ways_infirmary | Infirmary thread for Valjean

Cosette will cling close, to stroke back his white hair while he swallows pills and water, and to hold his hand as he falls asleep, and to bend and kiss his forehead when he's only nearly asleep.

When she's quite, quite sure that he's sleeping -- only then does she draw away, just far enough to hide her face in Marius's shoulder. If he's still kneeling on the ground, so be it; she'll sink to the ground with him.

She'll speak to the doctor, her husband's dear friend -- their dear friend now, for she'll never forget this -- in just a moment or two. She'll be ready then. But for a little while, she only wants to be held.

Another luxury of Milliways; there's time and space enough to let patients and families rest and grieve and worry in peace and in their own time, instead of a line of people waiting for every bed and seat. Joly may never stop being grateful for that.

So he lets the time be, and keeps himself quietly busy. He gets a blanket for M. Fauchlevent from the supply cabinet, and recalibrates the monitors for a man sleeping, instead of awake (and Joly's satisfied to see that the readings are nearer to what they should be for a man sleeping; whatever's agitating M. Fauchelevent seems to be a problem that will at least let him have some rest, even if he needs help to find it.)

And then there's time to send a note with a rat for some hot tea, and something stronger for Marius and his dear wife if they want it; and then Joly has nothing to do but wait and study the patient's results and plan the next steps of treatment, so he does that. They all have time enough.

Marius holds her tight, pressing his cheek against her hair. And tries not to think about how little he deserves this, or her. In any case, he won't be the first to pull away-- he'll follow her cue, wait until she's ready.

She doesn't know how long it is. Long enough to get ahold of herself a little; long enough for some comfort. Long enough to begin to feel as if she can talk to the doctor again, and then to feel that she needs to. She needs to thank him, and she needs to know more, and she needs to be an adult now; she needs to be Madame Pontmercy, not huddle like a frightened child. No matter how much she's felt like a frightened child ever since Javert showed up on their doorstep with his horrible news.

She draws away at last. She gives her husband a watery, brave smile, and then she fumbles out a handkerchief and dries her face as best she can. She must look a mess, and that strikes her in her vanity, but there's nothing to be done right now.

"My darling," she says. "I must beg your forgiveness for how little I've explained. I've been wanting to tell you all about Milliways, it's only -- only I couldn't think how to begin."

"And you, M. Joly--" She turns now, raising her voice, and finds a smile from somewhere, and a deep curtsey. "I can never thank you enough for the help you've given my dear father."

Marius shakes his head. "There is nothing to forgive." How could she have explained it? He can't imagine anything she could say would have made him believe in-- all this.

He turns to Joly, as well. "Joly, I--" Am glad you appear to somehow be alive? "--thank you."

Joly smiles at them as if they've just arrived, and no one's been having private conversations in front of him any ever. "Thank you both for bringing him. I'm so glad to have a chance to do him--and you--any good at all."

He waves at a couple of chairs near to the desk. There's a tray with real cups and a couple of thermoses on it. "Won't you--? I'm sure you both have questions."

About their father, and about people who should be dead and aren't.

Cosette glances up at her husband, though she knows her answer, and then tucks her hand into his elbow so they can make their way across the room.

Her nose is stuffed up, her eyes red, her face splotchy, her eyelashes clumped wetly. Handkerchiefs only do so much. But she carries herself as composedly as she can. She'll sit in the chair it's pulled out for her, and she'll look to Marius to begin with his questions first, unless he looks to her helplessly instead.

Marius pulls her chair out, of course, and then sits as well. Now, facing Joly once more, the only questions in his mind are about Joly himself, about their friends, about the barricade. But that is not the matter at hand.

"What--" He glances back at Valjean, asleep. "What may be done for him? Have you hope of his recovery?"

That's an easy one. "I don't think either of you need to have any fear of that. He's become very weak, as you've seen, and he's is sick--but all of it can be treated here. That tube in his arm--" Joly nods to it "--it's a way of giving him back the strength of the food and drink he's missed. I'm going to give him something to help keep him stronger against any other illness that might threaten while he's weak; there's a few other things, I'll give you as much detail as you like, and I want to go over it with him too. But what he mostly needs right now is rest and comfort and healthy surroundings."

