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It starts with two men standing on the opposite sides of a door. Right now, the door is closed. But it’s not going to stay that way.
Cut to Javert, standing outside a doorway, which is nondescript but significant of much more, made of sturdy wood in a place where such things are usually flimsy. The night is long and the chase has been longer, conducted under the auspices of his wounded pride and all the cunning he possesses, hounding one man across France in an attempt to jail him for the third time, send him back to the place where they both came from.
Tonight is the culmination of many nights, and many days besides. Javert has been after his prey this whole winter, it feels, and longer still. And yet, he is paralyzed. Indecision, and perhaps the need to find evidence has him cornered at the doorway, his hands at his sides, one fisted as if ready to be raised and knocked against the frame in a request for entry. Javert has been standing here in this manner for at least half of an hour, and he realizes that it is not the need for evidence that keeps him stuck fast with indecision, for in truth there is no need for evidence. He is a policeman; he barges in, requests to see this man’s papers. He will not have them, Javert will be able to ask to inspect his person for a prisoner’s brands. He will have them, the chase will conclude, and Jean Valjean will return to the prison where he belongs.
But in truth, this is not correct either. This line of thinking is overly simplified, and the inspector realizes it even though he perhaps does not wish to. The fact is that Javert has very little evidence save his recognition of Jean Valjean, and the look of recognition that Valjean had given him in upon seeing Javert dressed as a beggar for the express purposes of observing Valjean while unobserved. The mayor, it seems, still retains his habit of giving alms to the poor and traversing. Javert is not sure why, but he still finds it irritating as ever.
Javert cannot open the door because it his certainty that has paralyzed him. He is loathe to have the affair be over with in such a manner, to sneak up on Valjean in the middle of the night and drag him from his home. It lacks both panache and finality. Furthermore, what if he is wrong this time? Luck saved him previously, to have made a correct accusation that was vindicated in the end, but—
The door opens.
“Yes?” Asks a familiar voice, somewhat irate, sounding nothing like sleep.
Unmistakably, it is Jean Valjean. Javert’s paralysis still affects him; he cannot move. Thus his prey is free to continue, the line of his brows made heavy with a frown as he asks:
“Is there a particular reason that you’re standing at my doorway in the middle of the night, skulking like some thief or murderer?”
“Jean Valjean,” Javert starts, but the man in question only turns his eyes skyward, in irritated supplication.
“Yes, and you are Javert. What do you want?”
“You are under arrest,” Javert tries again, fumbling for solid ground.
Valjean laughs at him, startled and darkly amused. What remains of Javert’s poise falls away from him completely.
In order to illustrate what is befalling these men, we must first return to another scene.
Picture Jean Valjean, now well within his middle age, returned to Toulon once more after so many years of freedom. Imagine, if you will, a man returned (now for life) to a world of hard labor. His brands are old but ache in the cold just the same, the winter wind strong as he works in the shipyards of the hell that torments him and all those who share his chains.
The ship that Valjean works on is the Orion, in at the port for repairs. At the mast is the topman; the wind is high, and his footing is lost. He stumbles, and tripping from safety, grabs hold of a line in order to steady himself. Though he is successful in taking the rope in hand, the topman now finds himself dangling in their winter air, stranded between the cold from the water below and the storm that constantly blows off the ocean.
On the docks below, Valjean springs into action. He has moved so before, with more at stake. He once saved a man using only his strength at the risk of his freedom, and before levered his name when at stake were all the lies he’d taken years to build. Now, Valjean risks only his life, and relies solely on his determination.
“Unchain me,” he demands of his overseer, “I can save that man, unchain me.”
Stunned, the overseer allows it. There is something in Valjean’s face that declares that he will not run from his imprisonment when a life is at stake.
Freed, he scales the rigging on the Orion the way he once climbed through trees, finding his way to the stranded topman with relative ease, the sting of the wind meaning nothing to his old hide.
“Take my hand,” he shouts, pulling the rope up towards a more relative safety.
Valjean knows what he must look like, in his prisoner’s red, in his lighter, working chains. The topman takes his hand anyway, and through his surprise, Valjean lifts him, using the rope the topman swung from to tie them both to the mast.
They climb down slowly; when they reach the ground, Valjean finds that he is a hero. His manacles are unlocked. He is, eventually, handed letters of pardon.
Jean Valjean, a free man.
The words ring in his ears, as does his name. Massaging his wrists, the first that he does is find a way to his money, buried in the woods outside Montreuil. That in hand, he purchases clothes at the next town over. From there, he heads directly to Montfermeil, where waiting for him in the woods like a treasure is a starving child, her eyes too large in a frame much too small.
In another world, Valjean would not have opened his apartment door. He would have been too afraid to, knowing who stood on the other side and the power that man would have held over him all too well. In another world, Valjean would have hidden and cowered, sitting rigidly on the bed, forcing his breaths to be even and true.
But in this world, two acts of bravery have granted Jean Valjean a more legal freedom. Under the empowering auspices that his freeman’s papers provide, Valjean is strong enough to commit a third; at his touch, the door opens.
Beyond it stands inspector Javert, one hand clenched at his side, tensed as if to knock.
“Arrest me?” Valjean asks, darkly amused. “You’re here to arrest me? Again? How wonderful.”
“This is no laughing matter,” Javert growls.
“Oh, but it is,” Valjean counters. “I’m a free man, inspector. I was pardoned; by law, that makes me free, and well out of your jurisdiction. You have no right to accost me, or to question me.”
“Show me your papers,” the policeman barks.
“I’m a free man,” Valjean insists once more, retreating into the room only for a moment to find his letters of pardon, which he keeps by his papers of work.
He holds them out and Javert snatches at the pages and scowls, unheeding of the air hissed through Valjean’s teeth at the possible damage to the pages, or the frown he wears to match his shadow’s.
“This can’t be right,” Javert says, eyes flying over the page, turning words over in their storm.
There is a crease between his brows that Valjean remembers from regular reports and frequent frustrations. Javert always tried to smooth it out when he was working; before his inferiors the prison guard showed no outward sign of his displeasure save the falling of the lash. For his superior the mayor, the inspector seemed not to want to burden him. Now, Javert merely seems annoyed, though enraged is perhaps more apt. The little crease grows less so as heavy brows draw closer together in confounded anger; Valjean finds himself unwilling to move.
“It’s right, I assure you,” Valjean replies, because it’s either that or ‘I don’t have to prove anything to you,’ and while he knows that he could win that fight, there is a child to think of.
It always does come back to the child to think of. And, of course, the monumental need to be stubborn that has always allowed him to carry the day.
“I have as much of a legal right to be here as anybody,” Valjean tells his adversary. A thought comes to him; “except, perhaps, for you,” he tells Javert, and smirks when those brows shoot up, eyes snapping to his having leapt off the page.
“What,” Javert hisses, flatly.
