A/N: Welcome to another headcanon that wouldn't leave me alone. The premise here is that Combeferre has a nice landlady/housekeeper whom he reminds of her son who died of a childhood illness. It was either that or her son dies on the field of Waterloo, but this turned out to be the lesser of two evils.

Setting: Canon Era

Rating: T

Genre: Family, Tragedy

Characters: Combeferre, Combeferre's landlady

Warnings: character death

Word Count: 763

As Summer Turns to Autumn

He was a nice boy, that student who rented out her rooms.

He had introduced himself as Félicien Combeferre, a student of the Polytechnique.

She had noticed a hint of a Southern accent in his voice. In fact, he would sometimes slip into his native Occitan in the middle of a conversation.

Like most of the students who rented out her rooms in the past, he paid her to sweep the rooms and to provide for his meals.

He was polite in conversation. Not once did he address her as someone belonging to a lower station. Always, he would talk to her like a son addressing his mother, never a bourgeoisie student to his peasant housekeeper.

Gradually, she learned his history. He was the eldest son of well-to-do parents from Auvergne. He had two younger sisters. He was studying to become a doctor like his father before him, and he had come to Paris with two of his friends from boyhood. These friends were studying to be lawyers.

Her student had a thoughtful air about him. On more than one occasion, she would find him staring fixedly outside the window with his brown eyes framed by spectacles, auburn brows furrowed in deep thought.

She watched as he slowly changed the surroundings of the rooms, bringing life into them. She would find a new set of anatomical sketches and drawings of silk moths every time she came to sweep the rooms. Once, she even found a paper in his handwriting stating the errors on orthography found in the Dictionary of the Academy.

Sometimes, he would bring his friends, and she would hear their discourses said over a bottle of mulled wine.

On days where she would enter the rooms only to find him still sleeping on the desk next to a stack of lectures, she would smile tenderly and remember her own Charles.

Her Charles would have been the same age as her student, had Death not taken him for his own.

Perhaps, she thinks, her Charles might have grown up to become a student also, and he would have been friends with this boy.

Perhaps, this thought seemed very likely to her, this boy was her Charles, rightly restored to her by fickle Fate.

Three years have passed in this manner, and her student was now a house surgeon at Necker.

She still came to sweep the rooms, and to her surprise and utter horror, she began to see there objects belonging to the Republic, among others, an old map of France, which, if found by the authorities, would surely be regarded as both dangerous and treasonous.

She kept silent, not wanting the student whom she regarded as her own son to be arrested.

Her student had also begun to eat out more and more often, patronising, among others, the Café Musain and the Corinthe. Sometimes, he would not even return to the rooms until daybreak. These he told her to be the result of working long hours in the hospital because of the cholera epidemic.

And still she worried over him, like a mother worrying over an errant child.

Until one day, he returned to his rooms no longer.

The day after the barricades fell, she, like most women living near the Rue de la Chanvrerie, were summoned to clean the mess left by the insurgents.

They were only students, she was told, and her blood ran cold at the thought of her student being there.

She could feel her stomach turn when she arrived to see that the other women had already started scrubbing the blood off the pavement.

And then, when her gaze arrived at the bodies lining up the inside of the Corinthe, she felt her heart stop altogether.

There, in the middle of the line, she saw her student, his auburn hair caked with blood. From a distance, he seemed only sleeping, but upon closer inspection, she could clearly see the wounds on his chest from where he was pierced by bayonets. His spectacles still framed his unseeing eyes, glass cracked and stained with blood. At either side of him were his boyhood friends, whom she recognized because of their constant visits. In front of them, there kneeled a decorated soldier, head bowed in silent weeping. He heard her approach, and sensing her question, he spoke thus.

"I am their brother."

She smiled through her tears and looked at her student. "And I am his mother."

Nothing is more painful to a mother than to find her child only to lose him again.

That soldier is Lucien Thibaut, the star of my other barricade fic, Band of Brothers.

Also, if anyone wants to murder me by now, I have a tumblr. The link's in my profile because I can't insert it here.