Éponine Thénardier (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
filleauloup) wrote2013-02-08 08:40 pm
filleauloup) wrote2013-02-08 08:40 pm
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The Barricade at the Rue de la Chanvrerie, Paris, France, 5 June 1832
Dusk was setting in by the time Éponine returned to the Rue de la Chanvrerie. It was done; everything was in place. Yesterday Cosette and the old man she called Father had moved out of the house on the Rue Plumet, but not before Cosette managed to write a letter to inform Marius of her whereabouts. That letter was tucked away in Éponine's pocket; Éponine, in a grey workman's smock and patched trousers that she'd managed to wheedle out of some boy, had wandered back and forth along the Rue Plumet, past the gate of the overgrown garden, until Cosette noticed her and asked her to play errand-boy.
She wouldn't have done it without a disguise either way; she doubted that Cosette would recognize her now, but she didn't care to take the chance. Bad enough Marius had fallen in love with Cosette, and only found her because he'd asked Éponine to find her address for him. (And had he ever mentioned her to Cosette? She doubted it, and resented it as much as she was glad.) Bad enough that Éponine had wanted so much to make him happy that she'd agreed. Bad enough she had to see how happy and healthy Cosette looked, and remember the shivering, underfed waif back in Montfermeil who'd huddled in the empty corner by the hearth and cast longing looks at all of Éponine and Azelma's pretty toys. Bad enough Cosette had given her five francs to carry the letter and she'd accepted; having to endure that while Cosette looked at her with pity, knowing exactly who she was, would be one twist of the knife too many.
Then when an unsuspecting Marius arrived at the now empty house today she'd made sure to be there, hiding just out of sight, to tell him which of the barricades being built around the city was where his friends were waiting for him -- information she'd gotten earlier in the day from his friend Courfeyrac under the pretense of looking for Marius. She'd followed them to the Rue de la Chanvrerie and helped to pile up paving stones for the foundation of the barricade, doing just enough work to insinuate herself into their group. (They were too easy to trust, she thought, so wrapped up in their idealistic fervor that they forgot common sense.) Now all that was left was to find out if her gamble had been right, and if Marius would come to join his friends now that Cosette was apparently gone.
The main barricade, some seven or eight feet of torn-up paving stones, iron bars, wine casks, even an overturned omnibus that must have been added after she'd snuck off to the Rue Plumet, stretched the breadth of the street, but with her gaunt frame Éponine had no trouble slipping through the half-hidden gap left as an exit. She wouldn't be surprised if her brother turned up here; Gavroche seemed to have fallen in with these students. He was young enough, she reflected bitterly, to be caught up in their enthusiasm. Éponine, personally, thought it was a pretty idea, but just a notion, just a fancy like the ones she conjured up for herself on nights when she couldn't sleep and she needed to escape from her own thoughts but didn't care to find other ways of distracting herself. Only those imaginings always got away from her in the end, like this one would from them; pleasant as it seemed now, it was going to turn monstrous.
There was a peculiar irony to how getting cast out by their mother to fend for himself at such a young age had sheltered Gavroche from some of the worst. He'd probably fared better than she and Azelma had after that old philanthropist in the ugly yellow coat took Cosette away, back in Montfermeil. When they'd still had the inn, and Cosette was an easy target for Éponine's parents' anger. Before everything went so badly wrong.
There was no sign of Gavroche at the moment; she would have known if he were here by the sound of one of his cheerful and irreverent songs ringing off the walls. Instead the rough square proscribed by the barricades around the Corinth tavern was preternaturally silent, the boys who fancied themselves soldiers of some glorious cause pale and subdued. The sharp tang of gunpowder and blood in the air told her that one of them must have killed; their stricken expressions told her that it was the first time the reality of what they had planned to do cut through the heady haze of their dream. In some vague, distant way she pitied them for that loss of innocence, but she'd encountered several of them before on forays through the Quartier Latin and for all their grand talk of equality none of them had ever so much as said hello to her. She could repay their abstract consideration with a little bit of her own.
But abstraction had to give way to reality now, and reality was that without truly comprehending what they'd done they'd set something in motion that couldn't be stopped. The uprising was doomed, and so was everyone taking part.
She was here because she was counting on that.
