A/N-Yay! Y'all reviewed! That makes me exceedingly happy, you know... And just so we're clear from the get-go here, Enjolras is leaning towards Enjolras a la Hugo. Writing him as Raminjolras would interfere with my objectivity. Therefore, I'm attempting to find a balance halfway between musical!Enjolras and book!Enjolras (I will probably fail at this). And for some reason, Grantaire is having a great deal of fun with this (as if we expected anything else from him...)
3: Les Amis de l'ABC
Eponine felt her face flush, certain her skin must be approaching the same color as her hair. She awkwardly attempted to rise to her feet, with only moderate success. Her skirts had somehow gotten tangled up and as she struggled to rise, mumbling an awkward apology to the group of young men who continued to watch her, she only succeeded in tripping herself again.
A hand caught hers and prevented her from crashing back to the floor.
Eponine looked up into the face of her rescuer and found herself face to face with a handsome young man a few years her senior. He had a friendly, open face, set with green eyes and a guileless smile. His chestnut hair fell in his face as he helped her to her feet.
"Thank you," she said, thoroughly embarrassed.
"My pleasure, mademoiselle," he said, gallantly kissing the knuckles of the hand which he still held in his own, as if she were some sort of lady instead of a barmaid. "Allow me to introduce myself. I am Jean Prouvaire. And may I ask your name in return?"
Bewildered, Eponine hesitated a moment, in which interval one of the others- a tall man in possession of a terribly unfortunate visage- muttered, "Quit flirting, Jehan!"
The young man turned pink and released her hand immediately. "I-I suppose I ought to ask what, exactly, you're doing bursting through the door on us like that," he adjusted, before shooting an indecipherable glance at the man who had spoken.
She straightened her spine and summoned up every ounce of brass she had in her. "My name is Eponine Thenardier," she said proudly. "As you may or may not know, I work here, and am therefore free to burst through any door I choose. As for why I chose this particular door... Well, perhaps Gavroche can explain better than I can."
The boy in question was standing behind the second man who had spoken, peering out at Eponine from behind him and trying to disguise his smirk.
"Well?" the man Gavroche was using as a shield said. "Tell us a tale, won't you, little Gavroche? What's been going on?"
"She chased me," Gavroche said, sticking out his lower lip in an obvious ruse to garner sympathy. It worked well enough, because the others in the room drew a little closer to him protectively. It was subtle, and probably unconscious on the parts of almost all of them, but Eponine noticed all the same. Her little brother had always been able to easily charm anyone and everyone (their aunt being the only possible exception).
Eponine rolled her eyes. "I chased you because you ran, you dolt!" she exclaimed. "May I ask you all how you've come to know my brother?"
"Your brother?" Prouvaire asked, amazed. "This little gamin is your brother?"
Eponine shot the boy a glare. "Yes. He is. And he is supposed to be in Montreuil-sur-mer at the moment," she said pointedly. "What on earth are you doing in Paris, 'Vroche?"
The obvious flaw in his little game had been called up, and Gavroche shuffled his feet (though he still managed a cheeky little grin). "I got sick of it there, so I came here," he said.
"When?" Eponine asked.
Gavroche remained silent.
"He began following Grantaire to our meetings about three months ago now," Prouvaire said helpfully.
"Three-?" Eponine gasped. "Gavroche you little-! I-I don't... Oh dear lord, boy, what am I going to do with you?" She felt utterly lost for words. She wasn't sure if she was more furious or glad to see him at the moment.
The tall man looked down at the boy who was still trying to hide unsuccessfully behind him. "That right, little Gavroche?" he asked. "Is she your sister?"
Gavroche made a most excellent show of feigning shame as he nodded and stared at his feet, but Eponine could see the twinkle in his eye. One way or another, her little brother thought he had played a most excellent trick. She despaired once again of ever making him into anything resembling mannerly.
"Well then, any sister of Gavroche's is a friend of ours!" the man said magnanimously. "Allow me to introduce myself. I am Remi Grantaire, and these-" He made a grandiose gesture at the odd collection of young men around them. "-Are my compatriots in the literary society known as Les Amis de l'ABC."
Eponine could not hold back a snort. "Literary society?" she said before she could stop herself. "Is that what you're calling it? Well, I suppose that's enough to dupe the gendarmerie, but anybody who's actually paying attention knows what you're really doing here."
She regretted the words almost instantly, as the tension in the room rose noticeably. She wondered if they were really naive enough to think that all their treasonous talk was actually kept within the walls of this little room, that the only people who discovered these little clubs were the chosen ones they themselves informed. Judging by the looks of surprise on nearly every face, it appeared so.
From the back of the room, though, emerged one face that was very much not surprised. A man she had not seen before moved to stand next to Grantaire, and Eponine's breath caught in her throat. The man now looking at her was the most impossibly good-looking man she had ever seen. She thought he must be young, for he did not look all that much older than she was. He was tall, though not as tall as Grantaire, with fine golden hair and vividly blue eyes. Eponine thought wildly that he must surely be an angel, and an angry one at that to be casting such a dangerous look at her.
"And what is your stance on, as you say, 'what we're really doing here'?" he asked in a voice that, though warm and melodious in tone, managed to make her shiver a little. Eponine was left in no doubt that she was face-to-face with a formidable- possibly even dangerous- individual. Instincts born of many years of hard knocks made her tense up under the steely stare he had fixed her with.
But for all that this newcomer made her want to run and hide, Eponine was not in the habit of showing fear. She raised her chin to look up at him. "My opinion, monsieur? Well, I won't stop you, and I certainly won't report you to the police if that's what you're worried about, but I want no part in such things."
"You ought to," he said coldly. "It is the well-being of people like you that we are primarily concerned with."