“This is private property, inspector,” Valjean reminds him, and feels no small amount of glee. “I pay the rent in this apartment and if I choose not to accept guests—”
“Papa?” A thin, flighty voice asks from the darkness, a small hand reaching out for Valjean as if to fist in his trousers.
Some other context of critical importance, a few days prior to this night: Javert suspects before he acts. But it should not be surprising how quickly he acts once he has a suspicion to act on.
The encounter happens by chance; a child is reported missing in Montfermeil, and the police network of informers makes it known that a girl matching her description has been seen in the Gorbeau tenements, accompanied by a much older guardian. Javert is not out with the intent to catch Jean Valjean; as far as he knows, at this moment, that man is still in prison. Disliking reading, Javert often eschews the news, and as such has missed the declaration of the hero-criminal of Toulon, pardoned for the rescue of a freeman in dangerous conditions. When he takes to the streets of Gorbeau, Javert is looking for a kidnapper, not an old convict.
What he finds is neither.
Javert trails his suspect for days, but does not see him clearly at any point. He identifies him mainly by his yellow coat and the alms he gives from it, the heavy coins stuffed into the linings in the sleeves and the inside of the garment, making the thing hang wrong on his frame. According to the secretive manner in which he donates, Javert adds robbery or maybe counterfeiting to the man’s list of crimes.
He trails his prey dressed as a beggar. At one point, Javert impersonates someone to whom the man in the yellow coat had repeatedly given money. Setting down in his rags, Javert looks up at his prey and intends to find a face to memorize for the sake of giving a more detailed description to his coworkers. Instead, he looks to Jean Valjean.
The recognition is instantaneous and fleeting. Damaging, nonetheless. But fleeting.
Javert rents the apartment across the hall from his quarry. That night he gets the key, he goes to the opposite door, and waits, paralyzed with indecision, for it to open.
The child is tiny, and starved.
Not that Javert is unused to starved, tiny children. Paris, like Toulon, is full of them. But it is not spring yet, and this one is almost especially starved, and especially tiny. It’s the eyes that do it; Javert’s seen them before, but the last time he did, they were full from hating him, then terrified, then dead.
Guilt is a strange thing to a man who arranged his life so as to feel none. One child becomes a whole mother, and staring eyes afraid become pleading ones open for relief that never came.
At least, not from him.
“Cosette,” Valjean starts, and his voice is almost startled, body half turned to spot her. What was tense in his frame is now looser, lines of motion spilling out from his chest and shoulders to rest in his waist, his lower back, the pose of a man ready to snatch, and to run.
Javert would like to accuse him of having stolen this child. But in all good conscience he cannot. It is obvious whose daughter this is, and Valjean had pleaded before for the sake of this girl.
“So you found her after all,” he murmurs, and Valjean’s eyes snap to his.
The girl’s eyes, also, are fixed on Javert. “Who are you?” She asks. “Are you our new neighbor? If you’re our neighbor,” she continues, both men too stunned to interrupt her, “then you should come to dinner.”
“No,” Javert balks, speaking entirely out of instinct.
“Why not?” The girl asks.
“I am not going to eat dinner with a convict,” he says, feeling foolish, feeling irate. Mostly, he is confused. Javert turns back to Valjean, trying to put the girl out of his mind. “I’ll be taking your papers,” he asserts.
“You’ll find them all in order,” he promises Javert, like a challenge, poised between the child and the door. Protective, despite his unwarranted bravery. “Just be sure to have them back when you’re done with them.”
Javert nods, already distracted. “I’ll return tomorrow night,” he says, adding, almost as an absent-minded afterthought; “don’t run.”
Behind him, Valjean snorts. It could almost be derision.
The whole morning, Valjean waits, moving about the apartment quietly, burying a nest egg of his jet money in the floorboards, absently watching Cosette play beneath the room’s one table.
Two months ago, Valjesn would have been nervous to have his life in Javert’s hands, for surely his papers of pardon are the truest representatives of his life as a free man. But now that he is free, all his crimes expunged and forgiven fully in the eyes of the law, well. Javert is spiteful, but not overly so. Valjean knows from experience that Javert would resign before he would falsify evidence, and short of that, there is nothing that would cause the papers to be anything than what they are: a sound declaration of freedom.
Having been his superior, Valjean knows what good men like Javert can do for those who are law-abiding. It is merely strange to place himself within that category now, and to realize that he technically falls under the jurisdiction of those that Javert should protect. The thought is an odd one, and he tries not to dwell on it.
The light through the window is warm at noon, even though the apartment itself is still mostly chill, shot through with silence and cold, heat like voices slipping in through the window to try and liven the room. Valjean sits quietly with Cosette for nearly half an hour filled up with just staring before he breaks, the glass magic of their matched, bewildered gazes no longer molten but set, then shattered.
‘What are you?’ Valjean wants to ask her, because it’s been a million years since he was anywhere near a child.
‘Why don’t you tell me?’ He imagines those bird’s eyes saying, and he almost shudders, confused and wary, balking like a cornered stag in a hunting blind.
It’s been hardly any time since he last held any authority, but Valjean wears it worse now for having lost it. He never held it right to begin with, and Cosette’s mere presence is a clear reminder of the last time he misplaced it.
“How would you like,” he asks her, standing to wipe the dust off his pants and gather his wits, “to visit the garden?”
“I’ve never before,” Cosette starts, then thinks better of it, hunched in before she stands straight, craning her neck to look up, up at this bear of a man who towers over her whole world.
‘Lord,’ Valjean thinks, and would direct his eyes skyward, save for the challenge in the child’s.
Javert takes the papers to the station.
It’s not much work to have them checked; merely the morning spent to requisition what he needs from the police records and begin to cross-reference them with the numbers that the paper contains. Sure enough, Valjean’s story is corroborated by a newspaper from about a month ago; a returned prisoner at Toulon bagne saved the life of an innocent freeman in dangerous conditions, earning his pardon for heroic bravery. The man’s name? Jean Valjean. The status of his pardon? Valid.
Javert grinds his teeth. His mind is set to unease at this. He’s never been quite at home with the concept of a pardon, but he tries not to question it much, understanding that they are rare. He’d never expected to be confronted with the reality of one. He’d never expected to be confronted with the reality of a man such as Jean Valjean: recidivist, mayor, parole-breaker— pardoned. The thought keeps reverberating about his head. Eventually, he realizes grinding his teeth is making his jaw hurt. Javert puts a hand to his cheek and reminds himself to stop.
Having already stayed in for most of the morning, Javert decides to spend his day doing the paperwork he’s neglected since he came to Paris. It’s been nearly two months, and he hates to do it, much preferring fieldwork to drudgery, but it has to be done sometime. It’s a mostly mindless task, and Javert could use some work without thought.
The whole walk back to his apartment, Javert trudges through the falling snow and thinks of his previous sleepless night, spent tossing and turning over the possibilities engendered by this case. He does not like even the mere shadow of doubt that this event brings to his life. He has always been certain, and this? Well, it is nothing so much as confusion incarnate.
Valjean makes dinner that night for three, operating on a hunch.
