This is the point in the stage play when Eponine mostly just exists in the background of Marius and Cosette falling in love. As I've said before, I want to give her a more independent storyline with this fic, which is why neither Marius or Cosette appear in this chapter. The play implies that Eponine stopped living with her parents after she foiled her father's attempted robbery on Rue Plumet, but here, I made up my own reasons.

When Eponine was eighteen, living with her father got even worse. She wouldn't have believed that was possible, but it was. It was hard for her to pinpoint exactly when it started. It might've been the night when her father barged into her room, very late, and shook her awake. He always made her tend to any injuries he got during his robberies, and she thought that must be the case again tonight, but it wasn't.

"Hey, Eponine, get up," he said, and she knew from his smell and the slur of his words that he was very drunk, but his voice wasn't as rough as usual. He almost sounded as if he were happy-drunk, something that he hadn't been in a long time. "Can you still hold your liquor like you used to, my girl? Come on, get up and make your old man proud," and he dragged her out of her bed and into the kitchen.

Montparnasse and other members of the Patron-Minette gang were there, all gathered around the table, and before Eponine could react, her father sat down and pulled her into his lap. He wrapped one arm too tightly around her waist and picked up a full beer bottle with the other.

"Think you can drink this all in one go, my girl?" he asked, showing her the bottle. My girl. It had been a long time since he'd called her that, too. "I was jus' braggin' to the fellas 'bout how well you can hold your liquor, how I been givin' it to you since you were jus' a little thing."

Eponine couldn't quite remember the last time she'd had any alcohol, and she'd been missing it. Drinking an entire bottle at once was well past her usual limit, and she knew that it might make her sick, but she decided that too much beer was better than none at all.

Her father suddenly pressed his lips close to her ear and whispered, "You do this, my girl, and Papa will give you a sou." His voice was almost sing-song, as if he were talking to a child, and Eponine wondered if she was dreaming.

She narrowed her eyes at her father for a moment, insulted that he still expected her to believe his word about anything, then looked at the beer bottle. She picked it up, tilted her head back, and remembered to pace herself.

She drank the entire bottle at once, but she didn't do it for her father's money at all. She didn't believe for one second that he was actually going to give it to her; it was just another lie, like every word out of his mouth now. She drank it because she wanted the beer, and because she knew that if she didn't, if she embarrassed her father in front of the entire Patron-Minette, she would have to deal with his temper later. A hangover would be better than that.

She swayed on his lap, dizzy, as she set the empty bottle down on the table and wiped her mouth. The Patron-Minette clapped, and father kissed her and cheered much too loudly right in her ear, which made the dizziness even worse. The room began swimming... but then, suddenly, Eponine felt grounded again when her father squeezed her hand in his and pressed something into her palm. Something hard and flat, but... no, it couldn't be...

Eponine blinked down at it, not quite believing her eyes. Her father had actually done it, given her a sou for drinking the entire bottle. He had actually followed through and done what he'd said he would. She looked at it, still too surprised to speak, but he didn't notice her astonishment and just kissed her again, too close to her mouth. When had he last kept a promise to her?

You're dreaming this, Eponine told herself. This is a dream.

But when she woke up the next morning, she still had the sou.

But what really made life with her father worse was when he suddenly began sleeping in Eponine's bed with her.

He wouldn't say a word on those nights, and Eponine was too nervous to. He would simply barge into her pantry-room off the kitchen and lie down on her narrow mattress with her, shoving roughly her against the wall if she didn't make room for him fast enough. She never went to sleep until she was sure that he'd fallen asleep first, and some endless nights, she would never go to sleep at all, and then she would have to snatch bits of rest later, curling up under a bridge or in an abandoned house, when she was supposed to be picking pockets.

She tried to avoid touching her father, but her mattress was too narrow for that, so she told herself that she could cope with it. She could cope with the scratch of his stubbly whiskers on her face and neck, with the hard pokes of his belt buckle on her belly and hips, with the uncomfortable, heavy weight of his body pressed against the length of hers. She laid awake, listening to him breathe, and told herself that she could cope with it, as long as they were both fully clothed, and besides, he did make her bed warmer.

