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Javert is sinking into the howling, roaring void. He can’t tell if he’s hearing nothing at all or if the rushing water is deafening him; he can’t feel anything but the cut of icy cold through his numbing limbs. Everything is dark. He does not know if there is simply no light in this place, or if he’s gone blind. He has been falling deeper into the water for only a moment—or maybe he has been like this for an eternity.
He doesn’t know. In this place, all his senses are useless. The Seine refuses to take his unsleeping soul, but it devours the rest of him.
Somewhere before and beneath him, a vague shape forms from the murky darkness. Javert’s mind latches on to it like the distant flare of a lighthouse in a storm. He forces his unresponsive limbs to push him towards it, deeper into the unforgiving waters.
It begins to make itself clearer.
There is a long wooden spar twisting in the water. A shred of tattered sailcloth and moldering rope cling to it like a funeral shroud; Javert’s rigid fingers reach, clawlike, for the end of it. The rope trails like the tendrils of a jellyfish, and tangled in the strands is a figure. Between its hands there is a span of chain, caught inextricably in the line. A cloudy halo of white hair drifts aimlessly around the head. The body rolls in the rigging, red cassock grey in the dark, and its dull eyes pass over Javert, unseeing.
Javert’s hand clenches hard on the shattered fragment of the ship Orion¸ and he opens his mouth in a scream. He screams for a moment, an eternity—
All he can hear is the roar of the river. The river has him, it has him, it has him—
Somehow, in the long, sleepless years, Javert has forgotten dreaming.
Or perhaps time has merely dulled the memory of it, and he always dreamed so vividly. The first few nights were easy enough. He’d left the house at Rue Plumet, having stumbled through an explanation of the pardon he’d procured. He’d said something of his vow, something of his sudden unconsciousness, but couldn’t remember what. The confusion on Valjean’s face in his memory was a clear marker of the incoherency of his excuses, and the fear in the convict’s eyes had driven Javert out of the house, despite Valjean’s halting invitations to stay.
Javert’s own spartan room lacked a bed; he’d sold it years ago in favor of firewood in the winter, because he never slept but often found himself freezing. The first night, he laid out his greatcoat on the floor, the once-stalwart grey forever stained by the Seine. A spare shirt had been rolled up as a pillow, and he’d covered himself in the ragged quilt he kept beside his chair. The makeshift bed was no luxury by anyone’s metric, but to Javert, it was more than enough. He’d spent all his money on law books and had no budget for a mattress.
His greatcoat had always served him well enough before. He slept. He did not dream.
As the days passed, the iron anchor of exhaustion slowly loosed its hold on his bones. He no longer dreaded the setting of the sun. His collection of law books began to gather dust on their shelves, unopened, as Javert slept away the hours he’d once spent in research.
But as the days turned to weeks, Javert became accustomed to sleep again. Emboldened by the rest, his mind began to turn against him.
At first, the dreams were less clear. He would wake with the unsettling recollection of panic, but be unable to recall its source. Then he began to wake with fragments, flashes of horrors and the discordant roaring of fear. He began to sleep less.
The dreams became more vivid. Suddenly Javert began to find himself struggling to discern the line between waking and sleeping, between flashback and fabrication. He’d always struggled against his own memories, occasionally overwhelmed by moments he would have preferred to leave buried. They set his heart racing and trapped his breath in his chest.
Javert dreads the sunset again, and longs for the sleepless nights not so far behind him. Now, he resigns himself each night to the rest his body demands of him, and waits at the gallows of his own unconsciousness.
Jean Valjean is behind bars.
Javert is before him, his hands locked fast around the cold iron. The convict’s eyes gleam, pleading, in his filthy face. One wide hand, strong enough to raise a city from poverty, reaches for the bar beside Javert’s own grip. It is dark, and reeks of waste.
There’s a muddied corpse slung over Valjean’s shoulder. Javert pays it no mind. The dead are of no concern to him; they have fled beyond his reach. He sees only Valjean, behind bars at last, locked in.
There is such fear in his eyes.
Javert hears the roar of the river. His hands tighten on the sewer grate. In the darkness behind Valjean, a wave rises from the shadows. It crashes towards them, Javert on one side of the gate, Valjean on the other. The wave is red as the blood of the angry men, shed in the streets and run down through the gutters of Paris. And now, here, it rushes through the sewer, coming for Javert. The gate is locked and Valjean is behind bars—
Javert has never shied away from his own pain when there is a duty to be carried out. He has spent more than a decade carrying the law of Paris and his own torpid consciousness. He can bear a few unquiet nights.
But by the same measure, he is not a fool. There is no point in bearing crippling injury when there is a cure at hand.
