repositoryofgrief

[repositoryofgrief]

hey all! i haven’t been here in a long time, and i don’t really write fic regularly but i just wanted to let you guys know that what fic i do write is over at my ao3 (:

[repositoryofgrief]

title of blackbirds and canaries fandom les misérables characters/pairings eponine/enjolras rating t summary in which he wants to see her as patria, and she wants to be seen as human. not quite a love story, but close enough for the two of them. snapshots set around a general (and often screwy) timeline in the months leading up the the june rebellion. status 22 / [finally done!]

it’s 1 AM and i’ve washed my hands of this story. now that i’ve exorcised it, maybe i can finally write my final essays?

dulce et decorum est, pro patria mori.

“not that i love you less, but that i love france more,” he said. june had come, and the days were radiant with glow of summer sun. she stared at him from across a sea of books and muskets, hope and madness. she wished he wouldn’t, but to stop him would have been as cruel as to have killed him. the people will come, he had said. they will come to our call. they will answer tyranny with cries of freedom, and we shall free ourselves from the bondage of monarchy. eponine had her doubts about this.

“brutus died,” she said brusquely. “and octavius became augustus.”

and the romans killed their would-be saviour. even she knew that story.

“better to have died in freedom than live the subject of an empire.”

“france has been an empire!” she shouted at him. or did he forget haiti, forget napoleon? she looked down at her own skin, dark with the dawn of the day, and looked back at him, gaping. tunnel vision. the boy had tunnel vision.

he was sitting in a corner, cleaning the muskets and fretting over the gunpowder, which had gotten damp in the humidity of these wilting, rotting days. lamarque, he’d said, was faltering. the revolution would be any day now. she had stopped counting down the days and started counting up the moments, accruing memory in the time they had left. because everything would be different, soon. everything would change.

the june rains had only managed to whet the tension that had the city on edge; one loose spark and the whole of paris would be set aflame. enjolras was ready, eager, straining at the leash, a hellhound out for royal blood, arbiter of fury both human and divine. she looked at him sometimes through half-closed lids, and he seemed to be burning. perhaps he had been burning a long time; she had only tried not to notice.

bring the light of the day when you come summering, take the hope of the dawn when you’re gone.

“i’ll be there,” she said simply. “i’ll be fighting by your side.” not because she believed in his revolution, but because she believed in him, and because he had been the first person in a long time to have given her cause enough for belief.

it figured that this would be the thing to jolt him from his feverish stupor. “don’t,” he pleaded. “i need to know that you’re safe.”

“you would bar me from my own revolution?” she asked, tone arch and eyebrows arched. “you would liberate me from my own redemption?”

“you don’t need to be redeemed.”

“no,” she agreed. “but what is your revolution without the voice of the people? where is your vox, who are your populi?”

“let this be my fight,” he begged. “i want you to be safe.”

“oh, darling boy,” she laughed. she picked herself up and picked herself across the room to kneel at his side, cupping a hand against his face. his faunish freckles fanned out against her fingers, fragments of ancient constellations. “i’ve never been safe. and keeping me locked up is not a way to guarantee my freedom.”

“no,” he said. “i suppose not.” he opened his arms to her and she sank into them, closing her eyes against the stutter of his heartbeat. how much time did they have left? how many quiet moments like these, when she felt like a pebble, floating amidst the boundless sea of his warm embrace? how many more times would he skate the pads of his fingers lightly along the freckled skin of her shoulder? how many more tears would he cry into her hair?

this was not, she decided, any way to live life.

she knew another story, though. one not too different from that of marcus brutus, not quite so different from theirs.

“sabinus,” she said.

“hmm?” drowsily, he turned his head.

“do you know the story of sabinus and epponina? my mother used to tell it to me as a child.”

“tell it to me,” he said hoarsely. “i want to hear you tell it to me.”

the light in the room was blue that day; blue like twilight, like endings. but she had no desire to end. yet she was a fundamentally selfish person–she had to be, to survive. she could never be like cosette, with her arms wide open to encompass the world. this girl had claws, had teeth, had a howl. but this girl did not know if she could live with the self-doubt, the self-hatred, the anger anymore. she could not envision a future, but the future was all he saw.

“i’ll tell it to you tomorrow,” she said, with half a grin and a heart steady with sorrow.

“tomorrow,” he said. “tomorrow.”

and she smiled and pressed her lips to his cheeks, which were made of roses, and to his eyes, which were full of stars, and she kissed him with the sweet solemnity of someone who knew that tomorrow would be far too late.

[repositoryofgrief]

title of blackbirds and canaries fandom les misérables characters/pairings eponine/enjolras rating t summary in which he wants to see her as patria, and she wants to be seen as human. not quite a love story, but close enough for the two of them. snapshots set around a general (and often screwy) timeline in the months leading up the the june rebellion. status 21 / [almost done]

[you guys i almost made myself cry i didn’t mean for this to happen T^T]

his mouth met hers in a symphonic rhapsody of colours barren and bare, a clear ringing bell that cut through blue summer skies. he was sorry, he said, murmured, whispered, prayed, reverence hummed along the arch of her neck.

“i’m sorry.” he said to her collarbone.

“i’m sorry,” he sang against her jaw.

“i’m sorry, sorry, sorry,” was the chant, ancient and primal, against the slope of her shoulder.

to her, it sounded something like “love, love, love.”

for her part, eponine threaded spidery fingers through the gossamer of his golden hair and pressed her lips against the hollow beneath his cheekbone, which had grown gaunt as the months slipped past. it was may, the month of birth and rebirth, but the flowers had already begun to fall. early to bloom, she thought, early to die. but her hands slipped down to caress the fine, downy hair that curled against the base of her neck, and then she couldn’t think any more.

later, as they lay against each other in the shadow of the passing day, his head sweetly supine against the surrender of her lap, he tried to speak, and she silenced him.

“i know,” she said, because she didn’t want to think about it anymore.

“i want to say it,” he told her, taking her hand in his and holding them both up to the light, admiring how beautifully they were deified  in the light of the golden hour. durer could not have drawn more tenderly the hand that held his own.

the storm clouds were gathering outside, and june was ripe for revolution. the swelter and swoon of summer sunshine made the future seem bright. she could feel this, somewhere deep in her soul. she could feel that it would all soon be over.

“i dreamt of you when you were away,” he said. “i wrote down everything i wanted to tell you. but now i find myself speechless.”

“i’ve never known you to be without words,” she teased, smoothing down the frown lines that creased his forehead.

“it’s because you defy representation.” simple as that, so matter of fact it held the ring of truth. she was galvanized. she ached. he reached up to tug at a lock of hair that had fallen past the dam of her shoulder, plummeting like a waterfall towards him; it had grown so long in her absence, and he had not known how keenly he had missed her until she’d returned.

she leaned down to press a kiss against his nose. enjolras arched his head back to meet it with his lips.

“i’m sorry,” he said again when she had pulled away. “i should not have mistook you for patria. i die for her, but i live for you.”

“not enough to put her down.”

“i won’t put her down because i fight for you. a better world for you. for everyone.”

in toxic environments, she thought, canaries are the first to die. the first to stop singing. the least likely to survive. she didn’t tell him this, because he didn’t need telling, but she leaned her head back against the wall and stared up at the ceiling, feeling like her blood was a river that had frozen over. it was always going to end this way.

“vive,” she sighed.

“yes; vive la revolution.”

no, she thought. that was not what i meant. 

[repositoryofgrief]

OMG. man, the memories

title finding angels in dark places fandom les misérables characters/pairings eponine/enjolras rating t status complete [a story in ten parts] summary the first time they see each other is when she throws an egg at his face. the headlines the next day call her a potentially dangerous menace and analyse her life from birth to present. and she buys the paper and tacks it on her wall as a badge of honour. [au]

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[repositoryofgrief]

the butterfly dreams of better things [vignettes & flash fics]

昔者庄周梦为胡蝶，栩栩然胡蝶也��自喻适志与！不知周也。俄然觉，则蘧蘧然周也。不知周之梦为胡蝶与？胡蝶之梦为周与？周与胡蝶则必有分矣。此��谓物化。 "Once upon a time, I, Zhuang Zhou, dreamt I was a butterfly, fluttering hither and thither, to all intents and purposes a butterfly. I was conscious only of my happiness as a butterfly, unaware that I was Zhou. Soon I awoke, and there I was, veritably myself again. Now I do not know whether I was then a man dreaming I was a butterfly, or whether I am now a butterfly, dreaming I am a man. Between a man and a butterfly there is necessarily a distinction. The transition is called the transformation of material things." (Li Yutang translation) – a collection of e/e vignettes and flash fics that retell stories from chinese history, myth, folktales, and religion –

i.

Right now, they were bones, buried far beneath the desert sand, but shhh, you must never tell them that.

Many, many thousands of years ago, she was a brown-skinned maiden glittering in gold and opening her arms up to greet the kiss of sunlight that toppled and spilled out over her reddish hair. She had been beautiful. And – well – he hadn’t meant to look. And he wouldn’t have, if he knew this was how it was going to end.

But he was just a young initiate in the temple that towered above the city – fastidious, studious, meticulous in all his duties, his black curls the only parts of him that refused to be tamed. And his self-control was legendary. But it is my humble opinion that the most tightly wound things that are the easiest undone.

So when she walked in, barefoot, smelling of the sea, offering up the breeze, all he had to do was look in his eyes and know what 倾国倾城 meant. He just hadn’t known it would involve flooding, and a famine, and a comet, and so much death.

If he had known, he might have loved her anyway, but he would have felt worse about it.

-

ii. 知音 （the music of my heart）

You were born without the affinity for speech, so naturally you became a good listener. The quiet music of a butterfly’s wings, the gentle melody of the wind that weaved through the willows. That’s how you met him. That’s how you became legendary.

Once upon a time, they will say, years after the fact, Zhong Ziqi was wandering through the forest when he heard the sounds of Boya’s qin, and the rest was, of course, history.

That was not how it happened, not at all. There was a forest, and it was sun-dappled and warm, and you were sweating beneath your robes. It had been weeks since last you brushed your hair, or combed your beard, and you were a sight to behold (though not a sight for sore eyes). You were running short of food and running out of water, but those are not immediate concerns when you think with dread of the cacophony that accompanies the bazaar. Here, it is quiet. Here, it is calm. The birds know to fly away when strange men approach, and the crickets know noise from quiet. The only thing that ever talks to you here are the fond whispers that are carried upon the breeze, but at least they never expect you to reply.

And then, like words spoken into a moonless night, you can hear a trickle, no, a roar – and you think of water, and then salvation and then – I can finally bathe again. I wish I could have told you that you had been marked out for death, even then. The men with the ox’s head and the horse’s face were waiting, even then, to receive you at the gates of hell.

But we’ll allow you your happiness. You trod carefully in the direction of the river, careful not to trip over the tatters of your clothing (you have been wandering for so, so long). But as you step into the clearing, something changes in the air, and you begin to realise that the stream is not a stream, is no more than a dream, and mountains begin to rise from the ocean of your mind. And in the clearing you can see a placid young man, robed all in green, bent with eyes closed over a qin, his robes artfully arranged around him. His fingers are long and elegant and expressive as they danced against the strings, and his hair had the grace to billow nimbly in the light breeze.

“What can you see?” the young man called, in a voice so calm and clear. You shook your head, but he didn’t see. But he couldn’t see. What a pair you made! You, who could not speak; he, who could not see. They will conveniently forget these facts somewhere down the line, but for you, you, you – these things are inseparable from who you were to become.

You wait for him to finish before taking his hand, and pressing into his palms the words: 高山。流水。

[repositoryofgrief]

title: la belle dame sans merci fandom: is it weird to say i don't actually know characters/pairings: see above rating: t summary: spy au. um this could be read as e/e? at least e/e was what i had in mind, but also i've been kind of obsessed with resident evil and more specifically with ada wong (and that sort of happened to rope in leon kennedy, though to a much lesser extent) so this could totally be them too. or any other pairing like them. i just really like writing that indescribable dynamic that they both have, at least imo.

