Yet She Was Unafraid
He dips his fingers into the blood pooling at her side and allows himself a moment of repose in the midst of a revolution. It is red and warm as the darkness steals the light from his world. Blood is thick and startlingly alive for a girl so recently dead and sprawled on the barricades.
Marius lifts his head and surveys the scene. Red and black -- Paris smells of death and grime. Meters away and more, the blue uniforms of the National Guard lie motionless on the street, blanketed by the smoke still lingering from the gunfire. Enjolras called them the Enemy, a word so dirty he had to spit it out before it perverted his pristine revolutionary ideals. They were the tools employed by the national tyranny to destroy the true mettle of the French people.
Then he looks to his compatriots, swearing upon their graves they will fight on in her name, but all he can hear are moving mouths and silent words. What they're saying, he realizes, is nothing more than hollow platitudes. They'd fight in the name of goddamn Germany if that were the only thing left to cling to.
Marius watches Eponine's ragged hat fall as they lift her body away, revealing a mass of unkempt brown hair, swinging awkwardly in the nightfall mists. That is when the loss pierces him and leaves him supine on the ground, pleading with the heavens. Why, he wonders, why should she matter so much to him, now that she is no longer here but There, there outside his reach?
Someone pulls him up and he sits there, head hanging downward.
He doesn't know, he doesn't know.