filleauloup | Éponine's Warehouse, Friday Afternoon

Entry tags:

bucky,
cosette

Éponine's Warehouse, Friday Afternoon

For several years now Cosette had been prevailing upon Éponine to come and live with her and her father on the mainland, and for several years now Éponine, being equally stubborn, had declined the offer. She had worked too hard to make an independent life for herself, she said, and she wasn't about to go back to living off of anyone's charity, that she wasn't. But Cosette was nothing if not relentless in her earnest and open-hearted generosity and even Éponine could only withstand that for so long before conceding defeat.

Besides, Cosette was right: she had managed to save up a good bit of money in the last eight or so years (had it really been so many?), enough that she wouldn't have to be dependent on the Fauchelevents if she didn't care to be.

"You have worked so hard for so long," Cosette had said, picking up one of Éponine's hands in both of hers and turning it over to look at the palm and fingertips: not cracked and callused from years of exposure and hard labor as it had once been, but still bearing small scars and marks from that time along with countless little paper cuts and ink stains from handling letters and packages and paperwork all day. Then she continued, before Éponine's residual guilt from their childhood could come bubbling up again, "And no, don't you say it. I know what you've got in your mind to say, and don't you even think it. I forbid it, do you hear me? I'll have none of that, and besides, you know perfectly well that I don't blame you for a thing that happened back then. And in any case, the house is so lonely with only Papa and I, so if you still feel you've got to make up for things, then you can do so by keeping us company."

This she concluded with a bright smile and the air of someone who knew the argument to be comfortably won in her favor. She had also seen fit to introduce into the conversation, ever so innocently, that if Éponine were interested in completing her aducation, why, she knew of several schools in the area with just such a program! (Cosette, when she wished to be, was utterly ruthless in her persuasion.)

And so Éponine was packing away the last of her things that hadn't already been carted off to the Fauchelevent house earlier in the week: a few last pieces of clothing, whatever food she had on hand, her collection of books, the stash of liquor that had somehow shrunk from expansive to modest at some point she had failed to notice. Alouette was helping in the way only a cat could be of assistance: pouncing at stray bits of dust as they caught the afternoon light and occasionally curling up to take a nap as prominently and adorably as possible.

[OOC: Last post for this girl (and also effectively a sendoff for Cosette as well, by proxy). Mostly establishy but also open; I'll likely be glacially slow but I'll make it happen, damn it. Feel free to assume she let you know, if you need a reason to drop by.)

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Bucky had not been hiding.

But there'd been a note at his door, and okay, sure, maybe it had drawn him out of hiding.

Point was, he was here. Knocking on the door.

Éponine paused in the middle of rearranging a box of books for the twentieth time (and not managing to make any more room for more books in the process) and paused to peer out the window before opening the door.

"Ah, Monsieur Bucky! So you did get my note, I see? I'm glad to see you, that I am."

"Hey, Éponine," Bucky said, quiet and kind of mild underneath his baseball cap, as always. "Made it sound like you're... leaving."

And not the way he did all the time.

"Figured I should stop by." Had felt compelled to, no less.

"Well, it's very good to see you," she replied, smiling but a bit rueful all the same. "Because you see, that's the thing, I am leaving. Not very far, mind you, it's only that I'll be living across the causeway, but in any case I won't see you any more when you come in to check your mail, I'm afraid. So I supposed it might not be awfully polite to just up and disappear like that."

Sometime over the last eight or so years she'd gotten comfortable with the idea that she wasn't just another unfortunate street girl of the sort that went missing all the time, unremarked upon. That did not, however, mean she didn't enjoy knowing it.

"You wouldn't have been the first," Bucky said, but not in an 'unfortunate street girl' kind of way. More like in a... 'went off to war and got presumed dead' kind of way.

It was a little wry, all the same.

"But I'm glad for the heads up."

Yeah, somehow Éponine didn't figure him for the 'unfortunate street girl' type anyway. Go figure.

"And I'd hardly be the last, I imagine," she added as Alouette came over to wind around her ankles and peer up at Bucky with a dubious meow. "All the same, one never really knows around this place, that's for certain, what with time doing funny things whenever someone goes off on a trip. So I thought, well, I wouldn't feel right simply disappearing, so I'd best make sure I let my friends know. I hope you don't mind me presuming to include you there, but you have been awfully nice to me."

She let out one of her low, rough laughs.

"And one of my best customers to boot, so how d'you like that?"

Bucky looked down at Alouette and gave her a tiny wave with his fingers.

"I don't mind," he said as he looked up at Éponine again. Heavily doubted anyone should refer to him like that, but he didn't mind. "Place isn't gonna be the same without you."

Alouette meowed up at him, less skeptically this time.

"I will miss it," admitted Éponine, whose standards of friendship had risen quite a bit from Montparnasse and Marius since she'd been here. "I've gotten to know everyone so well, running all over the place every day for years and years. Only there's this girl, you see, used to be a student here, who --"

She could hardly call Cosette a childhood friend. It was... complicated.

"Well, we've known each other since we were little and she's the closest thing I've got to family these days, she and her father. And you see, they've been after me to go live with them for a while now, and I was bound to give in after a while, I suppose. But I'll miss all of you, that I will."

Bucky was going to remember this in a couple of months, probably. For the same reasons why that 'we've known each other since we were little and she's the closest thing I've got to family these days' hit a little close to home in a way that he was doing his best to repress.