It was ten o'clock in the evening when Éponine heard the high, clear voice of Gavroche -- singing, of course, like he always was -- approaching from the Rue St. Denis, followed by his exclamation of "They're coming! Where's my musket?" Anticipation, heavy with dread, had settled over the barricades during the hours of waiting, but at Gavroche's shout it dissipated immediately into a flurry of activity, orders given in low voices, and the clicks of gun hammers being primed.
It wasn't much longer before the steady marching rhythm of boots on pavement came at them through the darkness, building into a crescendo of gunfire that broke over the barricade with such fury that the sudden light from the muzzle-flashes of the National Guard's muskets was blinding. The pole upon which their red flag flew was cut cleanly in half. Éponine had been passing discharged guns back to be reloaded; in the terrible silence that followed she heard their leader, the one they called Enjolras (the one who looked like he'd been chiseled from marble and ought to be on a pedestal like one of the statues in the Luxembourg) calling for a volunteer to raise the flag again.
She was tempted, for a moment, to step forward and accept the undoubtedly fatal task, but only briefly; the symbolic gesture would mean nothing to her, and somehow she didn't have the heart to make a mockery of it for them, if for no one's sake but Gavroche's.
Then, someone did: Père Mabeuf, the old botanist, Marius's friend, whose garden Éponine had watered once in exchange for information. She heard some of the boys whispering to each other that he must be one of the old regicides of '93; it must have been nice, she thought, to believe things like that, nice hopeful things, so easily. She saw the look in Mabeuf's eyes as he carried the flag past her, toward the barricade: desperate, resigned, and resolute, like a man who had nothing left to lose. Once, months and months ago, she'd visited Marius's room and looked at herself in his mirror. Looking at Mabeuf now felt very much the same, as if, were she in front of that looking-glass now, it would be his eyes staring dully back at her. He mounted the barricade with steps surprisingly steady for his eighty-odd years, held the flag aloft, and was pierced through by the fire from dozens of muskets as he cried out, "Vive la France! Vive la révolution!"
His body was carried into the tavern -- past their prisoner, the implacable bulldog of a police inspector who had arrested her months ago but was the one bound to a pillar now -- and laid out on a table, draped in an old black shawl of Widow Hucheloup's. Enjolras bent down and kissed the old man's forehead -- Éponine wondered why that surprised his friends as much as it did -- before holding up a bloodstained and bullet-ridden coat.
"This is our flag now," he told them. Another pretty but meaningless gesture, though Éponine didn't begrudge them this one.
Then the first attack came in earnest, with the eerie flicker of torchlight reflecting off an oncoming wall of bayonets. Guardsmen and soldiers began to scale the barricade: the first one was shot by a defender who leaped to the summit of the barricade and in turn was cut down by the bayonet-thrust of a second. Éponine heard a call for help through the din of gunfire and shouting. Turning to look in the direction of the shout she caught sight, instead, of her brother with both hands wrapped around a massive musket that he was struggling to aim at the man towering over him. Gavroche squeezed the trigger and nothing happened; his assailant laughed and brought his bayonet to bear, and she was too far away and had just handed off the reloaded gun that had been passed to her, and her brother --
Scrambled back and out of the way as his attacker spun halfway around and toppled backwards with a bullet through his forehead.
Marius, it seemed, had arrived at last; Éponine turned to see him tossing away a pair of tiny, now empty pistols.
. . . and now that he was here, like she'd planned, she was terrified for him. He was such a dreamer, more romantic than revolutionary, and she wanted him here because she loved him for it but it was exactly why he didn't belong here. She saw him cast a frantic glance around for a weapon, because gendarmes were still swarming up the barricade, then bolt toward the keg of gunpowder just inside the tavern door.
Marius was completely focused on the powder keg and didn't seem to notice the soldier atop the barricade training a musket on him, but Éponine did. He didn't seem to see the finger tensing against the trigger, but she could.
She knew what would happen next, had been anticipating it, but she thought of the letter still in her pocket, a little girl with wide terrified eyes shrinking away from Éponine's mother's wrath, an empty overgrown garden on the Rue Plumet and her own squalid garret. How Marius had lit up like the sun bursting through the clouds when she'd told him she had Cosette's address, the blank, pallid expressions of the dead bodies she came across every now and then under the bridges and in the back alleys of Paris, and would the musket ball burst through his chest like those rays of sunlight before he couldn't stand any longer? How long would it be after he fell, before he looked like them? Maybe he was here and it was already too late to change that, but --
She couldn't have picked a single thought out of that jumbled mess to explain why, but she threw herself forward and clapped her hand over the muzzle of the gun.
