Claude was in no mood to open his door. He had traded getting enough sleep for having his hair act the same way Gaetan's did the first day he'd met her. At the moment, his short grey hair looked like a flustered chicken and he had yet to replace the hairbrush Esmeralda had broken. He was dressed in his undershirt and nightshirt and the floor was a lot more comfortable than getting up and telling whoever was at his door to go away—or just kill them, depending—but they insisted on pounding as loudly as they could on it.

"Oh, thank God it's you," Claude said, not surprised to find the answer to who thought it was a bright idea to wake him up at God Knows When at night. "I was having a nightmare I had a gypsy locked in my bedroom and I had spent a week waiting for you to find a little girl."

"Um…" Phoebus said. He not only didn't know how to respond to that, but to how the man looked. He was very thankful he'd taken the time to get fully dressed.

"I was being sarcastic," Claude said and closed the door on the captain.

Not to be outdone by a piece of wood, Phoebus opened it and tried again. "Humor doesn't suit you, sir."

"Neither does sleeping on my own floor and having to entertain an illiterate woman with the morals of her own goat. Now who's dead?"

"No one, sir—"

"What's on fire?"

"Nothing—"

"Then I don't care," Claude said and closed the door again.

Phoebus opened the door and both men wondered why the other didn't take the hint. "Sir, would you just listen to me?"

"That's been my problem for the last two minutes!" Frollo complained. "What could you possibly want at this time of night? A Bedtime story? Why don't you and Esmeralda just ask to jump on the bed for an hour?"

"Sir, I found Gaetan!"

Now Claude didn't know how to respond.

"I can't tell you where she is, things got kinda complicated."

"Phoebus, except for you, everything's complicated lately," Claude said. "I take it she's alive since you said no one's dead. What can you tell me, first off?"

"They took her to their Court of Miracles!" Phoebus said.

"The Court of Miracles?" Claude asked, his brain suddenly interested enough to wake up.

"She says she doesn't know where it is," Phoebus said. "They… they found out she was a girl."

"This is not good," Claude said flatly.

"They… kinda… it gets worse."

Claude didn't want to reply this time.

"Sir?" Phobus asked. "They…um…"

"I understand!" Claude scolded. "I'm not an idiot!" Admittedly, his mother had refused to explain such things that far, for it wasn't something a gentleman should know and his father had said 'ask your mother,' even if Claude told him his mother said to go to him instead, so Claude ended up learning the more gruesome details about the facts of life after dragging a very unfortunate woman to Jacques and the doctor explained it as nicely and vaguely as possible.

Claude put his hands up to explain to Phoebus the list of priorities, but put them down immediately when he found his brain had gone back to sleep. "Where is she?"

"I can't tell you," Phoebus said.

"For someone trying to help, you're doing a very bad job at all this."

"She's worried she's in trouble," Phoebus said. "She said something about…what was it? Philistine some number…"

"Philemon?" Claude asked.

"Sounds familiar. I'm sorry, it's late," Phoebus said. Admittedly, he had never read The Bible. He hadn't read much of anything save for maps. He was lucky he could read. Most of what he knew about The Bible came from superior officers. He got the gist of it down, and they had perfected the angry yelling part of it.

"Yes. Fine. Here is what will happen: I am going to go to bed. She is going to stay wherever you left her and I am going to trust you to keep her hidden. Tomorrow I will figure out what to do with Esmeralda. Tell Gaetan she is not in trouble and that she has one week."

"One week?" Phoebus asked. It must be later than he thought, he was missing whole sentences. "One week to what?"

"One week to get better."

"Just one week?" Phoebus protested. "Sir, I know I was vague, but—"

"I said to get better, not perfect," Claude corrected Phoebus. "I need her competent and coherent, that's all. I can't have her breaking down over it as my apprentice!"

"She's going back to work in a week?" Phoebus exclaimed. He hoped this was due to at least one of them not getting enough sleep.

"I put her on a horse and she stays close to me. I'll yell at people for her. I just need to keep up appearances. I need her to ride and wash the floor. She doesn't even have to talk for a while."

"But what do I do with her in the meantime?" Phoebus asked. "I've got some kid in my room! I can't just keep her there for a whole week."

"Why, do you have a real bed?" Claude asked. "If I wasn't so sure you two would be on each other like a pair of rabbits, I'd have you watch Esmeralda." Admittedly, he didn't want Phoebus anywhere near Esmeralda no matter what the situation, but he didn't want to admit it to himself, let alone to the captain. "Get a hotel and stay there. Go to the brothel and stay over for all I care. From what I've heard, she's got a lot more to worry about with you in the bed than you do."

