Some Scars Cannot Be Healed
By: La Fille de Belleville
Rated: PG-13
Summary: [The Triplets of Belleville] Champion's captivity in Belleville has taken a greater toll than Madame Souza knows. Some scars are permanent. This is the first Triplets of Belleville fanfic on fanfiction.net!
Disclaimer: I don't own these characters, or, for that matter, a city named "Belleville." (I just visit occasionally J.) They are the property of Sylvian Chomet, who drew the characters himself, produced an animated movie on them, and is now rolling in awards. Eh, bien, some guys have all the luck.
Author's Notes: If you're looking for a fanfic with the title characters of the movie, this isn't for you. (In case you haven't seen the movie—and I'll bet many of you probably haven't—there's a nice summary embedded in my fic.) If you detest Champion (that's pronounced 'Sham-pyo,' folks), you'll probably love this; if you feel for his character, this is one of those "Aw…" fanfics. Absolutely littered with angst. Review!
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Chapter One: Night
If a person happened to be commuting on the raised railway train from Paris into the countryside, they might be puzzled by an old, crooked house sagging precariously beside the dominating tracks. If they took a closer look in the upstairs window, especially around the hour of ten P.M., they might be able to catch a glimpse of a lanky figure crouched on a shabby bed, his thin mouth pursed with concentration as he maneuvered a long, shining needle into one of his scrawny forearms.
The person who caught such a rare glimpse of that figure might wonder what his name was, what had happened to him to make him so desperate—but by that time, the house would be lost to view amid the sooty fog that wound its way through the Parisian nightscape.
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Champion cautiously lifted his anvil-shaped head from the limp, graying pillow, eyes wide and staring into the darkness like an owl's. He listened to the absolute silence for a few moments before he carefully sat up in bed, moving as slowly as possible for fear of making one of the rusty springs of his mattress creak. Wraith-like, he crossed the bare floor and stuck his head out of the open door and into the hallway. As he had assumed, a death-like quiet enshrouded the house.
Satisfied with the silence, Champion carefully closed the door to his room and flicked on a dim, faintly blue electric light. The bulb cast an eerie glow over his pallid features and seemed to transform him into some ghostly apparition—an apparition who glided noiselessly over to his miniscule closet and retrieved a few odd essentials from their hiding place behind a large, haphazard pile of cycling memorabilia. Arms laden with his effects, Champion returned to his bed and sat cross-legged, meticulously preparing for that night's indulgence. His spider-like hands arranged the weirdly assorted objects: A small vial of clear liquid, a jar of rubbing alcohol, and a well-used cloth stained with drops of a rusty color. Beside those oddities rested a small, clear tube and a thin needle that glittered dangerously in the pale light.
Champion worked quickly, an oddly uninvolved purpose lingering in his large, round eyes. He needed to be so cursory—already his arms were trembling slightly from deprivation, and his mind whined of a bitter need for the liquid in the small glass vial. Unsteadily, he unscrewed the vial's cap and affixed one end of the tube over the bottle's small mouth, then slipped the needle into the other end. Gripping the gleaming needle between the thumb and forefinger of his right hand, he gave a small, satisfied sigh in anticipation of the relief that was about to come.
Flickering thoughts whirled in his aching brain, vying for recognition, and for a moment one of them shouldered its way to the forefront of his awareness. He found himself hesitating for an instant as he pondered the fateful events that had led up to this moment, regarding them with an outsider's interest.
It began in his boyhood, before he had ever known of Belleville and the French Mafia, or ever dreamed of competing in the prestigious Tour de France. His parents' deaths had opened a deep void in his life, and he had grown into a chubby child obsessed with the single photograph of his parents—a photograph in which they posed, grinning, on a bicycle. That photograph had prompted his lifelong desire to win the Tour de France, and it was a scrapbook that he had created that inspired his grandmother and caretaker, Madame Souza, to buy him a small tricycle.
From that day forward, Champion had trained relentlessly to become a world-class cyclist, aided by the sharp, rhythmic staccato of his grandmother's ever-present whistle. He'd devoted himself to an intense, albeit self-concocted training program, a regimen that had punished his body and changed him over the years into a man barely recognizable as the pudgy child in several old photos. His back was permanently hunched from years of crouching in an aero tuck over the handlebars of his bike; his face, arms, and torso were starkly lean, testament to continuous dietary restrictions. In contrast, the muscles of his calves and thighs had swelled to grossly disproportionate size, thanks to hours spent riding up and down the agonizingly inclined cobblestone streets of Paris each day. Trophies of varying size littered his room, and he'd finally undertaken the greatest challenge of his life—his first Tour de France, the greatest cycling race in the world and a cultural phenomenon in his home country.
He'd done comparatively well in the initial stages, gaining self-confidence and adjusting to the rhythm of the days-long race. Each day he had competed with the reassurance that Madame Souza and his faithful dog, Bruno, were following him in a voiture-balais at the tail end of the race, and the thought had merely spurred him to greater risks and greater triumphs. His carefully cultured legs had served him well, enduring the hardships that his mind demanded from them in every stage. For a few glorious evenings, he had actually believed that he might triumph on the course.
Then came the lethal stage: the Col du Femur, a torture route for cyclists up the southern slopes of moon-landscaped Mount Ventoux. The physical pain had nearly been outmatched by psychological battering—the mountain was ever-present and ever-rising, its steep slopes never dipping into shallow valleys or curves. Mentally and physically exhausted despite his rigorous training, Champion had doggedly pedaled on, despair enveloping his mind as he continued. His own psyche, more than his legs, had failed him.
He was done. He had known it, maybe, when he'd first seen the mountain's steep slopes rising before him. He had tried to ignore it, but his will had proved too weak.
He had failed.
He had embraced defeat with dignity, however. He had not fallen in a gasping, asphyxiated heap to the ground, like the two cyclists that had given in before him. Instead, he had dismounted from his bike and walked until the "hearse"—the dreaded medical vehicle that followed the racers—had come to claim him.
Unaware of the consequences of his actions, he had not struggled with his captors—not even when he had been ferried across the ocean and realized that something was wrong. He had preserved his dignity, standing and watching the blocky, generic Mafia gunmen as they monitored him and his fellow racers, who had been frightened and exhausted. He had not resisted as they forced him into the cellar that was to be his home for the next few months. Almost methodically, he had accepted his new, dull fate.
Then, one day, that situation had changed.
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