Chapter Ten

A/N: Thank you to Smiles1998, Guest, phangirl2017 and EyeSilver27927 for reviewing the last chapter.

Silence had fallen between the professor and the child stood just in front of his door. The revelation Pierre Sarcozet had made still hung in the air. It seemed to echo round and round in Éponine's mind, as she tried desperately to make sense of it all. He could not be telling the truth, it was simply not possible. It couldn't be true. It couldn't...

"You're lying." the brunette told the man, not so much for the sake of expressing her opinions as for the sake of breaking the awful silence, which had been weighing down on them like a slab of lead. "You can't be my brother, you're lying."

"Why would I lie?" he asked her, and she accepted that he made a fair point. However, there was still no chance that he could be a relative of hers. She only had one brother, and his name was Gavroche. She had had two before, but they had gone missing years ago. Besides, they had been younger than her, while this man was clearly much older.

"I don't know why you're lying to me, but you are." she professed, unwilling to believe this complete stranger could be telling her the truth. True, there had been times in the past where she had felt that she did not belong with the Jondrette family, as they had now renamed themselves, and there had been times where she had noticed subtle differences in appearance between herself and Azelma. But the life with them was all she had ever known. It couldn't have all been a lie. It couldn't have.

"When I was still a child, my mother had a child, a baby girl." he began. Éponine tried to block out the sound of his voice, as she suspected that she would now be proved wrong. Perhaps she should have been glad that some explanation was being offered to her, but she did not care to listen. All she had known in the past was being destroyed. And yet, no matter what her heart told her, her ears still forced her to listen. "My father had been dead for almost ten years, and we were starving. She had had to go and work at the docks, just to get enough to allow us to eat. And the child she has, it was the babe of one of her clients. She knew that the girl would have an awful life as a well-known bastard, and so she gave her away, to give her a chance in life. She handed her over to an innkeep and his wife at Montfermeil, and they swore that they would take care of her, as if she were their own. My mother still thinks of her, still speaks of my little sister. Ebony."

At the discovery of the name of the professor's younger sister, Éponine's heart both lept and sank in unison. The name of the child his mother had given away was so very similar to her own, so much so that it could have easily been a trick, a cruel jape that was a mere result of Marius mentioning her name in passing. But this man seemed kindly, far too much so to have ever done something so cruel, leading her to think that there was something more to this. Could it be that her own mother, Madame 'Jondrette', had taken her from a struggling woman and changed her name so that she would never be found?

The brunette suddenly realised that her gaze had been directed at the window for a long while now, and so she turned to face the man. He was staring at her again, though she now knew the reason for that. For the first time, she truly looked at Sarcozet, comparing his features mentally to her own. If she thought back to a time when every day she had spent hours in front of the mirror, making herself look as beautiful as was possible, when she was clean and tidy and her clothes were washed and well-fitting, then she could see many similarities between herself and Pierre. They had similar noses and cheekbones, and their eyes were exactly the same. Suddenly, it dawned on the girl. He was telling the truth.

"How did you find me?" she asked quietly. She seemed to have lost her voice with the shock, but given that she had spoken across silence, the question rang out loud and clear.

"My mother sent me. Well, our mother, I suppose." he explained to her, amending his statement fairly quickly. He was trying to build bridges with his younger sister, after all, and alienating her from the family, he realised, would not be a good way to start. "She received some money from her brother, a little while ago. He came into some wealth when he became the mayor of a town somewhere. I can never quite remember the name of it. She has the money now to have all her children with her, particularly as our sister, Bernadette, is married now, and so she wanted me to try and track down the innkeeper's wife she gave my sister away to."

"So you were trying to find my..." Éponine paused before she spoke the next word. Mother. For all these years, she had thought of Madame Thénardier as her mother, but now the word felt like poison on her lips. The woman had done nothing but lie to her and betray her trust, after all. How could she really love someone like that?

"Yes." Pierre finished for her, seeming to be aware of her issue at completing her sentence. "But then you appeared at the school, with Monsieur Pontmercy, and I suddenly realised that it had to be you. You look so similar to Bernadette, and exactly like Maman. How could you have been anyone else?"

'How could I have been anyone else?' the brunette repeated her brother's question in her mind, twisting it in the opposite way to which he had meant it. 'How could I have gone through all my life thinking I was someone, then suddenly have my world turned on its head when I find out that I'm someone else? Who am I really?'

The final question was an utter mystery to the girl. She did not know who she was at all, not anymore. But although she did not know the answer, she knew the reason for her lack of knowledge.

And so Éponine bade Professor Sarcozet farewell, before she began to make her way through the back streets of Paris, seeking out the Gorbeau apartment building, and the woman that had kept her identity a secret for all these years.

It was time for her to find out who she was.

A/N: Please review!