize she's waiting to see him eat his own before she tastes hers.

The food settles like lead in her stomach, and she spends the rest of the evening waiting to see if she falls ill, half-convinced that every slight gurgle of her stomach is the first symptoms that she's been poisoned.

It's more exhausting than sorting lentils or doing mending, to be sure, and despite herself she falls asleep again early in the evening, and she thinks, as exhaustion drags her under, At least if it's poison, this one is a kind one.

*

She wakes in the early morning, when the cottage is still half-dark, and she spends a moment lying on her back blinking up at the roof overhead, more than a little surprised to be awake at all, to not be ill, to not be doubled over in pain.

She turns her head, eventually, when the cottage is a little brighter, to see if Valjean and Fantine are still sleeping in the pallet they've laid out before the hearth, ever since she's been occupying their bed.

The pallet is still there, the blankets tossed and rumpled upon it, but it's otherwise empty. It shouldn't be alarming -- they've risen early every morning that she's been here, to get started on the seemingly-endless list of chores necessary for a pair of people to survive on their own in the depths of the forest. It won't be long, surely, before one of them returns with firewood and the other with water, or with berries or nuts that they've foraged, or trout from the stream that they've said is nearby.

She drops her arm over the side of the bed and is reassured when her fingers fine the warm, soft fur of Chou's back, the steady rise-and-fall of his ribs beneath her palm as he breathes, each one a soft whine as he sleeps, almost snoring.

The cadence of it shifts a little bit at her touch, and he moves beneath her hand, and then there's a cold nose pressed against her wrist and he licks her hand a little before settling down again and going back to sleep.

She'd like to do the same, particularly now that she's sure she hasn't been poisoned, at least not yet. But she slept through so much of the day before that she can't manage it; she shuts her eyes and curls beneath the blankets again, as much as she's able without disturbing her splinted leg, but her thoughts race despite herself, latching on to every small sound from outside and waiting for it to be Fantine and Valjean returned, or the princess herself come to finish the job she started.

It's perhaps an hour later, the sun risen far enough to brighten the small room of the cottage completely now, when Chou lifts his head abruptly from his nap and whines, high and sharp. His tail thumps twice against the floor, and then he stands and crosses to the cottage door and noses at it.

"Do you need to go out?" she asks him quietly, but doesn't expect a response. He's slept beside the bed all night, of course he does, if he slept through Valjean and Fantine leaving and so missed his opportunity. So she pushes back the blankets and sits up, then carefully swings her legs over the edge of the mattress and gropes for the crutch Valjean made her, that she keeps leaned against the head of the bed so she can reach it easily, when she needs it.

Chou whines again, louder, and as the sound trails off Cosette makes out the distant, steady crunch of footsteps and realizes he must have heard them coming before she did. She could wait until whoever it is -- Valjean, she thinks as they get closer, by the weight of them -- reaches the cottage and lets Chou out for her, but she needs to relieve herself as much as he does, so she braces the crutch against the floor and uses it to help lever herself upright onto her good leg, and uses it to keep her balanced as she carefully hobbles across the cottage to the door.

She's nearly there when Chou whines again, and then barks once, sharp and insistent.

"I'm coming, I'm coming," she says, laughing, and is just reaching for the door when there's a sharp cry from outside, and the sounds of the underbrush rustling.

Cosette pulls up short, startled, but then thinks, Oh, he must have tripped and fallen, and pulls the door open to see what sort of assistance she might be able to offer him.

As soon as the door's open, Chou takes off all at once, bounding off into the brush like he's caught a scent. Cosette would call after him but for the sight of Valjean a short distance from the cottage, lying sprawled in the underbrush but not tripped at all, or at least not in the way Cosette expected, if the arrow sticking out of his thigh is any indication.

For a moment, all Cosette can do is gape. Valjean sees her in the doorway, though, and lunges toward her, an arm thrown out, his eyes wide with alarm as he cries, "No! Stay inside!" and it's only because of that that the next arrow sinks itself into the trunk of the tree behind him, instead of landing squarely in his shoulder.

Cosette jerks back and ducks behind the wall, just next to the door. She drops her crutch and drops to the ground, cries out as it jostles her leg but at least she's a smaller target, tucked up into a ball there with the wall behind her, protecting her from the sight and the arrows of whoever it is who's out there.

They must be there for her, of course. If Éponine's ruse did fail then the princess may have found her, may have sent her huntsman after her to finish the job that she couldn't and Éponine wouldn't. Or if word did spread this far already, perhaps someone was desperate enough to try to claim Valjean and Fantine's reward for their own.

It doesn't matter why, really. It only matters that they're there, that Cosette can still hear their bow singing, their arrows whistling through the air. There's the sound of another impact and Valjean swearing, and Cosette shuts her eyes and tries to breathe past the rising tide of fear. He sounds angry, not hurt, and she can only hope that it was a close call.

That shouldn't matter, either. If they're going to fight over who gets to use her as leverage to secure a princess's favor, then she should let them shoot each other full of arrows and try to slip out and away while they're distracted with one another.

Except that her leg's still broken, and she won't make it far if she tries to walk on it. Except that, whatever they may intend with her, Valjean and Fantine have been nothing but kind to her while she's been in their care. They bandaged her leg. They've given her food and water and their own bed to lie in. They gave her a tonic that took the pain she thought she'd die with and made it vanish like mist beneath the rising sun.

Except that Valjean lay in the bushes, wounded and under attack and saw Cosette coming to help him, and he told her not to. Her told her to stay inside. He told her to stay safe.

If she's going to be killed or handed over to the princess anyway, at least she can have some hope that Valjean and Fantine will be merciful about it. Whoever this person is, raining arrows down on unsuspecting folks from the cover of the woods, she has no reason to expect anything of the sort from them.

Keeping low, Cosette scrambles across the floor over to the bed, to her pack that's been sitting at the foot of it ever since they brought her here. She drags it onto her lap and tears through it until her hand finds the cool, contoured grip of the knife Éponine gave her, that first night out in the woods. She grips it so tight her knuckles ache and she braces her back against the edge of the bed's frame, breathing fast and hard.

Outside, the sounds of the arrows has stopped, but Cosette can't see anything but a narrow stripe of brush and trees through the open doorway. She crawls over to her discarded crutch, halfway between the bed and the door, and shifts the knife to the hand on her good side, so she can use the other to brace her crutch against the floor and lever herself upright.

She comes up closer to the door, still keeping at least half-hidden behind the jamb, and peers out until she can see Valjean, still on his back in the undergrowth, still clutching at the arrow sticking out of his leg, but now there's someone standing over him, dressed in leathers with a quiver at their side and a bow on their back and one hand closed on the front of Valjean's shirt, dragging him half upright as they growl, "What have you done to her?"

Cosette staggers outside, drops the knife so she can grip the door frame for balance because she knows that voice. "Wait," she gasps, and Éponine's a dozen paces away, she shouldn't be able to hear her, but she whips around as though Cosette had screamed it, and her eyes go wide.

And it's then that Fantine comes out of the forest, one arm full of the firewood she'd gone to gather, her other hand gripping one of the larger branches, and her face is grim and determined as she steps up behind Éponine and swings it at the back of her head.

*

Cosette sits crosswise on the bed, her back against the wall so she can hold Éponine's head pillowed on her lap. The position makes her leg ache a bit, but it's nothing, nothing compared to the relief and the fear of seeing Éponine, seeing her here, when she should have been back at the city reveling in the princess's gratitude for the heart she'd brought her and told her belonged to Cosette.

It's nothing compared to the way her stomach clenches and every bit of food she's eaten today threatens to come up, every time she slides her hand beneath Éponine's head to adjust how she's lying on her lap and her fingers come away sticky with blood.

She brushes the wisps of hair from Éponine's face with the backs of her knuckles and watches her pulse beat in the hollow of her throat, watches her chest rise and fall, and she tells herself that she's not dead, she's not, she'll wake up soon enough, any minute now, she has to...

Fantine comes to her, once she's finished bandaging Valjean's leg, and she looks a little concerned but not contrite. There's a part of Cosette that wants to hate her for that, but she heard Valjean swearing as Fantine cut Éponine's arrow from his thigh, even if she couldn't bear to watch, and she can't quite manage to cling to the sentiment.

"Will you let me look at her?" Fantine asks, holding herself a step back in a way that Cosette isn't used to from her, and it's only when she swallows down the thickness in her throat and nods that Fantine comes up to the bedside.

She slides her hands beneath Éponine's head, taking the weight from Cosette's lap, and her brows furrow in concentration as her fingers probe at the back of Éponine's skull. Her eyes are on Éponine's slack face, but she's speaking to Cosette when she asks, very quietly, "Who is she?"

Cosette has to try twice before she can find her voice. "A friend," she says, and her voice croaks. She's not even sure if it's the truth. They hadn't been friendly at all as children, though Cosette would have welcomed it if Éponine had made the overture. And now-- now they've known each other for days, only that, and half of them were spent in mostly silence. Are they friends? Can she claim that?

She thinks of Éponine standing over Valjean, practically shaking him by the collar, demanding to know what have you done to her, and thinks perhaps she wouldn't refute it if she overheard Cosette name them as such.

Fantine carefully lays Éponine's head back in Cosette's lap after a moment. "I think the branch cut her, is all. Nothing feels broken. She'll probably wake soon." She hesitates, her gaze flickering between Cosette and Éponine before finally coming to rest on Cosette's face. "We know enough to keep ourselves alive out here, mostly, but I'm not a physician. One of us could go into town and get one, though. It'll take some time, but. We can do that."

Cosette wants to say yes, yes, of course, go now, why didn't you leave immediately. Everything in her cries out to say it, but she looks down at Éponine's slack face and remembers her admonition to trust no one, to stay away from anyplace large enough to attract notice. She's certain that the princess must know she still lives, and that word must have spread that the princess is looking for her, or else why would Éponine be here in the middle of the forest instead of back at home, being showered with gratitude? A physician from town might already know that the princess is looking for her, and might recognize her if he comes. Or he might speak a careless word to someone who knows. But can she risk Éponine dying, just so that she stays safe?

Éponine would tell her to refuse, under any circumstances. But Éponine doesn't get a say in the matter so long as she's unconscious, and Cosette is so, so tempted.

She shuts her eyes and draws three careful breaths before she's able to speak without her voice shaking and giving her away. "Let's give her a little time," she says, and hates herself for it. "If she doesn't wake, then we'll send for a physician."

Her eyes are closed, so she can't see how Fantine reacts, if she nods agreement or makes a face of protest, or something else entirely. There's a moment of quiet, just the steady rush of Cosette's lungs filling and emptying and filling again as Cosette carefully measures her breaths. She counts ten of them before Fantine says, halting, "Why would she think we'd done something to you?"

Because you're going to, of course, Cosette thinks, and her breath stutters. But Fantine and Valjean have been kind, and if it's all been just a ruse to lure her into complacency... Well. If they realize she knows their motive, they might not bother any longer. And Cosette could run with Éponine's help, maybe, but she can't on her own, and she won't while Éponine lies unconscious and bleeding onto her lap.

"I couldn't say," she says instead, and her voice rings flat to her own ears. But when she opens her eyes, Fantine doesn't look suspicious, just concerned. "You'll have to ask her, when she wakes."

Fantine doesn't look entirely satisfied by that, but she nods and rises from the bedside to go over to the water pitcher and wet a cloth, which she brings back and lifts Éponine's head enough to slide it beneath and press it to the wound. It's going to make Cosette's lap all damp, but there's very little that she cares about less, at the moment.

The cottage is quiet, mostly, as they settle in and wait. Fantine sits with Valjean by the fire and occasionally they trade low, whispered conversations. Once, Valjean tries flexing his leg and sucks air through his teeth, and Fantine hisses an admonition and lays a hand on his shoulder that settles him back into his seat.

Cosette stays where she is, holding Éponine's head on her lap and stroking her fingers through her hair, even though there's none left that had fallen into her face, and she's just starting to think, The hell with caution, she needs a physician, when Éponine stirs a little, and the rhythm of her breathing shifts, and Cosette's heart leaps right up into her throat.

"Éponine?" Cosette cups her face in her hands, trying to keep her touch gentle. "Éponine, are you awake? Can you hear me?"

Éponine's lips part, and her tongue comes out to wet them. "I can hear you," she says, her voice a dry rasp. She slowly blinks her eyes open, then immediately grimaces and shuts them against the light. "Am I dreaming?"

A bubble of hysterical laughter threatens to rise up in Cosette. She wants to drag Éponine up into her arms and hug her with relief, but she doesn't dare. She keeps her hands light and her voice soft, says, "No, you're waking up, and I'm glad for it. You've had us very worried."

"You're here," Éponine says, like it's all the evidence she needs to prove that she must be dreaming, and Cosette forgets herself for a moment and curls her hand on Éponine's shoulder, too firm. But Éponine's expression settles a little bit, like it's Cosette's ungentle grip that's finally convinced her that she's awake. "I thought you must be dead. I thought--"

"You're here," Cosette counters. "Why are you here? You're supposed to be--" She cuts herself off abruptly, remembering that Fantine and Valjean are sitting not three strides away at the hearth, and surely listening. That there are things they cannot hear, and secrets they can't know Cosette's discovered.

