Chapter Eleven - The End of the Story
DramaRose13: It's also a bit "Run Away With Me" from UAoSB so you can take what you will from that. Just so you know, I'm not planning on making the Jehelma a major thing, I just couldn't resist putting it in because they are so damn adorable.
Smiles1998: Prepare to find out! :)
HermsP: ...What are you resigned from? Sorry, I didn't understand haha :/
Disclaimer: All character and novel rights belong to Victor Hugo. Song lyrics belong to the creators of Les Misérables, the musical. I own nothing except for my own imagination.
In the basket Gavroche died for there were enough cartridges for each person to have seven more. This made fifteen total. When Combeferre and Courfeyrac distributed these Fauchelevent alone declined them, leaving fifteen extra much-needed cartridges.
The death of Gavroche had not ceased the attack of the army and the National guard. They had, however, stopped firing grape-shots and had started aiming for the centre of the barricade, hoping to blow an opening.
The moment this happened, Enjolras leapt to his feet and issued a command. "Quick! Half of you, take paving stones and block up the windows! Make haste!" He had seen a platoon of men with axes and hammers coming to the front of the army lines. It was the sappers, coming to destroy the barricade before the others stormed the insurgents.
There was a burst of activity as they carried out the order. Within a minute they completed the task, and Enjolras kept watch on the advancing sappers.
On a whim Enjolras also called out: "And bring out the wine, too!"
There was a resounding cheer as men stampeded into the bedroom, lead by Feuilly with the key. At least their last drinks are going to be the Poteau's best, Enjolras thought wryly before ordering another round of fire.
He was thinking fast. They were nearing the final stand; he could see this clearly. The barricade was weak and they hadn't the time to repair it. The sappers would break in easily with the sheer number of army men, and they would have little to no chance of surviving.
They closed up all the remaining openings with the paving stones and iron bars. The wine shop would be their fortress now.
Enjolras turned to Marius. "I'm giving you command of this situation. I'm going in to give the last orders." They exchanged a nod and a firm handshake, knowing this very well may be the last time they saw each other, before the blonde leader went inside. The kitchen had been turned into the sick bay, overseen by Joly and Combeferre, with some help from Éponine. Enjolras ordered for the door to be nailed up.
He went downstairs. "Do you have axes?"
Feuilly, who was in charge of the lower level, answered for the men there. "Yes!"
"Keep your axes ready to break the staircase. How many are there?"
"Two, and a poleax."
"Excellent. How many muskets?"
"Thirty-four."
"There are twenty-six of us left standing," Enjolras said. Feuilly almost shivered but stopped himself just in time. "So there are eight extra. Keep them loaded and nearby. Twenty of you, out to the barricade right when you hear the drum beat for the charge, and listen to Marius and Courfeyrac's orders if I fall. The remaining six, to the windows and the gaps, ready to ambush them when they come. Am I clear?"
"Yes!" came the answering cry of the people of the revolution, and Enjolras nodded.
"Good. Men, comrades... it was a pleasure fighting with you."
And thus, as June 6th ended, the final battle for the barricade began.
The barricade trembled at the first shot, but held. Éponine watched it with glittering eyes. The army was advancing quickly, their marching steps received by the insurgents with returning fire.
"Fire at will!" she heard Enjolras shout above the tumult, and caught his blonde hair flying in the wind as he fired his own carbine into the incoming men.
The army began to scale the barricade. Seeing this, the revolutionaries climbed up to meet them. Bayonets flashed gold with reflected sunlight and red with glistening blood. The sounds of living and dying men filled the air and all Éponine could see was the pure image of war.
With every man that fell Éponine felt something akin to a shot into her own breast, but with every man that fell it also grew duller. She had stopped handing muskets to people, because they were just grabbing whatever they could find. She still reloaded them, but she also fired a pistol at whoever got too close to her brothers in arms.
People began to truly realise that they would not leave this battle alive. The revolutionaries turned to the people, pounding on the doors of the citizens, pleading to be saved. The people locked their windows and their doors, turning away. Men that persisted banging on the houses were killed by the guards behind them, all too willing to take advantage.
Bossuet fell with a broken cry, and then Feuilly did, shouting "Vive la France" to the sky. Combeferre was impaled by bayonets as he bent over a wounded man, intent on bandaging his injuries.
Éponine soon stopped feeling anything in accordance to death. People died around her, and she shot others down without a second thought. Gone was the girl who still held sorrow and grief for extinguished lives, and all that was left was a hollow woman firing a gun into the chests of faceless, dying men.
