Disclaimer: Charlotte is my invention. The rest of the characters are not. I own nothing. I do not get paid for this.
Here it is: my first ever piece of fanfiction. I've seen the Les Misérables movie four times, and counting, and I just had to write this after falling in love with some amazing Eponine/Enjolras pieces. So here goes nothing…
Rain.
There had been a time, long ago, when she had loved it, loved the caressing water on her slim, pale arms. Now each raindrop was just another icy knife thrusting into her calloused, bleeding feet.
Rain.
There had been a time, long ago, when it had washed away the mist of Montfermeil and given crisp and glimmering definition to each leaf, each stone. Now, it was naught but blinding.
By some miracle, she made it. The plain wooden door she sought looked like salvation solidified. She banged against it with her bony fists, and each blow was weaker than the last.
He opened it, luckily, after mere seconds. His eyes widened slightly at her bruises, her soaked skin. "Eponine—what—"
"Let me in," she gasped out, and he did. "I need a place to stay for the night. Please."
…
There is something about her black eyes that softens the man of marble. They are familiar, too familiar. They remind him of loving a person with a blinding and furious and unconditional passion, so different from the steady ache that loving a country brings.
"Come in. I'll draw a bath for you, you'll catch hypothermia otherwise."
He heats water, brings her a towel and a bundle of clothing. She stares with wide eyes at the paternal edge to his movements. It hits her suddenly—she's staying with a stranger, not the icily passionate revolutionary she might call a friend when she desperately needs one.
He pretends not to see the trickle of blood tracing a garish line down her leg. Her skirts turn to threads several inches above her ankles, offering him a clear view of the evidence.
He doesn't know what to say.
She, meanwhile, has unfolded the bundle of cloth he handed to her. The clearly feminine nightgown and robe haven't been touched in years, that's clear. She doesn't know how to ask, but her question is clear in the charged silence between them.
"My sister. Charlotte."
He turns to leave, and she begins struggling with the laces of her blouse. Her fingers are stiff from cold.
He surprises her with more words, clipped and dead. Free of the passion that she has come to believe is a part of him, engraved into his bones, glowing behind his eyelids and on his perfect teeth. "She was the one who cared about the people. I was the ignorant bourgeois boy who wouldn't listen. There was a widow she liked to care for, a mother with four children, I think. She'd go to them often and I'd pretend I didn't know. Our parents despaired. And then the children got tuberculosis, and she caught it, and not even the finest doctors in Paris could help her. My father wasted away. He adored her. My mother blames me, because I was supposed to look after her. I was supposed to stop her from going. But I didn't."
His face is cold, but his eyes glitter with unshed tears. "I will see the people rise and imagine her smiling from heaven."
The sound of the door closing behind him is final. A coda to the only personal words any of the regulars at the café have ever heard from him.
He has to stop himself from blinking when she steps out of his bathroom wrapped in his sister's coral-colored robe. Charlotte's molten eyes, copied, by some strange twist of fate, into the gamine's angular face, are all the more striking when her skin is clean. He's surprised by how fair she really is. The dirt protects her from the sun.
She sits down across from him at his kitchen table, where he's scribbling a speech in his notebook. His place is modest to him and a castle to her.
Wordlessly, he gets up, rummages around in his kitchen, sets a plate of bread and meat in front of her. She eats, equally silent. It's been so long since she's tasted white bread. She's glad, in that moment, that she's forgotten how to cry. The taste is so sweet it stings, and she wouldn't want to shed tears in front of her benefactor.
"The bedroom is through the door on the left. You can use my bed tonight," he says when she's finished.
She nods without looking up. "And you, Monsieur Enjolras? Would you like me to repay you for your kindness?"
He almost chokes on his own dinner. He isn't sure whether he should be glad that an impassioned Charlotte educated him on the goings-on of street rats in dark alleys. At least he catches her meaning, for all that he is clueless about women in general. But he is Enjolras, dammit, the man who can find fury in crowds of dirty faces that have long since lost hope. A girl will not take him aback. "Certainly not."
She smiles, and he finds himself strangely fascinated by the gaps between her teeth. "Why not? Ever fucked a woman, Monsieur?"
He will not blush.
He is about to brush her off with another curt coda, but he makes the mistake of catching her eye first, and the truth tumbles out. "Non. And I don't intend to tonight. You don't owe me anything."
She smirks and shrugs.
"I mean it. You're welcome here anytime."
He almost believes he imagines her response, it's so quiet. "Thank you, Monsieur."
