Chapter Text
Eponine is ten, with parents who hate her and a little brother she’s terrified for, when she gets hit in the chest with a pebble. Some other kid tossed it and it’s pouring rain and they probably didn’t even see her, but she goes down like she’s been shot.
She kind of has.
The whole world is exploding around her and she can feel it in her chest, the hot spike of agony under her ribcage. She barely manages to scramble around the corner of the school, curling up out of sight in the lee of the building, and goes to pieces.
Cosette finds her there not ten minutes later, sobbing and clutching at her chest as if to hold her skin together.
(This is how Cosette and Eponine became friends: they were both seven and Cosette had no friends because she had just moved into town. Eponine had no friends because she had scared everyone off when her parents lost their money. Cosette saw the other girl sitting alone at lunch, marched over, and sat herself down with all the lordly determination of a cat.)
(“Hi, I’m Cosette, I’m seven and I’m new and my papa gave me a brownie for lunch today, do you want to share?”)
(Everyone knows that chocolate is the ultimate bargaining chip. Eponine sold her soul for half a brownie and regrets nothing, because Mssr. Valjean’s brownies are the sort of thing you kill a man for.)
“’Ponine?” Cosette asks anxiously. She’s never seen Eponine cry before, not even the time she walked to Cosette’s house in February wearing nothing but a t-shirt, jeans, and bruises. Not even when Mssr. Valjean—as Eponine insists on calling him—tried to make her go to the hospital about it.
Eponine drags her face up and stares at Cosette as if she’s never seen her before, like Cosette is a stranger rather than the person who spends all her time at Eponine’s side.
The words that spill from Eponine’s mouth aren’t their usual easy French. They’re archaic, strangely accented, grief-stricken.
It’s the language that makes Cosette remember. Eponine vaguely recognizes that it’s clearly not as severe for the delicate blonde, but she’s too busy remembering that she’s not actually dying to do anything else.
“’Ponine?” Cosette asks, crouching down in front of her friend and cupping Eponine’s face in her hands. The rain water is cold and slick and awful and-- “Eponine, look at me!”
Eponine blinks hard, once, twice, three times, and she’s looking at Marius—at Cosette—Marius?
“No, it’s me, it’s Cosette, Marius isn’t here,” Cosette says, starting to cry herself. “Eponine, please, what’s wrong?”
“I am dying,” Eponine says, in that strange old tongue, voice faint and distant. “My hand is pierced by a ball…”
“No, you’re fine, you’re okay,” Cosette insists, and her fingertips pressing into Eponine’s jaw are eight points of reality, cold and firm. She blinks again. Marius. No, Cosette.
“Cosette,” Eponine says, and her voice is raw from sobbing. “What’s happening?”
“You’re remembering. We both are, I think.” Cosette tries to stroke Eponine’s hair out of her face, the locks stuck to her skin and tangled with water. “Are you…okay?”
“I’m still pretty sure I’m dying,” Eponine says with the worst attempt at a laugh she’s heard from herself in years. “I. There’s no way I can go to class.”
“Right,” Cosette says, steel entering her pale blue eyes. For a second, Eponine has a powerful vision of her friend dressed in student’s garb, wielding a rifle and a ferocious expression. It’s easy, fitting—is it a relief that Cosette wasn’t one of them, or a shame that she never went to war, Eponine wonders. “Come with me.”
Cosette slings one of Eponine’s arms over her shoulders and supports her on the way into the school, steering them directly into the nurse’s office. Fortunately or otherwise, Eponine looks terrible, and the nurse takes one look at Cosette’s wide blue eyes and trembling lip and hands over a phone.
“Papa,” Cosette weeps. Eponine is too blurry to tell if Cosette’s distress is real or manufactured for the nurse’s benefit—blinking is still making reality blur around her. “Something’s wrong with ‘Ponine, she’s sick, and my head hurts so much, please, you have to come get us, please, Papa.”
