What used to be heaven

When your world is dark and bleak, you tend to find the light in the most seemingly insignificant of things.

Marius had always been Eponine's light.
And through a cruel twist of fate, Marius was blinded by a light of his own.

Sometimes, she wonders if this is her punishment for being so cruel to her as a child.

Eponine watches.

She watches the soft smile that graces Marius' face whenever Cosette's name is mentioned. She watches the way he literally cannot seem to tear his eyes away from her whenever she's around, limited though that time is. The students tease him whenever they notices this, but, of course, they do not look at him the way Eponine does.

She watches herself falling apart.

Eponine listens.

She listens to the quiet, elongated sighs that slip from him as he gazes wistfully at nothing in particular. She hears him say her name, saying it in such a way that she knows that he is smiling as he speaks. He has never said her name like that.
She listens to her heart breaking.

Her hands burn when she gives his letter away to Cosette’s father. There is a tiredness in his face, and she fancies she can see troubled shadows hovering somewhere beneath his eyes.

He tells her to go, so she does.

There is only one place she wants to be.

When Eponine runs through the rain, she is not thinking of how the air smells of gunpowder or feels the way the rain soaks her borrowed clothes, numbing her down to her very bones, making her hair stick to her head and neck, slowing her down with its icy weight.
She is thinking of nothing, but of him.
Eponine wants to see him smile when she tells him she has done her job. Wants to hear him saying her name, even if he doesn’t say it the way she wants him to. Craves any little bit of affection she can get from him, stores away each look, touch, word, into a often-visited corner of her mind so she can turn the moment over again, as if examining precious jewels.

So when the bullet hits her, burying into her chest, it surprises her a little to see just how much blood a person can hold in their body. It flows out of her, staining her clothes. Her chest burns like somebody has shot full of fire. She feels so warm it comes as a shock to her that she doesn’t start to melt the cold, muddy ground. She feels a pair of arms wrap around her body as it descends, smells a familiar scent of books.
Marius' mouth moves, his eyes blink rapidly as he looks down at her, his face growing slowly more pale as hers does.

Eponine thinks, wistfully, that this is what angels could look like.

Blood blooms across her chest, a scarlet flower amongst the bleak grey of her surroundings. A ghost of a smile hovers over her pale lips, her eyes wide and yearning as she stares up at Marius. She knows that she has said the word love somewhere, but she can no longer hear her own words over the continuous thrumming of rain.

The sky cries for her.

And, for a moment, after a lifetime of longing, of words that have fallen upon deaf ears. Of sidelong glances that were never returned, or even noticed.

After a liftime of wanting, she finally gets what she dreams of.

And when she lets go, she decides that, if she had not before, then there most certainly is a heaven.

She has just tasted it.