Disclaimer: I do not own any rights to Les Miserables or any of the characters.
Hey guys! So I'm not necessarily new to the fandom, but it's been a long, long time. I wrote some pretty extensive neurotically-resarched Les Mis fics years ago on another account, but this is the first Enjonine one, and the first Modern AU. Please let me know what you think!
Embers
There is grime under her fingernails. This is the first thing he notices about her, because she sits down next to him at the bus stop and starts to very intently and methodically pry it out with the nail of her right thumb, scraping at it and flicking it off and moving on to the next finger.
Enjolras isn't really looking at her so much as noticing it out of the corner of his eye. There is a curtain of long blonde hair concealing her face, frizzy and streaked with gold, as unruly as a child's. Her boots are so worn that sole of the left one is drooping to the ground, and then she starts tap tap tapping just the one foot against the concrete and it is no wonder why.
He shifts his eyes away from her deliberately and tries to ignore the sounds of her, all the scratching and the tapping and the breathing so close to him. He arrives at this bus stop every day at the precise same time, sits in this precise same side of the bench, and waits alone. In class he is surrounded by anxious overachievers sweating and grinding their teeth their way through Torts. At home he has four other roommates bursting at the gills in an apartment that can barely hold them. But here, at this bus stop on this shady road, at this one salvation from smell of stale beer and the other students' fear, is his island. His peace. His bus stop.
"You got a light?"
He almost says no.
"You shouldn't smoke," he says instead, but imperceptible brush against his bag and he can feel the outline of his old lighter in his front pocket.
She turns to face him, and then she flashes him one unexpected and blinding smile. She is not exactly pretty, but she is so unselfconscious with her crinkling eyes and her crooked bottom teeth that for one brief moment he is disarmed by the effect of her.
"Hypocrite," she says with a careless lilt to her voice. She holds her palm out expectedly, and without really consciously deciding to he slides his hand into his bag and pulls out the lighter. His hand brushes hers and he tries not to cringe as he thinks about the grime.
He sees the bus at the bottom of the hill. They have maybe thirty seconds before it reaches them, but she lights the cigarette anyway. Enjolras watches the flame lick in and out of the air with a deft flick of her finger and feels the familiar ache for the smell of smoke before she even so much as lifts the cigarette to her mouth.
He's been trying to quit. Not quite successfully. He sucks in an unwitting breath of it and hates her a little bit for being here, for distracting him with her foot-tapping and her cigarette-smoking in this one sacred time he has carved out in his day. It's been nine days since he had a smoke and he's not going to cave in now because some wily teenage girl lit up in front of him for half a second.
As the bus approaches he stands and hoists his bag up over his shoulder. The girl doesn't move, sitting contentedly on the bench, trying and failing to blow out a neat ring of smoke, contorting her lips and wheezing with the effort. She catches him watching and her eyes glint shamelessly.
The doors open and she still hasn't moved. Enjolras doesn't realize that he's hesitating until she speaks.
"I'm not getting on the bus, bourgeois boy," she says. She flicks a few ashes of the cigarette and he watches one of the embers flick to the ground at her feet.
After he has settled into his seat and the bus begins to pull away, he sees the reflection of her through the window: she leaps up from the bench, and in motion her layers of loose fabric cling to her to reveal a scrawny, disorganized assembly of limbs. He wonders if he just gave a light to a minor. He wonders who is driving the old pick-up truck she is clambering into. He wonders why mere seconds ago she was grinning madly over a little flame and now she is not smiling at all.
He doesn't run into her again for a month.
"You're not actually seeing that guy, are you?"
Enjolras enters the apartment after a particularly grueling line of questioning from one of his professors that lasted the better part of the lecture to hear Marius talking at their cheap excuse for a kitchen table.
"Who, 'Parnasse?"
Her voice rattles, low and husky. She has not been at his bus stop in all this time and he has not spared her a thought beyond their first encounter, but he is acutely aware of her identity before he finishes entering the threshold.
