Summary: A bit of a companion piece to "Valjean's Revenge, Take 2". Debatably AU. Another version of what might have motivated Javert to take his own life. My first attempt at a Javert suicide fic. NOT written in 1st person because I don't think I could really get inside Javert's head and do justice to his inner turmoil.
Javert stood erectly on the Pont-au-Change, surveying the city proudly as he had since being transferred from Montreuil. His bony hands clutched the railing like eagle talons, his beady eyes making out everything in the dim light provided by lanterns and the moon. Only tonight, something was different. He could feel it in the air. He was alive, and he should be dead.
It wasn't the first time Javert had almost died in the line of duty. He had always accepted that as a risk, just part of doing the job. But those students, those bourgeois boys whom he had spied on the night before, they had all died. Jean Valjean and his inexplicable act of mercy, as well as the half-dead boy he had dragged through the sewers, were right now the farthest things from Javert's mind. Those young men were dead, and it was as if he had killed them.
Javert did not consider himself an assassin. He had no desire to take lives. That was what the army was for. He merely caught criminals and let the state decide what to do with them. When he became a prison guard at the age of nineteen, he never thought that he would be called upon to murder a prisoner, let alone several citizens. Although he didn't quite admit it to himself, part of him was almost glad that he had been caught so that he didn't have to do it.
Those boys were traitors, he reminded himself sternly. They deserved to die. They brought it on themselves. In any case, your duty is to uphold the law at all costs. If that means killing citizens who commit treason, then so be it. They are all criminals, so much fouler than Jean Valjean. Prison and a trial are too good for them.
But why had those rich boys taken to the streets in the first place? It was a question that demanded to be asked, one so glaringly obvious that even someone as non-reflective as Javert was forced to ask it. Javert had always thought of rebels as people from circumstances similar to his own; poor, orphaned, abandoned, homeless; not the middle class, and certainly never the rich. People, in short, like Jean Valjean, Fantine, and the Thénardiers. But people like them were petty criminals. None would ever try to stage a coup d'etat. Javert knew in a vague way that the revolutionaries of 1789 had been, largely, middle class. But he had never really made that distinction until now.
Javert thought back to the olive-skinned boy growing up in the galleys of Toulon, the salt water spraying in his face, the rusty iron chains clanking against the rotting wood, the boy who despised his world and everyone in it, and who thought the only way out was to join the police. What did those students know about suffering that he didn't? What gave them the right to take justice into their own hands? The police did not oppress the middle class. They left them alone, and even helped them when they had been victims of a crime. Why, then, would the students see the police as the enemy? It made no sense. They had thrown their lives away, and for what? The poor? Was it possible that these bourgeois actually cared about those lower than they were? Impossible. The two classes lived in separate worlds; they had no contact with each other. At least, they shouldn't, not if things were being done properly. So why, then, did rebellions happen? Why did the students rise up on behalf of those who couldn't- or wouldn't- fight for themselves?
Because they're young, stupid, naive boys and they don't understand how the world works. They think they can change it. But nothing ever changes. Nothing ever can. Javert insisted this to himself as he began to pace again across the bridge. He furrowed his brow, as he always did when becoming resolute. But in the darkness, with nothing to distract him, the face of Enjolras came to him clearly, lit with a fanatical righteousness he had never witnessed in anyone but himself. It was a face filled with anger, the face of a man who wanted him dead. Javert knew that look all too well. He had given it countless times, to countless people. And when he had smiled at Enjolras with the smile of impending martyrdom, for the briefest of moments, he saw that smile reflected right back at him. It was something he could not deny.
The streets of Paris ran red with blood. The blood of his fellow National Guardsmen, as well as countless men, women and children who would never be known, who until today had been ordinary, law-abiding citizens. It was easy to forget that fact, shrouded by night, but come the dawn it would stain the cobblestones for all to see. The blood of patriots mingled with the blood of traitors- perhaps even within the same bodies? The words of a gamin came to him fleetingly: Everyone's equal when they're dead.
Everyone is equal before the law, Javert corrected himself. Those students had their chance at honest lives, and they blew it. They should have learned to take the privileges life granted them, instead of tossing them away. Javert shocked even himself when this thought crossed his mind. For the first time, he thought of the students as having 'privilege'- the privilege of being wealthy, of being able to take their lives in whatever direction they chose and to walk the streets without fear. Thus, the full gravity of what they had done hit him like a lightning bolt. What they had done wasn't despicable. It was admirable. They had done it for people like the gamin. People like Valjean. People like himself.
Javert could hardly breathe. Not only was he courting treasonous thoughts, he was putting himself in the same category as a street urchin and a convict. Did the students really think of 'the miserables' as one category? he demanded indignantly. How can they speak of patriotism? How can they possibly speak for all of us?
The universe seemed to cave in on itself as the words echoed out over the bridge: all of us.
The night was getting blacker now. No, Javert thought, pressing his hands to his temples as if to combat the physical force of the thoughts raging inside him. I cannot be thinking these things. Forgive me. He did not know to whom he was speaking. He did know that it was the first time he had ever asked forgiveness.
I have sinned. I have committed a great crime. Against France. Against her people. His head was swirling now. He collapsed beside the railing, hyperventilating, nauseous and weak, as if weighed down heavily by some invisible force that was crushing him from all sides. The only penalty is death.
He looked down at the rushing, gushing river below him, the waves crashing, ready to devour anything whole.
I have transgressed against Paris. She must be my executioner.
He summoned the strength to lift himself up and face the torrential current of the Seine. He had been born amidst the splashing of water, and now he would die in it. He was going to plunge himself into darkness, into the waste and filth of the Parisian people. It was justice in its earliest and purest form: poetic.
In Javert's final moments, Jean Valjean never crossed his mind.
A/N: I really hope you didn't think this was OOC. All I wanted was to portray Javert realistically except for the one twist of what caused him to commit suicide the night after the barricades fell. It's a little more Brick-verse in that Javert is not at all obsessed with Valjean, but also a bit film-inspired due to the moment in which Javert gives Gavroche his medal.