A/N: The characters of Les Miserables are the creation of Victor Hugo and, of course, are not my property. Day 17 (stockings) of the 25 Days of Fic Challenge. May be mildly AU, as I didn't check whether a December fit Hugo's timeline.
1
Cosette wills her pounding heart to slow as she huddles under her quilt. Footsteps in the night on the creaking floorboards of her chamber mean only bad things.
Waking with the pallid sun across her face, her first thought is that the expected beating never happened. No midnight demands to mop or scrub or fetch, no greasy strangers' fingers pinching her cheek as she poured their coffee, no. . . other things.
The child's shivers ease from her adult body. She opens her eyes to a room of simplicity and comfort—no garret, this, but tall windows, warm faded curtains, and her own pressed flowers and bibelots pinned around the mirror of her dressing table. She slips a robe over her chemise and takes chilly steps across the floor to make up the fire. The nuns won't approve of her lounging in bed so late.
The clothes drying on the rack in front of the fireplace are plain, but they're no orphans' rags. Even after so long, she can't help but stroke the silvery gray fabric, as amazed by the smoothness of her own fingers as the fineness of the weave.
One of her stockings is bulging. . . it won't do to tear it, and she hates darning, though she smiles over it obediently, as it's still far better work than scrubbing or the other. . . oh. When she reaches to take the stocking from the rack, it overflows with peppermints, nuts, and ribbons. Oh, Papa. The bounty runs through her fingers into the bowl formed by the skirt of her chemise as she digs greedily into the toe for the hidden clementine.
She's already dug a fingernail into the clementine's skin and is breathing its tart, sweet scent when she remembers. Nobody will come to take her treasures away. She can set them on the dressing table in perfect security. She can have them still in March or April or even July, if she likes.
Cosette sweeps the bounty from her lap into a drawer of the dressing table and hurries to dress so she can thank Papa for the surprise. Last thing, as she always does, she pauses before the mirror to check that everything is proper—it took her over a year to master remembering all the buttons and laces a young lady must fasten—and to smile at the demure young woman who faces her. No more ragged orphan, ever, thanks to Papa.
She's turning to the door in a whirl of gray skirts when she stops to grab one peppermint and slip it into her sleeve. Just in case.
2
Cold seeps so deep into Éponine's bones that she tells herself she no longer feels it.
When she pushes back the tattered pile of blankets and the December air hits her bare arms, she knows better.
Nothing she owns is really enough to stay warm. She can wrap herself in blankets and walk the streets like some ghost of past misdeeds, hoping to steal a jacket from someone overheated with drink.
She pushes her icy toes into her sabots, but the left one hits something.
A lump of coal.
How it rolled there, she can't imagine, but it's a little heat.
3
It's when the water freezes in his basin that Marius misses his grandfather's house.
He cracks the ice with a gesture that he calls practiced, though he's only been practicing it these past two weeks. New habits form swiftly enough—he's succeeding at this adventure in independence—but the memory of crackling fires and warm towels linger.
At his grandfather's house, he'd be up early in his dressing gown with his feet on the warm grate when the maid brought hot coffee with a plate of croissants so buttery that his fingers slipped on his pen after he ate one.
He didn't think so well, then, of course. He's had his eyes opened, here among the people. He sees more clearly; he thinks more deeply; he writes with an analytical vigor he scarcely imagined possible. He argues the issues of the day with minds that burn brighter than any hearth fire.
Marius' freshly washed stockings are stiff and cold, but he pulls them on anyway. The coffeehouse will be warm with the fire of the intellect.
If he's early enough, he can work on his sonnet for the beautiful girl in the garden. Fleur has so many rhymes that this poem threatens to become an epic.
4
Christmas is entirely bourgeois, Enjolras thinks as he strolls the snow-grimed streets to the coffeehouse. He has no patience with smiling pieties. The baby in the manger does not concern him: there are babies starving in the streets of Paris.
"Peppermint stick, m'sieur?" a boy's voice shouts.
Gavroche's grimy hand, red with cold, brandishes a sheaf of striped candies. He's grinning. He probably stole them. Enjolras is not against liberating property from the wealthy for the benefit of the poor.
"A true revolutionary shares, each equally with his brothers," Enjolras says. The cold makes his teeth ache.
"The revolution's coming, but dinnertime will be here first. Penny for candy from a poor street urchin?"
Gavroche's grin is so cheeky that Enjolras can't help smiling back. He digs in his jacket pocket for a penny—noticing as he does that his stockings need darning again—and hands it over.
"Merry Christmas, m'sieur!" Gavroche shouts as he dashes away.