Author's Note: I excavated this ancient fic from an even more ancient computer and decided that eh, what the hell. Contains modernity and an itsy-bitsy self-insertion. Pure escapism without any meaning besides the obvious.
The demonic roar of the approaching motorcycle penetrated the foliage of the surrounding trees and broke through Valjean's slumber. Half a second later his mind was flooded with the familiar buzz: a symphony of yowls and ululations, overlaid with a sort of electric hum. Valjean's body shuddered out of centuries-old habit.
Behind the trees, the engine died. Valjean lifted himself up on his elbows and turned his head to watch the rider park his machine. To his surprise he spied two men instead of one: a tall and lanky figure draped in black shook hands energetically with a similarly tall and lanky figure in jeans and a grey shirt. A second later Jeans-and-T-shirt was running across the rails towards the distant platform, adjusting his massive hiking backpack as he ran.
Tiens, thought Valjean, lying back down onto the brittle grass.
Half a minute later, a familiarly hoarse baritone growled above Valjean's head: "'Tschuldigung, ist hier noch frei?". Eyes still tightly closed against the blinding sun, Valjean smiled.
"I'll take it as 'yes'," said Javert in French.
"You look... terribly hot," replied Valjean, after taking in his friend's outfit. He wasn't sure whether the material was rubber, vinyl, faux leather or something even more modern and esoteric, but it was dotted with pockets, criss-crossed with zippers, and the only part of Javert it left uncovered was the face. What Valjean found most fantastic about the costume was that even though it looked like something out of a high-budget porno flick, it seemed to be typical wearing gear for local motorcyclists: he'd seen two of them similarly attired in line for the ice-cream as he was coming down to the lakeside.
"Ugh." Javert pulled off his gloves, ripped off his sunglasses and hurriedly undid the top button of his high collar. "Holy fucking hell. Don't get me wrong, I'm rather fond of this get-up, but this weather has been murderous. As soon as you drop the speed below fifteen, you're as good as broiled."
"Go change out of it. There's a toilet in the Imbiss. Did you see it?" offered Valjean, thinking back to the sweaty crowd in shorts and bikinis clustered around the food stand.
Shaking his head, Javert stepped into the shade under Valjean's tree, slipped the headphones off his neck and dropped them next to Valjean's bag.
"Yes. I also saw the mile long queue for that toilet. No, I'll be fine. I'll just strip here if you don't mind."
"I don't mind."
"Thought you wouldn't," said Javert with a lascivious grin.
"It's a free country. Half of the beach is nude anyhow."
"Don't get your hopes up."
The conversation stalled as Javert embarked on the disrobing mission with the agility of a firefighter who part-timed at Chippendales.
"How long has it been?" asked Valjean.
"Eighteen months", said Javert after a second's thought. Two zippers and five buttons later he was out of his strange jacket and remained in a white shirt, which was suspiciously crisp and pristine.
The sight of his friend's thin, dark wrists firmly cuffed into white linen made Valjean recall a wonderful and horrible night from more than half a century ago when a bald, half-dead walking skeleton showed up on his doorstep wearing his best friend's face. Javert caught his eyes and raised his eyebrows in question.
"Do you still have… it?" asked Valjean quietly, eyes glued to Javert's left forearm.
Javert uncuffed the shirt and pulled up the sleeve. The tattoo was there, but was darker than Valjean had remembered it.
"I renewed it a couple of months ago," explained Javert, lowered the sleeve and did up the buttons.
"Did the tattoo guy ask about it?"
Javert shrugged.
"He wasn't too curious. I told him I belonged to a secret society and this was my initiation number. He took it for a joke and didn't ask any more. A young American chap, maybe twenty-two, twenty-three. It obviously didn't ring any bells for him." He straightened out the already straight cuff. "Why would it, at this point? 'Z-576'. Could stand for a thousand things. Could be altogether random. Ignorance is bliss."
Valjean decided to change the subject before he said something embarrassingly maudlin.
"So how long has it been?"
"Look, I'm sorry I never made it to Italy last June, all right? The PST Sub-directorate went crazy after the second attack; they pulled the plug on my vacation time even before I said anything. I spent all of my rightful four weeks off nosing around Berlin," said Javert and lowered himself cautiously onto the grass, rolling up the jacket and arranging it under his head. The vinyl trousers stayed on.
"I remember. You never did tell me what happened."
"Don't even hope for it. It's all classified to high hell," said Javert glumly.
Valjean sighed.
