The Hunchback of Notre-Dame
The surmise of this is just what might have happened if Esmeralda allowed Dom Claude to touch her in the Bastille. 1982 movie verse, Frollo/Esmeralda.
A Fleeting Touch
A single touch can change a life. It can change the paths one is on, utterly obliterating it, and forging a new one.
A single touch can change one's perception of another human being, awaken passions, melt one's world until it narrows down to that single moment of contact, no matter how fleeting.
A fleeting touch can change destinies.
Esmeralda exhaled and shifted beneath the covers of her warm bed, sighing when she felt the strong, yet thin arm around her waist tighten possessively, even in sleep. She could feel the hot breath of her lover on the nape of her neck, deep, measured.
Opening her eyes to gaze at the rough plaster of the near wall, only just illuminated by the flickering of a candle, and the infant dawn outside, she reflected sleepily on how much had changed.
How her entire life had changed, by a fleeting touch in a prison cell.
She no longer danced on the streets for money, no longer lived under the thumb of Clopin. No longer lived in fear.
All because she had been dragged in front of the Archdeacon of Notre Dame for dancing in the streets.
How much had changed since that cold, frosty morning! It was strange how a seemingly insignificant moment could change so much, charged as it was with desperation and fear and resignation.
It had set her on the path to happiness and salvation.
It had saved her life.
Smiling gently, she remembered those moments of cold fear and sorrow, in that stinking cell of the Bastille, her aching foot burning, the only part of her body warm.
The moment that had changed so much.
Esmeralda was so cold.
The chill burned in her limbs, at the very centre of her body, spreading out but it could do nothing to numb the pain of her tortured ankle. That throbbed and prickled with a fierce, unrelenting burn.
The cold manacles around her wrists chafed and stung, cutting into the once delicate flesh of her arms, dried blood marring the white skin. They clunked as she moved, giving her no peace.
The cell was dark, with only tiny chinks of light from gaps in the stone. Esmeralda welcomed them. That meant that a world did still exist outside of these wretched walls, a world without the desperate screams of the Damned, in their cells and the torture chambers.
People had told her that Hell was heat and fire and unending burning, but she believed different. THIS was Hell.
This unending cold, the constant drip of moisture over the stones, the spiritless monotony of dungeon life, counted only in the passage of the vermin through the cells, and the sound of footsteps outside the cell door.
In the shadows, Esmeralda dreamed of her other life, before this mess. Before that cold morning when Clopin had forced her to dance in the streets for coins.
Before Phoebus and the priest.
Oh what a fool she had been!
Now she could see what she had been so blind to ignore before. The man she believed would take her away from her homeless, roving life was a monster of lust and selfish pleasures, the kind of man she had spent years avoiding. He had only wanted one thing of her, and it was not her hand.
She had been such a fool to believe. Every scrap of innocence she had once possessed had long been obliterated. Clopin had warned her, had warned that she would learn of love.
She had not realised he meant all kinds of love, not just the tender passion she had felt for Phoebus. She had seen lust, glowing in mens' eyes as she had danced, pure devotion in the eyes of that poor creature, Quasimodo and desperation and urgency as the archdeacon had fleetingly touched her hair.
It had frightened her, that last. She hadn't known how to respond, except with repulsion. He was the archdeacon, a priest sworn unto his God for life, wedded to his work.
Why then had his stifled passions fallen upon her? Why did he hate her so now, unless he blamed her for his downfall?
Was that why he had killed Phoebus, implicating her?
She guessed that now she would never know.
Esmeralda shivered, trying to stretch out her aching legs but her toes only hit the opposite wall. She bit back the tears of pain as her aching ankle was jolted, as her eyes listlessly stared at the cracked, slime ridden walls.
She had no idea how much time had passed since her imprisonment. Sun up, sun down, it made no difference in this world of shadows and cold.
The only measure of Time was the cold. She guessed it was always colder at night.
She was going to die soon. She knew it, and was resigned to it.
There was nothing which could save her now.
One day, night, hour….there came a break in the chill monotony.
