One Day More

Gavroche

He was somewhere warm. Somewhere soft, finally. He was finally allowed one day to rest, one moment, at last.

Could it be…? Javert thought, not bothering to open his eyes but just breathing in the sweet, cool air, feeling the bathwater breeze on his skin. Had he done what was right? Had letting Jean Valjean go really been enough to pave his way into having a soul, into having morals instead of laws, into entering into the blank expanse of eternal rest that lay before him, was he finally in----

Flecks of gritty stones washed over his face, stinging the sides of it where it was bruised and scraped. Tentatively, he reached one hand up to his cheek, where half his cheek was tattered away. He pressed at his face carefully for a moment more before opening his eyes in alarm and feeling more rapidly for his coat pocket.

"Aw, hell," he moaned, rooting through his empty, Seine-beaten-and-drenched greatcoat, which was looking shabby and a little worse for wear. It had come out torn and muddied, almost wearable but just worn enough to make him look ridiculous. It was, ironically, the state Javert himself was in. Oh, irony. His only friend.

Peeling himself off the ground and unsticking his legs from where they were sucked into the greasy river mud, he stood, carefully, painfully, at the bottom of the bridge, sloshing around unceremoniously until he reached dry land. Something shining caught his eye on the bank ahead of him---he squinted---ah! Francs? Some luck at last! If he wasn't dead, he would at least need to eat until he could find a way to die properly. He sloshed clumsily through the water until he reached his coin purse, finding with uncharacteristic and probably shocked hilarity that it seemed he had more money than when he died. By the time he picked it up, he realized it was because it wasn't his---it was a woman's, a beaded black thing. It would look pretty with his outfit. He stooped to pick it up, hesitated for only a second. Ah well, he thought. Karma is what karma does.

WHAM! He hadn't heard the stealthy footsteps until it was too late and there was a very painful, and very sharp, boot in the small of his back. He crumpled; fell back into the water. Before his muddled eyes, the coin purse was snatched up and into a pair of grubby hands, where it proceeded to be inspected as if the few francs among sous were crown jewels.

"So we meet again, Inspector Javert!" The voice was young, had a blatantly Cockney accent, and sounded immensely pleased with itself. Javert struggled to sit up, but another weight sat promptly on top of him. He half-sank into mud, thinking irritably that his clothing had lasted all of twenty years as being pristine and neat, and now in one day, they would be ruined. Twisting his neck at a very awkward angle, he looked up and met a pair of large blue eyes in a freckled face, very near to his own. Smears of soot ran along either side of the boy's cheeks. He smiled, giving Javert a gap-toothed grin.

"…Gavroche? But how…?" he said faintly, struggling pathetically under the bit of weight on his back. Dying really takes a lot out of you, he thought dryly. The person sitting on top of him couldn't weigh more than ninety pounds soaking wet, which he was. Eventually he just stopped trying and gave up limply, like a fish that didn't know how to breathe.

Gavroche squatted down by Javert's face, all friendly-like, and tugged his greatcoat from under him. Javert made a move to grab it, but his hands were too slow. He felt like he, for lack of a better comparison, had just jumped off a bridge and been slogging through mud and was being sat on and robbed by a couple kids. Namely, he felt like crap. So he just watched as Gavroche went through his (previously empty) coat, and listened to him talk. '

"You know, you ne'er treated me and my friends no good, Inspector," Gavroche said conversationally, pulling what looked like a locket and some wadded up papers out of the coat, which set Javert's head reeling. Where did those come from? he thought exasperatedly. He never kept anything in his pockets, just in case something like this happened. "We was always having to run away from you and your silly dandified friends, too, was we. And all we ever did was take a few apples, or a bite of bread, as some of us 'twould have it." He winked, making to open the locket but stopping when Javert flailed for it, coming a good foot short.

"What?" Gavroche said innocently, waving the locket gently in front of Javert's face. "You want to arrest me? You want to take back what's yours? Don't you know some people have probably felt the same way and had no other way to get it, they were so desperate, that they just needed a little bite of something or a couple sous to move forward?" Javert lunged for the locket, and missed. Gavroche polished it on his grubby shirt, making the tarnished surface worse.

"Dun worry, Inspector, I don't have it," Gavroche said matter-of-factly, "Thénardier does. I'm just a figment of your imagination. After all, I'm dead, ain't I? But you're not," he said, and giggled, not with his usual wholehearted childishness but with a darker hue to his throat. "You're a bit feverish, aren't you? Better watch out for the real sewer rats, Inspector."

Javert, whose mind had been sinking into a saltwater lull, snapped back to attention. His mind focused in on the locket, which no one had ever seen before and, if Gavroche truly wasn't real, no one ever would. Using all the strength left in him, Javert threw whoever was sitting on his back into the water, causing a girlish surprised squeal from the dirty-faced girl he faintly recognized as the girl who had died on the barricades the day Valjean had let him go. Some bourgeoisie name, he remembered. Eponine. But just standing, and remembering that, was too much for him, and he sank back into a dizzying black-edged stupor where he could still hear Gavroche's words.

"Someone up there's got their eye on you, Inspector Javert, and they can't punch in your time card just yet. So you just be careful, now, and don't be gettin' into no trouble, 'cause who saves the prisoner of his own mind?"

Javert had no answer to that question. He was blissfully gone, but not as gone as he had hoped.