Éponine Thénardier (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
filleauloup) wrote2013-12-25 01:06 am
filleauloup) wrote2013-12-25 01:06 am
Around the Island, Late Christmas Eve (or Early Christmas Morning)
Fandom reminded Éponine of home a great deal, and that was particularly true late at night when everything out of range of the street lamps was just a jumble of featureless, indistinguishable shapes. That made it easy, on nights like tonight when it was already too easy to fall prey to her own thoughts, to get lost in memories . . . and the inevitable self-recrimination that accompanied them.
She was turning a coin over in her fingers as she walked, the five-franc piece she always kept in her pocket. She'd still had it when she'd gone to the barricade in the Rue de la Chanvrerie, it had subsequently come with her to Fandom, and she'd never been able to bring herself to spend it. Five francs from Cosette to carry a letter to Marius; Marius had given her a coin of equal value once, too, as payment for finding Cosette's address for him, only the idea of taking money from him for anything turned her stomach and she'd dropped that coin into the street. (What ever became of it, she sometimes wondered? Had he ever picked it up? Because surely someone would have, and he had hardly been -- as far as she knew -- rich.)
If some of her father's angrier rants were to be believed, Cosette's adoptive father had paid five francs to let her play instead of work on that Christmas Eve back in Montfermeil as well. A ten-sou piece in her own shoe on that Christmas morning and a gold Louis d'or worth twenty francs in Cosette's dirt-caked wooden clog; the toy merchant's stall across the street from the inn where the expensive doll had been, then gone away along with Cosette and her father. Payment to find Cosette again, payment to deliver a message from her.
And here was this coin in her hand, that final payment, inextricably tied to so many parts of a life she wished she could forget -- and she didn't want to let it go. Instead, she just kept turning it over and over in her fingers, thinking about that night and the myriad ways things might have been different.
It was an exercise in futility, really, little more than an excuse to torture herself, but she was convinced she deserved that anyway.
[OOC: Turned out that doing something with the canonical significance of Christmas and the clusterfuck of a connection between Éponine and Cosette was an impossible temptation to resist (and I'm totally cheating and setting up for Cosette a little bit in advance), but if you feel like pinging in go for it.]
She was turning a coin over in her fingers as she walked, the five-franc piece she always kept in her pocket. She'd still had it when she'd gone to the barricade in the Rue de la Chanvrerie, it had subsequently come with her to Fandom, and she'd never been able to bring herself to spend it. Five francs from Cosette to carry a letter to Marius; Marius had given her a coin of equal value once, too, as payment for finding Cosette's address for him, only the idea of taking money from him for anything turned her stomach and she'd dropped that coin into the street. (What ever became of it, she sometimes wondered? Had he ever picked it up? Because surely someone would have, and he had hardly been -- as far as she knew -- rich.)
If some of her father's angrier rants were to be believed, Cosette's adoptive father had paid five francs to let her play instead of work on that Christmas Eve back in Montfermeil as well. A ten-sou piece in her own shoe on that Christmas morning and a gold Louis d'or worth twenty francs in Cosette's dirt-caked wooden clog; the toy merchant's stall across the street from the inn where the expensive doll had been, then gone away along with Cosette and her father. Payment to find Cosette again, payment to deliver a message from her.
And here was this coin in her hand, that final payment, inextricably tied to so many parts of a life she wished she could forget -- and she didn't want to let it go. Instead, she just kept turning it over and over in her fingers, thinking about that night and the myriad ways things might have been different.
It was an exercise in futility, really, little more than an excuse to torture herself, but she was convinced she deserved that anyway.
[OOC: Turned out that doing something with the canonical significance of Christmas and the clusterfuck of a connection between Éponine and Cosette was an impossible temptation to resist (and I'm totally cheating and setting up for Cosette a little bit in advance), but if you feel like pinging in go for it.]