Mssr. Valjean is a good man, a good father. The kind of father Eponine would have wanted for herself and her brother if she’d had her choice in the matter. He comes and gets them immediately. Cosette hurls herself into his broad chest, sobbing as if he’s been raised from the dead and ranting about watching him die.
“Shh,” he says, stroking her long blonde hair without answering her. He tucks one arm around her and picks her up as if she weighs nothing at all. “It’s all right. I’ll take you home. Eponine, come on.”
Eponine forces herself to her feet and reaches out blindly to take his offered hand. His palm engulfs hers and he pulls her close to his side, hand resting on her shoulder.
“Do you remember?” Eponine manages to ask as she curls into the backseat of his car. There was a moment of panic when she approached the car and didn’t recognize it, heard wild thoughts about horseless carriages polished to a shine.
“Remember what?” he asks as he peels Cosette from him and tucks her next to Eponine.
“Before.”
(This is how they know Mssr. Valjean remembers before: Cosette dozes off in the car and wakes up when they stop at her house, crying for Marius, and her father scoops her out of the car and hugs her as if he can put the world right, and doesn’t ask any questions.)
(He looks at Eponine and says, “I didn’t know you, back then.”)
(Eponine, sitting at their kitchen table with a mug of hot chocolate and a blanket wrapped around her like a cloak, looks up at him with the eyes of a woman who has seen war and says, “I was the first to die on the barricade.”)
(Mssr. Valjean pulls some strings and gets them the next two days off, and lets them sit on the floor under blankets until the universe makes sense again.)
Things are not normal after that. They can’t be. Sometimes Eponine and Cosette are walking around Paris with Valjean and they’ll pause and linger over a street or an alley, or see something in their history class and swap a quick glance. Their speech changes, landing somewhere between now and then, with all the articulation of grown women. Eponine learns everything there is to know about Cosette’s once-life, and tells her everything about her own. There is an entire day that is nothing but Eponine listing all of the sins she can remember committing against Cosette and begging for forgiveness. There is another that is nothing but Cosette apologizing for Marius and for Eponine’s poor stupid heart.
So, no, ‘normal’ isn’t the word. But by the time Eponine turns eleven and starts bringing her little brother—just recently five—to Cosette’s, they’re balanced. Eponine is shockingly upset that she never got to be friends with Cosette the last time around, and there has been at least one night of Cosette waking up in hysterical tears at the thought of Eponine, dead before they met.
Her little brother is six before Eponine sees him dart out into the street and bolts out after him, dragging him back as she yells.
“Gavroche, you almost gave me a goddamn heart attack!” she shouts, and he stares up at her. God, Eponine loves being able to swear without getting judgy looks, she loves the twenty-first century, fight her on this.
“Eponine?” he asks slowly, and she runs her sentence through her mind again. Shit. Fuck. She can barely remember what his real name was, the last time around. It’s definitely not Gavroche, this time, but he doesn’t seem to think she’s crazy. “Eponine,” he breathes, and throws himself at her. She crushes him to her, this stupid reckless kid that she’s somehow raising for the second time. “You died,” he mumbles into her stomach.
“I know,” she says quietly. “But it’s all okay now.”
The next person they find is Marius. It’s years later, they’re sixteen and Eponine keeps her hair in a pixie cut and has custody of Gavroche (it was ugly and they don’t talk about it) and wears bright red lipstick. Cosette still wears her hair long and loose, like cornsilk, and she wears pretty sundresses and pale silver eyeshadow. They wander Paris holding hands, or with their arms linked together, or with Eponine’s arm slung around Cosette’s shoulders, and they tell stories about the people passing by.
It’s good.
The lanky figure sprints up to them out of nowhere on a lovely late spring day, hurtling toward Cosette like a missile. Eponine catches an arm and hurls him over her shoulder onto the ground without thinking.
(This is how Eponine copes with two lives of horrible parents and one life of fighting a revolution: combat training, real combat training this time, the kind that sends her home with bruises and bloody lips and wildly triumphant eyes and the knowledge that she can take care of herself and her own.)
