Notes: Aside from being AU-ish, this is also a blend of book/musical/movie canon, because there are many things in the three versions that seemed to suit the narrative flow of this story (translation: sorry, guys, the last time I read the book was ten years ago). Title and chapter breaks are courtesy of the band Stars, which you should all check out because they are amazing and their songs are so the boys of the barricade. Suggestions and constructive criticism are very welcome. Onward!

Years Built on Sand

The revolution wasn't bad,

We hit the streets with all we had.

One morning, he is pick-pocketed on his way to the university.

She barrels into him, filling his ribcage with elbows and his mouth with dark, dark hair. His hands automatically fly to her upper arms to steady her and she ducks her head, murmuring apologies as prettily as any well-bred Parisian mademoiselle despite her stained, ragged clothes. He lets her go and she scurries away, and in his mind Grantaire's sneering because of course Enjolras wouldn't know how to hold on to a woman, even the slips and tatters of one.

There's a strange lightness in his pocket that wasn't there before. He digs his fingers into it, feels the empty space where his wallet should be.

He sighs. It's his fault, certainly, for taking the roundabout way, for venturing so close to the Court of Miracles. He'd wanted to see how the people lived, and it had cost him the last few sous that weren't in the bank. His father had cut him off last month.

He chases after the thief, bitterness giving his feet wings. She weaves through the crowds as fluidly as an antelope disappearing into waves of African grass, but he is tall and his legs are long and the sunlight picking out the brown in her hair gives her away. He shoulders into the gaps between the beggars and illicit vendors that she so effortlessly slips through, and finally he corners her against a stone wall in one of those dirty little side-streets reeking with piss and vomit from the night before.

He grabs her by the arm. She tries to wrench away, but his grip is strong. Above the din of the slums, the clatter of police-horses' hooves leach into their ears. The high-society affectations flee from her speech; she curses at him in a ferocious stream of argot.

Marius would reel at this verbal onslaught, but Enjolras is made of stronger stuff and so he calmly says, "I believe you have something of mine. Return it, and we shall speak no more of the matter."

Her eyes are wide and defiant, bright on her soot-smeared face, but the sound of hooves draws nearer and her expression flares into something close to panic.

"Fine," she spits out. "Doesn't feel like there's much here, anyway." Her voice is shockingly raspy for a woman's and it does not, does not send shivers down his spine.

She throws the wallet at him and it bounces to the muck at their feet. He releases her arm but, instead of running as he expected her to, she takes one step backward into the darkness of the alley, pressing herself closer to the wall. She doesn't move a muscle, doesn't even seem to draw breath while the police thunder past, stern silhouettes of men and horses casting shadows on the upturned faces of the wretched. She is looking at the police and Enjolras is looking at her, taking note of her sharp collarbones, her hollowed-out cheeks, the way her waist caves in.

Once the law enforcers have gone, she notices his inquiring gaze and huffs impatiently under the weight of it. "They got a good look at me last night," she explains. "I'm lying low for a while."

He retrieves his wallet, grimacing as slime coats his fingertips. "This is your version of lying low?"

She smirks. "Even the wicked must eat, Monsieur."

There are gaps in her teeth and mats in her hair. She can't be much younger than he is, but he can already see it clearly, the map of the future, how poverty will soon ruin the contours of her face until she'll look like one of those defeated gray women slumped on doorsteps begging for alms.

Overcome by a wave of compassion, he holds the wallet out to her. "Keep the money," he says. "You need it more than I do."

She lifts her chin. "I don't need charity."

He raises an eyebrow, affronted in spite of himself. "And yet you would happily filch this from my person? The end result is the same. Today, you don't starve."

"I starve on my own terms," she retorts. "Later, bourgeois boy." She whips out of the alleyway as quickly as a flash of lightning, and he is left staring at a stone wall. There is much about the world that he has yet to understand.

When we go down,

You're so ferocious.

He sees her again a few weeks later as he exits the Café Musain, still flushed from the heated turn that the evening's political discussion had taken. She's talking to the child Gavroche, her head bent low, the ends of her tangled hair sweeping across the gamin's dirty cheeks. Because they're right ahead of him on the path, he contemplates crossing to the other side of the street or simply turning around and walking in the opposite direction.