"It's become so hard to talk to you. You are always knee-deep in secrets," he said.
"It's my job," pointed out Javert with his habitual rationalism. "You are a civilian. Join the Interpol, then we can chatter up a storm. I'm sure Human Trafficking could use you."
Javert's German, Valjean noticed, was now tinged with an Oriental lilt. One of Javert's stranger linguistic quirks was not that he spoke every language in his repertoire with an accent – that seemed to be endemic among immortals - but that he spoke each one with a different accent. Given his current identity, he was probably shooting for South Asian, but to Valjean's ears he sounded Turkish, like a child of the first post-war Gastarbeiter generation. Another stranger in his own land: a variation on Javert's eternal theme.
"Police-work is not for me, you know that. I can't decide other people's fates so easily."
Javert smirked around a freshly lit menthol cigarette which he had pulled from behind his ear, like a street magician.
"There's something very Chinese about you, Jean. You always want to be at the very bottom of everything, like water. The Asian in me finds it charming."
Nearby a group of young ladies broke out into giggles. Javert turned his head and raised a black eyebrow at them. Three pairs of shifty eyes met him: two light and one dark. Then the brunette turned away to fiddle with the stereo and a little island on the beach was suddenly transported to the 1950s.
Valjean smiled. "The girls have nice music," he said.
"That's the Andrews Sisters," murmured Javert. The heat seemed to be putting him to sleep.
Valjean raised his eyebrows.
"You know them?"
Javert snorted.
"The music, love, not the birds. The Andrews Sisters and what's-his-name... They wrote songs for homesick American GIs stationed in Hawaii. And that guy is going to fall any second."
Valjean followed Javert's finger and watched a red wind sail topple slowly over. There was much garbled swearing and splashing from the crew - a muscular blond youth clad in bright red swimming trunks - and theatrical "Aw"s of pity from the girls. Valjean watched the young man struggle to right the sail and asked:
"Who was the fellow on your bike?"
"Just some guy. I picked him up about ten kilometers out of Freiburg. Poor bastard's rental car broke down on him, and he had a train to catch. So I decided to be nice for a change and gave him a lift."
"Why are you on that monster of yours anyway? Did Oli fix him up already?"
Jacket tossed a small handful of warm, powder-fine sand onto Valjean's bare stomach. "Don't call my Bucephalus a monster, you, gorilla."
"Beg your pardon."
"Yeah, he's fixed. It wasn't anything major. And I was going to head to Berlin on him, actually.
Given how things have turned out, you should probably come with."
"Won't that slow you down?"
"Don't make me laugh. Four days on a motorbike can get you just about anywhere east of Russia. I was planning to stop in Baden-Baden for the rest of the day, then tomorrow get to Heidelberg, stop for lunch and gas, ride on to Frankfurt, spend the night there, then plan on hitting a lake at some point the day after... But it's not set in stone or anything. So we'll ride for ten or eleven hours total instead of eight. Big deal."
"Are you sure I'm not too heavy for you?"
"Naw. Our GVWR is about twelve hundred pounds, subtract wet weight of six fifty... Don't worry about it. We'll have some wiggle room. You're not that fat," said Javert and tossed some more sand on Valjean's stomach.
Something chirruped from the depths of Javert's "pillow". Javert reached behind his head, deftly unzipped a slightly bulging chest pocket and flicked open a slim silver mobile, glancing briefly at the number before putting it to his ear.
"Hello, what do you want?" he grunted in accented English, lifting himself up on his elbows. "Is it urgent?... Fine. What is it?..." He listened for a bit, then sat up in the sand. "He wants to know what?" Javert's voice rose almost to a tenor. "You did send him my photo along with the file, right? … Uh huh… Uh huh… Well, then… Well, then, you tell that clown that I've already given him the time and the place, and I'm not going to waste my time with a quote-unquote detective that can't find a six-foot-three Indian in a crowd of Japanese without additional pointers. I will dress according to personal inclination and the Tokyo weather forecast. Is there anything else?... Well then, ciao."
Javert snapped the mobile shut and shoved it back into his pocket.
"Bloody politically correct nonsense bullshit pushers," he growled under his nose. "How do you like that, eh? He wants to know what I'll be wearing to the meeting in Tokyo. So that he can recognize me in the baggage claim, you see. As if I'm so difficult to recognize. Especially in Narita International. It's like that Soviet joke about the American spy in a Ukrainian village: 'Yakij zh ty garnij ukranskij hlopetz…'"
Javert didn't finish: another Presence has washed over them both.