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“How right you should kill with a knife,” Javert sneers, his chin high, his eyes steely in the face of death. Like a holy martyr. Like a young patriot.
Is he afraid, Valjean wonders, somewhere deep enough that it would never show? Or is fear only for those who doubt their path? Javert's dark eyes do not blink, his jaw is gritted as though he holds his resolve clenched in his teeth. What blood must pump through a conviction like that, to keep it running! If being pursued is exhausting, how much more so must it be to so relentlessly give pursuit!
He doesn't know what he is going to do until he has done it. It is only that the thought is so terrible, Javert's heart so shuttered and unknowable… Valjean bends and presses his lips to Javert's, his eyes closing, his hand that is not holding the knife coming up to rest on Javert's jaw. He feels the tense muscles there go slack against his fingertips.
Javert does not otherwise respond, but stands there like a man frozen. Valjean pulls away, his heart thudding dully in his chest. Javert remains staring. Valjean doesn't know what he was hoping for. He hadn't hoped for anything, he only wished to… he wanted Javert to know that…
Valjean swallows around what feels like a jagged stone in his throat and cuts the ropes around Javert's wrists with a quick tug. “You talk too much,” he says hoarsely. “Your life is safe in my hands.”
All the fear that was missing from Javert's face a few moments ago is there, now.
He seems to have regained his equilibrium by the time he meets Valjean at the sewer exit.
“I won't be swayed,” the inspector grits out. Valjean, bent under the limp weight of the boy on his shoulders — much less than a loaded cart, but that was ten years and a lifetime ago — wonders if he imagined the fear.
(He did not imagine it. Javert had touched his lips with the tips of shaking fingers and his eyes had been wide and hunted. “I don't understand,” he had said.)
Now, a carriage ride later, the boy is laid out in the sitting room with Cosette ministering to him, and Javert is standing out by the front gate waiting for Valjean to keep his promise. Then I'm yours, and all our debts are paid.
Valjean changes his clothes and cleans himself as best he can with a cloth. The stink of the sewer still hangs on him, but he can go to his fate in dry clothes, at least.
He pulls an envelope from a drawer in his desk, straightens his coat, and goes from his room. He passes by the room where Cosette sits vigil with the boy, and resists the pull to go inside, to wrap his arms around her and say goodbye. But she would never permit him to leave; perhaps he would not permit himself either. Valjean lays the envelope on a small table in the entryway, takes a deep breath, and then walks out, shutting the door behind him as quietly as he can.
Javert is still standing at the gate with his back to Valjean, his hands clasped behind him and his head tipped back to look at the sky. His silhouette against the streetlights, so familiar from so many years ago, no longer makes Valjean want to run. He is tired of running.
Valjean walks up and stands beside Javert. The other man makes no acknowledgment.
After a minute or so, Valjean clears his throat. Javert does not move.
“I would not have thought you would be so impatient to leave," is all he says.
Valjean finds he has little to say in reply to that. He does not wish to run from Javert, but neither does he wish to hurry away from the house where Cosette sits in the warm glow of lamplight, still ignorant of Valjean's sins. He does not know why Javert is lingering, though.
"I have always taken great comfort in the stars,” Javert says.
“I would have not taken you for a man who required much comfort,” Valjean replies. Javert glances over at him in an accusatory way.
“All men require comfort,” he says. He looks back up at the sky.
“The stars, then?” Valjean says after a moment, since it seems Javert wants to talk.
“They are constant,” Javert explains. “They never vary or doubt themselves. You can navigate by them. And you can always find one by the location of all the others--Polaris, Sirius, Antares.”
“You always did set great store by giving things their proper names,” Valjean agrees. “Javert, what is this about?”
Javert doesn't answer him, but only continues. “But if the stars were to move,” he says, “if the sky were to be jumbled, we would lose all of them. They would be a sea of nameless points. We could give them new names, but the old ones… they would be gone forever.”
Valjean gives a long exhale. “You speak in riddles, inspector,” he says.
Javert says nothing. Valjean looks up, to see if perhaps the stars Javert stares at and speaks of hold the answers, but the sky is dark with clouds. Not even the moon shows.
“What am I to be?” Javert says into the silence. He seems calm, but he gives an impression of brittleness, of something ready to crack. “After this. What shall I become?”
“Can you not still be a policeman?" Valjean asks, a little startled. "You were always a fine officer."
"I was not," Javert says to the sky. “I was a cold-hearted tyrant.”
Now Valjean is truly startled. "You did not always think so.”
"One of us has to be the villain, Valjean," Javert says impatiently. He turns his face away finally from the invisible stars, to stare down the gaslit street. "We cannot both get out of this with clean hands. We are wandering away from the question."
"I do not understand the question,” Valjean admits.
The tension coiled in his stomach is starting to take on a different shape than the one it has been all evening, no less terrible.
Javert turns suddenly toward him.
