Remember Me

Chapter Two: Nightmares

My eyes fill with tears as I watch Éponine's slowly close.

"I love you." I whisper to her. Her body goes limp in my arms and I press my lips against her cold, wet, forehead. What looks like smallest trace of a smile appears on her lips, but is gone in an instant. Éponine's blood lingers on my hands as Feuilly carries her away. I watch him walk, and a gunshot blasts through the air and he falls, dead. Suddenly all of my friends appear and topple onto each other, forming a new ghastly barricade of bloodied dead bodies.

I jerk awake with tears flowing down my cheeks. I drag a hand down my face and look around. I'm still collapsed in front of the fireplace of the apartment Courfeyrac and I used to share. Until he died along with everyone else, but me.

"Why?" I shout. An onslaught of tears overcomes me and I curl my knees to my chest. Three years from that night and I still don't know.

"Marius!" I hear a shrill voice shout from the hallway. I stand shakily and walk to the hall. Cosette stands there, looking panicked.

"There you are, my love, I was looking everywhere." Cosette sighs with an overly dripping sweetness. She flutters her eyelashes and I nod, looking away. I feel her hand on my shoulder guiding me out onto the street and in that instant I remember; today we are heading to America.

That's why I visited that god forsaken apartment that no longer belongs to my friend, but only dust and mice. I will never be back here again. Never be back to this place full of memories of my friend's horrible deaths, but also their wonder-filled, too-short lives.

I feel my face crumple and I lower my head so that Cosette cannot see my tears. It makes her uncomfortable when I cry for my dead friends.

When we finally reach our small, tucked away house on Rue Plumet I see that there is a carriage waiting for us. Already packed with trinkets and clothes that I have no use for.

I check the time on my gold pocket watch. It reads three forty in the afternoon. I didn't realise I had stayed in that apartment for so long.

"May I go inside for just a moment?" I ask Cosette. She sighs, then nods, brushing back her long, honey-blond hair in irritation.

I walk through the garden, remembering how Cosette and I first really met; when she professed her love for me, and I to her. I didn't realise then how much someone else, watching silently from behind the gate, meant to me. I open the thick wooden door to fifty five Rue Plumet, where a runaway convict once hid his daughter to escape from the law, and step inside.

"Marius, we must leave!" Cosette yells from beyond the garden. Have I really been in this doorframe for so long? I look at my watch again. Five o'clock.

"Indeed." I mutter to myself but continue on into the parlour. It all looks so barren, with no furniture, no people, nothing. Even so, I lower myself onto the wooden floor, still cold despite the July heat. I put my head in my hands and think about how lonely my life has become.

Could I have saved them? At least one? At least Gavroche, who was much too young to die at only eleven. Or Jean Provaire, the quiet poet, who never did wrong to any person. Or Éponine. Brave, teasing, solid, innocent, 'Ponine.

I wipe a tear from my cheek and lay back against the wall, letting the dark quiet of sleep wash over me, hoping no more nightmares will come with it.