A/N This fic was more of an experiment than anything else, both with the 'Parnasse/'Ponine ship and a more minimalist writing style, hence the brevity of each part. Text in italics (below) is not mine, but rather belongs to the poem "Lessons on Loving a Prophet," a brilliant piece by Jeanann Verlee. Cover image isn't mine, either.
i
You know how this ends. There's nothing you can do to change it, so make peace with it now. Ready your hands for the callus, shred the cloth for bandages, prepare the rosaries.
x
Her father has never been kind. Whenever his words took on a saccharine tone, it was always in sugared falsity, more often than not the prelude to a slap and lash that would sting on her skin for days. Perhaps her mother loved her at one point, but if she did, that is lost now in the vat of years.
They hate her. Perhaps even as much as she hates herself, though she cannot imagine how such could be possible. Her own spite comes from disgust at the evil within her, and theirs at repulsion from the good. She cannot win. Not ever. But that does not mean she need stop fighting.
It does mean that she must keep her head down and her lips still. They do not want her independence.
Her mother tells her one day, tearing a wooden brush through the briar thicket of her hair, that they have a new place to live. That there's an apartment, that her father has scraped together the scarce money mandated for the transaction, and that they're leaving their desecrated inn behind.
She cannot tell whether she cares, whether she feels any attachment to the barren building. It is easy enough to pretend it does not matter to her. So she keeps her chin straight and her eyes down, and her mother gives her a coo and a pat on the cheek. It is typical. She pays no mind to the words falling from her mother's lips, how they'll be in Paris, how her father will find better business associates there and everything will only improve.
Her insides rot at the prospect, and their putrid decay lends her strength for a ghost of a smile. It is steady. This is how she lies. And her lies are how she lives. It's a poisonous cycle, into which the venom is so integrated that there's no escape.
It's alright. She learned from the start that there's no way out. Such is the single lesson that her father has successfully coached her in.
ii
When you meet him, outside the grocery, along the boardwalk, beneath the overpass, you will not know what he is. He will be neither too charming nor too handsome, not thunder, not polish.
x
He introduces himself with a grandiose swipe of the top hat, a curve of the scarlet lips. He is unlike anything she has ever seen. Fragile in his strength; mighty in his delicacy. His very clothing is a contradiction, drab but shined to perfection, shelling him in garbage so treasured that it lends him an air of false extravagance. His curls are an inky waterfall, his eyes false diamonds.
"Montparnasse," her father declares him with a loose sneer.
Her eyes follow him. He is repulsive and breathtaking. A devil in a slaughtered angel's skin, and his smile traces the echoed path of the ichor marking his seraphic counterpart's destruction. Sharper evil lurks in his cutting planes than any which she has ever detected in her parents' musty residence.
The others, three of them standing in their silent line, do not matter to her. They are scum. Like her, like her parents, like her sister, like them all.
He is different. He is silver.
She is drawn into him, and her gaze on the curve of his smirk is that of a cobra's at its tamer.
Her father's taloned clutch at her shoulder scarce detracts her. He follows her through the shadows of her dreams, and when she closes her eyes come moonlight, he is waiting behind them.
She knows only his name and his smirk, and yet already despises and treasures him with a passion unmatched.
iii
The day you fall in love, his mouth will spill your name. He will repeat and repeat. He will not touch you. He will watch your hips, study whatever ample you have, will ask to watch you dance. When you turn to leave, he will use your name like a choke chain.
x
"Éponine."
He sighs and she convulses. Her skin is fragile under his stare, and they are locked together like bones, threaded with invisible tendons. His lashes shade his eyes, spilling shadow over the crystal, and she keeps her head down, as she has learned.
"Éponine."
His hands breathe fragments away from her, caressing the air. They stir her jaw; her chin lifts to watch him. Even now, she fears. She always fears. They all frighten her—he frightens her in his scarlet tranquility. He is like glass; in shattering, surely his jagged fragments will cut her apart.
"He'll find us," she gasps with her greasy hair striping her chapped lips, and her arms are around her own waist, the flint angles of her hips cause her hands to ache. "He'll find us and he'll hurt me, and he'll hurt you. Please, 'Parnasse, I don't want him to hurt you."
She stumbles backwards in the sorry faith that she will be strong enough, this time, but as soon as her hand is on the door, his voice is at her ears once more, resonating.
"Éponine."
