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The only comfort is that Marius cries when they carry her away. His grandfather is trying to explain that everything in his room must be burnt, it's the only way he can be healthy again when he returns from the seaside, and the maid scoops Éponine out of his arms while he screams and cries and Éponine wishes she could reach back because she's Real to him now, she's so close to being Real, and now she's losing everything.
She tries to echo how he cries, but she knows her cloth body won't form tears. It's rain, starting to fall in the back garden, that drips across her face, some of it soaking in and then dripping out again, down to touch the ground.
A flower grows out of the spot, and Éponine watches it happen in fascination, as it grows into a big hothouse flower, the kind she's only seen in Marius's books about jungles and adventures, and opens to reveal a girl sitting in the center of it, yawning and stretching and then blinking when she sees Éponine. “Mother didn't think I'd be called this soon,” she says. “I'm a nursery fairy, but she says I shouldn't be called while I'm in a nursery myself.” She frowns disapprovingly at the flower she's in as she steps out of it. “This flower made me very small. Are you the one I'm here for? You must be, you're crying. I'm Cosette.”
“I'm supposed to be Real, but my boy, he's sick and I was taken away.”
“Well, of course you're Real.” Cosette looks startled. “You couldn't be anything else, with how you are!”
Éponine knows she isn't as fine as she was the day she was bought. She knows her dress is torn and soiled from playing in the mud with a little boy, that her hair is in tangles because he didn't care to brush it and her stuffing has lost some of its molding. “That's not very nice to say.”
“It's the best thing to say!” says Cosette. “You look like someone loved you. You can't not be Real when someone loves you.” She flits up on little gossamer wings and kisses Éponine's painted-on lips. “Do you want to be a girl? A proper one, not a doll? You could live with Mother and me, and eat candy, and maybe one day you'll see your boy again?”
Éponine doesn't know what it is to be a proper girl, and since Cosette isn't really one either she doesn't think she should ask, but the chance of seeing Marius again is a tempting one. “Yes,” she says, and Cosette kisses her again, a little gold spark of magic, and Éponine is Real.
*
It's strange, being a girl. Éponine lives on a little street in a little house with Cosette and Fantine, and learns that girls talk and walk and write and do sums. She learns that girls don't have wings like fairies do when she tries to leap off a roof after Cosette, and that girls have bones like dolls don't, to break and be healed with fairy magic by a worried mother.
Girls have mothers, too, not just toymakers who crow about how much money there is to be made from them.
Éponine likes being a girl, likes to walk and to brush her own hair and to smile when she feels like smiling and cry when she feels like doing that. She cries a great deal for Marius, at first, Marius who isn't even in his house for her to see, still off at the coast to get better. Cosette holds her hand, though, and Éponine discovers she likes that as well.
Éponine grows up, she learns and changes and cuts her hair off for the sheer pleasure of knowing it will grow back, she talks to boys on the street and girls in the schoolroom and kisses the toys of every baby she meets and whispers to them to have hope whenever the mothers aren't looking. She can't hear them anymore, but the Saw-Horse gave her hope once, she can give it while she can.
She likes that best of all.
*
Girls, Éponine discovers, grow up into young ladies. Fantine clucks over the two of them, extending their dresses with magic and telling Cosette to practice flying because she hasn't been called since Éponine but she should start being called more soon, now that she's closer to grown.
Cosette grows up into the kind of young lady Éponine feels she ought to have been, if she was still a doll. Her hair is lovely and never out of place, she takes care with her dresses, and there are always lovely roses in her cheeks. Éponine is wilder—her first playmate was a boy, after all. She takes to wearing trousers, sometimes, when it won't shock, and other times she runs with her hair a banner behind her, laughing and telling Cosette she'll have to fly to catch up, and Cosette catches her every time, to take her hand and braid her hair into order again.
The day after Cosette is called for the second time, she comes to Éponine in a flurry of excitement, taking both her hands, flushed and lovely. “Come on, come, I have a surprise for you.”
Éponine allows herself to be led across the city to a house, a familiar house she hasn't passed since it went up for sale without one particular resident ever returning to it, and there she stops. “Cosette, no, I can't hope.”
“Not here.” Cosette keeps leading her, but she's avoided this street as much as Éponine for the last several years, so they must have passed it for a reason. They travel ages, far across the city, and to a little cafe by the river, where Cosette points inside. There's a group of young men there, but Éponine knows right away who she means: the pale, thin young man sitting near the window, looking out with a dreamy expression she still knows.
Éponine immediately wishes that she'd washed her face, changed her dress, sat patiently for Cosette or Fantine to do her hair even though Cosette didn't give her the time. Cosette looks the way she wishes she did, bright eyes and bright smile, and sure enough, when Marius focuses on the street, his eyes catch on Cosette first, and it's like being stabbed. She's loved Cosette forever, she can't grudge her any happiness, but Marius is the one who taught her what happiness was in the first place.
A second later, though, he seems to realize Cosette has a companion, and when he sees Éponine, his eyes widen, and then narrow, while Éponine stands with her heart beating fast in her chest, her heart beating.
It takes a long, long moment for Marius, half out of his chair, to mouth her name, but no time at all to grab Cosette's hand and run towards him.