Then she turned and saw Marius, whirling about with bayonet, musket, and pistol. Men fell around him like flies, and there was a brief second where she admired his prowess in battle. A musket breached his defenses.
"Marius!" she called out in warning, but it was too late. Marius crumpled and tumbled off the barricade, where she could no longer see him.
Well, that's that, thought Éponine, mindlessly stabbing a man in the heart as she registered the death of her first friend.
She turned around and this time she was faced by something that made her stop moving altogether.
Enjolras was covered in blood, but nearly none of it was his own. He stood at the entrance of the Poteau, carbine in hand. He picked men off one by one with a stern, measured expression, calculating each shot carefully before firing it. Guards died on their feet without even knowing he was there. In Éponine's eyes he was an angel of war, sweat glistening on his forehead, a cut on his lip, damp hair falling in golden ringlets, framing fiery blue eyes. She thought if she were to give him a nickname it would be Apollo.
Suddenly she recalled what she had told him, from what felt like ages in the past but was in reality just three days ago. She had told him she didn't love Marius. And you - I don't know how, but you made me realise it!
It seemed she knew now. It was a most inopportune time to think of it, but she knew. He made her realise it because she'd only known she wasn't in love with Marius since she had fallen in love with someone else. And it had made her know something was wrong because he had been where Marius hadn't. Enjolras was there, forever engraved into her because she'd done the thing she'd never intended to do: fall in love with him.
"Enjolras!" she called to him, intent on telling him all that she had discovered. "I've figured it out!"
He turned around, looking confused. And then his eyes widened in horror as the man next to him died from a bullet to the head. Éponine wondered if she'd suddenly regained her reaction to death, because she felt a sharp pain in her left arm.
All of a sudden she was on the ground, and when she looked down alarm at herself she saw red blossom on Enjolras' white, coffee-stained shirt.
Oh.
It almost felt like cheating, how easily he was killing these men. Enjolras brought down army man after army man, and found himself full of grim satisfaction.
"Enjolras!" He recognised that voice, because it held a very special place in his mind, and triggered an immediate response. He turned around automatically.
"I've figured it out!" Figured it out? Enjolras was confused. He wasn't sure if she was speaking in some kind of code.
When she got shot he barely noticed the man next to him collapse on the floor with a howl of pain. All he saw was Éponine falling, falling, blood spurting from a wound. She fell into the sea of men and Enjolras caught a glimpse of Joly racing to her side before the world slowed to a stop.
He couldn't breathe. He couldn't think. Éponine had been shot and she would most likely perish. He would die for Patria and live for Éponine, but now she was gone and he was fated to die for the country. Knowing the end of the story made it much easier for him to fight until it came.
Enjolras fired his carbine and realised he had no more cartridges left. With a shrug he spun and whacked the man in the head with the butt of the weapon instead. He fell with a grunt and Enjolras knew he could probably keep fighting as long as his carbine wasn't broken to pieces.
Gradually he felt himself be driven back into the Poteaux and up the stairs. They mustn't have had time to knock it down, he thought, thinking of Feuilly's dead body. The muzzle went flying as he brought the carbine down on the head of a guard once more.
And then he was backed up against a window with the barrel of a carbine in his right hand, all that was left of his weapon. He faced twenty guards, both National and Municipal. His carbine was now useless, and he could hardly see with the sweat and blood running down his face. Without blinking he dropped his carbine and bared his breast.
I'm sorry, Éponine, but I have nothing left to live for.
"Kill me."
Two heads poked around the corner. They gazed upon the crumbling barricade with wide eyes. On the second story of the Poteaux there seemed to be some kind of commotion. He could see the blurred outline of Enjolras' red vest.
"Do they know we're here?" he voiced his thoughts.
The other person turned her head back and gave him that look.
"Right. Stupid question."
His companion rolled her eyes and refocused her attention back on the Poteau.
"Enjolras is still alive, I have to go help him-"
Her hand flew up in a signal demanding silence. He shut up immediately. (He really was easy to order around.)
"I think I hear something."
Then, a distinctly female voice shrieked something incomprehensible.
She whipped back around to face him. Her hood fell back slightly, revealing more of her curling red hair, but she didn't reach up to stop it like she normally would. Her eyes were round with fright.
"That's my sister!"
The first thing Éponine noticed when she woke up was that Joly wasn't lying dea on top of her anymore. Someone must have peeled him off of her, seen her unconscious, and assumed she was dead as well.
The wine shop was deadly silent. Dead bodies lay scattered around her. She swallowed heavily when her eyes caught the still form of Combeferre, the three bayonets still imbedded in his chest. Tears pricked at her eyes but she willed them away.