He wakes up at three in the morning to the sound of a slight tapping outside his window, which, despite further investigation, yields no answers. He pushes a hand through a tangle of blond hair and grabs the cup by his bedside table for a cup of water. The evening breeze is cool and damp and his hair is plastered to his neck in sweat, and by the time he splashes icy water on his face and knocks back – to the extent that one can “knock back” – a glass of water, he’s almost convinced himself that that was what had woken him, and not the silent hope that blossoms in his chest.

And he’s sure he would have done a good job of forgetting the incident entirely, by sunrise at latest, had she not been sitting composedly, a picture of composure on his rumpled sheets, when he stumbles back into his room. And it’s unfair, for her to look so unruffled, when he is always blown away at the sight of her. Long legs crossing languidly as her eyes flick slowly up to greet him, hair darker and sleeker than a raven’s wing, even with illuminated by nothing more than the dim streetlight outside his bedroom window, the red dress that leans towards purple under the blue cast of nightfall. Something close to habit (but not quite there, because he told himself she didn’t come around often enough for this to become habit) compels him to sit himself down next to her, a slightly awkward contrast to her sleekness, and feel the way her weight inclines towards his. He coughs, slightly, and wishes now that he had not perhaps drank quite so much water in quite so little time, and unfolds both arms to place next to him on the bed. To place between them.

“You can’t keep coming around like this,” he begins.

“Would you rather prefer I didn’t come at all?” she arches a brow, challenging him with an answer she is already sure of.

And god, he wishes he could quit her, and give her an answer she doesn’t for once have, but instead he squeezes his eyes shut and whispers, “You know what I mean.”

“And you know why I can’t do what you’re asking of me.” She sighs too, a little flutter of air that dissipates before it even so much as ruffles the curtains. Just like her, he thinks. Elusive. Hard to catch. Even harder to lay hands on. And maybe that was why it was so frustrating that she refused the one request he made of her – validation. She was never easy to pin down, but on this matter she was downright evasive. He had begun – many times – to say what he wanted from her in so many words and she had – just as many times, sidestepped the issue as smoothly as she would have a punch, or a kick, or a knife in the gut. (Which, of course, was a knife in his gut.) And she always ran, to some unknown location to rendezvous with unknown people, and he would call out after a disappearing shadow who he was never exactly sure he would see again, until she appeared like this, like an illusion from a dream, to taunt him with his greatest insecurity.

He doesn’t say any of this, but drapes his right hand on her left shoulder, twirling a lock of her silken hair around calloused fingers, reveling in the way they, too, slip from his reach. And she leans into him, a rare moment of tenderness, and turns her elfin face to press a kiss against his bare shoulder. They have an agreement, if an unspoken one. She comes unarmed and with the full knowledge of where his weapons are stowed. They’re both deadly even so, but he’s flattered that she would grace him with that kind of trust, especially since he never seems to know exactly where he stands with her. And while he doesn’t ask her any questions, she’s not allowed to come with an agenda, either. And whatever happens in his bedroom is limited to his bedroom. “Don’t think this means I’ll go easy on you,” she’d whispered in his ear the first time she’d shown up at his window, skirt billowing in the wind and hair a little rumpled.  (He’d replied, “I wouldn’t expect you to.”)

Tonight, she seems content just to be in his presence, a familiar kind of peace he doesn’t find anywhere else but in her. Beyond these four walls they will almost certainly point guns at each other again and again and again, she with a smirk and he left with questions, always questions, endless questions, but inside, they are aware, they are deeply aware that they know no one else more thoroughly than each other. When his fingers know the exact places she’s sore from a long day’s work, or when she knows exactly where to bandage him up after a mission gone awry. The way her head fits under his, and the familiar tangerine scent of her hair.

He likes this, the calm, when the inky night blurs shadow into light, and there’s no line drawn in the sand for them to stand on opposite sides of. He is just him, simple, there, and she’s just her, with all her baggage at the door. But he also likes when the carefully varnished red nails that one night might caress the curve of his jaw gently or rake themselves down the curvature of his back become claws, become weapons, aimed without reservation at his jugular. Likes pulling out his knives at her, and feeling the sinew of her muscles under his relentless attack, the knowledge that she’s perfectly able to defend herself. Against him, if necessary. The half-sweet feeling that bubbles in the pit of his stomach when he’s watching her walk away into the sunset, the knowledge that no matter how often he calls out her name, only the wind will be there to respond.

It’s a careful balance, hard to strike. Often, he is confused. (About himself. About her. About, succinctly, everything.)

“If you had a choice,” she says, drawing careful sounds with her tongue, “and absolutely no limitations or reservations or reality to limit you, where would you like to spend the rest of your life?”

“In a philosophical mood, are we?” he chuckles, a little self-effacingly, because it’s usually him on the receiving end of this kind of mockery. But he lets her fingers through his hair guide him downwards so that he is staring up at her face (half in shadow, half in flame) from the not-so-uncomfortable vantage of her lap.

“Answer the question.”

“Truthfully?”

She shoots him a look. Did I ask to hear you lie to me?

“In a world with absolutely no limitations, I would like to spend the rest of my life by your side,” he says, because that’s the most impossible place to be. His eyes are fixed upon her face, gauging her reaction, but she has her head turned stonily away, even if her fingers tighten a little around his sun-soaked hair. He reaches a hand up to tap the tip of her upturned nose and says gently, “Hey, we’re just talking about dreams, right?” and her smile turns on abruptly as a lamp.

“Yes, of course.” But her gaze is absent even if her teeth are not.

“What about you?”

“What?”

“Where would you like to spend the rest of your life, if you had no limitations?”

“On a beach in Bali with a margarita in one hand and a flock of attractive men gathered around me,” she immediately recites, while her hands trickle down to caress his face, tracing across the high, taught planes of his cheekbones and the bridge of his nose. She looks down, again abruptly, and leans towards him, slowly, slowly, achingly slowly, until the tips of her hair brush against his face, and then she whispers, “Or I’d want to spend it in this room, where I don’t have to worry and I do have you.” He reaches up to press small kisses to the corner of her mouth until she pulls back and says haltingly, “I’m being sent overseas for a while. Knowing your luck, we’ll see each other there, but if not, then I’ll likely be gone for a long, long time.”

He leans up on his elbows. “What for this time?”

“Deep cover. But I can’t tell you anything more than that, and it’s better for both of us if you just didn’t ask.” He’s reminded not for the first time that wishes can only keep her here until the sun has come up. (It’s also not the first time he’s wished that night didn’t have to end.)

He doesn’t know when he fell asleep, only that he never heard her leave, and that it was the wind rustling through the tops of the trees that ultimately wakes him come morn. And she’s gone without a trace, not even a lipstick stain to prove that she was really there, and he begins to think that he’d dreamed it – and her – up in a fit of sentimentality when the wind pushes three fluttering scraps of paper towards him.

One for you, one for me, the first reads, in her distinctively spidery writing.

Two tickets, direct to Bali.

Well, he thinks, in any case, it’s been a long time since he’s taken a vacation.

[repositoryofgrief]

title 笑敬红尘一杯酒 fandom les misérables characters/pairings eponine/enjolras rating t summary she can't forget, he can't remember. a story of three lifetimes, and the start, perhaps, of something sweeter. reincarnation au.

In the days, weeks, months, years after the revolution, she remembered, even as Paris forgot. The blood had no chance to dry on the pavement before it was thrown out with the next day’s wash water to be purified by the ocean currents. Because thieves were good at remembering what people took from them, and people who have lost often remember best what was lost.

This did not change when she died.

Because of course she would be the one to remember.

~

The first time was on a battlefield and he was dying, because he would always die on battlefields and she would always be left behind. She was a nurse not because she wanted to be, or because she felt any obligation to a country that had in this life robbed her of hers, but because it paid well and was not as dangerous, and she had had enough of poverty and danger for one, for two, for several lifetimes. (Of course he went rushing right towards it, as if Death was a close and personal friend he was eager to greet again.)

She sat by his bedside and held his hand while night cloaked the both of them in words that could have once been said but are now hidden behind a veil of shattered memory. She wiped the sweat from his forehead, grimacing as he slipped further and further into delirium, muttering Latin words he had memorised what seemed like a thousand years ago, and which she remembered because she had sat by his feet when he had recited them.

She hushed him and told him the revolution was over, that it was long past, and rested her head on the hands she grasped. The heat radiating off his body was the same as it was back them, and she was just as cold. If he had always been Apollo, she would always remain Diana.

“Hush, little canary. There is no one here to hear your song.”

Yet the last words on his lips before she dozed off in the shadow of his light were still ‘liberte, egalite, fraternite’ -- a language he didn’t even speak in this lifetime.

By the time she woke up the next morning, all that was left of him was a dent in the sheets he had once occupied and a small, rose-shaped bloodstain.

In that lifetime, the second lifetime, the clearest lifetime, at least in terms of her memory, she would see him once more. By then she was a wizened old crone, and he a young boy, haloed by honeyed ringlets, and past her window in her little cottage in Provence he ran, full of hope and joy even as she was filled by a sort of sweet regret. She passed a hand over her wrinkled face and smiled, because even as youth still held the sweetness of elusive promise, she now preferred a quiet life, surrounded by her flowers and the letters her daughter wrote from abroad.

~

The second time she remembered him less. She did not know who he was or who he had been, nor who her soul had once been, only that his face was familiar and that she wanted to kiss it, wildly, passionately, recklessly. But then, all the girls in her young American classroom were madly in love with the young French emigre who taught them philosophy with a leftist edge that was dangerous in the fifties. They found it a little dangerous, and very thrilling, a welcome escape from the mundanity and regularity of their checkerboarded lives, on their little square blocks in their little square houses in their little square town with the bowling alley and the diner and the well-groomed lawns and neat-o lives.

And he was French, a word that rested foreign on her tongue and evoked imagery of romantic artists and jolly taverns and picturesque cafes and sizzling electric lights, lights, lights! He was everything they thought a Frenchman should be -- Parisian (though he said he came from Provence), cosmopolitan, dashing. His curls were disarrayed, his face very severe, his collars always starched.

It was, all in all, no wonder that the boys who had an interest in girls regarded him as competition.

To his credit, he never seemed to care, always hung aloof at the edges of the town, and they eventually moved on to newer, brighter, better things. Elvis Presley, for example, whose dark pompadour and home-grown handsome and overt sensuality became quickly the mode over their literature professor’s wild mane and foreign allure and button-downs, which were buttoned up to the very last button.

Not her, though. Up until the year she was seventeen she mooned over him, head propped up on one hand, dark hair cascading down past her desk, popping her gum whenever he walked by.

“It’s a schoolgirl crush,” her friends warned, “and that’s all it can ever be.” Because they were growing up, growing practical, and recognized that a man who had Marx and Fanon locked away in his desk was not delectable, he was dangerous.

She laughed along, but her soul was always an impractical one, longing for dresses even when she had once been short on food, and so she continued to look upon him with stars glimmering out of her eyes.

She graduated an average student in an average town with an average school, and her homemaker mother and office worker father were preparing her for an above-average life as the wife of a local entrepreneur’s son, whose mother was the cousin of her mother’s best friend, until the day the French schoolteacher showed up and asked if he could speak to their daughter.

“What is it?” she asked in low undertones as they swang on the porch swing while sunset quickly approached, exploding colour across the horizon in mimicry of a Pollack painting.

One ear kept sharp for the approach of her parents, who were at the window and safe in their assumption that he was seeking her for school-related purposes, he told her that she loved her.

She nearly laughed herself to death.