Éponine seems to realize the same thing a beat behind Cosette. She tenses and half-sits, frowning as she looks around the cottage. "Where are we? Where-- Gods," she swears when she sees Valjean and Fantine, sitting together by the fire and watching them both without any pretense that they aren't paying attention.

Beside her, Éponine quivers like one of her hounds on a scent. "I need to throw up," she says all at once, swinging her legs over the edge of the bed. "And then I need a glass of water. And then I believe that there are a great many explanations to be made. Help me outside?"

I can't, Cosette nearly says, but Éponine's not wrong about the explanations that are needed, and they can't be made while Valjean and Fantine are listening in. So she slides herself to the edge of the bed, grabs her crutch and gets herself upright, then holds her free hand out to Éponine. "Don't lean on me too hard," she warns, "or we're both liable to go tumbling over, but I think we can make it together."

Éponine is staring at her, at her leg, and Cosette doesn't know what to make of her expression. She catches Éponine's arm as she limps toward the door, pulling her around with it. "Perhaps you should be the one helping me outside," she jokes, and Éponine recalls herself enough move with her, and only breaks away to step ahead and swing the door open for Cosette before gesturing her through.

Chou's on the other side of the door, whining from where he'd been exiled after he jumped too exuberantly on Éponine a few too many times for Cosette to allow. He looks like he can't decide which of them he'd like to bowl over first, but Éponine gives him a firm command and he drops to his haunches and sits, whining quietly and with his tail thumping in the dirt and raising up dust, but he doesn't move from his place, perfectly obedient.

Cosette makes sure to swing the door shut behind them again and pauses long enough to give Chou an apologetic scratch on the head, then hobbles down off the cottage's front step and heads for the edge of the underbrush, a short distance away. "Here," she calls to Éponine. "If you're going to be sick, do it over here, where the smell of it won't fill the house."

Éponine comes to join her and then stands there, bent double with her hands braced on her knees, her face twisted up like she's just waiting for the sick to come up, or like she's fighting it off but unsure whether she'll win the battle.

Cosette shifts her weight so she can balance better and rub a hand over Éponine's back, between her shoulders. Éponine doesn't need the comfort, but Cosette wants to give it, and more, she wants it to look like it from the house, if Fantine and Valjean are watching. "Why are you here?" she asks Éponine in an undertone, and Éponine glances up at her without straightening.

"I found your shelter, and followed your tracks from there. I found where you fell"--she turns her head enough to glance at Cosette's bandaged leg, and her expression goes bleak--"and where you lay, and when I saw the tracks where you'd been dragged away, I thought you must have died and been dragged off by a bear or a wolf. And when it led me here I thought--" She shuts her eyes and presses the back of one hand against her mouth. Cosette presses her hand harder between her shoulder blades and waits while she fights back the nausea.

"I would have killed that man," Éponine says eventually, her voice thin and uneven. "If she hadn't... stopped me." She tips her head back, looking up at Cosette from where she's crouched over, a frown creasing her brows. "I'm a hunter, me tracking you here is hardly exceptional. But how did you find these people?"

"I didn't," Cosette says with a little laugh. "They found me. Or, well, Chou found them, and when they saw him rooting through their rubbish pile, they followed him back to me."

"No, I mean—" Éponine straightens, frowning at Cosette directly now. "How did you find them?"

Cosette shakes her head, baffled. "I don't understand what you're asking me."

"How did—" Éponine breaks off and stares at her, scarcely blinking. "You don't know," she says, and her voice is suddenly flat. "You don't know who you're living with?"

"I know—" Cosette glances over her shoulder towards the cottage despite herself. They're a ways away and speaking quietly enough that their voices shouldn't carry, but the risk of being overheard still makes her stomach tighten with dread. She drops her voice to the thinnest of whispers. "They know who I am. I overheard them talking about it one night. They've been kind, but I think they're just waiting for me to heal enough that they can bring me to the princess and turn me in."

Éponine gives a sharp crack of laughter that's entirely devoid of humor. "Oh, I doubt that." She takes Cosette's arm again and turns her around with it, toward the house. "Let's go back."

"Don't you need to be sick?" Cosette asks, but follows along with her, keeping pace at her side.

Éponine smiles, but the expression is just as wry and mirthless as her laugh had been. "Maybe later. We've got more important things to address right now." She opens the door for Cosette and gestures her on through, then stops long enough to scratch Chou under his chin and murmur some soft words. She waits until Cosette's out of the doorway before she tilts her head towards it and says, "All right, you can come on in, as long as you're going to behave yourself."

"He's been very well-behaved," Cosette says as Chou comes bounding in, panting happily, his tail wagging so hard that it shakes his whole body. "Until you came."

Éponine gives her a smile at that, a little sardonic curl to her mouth that's not happiness, not anything like, but at least it's warmer than the cold, brittle ones she's been giving ever since Cosette said that Fantine and Valjean were intending to betray her. But then it's gone, as quickly as it came, and she's straightening and pulling her shoulders back and turning to squarely face the other two, who are still sitting near each other by the fire, watching Éponine with concern.

Fantine offers her a mug of water that she'd already ladled up, then rises from her chair to offer that to her as well. "Are you feeling all right?"

"I will be feeling much better," Éponine says, gesturing Cosette towards the empty seat rather than taking it herself, "when you lot all stop keeping secrets from one another."

Cosette lowers herself down onto Fantine's chair with a sigh. If she had the freedom to do it, she'd say, Éponine, no, she'd say that they shouldn't let on what they know so long as neither of them are capable of running afterward. But she can't say that they shouldn't without giving that all away herself, so she holds her tongue and hopes that Éponine knows what she's doing.

"I'll start," she says, and turns herself to address Valjean. "I'll say, first, that I'm sorry for your leg, and glad my aim wasn't better. I was tracking my friend"--she tilts her head toward Cosette, as though they might think she was talking about anybody else--"and found the place where she fell, and saw that she'd been dragged here, and I assumed the worst. You will, I think, understand why in a moment."

The smile Valjean gives her is gentle and bears no signs that Cosette can see of malice or resentment. "My leg will heal," he tells her. And then, with humor bubbling through his voice, "And I am glad as well that your aim was less true." He doesn't press her for the understanding that she promised him, only seems content to wait.

Instead of providing it, Éponine turns to Fantine. She stands with her back straight and her shoulders squared, her jaw tight, like she's bracing for a fight, even though what she says is, "We haven't been properly introduced, I'm afraid. I'm Éponine Thénardier, and I can't believe you haven't told her the truth."

Cosette frowns at Éponine, unsure what any of that means, of why she should have any expectation that Fantine would have admitted their intentions. But when she looks to Fantine for some sort of insight, Fantine hasn't moved at all, is as motionless as one of the statues that adorned the palace, isn't even blinking, and yet somehow all at once gives the impression, looking at Éponine, that she's seen a ghost.

"I can't," Fantine breathes at last, and brings one hand up to cover her mouth, her eyes gone large and round above her palm. "I can't."

Cosette looks between the two of them, feeling at sea. "You know each other?" she asks eventually, of Éponine. "How?"

"Not quite," Éponine says, and doesn't once look away from Fantine. "We met once. She wouldn't recognize me, I'm sure, but she looks much the same as I remember. Older, a little." Éponine tips her head to the side. "But then, we all are." Her voice is gentler, this time, when she says, "Her life wasn't what you think. You should tell her."

Fantine doesn't say anything, doesn't respond, doesn't tell Cosette whatever it is that she ought to, just covers her face with both hands and bows her head forward, like she's weeping.

Cosette wraps her fingers tight around her crutch, gripping it hard enough that her knuckles ache. Her chest is tight and each breath is painful, and she rather wants to weep herself, or maybe to swing her crutch up and beat everyone about the head with it, until someone tells her something.

"I'll do it, if you won't," Éponine says softly. "But she should hear it from you."

Fantine takes a deep breath that shudders through her, then straightens, dropping her hands. "We met once, I think," she says, and she doesn't look away from Éponine even briefly, as though she won't -- or can't -- look at Cosette while she speaks. "She was a child. And I was--" Her voice trembles and falls apart, and she's quiet for a moment, the backs of her fingers pressed to her mouth, before she finds it again. "I was giving the care of my own child over to her parents, because I couldn't do the job as I ought."

Cosette understands every word that she speaks, and yet together they seem incomprehensible. She stares at Fantine, blinking, waiting for what she just said to make any sort of sense at all. "No," she says at length, shaking her head and bewildered. "No, you--"

"I named her Euphrasie," Fantine says, her voice as thin as the finest silk thread, and now she looks at Cosette, as she jolts back in her chair, "but I called her Cosette."

"You can't," Cosette breathes, gaping at her. "You-- How can you-- They said you died."

Fantine's face crumples with grief and regret and heartache. She starts to reach out towards Cosette as though she wants to take her into her arms, but pulls herself back almost at once, like she fears Cosette might throw off her embrace if she tried it. "I nearly did," she says, her voice cracking between every other word. "It was Jean who took me in, and nursed me back to health. But I was very ill for a very long time."

"They said--" Cosette's chest hurts. It feels as though someone is stepping on it, all their weight crushing down on her breastbone. She can scarcely breathe. "They said you must've fallen to the plague, or a pox, when your letters stopped coming."

Fantine shakes her head wildly. "I didn't," she breathes. "I didn't." And then, her eyes wary but her face brightening with hope, "You got my letters, though? You read them?"

Cosette hesitates. She drops her gaze down to her lap and plucks at a bit of loose stitching, until Éponine reaches over and lays her hand atop Cosette's, stilling her. Even so, Cosette can't look at Fantine. "Mistress Thénardier got them. I saw her with the coins you sent, sometimes. But the letters inside... She always threw them on the fire."

Fantine says nothing, nothing, nothing, until it's abruptly harder not to look than to keep hiding her gaze. Cosette dares a glance up at her, braced for fury or for further grief. Instead, she finds Fantine with her mouth tight, her fingers curled together into knots, sitting perfectly still, like a statue. Like Chou, when he's heard something rustling in the brush.

"They--" Fantine starts, and her voice is strangled, hoarse, like nothing Cosette's ever heard from her before. "They burnt--"

"My parents," Éponine says, very softly, and Cosette and Fantine's gazes both swing to her, "were not the sort of guardians you would have hoped for, for your daughter. I'm sorry."

"You do not have to atone for them," Cosette snaps. At the same time, Fantine says, soft and baffled, "You were a child when I saw you. You couldn't have been much older than Cosette was. What do you have to be sorry for?"

"I wasn't as kind to her as I could have been," Éponine says, like a confession, her eyes cast down and a hint of color burning on her cheeks.

"You saved me," Cosette says, heated.

"Young lady," Valjean says, and they all startle and turn to him, where he's watching them all with the gentlest expression Cosette's ever seen. "There is a hole in my leg that suggests to me that you have made up for whatever lack of friendship you might have shown as a girl."

That only makes the color on Éponine's face spread, and darken. "I'm sorry," she says in a burst, like they're difficult words for her to force out. "I thought you'd killed her."

Valjean, for his part, seems to take that accusation with equanimity, with a little crooked, bemused smile that offers her no condemnation. Fantine, though, asks softly, every line on her face carved with reluctance, "Were they so terrible? That you had to save her from them?"

Cosette laughs, wildly, and covers her face with her hands. She doesn't know. Cosette heeded Éponine's admonition not to trust so well, and now her own mother is sitting before her with no idea what her life has been like for the past ten years or more. "They were terrible," she agrees. "They did not love me, or even like me, and they tolerated me in their household only so long as my being there meant your letters came, and your coin with them. And when the letters stopped coming, they were worse, until I suppose they gave up on waiting, and then they took me to the palace and made me the royal family's responsibility, instead of their own."

Fantine is very still again, but this time she looks frozen, her expression caught halfway through a transformation so that Cosette has no idea what it means, or what it was becoming. "They left you with Félix?"

All the air in Cosette's lungs rushes out of her, leaving her light-headed, glad for Éponine's hand covering hers to keep her steady. Half her life and more she had spent in the palace, and in all those years she'd never known for sure if the Thénardiers had been right or if they had somehow duped the royal family into taking on their unwanted charge. "They fed me well, in the palace," Cosette offers softly, and that, inexplicably, makes Fantine's expression go thunderous. "They gave me tutors. He was... disinterested, but he wasn't unkind."

"And yet," Fantine says, unbearably gentle despite the fury building on her face, "you needed saving."

Cosette's voice dries up, and she shakes her head. Fantine is a woman who pulled her from the mud and took her into her home when she was nothing but a stranger in need, who says she's her mother, who looked murderous when Cosette confessed to the Thénardiers' neglect. Cosette doesn't know how to tell her that someone actively tried to kill her, in the face of all that.

