milliways_bar | (no subject)

"Papa!" The voice which sounds through the opening front door is a young woman's, light and sweet and eager. The voice's owner follows in a billow of skirts, glancing back over her shoulder into a homey little hallway as she calls to someone unseen. "Papa, are you quite ready?"

She turns her head -- and falters in astonishment as she crosses the threshold, and her boots hit the Milliways floorboards.

"Papa...?" Her hand falls away from the doorknob, and it swings delicately closed behind her.

She's a young woman of perhaps sixteen or seventeen, her rosy face framed by delicate ringlets escaping from a silk-covered bonnet. Her dress is of blue wool, sloping down at the shoulders, puffed out wide at the sleeves and gathering again at the wrists, her skirts a bell over layers of petticoats, a warm shawl wrapped about her shoulders, gloves on her small hands, a basket over one arm, small boots just visible -- in other words, the height of dainty femininity for 1832, and doubtless extremely impractical and peculiar to the eyes of most of Milliways' patrons.

Welcome to Milliways, Cosette.

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"There you are", he says with a smile, taking in the sight of the house. "You'll be able to go home whenever you like, just as if you never left. Most people find no time has passed there, however long they stay here."

"What a peculiar dream I'm having!" she says to herself, laughing a little, before she turns back to the young man.

"Very well. You say I can go home soon -- very well, if that's so. Will you tell me where I am?"

She's almost merry now. In a dream, you humor the figments of your imagination; you embrace the adventure, unless it's a nightmare, and so far this is not.

"It's called Milliways", he tells her readily. "It's a sort of tavern, but it crosses all manner of worlds and times. Would I be right to guess you're from Paris?"

"Yes, I am."

Worlds and times! What a marvelous dream. If she remembers it when she wakes, she'll tell Marius later, and perhaps she can make him smile with it.

"And... some time in the 1830s?" he hazards. "That was my original time, your dress is familiar."

"December of 1832."

She's a little proud of herself for remembering everything clearly even in a peculiar dream.

"What do you mean, original time?"

"December of 1832... in Paris." He smiles very faintly. "I lived there, and then I came here, and I stayed. This may seem an odd question, but were you in Paris six months ago?"

"I've lived in Paris since --"

Is it all her life? It can't have been, because her papa wasn't always at the convent, but she can't remember anything before it.

"I was very young," she finishes, with barely a pause. And then she realizes: "You mean the barricades? Well, I wasn't there -- of course I wasn't -- I didn't see anything, only afterwards. I was in my garden. But yes, monsieur, I was in Paris."

There was unrest before and unrest after, and barricades in 1830 too, but Cosette has been sheltered. The convent murmured nothing of 1830 in its students' hearing. In June, until Marius lay bloody and near dying at his grandfather's house, she thought the sounds of cannon fire was carriage doors being opened and shut.

"I was there also", he says simply, "and I'm glad you weren't at the barricades. My name is Gavroche."

He doesn't expect it to mean anything to her, unless perhaps she heard it from Marius.

Marius says very little about the barricade, or his friends, or almost anything. He was quiet and dreamy and besotted before, and now he's quiet and drawn and exhausted, and still besotted. He murmurs Angel! and holds her hand, and they gaze into each other's eyes lovingly and do not discuss battles and politics or how Marius got so many awful wounds.

"Pleased to meet you, Monsieur Gavroche," says Cosette, dipping an abbreviated little curtsey. "I'm Cosette Fauchelevent. Do you mean that you fought?"

She shouldn't ask, perhaps; it's a delicate subject, and there are many sides one could fight on -- though only one side likely to have a boy too young for the army on it, but anyway he raised the subject.

He doesn't show any sign of it, but oh, yes, he knows now who she is. He smiles at her.

"Pleased to meet you as well, Mam'selle Fauchelevent. I was very much younger then - Milliways time doesn't work in a straight line - and nobody would give me a gun, but in my own way I fought."

Very much younger, six months ago -- well, it's all the same, it's a dream.

"I should hope they would not let a young boy on a barricade." Cosette, naive soul, thinks that this is agreement.

A dilemma - to let her continue in her innocence, or to tell her the truth? He settles for something between the two.

"They did send me away, yes." Once. And he came back.

"And so they should have. That's good."

Her face shadows just a little as she continues: "It's no place for a child. Were you a little child? You must have been. I don't know anything about politics, I don't know much about the fighting, but I'm sure of that."

"I was... ten, probably. A gamin, and the boys on the barricade were my friends. But you're right, it was no place for a child."

Everyone knew that, but they couldn't stop him short of tying him up somewhere.