Her head falls and her throat shifts; she is incapable. He observes her in languid reclining. Twirls a finger, and her shoulders move in response. She is adhered to him. He could break her neck with a whisper.
"Stay with me," he tells her. Not a request. A command. She bends to his will, and is astonished by her own flexibility.
When he smiles, she shakes.
iv
He will call you miracle. Your face will unravel. This is his magic. When he begs you promise, say yes.
x
He touches her with the hands of an artisan, regarding her value, measuring her within and without. Still, he smiles. When the word beautiful falls from his crimson lips, it is the input of a judge, a weighted title which he supposes to be allotted to her. No passion drives his words, and yet it is rampant in his hands, even as they do no more than trace her lips, press her lashes, frame her waist.
"Stay with me?" he breathes, his lips behind her ear, in her hair. She trembles. He is so close. She feels him like a flame, burning her wherever they touch, yet she is addicted to his sultry smoke.
She cannot deny him. Her chest rings with his voice.
"I don't wanna get hurt. I've been through a damn lot already." She is wooden beside his titanium and starch beside his silk, but at least her words are steady. "You're just gonna make it worse."
He voices no denial. A small sound that could be a whine and could be a laugh moves from his lips down her spine, and she shudders.
"Stay with me anyways, love."
Her lungs are weaker than her fists, and she gasps as she pushes him away. His fingers catch her wrists, lips move to her bitten nails. He leans into her as though her skin is sacred.
"Stay," he sighs, into her palms, across her collarbone, towards her lips, over her forehead. Her teeth rock and her eyes ache, yet he burns her with such fervor, and maybe she has always been addicted to pain. "Stay."
"I will," she chokes, and can hear the ground stir below them as the maw of Hell unhinges to welcome her.
v
When he offers his lips, take them. Take his arms, his throat, take his toes when he offers. Gorge. Swallow everything whole. Gag. Vomit. Swallow more. Do not hesitate. No time for polite, or coy. Take.
x
He kisses her in the alleyway, both of them cradled by shadows as they tilt into the frozen brick wall. His touch blinds her, and when she returns it, it is not soft, not romantic. She seizes his shirtfront and pulls him as close as she can, straining, begging, knowing that if she can incite enough pleasured agony, it may be enough to drown out the dullness. He is darker than the densest of her fears, and yet his darkness is velvet. She chokes herself with it.
His arms are around her neck, then her shoulders and her hips and her waist, fingers cold against her hot skin; there is no time for words. They do not know how long they have. Long enough, surely, for this, for whatever twisted emotion they've managed to conjure between them. It scorches her, and she welcomes it, gasping as he demands, sighing as he contributes. His neck is as soft as his collar, and she barely bothers to differentiate, savoring the ignorance, stifling herself in him and all that he offers.
He bites, laughing as he does; at her lips and behind her ear and against her shoulder, and her overlong fingernails cut into his light wrists, so that they afflict one another in kind, perhaps drawing blood, certainly raising sweat, their breath entwining as they encompass one another. It is glory amidst the dust that is all she knows, and she is aware in those brief, trembling moments that she cannot leave him now, that this is more than she's ever received or given, and that she can't imagine him being gone.
She still cannot smile. She hasn't forgotten how this will end.
vi
When the minions call you whore, nod.
x
It starts with laughter. Low and slick, spreading like an oil stain from the thin, pale one. It hacks away at her, and she turns, but not before a hand mars her shoulder. He is frail-framed, yet strength still solidifies his grasp, and she gasps at the shriek that her scrawny muscles release.
"You're meanin' to say that you've been with 'im? With 'im? An ugly slut likes of you's been havin' at 'im now?"
He rasps into her ear, and she stumbles, reaching out for an anchor. Her hand breaks against the rock-hewn muscles of the large, wide-faced one, the one whom her father detests, and her breath catches. Bitterness lurches through her stomach. She wants to beg, to force herself away, to implore. Yet her father is watching. Watching with his ears, through them. If she protests, he will hear. His distance doesn't matter; any brief delay is irrelevant. They are his dogs.
Gueulemer shoves, and her feet raise clouds of dust as she slams into the masked one's arms. His bony limbs strike away her gasps, and his liquid purr of a laugh fills her ear like molten steel, aching and burning all the way down.