Burning, searing pain and the smell of her own scorched flesh chased every other thought out of Éponine's head as the musket ball tore through her hand. It might have shattered a few bones on its way, but she couldn't make enough sense of the pain to tell.
It might have gone through her chest, too, if her impulsive leap onto the barricade hadn't carried her onto a precariously balanced plank that gave way beneath her feet. As it was, she felt a sharp pain in her right shoulder just before her collision with the pavement chased all the air from her lungs.
"Clear out!" she thought she heard someone bellow through the gunfire and shouting and her own shock-induced haze. "Clear out or I'll blow up the whole place!"
It sounded like Marius, but no, the pain must be playing tricks on her, because the voice was bold and assertive and that didn't seem like the constantly distracted boy who'd lived next door, who'd never even realized that he saw her all the time in the Gorbeau building stairwell until the day she came knocking on his door with a letter. But wouldn't it be funny if it was him? She must be delirious now; the wounds she'd sustained might not be enough to fell some of the boys defending the barricade, but she hadn't had much to eat this week, hadn't had enough to eat or a full, decent night's sleep in years. Thin as she was, the musket ball had lodged itself deep in her shoulder and it felt like her entire right side was doused in flames; the fall to the ground, with little to absorb the impact, had hurt, and she was sure her ears were ringing.
Éponine had no idea how long it took her to half-crawl, half-drag herself out of the way, but she had been huddled against a wall in the little Rue Mondétour alley (hiding in the shadows in alleys was something she was good at) for a while, wondering whether she ought to try and stop the bleeding, when she realized that the threat must have worked. It was quiet out by the main barricade now . . . a funereal sort of quiet, she couldn't help thinking, but that was a bit inevitable. They hadn't done much more here than build their own tomb out of other people's leavings, after all.
Perhaps Marius would happen by and find her? She hoped he would. She kept listening for the sound of approaching footsteps, fighting the urge to just succumb to unconsciousness from the pain -- she'd liked it better before she realized just how badly she'd damaged her hand -- but drifting in and out despite her best efforts.
"What are you doing here?" The voice that jolted her back to alertness was disapproving and concerned all at once, but far too young to be Marius. Éponine opened her eyes.
"Gavroche." She'd been hoping it wouldn't be her brother who found her.
Gavroche frowned down at her. "What kind of game are you playing at?" he demanded in the scolding tone she knew he'd take. "This is business of monumental importance here. There's nothing here that'll tickle the old man's fancy."
"As if I care about that," Éponine scoffed, albeit weakly. "Father doesn't have a thing to do with this." She saw Gavroche's eyebrows raise, maybe because he wasn't used to hearing her speak without a single word of thieves' slang; it had been a while since they'd spoken, she realized. It must have been shortly after they'd let her out of prison, and that had been several months ago.
Gavroche scrubbed one hand through his hair and leaned against the heavy musket he gripped with the other hand. "'Parnasse?"
"No," Éponine snapped, vaguely surprised about the flare of indignation that crept into her voice. Her brother had nothing against the assassin, and whatever it was that she and Montparnasse were was of no consequence to him. Nor to her, not any more, but that had been true for longer than she'd realized.
Gavroche leaned forward, squinting to see in the scant moonlight. "Then why'd you go and get yourself nicked?" he asked, clicking his tongue reproachfully as he peered at her bleeding shoulder. He couldn't see her hand; she kept it carefully hidden, to avoid further reproach.
"It --" She stopped short, not wanting to say it out loud: Because I didn't mean to get injured. I meant to die.
"It doesn't matter," she said instead, thickly; her mouth was dry, and words felt like a monumental effort. "You oughtn't be here either, you know."
"Now look here," Gavroche began in an indignant tone, but Éponine held up her good hand to cut him off.