Éponine glances at her, her expression soft and understanding. When Cosette just looks back at her helplessly, Éponine squeezes her hand and gives Fantine the answer the Cosette cannot. "It's his new wife, you see. Cosette threatens the line of succession."

"Succession?" Fantine gives a shock of startled, disbelieving laughter. "For a minor prince of little consequence? He doesn't even have lands to bequeath to a legitimate heir, much less a daughter got out of wedlock. What could you possibly expect from him that might threaten a wife?"

"Oh," Cosette breathes. "Oh, you don't-- No, of course you wouldn't have heard, all the way out here and with you two surviving on your own as you do." She takes a deep breath, reminds herself that she's the daughter of a prince, that she's survived assassination and wilderness already. She has the strength to do this, too. "Fever took the city, a few months back. They tried to keep it out of the palace, but it came all the same, and when it left, it took the queen and her sons and everyone along the line of succession between the king and my—" even now, she can't call him father "—and Prince Félix with it." She looks down at her hands, at Éponine's hand laid over hers, her strong, dark fingers on Cosette's, pale and still faintly marked with streaks of her blood. "He's the heir, now. And I'm his eldest child, even if I am illegitimate, and I suppose the princess doesn't want to take any chances about what that means for the line of succession. If a minor prince of little consequence can find himself king one day, why not a minor prince's bastard daughter? It's not a risk she cares to take, anyway."

Cosette's quiet once she's gotten that out, all her words dried up, and everyone else in the room is quiet too. When a moment's passed and Fantine still hasn't said anything, she risks a glance up, sees Fantine looking shocked and a little baffled, and Cosette realizes that she still hasn't made it plain enough. All these months and years of keeping secrets, and she's forgotten how to be forthright. She turns her hand over so she can thread her fingers through Éponine's, because she knows this is going to be the hardest part, the worst for Fantine to hear, and there's a part of her that screams at the idea of saying something she knows will upset the mother she's longed for all her life, and only just found. "She tried to poison me," she says quietly, and watches how it transforms Fantine's shock and confusion into a sudden, sharp focus. "It didn't work, and I left the palace before she could try again." She squeezes Éponine's hand tightly. "Éponine's an apprentice hunter at the palace. I-- I didn't expect to find her there, but I did, and she helped me leave. She saved me."

"I left you," Éponine says, suddenly, violently bitter. "I never should have, you would still be on your feet if I hadn't. I told you it was as good as leaving you to die, didn't I? And for what?" She lets out a sharp, shuddering breath. "The princess didn't believe me, or at least, not well enough. I couldn't tell you the difference between a doe's heart and a woman's, but she wasn't convinced. She wanted to verify what I'd told her. She sent her huntsman to see."

Cold washes through Cosette's stomach. Her hand clenches around Éponine's, tight enough that it must be painful, but Éponine doesn't protest, doesn't shake her off, just holds onto her and keeps the terror from sending her flying apart in a hundred different directions. "That's why you're here," she whispers through numb lips. "That's why you came back."

Éponine tilts her head, a wordless acknowledgment. "I knew I could travel faster than him. I knew where to go, and he had to search. I found where we parted, and I found your tracks leading from there, and I followed them and obscured them as best as I was able, and laid down false paths to lead him astray. I did what I could." She falls silent for a moment, her throat working but no sound coming out. Her fingers tighten around Cosette's, holding on just as strongly as Cosette's holding onto her, as though there's a storm battering around them and they might be torn apart once again. "And then I found where you fell, and I thought it hadn't mattered at all." Her voice has gone hoarse, ragged. Cosette can't look at her, can't bear to see the emotion in her voice reflected on her face, the raw fear and grief at the thought that Cosette had died. "I left you. I told you I'd be leaving you to your death, and I left you anyway."

"I told you to," Cosette whispers. She glances sidelong at Fantine, abruptly afraid of what she'll think of this misguided confession, when Cosette's her daughter and Éponine's little more than a stranger. A stranger who confessed to being unkind to her daughter when she was at her most vulnerable. A stranger who attacked her home and her family and shot Valjean in the leg. She says it again, stronger, for Fantine now instead of Éponine: "I told her to."

Fantine shakes her head, a brief, fierce rejection, and for a moment Cosette's heart sinks. But what Fantine says is, "I'm sure you did what you thought was best at the time. It doesn't matter now, though. He's coming, that's what you said, right?" She reaches out blindly, gropes until Valjean catches her hand and holds it tightly. "The huntsman is coming for her."

"He's coming," Éponine agrees, her voice bleak, her face even more so.

"We have to go then," Fantine says, all at once resolute, her shoulders back and her face set with determination. She looks around the cottage like she's assessing with a glance what needs to come and what can stay, like she's just going to throw a few necessities in a knapsack and then walk away from everything else, from her life, from the home that she's built here with Valjean, all because someone's threatened Cosette, who she's only known for a few days. "We have to leave, now, while we can--"

"And go where?" Cosette asks softly, at the same time as Éponine is shaking her head, already opening her mouth to protest. "My leg's broken. I can't walk. I can barely make it outside to relieve myself."

"We can rent a cart--"

"It'll take days to arrange, that's what you said when you offered to take me into town, to a physician, right? And we can't take a cart through the woods." She glances at Éponine briefly. "I'm no hunter, but I suspect that even I could follow the tracks of a cart pulled through the forest. We'll lead him right to us. And if we stick to the roads and the traveled paths, then I'll risk being recognized by every traveler who passes us by. Surely the princess will make it known to more than just her huntsman that she's looking for me. She wouldn't say why, of course, but she'd make it known. Perhaps she'd simply say that I'm a criminal on the run from justice. It doesn't matter. There will be more people than just the huntsman looking for me."

"She's right," Éponine says, her voice warm with approval. Fantine swallows back the protest that she was about to voice and listens, but the growing franticness in her eyes is obvious and barely-restrained. "She can't move fast enough to keep ahead of the huntsman, and anywhere populated is going to be as great a risk. Our only real choice is to stay." She glances at Cosette again, and looks like she's just as sick at the thought as Fantine clearly is. "We stay. We give you the chance you need to heal. And I'll spend my days in the woods, laying down false trails to lead the huntsman astray. If we're very lucky, I might be able to buy us the time that we need for you to grow strong, and then we leave. If we're not--" Her words go tight again, her voice fraught. She looks away from Cosette, looks to Fantine and Valjean. "If we're not, then you're going to need to be prepared to protect her."

"I can do that," Fantine says, calm and sure.

Éponine gives her a wry smile and brings a hand up to the back of her head, her fingers gentle as they probe the back of her skull, where Fantine's branch hit. "Yes," she says, humor warming her voice. "I know you can."

Cosette pulls her hand from Éponine's and looks down at her own, twisted together on her lap. None of them say what they all know to be true: that Éponine might encounter the huntsman as she's trying to lead him on a merry chase, that he might find his way here all the same, that if he finds any of the three of them standing between him and Cosette, he'll likely kill them to get to her. Any or all of them could die, for her, because she was foolish enough to break her leg and too stubborn to die in the mud. She shuts her eyes and swallows down bitter, choking tears. She can't bear the thought of any of them laying down their lives in her defense, and she's too much of a coward to tell them not to.

A careful hand touches her cheek, and she takes a moment before she opens her eyes, unsure whether she expects to see Éponine or Fantine there before her.

It's Fantine, she discovers when she dares to look, gazing at her with a tender expression, everything Cosette ever wanted during the cold, lonely years of her youth. "I'm your mother," she says, soft and sure, and that, too, makes Cosette want to weep. "It's a mother's duty, and her right. I won't be kept from it."

"I've only just found you," Cosette whispers, her voice thick and unsteady. "What if I lose you?"

Fantine slides the hand on her cheek up into her hair, strokes it. Cosette wants, desperately, to shut her eyes and lean into the touch. "Then I will die knowing that I did right by you in the end, at least. And so I'll die glad."

Cosette shakes her head desperately and tries to protest, but the thickness in her throat chokes off her voice. There's a pressure building in her, of fear and desperation and it's all too much. Two hours earlier, she'd been alone in a house with people she thought meant to kill her. Now she has a mother, and Éponine's here, and the huntsman is coming for her. She draws a shuddering breath and tries to speak again, and instead just covers her face with her hands and cries into them. Her tears feel scalding where they land on her palms.

Arms come around her, pulling her into an embrace, and she's not sure who they belong to, can't stop weeping long enough to pull her hands down and check, but it doesn't matter. They're sure and firm and they hold her, and she thinks maybe it's Fantine, thinks Éponine isn't the sort to pull her into an embrace like this and not be self-conscious about it.

It ought to be awkward. Fantine may be her mother, but she's still nearly a stranger, a woman she's only known for days, and it ought to be strange and uncomfortable to be hugged by her like this. Perhaps it would be, if her emotions weren't in so much of a tumult to begin with, but there's no room left inside her for awkwardness or discomfort. It feels nice to have warm arms drawing her in, a cheek pressed to hers. She's been so lonely, all her life she's been lonely, and now there's Fantine, her mother, her mother who's here and real and solid before her, who's not dead. There's Valjean, who had an arrow in his leg and more raining down around him and whose first thought was still to keep her safe. There's Éponine, who came back, who fought her way through a forest to Cosette's side because she was in danger, who was ready to kill perfect strangers because she thought they'd harmed her.

And there's the huntsman, who's coming, who won't hesitate to kill all of them to get to Cosette.

There's nothing Cosette can do to keep them safe, short of finding the huntsman before he finds them, but she knows none of them would allow it. She pulls back from the embrace, drawing a deep, shuddering breath, and finds that it was Fantine's arms around her after all but that Éponine is close, looking unhappy, with one hand on Cosette's back as she wept, rubbing between her shoulder blades.

Cosette gives them both a watery smile and wipes the tears from her cheeks. "You had better do a very good job laying down false trails for the huntsman," she tells Éponine, her voice as firm as she can make it when she still feels like weeping. "Because I won't forgive any of you if you go and get yourselves killed on my behalf."

"Don't worry," Éponine says, and she looks grim and resolute. She looks like a hunter, and Cosette thinks that if he had any sense at all, the huntsman would turn on his heel and go right back to the palace the moment he saw that gaze turned on him. "I don't intend to let him anywhere near you."

It's not exactly what Cosette asked of her, but she can only swallow against the painful lump in her throat and nod, and hope that it's enough.

*

They coax her back into the bed eventually, though mutiny burns like a flame within her as she sits there, covered with blankets and propped up by pillows while the other three talk and plan and ready themselves. They don't exclude her, or don't mean to, she thinks. They don't talk in a hush, like they don't want her to overhear, and they all turn to her and listen when she speaks up with input or suggestions, but still she feels separated, there in the bed a few paces away instead of part of their cluster of conversation.

She would fight her way back out from under the covers, but the emotions of the past few hours have left her drained, wrung-out and empty, and exhaustion proves to be a greater force than her indignation. It drags her under, drags her down and smothers her until all is darkness, and she sleeps.

When she wakes, the light's changed through the cottage, and she feels as bleary-eyed and fuzzy-headed as though she's slept for days, instead of hours. There's the sound of movement as soon as she stirs, and she pushes herself upright enough to see Valjean at the table, cutting vegetables into pieces with a knife.

He smiles at her when she meets his gaze. "Are you feeling better now that you've rested?"

She sits up the rest of the way and drags her disheveled hair out of her face. "I don't know that I would call this better," she mutters, but the flash of concern on Valjean's face makes her regret it almost at once. "I'm sure I'll feel otherwise, once I've woken fully," she assures him. A glance around the cottage shows that they're the only ones there, and she frowns a little. "Where did the others go?"

"Fantine's gone down to the stream to do some washing. I offered to go in her stead, so she could be here with you, but she seemed to think the hole in my leg might pose a problem," he says with a wry smile. "Your friend took the dog to go hunt, she said, so she might contribute some meat to our supper. I told her it wasn't necessary, but..." He shrugs one shoulder, and Cosette can imagine how well Éponine would have taken to that suggestion.

Still, the idea of Éponine out in the woods alone with only Chou at her side makes cold curdle through her stomach. "She's hurt," she says, "she should be resting, more so than me."

"I did tell her that, too," Valjean says, and he's smiling still but it's a little rueful. His voice is gentle, when he pitches it toward Cosette. His gaze is gentle, when he lifts it to meet hers. "But I have known your friend a scant handful of hours, and yet I believe I can confidently say that she's not the sort to let herself be dissuaded from something she's set her mind to." His gaze gentles even further, and his voice goes even softer. "If it helps to hear, I don't believe she's inclined to take any risks so great that they might keep her from the duty she feels she has toward you. She'll be back soon enough."

Cosette swallows back a hollow laugh. She can't take any comfort from Valjean's reassurance, not when she knows exactly what Éponine thinks her duty to Cosette is. I left you, she'd said, and her voice was brimming over with guilt. Valjean might be sure in his estimations of her, but Cosette's known her longer, and knows her better, and wouldn't wager on what lengths Éponine would go to, to try to assuage that guilt.