"This ain't true, i'it, 'Parnasse? 'S this scum 'ad you where it matters, then?" Babet spits. She feels it sting her cheek, and her head drops, eyes squeezed shut to hold in the tears. She must be still. She must be silent. They can only be right. Protestations will cost her much more than the burn of a bruised conscience.
"Yes." His voice cuts into her, swifter than the most masterful of his knife work. "She has."
Laughter is meant to be an expression of glee. Even a being as devastated as her knows this. And yet what she hears now is acidic, rotten, slopping from all three of them in a sickening cacophony. He alone remains silent. She is blind, but she knows he is watching her. Doing nothing as a fist rams her side, as it is encouraged by a wheeze and a snort of sour amusement, endorsed with the scrape of long nails over her cheek, tearing, releasing a slick of crimson.
Nothing. He is ice-carven in the face of her stuttering flame.
vii
He will tell you of the others. How they went crazy in their sleep awaiting his return. Do not flinch. Do not doubt your thickened fingertips. Stand upright. You promised.
x
His voice is shaking.
She has never heard it anything but ironwood steady. It did not cross her mind that there was a possibility of anything else, and seeing it now, she cannot believe that it is him. He watches her with flat diamond eyes, his chest heaving, his fingers on her lips, grasping for her acceptance.
"It will only hurt you, 'Ponine. Please, it will only hurt you."
This is his lucidity. Suave pretense is gone; he is unmasked, and she wonders for the first time if perhaps he loves her. Hands frame her jaw, her cheeks. His forehead tilts against hers. It is blazing with a feverish heat. She inhales sharply, and he holds her as though she is crafted of porcelain.
"You're hurt enough without me, do not do this to yourself—"
Her arms are lead, yet she lifts a hand, covers his trembling lips, silencing him. He is briefly shocked, before her assertion softens him, and he sags, his chin slipping to her shoulder.
"I want this," she reminds him. She does not know whether it is the truth. "You know I want this."
As the night elapses, she is his rock, and she looks to the ceiling, lets his grip cut her, pretends that she does not care whether she feels his tears.
viii
When you find him in his room, thrashing in the sheets, pressing his palms into the walls, howling, his face a river... close the door. This is how he makes wine. Leave him in his sorcery.
x
Without her, his mask falls. Apart from the rest, the vision around him lessens, and he is seen only briefly through the impure visage of graceful dishonesty. A young boy. Frightened. Confused. Less than twenty years can be owed to him, and it is only in times like now that she sees it.
The door lies open, and he is there. Or some semblance of him, a phantasm of the glory within which she has become so immured, huddled against the wall with curls astray and shoulders struck by some invisible gale. He does not face her, but she knows him. No others match his figure, and she is sure that she would recognize him regardless. Her eyes bind to him in a way unmatched.
"'Parnasse?" she murmurs, her fingers leaden on the rusted hinges.
He shudders, heaves a decanter's worth of air, grows drunk upon it. He will not face her. She is his downfall. His bones are stretched thin, till he is transparent, and all the words that he is too weak to voice singe through her like lightning. That she has destroyed him. That he cannot last much longer. That she is dirty, and he despises her for tarnishing his flawlessness. That he curses her for being here now, for this is his escape, this is the place where he is free of her, and that she should chase him to his refuge is to pierce to his core, rip him apart, devastate him.
He does not want her. She has no use here. The door's shrieked protest is no object to her departure.
ix
When he explains that he cannot love. That he will never be yours alone. When he tells you how the meek, the gluttons, the tempted, the proud are his angels, do not mourn. Smile, feed him, wash his hair.
x
"You are nothing to me," he sighs, and his laugh is crystal. His eyes shine impenetrable, but his lips are not steady. He does not lie, but truth, in turn, has not touched him for years. The flush sinking into his cheeks is not handsome, not delicate. "You are poor, you are weak. I am not. I could never be."
"Didn't seem to be a problem before." She reaches out to touch him, and his fingertips meet hers, sparking against them. His eyes hold the bitten-back malice of an impending winter storm; he does not smile.
"I do not belong to you." The shift of his lips is low and careful, and she cannot glimpse his teeth. "How you feel, how you love. I do not understand it. I am above you. I must be."
She defies his objection, presses his hands aside and reaches to his face. Strokes it, caresses it, frames it. Her thumb brushes a runaway curl and his eyes close, neck loosens, chin dips.
"I despise you," he murmurs into her palm.