Absurd, he tells himself. Leaders of the proletariat revolution do not go out of their way to avoid street urchins.

She touches Gavroche's shoulder in a gesture intimately recognizable to anyone who has a sibling. The little boy nods once and then speeds away, the back of his patched green coat melting into the shadows. Enjolras draws nearer and she straightens up and their gazes meet.

"Oh, it's you," she says pleasantly. Her eyes glitter in the darkness.

"Good evening," he responds. "I didn't know Gavroche had a sister."

"He has two. And two brothers as well, although that's an interesting story in itself…" She starts walking and he falls into step beside her and she tells him a tale about little boys inside an elephant. It feels very strange for him to be listening instead of talking, to concentrate, not on lofty orations or philosophical debates, but on the patter of ordinary lives as stars rain down their silver light on the unquiet streets. All nights are replete with furtive footsteps and whores' whispers and the metallic rustle of coins, but in this particular instance, the sounds of secret evil are drowned out by her husky voice.

They turn the corner and she stops in front of what looks like a deserted yet well-maintained house, the owners most likely on vacation.

"This is where you leave me, Monsieur," she says, fishing into her pockets. "Unless you want to be an accessory." The starlight glints off a variety of lock-picks.

He stares at her nimble fingers expertly fiddling with the bits of metal. "You are no longer lying low, I suppose."

"No," she agrees, flashing him a gap-toothed smile. "I am very easy to forget."

He should have known that, among other things, the girl would be a liar.

There's a fire in your chest,

I see the flame.

He learns her name one afternoon when he brings an inebriated Marius home. Wine greases the wheels of friendship, and the Baron's son had just been initiated rather spectacularly. Enjolras staggers under the weight as the other man leans heavily against him.

A door flies open and suddenly she is there, racing down the steps, her eyes wide in alarm.

"Monsieur Marius!" she cries. Her gaze skitters accusingly to Enjolras. "What have you done- never mind, here, let me take him."

"I would not wish to interrupt your crime spree," Enjolras says coolly, gesturing with his free hand to the gaping door.

"I live here, sir," she snaps with such wounded dignity that he has to suppress a flicker of guilt.

"Éponine," croons Marius as his prone arm is transferred from a broad shoulder to a much skinnier one. "They have murdered me, Éponine."

"Yes, yes, and I shall avenge you," she tells him in soothing tones, her face softened by devotion.

Enjolras looks away.

If courage is a live wire,

I see it in your eyes.

He does not know how to be poor. He realizes that now as his stomach rumbles while the sun sets over Saint-Michel. His boots are of fine quality and should hold up for another year, but his feet are starting to hurt from walking around so much.

The girl, Éponine, is leaning against a streetlamp, munching on a loaf of black bread. She nods when she sees him, breaks off a piece of her supper, and presses it into his hands.

"Don't," she says when he tries to protest. "I know hunger when I see it. You're about to faint, bourgeois boy."

"I am called Enjolras."

"Yes, I know," she replies with the exasperated, dismissive air of one who knows many things but doesn't care much for a lot of them.

They eat in companionable silence, watching vendors hawk the last of their wares and the occasional carriage roll past. The bread is hard on his teeth, tasteless on his tongue, thick and rough going down his throat. He finds himself longing for a creamy pat of butter or a good soft cheese, comforts he had taken for granted in the simpler days of his childhood.

"That was a nice speech earlier, in the square," she remarks. "You're very good at that… talking thing."

"Oration," he supplies automatically. He hadn't noticed her among the crowd. How differently would it have colored the moment, if he'd known she was there?

Not much, he insists to himself. What is one person in the grand scheme of things?

"Pity the National Guard doesn't appreciate a show," she muses. The militia had shown up just as the cheers had gotten raucous, and the students had promptly scattered.

"They will soon learn that the people's voice cannot be hushed," he says. "One day, they will be forced to listen."

"Or to shut you up."

He shrugs. "An occupational hazard."

"You're walking on dangerous ground." She sounds melancholy in the light of the fading sun, breadcrumbs trailing from her thin fingers. "The situation's getting worse. This city's a powder keg."

"I do what must be done." For you. He glances at her profile, at the flutter of her lashes in the dusk. For people like you. "I would gladly give up my life for the fatherland."