Cosette plays under the table again, singing nonsense songs to her doll. She offers more than once to help with the meal, but Valjean is wary of letting her do so. It feels wrong to let her work in any way; he knows that at some point she will need chores as is proper for a child, but having seen the conditions she came from, he is cautious of that anything could overtax her, or be a reminder of her previous hell. In the end, he allows her to set the table. When Valjean makes it clear that she’ll be setting it for three, Cosette seems to remember their new neighbor, and gains a sense of excitement, bustling about the small room with a child’s easy joy.
Javert arrives without ceremony. This time, he does manage to knock on the door, first tentatively, then with growing strength.
Valjean wipes his hands clean on a rag as he proceeds to the door, and opens it to find Javert, his shoulders squared and his jaw set as if steeling himself for something.
“I was mistaken,” he admits. It is not so painful to either of them as the last time Javert said those words, but it still rings with the echoes of the last time he made accusations regarding Valjean’s legal status. Still, Javert does not seem willing to meet Valjean’s eyes.
“At least you took no real action this time,” Valjean allows, and steps backwards to invite Javert in.
For his part, the inspector only stands still, hovering at the doorway as if it were a line drawn in the sand. His eyes track Valjean’s movements by way of staring at his feet. Valjean sighs, exasperated, and at this Javert does look up. His expression is quite clearly a question in and of itself.
“You’re already here, you might as well come in and eat,” Valjean explains, gesturing to the set table, and inadvertently, to Cosette playing under it.
Javert remains rooted in place. Valjean holds out a hand. “At the least,” he says in what he hopes is a reasonable manner, “you should return my papers.”
At this, Javert moves, stepping over the threshold. “You didn’t need to go to this trouble,” Javert murmurs, eying the set table. “After all, I did spend the last several days stalking you through Paris.”
Valjean shrugs. “You’ve done worse,” he says candidly, and Javert’s frown deepens. “In any case,” Valjean continues, “you meant no real ill will.”
“I won’t take your charity,” Javert reminds him, placing the papers gingerly upon Valjean’s writing desk.
“It’s not charity,” Valjean corrects him. “Rather, call it curiosity.”
“Curiosity?”
Valjean nods. “I’d wondered, back in Montreuil, what it would have been were we to have been equals. Now that I have my chance, I’d rather not waste it.”
Javert startles. “We are not equals,” he insists.
“Why not?”
“Because you’re,” Javert stops. Closes his mouth, frowns. “Ah.”
Valjean’s smile is a small thing, but it is there. “Exactly.”
Though Javert continues to look displeased, he stays. “I’d always wondered how it was that you came to be mayor in Montreuil,” he says when they have set down for dinner, Valjean having said the grace while both he and Cosette watched awkwardly.
“It’s not so interesting of a story,” Valjean protests.
“Tell it anyway,” Javert insists. So Valjean does.
It goes better than he expects; Javert is an attentive listener, asking questions where he needs to, though generally in a manner not entirely intrusive to the tale. Cosette, of course, drinks in the story with an avid fascination. Accordingly, Valjean modifies certain aspects for her ears, but there is not much to change; he begins his story on the day that he entered Montreuil, not the day that he acquired his silver from the bishop Digne.
If Javert notices the details missing, well. His frown is a familiar thing, and Valjean is not yet versed enough in his expressions as to read the subtle differences between them.
The telling of one story does little to clear up the utter conundrum that is Jean Valjean. Javert leaves the apartment that night as awkwardly as he had entered, hyperaware of Cosette’s eyes on his back as he retreated. He slept poorly, again; he could not help but be consumed by the knowledge that was lying only a scant hallways away from an ex-convict. Despite Valjean’s talk of equals, Javert finds the concept hard to grasp; he tends to sort the world into a strata whereby others around him are either higher or lower than himself. It irks him to think that a pardoned criminal could think himself the same in any way as an upstanding policeman, no matter the technical location or circumstances of Javert’s birth. It feels too uncomfortably close to the truth: neither of them will ever be without the strain of criminality. Yet they are allowed to walk free.
In short, Valjean confuses him. Javert is unused to uncertainty, is unused to doubt, to questioning that which should be apparent. Valjean makes the wood beneath them feel unsound if they are both standing on the same floor; this moreso than anything else is what Javert dislikes about his neighbor.
He leaves the station the next morning for a raid, and for the whole day his thoughts are consumed with musings on his neighbor. ‘What the hell are you?’ Javert wants to ask the man, preferably as a demand, best issued while shaking him by the shoulders as if to divine his answers from a recalcitrant thug witness.
In his mind’s eye, Valjean smirks at him, though the image doesn’t last, his face not wearing it well outside of Javert’s rarely realized imagination. More likely, Valjean would only smile-grimace at him, and shrug, hands spread out in some sort of warding supplication, a clear gesture; I carry no weapon, I mean you no harm.
‘Peace,’ Javert thinks to himself, and snorts, startling the coworker that stands too close to his elbow to wait in the blind.
‘I don’t know,’ Valjean would say, standing in the dust-free footprints left by a prostitute’s daughter. ‘Why don’t you tell me, inspector?’
Around the corner, Javert’s prey is moving. He pounces, and his coworker too; a pickpocket only, but backed by several muggers, a ruffian band looking for an easy mark.
Javert doesn’t mean to get cut up in the scuffle. Like most of the important occurrences in what is becoming his life, it happens by some fated accident, and its consequences are more far reaching than could have been easily assumed when the moment occurred.
“Shit,” Javert curses, and with his iron cane clubs the man that slashed him, knocking the knife from his hand with a crack of bones that makes the criminal howl. His compatriot knocks Javert to the ground, and the inspector’s arm stings, burning where it crunches against the ground.
On the way back to the station, their prey in tow, his coworker tells Javert to go home; he’s bleeding all down his arm, and his greatcoat is terribly stained. It will need to be washed. And patched. Again.
“Shit,” Javert curses the rest of the way back once he is assured that he is alone, “shit shit fuck son of a whore, damn it—“
For the sake of illustration, we must detour again.
When Javert is younger, he makes a series of decisions, based on the limited information he has available to him at the time. These are not the wisest decisions that he ever makes, but he makes them just the same.
They are as follows: In man reside only two classes of human being; the respectable, and everyone else. The respectable are part of society; they are looked up to, they are the citizens. As for ‘everyone else,’ that is, of course, those who are outside of society. The criminals, the beggars, the wretchedly poor. And, of course, the policeman.
Being the son of a convict, Javert knows that he is doomed to be other forever, the burden of his destiny lying in his blood and the jail cell he was born in. This is the first decision. We must be clear here; this is a decision and not a fact, no matter that Javert may assume otherwise. Javert sees the world as a series of paths unfolding before him. At this point, he sees two: to take the high road, putting himself on the right side of society, even if he cannot join it; or, to take the low path, turning his determination towards the criminal life, and his cunning to it, too.
