It occurred to me today that I'd never cross-posted this from my Tumblr when I wrote it, and perhaps a few wandering souls over here would like to see it. A brief imagination-delving I wrote for my friend Autumn, who wondered a year or so ago what a Les Mis/Welcome to Night Vale crossover might look like.
Lieutenant Javert of the Sheriff's Secret Police often stands on his rooftop.
He is always Lieutenant Javert now, even when he's alone, even at this time of night, in civilian dress, his half-grey, front-pleated khakis, his blue polo tucked in and buttoned up to the top. He had a first name once, he remembers on occasion, but it does not matter now. It has not mattered in many years.
In a moment of doubt, once, early in his training, he had tried to recall the name he had once known for himself, to scribble it out on a scrap of paper at the sinks in the men's room, hardly able to hold the pen steady in his trembling, sweat-slippery hand. His breathing came fast as he crossed out letter after letter. In panic, he had looked up into his reflection, and every last organ in his body threatened to drop right through the floor when he realized that he could not find one trace of himself in that wide-eyed, panting, gaunt-lined face.
Who are you? he whispered. You have a name. Your name is… your name is…
His empty eyes seemed that they would swallow him up. He cried out. With one punch, the mirror collapsed into a million shivering shards. He ran back to the classroom, shoving his bleeding fist into the pocket of his jacket, and he told no one.
That night, he threw every mirror in his house out of the second floor window, sending them crashing to the front walk below. The pieces whispered a thousand little words as they scattered over the pavement and bounced into the grass. When he had thrown the last one, he leaned out over the windowsill and looked down.
Half-hidden in the yard, on the front walk, in the street, lay all those jagged, glinting patches of night and stars, blinking right back at him.
But that moment passed, with all the other little doubts, and they do not bother him anymore. The mirror in the academy's men's room has since been replaced, and the pieces of Javert's mindset, too, have been swept away for the installation of a bright, clear new purpose.
You see, personal identity means little once you see it for what it truly is: obsolete, a burden, one shout in a room full of shouting people, all clamoring to be heard, all unwilling to hear each other, and still all indistinguishable in the noise. If we would all but stop shouting, he thinks, then we would be able to hear what matters.
He wonders, perhaps, if the Secret Policemen are the only ones on earth who have learned to hear. Or perhaps they are the only ones who listen.
The desert becomes cool at this time of night, when the hot sun falls away and the moon has rolled himself deep in the cover of night, not even a crack of his body to be seen, and the little search-beams of the helicopters are mere slivers in the distance, silver needles bobbing and whirring through the dense, dark velvet of the city below. He can hardly see his own hands before him. The hairs rise on his arms in the breeze that slides over the roof like a silk scarf over a tabletop. He raises his head, and the skies open up to the vast, crowded forum of stars.
It's dangerous, his mother had shouted up to him once, many years ago. It's too big and it's full of wrath and blind fury and black holes and antimatter and – God, would you just get down from there?
He had gotten down then, but oh, the stars, the stars –
He had never forgotten.
Mother had not realized how gloriously right she had been. Space does not care for you – no more, at least, than anything else in the universe can or will. And it makes no promises of doing so, as others do. The planets hurtle on. The stars burn themselves out. The sun grows closer to scorching the earth with every year, as it has promised. No mercy, no sentimentality, no broken vows.
Space can be trusted to always do what it has always done.
Javert takes a few steps closer to the edge of the roof. He knows he will not fall. He cannot, for the stars are not through with him yet. The sky seems to rush to meet him. The blackness quivers, quivers more and more until it's like the thrum of the tuning fork that used to sit in the drawer of his stepfather's side table, a rising hum, a thrilling all over his body, and the sky trembles, and the stars burn with cold fury, with pinpricks that sting his eyes to the center, unrelenting, constant, so piercing and so tremulous that he could cry out in pain, in the ecstasy of religion, out here beneath the glory of order and time.
But he does not shout. To shout – so human, so selfish. He whispers, and he listens.
I will find him, he utters. I will see him imprisoned. All will be made right and just in the world again. This is my purpose.
The cool wind rattles the neighbor's roof antenna. His hair tickles his forehead as he breathes up into the night. Is it the light that shudders here, or the darkness? It is the darkness that moves, he decides. The light cannot be shaken or driven from its course.
The stars flicker coldly, but he knows they have listened.
Javert creaks back over the roof and clambers over the sill into the house. He shuts the window. He turns out the light.
The heavens tick on, like clockwork.