She takes a few deep, careful breaths, until she feels like she can do so without her fear choking her, and then she grabs at her crutch and maneuvers herself out of bed and onto her feet, and makes her way across the cottage to sit at the table with Valjean.

His expression clouds with concern as she comes, and darkens further when she holds a hand out to him and says, "Let me help."

"You need your rest, if you're to heal," he tells her, gently, and this time the gentleness makes her want to scream. "I can manage this well enough."

Cosette chooses her words carefully, picking through her frustration until she's found her way to something coherent. "If Éponine can hunt with a wounded head," she says, "then I can certain cut vegetables with a broken leg. Please," she adds, when he seems unconvinced. "Let me help." Give me something to do that isn't worry about you all, she doesn't say, but perhaps he reads it in her face all the same, because he gives her a long, searching look and then, with obvious reluctance, turns his knife around and lays the handle of it in her palm.

She lets out a breath she hadn't meant to hold, and reaches across the table to take one of the vegetables still waiting to be chopped.

"I was thinking a soup, tonight," Valjean says, as he finds a second knife and they work together in quiet companionship. "It'll stretch far enough to feed us all until we can do some more foraging, particularly if your friend manages to come back with a rabbit or two to add to the pot."

Cosette smiles at him, at the obvious overture, and she answers him in kind. And for at least a short space of time, there's a sense of normalcy she can cling to. At least as long as there's vegetables between them to chop and work they can do together, she can let herself forget that her leg is broken, that the huntsman is looking for her, that her father's wife wants her dead. For at least this long, there's the steady comfort of work to do and a companion to do it with, and easy conversation with which to pass the time.

*

Éponine does return with a rabbit, and a grouse too, and Valjean joins her outside to help her clean them while Fantine hangs up the washing, so that for a space of time Cosette's left alone inside the cottage with only Chou there for company, his chin on the edge of the bed and his tail thumping against the floor, looking very pleased with himself.

She dozes again, and rouses when a careful hand lands on her shoulder and Éponine's voice tells her that supper is ready, and she ought to eat to keep up her strength.

They all eat together, Cosette propped up in bed with the bowl on her lap and Éponine sitting cross-legged at the end of it, so that Fantine and Valjean can have the two chairs. Chou lays at their feet and occasionally throws wistful glances up towards the both of them, but he doesn't beg, though Valjean looks as though if he made the least bit of an overture, he'd start feeding him scraps from the table.

The house feels crowded with five of them in there now, but it's a pleasant sort of crowding. Not like the Thénardiers', where she had kept herself to the corners and the edges of rooms so she wouldn't attract notice by being in the way. Not like the palace, where she'd eaten her meals alone, up until the end, and then had sat at the king's dining table with more people around it than they have gathered here, but the room had been grand and intimidating and the space between her and them had felt cold.

This doesn't feel anything like that. Even with Valjean and Fantine on the other side of the room, there's closeness and chatter and warmth, there's the press of Éponine's knee against her feet as they try to fit the both of them on the bed, there's fond looks traded between Fantine and Valjean at little comments that must be shared jokes between the two of them, there's the low rumble of Chou snoring once he's finally resigned himself to not sharing in the meal while the rest of them are still eating it.

It makes Cosette's heart ache, and she doesn't say anything to draw attention to it, because she knows it's not going to last and she wishes it would. They're a ragtag sort of a group and she can only really claim a connection to one of them, but even so, it's the first time she's ever felt like part of a family. It's the first time any place has ever felt like a home.

Éponine relents once they've all finished eating and lets Valjean toss him the bones from the rabbit to chew, and Fantine casts her a sidelong glance with a crooked smile before she puts her bowl down on the floor for him to lick clean, and then they all have to do the same, even Éponine, laughing as she goes along, and then Fantine dishes up a fifth bowl for Chou alone, to round out his meal, and they all laugh at how glad he is for it, his tail wagging wildly and his eyes bright, and then laugh harder when he finishes stuffing himself and lays down with his head on Fantine's feet and his tail thumping against Valjean's ankles and promptly goes right back to snoring.

Cosette's the second of them to fall asleep, though she'd have said that she oughtn't need to for hours, considering how much of it she's already gotten. She rouses a little a few times through the evening, to sounds of quiet, murmured conversation or people moving around the cottage, but sinks back under before she can make out anything distinct, or even summon the willpower to open her eyes.

She wakes abruptly, her pulse racing, and lies there in bed for a moment with her eyes open and her heart thundering too fast, staring at the cottage's roof as she tries to figure out what woke her, and why.

The cottage is quiet, only the sounds of Chou snoring -- softer now than it had been at dinner -- and people breathing. She can faintly make out the pattern of thatching overhead, which means it must be very early morning. Too early for the rest of them to be up, who worked through the afternoon and evening, where Cosette only slept.

She can't make out anything that would have startled her awake, no shape or sound in the cottage that seems out of place. Her pulse slowly steadies as she lies there and tells herself that there's nothing to fear, but it leaves her jittery with nerves.

She slides one hand toward the edge of the bed and drops it down, feeling for Chou, who's slept there at the side of the bed every night since she woke and his exile from the house was lifted. But instead of landing in soft fur, her fingers find the bony shape of a shoulder, covered by blankets.

She would flinch back at once, but the moment she touches her, Éponine shifts, as though she were already awake but trying to lie still and not disturb the others, as Cosette was, or as though she were hovering so near to being awake that it took only the briefest of grazes to rouse her.

Éponine's shoulder presses into Cosette's touch for the briefest of moments before it falls away. The blankets rustle, too, so Cosette thinks she must be rolling onto her back, rather than pulling away. "Are you all right?" Éponine asks her, the faintest of breaths, but in the early-morning stillness the question feels as loud as a shout.

Cosette swallows and nods, before she realizes that Éponine won't be able to see her from where she's lying, won't have anything but the whisper of Cosette's hair across her pillow to know that she heard her at all. She tests her voice, finds it comes out croaky with sleep, but manages to say, "Yes. I'm sorry, I didn't mean to--"

Éponine's hand finds hers and squeezes around it. "You didn't," she says, and Cosette thinks it's probably a lie, but she doesn't protest.

She shifts across the bed instead, as quietly as she's able, and leans her head over the edge so she can see Éponine there, rolled onto her back like she'd suspected, her eyes a faint gleam in the darkness. "Why are you on the floor?" she asks in another hushed whisper.

She can't see Éponine's expression through the dark, but her voice warms enough that Cosette thinks she must be smiling. "Where else am I to sleep, when there's only one bed between the lot of us?"

Cosette meant more, Why aren't you on a pallet like the others? Why aren't you sleeping by the hearth, where it's warm, instead of all the way over here? She doesn't say any of it, though, just shifts her hand in Éponine's grip so that she can thread their fingers together, and hold on to Éponine the same way that Éponine's holding on to her.

"Go back to sleep," Éponine says, soft, more encouragement than command. "There's hours yet until any of us need to be up."

"I can't," Cosette confesses. "I don't think I can."

Éponine moves, the blankets shifting and sighing around her, and then there's a darker shadow against the ones cloaking the cottage: Éponine, kneeling up at the side of the bed, and the mattress dips a little bit beneath the weight as she braces a hand on it. "Can I--?"

"Oh," Cosette breathes, and shifts across the bed, closer to the wall, making room. "Yes, please, of course. You must be half-frozen from sleeping there." She lifts the edge of the blanket, letting in the cold air but inviting Éponine in behind it.

"I'm fine," Éponine says, and there's warmth in her voice, like she's holding back laughter, though Cosette can't imagine what she said that was funny. She climbs up on the bed, though, and settles Cosette's blanket over both of them, and then pulls her own up from the floor and drapes it over them too. And then she's close, her knees nudging up behind Cosette's, one arm going over her waist because there's nowhere else for her to fit it, her breath warm and gentle on the back of Cosette's neck.

"Sleep," she murmurs, and her arm drapes heavier around Cosette's waist. "You're safe. Just sleep."

And, inexplicably, Cosette feels her eyes drooping and her thoughts going soft and fuzzy-edged, and she does as she's told, and sleeps.

*

They start to settle into a new routine easily enough. Éponine leaves early most mornings, and takes Chou with her. Fantine and Valjean see to the household chores, doing the washing and fetching water and foraging for food. Cosette does what she can to help, what they'll allow her without putting up too much of a protest. She settles herself at the table most days, and peels or cuts vegetables that they bring back, folds the laundry once it's come in off the line, stirs the pot over the hearth so that Fantine or Valjean don't have to attend it, and can spend their attention on one of the countless other things that requires it, that Cosette doesn't have the strength or the mobility to do herself.

It's a relief to be able to get out of bed regularly, to be able to sit in a chair at a table and be part of the circle of conversation that forms when they're all there, once Éponine returns late in the evening, tired and disheveled and looking very much like she spent the day shoving her way through underbrush to lay down her false trails. Usually, at least, she'll return with a rabbit or quail or other bit of meat to add to their supper, too.

Éponine doesn't like to say how it's gone, when Cosette asks, she presses her mouth to a thin line and shakes her head, and sometimes says, "I've done what I can. He's not stupid, though. He'll realize he's being led on a chase eventually." And then she'll look at Cosette, as bleak as Cosette has ever seen her, and say, "I'll buy us as much time as I can. If we're lucky, maybe it'll be enough."

Cosette watches her closely when she returns in the evenings and thinks she can divine the answers that Éponine won't give her, all the same. There are days where she comes back and there's an ease to her, she leans back in her chair and jokes with the rest of them around the table or she'll let someone else have the chair and she'll sit on the floor, her back against the edge of the bed and her legs stretched out in front of her, crossed at the ankle, and those are the days when Cosette dares to think that they might be lucky after all.

Other days, Éponine returns with tension carving lines that bracket her mouth, and she sits stiff in her chair with her shoulders tight, her gaze darting around the room like she's watching for something. Those days are usually the ones where Cosette wakes in the middle of the night, choking around a gasp or with her heart pounding like she's been running through the woods, and she lies staring up at the shadowed roof overhead, choking on fear, until at last she gives in to it and reaches down to where Éponine is sleeping on the floor at her bedside, presses light, apologetic fingers to her shoulder, ready to pull her touch back and bide until morning if Éponine doesn't rouse.

And every time, Éponine rises like she's been waiting for it, blanket draped around her shoulders, and climbs into bed with her and wraps Cosette in her arms, and murmurs, "You're safe here, you're safe. You can sleep, you're safe," until her pulse slows and her breathing evens and the knot of fear wrapped around her throat loosens, and she's able to sleep after all.

*

It is, perhaps, inevitable when another storm sweeps through. The trees shake and shudder with the force of it, and the wind blows through the spaces between the windows and keeps them all huddling beneath blankets and shawls, and Éponine still goes out into the middle of it. She says it's more important now than ever, that the storm will wash away whatever might remain of Cosette's tracks and give her an opportunity to lay down fresh, misleading ones.

Cosette sits in front of the fire, warming her fingers on the heat coming off of it, and is desperately glad not to be out in it, to be mostly dry if not exactly warm, to have shelter she doesn't have to search and work and fight for.

It passes faster than the last one had, its rage vented in a few days, and afterwards Cosette goes outside to tip her face up to the sun and witness the blue of the sky and thaw her fingers out a bit beneath its warmth.

As she turns to make her way back inside, the end of her crutch slips in the mud that the storm has made of their front step, and she staggers and catches herself on her bad leg without meaning to, and gasps, bracing for the pain.

It doesn't come. She stares down at it in astonishment and gingerly tests it out, bracing it on the step and easing her weight onto it. It takes more of it than she'd have expected it to before she feels the queasy sense of discomfort that she's come to recognize as a precursor to pain.

The door of the cottage opens and Valjean is there, looking concerned. "Are you all right? You made a sound--"

"I'm fine." Cosette beams at him. "I caught myself on my leg and I thought it was going to hurt, but it didn't."

He looks glad at that, his face awash with relief and happiness at once. "Good, good," he says, and moves out of the doorway so she can come through it. "Don't go pushing yourself too hard too fast, though, or you'll only set your progress back."

"I won't," she promises him, and comes inside. She settles herself into one of the chairs by the table and stretches her leg out beneath it, happiness bubbling up in her. "But it's a relief to know I don't need to be confined to the bed quite so much."

Valjean looks like he wants to protest that, but he casts her a sidelong glance and doesn't say so, only says, mildly, "We'll see what we can find for you to do that won't be too strenuous."

It's as much as she's going to get from him for now, she knows, so she contents herself with that and reaches for a bowl of berries on the table that Fantine had gathered earlier, eats a few and sucks the juice from her fingers and then starts sorting through them, looking for any that are starting to spoil, and might ruin the rest.

After a long moment where she can feel Valjean watching her, feel the weight of him wanting to say something but holding himself back, he sighs and takes the other chair, and reaches out to help her. She slides the bowl over so it's between them, and they work together in mostly silence until Éponine gets home.