"Sir, that's the problem," Phoebus said. "What do I do?"

"You don't do anything."

"How does that help?"

"Phoebus, this is not alchemy. You leave her alone and if she wants to talk, she'll bring it up. Just tell her that's what you're going to do. If you can't figure out sleeping arrangements go talk to Jacques and ask him how he keeps from squishing that cat of his."

"I… never mind. Thank you, sir."

Phoebus turned and closed the door behind him.

Claude sighed. Well, at least he could get back to sleep. He blinked and suddenly the door was open again and Phoebus was in the doorway again.

"What is—hey!" Claude protested in vain as he was dragged out the door and down the stairs. "Phoebus, what is this all about?"

"No time, sir!" Phoebus said, dragging Claude to the street and just pulling harder to steady him when he tripped on a sleeping goat. "Where's your horse, again?"

"Dead."

"Right, damn. Here, take my horse," Phoebus said, lifting Frollo up and shoving his on the saddle. "Get to the hospice, now!" Phoebus shouted and slapped Achilles's rump and sent the horse running down the street before Claude could fight back and reprimand him.

………….

Claude didn't exactly arrive at the hospice as much as he was dumped in front of the door as Achilles shook him off and left, waving his tail in Claude's face.

"Same to you," Claude said. Phoebus was going to have another horse to find.

Claude walked into the hospice and crossed his arms at the sight in front of him. That damned puppeteer, whatever his name was, Claude couldn't remember and didn't care to, sat on one of the cots with his arm in a sling and his head and eye bandaged. He was in a fit of choking as if he were dangling in a noose and he rubbed his neck with his good hand. Beside him sat a woman who, as was made obvious by the marks on her dress and lack of headwear as the law stated, had been originally hired to do a bit more than pat him on the back on a bed. The two were surrounded by a semi-circle of soldiers pointing spears at them. "A long and boring story indeed," Claude said. "I know the reputation there is that you can buy anything, but the Val d'Amor doesn't offer babysitting services."

The puppeteer took a deep breath to yell something, only gag and send himself into a worse fit. The spears were shoved closer.

"I don't blame you for being in one of your moods, but may I ask you not to make my job more difficult?"

"I'm finished Jacques," Claude said. "What happened?"

"Someone beat him up and nearly strangled him," Jacques said. Jacques had a way with people, including Frollo. Shooing away solicitors and dealing with angry men who dragged the battle to the hospice with them and tried to continue it were like blinking with Jacques. He let life complicate itself instead of taking an active role in it. Jacques was dressed in his own nightshirt, which was already patterned most everywhere with stains from hundreds of previous late night disasters, but which had recently gained several large blood stains. Jacques himself had gained a black eye, which had taken time away from dabbing with a cold cloth to talk to Frollo. "I thought you were the smart one."

"Jacques, it has to be three in the morning—"

"It's five."

"I meant what happened to drag me down here?" Claude asked.

Jacques lifted a finger to start explaining, then put it down. The night was made of pathetic, discarded gestures. "Just follow me."

Jacques pointed to a cot in the farthest corner in the hospice that was hidden away in the ugliest donation blankets Claude had ever seen. Whoever was behind them was surely having nightmares, no matter what their state, even dead. Jacques followed Claude as he walked over to the cot, which must mean something was very wrong.

It wasn't unusual for cots to be covered. Jacques respected people's desire for privacy and no one wanted to see a beaten gypsy and his lady of the night cooing over each other and trying to make up cliché lines at each other while sick.

Claude pushed one of the blankets back and peered in. The only light came from a tiny candle on a stand beside the cot, the flame small and probably sick itself. The candle barely lit anything up, just a tiny halo around itself and nothing else. With the light shed from the stronger candles beyond allowed in, he could make out why he'd been summoned here.

"Quasimodo!" he cried out, shoving Jacques out of the curtain of blankets. Despite the darkness, he took his son's hand away from his own face and wrapped his arms around the boy's head. "My poor, innocent Quasimodo!" Claude had no idea where the words were coming from. He had no idea where this ache he felt in his chest came from either. He had not felt such pain since his mother began to let herself slip away to join his father. His little human dogs had been run down by gypsies and he felt he was the one bleeding. He closed his eyes and as Quasimodo cried against him, he remembered the last words anyone close to him had said. He had asked his mother if she hated him. That was all he could come up with, noticing her sudden depression. 'No, Claude. I do not hate you.' That was the last thing she said to him, to anyone.

