AN: Hi again and thanks for reading! Thanks to the people that signed up to follow this story, too :) Hope you enjoy this chapter. Again, reviews are always welcome :)

Chapter 2:

Even as she let the little boy lead her down the street, his hand squeezed in hers, Annette was lost in thought. Les Misérables. It had been one of the books she had read in the last year, not the most recent one, but not terribly long ago, either. Between War and Peace and Madame Bovary it had been, hadn't it? Or maybe it was after Zola's Germinal, and before something by Dickens. She didn't exactly remember her reading schedule – the days seemed to slide into each other now, anyways. She remembered being completely entranced by the work, though. It kept her up late into the night, especially once she'd reached the last third of the book or so, which she hadn't wanted to put down. She'd been all caught up in the story, in the characters, far more engrossed in their intrigues than she had been in the world around her, the people filling her everyday existence, and she'd cried hot tears – real tears – each time a character died.

Almost all of them do, Annette realized in shock. This little child, and all of the others, all of the revolutionaries, they all die so tragically!

It was bad enough when she had thought it was only fiction!

Was she going to meet them all? She felt like she knew them already, from reading about their lives, their passions, their dreams. Wasn't there anything she could do to help them, to keep them from the end she knew was coming?

"Don't be afraid, miss. I'll keep you safe."

Annette realized her hand was clenching Gavroche's far tighter than she'd ever meant to. Releasing the force of her grip, she attempted to smile, but it came out bitter.

It's not me I'm afraid for…!

Maybe she would get to meet the revolutionary students, later, then. If Gavroche was taking her to his sister, that would mean Eponine, and through her she would surely meet Marius – who, if Annette wasn't mistaken, was the young man she'd seen in the park. Well, and assuming Marius wasn't completely in shock at her mid-20th-century clothing, maybe she could convince Marius to introduce her to his friends, and then maybe she could talk them into calling the revolution off. They wouldn't persist, not if they really knew what was in store for them, would they?

Not getting involved wasn't an option. Though she knew that her feeling of knowing these people closely from the book might well turn out an illusion, as she'd never met them before, she already felt implicated in their story. If there was something, anything she could do to avert their sad fate, she felt responsible for doing it. If nothing else, Annette did know exactly what it was like to be sent away to safety in dangerous times while others she cared for, not so lucky, lost their lives, and she wasn't ever going to go through that again.

"Miss, where are you from?"

"I'm from Paris," Annette told him. "You don't have to call me 'miss' by the way. I'm just Annette, Annette Szekely."

"Sh-what?"

"Sheh-ké-ly. It's Hungarian." She couldn't help rolling her eyes, though she supposed that if the Parisians of 1949 couldn't pronounce it, she shouldn't expect the Parisians of 1832 to fare any better.

"Sorry. But you're from here in Paris?"

Annette nodded.

Gavroche frowned. Soon enough, though, he smiled again. "It's okay. My sister is at the apartment of a friend of ours right now. I think he's out, but you can talk to her, and maybe we can help you find your way home or something. If not, when our friend gets home, maybe he'll know what to do."

Soon enough, they were climbing a flight of stairs into yet again another wooden building. Gavroche knocked on a door with a fist, then pushed the door open. Self-consciously, Annette ran a hand through her hair, which was a mess. Usually stick-straight, the ends were curling up in the humid air. Figures, I travel back in time over a hundred years but the weather hasn't changed!

Through a narrow hallway, Gavroche led her into a small kitchen. By a window, probably over some kind of wood-burning stove, a young woman was stirring a pot of soup. She had long, brown hair; she was wearing a white shirt and a full, brown skirt in the style that Annette had seen earlier. As she looked towards them, Annette could see that the girl – Eponine, though Annette would wait to be introduced – had large brown eyes, indubitably larger at the moment than usual at the sight of Annette.

"Eponine, this is Annette. She got lost and so I thought I'd bring her here, and maybe we could help her get home."

Eponine nodded. She murmured "hello," but didn't say anything else, looking Annette quizzically up and down.

"Nice to meet you?" Annette offered awkwardly.

"Sorry," Eponine said after a minute, meeting Annette's eyes finally and attempting a smile. "You just look so strange. I mean, you're dressed so badly, but you look healthy. I can't tell what kind of person you are at all."

