Disclaimer: Not Mine.
At the age of fourteen or possibly sixteen at the most, he had already held the air of a man. While some men are simply born more effete than others in visage and form, he did not even exhibit the softness of youth. It seemed wrong for him to truly be so young. Those who did not look closely would have never suspected that he was still almost a child. He was broad and strong and held his shoulders with an unshakable posture that would have been the envy of any army brat. His dark hands were indefatigable as was his gaze. His sharp eyes seemed to be comprised not of flecks of color, but shards of scattered and unspoken memories. He looked out at the world through a veil of dark hair. He never even seemed to flinch, he was impenetrable. He was separate from his surroundings, though acutely aware.
The observations of an hour.
Not a single thing about him seemed French. He was dark and thick, but too imposing to glean any specifics at a faraway glance. In his proximity retaining any observations regarding his person was even more impossible. He had caught one of the other boys gazing in his direction and sent him a look of such poison that I feared he would shrivel away on the spot.
He arrived with several other boys seeking boys employment at Toulon and there was a world of difference between their incomplete gangly limbs, unblinking eyes, and lazily sloping shoulders and the vision beside them. He was dressed in rags which barely sufficed, but even poor cloth could not dampen the potency of his presence. They waited in a line outside of the warden's office. Me standing against the opposite wall; the boys and him by the door. It was my task to escort them there, where each would be assigned to a guard as an assistant. My rank was not yet high enough to merit an assistant and I knew I would not be considered. This filled me with disappointment.
"Where are you boys from?" I asked.
"Nantes." Said two relatively small and scrawny boys with unremarkable tawny hair. I wondered if they were related and what had brought them from nearly the opposite end of the country.
"St. Denis." Said the vast majority in a broken unison. They spoke of the local orphanage and I pitied them. It was alarming how many of the children orphanages turned out I knew intimately from their long stays in the prison of Toulon.
"Avignon." I thought he might have said that but it was only a mousy child who stood before him. The one whose answer I sought stood in stony silence, half of his chiseled face completely obscured by dark hair. Others rested tiredly against the stone walls. He stood firm, entirely removed. The others seemed to have bonded somewhat over the days they had waited to meet with the warden. While they would eye him warily from time to time he barely seemed to register them. His mouth was drawn into an unyielding line as he slowly surveyed his surroundings. What he thought was anyone's guess.
"And you, son?"
His eyes turned to me and pierced me as if I had just hurled a grave insult at him. His arresting hazel eyes flashed, the green flecks in them swirling about his pupils. I had seen nothing like them before in any Frenchman. I was almost dying to know what nation had yielded such a remarkable combination of features. I almost could not hold his gaze.
As his thin, sharply pointed lips parted slightly the door to warden Gagnon's office opened and the boys began to file inside. As he passed by me he stopped for only an instant, so close to me that I could perceive his slightly aquiline nose and remarkably smooth complexion. His foreign eyes held reluctant magic and were ringed like a feral cat's with bits of gold. Something raw and untamed lingered beneath the far reaching depths of his facade. The hallways were narrow and I could feel his breath against my cheek in the dank stone hall.
"Brest." He breathed so lowly that I could detect neither his true tone or accent. Then he spun on his heel with the same intensity and was gone through the warden's door. I followed inside, as was my duty, and stood beside him. His single word echoed in my mind as Gagnon looked over the boys and assigned them with little thought. He had said it with such distaste that I almost did not believe it to be his home. He spoke of the city the way released inmates spoke of their cells.
With this thought in mind I looked at him again. It was experience which separated him from the others. What made them look so young was their wide-eyed wonder at their surroundings. They had never been in a prison before. The stone walls which had become maddeningly grey and a source of depression and annoyance to me were wholly new to the boys, and therefore their fascination betrayed how green they were. They looked as vulnerable as every batch of new boys always had looked, some even looked terrified. The dark child already looked as if he owned the place. The spartan stone and filth of a french prison was nothing new to him. He had looked around as if apprising it and comparing it to those of his memory.
The prison at Brest was well known for harboring almost every inhabitant of the city at one point or another. Had the boy been referring to the jail?