(She jokingly calls it RTSD—Reincarnation Traumatic Stress Disorder—and it’s funny except when she wakes up sure that she’s dying or panics breathlessly at some tiny trigger or clings to Gavroche like he’ll disappear if she lets him go.)
(The fighting helps. It helps a lot. She believes in throwing punches first and asking questions later.)
“Who the fuck,” she starts to snarl, then blinks in surprise at the narrow face gasping for air against the pavement. “Jesus fuck,” she says with feeling. She still loves to swear, in case anyone’s curious. “Marius?”
He rolls more fully onto his back and gapes up at her. “’Ponine?” From the sounds of it, she knocked the wind out of him. She doesn’t feel as guilty as she probably should, because that’s what happens when you rush people without warning. It’s also holding back his usual rambling, so she can count her blessings.
“Marius!” Cosette cries, and drops to her knees without ceremony to kiss him. Eponine expects to feel some of that old, familiar ache, but instead there’s only a beat of nostalgic fondness. She politely allows them their moment, then offers her hand to Marius once Cosette releases him.
“Sorry about that,” Eponine says unapologetically as she pulls him to his feet. “Don’t rush people.”
“I can’t believe you’re here,” Marius says, heaving in a few deep breaths until he can straighten up completely. “I just—oh my gosh, you’re here, are the others here?”
“We haven’t found them,” Eponine says with a shrug. “It’s just us, Gavroche, and Monsieur Valjean.”
“Papa,” Cosette says, as if Marius might have missed that detail. She holds out her hand shyly and Marius links his fingers through hers, pulling her close.
Eponine is more okay with this than she expected to be. She’s happy. Her best friend and the man she had believed she was in love with—they deserve good things. And she deserves to live her own life for once, and she wants to wear red lipstick and dance all night and teach Gavroche to cheat at cards. Being in love with Marius…she doesn’t want that so much anymore.
So Marius joins them, and Valjean gives him a wary look at first but clearly remembers that this man made Cosette deliriously happy for a lifetime already, so there is no shovel talk forthcoming.
That doesn’t stop Eponine and Gavroche, though, who cheerfully corner Marius to threaten him with fates most dire should he be seized by any sudden fits of idiocy.
After Marius, it’s Jehan. Eponine and Cosette are seventeen, and Eponine has a spectacular panic attack when she wakes up on the morning of her seventeenth birthday convinced that she is going to die this year. Now it’s June 5th and Cosette is taking Eponine and Marius out to drink and dance and forget if it kills them all. They start early, walking together to a bar through the spring afternoon.
The young man with his hair pulled back into a many-stranded braid and a truly awful shirt covered in a pattern of daisies is familiar, but it’s the book of medieval poetry an inch from his nose that clinches it.
“Jehan?” Eponine calls automatically, and Marius bounds forward.
“Jehan!” he shouts with all his usual puppy-like enthusiasm, and the young man looks up in surprise. “Jehan, do you remember me? Look, you still read poetry, well, of course you still read poetry, do you still write? I hoped we’d find you, oh, wow, that shirt is…really something and what are those shoes.”
“Mar-ius?” Jehan says slowly, as if fitting the name to the face. “Marius,” he repeats more firmly, and his smile blooms across his face like sunshine. “You’re back. I’m back,” he revises, looking bemused. Eponine waits for the breakdown, but Jehan always had that strange ethereal calm about him, so instead of bursting into hysterics he rises from where he’s sprawled on the grass to give Marius a fierce hug. His eyes are a little damp when he pulls back, but he’s beaming. “And I love these shoes,” he adds, wiggling his toes inside…bedazzled high-top Converse in a violent shade of green, unless Eponine is hallucinating vividly. “I remember you,” he says to Eponine. “You…”
“I hung around before the fighting and I died first,” Eponine says bluntly. She’s discovered that sometimes it’s best to get straight to the point. “I’m Eponine. Nice to meet you properly.”