"Yeah, well," he said, offering his best approximation of a small, wry smile. "Sounds like you're going somewhere good. Fandom'll manage."

Éponine laughed, and Alouette curled around her ankles before going over to sniff cautiously at Bucky's shoe.

"Oh, I've no doubt of that. D'you know, I've been here just about eight years now? I don't feel as if anything could possibly surprise me any more, and yet it still does, sometimes, but what never surprises me is how the place always pulls through somehow. No, I don't worry about that at all... but I'm still allowed to be concerned about people, aren't I?"

Now that she'd learned how, gotten a halfway decent grasp on healthy interpersonal relationships and all that.

"Which is to say --" and she pulled a key ring out of her pocket, a single key with the uneven sheen of much handling attached to it -- "this place is yours if you'd like. There's folks that like having a place to hide sometimes, and seems to me you might be one of them."

Well, it was a guess more than anything, but she liked to think it was a good one.

Bucky had considered maybe crouching down to properly greet Alouette when Éponine said that and, well, now she had his attention instead.

"You're... leaving me this place?"

He looked surprised. Unsure.

That was fine; Alouette could sit there and look confident about pets being inevitable for a bit yet, before she got impatient about it.

"That's right, it is," said Éponine, holding the key out to him. "It's only that I'm awfully fond of the place, you know. If you'd seen it like it was when I first found it! Dusty and dark and a right mess..."

It was definitely a difference from the way the warehouse looked after years of gradual but steady improvements: the sort of loft-like space that made up the sleeping area had been set up properly for quite some time now, but there were proper shelves and a full kitchenette setup now, even a little living room area. Still on the sparse side, and much of the furniture had been salvaged from somewhere or gifted to her by customers, but the point was that it wasn't some empty and cold and impersonal space.

"But I've put in an awful lot of work on it all. It's the only place I've ever lived that felt like a proper home, so I'm quite fond of it, and I'd much rather it go to someone I like instead of any old stranger who might stumble across it, d'you see?"

It was warmer and less impersonal than Bucky's apartment.

Bucky was at something of a loss for words as he looked around the room. Something in him was telling him he didn't deserve this.

He had not yet reached for the key.

Éponine knew the feeling; it was part of why she had turned down Cosette's offer for so long, and why the best description of her expression right now would be shrewd. (It was still a bit of a stare that might be mildly unsettling, but it was a knowing kind of stare, though whether that improved matters or not was debatable.)

"If you'd like," she said half-playfully, "you can think of it as a personal favor to me, you looking after the place, only you've my permission to get as comfortable as you'd like, as well. How's that?"

That seemed to jolt Bucky back into the present. Or at least drew his attention back to her.

"Well," he said, barely more than a murmur, "if you put it like that..."

The way he held out his hand, palm up, was still a little hesitant.

"Now that's the spirit," Éponine said with a laugh -- that sound would never quite shed its slight touch of discordance, only these days there was enough genuine delight in it to drown out the most jarring undertones. She dropped the key into his hand with a flourish, and Alouette came over to headbutt his ankle as if to say she approved as well.

Though perhaps it might be more accurate to say she exuded a distinctly feline air of "It's about time."

"It's useful to have a place to lay low sometimes, even if it's just because it feels safe," Éponine said softly, and it wasn't quite so much that she was talking directly to him as that she was lost a bit in the past herself. She kept going in a half distracted voice, following her own meandering thoughts. "My little brother, he lived inside a great big hollow elephant statue at the Place de la Bastille. He was lucky, got out of the whole business when he did. If only -- "

And then she dropped that train of thought as if it were on fire and clapped her hands as if they'd just concluded some bit of business.

"Not that I've any business telling you how to use it, of course. That's only how it was for me, at first."

Bucky's hand closed slowly, carefully around the key. It was equally slow about lowering its way back to his side, too. He couldn't help being kind of hyper aware of the fact that he was holding the key, now.

And while he'd listened attentively to whatever that tangent of a memory had been, he didn't prod at it.

But he realized, right then, that he was going to miss her.

"Thank you," he said, a little lower, a little hesitant. "For... everything."

"It wasn't a hardship at all," Éponine assured him, nodding in satisfaction as he took the key. "I was glad to do it, I was."

Even if there had been nothing in it for her, she realized, which could be said about a lot of the things she'd done for people here over the years, couldn't it? That was a surprising revelation, but... a deeply gratifying one, as it turned out. One that felt quite a bit like breaking free from the worst of her ties to her family.

"Besides, you've been an awfully big help to me as well, and I'm just as grateful, you'd better believe that, Monsieur Bucky."

Bucky shook his head. "I haven't --"

Been anything.

"-- done much."

"Now, Monsieur," said Éponine in a light but stern tone, wholly unaware of the fact that she was trying to emulate the tone Cosette often took with her, "I'll have none of that kind of talk, you hear? Besides, sometimes it's what one doesn't do that matters more than what one actually does that counts more, that's what I think."

She glanced out the window into the street, humming absently for a moment.

"And anyhow, d'you know what else I think? I think -- well, you went away for a while, didn't you, and then it seemed to me you had an awful lot more of a sad look about you when you came back. I won't ask, I said to myself, and anyhow one can only take so much of knowing lots of things about lots of people 'round here but then I also thought, well, isn't that familiar, that look?"

She was still looking out of the window as she went on, her voice cracking a bit more from her efforts to soften it, "There's plenty of folks as would take that out on others. I've known loads of them. With me, at least, you never did."

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Éponine's Warehouse, Friday Afternoon

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