note: named after the band, though I do not own them or any characters.
To Eponine, the best season of all was summer.
Like most, she measures her days in who she spends them with.
Autumns, for instance, were hours spent playing footsy with Grantaire during detention, and winters were Joly wrapping scarves and coats around himself every time he went outside until they dubbed him their personal Michelin Man. With spring came AP testing, and Bossuet's inevitable cold throughout the entire ordeal. But summers, sunshine-gilded and chlorine-scented in all of their glory, summers were Enjolras.
Year 1
The only reason she came to the café in the first place was because Grantaire had begged. That, and bribed her with a pint of Ben and Jerry's, the scoundrel.
She'd met the tall, unruly-haired boy sitting in the back of the detention hall, and somehow they'd managed to bond over their mutual hate of geometry. Rather, math in general. But as nice as his friends seemed (one of them, Bossuet, had even helped her with her physics homework: "He has a deep and intimate relationship with gravity, kinda a love-hate thing," Grantaire had dramatically told her), she'd never really talked to them. She was a skinny, shadowy freshman with her own gang of friends just like her, and they were ambitious sophomores who'd never seen what lurked in the shadows of their "quaint" little hometown, so she'd never bothered.
Honestly, she could see why he wanted the company. This was ridiculously boring – a dusty room full of boys ranting about… she thinks it's something to do with the grading system, except now it's veering towards unequal treatment of lowerclassmen ever since Grantaire introduced her as his "clueless little baby frosh". At least they're cute.
Grantaire leans in, rasping into her ear. "Bet you can't bounce a pretzel off of Enjolras' ass," he smirks, nodding at the owner of said derriere, who was currently climbing up a table.
"How much you wanna bet I can?" Eponine whispers back.
"Grantaire has terrible aim, don't make him lose too much money," another guy, Courfeyrac joins the conversation, giving her a cheeky grin. Apparently target practice was a common occurrence.
She rolls a salt-crusted pretzel between her fingers. "How much?"
Grantaire tilts his head in consideration. "Another pint of Cherry Garcia."
She smirks. "Done." Eponine cracks her neck, considers her target (okay, more like checks out her target, but this is in the name of ice cream, so it's okay) and throws.
By the roars of laughter, Enjolras' wounded yelp of surprise is just about the funniest thing that's happened in a long time. Joly and even quiet Combefere, who was studying in the corner, award her with sweaty high-fives, and when Enjolras turns his head to give her a stern, blue-eyed glare, she just flashes him an unabashed grin of triumph.
Nights at the café aren't so bad after all, she decides.
The café becomes her little world away from the dark and grimy walls of home: the flash of Feuilly's braces and the bitter taste of their coffee become sensations as familiar as the tickle of her ponytail on the back of her neck. She spends her nights coaching Grantaire on his aim using peanuts and pretzels (Enjolras' hesitant dance of side-steps and dodges as he continues orating never stops being amusing), and once they manage to slip five packets of salt and pepper into his lemonade. Her embarrassing crush from eighth grade, Marius, is always around, but even that's not so bad. She always goes home with mussed hair from Bahorel's bear-hugs and Sharpied poems on her arms from Jehan, her sides aching from laughter.
This is what it feels to have friends, this is what it feels to be loved, Eponine would have thought, had she tried to articulate it. But the best things are uncontained, so she accepts what she feels as happiness and that is good enough.
Her bliss is rather rudely interrupted when she finally manages to bounce a peanut off of Enjolras' nose.
"Eponine," he suddenly hisses, and she wasn't even aware until then that he really knew her name, "would you please knock it off? Some of us are trying to get stuff done around here. Change the world, unlike certain empty-headed people who only focus on Starbucks and Facebook."
"Hypocrite much," she retorts under her breath like a sulky child, turning back around in her chair to take a sip of her water.
His voice suddenly turns into a low, menacing growl. "What did you call me?"
She whips back around. "You heard me."
Enjolras' eyes narrow into venomous slits, and she's already sliding her chair back to approach him. Grantaire's reaching a hand out to hold her back, and she can see Combeferre in the corner of her eye striding forward to do the same to Enjolras, but it's already too late.
"Look at you, all high-and-mighty, about helping the people, making 'sacrifices' for the cause. You talk about helping the community, and this entire summer I've just seen you get up on your table and yell. Why don't you go out there and experience what people actually go through, day-to-day, and then talk about helping, huh? Too afraid to get your pretty little designer jeans dirty?"
His face is darkening like a thunderstorm gathering on the horizon. "It's not like you would know anything about it," he practically spits.
