A/N: I'll jinx myself the moment I say this, but I think I can stick to an update schedule of once a week on Sundays. It's all dependent on how busy school keeps me at this point.
CHAPTER THREE
How much time had passed? That was the question, but it was not one Valjean possessed an answer to. The grim figure of three o'clock weighed heavily on his thoughts.
The cell in which Valjean had been imprisoned was built of solid limestone, and for light there was only a tiny, barred window high on the back wall. Below this was a rough wooden bed, little more than planks and a straw-stuffed mattress. A table made up the room's only other furnishing. In truth, it was not the worst cell in the complex, a luxury he was surely only afforded because he would be dead before the day was out.
No, not dead. Valjean lay on the bed, staring blankly at the ceiling. Worse than dead. To be Kissed by a dementor was to be obliterated, to be utterly erased. It was a final and absolute destruction of the soul. The body would live, but empty of any cognition. Valjean crossed himself fervently. There was a time when he had put little stock in his own soul, but it was not so anymore.
What would the Bishop have said of such a thing? The thought brought a fresh pang of hurt to Valjean's chest.
Eight years prior, half-starved and frostbitten, Valjean had stumbled upon the doorstep of Bienvenu Myriel, a Muggle Bishop. Too exhausted by rejections uncounted to make up some pretense, the Bishop had no sooner opened the church door than Valjean confessed all - that he was an escaped convict, and a user of witchcraft no less. Still, the Bishop Myriel did not bat an eye. He embraced Valjean as a brother, and it was the Bishop who assured Valjean that whatever the Bible might say of such matters, there was room enough in heaven for wizards alongside Muggles.
The gentle old man had been a balm on Valjean's hardened heart, but not before he had nearly endangered his freedom a second time. Had it not been for the Bishop's quick thinking and forgiving nature, Valjean would have found himself locked in a Muggle prison, and from there, it would have been only a matter of time before the Aurors descended upon him.
Valjean sold all the silver from that night - wands were expensive, doubly so if one lacked the proper paperwork - except for the candlesticks. Those he kept, and he cherished and feared them in equal measure.
Now they were lost to him, tucked safely away in a hiding place beyond the borders of Montreuil-sur-Mer. There they would remain, to turn dusty and tarnished, forgotten. He supposed he ought to be grateful; it was at the Bishop's behest that he had attempted to make his soul one worthy of forgiveness, and he could not stand the thought of any vestige of Myriel witnessing that soul be rent apart irreparably.
Curling in upon himself, Valjean shivered. He heard the distant sound of a bell tolling the hour, but it was so faint that he could not be certain whether it was reality or his own fevered imagination. Any moment, the door would open, and it would be over for him.
Somewhere, beyond Paris, a little girl was left bereft of a mother, and had no one to shield her from the coldness of the world. Valjean had made a promise to protect that child; it seemed that was to be a promise he could not keep. His hands balled into fists at his sides at the sheer injustice of it.
No - he did not accept that, he could not. If only for Cosette's sake, he had a duty to free himself. Sitting up, Valjean considered the window above his head. If he stood on the bed, he was just tall enough that he could reach the sill. Dragging himself to his feet, he stretched as high as he could until his hand caught.
Muscles strained as he pulled himself up the wall. He only got a quick look at the window before he let himself drop, but it was enough to know he would not be getting out that way. The bars were as thick as his thumb, and even if he had had a file with which to remove them, it would require days, perhaps weeks, and that was time he did not have.
Taking a deep breath, Valjean turned his attention instead to the door. The dark wood was solid, and it was with ill humor that Valjean recalled the iron reinforcement on the door's exterior. Still, the situation was grave, and so he took a running start, throwing his shoulder and his weight against it. The heavy door leaf barely shuddered in its place.
Charging it again and again, Valjean beat upon the door with mounting frustration, but the Conciergerie had been built to withstand revolutions, and its facilities were disinclined to yield to prisoners. Furious - with Javert, with the court, with himself - Valjean turned away from the door and kicked the table instead. The leg he struck buckled, and the little table sagged toward the floor.
Standing in the middle of the cell, despair took its paralytic course through Valjean's veins. Was it hopeless after all, then? He was a man who was used to escaping, but never had he been so utterly devoid of options.
His eyes closed of their own accord, fatigue seeming to weigh them shut. In the dark behind his eyelids, a flash of inspiration struck, the sort which occurs only to the very desperate. The idea was a foolishly dangerous one, with no wand as a catalyst to guide his magic, but surely any consequence was preferable to what a dementor would do to him.
Wandless magic among the wizarding folk was common enough as an accidental occurrence, but to perform it deliberately was nearly impossible for most. Wandless Apparition was nigh-on unheard of, and those rare few who managed it rarely brought all their limbs with them. Valjean pushed all this from his thoughts and cast about for a place, any place, settling on a quiet little street he knew of, hidden on the outskirts of Paris. With this in mind, he sucked in a deep breath of air and concentrated as hard as he could, willing himself to feel the same crushing vacuum and breathless void which had enveloped him earlier that day.
His eyes, still closed, squeezed still tighter in his focus. Without faltering, Valjean took a single step forward and pivoted, hoping against hope that he might be whisked away to safety.
He knew before he opened his eyes that it had not worked. There was no vacuum, no change in the air to signify he was outside. Nevertheless, he kept his eyes shut a moment, if only to preserve a little longer the illusion drawn by the part of him which had dared think he might succeed.
The moment passed. Valjean opened his eyes, and his breath was not quite a sob. He was surrounded by the same thick stone walls as before, standing in the center of the cell. He had not managed to budge even an inch.
