A/N: Supposed to have this up yesterday, but hey, that's what midterms does to you. Wished I could have worked in the talk with Cosette (because c'mon her and Eponine are meant to be total buds) but I decided to just keep this one short. Sorry.

Loveless

Part II

For a SEAS student, Feuilly was surprisingly bad at calculus. Sure, he was a pro at finding the answer, but showing his work? Guy needed to learn that being homeschooled didn't mean the profs were gonna go any less easy on you for not using their equation. Éponine snorted for what seemed to be the fiftieth time as she picked out another mistake in his problem set, hoping fervently that this guy never got to touch an actual engineering equation. If he was the future of the thermostat business, things were more screwed up than she thought.

Grantaire prodded her with the curved bottom of a bottle. "C'mon. Just a couple more shots. You're not even drunk yet!"

"I'm tipsy," she lied, twirling a pencil expertly as she mentally calculated how much trouble she'd get in if she jabbed it in his neck. Just a little bit. Growing up in the worst part of the city insured that she could guzzle alcohol like fruit punch at an age she was loathe to reveal, lest their stares of admiration turned to pity.

But this guy just didn't seem to get that when she said she wasn't accepting his drinking challenge, she seriously wasn't going to freaking accept his drinking challenge. (Even if that cultured wine he was sipping was barely enough to make a dent in the alcoholic tolerance she'd built up with gin and vodka found lying around her trashy childhood apartment). Either way, letting down her guard around this bunch didn't seem the best thing to do, as she still pretty sure that if she so much as mouthed something wrong, the bubble would suddenly pop and they'd go back to looking through her. But this Grant guy still seemed to have almost inhuman perseverance.

"Five more shots. Two more shots. Three more shots!"

Éponine was also starting to realize that none of them were particularly good at math.

"Grantaire, what time is it?" A smooth voice cut in.

The curly-haired man's eyes seemed to light up as he started, "Advent—"

A swift kick under the table cut him off quickly enough, and Éponine looked up to thank her unlikely savior, only to find a pair of dark eyes fixing her to her seat. Wishing even harder now that someone could district the man, she fidgeting in place while trying to avoid his gaze. Enjolras may have been the leader of the seemingly overgrown group of kids, but he was far from the most genial. Focusing on the question in front of her, she waited until he lost interest again or found someone else to go put on edge with his accusing stares.

There was a loud sigh that seemed to come from all corners of the room and Éponine looked up to find several of the men sporting similar looks of disappointment, as if they'd been cheated from a show. They'd been like this for the past three hours.

That settled it.

Something was going on here.

Even as Grantaire was sharply lectured on his ill-timed drinking or politely asked to at least refrain from hustling it to others, Éponine started to slowly rise from the table, realizing for the first time that more than a few of the boys were watching her do so. Laying down the papers gingerly, she tried to keep her steps casual, as the distance from the table to the counter was minimal and someone was bound to notice if she ran them.

A lifetime of conning with the family taught her nothing if not one simple fact—the service knew everything. Secrets just didn't exist in places where people worked. Whether it was a cleaning lady or a flight hostess, they were the people to go to when you wanted dirt. So Éponine only mourned the paltry remains of her wallet a little bit as she handed over an extravagant five dollars for a regular coffee just to have an excuse to talk to the server.

"Rough day?" she asked casually, knowing that empathy was always the best way to get into someone's good books. The server in question was a woman whom Éponine felt an instant mix of awe and contempt towards. Her dark skin and thick lashes only highlighted the seemingly ethereal powers of her light eyes, her scrutiny as obvious as a fortuneteller's half-lidded gaze, but her smile bright and alive with obvious compassion and interest.

Her voice seemed to only be an extension of that beauty, and so her simple "You really don't have any idea, do you darling?" was made doubly sweet.

Feeling the strange urge to grin along, even though she really didn't understand the joke there, Éponine introduced herself quickly to the small and curvy barista.

The woman responded with, "Oh, I already know your name. The talk of the café, really. You've really gotta tell me how you did it one day." She winked, as if it was a shared secret. "My name's Musichetta, but you can call me Chetta."

"I love you Chetta!"

The woman rolled her eyes in amusement at the voice and called back, "Yes, and when you finally pay off that tab of yours I'll start loving you too!"