He professed that he had attempted to suppress it, out of professional concerns, out of a concern for her future, but that he couldn’t forget her, not knowing that he had forgotten her once already and will forget her again.

“Could you possibly,” he asked shyly, “feel the same for me?”

And she looked at him, this twenty something from France and her heart went badump even though she knew it shouldn’t have. Instead, she told him to meet her beneath the old sycamore by the ghost house on the edge of town.

She told her homemaker mother and her office worker father, much milder, pleasanter, though no less money-minded than her parents of previous lives that her French teacher of literature and philosophy offered her a position at the school, and they did not question it even though she was an average student at an average school in an average town. It was no harm, they said, to let her try being independent before she settles down.

“I have an interview with the principal tomorrow,” she said, before heading up the staircase with its creaky bottom step to pack her things and her memories.

But that night the man he had been in love with who loved him no more told the policemen that he had found a Communist agent within the ranks of the school, and that he was indoctrinating them in Stalinism, which of course was the first step to a total collapse of government and society. They searched his desk at the tip, and were not pleased with what they found.

Ripples travel fast in small, tightly packed spaces but information cannot be transmitted faster than the speed of light through a vacuum, so the news did not reach her in time to prevent a day and night of waiting in the rain under the sycamore tree by the old ghost house on the edge of town.

The rain poured down, drumming past the leaves past the branches and into the coils of her dark hair, which he had admitted he had always wanted to run his hands through, as she stared down into her numb fingertips, which were beginning to turn blue, and pondered her own foolishness. Her tears mixed in with the rainwater until someone standing at a distance could not tell the two apart, except that she could, because her tears were salty and the rain bore the scent of absolution. At home on the porch, her homemaker mother hoped the interview was going well because it was running so long and her office worker father said that perhaps she had stayed at the schoolhouse because it was raining so hard.

She tracked mud into the house that night, and kicked the bag she’d packed under her bed, cursing his name, and fell crying into her pillow, but the next day her parents had no time to admonish her because she was running a fever. A doctor was called, the verdict announced: pneumonia.

She would be the one to leave him this time.

A moment of clarity came to her: she could remember because she couldn’t let go. All his worries had followed him into death, into martyrdom, and so had dissipated like dust blown in the wind.

“How strange,” she said to herself through lips yearning for water while she burnt up in the comfort of her warm bed.

~

In this life he is a novelist, which is good because it means he is a lot quieter, though no less determined to have people listen to his words. She makes coffee for overprivileged bourgeois young adults in a quiet college town in order to support her two siblings, who have found her again. They lived with a grandmother who liked to tell fantastic fictions from the 1950s, about a girl in her town who died of lovesickness.

And in this life, she failed to remember.

It must have been the rainwater, damned rainwater, washing everything away.

Rebirth. Renewal. A new opportunity to be a whole new person.

But of course neither of them were so predictable. Or maybe both of them were too predictable. Some lingering trauma, perhaps, from some ancient story that had long since been reduced to ashes and bone by the erosion of a hundred thousand years of wind, that had twined their two souls together, destined to meet, destined to repeat. (Was it a blessing or a curse?)

It began, as it had always begun and always will begin, at a cafe.

[repositoryofgrief]

title of blackbirds and canaries fandom les misérables characters/pairings eponine/enjolras rating t summary in which he wants to see her as patria, and she wants to be seen as human. not quite a love story, but close enough for the two of them. snapshots set around a general (and often screwy) timeline in the months leading up the the june rebellion. status 20 / [an indeterminate amount]

[um. i can't write anymore. whoops? that's what happens when you don't write anything for a year i guess]

some women are raised to be weak and that kills them inside. others are expected to be strong and it breaks them. but eponine, she of the shattered spirit, was anything but broken. it was a small part anger and a good part pride that kept her from knocking on the door. twice shy, three times lucky. he’d betrayed her twice already; she was a fool to want to go back.

still.

still.

marius had asked her why she hadn’t been around, and she had felt her heart constrict in anticipation of leaping, only she could not will her body to do what it had no desire to do. so she’d brushed it, and him, off with a shrug of a shoulder and a smile that disappeared before it could register.

“oh, you know me, monsieur marius. always flitting this way and that. like a leaf. it was about time i found something other than revolution to spend my time on anyway.”

to be honest, revolution had been on her mind more often than not that last few days, and it was often accompanied by a cacophonous orchestra of images, mostly flashes of gold as it turned molten in the sunlight, the quick quirk upward of a too-serious mouth, and long hair that brushed the curve of long eyelashes. it was, more than the revolutionary himself, infuriating.

because she had always prided herself in doing the leaving, in being able to escape before she became tethered, because girls with no names could not stay in the same place for very long. she had always prided herself in protecting herself from the grit of the reality around her, moving through the red dust of mortality with an elusive fluidity that dulled the sharpest of the pains, so –

so – so – so –

why was it so hard to leave?

was it so hard to leave?

or had she just grown complacent, too enamoured with the idea of permanence and roots, two things she’d watch slip through her fingers like the water she longed to embody, the water that best knew her, the water that held all the deepest, darkest parts of her? water never stopped moving. water was so strong. but she was but a drop in a country stream, not a river, not a sea, nor could she see herself being carried out to a stranger’s oceans.

the door swung open before she’d made a choice to knock.

i am weak, she wanted to say, for the eternity of you. martyrs lived, after all, well beyond any mortal life, and she could see from a thousand miles that he was destined to meet death running.

[repositoryofgrief]

title of blackbirds and canaries fandom les misérables characters/pairings eponine/enjolras rating t summary in which he wants to see her as patria, and she wants to be seen as human. not quite a love story, but close enough for the two of them. snapshots set around a general (and often screwy) timeline in the months leading up the the june rebellion. [it’s been a year. whoops. sorry?]

status 19 / [an indeterminate amount]

one calm day in january when the snow shimmered like sugar dusted across the alleyways of paris, eponine sat staring into her hands while the wind made white flurries dance like fairies around the trousers she had borrowed from her host, which had to be tied up around her waist for all they sagged around her. frigid chill laced its sharp fingers through the lattice of her hair, breathing iron into her soul, but her heart was miles away.

so when the door to the cafe swung open with a rush of warmth and clamour, she merely burrowed deeper into herself and wrapped her arms tighter around the railing, pressing her cheek into the metalwork and her lips to the freeze.

“you never speak of your family,” enjolras said conversationally, sitting down beside her and offering her a mug of ale.

her eyes fluttered shut and her mouth parted, quivering slightly, as she searched for the right answer to give. “should i speak of them often?”

“well.” enjolras considered this carefully. “i’m hardly in any position to be lecturing people on families given my current state of estrangement with my own, but surely you have one.”

“everyone has one,” she said simply. “and there’s nothing much else to say.”

he supposed he had to leave it at that. he leaned back against the brick and stretched his legs out and glanced at her from the corner of his eye. they weren’t close enough for friends, exactly, nor were they distant enough for strangers. he rather liked it — whatever it was. he was comfortable around her, restful, even.

“my clever m’sieur, i know you’re terribly serious, but would you like to hear a fairy tale?” she asked, taking a sip. the sweetness of it slicked down her throat. her knuckles were red around the mug, prominent against the delicacy of her fingers. (it worried him, but her cheeks were fuller, and she swore she’d always had such tiny hands. “the easier to rob you with, monsieur,” she’d laughed.)

he pretended not to be startled at this, only leaned in and regarded her with the same placidity as the snow.

“once upon a time in a land far, far, far from here, there was an innkeeper man and his wife.” her brown eyes found his blue ones, and he let her be the first to look away. “the innkeeper man and his wife lived in a little village, where the sun rose up out of the mountains every morning and drowned into a big, big lake at night, and they had two little daughters, and three little sons. but when this story takes place, there was just the oldest. she was very plump. she had dimples, and she had a head full of dark hair. her hair was very very thick and very very curly.” eponine smiled a little at this, putting a hand to her own shorn locks. he’d insisted they cut her hair two weeks ago when not one, but two combs snapped trying to push themselves through her tangles

he let his ears listen and his eyes watch: listen to the roughness of her voice, watch the stars that made her eyes look so far away.

“the year she was three they brought her a little birdie — a lark. and the little girl was excited to have someone — no, something — to play with, to dress in blue bonnets and poplin dresses and play princess with. she was all alone until then, you see. no one else in the big big village would play with her, and they told her she was the daughter of a thief, which, of course, was wrong, because she loved her daddy very, very much, and she knew it not to be true.” she smiled a little at that, and whether it was wistful or sardonic, it was hard to tell. her smiles were always so hard, full of rock and grit and gumption, that this soft one slipped past him like water through his fingers.

“her daddy said not to play with her — it — the lark —  and her mommy said that the lark came from bad people, and would be soon gone from the inn; they were just doing an act of christian kindness and taking it in for a while. ‘don’t go near it, dearie, it’s likely full of lice and disease. you wouldn’t want it to taint you, now, would it?’ and truth be told, she didn’t believe it, but she was annoyed, because the lark always sang, but never to her, always talked, but only to her dolls, and never looked twice at her. so she started to hurt the lark sometimes, pulling at its feathers and slapping at its wings. she’d tear her own dolls apart sometimes, just for the satisfaction of seeing how sad it made the lark, and how enviously the lark looked at her when her father the innkeeper and mother the innkeeper’s wife bought her a new doll. do you think worse of her now?”

“a little, yes.” the words slipped out before he considered them fully, because of course this was no fairytale. no fairytale begins like this, but that didn’t mean he didn’t get caught up in it.

“but she was so very small then. and there were so many people around her telling her what to do.”

“she should have known right and wrong, she should have known not to treat the lark so. her youth doesn’t excuse the injustice of her actions. we are all members of society and have an obligation to be kind towards each other.”

“are you awfully kind, enjolras?”

he turned towards her, eyes wide. it was the first time she hadn’t prefaced his name with a title of respect and, much as this feeling shamed him, he was startled. “i?”

“do you think you’re kind?” her dark eyes had always been shadowed, but now they were clear and bright, and she leaned, unblinking, towards him.

“as much as i can, i suppose.”

“i thought not. revolutionaries can’t afford to be kind,” she snickered. “nor are revolutions. not for the likes of me. in any case, you don’t have to worry about the lark. she flew away to be a rich man’s pet and the girl got her just desserts. she became rather like me, you see, wading through the people-mountains, the people-seas.” she tugged the collars of her red jacket closer and looked away from him.

“but to lecture others about kindness is beneath the likes of you, isn’t it?

the voice wasn’t bitter, it was sad. hollow, almost, a branch scraping against the winter frost during a snowstorm. for him, right now, that’s what she most resembled — sturdy, weary, but so, so delicate. he reached out a pair of soft, smooth hands to grasp her by the shoulders, to comfort her or talk to her, even he was not sure. futile, futile, the effort fell, because she shrugged his hands off her shoulder and threw his soul down a well.

“tell me, enjolras, am i broken to you, the same way a toy doll carelessly tossed aside is broken?”

“where’d you –”

“or am i nothing more than a street rat, some damned symbol of a damned revolution that i’ll be damned if i have anything to do with?” she didn’t yell, but it felt worse than her anger would have been.

“how’d you –”

“does it matter? but for the record, it’d be smart not to lay your notebooks out in the open where anyone can read anything you’ve written. just a tip from a street rat that knows nothing aside from the darker paths of the world.”