Half of her marveled at the fact that she had not been killed. Yes, she'd a pretty deep wound in her left arm, but it hadn't been deadly and she was right handed, anyway. She'd never been so grateful and upset at the medical student for saving her life.
He'd stitched up the wound and was in the process of bandaging it with a strip of linen when he'd gotten shot twice in the back. He had slumped on top of her, and in her shock, Éponine just barely managed to turn her face away before they bumped foreheads. The barrel of the musket he'd reached for just before his death, however, had fallen onto her head and she'd been knocked unconscious.
All these concussions are not doing me any good, Éponine thought dazedly as she propped herself up to a sitting position. She glanced down at her dress, soaked through with Joly's blood. It was really not a big surprise they'd mistaken her for dead.
There was a musket lying close to her - Joly's, perhaps? - that Éponine used to heave herself onto her feet. She'd lost a decent amount of blood, she knew, because the wine shop was doing that familiar swimming before her eyes. Too bad Enjolras hadn't been here to save her from the blood loss like last time.
Enjolras. The thought of him sent panic through her system. Was he alright? Had he been killed? This second notion made her heart beat faster as she glanced wildly around her, dreading to see him among the bodies on the floor. He wasn't there, Éponine had to look away when she realised Feuilly was lying just several metres away from Combeferre.
A masculine roar of defiance followed by the bang of a carbine going off and the stomping of feet up some stairs pricked at the back of Éponine's neck. Without a second thought, she raced towards the source of noise to the other side of the shop and bit back a scream of horror at the freshly dead Courfeyrac, a bullet and bayonet through the head and stomach respectively, lying prone on the staircase to the second floor. She saw his feral grin, frozen in death, and thought of Gavroche. How fitting that the two both die smiling, she reflected bitterly.
The shuffling of boots on the floor above her shook her out of her miserable reverie. Something fell to the floor with a clatter.
"Kill me."
The all-too-familiar voice literally staggered the gamine, whose hand flew to her throat in disbelief and shock. Something fiery roared in her chest and suddenly Éponine was leaping over Courfeyrac and sprinting up the steps. The sight before her took the air from her lungs.
Enjolras stood alone before about twenty guards. He had dropped his destroyed carbine (which he had clearly been using to hit people with) at his feet. His stance was proud and unafraid, and his blue eyes were calm and accepting. Even from the other side of the room Éponine thought she could see his vision of a better France in the azure orbs. Her heart pounded so hard she was scared the guards would hear it and turn around.
One of the guards spoke. "Do you wish your eyes bandaged?"
"No." His voice did not waver. Éponine experienced a surge of pride.
"Was it really you who killed the sergeant of artillery?" another asked. Éponine was pretty sure the revolutionaries had killed many of the artillery men, but then she remembered the one that had been loading the cannon when Enjolras shot him with perfect accuracy, giving them the precious minutes they needed to save the barricade.
"Yes." He sounded grave but sure in his decision to be executed.
The guards took aim, and Éponine opened her mouth to shout, cry, threaten- whatever it was that would save this man, she would do without hesitation.
And Grantaire came roaring from the back room, drunk with passion and startlingly sober. "Vive la République! Count me in!" he cried, pushing himself to Enjolras' side. "Vive la République! Two at one shot!"
Éponine would have laughed at the expression on Enjolras' face if the situation wasn't so dire. He was staring at Grantaire in a mixture of disapproval and absolute admiration. The dark-haired man turned to the commander of the barricade with an expression of respect.
"Will you permit it?" Grantaire asked with utter tenderness. Enjolras smiled and shook his hand.
Three things happened at once. The leader of the guard, a sergeant, raised his musket. Grantaire's eyes found Éponine's and they widened in surprise. Éponine screamed.
"You'll hafta shoot me too!" Éponine shrieked in a frenzied flurry of half-formed words, and as the guard turned to her she ran forwards and shielded Enjolras and Grantaire with her body.
The guards hesitated, because Éponine's disguise as a boy had long been blown, and normally women weren't shot firing-squad style.
Enjolras gripped Éponine's forearm. "What are you doing?" he hissed, fear audible through his tone. "I thought you'd been shot." Did she scare him? If anything, he was the formidable one, having killed at least a dozen men through whacking them with a gun alone.
She didn't answer, and instead watched the ensemble of guards intently.
"Move out of the way, girl," the leader of the guards said gruffly. "And you might be spared."
