Chapter Text
Éponine did not remember much of those first weeks after the barricade. There was nothing during those first days proceeding it, then, some flashes of light, of warmth, and of soft blankets. During her short moments of semi-lucidness, she believed herself against all expectations in Heaven.
It had been a long time that she had considered the option of Heaven. So long that she had still been a girl, back when her parents would still take her to mass on Sundays, when she would wear her prettiest dress and her mother would braid her dark, luscious hair and tie it with silk bows. Back when she did not even understand the meaning of God and Heaven, but she nevertheless was certain that whoever and whatever it was, it was a guarantee. It was a long time since Éponine had allowed herself to think like that – and yet, what other place could it be, that offered her such comfort and safety? And if this was Heaven, was it wrong of her to hope that the shadow that appeared by her bedside every now and then was her beloved Marius?
But then came the second week, and the blissful unconsciousness started to be intermingled with increasingly longer moments of painful reality. And reality stung, not only for the pain blossoming in her chest and right hand, but also for the realisation that the man by her bedside was not Marius – and likely would never be Marius.
The man by her side was a middle-aged well-off gentleman, judging from the style and make of his dress, who sat cloaked in the darkness the room provided, and who she would soon realise was as used to clinging to the shadows as she was herself. When he noticed her awake, sometime at the end of the second week since the barricade she would later learn, he made no show of happiness or even relief, but rather informed her – in a gruff, practical voice that she would soon come to know well – she was very foolish running around in men’s clothes and getting shot at a barricade. Upon her prying, he revealed that he had taken her from the barricade, thinking she was a boy and having planned on employing her as a errand’s boy after her recovery.
‘That was also,’ he noted, with a sniff of disdain, ‘before I noticed your hand. The wound may heal in time, but your hand will likely remain useless for the remainder of your probably short and miserable life.’
Still, she was rather deaf to his harsh words, mind only reeling with the fact that somehow she had survived the barricade. And if she had, might Marius not have as well? She carefully posed him the question, whether not there had been other survivors.
His answer came to the negative, and she felt crushed – but still not completely discouraged.
But, she therefore protested, if she had survived against all odds, might there not have been others, too?
‘Perhaps,’ he agreed, then after a short pause and with a finality that made clear that he did not wish to answer any more of her questions, ‘But any at the barricade would have long bled out before any help would have arrived.’
His answer stung for its brutish unfeelingness, and had she’d had any of her mental faculties left she may have considered it purposively so. As it was, however, overcome with fatigue and heartbreak, Éponine was soon again lost to the world.
The room was empty the next few times she came to. The chair by her bedside remained where it was, but also remained empty. In the monsieur’s stead, however, was always left a tray with bread and a cup of water, neither of which she ever left for long. First clumsily, with her left hand as the other was numb to the touch and restricted in its movements, then later with more energy and confidence, she tore into the bread and drank greedily from the water. Then, falling back into the soft pillows and closing her eyes, she soon came to expect the empty tray to have magically disappeared when next she’d open them again.
It was not until sometime during the third week that she started to feel constricted by her confinement to the room. Ever since coming to Paris, she had been used to if not actual freedom, at least freedom of movement, and the whole of the city had been her roaming ground. Now, with the third week of lying in bed and thinking only of Marius, the room’s walls seemed to close in on her. As soon as the feeling snuck up on her, she shimmied out of bed, for a moment shivering in the cold night now that her body was no longer used to thriving in it, and shuffled towards the door. There she listened for a moment and, when no sound came, cracked it open. In the moonlight that was cast through several windows, she was surprised to find the hallway her room opened up in to be wide and long, with several doors apart from her own, and woodwork and panelling so rich that she had no choice but to conclude that her benefactor, whoever he was, must indeed be quite well-off. As ever, her curiosity pulled at her to explore what lay behind each of the doors, but she first decided towards the stairs that lay at one end of the hallway, and that would surely lead her down to the main floor of the house.
As it was, tiptoeing down the staircase led her not to the main but to another upper floor, and only another set of stairs brought her out into an elegant entrance hall. Like the floor that housed her room and the one below, the walls were panelled with dark wood, the floor tiled with smooth stone that felt comfortably cool to her bare feet with the slight fever she was still running. Through an open arch, she noticed a sitting room, which although furnished with fine pieces, looked impersonal and untouched. At the end of the entrance hall, a door which she assumed must lead to a kitchen. Immediately in front of her, however, was a large, imposing door that she could only suppose must be the front door. She wondered where in Paris she was. She wondered if she could sneak out to find word about Marius. She would only be gone for a moment, but surely she would feel much better if she knew where he was, if…-
‘What are you doing?’
