A/N: Hi, all! I received some really positive feedback (as in, lots of you read!) for the last chapter, so I'm hoping I can keep up my quality level for this chapter. I would like to thank BlueRoseParamour for not only reading and reviewing, but also giving me the inspiration for my characterizations of Grantaire, Courfeyrac and Enjolras. It was so, so helpful. I've drawn some inspiration for the more emotional parts from my life, and I stole a line (I'll make it stand out) from Nowhere Boy.

Disclaimer: I don't own Les Mis, outside of my (sadly) abridged copy. If I could own all the characters in it, I'd be thrilled. But I don't, and that is that.

She supposed that her wrongdoings had something to do with her criminal life. What she could not understand was how she was suppose to correct this wrong if she was stuck here, and anyone she'd ever wronged was up (or down) and elsewhere. It had dawned on her that night, while she lay awake in her cot, that perhaps she might have wronged one of the men who lay in similar cots in adjacent rooms to hers. She had attempted to dispel this thought from her mind, but found whatever thought she used against it could also be used for it. Thus began the never ending debate in her mind, and using every last ounce of knowledge (which was very little if one actually accounted for her lack of any proper education outside of which she gleaned from Marius.) to reflect upon her interactions with the Friends, and see where she may have gone wrong. These thoughts, however, led her to that relentless roadblock that is fatigue, and before she could finish her analysis of the golden boy, she was asleep.

Her sleep was interrupted frequently though, and her thoughts returned to her wrongdoings. It seemed as if every time she was close, she drifted back off to sleep only to be awoken less than an hour later.

This pattern continued the night through until she eventually forced calming images upon her mind and it shut itself down. Her sleep from that moment on was the deepest sleep she had ever experienced.

She didn't need help, and she was stubborn in this decision. An entire day had passed, and she had interacted very little with the Amis. This had taken very little effort on her part and she had become quite contented with her solitude.

Without any paper to organize her thoughts, her mind had run in circles, chasing it's own tail. She had wandered out of her room and padded softly down the hallway. A light murmur in one of the other rooms caught her easily distracted attention, and she paused. There was a subtle light exiting every crack and crevice in the door. She pressed her ear against the door and listened in.

"There's nothing else to say about it." A lower voice said, and she recognized it as Golden Boy's. Even at such a low volume, the undertone of revolution still laced his voice.

"Yes there is, and you are well aware. We must decide what the facts are." That must have been Combeferre: none of the others could interact so freely with Golden Boy and vice versa.

"How do we decide facts if we're not even sure we're talking to each other right now?" Even with a thick, oak door between her and them, the air had been knocked out of her. How very self-aware of him to say, she had spent the entire time here trying to figure out what she had done wrong, but what was to say she was even here? This could all just be a hallucination from blood loss.

"You remember dying, and I remember the second before I did. That will do for me. Facts come along quickly after. For example, we know that all of us our here, returned completely safe and unharmed, as if it were nothing; but we know we are missing Marius, and that in itself is up to interpretation, as I saw him fall, and called out to him after he had fallen. You had seen him lying there lifeless. Than we can be assured he is dead. He is not with us however, which leaves a lot of loose ends, so to speak. Perhaps his darling Cosette-."

"That's ludicrous, proposing that she had died too makes no sense, she was wealthier than he, and she was a proper woman, no reason for her to run onto the barricade like that street tramp that followed him around."

Barely tearing herself away, and ignoring the fact that she was making more noise than the average frightened elephant, she stormed back to her room, anger spilling out of her. She threw herself down on her bed in a manner that seemed more suited to Azelma than to her. Flipping over, crossing her arms over her chest and exhaling angrily, she was able to see nothing but red. Her indignation manifested itself as tears, and her whole body heaved and shuddered as she sobbed like a brat.

Unexpectedly for her, no one bothered to come comfort her, to apologize, or to see if she was all right. She was left utterly alone, and she quickly realized this, bringing her sobs down to a more reasonable volume, rather than the attention-seeking volume they had been at before.

It was raining when she awoke, and she was fine with this, until she realized the oddity of it all. It was raining in paradise, which had to be a joke in some high-class circles somewhere in France, certainly. She did not get out of bed, for she had no reason to. Food was secured, money was irrelevant and she had no possessions to clean. Rather, she rolled over to the colder side of her pillow, and attempted to take an interest in that panelling of the wall in front of her.

In due course, she brought herself out of bed, deciding that it might be time to face other people. There was a weight on her chest, and she wasn't sure if it was because she had fallen asleep to thoughts of Marius the night previously, or because of what she had heard Golden Boy saying about her. Not that his conceptions of her mattered anyways, but being thought of as trash by someone so respected was definitely enough to put a damper on her ego.

Inside the room that was meant to replace le Café Musain, she found only one of the Amis. The drunk, whose name she had discerned truly was Grantaire, was sitting at a table, a book in his hands. Surprised to see him at least pretending to be scholarly, she decided this to be the best place to start a conversation, if she was to forge a friendship with him.

"Quel livre est-ce?" She asked, setting herself down ever so lightly on the chair that she may as well have been a high-class gentlewoman.

"Reveries of the Solitary Walker." He said, softly, completely immersed in his book.

"Is that an English book?" She asked, she had often heard educated people asking that and employed this method frequently with Marius, in a hurried attempt to look moderately educated.

"Non, c'est Jean-Jacques Rousseau." She made a noise of agreement. This is what she was terrified would happen, but she took it silently, striving to be more lady like, and less of complying with the stereotypes of average street scum.

The odd pair sat in silence, while he carried on reading his novel. The awkward tenseness of the room had become so stern that even Eponine's frantic attention span took notice of it. She was very close to getting up, when he set his book down.

"Combeferre asked me not to speak of it, but sometimes things are too overt to ignore." She looked at him in awe. While it has been said that there are firsts for everything, she never thought she'd hear the day he'd speak like the other Amis; this was the first time he'd sound as educated as he was.

"Your yearning for him is unbearably blatant, and you've spent all of fifty minutes in my presence. Before Combeferre comes back, I just would like to you understand that we are all concerned for Marius, and as soon as we're aware of where he is, you'll know."

She found herself staring into his eyes. They commanded hers with a force that could become detrimental to some poor woman one day. They lines are his eyes that usually signified recent laughter were no longer there, and his irises seemed a thousand shades darker, not the usual light brown, they almost seemed black. These eyes were not the cheerful drunkard's eyes, they were the eyes of a time-hardened revolutionist who had loved and lost, fought and lost, and lost just about every other source of happiness. This detail in itself was almost enough for her to respect him every bit as much as Courfeyrac or Golden Boy, but before she was able to define this respect in her sub-conscious, her jittery conscious had taken her from the Café to her room, without her realization of the movement.

She slept well that evening, because even if it was a one-sided relationship, she still had someone who understood her emotions. But brewing in the same part of her sub-conscious that had created respect for Grantaire was a storm of emotion for another Ami. One that had made him fruit défendu, not another person making him the fruit défendu. But such is life (or more appropriately, the after-life) and while Eponine's mind frolicked in dreams of Marius, it began schemeing of another.

A/N: I'm so sorry about such a short update. As soon as final exams are over I'll do a nice, long, quality update. Also, I will cross-plane hug you if you understand why I mention Jean-Jacques Rousseau.

Cheers!

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