Her eyes sting as she smiles. He is so broken, beyond even herself. Less time remains for him. She will be without him soon, and she does not know whether the concept is rewarding or painful. It is sure to be a relief, at least somehow, to be free of his invisible burning brands. Much as she loves the agony, it finds her repulsive.
"I know," she whispers, holding onto him, her throat dry. "I know."
x
He is a king among thieves. The leeches will hollow his skin, the crows reduce him to bones. His own heart will empty him. Allow for the bleed. Be ready with tourniquet and prayer.
x
Over time, she takes to standing beside him. Her hand sheathes his when no others are looking, and she poises before him when the robberies and cons and murders occur, shielding him with her darkness. She is the echo of a slave, on her knees before him, and her sepia mundaneness serves only to draw deeper shadows from him, to strike him into clearer ivory.
He wearies with the passing of the days. His skin is spared of its color, and chalk rises there in the absence of pearls. Shadows wing his eyes, his lips are bloodless; jaw roughened, ribs frail. As the long-lingering innocence of his features melts away, so does that of his nature, and his words lose their syrup. Dry bitterly. Rasp.
They do not speak much. She rots with him. The others' faces half-fall, regret seals over mocking: the young pair's elegance is whittled away, and, for the first time, they appear as the children they are. Stronger, thicker, callused and more pitiable for being such. They are nightmares. Little more.
The days pass in uniformity. Blood swells under her lips and pulses beneath her gathering bruises; she glowers in the day and groans in the night, touches him but doesn't speak, loves him with scarce a word. The winter sighs ashy breaths over Paris, cloaks its vitality. She knows, somehow, that it is approaching. Every hour is sacred, though her prayers voice only in the scrape of her nails over his straining waxen shoulders.
xi
In the dry burn of dawn, after the last of the lashes, the thorns and the spittle, when his limp body is laid at your feet, remember the night you loved him, the ember of his eyes and the way the words came like honey.
x
It is a gunshot, after all. Only a gunshot, and he cannot dodge fast enough, and she is already astray to deter another enemy, and it settles into place like clockwork. His fall is unremarkable. She does not look at him until she knows that he is gone, and that she will waste no time immersed in hollow hopes. Her veins are brittle.
Her father mourns with a scoff, the masked one turns away. None remove their hats. None lower their eyes. She is on her knees before him, and wondering how she never saw him properly before. How she never realized that, in their flatness, his eyes reflected such brilliance, glittered like shaven gems. His coldness was radiant, yet it is a tepid air that envelops him now.
She will not touch him, won't breathe upon his stillness. He is a broken figure, thrust over the bright-splashed floorboards, coattails awash in his own heated stain. She shudders. The others make no move, stand not towards pity, yet their silence is adequate respect. It is all he will receive. All that even she is capable of giving him.
"You're a bloody fool," she whispers, with the tangled strands of her dark hair obscuring her face, disguising her lips so that the words are truly between the two of them and no other.
She recalls his laughter, and in that instant is cracked.
xii
You were made for this.
x
Her sister finds her two days later, on the street, wrist-deep in the puddles with her knees scraped against cobblestone.
"Mum'n Papa are lookin' for you, 'Ponine," she mumbles, with no other greeting.
"No, they aren't." Éponine doesn't need to look up. She know what she'll see. Knows that the sight of the honey-haired girl with the hollowed cheeks will only sicken her further. She retches, reels. Hunger claws at her. She has not eaten since he fell. "They don't give a damn."
A small hand brushes her shoulder. The skin it touches is bruised. Probably from him. She treasures the injuries that he inflicted upon her; they are all of him she has left.
"Please, 'Ponine. Please come home. You're scarin' me."
Azelma makes no mention of Montparnasse. She does not need to. They forget him together.
Éponine pulls air past trembling lips and stands, feeling nothing deeper than the dirt on her skin. She is hollow, as she always knew she would be. Azelma still holds her; she still hopes. It is a fragile thing. A pitiable one. She wonders who will be Montparnasse to Azelma, who will desecrate her and leave ruins behind.
Yet she cannot be ruins. She must be alive, must be resilient. For all of them. For herself. He cannot hold her back, not now, not when she has finally escaped him.
She can't meet her sister's eyes. She knows what they contain. The question, lingering behind kaleidoscopic green and gold. Were you in love with him, 'Ponine?
Éponine's mouth smiles, and she settles an arm over the skinny shoulders beside her.
"Alright. Let's go home."