A/N: Musings on Eponine's beauty, or lack thereof. But this is how I think of her, not really beautiful unless you look at her in the right way. A little more than a drabble. Written in ten minutes. I actually like it. You may be Marius, or it may just be the reader, I do not care or know. Pick and don't ask me about it in your review. I do not own Eponine.
She has a strange beauty, like the strange fruit that clings to the barricade, like the strange juice that drips from her heart. It is not conventional beauty, but it is a loveliness of the streets, the thin face and slender hands and large expressive eyes wasted horribly on bitterness. Her cheekbones jut out and her hair is stringy and long and falls around her shoulders like ratted curtains draping just so.
She might have been lovely once, but you would not know. She does not show it. She is a shattered child, ruined by the streets, her prettiness covered by a sheen of dirtiness, by a sheet of sin.
You would not think of her as beautiful unless you knew her, unless you had felt the thick ropy scar across her palm, unless you had kissed her cold forehead or chapped soft lips. But she is. Her strange beauty stays with you, and her strange juice is still on your soft white hands.