A laugh that borders on the hysterical rips out of her. "How much you wanna bet?" She plants her hands on thin hips, looking around her. She spits word after word out of her mouth like stones. "Guess what: I know about your 'downtrodden' and 'unfortunate' because surprise, I am one. That's right, little Eponine, the one you never pay attention to unless she's chucking things at your head, I am the one with an abusive dad and an alcoholic mom with three kids in their shitty apartment, I am the definition of your 'unfortunate'. Try and fucking 'fix' me, pretty boy."
She looks around the room defiantly, fists clenched. Eyes big as saucers meet her everywhere, the boys frozen to their seats. And the most surprised of all is Enjolras.
Eponine takes a cruel amount of satisfaction in the way he looks like he's been slapped, and then she stomps out as noisily as she can.
She is walking to the pool three days later when the boys storm her with apologies and flowers, Courfeyrac dramatically sprawling on the pavement next to her feet to beg forgiveness.
They practically shriek with joy when she finally accepts their apologies, but she notices that there is no familiar blonde head amongst their ranks.
In fact, Enjolras says nothing to her when she returns to the café. The only sign of his repentance is a coffee he silently places in front of her before rapidly padding away.
"I don't even like my coffee black," she plaintively complains to Grantaire.
Combeferre makes soothing noises. "You know he's really sorry, he's just awkward around girls and doesn't know how to say anything."
She lifts her chin into the air loftily. "I'm not saying a word to him until he apologizes, the asshole."
No one ever said she wasn't stubborn.
Year 2
Due to their group of – well, okay, Marius doesn't show up sometimes, ever since he met his girlfriend, Cosette, but sometimes Joly and Bossuet bring along their girl, Musichetta, so the numbers fluctuate and decrease like tides – it's not that hard to avoid talking to Enjolras. Not to mention they take mostly different classes during the school year. There are some times where they're in their usual group and joking around, and she turns to the side to mutter something witty only to find him instead, and there are some times where he walks towards her, pacing near her table as if mustering up the courage to say something, but he never does. And so it goes, until the next summer.
"I don't know, man, just say sorry, it's really not that hard. Make her a cheesy mixtape or something, isn't that what everyone's doing these days –" she hears Grantaire say as she strides through the door, before everyone suddenly shushes each other.
Twelve wide and not-so-completely-guileless smiles turn towards her. "Oh, hey, look, it's Eponine."
"Hello! Totally did not notice you walk in, seriously, did not see you there…"
"You are so stupid, Marius," Courfeyrac hisses.
"Not nice, Courf," Combeferre scolds.
Enjolras coughs awkwardly, effectively silencing them all. " Um, Eponine, could I talk to you? Outside, preferably?"
He's even wringing his wrists, she notices amusedly, as she leans against the brick wall in the front of the café.
"I –um. I'd just like to say, I'm really sorry. About last summer," he starts off. "I was completely inconsiderate and hypocritical and you were right about everything. So, um, forgive me?"
He looks so bashful and awkward and repentant that she leans up on her tiptoes to pat him on the cheek. "Oh, alright. Just be glad you apologize pretty and I don't have the heart to mess up your face."
A relieved smile breaks out over his face before he pauses. "You're not going to start throwing pretzels at me again, are you?"
She laughs down at him from the third step up to the café. "Don't push it."
After that, they settle into – she wouldn't call it friendship, exactly, but something close. He continues to buy her coffee (she won't tell him what, though, so every single day there's a different drink on "her" table). She continues to toss food at him, but at least this time she tries to aim for his open mouth instead ("Makes your speeches more dynamic," she claims.) He stops wearing high-end clothes and one weekend, drags them all to a soup kitchen.
The way he talks to the rambling war veterans and listens to all their stories, playing catch with the kids and not minding the fact there are grass blades in his hair and dirt stains on the knees of his jeans, makes her smile. But of course, she hides it when he rises up from the field.
Because, even if they are technically reconciled, they are at each other's throats more often than not. It just ends in some sort of quiet change of opinions or unannounced compromise.
And ever since she hip-checked him on accident one day and he, mistaking her for Bahorel, had simply shoved back, they are pushing and shoving their way through each day. He decides to scrabble for her chair every time they both head towards the café tables like their own personal, extremely violent, silent game of musical chairs. She slaps his muscular upper arms enough times to leave bruises, but he kicks like a horse, so it's only fair, they both decide. What he has in size she makes up for in quickness, gracefully regaining her balance after he hip-checks her hard enough to send her teetering a few feet away.
Courfeyrac mumbles something about "aggressive flirting" into his soda while Bahorel yells something about ineffectiveness of limb usage. She's too busy avenging the death of her carefully straightened hair to bother caring.
Eponine rues the day his hands brush her hips and she lets out a squeak as fingers brush by her hipbones.
"Oh, God, you're ticklish," Enjolras exclaims, surprised. His eyes are wide as he stares at her with all the focus and curiosity he usually turns to political events, and usually she'd like it, if she was being honest, except in this instance, it probably doesn't bode well for her.
