#deranged alignment charts | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

breadvidence · 6 months

Text

DAMMIT I.III

On AO3.

SUMMARY: Two suicidal old men with moral scrupulosity in a three-legged potato sack race towards domesticity. Dallas 2014/Brick crossover, all adaptation decisions arbitrary.

Note: Every time I post one of these I struggle against the conventions of my youth. Where's the song lyrics. Where's the tildes. Does anyone need a stern talking-to about homophobia. In any case, this is structurally a type 1 on the Bristol Stool Chart, which I am as a kindness to myself calling a montage. Warning for suicidal ideation, medical setting, homophobia.

⁂

Javert’s therapist praises him for setting boundaries. This distresses him. It is undeserved praise. The necessity that he reveal no details of his history with Valjean makes him sound like a deranged idiot, but for honesty’s sake he mounts an attempt: no, it is not himself that he protects, but Fauchelevent (and how he stutters over the name—! what does she think of that?). The man can bring him lunch and be free of him when it becomes too much, as it becomes too much each time he visits; where could Fauchelevent go to be free if Javert nested in his home? Fauchelevent’s freedom, he stresses, is important. Not, Javert explains, that he means so much to the man; he’s not conceited; no, he is not important, he is unpleasant. He puts a great deal of stress on this word, trying to communicate by tone where facts cannot speak: I served as guard to his prisoner, surveilled him for four years, denounced him, subjected him to a profoundly awkward social situation, threatened to shoot him, surveilled him again for several days before conducting a foot chase, demanded he stab me, threatened to shoot him a second time, and detained him briefly.

The therapist types a note on her laptop. She says, “OK, Mr. Javert, to clarify: do you think this man is literally an angel?”

Valjean’s prohibition of being rude to nurses doubtless extends higher in the medical hierarchy to therapists. Javert breathes out through his teeth and clarifies.

⁂

Marius’ course had been complicated by a hospital infection—ironic, that it’s not from the sewer—and neurological deficits from the head wound, but he went to his grandfather’s with home health rather than languishing in an institution. The house is in one of the more modest streets of Highland Park, which does not mean it’s less than ostentatious. Jean Valjean would have never gone there except that Cosette asked, so he acquiesced. The interior reminds him disorientingly of his mother’s shows from the fifties, her fascination with American wealth, stilled in time.

Cosette has warned him about the grandfather. He has strange manners, Papa. Teasing him, Do not fight the nonagenarian over my honor, please. He does not.

The boy is limpid-eyed and solemn, as at the riot, with a new searching manner to his speech and a tremble in his hands, which Cosette will later tell him is much improved. Jean Valjean anticipates, with immense weariness, exclamations, exposition, explanations sought, Cosette upset, Cosette in tears, Cosette hanging on his neck in unwanted thanks, her young man in his debt when he wants no more tie between them than what his daughter’s love demands of him.

What he receives is a blessing, to his mind: a stiff greeting, “Pleased to finally meet you face-to-face, sir.” A hesitation, a question in his eyes that does not reach his lips. Marius cannot remember him well enough to accuse him.

Yes, a blessing.

Marius blurts, “About the gardens.” Loses his words, and tries, “About the house. About stalking, or—not stalking, I mean.” It is all spoken in a very cold tone, which saps it of the charm silliness might have given it.

Cosette looks very pretty, blushing, with her face in her hands.

Jean Valjean prays to God, though for what he does not know.

⁂

The television in the dayroom has been set to a program about the riots; it is on one of the channels that he would consider more aligned with his politics than not. Javert wants to claw his eyes and ears until there is blood and blood and no more sense. They call that young man a murderer and he thinks it is the same impulse as ever that makes him respond, No, not yet, he has not been deemed guilty by a jury of his peers. It is this imprecision of language to which he has always objected, conservative news or no. They have found a photo of Claquesous, blurry, in which he is young and smiling, face half turned from the camera as if in a presaging of his elder self’s leeriness of being seen full-on. Javert dwells on what he has always taken care to be unaware of: police contractors with felon’s histories, political agitators with state money in their pocket, men who do not get charged with their crimes.

He thinks: Valjean’s example recommends felons to whatever jobs they excel at—is there a different, mayor or police agent? The implication is that it is not the felony but the policework at fault. He shudders. How lucky he has been, or how careful his superiors, that he has never been assigned to participate in—that—all of it. What he would call dishonesty. Like worms, there chew at him questions, questions, questions, missing evidence in narcotics cases, bruises on the faces of detainees who came in unblemished, reports written by partners with events he couldn’t recall. He considers reaching out to Gisquet, but he has read the response his first email earned him, and he—cannot; the rebuke hurts, sharp-edged even through a mind flocked by benzos.

