Work Text:
“Do you remember when we were really young and we thought that putting spiders in your mother’s underwear was a good idea?” Cosette asks.
“I remember the whipping you got, if that’s what you mean,” Eponine replies. Her dark head rests comfortably on Cosette’s midriff. It should be comforting weight, but since neither Eponine nor Cosette have any weight any more, it simply tickles slightly. Cosette cards her fingers through the rich brown of her hair, which contrasts sharply with the blonde’s stained white dress.
“I’m plotting something similar for the homeless idiot who thinks that urinating on that War Memorial is acceptable. All I have to do is work out how I can bend the insect world to my will and I’ll have them stalking him for the rest of his life.”
“And here was me thinking you were the nice one in the relationship. Ain’t it supposed to be me with the nasty schemes?”
Cosette snorts. “Being dead is enough to test anyone’s patience.”
“I think being dead and hanging around in a cemetery will do that as well. It’s so cliché, it’s would almost be funny if it wasn’t so damn boring.”
Cosette sighs. “True. Learning how to control insects would at least be something to do.”
This was never her plan. Her plan was to grow old gracefully (or otherwise) with Marius and at least four grandchildren to spoil in the way her Papa had spoiled her. Three years after the barricades fell, two years after here Papa had succumbed to his final illness, Cosette had been helping up a small child who had fallen and grazed her knee when someone had pushed her – whether accidently or on purpose was a mystery never to be solved – beneath a carriage.
All they could say afterwards was ‘at least it was quick.’
It hadn’t felt quick, just incredibly disorientating. Even more so to watch herself lying in the muck of the Parisian street.
Thank God (if he existed, which Cosette was starting to doubt) for running into Eponine, who had three years experience being dead. Dying had softened her a little. A little under two hundred years had done the rest.
True, she still missed Marius. But Marius wasn’t here. He was buried beside her, though she had never seen his spirit, nor her Papa’s.
And now here she is. Lying on her back, in a cemetery, watching the fluffy clouds sail lazily through the blue sky, invisible to the world at large...though never completely alone.
Eponine sits up. She’s still dressed in the tatty boy’s clothes she’d died in. “Whatcha thinking about?”
Cosette smiles fondly up at her. “Nothing much. Just how I’m so bored, and so lucky to have you here. I never expected this.”
Eponine smiles in return, and leans down to press her lips gently to Cosette’s. There isn’t a lot of sensation, just the same light tickling that is Cosette’s comfort on this new plane of being. “I did.”
Cosette wants to snort derisively, but she’s so content can’t be bothered. She just kisses her again.