an entrance, if not a grand one.

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.