Dance for Me, Darling
Dancer by day, whore by night, slave every waking moment—a battered and bruised Eponine takes the stage nightly among the dancers of the Paris Opera Ballet as a golden-haired man watches every performance from the front row. Eponine/Enjolras one-shot.
This is an AU one-shot that takes place in 19th century Paris, just to clear things up. It's partly inspired by Carolyn Meyer's wonderful novel Marie, Dancing, which in turn was inspired by Edgar Degas' famous sculpture Little Dancer Aged Fourteen. I don't own the statue or Les Mis. If I did I'd be dead. I think that is clear.
Enjoy, and please review!
…
She dances for Azelma, whose crippled hands marred the stage for a night or two before she was turned away into the sleet and slush. Azelma, whose ribs and collarbones threaten to break through her graying skin. Azelma, whose cough grows worse daily. Who needs a shawl. Who needs bread.
She dances for Gavroche, to whom she slips a crust or two when she passes him on the street, if she can afford it. And the sad truth of the matter is that she dances for her mother, long lost to absinthe, and for her father, for the belt he uses to beat her if she doesn't bring him what he wants.
When she dances, it is Azelma's haunted eye and Gavroche's chapped hands she sees in the mirror. When she sells her body afterward, it is the little pocket of memory, pure and radiant, she keeps hidden in her heart, that fills the night.
Marius Pontmercy has never come to see her dance.
…
The man the girls like to call Apollo comes nightly. His dark clothing blends into the dimness of the theatre so perfectly that she can't tell if he's well-dressed or not.
She catches herself wondering one day when she's trying to mend her tattered bodice, and reminds herself she doesn't care.
…
When she leaps, she is weightless. But it's mere milliseconds before the heaviness in her chest drags her down. The blood-soaked tips of her dance shoes hit the floor and she absorbs her wretchedness, broken, wingless, before wandering off stage into hell.
She's been going to the foyer de la danse since she was eleven, twelve at the most. On her thirteenth birthday, she started counting the men on her skin. One scratch for each. She stopped soon, though. It was simply too hard to dance on legs riddled with holes. Too hard to scrub the blood from the tattered ribbons she binds around her ankles. Besides, they want her pretty. Her broken teeth and her bruises are quite enough without her adding to them.
…
A bit of hard bread soaked in coffee in the morning before rehearsal. A meandering walk through the streets with her hands clenched around her blouse and shawl, stiffening in the cold, between ballet class and her nightly performance. A knife hidden in her skirt to slash the faces of the rapists who won't pay, her fingers slipping into a pocket here or there. Hiding behind silk and face paint and dancing for a crowd that sees the epitome of elegance, never noticing the growing bit of deadness inside her, or the way her ribs show through her bodice. Lying silent and still and half-dead beneath a man with a penny or two in his pocket at night. Sleeping with her hand clenched around Azelma's.
The Opera's biannual examinations. Measly wages that, combined with her father's conning and her thievery her mother's work as a washerwoman and her income as a prostitute, pay the rent.
This, combined with the brunet boy at the Musain, is her life.
…
She meets Apollo's eyes one night. When she leaps, she hangs in the air a second longer than normal. She doesn't drop her head the instant the curtain falls, but lifts her chin for just another moment.
…
And then, one day, Marius comes, with an insubstantial blonde thing on his arm. That night, she steals a bottle from her mother's stash and loses herself. Azelma holds her in their shared bed, feeling instinctively that something's wrong. She dares not cry, for her father will hear. Instead, she clutches onto her sister, trying to convince herself that it would be a very bad idea to find a bridge and jump.
…
He smiles at her one night as she extends her arm towards him, lost in the motion, separated by the stage and the orchestra and the aisle and a universe or two. The smile has the appearance of marble cracking. She has to remind herself that she's in love with Marius.
…
With harsh mockery and a threat or two, she protects the blonde girl she now remembers from her father's gang. She doesn't cry afterwards, but it's a close call. Perhaps a tear slides down her cheek, stinging the open gash beside her lip, courtesy of her father, while she stitches the pointe shoes she'll have to make do with tomorrow at rehearsal, but if so she doesn't remember the next day.
…
And then, during rehearsal, she falls. One minute, she's struggling again to stitch together the shoe that has been worn a dozen times too many, shivering in the thinness of her bodice. The next, it's her turn on the floor, and she's listening to the harsh crack of the ballet mistress' voice in her ear. And then she's tangled on the ground and her ankle is on fire.
Examinations are approaching. Azelma's stopped working long ago, too sick now even to rise out of bed, too sick to survive another beating or another winter without a blanket.
She needs a promotion.
So she dances that night through the pain, smiling to the audience in their jewels and silks and furs, pretending to be an angel, the ultimate lie.
…
For the first time, Apollo joins the men looking for whores in the foyer. She sees him, awkward in the corner, as she brushes her scraggly curls over her shoulder and wraps her shawl around her bony form. She feels her world crash down around her feet again. She thought he was different, a god on earth.
He approaches. She thinks of Azelma, and doesn't shrink away. And when he's just a few feet away from her, she recognizes him.
"You're Marius' friend," they both say at once. Her voice cracks. His doesn't, but she gets the feeling, suddenly, that he is more scared of her than she is of him.
"I come to watch you," he says, after more than a moment of awkward silence.
He extends a hand towards her. She begins to weep.
Somehow, she finds herself in his stiff marble arms.
Yesterday I was alone
Today you are beside me
Suddenly I see
What I could not see
Something, suddenly,
Has begun.