“look, i didn’t mean it like that, i didn’t know you then –”

“and that makes it okay? if you’d never known me, if i hadn’t run from my father, if i never bothered you to teach me how to read again, if i remained the same street rat deserving of none of your respect but all of your pity, and your condescension, if i weren’t eponine but some other gamine fluttering past your lofty gaze, it would have been okay to call me – what – patria? like i didn’t have a name, like i wasn’t even a person? what do i have in common with your stinking patria anyway? beyond the things you’ve pasted with your words onto my body, as if i were a wall and your patria is some pretty poster to decorate me with?” 

he could feel the consternation turn into flame to burn him alive from the inside. there, licking at his liver, eating through his stomach. stupid, stupid, stupid. had he once thought she might have been flattered?

she pressed the mug back into his hands, and a few drops of ale fell to the snow like tears from her dry eyes. “you can have your patria,” she told him. “just don’t bring me into this.”

she didn’t come home that night, or the night after, or the night after that, and he was left to assume that just like she had breezed into his life, she breezed right out of it, like a tornado, leaving a mess of shame and a flutter of paper behind her. (but since when has home had a place for her in it?) too embarrassed to ask marius and too proud to look on his own, he pushed this down, as he pushed all things but the revolution down.

you have always given your heart to the sea, and let it swallow you, swallow you whole.

[repositoryofgrief]

Hheeeyy so I know it takes you awhile to write but I just wanna let you know I am in love with Allouettes (sp?) and I'm pretty sure you're the only one that writes Eponine/Cosette really well.

ahhhh thank you so much! C: i really like alouette, but at this point i’ve pretty much hit a wall because i’m not sure what i want to do with it/where to go. :C

[repositoryofgrief]

title welcome to the shatterdome fandom pacific rim characters/pairings mako mori, yancy becket rating g status complete summary

[part of a fic war with blahorel]

He’s not here to pilot a Mark III by dint of the fact that both legs are shattered and he can’t walk, let alone pilot a jaeger, but that fact is more bearable than all the people avoiding his gaze the first time he enters the Shatterdome. And he pretends like he can’t hear them, a smile plastered across the desert his face has become, all mirage and illusion and nothing kept, while his younger brother ferries him across the floor.

If only their whispers didn’t chase him across the room, didn’t hound him. But he bites his tongue and he feels Raleigh’s palm, steady and sure as it’s always been, solid on his shoulder. “Don’t mind them," he hisses under his breath, but it’s easy, Yancy thinks, for him to say.

(Do you see them? The one in the wheelchair and the one pushing him?)

He’s not the one who gets the pitying glances, the soft little sighs, and the “what a loss"es, as if he’s supposed to feel more for the loss of his piloting skills than he is the loss of the usage of his limbs.

(That one; he’s the second person ever to have piloted a jaeger alone; and with his injured brother still rigged up, and drifting, and in pain, next to him!)

Bile rises on his tongue and he swallows it back with a grimace. Yancy had expected this; but he hadn’t expected it to be quite so – well.

“What are we doing here?" he asks Marshal Pentecost, so abruptly that they all stop in their tracks and he lurches forward. It’s the first word he’s said to the Marshal since they boarded the plane to Hong Kong thirteen hours ago. “You still haven’t told us." Beyond the vague promises of former glory that had brought Raleigh knocking at his door after a straight six months on construction at the Wall, there’s been not so much as a straight word from the commander.

Stacker Pentecost sighs and straightens out his suit. “You’ve heard about the defunding of the PPDC’s defunding of the Jaeger Program in favour of construction of the Kaiju Wall, correct?"

Yancy shrugs. “Haven’t really kept up these last few years, Marshal." (He’s kept up plenty well.)

“Then you won’t have heard that we’re pooling our resources for one last attack on the Breach. I needed a Mark III pilot to run point for Striker Eureka." He gestures towards the imposing Mark V to their three-o-clock. “Piloted by Herc and Chuck Hansen. First and only of its kind, decommissioned only a day before the Sydney attack."

“What did you need Yancy here for, then?" Raleigh asks defensively, and the hand on his shoulder tenses. Yancy glances upwards to see the corners of his brother’s mouth tighten, and squeezes his hand reassuringly. I’m fine, kid. Don’t you worry about me.

“We’ve assigned him to work with the neural bridge operators; specifically to help prepare trainees for their first drift. We need all the experienced men we can get."

“Marshal." A soft, slightly accented voice turned them around. She’s a muscular woman with short black hair and equally black baggy clothing, holding a clipboard and a frown. Years of having been mentally attuned to his brother’s every action, every move, every thought, tells him Raleigh’s got that dorky grin plastered on his even dorkier face, and Yancy resists the urge to punch him lightly in the gut because that, my friends, would be unprofessional.

Pentecost introduces the young woman as Mako Mori, his protegee. And while she dips her head in greeting, Yancy can see her teeth worrying grooves into her lips.

“Yancy Becket. Pleased to meet you, Miss Mori." He extends a hand. She softens into a smile, her body inclines towards him.

“I know. I’ve heard much about you. I’m honoured to be working with you."

He smiles, though it doesn’t quite reach his eyes, and thinks of how much he’d rather be home, in a warm apartment with his parents and a brother who builds walls for a living (well, one Wall), and wonders why he let Raleigh convince him to come to Hong Kong.

“Where would you rather die?" his younger brother had asked, no doubt quoting a certain Marshal. “Here? Or in a Jaeger?"

But he hadn’t thought of the jaeger, because he had stopped trying to fight things five years ago. He had thought of his dreams for a future, complete and resplendent with a white picket fence and green ivy hanging off the spines of a trellis, and had asked if maybe this was something he was willing to take up arms for again.

Turns out, it was. It will be.

And underneath the arch of the Shatterdome, it is.

[repositoryofgrief]

title stranger than the yellow river running clear fandom les misérables characters/pairings eponine/enjolras rating g status 1/9ish summary you can all blame the tumblr user formerly known as blahorel and currently known as queenjeynes for this because she threatened to do some not so nice things to eponine and enjolras in her fic and i have no idea if she's going to follow through or not so i thought i would post this just in case because she scares me with what she does with her words.

1950s china, and all she wants to do is to keep her head down and stay alive. trust that the landlord's daughter will be obliged to marry the careful rebel of a son of a nationalist.

this started as an e/e fic but honestly idk what it is anymore so you can call this e/e if you like.

[cw: blood, murder, starvation/famine, violence, ideations of infanticide, um basically read up on the cultural revolution in china and be warned for everything there?]

They were married on dank day in late April, when the flowers were just beginning to bloom and their fragrance hung in the air, on the lush green plateau not fifteen miles from where she was born, because he had a list of crimes a mile long and she was the landlord’s daughter, and this was punishment for the both of them. The sun that day was weeping warm tears into the two long braids of her hair, twined carefully together with two pieces of yarn. (Cry, she remembered thinking. Cry for the children of water, who have been laid out to dry, who have wasted and withered and cracked from the salt and the brine of tears. Though she shed no tears when her father was shot, and his blood stained the parlour floor, where it had stayed for weeks before her mother’s careful scrubbing had cleansed it from the cracks between the tiles.)

She would have worn red on her body, too, drowned in it and never gotten up, like a ripe stain on the warm yellow body of the Loess Plateau, and her mother had, indeed, been eager for an excuse to go into town to barter for a bolt of red satin, but in the end the desire to look pretty in pretty things had been outweighed by the similarly strong desire to stay alive, to if possible, escape the taint of her father’s blood. Red weddings were as effective as a placard spelling it all out -- class enemy.

That spring day then, her groom was greeted instead with a loose blue qipao, the colour of the sky as it faded around the edges of the forever flat of the fields, embroidered with careful white hawthorns. White on blue, white on blue, white on blue. She could have laughed if she weren’t so close to crying, and she held close to her sister’s hands as she walked slowly towards a shadow.

He himself was dressed in fine fabrics to spite the world, and while heaven knows where he found silks that hung so beautifully from his broad shoulders, he stood straight in them, and when she approached turned to look her straight in the eyes. Which was when it truly hit her that she knew this man not at all.

Twenty-two, the party official who had shown up at their door had said. Arrested after having been found in bed with a woman and a man -- a sign of imperial decadence, just like the old emperors had done when they ruled the earth from the Huang He to the Zhu Jiang. This was the justice meted out to him. (Her justice as well, was the thing they’d left unsaid.)

Class enemies, after all, where best suited for other class enemies. And the day the official came was the day she had sat by the window, cross-legged on the kang and stared out into the fields of sorghum and tried to quell the rage inside her which fumed at the idea of being forever tied to his man who was the son and grandson of traitors, who had exploited the country and then left it when they were done, that her name would have to forever be tied with the bourgeoisie. She had thought to have options, when she reached a certain age. She was going to marry a farmer, a solid, steady farmer, who could give her the safety and the sex she wanted and whisk her away from these precarious politics in which she found herself standing (on a crumbling mountainside).

She had only wanted to know where she stood, only good ground and firm footing. Anger drove her eyes back up to meet his. She could have had all that, even with a man she despised, but he -- he was going to take all that away. It was only the steady pressure of her sister’s hand on the small of her back that drove her forward, stumbling across the sand, to meet him. She had seen this scene countless times -- in movies, on posters, in the art distributed by the local branch of the party to help motivate people to act according to the revolutionary ideal -- the sweet (but stern) tongzhi holding out her hand to lead her partner into the consummation of higher ideals, her partner sporting a feverish blush that put to shame the orchids she raised in her little plot of ground. Marriage, for the sake of the country. The party.

What noble, self-sacrificing kids, she snorted. She? Was much less interested in such selfless pursuits. She didn’t even need a husband who loved her. Just one who’d bring her more peace than she’d known, and this one wasn’t one to do it.

But what choice did she have? The thought crossed her mind to run north, into the steppes where no one can find her, and weather out the storm, but that was what her father had tried to do, in the dead of night with all the capital the family still had, but wasn’t he dragged back all the same, to be executed before his children’s eyes? So she looked down at her feet with a determination that baba once said would accomplish great things.

To the heavens and earth, to the one parent between the two of them where four might have sat, to each other through thinly veiled contemptuousness they bowed, and everyone tried to cheer when the rice wine was passed around, and he held her hand with a sort of compunctual rigidity that made her loathe him and see him yield to her will, because he looked so unbreakable, standing tall and straight like a tree. (The old saying went that a grass will always weather a storm, but a tree might not survive ‘til dawn. In this weather she was a storm, and he as rigid as an oak.)

And when night fell and the plateau cooled as it was wont to do, dropping twenty degrees to mirror the frostiness between husband and wife, she longed for someone to warm her, to sleep beside her on the large kang. But everything that she had dreamt her wedding night to be vanished in the huff of air it took for him to tell her not to worry, he’ll sleep on the other kang and she can have the large room with her mother.

He didn’t touch her at all, and for that, she didn’t know whether she loathed him or admired him. He didn’t speak, either, beyond those first few words after they were pushed into the dongfang, which was papered over with delicately pasted papercuts of cheerful domestic scenes. Contrasts, contrasts. Life was made all the more beautiful for contrasts. (Green grass, red blood. Blue sky, orange flowers. Shenxian he, mogui her.)

He didn’t even help out with housework, which she thought was exceedingly bourgeois of him, only stood about, a moroseness weighing down the high features of the aristocratic delicacy of his face. And while her brother set the table with the last of the fine china that had not be smashed, and gawked at him for his head full of fine hair and his face free of scars and his mouth full of teeth, he had waited outside by the rippling roar of the kitchen fire for his mantou, which was by this point already made with more water than flour. After which he looped around to the back of the little house to eat his mantou plain, eat it alone, sitting on the stairs and gazing wordless out into the flood of wheat.

Ma slammed the bowl down, and she looked up as if startled from a waking dream, the kuaizi she had been gnawing thoughtfully on still hanging from her lips.

“It’s a good thing you’re married out now, because no one would want a landlord’s daughter,” Mama said brusquely, taking big scoops of vegetables and dropping them into her own bowl. She quartered her mantou and used it to soak up some of the broth still left at the bottom of the plate. Her daughter followed suit, and chewed the soft dough quietly. It was oily, but still good. A solid meal. (And that’s all she ever wanted, really. A solidity to partner the effervescent nature of the dreams she dared hold onto. But now even that solidity was giving away beneath her feet.)