A door scraped open on rusty hinges, as Esmeralda slowly awoke from the boneless stupor into which she had fallen. Turning dim eyes to the tiny shaft of light now intruding into the shadowy cell, she could just make out the outline of a man in robes, hood up.
It had to be a vision, a ghost rising to torment her. Nothing human could reside in this place.
A rat squawked, and she turned her head to the side, too weary now to care.
But she could still hear the vision's harsh breaths, its presence as it now hovered over her.
"What do you want?" she asked, her voice frail and broken. It had not been used for days, or was it only hours? "Who are you?"
"A priest," it answered simply, and Esmeralda felt herself roused slightly. The voice was soothing and calm, assuring her of its reality. "Tell me, are you prepared?"
"For what?" she sighed, still not looking over her shoulder. She did not dare, lest the voice be but thin air and the oncoming march of insanity.
She did not believe any God could leave someone down here, in this way.
"For death?" the voice again asked, and Esmeralda felt something unlock within her, a desperation to live, to feel the sunlight on her skin, and its warmth on her feet.
"I'm…so…very cold. I want to go away from here, sir," Esmeralda replied stiltedly, eyes still shut against the Hell in which she lived now.
"You have only to follow me," the priest bent closer, and she inhaled the scent of incense and wax, and the smell of books.
She turned her head, eyes opening now to gaze up at the hooded face, obscured from her gaze, hope rising within her. "You?"
It was both a question of identity and hope, praying this stranger might be her salvation, while wondering about their true self.
The priest raised his hands to his hood, flicking it back, as ash-blonde hair and piercing blue eyes afire with desperation and burning met her own, youthful features gleaming in the dim light.
The Archdeacon!
Surely he was now only come to torment her? That infant hope within Esmeralda wailed and died, as she closed her eyes in defeat. "Oh…Dear God, no. I beg you, leave me be!" she breathed, brokenly, as she opened her eyes now glistening with unshed tears.
"I can't," Frollo shook his head, his voice hoarse, no longer commanding as when she'd first heard it. As broken as she.
He knelt down, until their faces were level, and she had no choice but to stare into his blue eyes even as she recoiled, and that wailing, dying hope within her burst free.
"What have I done for you to hate me so!" she cried, her voice carrying in the narrow chamber.
The urgency in Frollo's eyes surprised her as he leant closer, the cold, dominating power she had seen in the courtroom gone, leaving a frightened, unsure little boy.
"I don't hate you," he breathed. "As God is my witness, and the Devil my undoing, I love you."
Shock stilled Esmeralda's trembling sobs, as she looked at him with incredulity.
"Can't you even conceive of that? Yes, I who was once consumed by devotion to God…the sins of the flesh, the gross things of this Earth, they never touched me. And then…that morning I first saw you, a creature so beautiful, God would have chosen you before the virgin! Your eyes, so dark and radiant, hair glistening like threads of gold…"
Unable to bear the intensity in the Archdeacon's eyes, Esmeralda looked away, astounded so she could barely think. The Archdeacon, arguably the most powerful man in Paris, nay France was in love with her!
A priest, a man of the Cloth, who had taken vows of chastity and poverty was now knelt in front of her, vowing his love and desire for her, just hours before she was to die.
The world must have gone mad.
"…I was enchanted," Frollo was still talking. "I was bewitched, yes and I knew, I knew at once this was the Devil's doing! This was Satan reaching out for me, but I was helpless, quite helpless. And I remain so," he trailed off, quietly now, the passion in his voice dying to be replacing by an intense, burning urgency as she turned away from him again.
Inside her mind, Esmeralda was still fighting to make sense of everything that was happening. She had thought she had discovered love in Phoebus, and in Quasimodo but this…this was utterly different.
To be the object of such a powerful lust, an all-consuming obsession, was beyond her comprehension, simple Gypsy that she was.
And it was terrifying. She alone knew the true lengths he had gone to get her, what he was willing to do…
If she kept refusing him, what more would he do…? What evils would he be tempted to do?