“Why did you—?” he begins, then cuts himself off as abruptly as if he had slapped his own hand over his mouth. He looks at Valjean mutely for just a second, his eyes wild, his lips clamped shut over a word he can not say, and Valjean finally sees that the fear never left, that the familiar silhouette is hunched and pained as though it has been Javert carrying a heavy load since daybreak, instead of Valjean. Javert turns away again quickly, but his misery is clear now in the line of his shoulders. Valjean suppresses an urge to reach a hand out to him.
“That you would release me is ridiculous,” Javert says, his back to Valjean, the anger in his voice doing little to cloak his bewilderment, now that Valjean has seen it. “That you would… forgive me is impossible. But that you would—” He cuts himself off again. He does not seem able to name it.
Valjean stands beside Javert, feeling too cold for a June night, and finds he is no better equipped.
“You are a saint,” Javert spits. “Fine. I have been wrong about everything, at every turn, for as long as I have lived. Fine.” He pulls off his hat with a jerky movement and runs fitful fingers through his hair. It has partially escaped its ribbon and hangs disarrayed over his ears. Valjean wonders how many times today Javert has done the same thing.
“But you! For you the constellations seem to be intact. You see something in me I cannot fathom, so please,” he sneers, turning to Valjean again, “enlighten me, since you have so many answers. What am I to be?”
Answers? Valjean has never felt like a man with answers. He feels rather that he has spent his life going without.
“Inspector,” he says quietly, “are you going to arrest me?”
Javert's veneer of disdain wobbles and collapses, his anger crumbling like a wall under cannonfire, and his iron spine bends under its invisible load.
He does not speak, but his eyes are dark with pain and Valjean wants… he wants…
It must show in his face, because Javert takes a step backwards and crushes the brim of his hat in his hand, swallowing visibly. Valjean pulls himself back and forces his own hands to his sides.
“Why did you do it?” Javert demands, voice rasping. “What did you mean by it?”
The lamplight is sickly on Javert's slumped shoulders, his hollow cheeks. Valjean could turn around and go back into the house, now, before Cosette finds the letter on the table, and he knows somehow that Javert would not follow him, would not report him. But the desperate question in his eyes is too familiar, too much like the eyes of a newly released convict. Javert's tense fingers knead his ruined hat, and Valjean doesn't know what Javert would do if Valjean left him now, where he would go. He finds himself afraid of letting Javert go from here with his questions unanswered.
The only problem is that Valjean has no answers either. He wants, but he can't let himself say what. He feels, but he has spent so long locking it away that the keyhole has rusted. This is important, but he’s terrified to name why.
Javert sets great store by giving things their proper names. Thief. Officer. Convict. Saint. Mercy. Justice.
“You are not a villain,” Valjean says, because he knows this at least. Javert scoffs.
“No, a fine officer, by your reckoning,” he replies. “Perhaps you would even say a good man.” Valjean sees his teeth clench briefly, his lips press into a thin white line.
“I do not think,” Javert continues, speaking a shade too precisely, “that you kiss every fine officer or good man you encounter.”
Heat comes to Valjean’s face and the memory of the kiss arises unbidden—Javert’s rough lips, the rougher stubble of his cheek, that small spot of tension at his jaw, the one so tight now, melting under Valjean’s touch.
Valjean catches his breath. Javert is still waiting for a reply.
“No,” Valjean agrees, also speaking carefully. “I do not.”
He dares a step closer, undoing the distance that Javert put between them. Javert twitches, a spasm that runs down the length of his lank frame and delivers another bruising grip to the hat, but he does not step backward.
“You are not every good man, Javert,” he says. “You are…” He falters, and takes a breath.”You are something to me that I have long kept myself from naming, but it is not an enemy.”
“So name it now,” says Javert shortly, his teeth set rigidly.
The key will not turn in the lock. He is an old man and does not know how now to learn the language he needs. He says nothing.
After a long few moments, Javert looks away.
“Go back to your girl and her dying revolutionary,” he says. “Go back inside and you will never see me again.” The way he says it is not a command he is issuing; it sounds more like one half of a choice.
“Do you want me to?” Valjean says.
The muscles of Javert’s jaw work, but he does not otherwise stir or speak. Valjean does not know what he should say. They are both silent for a long, terrible stretch like a chasm.
“I admired you,” Javert says abruptly. “In Montreil-sur-Mer. Madeleine. You. I—” He stops, swallows. His fingers are trying to smooth out the crumpled brim of his hat with limited success. Valjean finds his eyes transfixed by the restless movement in the dim lamplight. He thinks Javert’s hands might be shaking.
“You were wrong about absolutely everything, of course,” he says. “It infuriated me, how wrong you were. But you wept in church, and people smiled when they spoke your name, and your convictions seemed to ground you, rather than weighing you down like a chain.”
The smallest, ragged intake of air, as though he cannot catch his breath.
“I did not want to be more like you, but I… admired you. I wanted… I do not know what I wanted.” He takes a half step backward, away from Valjean, gulps air. The sound is loud in the silence. “This is unbearable,” he mutters.