“Some son-in-law you got yourself now,” she grumbled, knocking her kuaizi against the bowl and making faces at her brother, who beamed back at her and crossed his eyes, tongue stuck between two missing front teeth. “Our children -- if we even have any -- will be doubly damned.”

A hand shot out to stop her tapping. “Don’t do that.”

“Or else what? I’m going to become a beggar later in life, asking alms from the heartless? Don’t you know, mama? Naxie gui gen lao shehui yijing yiqi si guangle.” She laughed and tossed her hair, which back then was still the dark of the underside of the moon’s smile, and shone bright as a copper coin. Because those days were the first days, the giddy days, and she, intoxicated on the wings of revolution, was almost happy. The old days were dead, she thought, and so was her father, but she didn’t mind the latter quite so much because he hadn’t spared a second thought for abandoning his family when he thought there might be trouble.

The light in the room was swept away like the tide ebbing out, gradually enough that you didn’t notice until it had been all but sucked out, and the keen space left behind was filled in by darkness, for nature hates vacuums, and through the thin film of dust on the windowpane, she could see her new bridegroom sitting on the steps, hunched over his bowl, chewing carefully on his mantou. Each bite deliberately taken, in that slow, careful way she could tell, even then, were to mark out their days together.

A stranger, a fading boy in the dwindling light.

She sighed.

[repositoryofgrief]

title of blackbirds and canaries fandom les misérables characters/pairings eponine/enjolras rating t summary in which he wants to see her as patria, and she wants to be seen as human. not quite a love story, but close enough for the two of them. snapshots set around a general (and often screwy) timeline in the months leading up the the june rebellion. status 18 / [an indeterminate amount]

more and more nights she found herself spending at the cafe musain, not tucked into a shadow as was her norm, but sitting in a chair at one of the overfull tables. eponine had initially taken enjolras up on his offer to accompany him to a meeting of les amis de l’abc because she wanted to see monsieur marius again.

since she’d left the shoddy building they both called their homes contact between them was rare; she didn’t go to that side of town anymore, and he rarely left it but to go to school, where she could no longer follow. and when they did bump into each other — often when he was dropping papers off for enjolras (she scanned his face carefully for a reaction; there was none, and her own stomach sank) or when he was late to a meeting — there was a smile, a laugh, a fond ruffling of her hair, and he was gone. he could never stay long.

so she walked through the cold in the raggedy old coat with which she refused to part and she walked up the stairs behind monsieur enjolras and sat in a chair and drank some mead and prayed and prayed for marius to show up. (he didn’t; he sent gavroche with his excuses, and gavroche had pulled a face at his sister with the knowledge she couldn’t return the favour because she owed him.)

the next night she came again. and the next. and the next.

and soon it became more habit than inclination that drew her to the cafe, whether or not monsieur marius showed up. she stopped looking up at the sound of every footfall with the hope that it was him, stopped glancing towards the windows where he usually sat, and focused on the man who looked as if he were truly capable of leading the armies of god. (she tried not to laugh at some of the things he said.)

(bless him, she chuckled, he tried so hard. and so, sometimes, did she.)

eponine watched him as he disengaged himself from his conversational partners to step up onto a chair. the room fell silent, as if under the silent thrall of enchantment. (perhaps it was enchantment, she thought, because this beautiful boy who wove beautiful words could not belong to the same world that birthed her.)

watching him, she got the sense that he was the only real thing in the room. that the rest of them were no more than figments, their realities dependent on the attention of others. but he existed separate from that, on his own, subject to the whims of no person. the timbre of his voice, the cadence of his speech — they were the realest things she knew.

and it hit her in a flash that he would go out burning, because he was like the sun, ever ablaze, lighting up the dark to be a beacon to the wandering and the wonderless and the lost. and boys like him never lived to old age, for fire turns to ash before long, but not before imprinting upon one the beauty of a red-hot ire. girls like her, well. girls composed of shadow and smoke who slipped, watery, through your hand, always overstayed their welcome. she was slick and she was flighty, and could disappear before you got a chance to see her clearly and she would linger, linger on long after the stars had emptied from the sphere of the sky. (though no one would notice, no one would see, for the moon needed the sun’s light to be real, and the water itself needed light to be seen by.)

“the abased will rise, and take the torch of freedom to the bright new world,” he was saying, and as the boys rose to clap she snorted gently to herself. “no they won’t,” she muttered. “no, they won’t.”

this last was rather louder than she’d intended, and uttered just as the cheering stopped. heads swerved to catch sight of her, and from his lofty place enjolras blinked at her.

she shrank back into her seat.

“what was that?” he asked with no real temper in his voice.

“you’re wrong about your abased rising to your revolt. they won’t.”

“eponine,” he scoffed. “i know of revolutions.”

“i would never question that,” eponine said, “for sure as sure i know nothing of it, nor do i want to know anything of it. i didn’t come here for your little revolution. but tell me, m’sieur enjolras, how well do you know the life of the poor? how well do you know the life of a laundress who has two children to raise and no man to earn a little extra? how well do you know the life of the chimney sweep, who has a family to support, who has brothers and parents who need food on the table, who cannot afford to die? dying is an awfully grand gesture, enjolras, and not everyone is able to sacrifice as much.” she looked straight into his eyes. “will your parents starve if you were to die? will your parents lose their only source of income? you can’t ask the people you proclaim to love so much to risk their families, risk their futures for you.”

and he was quieted, for once in his life, but by a perfect clarity. this girl who was not composed of light so much as she was woven out of the dark threads of night had an uncanny way of bringing dawn to those who best sought it. (those who led the light, he thought, rarely felt the glow of it on their skin.) and he was — gutted. like his insides had been carved out and thrown to rot behind some old trash heap.

she wasn’t – wrong. she wasn’t wrong, and it wasn’t right of him to ask that the people should die for his cause. it wasn’t perceptive of him not to expect this.

but she wasn’t finished. “you say you want to bring a – a future to the people, but can i ask who this future is for if all its beneficiaries are dead?”

was there an answer he could give? was there any answer he was qualified to give? he only stuttered out that she was right, looking as if all the cogs in his brain had come to an abrupt halt, or else had come apart. enjolras ran inkstained fingers through his egg yolk hair, looking a little frazzled even as his friends looked by parts worried and amused.

eponine had shrunk back against the big plush armchair that threatened to overwhelm her, looking timid, and a little scared, as if she was a schoolgirl who had spoken out of turn and who expected to be disciplined, with carefully sharpened words or with the crack of a ruler against soft palms, and it tugged at him a little bit — just a little bit (a negligible bit really, nothing to worry about) — to see her cower as he approached. “would you mind staying after?” he asked, extending a hand to pull her to her feet. “i have a few questions.”

“of course you would,” she answered brusquely and squared her shoulders to fling off the fear. but she took his hand anyway.

[repositoryofgrief]

so um hum this is probably not anything close to what you wanted and i'm super sorry for taking so long but this was literally the first thing that popped into my brain so here we are and there we have it. [terms & context will be given] also ofc thanks where it's due to iman for reading over this for me  to burn

They’re convinced that you need her, but you’re convinced you don’t. They’re convinced they can find her, but you tell them they won’t. It’s a battle. You’re not winning. (You still tell yourself you are.)

They’d never understand, though, why you’re hesitant to ask for her assistance (it’s more than the fact that she’s fu’erdai, though you can’t deny that your disdain for her arises partly from this fact), even though she’s known as Gui -- pretty much untraceable, with no agenda that he can follow. 

“She’s a wild card,” you protest, and you’re smothered with groans. (Someone throws a crumpled up napkin at you.) “She’s unpredictable and we don’t know what games she’s playing. Fuck, we don’t even know where she is.”

Which of course makes up a little more than half of your objections. You have to hand it to her, though, she’s a real professional. Thousands of documents leaked about the 2008 earthquake and not a single person implicated. (Unless you count the scores of government officials whose reputations were dragged through some heavy combination of mud and shame and public humiliation. And, of course, you.) But she’s nothing if not capricious and that same year the identities of thousands of dissidents were leaked to the CCP, in a job so flawless it could really only be her.

More than that, though, she’s the daughter of one of the men who had been instrumental to the construction of the firewall to begin with, and the blocking and censoring thereof of information. So yes, her motives are extremely suspect. Because you know her, you know how she is. Was.

Word around town is, though, that if you have enough money, she’s easily bought and willing to do your bidding -- computer-wise, anyway. Which is how his friends have come up with such a muddle-headed idea: to pool their money together and get her to crack the encryption on one of the tougher computers.

“She’s just as likely to sell us out as she is to help us,” he protests, but, they say, a chance in hell is better than none.

---

It’s the poet who finds her first, her legs crossed one over the other and a silver spoon stuck in one well-manicured hand (pinky finger quirked towards the heavens), slowly stirring a latte at one of the lesser known bars in Sanlitun. The low-hanging lights, like ivy swinging lazily off a trellis, dapple her dark hair orange and yellow, like she has caught fire on the barstool as the world centres itself around her person, one leg dangling, elongated by electric gold pumps with heels as tall as skyscrapers. He’s there for a poetry reading and he’s got the cynic and the scholar in tow (one by the ear, the other by the cuff) when he stops, very abruptly, and lifts his hand (fluttering, birdlike) to point at her.

“It’s her!” he hisses, so loudly the entire restaurant must have heard him.

“Who?”

“She’s the one we’ve been looking for!”

The cynic squints, edging around his friend’s body to get a better look. “How do you know it’s her?”

“The necklace she’s wearing.” The scholar likewise leans forward to look. It’s a dainty thing -- nothing too showy -- but a silver rose, though the rose is wilted, and its thorny stem digs rather sensually into her long neck, both alluring and disturbing all at once, somewhere between a caress and a chokehold.

“Go talk to her,” one hisses in his ear.

“You saw her first,” comes the other.

The poet swallows thoughtfully, or as thoughtful as a swallow can possibly be, takes one breath -- two breaths -- three -- and lilts towards her with his loping stride. He is all long arms and long fingers, but those his hands are delicate, they’re nowhere near as fragile as hers, so he figures he should be safe.

(He’s wrong, of course; her fingers can destroy worlds. But one step at a time, we’ll get there soon enough.)

He slides into the burnished leather stool next to hers and orders a scotch on the rocks and fiddles with his rings for a while before turning to her.

“So,” he starts, but she puts up a hand to stop him. (A poet knows the importance of hands. His have callouses along the index and middle fingers and are prone to cramping and he decorates them with polish and garish metal rings. Hers are very minimalist, all straight lines and soft palms and bare, neatly trimmed nails.)

She turns from her laptop (top of the line, he can tell) to face him. “Let me guess. You’re a cop, age, twenty-eight, who wants me to rat out some of my associates in exchange for some state secrets so you can get a promotion, right? Or you’re some bleeding heart who wants me to leak some documents and make the CCP piss themselves running in circles after me.”

“I -- “ It’s hard to get out words in front of a girl whose gaze is made of shards of ice that have not unfrozen even in a Beijing summer.

“You’d be pleased to know that I am no longer for hire,” she continues, offering him a cigarette. He shakes his head no and she shrugs, lighting on up for herself. “Broke ties with diedie dearest and everything. I’m bored of that old game, so I play my own now; those game don’t happen to include being paid money I’m not in any real and desperate need of. So thank you, but no thank you.” She turns back to her laptop, which he now notices is open to a romance drama (“Oh, Xiaoxiu! I love you so!” “Oh Chen Qiao, I thought you’d never say those words to me again!” Cue awkward kissing) and proceeds to very deliberately slip headphones on.

---

They don’t send the cynic in next because it’s likely her apathy will charm him faster than his persuasion can get to her, but rather the wit, with his charm and his jokes and the impassioned fever-shine of his eyes that matches the glitter-shine of the earring he wears. He smiles charmingly and compliments her on her  and she thanks him with a flick of long fingers that tell him resolutely to move away. You exchange glances with him across the bar (you are hunched over a simple bottle of Tsingtao, Lu Xun’s 阿Q正傳 hiding your face from her because it’s been too long and now is too bad a time) and nod aggressively at him to approach her.

