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✧
For all that Javert loathes the cold, August in Paris is nearly enough to make him rethink his preferences every year. The height of summer always turns the city into a sweltering mess as all activity slows to a trickle. Those that can flock to the promenades along the riverbank or to the public gardens with their fountains, seeking a reprieve from the weather. Everyone else – a category that has always included Javert – simply suffers through it.
August this year is no different: blindingly sunny and relentlessly hot, with the sort of cloying humidity that makes each breath feel heavy in his lungs. No, this summer is much the same as all the others that had come before it; rather, it is Javert who has changed.
For one thing, he didn’t think he’d live to see it.
He’d been at first certain, and later determined, that he would die that night in June, and at each turn Valjean thwarted him, and now – here he is, sitting on a bench with his back against a tree in the garden at No. 55, Rue Plumet, watching Valjean tend to his flowerbeds. Javert’s shirt is already sticking to his back, despite the fact it’s only just past ten in the morning; he’s foregone his cravat entirely – Mlle. Cosette is out of the house and Valjean, after all, has seen him in far worse states.
Golden sunlight filters down through the branches, casting dappled shadows on grass he knows objectively to be green. Not, of course, that he can tell for himself – and that is precisely the subject that has occupied his thoughts more and more of late. He finds himself wondering what it would be like, to see the world in full, but his imagination isn’t up to the task. The only colours Javert can see at present are reds and yellows.
Red, of course, was the first.
✧
Javert hardly made a sound as Valjean wrapped a hand around his upper arm and hauled him to his feet, dragging him from the café out into the alleyway behind it. By sheer blind luck Valjean’s hand had closed around a bruise – courtesy of the schoolboys – and Javert bit the inside of his cheek and swallowed the pain. His expression barely deviated from its usual blunt stoicism as Valjean led him, stumbling, to his death.
He grunted as Valjean shoved him against the stone wall of a building, and their eyes met at last in the gloom. The shorter man’s expression was grave, his gaze sharp, and through the shadows Javert could see the tension in his shoulders and around the corners of his mouth. It was the same tension he’d seen ten years ago in a hospital sick ward, the same barely-contained violence. Suddenly, it seemed to Javert as though no time had passed at all – that they were still Monsieur le Maire and Inspector of Police in a backwater town. Here, at last, they had come full circle, a snake biting its own tail. They could only end where they began – as convict and guard, as policeman and criminal.
Dying at the hands of the failed revolutionaries was a fate he’d been willing to accept with equanimity, but dying at Valjean’s hands felt – right. If he’d been one to put stock in such things he might have called it preordained.
“Take your revenge, then,” he invited. “Ah – a knife. Yes, that suits you better.” Of course a criminal like Valjean wouldn’t give him the dignity of a clean death. But Valjean simply sighed, shutting his eyes for a long moment.
“No, Javert. Your life is safe in my hands.”
Valjean’s hand closed around his forearm, and he began sawing at the rope. Javert froze in surprise, unable, for a moment, to comprehend what was happening – that Valjean had turned the knife not against his flesh but against his bonds. As the strands frayed, Valjean tugged at them, pulling them away.
“You are free.” His fingers brushed against the inside of Javert’s wrist –
It was like an explosion of light and sound, a sudden blinding rush that left everything except the two of them untouched. Valjean staggered back, pocket-knife clattering to the cobblestones; if Javert hadn’t had his back to the wall, he might have collapsed from the force of the sensation dragging him along like a riptide. Something unfurled inside him like a flower blooming, like a newborn taking its first breath, and he gasped reflexively, throat seizing.
The lapels of Valjean’s national guard uniform were scarlet.
They were scarlet, and he could see them.
“No,” he said, trying uselessly to refute the truth of what had just happened. No, it could not be, this – this convict, this criminal could not be his soulmate. Valjean stared at him wordlessly, jaw slack. What colour did he see amongst the shades of monotone grey?
“You—” the words stuck in Javert’s throat; he swallowed against the bruise left by the ropes.
Valjean appeared to return to himself; he closed the distance between them again, one fist bunching in the fabric of his sleeve, and pulled Javert away from the wall.
“You must leave.”
“Why could you not simply kill me—”
“Javert—”
“I’ll be dead before I have a convict for a soulmate,” he growled, gripping Valjean’s arms. For a split second, naked anger swept across Valjean’s face – his brows drew together, eyes flinty – then it fled.
“Clear out of here!” Valjean said, hushed but no less intense for it, and he punctuated his words with a shove. Javert stumbled back, tripping over loose cobblestones, a pace away from falling as he stared at Valjean, who drew the pistol from the waist of his trousers. For a split second he wondered if Valjean had changed his mind in the blink of an eye, and meant to kill him after all.
