It's dark outside. The train rattles along its tracks in an indeterminate line.

Marius Pontmercy sits with his back to to the window and his knees pulled up to his chest. He presses his hands together between his knees to keep them from shaking.

"We shouldn't have left him like that," says Joly, and he doesn't need to clarify who it is that he's referring to.

No one says anything.

There had been ten of them, once. Now there are three.

"We can't ever go home, can we?" asks Lesgles. This, too, they all know to be true. Even now that they are free, they can never return to their old lives. Officials would come for them within hours, bundling them off to the nearest research facility.

Marius thinks of Cosette. She must have cried, when she discovered where he'd been taken, mustn't she? Her face, tear-washed, rises up behind his eyes and he realises that one day, he might not be able to call her image to mind quite so easily.

"I want to write letters," he says.

-o0o0o0o0o0o0o0o0o0o0o0o-

Eponine Thenardier is in the poky kitchen when the letter comes. She's leaning against the table, jutting her hip in what she hopes is a vaguely provocative gesture, and talking to Montparnasse. The radio is on, blaring some cheesy, peppy tune from the 2020s, or '30s, maybe.

Mrs Bergham, foster matriarch and self-professed battleaxe, appears in the doorway. Strands of flyaway grey-white hair are escaping from her haphazard bun. Her expression is even more grim than is usual.

"What?" Montparnasse demands, his lips curving upwards in a smirk.

Predictably, Mrs Bergham glowers. "I'll thank you not to take that tone with me," she says abruptly. Then, without preamble: "Eponine, I've got a letter I think you should read."

Eponine shrugs, rolls her eyes at Montparnasse, and takes the letter. It is written on fine-ruled paper torn hurriedly from a spiral-bound notebook. It isn't signed.

The letter tells her that Feuilly – the writer hadn't known his first name – is dead. It tells her that he had died as a result of an adverse reaction to a sedative; that he and some others had tried to escape. That he had been brave and kind, and that the writer is alive and free in part because of him.

She stares at the paper until the words blur. She remembers laughing with him – arguing with him – grappling with him for the TV remote-control. She remembers his thin, earnest face with those large hazel eyes.

"Oh," she says in a small voice, quite unlike her own.

Then, the letter still clutched in her hand, she barrels past Mrs Bergham, almost bowling her over.

She runs. Runs until her muscles pulse with a dull ache; until her lungs run out of air. Then she collapses unceremoniously onto the damp pavement.

Fucking officials.

But anger does nothing to help. There is a hollow, empty space inside of her; a void reserved for a warm, righteously indignant, endearingly head-in-the-clouds boy who had once been her friend.

-o0o0o0o0o0o0o0o0o0o0o0o0o0o-

Jehan Prouvaire's mother rocks herself to and fro, her body wracked by silent sobs. She wraps her arms tightly around herself, as though to keep from coming apart.

Her husband holds her, his own tears damming up behind his eyes. He will allow himself to cry later, when he is alone.

There is a deep purple orchid in a vase on their living room windowsill; it is the only witness to their quiet tragedy.

-o0o0o0o0o0o0o0o0o0o0o0o0o0o-

Aneille Laurier weeps, too, lying face-down on her bed; head cradled in her arms.

The letter, brought to her by his parents, tells her how brave he was; how persistent and resilient; how he had tried to give the rest of them a little light and hope. But the letter-writer only calls him Courfeyrac; they don't know him, really.

She knows him. She has been to the fair with him; watched bad action films with him; kissed him fiercely in the park near his house. She has laughed at his terrible jokes and blushed at his unabashed compliments.

The letter goes on to tell he that he has been Altered. She thinks she has resigned herself to this already, but seeing it in writing is different.

In her mind she sees him; expression blank; eyes flat and soulless.

She hates the writer of this letter for telling her all of this. She would rather not know.

She would rather he was dead.

-o0o0o0o0o0o0o0o0o0o0o0o-

Alain Combeferre loses his son and his wife almost in one fell swoop.

The day of the letter, he goes out to work. He goes because it is the only means of distracting himself. He goes because he cannot deal with Heloise and her boundless grief. And because really, he already lost his son, the day the officials came to take him away.

After the fact, he realises his mistake; Heloise, who is – was – fragile at the very best of times, needed someone to stay with her.

She goes quietly. Much more quietly than their firstborn, or so he's heard. Sleeping pills, washed down with strong port wine. She lies on her side on their bed, her eyes closed slackly.

The heady scent of the wine fills the room. His brain reconfigures it as the scent of loss. After this, he will never be able to stand it.

He sits on the edge of the bed, hands limp in his lap, and realises that you can be a villain not only by dint of the things you have done, but also the things you haven't.

-o0o0o0o0o0o0o0o0o0o0o0o0o0o0o-

Cosette reads Marius' letter in the sunlit hallway. The paper reverberates in her trembling hands.

Marius is alive and unharmed – and free.

She is in his thoughts – and will be, always – but he cannot see her. He hopes she understands that.

The house is very quiet. Cosette sits down on the bottom step, her skirt pooling around her. Her whole body shakes, overtaken by a duelling combination of relief and deep sorrow. She wants more than anything to go to him, but how could she? She has no idea where he is, and it's better that way.

But.

But he escaped. And he's alright. That's what matters, she tells herself, that's what's important.

Why is it, then, that she, too, cannot keep herself from crying?

-o0o0o0o0o0o0o0o0o0o0o0o0o0o-

The boys disembark the train at different stops, to make themselves more difficult to track. Marius is the last to get off.

He stands at daybreak in a new city. The windows of the skyscrapers are blinding. A paperboy careens past on a sleek bike.

Marius does not know what to do. He cannot be Marius Pontmercy any longer. He is a boy without a name, or a past, or a friend.

But beyond all of that – eclipsing all of that – he is free.