"Absolutely not," she said firmly, and the hand on her forearm tightened. "If they die, I die."
"Éponine, listen to them," whispered Enjolras, voice trembling a bit.
"Shut up," said Éponine.
The guards exchanged glances and then the sergeant raised his musket again. The other guards followed his lead. Éponine reached for Grantaire and Enjolras' hands, and the three grasped each other's fingers, gazing into the jaws of death, forcing themselves to keep their eyes open.
A single shot rang out and the guards looked around, confused. The leader of the guard fell to the ground, a bullet in the back of his head. Éponine, Enjolras, and Grantaire stared at the last person they'd expected to see saving them.
Behind the guards was none other than Montparnasse, his pistol still aimed at the space where the sergeant's head was. "We're even," said the man, looking straight at the open-mouthed Éponine, and was pierced by eight muskets in a deafening bang and a cloud of smoke.
Grantaire and Éponine shared a quick look of mutual understanding: save Enjolras. At the same time that Montparnasse was shot Éponine and Grantaire pushed the leader of the revolution out through the window behind them. At the crash, the guards turned around and the eleven men who were not reloading their muskets aimed at the remaining pair. They leapt out together, holding each other's shoulders for support as they fell the two stories to the ground.
Grantaire's knee gave way with an almighty crack and a cry of pain. Éponine felt her newly healed ankle sprain itself again, but was otherwise unaffected from the fall because she'd landed on Enjolras, who was groaning in pain.
"Merde. Are you okay?" Éponine rolled of the blonde man and got to her knees, checking frantically for injuries on the two of them.
"I think he landed on Bossuet," Grantaire said, very matter-of-factly.
"Just his luck," Enjolras grunted, gingerly poking at a dislocated shoulder as he sat up. Éponine was incredulous that Enjolras of all people would try and make a joke at a time like this.
"Run!" she suddenly yelled, and pulled the two of them up, not even thinking of her own injuries that blazed with pain as she did so. The entire guard (minus the sergeant) was aiming at them through the open window.
They ran.
They found themselves in a little alley. They pushed piles of fallen bricks into the front of it, where it would shield them from view as long as they crouched down (not that they wanted to stand with their respective wounds, anyway).
Éponine and Grantaire immediately slumped to the ground and began trying to bandage themselves with a shirt. Enjolras sat silent and still for a long time and then suddenly, he turned on them, a familiar fire in his eyes.
"I cannot believe you did that!" he thundered, treating them both to a ferocious glower. "I was prepared to die- to go down in one shining blaze of glory- to-"
Éponine cut him off with a resounding smack to the face. Grantaire cracked a small grin. "You promised," she growled, eyes flashing, "that you would live for me."
If he were completely honest, Grantaire would admit that even from the floor Éponine could be extremely intimidating.
"I had nothing left to live for!" Enjolras exclaimed, turning on her, but the moment their eyes met he softened. "I thought you'd been killed, Ponine, and without you I had nothing left to live for. Just Patria to die for." His eyes were burning with desperation and longing when he asked finally, "Why did you do it?"
Éponine had never seen him so out of control, and it gave her the strength to answer truthfully.
"Because," she said, "I'm in love with you."
When he didn't answer immediately her heart trembled. Had she made a mistake? Had she misread the previous words he'd said at the barricade? Did he mean something else? She braced herself for immense agony.
Then his face cleared, and something bright came shining through. He smiled a full, real smile, and Éponine felt a little dizzy. Enjolras was breathless when he finally responded.
"You're insane," he said, and then softly held her face between his hands and brought her lips to his in a searing kiss.
She was pleasantly surprised to discover that for someone who was so inexperienced with women, he was quite good at kissing. They stayed entangled in their heated embrace before they broke apart.
"What kind of answer was that?" Éponine panted, afraid to hope again, though inside she was already dancing with joy.
Enjolras' lips curled in that sinfully sexy crooked half-grin, and Éponine knew she would follow this man wherever he went.
He and his companion watched the fall, and the escape. He sagged in relief once they were out of sight, holding onto the wall for support. "They're safe," he breathed. "They've survived."
"For now," his companion said, as she pulled them back around the corner. "We can't be there for much longer, the army's bound to start looking for them."
He was silent, even as she dragged them in the opposite direction of their friends. "They really think I'm dead, then?"
Azelma looked back at him, compassion filling her green eyes. "To the rest of France, Jean Prouvaire is just another tragic casualty of war."
AN: The good news is that Enjolras, Éponine, Grantaire, Jehan, and Azelma are all alive. The bad news is that everyone else is either dead or missing.