Determined to be on the right side of society, even though he knows that he will never be a part of it, Javert becomes a policeman. This is the second decision, but it is by necessity nested inside the first. There is no choice after this in his entire life that is not informed by, or affecting the decisions made in this moment.
This does not excuse the choices he makes, such as to be brutal with a dying woman, or to let free a rich man simply because he is rich and a more convenient scapegoat exists in the form of an angry prostitute. No, Javert’s first choices do not excuse the rest he makes afterwards. But it has to be understood, that when looking at the way he reasons things, at least his conclusions are explained.
Javert is fumbling with a bandage when the knocking at his door, which had begun not long after he arrived at his apartment, ceases. Javert looks up from his feeble attempt to stop his own bleeding, and the door clicks open with the lock despite the key being in the inspector’s coat pocket.
Valjean, of course, stands at the improbably opened doorway with a lockpick, eyes wide and getting wider when he catches sight of Javert’s injured arm.
“Is that a lockpick?” Javert asks.
“No,” Valjean answers, and hastily stuffs the offending item up his sleeve. “Is that a knifewound?”
“Yes. Are you coming in or not?” Javert snarls at him. “This is private property and I won’t tolerate trespassing—”
Valjean steps into the room.
What a sight Javert must make, standing in his greatcoat, on which snow is slowly melting, one arm of the garment stained dark with blood. He knows that he is most likely completely unfit for company, despite the bandage he had tried to tie without the use of his dominant hand.
“What did you do to yourself, Javert?” Valjean asks, coming closer.
Javert moves back. “It’s not what I did,” he grumbles in correction, “rather what occurred between myself and one of the more criminal elements of this city.”
At this Valjean only proceeds to look more worried, stepping forward once more. Accordingly, Javert backs up, accidentally bumping the room’s single table. He swears under his breath and Valjean shoots him a look that is singularly unimpressed; Javert grits his teeth, but stays in place, holding his arm in front of his body almost protectively.
“Javert,” Valjean starts dryly, “you can’t possibly intend to bandage that yourself.”
“I’ve already done so,” he counters.
“Not well, obviously,” Valjean retorts, gesturing meaningfully at the loose tie of his bandage, which is already beginning to soak through. “You’re losing a lot of blood; someone needs to look at that properly, and I’ll not have you bleeding out when it could be prevented.”
Javert grinds his teeth. “I will not,” he repeats, “be taking your charity Jean Valjean.”
Valjean frowns. “Only you would dare mistake the urge to help one’s neighbor as charity.”
This catches Javert cold; he had not before this thought of them as neighbors. It is a singularly arresting thought.
“I’m counting this as an invitation,” Valjean growls eventually, and moves the rest of the way into Javert’s space while the inspector is distracted. He is rougher with the bandage than he could be, or else Javert’s injured flesh is more sensitive than he would have otherwise assumed.
“What, to molest me?” Javert snipes back.
Valjean pauses before looking up at Javert, his brow furrowed, though he does not let go of Javert’s arm, as if afraid that the inspector will bolt should he do so. Which is a ridiculous thought; Javert would be hard pressed to run when Valjean is standing between him and the door, and either way, this is his own lodging. Javert would be a fool to flee when he has the right to this space.
“Can you take off your coat?” Valjean asks Javert, pulling the inspector’s attention from his musings. “I’m going to need access to your arm if I’m going to get this clean; I can only assume that you do not wish to go to a doctor.”
Valjean is indeed correct; Javert certainly doesn’t have the funds to afford one. The inspector begins removing the coat slowly, first his right shoulder, then his left; at his dominant hand, he finds himself stuck, hissing through his teeth. This is why he had left the coat on earlier when he first bandaged his arm; it’s simply too painful to try and take the thing off by himself.
Javert is forced to allow Valjean to assist him. It is cold in the unheated apartment, Javert not yet having lit the stove, but he can still feel the other man (his neighbor’s) body heat as he steps around Javert to help remove the offending garment. But eventually it is off, and Valjean has rolled up his left shirtsleeve, examining the cut Javert had so hastily tried to bandage on his own.
Valjean’s fingers on his skin are too warm, or else the skin is too abraded. There must have been something foul on that knife, for even as Valjean picks the gravel out from where Javert fell, the skin is visibly red, and already beginning to tighten with swelling.
“That’s not good,” Valjean mutters quietly.
“What?” Javert snaps, feeling his heartbeat in his ears.
“Will you come back to my apartment tomorrow?” Valjean asks him, still in the soft tones once used by a mayor. “You’ll need someone to change the bandage again, and I’d not like to risk an infection.”
“Fine,” Javert snaps, and pulls back his arm, feeling underdressed and somewhat vulnerable in only his shirtsleeves.
Over the years of their unwilling acquaintance, Valjean does not intend to develop a fixation on Javert. Nonetheless, he does so.
Close observation is a path that, for the paranoid, runs in two directions. The inspector scrutinized the mayor for many years, and before that, the prison guard watched over his charges. In each case Valjean felt those gray eyes on him and always stared back, making a study of Javert that was always admittedly incomplete.
Javert watches him and Valjean watches him back, always, always wondering about the heavy eyes that follow him throughout his life, the unrelenting presence it seems he will never be free of.
It had been a strange thing, in the hospital, to see betrayal in Javert’s eyes. But worse had been subservience in the mayor’s office, nearly as intolerable as the cold hate that rolled off all the guards of Toulon as steadily as the wind off the sea. When Valjean tells Javert that he has thought about their being equals, he neglects to mention the circumstances in which he has imagined such a thing. Perhaps this is just as well; they are not exactly daytime musings, or fit for polite company, no matter how distrustfully arrayed.
Valjean has lived a life of chastity, but that has not stopped him from wondering.
The next morning, Javert arrives on Valjean’s doorstep, fidgeting as he does so. Valjean opens the door; Javert steps through.
Valjean makes quick enough work of the bandage, this time having already been prepared with a basin of water heated over the stove, and clean cloths as opposed to the rags Javert had had on hand. Cosette, ever helpful, flits about preparing breakfast; toast, eggs. Nothing fancy, but filling enough. When he is done with Javert’s arm, Valjean offers Javert some of the food, and watches his neighbor bristle at the implied charity. Javert takes the food all the same, even if he does eat it in an off-handed manner that could best be described as sulky.
“You never did explain where you learned your skills in the garden,” Javert says eventually, nodding at the empty box that sits in the window, waiting for spring to be filled.
“I was a tree pruner, in another life,” Valjean replies. “I could tell you the story, if you wish. It’s not interesting, but—”
“Tell it anyway,” Javert says, so Valjean does.
It hurts less than he thought it would, to speak of home. In truth, Faverolles hardly feels like home at all anymore. Nineteen years’ imprisonment can do that to a man, but there is the fact, also, that Valjean has lived more lives under more names than most men do in the entirety of their lifespan. No wonder, then, that home could become such an abstract concept, and one so rarely applied to himself.