Valjean raised the gun and fired into the air.
“Go,” he whispered fiercely.
And this time Javert could not help but obey.
✧
The sole of his boot scraped against the stone as Javert pulled himself onto the parapet. Despite the height and the wind coming off the river, he did not sway, eyes fixed on the frothing, inky-black mass of water under the leaden sky as the seconds dripped away.
Once his course was set, Javert never deviated from it; his entire life had been a methodical journey down a single straight path. Until now. Now – he could choose one path or another, but the mere act of choosing was… unconscionable. He had no right to choose, to decide to overthrow the entire legal and judicial order in favour of personal and subjective judgement. He had no right to decide when the laws of man did and did not apply.
A flash of colour caught his downturned eye – the red abrasions left by the rope, stark against his otherwise grey wrists.
You are free.
A subtle tremor ran through him, from the base of his spine to the tips of his fingers, then settled into his hands to stay.
It was incontrovertible proof, was it not? An entire lifetime spent attempting to remain upright, to hold himself above the criminals that preyed on society, and this entire time his soulmate had been one of their number. He could not live with this failure; he was no upholder of law and order, but a fraud. He could not bring himself to step down from the parapet and arrest Valjean. His choices, his choices were – his hands clenched once, convulsively. There was only one choice.
Javert jumped.
It was over almost too fast for him to process it: the sudden drop, the wind whistling in his ears, the water rushing to meet him like an old friend. Then he hit the surface, and everything went perfectly black.
✧
When he was a boy, no more than three or four, his mother would nestle him in her arms and wrap her shawl around the both of them to fend off the night chill, and would tell him about all the colors and sights of the outside world. Her husband was her soul mate, and so she – a rarity in prison – was able to see in colour. Javert would do his best to imagine the things she described to him, though all he’d ever seen of the outside world was the square of sky visible from the prison yard and the tiny window near the ceiling of their cell.
“One day, my son, you will find the one to show you these things,” she promised, voice low and soothing in his ear, a lock of hair that smelled faintly of candle smoke slipping over her shoulder. “One day you will see the colours for yourself.”
But as he grew older, he came to see the folly in her words. Her soulmate was a petty thief, and he died a galley slave. What use was it to see colors, he thought, if all it had done was pull her further into the muck, doom her to fall forever out of respectable society?
What good was a sunset to him?
At the age of six, his mother succumbed to consumption in the tiny cell they shared, unable even to raise her head to see the sky one last time, and Javert was, from then on, utterly alone. By the time he saw a forest, or the sunlight glinting off the waves, it meant nothing to him. At eleven, he joined the police as an informant, a skinny, underfed youth just on the cusp of puberty. At seventeen, he became a guard at the prison hulks. He hadn’t thought of sunsets in years.
And then he saw the convict.
He stood at the end of the line of men working down in the quarry, double chain looped around his neck, forcing him to drag his foot under the weight of it, the muscles of his back bunching under the rough smock of the galley slave as he carted loads of stone.
“Careful with that one,” his commanding officer said with a jerk of his head. “He’s wild, strong as any four of the others. Don’t get caught out.”
As though he could hear himself being spoken of, the convict raised his gaze from the dirt where he laboured, directing it at them; though they were separated by an entire prison yard, Javert caught it. His heart thudded in his chest as time seemed to thicken like honey around them. It felt, in that moment, almost like standing in the oncoming tide – the blinding glare of the sun and the frigidness of the water; the way each wave tugged at the back of his legs before the crest of the next one hit. Looking into the convict’s eyes felt like being suspended in that wake, that moment of void just before the storm, stretched to infinity.
Then one of the other guards struck the convict for slacking, and the moment was definitively broken. Javert exhaled one shuddering breath, tamped ruthlessly down on his disquiet, and returned to his job.
For a moment, though, he'd remembered his mother’s voice, and the promise of sunsets.
✧
Javert awoke; that was the first unpleasant surprise. Consciousness intruded on him in the form of a deep ache in his back, in his head – everywhere. He opened his eyes, and the world presented itself in a blurry wash of light and shadow. He blinked, attempting to force it back into focus as the realisation spread through him that he was, in fact, still alive.
The second unpleasant surprise made itself known not long after. He lay on his back, blinking at a room that slowly eddied into focus. It was sparsely but comfortably furnished, and sunlight streamed into it through an open window, illuminating the pattern of tiny flowers climbing up the wallpaper. He stared at it for a minute before realising what it is he was seeing.
The flowers were not red.
