A/N- Sorry about the horrible delay and this short chapter. Basically, I'm slowly recovering from the world's meanest case of writer's block and a bunch of AP exams along with the SAT... But I'm trying really hard to come back! I told myself every day that I love this story far too much to abandon it... So trust me, I will never rest till I'm able to finish it. It just hope there's someone left to read it...
When Montparnasse awoke, he did not open his eyes. A thought was nudging at him, and he could not quite grasp it.
The first thing he noticed was a musty smell. Sore, he stretched his arms above his head and heard a slight rattling sound. Montparnasse moved to press the palms of his hands against his eyelids, and that was when he realised that something was wrong. Had he misjudged the distance?
Slowly, Montparnasse began to move each of his fingers against his own head. He felt each finger of one hand drum against his hair, and he moved on to the other. He tapped the thumb of that hand. It never touched his head. Montparnasse tried harder, concentrating with all his strength on pressing the thumb against his face, but he did not feel it touching him. And now that his thoughts were on that hand, he noticed that while he felt the flesh of his palm on one eyelid, he felt a sort of rough cloth against the other. He slowly took both arms away from his face and opened his eyes.
His surroundings took a few moments to become clear. The first thing to come into focus was a dirty-looking ceiling. He blinked a few times and brought both arms in front of his face. What he saw made his stomach lurch as though he would be sick.
One of his arms ended in a coarse, bloodstained bandage. His hand was gone. Montparnasse prodded it the cloths, feeling for his hand, hoping that it was somehow wrapped inside. He could not tell whether the hand was completely gone, or whether the lumps in the cloth were somehow a part of it. Upon rolling up the sleeve he noticed a long, fresh wound running the length of his arm, and that was when he remembered the barricades. The flattened circle left by Éponine's teeth was still scarred onto his other palm.
Someone coughed, and Montparnasse looked around him at last.
He was in a prison cell.
The room was cold, though he knew that somewhere outside the June heat must have been blistering. The stones were spotted with drops of icy, murky sweat that managed to add a moulding smell to the heavy air.
Montparnasse was lying on his back, the top of his head pressed against the heavy door and his feet against the far wall. His fine clothes were gone, replaced with a red smock and cotton trousers. A green cap lay by a pair of wooden clogs in the corner.
He heard another cough and realised that a guard must be posted outside his door. Montparnasse made an attempt to prop the little cell whirled around him in a blur of greys and faded away.
When one is burdened with exhaustion, its heaviness pulling the eyes back and pressing against the lids, there is a time between sleep and waking that is nothing but a brief series of images as the mind struggles against the weary body. The eyes snap open only long enough to see a moment of surroundings before blurring again. The time between these moments is unknown to the sleeper, and it all smudges together as if it were a dream.
That was prison to Montparnasse.
When the others had finally managed to help him escape, he was quieter, rougher. The soft black waves of his hair were broken with tiny streaks of premature white. A long red scar stretched across his pale cheek from histemple to the corner of his mouth, and a vague limp affected his walk.
Babet would ask him what he had done in prison, and who he had met. The answers he received were unclear.
He remembered a large man called Mangedentelle—Dentelle—only slightly smaller than Gueulemer. Dentelle had slept on the cot next to him, or sometimes behind him.
Other prisoners had hated Montparnasse. They had had to do the work that he could not.
One of them had retained half of a broken shoe and sharpened it against the stone wall at night, making a sort of blade.
Montparnasse remembered lying awake in the dark, Dentelle's hot breath on his hair, listening to the soft scraping from across the room, knowing that the weapon was being made to use against him, Boiteaux, the Cripple, who could not finish his work.
Boiteaux, who made the women stare when the convicts were working.
Boiteaux, who had allowed Dentelle to befriend him.
It was hardly more than a week after Montparnasse escaped, a few days before Mardi Gras, when Dentelle was put to death. The others went to watch, but Montparnasse stayed behind in the sewer, avoiding the grate. The guards had thought that Montparnasse and Dentelle were friends. Brujonwas certainthat the execution was a trap.
When they returned, Thénardier was with them.