A/N: In a recent community production of Les Mis, the actor playing Thenardier doubled as a student. This actor was assigned to carry the actress playing Éponine from the stage following 'A Little Fall of Rain', as well as the solo line "she will not die in vain". This is an AU set up, assuming Thenardier was undercover on the barricade, about Thenardier's (alias Jondrette) thoughts on his daughter's death. If you recognize it, I don't own it. Kindly review.
Jondrette, they called him on the barricade. His battlefield alias, his identity of a layman suffering the indignities of a false republic. The perfect candidate for recruitment by the student revolution. A quiet, seething man, cleverer than he let on, and a most accomplished thief. The student revolution was a dream. Trust enough to rob his living for these three days, the means to mill the corpses after the inevitable collapse of this latest folly. What did they know, these aristocrats, these boys, these paper soldiers? These oh-so-gallant gentry with their landed estates and their grand notions of classlessness. These lawyers and doctors and greater parasites than the basest criminals. Purity bought them blindsight, then delivered them up to the spit of the bayonets.
But before they had, Jondrette had seen his way out. Pacing his post on the barricade's right, he turned to their leader. "Ho, comrade! There's a boy, climbing the barricade!"
Enjolras looked. Indeed, a small figure was finding footholds on the desperate paving stones. Cloaked in a long, threadbare, shapeless coat, brown like the streets. Its head was covered and lowered against the splintering wood. It moved slowly, and less with caution than clear, disabling pain.
"Keep your guns on him, soldier! Alone?"
"Yes."
"Armed?"
Jondrette looked hard, lied harder at the sight of that black hair. "A knife between his teeth."
"Feully!"
Enjolras had barely to shout. Feully abandoned his gun but not his post. "Ho there!" The figure raised its head slowly. The face beneath the black cap was white, too white for all its livid sweat, and trembling.
"Monsieur Marius!" It was a girl's voice that shouted, in a voice disappearing like a dying man's breath. Across the barricade a stir. My God, a girl! Pull her up, lay down your arms! No! A spy like the others, hold yourselves in readiness! Pull her through, Feully! Marius, she says she knows you! All the while, Jondrette watched with a cold eye. The body pulled through the gallows trap was shrouded in her father's coat, pale as death and tormented by its ravishing. The black hair spilled from beneath a black page cap, ragged and, Jondrette saw even from here, soaked through with blood. A gasp. Young master Pontmercy threw aside his gun and fell to his knees. "My God, 'Ponine, what were you thinking…? No, don't speak, dear. Hush now, you'll be all right…" Jondrette folded his arms and set his jaw. A soldier fallen.
How very like your father, Monsieur. Action without thought, gratitude without cause. 'You'll find a gold watch in my pocket…' All you owed to a thief. And did you know what such a girl was capable of…? For it was indeed young Éponine who had come through that hangman's trap, not a shred of dignity left to her as she clung to Monsieur's coat and kissed the arms that held her now from obligation and nothing more. And all the while, Jondrette watched, unrecognized. Watched as Enjolras seized little Gavroche and made to haul him from the barricade, as the boy pulled and yelped and twisted free and ran to where Éponine lay. Or what remained when the last goodbyes were said.
Jondrette had seen enough of death to know the moment the child slipped away. She left Monsieur a wonderful audience to his grief. She left a mother who would mourn her as a lioness mourns her cubs, a sister who would buckle under the weight of her mother's turbulence, a brother who would take, crippled, wings clipped, to the streets as before. And a father? Jondrette never knew who that was. But it was Éponine, not her mother, who paid for the deception. Jondrette stepped forward as Enjolras took Marius Pontmercy into his arms like a brother, as Grantaire lifted Gavroche's whirling fists into his amid shameful tears.
"She must be moved."
Marius choked, so sentimental in her death as he had never been in her life. "She is the first of us to fall. She must stay."
"Monsieur has never seen a battle-scarred body in the light of dawn, I take it? Trust me, boy, it is better this way."
Enjolras had lain down his gun. He would not let Marius turn his head to Éponine. He nodded. Magnanimous dismissal of the republic. Even among their ideals, Jondrette was a layman. And so he stooped, a rat's strength even in his old age, and took the body over his shoulder like a crusader. It was no small reaching to descend the desperate stone so burdened, but if she should happen to fall, what of it? She was dead, insensate, and yet she bled. And as she still bled, she was obedient as she never had been in life.
At the barricade's base, out of sight of the others, Jondrette stooped down once more, shifting Éponine across his arms like a child. Why he did it, he could not be certain. He could not search her as easily, though of course she had nothing more than he, perhaps less than he. He could not feel the heart no longer beating against his back, the weight of small stone breasts, the hands like his that could no longer resist, not carrying her as he did like a babe. But she was fully his at last, for they were alone, father and daughter… and yet that last communion, that last kiss of Monsieur Marius Pontmercy on unfaithful lips, had she been stolen from the streets in time to save her mortal soul, if not her body?
Jondrette had never kissed his children, you see. His sons were a product of flippant neglect, and Éponine was a cause for her mother's burning envy. This was because Jondrette preferred her, and her bed, over his wife, and they knew it, all the dissolutes who helped them rob and Jondrette to kill.
You'll regret this, my dear, when you've something to scream about…Montparnasse had guarded her like a corpse that once, holding the knife to her throat while Thenardier disappeared into the shadows. There was no one who had loved dear Éponine so little as her father, who would lie with her in torment, or so much as Monsieur Marius, who would not dream of touching her. And yet Jondrette had never kissed her. She was not so much a person as his son Gavroche, so useful as his gang, so deadly as his wife, and more likely to be lost to the light than any of them. Less innocent than most, and yet all the more desirous of redemption.
He laid her down in the earth of the field near Paris more gently than he'd ever had to when she struggled. She had nothing worth searching for, he knew that much, and yet something would have him linger over the remains of the girl meant to be his daughter.
"You were a fool, Éponine." He told her at last, told her lips open with Marius's kiss and communion, told her eyes hazel with dreams, told every scar and every place still pale with innocence. It had been a long time since he used her name. "A pretty little fool, that's what he took you for. Didn't I warn you of such things…?" But he stopped then. Éponine could not hear him, and never would she hear him again. And yet he was close to something as he watched her, unchanging. To claiming her, now and forever, as a daughter worthy of protection and of name, and perhaps even of love. He would never know how long he might have stood over, unseeing, unfeeling, perhaps a night or an eternity, before he might have knelt to kiss the livid forehead. Perhaps he would never have, not with Marius's kiss on unfaithful lips. But he straightened then, with the feeling that he was being watched. Little Gavroche had followed with his eyes on Éponine alone, but as Jondrette turned, Gavroche, propelled by rage as well as grief, had attacked.
"Never lay your filthy hands on her again, you slimy bilge rat! Oh-"
Had Jondrette had his pistol, he might have fired now, into the leg or the stomach. A bleed wound. Not to kill, merely to make his escape. But he contented himself with a swipe to the boy's head that set him on the ground. And it was the cold earth that interested Gavroche now, not as cold as his mother's heart, and holding his sister's body now, more truly than the false love of Monsieur Marius ever could. It was Gavroche who laid his head against Éponine's heart no longer beating in the silence as Jondrette slipped into the streets to await those last, fateful gunshots, and it as Gavroche who would never know how close Jondrette might have been to kissing his child as she lay, insensate to his command, untouchable now to all but providence.