"Master, forgive me," Quasimodo whispered.

Claude stood up and adjusted Quasimodo's head up to sit down and set the boy's head in his lap. He took his son's giant hand in his own. "Quasimodo, I told you, I would understand."

"Gaetan's gone, master."

"I found her. She's safe, Quasimodo," he whispered. They were nowhere near the soldiers and Claude could hear Jacques complaining past the curtains. They could talk freely.

"Se ran from me, master. I tried to rescue her from the gypsy, but she ran from me. She knew it was me. I failed you."

"No, Quasimodo, no you didn't," Claude said.

The boy shivered in his father's lap. He wasn't quite slurring, but his speech was slowed and his words kept threatening to trail off and get lost. He was talking as if he were drugged or… or bleeding to death.

"It was not you, my boy. It was the gypsies, Quasimodo. They tortured her. They hurt her and confused her. She could not tell friend from foe. She is safe now, and getting better, but if you want to see her again, you will have to let the doctor tend to that wound."

"But, master—" Quasimodo tried to move, only to flinch in pain and curl up against the wound.

"It may hurt, but Jacques is a good man," Claude said. "I trust him. I will not let him do anything wrong, I promise."

"I'm scared," Quasimodo whimpered. He started to cry from the pain. "Don't leave me, master."

"I will stay right here for you, Quasimodo." The gypsies had found a way into his head and were pillaging and burning. There were places in his mind he felt were safe and he left them buried under cobwebs and had forgotten about them almost entirely. But now those safe, perfectly calm parts of his mind had been set aflame and he watched helplessly as the beautiful facades were consumed by ugly scorching black and eaten away in seconds.

All the pieces the gypsies had taken away amounted to one thing: he was no longer in control. He felt safe in control. So long as he was safe in his mind, he could keep Paris safe in their homes. Every attack on the people and the city he had struck back at and won. Every attack on him he'd pushed back and easily triumphed over. But no one had ever attacked his mind since the archdeacon had twenty years ago and he'd still won. Quasimodo was his. He was in control. He had molded the boy the way he wanted and he was just another bit of power he held in his hand.

But that power, that armor, that feeling of security that had replaced people with things had been stripped away and he was locked in a dungeon and being toyed with, given false hopes for escape for others' entertainment to watch as he futilely chased after them.

These were his dogs, his horses, his pets and people, his and only his. They had been stolen away and ripped open and tossed back, reduced to nothing more than frail humans and given a pain he could not escape from sharing. They were not things anymore, but living beings with souls and he was forced to see such a truth and suffer as he never had before. He never felt he should bother with such care and never felt he was capable of it, especially for them, but it was there. An affection that shredded his chest like poisoned claws helped him through the night as he watched Jacques sew up a wound on Quasimodo's side. Whatever newfound painful power he hand now held on tightly to his son's hand and cradled his head as he waited for the boy to fall asleep long after Jacques had gone.

………………

"Jacques—" Claude started to ask as he walked into Jacque's back room, only to be cut off by the doctor and the need to stifle a yawn.

"He'll be fine," Jacques said, adjusting his long tunic over his shirt. "Just tell him no bell ringing for a few weeks or his wound with come open again."

"You're getting dressed?" Claude asked. He was still in his nightshirt, which had collected its own stains.

"It's eight o'clock," Jacques said.

"Can I break my arm and stay here for the day?" Claude asked. It wasn't that he needed sleep; it was that he already didn't want to deal with any of this, but without sleep, he couldn't even remember anyone's names and match disasters to them. It was all a blurry, sorry-looking mess of people he knew and all he could remember at the moment was that he didn't want to even have known half of them.

"Claude, can we talk?"

"Jacques, this is not the time. I want to go to bed and by that I mean I want to sleep. Besides, I thought you said you weren't interested in me."

"You are tired," Jacques said. Jacques looked out the door. The soldiers weren't paying any attention to either of them. In fact, they were exchanging lewd and badly thought up jokes about the gypsy and his hired woman, shaking at least one of their victims awake to tell one of their more amusing jokes to them. Jacques closed the door to the back room anyway. "You've never really made my job all that easy and I can't blame you, but do you mind explaining something? Consider it a favor. You can stay here."

"If this is about Phoebus doing something stupid, I'm afraid I can't."

