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Sleep is not an easy thing, for any of them. In any configuration, sleep is hard, and though alone is worst for all of them, sleeping with another person often isn’t all that better. When it’s just two of them, they always feel the absence of their third as a palpable thing in the bed with them. When it’s all of three of them, things become fairly awkward fairly quickly, the post-coitus sleeping arrangements a bit hard to wrangle when one of them has a set of shoulders the width of two Fantines, and the other man in the bed is more of a tree than a human being when it comes to height. Valjean’s got the strength of ten men and the chest width of three, and while Javert’s leaner, he’s also taller, counting in at six feet, three inches. Valjean isn’t much better, though he's still significantly shorter than Javert.
As a woman of five-foot-five, Fantine does not appreciate the difference in height for many reasons, but the biggest one is how damned awkward it can make things. With a foot of height between them, Fantine is regularly stuck looking up at Javert in most situations, a problem not really solved with the addition of sex. Most of the time Fantine doesn’t mind, especially not when Javert uses his height to manhandle her when Valjean tends to shy away from really laying a hand on anyone in this capacity, but still, the problem lingers when afterwards the men are simply too big for Fantine to really throw her arms around. Which is fine, all told, probably. They’ve all got their ticks, and Fantine often finds herself sandwiched between Valjean and Javert out of necessity, if only because Javert is something of an octopus and Valjean still panics sometimes if he’s disoriented and finds Javert touching him without his explicit and enthusiastic consent.
The first time Valjean woke up to Javert on top of him, he gave the man a black eye. Javert had cursed, and Valjean had apologized profusely, which in turn caused Javert to grow cross before tripping over his own tongue in his haste to find his own way to apologize in his own abrasive, highly self-flagellating manner. The cycle had fed into itself until both of the men had worked themselves into a fine sulk of self-loathing and doubt, and though eventually they had worked it out between the two of them just how stupid they were being, Fantine still privately considers it a miracle that they’re still sleeping together at all.
While the heat, too, of three bodies in one bed can be oppressive (it’s not like Fantine has the money to afford a landlord willing to spring for central air) the three of them have simply learned to do without blankets. And in the winter when the same problem arises but in reverse, they simply return the blankets to the bed, and share warmth between them. It’s not that bad of an arrangement, least of all for Fantine. When she has them, she has two strapping older men sharing her bed and fucking her senseless. In the mornings, they stick around to give Fantine baleful, disapproving looks when her coffee is more Irish than not, and try to glare her broken toaster oven into submission. Then, more often than not, they’re off again, out to go hunt the things that go bump in the night, all to the tune of songs Fantine hasn’t heard since she was a teenager.
But (and this is a small but except for how it isn’t) sometimes things aren’t so good, or comfortable, or easy.
All three of them are plagued by nightmares. It comes with the territory, and just because they’re not all as physically scarred as Valjean is doesn’t mean that Fantine and Javert don’t carry old wounds of their own. Javert, for example, dreams primarily in a language that Fantine does not understand, and despite of her dabbling in languages, has no wish to learn if it would mean intruding on the mumbled terrors of Javert’s childhood. The closest that Fantine is willing to go to that maze of thorns is from the other end of a metaphorical weedwhacker. She has no particular desire to understand Javert’s nightly terrors. Fantine thinks that Javert at least deserves the privacy of his own demons, the same as everyone else. As long as the same courtesy is afforded to her, Fantine sees no need to go poking around in Javert’s subconscious. He has dealt with his trauma for decades, just the same as the rest of them; with liberal applications of repression, denial, and carefully administered, therapeutic and gratuitous violence.
Fantine thinks that the arrangement works, more or less. None of them are the type to pry, outside Javert, who views prying as a professional undertaking, but still understands to keep that particular sort of work as far away from the bedroom as possible, even and especially after sex. Valjean especially enjoys his privacy, to the point where Fantine is nearly positive that the man would break out into hives and jump out the nearest window if she were ever to ask him some truly pointed questions about his family, or who he was before he met Javert. Which, of course, is only fair. By unspoken agreement, none of them existed before they met one another. Their youths, especially, are strictly off limits.
But that doesn’t stop those pasts from leaking over into the present, dripping in through the cracks in the walls they have built within their minds. They’ve all got skeletons to rattle in their closets, and some nights the bones shake a bit louder than others. The noise of it keeps them awake, someone shuddering in the bed loud enough to creak the boxsprings with the fine tremors that come from muscles wound too tight. Fantine struggles to wakefulness at an hour her internal clock tells her is somewhere in the neighborhood between still dark o’clock and no, fuck, no, stop that.
“Somebody is thinking too loud, and I am going to kick you in the chest if you don’t stop that right now,” Fantine declares firmly, eyes screwed shut and turned up towards the ceiling.
Next to her, Javert goes stiff, the boxsprings stilling suddenly, and Fantine sighs, inwardly, because of course it’s him.
“I am sorry,” Javert starts, and Fantine sighs, outwardly, because of course he is.
“No you’re not,” Fantine says, rolling over to plant her cheek on the Javert’s gray-haired chest.