Her lashes are delicate as spider's webs in the lamplight. "I'll sleep on the armchair, Monsieur, I won't let you give up your bed for me."
She's curled up there as promised before he can protest.
It's past midnight when he closes his books and crawls into bed; it's nearing one when she leaves the chair and crawls in beside him. She holds her breath when he stirs, guilty but unwilling to sleep upright on scratchy upholstery when she's used to floors and doorsteps. But he only puts his arms around her, instinctively, without waking up.
She takes in his scent and has to remind herself that she's in love with Marius.
Courfeyrac bursts into the apartment just as the sun's rising, Joly on his heels. They've got a key, of course. They both stop dead in the doorway to the bedroom, staring unabashedly at the slim form cradled in their friend's arms.
Enjolras stirs. Slowly, the presence next to him morphs from warmth to a too-thin girl. The neckline of her borrowed nightgown has slipped, revealing the slash of a collarbone and the curve of a pale shoulder. He tucks his sheets around her, protecting her long-lost modesty, and slips out of the bed, turning to face his friends.
"Well, you obviously did something wrong if she's still dressed," Courfeyrac mouths. Enjolras marches past them both and takes a seat at the table before responding.
"It's not what you think." And then, in a tone that leaves no room for argument: "Down to business."
Courfeyrac sighs before pulling out a map. "We wanted to barricade this street here, but we just got word, the people there have turned against us again. They still live in fear, Enjolras…"
He thinks of her and almost murmurs so do I.
He's alone, and eating porridge, when she finally stumbles out of his bedroom, dressed in her own clothes once again. She shouldn't be in those rags, he thinks, I have things of Charlotte's that I can give her…
"Little vixen," he teases, making a valiant attempt not to chuckle. "I had a hard time explaining that to the boys."
"What?"
"Courfeyrac and Joly came to discuss strategy, only to find you in my bed."
"Oh. Sorry."
He pauses, holding her gaze. "Don't be. I won't begrudge you a good night's sleep." He looks back down at his breakfast; he doesn't hear her approach, and then suddenly she's right in front of him, and she's overwhelming all his senses, and he's somehow simultaneously sinking and floating, and her lips are dry and cracked and fierce and heavenly against his.
He hasn't got a clue what he's doing, but his hands do, and they're cupping her face, tangling in her hair, dipping into the valley of her waist without permission.
It's his own breathless little gasp that brings him back to his senses.
"I thought we agreed that you don't owe me anything?" He manages to get his breathing under control once he's pushed her away.
"Who said anything about owing? Perhaps I wanted to do that. Perhaps I want you to repay me for the pleasure of my company." She's smirking.
"I thought Pontmercy was your…"
But her face has gone perfectly blank, which only highlights the agony in her eyes.
"I'm…sorry…"
Idiot, he berates himself. He would do anything just then to bring back her teasing half-smile.
"Please, Monsieur…you must tell me…" She's close to tears when she grabs his arm. "Did he…does he ever speak of me…has he ever mentioned me to you…"
The answer is clear in his silence.
"Just of Cosette, then," she whispers, and her pain is palpable.
He doesn't want to think of Pontmercy. He doesn't want to think of how annoyed he was when Marius came practically singing of being struck to the floor in breathless delight, partly because Marius was unknowingly holding a mirror to his friends' face, and partly because the boy is allowed to be a lovesick fool, while Enjolras has a revolution to run.
He remembers his moment of breathless delight all too clearly. He remembers first noticing the bedraggled little shape that was Marius' shadow and seeing only another statistic. He remembers the fool whispering something to the girl, gifting her a smile. And he remembers how her face changed with that scrap of attention, like the sun breaking through from behind the clouds.
Unrequited love makes her beautiful.
She interrupts his reverie with a choked attempt at words. "I…must go…"
"Non, mademoiselle, please. Stay for breakfast." His voice seems to him to be at once too strong and too weak.
She shakes her head, already turning away from him.
Of their own accord, his hands reach out to grasp her arm. He pushes up her sleeve and, ever so gently, brushes his fingertips against the bruises imprinted into her skin. "Please don't go back, mademoiselle." His eyes drop to where he knows she's been cut the deepest and she jerks away.
Her mouth twists. His pity is salt to her wounds.
She has already opened the door when he thinks of something that might, just might, make her stay.
"Eponine. My name is Julien." Just another thing the young men he calls his friends don't know
"Julien," she repeats, tasting the word, and they both realize simultaneously that she's not leaving today.
To be continued. Reviews are appreciated.