A Midnight Sun Is Rising

Eponine’s parents left her when she was eleven. It was a simple con gone wrong, a slipped hand and off-target fingers, and then it was all over. She was the watch-dog and managed to slip into the shadows before police arrived to cart-off the group. Born into the filth of the alleys, running into the night came secondhand to her. The streets were filled with the quiet murmurings of the damned, and for a second, if only a second, beneath the yellow pool of light cast by a street lamp Eponine could believe she was free. She wandered the night away, a wayward phantom, shoving off drunken specimens of the underworld and drifting between light and dark. Always a lone traveler, leaving no trace, her long-buried hopes and dreams tied into a neat little package tucked behind her heart. But she had to go home at some point for her siblings, and when she did the next morning they were waiting.

It was sunrise, the sort of sunrise only the underbelly of society could conjure up, with bloody wisps of cloud tainted by smoke rotting in the growing light. As soon as she walked in the door they were there, crowding the dirty little hovel with their crisp white uniforms. Gavroche and Azelma sat in the corner, faces blank and hands gripping beaten suitcases. “We are taking you to the Home for Displaced Children,” the officials told her. “You will be safe there. Pack your stuff.”

Eponine thought about running, about jumping out her bedroom window and taking flight, but her siblings weighed down her wings. She couldn’t leave them. Abandonment was her parents’ legacy.

For seven years she had stolen, conned, sold herself in the dank metal veins of a rusted and broken society. For seven years she had given everything, from her teeth to her dignity, just to survive. And so with a last glance at the hell-hole she refused to call home, Eponine left it all behind.

The Home was near the heart of the city, a building that looked as if it had risen from a Grimm fairytale. All iron and stone, towering gate and barred windows, a prison more than a refuge. Still she walked through the doors with her head high. She was Thenardier- Queen of the Underworld. The children recognized this and parted to make way. Gavroche and Azelma followed close behind, him an unflinching prince of runaways and her a slumped specter. The officials led them through the halls, electric light flickering against whitewashed walls, a kind of dark parade. From all sides children watched, from three to seventeen, grimy even beneath their government issued clothes. We are the lost, tired eyes seemed to call. We are the lost, the forgotten, the limp bodies slumped in an alleyway that no one cares about. The broken, the despairing, the old-from-birth, the dirt beneath the feet of Society. We are the lost.

I may be forgotten, Eponine thought, but I am not lost yet.

The dorms were on the third floor, classrooms on the second, dining and administration on the first. Guards were posted around the perimeter, guns too heavy for clever little fingers to snatch tucked in their belts. Rooms were sparse, bunk beds nailed to the walls with trunks shoved underneath and basins with murky water lining one wall. Privacy was a luxury not provided. Dignity had long since fled these children. The air was brutally cold.

Schedules were tight, breakfast then classes followed by lunch, chores, and more classes. Evenings held half an hour of free time. Eponine was quiet and obedient, doing as she was told. No more, no less. The children left her and her siblings alone. Three weeks proceeded in this way. However, no walls could block out the darkness the children themselves trailed in like mud tracked on shoes.

Gavroche had his food stolen by an older boy. A simple act, but an act with consequences nonetheless. As a child who fought everyday for sustenance not so long ago, Gavroche did not hesitate to challenge the thief. And so it was Eponine walked into the dorms one day to find her brother bloodied, bruised, hungry, and sentenced to severe punishment. To be fair, he had held his own against the older boy, but poverty is a jungle and one learns how to behave as a jaguar. Nails like claws and teeth like fangs. She gave him her dinner that evening.

The Home’s punishment consisted of four hours in a pitch black freezing closet. Gavroche endured it with silence, a sort of quiet rebellion. The children looked at him with respect after that.

One somber night Eponine slipped away. She found a passageway, what looked to be an old maintenance tunnel, in the basement of the Home. The air was metallic, dank, dirty light shining off metal walls. It led to a vast underground cavern, an obsidian black dome too smooth to be natural arching above her head. Every night for the next four weeks was spent exploring this place, the haven of government secrets and dark truths. This, dear reader, is how she learned what was previously told. The experiments gone wrong, the drugging of the people, all atrocities committed under the city itself with obscurity as a treacherous earthy veil.

At the end of four weeks she met Feuilly. It had been a long day, longer than normal, and every bone in her body ached. For the first time in a long time Eponine was thinking of what she had left behind, images of a rich boy hunched over a book in the library rising again to her mind. He had been handsome even as a child, sparkling green eyes and a permanent jovial grin. Her ten year old mind had immediately been attracted to him. It was little more than an acquaintance, polite words exchanged in the only public library of the Society as the worst of her life raged on outside the carved doors, but his kindness had awakened in her a longing for something more, someone more.

And so when Eponine entered the reading room to find a boy hunched over a thick green volume, she had nearly shrieked at the sudden vision, so similar to her most treasured memory. But this boy, while pleasing to look at and outwardly clever, was not her Marius. He looked up as she stared, green eyes smiling, and raised his eyebrows. “Feuilly.”

“I… what?” she asked, still lost in her dreams.

He grinned and stood, neatly tucking the book under his arm to offer his hand. “My name. It’s Feuilly.”

She took it with slight hesitation. “Eponine.”

Feuilly nodded amiably before settling back onto the rickety wooden chair, the best the Home could buy, curling up contently.

“What are you reading?”

He snorted. “The only legal history book around. It’s about the other nations, Before.”

Eponine stepped closer, natural curiosity overthrowing learned caution. “Where’d a boy like you learn to read books like that?” She smiled after a moment, seemingly realizing the roughness of the question.

Feuilly merely smiled in return. “I taught myself. Education is deliverance.”

She whistled, impressed. “I know a bit. How to read and write, I mean. Learned from my father.”

“I could help, if you’d like? I need someone to discuss this with anyway.”

And from that moment forward, Eponine had found a friend.

It would be a long four years before her parents came home from the Academy to claim them. They wore fake expressions of love, all melted sugar and sour sweetness, spewing velvety words of I missed you so as they hiked through the city to the brand new house given to brand new, reformed officials. White walls, white ceilings, white sheets, white lie, she thought. And what a lovely clean little lie it was. So she lived it.

In her dreams, she roamed the sooty city under moonlight turned to silvery ash. In her dreams, she left the lie behind. When her father hit her, when her mother screamed curses, when her siblings starved because of her parent’s greed and the walls couldn’t hold in the cries of pain and everything spun in dizzy white circles at night and blood stained the pretty walls and turned her thoughts vile, she dreamed.

And so a child of darkness was born.