My most sincere apologies (to anyone who cares) for seemingly abandoning this story. What can I say? It's been a heck of a year. I'm also very probably a bad person.

About a week ago, I realized that I missed writing "my" Javert--though it took me nearly the whole week to get his voice somewhere close to right again. Thus, a long-ish chapter (more practice for me, more reading for you--everyone wins!) More to come within the next two weeks--it'll even have a cohesive plot and everything!

Edited to add: thanks to Bramblefox, I have picked up the pronoun I so unceremoniously dropped before publishing the first time. Serves me right for proofreading my own work, I suppose.

Auberge le Roi did not disappoint. As Javert approached the inn, a young man wearing a tall hat and carrying a silver-capped cane stumbled through the doorway with an elegant and obviously inebriated young blonde woman, who giggled as he pulled her across the threshold. The man looked up with a foolish grin and bowed deeply, holding the door open as Javert entered.

Inside, the common room was nearly empty but for a few determined souls with brandy still in their cups, and an elderly man busily whisking a broom back and forth across the floorboards. Javert cleared his throat as he approached the man with the broom, but got no response. He tried again, closer and more loudly, but still the man continued sweeping.

"Excuse me, are you Monsieur Girard," Javert asked, trying to get within the man's line of sight. Finally the man looked up at him with a puzzled scowl.

"Are you Monsieur Girard?" Javert repeated. The man shook his head, gesturing to his ears and shrugging. Deaf. Javert handed him the note from Pére Deveroux.

The man studied it for a moment, and then nodded as if to himself. He leaned the broom up against the wall and scuttled back behind the counter to pull out a large ledger book. With one finger, he scanned back and forth across the pages for a few moments, then nodded and snapped the book shut. Grabbing a key from the pegboard behind him, he slipped out from behind the counter again and gestured to his guest to follow him.

The man led Javert up a narrow staircase and down the hall to a door marked number 6. With a click, Monsieur Girard turned the key in the lock and held the door open for Javert to enter. The space in the room was mostly consumed by the bed, which was centered against one of the short walls. A writing desk and cane chair stood in the corner, with an oil lamp that the innkeeper lit before handing the key to Javert and retreating down the stairs again. After latching the door and slipping his boots off, Javert considered the bed carefully. It had been more than a fortnight since he'd slept in a bed. Exhausted, he sat down and allowed himself to fall back onto it. If anything could have surpassed the exquisite comfort of the feather mattress and clean linens, Javert was certain such a thing would be illegal.

- - - -

The next morning, he woke, dressed in his second set of clothes, and descended the stairs just before dawn. There was a young, cheerful woman behind the counter this time, and he approached her to return the key.

"Good morning, M'sieur," she greeted him. "On your way so early?"

He nodded.

"Your room number, please?"

"Number six."

With a smile, she plucked the key from his hand and turned to hang it up again, then pulled out the ledger book. Javert fingered the remaining coins in his pocket, not sure whether to hope that the innkeeper had written down the instructions from Pére Deveroux or to hope that the old man had forgotten and he would be forced to pay—leaving far poorer than he intended, but at least without debt.

"Ah, paid in full last night. Funny—Grandpére must have forgotten to take your name, M'sieur." She looked up at him expectantly.

He paused for a moment, remembering his conversation with Pére Deveroux the previous evening.

"Revenant. Etienne Revenant."

She dutifully wrote it down, then followed the line over with her finger.

"You are owed breakfast, it says here," the young woman said, tucking the book away again. "What may I get for you, Monsieur Revenant? You're the first I've seen up, and there's coffee and fresh bread. I have some ham and eggs, too, if you're willing to wait a bit."

He was anxious to return to the church, but before he could reply, his stomach growled and he reconsidered the wisdom of committing to a day's labor without a meal first. Hoping the young lady had not noticed, he nodded.

"That would be more than acceptable, Mademoiselle."

"Of course, M'sieur." She started towards the stove, and Javert settled himself at a table near the counter.

"That's an odd name, Revenant," Mademoiselle Girard called back after a few moments of silence. "Where do you come from?"

"Paris," Javert responded.

"Ah, what luck, I've never been there. Is that where you're headed? Back home?" she asked.

"Not yet." Not ever.

"What did you do in Paris?"

His heart skipped a beat before he reminded himself that she was referring to his occupation. It was a good question, one he had been considering since his experience the day before. Giving a false name was one thing—during the time he spent with Tobar and his clan, he realized that he could no longer go by the name of Javert, regardless of whether or not it was known to others. That Pére Deveroux had given him a workable pseudonym by accident was fortunate. But he hated to lie outright; he was not a common criminal, nor some shady dealer of snake oil cures.

Claiming to be a tinsmith was right out. Saying he was an inspector had the virtue of being true, "was" being the operative word. However, calling oneself an inspector had the unfortunate effect of causing others to be wary, and he considered himself too young to pass as a retiree.

The main trouble with this question, though, was that he had not decided on a response, and the pause in conversation was running too long.

"I was a tailor," he finally answered, plucking up the first inoffensive job title that popped into mind. It wasn't hopelessly untrue, he supposed—lacking the money to send his clothes out for repair, he'd done his own mending for most of his life and was fairly handy at it.