Javert nods along throughout the story, and this time does not interrupt, though Cosette does, asking questions about the gardens, and the trees Valjean had to climb. He tells the story in such a way as to exclude his sister and her family from the narrative entirely; there are some things that he simply does not want anyone to know, or even dwell upon himself.
The story finishes with no ending, Javert noticing the time as the sun moves through the sky, cursing abortedly as he stands.
“Where are you going?” Valjean demands.
“Work,” Javert growls, turning awkwardly in an attempt to find the coat he had left across the hall.
“Work?” Valjean parrots, completely incredulous. “Javert your arm is almost certainly infected. You’re not working.”
“I’ve persevered though worse,” Javert grids out, and stalks to the door.
Valjean arrives first, and plants himself at the threshold. “They’re not going to let you into the streets like this,” he cautions Javert.
“There’s always paperwork.”
Valjean’s mouth twitches in the beginnings of a smile. “You’ve never liked paperwork. You delivered reports in person in order to avoid it.”
“That was not the only reason,” Javert mutters, and they both flush.
“Stay,” Valjean demands, trying to control his own reactions. “If you’re so bent on working, I’ll go to the station for you. Though I can’t see how you’d work; you can barely move your arm, much less write with that hand.”
“You,” Javert blinks, “would go to the station?”
Valjean makes a grin that is more of a grimace. “I’m a free man, aren’t I? There’s nothing for me to fear there, now is there?”
It’s a question and it shouldn’t be, but Javert answers it anyway, seeming to be at war with himself before he saying quietly: “no, there should be nothing there to endanger you.”
Valjean nods, and his smile turns a shade relieved. “Well, then.”
He turns to the door, collects his yellow coat, the linings still stuffed with sous. “I’ll be off; since you’re here,” he says, the idea striking him, “you can watch Cosette. She has a habit of playing under the furniture, and she’ll need someone to mind her in my absence.”
Before Javert can protest, Valjean is out the door, and gone.
Javert cannot think of himself as ever having been particularly good with children. To be completely honest, he’s never been exposed to children since the time he counted himself as one of their number. And yet Cosette seems to gravitate towards him, perhaps because he is the only other man, in fact, the only other person in her life at all outside Valjean.
“Tell me a story,” Cosette demands of him, before adding, hastily; “please.” There is something in her that cringes still, but the rest of her inheritance is a natural boldness that makes her fearless around Javert.
“I’m no good for stories,” the policeman tells the girl. “Go ask—” your guardian, the convict, Valjean. Javert shakes his head. “Go ask your father, he has a thousand of them, and more than that.”
“No,” Cosette answers back, bird-boned princess in her cage beneath the table and all its tapestries of cloth. “He never answers my questions.”
“What makes you think that I will?” Javert prods her, not with his finger but his eyes, which pointedly do not in her direction glance.
The tiny girl looks up at him and through him, leveling a small stare that announces; unimpressed “You’re always asking so many of your own,” she tells him.
Javert doesn’t have an answer to that.
He uses his opportunity alone in Valjean’s apartment to search the place. He’s not sure what it is that he’s trying to find, only that he’s looking. For contraband, maybe, but there’s a part of him that gets sick at the idea of Jean Valjean hiding something illegal in his house.
Stalking through the room, Javert’s foot presses too heavily on one of the floorboards. The wood creaks differently than any other step in the place, a thin sound that indicates a small hollow beneath it. On hands and knees, careful to keep the weight off his injured arm, Javert pries the loose board up.
Beneath it is a bag of money, a significant amount that Javert does not bother counting up.
‘So this is what he did when I arrested him the second time,’ Javert realizes, and finds that yes, there is still dirt on the bag from where it was buried in the woods so many months ago. There is a dull roar in his ears, and he wonders why it is that Valjean has stayed, what he could possibly be doing here in these dingy apartments in the wrong end of town with that much money so easily at hand—
“What are you doing?” Cosette asks him, suddenly appearing at his elbow.
Javert swears at her arrival. The rushing in his ears is fading, but the little girl remains, staring at him with those large, inquisitive eyes.
“What does that word mean?” She asks him. “I’ve heard them say it often at the inn, before, but I didn’t ask that many questions there—”
“Don’t tell your father I said it,” Javert tells her quickly. “It’s a bad word.”
“How can words be bad?” The girl questions him. “It’s just a word.”
Javert thinks of prison, and his own darkened childhood. “Not all words should be said,” Javert answers her slowly, and is careful with each syllable. “Some things are better left unsaid, I think.”
“Isn’t that lying?” Cosette picks at the thread of her dress, the cotton shift warm and blue.
Javert thinks, then shakes his head. “It’s not lying,” he corrects her, and himself, “just a more selective version of the truth.”
“I didn’t know that the truth could have versions,” Cosette tells him.
Javert shrugs at her, and feels helpless. “Neither did I,” he admits, and lets the child lead him to the window, and show him the box her father is building her for spring, the space that she will plant her garden in.
Valjean approaches the station like a fox walking knowingly into a trap. All around him he can practically smell hunters, and though he knows he is safe from them, he cannot help but pull his sleeves low around his wrists, and step too heavily on his left leg.
At the desk, he requests Javert’s papers, only to be met with incredulous stares. When asked why, Valjean tries to smile, and answers that he is merely Javert’s neighbor, and that the inspector has been laid up lately with an infected wound.
Wandering by, one of Javert’s colleagues corroborates this, attesting to the ferocity of the man they took down, and the poor condition of his knife. “Shame Javert had to take the blow so hard,” the man says, “but it’s better that he rest and keep use of his arm than risk losing it entirely.”
Valjean, for his part, wholeheartedly agrees. Still, once he has the papers he needs, compiled into a stack tied with twine, he is flees, scampering from the precinct as fast as his uneven stride can take him.
When Valjean arrives, Javert is under the table with Cosette. Or rather, not quite under it; he’s frankly too tall for such a maneuver, and instead is sitting on the edge of the tablecloth that has spilled onto the floor, making a backdrop for Cosette’s illusory kingdom.
When Javert looks up, he finds hazel eyes staring at him.
“What?” He snaps.
“Nothing,” Valjean replies with a smile just this side of helpless. “I was only thinking that you are remarkably good at this, inspector.”
Javert grumbles, but allows himself to be talked into dinner. Cosette’s grin is small but incandescent, and Javert finds that he does not mind, so much, the way that the people in this apartment continue to stare.
That night, Valjean tells another of his stories, this time lingering on the first jet factory, and the early manufacture of its beads.
“Your rosary, Javert, came from that first batch,” Valjean remarks, nodding at the strand that is looped around the inspector’s neck.
Unconsciously, Javert brings a hand to the offending object.
“It was a failure, of course; too many beads on the string to be proper. But I kept it for sentimental reasons.”
“Yet you gave it away,” Javert replies quietly.
Valjean’s mouth quirks into a grin. “For sentimental reasons.”
When Javert returns back to his apartment, he cannot even begin to call it home. Sleep still eludes him, and the space that lies between two doorways suddenly feels the width of a river.
