trigger warning for suicide ideations
Sometimes she dreamed of drowning again, but only very late at night, when the lights dim to as low as they would go in a city full of stars. She'd imagine the round fingers of the Seine caressing her body more softly than any human touch ever had. She wanted to hear the loud silence of the rush of the water about her, to be able to hear the thumpthumpthump of her heartbeat thrumming through a body too small for echoes.
It would be blessed silence that filled her mind, and not the din of the city above, or the disquiet of her own making. And the water, the water, will wash all her sins away, and she will be clean, clean, clean again.
No ghosts would haunt the corners of her vision, no whispers to daze and confuse, no voices in the back of her mind muttering an incessant stream of curses. No horrible, desperate, wretched love that would never, could never, not ever in any world come to pass.
And she could just be Éponine, Éponine as she was, as she had been, as she'd lost.
The urge had buried itself under a layer of thinly-stretched happiness since she first met Monsieur Marius, when he looked at her (at her! as if she were corporeal, composed of flesh and bone and transient emotion and not through her, as if she were the spectre she sometimes imagined herself to be) with his gentle eyes and reached into his pocket for what coin he could give her, but it was creeping back in.
It wasn't that she wanted to die, really, so much as she wanted to stop living, because she had realised long ago that in her life there could be no happy ending, that the best she could get was a tiny space in Monsieur Marius' soul from where she might bear witness to a happiness she could have known in another life.
And she had at some point believed herself to be content in knowing this, satisfied with what attention M'sieur Marius had to give her, but that certainty that looked so fine under the sun turned waifish and elusive under the moon, because things looked better in the day, and Éponine was a creature made of the shadows of the night.