"Well… did you find anything about me?"

"Jesus Christ, Montparnasse, can you maybe think about someone other than yourself for once?"

Montparnasse smirked and tugged Grantaire by his collar so that their lips were almost touching. "You wouldn't have me any other way."

"While that's true…" Grantaire pulled away. "I need you to be serious about this."

Montparnasse huffed with disappointment and leaned against the wall. Rolling his eyes, he said, "I hate to be rude—"

"But you're going to be anyway."

"—but I really don't care about your friends." Montparnasse had a way of being honest. Sometimes, in a time such as this, it was really unappreciated. "So did you—"

"Yes," Grantaire sighed, exasperated. "You were a criminal in Paris—"

"That's alright."

"Will you let me finish? You were a criminal in Paris, part of an infamous gang. Your name was unknown, but you went by the alibi 'Montparnasse'." Grantaire handed Montparnasse a stack of papers he printed from the Wikipedia for the gang known as La Patron-Minette.

"… like the fucking graveyard? At least it's actually my name. What a morbid asshole."

"And you're not one?" Grantaire scoffed. "The point is… we need to tell them—"

"Why?" Montparnasse asked without any intonation. Grantaire didn't understand how his boyfriend couldn't grasp the meaning of this disastrous situation.

"Why? Because if we don't, history will almost definety repeat itself. I don't know about you, but I don't really want to be executed again." Grantaire tried to keep himself from screaming. Montparnasse just peered up from the paper and shrugged.

"You have to do some messed up shit to be put to death nowadays," Mont said. He looked up from the paper but seemed as if he was about to look back down any second.

"That's not the point—"

"Grantaire, I don't think it matters. And honestly, I think it's just a coincidence. I mean... things aren't exactly the same this time around. Éponine may claim that she still likes that Pontmercy kid, but we both know the truth." Montparnasse ignored Grantaire's visible wince. "She and Enjolras probably never met back in the ol' times, did they?"

"Fuck , I don't know. They might've."

"If she were put in the whole revolution situation now, would she take a bullet for Marius?" Montparnasse didn't let Grantaire respond. "Probably not. And hey." He smirked and put down the papers. Montparnasse grabbed Grantaire's hands. "We probably didn't meet in the eighteen hundreds, now did we?. What makes you think that other things won't change?"

Grantaire deliberated for a few moments, allowing his eyes to wander around the Jondrette's trailer. Why he and Montparnasse were meeting here, he didn't know. He wondered if Montparnasse even had a place to stay. Or parents for that matter. He turned back to his boyfriend."Far enough, but we should still tell Azelma."

"Why?" Montparnasse's sharp face twisted in confusion. "She's got nothing to do with this."

"Were you even listening? This entire thing revolves around her!" Grantaire said as slowly as he could so that Montparnasse would actually understand this time around. "She was the only survivor, in case that part passed you by."

"Well, it seems like I survived too, so... see ya." Montparnasse started to leave, but Grantaire grabbed his arm and pulled him back.

"Ava is going to be here any second. We can talk to her then. See? We don't even have to go anywhere. It requires almost zero effort."

Montparnasse rolled his eyes. "Fine."

As if on cue, the door to the trailer opened and a young girl came into the space. She was a strange girl, and Grantaire sometimes didn't understand how she could be related to the fiery Éponine and Gavroche when she was so quiet and passive. However, she shared their features. Her black eyes were the same shape as Gavroche's blue ones, and she had the same long, blond eyelashes. She and Éponine had similar hair, long and curly and always tangled. Azelma's, however, was black (it gleamed blue in the right light) while Éponine's was chestnut.

She looked like them, yes, but there was something off-putting about her that didn't exsist in either of her siblings.

"Azelma? Hi, I'm Éponine's friend."

The girl blinked dumbly up at Grantaire. "Éponine?"

"Yeah," Grantaire said. He felt as if he should be talking slowly, but he did his best to treat her like any other fourteen-year-old girl. "Look, we need to talk to you…"

"Éponine! Grantaire's here!" Gavroche called from the foyer. Éponine wound her sopping hair into a loose bun and shouted back, "I'll be right there!"

She shrugged on a bathrobe (one of the purchases made on her shopping trip with Fantine Enjolras) and ducked into the hallway. The house was eerily quiet—it was as if Gavroche wasn't even there. Enjolras and his mother left early in the morning to spend the day with Cosette and her adoptive father, and even though neither of them were particularly loud, their absence left the house feeling lonely.

"Hey!" Éponine called. Grantaire stood awkwardly in the foyer, holding a beige folder. "Come on up to my room—or, er… Cosette's room."

