This is a relatively uneventful chapter. Woops. This will probably be the last one that doesn't center on Eponine and Javert so. . . yaaaaaaay. I guess. I have a feeling you guys are going to really like the next chapter hahahahaha. ha. Thanks again for the well wishes, readers. I'm home and well if not back to my usual health. I'll try to update early this week out of celebration ;)
Oh yeah, before I forget. I love it when you include favorite quotes from chapters in your reviews (no, this is not just an ego thing. . . I swear), it helps find what kind of writing you all find ideal. :)
Javert drummed his fingers against the top of his desk, his other hand absentmindedly scratching away at another inmate's paperwork. Here and there he would realize he had made a mistake and crossed out whatever errors he had made with a slight frustration. He rarely made any faults while working, but he blamed his sudden lack of concentration to the pack of officers constantly walking up and down the hallway outside his office at the police headquarters and the shouts of the mad prostitute down the corridor, though he had worked in far more distracting conditions. What was really creating his distant attention, however, was the prospect that he was getting married the following week. He was by no standards nervous, only anxious to be wed already.
Eponine had dragged out their engagement long enough and, now that it was midsummer, he was becoming increasingly frustrated, both physically and mentally. He ached for sexual release, though he would not dream of initiating anything with her, it being so close to their wedding day. Gritting his teeth at the prospect of finally taking her to his bed, he ignored the sinful thoughts manifesting themselves in his mind's eye and tried to concentrate on the black and white forms in front of him. Amongst his sexual agitation also lay the problem that he knew she did not feel for him quite as strong as he felt for her. Although he refused to ponder it, he was not ignorant to the fact that she was still very much in love with one Baron Marius Pontmercy. Several days prior, he had received a letter addressed to Eponine Thenardier in the care of Inspector Javert, and, seeing that the return address read the 'Pontmercy household' he had decided against giving it to her and instead opened it himself.
After a year, the young man had finally discovered the whereabouts of his former friend and, claiming about something his father had owed to the Thenardiers, he and his wife requested an audience with Eponine as soon as possible. Though he knew he was being irrational, he did not want to risk the chance of losing her to some stupid child's fantasy she was still clinging onto, and Javert had promptly burned the letter so that she wouldn't stumble upon it in his office accidentally. Once they were married, he would let her see the young student again, but until then he would shelter her from the attentions of all other men. Several times he had noticed a man looking her way with interest in their eyes, and each time he did it only made him more impatient to marry her. He had even caught Officer Liviet staring at her once when he had dropped by his house one evening to deliver some consequential news. Eponine had stared back for a fraction of a moment, smiled politely, then dropped her gaze almost immediately. Javert had been quite pleased with the amount of attention she had paid him, but he still did not refrain from making the young officer depart quickly. He adored her and he would not make some small mistake that would devastate whatever feelings she had for him.
All in all, he was annoyed, paranoid, and distracted. If someone decided to cross the thin barrier of his temper today it would not end well for them.
Signing his name on one last document, Javert stood tiredly and shuffled the papers into perfect order. Leaving the stack of parchment in an infallibly neat pile on the corner of his desk, he stretched his legs, stiff and aching from lack of use, and stepped through the door that led out into the hallway. On a normal day, he would have left the police head quarters and returned home to be with Eponine by the fireplace in his parlor, but he needed to speak with the head of the police force first. When the previous police chief had retired in the past year, the open position had been offered to Javert, but he had turned it down, thinking himself unworthy of anything he didn't already have, leaving Officer Reunaldi to fulfill the job.
In the hallway, a man gave him a dark glower and Javert shoved past him, remembering him vaguely as the idiot boy whose fingers he had fractured the night he had gone drinking with the other officers. Javert gave a glance back at him, sneering haughtily, and the two openly displayed their hatred for the other, one because the other had insulted his wife, and one because the other had permanently damaged his fingers.
When he stepped into the open doorway at the end of the hallway, he discovered there was already another man in the office speaking to the chief of police. Standing in the doorway somewhat annoyed, he crossed his arms over his chest and leaned against the jamb, his eyes narrowed with impatience while he waited for the other man to take his leave.