"Oh,' she said, "My father is a tailor, on Avenue d'Ouvrier. Henri Girard." She flashed a grin back at him. "You're not here to set up shop, are you?"

"No."

"You should go introduce yourself to him," she continued. "He likes new people. Always asks who I've met while I'm here, wants me to tell him stories." Some little apprehension must have shown on Javert's face, because the next time the young woman turned around, she quickly added, "Don't fret, Monsieur, I won't mention you if you'd rather I didn't."

She continued chatting pleasantly as she worked, with Javert supplying the occasional ums and ahs that encouraged her to continue speaking. He observed her through the pass-through window in the same practiced way he'd watched other people for years—closely attentive but without staring. As a mental exercise, he considered the things he could learn from her appearance and mannerisms. Her auburn hair was hastily put-up, slightly askew, and that plus a slight clumsiness as she poured his coffee made him sure that her good cheer hid a natural distaste for the early hours. The hem of her dress was recently replaced, the fabric too crisp in relation to the wear that softened the rest of the skirt, and it told him that she was not poor at present, but came close at times. In her voice he caught a hint of roughness that spoke of time spent in the presence of smoke and alcohol—perhaps a café, or simply the common room of the inn—and from her choice of language it was likely a place that catered to laborers and working men.

As he watched her, thoughts floated to the forefront of his mind. The first was that the Mademoiselle Girard was possibly quite pretty. It had been so long since his last prolonged contact with young women of decent social standing that he had forgotten how they were meant to look.

By the time she brought his breakfast, after perhaps ten minutes spent recounting her introduction to the handsome young woodcarver who liked to set up his stall across the street, a second thought had pushed its way into Javert's awareness: Mademoiselle Girard talked too much.

- - - -

Soon after, Javert found himself seated on the steps of the church in the morning sun, listening to the murmur of Latin plainsong coming from the closed door behind him. The skies were clear and bright, and the previous day's rain seemed to have scoured the city clean. He stretched his arms behind him, leaned back, and breathed in deeply. It was so strange, he thought, to feel this peaceful. He tried to remember the last time he'd experienced the sensation, and utterly failed. Perhaps, he surmised, he had never felt like this before. The thought gave him pause. He ran through the various epochs of his life as he remembered them, searching.

Childhood? No—birth in a prison is an ignominious beginning, and for a long time his life grew little better. His mother was Romani, abandoned by her family for taking up with a Parisian thief, and then abandoned by said thief when he discovered that she was both pregnant and consumptive. Her death fell somewhere just beyond the edges of Javert's memory.

He was raised by the church as a charity case, fortunate compared to those orphans who ended up on the street, but still an outcast from the start. He was intelligent, certainly, and could recall verbatim nearly everything that was told to him, but he had the devil's own time learning to read and write. Words had a funny way about them when put down on the page—when he was young he occasionally suspected that they moved without his knowledge, because they never seemed to stay the same as when someone else read them. They flipped and squeezed together or stretched apart in front of his eyes until he could make no sense of them. His teachers accused him of failing to study, beat him for laziness, and called him an imbecile and an idiot child. He took ever greater pains when completing his schoolwork, sometimes working late into the night by candlelight in preparation for the next lesson. His scores improved, but at the cost of leisure time, and often sleep as well. It came a little easier as he grew older, but he still read slowly and with great care, and never for the pleasure of it.

His classmates were worse. To them, he was a poor Gypsy, a creature almost below consideration already. Once they discovered that the slender, somber boy could barely read or write, they abused him constantly. They taunted him, threw him into snow banks and mud puddles, tore the pages of his copy book on which he'd worked so many hours hoping to avoid further punishment, and kicked or tripped him when the schoolmaster was not looking. Complaints earned him nothing more than doubting looks and further mistreatment. He learned quickly that the way to prevent continued humiliation was to avoid the others, and when that was impossible, to endure their torment silently.

After that came a slow but steady climb up the ranks of the gendarmes, from an assistant to the guards at Toulon to Inspector First Class in the Paris prefecture. In Toulon he learned to be exacting, and at times barely avoided descending to base cruelty. As an Inspector, he learned to be tenacious. He'd spent more than a decade chasing after the man Valjean, a chase that brought him no time for relaxation, and which he had been unable to end except by giving himself over to Death. The night the barricades fell, he discovered that Death had no use for him, and so it gave him back, with the admonishment to rest.

And so rest he did, there in front of the church with the sun streaming down on his face. Behind him, he could hear the voice of Pére Deveroux reading the final Gospel of the Mass—specifically, the beginning of the Gospel of St. John, a passage Javert himself had learnt by heart as a boy. He strained his ears to pick up the verse:

"Non erat ille lux, sed ut testimónium perhibéret de lúmine. Erat lux vera quæ illúminat omnem hóminem veniéntem in hunc mundum."

He was not the light, but was to give testimony of the light, that was the true light which enlighteneth every man that cometh into this world.

Javert rose from the steps with the assistance of his cane and brushed the dust from his trousers. The churchgoers would exit soon enough, and then it would be time to meet with the priest. Javert smiled at the thought. At least one of the debts he'd incurred would be paid in full.