Grantaire balked. "What?"

"Long story short: Cosette is Enjolras's long-lost sister," Éponine tossed over her shoulder. She heard Grantaire following her up the stairs, and once they were both in front of the door to her bedroom, she noticed the weird expression on his face. "Grantaire… what's wrong?"

"I don't think that happened the first time… Montparnasse was right," he muttered to himself. Éponine waved a hand right in front of his eyes, causing him to jump.

"Wait…. Are you sober?"

"Don't sound so surprised," Grantaire joked. He tried to smile, but it felt plastic and it melted in the heat of the stress that caused him to nearly vibrate from nervous energy.

"Seriously, what's wrong?" Éponine worried. She placed a hand on his forehead, only for him to bat it away.

Éponine saw that he was freakishly focused on something. His eyes were darting around as if he was paranoid. Grantaire whispered, "I need to talk to you. It's serious."

Éponine frowned. "Are you and Montparnasse—"

"Still happily together? Yes."

"And yet you still like Enjolras," Éponine said. She could tell that he could—although when that didn't drag up as much of a reaction as she expected, she knew that wasn't what was bothering him.

"How can you tell?" Grantaire seemed only slightly confused—the other thing was obviously weighing heavily on his heart.

"Call it a sixth sense," she sighed. She opened the door and ushered Grantaire in. He sat on the edge of her bed uncomfortably… very different than how he usually acted.

"This bed hasn't been slept in," he observed with a sort of level curiosity. "So you and Enjolras finally screwed?"

"No. And what do you mean by 'finally'?"

"I mean I've been waiting for it to happen. And I know that you two hooked up." Grantaire managed a slight smile, although Éponine was nearly overwhelmed with guilt when she saw the pain in his eyes. "You've got a hickey."

Shocked, her hand shot up to her neck to find that Grantaire was right. She lowered her hand and tried not to let it show that she'd almost forgotten about her best friend's preoccupation with Enjolras.

"I'm a terrible friend," Éponine barely managed to say. To her surprise, Grantaire just laughed.

"I gave you my blessing a long time ago. You just didn't realize it."

"That doesn't change anything!" Éponine exclaimed. "You still like him! And I've… I've betrayed you."

"You're right and you're wrong," Grantaire sighed. He still sounded distracted. "My 'blessing' doesn't stop me from being jealous. But it also doesn't stop me from being your friend," he said kindly, looking up at her.

"How are you so good? I could never be so selfless." Éponine sat down on the bed next to Grantaire, but allowed some space in between them. "The thing with Marius and Cosette was different. I didn't love Marius.. hell, I didn't even know him. It was more like a celebrity crush than anything else—"

"—just like my fixation with your pretty boyfriend. It's not your fault that I'm still hung up on him, just like it wasn't Cosette's when you lost any chance with Marius. Anyway," Grantaire sighs. He shakes his head as if to clear it. "We need to talk about something more important than boys."

"What is it?"

Grantaire looked around the room again before standing and crossing to the door to close it. "Gavroche won't hear us, will he?"

"I don't think so. Why?"

"We should probably wait for Enjolras. He needs to hear this too—"

"Grantaire, what the hell is going on?"

There were a few moments of silence as Grantaire stared at the folder in his hand. He seemed to be debating whether or not to show it to Éponine.

"We need to talk about how you died," he finally said.

"How I—what?" Éponine was confused, and more so when she realized something else: "Why the past tense? Holy fuck, am I a ghost? Is this some sort of The Sixth Sense shit?"

Grantaire laughed a real belly laugh and it dissolved at least some of the tension in his shoulders. "You're not a ghost. Well, not exactly."

"What do you mean? Out with it!"

Grantaire opened the folder and removed a photograph. He walked back over to the bed and handed the picture to Éponine. She took it from his hands and stared at what was a picture of a painting. The hand holding the canvas up to the ledge was undeniably Grantaire's—she recognized the ink-stained fingers and jagged nails.

It was a painting of her, Enjolras, Marius, Courfeyrac, and Gavroche on a pile of bones and tombstones and coffins. All of them were bloody, and she was clinging to Marius's leg. Lost, Éponine said, "This is really, really good and all, just like everything you make… but… why so morbid?"

"I didn't paint it," Grantaire confessed.

"Who did?"

"A woman named Azelma Thérnardier."

"Someone with the same name as my sister? Weird. Who is she?"

"Some French lady." Grantaire shrugged and seemed to steel himself to say the next thing. "The thing is… Éponine, she painted it in 1835."