Valjean has more errands to run the next day. Javert once more agrees to watch Cosette, and has his bandages changed, using the last of Valjean’s clean rags, necessitating that laundry be done at some point in the future.
Hovering suspended on the threshold, Valjean looks as if he has something to say, but thinks better of it. He leaves, closing his mouth, and the door behind him, stranding Javert with Cosette, whom Javert has still not heard the man refer to as his daughter, despite the obvious affection that he showers on the child.
“You said you were someone who knew Papa, but he doesn’t say much else. Who are you?” Cosette asks Javert the last word twice; she is too much like her mother. She starts with vous, then corrects herself to tu, the exact opposite of proper.
It’s too damn cold in these apartments. Javert can see each feathered word that comes out of her breath, thin tendrils of steam rising up to the low-hanging rafters.
“I don’t know,” Javert tells her truthfully, because he’s never lied once in his life. His chest feels hollow on the inside, as if someone had taken the vital things from it with a scooping hand, or a wooden spoon. “Why don’t you tell me?” He asks Cosette instead of pondering that emptiness and the last tatters of his internal bastion.
What sort of a world has this become that an inspector would seek honest answers from a child? Everything has been turned on its head.
Cosette wrinkles her nose. “I don’t think that’s how it works.”
Javert hums a noise of question, distracted in his own musings.
“No,” the girl continues, “I think that’s the sort of thing you have to figure out for yourself.”
Dinner that night is accompanied by another story; it is about a street beggar, and Javert barely hears it, lost inside his own head.
Valjean watches him as he speaks, and everywhere his eyes go Javert feels as a wave of fire pressing up through the skin. Trying as best he can to clear his head, he thinks, hard, on the stories that Valjean has told, the evidence corroborated by his pardon, the record of his tenure as mayor.
Cosette falls asleep beneath the table, on the pile of tablecloth that she had once more dragged from the furniture to make a world of her own devising. Javert watches her breathe, and thinks about the girl that Valjean has never publicly called his daughter.
“Why do you always refer to her by name?” Javert asks him when the quiet becomes too much. “You always call her Cosette; she calls you Papa and you’ve never even once acknowledged her as your daughter—”
Valjean splutters. “Because she is not!” He stammers.
Javert frowns, and looks at him sideways. “Then what is she?” He counters. “Certainly not just some orphan you took in off the streets. Even then you intended to find her. How could she be anything but?”
Valjean doesn’t respond. The silence grows in the room, shrinking the space around it; it should be uncomfortable, but it is not. Javert finds that all the more disturbing.
“Your daughter keeps asking me for stories.” Javert says eventually.
Valjean looks at him, somewhat disgruntled at Javert’s insistence on the point. “So tell her some,” he says.
“It’s not my place when you have so many,” Javert protests. “I’ve never been any good with words.”
“Like I have? You’ve always been witty enough.”
“There’s a difference between sarcasm and stories fit for children.”
“Just as there is between becoming another man and telling a child’s tale.” Valjean counters. He is smiling, and Javert cannot help but watching his mouth.
Javert’s throat is dry. He swallows, coughs.
“Madeleine always did sound like he was made of sawdust.”
Valjean’s smile falls away.
“That’s because I was always trying not to choke.”
“The mayor’s chain was tight after all, then?”
Javert had always wondered about that.
“And so were my convict’s manacles.”
Silence falls like a guillotine this time, and the conversation dies accordingly. Javert has nothing to say to that; the reminder that his neighbor is a pardoned criminal sets Javert on edge as well as it does the ex-con in question. They are back to breathing, quiet, steady, and even though there are three people in it, the room is still cold, and the apartment building still smells like the refuse it so shoddily houses. When Javert looks at Cosette, sleeping under the table, shivering slightly, he can almost pretend that her father is sleeping as well, so even is his breath. But Javert can also feel Valjean’s eyes on his skin, and he is tired of listening to Valjean breathe.
When Javert returns to his apartment as Valjean puts Cosette to bed, the inspector loses himself in thought, as he is becoming accustomed to. Waking the next morning, the sun through the window announces it being near to noon; he has slept away an entire morning after so many sleepless nights, and perhaps it only serves him right for his inability to think.
When Javert fails to answer his door that day, Valjean at first is consumed with panic, being by nature a paranoid man, especially in situations where Javert is concerned. When he hears snoring, however, emanating from the thinness of the door that separates them, he ceases his knocking, and despite himself, smiles.
Returning to his side of the hall, Valjean offers Cosette another trip to the gardens, one that she is quick to seize. Even in winter Luxembourg is still gorgeous in the mornings, and the snow is melting over the dead grass and the wilted bushes, the dirty runoff water a promise of a better spring. Luxembourg is fantasy for Cosette in a way that the woods of Montfermeil never were. There is no malice here, no demons. Only the sound of little birds, and the city coming alive.
Valjean watches her play in the small, lingering drifts of snow, and is glad that she agreed to put on shoes, and mittens too. Her hands are still so small in his; he is terrified of this little girl, Valjean finds, and all that she represents. Cosette makes him afraid in ways that he has not been in a long time, and not only for himself. What a thing it is to be responsible for a life again, and moreso to want the burden. He has a family, now, strange as it is, comprised of a whore’s orphan and a disgruntled policeman.
It surprises Valjean, to realize that he’s begun to think of them both as family. He had promised, when he found her, to be a parent to Cosette, much as he’s been awkward at the role since. But Javert? The man is, or had been, his natural enemy. Still Valjean wants him close, has most likely always wanted him close, though never with this little hostility.
In the bushes, Cosette is building herself a little house. She constructs it with sticks, and fills it with stones, and sings to herself as she tries to buttress it with twigs. She seems to be having trouble with the door, but the walls are sound, and when Valjean asks about their absence, she tells him that there's no need for windows if the walls can be seen through.
Javert spends the whole day doing nothing but thinking. He feels as if a fever has overtaken him, and it is not the infection in his arm but the more serious malady in his brain, that niggling specter called doubt, one with which Javert had never before been afflicted before entering the acquaintance of Jean Valjean.
‘Who is this man?’ He asks himself. He imagines asking Valjean the question, but imagines also Valjean’s answer, full of lips and teeth and a vicious smile:
‘Why don’t you tell me, inspector? After all, you seem to have so many ideas about who it is that I am.’
Javert knows he should not fixate on that mouth. There is nothing but danger there, and he would like to think himself an honest man.
That is the crux of the matter, he realizes, the concept of honesty. Javert lives his life with the certainty of a man who has never knowingly told a lie. This is his point of pride, the foundation upon which he has built his life; honesty, morality as dictated by the law, justice as dictated by the law. Yet these things do not coincide. Justice dictated that Jean Valjean face nineteen years in prison for his crimes, and a lifetime afterwards for theft, the breaking of his parole, the robbery from a child, not to mention a man of the cloth.