They were not red, and yet they had colour.
Javert inhaled sharply as the reality of what must have happened slammed into him. He rose to his elbows, only to dissolve into a fit of coughing as the sudden gesture sent pain stabbing through his ribcage. It felt as though his wooden heart had finally shattered inside his chest and left splinters in his lungs; he doubled over, unable to draw a full breath and too in pain to straighten his spine. How dare he – how dare he take away his one escape, how dare he drag Javert back into the world he’d meant to quit and make him choose, how—
There was a sound of hurried footsteps, then the turning of a door handle.
“Javert!” Valjean exclaimed, alarm in his voice. A hand alighted on his back and Javert spasmed, flinging out one arm.
“Don’t touch me,” he snarled, and Valjean froze mid-gesture, a stricken expression on his face.
It was a sharp, downward spiral from there. The first few days, Javert swung wildly between ungrateful, angry, and sarcastic, his soul jagged with the ignominy of his position and his failure. He hadn’t wanted Valjean’s help, not at the barricades and certainly not now. Worse, Valjean had, however unknowingly, rejected the one thing Javert had ever done for his benefit. And so he lashed out at first, trying to make Valjean throw him out, perhaps, or else prove to himself that Valjean couldn’t possibly be as good a man as he seemed – that his forbearance had limits, that this statue of a saint would crack under the pressure and reveal the convict underneath.
But Valjean persisted. He took the abuse Javert hurled at him, though the hurt was plain on his face. He was careful not to touch Javert again without at least one layer of fabric separating their skin after that – shirt or bed sheet or bandage – but he was adamant that Javert allow his wounds to be treated, that he rest and recover.
Slowly, the desire to lash out faded in the face of Valjean’s implacable kindness, replaced by exhaustion, then resignation, then – at long last – a quiet, uncertain sort of gratitude. Finally, they began to talk, in stilted sentences that progressed to tentative remarks and then to actual conversation, and even though their differences in opinion were manifold, Javert found himself surprised by how much he enjoyed it. As the days passed and June slipped into July and Javert healed, a strange sort of camaraderie inexorably began to take root.
The flowers, he learned much later, were yellow.
✧
Javert sighs, dragging a hand down his face. In the weeks following his rescue from the river, he’s seen that stricken expression on Valjean’s face what has to be dozens of times. More often than not, he’s been the direct cause. Just as well he hasn’t been keeping count.
Despite the fact that things between them are no longer tense – are even friendly, as inconceivable as it would have been a few months ago – Valjean has been religious about not touching Javert. Just the other day he’d absentmindedly passed Javert a cup of tea only to nearly drop it on realising how close their bare hands were. Javert wonders what colour he might see now, if Valjean had forgotten himself and allowed their fingers to touch. He wonders how many colours, how many shades, there even are to discover.
Javert knows he doesn’t deserve any of the grace Valjean has bestowed on him. To ask more of him now would be beyond unscrupulous – selfish, hypocritical. What he should do is leave Valjean in peace, now that he’s whole enough that he doesn’t need his care anymore. His presence has surely caused Valjean enough anguish already, anguish he can now admit was entirely undeserved. For Valjean deserves peace and quiet, and to live out the rest of his days with his daughter and his garden under the sun. Javert has no place in such a picture.
And yet – and yet. Still, he wants.
He wants to touch Valjean; that’s the simple truth of it. He wants it with a keenness that catches him by surprise if he lets it, a panging in his chest that feels almost worse than waking up with cracked ribs.
Valjean pauses over a bed of small, mid-tone flowers, and brushes the edge of one with the crook of his finger. A small, absent smile spreads across his face.
“What colour are they?”
The question leaves Javert’s lips without thinking, and he mentally kicks himself. They’ve talked of many things, but colour remains a taboo between them – he should know better than to bring it up. And yet, to his surprise, Valjean looks over to him, and his smile widens by a hair.
“They’re blue.”
Javert rises, moving over to Valjean and crouching beside him. This close he can smell the loose, freshly-turned earth, see the subtle smattering of dark grey freckles across the bridge of Valjean’s nose.
“I can’t see blue yet,” he says. He shouldn’t be talking about this, he should know to leave well enough alone – but his discipline seems to fail him where Valjean is concerned. “What is it like?”
Valjean huffs quietly. “It’s… it looks like the sky?” he offers thoughtfully. “It’s a calm colour. It makes me feel—” he breaks off, gaze turned away from Javert, apparently suddenly engrossed by the vines growing along the garden wall. The morning sunlight halos his hair so much that it almost seems to glow from within.