Unless he takes himself off the edge of another bridge, or overcomes his squeamishness about exposed nasal cavities and risks a gunshot, or suppresses his resistance to taking medication in doses other than prescribed—really, there are so many ways to die, he could number more—unless he resigns, he will be a witness on the stand for that trial. He did not see Claquesous die, but it is rather compelling for the prosecution, those several hours he spent a guest of Enjolras and his friends. He thinks his past self would have seen them as rebellious, and disgusting; he does not know, now. He does not trust himself with this.

It would be easier to pretend that Jean Valjean is the sun which has risen, but all that good man has done is turned Javert’s face towards the horizon. What climbs above and burns him, what shows that he has deemed emptiness where there has in fact been darkness—that is something a great deal more awful than any single man could be, whatever awe he commands.

On previous occasions when Valjean has offered to drive him someplace off-site, given there’s room for the wheelchair in his trunk, Javert has been an utter bitch in response. Today he says, Please.

They get lunch. It is too much not for Javert’s spine or pelvis but for his left leg, which is swollen now, and the persistent numbness in his feet is like a saw’s whine under his skin, but he makes Valjean laugh, once. It is good.

⁂

Señor, Javert texts him in the middle of the night, and a rambling apology in Spanish. Maldito santo, he calls him. The vocabulary is robust and the grammar poorly. The word puta features regularly. In a particularly confused message, he repeats he aquí el hombre twice, then that Jean Valjean is solamente un hombre. The sentiment is difficult to perceive, much less absorb.

In the morning he replies, You know that I’m not Hispanic, don’t you?

I noticed you’re not Juan Valjuan yes

Please stop before, he types, and doesn’t know how to finish the sentence. Thinks the children with their strange ways of wording things might just add racismand call it a day.

Not worht putting through Google translate so you know

Jean Valjean erases his previous text and begins, No, I do understand Spanish, but

I wouldn’t have sent it w/o the klonopin trazodone combo.

Jean Valjean erases, again, and before he can consider that he exerts undue influence, writes, Do you think they have prescribed too many

BTW back at Baylor for cts today so will be too busy waiting for them to get their shit together to entertain you.

medications. Jean Valjean does not hit send. He deletes the message and instead texts, Ok. He thinks of prison doctors, the haze of compliance.

⁂

“I have not been to a Catholic service for many years,” Valjean says, “but I wouldn’t mind it, if you want to go. Ah, the Saturday before, too, if you like.”

“You’ve lost the faith?” Javert surprises himself with a nameless jerk of emotion in his chest.

“In God? Never.” He smiles, a soft thing. “But the details of a man’s religion are interesting only to him and his minister. I won’t bore you.”

Javert recalls how, when handed his effects in the hospital, he had taken the rosary from the plastic bag and clasped it in his hand. After some time he realized that he was flushed, unable to look directly at Christ on the crucifix. He has lived his adult life in mortal sin, his righteousness as a man unshaken by his awareness that he stood among the Good Shepherd’s flock a ram with flystrike, biting at the wool between his legs. His expectations for his place in the social order has always been dour, and his faith was not excepted, with his religion further suppressed by a frank lack of neighborliness. He went to Mass on Sunday, he selected Catholic when asked for his denomination, and he carried that damned rosary, which was with its origin and associations equally a reminder of his dedication to the police. Never has he suffered to blush in the face of God. Bitterly, bitterly does he blush now. His recent attempt to break the fifth commandment has little to do with this, he admits to himself—though perhaps the God from whom he sought to resign would be exasperated by the fact? In any case, he had not, on the bridge, been running to anywhere he did not expect to end regardless. Only, the sins which condemned him changed.

“Javert?”

What he wants to say is, Please, talk with me about God. Hearing in his own ear the effortful quality of his speech, he says, “I can’t kneel for all that fucking penance I’m due.” He has not done penance in decades, but he knows perfectly well one’s knees are the least of it. “Let’s not.”

Valjean touches his elbow and changes the topic.

It occurs to him that after four years in the same congregation, Valjean never took note that Javert didn’t come to confession or receive holy Communion. The lack of counter-surveillance is frankly galling. Or—he’s forgotten? Either way, it is difficult not to sulk.

⁂

It is a moral good and existential threat when several of Marius’ friends are released from detention. They managed to escape the police confrontation without major head wounds and cannot be relied upon to let Jean Valjean be. He, who has allowed Cosette her way in the matter of engineering situations in which himself and her young man must interact, now withdraws again.