"It's about the boy, the bell ringer," Jacques said. "I couldn't get near him and the soldiers didn't want to try after he nearly killed that man while he had a dagger in his side. I barely got it out before he clocked me across the face."

"Jacques, am I involved in this little story at all?"

"He demanded to see you, so I had your cute blonde bring you here. Personally, I would have chosen a better time of day if I could. Claude, who is he?"

"He's the bell ringer of Notre Dame. May I go to sleep now?"

"I mean, how did you do that?"

"Do what?" Claude asked, trying to shake sleep away for a few moments more. "Jacques, are you well? You sound like Phoebus."

"You were holding onto him like he was a frightened puppy," Jacques said. "What was that all about? You didn't do that when they put your horse down."

"He's my son," Claude said. "May I please go to sleep now?"

"But…you…it…he…" Jacques said, waving his hand around in little circles and pantomiming what was going on in his head. The wheel was turning, but the hamster had had a stroke. "Huh?"

"The archdeacon made me adopt him," Claude said. "I really don't like to talk about it."

"Claude, as your doctor and the closest thing you have to a friend, I advise you not to talk to that man ever again."

"If I could, things would certainly start improving."

"But you've never been married and you only got that girl a few months ago and she can't have been much help anyway. How in the world would you know how to take care of children?"

"Jacques, will answering this get me to a bed faster?"

"Yes," Jacques said. Jacques may have been a good and rather ethical doctor, but he always knew how to extract secrets from anyone he felt like, even those who weren't injured.

"I wrote a letter to the archdeacon's mother for help. Now stop giggling."

"I'm sorry, but—" Jacques burst into a short fit of laughter before containing it again. "You have to tell me some of her stories about him."

"Yes, excommunication would just top my day off right now with all the other things I have to handle," Claude said. "Look, if I can't go to sleep, can you just kill me?"

"One more thing first," Jacques said. For the first time since Claude told the man he wished he shared Jacques' disposition as an excuse to keep the archdeacon from trying to throw women his way now and then, Jacques was embarrassed and trying to hide something he couldn't anymore. "You are the last person I'd ask, but now that… well… here."

Jacques moved a chair covered in his hideous blankets away from his work table and retrieved a basket from underneath it. Inside the basket, badly wrapped in the last of the blankets, was a familiar baby. The only thing different about the child since Claude had last seen it was that it was silent and asleep, a state Claude couldn't imagine the child in. "Consider it another favor, a very big one. I know that's what got you into the mess you're in right now, but I really need you to take this off my hands."

"Jacques, I am not the orphanage."

"It's not mine," Jacques said, as if that were all the reason Claude should take it.

"Of course it's not yours. You don't need to explain that part to me," Claude said, shoving the basket at Jacques. "But I'm not adopting any more children. Especially that one, considering where it obviously came from!"

"Claude, I'm holding it for the archdeacon. He said the father was in some sort of trouble and would come and get it as soon as he could. He gave it to me and I had to drug it to shut it up! Can't you just… put it somewhere or something?"

Claude didn't know where to start. He knew where he shouldn't, though. Saying that the father was in the next room under arrest for child abduction, attempted murder of a public official, trespassing, and assault on both a citizen and another public official was just going to make Jacques keep him awake longer. "Well, you're a doctor, so you probably haven't poisoned it." Was that good or bad? Claude figured he didn't care and the baby's health could get in the back of the line of problems he couldn't deal with right now.

"Tell that man if he tries to rescue one more baby, he's going to end up killing it." Notre Dame had actually been a convenient place to leave a baby. Keep it inside, leash it to a post where it couldn't get free and wouldn't hurt itself or anything else, and he could go to work and come back at the end of the day. A doctor's workshop, however, was not a good place to leave a baby and Claude honestly wondered how Jacques kept his cat from accidentally setting fire to the place. "Fine. I'll watch it for a while and I'll figure something permanent out in the morning."

"It is morning," Jacques said. He looked at the baby and shrugged. He shoved it back under the table.

"Tomorrow morning," Claude said. "If I don't sleep until then, I am certainly not spending another late night babysitting any more people. Which reminds me, I know exactly how you start to pay me back."

"Start?"

"Do you know how to change a diaper?"

"Not in the slightest."

"Do you know how much children that age scream?"

"Um…"

"Are you willing to explain to the archdeacon why one of us couldn't deal with it anymore and smothered it with a pillow or drowned it in a well?"

"Can't I just go to jail?"

"Not if I can't."