Les Miserables: "House Upon the Hill", Joly/Bossuet/Musichetta, (PG)

Title: House Upon the Hill
Author: Tiamat’s Child
Fandom: Les Miserables
Rating: PG
Pairings: Joly/Bossuet/Musichetta
Summary: The hardest part is always the day to day living. Or at least that’s what Musichetta would tell you. And she’d be right.
Disclaimer: See the pretty French people? They're public domain, but I didn't make them up, Victor Hugo did.
Notes: Written in 44 minutes for the ‘sacrifice’ challenge at Contralemontre.

EDIT: So, so sorry about the bad cut. I didn't notice right away. My apologies for the exploded friend's pages!

House Upon the Hill

I

Musichetta loves her boarding house. She likes living there, with her strange fellow boarders and her overprotective landlady and her beautiful roommate who lets her hide on the edges of things when she’s not feeling so well. The food is good and the rooms are warm.

Besides, she hasn’t got anywhere else to go.

Or, at least, she hasn’t until Joly asks her to move in with him and Bossuet. Then she has a few decisions she has to make.

She loves the boys. But she likes it where she is.

In the end she spills the whole story out to her roommate, who gives her a little thawp on the shoulder and demands to know what she’s doing still sitting in the kitchen of a boarding house for shop girls when she could be off with her lovers, trading three way kisses. Musichetta has to admit that when you put it that way it really doesn’t make much sense. Her roommate laughs and says she’s a goose.

So she decides to move out.

But it’s still a wrench, packing up her clothes and books. And all the girls cry when she gives them kisses on the cheek to say goodbye. Even her roommate cries. Even the landlady.

Cook could probably make saltwater taffy with all her tears, but that’s not unusual. Cook cries at everything.

II

Joly hates it when Bossuet vanishes.

The first day is never too bad. It’s always unpleasant, waking up and finding a note that says something like, “Out for a walk. Back in a few days,” but at least there’s always the hope that Bossuet will change his mind and come home in time to have warm sandwiches for supper. And after supper has come and past with no sign of him there’s always the hope (which Joly and Musichetta have both learned never to voice out loud) that he will come back in time to sleep tangled up in a warm pile together. And then after they’ve gone to bed there’s always the hope he’ll be there in the morning.

The second day Joly always starts to worry. There are so many terrible things that can happen in Paris, and Bossuet has a knack for stumbling straight into trouble. It’s true that he also has a knack for stumbling out of it, but Joly can’t help trusting that second knack less than the first one. There have been times Bossuet came home black and red from beatings, or downcast from the loss of every last bit of money he had, or silent and vague from days in prison. Bossuet may sometimes say he’s the luckiest man in the world, but that’s just him being romantic.

Bossuet has bad luck.

On the third day Musichetta starts talking about going to stay with friends for a while. “Yvette has a new baby. She’s said she could use my help.”

Joly understands. It’s too quiet with just the two of them.

After a week neither of them can sleep, and after two weeks both have to leave the flat and find someone to put up with them for a while. Joly usually ends up panicking in Combeferre’s rooms, and Musichetta goes back to her old boarding house.

They both hate it when Bossuet leaves them.

But they know why he does. Bossuet wanders. That’s part of who he is. It’s rather like being in love with a cat. He’ll always come home, but he has to go away every now and then.

So they don’t say a word once he’s back. And no one else ever mentions it. They hate it when Bossuet disappears, but he doesn’t know that.

It’s best that way.

III

Joly’s little rituals could try the patience of a saint, and neither Bossuet or Musichetta is a saint, as is shown by the fact that they continue to share a bed not only with each other but with Joly as well.

Sometimes Musichetta would like to smack Joly when he hovers over her, convinced she’s got whatever he learned about in that day’s lecture because he’s got it, of course, and he must have given it to her, that’s why she’s been so tired these past few days. The truth, of course, is that except for his susceptibility to colds Joly is disgustingly healthy. And Musichetta is tired because she’s been staying late and coming in early to help in the shop, because they have an important order coming up (and doesn’t it seem like that’s always the case?) and everyone needs to work long if it’s going to be ready.

Sometimes Bossuet wants to give Joly a nice, firm shake when he’s agonizing over his impending death. Joly has reason to worry, he knows. The stuff in the hospitals and slums is nasty beyond human comprehension. But Bossuet doesn’t want to think about it, just as he doesn’t want to think about the violent death Bahorel’s temper is going to bring him, or the slow slide into true insanity that lies in front of Grantaire. He doesn’t want to think of Jehan’s neck snapped, or his brain torn through by a bullet. He doesn’t want to think of all the things that are lurking out there to kill Joly. He wishes Joly wouldn’t think of it.

But they do their best not to hit Joly. And they try, oh they try, to pretend that they don’t worry. And in return Joly pretends all his fears are just a joke, a game, another way to poke fun at himself.

Silly, paranoid Joly. And everyone knows it isn’t really real. It’s just another thing that makes him so very much himself.

That’s all.

IV

Bossuet is shocked when he realizes that Musichetta doesn’t know how to read. “Well, it’s not as if anyone would really bother to teach me,” she says, “There’s no need to look at me as if I’ve grown three heads. I’m just a poor girl, and no one teaches us to read.”

“But you have books!” he says, “Books. And I know you know what’s in them.”

She shrugs. “I used to get other people to read them out loud to me. Don’t be so surprised, Bossuet. There simply wasn’t time to learn.”

“I could teach you,” he says, before he even really thinks about what he’s offering.

“Could you?” she asks, and her face is open and hungry, a look he’s never really seen on her before, outside of their bed, and this is a little different even from that. That has the understanding that she’ll be taken care of in it. There is nothing of the sort in this. Just want and a sort of fear that she’ll never be able to find a way to fill that want.

So he nods.

And yes, it takes time he could put to very good use studying or working for Les Amis. But it’s worth it. He never wants to see a look like that on Musichetta’s face again, and it’s wonderful fun to watch it disappear into the wonder that she can read.

V

“It’s about compromise, isn’t it?”

“What is?”

“Us.”

“I thought we were about how nice it is to kiss two people at once, even if that means that your lips can’t touch.”

“…That too.”