"Keeping Watch In The Night," Part Two
"You're saying that I am fictional. And not only me, but also my entire universe. My father, my home, my friends--what few I have--are all nothing but some dead man's fancies?"
"Well, that's not really how I'd put it..."
"Yes, or no?" Michel stopped walking and whirled around to face Sylveste. The Agent was several inches shorter than Michel, and was clearly a bit intimidated. "Yes, or no?"
"Uh, yes. Technically. But you're kind of simplifying things..."
Michel stormed ahead. He could find this Response Centre without anyone's help, and he needed to be alone with his thoughts. If he were truly fictional, just some words on a page made up by someone who needed an antagonist, then was he still human? Did he even have a soul? This was too impossible to be real.
Sylveste had said that Agents lived in their Headquarters. Perhaps there might be a chapel somewhere. He needed a place to calm down and think.
Before much thinking could be done, however, Michel almost walked into a door. He examined the sign that had been nailed to it. "RC 9430: ROUGE, DBS."
This was perhaps a sign that Michel needed to stop thinking and do what he was told. Or at least pause the thinking for a moment. He knocked on the door, and a young man answered.
It took a fair bit of restraint on Michel's part to keep himself from crying out in surprise. Agent Rouge's appearance certainly matched his name; His skin was the same hue as a fresh cherry, and his hair was the color of wine. "Hello?"
"You are Agent Rouge?" The man nodded. "I am Michel Javert. I was told to report here, sir."
"Um, okay. Come in. And you don't need to call me 'sir.' Just 'Rouge' is fine."
Michel entered the room and looked around. Like everywhere else in Headquarters, the Response Centre had walls of a generic grey. Its most prominent feature was a strange object covered in screens and buttons. Rouge defined it as "the console." There were also a few chairs, and some photographs--in color--of Rouge and a young man with blond hair. A strange smell was coming from a table in the corner, on which was a small glass jar, a bottle of vinegar, and a bottle labelled "valerian." Rouge quickly threw a sheet over the table.
"Nothing to see there. It's definitely not ingredients for a stink bomb, if that's what you're thinking. No, not at all. I would never do something so juvenile." He sat down on one of the chairs and motioned for Michel to sit in another. "So, you're my new partner. How much did they bother telling you?"
Michel made a quick mental tally of what he had learned so far. "I am not supposed to exist, I am not dead, and I am fictional. And flowers can speak."
"Well, that's a start. They told me less than that when I was recruited. Do you know what continuum you came from?"
Michel remembered the title that Sylveste had mentioned. "Les Misérables."
"Right. I should have guessed, with your last name being Javert. Related to the Inspector, I take it?"
"My father." Michel's throat tightened as he remembered the barricades, and the shot from the tavern.
"Okay, well...did they tell you anything about what it is that the PPC does?" Michel repeated what Carol and Sylveste had told him, and explained about Gabrielle. Rouge bit his lip in thought. "I've always liked Carol and Sylveste. They're very practical. Now, do you have any idea what 'slash' is?" Michel shook his head. "All right...basically, a slash fic is a story where someone writes about two characters of the same gender...um, how would they have said it in the nineteenth century? Two characters of the same gender having romantic feelings toward each other."
"The Greek vice," Michel muttered. He was a policier; he knew of such things. He'd seen things in the poorer parts of Paris that had seared themselves into his mind, and no man could fail to notice the looks that that drunkard Grantaire had given Enjolras.
"Uh, yeah. It's a bit more accepted these days than it was in your time. Anyway, most slash is harmless. As long as they keep people in character and make it plausible, it's fine. But if they mess with the rules of the universe, or the characters, or anything, then we go in. It's not like with a Mary-Sue; these are canon characters, so there's no one to kill. We have to exorcise the slash from the canons, then wipe their memory of the incident. Are you with me so far?"
"I..." Before Michel could explain that he needed Rouge to slow down because he'd only understood half of the Agent's English, there was a piercing sound.
[BEEEEEEEEEP!]
"What is THAT?" Michel shouted.
Rouge pressed some buttons on the console. "That is the sound this thing makes when we have to go on a mission. Looks like it's in your home continuum...uh-oh. Um, maybe you should stay here. I don't think you're quite ready for..."
"What is it?" Michel joined Rouge at the console and examined the screen at which Rouge was looking. It took him a while to understand what it was saying; he spoke English much better than he read it. Finally, he figured out what Rouge was worried about. He gripped his cane until his knuckles turned white. "My father. And Valjean."
"Yeah. Listen, you can just hang out here; I'll handle it my--"
"I. Am. Coming," Michel growled.
"Okay, you're coming. That works, too."
***
Empty. That was the word he was looking for. His work seemed so empty. Valjean was the only prisoner that ever escaped him. Valjean was the only person he ever cared about. Without him he was empty. Empty. Constant emptiness. It was the emptiness that wouldn't go away. It was the emptiness that kept him going.
"Repeat yourself much?" Rouge muttered.
Michel glowered. Glowering was something he did very well. The person in front of them looked like his father, but the idea of Inspector Javert ever moping like this about anything was absurd. "That thing cannot be my father."
"No, it's Javert all right. He's possessed by the slash. Once we exorcise it, he'll be back to normal."
"Then why are we sitting here?" Michel leapt to his feet and tried to rush forward. Rouge held him back. The strangely-colored man was much stronger than he looked. "Let go of me!"
