Prologue

Javert gripped the bottle in his hands as if it would run away from him. Like it could. If it could, it probably would run away from the angry aura of Javert. It would run away, far away, to a damn convent, like Jean Valjean.

Monsieur l'Mayor indeed! Javert laughed inwardly at his own foolishness. So fooled had he been at the sight of the kindly mayor of Montreuil that he had thought nothing. Though, he supposed, it had always been there, the spirit of Jean Valjean. It had started when Javert had seen Monsieur l'Mayor lifting the cart of the old man who fell under it. The cart must have been heavy, and the lifting had reminded Javert of Jean Valjean. At first, when he had written the letter to Paris to inform them of his suspicions, he had been poised and ready to arrest. He would have no qualms about it, for he hated Jean Valjean for being so elusive. But, when the letter had come back while he was overseeing executions (unusually, they were his favorite pastimes), he had crumpled it up in his hand in fury. He had gone to Monsieur Madeleine and told him of his transgression. Like the saintly man that he was known to be, Madeleine had forgiven him and told him t5o go back to his regular duty. It had not been a happy event for Javert, who thought that his guilt would crush him like he thought that he deserved. At Champathieu's, that man that they had thought to be Jean Valjean, trial, Madeleine had showed up and declared that he was 24601 and then ran to the hospital to visit the dying prostitute, Fantine. Javert had confronted him, lost him, and then had gone to the gates of Paris, for Valjean dared not to return to Montreuil. Valjean had shown up, of course, with the prostitute's daughter, Cosette. She was a dirty little blond thing that was skinny enough that you could see her bones sticking out awkwardly. Valjean had climbed the walls of Paris with the child and escaped to somewhere, but nobody knew where for sure. Javert thought that he had most likely gone to the convent, which was one of the only places where Javert was morally bound to not arrest or attack him. Now, all Javert had to do was wait for Valjean to leave the Petit-Picpus convent so that he could snatch him up and show him what true justice was.

In the meantime, Javert was coddling a bottle of hard whiskey to comfort himself over the loss. He felt humiliated and demeaned.

He never drank, so why should he? What would it accomplish? Nothing. A bottle offered no comfort. That was a person's job. Unfortunately, at the moment, Javert had no people who cared for him or wanted to be associated with him. That had been the Mayor's job…

Javert fumbled with his cravat with one hand. At the moment, the other hand was feebly undoing the buttons on Madeleine's trousers.

Their lips caught in a frenzied kiss that was filled with undeniable passion and energy. Their teeth clacked together a few times, but the two men didn't care. Madeleine's lips were soft, Javert noted, and tasted of….strawberries? How strange.

Madeleine looked down at Javert once the offending articles of clothing were removed with large brown eyes. In those eyes, Javert could see only love. "Are you sure you want this?" Madeleine asked, punctuating the sentence with a chaste connection of lips.

"Yes, God yes," Javert answered, tackling Madeleine back onto Madeleine's soft bed. The blue fabric was inexpensive yet quite comfortable for their activity. Javert deftly slid the coarse fabric of Madeleine's trousers as Madeleine did the same to him. Javert didn't notice, nor did he care, that Madeleine failed to remove his shirt and instead only buttoned it tighter.

They were both already completely ready. Somehow, they had already agreed that Javert was the one to be fucked as Madeleine rubbed the small bottle of oil over his entrance.

Madeleine thrust in with ease over and over again. At first the stretch hurt and Javert felt like he was being torn apart by wild beasts. Not a wild beast, he thought, is Madeleine, for he looked out for my care. It was true: Madeleine was looking with only love and empathy into his lover's eyes. "Are you okay?" Madeleine asked with worry evident in his voice as Javert cried out.

Javert shivered. It had not been a cry of pain, it had been a cry that he made because something actually felt good. "Yes. I'm fine, just please go back. God, please, you must!"