"There's a letter. In my pocket," she told him, indicating the pocket of the torn smock. She hadn't meant to do this, but somehow the thought of Cosette waiting in naive good faith that the boy she'd asked to deliver her letter had done what she asked evoked a twinge of pity as much it did envy that the other girl could still be that trusting. (How, after everything Éponine's parents had done to her?) She'd succeeded in keeping them apart; surely she could allow them at least this much? Anyhow, they were all doomed here, and she didn't want Marius to hold it against her in the afterlife. "Do you know Monsieur Marius? Mind he gets it," she instructed at Gavroche's nod, "and tell him--"
She meant to say tell him to come find me here, but when Gavroche reached into her pocket for the letter he jarred her wounded hand and the rest of the sentence was lost in a strangled yelp of pain.
He stood, looking down at her with his head tilted in the way that, combined with his darting movements, always reminded her of a bird. "Well, let this be a lesson to you, then," he intoned sternly, as if he weren't six years her junior. "I'll see your Monsieur What's His Name gets this, but mind you don't get in the way of any more gendarmes. They've a fondness for using those stingers of theirs."
Before Éponine could repeat her request he'd seized his musket and dashed away, leaving her to hope the letter would be enough to drive Marius to find her here.
She had no way of knowing that Gavroche, upon delivering the letter, had let slip to Marius that it was his sister Éponine who'd asked him to pass the note on, but not that she was here. Nor did she have any way of knowing that Marius, upon realizing that Gavroche was a Thénardier, had immediately thought of the debt his father had asked him to repay to the family of the man he believed had saved his life and taken it upon himself to send the boy away from the barricade with a letter of his own, hoping to keep him away from certain death. Marius, unlike her, wouldn't realize that Gavroche would only make sure to deliver the letter and get back as fast as he could; Gavroche was as stubborn and wily as she was, and Marius was too blind and trusting and innocent.
She had to wait for him, but she was so tired, and surely she could close her eyes for just a minute . . .
When she came to again it wasn't to an exchange of gunfire from the either side of the barricade, but to the sound of enraged men trying to break down the tavern door. Grateful that she had so much practice at sneaking about, Éponine slipped out of her hiding place to peer around the corner out of the alley -- and immediately shrank back when she saw soldiers begin to force their way into the Corinth tavern and the nearby houses in search of any remaining rebels.
So he hadn't come; most likely he was dead like all the others, and the thought clawed at her gut worse than any bout of starvation she'd ever had. He was gone even though she had tried to save him, and Cosette would be devastated. She'd taken Marius away from Cosette the way everything had been taken from her, but Éponine felt no sense of accomplishment, or even selfish satisfaction, in that knowledge. She hadn't considered feeling guilty about the whole thing; she'd assumed she wouldn't be around to face consequences, after all.
But she had survived, apparently, and she was not going to stay here at the mercy of soldiers high on anger and bloodlust. The hail of bullets and grapeshot during the assault on the barricade had been one thing. If they found her, these men would execute her like a criminal -- something far worse than the petty thief she was -- like they must have whoever they'd just found upstairs in the tavern, judging from the firing squad volley that rang out, and those were terms on which she did not choose to die.
Besides, maybe she owed Cosette at least as much as bringing the news herself. (Maybe seeing the look on Cosette's face would make her feel better, and they'd be even after all these years.)
She wanted to find them, Marius and Gavroche, and at least say goodbye (damn these boys for dragging her brother into this), but unless she cared to offer herself up to that firing squad it would be impossible. Éponine kept close to the walls of the Mondétour alley toward the little barricade and slipped through a gap that would never have let her through if she'd been decently fed. Still, it was a tight enough squeeze that she had to almost bite through her lip to keep from crying out when a jagged piece of paving stone wrenched her injured shoulder and started it to bleeding again, worse than before. It must have torn the wound open further, maybe even driven the musket ball deeper.
She knew this neighborhood very well: which combination of alleys was the safest and which one the shortest, where she could hide if she had to, who might help her, and what they'd want in return. There, between two houses, was a gap too narrow for a grown man, and she'd used it to shake off a tail or two before. Besides, there was a little café there on the other side, and while the quality of its food was dubious at best the proprietor didn't mind taking her money on those rare occasions when she had a bit to spend on a meal. She knew how he had looked at her then; for a different kind of price he might be persuaded to help her now.
She had her eyes half-shut against a growing dizziness, though, and so failed to notice that the tiny alleyway hadn't let her out by the back door of the café. Or, for that matter, anywhere in Paris at all . . .