There was no response.

Éponine found herself start to laugh softly, only to stop at the look at Chetta's face. She frowned. "What?"

Sliding across a cup of coffee that Éponine never even saw her make, Chetta said sagely, "If you really wanna figure out what's goin' on, try laughing like that around mister-marble over there." She gestured over the silent Enjolras, who appeared engrossed in his book despite the fact that he didn't seem to have made any advances in it for the last few minutes.

Éponine blinked, confused. "Huh?"

"Ooh, just go already!"

Chetta pushed her forward with a surprisingly strong arm, sending the slip of a girl flailing for a moment. Éponine managed to catch herself at the last instant on the table, letting loose a relieved sigh. When she looked up, she found herself staring face to face with the same dark stare that had sent her escaping only moments previous.

To her credit, she only flinched back a little this time, and was finally able to catch the quick flicker of almost-desperation in his blue eyes. Clutching her scarf for reassurance, Éponine said quickly, "I'm fine." He backed off a little, still looking skeptical, but then she just decided to go for it and grinned, hoping that the same technique that got worried professors off her back about her numerous 'accidental' bruises would maybe work on getting this guy far, far away from her.

Against all her expectations, rather than just nodding and returning to his book, Enjolras gave her a tight smile in return, dashing her previous thoughts of him having been born without a soul, but breathing new life into her hushed discussions with Jehan about the marble faced leader of ABC tutoring being an alien.

No one of this world had any right looking that beautiful.

X

Éponine would admit—in situations where she either had a gun pointed to her head (which came up more often than one would think) or when she was down to the last bit of stolen chocolates—that she was a bit of a romantic.

She used to claim it ran in the family, but when some people started having coughing fits at the thought of her father gushing over a rom-com, she'd quickly amended it. It ran in her maternal line. Probably. Her mother never disclosed much about her own family, whether or not she even had any, and so Éponine was left to her own devices in trying to figure out whether her grandmother had poured over trashy romantic novels to the extent her mom did.

Her own name was partly the result of this, although despite how horrible it had been in the beginnings of elementary school (when it was shortened to either pony, horse face, or your-daddy-shot-my-daddy) Éponine had slowly grown into it, glad she at least at something to call her own. She may have a little overboard on the romantic later in life, though.

Scratch that. The moment she'd thrown herself in the way of a bullet, rubber or not, just to give a guy who already had a girlfriend a head-start in escaping from security, she'd practically leaped off the damn board.

So she was just jumping ship now.

Éponine admitted to herself that even if she didn't really regret her actions (love was love, no matter how unrequited and totally stupid), she was going to put herself on the back-burner for a bit now. Not that it really mattered, seeing as how her prospects now that she was a broke college dropout was practically zilch. Sure, there were the boys, but really?

The mystery had been lost from every single one of those relationships right after the first game of 'never-have-I-ever'. Looking back, she really could have done with the mental image of Bossuet, Joly, and the apparently rather adventurous Chetta doing that stuff. Any of it. All of it. Éponine was glad she'd at least had the peace of mind to drop out of the contest before they'd brought out the pictures.

She'd joined a silently fuming Enjolras by the counter, rolling her eyes at the antics of the rest of the boys as their leader attempted to get some paper or another done. At least this guy was half bad, when it came down to it. Scary as shit, yea, but relatively harmless.

Éponine tried to stretch her hand over his arm to grab at the last dregs of her coffee, only to have him physically recoil from her, slamming his pricey laptop shut as he slid over a seat. Her face dropped as Enjolras quickly resumed his work with no particular attention towards the woman he'd just so rudely scooted away from.

Letting out a deep sigh, Éponine let her hair fall to the side as a curtain against his way too pretty face and sipped slowly at her already lukewarm cup, stupidly aware of the way he suddenly froze and let out a small noise that was probably one of irritation. She was pretty chill with a lot of things that went down in the Café Musain.

But the fact that apparently the marble prince of the ABC Tutors hated her guts?

Yea, that sucked a little.

A/N: Also major love to those who reviewed. You guys are the bomb and may or may not have reminded me to update this because dammit school is distracting. Or maybe this is distracting? Nah.