He recognizes her brightness in Marius’ presence as the open expression of what he has seen from the corner of his eye, in moments she did not know he watched, such that even if he hadn’t remembered those awkward days in the Arboretum he would have been able to place when their relationship first began. More than it troubles him to hate this person who his daughter so loves, it disturbs him that she predicted it—it is not for her to bear up that she is everything to him. Even as it broke him, he has always been proud that she chose an out-of-state medical school, that she did not take him into consideration for that. That she has felt the need for such caution around her romantic life is—

In all his turmoils of the soul Jean Valjean has had moments when he did not comprehend the whole of himself, and moments of denial; there is only clarity here: that she is everything to him that a lonely soul cries out for, but never that. What jealousy he has of her intimacy with Marius is not—that. He prays to God that she has never thought of such things, that her reticence indicates instead a caution born of a deeply religious upbringing, the shadow of the convent, his own silence giving no guide.

She texts him frequently, and calls twice a week, and if it troubles her that he declines her invitations to spend time together, she does not tell.

He has found himself, of late, distracted by the question of how to make his various charitable projects move along without him. The money is his, and the impetus, but never the name or the hands, and it is not so difficult. It troubles him to think that they might deviate from their purpose without his eyes upon them; he prays on this, and concludes it is the sin of pride, as haunted his work in Montreuil. He thinks to himself that Javert is another charitable work that needs to gain independence, and feels badly over the knowledge that this would hurt the man’s pride. There is melancholy, too, but he cannot place why. He thinks of when Cosette was a little girl and they had found a bluebird chick pushed from the nest, half-dead, which they kept ’til it fledged and could be let free, and how she wept over its flight; has his heart been moved as hers was?

Javert, like the bluebird chick, has his moments of utterly lacking charms. He is up on crutches at last, and Jean Valjean has convinced him to come out for a celebratory meal. Evidently the resident in the neighboring room listens to Johnny Cash regularly, which has occasioned—Jean Valjean glances at his phone—a fifteen minute rant about the artist’s poor morals. He has not previously put much thought into Cash, but he has the sense from the facts stated between Javert’s opinions that their perspectives do not align.

In the pause following the arrival of their meal, he says, “He recorded those prison albums, didn’t he? I seem to recall he did some advocacy work.” He takes a bite of his gnocchi.

Javert looks struck, which is unfair. Jean Valjean barely said a thing. There is a silence. Javert takes what is more than a sip of his wine.

He adds, “‘Ring of Fire’ was catchy. I remember when it was on the radio. Ah, you probably weren’t even born.”

“You’re not that much older,” Javert mutters, in an odd tone; then, altogether too neutral, “That was one of my mother’s favorites.”

A man this fucked up, Jean Valjean thinks, has nothing good to say about his childhood. While he shouldn’t throw stones, his answer to the subject remains no, thank you. “You always change the radio to classic rock. That’s your preference?”

“Not really, but it’s more palatable than the pop shit you always have it tuned to.” His smile is unexpected and softens his tone as he continues, “Ridiculous, a man your age listening to Taylor Swift and—I don’t know what else. The goddamn song about being happy that they won’t stop playing.”

“The Pharrell Williams single? He’s quite an influential producer, too.” The station he prefers plays songs from the turn of the millennium to the present, and he’s really more invested in the older—relatively speaking—music, but explaining would require he talk about Cosette, nostalgia for her childhood, and he has thus far avoided mentioning her. Besides, this mockery from Javert, it’s—well, Jean Valjean does not mind it. He might even mistake it for friendliness.

⁂

Good fucking Christ, thinks Javert, who can still feel his own smile in the corner of his lip, m I friends with that old man? He chose the glass of wine over the evening meds contraindicated for use with alcohol, and is therefore trapped awake with all the inescapable little sounds of a facility at night around him. The neighbor who listens to Johnny Cash also snores. He reviews the six weeks that have passed since he turned his head and found Valjean at his bedside. He tallies their behavior against his abstract knowledge of friendship. The results are not amenable to him. Surely they are symbols of failure and suffering to each other before they are men, much less more?

—Surely?

Valjean wore slacks and a button-up to their little celebration dinner—did symbols of failure and suffering go to dinner together?—and had something of Madeleine’s charm about him. Could be decade-old sexual frustration reviving, Javert tells himself, whose hatred of the man in Montreuil was matched step for step with a willingness to get on his knees for him. Javert is much more accustomed to thinking of himself as a cocksucker than as someone’s friend. He is too alert and too honest to accept this substitution; far be it from him to pretend he wouldn’t bend over for Valjean, but that hardly signifies where the question of emotion is concerned.