“Oh, and Jehan, this is Cosette,” Marius says with an adoring smile. “She’s--”
“Yes, I know who Cosette is, I remember,” Jehan hurries to say, cutting through Marius’ ramble. Cosette flushes prettily, pink staining her cheeks, and offers a hand to shake. “I don’t think I ever had the pleasure,” Jehan adds with his sunny smile, taking her hand and tugging her in so that he can peck her cheek. Once he releases her, he pounces on Eponine, to her surprise. He hugs her like an old friend and his lips just brush her skin, and she hesitantly hugs him back.
She always wanted to be part of Les Amis, and now that one of them is greeting her like a sister she’s not sure what to do.
“You were really brave,” he tells her quietly. “I wanted to be as brave as you.”
She doesn’t burst into tears, but it’s a near thing, and Jehan bounces along with them toward the bar with his hand in hers and his arm around Marius. He seems like the same person he was then, prone to rhapsodies about beauty and death when drunk—and they are all very drunk by midnight, as Cosette planned—and he is like sunlight bound in skin beside Eponine.
(This is how they find Joly: he sees Eponine cut her hand on the edge of a broken plate in the coffee shop she works at, and rushes up with a tirade about the importance of disinfecting wounds. He talks so fast and passionately that her hand is cleaned and bandaged before she remembers how to stop gaping and interrupt him.)
(“Do you know me?” she asks hesitantly.)
(He does not.)
(He continues not to know these strange people for two months. He thinks they’re endearing, but possibly quite mad, and talks about doing a study in group obsessions to explain their apparent collective fixation on the 1800’s. One day they walk through the doors of Eponine’s workplace, dropping her off for a shift, and there is a new hire at the counter, petite and dark and lovely, talking to a tall man with a shaved head.)
(Joly shrieks and almost faints straight into Bousset’s arms, who exhibits his usual degree of grace and almost drops him straight onto the tiles.)
(Musichetta screams in delight, hugs him, kisses him emphatically, punches him in the face, and screams again, all in very quick succession. It’s a busy day.)
They enter university, some of them. Eponine and Cosette and Jehan and Joly just out of school, Marius after a gap year. Bousset decides to take a year off to figure out what he wants to do, dropping his classes in favor of bouncing fluidly from one job to another, and Musichetta blithely announces that she’s perfectly happy working in the coffee shop and singing at open mic nights. They’ve been in school for three months and it’s turning bitterly cold when they find Bahorel, and they find Bahorel because Eponine finds trouble.
So it goes like this. It starts as a civil in-class discussion about the merits of the pro-choice movement. It’s now a not-so-civil out-of-class shouting match, Eponine against three young men, all of them bigger than her, about a case that recently hit the news, a woman who went to trial for getting an abortion after a rape. Eponine is breathless with the stupidity of her opponents, and so high on adrenaline that she could probably be shot in the chest again without noticing it.
“Jesus fucking Christ,” she shouts because she can’t believe what she’s hearing. “Are you using the ‘men can’t control themselves’ argument with me right now? Is that actually the tack you’re taking? God, I’m embarrassed for you!”
Yeah, that’s about when it turns violent. In retrospect she probably could have tried harder to keep it peaceful.
She doesn’t notice the walking brick house wading into the fight to help her until he laughs, inches from her side, and says, “I think Enjolras would have liked you, last time around.”
Eponine’s brain runs a tally and comes up with exactly one person who would fit the description of ‘fighting and joking about it.’ “Bahorel?” she says in surprise, head whipping around to see him toss one of their opponents to the ground.
“Stay down this time,” he orders, and the student doesn’t test his luck. “That’s me,” he tells Eponine brightly as she flips another student over her hip and jams his arm up behind his back until he cries for her to let him go. “I need a drink after this,” he says brightly as the two of them each grab an arm and take down the last student. “You know a place?”
“Yep,” Eponine says, dusting herself off. “Follow me.”
When the others find them, they’re sitting in a bar at four in the afternoon, more than a little tipsy and laughing, with bruises blooming on their faces and scraped knuckles. Bahorel is welcomed with utter jubilation.
