Wide Eyes and Razor Blades and Ticking Clocks
A Valjean and Cosette Vignette
You were never meant to see me like this, my darling. But of course, if I'd had my way, you wouldn't have grown up either.
She runs barefoot in the garden, and as hard as he tries not to, he worries, and there's always a word of warning on his lips, because he doesn't want her to catch a cold or tear her skin on stray thorns—she has filled the garden with roses, and the most beautiful things cut with the sharpest of edges—perfection slices like a razor blade, as he's learned from her.
Fantine faded away in his arms, but somehow he things this is worse—watching Cosette grow wilder and freer and brighter—watching her grow, in short. Because Fantine was never his to lose, whereas Cosette—Cosette learned to read because he taught her at twilight, Cosette falls asleep to the sound of his voice reading her favorite Bible passages aloud, Cosette still curls up against his chest at night when she has nightmares, Cosette impulsively kisses his cheek whenever he makes her laugh. He never really knew Fantine, only the ghost of a shadow of her. He knows Cosette, from the gap between her front teeth to the crease that appears between her delicate eyebrows whenever she's about to ask him some childishly impossible what if question, from the birdlike motion with which she tucks her hair behind her right ear whenever she's nervous to the way she can't sleep without the window open to the bowls of milk and seed she always leaves outside the gates for stray cats and hungry birds. He wants her to need him as much as he needs her but she doesn't so he's left with fervent silent half-formed prayers for just a little more time.
He knows her, but he makes sure that she does not know him. He hides away his memories and checks his words and covers his tracks but he does not consider the fact that she will acquire sharp eyes and a sharper mind and will one day make a few inferences of her own. That it'll become a little too hard to look her in the eye when he lies to her.
She is thirteen years old, a bright-eyed woman-child somehow graceful in the awkwardness of her changing body, the one and only time she accidentally catches sight of him shirtless, sees his naked ravaged back and mutilated wrists.
He managed to hide every last one of his scars from her for years, and he was careless one evening and the whole illusion came crashing down.
He must have forgotten to close his bedroom door properly, and there must have been a draft that opened it wider. It doesn't matter, in the end, because she passes by and sees the hideous stripes of scarred flesh across his back and shoulders and it can't be undone. He turns and sees her, frozen and horrified in the doorway with a half-imagined phantom pain making her own shoulders twitch. He'll never forget that moment, any more than he'll forget the lashings that caused it. Slowly, deliberately, he puts his shirt back on and she stumbles away and it takes him a second too long to process her movement, and she's closing her bedroom door before it even occurs to him that he has to follow her.
A curious mixture of horror and rage and pity and protectiveness keeps her awake that night, but it is with nothing but pure adoration in her heart that she sits down next to him the following day. Without a word, she begins massaging his shoulders, feeling the tensions trapped deep in his muscles and reshaping old wounds with a feather-light touch.
Does it still hurt? There is something akin to wonder in her voice.
Not anymore. And he realizes, once he's spoken, that he is not lying, that all he can feel is the warmth of her small hand.
It is the only time she speaks of the incident. But she knows. Even though she never sees the brand on his chest, she knows, and through her frustration she loves him all the more for it.
She runs barefoot in the garden, and as hard as he tries not to, he worries, and there's always a word of warning on his lips, because he doesn't want her to catch a cold. She looks back at him, lifting elegant skirts around her shapely white ankles and digging her toes into the grass, and almost rolls her eyes, a laugh on her lips. She's a young woman now, wide-eyed, graceful in her adult body, and he's an old man with one too many fears, and exactly one love he's learning to let go of, because he proved that it is possible for old men to learn new things like hope and passion and acceptance, and she loves him all the more for it.