A/N- I've just discovered a rather fantastic thing: a little one-act musical called Bluebird. Ramin Karimloo sings Ben on the album, which was how I discovered it, and frankly it's fantastic. His character is such a shameless flirt and yet so deep... sort of like what would happen if you jumbled up the personalities of Courfeyrac, Jehan and Enjolras and dropped him in the middle of WWII. It's just a little one-act piece, but it really packs a punch! Acquire it. Now.

Chapter 11
December 13th, 1830

Enjolras woke early, in fact he was up before the sun, as was his habit. When he opened his eyes he found himself face-to-face with a sleeping Éponine.

He abandoned the warmth of the mattress quickly. His bed, though large enough to accommodate two, was only barely so. His sleep over the course of the night had been something of a restless one; he, being used to having the use of the entire bed, had felt particularly stifled once relegated to the left side. It was the first time in the whole of his life that he had shared a bed with anyone, and he could safely say he did not enjoy it.

It could have been worse, he reminded himself. It could be Hyacinthe Guillory lying there.

As he dressed, he glanced over at Éponine. She did not make anywhere near as pretty a picture as Hyacinthe would have, but he was glad that it was Éponine and not Hyacinthe who was occupying his bed. There was, he was surprised to find, a certain sweetness to Éponine when she was asleep. One could catch quick glimpses of it during her waking hours, when she laughed that unrestrained laugh or hers or when she was near Marius, but bitterness about her hard life concealed it most of the time. Looking at her like this, with her red hair out of its combs and fanned out in a wild frizz on the pillow and her expression utterly unguarded, was an almost surreal experience. It was almost like seeing Éponine as she might have been, had her father been respectable. She was still painfully thin, her collarbone protruding sharply and her cheeks still sunken, but with her face so relaxed, she seemed gentle and very young.

Suddenly her eyes blinked open.

"Antoine?" she asked, her voice thick with sleep. "Where are you going?"

"You should go back to sleep. I'm off for the Sorbonne," he explained. "Professor Blondeau's lecture starts in an hour."

"Oh."

So saying, she closed her eyes once more and immediately drifted off. He smiled in amusement, put on his coat, and quietly left the apartment.

Some time later, once the sun had fully established herself in the morning sky, Éponine awoke. For a solid minute, she was utterly disoriented. This was neither her straw mattress in the Gorbeau House, nor was it the little couch in Musichetta's flat that she had made her own for the past few weeks.

Then it dawned on her. Yesterday was her wedding day. She was in Antoine's home- now her home as well, she supposed.

She climbed out of bed and went to the window. She pushed aside the curtains and looked out on the street below. It had snowed the evening before, blanketing the whole of the Rue Royer-Collard in a fresh layer of white. She was sure she had been on this street before. She could recall running down the narrow street with her sister right on her heels. Or maybe it had been the gendarmes. Or maybe she had been the one following. Following Marius?

She sighed. Marius was well and truly lost to her now, wasn't he?

Musichetta's advice was ringing in her ears. "Marry the man who'll have you... He'll take care of you..." But what good was a comfortable life without Marius in it?

Except he was in it. He was Antoine's friend, and he was still hers, too. He would still be there, as much as he ever had been. That might be worse than losing him completely, she thought. How was she to bear seeing him? At least before, there had been a chance- however slim- that Marius might one day look at her and realize he loved her the way she loved him. Now, though, that door was closed forever. She would be there as much as always, but on her husband's arm.

Her husband... good God, she was married! And to a man she didn't love in the slightest.

How ironic, she thought. Her mother had told her a hundred times that her name was specifically chosen, named for the Éponine of lore, who died at Caesar's feet for the love of her husband, Sabinus. Eloise Thenardier had hoped that being named for such a romantic figure would protect her eldest daughter from succumbing to the same fate, a loveless life tied to a worthless man, that she had suffered. When Éponine had met Marius, she had been sure he was the one her name was meant to guide her to.

Well, she had halfway succeeded, she supposed. Antoine was a thousand times the man her father was. She might not love him, but she trusted him and that was saying something. He would look after her, just as Musichetta said.

Was she always to be torn in two?

It was a question for another day. She did not want to be unhappy today. This was a day for warmer thoughts. She took a few minutes to straighten out the mess that had been made of the bedding. Then she dressed herself, today in the blue gown, struggling a little with the stays to which she was unused. She debated with herself as to whether she was going to pin her hair up, but decided it was too much effort unless she decided she was going to go out, which she was rather disinclined to do.

She wandered out into the parlor, wondering what she should do today. What on earth did the wives of wealthy men do with all their time?

All debate was immediately put out of her head when she caught sight of something that, due to the large numbers of Republicans crowding the space, she had not noticed the evening before: a very full bookshelf.

It was Éponine's one claim to gentility that she was literate. Through all the years that she had been cold and hungry, she had clung to that one simple fact as proof that she wasn't meant to be so. It meant she was a cut above all the other wretched waifs who occupied the gutter with her. She was eternally grateful to her mother for that one tremendous gift she had given her. When Marius had moved into the apartment next to theirs in the Gorbeau house, she had taken to stealing his books until he noticed they were missing and took them back with a perpetual air of gentle indulgence. In retrospect, she wasn't sure if Marius actually knew she had read them.