They find Feuilly less than a week later. He’s had a stressful day and Bahorel takes him by surprise, earning a black eye before remembrance kicks in. Feuilly feels terrible about it until he hears the story of Joly thinking they were all insane, the story of Musichetta punching Joly even after knowing who he was, and the story of Marius getting thrown over Eponine’s shoulder. Then he lowers his head to the table with great ceremony and laughs helplessly until they slide another beer into his hand. Jehan pets his curly red hair and Bahorel grins under the ice pack Joly foisted upon him. Musichetta ghosts in and out of the back room of the coffee shop during her breaks, swooping down to give Feuilly a kiss on the cheek and an “I’m Musichetta, I don’t think we met last time,” exactly the way she’s greeted everyone except her boys.
Things are quiet for a long time after that. Years. Cosette and Marius get engaged, again, and Valjean is pleased to discover that most of the reincarnated Amis are more than happy to acquire a gruff uncle-figure. Joly, Bousset, and Musichetta get an apartment that’s barely big enough for two, let alone all three of them. Eponine and Cosette still live together with Gavroche, although Cosette spends a decent amount of time at Marius’, and Jehan eventually gives up on trying to make ends meet with his poetry and moves into their apartment, too. It’s crowded, but Eponine is speechless with how much she loves having everyone there, close enough to touch. She’s properly one of them, this time around, listening to Jehan’s poetry and getting phone calls when Bahorel lands himself in hospital after a fist fight. The first time she comes down with a cold, Joly turns up on her doorstep armed to the teeth with vitamin C and soups—she recovers in record time. It’s good and she’s happy and she thinks that it was worth dying, to get this second lifetime.
(This is the truth: not everything is so easy. Sometimes it’s hard to keep their timelines straight, ranging over Paris as they do.)
(One day Jehan calls her in near-hysterics—he’s wandered too far, landed in the Musain’s old neighborhood, and although the inn is gone, the air, he says, is the same. She ‘borrows’ Bousset’s car and a blanket from Cosette’s nest to go get him, and she and Jehan spend the rest of the day on the couch with Gavroche, watching movies and drinking hot chocolate. She calls Cosette to tell her what happened, and when she and Marius get home from their day trip, they find the three of them curled tightly together, asleep.)
(Her old joke about RTSD enters common use, a shorthand for when Musichetta wakes up screaming herself hoarse at the image of her boys, dead, side by side, for when Bahorel can’t breathe around the bayonet in his ribs except by going out to pick a fight, for when it rains lightly and Eponine shakes down to her bones. For when Marius finds two paintings of a golden-haired god and his friends up for auction, in addition to a half-scorched sketchbook, all signed with a large, stylized R, and all of them sit in his apartment in shocked silence. It’s said with a quirk of the lips and bared teeth, something that’s only funny because they force themselves to laugh instead of lying down and never moving again.)
(It’s dark and twisted and Eponine is crushingly proud of them every time she hears the phrase.)
Eponine and Cosette are debating the merits of getting a job at a large paper and making a name for yourself by selling your soul versus getting a job at a small but virtuous one and probably never getting your words out when Jehan, practically bouncing with excitement, drags two men into the coffee shop. He found them in the library, he announces, and Courfeyrac was trying to convince Combeferre to blow off his homework.
It shocks absolutely no one that Courfeyrac and Combeferre met before Jehan got his hands on them. There are more delighted reunions, tears and laughter and tight hugs. Gavroche almost bowls Courfeyrac over and the lanky man is suddenly hard-pressed to resist crying outright as he hugs the boy fiercely.
“Where’s Enjolras?” Combeferre finally asks, and the two of them do seem oddly unbalanced without their golden-haired third.
Eponine shakes her head apologetically. “Haven’t found him yet.”
“Ah, and you must be little Gav’s lovely sister,” Courfeyrac declares, sweeping up her hand and kissing the back of it. She stares at him, grinning. It’s good to see that his humor is as good as ever. “I never had the privilege of meeting you properly.”
“That’s enough,” Combeferre says with a sigh, towing him back by the collar. “I’m Combeferre, this is Courfeyrac.”
