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There hadn’t been a single night since June 6th, 1832 where Marius Pontmercy’s dreams weren’t full of barricades. It was all he saw behind closed eyes. Shouting and blood fire and...loss. So much loss. His friends that had been so full of ideals and dreams mere days before were gone. They had died what they had believed in. He had even heard that Enjolras and Grantaire had died side-by-side. If Grantaire of all people died for a revolution he had never believed in, then why was Marius still alive? Why was he the one who survived? Why was he the only one left to remember? Even Éponine was...gone. He would never lie and say he had any feelings towards the girl that were beyond platonic but he had cared about her. He’d cared about all of them.
Courfeyrac. Combeferre. Enjolras. Grantaire. Joly. Bossuet. Bahorel. Feuilly. Prouvaire. Éponine. Gavroche. He repeated their names on loop in his head every morning when he woke up and every night before he slept. Marius would not let himself forget. He would not pretend to come away unscathed. He thought of them all often. He thought about Courfeyrac’s laugh. He thought about how eager Éponine always was to talk to him. He thought about, even when he didn’t entirely share their ideals, he had been accepted into this group of students with dreams far bigger than all of them could have ever imagined. But they had died before even a fraction of those dreams could come to life. Les Amis de l’ABC. A group which barely missed becoming historic. They deserved to go down in history; to be remembered. But history belonged to the winners and all they had done was lose. Marius had lost the one group of people he would ever truly be able to call friends.
Cosette did her best to help but she could never fully understand. She had never had the chance to meet them all; to know them as Marius had. She had come into his life just as they had left it. But still, she asked him about them. She listened to each story he told and did her best to remember it all. But Cosette had not been on the Barricades. She had not seen hope turn to fear turn to panic and then finally; acceptance. All of them had accepted they were going to die there. And almost all of them had. Marius had no reason to ever associate Cosette with bloodshed. She was the one good thing in his life when everything else had fallen apart.. His light. His sunrise after an endless night.
It was a year to the day after the Barricade fell that Marius first saw it. It wasn’t anything grand either. Just a figure with familiar blonde hair, shaking his head as he stood in front of a painting of Napoleon. The painting itself had been an heirloom that Marius had never bothered getting rid of. But he didn’t get long to focus on the figure. Just as soon as he had appeared, he disappeared. Had...Had Marius just imagined it? Yes. That had to be it. Enjolras was long since dead. There was no possible way that could have been him. He tried to push the thought out of his mind. Though, he was unable to do so for long. The second time it happened, it was barely a week later. Marius had been attempting to be polite to visiting relatives that he truly didn’t care of. He had been stumbling over his words when he heard it. Courfeyrac’s laugh. It wasn’t a snippet either. It was loud; ricocheting through the room like a speeding bullet. But no one else seemed to hear it - or if they did, they didn’t comment on it. More incidents happened after that. Grantaire’s drunken singing filled the wine chamber. The figure of Jehan Prouvaire often loitered in his library. He grew sick one winter and was certain he even heard Joly and Combeferre complaining about his physician.
It was a long time before Marius managed to work out why he always saw them there; why he was haunted by them all. The answer came from the limp that had never entirely gone away. If it wasn’t for Cosette’s father, Marius would have died on the Barricade. He would have died as one of them. But he hadn’t. He had been saved. Perhaps...Perhaps fate had been set on him dying there. Perhaps this was his punishment for surviving. But...there were times when the ghosts of his past weren’t entirely wanted. The days where it got too much; where his memories broke him. It was then that he would feel a comforting hand on his shoulder that he knew wasn’t his wife’s. Marius would hear voices that remained eternally youthful; insisting that it was okay or that they didn’t blame him. Those were the only moments he dared indulge in the possibility that the ghosts were real. His deep seated need for forgiveness outweighed any form of logic in his mind.
As time went on, he simply...adjusted to the ghosts. Marius never responded to them or outright acknowledged them but they were there. He accepted that. He accepted that he heard his old friends bickering after his first born child was named after Courfeyrac. He wrote down the new poems he heard Prouvaire recite them, always claiming that they were old ones he had found tucked away - even if the paper was far too new. But he adjusted. Cosette knew something was...off but she had never outright mentioned it and Marius had no good explanation for her. But there were times he hated the ghosts. The entire month of June. It was when his memories grew terrible once more and their presence became a plague. It was only made worse by his youngest daughter’s birthday. June 6th. It was like fate was laughing at him.
Though, there was one day when Marius saw no sign of the ghosts at all. That was when he knew it was over. He was an old man by then. Cosette had passed on years ago, dying peacefully in her sleep. And Marius...Marius had been sick for months. He knew his end was near and so did everyone else. Marius Pontmercy died surrounded by his children and grandchildren. He died fifty years too late.
The first thing he noticed when he passed over was that he was young ago. He was dressed just as he had been when he first made his way to the Barricade; he was dressed in the clothes he was supposed to have died in. But the world around him was not a tense barricade. It was Paris but more...peaceful somehow. Calmer. He walked for a while, not entirely sure where he was going until he stopped. Before him stood a familiar building and inside, it was full o f familiar people. The Cafe Musain with Les Amis de l’ABC once more converging inside. All conversation stopped as he stepped inside. Marius looked at them for a few moments with almost-disbelief. Like always, Enjolras was the first to speak.
“You’re terrible at many things, Pontmercy. It appears dying is one of them.” He couldn’t help it. He laughed and he smiled. Thirteen words were all it took for the weight of ever second that had passed since June 1832 to be lifted from his shoulders. Finally, Marius Pontmercy found peace.