One step, two steps, fifty steps across the hardwood floor to where she has perched herself, resplendent with a glass of red wine at three in the afternoon.

He clears his throat and circles round for another point of entry. “I know you’ve said that you no longer take jobs for money, but --”

She looks at him from beneath her lashes, which she flutter coyly. “Did I not make myself clear?” she asks in a voice sweet as poison, raising the glass to her lips and lowering them with a lip-shaped stain.

“Look, I don’t think you understand the nature of our organisation, and --”

“No, I understand perfectly.” (When she grins, it’s a feral grin, and it’s at once familiar and strange, and you’re reminded of college, when she could be bothered to care, made to care, persuaded to care. And you’re not sure what you’re more frightened of, the girl who cares too fast, too fervently, too much, or the girl who cares not at all.)

“Do you really think you’re the only ones?” she continues, hands tightening around the glass. (Ah, there it is. There is the flicker of recognition of an old quirk she hasn’t managed to repress. There is the familiarity. There, you remind yourself, is the way in. Proof she’s still the same person in some fundamental way, that you still know her in some fundamental way.) “In these last five years, do you know how many people have propositioned me? Bringing, I’ll have you know, much more lavish gifts than some scotch. I have jewelry rotting away at home that the First Lady would covet. I have dresses made of silk harvested from Hangzhou and embroidered in Suzhou by the masters. Do you really think that I haven’t seen it all? From grassroots organisations to government agencies -- who do you think hasn’t come to me to do their dirty work? If I was so easily bought to do you really think I’d be in such high demand? I take jobs that interest me and -- now -- I take jobs not at all. No amount of moral righteousness is going to change that.”

For the first time, perhaps, in a very, very long time, the wit is out of words. He gapes helplessly at the girl, his arms still crossed cocksure but a face a picture of confusion.

Despite your initial reluctance,  you swing your legs over the side of the barstool and count the clicks of your heels against the hardwood floor until you’re standing before her (74 steps; it had been 159 when you were dragged away). “Consider it reparations,” you cut in smoothly, and indicate to the other man that he should move back to the little table in the corner where the boys are sitting, out of sight but within hearing, unjustifiably pleased at the way your voice decidedly doesn’t crack, the way your hands don’t tremble, your lips don’t quiver. It’s been years, and you’ve changed and she’s changed and you both have such clearly different priorities now, but when she looks up at you, you could swear you’re in college again, and you see her for the first time across the room at the library, the both of you hunched over computers, skin sickly with lack of sun. (You had just broken up with your boyfriend, she with hers. You bonded over that. Remember?)

(No? Perhaps it’s for the best.)

“What reparations could I possibly make to you, xiansheng?” she questions, already turning away, the sharp edge of her hair matching the sharp edge of her jaw and the sharp edge to her voice.

You have no time for this. And less patience, it seems, than has been previously estimated. You put a hand the back of her laptop and push down with the intent of snapping it shut, but she’s quick, and her fingers are pushing in the opposite direction, her eyes making clear that if it were indeed possible to immolate with but a glance, you would have been a pile of ash on the tile long ago.

“The one you incurred when you ratted me out to the police and let me get sentenced to five years in jail when it was your leak we were working on. When you stood and you watched when they came and carted me away. When you made no efforts to contact me, or to apologise to me. When you saw my future go down the drain and you stood by, and you did nothing.”

“What was I supposed to have done?” she asks, slamming her glass down on the counter, and the old fire is back, and that brings something that, while not warmth, is still warming. “Weep? Beg at their feet? You should know I’ve never been that kind of person. Was I supposed to have broke you out of jail? Because I’m well-versed in the theft of information I must be similarly well-versed in the theft of a person? Did you forget what job we were working? Was I supposed to stop something so important for – what – you?”

She’s ice, you think. At cold enough temperatures, hot enough to scald.

“Seventy thousand casualties and absolutely no transparency or accountability. I had to find the information, hack into the government servers, which, as you can imagine, was just a walk in the park, cover my tracks, release the information in a carefully controlled way so that none of it traces back to me, which, as you can imagine, became significantly more difficult after my right hand man got himself incarcerated.”

“You told them,” you yell, forgetting yourself until you realise that the bartender has been shining the same glass for the last five minutes. “You told them,” repeated, softer. “How else could they have known?”

“Yes, I told them. Is that what you want to hear?” She looks at you with maddening calm and runs her fingers through short hair (it was long when you knew her). “I told the police because you were being careless and crude and you could have gotten me into a lot of trouble, and I needed you out of the way. Besides, it was petty crime I reported you for. If I hadn’t, you and I both would be in jail a lot longer -- if not worse.”

Numb, you stand and stare. She stares back at you, and for the first time you notice that perhaps she hasn’t gone on to some form of careless glory like you’d expected. There are dark circles beneath her eyes, which have grown much older than five years should warrant, and the fingers that are hovering over the keyboard flex and curl and -- tremble -- like a glass of water on a moving train, and her lipstick is not so much put on as it is smeared.

But still.

“There are other ways to get me out of the picture than to have me arrested,” you spit , clenching your hands behind your back because oh you have been operating under a mistake all along and you are the fool on the linoleum, hands bound, eyes wet, haughty but then brought low.

“Would you have listened to me if I had told you the truth? And would you have stayed away if I drove you off? I know you better than you know me and you think much more highly of your abilities than you should, to be honest. Convinced that you are always needed, that you will always be a help more than a hindrance. Not so. And perhaps I was a little cruel. But I’m not a good person; I’ve never pretended to be.”

“That’s it? No remorse.”

“I make a point of never feeling remorse. And I’m telling you right now that whatever harebrained scheme you’re cooking up that needs my abilities? You won’t be able to do. Government servers are far more secure and complex than you’re able to deal with.” Her hands press together like her lips do, and a furrow appears between her brows for half a second before she wipes it clean off her face.

“Then help.” You slide into the seat beside her and lean in very close, because five years isn’t so long a time as to make you forget that she once said she likes the smell of you, and that your handsome face is no detraction to your silver tongue.

Her lips tilt in the semblance of a smile, one side curling up pleasedly. “Oh, come on. I know you can be more persuasive than that.”

(If she once also said she likes the feel of your lips against hers, will you kiss her now, too?)

(The correct answer is you do.)

And when you pull back she leans into you and takes a stuttering breath, and you find to your amazement that her knuckles have gone white against the marble of the counter. “Interesting rhetorical strategy.”

“I didn’t think you’d be receptive to another argument, to be honest,” you admit, but you’re feeling a little faint yourself and your own hands have been fisted in the worn denim of your last good pair jeans.

She holds up a hand. “To clarify: I didn’t say I was receptive to your argument. But I will agree to give it some more thought, even if I think this entire venture is foolish, because I remember the days before my father made it big and you’ve never had those days.”

“Should I--?”

“Don’t bother,” she says. “I’ll find you.”

---

She does, though she makes you wait for it. You’re still a little uneasy, you and her, and the group seems to have noticed, because they’ve stopped asking questions, which is both less and more of an annoyance because you don’t want anyone to feel as if they must tiptoe around you like they’re walking on eggshells. Not a healthy group dynamic, in your opinion. (But you don’t want anyone asking, either, because you’ve just picked yourself back up again and there’s nothing you’d like more than to move forward from this fixed point in time.)

Though when she breezes in the door of his apartment as if she’s ushered in personally by the East Wind himself everyone falls silent, scattered as they are around your sparse apartment (two photographs, a glass coffee table, a black sofa) and looks up, hands, fluttering over keyboards, eyes not knowing where to glance. You’re the last to notice, but only because you’ve been busying yourself with editing the air conditioner repairman’s most recent blog post about the inherent injustice in the hukou system. Though when the hush comes it comes with a surety that blocks out even stillness. She meets your eyes with a smile.

“I come with a few strings attached.”

It is only the fervently adoring glances she’s showered by from the rest of his friends that stops him from rolling his eyes. Of course she would. She had conditions the first time they met, too. (“Don’t fall in love with me.” That had turned out fairly well.)

“One: compromise my safety and I will spill your secrets. I wasn’t afraid to do it then and I won’t be afraid to do it now. Two: if I want you off this venture, you’re off and you stay off until further notice. No whining, complaining, or keeping me from my work. I expect to be paid in shoes and waimai. Is that reasonable?”

The lark smiles appreciatively and walks forward to welcome her, bare feet slapping softly across the slippery expanse of your living room floor. And you smile too, more hesitantly. Not because you’ve forgiven her or because she’s looking for forgiveness, but you’re thinking that maybe you’ll start over, and maybe this time you’ll be different, the two of you and your computers and your busy fingers that will someday orchestrate the collapse of this entire damned affair.

----------------------

ccp = chinese communist party (probably more accurately gcd, since the pinyin is gongchandang, but it's better known in the anglosphere as the ccp, so i went with that)

the incident 'five years ago' to which i refer is the 2008 earthquake in sichuan. there's been another earthquake caused by the same fault line, and i encourage everyone to donate if they can, though i'd do some serious research first, and i wouldn't trust the chinese red cross.

鬼 (gui) means demon, or ghost.

富二代 (fu'erdai) refers to the generation of young people whose parents made their money through capitalism during the 80s and 90s, when china was integrating capitalism into the economy. i have no love for those capitalists and no love for fu'erdai either, but someone like thenardier is likely to be able to make money off of it. fun fact: the real life guy who created the firewall? can't get over it, apparently.

户口 (hukou) is a household registration system in china.

先生 (xiansheng) = sir

[repositoryofgrief]

title winds blow, rivers freeze   fandom les misérables characters/pairings aro ace!enjolras, genderfluid!eponine, platonic best friendship rating g status complete summary the night before the revolution, the bird and the rebel have a heart to heart. fluff(ish?)  iman, i believe, mentioned that there were too few aromantic asexual enjolrases in fandom, and i think there are far too few genderfluid eponines, and e/é friendship makes me just as happy as e/é so. C:

so the title is a reference to lines supposedly uttered by jing ke, one of my favourite figures (also a failed revolutionary, though he was of the assassin rather than revolt flavour) in chinese history. by the side of the yi river as he set off for the state of qin, and accompanied by the music of one of his dearest friends, he sang, ‘winds blow, rivers freeze. the hero fords, never returns!” (風蕭蕭兮易水寒，壯士一去兮不復還)

“So tell me about your plans for the future,” Eponine requested the night before the storm as they’re curled into his side like a kitten nuzzled against its mother, the moonlight dappling their delicate face with an unearthly sort of glow. (They looked so at home in the fluid, river-silver glow.) “What will you do, after?”

Enjolras turned to look at them, freeing one hand from beneath a pillow to wrap around their shoulders while the other weaves its way into their oceans of long, dark hair. “I -- don’t know, to be honest with you. I always thought that once the revolution was over I could really start to -- I don’t know, live. I’ve concentrated all my efforts on this for so long that it almost feels like failure if it doesn’t not succeed. Because what will I have to care for, after?”

“You can’t carry the weight of the world on your shoulders forever, Enjolras,” Eponine muttered into the silk of his nightshirt. They frowned at him, eyebrows furrowing and mouth set in a firm line of utter disapproval.

“Perhaps not. But somehow I feel as though it is a boulder attached to my leg and I shall always feel the mass of it to drag me down into oblivion.” But though his words were heavy, his heart was light as they tucked themselves against his collarbone and their hands traced constellations out of the ligaments of his spine. “What will you do then, after?”