*

Most of the woods close around the cottage have already been well-foraged, the first place that Valjean and Fantine are likely to look before they venture off further from home, and so there's little point in Cosette looking for nuts or seeds or root vegetables there, and she's just as reluctant as any of the rest of them are about the idea of venturing out too far and risking her leg with the effort. But with the storm's passing, little clusters of mushrooms start to sprout up in its wake, pushing through the soft, soaked earth around every tree trunk and beneath every fallen log. And those she can gather, and still stay close to the cottage, and in doing so free Valjean and Fantine from the task so they can venture father afield.

It's a little awkward, hobbling about with her crutch in the mud, even now that she can dare to put a little weight on her foot when necessary, and she's sure she makes quite a picture, trying to fight her way back up onto her feet after dropping to her knees to inspect the mushrooms and carefully work them free of the dirt. They outfit a basket with a rope handle, at least, so she can sling it over her shoulder and not have to occupy her hands with holding it, when she needs them for the crutch and for keeping her balance. And they're all four of them glad, she thinks, to have a bit of a change of pace in their meals.

Fantine shows her how to cut the mushrooms into thin slices and to lay them out in the sun, so they won't make themselves sick of them in the sudden glut, and so they'll have some to last once the forest has dried out and the mushrooms no longer grow. She's glad, at least, to be able to be useful, and there's satisfaction to be had in watching her two baskets grow full, one with the smooth, soft caps of the fresh mushrooms and the other with leathery slices of the dried.

She's out picking mushrooms in the afternoon, a little farther from the cottage now that the ones very near to it have all been gathered, and haven't regrown yet. She's near enough it wouldn't take her more than a minute or two to get back, even slowed as she is with her leg and her crutch, just a thin veil of trees and brush between her and the cottage to give the impression that she's deeper in the wilds of the forest that she is. She crouches down to check a little cluster of mushrooms growing in the shade of an overhanging stone, looking for the frills that Éponine had showed her that would tell her if they were good to eat, and as she's pushing herself back upright with her crutch braced against a root, so it won't sink into the soft dirt, there's a sound behind her, a sighing of branches and leaves like the wind's blowing them, though the air is still, and the quiet snap of a twig breaking.

She puts the mushrooms in her basket and means to turn, expecting Valjean or Fantine come looking for her. But before she can, there's a broad, strong hand pressing over her mouth, another grasping her arm with a punishing grip, both of them pulling her off balance and pinned against the body behind her as a rough voice growls in her ear, "Not a sound, little mouse, or I'll kill everyone in that little hovel, instead of just you."

Cosette's breath shudders out of her, terror gripping her like a fist around her throat, and she couldn't have made a sound even if she wanted to.

He must take her silence for assent, because after a moment the hand on her arm releases, and there's the sound of metal on leather and then a sharp pinprick at her back, just between her ribs. She doesn't need to be a huntsman, or even a huntsman's apprentice, to guess that he's positioned the knife so that the slightest pressure will sink it deep, right into her heart, and kill her instantly.

"You've led me on quite a chase, haven't you?" he hisses in her ear, and she wants to flinch away but doesn't dare, not with the knife's point digging into her. "I'd have made this quick if you hadn't wasted my time."

She's heard enough about him from Éponine that she doesn't believe him, but it doesn't matter. He has her, has her as surely as one of Éponine's snares that he no doubt taught her to make, and if she screams Fantine and Valjean will come running, and he'll kill her anyway but then he'll kill them too. If she screams, perhaps he'll kill her swiftly, but she won't trade her pain for Valjean and Fantine's, who have only ever been kind to her, even when she thought the worst of them.

She doesn't make a sound and doesn't do anything but tremble there in his grasp, but she must betray herself anyway, because he chuckles and says, "That's right, little mouse. Come this way. Do as I tell you," and he sounds so smug. His words are followed almost immediately by the pinprick of pain at her back growing sharper as he nudges her along with the point of his knife, urging her deeper into the woods.

Mouse he called her, twice now, and it's no different than what she's called herself, in the Thénardiers' home, in her father's. But all at once, it makes her angry.

She shifts her crutch like she's going to do as he says, lifts her bad leg like she's going to walk, and instead brings it down as hard as she can on his foot, hard enough to make him jerk back from her, hissing. Hard enough to break the cast beneath her heel and make pain explode through her at the impact.

Her leg crumples beneath her and she falls, screaming, trying simultaneously to stuff a fist into her mouth to muffle her cries and to kick out at the huntsman behind her, scrambling to put distance between them.

He recovers from the surprise and the pain almost at once, and his face transforms with a snarl as he throws himself after her. She pulls herself across the forest floor with anything she can grab onto, roots and saplings and stones, swallowing back her cries as her leg drags and catches behind her. But he's got two good legs to her one and it's pointless, he's over her in an instant and there's fury on his face and a knife in his hand, and she can hear Fantine and Valjean close by, crashing through the underbrush and shouting her name, and she's stupid, she's so stupid. What did she intend to do, run from him? On her broken leg? And now she's going to die anyway but Fantine and Valjean are, too, all because she was too much of a coward to face her death and let herself be marched towards it.

Still, she kicks at him as he looms over her, tries to fight him off even though it's pointless and she's only putting off the inevitable. He grabs her foot with a snarl when she drives her heel at his knee, uses it to drag her towards him. He grabs a great handful of her hair in his fist and hauls her halfway off the ground with it. The knife in his other hand flashes as he shifts his grip, drawing it back so he can strike down at her and finish this once and for all.

She doesn't even know if she's screaming anymore. All she can hear is the ring of agony in her ears, the crash of Valjean and Fantine through the trees, their voices shouting for her with growing desperation, her own gulping breaths and the huntsman's.

And somehow over it all, she hears a familiar sound, almost a whistle, but this time the impact that follows is a wet sound and the huntsman lurches above her, his eyes gone wide as his hand goes slack.

Cosette scarcely manages to scramble out of the way as he falls, crashing into the litter of the forest floor beside her with the fletched end of an arrow sticking up out of his back. There's a trickle of blood coming from his mouth, dripping to the ground, and his eyes are open but he's not moving at all. Cosette scrambles back further from him, her fingers digging into the earth beneath her, but she can't tear her gaze away from him, lying dead at her side.

Éponine comes crashing through the undergrowth before Cosette can draw breath to call her name, two strides ahead of Fantine and Valjean coming in front the other direction, and she only stops long enough to grab the knife from the huntsman's slack hand and shove it in her belt before she drops to her knees at Cosette's side and drags her up into her arms.

"Are you all right? I'm sorry, I'm so sorry. He must have realized he was being led on a chase at some point, and he led me on a chase instead without me even suspecting it. I found his camp this morning and realized he must have been watching the cottage for days, maybe even before the storm. I came back as soon as I realized, as fast as I could, but I-- Cosette, please talk to me, tell me you're all right. I was so afraid I'd be too late, and I was. Please, Cosette, tell me you're all right, you have to be all right."

"I'd say you were right on time," Cosette says, her voice croaking, and then bursts into tears.

*

They carry her back to the cottage, the three of them. Valjean tries to convince her to take a dose of the tonic, but she she shakes her head fiercely until he relents. It makes her sleep, and she doesn't want to sleep right now, she needs to be awake, needs to feel the strength of his arms at her back, needs to watch as Éponine goes over to the huntsman and wrenches her arrow from his back before she kicks him over so she can press her fingers to the side of his throat and be sure he's dead. She needs to see the sky and the treetops gliding past overhead, and, yes, needs the pain of her leg when they jolt as they carry over her a rougher bit of ground, needs all of it to remind her that she's alive after all, despite all the odds.

Still, there are tears dripping down her cheeks by the time they get her to the cottage and inside and onto the bed, tears from pain instead of the ones of fear and desperation and relief that had burst from her like a thunderstorm when Éponine had wrapped her in her arms and talked about being afraid for her. They make Éponine's already-grave face go ashen, and she climbs right up onto the bed with Cosette and wraps her arms around her once more, holding her like she never means to let her go as Fantine and Valjean inspect the damage done to her cast and cluck their tongues and fuss over her.

"I'll stoke the fire, so we can melt the beeswax," Fantine says, her voice so tight it seems a breath away from fraying apart completely. "We'll recast it. It won't take long."

"It may not be terribly comfortable, until the cast has hardened," Valjean tells Cosette apologetically.

"It's fine," Cosette tells them. Her voice is still hoarse, from screaming or from crying -- she couldn't say. "I'm alive."

They must understand what she means, because their expressions soften, and Fantine turns away abruptly and brings her hands up to her face, and behind her Éponine makes a wounded sound and tightens her arms until she's squeezing all the breath from Cosette.

Cosette doesn't protest, just leans back and feels the solidness of Éponine behind her, the strength of her arms around her, and lets it ground her.

*

Cosette spends two days in bed, only venturing out of it to relieve herself, and then she doesn't dare to put even the slightest amount of weight on her leg. They all hover around her, like they mean to snatch her up if she shows even the slightest hint of falling, or of pain. Éponine doesn't leave like she has every other day, and Cosette supposes that there's no need now, with the threat of the huntsman finding his way to her already realized, but Fantine and Valjean don't, either, not even to fetch water or do the washing. "We have enough to last us, for now," Fantine comments easily when Cosette asks, and it's not a lie but it is, Cosette thinks, stretching the truth.

She doesn't say anything else about it to any of them. It feels a little claustrophobic to have them all so close and so attentive, but it's infinitely preferable to the alternative. She's glad to have people who care about her around her, glad to have Fantine quietly insisting she eat when she's too upset to have an appetite and wouldn't if left to her own devices, glad to have Éponine sitting crosslegged on the bed with her, combing through her hair and plucking out the bits of twigs and fallen leaves and pine needles that have tangled themselves up into it, glad to have Valjean's steady, quiet calm to anchor her when she remembers those moments in the woods and thinks about what nearly happened and the fear rises up to choke her throat.

On the dawn of the third day, she wakes and her leg isn't throbbing. She lays in bed staring at the roof overhead, with Éponine's arms secure around her, and waits for it to come, waits for her broken bones to wake up too, and remember the damage she did to them.

It doesn't hurt, not even when she sits up and swings her legs off the side of the bed. Éponine stirs a little as she slips from her embrace, and reaches for her. "Is everything all right?" she asks, her voice soft and muzzy with sleep.

Cosette nods, and slips her hand into Éponine's to squeeze it, offering reassurance. "I'm fine." I'm alive, she thinks. I'm alive, I'm alive, I'm alive. "My leg's better."

Éponine pushes herself up on an elbow and pushes her hair out of her face. She watches her, grave, through the early morning light. "Good," she says, decisive. And then, gentler, "Did you think it wouldn't be?"

Cosette takes a deep breath. When she lets it out, it shudders through her. "I thought perhaps I'd broken it anew. I thought I'd set us back all these weeks, that we were going to have to stay here and wait for the princess to send someone else after me, because of my own stupidity."

"Your stupidity," Éponine says, "saved your life. Better your leg than that."

"You saved my life." Cosette speaks the words softly, directed down to her knees. "Again."

"You bought me the time I needed. My bow would have been useless if he'd cut your throat before I reached you."

Cosette takes another breath and it shudders through her harder than the last. Éponine must feel her trembling with it, because she sits up and presses herself against Cosette's back, wraps her arms around her middle and hooks her chin over her shoulder, surrounding her. "Bones will heal," she says, firm and sure, leaving no room for Cosette's doubts or fears. "Even if you had broken it again, it would heal. It only needs time, and gentleness. You bought yourself that time. We did," she amends before Cosette can protest, like she can feel it rising up in her, because Cosette didn't do anything, all Cosette did was hurt herself through foolishness and scream when she'd meant not to, when she'd known what it would mean for the rest of them. "Now you just need to remember to give it that gentleness. Don't push yourself too hard, or too fast. Let it heal, and let us help you while it does."

Cosette turns within the circle of Éponine's embrace and presses her face to her shoulder, breathing raggedly there. Éponine just holds onto her, lifts a hand to press it to the back of her neck, to her hair. Cosette wishes, selfishly, that they could both stay just like this and not have to concern themselves with anything beyond the confines of this small bed and the nest of blankets they've made around them. No forests, no huntsmen, no princesses who want to see her dead, no royal fathers who never took an interest in her beyond to ensure she wasn't an embarrassment.

Cosette lifts her head from the curve of Éponine's shoulder. Morning light is starting to gild the edges of her face and to brighten the room around them. Cosette shuts her eyes against it, but she can still feel the fragile walls of their illusory solitude crumble away, letting in everything that she would rather not have to face. It sits on her chest like a stone, squeezing the breath out of her.

Éponine just holds her, letting her go where she will. Cosette can still see her like an afterimage burned against the backs of her eyelids, glowing like gold, warm beneath her hands, and Cosette leans in and finds her mouth and kisses her, shivering within her arms.

Éponine lets out a single, sharp breath, like Cosette has stolen it from her. Her hands go tight on Cosette's back. Her lips move against Cosette's but only tentatively, like she's trying to shape words she can't voice.

