Author's Note: just a short idea I've had for a story. It occurs in neither in complete musical verse nor book verse, but some amalgamation of the two.
Thus, I leave you in a dark room of the Gorbeau tenements, as infamous as they are...
His fingers massaged over his brow. His eager blue eyes strained to read the tome that rested open-leafed on his desk. The candle at his elbow sputtered and smoked, so close to gutting out and letting the early-morning darkness fill the small bedroom.
Marius sighed, stretching his arms high above his head and reclining against the ribbed back of his old chair. To be so young and plagued by cares wearied him. Long hours over books and no money for coal or wood to light up the heating stove made for long, cold and sleepless nights. His breath fogged from his mouth, the plume barely visible in February's freezing night. Marius shrugged his complaints away, trying to smile as he stretched his back out against the chair, hoping to crack his stiffened spine. Things could always be worse, he reassured himself with a feeble laugh to himself.
Suddenly something beneath him cracked loudly, and it was most certainly not his back. Before he knew it, Marius lay sprawled across the mercilessly hard wooden floor, his legs still hanging on the seat of his chair, the remnants of his chair's back poked and gouged into his spine. Tumbled, draped, and frankly embarrassed, Marius brushed himself off, pulling a thin wooden rod from under his hip. Heaving himself up with a chuckle and an ironic shake of his head, he shoved the stick into the stove and began to shovel the matching remnants to join their mate.
Things could always be worse. At least now he had firewood.
Soon, the small tenement room crackled and sparked with heat. Crouching by the thawing heat and smoking stove, Marius propped the law book between his knees, squinting by the dim firelight at the faint and yellowed pages. The pop and hiss of fire lulled him, creating a fuzzy silence, a dulling quietness that enveloped him. Numb to everything around him, Marius hardly noticed the fifty pages of his law book pass before his attention; that is until the law book's pages became a pillow for his studiously creased forehead.
But before he could so much as take a few minutes of cozy respite, Marius jumped at the loud thuds and bangs that suddenly sounded through his tiny room. The booming voice of his neighbor echoed straight through the adjoining wall, physically reverberating through the thin floorboards under him.
Again, this was merely part and parcel to his current, pitiful existence. "Shut up, Jondrette," Marius grumbled into his open law book. With a groan, he stoked the fire, breaking the former leg of his chair across his knee to feed the flames.
The man's growl rose to a scream, terrifying and earthshaking. "What do you mean that you won' do it?"
A pause of several seconds seemed to hang in the air before Jondrette's berating continued. The silence of a timid reply too thin to pass through paper-thin walls.
The roar had grown even louder, if that were possible. "No, my girl. I'll have none o' this from you. It's Carnival. There are loads of fat money purses and that many more prying eyes of the police all around. Those dogs have their wind up. Pickin' pockets just won' work. If you don' bring in fifty francs by Wednesday, then I'll flay that filthy back o' yours, you hear me?"
Something thudded loudly against the joining wall, and Marius was half-sure that the wall would give way to whatever caused such a resounding crash. Bare feet bolted across their floor, stopping for but a second to fling open their door before racing down the hall and down the stairs.
As the steps pounded past his door, Marius heard a familiar voice sobbing and moaning, its throaty and scratched resonance unmistakable.
"Eponine," Marius realized to the silence of his room, quickly heaving himself from the floor and hurriedly grabbing his coat and hat. Little good they would do against the winter winds. He flung open his own door, not even pausing to lock the latch behind him. Such is the benefit of owning no belongings, after all. Careful not to trip down the rickety and weak wooden stairs, Marius knew trouble was rearing its ugly head for the poor girl. And for all the times she had tried to comfort him, he would do the same.
Reaching the front door, he stumbled out of the tenements and into the empty street. In the faintly seeping light of dawn, he barely caught sight of her sullied slip darting around the corner. Under his breath, Marius threw a silent curse at the corner window of the tenement behind his back. This was neither the first, nor the last time Jondrette threw his own daughter into the clutches of crime. As a law student, it vaguely irked him, as a humanitarian, it caused his beating heart to bleed for her with pity. Such a family as the Jondrettes rarely sprung from healthy soil. Marius knew little enough about botany so as not to mistake if for law, but he knew enough to recognize when a rose is choked out by its own thorns.