“Hell if I could tell you.” Their breezy chuckle was like the chime of bells on a late summer sunset. “Ideally, though? I’d love to live in a cottage someplace quiet in the country, away from the chaos of the cities and the chaos of you, monsieur Enjolras. I’d have flowers in the front garden and dried herbs hanging in the gardens and I’d marry some nice, steady person with no fires of revolution boiling in their busy brains like you, my friend, and we’ll eat jam on toast each morning, and I’ll bake garlic bread with rosemary to keep them remembering me.”

“Can’t imagine someone not loving you, bird,” he said affectionately. “Though you seemed to have planned in some detail these events of the future. Who is your intended, then? Marius?”

“As if,” Eponine snorted, poking him in the ribs. He squirmed away from them, laughing. “Someone closer to ‘Parnasse, maybe.”

“I thought you said you wanted someone steady.”

They were quiet for a long time afterwards, their breaths tiny pinpricks in the large blanket of still, and Enjolras gazed at them out of the corners of his eyes to see if they were asleep. Eponine’s eyes were wide open, though, and stared resolutely up at the ceiling. “Montparnasse is as steady as I could expect him to be,” they finally said, mouth curling into a slow, dreamy grin. “I could be happy with him, I think. What about you?”

“What?”

“Will you settle down?”

“If I must.”

“Who with?”

He shrugged. “No one. I’ve never had much of an inclination in that direction, you know. Never really wanted romantic entanglements -- or sexual ones either, at that. It was always more important that I planned well for this revolution, and besides, I don’t think it would suit me. I have friends, I have their love and companionship, and I like that a lot better.”

“Oh.” Eponine considered this, chewing on their lip. “But Enjo, I don’t want you to be alone.”

“Why do you assume not wanting a partner means always being alone, bird? I have my friends, I have my causes, I have the people; I will never be alone. Perhaps I, too, will move to the country in a little cottage right next to yours with the birds chirping outside the windows and some ivy creeping up the trellis, and be plagued by the shouts of your one or three children. Would you stop worrying then?”

Eponine laughed, though not too loudly because there were people sleeping in the next room, and not too hard because there was a bruise that had taken its dandy time to blossom up their hip and ribcage.

“I’m a natural worrier,” they said. “Don’t think you could ever get me to stop. But speaking of which --” they rolled themselves over onto their good side, propping up a dark head tangled with curls to stare into his bright blue eyes. “Can you promise me you’ll keep my brother away tomorrow?”

“Eponine,” he groaned. “I can’t make Gavroche do anything he doesn’t want to do, you know that. He’s his own man, he can make his own decisions --”

“He’s fourteen.”

“And old enough to know what he wants. I’ll make you the promise that I’ll see to it he’s not going to be doing anything that would put him at higher risk but I can’t guarantee his safety.” They were angry, he could see that, but even as Eponine turned away he cradled them to him and pressed a kiss to their neck. “Get some sleep, bird. Tomorrow will come too soon and then it will be too late.”

He never heard if they answered or not.

It didn't matter anyway.

[repositoryofgrief]

title chiaroscuro  fandom les misérables characters/pairings enjolras/éponine rating g status complete summary it's a strange town for a born-a-baptist blonde from baltimore and wraith borne of the shadows of chinatown. [au, drabble] 

-------------------------------------

Tell me about the dream where we pull the bodies from the lake                                                     and dress them in warm clothes again

-------------------------------------

He lives in the seedier part of town, where the neon lights flicker and buzz under the hood of night and the moon falls sweetly through slightly slanted slats over the window. He’s got a pencil tucked behind one ear and slightly calloused, ink-stained fingers that fidget and twist up into his greasy, oil-stained shirt and twine over, under, behind his suspenders. There is an electric energy that courses through him which makes him feel a little light-headed and giddy, though his impatience stains his veins like poison.

She should be here already, he thinks as he waits. We agreed to meet at ten. It’s ten-thirty already, and the cracked timepiece on the mantle spits the seconds out to him like some sinister metronome, reminding him of urgency, of the danger, of the threat. (She-should-be-here she-should-be-here she-should-be-here.)

When finally there comes a sharp knock on the door, he almost leaps out of his seat to crack the door open and confirm that it’s her. And there she stands, a little slip of a thing, in someone’s flimsy castoff sequined dress, a shadow in silver and stars, holding in her hands a folder and in her eyes a grin.

“You’re late.”

“And you’re impatient,” she says, shoving the file at him and letting herself into the room.

He nudges the door closed with his foot and thumbs through the papers she’d collected while she makes herself comfortable on the dingy settee that someone’s grandmother has died in and watches him, intently, and does not look away. People in New York, he’s noticed, are practiced in the art of looking away, staring at a fixed point in space and pretending not to notice.

She gazes at him brazenly, without any shame, and he knows these are new mores for a new age, but he’s still not used to someone like -- well -- her -- to be so open and brash, and he doesn’t expect someone who comes from so traditional a background to so quickly adopt these American fashions.

“Were you nervous I’d get stopped and jailed?” she smirks, draping one leg over the arm of the chair and propping her dark head up onto one grotesquely delicate arm. “Has the Tin Man found a heart?”

“I was nervous,” he is quick to correct her (though it isn’t correcting if she’s the one who is correct to begin with), “because I was scared I wouldn’t have the materials necessary for my last article.”

“Does anyone even read your newspaper?” she grouses. He doesn’t deign to answer her, which is good, because she isn’t looking for an answer. She stares at the peeling yellow wallpaper that’s papered over water stains on his ceiling and thinks how lucky he is to have her, and how lucky he is to have had the money to buy her services, because this pretty little rich boy would not have the privilege of her company otherwise. She has better things to do, nicer places to be, sweeter people to hang around.

Still, she stays, and it’s only partly because of the money. And he is glad she stays, and it’s only partly because of the silent company she often offers to lessen the crushing weight of stillness. New York is a big city, after all, and it is so easy to feel alone.

-------------------------------------

How it was late, and no one could sleep, the horses running                                                     until they forget that they are horses.

-------------------------------------

Blonde-haired blue-eyed born a Baptist in Baltimore who graduated from Brown is the very picture of the Modern American Boy in all his vigour and youth and idealism and looks, except that Modern American Boys are not often communist sympathisers. Modern American Boys also do not go out of their way to ruin their good looks staying up all hours of the night so that bruises dull the keenness of their brisk blue eyes and dirt weighs down their amber curls, but that’s what he does.

No, modern American boys go to speakeasies and kiss daring girls and glow and glitter under the glimmer of electric lights and they forget, forget, forget all they lost in the wake of the war. They close their eyes and pretend not to see, because to see is to know and to know is to remember and to remember is to die a thousand times over. You can’t, after all, recapture the innocence you lost, but you can fake its brilliance with borrowed luminance that drown out the singing of the stars.

It was, then, appropriate that he refuses to not see, because he has always been marked for death.

He takes his coffee black and the caffeine tides him over under the sun has broken through the blanket night has laid over the world, whereupon he crawls like a cat to sleep in the warm rays of morning.

She thinks it’s ridiculous and mildly vain of him to do so -- there’s hardly anything preventing him from sparing the expense of candlelight and working by day, after all, but then, what does she know? She’s just a Chinatown brat who really shouldn’t be hanging out with men like him but he likes it and she doesn’t mind it, so she stays for as long as it pleases her, blowing where the wind will take her and she always has done.

Like a leaf feathered along by the hollow breeze, she does things in spurts and she languishes like the light on a summer day. He sprints, sustained and high-energy, and then crashes. She cradles his golden head in her small brown hands one day during one such crash, when he’s fighting to keep his eyes open and she’s telling him to just let them close. It’s ridiculous, she thinks, the way he thinks he’s superhuman, both less and more than he is. The way he thinks that he’s beyond sleep, at least until he finishes this last article, thinks he’s beyond light, when he is the very embodiment of it.

She sets his head in the dust when she hears him start to snore and crawls on all fours to the floorboard under which he’s hidden his stash of booze. Not that he drinks it, of course. You can take the boy out of his bourgeois household, but you can never, not ever, take the bourgeois out of the boy. He’s still a strict temperate, lips chaste of both kisses and alcohol, though his friends often drink less-than-genuine toasts to the longevity of their government. She picks at the floorboard, prying it up with chipped nails and calloused fingers, and steals a sip from a silver flask. The fire burns through her, heat licking at her insides, and she breathes out slowly, feeling her lungs shrivel and her liver cry and her throat convulse in agony. This is pain, but it is exquisite. Forbidden. And so, of course, all the more desirable.

-------------------------------------

Look at the light through the windowpane. That means it’s noon, that means we’re inconsolable.

-------------------------------------

He’s  always maybe a little disappointed when she has better things to do than to swing ‘round his place, which is maybe (only maybe) why he’s a little loose with his spare change and asks her to do information runs for him when he doesn’t necessarily need it.

She’s always maybe a little scared whenever he asks it of her, though a thousand protestations she might make to the contrary. Dark alleys do not frighten her, not bureaucrats nor policemen, but the night would often close in on her and settle like a lover about her shoulders to remind her of her desperate lonesomeness. Often on these illicit runs she would gravitate towards the flickering electric lights of some twenty-four-hour restaurant or a dim sum parlour like a moth drawn to the flame, but she always runs before she’s hurt. (If there’s one thing she’s good at, it’s running away.)

Sometimes from the dark of the windows he gazes down at her, golden curls bowed to catch a glimpse of the waif who slips from shadow to shadow like those are the people among which she most belongs, a paper, a file, sometimes a photograph clasped between fingers calloused from years of doing odd jobs and drifting nowhere in particular. There is something about her that makes him ache with something close to longing. He feels restless when she is around -- his fingers yearn to reach for her, his eyes get the better of him as if they are magnetised to her person, and the wanderlust his mouth feels will only be satisfied when it knows hers intimately.

Which is,

very distinctly, he thinks,

wrong.

He has more important things to worry about, bigger things planned, a world to change before he can stop for a primrose smile. (But she forces him to a halt, he has no choice in the matter. The world is moving so quickly around them, people rushing from one place to the next, that is it good, or so he rationalises, that he allows himself this time of admiration. Adoration? He can’t rightly say..)

(Love, too, is revolutionary.

But he doesn’t know this yet.)

-------------------------------------

Tell me how all this, and love too, will ruin us. These, our bodies, possessed by light.                                                     Tell me we’ll never get used to it.

-------------------------------------

It isn’t love that drives her lips to his (though if it is, it’s a lazy sort of love), but need, a compulsion to be so near a person their scent (lilac and grease and a certain indescribable sweetness that sits heavy on her tongue) tangles in her hair and their skin so electric that she’s shocked to the marrow. She’s even more shocked, though, when he starts kissing her back, his lips responding eagerly to hers, a caress ardent and urgent as the lick of flames, and his hands flutter up to be near her face. She stops for a second, and thinks she might sob, but he dips his head and presses his mouth to her collarbone (and she feels worshipped, feels the reverence rolling off him in great waves that threaten to overwhelm) and she holds his pale hands to her dark face and soaks it in.

Sudden as it starts, it’s over. He’s gasping, one hand pressing up against his heart as if to force it still, but her breathing is steady, is content, is luxuriating in everything kisses should have been, but never were, until -- well. A small smile settles on her lips as she runs her fingers from his neck to the small of his back, and he shivers.

“Stay tonight?” he asks, because loneliness is his own secret ache and his best articles are written when she is there to tear them apart.

“I had made plans with the President and his wife tonight,” she teases, “but I’m sure they won’t mind if I blow them off.”

When the bitter ghost of dawn haunts the golden sliver of jagged rooftops, they agree through mutual silence not to speak of it, but then, they don’t have to. He will watch the sun fall on her upturned face to illuminate a smile that could put Apollo to shame and she will shyly tangle her fingers in his. Something has shifted, but words are not of use -- a little sleepy smirk on the girl curled up on his couch says more than an entire tome, and the way she pushes her fingers through his hair better than a mouth full of prophecy.