"She said she was from Paris," Gavroche told Eponine.

"I've never seen a dress like yours before," Eponine clarified.

"I'm sure you haven't."

Their reaction had to be reasonable. After all, one didn't meet time travelers – if that's what she was now – everyday. Still, Annette was just as shocked to find herself back in 1832 as they clearly were to have her there, and she'd managed to keep her reflections about running water and baths to herself.

"What happened to your hair?" Eponine asked after another minute. "It's so short! Were you sick, maybe, or did you have to sell it?" Now her look was one of pity.

At this, Annette had to hold back ironic laughter. She might be in the 19th century now, but she'd never thought anyone might take her for the tragic heroine type, a Fantine or a tuberculin Mimi. Did Eponine ever meet Fantine, actually? If she did Eponine would have been too young to remember it…

"Um, actually, this is considered fashionable where I come from," Annette told the siblings. "Would you believe that?"

"Really? But I've never seen anyone like you before, not anywhere in Paris. You said you were from Paris, weren't you?" Gavroche asked again.

"So I am from Paris," Annette repeated. They didn't believe her, this was clear, but she couldn't exactly tell them the truth, could she?

"Does everyone have short hair where you come from? Why would girls want to cut their hair short if they didn't have to?" This was Eponine.

"Not everyone." To be honest, Annette didn't think her hair was that short. Between her chin and the bottom of her ear in front, shorter in back, a classic bob, essentially, like from the 1920s. Of course, these people here personally remembered the 1820s. They wouldn't know anything about Clara Bow or it-girls, the pictures, or even the old, turn-of-the-century cinématographe. "I don't know anyone with hair as long as yours, though, Eponine. Most girls have it about my length, or maybe to their shoulders. It's really not unusual. I had it short as a child, then long, in braids, as a schoolgirl, then when I finished school I cut it again. I guess after women for millennia went through life with all their ideas about beauty and self-worth caught up in them having long hair, it must have been very liberating for them to be able to cut it off and not feel any less feminine for it."

"That makes some sense, actually," the other young woman conceded.

"'Women through millennia?'" Gavroche asked.

"Hush, Gavroche, obviously she didn't mean one same woman!" Then, Eponine laughed. "Gavroche has longer hair than you, actually."

Annette did smile honestly now. "That's true. I think he'd be as much as a sight where I come from as I apparently am here."

Gavroche grinned.

"Do you want some soup?" Eponine gestured to the pot, then to Gavroche, "I found these vegetables and Marius said I could cook them here."

Peering in, Annette could see meager chunks of carrot and a potato, floating in what looked like nothing more than boiling water. Not even a bouillon cube was there to flavor it.

"Oh, I couldn't take your food," Annette insisted. "You don't have very much."

"Do you have anything, though?" Gavroche asked her.

Suddenly, another wave of panic threatened to destabilize her as she realized she had no food on her, and if she didn't find a way to get home, or relied on the help of these people she knew could barely feed themselves, she had no way to get anything to eat for herself any time soon. Even as that thought was washing over her, though, she was reaching a hand into the part of her purse that was for coins, calming as she felt the familiar touch of one-and-five franc pieces. In fact, a franc was worth quite a lot of money in Les Misérables, wasn't it? Wasn't it ten francs that Fantine was struggling so hard to get, to send to Cosette? In 1949, ten francs could buy you less than nothing, but in 1832… ten years after the part with Fantine, granted …

"You know, I might actually be able to help you two," Annette told Eponine and Gavroche. "I have some money on me that might be worth quite a lot to you. I can show you if you want. If it works, we can share it equally among the three of us. If it doesn't work, well, then I'm up a creek, but no more than you usually are."

Gavroche laughed and Eponine smiled shyly, and Annette fished a handful of coins into her fist, but at that moment the front door banged open again and the young man from the park came into the kitchen, so Annette, dropping the coins back into her purse, turned to face him.

"I've just finished the soup, Monsieur Marius," Eponine announced, slightly breathless now that she turned to talk with him. "This is Annette, by the way. Gavroche found her out on the street somewhere. She got lost."

Monsieur, really? And he's a revolutionary? Annette asked herself.

"I saw you in the park. I thought you looked funny." Marius told Annette. "I'm Marius, by the way."

