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Enjolras first sees her lurking in the Union bar, back in the third or fourth week of term. She'd been decorated in bundles and bundles of outerwear, pinned in the corner by a gaggle of laughing aristocrats, heavy-lidded and liquor-lipped. For a moment he zones out, eyes snagged in her hair.
She finds him two months after that; breathless and thickly woven once more, as if there was nothing underneath her coats but space; and she's looking at his eyes like she wants to look in, as if she could climb right in and stay, and he's uncomfortable, but not averse - she stands much too close -
like she's just been struck by how eager she really is -
Joly introduces them three days after that, and her hair is combed and her lips are red, and he'd feel guilty if he knew what he should be feeling guilty for, turning away as she stutters out her last lines. Red for revolt, red for sickness, red for that stirring in his stomach when he sees a rising flag in the distance, the city mapped before him, ready to be moulded into anything he could ever want.
She's a constant; but so is Joly, and Combeferre, Feuilly, Courfeyrac, and so are the worlds in his head, spinning realities in the reality he can't seem to touch (can't seem to be heard). She's a black hole, sucking time out of the room, into screaming eyes and howling cries, returning him to his victory days.
Her reality a galaxy, his the sunrise before it collapses. A falling monarch, or a toppled tradition.
They don't talk, like they could - he's guilty, and she's breathing deeply as her heart stutters, stutters, stutt - a shadow of a woman, blinded but so pleased, hitting the bottom of the bottle.
Enjolras firsts sees her lurking in the Union bar, and last sees her escaping through his heart into a world he'd never known he'd harboured, hidden.