He could bathe in the glow of her chiaroscuro forever, this girl woven from darks and lights but is never once anything less than herself.

-------------------------------------

the lines are from richard siken's scheherazade. 

psst i also want to make clear that his throwaway line in the beginning about chinese-american eponine being from so 'traditional a background' is racist and unacceptable, because i had initially wanted to set up for conflict there and discussion of enjolras' privilege but then i never really got round to it so. yeah. just so we're clear.

[repositoryofgrief]

title i have weathered worser days/augustine fandom les misérables characters/pairings enjolras/éponine rating g status complete summary eyes are supposed to be the windows to the soul, but hers are blank and bleak, and bore straight into his bones. [au]

the quotes are from vienna teng’s song augustine. this isn’t…strictly related to windows, but halfway through this it kind of ran away from me.

———

Oh my god, what have I done? Chasing some mirage in my Mojave sun Don’t say every chance is lost Please don’t say anything at all

———

Eyes are supposed to be the windows to the soul, but hers are blank and bleak, and bore straight into his bones. He shivers, shifting his stance before the one-way mirror of the interrogation room, assuring himself that, despite the smug smile and the gaze that is trained straight upon him, she cannot see him. For while her glass green eyes seem all seeing, even she cannot defy science.

Or at least, she —

— shouldn’t.

But the truth is he doesn’t know anymore, at least not with this impossible girl. He’s chased her across three states and seven major jewelry heists, and who knows how many petty crimes, into the wide expanse of desert where he ran her to the ground. Though perhaps that isn’t the correct turn of phrase. She’d slipped up. Her sly fingers hadn’t been fast enough, and there had been a hotel room key at the scene of the last robbery, where she’d made off with three hundred thousand in diamonds and gold.

It had been a routine enough bust — they’d found her right where they expected her, a room 256 at a Sunset Motel near sundown, the kind of cocktail evening that was made for neat closure and movie-endings.

There, then, is the trouble. He drags a hand down his face and squeezes his eyes tightly closed until he can see shapes behind his lids. Because he has, after all, chased her across three states during seven major jewelry heists, and he knows this girl is smart, he knows this girl is wily, he knows this girl like her doesn’t just make a mistake like that.

“Calm your ass down, Enjolras,” the chief had said, patting him on the back with the sort of finality that let him know he isn’t to dwell on this if he wants to see that raise at the end of the month but, to be honest, he’d rather see justice done than more money in his bank account. “The chit made a mistake. Happens to all, even the best — which she’s not. Don’t think too much on it.”

He’s always been an overthinker, though, so of course he overthinks, standing not two inches away from the face she presses lightly against the pane of glass — not that she would know he’s here. He’d made the arrest too easily. She had all but presented herself to him, disentangling herself from the mass of limbs and bedsheets she’d been previously occupied with, making flirty remarks and commenting on his musculature, as if this — to land in jail — had been her plan all the while. And he knows beyond a measure of doubt that she’s working with a partner, a partner who is as mysterious as she is, twice the shadowy figure.

“Screw this,” he whispers, in defiance of her grin, and turns on his heel. “If she doesn’t crack, I swear to god I will.”

She’s sitting placidly down when he walks in, her hands twined and her head bowed in some vague approximation of prayer, dark curls growing straight up to heaven. She doesn’t look up to even acknowledge his presence when he drops into the seat opposite her, slamming her files on the table before him.

“Your name is Éponine Jondrette, you’re nineteen, and you were born in Argent, California and you’ve been arrested for vandalism, theft, and trespassing.”

“All brand new information, I’m sure,” she drawls, flicking her eyes up at him. “There a point to this recitation, officer?”

“All this we knew and you didn’t say a word. Would you like to know how quickly we can dig up more on you?”

“How much do you want to bet this is a bluff?” She addresses the vacant air beside her, and Enjolras feels a surge of annoyance rush through his veins. (It is a bluff. There’s shockingly little information about Éponine Jondrette, as if she’s lived off the grid her whole life and only surfaced at age fourteen to begin committing petty crimes and now, taking part in jewelry heists.)

“My point is you have a record.”

“I’ve never been charged.”

“But it’s a record nonetheless. And jewelry theft is —” he inhales sharply. “— quite the addition. Especially in the amounts you’ve been lifting.”

She looks at him full-on at last. “Don’t hint at things, officer, it makes you dreadfully unappealing. If you want to bribe me or ask for favours it’s high time you came out and said so.”

“We could reduce your sentence for the name of your accomplice, and his location.”

“She—” Éponine is careful to enunciate the word clearly, “is someplace you’ll never find her. Far away on a tropical island, perhaps, where I will be on my way to meet her tomorrow for a rendezvous before we split the lot and live as happy old ladies together.”

Éponine leans forward, tracing one brown finger along the edge of his jawline. “Justice is scarce for people like me, but only if you can keep me long enough to drag me to court. And these chains couldn’t keep me here if they tried, officer.”

“So there is indeed honour among thieves,” he finds it in himself to say as her hands trace down his jawline and a knot makes its way up his throat.

“More than there is among cops, officer.”

———

In sand and thorns I’m walking forth Bare and blinking as the day that I was born Bells in spires of China white Ring for an Augustine tonight

———

Enjolras gets some answers, finally, finally, finally, when he’s interrogating her again and Bossuet pokes his head in the door and tells him to go fix it because someone’s just robbed another jewelry store, and the chief isn’t happy.

He rounds on her, leaning over her with both hands spread, but she’s far from intimidated. She smiles at him, cool as you please, and advises him to go check up on it. “I don’t think the boss would be too pleased if you let another thief slip through your fingers,” she murmurs, the very picture of innocence. He doesn’t trust her as far as he can throw her, so he has Bossuet stand guard while he rushes to the chief’s office to smooth things over.

When he rushes back he half-expects to find her gone, and Bossuet lying half-conscious on the ground, but they’re playing a game of Go Fish when he barges in. She’s a good one for disappearing, this one, and slier than a fox among the hens.

“Do you have any kings?” she asks, even as Bossuet lays his cards down to greet his friend. Enjolras indicates with a toss of his head that the other man should leave, which he obeys without complaint, and he sits himself opposite her, as has been his habit for the last few days. She’s been charged (finally), due to evidence presented by one Detective Enjolras, but that doesn’t mean the case is solid. They have evidence stacked up against her for one heist only — the diamonds were found in a safebox beneath the hotel bed, the gold hidden beneath the first layer of clothing in her suitcase — but they by no means have anything to tie her back to the other thefts.

“You know how bad the justice system is for girls like you, right?” he asks softly when he’s comfortable (enough) in the chair. “You’re definitely going away, and for a sentence far harsher and longer than any white girl in your position. If you’d give up the name of your cohort, I can ask them for clemency and lessen your sentence.”

“I am aware of both facts,” she says. “And I assure you I don’t need your clemency.”

“Then what is it?” he growls. “Why are you here if you keep maintaining that you’re going to be out of here soon? Why do you stay?”

“The truth?” she asks, extending a pinky finger. He scoffs at her offering (they are not, after all, all of five years old), but she’s in earnest, so he hooks his pinky around hers and prepares for a rigamarole the likes of which the world has not known since Scheherazade.

“I was curious about you,” she admits, free and easy as you please, and he’s floored.

“What are you saying, exactly?”

She takes her own sweet time about it, shifting first this way, then that, like a flower bending in the wind, to get comfortable in the deliberately uncomfortable chairs of the interrogation room. She threads fingers through her hair, taps her foot against a leg of the table, and pouts a little, until he’s convinced she’s toying with him for her own amusement’s sake (she is).

“It’s not like I haven’t known my fair share of cops.” She pauses, then grins, then adds, “Some more intimately than others. But you — I have to give some credit where it’s due, officer. You’re not as clever as me, but you are fair-ly wi-ly in-deed. So I had to know. That’s always been my weakness, you know. The one place I go wrong. I’m too curious for my own good, they say. Always want to know if I can take just that little bit more, go up against a safe just a little bit more secure, understand a cop that’s been chasing me across three states just to drag me back to Utah and charge me with whatever he can scrap up on me.” Éponine pulls a face of comically exaggerated shock. “Whoops. Shouldn’t have said that. Now you know too much about me again. And then I’d have to kill you and, well, that just makes the game no fun to play.”

“The game?” Enjolras doesn’t know how he manages to feel both flattered and insulted, but he takes it. God knows when she’d be so forthright with information again.

“The chase, of course! Aren’t you going to come after me once I break out of prison? Or are you not up for the challenge?”

“I — “ he starts to vocalise, though he doesn’t quite know what he wants to say to her yet. You’re so strange, his brain wants to say, but his ears are telling him to tell her that if she’s so confident he’ll never catch her, there’s no point to this game anyway. And then his hands jump in with the notion of asking her What makes you think I want to play this game with you anyway? (I am an officer of the law. I am the upholder of all that is righteous and just. I am, perhaps, lying to myself about that last one.)

Thankfully, for both his sake and the girl’s, he’s interrupted with the slamming open of the doors.

“If you don’t mind, Detective Enjolras, I have an uncharged suspect sitting in room three waiting to be questioned about a certain larceny case he may or may not be involved in, if you care to have the care to wander down there, since you managed to scrape up some free time to talk to a suspect in a case that is closed, who will be going to court in a few days.”

He bites his tongue to keep from rebuking the chief because he does need this job, after all, even if the man is unwilling to recognise that he has not, indeed, caught Éponine’s accomplice and the case — the larger case — is not, in fact, closed and pulls himself to the seat to room three, where he will interview a man with a scruff, whose ashy cigarette smell is worn with nowhere near the panache of the girl with the glassy mirror-eyes that only reflected emotion back at you who is waiting for him in room one.

(She’s not waiting for him.

She’s long gone.)

———

Lead me now, I understand Faith is both the prison and the open hand Bells on low on high Will you ring for Augustine tonight?

What she leaves in the room: a postcard, with the line this is all you need to know scrawled on the back, a little pile of cigarette ash, still curling plumes of smoke into the air, and a single lacquered red bean. What she takes — handcuffs (his, actually, though he doesn’t know how she managed to filch them), her dark heavenwards hair, the air of Mojave magic that travels where she does.

He takes the card, though it’s evidence, really. The chief isn’t pleased (in fact, he’s fuming), but though they scour the room and later, the video surveillance of the room, they can find nothing, and are forced to let it go.

Except him. And it’s no sense of moral righteousness that convinces him he must find her.

What makes you think I want to play this game with you anyway?

What she said that day about curiosity — perhaps it was true for her, or perhaps she was good at reading him as well, because curiosity has always been his downfall. And it will hound him, he knows, if he doesn’t track her down. If he doesn’t prove his mettle. If he doesn’t show her that he has guts enough and brains enough to play this game — and better — win it. And it’s not justice he’s seeking, but —

— validation.

So he waits for the day when he’ll pack his bags and take his car out to the Mojave, towards the particular sprig of desert lily, towards her infuriating smirk and her eyes that looked like a shattered sea.

(He has always, he thinks, loved to solve riddles.)

———

notes:

i’m going to be honest here and say i have absolutely no idea what’s going on. this is like a runaway train that’s going down a mountain with no way to stop itself and i also don’t know when enjolras turned into javert. (okay, i do. obviously canon!enjolras would never have been a policeman, and any incarnation of activist!enjolras would pretty quickly realise the failings of our justice system and the way police engage in oppressive behaviour and are an arm of the state, and how police brutality targets primarily people of colour, gsm, immigrants (usually also of colour, etc). but i did want to have police!enjolras so instead of trying to keep him enjolras as we know him, i tried to think about how his key characteristics would work in a person who has made the decision to become a cop instead of a person who would of course be anti-cop. i did still want to keep some awareness of the injustice of the justice system, though, so. i hope it worked? and i realised halfway through writing it that he was sounding dangerously like a certain police inspector…whoops.)