like the forms of the shadows which traverse dreams

Leave a note, a message, an anonymous love letter...

[set to right around Rosie's departure, bc I'm slow af]

Checking the mailbox that sits at the edge of the property after she parks her motorcycle is so second nature that Eponine hardly thinks about it; she almost doesn't look at the mail. Something, some nagging little voice in the back of her mind, draws her eye to the couple of envelopes as she heads toward the house itself, catches the Barton University return address.

She tears the envelope open. ( tldr oops this is why I need to keep them up to date )
She half-jogs for the door, already calling, "Ellie! El, are you here?" If she's not, she's not far: her truck's in the drive. "I've got news!"

At the same time as she calls brightly to her girlfriend, she's typing away at her phone, even as she gets the door and hangs up her helmet. Of course Ellie is the first she thinks of telling: wants her to know more than anything, wants her to be proud, maybe a little bit hopes she'll pick her up and spin her around or something equally ridiculous. But there's someone else who she has to tell before any other friend, and of course that's her Olivia, the best Lady Macbeth in the world, the only person ever whose friendship could blossom out of a bizarre forced musical number and navigate being made an accessory to murder and absolute besottedness with such --

Her phone interrupts. It's not its usual noise, an odd, sadly insistent sound that she's heard maybe once before, and something flutters in her chest.

[Message unable to send.]

Eponine hits send again, an ice threading through the light, bubbly excitement in her stomach. Her phone beeps.

[Message unable to send.] And then, as if to prevent her continuing,
[This number is no longer in service.]

It feels as though everything has stopped -- though of course nothing has, the sun and the lake water and the calls of geese and squirrels going on as usual. Eponine lets her bag slide off her shoulder and drop to the floor, heavily.

[Dated to the 27th and anytime a few days later in the week]

She doesn't know if it's denial or simply that she's got graduation, first, and spends the next couple of days not doing much -- Eponine had planned in advance to have a few days off work, just to rest from finals and process that she was finally done with high school and get to stay in with Ellie, a bit. Whatever it is, she misses the beginning of what's happening, doesn't catch it at first despite her usual determination to be aware of things going on in Darrow, to have one ear to the ground, as it were. 

But then they come in, that Monday, and everyone else is gone. It's just she and Elio, staring at each other in alarm, and looking around at streets that have somehow gone from a little calmer than usual to absolutely desolate. She's been busy, and she knows he's had plenty on his own mind, loss and now -- an odd, different kind of loss to cope with when Oliver had returned, not remembering any of it -- but she can't have missed all this, can she? But their coworkers aren't here, nor the everyday passersby, and though they're all a little strange in one way or another, she's gone to school with the Darrow-born, she's grown to like her manager and underlings at the store, she's gotten used to the presence of people even when some of them can't be trusted. Not all of anyone can be trusted. 

It's only ever been their kind, newcomers to Darrow, that have disappeared before. If it's everyone, how do any of them stand a chance?  

In the following days, she can't keep that from her mind, that horror of someone just not being where they ought, and she knows it must have been on Elio's when he told them both abruptly to go on home. 

It's not what she finds her first concern, though, not as soon as she realizes -- very shortly after she leaves -- that without the rest of the city here, there's more than just bookshops that are locked. With no one to open them, grocery stores, restaurants, clothing stores stay shuttered; others are never closed at all, and of course, she's not the only one that realizes very quickly that the normal flow of commerce is not going to last, nor do they have any way of knowing how long this will go on or when it will end.  

In the pit of her stomach she can feel more than think about those cold winters and hot summers in Paris, those days between meals that she joked to Marius about, scrounging for anything at all to keep even Azelma fed, and when she sees a car crashed into a corner store on the way home, that first Monday, she pulls over. The window's made of the sort of glass that shatters and spiders, and after looking both ways -- even though there's no one to see her -- she kicks the glass out and climbs in. She impulsively, quickly looks for the sort of things that might need replacing and will last them even if the power goes out unmanned or they have to leave the house: tinned meat and vegetables, nuts, powdered milk and juice, bottled water, peanut butter and bread. Fresh produce takes up too much space, but it won't keep here in an abandoned shop and citrus fruit always feels luxurious to Eponine, beside keeping off scurvy, and she shoves oranges and limes on top. Her instincts become more rattled: at the first sound of a car, she hides and darts off, and ducks into another store instead to pick up bandages, painkillers, antibiotic ointment, a lighter, peroxide -- things Ellie would probably die before she didn't have on hand, but that Eponine can't bring herself to think of as worthy of abandoning. Anything she can stuff into the remaining gaps and jacket pockets.


Eponine comes back home weighed down with supplies, her face drawn, her arms pimpled with gooseflesh despite the summer heat. She kisses the nubbly head of the growing goat in the yard, but her stomach twists as she walks back up the drive. She's half-expecting Ellie to be gone, too, she realizes, despite everything seeming to indicate it's everyone but them, as she slowly leans on the door and calls out a hello.