Cosette jerks back all at once. The weight on her chest turns crushing. "Oh," she breathes. "Oh, I shouldn't have-- I'm sorry--"

Éponine cups her face in her hands. She frowns, like she's trying to puzzle something out, then draws her in and covers Cosette's mouth with hers. Her hands are gentle and her lips are warm and Cosette gasps in air and wraps her arms around her neck and presses close.

She feels warm, and every press of Éponine's lips makes it easier to breathe, makes the weight on her chest feel lighter and lighter. She makes a sound into the kiss and Éponine strokes a hand over the side of her face and softly shushes her, like she thinks she's distressed or that she needs soothing, but it's not that. It's the opposite of that. It feels like the sun breaking through the clouds after a thunderstorm.

When Éponine eases her back, hands gentle but insistent, Cosette keeps her eyes shut and leans in against her touch. "The only thing you shouldn't do," Éponine says like they're finishing a conversation, her voice low and a little rough, and it makes Cosette want to wrap around her and never let go, "is apologize."

Cosette's not entirely sure she believes that, when she kissed her without asking and didn't know that she'd want to kiss back. But she doesn't want to argue with her, not now, not about that. Not when she could curl up and press in close and let Éponine hold her, her arms and the blankets warm around her, and let them both keep morning at bay a little longer.

*

Later, when the sun's too bright even through their eyelids, and the sounds of Fantine and Valjean rising and moving about are impossible to ignore, Cosette rises too and, bolstered by the receding pain in her leg, makes her way from the bed to the chair at the table. She waits until they've had breakfast and then, before they can come up with excuses for why they all ought to stay in the cottage and fuss over her more, she catches each of their gazes in turn and quietly asks, "What are we going to do?"

Fantine and Valjean's faces both go grave, and a little sad, like they'd hoped they could hold this moment at bay a little longer, though that seems foolish. Éponine, for her part, looks resolved. "We can't stay," she says, decisive and like she's been rehearsing it for days. Then she falters a little and glances briefly at Fantine and Valjean before her gaze returns back to Cosette. "Or-- you can't stay, rather. She'll realize something's happened to the huntsman eventually. It won't make her less eager to find you. If you stay, this'll only happen again."

Fantine's hand clenches tight around her mug, tight enough that her knuckles go pale and bloodless. "If you think," she says, her voice vibrating with barely-restrained emotion, "that I am going to stay here and let my daughter go off into the woods without me, with a broken leg and someone hunting her--especially after what happened the other day--"

"I didn't think it," Éponine says quietly, meeting and holding her gaze, and some of the tension melts out of Fantine. "But I wasn't going to assume."

"If you leave," Valjean says, as steady as ever, "then of course we'll be coming with you. Houses can be rebuilt. Homes can be remade."

Cosette wants to cry looking at all of them, listening to all of them plan to leave their entire lives behind for her sake. She wants to cry, too, listening to what they're proposing, and thinking about what it means. It's only been two days since the pain of her broken bone was fresh and consuming, and she feels a little queasy contemplating suffering that a third time. "My leg," she says, and they all quiet at once and look at her. "I don't-- It's better. But I don't know that it's up for traveling yet. It's only just stopped hurting," she adds, and her voice quavers a little bit, though she didn't mean it to.

Fantine's face softens, and she reaches across the table and grips Cosette's hand. Éponine though, to her side, looks resigned and grim. She looks like Cosette has just asked her to stand on a mound of fire ants.

"We have a little time," she says, and sounds like the words are being forced from her. "The princess won't know something's happened to him right away. I don't know how much time, but-- We can afford a little." The corners of her mouth go tight. "And I can patrol the forest, so we'll know when time's run out. We can stay a little longer, to let you heal. But we won't be able to stay for long."

Cosette shuts her eyes and nods her acceptance. There isn't anything else to do. There isn't any better alternative.

Éponine says, "Right. Then I'd better go start covering his tracks," and calls Chou to her, and starts to ready herself to leave. Cosette watches her from the table, watches how grim she looks at all of it and wishes there were something she could do to make it better. But wishing won't make her leg heal any faster, and it won't make the princess stop wanting her dead. And she doesn't have anything else to offer Éponine, so she just holds her tongue and swallows down the wistful lump in her throat and helps as much as she can from the table while Fantine gets breakfast cooking for all of them.

She and Valjean retreat to the bed to eat, once it's ready, leaving the table and the other chair for Éponine. Cosette watches her across it, blowing on her porridge to cool it off. "It'd be better, wouldn't it, if we used what time we have to get a head start?" she asks quietly. The thought of a bumpy wagon ride without a little longer for her leg to heal makes her queasy.

The corners of Éponine's mouth go tight. She doesn't say yes, but Cosette knows that's what it means. She stabs her spoon into her bowl and only says, resolute, "If you need more time, then I'm going to make sure that you have it," with a finality that says that that's the end of the matter.

Cosette shuts her eyes briefly, then eats her porridge, even though it's still a little hotter than she'd prefer. She wishes she were braver, that she were stronger, that the threat of returning pain didn't make her want to weep. Hurting should be preferable to dying, shouldn't it?

A hand on her shoulder makes her jump, and she looks up at Éponine standing at her side. "Rest," Éponine tells her, and squeezes her shoulder. "Heal as much as you can. Let us take care of the rest."

Cosette nods -- what else is she to do? -- and Éponine gives her another squeeze before she steps away, and calls Chou to her as she shoulders her back. "I'll be back before dark," she promises Cosette, promises them all, and then she's gone, and there's no point to Cosette's urge to call her back and make any promises it takes to get her to stop looking so somber.

She stays at the table most of the day, reluctant to test her luck, and by the time supper's ready and Éponine is back, looking tired and worn and still far too grave, Cosette's leg has started aching again and she's moved back to the bed.

Cosette holds a hand out to her at the sight of her, beckoning her over, and that at least makes the corner of Éponine's mouth turn up with a slight smile, but she shakes her head and doesn't come. "I'm filthy," she says, holding up her hands as though to hold Cosette back. "The bed won't be fit to sleep in if I climb in there now. Let me go wash first." And Cosette can see that it's true, that there's dirt under her fingernails and in the creases of her palms, and she doesn't want to think too hard about what Éponine has had to do to cover the huntsman's trail, so she just drops her hand back down to her side and nods, and calls Chou over from Éponine's side to scratch behind his ears. He lays his head on the edge of the bed and gazes at her blissfully, and when Cosette looks up from lavishing him with attention, Éponine has gone again, the door left open behind her so that Cosette can see her making her way down the narrow path to the stream.

She's not gone long, and she returns stripped to her shirt and changed into a clean pair of trousers, her hands and face pink from scrubbing, and she climbs right up onto the bed with Cosette without her having to ask again, and sits crosslegged at her side with her knee pressed to Cosette's thigh and her side, from her shoulder all the way down to her hip, a warm stripe of pressure against Cosette's, and Fantine and Valjean bring them their plates so they can eat supper there without having to move.

Cosette leans her shoulder in a little harder against Éponine's, and when she risks a look sideways, Éponine's glanced up at her and is smiling, like she's somehow surprised to find Cosette at her side, but like it's a good surprise.

"How are you?" she asks her softly.

Éponine laughs a little, though Cosette's not sure where she might have found humor in the question. "Much better, now that I'm clean and my belly's full. How are you?"

Cosette makes a face and a frustrated gesture. "My leg started hurting again," she says, and she shouldn't sound so petulant, she knows. But she's so tired of being in pain, and so weary of being afraid of it.

Éponine leans in and presses a kiss to her temple. "Let me distract you?"

Cosette flushes, heat washing across her face. She thinks of that morning and the kisses they traded, thinks of how close they're both pressing into one another and the lingering warmth Éponine's lips against her skin just now, thinks, Fantine is right there, hearing everything we say, and she's my mother, and still can't quite manage to summon a protest. But Éponine just hands their plates and cutlery off to Valjean and then moves Cosette about the bed until Éponine can wrap her in her arms, letting her lean back against her chest so that Cosette feels cradled, and she starts telling her, soft and low, about everything of little consequence that she saw while out in the forest.

She tells her about a fox kit that crossed her path, and how its ears were bigger than the whole rest of its head combined. She tells her about a patch of blackberry brambles she nearly fell into when a root caught her foot, tells it with laughter lurking in her voice like she's inviting Cosette to make light of her clumsiness, but Cosette can only think of how Éponine might have easily broken her foot or her leg and none of them would have known where to find her or why she never came back, and though she doesn't make a sound, Éponine tightens her arms around her like she knows and moves quickly on.

There are stories that make her laugh. She tells her about Chou chasing a rabbit into its den and coming up with a mouthful of mud and his muzzle gone black with it, and looking offended by both, and Cosette laughs so hard that Fantine and Valjean both look over at them from the conversation they've been having, curious. Cosette makes Éponine tell it again so that they can hear, and then all four of them are laughing, until the cottage seems warm and filled with it and Cosette can almost forget that there's still someone out in the world who wants her dead.

Later, when Fantine has urged Valjean to accompany her down to the stream to fetch some water for tomorrow's breakfast, though it's gone dark out and the chore could, by rights, wait until morning when they'll be able to see where they're putting their feet, Éponine gives the door a long look after they've gone and hums a thoughtful sound. Before Cosette can ask why, though, Éponine presses another kiss to her temple and lingers there, her lips curving with a grin against her skin. "That's not the distraction you wanted from me earlier, was it?"

Cosette's breath hiccups, just a little, just once before she smooths it out again. "It's not what I thought you meant," she admits, heat burning across her face once more. "But it was perfect. Thank you."

Éponine hums again, mostly pleased this time but still a little thoughtful, and lifts one hand to her cheek, turning her face toward her with the gentle pressure of her fingertips. Her gaze roams over her face for a moment, her brows drawn like she's concentrating, and Cosette doesn't know what she reads there but after a moment she leans in and kisses her, and Cosette's breath hitches again, and this time there's no steadying it.

Cosette shivers within the circle of Éponine's arms, though she's warm, not cold. Éponine's lips are soft on hers, gently coaxing, like maybe she thinks Cosette needs to be soothed. But Cosette tightens her hands on her shoulders and Éponine smiles a little against her mouth and slips her hand around to fit the curve of the back of her neck, and catches the edge of her lip with just a hint of teeth. Her smile spreads when Cosette shivers hard, and leans in hard, and wraps her arms around her neck to hold her close.

Cosette doesn't remember moving, or being moved, only realizes they have because she draws back to gulp air into her lungs and realizes they're lying down now instead of sitting, pressed close and with their legs intertwined, Éponine's hair like an ink stain spread across the pillow.

Éponine brushes the backs of her fingers against Cosette's cheek. She looks mostly warm and wanting, but there's a hint of concern in the set of her brows, the line of her mouth. Cosette wants to laugh at it, wildly. She wants to dust her face with kisses until the worry vanishes. How could she think Cosette meant to do anything but to catch her breath?

She bears Éponine down onto her back and curves over her, kissing and kissing her. She kisses her until Éponine sighs against her mouth, until she pushes her fingers into Cosette's hair and scratches her nails against her scalp, until she makes a happy, humming noise into the kiss and her lips curve. And then Cosette draws back and looks down at her in the light of the hearthfire, to see if her smile has brightened, if it's happy and uncomplicated yet.

She looks happy, anyway. Cosette supposes there's too much that's complicated around them for either of them not to be. But this was meant to be a distraction from all that, and she can at least make sure that it is for both of them, instead of Cosette alone.

She spreads a hand across Éponine's shoulder and leans a bit of her weight onto it, just enough to keep her there, and then she cups Éponine's face in her other hand and leans down and kisses away the noise that she makes at that, soft and humming and glad, kisses her until every inch of Cosette's skin feels as warm as though she sat directly in front of the fire for too long, kisses her until neither of them can remember anything beyond the bounds of their own skin, and each other's.

*

There is, of course, only so long that they can keep the rest of the world at bay for one another. But Cosette wakes feeling safe and warm, with Éponine's arms wrapped around her still, and Cosette can't remember falling asleep, only remembers trading long, lazy, drugging kisses until neither of them were breathing steadily and the night seemed endless around them.

Éponine groans when she wakes, like it's a torment to face the prospect of having to leave the bed. But once her eyes are open, she only looks at Cosette with something in them like regret for a moment, and draws her in and kisses her firmly, and then rises and starts dressing and pulling on her boots before anyone's even made breakfast.

She reels Cosette in for one last kiss before she leaves, bending over the bed and pressing her lips hard to Cosette's, like it means something. And then she turns away before Cosette can get more than a glimpse of the reluctance in her eyes hardening with resolve, and calls Chou to her, and slips out of the cottage into the cool blue dawn before anyone else in the house is even up.