"One moment, Liviet." The ugly, aging man at the desk said, raising a solitary finger to the young man like was nothing but a child. "What is it Javert? Come to try and resign again?" He said, humorously, his thick and heavy eyebrows twisting upwards.
"Liviet can continue with his report. I've nothing important, I can wait until after." He answered, quietly. Despite his eagerness to return home, he would still allow himself to portray only the cleanest amounts of subordination, order, and politeness when speaking to his superior.
"Nonsense. Whatever you have to say is much more important." He said, and the handsome young officer cast a surly and disdainful look at the other occupants of the room, vastly irritated by the man who had interrupted his conversation with his superior officer. Rocking on the heels of his feet, Liviet copied Javert and crossed his arms over his chest, settling into a stubborn silence, agreeing with his chief and motioning to the Inspector to say whatever he needed to say.
"I only need to request several days off of duty the following week for a personal matter." Javert said, assuming a mechanically perfect form of posture and tone of voice. His blank face gave no hints as to what his personal matter may be, however, and Reunaldi stared at him in mild surprise.
"On most days I practically have to barricade the doors to get you out of here. What personal matter would be so important that you have to take several days off? Your father isn't ill, is he?"
"My father is in a remarkable state of health. I merely foresee next week to be slightly busy."
"And what personal things would you be doing next week?"
He was silent for a moment, his flinty eyes glinting in the last whispers of sunlight disappearing through the window to his right. He thought for a moment about lying to keep his own personal life private, but he decided against it. "This following Monday would be the date of my wedding." Javert said, his voice as rigidly straight as his back in front of his superior. Though nobody in the room noticed it, Liviet, now situated in the corner, stumbled backwards slightly, slipping over his own feet, his face ashen and expressionless. A rush of blood pounded and roared in his ears so loudly that he missed the next few sentences passing between the other officers, listening to their warped voices as if they were speaking behind a thick and heavy pane of glass.
A cymbal crashed within his temple and he slipped out of the room, neither men noticing him leave. His blood burned like molten lead in his veins, but Lestan felt impossibly cold as a deep block of oppression settled over his shoulders, crushing him with heavy and clammy hands of ugly emotions. Pushing past cells and doors and inmates and other gendarmes, he found himself bursting into the darkness of the hot, summer air. It was well past night fall and, though lanterns were lit softly everywhere around him, he could barely notice the dazzling light around him through his catastrophic mixture of pain, jealousy, anger, anguish and, worst of all, heartbreak.
There was some type of holiday going on, though he didn't know for what, and there were many people around him, men out with their wives and mistresses and lovers, men out with their friends and brothers and children and family, all smiling happily in celebration, but, like he had always been, Lestan de Liviet was alone. He had no family, himself being an only child and his affectionless parents having died some years ago. He had thought that, in the fool's hope of a first love, he might have finally found a place to call home and a woman to call wife with Eponine, but his dreams had been destroyed. He smiled kindly, he took pride in himself as a police officer, he laughed with the few men who considered him a friend, but internally he was nothing but an immense and complicated structure of depression. He could not help but think about how, although he had scarcely spoken with her, Eponine always filled him with an innumerable amount of happiness. Now he thought bitterly about how she had turned his joy into dust. The worst part of his sorrow was that he knew he still loved, adored, and worshiped the woman in the window who sometimes sang feeble rhymes. Pushing rudely past the collective amounts of happy people, he scowled, walking quickly and meaningfully in a particular direction.
He was not crying like the time before when Eponine had delivered to him her fatal rejection, there was not enough energy left inside his young body to weep, but, if anyone had been listening attentively to him as he shoved past person after person, they would have noticed the unfathomable amounts of tortuous pain flowing from what seemed to be the very core of his being. Lestan felt as if he was lost in a coldness that not even God could rectify, trapped in a nirvana whose peace and happiness had been replaced with war and sorrow. His hope, his dreams, were nothing but twisted fragments of someone he used to be, but no longer was. Another cold, almost heartless being had replaced him, worming his way into his mind to think bitterly and icily of every moment and aspect of life.
