Javert ✍ 025
Who: Inspector Javert and Naomi Javert (Hunter)
Where: Their condominium in the government district
Style: ... To be determined
Status: Closed closed closed ( Read more... )
Where: Their condominium in the government district
Style: ... To be determined
Status: Closed closed closed ( Read more... )
"I have brought you something." The brown bag that held their take-out dinner was still on the counter he crossed to it in two long steps. He drew a plain butcher-paper-and-string parcel from the bag and finally tossed the bigger vessel out. "On my return today. You will be relieved to hear that it is not a second dinner."
Javert sat beside her, his long and gangly legs stretched and lengthened, his back curving against the slouch of the couch backrest. He still managed to tower over his tiny, fragile wife. He held the package out to her with an intent, studying stare. He offered the parcel to her tenderly, as if there were something in the back of his head telling him that her bones may shatter beneath the weight of a simple and straightforward gift.
He arched a brow, a crackling twitch visible at the corner of his mouth. Perhaps he was not completely devoid of his sardonic brand of humor yet.
"To relieve your boredom." He shook his head almost imperceptibly, his eyes rolling toward the ceiling. "I cannot fathom how you manage to keep your head. You've strapped me to the bed-post during my recovery times, in the past. Even then I am restless!"
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It was mostly unnerving, but it only made the woman that much more determined to appear as normal and as well as possible while under his dark gaze. So as Javert finally joined her on their couch, the tiny woman straightened stubbornly under her thick blanket and shined a bright smile up at her husband as she reached for the unexpected gift. She needed to give off some kind of convincing appearance of strength for his sake.
"Thank God, I can barely handle my one oversized dinner on my own. If I didn't know any better, I'd think you were trying to turn me into a fat, lazy housewife like all of the other boring wives here." They both, of course, are fully aware of that possibility never coming even close to being true, but inappropriate teases have never stopped them before. Morbid jokes over his tragic suicide and her own impending death are just commonplace between them by now. "But thankfully I already know you love me just the way I am."
Still smiling softly, though that attractive sparkle in her eyes may reveal that she's just a little more excited at being given a gift than she will let on, Naomi turned her attention to the plainly wrapped package, opening it carefully.
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Beneath the brown butcher paper Naomi will find the very books she asked for earlier in the month: extravagant and rather racy romance novels, the one on top prominently featuring a muscled police officer that put Inspector Javert's own gangly mess of limbs to shame. It was rather embarrassing, really, to be seen in public buying an erotic women's novel as a representative of the city's police service. But in matters concerning his wife, Javert was beyond humiliation, and he set about his task with his customary intimidation, self-assuredness, and authority. The poor sod who rung up Javert's purchases at the book store ended up with the flustered short end of the stick, positively crumpling under the Inspector's intense and cold stare whilst he fulfilled Naomi's tongue-in-cheek request. It was doubtful that boy would allow the word to spread too far, after his unpleasant experience.
Javert sipped the wine.
"Your eyes still work, I hope." He gestured to the books. "Are they your taste?"
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It shouldn't be any surprise at all that the Inspector's wife immediately began laughing wildly without restraint at the sight of her gift, her entire expression brightening in unexpected delight. While it was true her old book collection had been incredibly well used in the last month while she'd been trapped inside due to both her sickness and the raging winter weather she detested, she honestly hadn't thought her husband would at all comply with her playful, joking request. But apparently, the old man would never run out of amusing thrills to keep her forever on her toes, would he? That simple thought always brought a warm, welcome feeling along with it. As strange a pair as they seemed to be to the public eye, Javert rarely disappointed her and never was boring.
Resting a tiny hand over the immodestly dressed hunk on the cover, Naomi turned her darling, excited smile on her husband. "I absolutely can't believe you." Which, obviously, was a very huge and completely entertained 'thank you' from the woman.
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He gave a dry little laugh, fanning out the assortment of books he picked up from the store for her. He reached past her carefully to pick up her still-full wine glass and held it for her until she beckoned for it. Finally, he leaned and folded just over her shoulder, his warm and alive breath brushing her goosebumped and pale throat, to watch her crack open and sift through his carefully-selected gifts.
"Do you see, now," he continued in a musing tone, "how you have ruined me entirely?"
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Though honestly, it was likely a thought he'd had many times over in the last few weeks while taking care of his sick wife as she crept closer and closer to the end.
Turning her head to peek coyly over her shoulder at her oddly playful husband, Naomi twisted enough in her secure (and comfortably warm) position on the couch to press a soft, peck of a kiss to his lips in thanks. As strange as it was for such a usually detached woman to admit it to anyone including herself, these infrequent romantic moments between them really did warm her up pleasantly in a way she never truly expected anyone to ever make her feel. They never popped up very often in their all too busy day-to-day lives, but the feeling always managed to take her by surprise.