Unexpectedly, she scoffs. "How like a boy! You have no idea. The land is a woman, Monsieur. The wretched know that. We're born in her gutters. All of us have slept outdoors at one point or the other, in the embrace of her seasons. We throw ourselves at her mercy, old and roaring and ugly mistress that she is, and she will never love us back."

He stares at her, taken by surprise, frantically leafing through his mind so he can put a name to this defeatist brand of nationalism. But, for once, his eloquence fails him, half-formed ideas disappearing before they can leave his mouth.

She grins, slyly. "You won't read that in any of your textbooks."

He finds the words at last, although they're not what he expected them to be. "Walk with me awhile."

Breathless and too alive to sleep,

Breathless, lost, and too alive to stop.

The days pass and she shows him the city as he's never seen it before, exposing the seedy underbelly of Paris, opening up its rotten heart. She takes him to the gypsy camps and the fishwife districts. She introduces him to old soldiers who had survived the wars whole but cut off their limbs to beg for a living, letting desperation take what the enemy could not. She explains the trade in teeth and hair.

Gradually, the pieces fall into place in his head, shaping a clearer picture of his France and what needs to be done in order to improve it. His speeches become fiercer and his plans for rebellion more concrete as his veins roil with the fervor of a man who finally understands what is at stake.

This newfound vigor does not go unnoticed by the Friends of the ABC.

"I know that look," Grantaire slurs one night at the Musain. "Who's the unlucky mademoiselle, Enjolras?"

"Patria," he replies sternly. The others guffaw, but he frowns to himself. He'd been poring over a historical account of the Journée des barricades, but also thinking about how Éponine had so charmingly cajoled him earlier in the day into letting an old Roma woman tell his fortune. Until Grantaire made his remark, he hadn't even realized that he'd arrived at the end of an entire paragraph with no idea what it said.

The girl is becoming a distraction. He would have to stay away.

Will we wake in the morning,

And know what it was for?

Of course she disappears just as he makes the decision to avoid her, to tell her that their strolls are no longer possible. It would be in her nature to not let him have even that.

He doesn't see her until rumors of General Lamarque's illness begin to grip the populace. He almost trips over her on the street. She looks thinner and scragglier than ever as she takes off her cap and places it on the sidewalk, wiping sweat from her brow.

"Hello," she says, dimpling up at him. It's an overcast day and her eyes are darker than he remembers. "I've been in jail. Just got out."

"Are you all right?" he asks tentatively.

"Sure," she chirps. "I had my sister for company, so it wasn't that bad."

His fists clench of their own volition, and so he slips them into his pockets. He can rationalize the anger he feels at injustice, but what he can't explain is the protectiveness, the ache.

A couple of gentlemen walk past. One of them absentmindedly tosses a coin into Éponine's upturned cap. Enjolras watches as she chases after the man and returns the money, and when she comes back to him, the proud tilt of her chin sends knots into his throat. She places the cap on her head once more and it dangles over her ear at a precarious angle. It takes all his willpower not to reach out and straighten it. He hasn't touched her since the day they met, and he has no plans of falling into the habit now.

"Shall we get soup?" she suggests. "I know a place. Best gristle in town."

This is it, then. This is the moment when Enjolras does not throw away the revolution for a pair of pretty eyes, and in his haste to seize it, his words come out sounding harsher than intended. "I'm busy. Given Lamarque's impending demise, I will, in fact, continue to be busy for the foreseeable future."

She shrugs. She doesn't look hurt at all, and perhaps that irritates him a little bit. "Your loss."

So tired,

Waiting for the end to come.

Marius is in love, but the other students tease him about his shadow. Enjolras sees her sometimes from the balcony window of the Musain on late nights, disappearing around corners, standing beside walls, waiting to catch a glimpse of the object of her affections.

It bothers him, and he doesn't know why.

He is awfully busy, though. He stockpiles weapons and sketches plans for barricades on city maps. He discusses strategies with his lieutenants. They will be hopelessly outgunned and outnumbered at first, but he is confident that the masses will soon be inspired to take up the cause. This fight is for them, after all. His orations in the public square take on a more urgent tone, leaving no doubt in even the casual listener's mind as to what lengths his Society will go to. Support comes pouring in from Rue du Bac and Notre Dame. Lamarque continues to fade, and the wide nets of the National Guard close in.

