A/N: This is an experiment in me just sitting down and writing something in one go that I've had in mind. This is only my second fic ever and my first Les Mis one! I'm pretty stoked you could say.

This was inspired by firstly a beautiful pic I saw of alternating Cosette and Eponine pictures from the movie with the text you will read below (I take no credit for that, whoever created that image was a genius who so accurately described what I thought about these girls.) The other inspiration was the fact that I'm doing Les Mis in the fall, and while I do like Eponine more, I'm a soprano and much more a Cosette. It just resulted in me thinking about how similar these two are, something you don't really realize unless you think about it in depth.

The bolded parts below are what I think especially apply to each girl.

A girl full of anger,

A girl full of hope,

A girl with a mother who just couldn't cope,

A girl who felt caught,

Thought no one could see,

Maybe one day she'll be free

She had a roof over her head. She had ample food, clothing, other necessities. She had been rescued by the kindest and saintliest of men, had grown up with his love and protection.

She had a home.

Cosette was well aware of everything she had to be thankful for. There was much, and she made a conscientious effort every day to not take any of it for granted. Compared to so many, she was beyond blessed.

And yet, Cosette was lonely. She knew no people her own age, had neither the benefit nor the opportunity to make friends. It was only ever her and Papa, and she would never, ever tell him this, but sometimes, her loneliness threatened to crush her at night. What would it be like, she wondered, to go to a party, and spend the night laughing and eating and merry-making with jolly people? What would it be like to have a conversation in a room noisy with other peoples' chatter? To have to raise her voice just to be heard?

It was so very quiet, just her and Papa.

Cosette was unsure of what she would have been like if she'd been a normal girl her age. She wasn't sure what normal girls did or felt, if they were loud and opinionated, or if crowds stirred their insides. She wasn't sure what normal girls felt around normal boys. Boys, not white-haired men. How could she, when she'd never experienced any of it?

'Would you be as quiet as you are now, Cosette?' she asked herself.

She was so very sick of being quiet.

And sick of quiet things in general: books, sewing, needlework, flowers, gardens, drawing or writing or thinking. She was done with these things. She wanted music and laughter and maybe just a little bit of chaos. Everything in her world was so ordered, it would be nice to expand once and a while.

She never told Papa any of this. She was very careful not to let him see. Things like going out into the city worried him so, and she didn't want him to worry. He would worry, for example, if Cosette told him that sometimes she felt so trapped sitting in the garden and unable to see much of the world outside of it that she couldn't breath. So she didn't tell him that she felt like a lark caught in a cage. She told him she was as fine as she'd always been, and she waited.

Perhaps that sounds apathetic or lazy to you, waiting, not doing anything on her own or defying her father. But you see, the one thing Cosette had always had in abundance was hope. Even when she'd been living with the Thenardiers and had had so much more to lament, there'd always been that spark they couldn't destroy. She'd had to believe in something then, and believe in it she still did: that there was a solution coming, that she only had to endure the cage for a little while longer before a change came that granted her her freedom.

And then, the day came when she met the boy she'd fallen in love with at the gate to her cage, and she was proven right.