Routine Maintenance

[personalmephistopheles]

Fandom: Les Miserables
Rating: G
Setting: Modern au
Characters: Enjolras, Éponine Thénardier
Primary Pairings: Enjolras/Éponine Thénardier (queerplatonic)
Secondary Pairings: Enjolras/Grantaire (unrequited)
Word Count: 287 

General Summary: Enjolras doesn’t work quite like other people do, but Éponine doesn’t mind it. 

Author’s Note: A piece I wrote for one of my best friends when she had a bad day back in July 2013.


She sometimes doesn’t quite understand how he functions - how he pushes himself to extremes until the gears just refuse to turn and he collapses in a heap of long, slender limbs and golden blond curls, and so she watches him sleep.
 

Sometimes she imagines, as she traces her fingers down his spine, that she can hear the cogs and nuts and bolts of him slowly put themselves back into working order, slotting into place, polished again, and slick with the oil needed to run such a fast-paced piece of machinery. Though if she was honest, she was pretty sure that what he required in order to run was more like rocket fuel.

Sometimes she places her head on his chest once he turns over restlessly onto his back - even at rest, he’s always in motion, it seems - and half expects to hear the motor of his heart purring in his chest like a sleeping kitten, and so the slightly arrhythmic thudding of his pulse is always - despite herself - something of a surprise.

It was, she remembers, R who first bitterly compared Enjolras to a machine. "He’s like one of the gadgets in your shop, ‘Ponine," he had remarked, "Doesn’t need sleep, doesn’t need sex, doesn’t need food. It’s a wonder he functions at all. He doesn’t need anything from any of us."

Éponine hadn’t said anything then, but she had known even then that Grantaire wasn’t entirely correct. Even the most self-controlled piece of machinery still needed routine maintenance, even if it was just company and the lightest touch of a skilled mechanic, and she was more than happy to fulfil that particular position of trust, whatever it happened to mean.