"...and you will shadow me." Gagnon said matter-of-factly. I understood his choice well. All of the other boys looked weak and would prove to be easy pickings for the inmates. It was not so with the caramel-skinned and severe young man standing erect before his desk. The room was empty except for Gagnon, the younger man, and myself. "I like the look of you." There was a mechanical sense of precision and intent to his gaze as he accepted the warden's appraisal of his person. An insult probably would have inspired the same dispassionate deference. However, there was not an ounce of submission in his stance.
Gagnon had meant nothing untoward, you must understand, he was merely noting the qualities I have already expounded upon. Neither man paid the slightest amount of attention to me. I might as well of not even been in the room. I tried to gauge the younger man's reactions discretely, through only the corner of my eye. I received the distinct impression that he was well aware of my gaze and found it irrelevant and unimportant. He seemed to be the type to find very little worth his concern.
"What is your name?" Gagnon asked. He himself was entirely common in appearance and only slightly stout yet strong. He was somewhat small in stature and his eyes were wideset and brown. His clipped greying hair was also thinning. A network of lines were entrenched about his keen eyes and almost nonexistent lips. He was missing half of one ring finger and walked with a slight limp. The prison had devoured his youth and his heart. He was a man entirely devoted to his work. As far as I know, he had no family, nothing to speak of outside of Toulon.
"Javert." He replied with the same dearth of emotion. It was a french name undoubtedly, however not one I had ever heard before. It could very well have been a creation of his own and told me nothing of is nationality. The warden peered at him, waiting for him to divulge his first name. Javert stood stolidly beneath that gaze which had caused others to crumble. It seemed he was naturally a man of few words. The warden shook his head and wrote this down, not particularly caring if the quiet young man was particularly secretive. He found the incessant blathering of most youths unbearable and most of his assistants did not last a week.
"Very well." Gagnon had finished writing. "How old are you?"
"I'm not sure, Monsieur." Javert's tone and expression were unreadable.
"Seventeen." The warden corrected and Javert accepted this blandly, as if such details did not really matter. He might have responded in precisely the same way had Gagnon declared him to be eighty.
After several other trifles were taken care of Javert and I left the small stone office side by side. Gagnon had told me to take him to be fitted for a particular uniform, befitting of his rank as the warden's personal assistant. I wanted so badly to speak to him as I did not know when we would again be alone, but I could not begin to think of what to say. His singular eyes were ever fixed ahead.
"I am Desjardins." I said at last and Javert nodded politely, though I could tell he was not genuinely interested. He barely looked at me. At the time I blamed his disinterest on the fact that he must have been quite overwhelmed. While it would have been polite for him to reintroduce himself, he did not. He knew that I already knew and that was enough. I would come to learn that niceties were even more abhorrent and foreign to him than the idea of true kindness.
"The warden has gone through many assistants." He stated as if he had known the man for years. How he had gleaned this I was not sure. Something in Gagnon's manner must have tipped him off, although what exactly what he had seen was beyond me. He did not even need to ask. "Is it against your codes to tell me why, Monsieur Desjardins?"
He stopped and so did I. His strange eyes bore into mine. He was nearly my height, I bent my chin, not of my own volition. His gaze paralyzed me.
"The warden is demanding, but he is no match for Toulon itself." I said. "We guards fare little better than the prisoners." At this his eyes narrowed, dangerously. Such hatred and disgust burned for a brief instant that I thought he might attempt to murder me in the corridor. He muttered something unintelligible through gritted teeth before walking swiftly in the direction I had been leading him. I quickly caught up to him. Javert had almost managed to convince me that he knew the way himself.
"Not many men can handle spending so much time in such a dismal place with grace. We have lost as many guards to madness as prisoners." I said quickly and while his facial expression was no longer full of unmitigated loathing it was by no means soft. His normal expression seemed to be one of cool anger beneath an imperious calm. He seemed to be impressed by nothing.
"I'm sure." He said politely and I was certain that I detected a slight accent of some kind. It was implacable and exotic and almost unnoticeable at once. He was again disinterested. If I was right, and he had spent time in Brest Prison, he already knew about the kinds of terrors which flourished only under prison conditions. He may have known exactly what became of man when he was locked away. I saw one of his eyes focus squarely on me. It was if he was seeing me for the first time. He was watching me pale with the same clinical interest one looks at a an insect pinned to a board with. He seemed to be able to read my mind. As the exact words "What else could this child be sure of?" rang in my ears he lifted a single dark eyebrow. It was a quick gesture and before I could truly read it, it was gone.