"Yeah," says Marius. From the entry way their backs are both turned to him. Neither even turns to acknowledge that he has entered the apartment.
She shakes her head, her thin shoulders hunching. Her sweater is draped over the chair, her shoulder bag strewn out on the floor, her hair loose and tangled down her back. There is not a single part of her contained.
"No, no, no," she says, a little too emphatically. She pauses, and then says in a measured tone, "No, I'm not—of course not. Montparnasse is a friend of my dad's, he just—he's got a car, is all."
Enjolras can hear the scowl in Marius's voice. "Good. I don't like him."
The girl shrugs again, and leans closer to Marius, the fabric of her gauzy shirt grazing his skin. "I'm not interested in guys like him," she says, leaning, leaning, leaning.
Enjolras sets his bag down on the counter and she visibly flinches, drawing herself back.
"Hey, Enjolras," says Marius, who is either used to the girl's mannerisms or oblivious. Enjolras suspects the latter. Of all his roommates Marius might be the most well-intentioned, but it does him very little good with his complete ignorance of most social cues. He gestures to the scrawny girl from bus stop and says, "This is my friend Eponine."
Eponine nods in his direction, but her eyes don't leave the floor.
"Hello," says Enjolras stiffly, still reeling from the stress of his professor's rapid fire demands.
Her lids brush up and she briefly regards him. "Hey," she says, with a shyness that he wouldn't have thought she was capable of. She looks away, but not before he sees that her pale cheeks are inflamed. She pushes a chunk of matted yellow hair behind her ear and turns back to Marius.
"Eponine was my neighbor before I moved in with you guys," Marius explains. "Eponine, Enjolras is a student at the law—"
"Don't you have a class right now, Pontmercy?" Enjolras interrupts.
Marius's eyes flicker over to the over clock. "Oh, shoot," he says, clamoring up from the table. "Why didn't you say something?" he chides Eponine.
"I'm not your social secretary," she says, gaining back some of her wits.
"If you run you'll catch the 12:10," says Enjolras.
Marius is almost halfway out the door when he stops short. "Is your ride coming?" he asks Eponine.
"I'll call him."
"I got her," says Courfeyrac, emerging from the living room.
Eponine shakes her head. "I'm fine."
"Get in the Prius, kid."
"Courf—"
In one swift motion Courfeyrac yanks her jacket off of the chair and plops it over her head by the hood, shielding her eyes. "Shake a leg, I've got to go to the library anyway."
Marius shouts a goodbye to Eponine and slams the front door behind him. She wrestles the hood of the coat off of her face and stares at the door for a beat too long, her hair making a frizzy halo around her forehead. Courfeyrac jingles his keys and she turns to him and grumbles, "You don't have to drive me."
"And you don't have to give my advice on picking up hot nerds at the library on the way there. But you'll do it anyway. Because you're a pal," says Courfeyrac, in his usual conciliatory way.
She snorts outright and swats at him, hitting him square in the stomach, and the gesture is so familiar, like she has gone through the motions of this same kind of banter with him hundreds of times. Enjolras presses himself against the counter to walk past them in the narrow space of the kitchen and wonders how much else goes on in this apartment without him knowing. Who is this person who has installed herself into the lives of his friends without even a shred of his awareness?
Combeferre is always on his case about being a recluse. This is the first time he has wondered if there's any truth to it.
"See you around."
It takes Enjolras a moment to realize that she's talking to him. By the time he turns his head the two of them are out the door and the apartment is finally, mercifully quiet. He sinks into the couch and stares at the blank television screen and hears himself breathe for what feels like the first time in months.
A week later she is sitting on the front steps of their apartment. It's raining, a cold mist of a spray, the kind that doesn't make enough noise to rattle a window with any satisfaction but still leaves a miserable chill in the air. She is wearing the same thin jacket and the same raggedy boots, the mane of hair matted against her neck.