[OOC: NFI/NFB, of course, OOC okay. Oh, god, this is long. The scary part is that I originally wrote it in the style of the book and then revised it because that was too long. Some dialogue taken from the Norman Denny translation of Les Misérables, by Victor Hugo; this whole scene is adapted from that, with a few twists. TBC.
Content warning: This post contains references to physical abuse and attempted suicide, not to mention a whole lot of people dying horribly.]
She wouldn't have done it without a disguise either way; she doubted that Cosette would recognize her now, but she didn't care to take the chance. Bad enough Marius had fallen in love with Cosette, and only found her because he'd asked Éponine to find her address for him. (And had he ever mentioned her to Cosette? She doubted it, and resented it as much as she was glad.) Bad enough that Éponine had wanted so much to make him happy that she'd agreed. Bad enough she had to see how happy and healthy Cosette looked, and remember the shivering, underfed waif back in Montfermeil who'd huddled in the empty corner by the hearth and cast longing looks at all of Éponine and Azelma's pretty toys. Bad enough Cosette had given her five francs to carry the letter and she'd accepted; having to endure that while Cosette looked at her with pity, knowing exactly who she was, would be one twist of the knife too many.
Then when an unsuspecting Marius arrived at the now empty house today she'd made sure to be there, hiding just out of sight, to tell him which of the barricades being built around the city was where his friends were waiting for him -- information she'd gotten earlier in the day from his friend Courfeyrac under the pretense of looking for Marius. She'd followed them to the Rue de la Chanvrerie and helped to pile up paving stones for the foundation of the barricade, doing just enough work to insinuate herself into their group. (They were too easy to trust, she thought, so wrapped up in their idealistic fervor that they forgot common sense.) Now all that was left was to find out if her gamble had been right, and if Marius would come to join his friends now that Cosette was apparently gone.
The main barricade, some seven or eight feet of torn-up paving stones, iron bars, wine casks, even an overturned omnibus that must have been added after she'd snuck off to the Rue Plumet, stretched the breadth of the street, but with her gaunt frame Éponine had no trouble slipping through the half-hidden gap left as an exit. She wouldn't be surprised if her brother turned up here; Gavroche seemed to have fallen in with these students. He was young enough, she reflected bitterly, to be caught up in their enthusiasm. Éponine, personally, thought it was a pretty idea, but just a notion, just a fancy like the ones she conjured up for herself on nights when she couldn't sleep and she needed to escape from her own thoughts but didn't care to find other ways of distracting herself. Only those imaginings always got away from her in the end, like this one would from them; pleasant as it seemed now, it was going to turn monstrous.
There was a peculiar irony to how getting cast out by their mother to fend for himself at such a young age had sheltered Gavroche from some of the worst. He'd probably fared better than she and Azelma had after that old philanthropist in the ugly yellow coat took Cosette away, back in Montfermeil. When they'd still had the inn, and Cosette was an easy target for Éponine's parents' anger. Before everything went so badly wrong.
There was no sign of Gavroche at the moment; she would have known if he were here by the sound of one of his cheerful and irreverent songs ringing off the walls. Instead the rough square proscribed by the barricades around the Corinth tavern was preternaturally silent, the boys who fancied themselves soldiers of some glorious cause pale and subdued. The sharp tang of gunpowder and blood in the air told her that one of them must have killed; their stricken expressions told her that it was the first time the reality of what they had planned to do cut through the heady haze of their dream. In some vague, distant way she pitied them for that loss of innocence, but she'd encountered several of them before on forays through the Quartier Latin and for all their grand talk of equality none of them had ever so much as said hello to her. She could repay their abstract consideration with a little bit of her own.
But abstraction had to give way to reality now, and reality was that without truly comprehending what they'd done they'd set something in motion that couldn't be stopped. The uprising was doomed, and so was everyone taking part.
She was here because she was counting on that.
It was ten o'clock in the evening when Éponine heard the high, clear voice of Gavroche -- singing, of course, like he always was -- approaching from the Rue St. Denis, followed by his exclamation of "They're coming! Where's my musket?" Anticipation, heavy with dread, had settled over the barricades during the hours of waiting, but at Gavroche's shout it dissipated immediately into a flurry of activity, orders given in low voices, and the clicks of gun hammers being primed.