“Your eyes are blue,” Valjean says finally, so quietly Javert almost doesn’t catch it. His heart thuds heavily in his chest.
“May I touch you?” The words leave him in a rush, more an exhale than a sentence.
Valjean’s head whips around to look at Javert, and only now does he realise how close they’re sitting; he has to make a conscious effort not to jerk back in surprise. Valjean is silent, eyes wide, staring at him. With every passing second Javert is more and more certain he’s ruined the fragile trust between them irrevocably – until Valjean says, with a strangled voice: “Yes.”
Javert swallows, throat dry. He reaches out slowly, giving Valjean ample room to change his mind, to draw away, but Valjean doesn’t move. His hand lands on Valjean’s jaw and he brushes the pad of his thumb over his skin reflexively. The sunlight seems somehow to deepen, and points of new colour bloom in his peripheral vision, an echo of that first burst of light behind his eyelids. Javert is struck by a feeling he can’t put a name to, an urge to do… something. He’s not sure what.
The moment stretches too long, and he withdraws awkwardly, embarrassed.
The answer comes to him later that evening, dropping fully-formed into his mind like a stone into a pond. He flings one arm over his eyes with a groan, because the truth is this: in that moment, he desperately wanted to kiss Jean Valjean.
✧
After that Valjean no longer stops himself from touching Javert – though he doesn’t actively seek out touch, and Javert doesn’t press the issue, still reeling from his earlier realisation. Not every touch adds colour to his vision, but the ones that do are unmistakable: light dancing behind his eyes, that feeling of something blossoming in his chest. Though the topic is still fraught with tension, they begin to compare what colours they can see, and they quickly realise there’s no overlap between them yet. It’s as though they’ve been placed on opposite sides of a circle: Valjean can see blues and greens and little else, whereas Javert’s colours have thus far all been warm. Even in this, they seem to be mirror images of each other.
One afternoon Valjean asks if Javert might pass him a trowel (“by the potted plant, the one that looks like a spade”), and as their hands meet over the handle a host of flowers bursts into colour around him. According to Valjean they’re supposed to be pink, but pink is one of the colours Valjean himself cannot see yet. It’s… rounder than red, somehow; Javert finds he likes it more.
The following week Javert bumps the dining-room table accidentally, causing a wine bottle to topple, and they both lunge to steady it before it can ruin the tablecloth, which turns from grey to a delicate cream colour between one blink and the next. A beat passes before Javert realises he’s covered Valjean’s hand entirely with his own, and he jumps back, mortified. Valjean avoids his gaze for the rest of the night, and Javert has to remind himself he should not ask for more, that he’s been given more than he deserves already.
Near the end of August, over breakfast, Javert broaches the subject of his departing. He’s fully recovered from the river, or near enough, and he can hardly justify staying in Valjean’s home, dining on his money. He opens his mouth to say as much, only for all his arguments to die in his throat as Valjean reaches across the kitchen table and grasps his hand. The bowl of grapes by his elbow turns a deep shade of – purple, that’s it.
“It’s no trouble,” Valjean tells him after a second, gentle but insistent. “I have more than enough money and I—” the tips of his ears turn pink – “I enjoy the company, now that Cosette is more and more out of the house.”
Javert doesn’t bring the matter up again.
His sense of pride, however, will not allow him to simply take from Valjean without giving him anything in return – Lord knows, he’s taken enough from him already. This thought turns out to be the answer to what he might possibly offer Valjean, and the thought of a goal to work for energises him in a way he hasn’t felt since the rebellion. He begins to make inquiries: first of his patron, then with his former colleagues at the police department, and finally – and with great caution – a number of lawyers. It proves a daunting task, but Javert is determined to prove equal to it.
He is determined to succeed.
✧
August has turned to September when Javert looks up at the evening sky and cannot contain his gasp.
“Hm?” Valjean looks at him over his shoulder from where he’s pruning dead leaves from a bush.
For a moment Javert says nothing, tongue stuck to the roof of his mouth. For the first time, the sky is entirely awash with colour, bands of reds and yellows and oranges and pinks streaking across it, dusting the edges of the clouds as they fade to a deep, royal purple.
She was right, he thinks dazedly.
“The sunset,” he manages at last, “it’s…”
“Ah.” Valjean lays aside his gardening tools, divests himself of his gloves, and sits beside Javert on the stone bench, looking up at the sky.
“Can you see them?”
“Not all,” Valjean replies, peering upward. “Purples, mostly. Pinks, as of yesterday.”
Javert flushes at the memory – a few strands of hair had slipped from his queue as he read the newspaper, and Valjean had absently reached over to tuck them behind his ear, and the wooden table turned brown under his fingers.
