I should be finishing the next chapter of "Something Like Love", but it's three in the morning, so instead I post random vignettes. Go fig. --M.
They turn dirty faces up toward him as he passes. He has the fastidious urge to lean over and scrub at their grimy cheeks, like an attentive father. God! he's getting sentimental. They have been on this corner every day for the past two weeks; he would not be surprised to learn that they sleep here. The older one looks perhaps nine years old.
Courfeyrac throws them money like a guilt-offering. Combeferre stops and crouches on the curb to talk to them, as though they were his younger brothers. But all Enjolras can do is walk on, trying not to be nailed to the spot by their hollow eyes.
Don't look at me so. Don't stare like that, needing and hopeful and furious and lost. I am doing the best I can.
I cannot stop for all of you. I cannot do anything for you one at a time, and if I stop for you, little boy with your filthy face, little girl with her thin arms, I will be lost. I will delude myself that you are the only ones. I will begin to think that doing something for you makes a difference to the gulf of need that surrounds me. I will begin to be complacent.
"I am doing the best I can," he whispers, words lost in the noise of the street.