He hardly has time to miss her. He thinks that this, too, is grace.

Do you want to die together?

Yes, I do. Yes, I do.

It happens so fast.

He is standing on a makeshift platform outside Lamarque's house. The people are raising their fists, they're crying Vive la France, and Enjolras is at the top of his game, playing his audience's passions like harp-strings, when the National Guard rears up in the distance, their arrival announced by the thunder of hooves and the flash of batons.

He and Marius jump down from the platform and disappear into the throng, hurriedly distributing pamphlets and instructions for the next assembly. The militia draws nearer and, from the determined looks on their faces, from the way they press their steeds into the crowd, it is so, so obvious that this is no ordinary riot dispersal. They have orders to arrest, perhaps even to shoot on sight.

The students scatter in all directions. Enjolras loses track of his friends, maps out escape routes in his head. The streets are pure chaos. He runs, one hand clamped over the stitch that's blossomed on his side, glancing back to see three guards hot on his tail.

He ducks into the slums, taking care to give the gypsy quarters a wide berth; he does not want to cause them any more trouble with the law than they're already in by virtue of what they are. The guards yell at him to stop as he skitters around a motley crew of gamins, turning the corner into-

-A dead end. For a second he just stares blankly at the wall, out of options, out of time, hoof-beats pounding in his ears.

Someone comes up from behind, grabs him by the arm, pulling him into the nearby alley between two run-down houses.

"What are you doing?" he snaps at Éponine. "Get away, it's not safe."

But her fingers are already dancing around him, taking off his purple jacket, tossing it aside. It's a strangely intimate act, but he chalks up the pounding of his heart to the fear of getting caught.

"The first rule of running, Monsieur, is to not look like the one they're chasing," she hisses. "Stay close to the wall."

Her breath traces patterns on his face, smelling like cherry liquor and mint leaves. Enjolras has never been this close to a woman before, close enough to count freckles, close enough to catch the flecks of gold in her eyes.

"He must've gone in here!" one of the guards shouts from afar. "Search the alleys!"

Éponine whispers argot curses, fumbling with the folds of her skirt. Enjolras tenses. He doesn't want her to fight for him, he doesn't want them to come to an ignoble end in the stinking slum districts like a couple of cornered rats, mere days before the revolution-

It's not a gun or a knife, but a tin flask. Without further ado, she shoves it into his mouth, forcing him to choke down the contents. Liquor burns his throat, sickly sweet with a cold aftertaste. He pulls back, coughing, and she takes a swig herself before dropping the now-empty container.

"Believe me, bourgeois boy," she murmurs in a voice like smoke, "you're going to need that."

"Why-" Enjolras starts to say, but suddenly there are footsteps and voices and she's surging up, pressing him against the wall, slamming her mouth over his.

Their teeth clack together and the pain makes him wince. He starts to shove her away, but she flicks her tongue into the dip of his lower lip and his hands fall limply to her waist, his eyes drifting shut. Éponine kisses like she speaks, impudent and rough, but her lips are soft and she tastes like cherry and mint and maybe it's not so bad, after all.

"Who's there?" someone demands from the entrance of the alley. Enjolras almost jerks away in panic, but Éponine flings her arms around his neck, dragging him down to her, shielding his face from view with her thin limbs and her soot-stained locks. Her hands fist at his hair, tugging insistently, little warning signs, Go with it, they urge, go with it or we're both dead.

She deepens the kiss and this time he responds, lips probing tentatively, guided by instinct, his grip tightening around her waist. She moans low at the back of her throat- for theatrical effect, he guesses, but there is nothing staged about the way his blood sings in response.

He hears a snort of disgust, someone muttering, "Nothing here, just a couple of drunk brats groping each other," footsteps fading away…

Suddenly, irrationally afraid that she'll stop now that the danger is past, he holds her closer, feels the heat of her skin through her flimsy chemise. She is a skinny little thing, all sinew and fire, and she robs the breath from his lungs as easily as she filches pockets.