One morning, her father blinked awake earlier than Eponine had expected. She hadn't sleep much that night and was lying awake in bed, reading from her Bible. The old book was now dangerously worn, stained and tattered around the edges. Last year, the binding of the spine had started to fall apart, and Eponine nicked a pot of glue and carefully glued it back together. It was still the only book she'd ever owned, but despite her efforts to take care of it over the years, it looked nothing like the clean, new Bible that the nuns had given her when she was little.

But then, Eponine knew that she looked nothing like the happy, spoiled little girl she had been then - nothing at all.

"What're you wastin' yer time with that for?" her father asked, yawning, when he stirred awake next to her and saw her reading it. "It's all just made-up bullshit."

He had said this to her before, and Eponine usually shrugged and said nothing. This morning, though, some spirit had come to move her life, and she found herself answering him.

"You had better hope so."

That made her father wake up fully, and he narrowed his eyes at her dangerously, but there was still a bit of jest in his voice when he asked, "Oh, yeah? And why's that?"

"What do you think it says will happen to men like you after you die? I'll tell you." And without meaning to, she recited the first verse she could think of that described her father. "The cowardly, the unbelieving, the vile, the murderers, the idolaters, and the liars - their place will be in the fiery lake of burning sulfur."

Her father made a fast motion, and Eponine was so surprised when he didn't strike her that it took a moment for her to realize that he'd snatched the Bible out of her hands. She was too late to him as he went into the kitchen and threw the book into the fire.

Eponine stood there, too stunned to move, watching the pages crumble and burn to ash. She had had that Bible for longer than she'd ever had anything, and even as she watched it burn, it seemed impossible that it could really be gone forever after all these years. She hadn't realized before now how much the book meant to her.

Her father grunted and mumbled, "Yeah, that shut you up," and her attention shifted back to him. Her astonishment flickered into a hot rage. She hadn't realized before now how much of the book she had memorized without even trying, and suddenly, verses were flowing from her mouth like a river that had broken its dam.

"The wicked will go down to the realm of the dead, and all the nations that forget God," and her father yelled at her to shut up, but she kept going. "They will be punished with everlasting destruction and shut out from the presence of the Lord," and her father slapped her hard across the face, but her voice just rose louder.

"The one who sins in the one who will die!" she screamed in his face, and then he grabbed her arm and they were both striking at each other, their arms and legs flying. Eponine heard a bottle fall and smash onto the floor, but through all the commotion, she kept reciting every verse that sprang into her head. "The child shall not share the guilt of the parent!"

She didn't stop until her father finally opened the door to their rooms and threw her out, so hard that she crashed into the opposite wall. By then, Eponine was reciting from Revelations, from a part of the book that had been her favorite when she was little, because she'd loved being scared. "They were not allowed to kill them, but only to torture them for months, and the agony was like the sting of a scorpion."

"Stay the fuck out," her father growled at her, as he flung her outside, and somewhere in the back of her mind, Eponine understood that she could never come back from this.

She whirled around to face him and got in one last curse. "You shall seek death but shall not find it! You shall long to die, but death shall flee from you!"

Eponine was pleased to see, just before he slammed the door, that her father actually looked unnerved. There was real fear in his eyes beneath the anger, and she wondered if he was imagining himself burning in that lake of fire forever. It felt good to have that image as her last glimpse of him.

Then the door slammed shut, the harsh bang of it echoing down the narrow hall of the boarding house, and Eponine was on her own - nowhere to turn, no one to go to. She had nothing but the clothes on her back and the sou that her father had given her, which she'd been careful to keep on her since that night. But she was unafraid. It made her feel strong to know that even though her Bible was gone, part of it was still there, inside her. Perhaps she had more inside her than she'd realized.