“Eponine,” she says. “And I know who you are. With you two I believe we’ve found everyone except Enjolras and Grantaire.”
“Really?” Combeferre looks startled. “When Jehan said that most of the others were back…”
“Trust me, I expected him to turn up too,” Eponine says dryly. Somehow she seems to have been elected spokesperson, sometime around when they found Joly, and she dearly hopes that Enjolras gets a move-on so that she can pawn the duty off onto its rightful patsy. Other reasons too, obviously, because Enjolras was a fucking glory even from a distance, fire and wrath and pure, hard metal, but God does she ever want to have someone else take the reins. “We’ll find him,” she says, trying to sound confident. “We will.”
Maybe she has some potential at this thing after all, because everyone seems convinced.
So. Enjolras.
To absolutely no one’s surprise, Enjolras crashes (back) into their lives with no shortage of brisk aplomb. He takes his sweet time about it, too, the fucker—Eponine’s in her third year of university.
Eponine is talking to Courfeyrac, waiting for Combeferre to come out of his last lecture of the day, when someone clears their throat behind him.
“Excuse me,” says a sharp, well-articulated voice, the kind of voice made for rallying troops and calling orders, and Courfeyrac goes paper white and drops everything he’s holding—his phone makes a sinister crack upon hitting the pavement. “Have you heard about the protest next weekend--” the voice starts, but they don’t get to finish, because Courfeyrac spins on the spot and hurls himself at the red-coated speaker like a particularly lanky missile.
True to form, Enjolras manages to save the fliers in his hand and catch Courfeyrac without trouble.
“Enjolras,” Courfeyrac says, hugging him fiercely. Enjolras is tellingly stiff, and Courfeyrac holds him at arms-length, asking uneasily, “Do you know me?”
Enjolras blinks for a long moment, then recognition washes over his face and his severe features break into a glowing smile. “Courfeyrac,” he says warmly, and Courfeyrac yanks him back into a hug so all-engulfing that Enjolras is reduced to a head of mussed golden hair and a red jacket.
“Enjolras?” Combeferre says from the door of the lecture hall, and Eponine’s never heard him timid before, but that’s definitely the best word for his tone now. Enjolras pries himself free from Courfeyrac’s surprisingly comprehensive hold and Combeferre takes a few shaky steps forward before he seems to just fall into Enjolras. There are definitely some tears among the three of them, and Eponine quietly slips her phone out of her pocket.
WE FOUND E, she types into a group text. NOT A DRILL. MEET AT ABC IMMEDIATELY. Musichetta swears blind that she had nothing to do with the renaming of the coffee shop. No one, not even Joly, believes her.
Her phone immediately starts to vibrate as everyone commences a full-scale conniption. She shoves it into her pocket again as Enjolras and the others separate and he looks over at her, with the vague recognition she’s come to expect from Les Amis.
“I’m sorry,” he says, just as crisply polite this time around as last. “I don’t recall your name.”
“Eponine,” she says, a smile starting to spread across her own face. “I’ve been keeping an eye on your comrades for you, but I’ll thank you to take them off my hands.”
“You died on the barricade,” Enjolras says, blue eyes shrewd. “Saving Marius.”
“Yes,” she says. “He lived,” she adds, because this matters to them, that one of them lived through that awful fight, and it matters to her that her sacrifice wasn’t in vain. She’s thanked Valjean for it more times than she can count. “He married Cosette.”
Enjolras smiles faintly. “That’s good. I’m glad someone made it out in spite of my folly.”
Combeferre and Courfeyrac appear to be genuinely struck dumb by this, but Eponine was ready for it, wondering how this meeting would go ever since she was a child, so she gets there first.
She slaps him. It’s an act that’s much more Eponine-who-died than Eponine-who-lives, but it works, leaving him speechless.
