Chapter Twelve

A/N: Thank you to Alex-samsprout and MissFiyerabaMeponineSherlock for reviewing the last chapter.

Marius was strolling through the streets of Paris on his own, putting one foot quickly in front of the other in an attempt to reach his home before dark. He had worked a couple of extra hours, to try and make up some more money to save towards the wedding, which was only a matter of weeks away, little over a month in truth. It was rather quick to marry, certainly, but after all the chaos and heartache of the night at the barricades, he and Cosette had realised that life was too short to wait, and so their plans had gone ahead more swiftly than they really would have liked. He was soon to be a married man. A spike of pain in his heart reminded him that Enjolras would not be there, stood at his side, and neither would any of the others from Les Amis de L'ABC. He would be alone.

'No, I'll not be alone.' he thought. 'I'll have 'Ponine, after all. She would never miss such a day, she would never want to. I'll convince Cosette to have her be a bridesmaid, if not the maid of honour, for the wedding. She'll be glad to be so heavily involved. She would have been upset to be left out of it all.'

Marius raised his head as he heard a shout come from a nearby street. It did not surprise him, though it caused him to move a little faster. The twisting alleyways of the French capital had always been dangerous to navigate after dark, as the working classes went to great extents to extract money from the bourgeoisie, just to feed their families for another day. 'This was the world we were fighting against,' he noted with a sigh. 'And it hasn't changed a bit.'

But when the shout sounded once again, Marius recognised it as that of a woman, as the pitch was just a notch too high to be that of a man. Immediately, he set off in the direction of the noise, his morals no longer allowing him to deny that he should try and help. 'After all,' he thought. 'If an innocent woman if being hurt, it is my duty to try and stop that from happening.'

The source of the sound caught his eye when he reached the Rue de Villette, a street he had avoided ever since the night of the barricade, for fear of the memories it might provoke. The Café Musain stood at the end of the road, its former glory utterly destroyed, the windows broken and the door pulled off its hinges, with dents in the plaster from the cannonballs that had been fired at the building during the onslaught. It looked nothing like the building he had once deemed a second home. 'Possibly because it is void of the men I saw as my brothers.' he thought morbidly, before he began to move closer to the shouts, which had now become shrieks.

The woman, young with deep brunette hair, was being pulled away from the Musain by two men, who appeared to be police officers, judging by the deep blue uniforms they wore. 'Probably a relative of one of the students.' he assumed, as he noted that another two police officers were removing the bodies of the boys from the building, to take them to be buried, most likely in a nameless mass grave in the middle of nowhere. 'It's horrific that they could be treated in that way; all they wanted to do was make their lives more tolerable.'

However, as he continued to approach them, he noticed more details about the situation. The young woman was not just being restrained from the building, she was being roughly bundled away from it, something which the bruises blooming on her arms clearly showed. She was extremely thin, but she did not seem to have any lack of spirit, as she was quite evidently giving as good as she got, violently beating any one of the officers that came into the path of her arms and legs. 'The boy must be important to her, whoever he is.' Marius reasoned.

But then, he saw the boy lying on the floor, his curly mop of dirtied blonde hair, matted with grease and gunpowder identified him as young Gavroche, the child that had tried to retrieve some additional ammunition for the rebels and had been shot in the side for his trouble. Sadness overwhelmed him as he remembered that the child had been one of the first to fall in the fight. But another moment passed, and he realised that there was only one young woman who would put up such a fight for the corpse of the young boy.

"Good God." he sighed under his breath, as he recognised the underweight young woman as none other than his dearest friend. "Éponine!"

The three involved in the scuffle turned to face the man, the officers' faces a picture of surprise and Éponine's a picture of relief and happiness. Marius continued to walk until he reached their side, before he spoke once again.

"What is your problem with her?" he asked quite bluntly, his blood boiling with the idea that two men who were meant to uphold the letter of the law would manhandle a young woman for no real offence.

"They're trying to take 'Vroche away, Marius!" Éponine told the student, before either officer had a chance to speak. Her voice was choked with unshed tears, yet still containing the passion he had always known of 'Ponine. "I won't let them take him! He's my brother, Marius, I will not let them take him away from me!"

Seeing that she was becoming very distressed, Marius stepped in, taking 'Ponine in his arms, as the policemen had released her, seeing that she was going to do no further harm in the state she was in. He held her tightly to his chest, supporting her weight as her knees buckled beneath her, the sorrow of her brother's passing finally setting in.

Half an hour of negotiations, and a couple of francs into the bargain, Marius had secured a deal with the policemen to allow them to take Gavroche's body away and bury him themselves. Neither of them had had the funds for an elaborate burial, but they had done the best they could do with a bare patch of land at the back end of a city park, a hunk of granite and a chisel. The young man had studied the arts for quite a while, and he had learnt to chip words into such material at a much earlier age. He had buried the boy himself, knowing that 'Ponine would not be able to stomach the job; he could barely stomach it himself, but she had returned to him later, with a bunch of wilting flowers, to place on the boy's grave.

They sat there until long after the darkness had claimed the sky, until the moon was almost at its highest point. Neither spoke, they merely sat, their hands clasped together, gazing at the intricately carved stone marking the grave of another child that had died on the barricade through eyes glossed over with tears. The sadness of the moment hung in the air, and the poignance of it, as Éponine rested her head on Marius' shoulder, and he wrapped his arms tightly around her shoulder, both of them observing the beautiful message that had been carved into the tombstone.

Here lies Gavroche Jondrette,
The bravest boy that ever climbed the barricades, who died trying to protect the cause of the children of France, though he was still only a child himself,
'Music expresses that which cannot be expressed in words and cannot remain silent.'

A/N: Please review!