Beyond The Barricade (A Les Miserables FanFic)

i. A Road Less Travelled

There were two or three roads that led to the Cafe Musain which Marius Pontmercy hadn't travelled in his life and he had no intention of doing so at this moment. Instead, he turned left into a narrow side street, away from the larger houses of the Rue Plumet. Once comfortably positioned in the shadows, he looked around for the street urchin.

Sure enough, she stepped out of the darkness and his breath caught in his throat as he recognised her for perhaps the fifth or sixth time. She sidled towards him with her hands in the pockets of her tent-like overcoat. "Hello, Monsieur Marius." one side of her mouth pulled up into a sort of half-smile. Marius looked at her, properly now, having not heard that voice for nearly eighteen months, taking in her tattered, mustard-yellow chemise and patched brown skirt and cap. His voice came out in a strangled laugh, "'Ponine. Funny seeing you here... Well, not... Funny..." He ran a hand over his unshaven face and sank down onto his haunches, making it seem as if he was attempting to support the brick wall, with all its ripped political posters attached to it, behind him. To Eponine Thenardier's eyes, it looked as if it was the other way round. She sat herself down next to him, flicking a wayward piece of dirt off her skirt with a grubby fingertip as Marius turned his face to look at her. "Why are you here?" His voice had been reduced to nothing, almost as if he was still hoarse from his days atop the barricade in the Rue de Villette. Eponine raised her head so that she was looking directly into the young man's eyes. "I'm here to welcome you, of course."

Marius tilted his head up so that he could see the lean strip of sky that was visible through the gap between the tops of the precariously leaning houses that stood side by side on this particular street, "Yes, but why here? And why you?" Eponine looked at him, hurt flickering for a split second in her dull grey eyes, yet she answered simply and shortly, "My heart was here in life, so I'm here in death. It's the way. And then if your heart belonged nowhere... Well..." She never finished her sentence as Marius stood suddenly, stumbling backwards into the darkness of the alleyway, a crazed light in his eyes as if he'd just set eyes upon the Devil himself. "You... You?" He shook his head, over and over, before sinking down onto his haunches again and rocking ever so slightly backwards and forwards, a stray tear leaking from his eye. Eponine looked at him. She hadn't seen him so haunted since the day he'd seen her arrive over the top of the barricade, wounded both physically and mentally, with news of his love. "Marius," she reached out a scrawny arm to slow his manic rocking on the hard cobbled ground, "you were ill, I'm sorry. You must remember..." she knelt before him and observed, with her quick, hawk-like eyes, that there were shadows lurking sinisterly in the hollows of his cheeks and his eyes were both carrying the burden of heavy-looking dark circles beneath them.

After a few moments, Eponine straightened and leant against the wall, waiting for the inevitable words to come from his mouth, and they did, in a spluttering stream of grief, "And what of Cosette?" Eponine shrugged off the question at the mention of the girl she'd grown up with in her father's inn when they had both been children. Marius stood and looked directly at his friend, "I want to see her." he said decisively. Eponine shook her head, "If I could see my mother and father and little Azelma to give them what they deserve, don't you think I would've done already?" Marius opened his mouth to say something but his breath was interrupted by Eponine's hand on his. She gripped it hard, savouring the warmth of it that she'd only known a couple of times in life, still feeling that familiar twist of her heart at the contact between them. Without another word, Eponine dragged his unwilling body down a road that was totally foreign to him, yet he knew exactly where it led.

There was now one less road leading to the Cafe Musain that Marius Pontmercy hadn't travelled.