He stops and regards her for a moment, and realizes from the challenge in her eyes that she noticed him approaching long before he noticed her sitting there.
"Get up," he says.
She shakes her head. "I'm waiting for Marius."
Her chin is raised, her eyes defiant, but she is quivering like a blade of grass in the wind. He offers her his hand to help her up and she raises an eyebrow at him.
Enjolras drops his hand. He has a mountain of reading to do and no time to deal with this surly teenager. "Marius is out to dinner with Courfeyrac and his family," he says, maybe a little meaner than he should.
"Oh." Her disappointment is evident. "Nobody told me," she says.
Enjolras feels the muscles in his shoulders loosen. She's just a stupid kid. "Come inside."
"I come over every Friday night," she says, mostly to herself, still sitting on the steps.
They forgot about her, then. Enjolras doesn't have much trouble believing that Marius is careless enough to do just that, but he is a little surprised at Courfeyrac, who usually goes out of his way to make sure nobody is excluded—even those most reluctant to partake in his antics, as Enjolras knows all too well. He wonders how long she's been sitting here. He wonders if she has any idea that of all the neighborhoods near the campus this is probably one of the worst to be lurking in alone at night.
He regards her, the incongruity of her careless posture and her wide watching eyes, and decides that she knows and doesn't care. A lecture would be wasted on her.
"Well the next bus isn't coming for at least a half an hour," Enjolras says, even though she probably knows this already. He starts walking toward the apartment and says gruffly, "Wait inside until then."
She's so quiet that he doesn't realize she has followed him until he hears the drip-drip-drip of her wet coat on the dry cement under the awning. "Leave your coat out here," he says, and she dumps it on the ground without any ceremony and wrings her hair out over it.
As the lock unclicks and they enter the apartment he feels a pang of annoyance, not too different from the one that he felt the first time he encountered her. He can count on one hand the number of times he has had this apartment to himself. And here she is, with her shivering and her ragged breathing and her brown eyes swimming up at him curiously.
"Stay there," he says, and comes back from the clean laundry pile with a pair of sweatpants and a t-shirt.
"These are Marius's."
Enjolras's eyes flicker over to the open textbooks on the living room table. "I'm sure he won't mind."
She slinks into the bathroom, leaving wet footprints on their shoddy carpet. He resumes a chapter on property law with such intensive focus that a half hour passes without his notice, and when the rain picks up and he stares out the window he finally notices her on the other couch, curled into one of the corners with her eyes shut and her skinny arms wrapped around her knees.
She is pale and heavy-lidded, her features almost comically large, exaggerated by her skinniness. There is nothing dainty about her in waking life, but asleep she is fragile, her toes perfectly curled into her feet, her damp hair curling at the nape of her neck.
One of the sleeves of Marius's old t-shirt is pushed up against the fabric of the couch and he can see the distinct outline of a bruise, of the fingers that must have wrapped around her arm and pulled. His scowl deepens. He tries to turn back to the textbook but he is feeling suddenly cynical, suddenly impatient and angry and useless.
Three years. Three years until he finishes law school. But seeing this strange girl curled up on the couch, quick to trust and quick to sleep, and it suddenly feels a lot longer than that.
Enjolras doesn't hate parties. What he hates is wasting time, and this is a prime example of it. Nobody here has anything worthwhile to say, and if they do the alcohol has effectively numbed it out of them. Enjolras walks out to the back porch with the half a beer he has been nursing all night, too edgy, too stiff, too sober.
There she is.
"Stop, 'Parnasse," she says, batting some boy off of her. He is as unnaturally skinny as she is, his dark hair slicked with grease, his smile sly and slow. Without paying any heed to her words his fingers slide up her side, goosing her ribs, edging too close to the small swell of her breast.
Enjolras isn't going to say anything until he sees her wince. "Hey," he says, too loudly, taking a stilted step toward them.