“No I’m not,” Javert agrees, throwing an arm around her back, and they’re both lying, but so what? Lies between the three of them are commonplace, habitual. They speak lies more fluently than they speak French most days, and that’s not Valjean’s fault alone, conman that he is. No, Fantine and Javert, for all their shared tendency towards honesty, are veteran liars themselves. They have to be, with the scars they carry, the jobs they do. Theirs is not an occupation for the naturally honest. Theirs is not the occupation for those who were meant to be alone. Which, in the end sucks terribly for the both of them, since Fantine has always been a pack creature, and Javert has never been one who sat well with lies. But they make the best of things. They are nothing if not tenacious bastards to the last.
Fantine keeps her eyes shut and reaches an arm across Javert’s chest, the former inspector lifting his arm obligingly enough for Fantine’s purposes. With studied carelessness, Fantine shifts against Javert, tucking her knees up to his side, bracketing his right leg with both of hers, forcing a limb under his, latching an arm across his body. Behind her, Valjean snores like a lawnmower, not to wake up until the morning, or until one of them tries to leave the bed.
Startle easily, does their conman, and Fantine, at least, has learned to accommodate Valjean’s deep paranoia and his nervous, lifesaving twitches in the same way that she tolerates Javert’s intense curiosity and his need to pursue every single avenue of possibility when on a case. It is, in the same way that (Fantine hopes) the two men put up with her own mixed alcohol-and-caffeine habit, and her avoidance of certain topics including but not limited to; babies, children, princesses, her missing teeth, and vampires. The three of them are nothing so much as a tiptoed eggshell waltz conducted on the minefield of their latent issues.
‘Codependence is a good look on us,’ Fantine thinks wryly. She’s not even sure, at this point, if she’s being bitingly sarcastic, or bitterly ironic. She is able to admit to herself, at least, that most likely, it’s both. In either case, it hardly matters. There’s too much truth in the statement, anyway.
“Who’s thinking too loudly, now, hm?” Javert asks her, and Fantine turns her head to bite none-too-gently at his chest.
“Shut up,” Fantine mutters almost primly. “I was musing. There’s a difference.”
“What, between musing and thinking?” Javert prods her, amused and not even trying to hide it, which really only goes to show that this last hunt has ruined them all, turned them into tired husks of themselves if Javert is willing to let himself be openly affectionate, even in the privacy of their own home.
“Between musing and brooding,” Fantine corrects him, snuggling closer as Javert begins to truly octopus around her, his arm pressed along the bow of her spine as he pulls his free hand into Fantine’s short blonde hair. He can never stop playing with it; but she doesn’t blame him. Fantine can never keep her own hands out of Javert’s long locks, either. Long and reaching down to his shoulders with out of its ponytail, Javert’s hair is surprisingly soft, and much too fun to mess with when Fantine has the time and the inclination to do so.
“Is that what you call it then?” Javert rumbles. Fantine can feel the vibrations travel up through his chest, through his ribs to judder in the bones of her inner ear.
“When you do it, certainly,” Fantine retorts, and Javert snorts a small huff of laughter at her somewhat imperious tone.
Javert runs a massive hand through Fantine’s short hair, and she can feel the callouses on his fingers against her scalp. The motion is repetitive, soothing, familiar. Javert’s done this before, when the nightmares are Fantine’s, holding her close to keep the shadows of her past at bay. In Fantine’s case, at least, touch makes for the best sort of anchor, and Javert has always taken pains to keep her grounded in reality. The man is almost, but not quite as much of a loner as Valjean, and that makes the difference, in the end, the understanding that some things should not be faced alone.
In the summer dark of a hot Parisian apartment, Javert runs his fingers through Fantine’s short hair, weaving a tattoo in counterpoint to the relentless trainwreck of Valjean’s snores.
“Go back to sleep,” Javert says after a minute or so. Fantine can feel her eyes growing heavy again, but-
“You first,” she mumbles insistently, the words a bit lost in Javert’s pectorals thanks to the way Fantine has her mouth smushed up against them. In the morning, they’re both going to wake up with Fantine having drooled all over Javert, and she cannot even bring herself to feel mortified about it, which probably speaks volumes of its own as towards her state of exhaustion.
Javert chuckles at her, the sound rich and dark in the warmth of the night, the noise starting in the back of his chest to rumble in his lungs.
“You’re not going to make another minute,” he accuses her with a grin, to which Fantine responds with a slurred protestation into his skin. This time, Javert outright laughs at her, though his hand does not stop petting at her head.
“Go to sleep,” Javert says again, adding, “I will be fine.”
Fantine, god help her, believes him. Or at least, she is too tired to try and determine whether this lie is of the malevolent or benign, rather like a tumor, though the metaphor in its larger scale is escaping her.
Fantine takes the moment to spill one last protestation from her lips before letting her eyes slip closed the rest of the way under the steady onslaught of Javert’s calming touch. Behind her, Valjean is snoring like a chainsaw revving, and under her ear she can hear Javert’s steady breathing. For the moment, at least, they are safe. And sometimes, that is enough.