Which Milliways has, of course. So much more than Paris that Joly won't currently try to explain it. "I couldn't promise to have him on his feet in a year in Paris, but here he should be able to walk around even without aid in a week or two. I'd really prefer he stayed at least a month, to get his strength back enough to be really proof against any fevers or contagion he might encounter when he returns. But tomorrow he should be ready to move into a room of his own here, and then ,well, we'll see how he does; but there's no reason at all he shouldn't recover, with rest and care." That there's no apparent reason he should have become sick at all doesn't worry Joly, who knows very well that illnesses happen when they happen.

Still-- "Of course, he does seem distraught about something. If there's anything I should know about--if he's had a shock, or some obvious recent exposure -- please tell me. But in any case, your being here should help a good deal. I do hope you'll both stay while he recovers; it would be a great help."

He smiles almost apologetically at Marius. "I know it must be startling to be here for the first time--but oh, i do hope you'll stay a while. Everyone will be so glad to see you, you know."

"Everyone--" He echoes faintly-- but that's not the question, he's not going to think about that just yet.

"I am very glad to hear it, very glad indeed. We-- we shall stay, of course--" He looks questioningly to Cosette, though he doubts very much she'll disagree.

"As long as Father needs, we shall stay," she agrees, firmly. "Anything he needs -- anything, he'll have it."

And then to Marius, with a sort of uncertain apology, "This place, Milliways -- it's a very peculiar place. I don't know how to explain it at all. But it's good, it's full of so many good people and miraculous things. And one of them -- oh, it's strange! -- is that however long we're here, we'll return without a moment having passed. So you see we won't be missed. Grandfather and Aunt Gillenormand won't worry about us at all."

Joly nods. "Exactly right. Why you could take the time to learn another five languages here, you know, and if you left coffee on the table at home it would still be hot when you returned. Think of it as a sort of--retreat, that may be easiest. A holiday from the world and time both. It is a hotel, after all. A wonderful hotel; quite the healthiest and cleanest place, with everything you could need."

He smiles. "And speaking of that--" He pours them both a cup of hot coffee with milk from one of the thermoses; or in this case more like milk with coffee. "You both need something in your systems, you've had quite a day." Even and especially if they're both too worried about M. Fauchelevent to know it.

Joly adds a small dose of brandy to Marius' coffee--what anyone of his day would consider purely medicinal. Still, it is brandy, so he asks Cosette first before adding it to hers. "--Madame? Will you have a little to settle your nerves?"

It's a moment of home, overlaid with this strange bright room and Joly's earnestly sympathetic face: hot coffee and milk and a spoonful of brandy, like Toussaint used to push on her if she was ill or worried or cold. Just that thought makes the wailing desire to be a little girl again, safe and cared for, surge inside her -- which is all the proof anyone might need that her nerves could use some settling.

She's a grown woman now, a married woman of 17, and it's her job now to care for her father.

"Yes," she says, feeling the cup warm her hands even through its thin saucer. "Just a little drop -- thank you, monsieur."

Marius takes his up his own cup with a grateful nod. He takes a sip and just sits a moment, trying to let the warmth and the brandy sink in and settle him. It-- well, it almost works.

"As for a shock," he says tentatively after a moment or two. "There is much I-- I think I cannot say, but-- certain matters he had thought to keep secret have been-- revealed. I believe it startled him very much to realize it."

Joly adds a polite, medical dose of brandy to Cosette's coffee with a murmured politeness, and turns to listen to Marius. At Marius' comment, he frowns a little. What secrets could such a man have? "He's not in any sort of trouble --? I mean, he hasn't drawn attention for-- the barricade, what he did there, or --anything of that? Javert seemed quite determined to shield him from all that."

Marius, perhaps oddly, blushes. Coffee and brandy, it seems, do little to settle the ache of guilt in the pit of his stomach.

"No," he says. "I believe none know of that."

Cosette bites her lip.