"I really have, haven't I? You're absolutely ruined." And with that hint of smug pride not even trying to hide itself in her honeyed tone, she regarded the man briefly before leaning in for another kiss, one that was much more intimate and spoke greater volumes than the last.
Still smiling as she finally broke away, Naomi happily turned her attention towards the various gifted books in hand, picking up a few novels and flipping through the fresh pages for any particularly racy sentences to leap out at her and catch her eye. "Now that you mention it, darling, I think there may be something wrong with my vision tonight. I just can't seem to focus on the print for very long."
Now, as Javert should hopefully realize after dealing with his scheming wife for so very long, there was absolutely no reason to panic at the mention of something wrong with her tonight, even after the week of hell they had been through. The tiny woman held out a raunchy book to him plainly, switching it instead for the glass of wine he'd been holding, and immediately snuggled against his long side.
And even though she was polite enough to ask him formally, it appeared that Naomi already knew just how the man would answer her question. "Will you read to your silly wife?"
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"I? Read?" he breathed. He plucked out the book with the half-naked policeman on the cover and fingered through it in distaste, as if the pages were slathered in piss. "Ah! You do have an infuriating knack for requesting my favorite activities."
Javert turned to the first page, his eyes sweeping across the first paragraph. He cast an exaggerated arched brow to Naomi, done to such an extent that she probably read it as him carrying on with that brand of melodramatic effect he was so fond of.
"I tell you," he rumbled, "I am not responsible for any unpleasant --" he tilted his head, "or pleasant -- side-effects from this reading. Do we have a deal?"
Javert readjusted her, and ensured she was comfortable and the fire was burning bright. Then he read.
First he slyly and rather defiantly read in the sort of cold monotone well-befitting of a stern inspector. At her complaint, he took it in the opposite direction, adding far too much inappropriate inflection, overemphasizing each syllable, and painfully over-pronouncing even the lengthiest and most flowery of words.
It was not until chapter three that Javert's true colors sang. Reading stopped being an awkward and foreign endeavor, and slowly took on the flamboyance and fun of a carnival or a dramatic theatre. The man was a natural storyteller, as much as he would not care to admit it, and his years as a father influenced the tone, timber, and gestures he selected with each new scene. Perhaps in an alternative lifetime, under different circumstances, Javert would have made an admirable and rather discomfitably comical performer.
He read. And he read. The time whittled away, and the fireplace waxed and waned and dimmed. Occasionally he would pause between paragraphs or scenes to feed the fire or fetch another drink. The alcohol did lubricate his performance quite well, for a time.
Before they knew it, with the snow billowing in bales out the window, Javert reached the tenth chapter in the stirring romantic adventures of Muscle Man Police Man and Stripper Spy-ette From Hell...
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The evening hours passed by without notice as she sat curled up loyally at his side, head rested against his relaxed shoulder, a delicate hand always reaching out to touch some part of him, to keep connected. Even during the quick pauses to refresh and replenish, Naomi's sharp mind didn't stray away from the story at hand and the enjoyable time she was having simply listening to her husband read aloud to her. It was strange that such a bland, completely unexciting activity could bring so many emotions and fond memories floating to the surface for the man's tiny wife, but the memories of their two previous lives together were just too strong to ignore.
Why hadn't she thought of bullying him into reading to her sooner?
Just as the man paused briefly to draw a steady breath between paragraphs, the woman slipped her slender fingers over the page to momentarily halt his progress and catch his attention back to her. "As enjoyable as this really is-" And it truly was. "-let's save the rest of it for tomorrow night after dinner. It's gotten late and I have my spa appointment in the morning."
For once, oddly enough, she doesn't start in with the usual teasing of how right she'd been in knowing he'd have a good time with it. "Let's get some rest before you lose your voice from so much storytelling.
Come to bed with me."
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"Well," he murmured wryly. "It is quite a tragedy to miss your beauty rest for a spa day. Let's not allow that." He was feeling just as exhausted, if not more, than her. The stress from the week had done a number on his mood and body, and his petty officers at work were the ones to bear the brunt of his testy wrath. He lightly tossed the book to the coffee table, where it slid to a rest atop the small stack he had bought for her. He got up from the couch, grabbing the wine glasses along the way. "Go on ahead of me, then. I will straighten up here and join you soon. Don't mind the fire! I've got it."
Javert disappeared into the kitchen.