Valjean is, undoubtedly, a recidivist. And yet, he was pardoned. Javert has seen him save one life, and now heard of him saving two more; first the man falsely accused as bearing his name, then the topman of the Orion. Valjean is a hero. But he cannot be a criminal and a hero at once; this contradicts the central tenets of Javert’s beliefs about the world.
‘How quickly they’ve crawled under my skin,’ Javert thinks bitterly, and paces the space that lingers in his own cold apartment, case files strewn unlooked at on the table he maintains at its lonely center.
There is a knock at his door. It is almost certainly Valjean. No one else would call on him at this hour.
A convict (pardoned) and a whore’s daughter, Javert’s neighbors. He could move, certainly, and is forced to examine in confused frustration why the thought had not occurred to him until now, just as he discovers that he would not want to leave.
Javert falls into this particular revelation slowly, with all the inertia properly commanded by the fall of a thing incorrectly built and held up for years by willpower alone. When his world crumbles, it does so quietly and without fanfare, all his rationalizations stripped away, leaving only the core of him, bared.
Valjean knocks on his door again, and when Javert moves to open it, Valjean is staring at him with eyes that he recognizes, and are much too wide.
“You are not a criminal,” is the first thing he says to Valjean. Even to his own ears, the words sound as if he were destroying them, scraped harshly over gravel, or coarser sand.
“You’re only figuring this out now?” Valjean blurts. He has become tactless since declaring their equality; nothing to hide, maybe, or else the trust that there is nothing more damaging that Javert could know than what he already does. One option frightens him more than the other, and Javert will not let himself dwell on it, not now.
“Shut up,” he hisses, and with his good hand, grabs Valjean by the lapels.
When their mouths meet, it is more like an avalanche than it is a kiss. The world shakes apart and reforms itself between them; Javert clings to Valjean like he is drowning and Valjean is a source of air. When they break to breathe, Valjean leans forward as if the bones had gone out from his knees, resting heavily on Javert, one of his hands resting on the inspector’s back, lightly fisted in his shirt.
“I never thought I would love my neighbor this way,” he says, and what is left of Javert’s old world’s order falls completely, the knell of an era heralded by the sound of that word.
“Now you care about what is right,” Javert mutters, and knows that he must look and sound more than slightly hysterical, here with his hand on his neighbor’s shirt, and his mouth wet and red.
Valjean brings Javert further into the inspector’s apartment and can scarcely believe his senses. The inspector trails behind him as if unmoored and looking for an anchor. Trusting that Cosette will remain asleep for the night, Valjean pulls Javert to the bed, and when they fall upon each other, it is more as like two meeting mountains than it is two men making love.
Valjean has imagined, before, what this would be. None of his dreams, for all the shame that they encompassed, were ever anything like this. He himself is delirious with it but Javert seems to be gasping for air, seeking reassurance in every touch, looking to map his partner with every motion. They move together and move together, hands finding each other in the dark.
When they are spent, Javert nearly collapses. He is feverish, and Valjean worries as to the state of his health, but allows himself to sleep as well, Javert’s hand tangled in his being compelling enough as for a reason to stay.
When he wakes in the morning, they are still connected that way, and moreso, their legs having come to be entwined as well. Valjean hates to extricate himself and so chooses not to, contemplating in the early morning light just what his life has become.
‘Three days,’ he thinks, and snorts. When he closes his eyes, he both hears and feels Javert breathing, twin sensations that perhaps should not be comforting, but are. This close to another person, the room could almost be mistaken for warm.
The morning arrives with a flare of pain, and the sound of Valjean's breathing. The sheets are filthy, and Javert’s arm is beyond sore, protesting the death grip he seems to have maintained on Valjean's hand while they slept. Grumbling, Javert moves to untangle their arms and legs, and sits up with some difficulty, as Valjean seems unwilling to let him go, even as he wakes. At Javert's hiss of discomfort he eases off, then seems to become more aware as Javert leaves the bed to heat water to try and find a way to clean them both off.
“Let me,” Valjean offers and Javert does not protest, letting the man (his neighbor) run the warm cloth over his skin and help him into a fresh shirt. Javert offers a roll of cloth from his supply for bandages, and though Valjean looks displeased to see that Javert is so prepared for the inevitability of his own injury, he takes it nonetheless.
“I need you to watch Cosette for me,” Valjean says to him when he finishes fussing over Javert’s bandage, at last moving to clean himself with the warm water as well.
“What,” Javert says flatly.
“You’re injured and I should find work,” Valjean says, like it’s reasonable and not at all like he has a nest egg of jet money buried under his floorboards. Or, as if he weren't sitting in the apartment of his old enemy and wiping himself clean from the night's exertion. Javert has never understood him less than in this moment; he doubts that in this case, he will ever stop being confused.
“Now you want to be a contributing member of society?” Javert asks him, utterly incredulous, and more than slightly sarcastic.
“Well not all of us can be policemen,” Valjean fires back, then visibly reins himself in. “I need someone to watch my—” he pauses on the word, “daughter.”
They stare at each other and don’t look away, eyes locked and conflicted, Javert’s searching his.
“Why me?” Javert asks him, after a while, turning away, picking at the newness of today’s bandage.
“Because you are all I have left,” he says, and Javert can hear the bare truth in it.
Valjean brings Javert back to his apartment across the hall, and gets dressed himself. Thankfully, Cosette is not yet awake, though once he has his clothes on, Valjean moves to rouse her. “Be good for him,” Valjean instructs her, then leaves. There is something unsettled in him; Javert is more pleased with that than he should be. It feels vicious.
“Are you alright?” Cosette asks him when Valjean leaves the room, and she still won’t call him monsieur. Her eyes are too big in the room’s insufficient darkness, and there is something in the slight quiver of her voice that Javert does not like.
“What would make you think that I wasn’t?” He asks her lightly, but knows he is still shaking to his bones.
Cosette gives him the look he is becoming used to, the one that says he is a ninny but she doesn’t mind him. Javert nearly quails under it, and thinks of children with the right sort of parents, and wonders that they aren’t, either of them.
The little girl clambers onto him without permission or so much as asking, and when Javert opens his arms for her, they move slowly, one still bandaged and cut, though healing beneath that.
“Please don’t leave,” she commands him, but it is not the usual of her childish orders. There’s something almost hopeless in it, and the tone of it resonates inside a heart of wood—
“I wouldn’t,” Javert tells her now, and is stunned to find it true. “I don’t— I couldn’t—”
“Good,” Cosette says fiercely against his collarbone, and tightens her fists against the fabric of his shirt where hands have tried to meet around his back.
When Javert hugs her back, she nearly squeaks with it, but holds tighter all the same as they both flee the winter towards the warmth.
Valjean goes to the house on Rue Plumet alone first, because he has never been one for hope and it’s never a good time to start a new bad habit. Worse, he feels vindictive. Javert has never been anything but under his skin, and yet Valjean still finds himself slightly unnerved by the reality of what was once confined to his dreams. In his dreams, at least in the better, kinder ones, Javert did not snap at him so harshly, or look half so lost. The inspector is not the only one looking for a mooring, and accordingly, Valjean has left to find one.