With a strangled groan, he breaks away, pressing kisses to her jaw, to the slope of her neck, his hands wandering all over her body. She arches into him, her lips grazing his ear, and he returns to her mouth, drinking it in, all of it, the feeling, the ache, their hearts like drums, all he has ever known.

She pulls away and he follows, fool that he is, mouth desperate to regain contact with hers. He stops himself only when he spots the shaken look in her eyes.

She recovers valiantly, with a smirk. "Bravo, Monsieur," she drawls. "I didn't know you had it in you."

And then she turns and leaves. He doesn't see her again until the barricade.

Thousands of ghosts in the daylight,

One day we all disappear.

Someone helps him prop a table up against the growing pile of furniture. She's dressed like a boy, her chest bound, her long hair tucked into a cap, but he would know those hands anywhere. He seizes them and stares into her face.

"You little idiot," he bites out. "Go away!"

She starts to explain. He catches the name "Marius" before her voice is drowned out by the sound of a piano crashing from a second floor. Rage boils inside him, and for a moment the war is blotted out by his unbelievable fury that she was willing to die for a man in love with somebody else. He hauls her into the wine shop despite her protests and all but throws her inside, barking orders at Courfeyrac to bar the door.

You will not be Alcyone, he promises silently as he storms back to his post, her indignant shrieks still ringing in his ears. I won't let you. You will let me have that much, at least.

We'll fight 'til we're raw,

Just give me one more day.

They have to let her out eventually, and, in the end, he has to be the one to save her.

Marius is approaching the barricade, torch ablaze, and she's already running, and he's running, too. The soldier aims his rifle and Éponine is trying to push Marius aside and Enjolras is-

- Holding the barrel in his hands, pointing it up at empty air just as the trigger goes off, heat and sulfur singeing his palms, no one's dying today, not yet, not yet-

"Fall back! Fall back!" the soldiers are crying, and Marius is standing there, sort of breathlessly laughing because he can't believe his plan worked, and Enjolras and Éponine are on the ground, avoiding each other's eyes.

"Alcyone propter amorem ipsa se in mare praecipitavit," mutters Enjolras.

She swallows, if not understanding the words, at least understanding the tone in which they had been said.

They had lights inside their eyes,

They were kids that I once knew.

Another night falls over the quiet streets of Paris in veils of ice and silver. The Friends of the ABC slump against their barricade, obtaining desultory chugs from the bottles they pass around with as much lack of enthusiasm.

"I was not expecting this," Prouvaire remarks. "All this waiting around! I wanted something glorious. I wanted to go down in flames."

"You still might," Lesgle tells him darkly.

"Some rebellions take longer to catch fire than others," says Feuilly.

"This fire's already caught," says Bahorel, "and it's sputtering out. We're all there is. I know my people. It's all about the moment with us, see? If they didn't join up the moment we started taking their chairs, they're never going to come."

"Patience," counsels Combeferre. "They will rise."

Grantaire knocks down the remaining liquor in his bottle. He makes a face. "Do you know what I expected? Better drink, that is for certain."

"Careful, Grantaire," says Joly, "lest you rampage through the Luxembourg Gardens in your underwear again."

"I might do without the underwear this time," Grantaire reflects. "This is a revolution, after all."

The others cheer and guffaw, and the talk turns to other drunken antics and other happier times. Memories of terrifying professors and beautiful girls and long-gone summer days come back to life with a certain poignant slowness, wrapping the boys in a haze of what in the dim light of the stars and the flicker of torches could almost be called wonder.

Enjolras is only half-listening to the conversation. His head is bent over Éponine's open hand, his brow furrowed as he removes wooden splinters from her fingertips.

"What's an Alycone?" she asks him.

"In Greek myth, she married the son of the Morning Star," he replies shortly, not because the question annoys him, but because he's doing delicate work that requires focus. "She loved her husband so much that, when she learned that he had perished in a shipwreck, she threw herself into the sea in her grief. Out of compassion, the gods transformed her and her husband into the birds we now know as kingfishers."

She chortles. "That's what they teach you, up there in your fancy university?"

"Taught," he corrects with a grim half-smile. "I don't think they'll let me back in after this."

He squeezes out another splinter from the pad of her thumb. She sighs. That's what always gets him, how she never seems surprised by pain.

"She died for love, though," Éponine muses. "That's not so bad."