She nearly tripped down the last steps of the stairs, and most definitely jumped in her place in surprise. A dark presence had appeared at the head of the staircase, and she recognised its voice and overall imposingness for her nameless benefactor. At that moment, however, he did not at all appear so beneficent.
‘I was just…’
‘Did I tell you you could just nose all about my house?’
‘I wasn’t…’ As he advanced on her, she felt the hairs on her arms rise and her eyes shifted towards the front door. This was not the first time she’d been in a situation like this – her father only too often obliging in teaching her a lesson on thinking on her feet. The only question was how likely was it that the front door would be unlocked?
Unfortunately, this man was more perceptive than her father was in his drunken stupors, and at seeing her eyes shift towards the door he made a noise that sounded almost like a growl. ‘So you are running, aren’t you?’ He scoffed, ‘And do tell, where were you planning on going in your state?’
‘I would find a place,’ she bit back, trying to force some defiance into her tone if only to mask her fear, ‘I can take care of myself, I know my way around Paris.’
He remained silent for a moment, and later Éponine would tell herself that she’d seen a cold smile cross his expression even though his face had been shrouded in darkness at the time. ‘It is unfortunate then that this is not Paris, is it not, mademoiselle?’
That stunned her for a moment, and for a moment she was not sure what to do. But then he was still advancing, and although she had no reason to mistrust his word, she did not trust him, and she knew very well what men were capable of doing to girls in their power. Still, a voice that sounded suspiciously like Azelma’s muttered in her mind, quite like her sister always did when she wanted to make a point but was too afraid to draw attention to herself, still he saved you from the barricade, treated your wounds, gave you food, and allowed you to stay in his house. Éponine wanted to bite back that men had also given her a few sous for taking her into filthy alleyways, but never got the chance because just then he took another step, and his profile for the first time became visible in the pale light of the moon.
She bit down, hard, on her tongue, and only years of perfecting the art of silence kept the scream from tearing out of her throat. If she had wondered at his talent for blending with the shadows, she could now only conclude that it must rather be a learned art than a natural talent, for none with a face like his could ever pass in polite society. Even in the hungry, the poor, the diseased that frequented her social circles, Éponine would be hard-pressed to find one as ugly as he was. And ugly he was, for red, puckered scar tissue covered most of his face and throat, in some places even seeming to have molten the flesh right from his bones. She could only imagine him a burn victim of some kind, though if it was indeed fire that had touched him, she found herself thinking sinfully that it might have been better if it had swallowed him whole.
Still, although her teeth had kept her scream at bay, it had not stopped the unwounded hand from flying up to cover her mouth – and the movement had not gone unnoticed by her benefactor. At one, his face – that horrible face – contorted into rage, though his voice remained for once completely calm. ‘Out.’
Finding the door unlocked, she’d fled from the house without another word.
Throughout her initial flight, Éponine was under the irrational assumption that he was following her. That if she but stopped for a moment, he’d pull her back by her hair and lock her up forever in that room from which the walls had seemed to close in on her. And so she ran ever on, until her bare feet were bleeding and she shivered in her thin, dirtied chemise despite the high fever she was running, and until she had somehow reached the docks of this unknown town and there was no further to run. And there, plagued with pain and exhaustion and hopelessness, she found herself an empty hollow in the stone foundation of the boulevard to tuck away in.
Unexpectedly, as she drifted off into delirious oblivion, her thoughts turned to her parents, and she wondered if they had at all missed her. No, not they, she’d thought somewhat vaguely, mind swimming as it recollected memories from not too long ago and tried to piece them together in the proper order, her mother had died only a few weeks ago, when they were put in prison for another stupid scheme of her father’s. Odd, how that realisation hardly reached her. She knew that fact should do something to her – mean something to her – but all she currently felt was emptiness. Instead, she wondered about her father. Did he know that she went to the barricades? Did he care? Had he now employed Azelma for his schemes? It would be no good at all, she scoffed loudly, half-delirious, for Azelma was such a scaredy cat that she would never be a good lookout. Yes, her brother would have done much better for his schemes, but her parents had never cared for him. Even when they’d still had the inn, it had been mostly Éponine who would go into his room at night to sing him softly to sleep, or to rock him in her arms when he was crying, ever aware that any sound from him would earn him another beating from their father, or a violent shaking from their mother. She had never quite forgiven him for leaving their family when they came to Paris, but she could now understand. Yes, he had probably been right to get out when he still could.