"Annette. Szekely. Yeah, I know. I'm from 1949."

Why not? She'd have to tell them sometime, wouldn't she? Besides, stalling, searching for a convincing story, was not working; Annette was decidedly no good at lying.

"What?"

"1949." Reaching a hand back down into her purse, Annette fished out her identity card. There, next to her black-and-white photo, one from several years back, when she still had the aforementioned long braids, was her birth date.

"Wait, what's this?" Marius asked her.

"My identity card. As you can see, I was born in 1930, so I'm 19 now, in 1949. I don't know how, but somehow I have found myself back in … 1832, is it?"

As if she didn't know!

Marius nodded slowly, trying to take it all in, she supposed.

"That's why she's dressed the way she is, and that's why her hair is short," Eponine called out helpfully. "That's fashionable where she's from, she said."

"This actually makes some sense," Marius told them. "I mean, less than a hundred years ago all those people had those powdered wigs, so..."

"Annette, show him your money." Gavroche suddenly remembered the coins. "Marius will know if they're worth something."

Eponine began to explain what Annette had said about the coins, now, as Annette pulled out a few and put them in Marius's hand. The young man looked them over, at first frowning, his eyes narrowing, and then suddenly grinning broadly.

"They're so light!" he exclaimed. "What are they made of?" He held up a five-franc piece.

"Um, aluminum, I suppose," Annette said. "Sometimes it's nickel, but that one … yeah, if it was minted back in '45 I think it was aluminum. Those are very light."

"And it's worth a lot in 1949?"

"No, it's worth next to nothing. But we had a lot of inflation in the last few … decades, really, I think, particularly with the war and with the financial crash before that. It might be worth a lot more to you and your friends."

"Our francs are made of silver, in fact," Marius responded. "I'm not sure anyone will actually think this is money. What's interesting to me, though, is what it says on it. Do you read?"

Annette was about to snap 'of course,' but then realized that Marius's less fortunate acquaintances probably couldn't, back in 1832. Instead, she simply nodded. So, Marius handed the small coin back to her and she looked it over. 'RF' it said on one side, surrounded by some kind or wreath. On the other side, the words 'République française' were encircling a woman's head – Marianne, she supposed.

"Oh!" Annette suddenly exclaimed. Fishing a ten-franc coin out of her purse now, she handed it to Marius. "And this one says 'liberté égalité fraternité' around the top. I, um, take it your money doesn't?"

Shaking his head slowly, Marius pulled a coin from his pocket and handed it to her. Holding it, she could see what he meant about the weight. The silver wasn't heavy, nor was the aluminum coin feather-light, but his coin had a sense of solidness, of substantiality, that hers did not. Like hers, it was stamped '5 Francs,' but unlike hers, the heads' side bore a man's face and the words 'Louis Philippe I, Roi des français.'

"Right…" Annette breathed, handing his money back to him. He, in turn, returned hers.

"What's going on?" Gavroche asked.

"It's a revolutionary coin," Marius announced. "Annette, do you … um, do you believe in the things on the coin? The Republic, liberty and equality and fraternity, things like that?"

Nobody had ever asked her this question before. She supposed if someone had, back in her own time, she might have just rolled her eyes and mumbled that it beat the alternative, knowing that both she and her interlocutor would be thinking of the years of the Vichy regime. Suddenly conscious, however, of what these symbols must mean for Marius and for Gavroche, probably for Eponine as well, and doubtless for all of Marius's friends, Annette nodded earnestly. "Yes. Yes I do. Of course I do."

"Wow, great. Annette, would you mind if I introduced you to some friends of mine?"

Annette shook her head, trying not to show her excitement, full aware that her heart was pounding now no longer from panic but from something else entirely. Marius had already gone for his coat, exclaiming, "I know Enjolras for sure will want to see that coin."

"I guess if I tried to spend it people would think your friends had made the coin themselves," Annette murmured to Gavroche, who grinned again.

"Wait up, we're all coming!" Eponine exclaimed, opening a door and banking the fire inside the stove with some kind of metal tool. Then, only a few seconds later, they were all out in the street once more.

AN: cinématographe – an early French movie camera

I wanted to post links to images of the coins that Annette and Marius show each other, but FFnet wouldn't let me. So, um, PM me if you want the links or something?