“You’re missing red and orange, then,” he says, partly to distract himself from the way his pulse has started to race. “And yellow.”
“So it seems.” Valjean tilts his head, looking at Javert out of the corner of his eye. “Might you… describe it?” He gestures vaguely at the sky.
Javert blinks. “I’m no poet,” he warns. He doubts the sort of descriptions he’s good at giving – which by and large involve criminals, and identifying marks for the quick apprehending thereof – will be particularly helpful. After a moment of hesitation, he digs into the old, faded memories of his childhood.
Orange is the happiest colour, my son, his mother’s voice echoes through the years. It will make you want to dance one day, you’ll see.
Slowly, but with growing confidence, he begins to describe the colours Valjean cannot see; the way they shift and blend into each other, how they scatter across the clouds, the way they make the very sky seem as though it’s caught fire. As he speaks, Valjean leans in gradually – or perhaps it’s Javert who leans towards Valjean – until their shoulders are pressed against each other, the contact almost too warm in the balmy summer evening.
Valjean’s hand slips haltingly over his, and every plant in the garden erupts in a thousand jewel-like tones.
So that’s green.
“Ah,” Valjean exclaims pointing up with his other hand. “Is… that orange?” he hazards. Javert follows the line of his arm.
“It is,” he confirms.
“Then you’ve done a remarkable job of describing it.” Valjean smiles at him, and Javert’s heart squeezes once more in his chest. Valjean’s eyes are flecked with green, and the warmth in them sparks another sweeping wave of want that leaves him breathless. Unable to help himself, he turns his hand palm upward under Valjean’s and laces their fingers together.
“I don’t deserve this,” he says helplessly. Despite his efforts to keep it contained, his regard for Valjean has only grown, and now it feels as though the sunset has made a second home inside his chest, an impossible, gentle glow.
“What man has what he deserves?” Valjean replies wryly.
“You will, if all goes well.”
Valjean blinks, startled.
“That is to say,” he corrects hastily, “I’ve made inquiries – I haven’t mentioned you by name, you have nothing to fear—” damn it, that was the exact wrong thing to say; Valjean is looking more worried by the second. He hadn’t even meant to bring it up, not until the matter was settled. “It’s not finished yet, but there’s enough witnesses to your character that a pardon is quite likely—”
“A pardon?” Valjean’s eyes have gone wide as saucers, jaw slack. He looks… faintly horrified, Javert realises with a sinking feeling. He clears his throat uncomfortably.
“Yes,” he replies. “If you want it.”
Valjean’s shoulders curve in on themselves as he looks away. “It’s not that I don’t want it,” he says softly, “it’s simply – Javert, I’ve done nothing to deserve a pardon.”
“You’ve done noth—” he sputters, then draws a deep breath. “Valjean. I hounded you for nearly twenty years, and despite that, you risked your life to save mine in the rebellion, when you had every right to end it instead.” Valjean makes a sound in his throat at that, and Javert squeezes his hand, simultaneously an acknowledgement of their difference in opinion on this matter, and a refusal to allow Valjean to protest.
“And then,” he continues, “you followed me into a part of the Seine no man should be able to come out of alive to save me a second time, and cared for me when I did not have the sense to be grateful. You and your daughter give alms to the poor every Sunday despite the risk of bringing attention down on your head; you – you are a member of the National Guard, for God’s sake. I cannot think of a man more deserving of a pardon. I doubt he exists. Valjean, you are—”
“May I kiss you?”
The breath catches in Javert’s throat; Valjean’s hand flies to his mouth, and he flushes from his neck to the roots of his hair. “That is – that’s not – I mean—”
“Yes,” Javert cuts him off, hand sliding up Valjean’s arm to his elbow, and Valjean stills under his touch. “Please.”
For a brief second neither moves – then Valjean slides closer, until his thigh is a line of heat against Javert’s. One of Valjean’s hands rises to the nape of his neck, cool against his skin, and Javert responds in kind, sinking trembling fingers into the soft curls at the back of Valjean’s head as Valjean leans in and softly presses his lips to his. It feels like sparks beneath his skin, a light and warmth that blooms outward until he can hardly contain it, and he gasps into Valjean’s mouth, leaning in to deepen the kiss.
When they separate, breathing unevenly, Valjean looks up to the sky again.
“Oh. I think – was that the rest of them?” he asks, and Javert blinks, looking around. Is the grey of the wall a colour he’s still missing, or is the stone actually grey?
“I’m not sure,” he admits. “... Perhaps we should double-check.”
Valjean laughs, and leans back in.