The sight of Antoine's stacks of books was like a magnet to her. She ran immediately to the shelf and sorted through the titles eagerly. Really it did not matter much what it was. Éponine would read anything, she hadn't exactly had the opportunity to be picky about her reading material when she was fortunate enough to get her hands on something. Eventually she settled on a slim volume entitled Méditations Metaphysiques, which she carried with her to the chair nearest the window in order to take advantage of the winter sunlight.

Enjolras arrived home utterly worn out. Truth be told, he had not been as attentive to his studies lately as he perhaps ought to have been, and it was starting to catch up to him. It wasn't just the eagle-eyed Blondeau who seemed to be taking the opportunity to put him through the wringer. He tried to convince himself that the sudden excess of schoolwork wasn't a direct attack at himself, but it was rather difficult to believe that.

When he entered his apartment, he found Éponine sitting at the table in the kitchen, her head in her hands, laughing quietly to herself.

"Éponine?" he asked, a bit worried for her state of mind.

She looked up at him sharply. "Oh! Hello, Antoine," she said, still with the traces of laughter in her expression.

"May I ask what you're laughing at?" He set his books down on the table.

She shrugged. "You really are a confirmed bachelor, aren't you?" she said, and it really was not a question at all. "I thought I would try to fix something up for dinner, but you don't really keep a stocked larder, do you?"

He sighed, sitting down across the table from her. "You're teasing me."

"Yes, I am."

"That's going to be a pretty regular occurrence, isn't it?"

"I assume so," she replied, grinning at him cheekily. "You make it rather easy."

"You and Grantaire both," he muttered. "No, as I usually dine out I don't bother to keep up my pantry. I am a student, after all."

She nodded. "Then you really do live at the Cafe Musain. I used to wonder if you ever left, and now it seems I was partially right!"

Éponine, he decided right then and there, was without a doubt the strangest creature he had ever met. He was pretty sure she was teasing him again, but there was something of honesty in her statement which unnerved him a little. "I do leave, sometimes," he said. "But the work we're doing there is important."

She did not respond to this.

"I'll write the letter to my father now, and afterwards we can go in search of supper," he told her, pulling a sheet of blank paper out of the pile of books and things he had brought in with him.

She leaned forward. "What are we going to tell him? What's our story?"

"I think it best to keep as close to the truth as possible, while still serving our purpose," he began.

"First rule of lying," Éponine said sagely. "That way it looks like the evidence corroborates your story."

"Precisely. I won't relate the whole story in a letter, of course, but-"

"But in case he comes here, like you think he will, we had better know what we're planning on telling him."

Enjolras nodded. "In that line of thinking, Feuilly found me today and told me that the documents have been altered. He's going to bring them to the meeting tomorrow, and he said that he changed the date of our ceremony to the fourth of August."

"The fourth of August..." Éponine chewed her lip thoughtfully. "What were you doing around that time?"

He shrugged. "Nothing special. Schoolwork, mostly. Lamenting the ascension of Louis-Philippe, otherwise."

"Yes, that was right around the time that happened, wasn't it?" Suddenly, a bright spark that might have been called mischief kindled in her dark eye. "I was a working girl," she said, sounding very pleased with herself. "A laundress. We met each other in April through our mutual friend, Musichetta, and you fell very much in love with me- oh, don't look like that Antoine, we both know it's all lies anyway!- but I would not give in to your advances. But after all that fighting in July, I was so worried for your safety that I finally agreed to be yours, and we were married within the week."

Enjolras shook his head. "I'm not sure he'll believe that. He's spent the last six years lamenting my apparent lack of interest in the opposite gender; a story that involves me in ardent pursuit of a lady's hand will give itself away as an obvious lie."

Éponine laughed. "Quite the opposite!" she exclaimed. "I'll bet your father is the type who is always convinced he's right about everything, isn't he?"

"Yes, how did you guess?"

"Because his son is the same. No, I said don't look at me like that! It's not a bad thing, necessarily. And anyway, we can use it to our advantage. If your father has spent so long believing you're only being stubborn and just waiting for the day when some girl sends you head-over-heels, he'll be so pleased to have been right all along that he won't stop to think about it more than that."

Enjolras looked at her curiously. "That's actually quite true," he said, amazed.

"I may not know all the fancy things that are in your books," Éponine replied, "But there are a lot of things I do know about, and people are one of them. You have to be good at that, living on the street. It keeps you sharp." She gave him a smug grin.

And so the letter was written and posted, and the pair went off to dinner feeling rather pleased with themselves. Enjolras, however, could not help but feel a little apprehensive. He knew his father too well to think this would be taken easily.

A/N- I'm not a huge fan of this chapter, but it had to be written so that I could get on to bigger and better things. And you know what I've noticed? I'm not nearly as fond of writing things from 'Ponine's point of view as I am of writing them from Antoine's. Perhaps it's just that he and I are so similar, and I can get inside his head much more easily...

Anyway, to my anonymous reviewer PonineTeazerBlaze: Thank you for your review, and I do hope you get a FFn account soon so that I can reply properly to any more reviews you leave! I'm glad you think this has some realism to it- I really try to keep my E/E stories as likely and realistic as possible, because it's a pairing that needs it more than perhaps any other.