A/N: We're getting darker up in here! AKA let's not forget that Les Amis participated in a violent revolution, ok thanks.
Let me just preface this by saying that I kind of hate the fact that I sort of shoe-horned Éponine into the role of "the victim" here. I can offer all kinds of reasons why it made sense to do it (she is intimately tied with Patron-Minette and they had to be introduced somehow, her death in the musical fulfils a similar role (she's not dying here)), but that doesn't change the fact that it's a crappy trend in writing.
Summary: Éponine only comes to the Corinth once. Enjolras tries his hand at artistic expression. Or, Éponine and the process of radicalisation.
Les Amis have returned to the streets in a renewed effort to collect donations for underprivileged students, and the group has grown exponentially in the process. It speaks to the growing awareness of their campaign that they soon become large enough that it becomes too disruptive to gather in the Musain café for their weekly meetings. The core group of them still spend time there together a few days a week, but official meetings need to move to a larger, emptier space.
It's Grantaire who knows the city best, Grantaire who lives in the shadows, thrives in the back-alley bars and restaurants, in the dingy boxing clubs and wide open dance studios, Grantaire who walks home along the Seine by night breathing the city in, and watches the people ducking in and out of buildings, and sometimes he follows them inside. It's Grantaire who finds them the Corinth; a drab wine-shop down an alley near his apartment that serves bad food and worryingly strong alcohol and always seems to be covered in a thin layer of dust. Authorities tended to avoid it. They all loved it.
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Éponine turns up one day completely out of the blue. They've never seen her around before, never spoken to her at a protest or handed her a flyer, but the door swings open in the middle of a meeting and she walks in to the Corinth with her head held high, bringing in a blast of cold wind that causes everyone to look her way. She looks windswept and tired, oh so tired, but she doesn't flinch away from all the eyes staring at her, twisting her face into a mocking grin and proclaiming that they're all fools, and she's only here because she wants to see what her little brother wants to get involved in.
Bahorel and Feuilly shift to make room for her at their table, but instead she stands listening for ten minutes while Enjolras picks up where he left off before the interruption. Eventually, she turns and seats herself at Grantaire's corner table, with his glass of wine in hand.
They talk quietly for the rest of the meeting. Neither of them smile, but he notices that they glance at him often. It makes him very uncomfortable; dark, sad eyes watching him from the corner, holding things that he doesn't understand.
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Enjolras sees Éponine again once more when he runs into her while handing out flyers. She's sporting a black eye and split lip combo that looks both old, and still painful. When he makes an aborted move to take her chin in his hand to get a better look, she makes a similar one to slap him, though neither actually follow through. Instead, he says that he is taking her to Joly, and her protests are cut off with a wince of pain, so she follows reluctantly.
Joly tuts when he's concerned. His teachers and supervisors have told him that it makes him come across as disapproving and judgemental, but Enjolras knows that just his way of keeping himself focused by making repetitive sounds. He tuts now, as he prods at the swollen, darker skin around Éponine's eye. She only sits, however, watching Enjolras with her good eye, sad and calculating. Eventually, she speaks: "You're breaking his heart, you know."
Enjolras is momentarily confused. "If Gavroche still wants to join us when he's older, he is absolutely welcome to." He says, hesitatingly. Saying Gavroche would be broken hearted over his rejection of his membership would be overdramatic, but children are prone excessives.
Éponine only scoffs, loudly, as she takes the cooling cream Joly offers her for her eye and the antiseptic for the split in her lip, which looks as if he has been left uncovered for days and is starting to look inflamed. She leaves without another word to either of them, but muttering to herself about men being ridiculous.
Enjolras wonders sometimes how she is.
When he turns to Joly, he looks disappointed in him, and Enjolras wants to curl up and not move for a long time. He calls Courfeyrac.
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Montparnass is often thought to be the leader of the Patron-Minette gang. Young, beautiful and exquisitely dressed, he walks fearlessly through the streets during daylight hours; the aspiring actor turned pickpocket and assassin who can be legally tied to at least three murders, and through the passage of rumour, more. It is perhaps through this visibility that comes the assumption of leadership, when in truth there are four heads to the Patron-Minette snake.
All four have warrants for gang-related offences - robbery, minor drug charges - but Claquesous is a shady character, faceless but for a mask, shadowless for never being seen in the light. And he is also wanted for questioning over the death of a local shopkeeper, albeit under an assumed name.
Les Amis have been on the lookout of the gang since the first warrant was released. Their name is synonymous with harassment, and while the group has never put much faith in the effectiveness or impartiality of the police force, the streets would be much safer if the four of them were behind bars. Montparnass at least is a dangerous criminal, even if the other three are mostly just petty thugs, but Enjolras has as many doubts about vigilante justice as he does of the civil service. He may not hesitate to step into brawls on the street, or whip a crowd into a frenzy that could lead to violence, but he does not know if he could do something to permanently, or at the very least majorly incapacitate another person; taking the law into your own hands is a slippery slope towards pursuing your own vengeance and grudges, rather than what is best for everyone. They have always been about equalising the status of all the people, rather than individual gain.
Well, he didn't know, until he hears through communication channels that it was Claquesous who had attacked Éponine, and when Gavroche innocently boasts that he can find the gang member, Enjolras calls Combeferre and Courfeyrac and tells them to make excuses to get out of classes for the rest of the day.
They catch up with Claquesous in a dark, back alleyway, and it's so cliché that Courfeyrac almost laughs at it, despite the seriousness of the situation. Gavroche had wanted to follow them in, but Enjolras had sent him away, though whether or not he actually left, and wasn't just skulking in a corner, he couldn't be sure; he had departed entirely too easily. Either way, they don't want him to see what they're about to do.
Claquesous doesn't seem nervous when they approach him, and it strikes Enjolras that he has seen his smirk somewhere. Perhaps at a meeting, or a rally, in which case he would know Les Amis stance on vigilante justice. Since they never discussed what they were doing here at any meeting, however, he would not know that this ideology has recently changed, just for him. At least, not until Combeferre and Enjolras pull out police batons that they had stolen the last time they had been confined to a holding cell. Enjolras had thought there was a certain kind of poetry in that, though he will admit himself that he has never had much of a feel for the arts beyond oration. Grantaire would have known. He has artistic talent; a flare for art and for beauty. But they hadn't told anyone where they would be tonight. Least of all Grantaire, who would've told them that they'd end up in trouble for no reason (They had considered Bahorel because he is great in a fight, but for all he talks about not wanting to be a lawyer he retains a lawyer's moral objection to vigilantism).
Claquesous is lucky that Coufeyrac is there with them, or else he'd be leaving with much worse than a broken leg and collar bone, if he ever left at all. Combeferre was right beside him; a pacifist by nature, but the type who would bring three guns to a fight that only needed one, never mistaking passivity for inactivity, and willing to go as far as Enjolras for the cause. He would never have stopped him. Nor stopped himself.
Truthfully, Enjolras and Combeferre are lucky for Courfeyrac's presence, too. It would be all too easy for the two of them to logic themselves into huge and terrible acts of violence without him around to remind them of a devotion to individual people, rather than just an ideology. He completes them, in the way he rests his hands on their elbows and draws them away from the broken and bleeding man slumped against the bricks of the alley, and then calls the police to pick him up.
Three three brush shoulders constantly as they walk out of the alley without looking back, and understanding passes between them, along those points of contact. Éponine may not have been one of them, but they fight for everyone. And they will fight, if they must.