When they both reached their climaxes, Madeleine fell forward onto Javert's chest. Javert breathed heavily and in time with Madeleine's dehydrated pants of tiredness. It had been wonderful, the loss of innocence. He could not say he was completely innocent to the act. He'd grown up around it, but he had never participated in it. This was his first time, and he had been glad for it to have happened iwht Monsieur Madeleine. In fact, Javert loved him.

Javert only gripped the bottle tighter as he recalled that. Yes, indeed, he had most certainly been in love with Monsieur Madeleine. The man's muscled arms, chest…..it was all too much for him to be able to resist. It had not been all of the man's physical beauty, however, that had brought Javert to his knees. Indeed, it had been the man's kindness. Javert had never known kindness. He'd not known kindness when his mother, a gypsy princess accused of murder, gave birth to him in prison. He'd not known kindness when he was adopted by a rich family who never bothered to pay any bit of attention to him. He'd not known kindness in Toulon, where he started his work as an enforcer of the law. Neither had he known it when he started his police work in Montreuil. He'd only found kindness in Monsieur Madeleine, who loved him as a man loves a woman.

He would go to hell for the act, Javert reasoned. In the bible, which he read fervently and had mostly memorized, it strictly prohibited the act of homosexuality. It damned homosexuals to hell. If Madeleine's love was hell, it was the sweetest hell he would know and Javert wanted to stay. He would be condemned in society if anybody found out. He would be evicted from the police force, not that many of them could say anything without being hypocrites. Javert had seen the events of homosexual rape in Toulon, where the prisoners were starved for pleasure from women and resorted to using each other as toys. It had disgusted him, and he swore to himself that he would never be that way. It had not turned out that way, though, and Javert realized that he didn't mind it one bit.

When he had found out that his lover was 24601, however, his world came crashing down. He immediately felt an immense hatred for the man that he had once loved and had shared his first moments of passion with. He felt a sense of betrayal. He'd been bamboozled like the fool that he now knew that he was. Of course. Javert thought and reasoned that Valjean had been using him so that Javert would have no moral reason to arrest him. Big mistake, 24601, Javert thought. Javert still had a legal obligation to arrest him.

Javert uncorked the bottle, finally giving in to the call of the bottle. The whiskey burned the back of his throat and reminded him why he didn't drink. It was too sweet of a release of his grip on reality, however, to care that much.

When he had finished the contents of the bottle, he walked out of the bar and down the snowy streets toward his modest Inspector's home in Paris. It was his home now, as it would be for the rest of his life. That's what he believed to be true. He might as well get used to it. Now that he was away from Montreuil, he thought, he could forget his affair with Monsieur Madeleine. Big mistake. He would never and could never forget. He knew this.

In anger and frustration, Javert seized his bottle and threw it against the brick wall on the outside of his house, not caring when it shattered into smithereens. He didn't care when a shard came back and cut his hand. He didn't care when the red, life-giving substance started flowing freely out of the cut in his hand. He didn't care that his blood stained the hem of his coat and left a trail on the ground. He didn't care about the horrified look his new housekeeper gave him as she took his coat and ushered him into the house.

Javert sat down in his new bedroom and let out an exasperated sigh of frustration and anger, coddling his newly bandaged hand against his chest. He almost felt sorry for this pathetic state that he was in.

He grasped a small, leather-covered book that he kept in his writing desk. Flipping to a new page, he wrote the following.

I will catch that son of a bitch and show him the hand of justice. I swear this by God. I swear this by the stars. He was getting drunk, that he could tell by the messy and unruly way that his handwriting was scrawled across the page, the letter varying in size and shape and switching between his normal cursive handwriting and his rarely-used print handwriting.

Javert crawled over to his bed and lay down. He fell into a sleep where he dreamed of convicts, chest brands, the salty taste of the sea, and, most of all, Jean Valjean.

()()()()()()()()()()()()()()()

This chapter was a lot longer than normal chapters, I know. I also wanted to say that I have nothing against homosexuals. I only wrote that on behalf of Javert's character. Again. I have nothing wrong with homosexuals.