A/N: Took a short break in writing I Do Not Love You-unfortunately, I'm a little stuck but hopefully I'll pull through soon.
Please, please please, if you can, watch the Turn to Stone dance by Melanie and Marko before watching this, or listen to the song by Ingrid Michaelson.
"This is infinitely better than I dreamed of," she laughs, shaking her head and feeling her hair finally whip around in response. She leaps, feeling the bend in her feet; she twirls, extending her arms to receive the gentle wind's kiss across her surface.
He has never seen her smile before, though his stare is fixed on hers by the luck of arrangement. Still, he finds familiarity in the warmth of his chest when her lips curl upwards. He feels the benign burn in his cheeks, and he does not understand. He, too, is in frighteningly new territory, but he does not acknowledge so.
"You're wasting your time," he replies. "They did not give us forever."
She does not listen, instead continuing to spin around, developing the rhythm of the dance. After coming to a halt, she stumbles and falls to the ground, her hands reaching out to the ground in an instinctive attempt to break the momentum. The action is knew to her, but it feels natural and she assumes it must be what humans do when they fall. Her head tips back as she laughs loudly, and her companion only rolls his eyes.
"Is this all you want to do?" he asks, irritated. "I want to see everything."
"We've been able to see before this," she pouts.
"Only what we are fixed on seeing," he argues.
She looks at him, and he cannot ignore the flash of hurt that conquers her eyes for one short moment. "Fine," she growls, taking his hand angrily. "We'll see everything you want."
—
She does not understand what he expected, nor how he feels. For someone given the gift of flesh for an entire rotation of the Earth, his expression still hardly varies from his creator's stone countenance.
But mostly, it is accurate; he is enraged. He sees vices and extravagance, yet he sees struggle and death too—all with the same eyes in the same place. He walks past men on the street, and he feels disgusted in the nature of their glances at her; she is not adored like she is in stone. No, her flesh is lusted after by a primal desire. He knew of the variation of man, but his stationary fixture only allowed him a fraction of the scope until now.
Man is ugly; man is wretched; man is, dare he say so, inherently evil.
She shakes her head vigorously. "No," she argues. "You lie, Apollo." They make their way to a rooftop, where the city's lights start to dance underneath the calming blue of dusk. "Man is good. You've seen it before, don't tell me you haven't."
She surely has. His name is Marius—he has visited the museum since he was a child, and he has always stopped in front of her; enough for her to learn of his name.
She listened to his father's explanation of her statue, the bright-eyed ten year old nodding in understanding. She watched him share the story proudly in front of his class on a museum field trip.
She could do nothing but observe as he sobbed uncontrollably on a rainy day, dressed in black appearing much older than his sixteen years. She knew that her marble arms could offer no comfort, despite how much she wished them to. She hears the word "love" constantly in the grand, elegant halls, and she assumed this is what they mean: she would rather shatter into an ugly mess than listen to his painful cries.
She watched him meet a wide-eyed intern at the museum, who expresses a profound appreciation in his favorite statue's tragic story. She is no longer Marius' favorite sight in the museum, and she resigns; man does not love statue, man loves man.
But love is still beautiful, she admits, and it is her secret wish to experience it before she turns to stone.
"Never," he replies stubbornly, his eyebrows knitted together. He is alarmed when her arms slip around him in her first attempt at an embrace. "What are you doing?"
"We are man tonight," she replies, looking up at his face against the faintest hint of stars. "And this is the most beautiful thing about man." She places a gentle kiss on his lips and pauses to share a glance with him once more. The anger in his eyes has vanished, and she takes it as permission, brushing her lips against his once again before he pulls her in further.
They spill their passion onto the rooftop, yet what they feel hardly belongs to the earth, but the heavens.
As he holds her against him, he breathes a soft, "I feel love for you."
She laughs. "That's not how man says it," she tells him, kissing him on his jawline once more as he returns the favor on the space between her brows.
—
The next day, they are stone again. As people make their way across the hall, he looks at her like he always does. But something has changed—he feels.
He wants to tell her: she has always been able to feel. They have always been able to feel. Man looks at statues for the vision of beauty; statues look at man for the emotion of it.
The museum has closed, yet he sees the young man who visits so frequently, with a girl he too has noticed a few times.
"She's stunning," the young man looks at Eponine in deep admiration—the way she is meant to be looked at. "She isn't like the other sculptures; she wasn't made to see, but to be felt. Her sadness isn't forlorn, it's passionate."
The girl nods. "She would have been perfect with Enjolras," she looks at him from across the room. "Everyone talks about his beauty, but I can feel him too." She sighs happily. "His fire and her storm, the love they would have had on Earth."
He sees the young man down on one knee, but he looks back at Eponine, only able to imagine her knowing smile. Man is good because man loves.
But they do too. Their beauty draws people in for generations; the symbol of power and the tragic beauty, opposite to each other. He hears a child speak of magic in the room.
It is their love that is the spell.