"We're only six paragraphs in. See, this is why I wanted you to stay back at the RC. This is too close to home for a first mission."
Michel tried to pull away. Rouge sighed, shifted his grip on Michel's arm, and flipped him onto his back. Michel lay, stunned, on the street. He'd been in plenty of fights before, and he prided himself in his strength. To be floored so easily was embarassing.
Hatred. Towards his line of work that kept him from loving Valjean.
Fear. Fear of rejection from his love.
"Sentence fragments. Fragments that the author overuses," said Rouge. "Okay, we can exorcise now. Um, it involves hitting him. You can stay here if..."
"I will do what it takes to return my father to a sane state of mind," Michel interrupted. He tried not to pay attention to how much his back hurt. "Tell me what to do."
"Right. Here, you take the CDs--" Rouge handed a black box to him. 'Les Misérables: Complete Symphonic Recording' was written on it, along with a portrait of a small child in front of the French flag. "--And I'll take the Brick." He brandished a very thick book, which bore the same picture of the child. "Now we hit him with these while commanding the slash to get out."
Michel had fought his father before, in practice for the brawls he'd face as a police officer. This was different. This Inspector offered no resistance; he barely noticed Michel and Rouge before the two attacked him.
"Avaunt, Uncanon! Get thee behind me, Slash!" Rouge shouted. "The power of HUGO, BOUBIL, SCHONBERG, and KRETZMER commands you!"
The wispy figure of a girl floated into the air. Michel swung at her with the box before she disappeared.
Rouge produced a small metal rod and told Michel to look away. Michel did so. There was a flash of light in his peripheral vision. When he turned back, Inspector Javert was looking at them, dazed. "You are Inspector Javert," Rouge told him. "You are not in love with Jean Valjean. You didn't see us. Be on your way."
Rouge fiddled with a device similar to the one Sylveste had used earlier to make the door to Headquarters. "Come on, let's go."
***
"What is this?"
Rouge paused his experiment (which had nothing to do with stink bombs, don't be ridiculous), as the CD case being waved in his face was making it very hard to work. "It's the Complete Symphonic Recording of Les Misérables. I explained the concept of musicals already, didn't I?"
"Not that. This." Michel pointed to the list of tracks.
Rouge looked at the title he was indicating: 'Javert's Suicide.' "Oh. You didn't know about that?"
"I knew my father was dead. But he was shot. It wasn't suicide."
"Huh. Okay, sit down. I'll try to explain." Rouge gave an abbreviated synopsis of the second act. When he was finished, he waited for Michel to say something, but the recruit was silent.
Michel stood up and walked over to the console. Rouge had given him a quick lesson on how to operate it, and he thought he remembered which buttons activated the portal. Before Rouge realized what his partner was doing, Michel had stepped through the portal into Paris.
"Michel! Get back here!" Rouge grabbed his bag of equipment and ran after Michel. "Michel Javert, what the heck are you doing?"
***
There was no reason, Rouge decided as he attempted to navigate the streets of Paris, why Michel had not been sent to FicPsych for some kind of orientation, or counseling, or something. He'd just been transplanted several centuries and discovered that his entire world was fiction, and no one expected him to snap?
When Rouge finally found the bridge he was looking for, Michel was standing on the edge, holding a hat and singing to himself.
"Noir ou blanc, hors la loi ou dedans
Noir ou blanc, c'est Javert ou Valjean..."
Rouge couldn't speak French, but he recognized the tune to "Javert's Suicide." "Michel!" he shouted, racing toward his partner. "Don't do anything stupid, okay? It's not worth it!" Please don't let me lose another one.
Michel glanced up. "I'm not going to jump," he said, though he didn't sound too sure of it. "I just needed to see for myself." He took a last, long look at the hat and tossed it into the water.
“Don’t scare me like that!” Rouge activated the portal to their RC. “Come on, let’s go back.”
Michel hesitated. “What would happen if I stayed here?”
“Honestly? You’ll either fade out of existence, now that the Sue’s gone, or someone from the PPC would kill you.” And that someone would probably be me. Don’t you dare make me go through that again.
“So that’s the choice: to stay and die,” said Michel, rhythmically. “Or to forsake the world that’s mine…this is my home.
“And yet I’ve seen what they can do; perhaps I ought to come with you…this is my home.
"And I have sworn to guard her streets…Can’t leave my duty incomplete.”
Everything was quiet for a moment, except for the distant sloshing of the Seine.
“So,” said Rouge, “Is that a yes?”
“That is a yes. I will come back.”
“Great.” Rouge activated the portal. “Um, why were you singing it?”
“I was singing?”
Notes
"Gardien de la paix" is a rank in the Parisian Police roughly equivalent to "Constable." Roughly.
Minis were created by Miss Cam for the Official Fanfiction University of Middle-Earth. Mini-Bricks are the property of l'Université des Ecrivains Misérables.
9430 was Jean Valjean's second prison number, often ignored in favor of the more famous 24601.
The recipe for a stink bomb can be found on page 194 of The Daring Book for Girls, by Andrea J. Buchanan and Miriam Perkowitz.
Translations of French lyrics:
"Black or white, outside the law or within
Black or white, it is Javert or Valjean..."
The lyrics to Michel’s song are my composition, to the tune of one of Jean Valjean’s monologues in the prologue (“And now I know how freedom feels, the jailor always at your heels…it is the law,” etc.). I offer no excuse for the poor rhymes or meter.