One Week Later.
It has been ten days since the fall of the barricades.
Eponine sat in one of the armchairs, her knees pulled up to her chin, watching the rain pour down outside. It ran down the window in thin rivers, and she wondered if Azelma had somewhere safe to sleep tonight. A few days ago, she would have worried about Gavroche too.
Gavroche. Even thinking his name made her heart break. She should have been there to protect him. She should have pulled him away from the barricades as soon as she saw him there. She should have told someone to take care of him.
A single tear came to the corner of her eye, and she brushed it away, even as anger roiled inside of her. There would be no funeral for Gavroche. All of the bodies had been burned or dumped in the sewers. There would be no funeral for any of them, no way to say goodbye. She didn’t even have anything to remember him by, except for the small pin that she had found sitting on her bedside table when she finally surfaced from her hallucinations. She held it in her hand now, examining it.
All of the other students had worn them, she remembered, turning it over in her hand. It was dirty and ragged, the red edges frayed, the band of white tinged with dust and soil, the blue center speckled with mud. It was wrinkled, as if he had shoved it into his pocket while he slept, or held it in his fist.
She sighed and carefully fixed it to the front of her shirt. She wasn’t sure if it was the same one that she had worn when she had found Azelma Across the room, Enjolras looked up, but she didn’t meet his eyes. She hadn’t spoken a word to him since slapping him. In fact, this was the first time they’d been in the same room as each other since then. She’d made a point of avoiding him, even though that meant spending a great deal of time cooped up in her room, pacing back and forth across the floor. She wasn’t able to sit still like this. She wanted to be outside, doing something, even though she wasn’t sure what she needed to do, or what she even could do. It didn’t matter to her, though. Even walking around in the rain would be better than sitting here, staring out at the same garden every day, talking to the same people, listening to the same conversations and the same tired voices. Even the nights spent at Marius’s house hadn’t been as bad as this, because then she had been able to leave whenever she wanted. Here, it seemed like there was always someone hovering near the door, reminding her that the doctor had said that she needed at least two weeks of recovery time.
She realized that Enjolras was still staring at her, and she looked up and glared at him. Within a second, he had turned away, his eyes dark and brooding as always. She sighed again and turned towards the window. The rain didn’t even change the look of the garden, not the way that it always seemed to change the streets of Paris. When it rained out there, the entire world seemed darker. The river began to bulge, and the water sometimes overflowed its banks, spilling into the streets. The pavement would shine like silver, and the buildings almost seemed to sag under the weight of the pounding storms.
She stood up. “I’m going out,” she said, half-daring him to stop her. Cosette and Marius were shopping – something about the wedding, dear God – and Monsieur Madeline was in town again, though she wasn’t sure why, and Grantaire was passed out in his bed.
“You’re not supposed to go out,” he said, not looking up from his book.
“If I have to sit here one more minute, I am going to lose what little sanity I still have,” she said, glaring at him. If looks could kill, Enjolras would be a puddle on the floor. He refused to meet her eyes, still looking down into his book. As she watched, he turned a page, as if he was paying utterly no attention to her at all.