To be a convict -- he's her dear beloved father, whatever her parentage, and his love and goodness outweigh anything. But she won't tell anyone else. She wouldn't even if she didn't know how it would grieve and horrify him. What would this kind Dr. Joly think of the man he's been treating, if he knew? She won't risk the consequences, for any and all of them.

"It doesn't matter what it is. It doesn't! He's a good man, a saint, there's no harm to anyone in his secrets. Only he holds them so very close. And -- and I can't tell you, M. Joly, why he's made himself so very ill. I don't know. We would have given him anything he needed, my husband and I, if we'd known. He's always had his secrets and his whims. I don't know what he was thinking."

This is... more true than not, anyway. But what she does know, she won't say.

"He..." Marius's voice comes out faint and strained. He clears his throat, pushes a slightly shaking hand through his hair, and tried again. "He thought himself no longer welcome in our house. He-- I made it clear to him that this was so. God!" He turns away and drops his face into his hands. "I though I had pieced together the truth, but I had it all, all wrong!"

"I don't understand you."

She means it to be light, teasing, as if everything were normal, as if she could push away some of the awfulness of today; it comes out uncertain instead.

Joly reaches out to press Marius' shoulder again, and keeps the contact, for what little stability or comfort it might offer against whatever terrible news has his friend so troubled. When Cosette says she doesn't understand, he nods in agreement with her. "I don't know what news has come to you; but here, whatever sort of trouble has found you, you've no need to hide it, you're with friends."

He meets Cosette's eyes. "And we'll do whatever we can for you, all of you, here. You're quite right about your father, Madame, I know. I've seen it; he is a hero, a wonderful man. " She seems strangely worried that he believe it; well, he does.

"He is, he is," Marius agrees fervently, looking up once more. "I have nothing to hide-- I will not hide it."

He turns towards Cosette. He cannot explain everything in detail with Joly here, but he can get close enough. After all, it doesn't matter of Joly knows of his stupid ideas-- they aren't true, not at all.

"I knew of your father's past. He told me after we were married and swore me to secrecy. And I-- I took it all amiss." He ducks his head, ashamed, but forces himself to look up to meet her gaze again. "I thought-- I thought he had killed the spy, the inspector, Javert. I thought he had stolen the money that was your dowry-- it was for this reason I refused to spend it. It was for this reason I-- I made it plain through certain-- certain signs that perhaps he should not continue to see you."

He can't go on, can't look at her any longer. He clasps his hands together in his lap to try and stop their shaking and stares at them.

The coffee cup in her hands feels unreal: solid, warm, somewhere very far away.

"But--"

It's just blankly bewildered.

"But how could you think that? Of him? Why did you -- why did neither of you say? I could have told you he would never do such a thing."

Joly, still with one hand on Marius' shoulder, is no more enlightened than he was a moment ago.One fact stands out with an especial lack of clarity. "But-- Javert is alive. He has been --not as I am, truly alive, free to return to Paris. He and your father have associated here very often. Why would Monsieur Fauchelevent tell you otherwise?"

Some secret between them? Does it have to do with the spying?

"He did not tell me," Marius replies. "Upon the barricade-- when he begged custody of the spy, and-- I thought Javert dead."

To Cosette, he says, "I swore not to tell."

It comes out faintly, weakly, and he knows it is no excuse at all. "He had hidden his past, I did not think you would know any more of it than I. I-- I hoped to protect you from the knowledge of it. If he had truly done the wicked things I thought of him. But he did not!" He must be absolutely clear on this point. "The man is a saint, a wonder-- he saved my life, and I have done this to him!" He looks to Cosette again. "To you. He-- he may have died, and you never have seen him, and the fault would have been all mine."

She wants --

She wants to scream, or burst into tears, or run out into her own safe garden, or make angry demands, and she can't do any of them here in front of M. Joly. She sets her coffee cup down on the desk with hands that are just beginning to tremble, and presses her clasped hands to her mouth, and bows her head so her ringlets fall forward and hide her face a little.

"He protected me from it," she whispers, staring at the strange tiled floor. "And you protected me too, and so I knew nothing whatsoever. I told him over and over again that he was welcome, so many times. But he only smiled. He only called me Madame. I knew nothing at all."

She won't cry again. She won't, she won't.

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