It's tough for everyone, everywhere. Even the bourgeois, for all their wealth and luxury, for all that they scoff at us and shudder in our presence on the streets, or pretend we aren't here. Of course, I'd exchange my life for that of a bourgeois any day, problems or not, if I could keep Cosette as well (but can anyone have it both ways?). Not that any bourgeois would exchange places with an orphan prostitute with a child.

"Fantine, after work, let's go out and have some fun, okay?" Antoinette smiles up at me. She's young and new, afraid but sure it'll all work out in the end, that this won't last long and she'll bounce right back. That the world can forgive and forget what she's been (and, in their minds, always will be).

I was like that once. Hopeful. How I am now is the rainy day after you thought the world had cleared up and the sun had shone on you for a while... and you thought it would last forever.

Nothing lasts forever.

I shake my head at the child (eighteen only; even I am older than that: twenty-five. At twenty-five, shouldn't all the world's possibilities lie before me? Shouldn't I have a home, a family, with Felix and Cosette and the sun shining bright?). "I cannot. I want only to go home and sleep." To forget this. I shudder and begin to cough--a choking, hacking cough, as if I would cough my lungs out; sometimes I fear I will--and a look of alarm covers 'Toinette's face.

"Are you okay?" she cries out. I nod: I do not trust my voice. She smiles again, relieved. I wish I could wipe the smile from her face; smiles are attractive and hers is like a siren song. I wish I could save this girl from all the trouble the world has given me, but before I can advise her, she is walking away with a young man. If only she... if only we all could walk away from this forever. He looks handsome, respectable (don't they all? None of them are, not really, else would they have to come to us?), and she is chatting merrily, hoping that by forging a friendship, she'll make him gentler, kinder.

She learns quicker than I expected; this is one of Violette's tricks. Violette Deuranger is a frightened, silent, shaking creature, unlike this Antoinette Beaumont; Antoinette is a cheerful, friendly, though overly apolegetic, little bird.

Like I used to be.

Like my Cosette is. God, never let Cosette be in this position. Never let her learn what I've done for her. What she doesn't know, can't hurt her... and can't be turned against her.

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