Silence. Cold, calm silence. Here, Javert could hear himself think, both a good and a bad thing: after all, most of the Inspector's worst decisions arose from those times he spent thinking fifteen minutes too much. He shouldered the sink on and went about washing up, able to listen to his thoughts, but unable to relax, his jaw pulled tight. Perhaps, if Naomi were to pay attention while she crawled into their shared bed, she may overhear her husband muttering indiscernable chides and musings to himself over the rush of the kitchen water.
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She never would have related it to his current level of stress or exhaustion, which, she hoped, was slowly decreasing as her recovery seemed to progress. But even after three completely different lifetimes together, Naomi was more often than not still very wrong about the man she shared a home with. There was quite a great deal about him she couldn't completely fathom. Javert would always be a mystery.
As the man took care of the chores in her absence, Naomi went about her usual evening time routine in the bathroom with her own thoughts oddly calm. She may feel chilled, tired, and have the same constant ache in her side that she'd experience last week during her hospitalization, but things seemed to be improving more and more every day. Perhaps by the end of the month, she hoped, she could return to work and find life to be normal again.
By the time that Javert should return to their room, he will find his small wife already curled up under the comforter with their lamp on, waiting for him.
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The Inspector was always a somewhat neat and fastidious creature, but he tended to organize his things with his singular brand of ordered chaos. It was not until he had a wife in tow and sank money into owned property that he was forced to have an eye for cataloguing lest his woman ravage and mutilate his filing system for the sake of desk and counter space. Tonight, as he did the entire week, he took extra care to wipe down the counters, rid those glasses of cloudy dish-soap specs, and dry the plates before shelving them into their respective and orderly homes. It was an almost meditative process, helping to both keep his mind preoccupied and to relax his weary nerves.
He also spared the time to wash himself after straightening the dishes and putting out the fire. While Naomi curled and shivered deeper into their bed, he methodically stripped and scrubbed and rinsed his face, pausing only to grimace at the mirror. He was looking quite old, he noticed, like a half-drowned bulldog. Gone was that vigor and determination that he was so keen to ingrain in his spirit. Were his colleagues seeing this change? What about the public, or his criminal quarry that he chased day in and day out through Somni's underbelly?
Javert shook the water off his hair and face and wiped himself dry with a hand towel. He finally settled down and climbed into bed beside his ill wife.
"Look at you," he muttered quietly into her ear as he reached over her for the light. "Let's make a bet. Do you think the good people at the medical spa tomorrow will take you for my daughter rather than a wife?"
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Even when she was feeling such warm, loving feelings for her dear husband of less than a year, Naomi would always have a rather selfish mindset. It was just too big a part of who she was.
"Oh please," she murmured in reply before burrowing deeper into the heavy blanket to seek out the warmth there. Even if she still had some weight to gain back and some color to bring back to her checks after the last month of wretched illness, Naomi was still completely assured in her beauty. "I think you'll just be congratulated once again on your stunning luck and good taste. Just like usual." Though really, with her going out in this state, the age gap between them really wouldn't appear to be quite as large as usually looked.
There was a brief pause as the woman shifted around in the sheets, trying to get comfortable. "It's so cold tonight..."
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He forced her closer, sharing his body heat with hers and holding her still. To his touch, she felt very warm, indeed; a little too warm, perhaps.
"Does that work? Else I'll fetch another blanket at my own risk of sweating out like some filthy hog in summertime."
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"No," she uttered softly right into his broad chest, squirming to find the perfect position for maximum comfort. "This is absolutely perfect. Thank you." And with a final quick kiss to his jaw, Naomi pressed herself against his warm body, mumbled a whispered goodnight, and quickly fell into a peaceful, deep sleep, no doubt a happy side effect of the delicious wine and sleep medication she had earlier consumed.
And sleep heavily they did. For the first few hours, at least.
It was early into the dark morning hours when Naomi stirred briefly, a barely noticeable jerk of her skinny limbs under the piled up sheets and blankets. A moment later, she was completely still again, as if it had been nothing more than a harmless reaction to a particularly eventful dream. But then her eyes snapped open wildly, all trace of sleep gone from her expression as her usually lovely face contorted oddly in a combination of both incredible pain and sickening fear. The dull, irritating ache that had been stuck with her all day had transformed into a real searing pain inside of her thin form, leaving her entire body shaking as if shivering from the cold.
Much to her own horror, the ill woman found herself frozen in her full shock and panic, a sharp call for her husband's help stuck deep down into her throat as the discomforting pain only intensified. She couldn't move. She couldn't do anything.
