2,400+ words of pure nonsense; an interpretation of Javert's suicide that dips a bit too much into his relationship with God (or lack thereof) for my favor, but there it is. Unbeta'd, but it shouldn't be too bad, or any worse than it could potentially be? It's not getting any better, haha; but any mistakes would be gladly taken into account, if you could be so kind as to point them out?
Trigger warnings include: suicide (obviously), mentions of corpses, and mentions of animal death. Also dehumanization, if that's a trigger.
Not meant to glorify this scene in the slightest, only to highlight how horrible it was.
Javert passed slowly down the Rue de l'Homme-Armé, jaw set tightly, mouth stretched thin and pressed firmly into a white line. For all of the upheaval going on deep in that man's soul, the color had not yet drained from his face; indeed, heat rose to his cheeks, as if the realization that there existed within him such a strange and distasteful thing as a human soul irked him. He rebelled against it, and that is what shocked him, stunning him briefly so that he lost track of where his feet carried him. Never in his life had he rebelled against anything: he was composed of those two simple elements which raised up the magistrate and cast down the revolutionary; it troubled him that the idealist and the philosopher could exist in both, but, as with all things that troubled him so, he deemed it above his jurisdiction and ignored it. He had once ignored God in such a way; but, upon the decomposition of that beautifully straight line which divided the inspector into his two solid halves of "the superior is always right!" and "the criminal, the rebel is always wrong!", he was forced to backtrack and take stock of himself.
Introspection was not something that Javert was given to. Indeed, much as he rejected the possibility of his having a soul, he refused to see himself as anything but a vessel. Now that that vessel was full, he bristled, made as if to seize whatever was inside him and cast it away from himself. To be human was to be reproachable; to have a soul and a heart was to be human, and his problem was so clear!; but how to handle it? There was no law which dictated how to make a shell of oneself, no guidebook and no rules; and, as Javert had never had need to think outside of the preset orders and regulations before, he had no way of coping. It always happened in this way. Before M. Madeleine, he wrestled with himself, bowed and fixed his eyes on the ground, without knowledge or inkling of what to do; here was the vessel before its master, but Madeleine had not stretched forth a hand to deal with him, and Javert was as a puppet with its strings cut — useless until needed; and until the apology had welled in him, he had contented himself with pinching the wood shavings on the mayor's desk; but he had been content in his emptiness, in his wood shavings. There were no such distractions in sight, but there was the parapet, here; he had come upon the Seine, near to the Pont au Change. He stopped, wrung his hands, and wondered what to do with himself. He should go to the nearest station house and — and what? Hanging on a thread, Javert again found himself as useless as he had in that office. His spirit dipped lower.
Eyes downcast, fingers curling about the parapet there, Javert felt beneath his palms the stone that he would never be. He had only ever been a man; the statue was a layer broken by the hammer in the hand of Jean Valjean. He thought, "The convict has bested me! And that is good!" For he owed this man a debt — his life — and knew not how to repay it. Momentarily, he considered the matter settled. If not for his interference with the fiacre, with reading the boy's address in the dark with those cat eyes of his, Jean Valjean would never have been able to find the corpse's home. Surely he would have collapsed and died in the street?; but, no. Javert still recalled the Jack of old, and could not imagine those legs ever giving out. Jean Valjean was the enemy who would never tire, the convict who could run forever; it was Javert who was fallible, Javert who tired and slowed here at the Pont au Change. Once again, he found Valjean faultless, and it stirred up an anger within him.
Criminals! Criminals were what tore society asunder! Were everybody to obey the rules, were everybody to stay on the right side of the law, there would be no need for argument or violence or revolution. The people brought themselves low and the students blamed the government. How easy, to blame something without a face! When confronted with human eyes, honey brown and calm, with that pleading glint which was driven out of most at the Bagne; oh, how had it remained, what kept that soul afloat—
The answer, he was doubtless the man would have said, was God. Javert, floundering and drowning on solid ground, had not the confidence nor the impulse to reach for God, to grasp onto that hand and hold himself up. Some men stumbled, and stumbled further into Church, in which a benefactor in a clean white robe would pass a hand over their foreheads and exclaim, "You are absolved of your sin!" And how! How could such things be? Javert's very skin felt sticky with misdeeds, and yet he could not think of a single thing that he had done wrong! Always, always he had remained within the confines of the law, in the right, serving Justice; so what? What had rocked this man so entirely that he felt all of a sudden a choking about his throat, a lack of air, and not the words to push out a single prayer from lips which had never felt the need to pray in the first place?
"Morality," thought he, with the most profound of shudders, "is not the same as the Law; and the Law is not as Justice, and the Justice of Man and the Justice of God are not synonymous."
He felt ready to vomit.
In the purity of that wretched being was the overwhelming need to serve all superiors. God, many claimed, was one such superior — the ultimate superior, whom, until now, Javert had not paid any mind to, so far above was he and not in relation to the work that Javert did on earth. That barrier, removed by the scarred hands of a former mayor, offered its protection no longer, and Javert was made to realize that he had made a horrible error in deafening himself to these orders. However, this apology (and an apology was necessary, as well as resignation) would not be so easy as to go stand in the office of a liar and a clown, to bow his head and admit his sins and request his immediate dismissal. God was still not corporeal, despite His now being a relevant force; Javert would have to take matters into his own hands, and he shied from such responsibility. To do that would be to step into the bounds of society, if only for a moment: he found this still to be wrong. The dirt of prison still clung to his skin; he had been born in it. With some amusement, he noted that, unlike Valjean, he could not enter, become unclean, only to exit and bathe and be pure once more. Sins and faults clung to Javert, gave his greatcoat the weight it lost through repeated burnings. That grave air of authority was due in one part to Javert's personality, in two to the mistakes that he would not and could not let go of.