Esmeralda thought of Jesus Christ, of the sacrifice he made to protect humanity from its own evil. Was her purpose on this Earth to protect this broken, desperate man from himself, and protecting others?
Now she knew the truth, she could understand more. Who would expect a priest to be able to handle emotion, after so long locking it away? She had always seen priests of the Archdeacon's ilk to be above human weaknesses', but it was clear they were not.
What was worse, they did not understand how to deal with it, once it happened.
Esmeralda had never asked to be beautiful, had never asked to be what she was. She was what her life had formed her into, and so was the Archdeacon.
She could never condone his actions, but at least she could understand them now, even if that understanding brought fear and a painful clarity.
"Look at me. Look at me!" was the tortured cry, willing Esmeralda to turn her head. She did so, slowly, gazing into the earnest, anguished blue eyes of the Archdeacon. "You told me just now, that you felt cold. And I tell you, that an endless black, wintry night reigns in my soul. I was there, when they questioned you in the court. I was there when they placed you under the vile hand of the torturer!" his voice cracked even more and Esmeralda, good, kind Esmeralda could not find it within her to hate him for what he had done. "If you had cried out once more, I would have plunged the dagger into my own heart!"
At the anguished admission, full of tortured yearning and self-hatred, Esmeralda felt a warm feeling grow in her breast, a mixture of pity and an almost mother-like tenderness, tempered by resignation.
She had an idea of what was to come soon, and she was now at peace with the notion. She would be the sacrifice that saved Claude Frollo from himself, and others from him.
She was just too tired to fight anymore.
She looked into the Archdeacon's watery blue eyes, overflowing with passion and longing, in his deceptively youthful face, and the ash-blonde hair confined into the priest's tonsure, and could only gaze, transfixed, at the vulnerability of this powerful man of God.
"Esmeralda…" he breathed her name, and it was said with such devoted longing, she shivered. "If I could just once caress you…take pity on me."
Her breath stuttering in her throat, Esmeralda could only sit there, filthy and in chains, too weary to say yay or nay as Frollo extended his hand.
The most fleeting touch.
He did not caress where she had expected him to, where many men had tried to caress her before, but touched her cheek with the tips of his fingers, tracing the jawbone up, to her eyes. Esmeralda found her lashes fluttering shut, amazed by that simple touch as it extended over her forehead, before drifting over her nose to her lips, where it traced with a fervent adoration. His hands were smooth, unmarred by hard labour, probably the hardest labour he had ever done being to write with quill and ink, and they glided over her skin, now following the curvature of her throat. Eyes closed, she felt a moan welling up but suppressed it with effort. Her breath entirely froze when she felt those questing fingers, hesitant and yet adoring, trail down her exposed collarbone, and halting where her heart beat quickly beneath his fingertips.
Now trembling, she opened her eyes to look into his, equally as unsteady, as she placed her manacled hand over his, flattening the palm against her heartbeat, feeling its heavy weight there as keenly as any brand.
Such a fleeting touch, so gentle and almost ethereal.
It destroyed her world, and remade it anew, as she sacrificed herself for the sanity of one man, to save countless others and found a road to happiness.
It was then, as she sat in the shadows with a lovelorn priest, torn apart by his own desires, her only salvation, she realised a truth.
A fleeting touch was like Time. It could pass within seconds, never to be reclaimed, but it held the power to both destroy and to create a life.
Esmeralda felt her lover stir beside her, clutching her close, his hand splayed over her rounded stomach.
"Morning has broken, my love," he breathed into her hair, just as she rolled over onto her back, allowing him to rear over her, imprisoned between his arms.
Esmeralda did not speak, but merely lifted her lips to the Archdeacon's, offering them freely. He took with a passionate abandon, making her moan before she slid her hands into his ash-blonde hair.
A fleeting touch inside of her made her smile against his lips, as she relaxed onto the pillow, his artist's hands splaying over her swollen abdomen, as that fleeting touch came again against the wall of her stomach.
It had been a fleeting touch that had brought them and sealed them together irrevocably, and now another fleeting touch from the child she bore would ensure nothing would separate them.