It wasn't much longer before the steady marching rhythm of boots on pavement came at them through the darkness, building into a crescendo of gunfire that broke over the barricade with such fury that the sudden light from the muzzle-flashes of the National Guard's muskets was blinding. The pole upon which their red flag flew was cut cleanly in half. Éponine had been passing discharged guns back to be reloaded; in the terrible silence that followed she heard their leader, the one they called Enjolras (the one who looked like he'd been chiseled from marble and ought to be on a pedestal like one of the statues in the Luxembourg) calling for a volunteer to raise the flag again.
She was tempted, for a moment, to step forward and accept the undoubtedly fatal task, but only briefly; the symbolic gesture would mean nothing to her, and somehow she didn't have the heart to make a mockery of it for them, if for no one's sake but Gavroche's.
Then, someone did: Père Mabeuf, the old botanist, Marius's friend, whose garden Éponine had watered once in exchange for information. She heard some of the boys whispering to each other that he must be one of the old regicides of '93; it must have been nice, she thought, to believe things like that, nice hopeful things, so easily. She saw the look in Mabeuf's eyes as he carried the flag past her, toward the barricade: desperate, resigned, and resolute, like a man who had nothing left to lose. Once, months and months ago, she'd visited Marius's room and looked at herself in his mirror. Looking at Mabeuf now felt very much the same, as if, were she in front of that looking-glass now, it would be his eyes staring dully back at her. He mounted the barricade with steps surprisingly steady for his eighty-odd years, held the flag aloft, and was pierced through by the fire from dozens of muskets as he cried out, "Vive la France! Vive la révolution!"
His body was carried into the tavern -- past their prisoner, the implacable bulldog of a police inspector who had arrested her months ago but was the one bound to a pillar now -- and laid out on a table, draped in an old black shawl of Widow Hucheloup's. Enjolras bent down and kissed the old man's forehead -- Éponine wondered why that surprised his friends as much as it did -- before holding up a bloodstained and bullet-ridden coat.
"This is our flag now," he told them. Another pretty but meaningless gesture, though Éponine didn't begrudge them this one.
Then the first attack came in earnest, with the eerie flicker of torchlight reflecting off an oncoming wall of bayonets. Guardsmen and soldiers began to scale the barricade: the first one was shot by a defender who leaped to the summit of the barricade and in turn was cut down by the bayonet-thrust of a second. Éponine heard a call for help through the din of gunfire and shouting. Turning to look in the direction of the shout she caught sight, instead, of her brother with both hands wrapped around a massive musket that he was struggling to aim at the man towering over him. Gavroche squeezed the trigger and nothing happened; his assailant laughed and brought his bayonet to bear, and she was too far away and had just handed off the reloaded gun that had been passed to her, and her brother --
Scrambled back and out of the way as his attacker spun halfway around and toppled backwards with a bullet through his forehead.
Marius, it seemed, had arrived at last; Éponine turned to see him tossing away a pair of tiny, now empty pistols.
. . . and now that he was here, like she'd planned, she was terrified for him. He was such a dreamer, more romantic than revolutionary, and she wanted him here because she loved him for it but it was exactly why he didn't belong here. She saw him cast a frantic glance around for a weapon, because gendarmes were still swarming up the barricade, then bolt toward the keg of gunpowder just inside the tavern door.
Marius was completely focused on the powder keg and didn't seem to notice the soldier atop the barricade training a musket on him, but Éponine did. He didn't seem to see the finger tensing against the trigger, but she could.
She knew what would happen next, had been anticipating it, but she thought of the letter still in her pocket, a little girl with wide terrified eyes shrinking away from Éponine's mother's wrath, an empty overgrown garden on the Rue Plumet and her own squalid garret. How Marius had lit up like the sun bursting through the clouds when she'd told him she had Cosette's address, the blank, pallid expressions of the dead bodies she came across every now and then under the bridges and in the back alleys of Paris, and would the musket ball burst through his chest like those rays of sunlight before he couldn't stand any longer? How long would it be after he fell, before he looked like them? Maybe he was here and it was already too late to change that, but --
She couldn't have picked a single thought out of that jumbled mess to explain why, but she threw herself forward and clapped her hand over the muzzle of the gun.
Burning, searing pain and the smell of her own scorched flesh chased every other thought out of Éponine's head as the musket ball tore through her hand. It might have shattered a few bones on its way, but she couldn't make enough sense of the pain to tell.