It lasted only a single minute. The unexpectedly hot pain that had so quickly passed through her body had evaporated, leaving the doctor weak and exhausted. Her eyes closed.
And so it was in the arms of Inspector Javert, who truly was as unfortunate and unlucky as he had earlier claimed to be, that Naomi Hunter's life faded away into nothingness, as the man holding her slept on without even noticing.
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He was groggy. His rest was not a peaceful one, plagued by strange and unsettling dreams that he could not quite grasp. The memories of them were slipping rapidly. His first instinct was to reach for his Dreamberry device on his nightstand, ensuring that no private matters aired publicly that night, or that he was not plagued with calls. Only one new message appeared in his voicemail, and it was a professional confirmation of the med-spa appointment for his wife in the mid-morning.
It was a fortunate night, then. No irritating broadcasts, no unpleasant phone calls from nosy citizens, no invasions of his personal privacy. Javert clicked his tongue and glanced to his unmoving wife.
Well! Let the girl rest, he instructed to himself silently. There were some hours before she was required for the appointment, and the eternal father himself knew how her precious strength dwindled here and there. He gingerly extracted himself from the bedsheets and went about his morning ablutions.
And rest, he let her. He let her be until well after he had showered, shaved, and dressed. He moved into the kitchen, brewed an entire pot of coffee, kindled a new fire, watched the snowfall outside, and read ahead in the book they began the night before, planning out just how he would introduce his own, ah, improvements (he thought with a wry smirk) to the plot as they progressed.
Javert had assumed the coffee pot would rouse her, as it often did on weekends. When that didn't elicit a single noise from the bedroom, he rationalized that her body must still be weary from illness, and that he was a damn fool for frowning uncertainly about it. Breakfast would certainly rouse her, if not for want of food than for the nausea it could cause. But two rounds of toast and a fried egg later, with two plates set out haphazardly, and there was still nothing.
The Inspector grimaced deeply. "Enough!" he muttered to himself. "What is this nonsense? She would sleep past noon, at this rate!" He let the eggs rest on the stove and swept into the bedroom, snatched the curtains in one mighty fist and drew them broadly open.
"And they say women sleep as lightly as they tread!" Javert called out dryly, his back still to the bed. The roads were blanketed in thick snow cover. There would be no motorbiking that day. "Come, are you awake yet? Any longer, and you will be late!"
Javert turned around, arms akimbo. He laid his mockingly stern eyes on her for the first time that morning.
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To any observing eyes, should they be looking in on the diarama of his afterlife, Javert was preternaturally calm and composed, with one key effect: whatever vitality was left in his face drained out of him in an instant, revealing a cold, hollow man.
Whatever was on the bed was no longer Naomi. But Javert knew, with a deepening melancholy and horror in his viscera, that this would be the last and the only image he would see of her for the rest of his worthless days.
She remained in the same position, her arms curled and hands splayed, her vibrant and beautiful skin dulled with an unhealthy, yellowing sheen. She looked so thin, her bones prominent and creating severe dips and hollows along the length of her body. But it was her face, her mouth stretched wide and eyes squeezed and contorted and twisted in clear pain, that had burned a permanent place in his mind's file-cabinet of gruesome corpses.
Javert knew it was worthless, that it was already done, too late. Yet still, he numbly picked up her cold wrist and sought a pulse.
She is stiff already, he observed aloud, dropping the hand, his naturally critical mind chugging through the fog. That told him it could have occurred hours ago. She. It. That. The joints would not give, her arm stuck stubbornly at that singular angle. Her face was frozen that way, as it would be until she were burned. And she would be burned to ash, of course. Capricious like the wind, not buried six feet underground. Not that it would matter to her what suited her best.
The stinging in his eyes came next. The blurred vision, the heat rolling down one cheek.
Had he felt her shiver and twitch and convulse in the night? If he had stirred when she did, would he have sent for the doctor soon enough? Could he have bought her an extra week, month, year? Had she attempted to cry out before her breath expired?
Yet on the outside, Javert was little more than a statue, hardly breathing, with a very uncomfortable fullness in his eye.
Javert sat down beside her. His head sank between his shoulders, and his chest palpitated like a madwoman. Strange, how mortality became so pungent in these sentimental situations. And for Javert, it was nothing more than a borrowed mortality; he had died so long ago that he had almost allowed himself to forget he was already dead. Did that render it impossible to follow her?
A drop fell onto the face of his Dreamberry. He sent a brief message to the office, Inspector Javert will not be available today. He opened the keypad, dialing three distinct numbers, and pressed the receiver to his ear.
'What is your Emergency today?'
"I require a doctor, a mortician, and a casket immediately. For my wife."
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