The walls around the property are high, and crusted over with dead, brown ivy that will certainly regrow over the next several months. The iron gate, intricately designed and terribly sturdy, is higher than someone could conceivably climb, and is locked with heavy chain. Because it’s always smart to maintain good old habits, Valjean scrambles over the precipice by hand anyway, finding footholds that only squirrels would, or the very determined.
Behind the gate is a house with a terrace and very small shed. The house has too many windows, and through one of them on the ground floor, Valjean can see an old piano, and all the dust that covers the floor, the house a long time unlived in.
The garden around the side is likewise unkempt. Everything there is like the ivy on the walls; dead, brown, and dying. But Valjean knows the earth, having grown in it himself and learned to live and breathe the soil; he knows the land is sleeping and not dead. It’s only quiet for now, waiting throughout the end of this long winter, ready to liven with the spring. Beneath the thin line of frost, Valjean can nearly see the warmth holding now to rise with steam off the melting snow. The thaw is coming in the air, and waiting in the ground that crunches beneath the sturdy leather of his boots.
There, a fountain, cracked but repairable. Here, a birdbath. There, the porch overlooking it all. Valjean can readily imagine Cosette easily in this garden, and sees in the corner of his mind’s eye Javert sitting on the stoop watching her and trying not to smile.
Valjean picks the lock on the way away from the house, and relocks it once he has crossed the gate, and considers the cost of the things he will want, and what may be used to purchase them, if they can be purchased at all.
“You could have had me for forced entry, when I barged into your apartment the other night,” Valjean tells Javert later, when Cosette is asleep beneath the table and Javert’s greatcoat has made her nest.
“It wouldn’t have stuck,” Javert replies, and is clearly uncomfortable.
Valjean looks at him but does not, and decides he does not care if Javert knows that he is being watched. He is skittish when not confronted, and Valjean would rather an answer than this silence, though he will get what he can take.
“Did I ever tell you the story,” he asks Javert slowly, nodding his head in Cosette’s direction, “of how I found her?”
“I’m sure you will tell me anyway,” Javert retorts dryly, but the habit of his snapping is thin, and wears weary. Valjean can feel his eyes on him, and wonders now as to their purpose.
It’s a comfort but a vicious one, and it prods at the angry, unfurling thing behind his ribcage. Valjean feels it moving sometimes. It keeps throwing itself against the walls and the silences of this cold and dusty place, trying time after time to sink its growing roots into the hollow spaces beneath the floorboards. But the closest thing to empty he is finding lives in Javert, and in the place where Valjean used to keep his unsaid name, now repeated over and over to make tracks in the frozen air so that he cannot run from the shapes that it makes. Javert brings out the worst, most human things about him, it seems.
Someday, Valjean is going to stop being afraid of that.
It doesn’t take long for Javert to give up on trying to do any paperwork for the day. He is halfway through the report on the arrest where he was injured before he gets frustrated and gives up for the time being. He has no way to say ‘I was distracted thinking about my former convict of a neighbor, and in my inattention, allowed myself to be knifed.’ It is an infuriating conclusion, now just as much as it was two days ago.
Having surrendered any pretense of productivity, Javert listens to Cosette as she plays, tries to feel the stilted rhythms of this little world while Cosette sits under the table, and from shadows, begins to construct a home.
While he watches, Cosette explains, patiently, that the trick to building a house has everything to do with light. With warmth, and the people in it. Using her small hands, she outlines dimensions: four walls, two floors, doorway almost twice as wide as it is tall.
“Who is going to make a door with such odd proportions?” Javert asks.
The look Cosette gives him is frustrated, and she only wilts for a moment before she pouts. “It doesn’t matter,” she says. “If no one will build the door, then there doesn’t have to be one that’s made of wood. It can just be a hole. People only need a way to get in.”
“I’m moving,” Valjean blurts that night, after dinner. Javert stands on the threshold once more, this time to leave, and Valjean finds himself hesitating for what feels like the first time in a long time. “That is, Cosette and I— we’re moving. Gorbeau is not exactly the safest place to raise a child, and I’ve found a house—”
“Wonderful,” Javert bites out.
“Move with us, when we go,” Valjean asks him, tells him, tries not to plead. “It’ll be a bigger place, for Cosette and I, and the rent will be better away from here, but more expensive, and I’ll need someone else to help to pay—”
“Valjean,” Javert says, and he sounds as frayed as Valjean feels, “I know about the money beneath your floorboards.”
“Come with me anyway,” Valjean asks him, not missing a beat. “Just one night, one more night, you can try it and go back in the morning—”
“Valjean,” Javert says again. He closes his eyes, and his mouth too, around the thing he nearly says.
“Yes?” Valjean asks, and feels something winged beating behind his ribcage. It’s always time and there’s never enough, and he’d steal it if he had to, but this isn’t something he can pick up and take, not if Javert won’t willingly come.
“I didn’t intend to become a convict’s neighbor,” Javert admits, watching Cosette play beneath the room’s one table.
“You didn’t,” Valjean reminds him. Maybe that shouldn’t help, but it certainly looks like it does.
“Someday,” Javert rasps at him, hands twitching like he wants to cover his face, “you’re going to have to stop offering me things that I so desperately want—”
The house on Rue Plumet is really two houses. There’s the large, manor house, and then a smaller one in the garden, which is more of a shack. In actuality, the landlord informs them, the second house is a shack, and houses the garden tools. But looking at Javert, he is quick to tell Valjean, dressed in the finery Javert wouldn’t let him foist off on him, that the shack could be easily converted into another home, fit for a sublet tenant.
“Can you show me the garden?” Valjean asks instead, and puts his serene mercy on the man who fidgets under Javert’s unimpressed glare.
The landlord shows them the garden. It’s still winter, but spring is coming soon, and though he understands nothing of the earth, Javert can see it blooming in the ground, heat spreading up from below to warm the land, which he thinks is dead and not sleeping. Around the property there are high walls covered in dead greenery, with a wrought-iron gate between Paris and this dead little world. The house has too many windows and there’s not much to look at, but there could be, later.
Valjean watches him from the corner of his eye and Javert resolutely does not fidget under that gaze.
“We’ll take it,” Valjean announces.
Javert should not read so much meaning into that we. But it feels good to do so, and he is listening to his heart more often, these days.
It starts with two men standing on the opposite sides of a door.
“Well,” Valjean asks Javert, “are you coming in or not?”
Javert moves to answer him when he is struck from behind by the barreling movements of a child. Cosette grabs his hand.
“Inside,” she urges him, “come on, there’s a piano, I’d like to show you—”
Javert allows himself to be pulled. He smiles at Valjean, and Valjean smiles back. Valjean shuts the door behind him as he follows his family into the house. In the parlor, he can hear the first hesitant notes of Cosette at the piano. It is in desperate need of a tuning.