His fingers dart out experimentally and graze her hipbones, and once again she lets out an aggrieved yelp.
"I hate you," she hisses, and he just laughs like a child.
The café from then on rings with yelps and squeaks, and she's taken to walking around with her elbows firmly pinned to her sides, but, as she points out to nobody in particular, Courfeyrac's arm teasingly around her shoulders as Enjolras catches a pretzel in his teeth like a seasoned pro, "This is way better than last year."
Year 3
The third year, though, the year before her junior and their senior year, is the best, in her opinion.
First of all, the boys all get their licenses, some later than others. ("Bossuet, how do you fail your driver's test five times?" "Please, don't ask.")
"No, Eponine, this does not mean you get 12 personal chaffeurs," Feuilly mumbles as she practically shrieks her congratulations. She's about to give them her perfected puppy dog eyes, until they're all distracted.
"What the hell is that," Grantaire leans out to peer down. "Oh my God, Courfeyrac."
Courf just leans out of the Ford Mustang convertible with an air borrowed somewhere from a 80s movie or something, sunglasses sliding down his nose. "I call it the neon orange car of sex."
"More like the neon orange car of ugly," Joly mutters, while Jehan composes a haiku up on the spot about "paint like orange-flavored Pepto Bismol", which takes up a line in and out of itself.
Of course, there are other, more pressing concerns than the especial horror that is the color of Courfeyrac's car.
"The city wants to mow down this café and put up a line of cookie-cutter apartments in its place," Enjolras bugles angrily from the top of a now well-worn table. "The board is pointedly overriding the wishes of their citizens for their own goals. My friends, we are not going to let them. We are going to show them how much this café means to this community."
Thus begins the most caffeinated summer of her life.
Every time she manages to polish off her caramel macchiato (he finally got it right on his 29th try), Enjolras comes by with another round of drinks. Musichetta, who'd finally gotten a job there, grouses she ought to get a raise with how fast she's pumping out their various coffees, and Courf simpers about getting fat, and Joly about the debilitating effects of too much caffeine, but the entire town is guzzling down lattes and espressos with them.
Enjolras, being Enjolras, takes advantage of their now sleepless states to organize a protest. "This town's system of government is tyrannical and downright corrupt, and we are going to show it to the world."
Combeferre types pamphlets that a wildly-gesticulating Enjolras dictates, while Bahorel and Courfeyrac dispense them from his "neon orange car of sex" (she's sure he gathers up half of the town's phone numbers in exchange, somehow, some way). Jehan even comes up with catchy slogans, and she and Grantaire paint them over every blank –and not-so-blank – wall they can find.
The protest happens in mid-July, and when it does, the entire town shows up.
She's never been so proud in her life, she thinks, looking up at her boys from the front row. Grantaire cries talking about his experiences of discrimination ever since he openly admitted to being gay and she has to fight back her own tears of sympathy. Joly and Combeferre do a presentation on the maltreatment of the mentally handicapped in their own local hospital, and the gasps and roars of anger that ripple throughout the crowd ring in her ears. But Enjolras, Enjolras is the one that is truly astonishing, as he stands up on a stage like he was born to be there, glimmering in the sun. In that moment he is fiercer and more alive than she has ever seen him.
In that moment, as the crowd roars and surges up around them, she could swear her heart was full enough to burst.
They rush into their café for a victory celebration, and Musichetta sweeps by to inform them that they have won at last, that their café will stand forever, and that they have earned themselves a month of free drinks.
Mock-groans chorus throughout the room before their laughter a second later vibrates through her bones.
Courfeyrac's teaching Jehan how to tango in the corner of the room, and Grantaire's trying to beg Musichetta into bringing him something stronger than coffee, and in the noise Enjolras comes to sit next to her, giving her a poke.
"Mean," she whines, trying to ignore the way his fingers seemed to linger on her hips tonight, like they seem to have for the past couple months, and the way she feels his laughter in the base of her spine. "Where'd you get the guitar?"
"Jehan had it," he shrugs. "I'll teach you if you want."
She smirks. "Okay. What do I do first, teacher?"
He reaches over and guides her fingers onto the strings. "Here, put your fingers like this. No, your second finger right here. There you go – this is the G major chord."
"I didn't know you were musically inclined – ow!" The pain in her fingertips makes her jerk her hands away.
Enjolras chuckles lightly. "Hurts, doesn't it." He reaches over to grab her hands in his, and she holds back from shivering at how warm his hands are as he rubs his thumb gently over her fingertips. "But you know, the most beautiful things are often born of pain."
His eyes meet hers, and suddenly she can't look away.