Enjolras scoffs. "How like a teenager!"

"I am not much younger than you are," she reminds him cheekily. "And, what's more important, she killed herself. The consumption didn't take her. No one stuck a knife between her ribs. She didn't starve in prison. She made a choice. That's more than a lot of people can ask for."

He tears his gaze from her palm to her eyes, those dark liquid eyes that even now, in the midst of war, pull him beneath their surface, drowning him in what could have been, in what could be, if I live, if we live-

"My own terms, remember?" she says. It's a gentle admonishment. "They're not much, but they're all I've got."

"You gave Marius the letter. You have no reason to stay."

Please leave, are the unspoken words that linger on the tip of his tongue. I've never begged a woman for anything and I'll be horrible at it. Don't make me do that. Please just leave.

Her hand moves slightly in the loose clasp of his when she shrugs, and his fingers unconsciously tighten around her wrist. "There is nothing left for me to go back to," she rasps, "except a France that will always be the same. Or a new France that I had no part in building. I don't know which is worse, and I don't intend to find out."

Calmly, she stands up. He's still holding on to her hand, a fact that doesn't go unnoticed by Grantaire, who nudges Bahorel. They fix intoxicated leers on the couple, but instead of looking annoying or debauched, they merely look young in the firelight.

Éponine ignores them. She tugs her wrist free and walks over to Gavroche. But she stops halfway, turns back to Enjolras, and sadly tells him, "You are Alcyone, too, Monsieur."

You held me at the barricade,

And I wept at the mistakes we made.

Another dawn paints the sky in eggshell and turquoise. News filters in from the rest of the city. All the other barricades have fallen, like dams crumbling in a river of blood. The National Guard has called for reinforcements, and they are shooting to kill.

The people do not arrive.

Someone remarks to Enjolras that the ammunition is running low. Preoccupied by the strategies clouding his mind, he nods absently, and it takes him a while to realize that he had no idea who had spoken, had heard the words but not the voice. He resolves to do better in the future, however short that may be.

As they take their positions, bracing themselves for onslaught, Enjolras gazes at his comrades, his friends. He absorbs their features, their mannerisms, forcing himself not to skip a single thing. He will never see them again in this life.

Éponine's beside him, loading her pistol. She stops and looks up when she feels his stare. He counts her freckles for the last time.

She draws a shuddery intake of breath. "We're going to die, aren't we?"

Not you, Enjolras wants to say. Not here, not now. Go, and I will follow. I will try to follow. I will follow you…

But leaders do not follow. He will head the last charge and he will fall into a tomb of light, and he will not garb this occasion with flowery assurances and he will let her choose.

"Alcyone's father was the god of the winds," he replies at last. "After she was transformed, he would calm the seas for a while so she could make her nests safely. That is why we call times of peace the halcyon days."

She smiles, crooked and watery and his. "Okay," she says. "Okay."

I'll mark off each day with a cross,

And I'll laugh about all that we've lost.

Battle makes cowards of them all.

They are shaking as they scrounge for furniture to replace the ones that have been destroyed, they are whimpering as they crack their rifles, they are flinching at the sound of explosions, and Joly, Joly who has always been the happiest, is hunched behind a table, hands clapped over his ears, sobbing as the smoke thickens and the bullets rain.

There's a moment of quiet after the first exchange of gunshots. Halcyon days, Enjolras thinks wryly, and he's about to remark the same to Éponine, but suddenly Courfeyrac is screaming Gavroche's name and another blast rings out, and then silence-

She does not cry. Instead, she squares her shoulders and lifts her chin, with the kind of confidence that stems from her knowledge that she will see her brother again in a very short amount of time, and that's how it really hits Enjolras that they're all going to-

He climbs to the top of the barricade on unsteady feet, all pounding heart and sweaty hands. Too soon, too soon. He grips the red banner as he stares down at the soldiers and their cannons, but for some reason he can only feel the curve of Éponine's waist, can only see the sunlight trapped in the waves of her hair.

"Enjolras," whispers a raspy voice from below.

"I was ready." The words come out angry and bewildered and accusing. "I was ready, and you made me afraid to die."

She reaches for his free hand. He links their fingers together.

And he raises the flag.

He doesn't want her,

But he just won't let her go.

End