Resignation, resignation, and how to go about it? If he had been wrong all of his life, there was much to be punished for — the idea of repenting was rejected, even now, even in the face of Jean Valjean. That man was an anomaly that Javert outright refused to touch, both in a literal and psychological sense. Oh, yes, it was clear to him now that he had never intended to arrest Valjean; at least, not since the barricades had fallen. Clasping the old man's arms, crouching in the mud, he had looked into his eyes and felt… nothing. He had felt nothing. Now he felt himself tearing in two and found no response ready at the tip of his tongue. He shriveled, shrunk back, and thought, with his hands digging deep into his whiskers and his elbows supporting him where his palms had been.
He paused again to stare down into the waters of the Seine, and noted there the absence of a reflection. It seemed to him that Inspector Javert had ceased to exist; he had vanished with the shutting of the door of No. 7 Rue de l'Homme-Armé. Hesitating there only a moment, the body had taken flight while the spirit remained hovering over the shoulder of Jean Valjean, curling and uncurling as a serpent. The human hands of Javert would never clench in such a manner again; the snake was dead, its venom neutralized; the most that it could do would be to raise its head and watch, and the eyes were already tired of searching the sky for the stars that were not there and thusly were not reflected in the river below. Javert, like the stars, had burnt out entirely: the flame that had been set against the pire that was the inspector's wooden heart by M. Madeleine of Montreuil-sur-Mer faded out, the embers settled at the bottom of Javert's ribcage, and were cold. Even as the weight of the world settled upon Javert's shoulders and crushed his iron spine, there was not enough heat to reshape it; therefore the only option was to break, to splinter and fall apart.
A dead man does not resign, he is already useless. Javert was struck a blow across the face:he was already useless. What kept him from leaving? What was the point in leaving? No point anywhere and still such sins to repent for! Ignoring a direct superior!; but a superior which would tell him to release a man convicted by law! Despite the suffering which had taken hold of him, he felt within his breast, beating wildly against his ribcage, the ever-urgent need to serve the law in all its forms. What to do, when one conflicted with another? He despised conflict!; and still it took such a hold of him! How terrible! How unfortunate! Javert was miserable.
Then, in a linear fashion, step by painful step; that was the way. Firstly, he removed his hat, and placed it on the parapet; his head was now bare to the starless sky. He glanced up at the abyss, and felt a chill sink its claws into him. Had he not had claws, once? Surely he had! They were at his sides, now, limp! Why? Why could he not turn on his heel, stalk back to the house on the Rue de l'Homme-Armé, throw open the door, crying, "Your hour is up!" To lay his hands upon that man, to draw their faces close, to see terror in those sweet, sad eyes!—
There would be no terror there. Javert, having turned to do just as described, stopped. Feeling the need to howl his frustration, he instead dropped his head to his hands and cradled it there, moaning out a low, "No." That was the thing which he could not do; in some way or another, Jean Valjean was untouchable to him, now.
Javert had not been in Toulon when the pruner of Faverolles had raised his hand and placed it upon the phantom heads of seven small children as his collar was hammered on, but he felt the shadow of it press itself upon him. He did not associate convicts with sadness; misery, yes, but never sorrow. Beasts do not feel sorrow in that way. He recalled a dog, then, crouched in the street and baying for the brother which it had lost to a cart. Wrong again: those creatures did suffer; and now, he was left with another question — were convicts not beasts? Or was Javert lesser than the dog in the street? Did he seek to lick the hand of Jean Valjean, of disorder?
No, not that; then what? What? He cast his eyes out across the Seine and saw the shadows of both the Palais de Justice and the Notre-Dame. God's Law, Man's Law; which did Javert conform to, and was there a line between the two which he might walk? Wavering as he was, he did not trust his own balance.
The river alone cut a path down the center of Paris. Water that cleaved the heart in two… water which reflected nothing, gave up nothing, held nothing; water which was, in all forms, an abyss. Water which broke and did not reform as it had not the heat to do so, but carried all of the pieces away. Water that kept the city clean — even now, running with the blood of insurgents repulsing the law of the government and ascending to grasp the hand of God. That blonde marble lover of liberty was miles ahead of Javert, who had given himself to chains and slavery happily.
He ascended onto the parapet, grasping the lamppost beside him; but his fingers still would not clench, and his grip was horribly loose. This was it: this was the answer; and yet Javert was not even thinking clearly. In truth, he had little knowledge of what he was doing at the moment. He moved mechanically, as if he had been set upon rails all of his life; and this was just another planned scene, and he with no inkling as to what was contained in the script.
A last, shaky glance upwards to the abyss hanging over his head: he who sought to find the middle ground and walk it could not survive in this land in-between any longer. Perhaps Valjean could, perhaps that boy who might not be dead and might pull through and might go on to live a fulfilling life — perhaps he could; but not Javert. He outside of society, he who refused to try to enter for fear of sullying what he idealized and idolized, and simultaneously sneered at the imperfection in; he could not. He would not. He did not.
Former inspector Javert, of the First Class, Paris, France, released his hold upon the lamppost. He wavered, did not slip; no, he leapt up with purpose, arched, and fell down to the cold water with a splash. There was no pain, not from his perspective; the body broke, the bones, that is; but Javert himself sank straight through into the darkness, and did not resurface.