I have been horribly remiss with this story… *headdesk* I have a bit of a buffer of story finally stacked up, but with NaNoWriMo coming up I'll have to take a break. Sigh.
I own nothing of Les Miserables. Wah.
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The poor young lieutenant on duty at the front desk of the Prefecture couldn't help gaping as what appeared to be Inspector Javert with a horse attached to his lower half sauntered in the front door, followed by a panicky-looking Sergeant Prideux. He continued to gape as the inspector took off his hat and shot a cold look at him.
"What's wrong with your jaw that it has to sag like that?" Inspector Javert growled. The lieutenant snapped his jaw shut and spluttered, "Nothing, sir!" As the cold gaze continued to pierce through him he scrambled to his feet, knocking his chair back in the process, and stood at trembling attention.
"Good. Pick up that chair and carry on." Inspector Javert finally took his gaze from the lieutenant, who frantically grabbed his chair and stood it up with a slam. As Javert strode past, hooves clopping on the solid floor like a strange sort of majestic metronome, the lieutenant sank down into his chair and stared at Sergeant Prideux. The latter shot a wild-eyed look at the lieutenant, shrugged enormously, and flopped into a welcoming seat.
"What--who--" the young lieutenant gasped. Prideux paused, visibly seized a hold of his own quivering reactions, and said, "Don't you just hate it when they don't listen to you?"
"Huh?"
"Don't tell me you've never seen a centaur before! Impossible beasts. I TOLD him not to go in here, but no, he had to go and be all 'I'm gonna do this my way'--" Prideux waved his hands around vaguely. "It's all very exasperating. Next time I'll just leave him at home."
"Er…" The lieutenant was now hopelessly confused. "You mean…he belongs to you?"
"Dear me, no!" Prideux slapped a hand across the desktop. "Don't say that in his hearing--he hates me to begin with. Very outspoken against the ownership thing."
"Er…" the lieutenant said again. Before he could choose a more intelligent approach a high-pitched shriek was heard from the back of the Prefecture. Both the lieutenant and Prideux recoiled to listen stiffly for another such sound. They didn't have long to wait.
"Inspector Javert! But how--what--" The whiny voice of Rousseau seemed on the verge of hysteria; Prideux had a strange image of a screeching pig stuck underneath a fence and snickered quietly.
"Oh, shut up!" Now Javert's voice rose above the squealing. It shut off as quickly as a slap, and Javert's voice continued. Unfortunately, the doors and walls between Javert and Prideux's ears muffled the voice until its baritone rumble could hardly be heard.
"Dang," Prideux grumbled. "If you would excuse me…" With that he ambled off with the best show of unconcern he could manage--that is, until he walked through the first door leading to the hallways. Then he pressed himself against the wall, inching along until he could pick out the voice of Javert in Rousseau's office.
"This was none of my doing--I just woke up this morning like this. Now, this will not reflect on my police-work at all. If anything it should help the force--"
"Help?" Rousseau squawked. "You must be joking!"
"No, I most certainly am not joking." An irritated note crept into the inspector's voice--Prideux could just see the man gritting his teeth in a snarl.
"No…no, I couldn't possibly--it's out of my jurisdiction--" Ah, falling back on the old 'make it someone else's problem' tack. Prideux rolled his eyes and tried to send a telepathic message to Javert along the lines of 'stop wasting your time, the old fool won't help us unless you threatened him with bodily harm'. Of course, Javert would never threaten a superior with anything resembling bodily harm, unless the transformation had addled his brain worse than they already were.
Apparently this prediction proved true, for after a short silence on the part of Javert, the inspector made a quiet acquiescence. Hooves clopped the wood floor, and before Prideux could scramble back to the front room the door opened and Javert pinned the sergeant to the floor with a withering glare.
Prideux resisted the urge to writhe under that gaze and grinned as disarmingly as he could. "Good afternoon, M. l'Inspecteur."
"Oh, shut up," Javert growled while sweeping past. "I'm going out."
"Er…" Prideux popped to his feet and saluted. "Permission to accompany you, sir!"
The glare intensified, and Prideux shrank back mumbling, "Yes, sir." It would have taken a blithering idiot not to see the unspoken threat in that gaze, and whereas Prideux was a clumsy moron he certainly wasn't a blithering idiot. He trailed after Javert, looked at the Inspector's back hooves, and thought better of following him so closely. He'd seen the after-effects of being kicked by a horse before, and it wasn't something he wanted to experience for himself.
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Javert exited the Prefecture with the heaviness of anger still clinging in shreds like the ruined remnants of his trousers this morning. Enough with the metaphors, he grumbled inwardly. It was bad enough that his recent transformation was cumbersome and unwieldy in buildings, but the fact that Deputy Chief Rousseau had tried to push the problem off to someone else was infuriating. He needed to cool off somewhere.
The door behind him opened, and Prideux strode out to lean against the wall of the Prefecture. The last face Javert wanted to see (other than Deputy Chief Rousseau) was Prideux's grinning mug. "I didn't say you could come with me," he snarled at the oblivious sergeant.
Prideux took one look at Javert's stormy face and decided that it probably wasn't in his best interest to follow the Inspector. "Er…I was just going back in," he mumbled, throwing out a few transparent excuses before hurrying back into the relative safety of the Prefecture. Javert seethed for a moment, nearly knocked down an innocent passer-by with his glare, and carefully made his way down the stone steps. Before he could take more than a dozen steps he became sharply aware of all the looks he was receiving: everyone in the small plaza had stopped and were either staring with open curiosity or pretending not to stare while doing so. He nearly hesitated--should he confront the nosy pedestrians, or merely ignore them as he always did? The question crossed his mind in a split second, and he slid into the familiar retreat of looking straight ahead as if unconscious of anything unusual, thank you very much, and serenely pacing across the plaza. In a few moments the odd silence lifted, replaced with the soft buzz of conversation. The familiar sound unconsciously reassured Javert, and he tucked his chin into his coat collar to sink into thought. Once he did so, the looks and murmuring ceased to bother him.
A plan of action, that's what he needed. He should go back to his apartment--that fleeing of earlier was an odd whim brought on by the transformation. Perhaps the horse part brought on a subliminal change in his thinking--he gritted his teeth at the annoyance of such a notion. It would make his life unnecessarily difficult if he had to retrain aspects of his brain.
So, go back to the apartment, ignore Mme. Gillette's harping, and plot the rest of his plan-of-action. With a solid goal in mind, Javert directed his feet towards the apartment. Mme. Gillette would be a formidable obstacle, but nothing he couldn't handle.