And now she knows what that nagging feeling in her chest is, and she knows why she now welcomes the shoves and pokes, the kicks and pushes, the way she can tell when he's angry because his jaw tightens, the way he tilts his head and purses his lips when he's puzzling something out, how she can't stop noticing the flash of his neck as he ducks to catch a peanut in his teeth, the way he always licks his lips when he's thinking of words in the middle of his speeches.
She is in love with him. Her best friend.
Suddenly his hands around hers burn like fire, and she fervently hopes the lighting hides her blush. "You stole that from one of Jehan's sonnets, didn't you?" She teases, in an attempt at recovery.
"That's for me to know and you to figure out," he smirks, and her heart suddenly kicks against her ribcage like a bird flapping to get free.
Luckily enough, he turns his attention from her and onto the guitar as she requests song after song, watching him bend over the instrument almost lovingly, fingers caressing the trembling strings.
The dimming light from outside illuminates his profile in a shock of sunshine that is turning to molten amber, his eyes flashing like blue coals.
And she realizes in this moment she could, in the happy burbling chaos of the room, just lean over. Just thread her hands through his spun-gold hair and kiss him until she's breathless, kiss him until everything faded away.
She doesn't.
There's this phrase that people seldom say these days. "Once in a blue moon."
Moments, opportunities like this with them sitting together, alone in a crowded room, they come once in a blue moon.
She chooses to ignore science. Eponine chooses to hope those moons are as blue as his eyes.
Year 4
If the last year was their best summer, then this one is the worst.
"Congratulations," she tells them all at senior graduation.
Don't leave me, is what she really means.
This summer, as she knew it would, is filled with preparation. With Joly fervently thanking the heavens that he made it this far and was on his way to medical school, Combeferre weeping over how his philosophy books are far too heavy to bring to college, and Courfeyrac speculating on how hot girls in California really are.
Not to mention Enjolras' incredible restraint on not bragging on getting into Harvard to study law.
"It's a great school," she says. "So far, though." Her voice is casual, flat, no yearning seeping in. "You're not gonna come running home because you miss your mommy and daddy, will you?"
Grantaire leans in. "Will you miss us?"
"No." She says flatly.
Such a lie.
Musichetta hands them their drinks, no need to order any more. They drive around in Courfeyrac's convertible, top rolled down and blasting music so loud a passerby mumbles something about being struck by lightning if they don't at least change the channel. They drip ice cream on pavements, conduct epic splash wars late at night at the local pool, play messy games of tackle football in the park.
But it's not the same. All she can hear is "I called my roommate the other day, doesn't seem like a serial killer, thank the heavens," or "Why can't I just bring the entirety of Costco with me" and "Fucking airplane tickets, why are you so expensive and why does TSA always grope me and not the shady guy in all black who looks like he eats small children with his morning cup of joe, huh?"
She wishes, not for the first time in her life, that she was different. That she was loveable and bubbly like Cosette, enchanting and gorgeous like Musichetta, that she had something to offer them.
Not really them.
Forget them.
Him, really.
I wish I could hate you, I wish your stupid smile wasn't so fucking stupid, I wish your eyes weren't so fucking blue, I wish you weren't so fucking passionate about other people, about seeing the people who nobody sees, I wish you weren't so fucking brilliant because then you wouldn't be in fucking Harvard, she thinks fervently on the shores of their nearby lake, watching Bahorel and Feuilly wrestle in the water, Combeferre reading books on a towel peacefully, Joly applying sunscreen every five minutes.
She briefly considers makingherself into some sort of reason to stay, but no one, not even Enjolras, is enough to make her change herself, and besides, she thinks in a fit of pique, if she is not good enough on her own to persuade them to stay then it is a lost cause.
She also considers freezing them out as punishment, but as strong arms suddenly pick her up and toss her underwater and she screams as the chill, splashing wildly in retaliation, she couldn't bear not being with them for this final summer.
Eponine would never be able to forgive herself for not being able to witness Cosette happily building a sandcastle on top of a sleeping Marius, Enjolras' soaking curls dripping into his eyes and the way he shakes like a ruffled Labrador in a vain attempt to cast off all the water, Grantaire accidentally managing to get a fish into his swimshorts.
"Be honest now," Enjolras asks, two months later, in the airport, the last one to leave. "Will you miss me?"
She peers up at him, memorizing the way he looks at her expectantly, the way his lips are slightly parted, the angle he tilts his head questioningly, the stray curl that keeps falling over his forehead no matter how often he brushes it back.
"As much as you'll miss me."
Is that disappointment flickering over his features as he nods slowly? Resignation?
She doesn't get a chance to see, because he gives her one last hug before walking away.
"Until next summer, then?" Out of her mouth, it sounds like a question.
He turns back. His smile is fond but sad. "Until next summer."