A/N- I am now totally obsessed with Bluebird. Ben is so utterly incorrigible, but very sweet! (And Ramin Karimloo's speaking voice sounds exactly like you'd think from his singing voice, which is gratifying to someone who's been trying to predict what his speaking voice would sound like for months.)

Chapter 12
December 18th, 1830

Over the next several days, the unlikely couple settled into a curious sort of rhythm. Every day Enjolras rose at dawn and went to his classes, leaving Éponine asleep. Sharing the bed did not get easier, but he felt that with time he could surely become used to it. Sometime after he had left, Éponine rose and went about her day. Once she went out, and walked to the little park nearby, but the rest of the time, she remained in the apartment. She shut herself up with her husband's bookshelf, and was perfectly content with that. Entirely unbeknownst to him, Éponine was devouring the little volume of Descartes she had found that first day. Whether she really comprehended everything she read is doubtful, but as she struggled her way through the slim book of philosophy she felt more genuinely at peace than she had in some years. She was not a swift reader, but very dedicated, and she took an exceptional amount of delight in being able to broaden her mind.

I always told him, didn't I? she said to herself. I always told Marius I could have been a student, and look at me now!

And so she passed her days by grappling with concepts which were far beyond any challenge that had ever been set to her mind before, and finding herself equal to them, though she did have to make liberal use of the dictionary she purchased at the bookshop.

When his classes were over for the day, Enjolras returned home, and the pair of them went to dinner together. Sometimes they were joined by other members of the Amis, but three times they dined alone, and on these occasions Enjolras found himself a little tongue-tied. He had no idea how to talk to Éponine. He could converse intelligently with his professors and his contemporaries at the university, and there were very few things at which he was more skilled than his eloquent addresses in the back room of the Cafe Musain. But present him with a young woman, and he was stuck for a subject to discuss.

Fortunately for him, Éponine was more than capable of bridging the gap. Uneducated she might be, but there were very few people in the world who could talk quite as extensively as the new Madame Enjolras. Quite without meaning to, she managed on several occasions to draw her ordinarily reserved husband into animated conversation about absolutely nothing at all.

In the aftermath of these kinds of discourses, Enjolras always found himself wondering how on earth she had done so. He was not a man who liked to waste words on trivial things, but Éponine spoke in a way that leant even everyday subjects interest and vivacity. She rambled sometimes, jumping from topic to topic without any apparent connection between them, lending her an air somewhat akin to a fluttering sparrow. Perhaps once, not so long ago, it would have been pathetic to see her speak so. Out of the mouth of a well-dressed woman however, even one who was very plain, her manner of talking was actually rather charming. Her chattering mien showed, not a lack of intelligence but rather a certain freedom of thought. She had not been trained to think in a specific way and so she formed her ideas, scattered though they were, in a manner that was uniquely her own.

While she plainly spent most of her time with her head in the clouds, what she had to say she said plainly and directly, which he found refreshing. She had no patience with dancing around a subject for the sake of delicacy. The life she had led had robbed her of any such illusions and refinements. She had a little to learn perhaps on the subject of tact. However, Enjolras found that he valued the ability to be very blunt with him that came with this deficiency.

After they had dined, he walked her home and departed on his own for the Cafe Musain, where he presided over the meetings of the Amis, or simply met with his friends if no regular meeting was arranged.

When Saturday came around, they found their routine varied slightly. Upon hearing that Louis-Philippe had been made king in July, Enjolras had deliberately taken a lighter class load this year, knowing that the work of the Revolution was not yet done. As such, he had managed to arrange it so that he did not have any classes on Saturdays. He had been glad of it as the society that became the Amis formed, because it allowed him to spend these days at the cafe or one of their other meeting-places, speaking with the working-men until the other students were able to join them.

"I usually spend my Saturdays at the Musain," he informed Éponine over breakfast.

She nodded. "I know. I did sometimes pay attention to more than just Marius." Her tone was not reproachful in the slightest, which was amazing to him. If his mother (or indeed any of the other women he knew) had said such a thing, it would have been a barely-disguised reprimand.

"So I'm beginning to see," he replied, a slight smile on his face. "Will you manage on your own for supper tonight? I wasn't planning on coming home until we're done tonight."

It felt very strange to him to be making such considerations. Since he had left Lyon three years previously, he had been accountable to no one, and had long since fallen out of the habit of informing anyone of his comings and goings. Combeferre usually kept track, because it was in his nature to keep track of everything, but that was the extent of any attention anyone really paid to the minute details of his life.