Cosette stretches beneath the blankets, where the warmth of Éponine's body next to hers is still lingering, and tests her leg carefully, twisting it one way and then the other, as much as she can within Valjean's remade cast. When there's no discomfort beyond that of a good, needed stretch, no pain or queasy precursor to it, she decides that if Éponine can do something unwanted and unpleasant but necessary, then Cosette can do no less, and she rises with the help of her crutch and resolutely makes her way to the hearth to stoke up the fire and get porridge started, before either Fantine or Valjean can wake and tell her she doesn't need to, and shoo her off back to bed.

For a few days, she limits herself to tasks around the house, to cooking and cleaning and helping Fantine and Valjean wherever she sees the opportunity. And when her leg seems able to hold up to that, and it doesn't make the pain return, she rises one morning not long after Éponine's left, and pulls on a boot and wraps a shawl around her shoulders, and doesn't acknowledge the worried looks Fantine gives her from the table as she takes up her crutch and slings the gathering basket over her shoulder, and makes her way out of the cottage and into the thin undergrowth around the cottage.

She finds a few clusters of mushrooms growing there, though Valjean's gone out a few times and come back with mushrooms for them to add to their supper. She kneels carefully and checks for the signs Éponine taught her, then fills her basket with all she can find, and when the mushrooms have all been gathered and her basket isn't yet full but her courage falters at the idea of venturing any deeper into the forest proper, she gathers sticks and bits of fallen pine needles and thin, dead branches that they can use for kindling.

She feels like she doesn't breathe at all until she's back in the cottage, the door swung shut behind her and nothing bad has happened at all, except that one of the broken sticks she put her in basket gave her a splinter in her palm that aches a little, until she unloads her basket onto the table and sits in the chair there and spends a moment working it free.

The cottage is still, Valjean and Fantine gone to see to the work for the day, not even Chou there to keep her company, so she sits in the quiet at the table and carefully cuts the mushrooms into slices and lays them out in the sun to dry the way Fantine showed her.

It's a warm day out, the sky bright and clear overhead, and the mushrooms are dry enough to store well before Fantine or Valjean return, so Cosette brings them back inside, wraps them in a clean cloth and tucks them in a basket, and leaves the basket on a shelf high enough that Chou won't be able to get into it.

It's not much, as help around the house goes, but there's satisfaction to be had in starting something and seeing it through to completion in the course of a day, so the next morning when the house is empty she does the same thing, and day by day, her little basket slowly fills. And day by day, her leg is stronger and she's able to do more, and the time grows nearer when she'll be fit to travel, and they can leave all this behind them. Cosette begins to hold a close, secret hope in her heart that maybe she'll be strong enough soon enough, maybe they'll be able to leave together and anyone who comes searching for her will only find the little cottage, left behind and empty.

Éponine comes back from the woods one evening and her mouth is tight, her eyes somber, and she doesn't have to say anything. Cosette looks at her face when she welcomes her home and feels that hope that she's held close go slipping through her fingers like silk ribbon. "Tell me," she says quietly, and urges Éponine inside and into one of the chairs.

"There's signs of someone in the woods," Éponine says, grim, and catches Cosette's hand to pull her down into the other chair, beside hers at the table. She draws a deep breath. "It could just be a hunter. An ordinary hunter, not one of the royal family's."

It could, but the way Éponine says it -- desperate, like she's trying to convince herself as much as Cosette -- makes Cosette certain that it's not. Still, she says, "It could be," and grips Éponine's hand tight on the table. "You'll go back out tomorrow, to see where they're headed?"

"The moment there's enough light to see by," Éponine promises.

"And we'll go to town," Fantine says from where she's standing with Valjean, gripping his hand so hard her fingers have gone white where they're wrapped around his. "We'll rent a cart, and a spare horse. I can ride the horse back here, while Jean brings the cart. It'll be faster, and we can ride out to meet him on the road."

No one asks if her leg will be able to tolerate the ride, or the cart. They all know, the same as she does, that it's no longer an option. She'll ride the horse, and she'll sit in the cart, and if it hurts her leg then her leg will hurt. She's just going to have to bear it.

She nods, because what else is there to do? And she coaxes Éponine to bed earlier than she ordinarily would, because she wants to not have to think about the days to come for a few hours, and because Éponine's going to need her sleep for the early morning she has facing her, and Fantine and Valjean, too. And when they're both in the bed, Cosette curls around her and holds her hard, and Éponine doesn't say anything but her arms are wrapped just as tightly around Cosette.

Cosette shuts her eyes and tries to let the warmth and strength of Éponine around her soothe her. She listens to the rhythm of Éponine's breathing and waits for it to even out, waits for her to fall asleep so that Cosette can follow after her, but when oblivion finally claims Cosette and drags her under, Éponine's breath is still ragged and unsteady against the side of her throat and her arms are still cinched tight, as though she could keep the world from Cosette if she just holds her close enough.

*

"They're smart," Éponine says grimly when she returns the next evening. "Whoever it is she's sent, they know how to cover their tracks. I've got my work cut out for me just trying not to lose the trail."

Cosette watches Éponine for a moment, thinking about how the day before, Éponine had hedged about who might have found their way into their woods, had said that it might be an ordinary hunter. And now she's not, now she's speaking like it's certain that whoever's come, they've come at the princess's behest. Cosette swallows, her throat suddenly dry. "They're coming nearer, then?" she asks quietly.

Éponine's mouth goes flat with unhappiness. "They are," she says, like she thinks the admission is the part that's going to upset Cosette. Like Cosette hasn't already figured that much out on her own.

Cosette draws a deep breath, then nods once. She gestures to the rabbits still hanging from Éponine's hands, forgotten. "You went hunting?"

Éponine looks down at them with a startle and a grimace, like she really had forgotten about them. "I didn't mean to. Chou chased them down. He's forgotten all his training since we left the palace kennels behind, he didn't listen to me at all when I tried to call him back."

"He's a good boy, then." Cosette drops a hand down, knowing that Chou will flop down beside her chair and lean his head into it the moment she does. She scratches behind his ears and smiles a little as he wriggles closer to her. "He found us supper. It won't do any good to try to keep the princess from killing me, only to starve the both of us in the process. If you fetch the knife," she says, "I'll make us a soup, and we'll have enough supper for tomorrow as well."

Éponine does as she asks, bringing the knife over to the table, and the little basket of gathered vegetables that they hadn't eaten yet, and lays a hand on her shoulder for a moment before she gives it a squeeze, and drops it away. "I'll go clean these outside," she says, and Cosette nods and starts cutting up carrots.

By the time Éponine returns, Cosette's cut up all their vegetables and made a little mound of them in the pot. Éponine lays the rabbits in on top, then helps Cosette lift the water bucket and pour enough into the pot to cover it all. Then she motions Cosette back to her chair and carries it herself to hang over the fire and begin to cook.

"I don't know how you meant to carry that heavy pot and use your crutch," she says with a smile, when she turns back and sees Cosette's expression. "I'm sure you had a very clever plan. But this way we didn't risk our supper ending up all over the floor, or you on the floor." She pulls the other chair around the table so that, when she sits in it, she's close at Cosette's side, and leans in to press a kiss to her temple. "Should I make some tea, too, so long as we've got the fire going?"

Cosette nods, but leans in against Éponine's side when she moves to stand up again. "In a minute," she says, and shuts her eyes when Éponine settles back down and wraps an arm around her back, holding her there against her.

Neither of them move again until the pot on the fire starts bubbling, and the soup needs stirring.

*

Cosette knows what must be done.

She kisses Éponine good-bye when she leaves in the morning, and her hands grip too tight when she does so, but Éponine just draws back and looks at her, one hand lifting to cup her cheek. "I'd stay if I could," she says, and sounds truly regretful. "You shouldn't be alone."

"Of course you can't." Cosette rises onto her toes to kiss her again and tries to gentle her touch, so it won't alarm her. "Just come home safe."

Éponine goes, and Chou goes with her, though he whines like he objects to being made to choose between the two of them. Cosette stands in the doorway, fingers wrapped tight around the jamb, and watches them go until the forest has swallowed them up, and she can't hear the quiet commands Éponine gives to Chou over the sigh of the wind through the trees and the musical chirping of the birds of the forest.

And then she goes back inside and latches the door, and sits at the table, and tries to pretend she doesn't notice the way her hands tremble as she fetches the basket of mushrooms she'd been so careful to gather and preserve, and begins to cut the dried-out slices into pieces small enough to eat. It gives her something to do with her hands through the morning, at least, even if they don't ever really stop shaking.

When she's emptied her basket and made a nice little mound of mushroom pieces on the table, she scoops them all up and carries them carefully to the fire to add to the simmering soup, stirs them in and covers it up again and then moves to the bed with one of Éponine's shirts, which got caught on a branch out in the woods and needs mending.

She doesn't startle when, a few hours on, towards early afternoon, there's a knock at the cottage door. She sets aside the sock she was darning onto the small pile of clothes she'd mended during the course of the day, and grabs her crutch and holds it in a tight grip to steady her hands, and makes her way over to the door to answer it.

She's not even surprised, not really, when she swings the door open and the princess herself is standing on their front step, though she certainly seems surprised to find Cosette there before her. Her face washes with it, and rage right after, though that's quickly swept away beneath the mask of smooth pleasantness that Cosette knows too well from life in the palace. "Cosette." Her smile is sweet and broad and entirely false. "What a surprise."

"You have traveled a very long way. You must be weary." Cosette moves back, out of the doorway, and gestures within. "Do come in and rest a while."

Surprise again, and then wariness, and then the mask and that smile, full of sugar and poison. "You are too kind." She steps through, into the cottage, and swings the door shut quite deliberately behind her. "You must be wondering why I've called upon you like this."

Called upon, as though they were still at court. As though this were a social visit, and she hadn't come here to cut Cosette's heart from her chest. If they were at the palace still, and if Cosette were a part of the court instead of just a bastard daughter who was expected to keep herself out of the way as much as possible, Cosette would be expected to demur, even if it weren't the truth. She would say, No, I can't imagine what would bring such honor to my door.

Cosette limps with her crutch over to the table, and the chair that's closer to the hearth, and lowers herself down into it. "I know why you're here," she says.

For a moment, all the princess can do is blink at her. Her hand twitches at her side, toward the sheath hanging from her belt, and the dagger tucked into it. It looks fine and ornately carved, and Cosette has no doubt that it is far from ornamental.

"You are wondering what's happened to your huntsman, of course."

Some of the tension leaves her, at that, but only a fraction. Still, she drops her hand away from the dagger and moves toward the table. "Yes. He writes me regularly when he is away from the palace, but his latest letter never came. It's quite unlike him, and I'm terribly concerned."

Cosette nods and rises from her chair, moving over to the hearth to ladle soup into a bowl. The princess is still standing beside the table when Cosette turns back, and Cosette gives her a startled look. She puts the bowl on the table before her chair, freeing her hand so she can gesture to the other with it. "Please, sit. Would you care for some soup? If you traveled through luncheon, you must be famished."

The princess sits, and doesn't answer. Cosette turns back to the fire and serves up a second bowl, and carries it carefully over to set it before the princess, and lays a set of silverware beside it. She lowers herself back into her chair and blows on her soup to cool it before she takes her first bite. The princess watches her closely, eyes narrowed in consideration, and lifts her spoon from the table. "You're right to be concerned. These woods are very treacherous, and I'm afraid he did not survive. He's buried somewhere near here, if the animals haven't dug him up."

The princess freezes, staring at Cosette across the table. "You killed him?" She sounds doubtful.

"He had a knife at my throat," Cosette says, like that explains everything. It does.

The princess settles back in her chair, looking at Cosette anew. Her mask has slipped and she hasn't bothered to replace it, and now her face is cold and hard and calculating. "You do know why I've come, then."

"Of course I do," Cosette says gently. "I'm not a fool." She takes another bite of soup, then gestures to the princess's bowl. "Eat, please. I'm sure it's nothing to compare to what you're used to from the palace chefs, but it'll be better while it's hot."

The princess's fingers go tight around the spoon. She stares at Cosette without moving. "You invite me into your home, you offer me a meal, and you know-- Why?"

Cosette sighs a little and sets her spoon down. She gestures to her crutch where it leans against the edge of the table, to her leg. "It's not as though I have any hope of outrunning you. I tried when your huntsman came, and I nearly died on my back in the mud. This time, if it's all the same to you, I'd rather keep my dignity." She lifts a brow and gives the princess a pointed look across the table. "One might expect a hunter to be coarse and unrefined, after all, but we are peers of the realm, are we not? We can do this civilly, without forgetting our manners."

The princess smiles, and for the first time it's genuine. She smiles like a cat with a mouse caught between its paws, sure in the knowledge that she can take her time toying with it. "Of course. We are both princesses. It wouldn't do to forget that." She blows delicately on a spoonful of soup before eating it, with the precise sort of courtly etiquette as if she were eating from fine china in the king's dining chamber, instead of from rough earthenware in a cottage in the woods. She frowns a little at the bowl set in front of her and hums thoughtfully. "Rustic," she declares after a moment. "But hunger makes for a fine seasoning, and you're not wrong about traveling through my luncheon. I suppose it's the best one can expect from something cooked over a fire in the woods."