Should he ask?

⁂

A dozen times Jean Valjean almost demands, What is it, Javert, and a dozen times he falls back from the question. The man is a creature of habit, he knows; doubtless the transfer from the SNF to home, while seeming to him like a blessed escape, is in actuality a struggle. God alone in his wisdom knows what might be passing through that blockish skull. He has an elbow leaned against the door, chin propped in cupped palm. There’s quiet in the car, volume low on the censored verses of Nicki Minaj; Javert has not switched the station.

“I didn’t realize there was a woman in your life,” he says, abrupt but neutral.

It locks the muscles of his back. “I don’t see what makes you say that.”

“Her mail is in your car,” Javert says. “Saw it when I put my bag in the back seat. Or am I not the only invalid you’ve played postal service to?”

Yes, letters from the finance office of the college; he recalls, but would not have expected the man to notice, tucked as they are into the pocket on the back of the driver’s seat. His instinct is to lie—what does it matter, when they will not see more of each other? He could say: someone from church. A neighbor on a trip. A girlfriend? He is dubious he could sell the last, particularly given Javert must have been aware he abstained from romance in Montreuil. “You do know of her,” he says. “My daughter, Cosette.”

“You kept that child?” From the corner of his eye, it is impossible to make out quite what Javert’s expression has gone to, but his voice is harsh. “You can’t have adopted her.”

I paid for her, Jean Valjean decidedly does not say, and knows he ought to have lied. “Ah, well.” He glances over. “Do you have a grocery store preference?”

In a distant tone, he replies, “Tom Thumb is fine. Take a right off the Field Street exit. We’ll have to go past the Jack Evans Headquarters on the way to my apartment—that fine?” When he receives a brisk gesture of assent, he restarts, with a dogged air, “The parole violation and fraud charges alone are enough for a prison sentence, but the statute of limitations won’t have expired for a fucking kidnapping, and—”

“Javert,” he says, his voice soft, “if you ar reconsidering seeing to my arrest, I would ask you to not involve Cosette.”

“I’m not—” His hands come up as if to seize, to fling something away from him. “Never mind. I won’t think about it.”

Given the depth of his agitation, this seems an unlikely way to resolve the situation. “I shouldn’t have put you in this position.”

“I’m not thinking it through, Valjean.” He presses close to the door, as if he would escape were they not on a highway.

“Cosette’s mother—” He has not been able to bring her name to his lips for years. “—gave her into my care.”

“Yes, that woman had a habit of child abandonment, didn’t she?” he snarls, his vitriol towards Fantine shockingly crisp-edged, as if he has kept it under glass all these years. “You were a rich man, a prominent one. Of course the bitch would want to cuckoo her child into your house. I, of all fucking people, am aware she didn’t have time to change her mind once she knew what you are.”

“No, she didn’t have time.” He will not look on those memories, knowing how he will find them: all of it gone strange with time and too much contemplation, here blurred, here more vivid than reality. He will hear the sound her skull make as it struck the headboard, feel her hand still warm under his lips, weep for how in her final repose she seemed to smile. He takes the exit. “Regardless, I made a promise.”

“A fugitive’s promise to a whore,” he snarls, “is not a legal transfer of child custody.”

“No.” He takes the opportunity of a red light to turn and face the other man in full. “She wasn’t that.”

“Well, she was never convicted,” Javert mutters. He holds eye contact, but too much of his sclera show. “No, she was never even charged.” The car behind them honks and he flinches hard enough to hit the door.

Jean Valjean does not startle; he checks the intersection before he drives forward. The controlled breathing of the man next to him is over-loud, and he wonders if he ought to pull off into an empty lot for this conversation. He would not engage with it at all, except he must be certain that Javert will not interfere in Cosette’s life. “I didn’t realize you held on to this anger. I haven’t seen it in you these past weeks.”

“Why should my feelings have changed?” he returns. “You humiliated me—and then I humiliated myself. Twice, if you count that shitshow of an arrest attempt. Yes. Twice. And you—you don’t feel anything? I distinctly recall you accused me of murder, at the time.”

He pulls into the Tom Thumb lot, parks. When he turns off the car, the radio keeps playing; Pharrell invites them to clap along. He presses the dial to silence it. His memories of Javert’s part in his downfall as Madeleine are faded, and not from being too gone-over; this man had the misfortune of being the lesser concern in each of the encounters that have remained so important to him, nothing beside Champmathieu, less than nothing beside Fantine. What does he recall? The surprise in Javert’s eyes when he took the gun from his hands and struck him with it, as if they had jumped from one script to another. Yes, most of all he remembers those eyes, watching through the years. Scattered incidences, from less emotional times. Sudden, clear: trying to calm Javert down, saying, I esteem you. A lie. He wonders now what impact it had. He is glad to have remembered; he will not try to de-escalate this situation in the same way, knowing it will not work.