"I should be perfectly alright," Éponine said, not meeting his eyes.

"So how goes it with your wife?" Courfeyrac asked, a mischievous twinkle in his eye. He had leapt on every opportunity since the wedding to bring up the subject of Éponine as frequently as possible to Enjolras. Being delightfully single and wanton himself, he had taken it upon himself to tease Enjolras for the fact that he had never been the latter and was very decidedly no longer the former.

Jean Prouvaire, by contrast had taken the opposite stance. He was quite delighted with the match and certain, though Enjolras and his wife were not really couple, that they would be good for each other. In consequence it was he, rather than Enjolras, who responded to Courfeyrac's attempt to get a rise out of the leader of the Amis.

"Don't bother the man," he spoke up sharply. "It is not any of our business anyway!"

Courfeyrac, however, was persistent. "No, Enjolras is our friend! Haven't friends a right to know things about each others lives?"

"No one wants to know the details of your personal life, Courfeyrac," Bahorel said. "Though I'm sure half the ladies in Paris would be glad to tell a tale!"

Courfeyrac, who was pleased with such a reputation and insulted that it should be so widely-known (not to mention the subject of a jest), hurled a crumpled-up ball of parchment in the direction of the taller man, missing him completely. Bahorel smirked at him.

"That's entirely beside the point!" Jehan protested in the midst of this. "If he doesn't want to talk about Éponine, he has every right to keep his business to himself."

"I find it ironic," Combeferre interjected, "that the only one who has had nothing whatsoever to say in the whole course of this debate is the one whom it most concerns."

"Thank you, mon ami," Enjolras said, sharing a grateful look with Combeferre. "As it happens, Courfeyrac, everything is perfectly alright. Éponine and I get along tolerably well, and that is really all there is to say."

"Have you written your father yet?" Combeferre asked.

"I did on Monday."

The medical student looked concerned. "What do you expect by way of a reply?"

Enjolras shrugged. "Who knows? I expect he'll come to chastise me somehow, but beyond that, who can say? To be perfectly frank I'm really trying not to think about it. Worrying about it will do me no good at all."

"Ah, a practical approach!" Bahorel commended.

"And with that said, I suggest that we abandon the subject of my private life. It is not likely to provide us with any particular advantage when the day comes for us to liberate France, and therefore is of no use here," Enjolras suggested.

Jehan nodded enthusiastically. "I agree wholeheartedly," he said. "And look, the rest of our company seems to have arrived, none too soon!"

He spoke true. A handful of additional workingmen were trailing in, accompanied by a surprisingly steady-eyed Grantaire, Joly and Laigle, and Feuilly and Marius who were deep in conversation. With the Amis and their hangers-on assembled in their entirety, Enjolras was grateful to escape any further interrogation by Courfeyrac in favor of much more important subjects of conversation. He got to his feet.

"Citizens!" he spoke up fiercely, projecting so that his powerful tenor voice reached the very farthest corners of the room, commanding the attention of every man present. "For many months we have been meeting here, airing our grievances against the crown, thinking ourselves the only men in Paris with the courage to speak so. This is not the case. As our friend Bahorel will shortly tell us, we are not alone in our thinking. We have known this, of course. No country can truly prosper under the rule of tyranny, and her citizens shall surely feel the discomfort of an ill-fitting regime. Until recently however, we were, to a man, under the impression that we were the only company yet ready to complete what our efforts in July began. Through his efforts, Bahorel has discovered this is not the case. Other conclaves such as this one are already forming, amorphous but plentiful, all across the city. We are not alone, mes amis!"

Enthusiastic applause greeted this pronouncement, and Bahorel got to his feet, ready to convey the details of his discoveries to the company. As the group shifted around in the natural course of such a crowd, a small gap opened up that had not been there before and Enjolras spied, through this gap, a flash of peacock blue fabric and dark red hair. He craned his neck as Bahorel began speaking, and his suspicions were confirmed. At the back of the group, near the wall, Éponine sat quietly watching the goings-on, the lone woman in a crowd of discontented men.

"What are you doing here?" Enjolras asked. The meeting was over and for the most part everyone had left. He had caught Éponine attempting to slip out unnoticed, and apprehended her.

She shrugged. "I was bored all by myself," she explained. "Coming to these meetings has become a habit, I guess."

He couldn't quite suppress the thought that she was probably more interested in seeing Marius regularly than anything else, but he did not give that suspicion a voice. "It isn't really a place for women," he said.

Éponine let out a bark of laughter. "It didn't seem to bother you before!"