They are tragic and absurd, the two of them, old men talking of such things in the open street, talking without having the words, jiggling the rusted locks on their hearts. But there is no one here to hear them fumbling, to be shocked at the terrible things they are failing to say.
Paris is sleeping, an exhausted sleep of healing, like the boy inside the house. There is no one here to judge this.
If it is said badly, at least it is said.
“I wanted, too,” Valjean says.
Javert glances back at Valjean, his movement jerky, his eyes almost panicked, and looks quickly away again. Valjean sighs.
“Montreil-sur-Mer. It seems like a lifetime ago. Were we different people then, or do we only know each other better now?” He shakes his head. “And then sometimes Toulon feels so near.” He has not said the name of that place out loud since the courtroom in Arras. It makes the dark street, the words he’s saying, seem even more surreal, but Valjean does not stop talking. “Doesn’t it seem strange to you, that we knew each other for so long in that place, and never knew each other at all? Ten years, it must have been—”
“Twelve,” interrupts Javert abruptly. Valjean stops, and Javert coughs and runs his hand through his hair again. “When you were released. I had been at Toulon twelve years.” He looks at his hat in his hands.
“And yet I learned more about you that night in the hospital than in all those twelve years,” Valjean continues, smiling a little. “I have sometimes thought since then that maybe we are more alike than either of us would admit.”
Javert scoffs down at his hat, and for a strange moment it feels like those lost days in Montreil-sur-Mer again. It gives Valjean the courage to step forward again, ask what he wants to ask.
“Do you wish I hadn’t done it?” he says quietly. “Last night? That I hadn’t—”
Javert cuts him off. “I wish you had killed me,” he says.
Valjean sighs and gives a small smile, weary, patient.
“Now who is avoiding questions?”
“Do not ask me such questions and I will not have to avoid them,” Javert snaps, but his lips are trembling. Valjean takes another half step closer and Javert glances at him as a spooked horse would.
“You ask me what you are to be,” Valjean says. “I confess it is a question I have never known how to answer for myself. For ten years I have been a father, but if the boy lives… if they marry…” He shrugs. “Before that I was a mayor. I did not ask to be, but they told me it was where I was needed.” He looks up to the clouded sky. “Where shall I be needed now?”
“I am not sure I have ever been needed,” Javert says. The words are mumbled at the ground; Valjean wonders if Javert has ever mumbled before in his life. “I find myself doubting any good I’ve ever done. I have tried to walk a path of righteousness, but if I have been navigating all this time by false constellations… How many others have I ruined?” He huffs a breath, turning his hat in his hands. “And yet,” he murmurs, “they don’t matter.”
Valjean wants to object automatically, like they are mayor and officer disagreeing on a point of ethics, but Javert looks up at Valjean and his eyes are glittering darkly, terribly. He has a look that Valjean has only seen in the most wretched of men, and it closes Valjean’s throat.
“I have been thinking of it all day while you slogged through that sewer, and the only mistake that harrows me, the only thing I cannot abide, is what I have done to you.” Valjean sees his throat move in a hard swallow. His voice is rough, and his haunted eyes are pinned to Valjean. “Why is that, do you think?”
If Valjean lets his cowardice ruin this, he will not be able to abide it either.
“I think,” he says, “that something connects us, and our being too old to know the word for it does not make it less real.” What word would youth use? He thinks of the girl and the boy in the house behind him, and knows he does not have to wonder.
What he does not know is whether it is an answer that Javert would accept.
He takes another step closer. Javert watches him warily, but does not retreat. It is the closest they have stood since the alley, and before that, since they raised weapons against one another in a far away hospital. If he reached out, he could touch Javert’s face with his fingertips.
He says very softly, “Do you wish I had not kissed you?”
“I wish you had killed me,” Javert says again immediately, but his voice is certainly shaking now. “I wish those students had killed me, I wish I had gone and flung myself into the Seine as soon as you went inside that house, I wish…”
His voice breaks. He looks at Valjean as though he cannot look anywhere else. He swallows again. The moon comes out through a hole in the clouds, and silver washes over Javert’s pale face.
“No. I do not wish that,” Javert says, almost too quietly to hear. But the street is silent, the world is silent and sleeping, and Valjean does hear it.
Valjean closes the last of the distance between them, and his hands are not steady either.
It is ridiculous for hands as weathered as his to cup anyone’s chin, to run trembling fingertips over a pale cheek with so much grey in the whiskers, but every part of this is ridiculous. Maybe there is no avoiding it — maybe it is simply ridiculous, being human, being alive on God’s Earth.
A long time to learn such a lesson, but better than never.
“Men like me can never change, Valjean,” Javert whispers.
But they have changed, they have already, Valjean thinks. Have they ever stopped?
Valjean presses his lips to Javert’s again, and this time, hands reach up and close around his shoulders like vices. This time, Javert presses back.
They are men, no worse than any men, Valjean thinks, and kisses him.