En Route to the Abandoned Warehouse District, Saturday Evening

[filleauloup]

These dreams the past couple of nights had Éponine feeling -- well, somewhat less stable than usual. The day they had to leave Montfermeil, Montparnasse's vicious smile, Inspector Javert's hand clamping down on her shoulder, the clang of a barred door shutting her into a prison cell, the hail of grapeshot from the National Guard's artillery: a lifetime of too-vivid memories that a drunken stupor had always managed to dispel before, if only temporarily. Not even that was working now, not with other people's emotions trying to insinuate themselves into her head along with everything else.

She was stumbling, dazed and reeling from too many things to process at once, and turned a corner into an alley to find her way blocked off. Or was it? She couldn't tell; it might be real, or it might not, and she couldn't get her bearings enough to sort out which was which. All she knew one way or the other was that the alleyway in front of her was blocked off by a barricade about seven feet high, a surprisingly well-organized construction of paving stones and barrels arranged around a cart and even an overturned omnibus. Twenty or so young men, students and workers for the most part, milled around the base of the barricade talking in low murmurs.

One particularly scrawny figure in corduroy trousers and a cap pulled down low raised its head and looked straight through her; Éponine shuddered. Somehow, from this angle and from several years later, the look of bleak desperation in her own eyes was profoundly unsettling. Safe to say she had never anticipated knowing what that had looked like.

Then -- "Watch out!" That was Gavroche's voice, from atop the barricade; she saw her brother turn to shout the warning just as the glint of bayonets became visible behind him.

She pressed herself against the wall and froze.

[OOC: Open if you like! SP-due-to-vet-appointment in effect in a bit, though.

ETA: Yeah, so content warning in the comments for mentions of attempted suicide.]

Comments

[filleauloup]

"Girls like me don't," Éponine insisted, but her voice was flat, like she was echoing someone else's words. "Not after -- no."

The next apparition was an image of her taking off a shawl and hiding it in a corner so that when she came up to a door and knocked on it she was only in her tattered skirt and a too-large shirt that fell open almost to the waist. The image only lasted a few seconds, but that was a few seconds too long, if you asked her.

[throughaphase]

"Yeah," Kitty said, frowning. "You do."

[filleauloup]

"I don't see how you believe that," Éponine said quietly, almost plaintively, then rubbed both hands over her face. "But I'll take your word for it, at least for a while. I'm tired of this."

[throughaphase]

"People do what they need to do to get by," Kitty told her, meaning it. "I know plenty of people who've done worse. This is just whatever's going on screwing with you."