"Well-"

"I haven't become a different person because I've taken a different surname!" she exclaimed. "I like being here. These meetings, your friends... they're the closest thing to proper friends I've ever had, and I would miss that something awful."

Enjolras found that very difficult to counter. "Come, let us walk," he said. Together they left the cafe, and as they set off down the darkening street, he tried to come up with a way to explain why he was suddenly so unnerved by Éponine's presence at the meetings. To be perfectly honest, he suspected that Courfeyrac's incessant nagging had something to do with it.

Éponine, it seemed, was taking his silence as a refusal to discuss the subject further because after a few moments she said, in a distressed tone, "I thought you didn't- how did you put it? Oh, I thought you didn't believe in the subjugation of other people! What's wrong with me coming to the meetings?"

"No, there's nothing wrong with it, exactly," he said hurriedly. "It's just... les Amis de l'ABC is serious business."

"I can be serious."

"Yes, I know. I just want you to know what you'd be getting yourself into. Do you really understand what we're meeting for?"

She did not meet his eyes; she bit her lip and shook her head abashedly. He had not expected anything else, having known that the only reason she was there in the first place was to look at Marius. This annoyed him for a wide variety of reasons.

"Very well," he said. "Perhaps I should explain it to you."

"I think I would like that."

Enjolras wondered how to begin. Where should he start and how should he say this so that Éponine would understand?

"France is suffering," he said. "You have experienced the worst examples of this firsthand. Starvation is common, taxes are absurd, and the class divide has never been so painfully obvious. The aristocracy live pampered lives, the common people starve, and the ever-dwindling number of bourgeois are caught between."

"And so you want to kill the king, right?" she asked, utterly innocent.

He looked at her startled. "I want no such thing!" he protested. "I'm sure there are men out there who would gladly commit regicide, but as for myself and the rest of the Amis, it is not Louis-Philippe that we have a quarrel with. I know very little of the king, but he seems an honest and just man from what evidence I have seen. It is the entire institution of the monarchy which we dispute. It is the throne, not the man, that we are against. That is not to say that we would not kill him, or any man who stands in the way of the natural progress of the human race toward freedom, if it became necessary. As for myself, though, I have listened enough to Combeferre that I have come to sympathize very strongly with his way of looking at it. A bloodless revolution would be infinitely preferable to a repetition of la Terreur."

Éponine nodded slowly. "I can understand that. It's a very noble way of looking at it. So, then, what is it you hope to accomplish with all this revolution?"

"We wish to better the lot of all people, so that children need never go hungry and men need never feel desperate. To do this, we hope to establish a republic, a free state with representative government."

"With a what government?"

"Representative government," he explained patiently. "This would mean that the people would be able to elect their own statesmen. The right to lead would not be granted by the artificial establishment we call 'birthright' but rather through the collective will of the people who are governed."

Éponine's eyes were huge, and she stopped dead in her tracks and stared at him in the glow of the nearby lantern. "Who would get to choose?" she asked eagerly.

"Ideally, everyone."

"Even me?"

He would have laughed at her expression were she not so extraordinarily earnest. As it was, he gave her innocent question a very serious thinking-over. Jehan's plaintive protests on behalf of womankind echoed in his head and, confronted with Éponine, he found them rather more applicable than he had in the past. He said, "Perhaps. The question of woman's place in such a republic would be an idea for debate. It's a complex issue, and arguments of education and capability are called to question. But if the world were fair and all people given the equal rights that are theirs by nature, then yes, logic and reason say that women should be given their say in affairs as much as any other governed citizen."

Even Enjolras, with all his capacity for eloquence, would not have been able to put words to his wife's expression in that moment. She still had not resumed walking, and the look on her face was a strange blend of amazement and delight and confusion all at once.

"And this is what you're fighting for," she said softly, half a question and half an exclamation of wonderment.

He nodded.

She smiled broadly. "You and your friends are wonderful men," she said firmly.

So saying, she took his arm, and continued down the street. They arrived home and went about the routine of preparing for bed. Éponine did not say one entire word the entire rest of the evening except to bid him good-night, and the look on her face was one of deep contemplation.

A/N- Because you just know Éponine's a teensy bit of a feminist (I can categorically prove that this was part of Hugo's intention with her character, right down to the page number you should look up for the evidence). That said, I have something Extremely Important that you should pay attention to:

As many of you will already be aware, I've returned to university, with 19 credit hours to my name this semester. I'm going to be VERY busy. I'll try to keep updates semi-regular, but my education is really, REALLY important to me, so please be patient with me until May, okay?