Author's Note: This was originally a 15-minute challenge involving Marius and a dream. I edited it a little for grammar, but other than that, it's pretty much the same. So don't judge it very harshly.

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One night's dream had Marius lose himself during a torrential rainstorm in the very bowels of the Cite. For what seemed like an eternity, the young man wandered the dark, gloomy labyrinth of the winding streets and struggled in vain to figure out how he got there and how he should make his escape. There were no bridges to be seen; there was no water other than that which fell from the skies; the quays eluded him.

Marius squeezed through the deserted alleys, which seemed to become narrower and narrower each time, until his shoulders were almost brushing the buildings on both sides. The eaves of those dismal structures overhung so close together that they formed a sort of dank plaster archways about two times the height of a man.

Marius kept passing the same run-down dram-shops and the broken lamps over and over again, and several times he had heard the peal of Palais de Justice announcing the hour. Eventually, exhausted and soaking wet, he stopped walking on a corner and leaned againt a half-rotten vertical stairway. Immediately, his eyes fell on a tapis-franc across the street - and because of the cramped space, only several feet away from him. The entryway into dreary drinking den was illuminated by a lamp glowing faintly behind a glass globe of a reflector. On it, there was a strange sign painted in crooked red letters: instead of the usual advertisements of lodgings or meal specials, it proclaimed: Lasciate ogni speranza.

In the next moment, without any idea of how it happened, Marius found himself inside. He was seated on an uncomfortable straight-backed chair behind an enourmous table which was so high that it made him recall eating with his grandfather as a small child. His legs dangled in mid-air and the filthy oilskin covering the table was almost under his chin. Despite its prodigous size, there were only two chairs by the table, one occupied by Marius and the other by a something which Marius at first took for a huge rag doll. The abysmal lighting only allowed him to discern a woolen overcoat and a top hat, but nothing else.

Suddenly, his companion turned towards him, and with blood-curdling horror Marius perceived that he was, indeed, seated next to an enourmous rag doll. Properly speaking, it wasn't even a doll - it wasn't really anything besides the coat and the hat, both of which appeared to be draped over a ghost.

The empty space between the hat and the coat collar seemed to be giving Marius an inquisitive look.

"Well?" asked the coat and hat in a low, hoarse voice, which Marius found familiar.

"Pardon, ... ugh... monsieur?" said Marius, attemting to calculate where the figure's eyes ought to be situated so to avoid looking directly at them.

"Are you here to talk to them or just passing through? Don't play the fool, now. You don't have much time, you know. Some of them are gone already."

"Who is gone?"

"Your collaborators, naturally," answered the coat irately. "Open your peepers and take a proper look around you."

As soon as the figure spoke, Marius realized that he was surrounded by his dead comrades. Combeferre and Courfeyrac were playing dominoes at the table immediately to his right; Enjolras sat by the stove with a huge, woolen blanket covering his lap; and Grantaire was sitting right behind him and making strange, jerky hand motions, as if attemtping to catch a fly buzzing around Enjolras' blond head.

"Where are the others?" asked Marius, looking around.

"They're gone already. See?" answered the coat and pointed with its right sleeve towards a trail of wilted flowers leading across the room towards a door. Marius recognized Jean Prouvaire's favorite begonias.

"What shall I say to them?" he asked softly. The coat shrugged.

"Whatever you think they want to hear," it answered and suddenly folded in on itself. The hat fell onto the floor and rolled off into a corner.

"Friends!" said Marius somewhat too loudly and fell silent, searching for words appropriate for the occasion.

"Oh, shut up, you," answered Grantaire without pausing in his peculiar ministrations above Enjolras' head.

"Yes, really now, Pontmercy," mumbled Combeferre. "It's bad enough that you showed up uninvited. Now the place will reek of live human for Lord knows how long."

"I just wanted to say..." Marius strained to discern Combeferre's face in the dark, but all that he could see were his glasses, or rather the faint glints of yellow light on the lenses. One of them appeared to be cracked. "I just wanted to say, I'm sorry I alone lived."

"Hah!" barked out Courfeyrac. "He's sorry!" he exclaimed and slammed a domino bone onto the table with a crack that was loud enough to pass for a pistol shot.

"You're not sorry. You can't lie here. We're past lies now." Combeferre turned towards Marius and Marius' blood congealed in his veins. Combeferre's glasses were grown straight into his face, like roots, and tears of blood rolled from beneath the cracked lenses.

"I'll make it up to you!" panicked Marius. "I'll write a book about you! You won't regret that I lived!" Marius really wanted for Enjolras to say something, or at least to look his way, but Enjolras sat perfectly still in his chair.

"He'll write a book!" echoed Courfeyrac.

"Et moi, je ne me tuerais point: j'apprendrais l'orthographe, Pour leur ecrire en vers un bon epitaphe!" quoted Grantaire with mock solemnity. No one laughed.

"Then what will you have me do!" howled Marius, grasping his hair in handfuls and tearing. Tears stung his eyes. "How shall I appease you! I can't eat, I can't sleep. Your faces haunt my every waking moment; the disgust in your eyes rends my soul! Tell me what to do now that all this has happened!"

"Be honest, be kind," suddenly spoke up Enjolras from his dark, stove-warmed corner. "History will take care of the rest."

"Enjolras," whispered Marius, struggling to make out his beloved friend's features through the sheen of tears veiling his eyes. "Enjolras..."

"Be honest, be kind," repeated Enjolras in the same hollow tone. "It's so cold here, Marius. If only you knew... how cold..."

At that moment Grantaire roared and threw himself on the floor at Enjolras' knees, and Marius suddenly understood that all of his strange gestures were simply desperate attempts to embrace Enjolras. An unseen wall held Grantaire at arm's length from his friend and leader, and Grantaire's face held such grief and such helpless fury that Marius felt as if he were intruding on a very private scene and turned away.

Saddened by his comrades' rebukes, Marius lowered his head and stared at the gunk caked onto the oilskin covering his table. The stains all had rather queer shapes to them. One looked like a decapitated eagle in flight; another resembled a fleur-de-lis turned upside down; a third one reminded him of a dessicated pear. But the oddest one appeared to be a pair of black eyes with long symmetrical rays of lashes. That one looked entirely too realistic to be due to accident and not to some customer's boredom. Marius stared dumbly into the two round black holes burnt into the oilskin to represent the irises. Then the right eye winked at him, and Marius turned away in disgust, thinking: what, government spies even here?

He became aware of a queer sound,and his first thought was that the deluge outside must have shifted some tiles off the roof or forced a layer of plaster loose from a wall. The noise came again, this time louder. It was clearly originating from Enjolras' corner. Marius turned his head and froze in his seat. A crack was widening in the base of Enjolras' skull and travelling downwards along his spine. Then thinner cracks began to spread all along his white arms, like the fragile latticework of bare tree branches against the winter sky. Grantaire sobbed and thrashed on the floor before Enjolras like a man posessed by demons. Marius could not stand to watch any longer and hid his face in his hands. When he recovered the bravery to look again, there was nothing left of Apollo but a pile of rock chips and gray dust.

Marius woke with his nightshirt drenched in foul cold sweat and with Grantaire's animal howl of despair still ringing in his ears.