If you were to ask Eponine later, she would have conceded that he had a point. She would also have admitted that he was right in his generalizations; she was a working girl and she did come from a questionable family. But right at that moment, when the haughty words left his mouth, she was too insulted to be quite that rational, let alone notice that, though most of the young men had turned their attention away from her to converse quietly among themselves, suddenly every eye in the room was on her once more.
"People like me?" she asked, in a tone that, though she did not know it, rivaled his for sheer frigidity. "Just what do you mean by that? Poor? Uneducated?"
"I mean no offense," he said, and she was only mildly placated by the fact that his tone was quite sincere.
"I'm sure you don't. But for all your talk of equality, or whatever else it is you Republicans talk about, you obviously don't know much about "people like me" if you think that kind of persuasion's the way to gain a following!"
The blonde man's face flushed in anger, and he opened his mouth, but Grantaire intervened. He threw an arm around the younger man's shoulders jovially and said, "Pay no attention to our resident orator, Mademoiselle Thenardier. Enjolras is a decent chap, he really is, but terribly outspoken when it comes to these funny ideas he gets in his head sometimes." His tone was light, and anyone could see he was teasing his friend more than he was really addressing Eponine.
The man called Enjolras shot Grantaire a look that seemed caught halfway between amusement and annoyance, and shrugged off his arm.
Grantaire hardly took notice. "Come then, Sister of Gavroche!" he said, grinning broadly. "Leave Antoine here to his foolhardy dreams and allow me to introduce you to the rest of these good gentlemen here!"
Eponine decided right then and there that she liked Grantaire. Despite his mis-arranged features and the alcohol she could smell on him as he moved to stand at her side, he seemed- based solely on first impressions- to have an exceptional gift for dispelling tension, and when he smiled as he was smiling now, one forgot about his face because he was, in fact, rather charming.
The next few minutes were a whirlwind of names and faces as Grantaire and a very excitable Gavroche proceeded to make her known to each and every one of the students that populated the meeting. Eponine was initially embarrassed, as she realized that they had all been quietly observing her less-than-elegant first impression, but she quickly forgot her mortification as she worked to commit the array of names and faces to detailed memory, as had her habit since childhood. She wasn't sure whether she wanted to plant them firmly in her mind because she wanted to avoid them or if, disregarding her desire to stay out of the whole mess, it was because she couldn't help but like this unexpected collection of students in spite of the threat they represented. She knew Roxanne would be irritated at her for lingering, but she couldn't find a polite excuse to leave quite so abruptly.
In addition to Prouvaire, Grantaire, and the disagreeable Enjolras, there was Bossuet, a smiling man with a face far too young for the shiny hairless crown of his head, and Matthieu Courfeyrac, who initially struck her as being somewhat magnetic, with his infectious smile and boisterous attitudes. There was Christophe Bahorel, a grumbling, dark-haired man with broad shoulders who said more in the two minutes she conversed with him than most of the rest did put together, and Alexandre Joly, a fresh-faced young man who managed to be both pleasant and bizarrely intense at the same time.
She encountered Phillippe, the quiet boy nearly her own age who mumbled an introduction, turned bright red, and quickly engaged Bossuet in conversation, Alain Paillard, who had hair even redder than her own who spoke softly and was of serious countenance, and a handful of others.
"You would have met Combeferre," Grantaire said once he'd given her a complete tour of his comrades, "But he's gone back home to Nice for a time. I'm sure you'll see him sooner or later, though."
Eponine suddenly wondered just what on earth she had gotten herself into- or, more accurately, what Gavroche had gotten her into. "No, I-" she began, unsure of what exactly she could say to explain the reluctance she ought to have expressed plainly several minutes ago.
Before she could speak, however, a shout echoed down the hall from the main room. Eponine sighed. "That'll be the soldiers. Knew they'd be trouble," she said ruefully, throwing a distracted look over her shoulder. She took a few steps toward the door, grateful for the excuse to get out of there and away from all their staring eyes. "I should probably go throw them out before they make a mess. Come on, Gavroche."
"Can't I stay?" he pleaded, pulling at her skirt.
Eponine hesitated. Roxanne would be annoyed to have him underfoot in the kitchen... but she couldn't leave him here!
"We certainly wouldn't mind," Prouvaire said helpfully.
"They talk about such interesting things!" Gavroche protested.
Oh good Lord... Eponine groaned internally. Just what she needed, Gavroche getting himself attached. But there wasn't much she could do about it now, and the increasing volume of the yelling echoing back from the commons left her no option. "Alright," she sighed. "But we're having a good long talk later! You have a lot of explaining to do!"
She nodded politely in the general direction of the students and fled the room. Drunken soldiers were far easier to deal with, in her opinion.
.
After the abrupt exit of Mlle. Thenardier, Enjolras, who had retreated to a far table while Grantaire introduced the young woman to the rest of the group, moved once more to the center of the room and tried to resume the discussion they'd been having before first Gavroche and then Eponine burst into the room. For the most part, the other students readily joined in. Only Bossuet and Grantaire still lingered a moment.
"I think I like your sister," Grantaire said roundly to Gavroche.
"You like all women," Bossuet pointed out.
Grantaire shrugged and waved a hand airily, as if to say So? "Still," he pointed out, "It's been awhile since anybody went after Enjolras like that. It's easy to see where Little Gavroche learned his mouth from." He ruffled the little would-be gamin's hair, which caused Gavroche to squirm away, determinedly pushing his dark strands back into place and making a sour face at Grantaire, all of which only served to make the two young men laugh.
A/N- Not my best, I must say, but after a huge amount of tweaking I just couldn't find a way to get it any better, so you'll have to live with this. As always, I love getting feedback...