Then there was the sound of a key in the lock, and Valjean spun around in a panic. He was not ready, had not prepared himself for the inevitable, but the door was pushing inexorably open anyway. Entering through the door frame was Javert, cold and composed as ever, his navy robes swishing around his ankles.
Valjean froze. The Auror also stopped, the door swinging back shut behind him. He was alone, or so it seemed, and when no icy chill creeped up his spine, it dawned on Valjean that Javert had not brought the dementor with him, either. Panic replaced itself with anger.
"What are you doing here?" Valjean demanded. "Have they made you executioner as well, now?"
Javert looked at him with some distaste. "The matter of your sentencing will be carried out by a professional. My duties do not extend to such things."
"Then why are you here?" Valjean asked again.
Javert crossed his arms. "As a witness," he replied curtly.
"A witness," Valjean repeated. "A witness. You aren't content to leave me to die, you have to be here to watch? Is that what you wanted, Javert?"
The Auror pursed his lips. "Do not blame me for the consequences of your own actions."
"The consequences of my actions? " said Valjean incredulously, his voice climbing in pitch to something near hysterics. "Javert, do you understand what they're going to do to me?"
"I spoke with the Président following your appeal," Javert answered him. "It seems that in order to better manage the threat posed by He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named, the Grand Chambre has elected to deal with all dangerous witches and wizards in this manner until such a time as order is restored."
"Of course," Valjean laughed bitterly. "I would be the one they call dangerous."
Javert continued as if he had not heard. "I agreed with the Président that strong measures needed to be taken to discourage further Death Eater activity, but expressed my concern with the safety of bringing a dementor into a public building. He in turn suggested I observe the procedure to satisfy myself with its suitability."
Shaking his head in disbelief, Valjean sank onto the bed. It was said that to watch the Dementor's Kiss was nearly as unbearable for the observer as it was for the victim; was that true of Javert, or would he be as unfeeling as ever? Somehow, Valjean was inclined to believe the latter, though he was not sure if that was better or worse than the alternative.
"This isn't right, Javert," he said. "I know you couldn't care less, but it's not."
The Auror looked as though about to respond, but then the door opened for the second time that afternoon, and with it came a cold wind, like the first frozen gust of a winter storm. Javert turned and stepped to the side, revealing two figures standing in the passage outside. One was a human witch, but Valjean only had eyes for the other.
For those who have never seen a dementor, a description cannot convey the experience of being in the presence of one. They are spectral wraiths, draped in black robes, their faces obscured by their hood, but it is not their appearance which makes them so universally feared, nor is it the bone-chilling cold that accompanies their every move.
Javert was speaking, but a silence had dampened Valjean's ears. The dementor glided forward, and the world fell away, until nothing was left but the silence, and the dementor, and the cold. The cold was everywhere; in his fingers; in his arms; stealing into his chest and taking what warmth was kept there. Valjean exhaled, and his breath turned into a crystalline white mist as the temperature dropped.
The Dark creature approached, and Valjean felt the beat of his heart skip; fear made it erratic. And then, trapped in the creature's thrall, the memories started. Everything faded, except for that.
His sister, already thin and wasted by her last pregnancy, was draped over his shoulder, weeping. Her husband was dead, frozen to death while out in the cold searching for more firewood. He had been Valjean's friend, too, since childhood, and he mourned his loss and what it would mean for his seven little nieces and nephews. The biggest of them came up only just past his waist, and they were all lean, even the baby. The winter had been hard on everyone.
The night he stole the bread started with an argument. No amount of magic seemed to multiply what little food they possessed into enough for everyone; he did not think his stomach had been full in months. There was no work to be had in Faverolles, though, not for a pruner, and he had not found a tree worthy of selling for wand wood in over a year.
If only he had not used magic to break the window; this one thought he repeated over and over again to himself, but by then it was too late. The government noted his use of magic on a Muggle shop, and every Auror within five miles arrived on the scene. He tried to run, of course, but to no avail - a thick rope materialized out of the air, wrapping around his legs and his torso and his neck. He fell, tasting blood as his chin hit the pavement. Valjean's last conscious thought was for the baby, who would now surely starve.
Vaguely, Valjean recognized that the dementor was approaching him. It stopped inches from where he sat, seeming to regard him curiously. Then it leaned down closer.
Like the creatures which inhabit it, Azkaban is not a place that can be described. It can only be felt. Once the fortress of a particularly twisted Dark Wizard, Azkaban was nothing but floor after floor of tiny cells, where once upon a time, the wizard had tortured Muggle sailors to their deaths. Their tormented souls haunted the place still, not as ghosts, but within the very walls of the place. From that anguish was born the dementors, deathless, and with an insatiable appetite for human misery.
The dementor reached out with a frozen, rotted hand, and clamped it around Valjean's throat. His skin burned where it touched him, and his breath stopped, cut short by the pressure of the thing's grip. He wanted to scream, to struggle, but he could not.
Valjean was put in chains to contain the strength he inherited, and they threw him into one of the prison cells. Left there to rot, he languished alongside the worst of the wizarding world for the mere crime of hoping to feed his family. The screaming there never stopped; sometimes it was the inmates, sometimes the wind, and sometimes it seemed the place rang with the echoes of screams from those long-since dead. Madness descended upon him slowly.
The dementor raised its other hand. It was almost gentle in its touch as its crusted fingers ran down Valjean's jawline; then it grabbed him by the chin, and forced his mouth open. The dementor's hood fell back, revealing a necrotized head, eyeless, noseless, faceless, except for a gaping, black hole where its mouth should have been. The fraction of Valjean that was still aware of his surroundings knew this was the end. He did not have the presence of mind to pray as the thing lowered its head towards his own.
There was a flash of bright, white light, and Valjean knew nothing more as he fell into blackness. It seemed he was falling for a long, long time.