There's something else she wants to do. She'd seen on Elio's face that he wasn't in any sort of state of mind for company, when he'd sent her home, that Monday. But even as she tries -- tries -- to put aside the idea that she and Ellie might run out of something and not be able to get it -- she comes back to that other, more insidious fear. Out in the country as they are, they might not even know if something worse happens or if those not born in Darrow begin to disappear. Like so many have from her life, only it's never been all at once. For a while she hasn't been there, enough, for Elio; has worried quietly over him but hasn't found it her place to say so. And, thinking of that and of the uncertainty of it all, she can't stand the idea that he might have the same fears, be bearing them alone. Hopefully, he's reached out to Oliver, Oliver to him, in some way this fearful time brought them closer together. But if she didn't do so herself and something happened... She can't bear it.

So, a few days later, with some of the nicer supplies -- and a bottle of wine she'd liberated, like a good guest -- she knocks, tentatively, on his door. "Elio?" She winces. "I'll go away, if you want, but if you're here, just -- tell me so, all right?"  

[OOC: Sorry about the title, it was what came to mind, lol. If you're Elio, obviously the end is for you. If you're Rosie or Ellie or someone else, catch her earlier.]

[dated sometime between Valentine's and today, we'll play it by ear!]

It's a Saturday, which generally means work, but she's the close shift today. When Eponine wakes up while it's still morning enough to feel early, it doesn't mean groaning and rushing. She wakes up feeling rested after a dream that she can't remember but that she seems to remember being pleasant, and debates staying in bed just because she can, and then gets herself up and dressed because that rarely works.

Today what it means is that she looks around her apartment, and thinks, I have so much to pack up, and not much at all, too with some bemusement and then, delightedly, Soon I'll be living with Ellie all the time! and subsequently, Dieu au paradis, what if this is a complete disaster.

She sits down on the floor of her living room. Ellie is not the one to talk to about this: for one, she's not an unbiased party, but also Eponine doesn't want to scare her into actually taking the invitation back. For she really is excited about it, so much she could burst, really, or she wouldn't be nervous.

This requires a specific sort of friend. Someone she can trust not to laugh at her for being excited or for being nervous, and someone who knows her and the sorts of reasons she has to doubt herself, and someone who won't find girl talk too frivolous -- which should by rights exclude her from the conversation. She'd never imagined she'd need or have the chance to fret over the landmarks of a relationship, and this one had started so slowly and escalated so obliquely that she'd not had to fret much over it, or rather, the major moments had been figured out on the go.

But this is a proper, silly-but-completely-serious, fret, and there's only one person for it.

Are you doing anything today, and if not, ☕️☕️? she texts Rosie.
I will admit that this is not an ENTIRELY selfish question she adds a few moments later in the interest of honesty, for I need some advice. But I'd like to see you, too. xx

dated to whenever

It shouldn't, after all these months, but it still feels nerve-wrackingly exciting when, in the middle of several hours of intermittent texting about nothing at all, Ellie asks Eponine if she'd like to come over. (She agrees readily, of course. She was never not going to agree, and she thinks Ellie knows that, too: but the asking is part of the game, isn't it?)

Walking out to the countryside isn't taxing for her, but it does take a little bit, and it makes Eponine think about how much she'd enjoyed riding Lisbeth's motorcycle. For whatever reason, cars still unnerve her -- she even rather likes riding in Jamie's car and Ellie's truck well enough, and she likes looking at Sam's Impala, but she still feels as though she wouldn't like to be responsible for that much weight and size. But the motorcycle had felt powerful and lithe even though she knows it's also more dangerous.

If she gets tired of this walk one day, perhaps she'll save up for one. It does feel nice, though, the city fading into trees and fields that, raised in the smog of Paris and most of her friends living downtown in Darrow, she associates with these visits more than anything else.

She skips up the steps to knock on the door, and calls, with a smirk after a moment, "Open up, it's the police," with a laugh in her tone.

The term mental health clinic is an unfamiliar one for Eponine: in her own time, there'd be asylums, or sometimes prisons like Les Madelonettes, where she had stayed for a short time, would hold such girls as did not quite behave properly for their parents to claim them publicly.

This place doesn't look like either, but she still feels a sense of trepidation as she walks in the place and signs in with her name in the waiting room.

She's meant to meet with a therapist, and a doctor -- maybe the same person capable of doing both, she can't quite keep track, and doesn't know, anyway, what they're supposed to do for her or what she's supposed to say. Marcus had intervened on her behalf with the Children's Home, and the school: that's all she knows, or she knows she'd be in a world worse trouble. Perhaps they would be too, with a school accusing them of letting a charge go truant, not attending her classes and failing to do the work, not showing up for detention. She wasn't present for all that was spoken.

Right now, the alternative to kicking her out of school, or of the Home, or whatever it was -- this, mandated because she's still a minor in this place -- seems worse. What is she supposed to say? Well, I was taken advantage of, and it reminded me how horrible men are even in this place where I expected them to be better, and then I killed one of them only half by accident, so no, I haven't been paying attention to school? Not likely. If they think she'll be able to tell some strange man in a white coat all her secrets they're fooling themselves.