“You listen to me,” she snarls, stabbing a finger into his chest. “Don’t you fucking dare take that away from us. You think for one second that we would have fought just for your pretty words and pretty face if we didn’t believe in what you were doing?” He opens his mouth and she pokes him again, harder. “Did I say you could talk? We fought because we knew you were right, and because the people we loved were fighting, and if you for one minute try to steal that from us by blaming yourself, we’re going to find out how well this reincarnation thing works, because I will kill you. I will fucking murder you, because I have remembered this bullshit for eleven years and knowing that I fought and died on my own choice was all that kept me going some days. All that kept my brother going some days, and I will gladly kill you for taking that away.” She breathes, shaky, and asks quietly, “Am I clear?”
Enjolras looks down at her for a long moment, because he is taller than her and she probably doesn’t look as menacing as she wants to. His lips are parted in surprise and a red mark is rising on his cheek, because she is strong and put a lot of force into that slap.
“I think it’s a shame we didn’t meet last time,” he says at last, sounding bemused. “I suppose we’re clear.”
“Good, because I’m going to have my goddamn eye on you. Okay,” Eponine says briskly, pulling out her phone and cringing slightly at the number of texts there—forty-nine. “The others will probably launch a search party if we don’t go meet them at the ABC, so.” She makes a gesture as if conducting an orchestra and the three men follow her as she starts toward the road, her boots thudding against the ground.
“Who have you found? Who else is here?” Enjolras asks, with the stiff eagerness she remembers from watching him greet his friends the last time around.
“Almost everyone,” Combeferre says immediately. “Jehan found Courf and me at the library last year, and before that was…who?”
“Feuilly,” Eponine says. “Bahorel. Bousset and Musichetta found each other first, then us. Joly thought we were crazy until we found the other two. Jehan. Marius when we were sixteen. And Cosette and I grew up together this time around, since before we remembered.”
“Not Grantaire?” Enjolras asks with all the shrewd intelligence she remembers.
“No sign of him,” she says, because while Eponine doesn’t believe in softening the truth much anymore, she’s also pretty sure that Enjolras is better off without seeing the paintings and sketches Marius keeps in storage. She never saw Enjolras and Grantaire go more than a day without getting into a shouting match, and she’s quite confident that their golden leader would react poorly to the way Grantaire saw him. Better for everybody if she doesn’t get into it.
There’s a pause and his face does something she doesn’t recognize in her periphery. “How are they?” Enjolras asks.
Eponine shrugs. “You know, they’re reincarnated revolutionaries. We’ve all got our issues. Mostly we’re okay. Cosette and Marius are engaged again, and Jehan lives with me and Gavroche—and I guess technically Cosette, but she sleeps at Marius’ more often than not. Joly, Musichetta, and Bousset are together again, have been for a while. We have more good days than bad ones.” She shoots a look at him, sidelong. “We’ve all been slowly dying of impatience while you got your ass in gear. What are those even for?” she adds, nodding to his fliers.
“Protest,” he says crisply. “For women’s rights.”
“Of course they are,” Courfeyrac says, tossing an arm around Enjolras’ shoulders. The blond submits to it with good grace and a fond smile. “I’ve missed having a cause.”
“And this time around we’re a lot less likely to get shot wholesale,” Eponine notes, voice as bland as she can make it. They slow to a halt outside the ABC and she pushes the door open, leading the three of them into the back room Musichetta quietly claimed for them. Through means unknown and possibly illegal, everyone is already there, even Gavroche, who definitely has school at the moment. She’s willing to let it slide today, though. Her arrival sends out ripples through the room, voices lowering and bodies reorienting. It’s strange, the way every conversation pauses when she appears now, heads turning toward her. It’s the sort of response she remembers watching Enjolras command, before their deaths.
“Eponine,” Jehan says brightly, bounding toward her as she steps in. Gavroche thuds into her and she huffs, wrapping an arm around his shoulders—he’s coming into some height now; he’ll probably be taller than her someday. She can’t wait to see it.
The room explodes with noise. All she can make out is Bahorel’s booming voice asking, “Were you serious? You found him?”
She grins at their enthusiasm and steps away from the door with a flourish.
“May I present your long-lost commander,” she says wryly, and Enjolras steps through the door with a hesitant smile on his face. She’s never seen him hesitant before—it’s novel.