She had seen him at the barricade – of course he was there; he was always there where adventure was to be had and grownups to be outsmarted – and she thought he had recognised her, too. She wondered if he had told her father that she’d died. He probably would have, or at least have gotten the message to him somehow. Her father did not really care, but Gavroche must know that Azelma would be utterly miserable with not knowing. Yes, he would tell her, she was sure. He would tell her Éponine was dead.
Against her expectations and even hopes, Éponine did not die that night, and she woke the following morning to the smell of rotten fish, seagulls calling from up high as they circled the docks, and the complete hopelessness of her situation. In the cool morning light of August, the dressing around her hand and chest looked dirty and in the case of her chest, was slowly seeping through blood. Her feet, though perhaps less seriously injured, did not look to be in any better a state. All in all, she realised the direness of her situation. And she still did not know where she even was.
That morning, she roamed around the small city, begging for coin or food because she was in no state to steal it, and information. The first she got, to a meagre extent, the latter, less than she wished for. The city she was in was called Le Havre, and was over three days travel by carriage from Paris. Far worse than the physical distance between herself and Marius, however, was the news that she, with much difficulty in extracting it, received about the barricade. Indeed, nobody seemed to wish to speak much of it, but what they spoke all congregated on one thing: the rebellion had been squashed down the very night of their stand. What that meant for Marius, she dared not think about. Still, whatever fate had befallen him, she knew it was entirely her fault.
The remainder of the day she drifted through the city, too blind to see and too numb to absorb any of it, her mind centred only on that one thought: it was her fault. If only she had given Marius the letter Cosette had entrusted her with, he would not have gone to the barricades. If only she had given the letter, he would not be where he was now, in hiding, in prison or… No, not dead, Marius could not be dead. If she had only given him the letter, she could have now caught the first ride to Paris, could have found him there, and convinced him that he should have been with her all along. But he would not be there, sitting in the Musain with his friends or alone at his apartment at Gorbeau House, or even lounging in the Luxembourg gardens with another one of his smart books.
She returned that night to the empty nook near the docks, to the smell of rotten fish, the emptiness and the loneliness, to the prospect of dying of hunger or infection, whichever came first. And yet another day came and the delirium was worse, and she did not move away from the nook at all that day. She fell in and out of consciousness, aided by the ever-present fever in her bones, and the next morning dawned before she realised it – and even when it did, she hardly realised it, for her mind was dazed with delirium so much that for a moment she fancied herself back in Montfermeil, where Azelma and she would sometimes play hide and seek and she would press herself into any nook or cranny small enough to hold her, and could wait for hours only to end up making a noise so that the game would advance. She whistled lowly, then again louder, and then finally called out her sister’s name. But Azelma was not looking for her, she realised after some time, and she was not feeling warm with the heat of exertion after a summer afternoon of play but with fever, and the beat in her chest did not arise from her heart but from the infected bullet wound right next to it.
Éponine realised all this and at the same time, none of it. She welcomed death and at the same time, found cold tears leaking down her enflamed cheeks at the very prospect of it. It was just like that winter four years ago, the second winter after they got to Paris, she scolded herself even in her despair, when she wanted to drown herself but was too afraid the water would be cold. It was just like when she went to the barricade, too, to die with Marius but really only to hope that he would take her away from there and away from the life she had lived. Both of those times she had been desperate for some kind of salvation, even if it came in the form of death. But she had neither drowned that winter, nor did she live or die to be with Marius. And she did not have to give in to dying of infection now.
She pulled herself up with difficulty, aching feet protesting the action even as her vision temporarily darkened from the lack of nurture. Oh how cruel the world was, for it had taken her years to get used to starvation, but only weeks to get used to a steady meal a day, even if it was only bread. But still she pressed on, driven by the same sense of self-preservation that had made her flee into the city several days ago now back to the house that had caused it. Had she been of a sane, clear mind, she might have considered the prudence of such a measure, might have considered the small odds of salvation. But she was not, and she only told herself with each dragging step that if she could just make it back, all would be well.
And in the end, she did make it back, if only barely. The moon was already high in the sky when she finally found the house, and not by anything but sheer luck. When she did, exhaustion overtook her before she managed to ring the doorbell.