Javert steals up the Rue Plumet in the cool of the late afternoon. From a shadowed corner across the road, he gazes into the unkempt garden. The gate stands a few inches open—a risk, he knows, that Valjean would never have allowed before the pardon—but still the wrought iron bars his view. Through it, he sees the white head bowed over the flower beds, the cloud of butterflies and the broad shoulders, held loosely under a workman’s shirt. He finds him, he sees him, safe, behind bars. Has he not kept his oath?
He hopes it is enough. Javert slips out of the shadow and back to his apartment. He does not see the white head turn and watch him go.
The sun is still in the sky, but Javert curls atop his greatcoat and lets sleep drag him under.
Javert stands still as the crowd roars around him. Their faces are unclear; their voices are only a clamor of fear and horror. He stands. His hands are full of a slightly worn gentleman’s coat, out of fashion a few years, but perfectly serviceable. It smells faintly of the glass foundry.
The movement of the agitated crowd sometimes cuts off his line of sight, but his eyes remain locked in place anyway. The horse, floundering in the muck. The cart, its axle snapped like a bone. The hand, curled and mostly submerged in the mud.
Javert cannot move. His breath is caught in his throat. At the edge of his vison, he sees the jack-screw arriving. His thumb moves against the fine, weathered fabric of the coat. It is tailored for such broad shoulders. He stares at the hand. The bleached linen of the cuff. The broad palm. The workman’s callus. The faint edge of scar tissue. The still pulse.
They are too late. They’ve fetched the jack-screw but they’re too late; the crowd swarms uselessly, and Javert stands, holding the coat of a good man. A dead man. The hand is curled in the mud. The jack-screw. The jack-screw and the hand and the jack-screw—
The hand is curled around his shoulder, shaking him.
Javert wakes.
He finds himself panting. In the dream—it had been a dream?—he did not remember breathing so heavily, but now he struggles to catch his breath. He cannot tear his eyes from the familiar hand, cannot bear to follow the dirt-stained sleeve to the broad shoulder, to the white hair and worried eyes.
“Javert,” Valjean says, “You were only dreaming.”
A sound rises in Javert’s throat. It is already rattling in the air before he knows it to be a laugh; he is sure is teeth are bared in a hideous smile, and still he cannot look at Valjean’s face.
“Only a dream?” he barks, “Only?”
He staggers to his feet. Once, he could walk the fine edge of a rooftop without flinching, but now he sways like a drunk on the wide, rough floorboards. “Only dreams. No, Valjean, these are not dreams; they are the ghosts of a cruel man. The vicious fantasies that kept him amused on long nights; the undeserved revenge he longed to take against a saint. Only dreams! I know that I am damned. I know that my treatment of you has damned me. No, Valjean, they are not dreams.”
The convict is still kneeling on the floor beside Javert’s makeshift bed. “I do not think,” he begins, “That I have ever heard you call me by my name before.”
Javert slumps, and finally lets his eyes fall on Valjean. “I don’t deserve to call you by it even now. Stand. I cannot bear to see you kneeling.”
The face that turns towards Javert is lined with confusion, even as the man rises. “Why me? Why are you so tormented by dreams of me?”
“Because you are a good man,” Javert sighs, defeated, “And I have wronged you.”
“You’ve done your duty, nothing more. And the pardon—any wrong you may have done would be forgiven by that.” Valjean mumbles. He is clearly uncomfortable. Javert cannot tell if the discomfort is caused by Javert’s honesty or merely by Javert himself. Valjean’s eyes fall on Javert’s greatcoat, and he frowns. “Why are you sleeping on the floorboards? Have you no bed?”
“I have not needed a bed in more than ten years.”
“Javert, you cannot sleep upon a wooden plank. Please, I owe you my freedom; let me at least give you a bed to sleep in.”
“You owe me nothing,” Javert snaps, unintentionally sharp. The ex-convict flinches. Javert immediately regrets his tone, and cannot help but remember that first morning at the Rue Plumet. The warm light, the smell of flowers, the soft bed. He cannot unbend himself to agree outright, but the rigid line of his spine softens.
Valjean’s large hand closes around Javert’s wrist, burning like a brand.
“I insist,” he says.
Javert surrenders.
Javert stands on the banks of the river, and listens to the water. It roars, but is drowned out by the sound of the wind in the rosebushes and the chirp of evening crickets. The air smells of roses.
The river runs through the garden. The Seine is too broad to fit in the garden of the house at Rue Plumet, but it does anyway. The high stone walls shiver with ivy, and an ornately barred gate keeps out the horrors of the world. Javert feels the waning sun on his skin, and curls his fingers into the warm hand around them. The first stars of evening glitter down, shining on the dark waters.
“I found you,” Valjean murmurs. Javert turns away from the river, and smiles.
He is dreaming.