His reticence proves unfounded almost at once, of course, as the breath of shock fades to be replaced by a roar of greeting. Jehan, still standing near Eponine, hurls himself at Enjolras and the blond is put in the position of catching someone for the third time in an hour. He looks mostly unbothered when the others seem to take it as permission to mob him, burying him briefly under the onslaught of welcoming hands and teary laughter.
“I’ve heard a lot about you,” Cosette says shyly once he’s managed to extricate himself and Enjolras gives her a quick once-over, clearly noticing the engagement ring on her hand.
“You must be Marius’ Cosette. He spoke highly of you,” he says with an admirably straight face, and she nods, fond resignation flickering over her face as Marius blushes faint scarlet. “So does Eponine.” At that, Cosette grins properly, shooting a look over Enjolras’ shoulder at Eponine, who shrugs. She hadn’t said much, but if he wants to interpret it as ‘speaking highly,’ he’s welcome to do so. Enjolras glances around the room and his gaze lands on the only other unfamiliar face—Musichetta, sitting on Bousset’s lap as he does service as her throne.
She gives Enjolras a very skeptical look and asks, “So what happened to your face?”
Rueful, Enjolras raises his fingertips to his cheek, touching the reddened skin gently. “Eponine.”
“Me too,” Marius mutters, and Cosette steers him by the collar back to a chair. “What?” he protests as she pushes him down into the seat and pats him absently on the cheek.
“Hush, honey,” she says, and Eponine muffles a snicker. Cosette turns a narrow look on her and manages to hold it for a few seconds before a grin cracks across her face and she asks, “How long did it take?”
“Not even five minutes,” Eponine says, and Cosette laughs. “You owe me so much money.”
“You paid better attention than we thought, didn’t you?” Combeferre asks, and Eponine gives him a very dry look. Enjolras laughs and there’s a great scuffle as three chairs are cleared up for them, Eponine opting to lean comfortably against a table instead.
“What happened?” Joly presses, looking concerned.
Eponine grins a little. “We had a quick chat about exactly whose decisions led to our untimely deaths.”
“Oh, Enjolras,” Jehan says. Jehan’s reproachful expression could make hardened murderers break down in guilt-ridden tears. Enjolras shifts awkwardly under the poet’s gaze. “Tell me you didn’t.”
“Well, he’s not going to do it again,” Courfeyrac says, amused. “You really put some force into that, ‘Ponine.” Eponine raises a hand in smug acknowledgement of the compliment, and Musichetta seems to wilt a little bit against Bousset’s chest, her righteous anger fading to a low crackle rather than the severe glint in her eye from before. She reaches out and links her fingers through Joly’s, his long, delicate digits tangling with her own.
“So,” Eponine says, hopping up onto the table with a little hitch and crossing her legs so that she can rest an elbow on her knee and her chin on her fist. “You said you had fliers for a protest, right, Enjolras?”
(This is how they spend their first Saturday reunited with their leader: bearing signs and chanting at the protest. It turns out to actually be a counter-protest, defending a clinic against a mob of people spitting hateful words at girls and women on their way in. Les Amis are more than happy to rally to the cause.)
(Enjolras is pressganged into service with a megaphone when the four students who organized the thing hear him conducting Les Amis through the chants like an old pro. Dressed in his bright red jacket, gold curls windswept around his eyes, he commands attention and directs it where he wants it with ease.)
(Bahorel is the first to go and offer a girl his arm, escorting her inside and looming pointedly in the direction of the protesters. Feuilly does the same almost immediately, and Jehan soothes a teenaged girl on the verge of tears. Musichetta has a brief word with the nurse who comes out to see, and the woman almost bursts into tears herself, locking the dark girl into a tight hug.)
(A protester crosses the inviolable line an hour in, red with anger and indignation. Eponine appears in his path, apparently out of thin air, with a knife-like smile and the look of a woman at war. The protester retreats so fast he almost sprains an ankle.)
(It’s good.)