By the time he reached his desired destination, there was not a single person on the bridge above the river Seine. The warm summer air made a humid mist rise from above the vast stretch of swirling dark water before him and he lifted one shaky leg to the top of the parapet, soon followed by another. Somewhere in the distance he thought he heard a pair of men's boots beating against the cobbled pavement so that the sharp sounds of footsteps filled the air, tearing at his ear drums. He did not concentrate on it for long, however. The fog was thick, but if someone were to walk past him at that moment they would have easily been able to see him perched precariously on the stone railing that separated him from life and death, and he did not want to be seen. If he was prevented from taking his own life in some way he did not want to live with the scandal and embarrassment of attempted suicide.
But a prevention was probably not very likely.
The river spoke silent words to him, heartless and uncaring and, like always, as unsympathetic as the people that filled his sad and empty world. It urged him to jump, gladly offering its huge jaws in a wide yawn to swallow him up so that no one would be able to find his body for weeks until it was fished out of the dank and polluted water by some peasants. It would have looked like he had been pushed, erasing even the faintest trace of suicide that might mark his body. People paid such scarce attention to him that they probably wouldn't even be able to guess that he had taken his own life. All this while he had been falling apart and not a single man or woman had noticed it, but now it was too late.
"I've tried to crawl out of my damn past for as long as I can remember, but now you win." He said, wretchedly glaring at the starless and moonless sky where he envisioned God to be watching him. "I've done a lot of bad things in my life, I killed that man, but now I've made up for it, haven't I? Now I'm a good citizen, but you still won't let me be."
Lestan's fists clenched and he tried in vain to ignore the dazzling lights that seemed to be creating themselves behind his eyes. The footsteps that still hung in the air violently seemed to be getting nearer and nearer and it was clearly evident that, whoever the man was, he was crossing the bridge. Despite the fact that his hands trembled slightly, he knew he would have to jump soon lest he risk being found out by the man crossing the bridge. However, as soon as he dwelled on them again, the slapping of shoe against pavement stopped instantaneously and he gave a sigh of relief, still thinking himself alone to speak aloud his last few thoughts. Little did he know that, a few feet away, a ghostly thin and seemingly opaque figure watched him.
"Alright. You win. I give up. She won't ever love me. No one ever has and no one ever will, and I don't want to live in a world where no one wants me."
Raising one black, worn, and tentative boot to the edge of the parapet, he gave a shuddering breath, something meant to be a hiss but only carving itself into the near silence as a sob. His sole scraped the edge of the crumbling, weather beaten stone there and he thought that the wet scrape might be the last sound he heard before the whistling of wind filled his ears and a sharp, devastating crash into cold and cruel water ended his life.
"I'm so bored with it all." He murmured, closing his eyes, tiredly.
Lestan's foot slipped and jerked forward but he did not plummet to his death as he thought he would. A hand gripping the back of his coat pulled him backwards roughly, making him fall to the ground of the bridge painfully. After a stunned moment, his back throbbing numbly, he looked up with a scowl at the man who had saved his life. Instead he found a small being that seemed neither male nor female, their large blue eyes glistening beneath the thin layer of mist that separated them.
"What if I said I cared about you, Miseour?" The person that had pulled him back from his dark and deep death said, tentatively. "Your life is a gift from God. It's a sin to take away that gift."
Still laying on his back, he stared into the face of a stranger whom he thought looked slightly familiar. The voice Lestan had heard was obviously a girl's voice, though the individual before him was dressed like a boy, complete with ragged trench coat that hung down to their knees and a cap that covered their flossy blond hair messily. What he didn't know was that, living as a young girl in the slums of Saint-Michelle, it was safer to dress like a man at night.
"Come on, Miseour. I'll get you out of this heat. It's making you dizzy, that's all. Come on now. . . ."