Javert watches him, making no move to leave the vehicle. Fuck. He’s asked a question, and his patience has never been lacking.

“I have never wanted you to come to harm,” he tries.

Javert looks unimpressed by this.

What does he feel? At the moment, exasperation, and that first stutter of the heart that precedes the chase when one is the prey. “Please—”

“Don’t say please to me,” Javert rasps.

It is one of those moments of vulnerability which has nearly driven him from the man’s side, entanglement be damned. He goes still. “We should get those groceries.”

Javert holds out a hand to him, gaze gone sharp, and while the curbing of his emotion is welcome, the shift of attention is not. “Are you afraid? What of?”

“Habit, only. I am used to running.” The honesty costs him nothing, but still, it stings his throat. “You don’t want me to say please—but I don’t know how else to ask, Javert. Please. I don’t care about the past. Cosette has not known what it means to run. Not like I have. She doesn’t know.”

“Anything?” Javert asks, bewildered, and sees the answer in his expression. “That’s fucked up, Valjean. Why must you lie?”

Jean Valjean undoes his seatbelt. “Well?”

“You said please and never specified what you wanted,” Javert replies, pettish, and mimics him. “But—fine. You’re a kidnapper; very good! Add it to the list. You’re a good man. I know that. What do you expect, anyway, that I’ll tip off the police? With what evidence? As if I didn’t learn my lesson the first time.”

“You were right then, too,” Jean Valjean says.

“No. I’d be equally wrong now.” Javert pops the car door with more force than is necessary. “I’ll have an answer some day, but sitting this long has been hell. —Don’t rush, I can lean on the car and get the crutches out of the back. Christ in heaven.”

It is an awkward shopping trip, a quiet drive the rest of the way to the apartment, both of them flinching under the shadow of police headquarters as they pass it by. Javert seems too tired for further conversation, for which Jean Valjean feels guilt, gratitude. They bicker over who ought to go up the stairs behind the other, Jean Valjean to catch Javert should he fall, or Jean Valjean so that should Javert fall he not be knocked down. Jean Valjean prevails. It feels normal, as if they had not fought. He does not know what to make of the fact that there is a sense of normal from which to deviate. When it seems like Javert might offer him some kind of hospitality, a glass of water, he leaves.

There, he thinks as he drives back to the Southlake apartment. We are quit of each other.

⁂

In the first moment that he is alone, Javert goes to his gun safe and removes the P250. It is not illegal for him to own; no part of his hospitalization related to his mental illness, and he has not been adjudicated as mentally defective. Whether the spirit of the law would see his right to carry revoked is another matter, and none of his concern. Or—perhaps it should be? Such questions are what makes him look speculatively at the firearm. But he does not own any tarps to put down and catch the mess, he thinks, and he has been on good terms with his landlord all these years.

He sits on his bed, the crutches fallen to the ground at his feet, and rests his forehead along the barrel of the unloaded handgun. It is painful to think. He would rather be cleaning up the disgusting amount of dust that has accumulated in his absence. In his ears is the sound of the river, in his eyes the mist. He blinks away the latter, an unmarked time later, and struggles with his rigid back to retrieve the crutches, and return the P250 to the safe. Not today, he tells himself.

He wants his goddamn answers from Jean Valjean, for one.

After a week, Javert determines that Valjean does not intend to contact him. Well, is the man such a pussy that he can’t handle one argument over their shared past? Has Javert not reassured him that he will take no action against him? He composes several texts. He experiences self-loathing over those that are too harsh, and a different, less comfortable emotion when they are overly needy. Attempting to directly confront the reason for this silence does not prove fruitful. He settles on, Making stuffed chicken tomorrow night. Come over if you want. Six o’ clock. He adds, after a very stressful ten minutes, Can be earlier or later if you need it to be.

⁂

Jean Valjean realizes, quite startled, that what Javert has extended to him is the open palm of friendship. This is far from the first time he has been presented with such a thing, but it is the only one he has been uncertain how to avoid. Old Fauchelevent had been tricky, but he had only to think of his deceptions to place distance between them. He has no such excuse here. He received Javert’s text five hours ago and has yet to reply.

6 is fine, he plucks out. Sends.

#DAMMIT #fanfic (mine)

2 notes · View notes