That Which Cannot Hold

Authour's Note: Well hi again! This is a sequel to One Day More, a story that conveniently cropped up in my head when I'm supposed to be studying for finals. Isn't it remarkable how that happens? Anywhoos, I introduce Fantine into Javert's little epic tale...and she is HEAVILY OOC. If that makes you uncomfortable, well…put your big girl pants on. I promise you'll understand her. Eventually.

Remember, reviews are like those little sparkly plastic rainbow 'Happy Birthday' thingies speared into the tops of those delicious factory-produced cupcakes.

Purgatory

Javert slowly awoke to the cold feeling of-well, nothingness. If he had to take a logical guess, it would be that he was lying with a gritty, rigid pillow of dirt under his cheek, scrubbing uncomfortably against the half-healed scrapes his little rendezvous with the Seine had given him before. Before…what? he thought muzzily, slowly climbing to his knees and stretching his neck and arms gingerly. The smog before him stung at his eyes. Damn it, why can't I stay conscious of my surroundings for more than a day, he began to grumble to himself, and then stopped cold in his thoughts, a dark heavy sail of dread snapping open in his stomach, a ship menacing and in wait.

A day. I was given one more day with Valjean…his eyes widened, straining to see past what his senses could not determine. His mind could not wrap itself around the fact-it must be a fact, he thought, he had known of his fate as only the dying can-that he was dead and lying in what seemed to be a no-more-superior pile of dirt than any bordering France's rivers. Well, he thought stoically, getting to his feet and kicking a pebble gloomily, it could be a lot worse, as Heaven goes.

A voice started at this thought, startling him to move reflexively for the beating-stick ever present at his waist. Astonishingly, it was not there. He could fend off no angels here.

"And what makes you so sure, Inspector, that this is Heaven that you've reached?" The voice seemed to echo inside his mind, laughingly, tauntingly. It was neither a man nor a woman's, Javert's favourite kind of voice. To know the gender of the voice of the authority addressing you was to have an advantage. Javert was polite and canny as expected when it came to women of class and wealth, but he was no gentleman to those who did crimes against or threw the names of their family down in dishonor. The Inspector wobbled to a standing position, and his surroundings swirled and melted into what looked to be a lowly-lit interior of a room, with a polished wood fireplace flickering and alive and throwing flames unto the walls. The taste of sweet smoke and ember was cloying as it coated Javert's throat. The speaker was not facing him, in a high-backed deep-red armchair plush and luxurious against the full-windowed walls, dusty glass looking down from a great height on a dark factory floor. Javert's heart sank as he recognized the factory of M. Madeleine, or Valjean as he had not known, only this office was mustier and lit more lowly, with a scent of dirty linen and wine heavy and damp upon Javert's breath. The speaker's legs were crossed, and Javert could note that it was in fact a woman who spoke: the legs were half-decently covered by the hem of a black dress, but she left some amount showing, though seemingly shrouded in a tight, black, sheer material that the astounded Inspector could only describe as a second skin. The legs unfolded from their cross and turned the chair around towards him, revealing a woman dressed in mourning, a tilted hat with a spiderweb-like veil drawn across her face.

"Hello, Javert," she said, in a voice lower than Javert had known her to have. He recognized the blonde hair, though, ragged and unruly-curled from its hurried cut, and he recognized the black gap of a missing tooth as she let a grin slip through her reddened lips. The black dress was severely buttoned all the way up her throat, but the air she was giving off was no different than what she had been in real life. Prostitution, he thought disgustedly. It can't leave a soul.

"Fantine," he acknowledged with a curt nod of his head, reasoning she must hold a position of some power if she were to be addressing him as such. She smiled as he said so, playing with a necklace in between her gloved fingers. Javert recognized his locket with another heart-rending lurch, unhappy to be so out of control with his own fate. Fantine studied it, watching him out of the corner of one heavily lashed eye, watching his eyes stray to the windows.

"I wouldn't think so poorly of me, Inspector, any more," she murmured softly, studying the picture of the mother Javert had not known pressed into her palm. She snapped it shut, and Javert abruptly flinched. Shaking his head, he opened his mouth to speak. Fantine raised an eyebrow. Taken aback by this gesture of contempt, Javert pressed on. All formalities were disposed of.

"Where am I? Why are you here?" Javert spoke coldly and quietly, his usual expectations for questions like who, and where, and why. Fantine laughed, a sound chilling in the dead, sluggish air, and she gestured down at the factory workers, as small as rats on the floor below.

"You're with the people you belong with, my dear Inspector," she said, never varying her slow, low voice, never breaking the stoic, bland look on her face. Javert found himself near to being frustrated, especially since he understood now that she was mocking his demeanor in life and that he must now play the worried convict waiting for his sentence. But true to his word, Javert just blinked and waited for further instruction.

Fantine sighed and played with the clasp of the necklace, slipping it around her slender throat with red finger-marks still clearly visible from where Javert had gripped her neck the night she died. Her heavy-lidded eyes met his, boldly, and he noticed how remarkably blue they must have been before they faded and became a worn yellow-grey.

"Ma'am, I demand to know why I am here and whom I can consult who can refer me to a way home," Javert spoke softly but sternly, hands behind his back. His buttoned-up coat to the neck rivaled Fantine's own dress, a woman's mockery of the law. Fantine let loose another secretive smile, and her eyes slid to a point behind Javert's shoulder.

"Sometimes we land in places where we don't know what we've done to deserve it, and, my dear, there is never an easy way home," Fantine said, watching lazily as two men in white took Javert by the shoulders, the man shocked and furious through the cracks in his composure. She watched complacently as he tried to fight them off, but they collared him in an iron clamp so similar to those of the chain gangs he'd watched over with such pride. She watched as he pretended to deflate in acceptance, but, as he slumped, he tried Valjean's old move of reaching for a chair to beat at his attackers and was easily bested. She watched as, in punishment, the men wrenched at the iron chains around his neck, bringing him to his knees to be dragged, leaving him gasping and with angry pink marks much like on Fantine's own throat.

Fantine turned the old stereo in the room up, a remarkable anachronistic invention allowed when you were visiting an old friend in Purgatory. She listened as the man's rich, melancholy voice crooned about his kind of town, letting it wash over her, drowning out the anguished cries of the newer victims and the dead, cold silence of those who were old and who waited. It would be a long wait for Javert, she mused, sitting at one job dully in the ash-laden factory while his case pended. A grin came to her mouth as one came to a cats' jaws, and she coughed a bitter laugh and flicked the ends of her cigarette into the fire.

Everyone gets their redemption.