It might have gone through her chest, too, if her impulsive leap onto the barricade hadn't carried her onto a precariously balanced plank that gave way beneath her feet. As it was, she felt a sharp pain in her right shoulder just before her collision with the pavement chased all the air from her lungs.
"Clear out!" she thought she heard someone bellow through the gunfire and shouting and her own shock-induced haze. "Clear out or I'll blow up the whole place!"
It sounded like Marius, but no, the pain must be playing tricks on her, because the voice was bold and assertive and that didn't seem like the constantly distracted boy who'd lived next door, who'd never even realized that he saw her all the time in the Gorbeau building stairwell until the day she came knocking on his door with a letter. But wouldn't it be funny if it was him? She must be delirious now; the wounds she'd sustained might not be enough to fell some of the boys defending the barricade, but she hadn't had much to eat this week, hadn't had enough to eat or a full, decent night's sleep in years. Thin as she was, the musket ball had lodged itself deep in her shoulder and it felt like her entire right side was doused in flames; the fall to the ground, with little to absorb the impact, had hurt, and she was sure her ears were ringing.
Éponine had no idea how long it took her to half-crawl, half-drag herself out of the way, but she had been huddled against a wall in the little Rue Mondétour alley (hiding in the shadows in alleys was something she was good at) for a while, wondering whether she ought to try and stop the bleeding, when she realized that the threat must have worked. It was quiet out by the main barricade now . . . a funereal sort of quiet, she couldn't help thinking, but that was a bit inevitable. They hadn't done much more here than build their own tomb out of other people's leavings, after all.
Perhaps Marius would happen by and find her? She hoped he would. She kept listening for the sound of approaching footsteps, fighting the urge to just succumb to unconsciousness from the pain -- she'd liked it better before she realized just how badly she'd damaged her hand -- but drifting in and out despite her best efforts.
"What are you doing here?" The voice that jolted her back to alertness was disapproving and concerned all at once, but far too young to be Marius. Éponine opened her eyes.
"Gavroche." She'd been hoping it wouldn't be her brother who found her.
Gavroche frowned down at her. "What kind of game are you playing at?" he demanded in the scolding tone she knew he'd take. "This is business of monumental importance here. There's nothing here that'll tickle the old man's fancy."
"As if I care about that," Éponine scoffed, albeit weakly. "Father doesn't have a thing to do with this." She saw Gavroche's eyebrows raise, maybe because he wasn't used to hearing her speak without a single word of thieves' slang; it had been a while since they'd spoken, she realized. It must have been shortly after they'd let her out of prison, and that had been several months ago.
Gavroche scrubbed one hand through his hair and leaned against the heavy musket he gripped with the other hand. "'Parnasse?"
"No," Éponine snapped, vaguely surprised about the flare of indignation that crept into her voice. Her brother had nothing against the assassin, and whatever it was that she and Montparnasse were was of no consequence to him. Nor to her, not any more, but that had been true for longer than she'd realized.
Gavroche leaned forward, squinting to see in the scant moonlight. "Then why'd you go and get yourself nicked?" he asked, clicking his tongue reproachfully as he peered at her bleeding shoulder. He couldn't see her hand; she kept it carefully hidden, to avoid further reproach.
"It --" She stopped short, not wanting to say it out loud: Because I didn't mean to get injured. I meant to die.
"It doesn't matter," she said instead, thickly; her mouth was dry, and words felt like a monumental effort. "You oughtn't be here either, you know."
"Now look here," Gavroche began in an indignant tone, but Éponine held up her good hand to cut him off.
"There's a letter. In my pocket," she told him, indicating the pocket of the torn smock. She hadn't meant to do this, but somehow the thought of Cosette waiting in naive good faith that the boy she'd asked to deliver her letter had done what she asked evoked a twinge of pity as much it did envy that the other girl could still be that trusting. (How, after everything Éponine's parents had done to her?) She'd succeeded in keeping them apart; surely she could allow them at least this much? Anyhow, they were all doomed here, and she didn't want Marius to hold it against her in the afterlife. "Do you know Monsieur Marius? Mind he gets it," she instructed at Gavroche's nod, "and tell him--"
She meant to say tell him to come find me here, but when Gavroche reached into her pocket for the letter he jarred her wounded hand and the rest of the sentence was lost in a strangled yelp of pain.
