Combeferre: June 1, 1842
(An alternate universe in which Combeferre survives the barricades in a fairly complicated offshoot of the email roleplay)
It has been nine years now- almost ten- and I still have nightmares. I don't tell Jeannette, she has enough to worry about, as worries too easily about me anyway. She would only try to find a way to help, I know, but there is little she could do to make the faces of my friends, the sounds of the gunshots, the bloodshed that periodically haunts my nights go away. And besides, I think I have almost grown used to it.
It's odd the things one remembers after ten years, after what as really a lifetime ago but feels like only yesterday. I can still hear, as clearly as if they were right outside my window, the shots that killed Jehan. I can still see, in sharp detail, the face of the first man I killed, and I can picture the look on his face when he realized his death was imminent. At the same time, I could not tell you a thing about how Joly died, though he fell right in front of me, or a word of encouragement I said to those men on that rainy June night.
I have thankfully gotten to the place where I can think of them without pain, even this close to the anniversary of their deaths, but this is more thanks to Jeannette and Henri, my son, than any will power of my own. Both of them have helped me more than they will ever know. At first, I thought their presence would make things worse by causing me to remember; back them I thought I could forget everything that had happened to me and move on. But instead, with their help, I learned to remember Enjolras, Prouvaire, Feuilly, Courfeyrac, and the rest of Les Amis de l'ABC without pain, as they were before their untimely end.
And maybe, if I'm lucky (and luck seems to have found me the last couple of years: I'm alive, I have Jeannette, I have Henri), I'll some day be able to have the hope I possessed as an idealistic student: hope for the human race, hope for France, hope for the world.