The boy doesn't look over, but Eponine does. "Hey," she says back, her eyes lighting up in recognition.
The boy's hand is now snaking up her thigh. She's staring at Enjolras and doesn't seem to notice. "She said to stop," Enjolras says.
Eponine laughs and the boy's face twists into a sneer. "Who the fuck are you," he says, but before it escalates Eponine chirps agreeably: "Is Marius here?"
The boy huffs a disgusted breath of air, removing his hand with such force that Eponine wobbles and has to catch her balance on the porch ledge. "Of course you know these pricks," he mutters, spitting on the porch. "Jesus, 'Ponine."
The boy leaves, and suddenly the porch is too quiet. There is a couple making out a few feet away, and a few drunk girls muttering on the steps in whispers and shrill laughter, but other than that it is just the pair of them, Enjolras shifting his weight between his feet stiffly while Eponine hugs her arms to her chest against the cold. She stares up at him without much expectation and takes a swig of something out of a red cup.
"You're underage," says Enjolras.
She finishes the swig and wipes her mouth off with her sleeve. "Says who?"
"Are you even a student here?" he asks, suspecting the worst. Suspecting she is still in high school, and his friends really are thick-skulled enough to let her follow them around despite the fact that this is one hundred percent illegal.
He is expecting some sort of guilt or maybe even fear now that he has caught her. Instead the space between her brows puckers and she says indignantly, "I could have been. I got in."
"Then why aren't you?"
Her chin juts out. "I don't have the money."
"So you take out loans," says Enjolras practically.
She shakes her head and stares into her drink as if she is considering it. "It's not that simple," she says, and her eyes flit to the door into the party, where the boy from before is somewhere lost in the crowd. "If I took out a loan – my family …" She shakes her head again and makes a sloppy, indistinct gesture. "Besides, what's school going to teach me that I don't already know?"
Enjolras has a feeling she doesn't actually want his opinion on the matter. "So what do you do instead?"
His question is stilted but she doesn't care. "I bartend."
"You do not."
"I'm nineteen," she says. "There's nothing illegal about me serving alcohol."
"And during the day?"
She shrugs at him. "I find work." She slides off the ledge of the porch without offering to clarify, and takes another slow sip of beer. He wonders how someone so small isn't on the floor by now when he feels himself buzzing after half a drink. "You're a law student, then. How old are you?"
"Twenty-three."
"You talk like an old man."
"Maybe I am one."
After a beat her lips crack into a wry and unexpected grin. "Marius never talks about you," she says. "I only knew you existed because of all the law books in the living room. "
"He never talks about you, either."
Her little mouth contorts and in an instant he can see the wet, shining hurt in her eyes. "Oh," she says.
It wasn't his intention to offend her. She sets the drink down on the ledge and crosses her arms in front of her chest. It's late in October now, the winter wind nipping at their heels. Every other girl here is dressed in something short and low, stumbling in heels so high and outfits so inadequate that their knees and elbows are bright red with the chill. They look foolish. In her jeans and her raggedy coat, Eponine does not.
He wants to tell her this. To make up for whatever offense he has just committed. But it's at that precise moment that she heaves a long, indulgent sigh and he realizes – she is infatuated. With Pontmercy.
"I mean," he says. "We don't talk much as it is."
"I'm going back inside," she says flatly.
The curtain of scraggly blonde hair falls over her eyes as she passes him, heading for the open door, for the throng of sweating bodies, for the sticky floors and the thrum of the bass beating like a heartbeat in the walls.
He reaches out for her. He means to touch her arm but she is gesturing something to herself and his hand hooks with hers. She looks up at him, her wide eyes searching his face, but she doesn't pull her hand away.
Instead he drops it, and her arm falls like a rag doll's back at her side.
"How are you getting home?"
The laugh on her lips is bitter beyond her years. "Oh, Enjolras," she says. Something unfamiliar in him stirs at the sound of her saying his name. "I'm not."