He stood, looking down at her with his head tilted in the way that, combined with his darting movements, always reminded her of a bird. "Well, let this be a lesson to you, then," he intoned sternly, as if he weren't six years her junior. "I'll see your Monsieur What's His Name gets this, but mind you don't get in the way of any more gendarmes. They've a fondness for using those stingers of theirs."
Before Éponine could repeat her request he'd seized his musket and dashed away, leaving her to hope the letter would be enough to drive Marius to find her here.
She had no way of knowing that Gavroche, upon delivering the letter, had let slip to Marius that it was his sister Éponine who'd asked him to pass the note on, but not that she was here. Nor did she have any way of knowing that Marius, upon realizing that Gavroche was a Thénardier, had immediately thought of the debt his father had asked him to repay to the family of the man he believed had saved his life and taken it upon himself to send the boy away from the barricade with a letter of his own, hoping to keep him away from certain death. Marius, unlike her, wouldn't realize that Gavroche would only make sure to deliver the letter and get back as fast as he could; Gavroche was as stubborn and wily as she was, and Marius was too blind and trusting and innocent.
She had to wait for him, but she was so tired, and surely she could close her eyes for just a minute . . .
When she came to again it wasn't to an exchange of gunfire from the either side of the barricade, but to the sound of enraged men trying to break down the tavern door. Grateful that she had so much practice at sneaking about, Éponine slipped out of her hiding place to peer around the corner out of the alley -- and immediately shrank back when she saw soldiers begin to force their way into the Corinth tavern and the nearby houses in search of any remaining rebels.
So he hadn't come; most likely he was dead like all the others, and the thought clawed at her gut worse than any bout of starvation she'd ever had. He was gone even though she had tried to save him, and Cosette would be devastated. She'd taken Marius away from Cosette the way everything had been taken from her, but Éponine felt no sense of accomplishment, or even selfish satisfaction, in that knowledge. She hadn't considered feeling guilty about the whole thing; she'd assumed she wouldn't be around to face consequences, after all.
But she had survived, apparently, and she was not going to stay here at the mercy of soldiers high on anger and bloodlust. The hail of bullets and grapeshot during the assault on the barricade had been one thing. If they found her, these men would execute her like a criminal -- something far worse than the petty thief she was -- like they must have whoever they'd just found upstairs in the tavern, judging from the firing squad volley that rang out, and those were terms on which she did not choose to die.
Besides, maybe she owed Cosette at least as much as bringing the news herself. (Maybe seeing the look on Cosette's face would make her feel better, and they'd be even after all these years.)
She wanted to find them, Marius and Gavroche, and at least say goodbye (damn these boys for dragging her brother into this), but unless she cared to offer herself up to that firing squad it would be impossible. Éponine kept close to the walls of the Mondétour alley toward the little barricade and slipped through a gap that would never have let her through if she'd been decently fed. Still, it was a tight enough squeeze that she had to almost bite through her lip to keep from crying out when a jagged piece of paving stone wrenched her injured shoulder and started it to bleeding again, worse than before. It must have torn the wound open further, maybe even driven the musket ball deeper.
She knew this neighborhood very well: which combination of alleys was the safest and which one the shortest, where she could hide if she had to, who might help her, and what they'd want in return. There, between two houses, was a gap too narrow for a grown man, and she'd used it to shake off a tail or two before. Besides, there was a little café there on the other side, and while the quality of its food was dubious at best the proprietor didn't mind taking her money on those rare occasions when she had a bit to spend on a meal. She knew how he had looked at her then; for a different kind of price he might be persuaded to help her now.
She had her eyes half-shut against a growing dizziness, though, and so failed to notice that the tiny alleyway hadn't let her out by the back door of the café. Or, for that matter, anywhere in Paris at all . . .
[OOC: NFI/NFB, of course, OOC okay. Oh, god, this is long. The scary part is that I originally wrote it in the style of the book and then revised it because that was too long. Some dialogue taken from the Norman Denny translation of Les Misérables, by Victor Hugo; this whole scene is adapted from that, with a few twists. TBC.
Content warning: This post contains references to physical abuse and attempted suicide, not to mention a whole lot of people dying horribly.]