She fidgets, casing the windows and doors for an easy slip out. In the room, everyone is subdued: there's a girl about her age in a hoodie pulled up over her head and biting her nails; a young man slouched in a chair who looks like he probably is being seen as an adult; a mother shushing a small, whining child just old enough to be in primary school: which of them is ill is beyond Eponine's ability to tell. Others come in and out.

The wait is interminable, each doctor who appears at the door with a name that's not hers looking less appealing than the next. If she doesn't stay, she doesn't know what happens to her, or to the Home. If she does, she still doesn't know. The room starts to blur, to twist, at the edges of her vision, and finally she pushes herself to her feet all at once, slipping out the door and into the stairwell to catch her breath.

[Dated to Sep 28 or so. TW for discussion of sexual violence, and actual physical violence in the comments]

She'd come home, late, always late these nights, and found a note and keys under her pillow.

He lives one floor above. Use the kitchen window to get onto the fire escape. I'll need the keys back in the afternoons.

It wasn't signed, but she knew whose handiwork it was. And who He was, for who else could He be? There were a lot of hes, as it turned out: listen to the police scanner, do a bit of research and a bit of spying, and you found out quite a lot about them. She, and Octavia sometimes, Eleanor at times, they'd been making sure to strike some fear into the predators, while Rosie had been keeping eyes off them -- more important than anyone, perhaps -- but the one that came with a capital H?

There was only one, in her mind, these days. Days that passed in blurs, caught in thinking of what would happen in the night. And it sure wasn't God.

That day, she skips school and watches for him to leave. Gives it a test run all alone, through the cute apartment Rosie's letting her through, shushing the curious dog, climbing out carefully through the kitchen window onto the fire escape. It's rickety, feels as though it might never have been used for its purpose, but she scales it easily and jimmies the window with a little effort.

Standing in his apartment, Eponine feels a certain sort of power. A dizzy one: the place smells like him, and like alcohol, both of which push at her senses to go somewhere else. But she's standing in his place, now. They've done this before, wait for a man until he gets home and capture him. She knows how he moves. She watches. It's what she does: know a bit more than anyone else, and he hasn't taken that away from her.

Eponine hands the keys back over to Rosie with a smile just for her, and retrieves them back from her the next evening. She leaves messages for Octavia, and Eleanor too, if she wants to join them. Meet me tonight. Hunting to do.

It was the end of the year at school, only four more days to go, which was hardly any time at all really. All the tests were done; all the events over with. Most classes were just showing movies, and although Eponine had rarely seen moving pictures, except for time to time in the Children's Home common rooms -- and even then they had to be deemed appropriate for anyone who might be in the room -- even she was tiring of the ridiculous plots that seemed to play out on the small screens allotted to the classrooms of Darrow High.

It was far too much time that could be spent doing better things. If she slipped school, she could go to the beach, or go shopping, or -- she thought warmly -- spend time with her boyfriend. It was still such a novel idea, being someone's girlfriend; the sort of title to inspire foolish butterflies. In fact, it seemed altogether ridiculous if she stopped and thought about it too hard, and so she didn't. After all, she deserved some good things.

Instead, while the TV plays something about a group of poor children who play some game involving a frozen lake and sticks that she can't quite make heads or tails of, and what seems to be a very wealthy man who drinks too much, she sends a message off to Nicaise.

This movie is terrible. I miss you! Meet me outside after school? xx

After school, she looks around for him in the throng of children streaming out the doors, smiling.

She opens her eyes and she is on a shore.

Mama spoke of the shore, once, in the same bitterly dulcet tones she occasionally employed to imagine a life without the Thenardier; Eponine has never seen it, unless the filthy banks of the Seine count as some sort of shore. Still, there are only so many things that a lot of land dipping into water can be, can it? She's not stupid.

She simply blinks at it. She'd been preparing herself to march onto the barricades and, what? Perhaps die, rather romantically, alongside Marius, or if not, at least make sure they both survived the Guard and she had a good story to tell about the revolution. Only he'd caught her out, hadn't he, and ordered her to bring his Cosette a letter. Well, so much for her resolve. She'd done it, even though she should have thrown it away. Or well, her father had intercepted it. So perhaps her once-foster-sister, now so lovely and earnest and exactly the sort that should marry a ridiculous starving lawyer from a wealthy family, will never see it, depending on the old man.

But she'd been going back, is the point, and she'd stopped to sigh at herself for just a moment.

And now she is looking at an unfamiliar ocean, and for just a moment, Eponine allows herself to be afraid. It wouldn't be the first time she had seen something not there, but it would be the strangest in quite some time. It's cold, and the beach is empty.

Fear isn't something that she can wallow in, and she whirls around, casting her eyes up and down along the sand to get some sense of herself. There are people, further up the beach, dressed strangely, and when she turns, there are such lights behind her as nothing she's ever seen.

Her eyes narrow and she tries to ignore the quickness of her heart.