June 7, 1832
Cosette crept through the shadows. She didn't know why she had felt the need to return here, to the Rue Saint-Denis. But here she was, nevertheless.
The streets of Paris were silent—much more so than they had been so last night, when she had stood fifteen feet below this very spot and waited for Marius to make his choice. Cosette shivered, looking around. Is she here? Even now?
The silence was broken by a man with long, scraggly hair climbing out of a door near the ground. The sewers? she thought. She watched, sickened, as he began picking among the bodies of the dead. As he did so, he talked to himself in a nasal tone.
"Lovely gun here...I'll be able to make a pretty...sou...off of that one, yes indeed...and what have we here?" He had found it, Cosette realized. The cup Marius had spoken of. She lunged for it, forgetting all thought of secrecy as her fingers closed around it just before the man did...he barely had time to look at her, startled, before she was up and running, running through the streets, mindless of skirts and shoes getting muddy...
She reached home at last, breathless, clutching the cup tightly. She had found what she had set out to do, she could at last get inside, warm herself by the fire, perhaps have a cup of tea...
The gamin was waiting for her.
You again? she knew her expression said.
His own countenance was expressionless as he held out his hand. She clutched the cup even tighter and shook her head.
He stared at her for a moment, then scampered off into the darkness. Cosette smiled. Victory.
Before going inside, she paused to look at her prize carefully in the moonlight. It was a crude, wooden cup, with indecipherable carved designs on it. "A collector's piece indeed," she murmured. "Every detail exactly as he said." She stared at it. One of the carvings was, she was sure, a round, wide eye, staring directly at her.
"Will you still be here when all the rest of us are dead?"
She opened the gate and hurried into the house. Papa was waiting for her.
A/N: I felt bad posting a story without actually posting anything, so I wrote this in about twenty minutes. I feel like it's actually rather good, considering. And it wasn't funny, so I think I'm gonna change the category from Humor. Oh, and I realized that everything I had written in my Red Five-Subject Notebook of Enjolrasness was crap, so I'm going to rewrite the whole thing. FIE UPON FANFICTION FOR DESTROYING ALL OF MY AWESOME SPACING FROM LAST CHAPTER! FIE, I SAY!
This chapter has caused someone to be added to the cast list.
THE AUCTIONEER...THENARDIER (with an accent that I'm to lazy to type)
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