Cosette inclines her head, as gracious a nod as she can manage. "I have a boon to ask of you, if I may," she says when the meal has progressed in silence a few moments more.

The princess lifts an eyebrow at her, arch. "You may ask," she says like a queen bestowing a favor on a peasant. She doesn't say, but I make no promises I'll grant it, but she doesn't have to. Cosette grew up in the court, after all.

"Will you see it done swiftly? I would prefer not to suffer."

The princess's haughty look turns to a smirk. She has all the power in this negotiation, and she knows it. If she wished to make Cosette's death a lingering one, what could Cosette do to stop her? "I have no wish to torment you," she says at length, after a pause long enough to make Cosette sweat, waiting for it. "Only to secure my future, and that of the children I mean to bear. I'll make it as quick as I can."

Cosette can't quite manage to form words past the thickness in her throat, so she only nods, and tries to remember to breathe.

When she fumbles her spoon a few moments later, making a clatter and a mess across the table, the princess looks up at her sharply, scowling as though she's annoyed that Cosette has ruined the facade of manners that they've laid over this meal by doing something so uncouth as dropping a utensil. Cosette tries to pick it up, but her hands are shaking too hard to keep under control now, and her fingertips feel numb and clumsy with it.

The princess's scowl deepens as she watches Cosette struggle. "What's wrong with you?" she demands. "I told you I'd be kind about it. You can't be afraid now."

Cosette shakes her head and spreads her hands across the surface of the table to brace herself. She has to focus hard to breathe, and harder to speak. "I'm not afraid to die." Her voice doesn't sound quite right, and she's not sure if the problem is with her tongue or her ears.

The princess's eyes go round with realization. "No," she says, and she sounds wrong now, too. She frowns like she hears it as well, and then her face transforms with a snarl of pure rage. She pulls the dagger from her belt and rises, moving toward Cosette like she means to use the blade to finish what Cosette's started.

She only manages a single step before she has to stop and catch herself with one hand on the back of her chair. She stares at Cosette and her face is pale now, disbelieving. "No," she says again. "You ate the soup too."

Cosette's throat is too tight now to manage more than the thinnest, wheezing breaths. All she can do is nod.

"Why?" The princess's voice is thick now, ungraceful, all her courtly mannerisms gone as the poison takes hold. Her face is still pale, bloodless, and her chest heaves as she struggles to breathe. "What's the point of killing me if you've just gone and killed yourself to do it?"

Cosette would answer her, but her throat is shut tight now, her head swimming with it as the numbness spreads through her body. The princess staggers another step toward her, leaning heavily against the table, and Cosette tries to pull away from her and the dagger she's still holding clenched in her fist.

She's too far gone now, and clumsy with it. She feels the chair tilt beneath her weight, feels it slip past the balancing point and over, taking her with it. Everything seems to move slowly, but her thoughts are even slower still. She can't make herself grab for the table, can't throw an arm out to catch herself as she falls.

She feels the brief, lurching sense of weightlessness, and sees the cottage floor rushing toward her.

She never feels the impact.

*

She's aware of sounds, distant and indistinct, but the harder she tries to fight her way towards them, the more the darkness clings around her, thick and suffocating. It wraps around her and pulls her down, drowns her until it's easier to give into it than to keep fighting, and everything goes black and still once again.

The next thing she knows is a break in the darkness, darker greys working through the formless black around her. This time she waits for it, lets it come to her instead of fighting toward it.

Slowly, slowly, shapes resolve themselves from the darkness, and then movement, so swift it seems dizzying while her mind is still swimming through honey, each thought slow and sluggish.

There's pain, a low, building throb of it that she clings to. And eventually she realizes that the shapes around her haven't changed, but suddenly they make sense where before they had been only meaningless patterns of color and texture and motion.

The thatched roof of the cottage is above her, light and shadow leaping across it in a dance that's mesmerizing, that seems fascinating and intricate, until she realizes it must be because of the flickering light of flames cast upon them, either from the hearth or perhaps candles set about the room. It's night, she realizes, and somehow that thought feels like a victory, another step out of the darkness that even now wants to lure her back into its embrace with the promise of oblivion.

She manages to move, just a little, just the slightest roll of her head so that she can see the cottage, the hearth and the table where Fantine is sitting with her back bowed and her face in her palms, where Valjean has reached a hand to rest between her shoulders. And closer, there's Éponine, Éponine who must be sitting on the floor beside the bed because she has her head on it, her face tucked into the shelter of her arms so all Cosette can really see of her is her hair spreading like spilled ink across the bedclothes and one arm stretched out from beneath it, her fingers twisted through someone else's, dark skin against pale.

Cosette realizes, too slow, that it's her hand, her fingers. She can't feel it but Éponine is there, Éponine is holding her hand and hiding her face in her arms and Cosette wants to reach for her but when she tries to lift a hand, it feels as pointless as throwing her weight against the side of a mountain and expecting it to move.

She tries to speak instead, tries to say Éponine's name, tries to say I'm sorry because she knows she's the reason everyone's hiding their faces and looking bowed over with grief. She only manages a thin, ragged sound, but it makes Éponine jerk her head up from the bed.

She looks dreadful, her face haggard, her eyes red and puffy. She stares at Cosette, mouth agape, hope and fear warring in her eyes. "Cosette?" she says, scarcely a breath, half-disbelieving. Her hand tightens on Cosette's, tightens to the point where Cosette can feel the pain of it, where she couldn't feel her touch, and it makes Cosette want to weep with joy to have even that.

Cosette tries again to speak, but her tongue is thick and heavy still, and she can only make another horrible, meaningless noise. Still, it's enough to make Éponine press a hand to her mouth and give a desperate sob, to make her eyes shine as tears well up and then overflow, dripping down her cheeks.

"You idiot," she breathes, and then all but hurls herself onto and half-across the bed. "You stupid, stupid— What were you thinking?" Éponine's hands cup her face, and they're trembling. She bows overs Cosette and kisses her cheeks, her eyes, her brow, holds her like she's never going to let go and kisses her like she never means to stop.

Cosette can feel it. It doesn't hurt, and she can feel it, and that and Éponine's franticness make her cry now where she was dry-eyed and calm before, now when it's pointless, now when it's all done and she's somehow inexplicably still alive.

She has to try several times before she can make her voice do anything but croak. Even then, she sounds like she's half dead, like a wraith come back from the brink to speak once more to the living. "I had to stop her," she says. Even that takes an enormous effort, but it's worth it for the way it makes Fantine's breath hiccup and makes Éponine press her face to Cosette's throat and breathe raggedly there for a moment.

It's only a moment, though, then Éponine lifts her head and frowns fiercely down at Cosette through her tears. "What's the use of stopping her if you kill yourself all the same in doing so? You were supposed to stay safe."

Cosette would laugh, but when she tries it she only makes a hoarse, coughing sound that makes Éponine pull back and look at her in alarm, so she stops and shakes her head instead, wets her lips and gathers her strength to answer her. "She would have killed the rest of you, too. She wouldn't want to leave anyone who could say what she'd done. You were going to come home, and I had to make sure she didn't hurt you."

"By poisoning yourself." Éponine sits back and presses the heels of her hands against her eyes. Cosette wants to reach for her, and manages to lift her hand a few inches from the bed before it starts trembling too violently and she has to drop it back onto the blankets. "The cost is too high."

"It was mine to pay."

Éponine lowers her hands and gives Cosette a level look. Her face is still blotchy from crying, her eyes puffy with it. "Not only you," she says, and Cosette drops her gaze. "I had to come home. I had to find you like that, and I--" She breaks off, breathing raggedly.

"I'm sorry," Cosette says, very softly.

Fantine rises from the table and comes over to sit on the edge of the bed. She strokes her fingers through the hair at Cosette's brow, over and over again, her touch as gentle as a whisper. "You're alive," she says quietly, and then repeats it, like a mantra, like she needs reminding that it's true. "You're alive. That's what matters."

Cosette turns her face toward her touch, pressing into it. "Help me sit up?" she asks.

Fantine shakes her head at the same time that Éponine makes a protesting sound. "Not yet," Fantine says, and just continues stroking her hair tenderly. "You should save your strength. Rest a while longer, and when you wake then we'll see."

Cosette doesn't want to sleep, doesn't want to sink back into that darkness that she didn't think she'd escape from. But just waking, just speaking this much and holding on to Éponine's hand, has left her weary to her bones. She tries to keep her eyes open as the conversation moves on, but she doesn't last long before she slips under again into a dark and dreamless sleep.

*

The next time she wakes, it's easier. She doesn't have to fight her way towards it, and she can feel the cool prickle of air against her cheeks, the weight and texture of the blankets against her shoulder and beneath her fingers. She lays there a moment and tests her body, curls her hands and then opens them again, stretches her legs and curls her toes. She still feels weak, every movement making her tremble with exhaustion. But she feels, and she can move, she can roll over from her side onto her stomach, closer to the edge of the bed, and reach one hand down until she feels cloth, and warmth, and a gentle rise-and-fall of breathing that's rhythm shifts at her touch.

"Why are you on the floor again?" she asks in a whisper, soft in the darkness.

Éponine stirs, her blankets rustling. Her hand slips into Cosette's, easily, like it belongs there. "You needed your rest. Need your rest. I'd have disturbed you."

"Don't be ridiculous." Cosette tightens her fingers around Éponine's. "Come up here, please?"

Éponine doesn't protest. She moves as soon as Cosette speaks, rising and laying her blanket over Cosette before she climbs over her into the bed, carefully, so carefully, and then slides beneath their combined blankets and eases herself in behind Cosette until she's pressed to her back and her breath is soft and warm against Cosette's nape. "How do you feel?"

"Better." Cosette reaches behind her, catches Éponine's arm and pulls it around her until she gets the idea and clasps her tight. "Still weak." She thinks about saying, But I can feel again. But I can move, but thinks it would only distress Éponine to know that she hadn't been able to before.

Éponine presses her face to Cosette's shoulder, so she can feel it when she nods. "You'll get better," she says, and she sounds sure and firm, like she'll allow nothing less. "Your strength will return."

Cosette slips her fingers through Éponine's, where she has them spread across Cosette's stomach, and sweeps her thumb back and forth along Éponine's. "What are we going to do?" she asks very softly into the night.

Éponine's hand presses a little tighter, pulling her a little closer. "You're going to rest," she says, and that's firm too, non-negotiable. "You're going to heal and recover. And when you're strong enough to look beyond that-- Then, it's up to you."

It knocks the air from her lungs a little, thinking of that, thinking of having a choice when she's never felt like she had one in anything, all her life.

"You could go back to the city," Éponine says, offered quietly, like a gift held on outstretched hands. "To the palace. You're your father's only heir now."

Cosette recoils from the thought, pulling away from Éponine, who makes a low sound of protest and draws her back in, urges her back down.

"You'd make a wonderful queen," she says. "You'd be kind and just, and everything your people need. I would take a knee for you, and swear my oath."

"No," Cosette says reflexively, shuddering at the thought. "No, I don't want that." Not the responsibility of a kingdom on her shoulders, not the wealth or the power or the danger of ruling. Not Éponine on a knee before her, bowing before her, treating her with deference instead of this easy warmth. She doesn't want that, not any of it.

Éponine hums a little, easily accepting, and draws her back into her arms. Her chin hooks over Cosette's shoulder and her breath ruffles through the hair at her cheek. "There's a whole world of choices open to you, then."

Cosette closes her eyes and thinks of it, of a whole world spread out before her, a hundred different places she could go, none of them this terrible, wretched kingdom. "Yes," she says at once, decisive. "I want to leave. I want to go... anywhere else."

Éponine presses a kiss to the side of her neck. Her lips curve there against her skin. "Then that's what you're going to do."

You she says, not we, and Cosette frowns and turns within the circle of her arms, facing her. She reaches a hand up until she finds Éponine's face and traces her fingers along the edges of it. "What about you? You could go back. They'll be in need of a huntsman. You could advance, you could--"

"No," Éponine says, sharp. "Don't be ridiculous. I won't serve the palace, not if you're not--" She leans in, presses her brow to Cosette's, the tips of their noses touching. One hand curves gently around the back of her neck. "I'm going where you go, of course."

Cosette is more grateful and more relieved than she has words to express. "Then that's what we'll do," she says, decisive. "We'll go somewhere else. We'll travel until we find someplace better. Someplace we can be... free. Of all of this."

Éponine's voice warms like she's smiling, like she's smiling broadly. "Yes." The hand on Cosette's neck slips around, Éponine's thumb brushing across her cheekbone. "We'll do all those things. But first you'll rest, and heal."

Cosette nods, relenting. She reaches up to take Éponine's hand, and clasps it between both of hers. "Stay with me?"

Éponine's breath shudders, just a little. She curls her fingers through Cosette's, twines her legs through hers, leans in so she can press a soft kiss to her mouth.

"Yes," she says. "I'll stay."

And Cosette nods, and shuts her eyes, and sleeps once more.