World: Paris
Scene: The police post at #14 Rue de Pontoise, December 1831. God, was this really four years ago? Yes. Yes, it was. Gack.
Players: Javert = Dessa; Fantine = Abby
This is a dark office-like area. The only light emanates from a wood-burning stove in one corner and a single candle on the desk along one wall. The desk is also covered in various papers, all of which appear important. There is a trash can next to the desk, carrying more papers which seem not-so-important. There are a few chairs for people coming in to visit. The stove makes the room very warm and cozy. The floor is caked with mud from people trailing it in from outside. An iron door is on the south wall of the office, opposite the main entrance. It leads into the stone enclosure behind the building.
An Inspector, in a top hat, a black coat reaching halfway between his knees and the floor, and rubber boots, which, although you can't see where they end, you can tell reach up past his knees from his odd manner of walking. His speech is short, clipped, and sounds more like the howls of an animal than human speech. More likely, he does not speak, but spits out every word with a terrible bitterness. His face is hideous, it has a snub nose, with large nostrils, and on his cheeks are huge sideburns. When he smiles, a huge wrinkle is formed around his nose and mouth, and there is a wrinkle in the center of his forehead, always giving him a gloomy expression. His hair, brown, but greying, reaches down to his elbows, and is tied back neatly in a black ribbon. Everything about this man implies that he is orderly to an extreme. Not a wrinkle is in his uniform, nor is there a hair out of place. His entire personality expresses the spy and the sneak, the man who sees without being seen.
A smallish woman, slender almost to frailty, cropped golden hair curling about her sober, pale face. Pale, in fact, to the point of transparency, for if one looks, things are visible through Fantine, gauzy nightgown and all. Only her blue eyes seem to have any presence, intent and vivid.
Javert stares intently at the papers on his desk, occasionally taking notes on one. He sighs as he feels someone here with him. Without looking up, he shouts backwards over his shoulder to whoever it is: "Well? What in God's name IS it???"
In the corner of the room, a draft picks up, scuttling odd bits of corner-litter across the floor. A shimmer in the air; then, a shadowy figure which studies him silently, not answering.
Javert shivers slightly at the draft, and moves the chair over closer to the stove. "Well? Are you just going to stand there all night?" He suddenly leaps up from his chair. "LOOK! I haven't time for such non--" he steps back a second at the odd visage before him.
A half-audible sigh, hardly more than the sough of wind past the window. The shadow glides a little nearer, pale lips parting as though to speak, though nothing comes out. She regards him solemnly, wavering a little.
Javert begins to step back, as a reflex, but composes himself, and addresses the... thing... almost without shaking. "Who... What are you?"
Fantine studies him quite straightforwardly. Then like a distant rustle of leaves: "You know."
Javert says, "I-- I do not."
Incongruously enough, the shadow gives an exasperated sort of sigh. "You should." With a gust of wind she moves to hover directly in front of him. "You surely should."
Javert stares into the more visible eyes... and is shaken by a memory. "I-- It cannot be." He stumbles backward, falling into his chair again. "WHO ARE YOU? You... you can't be..."
Fantine smiles thinly, which, granted, may be the only way she's capable now of smiling. "I can be. I am. It is good you remember, after all. I should be disappointed, otherwise."
Javert mumbles to his necktie, "No... it's not. I'm tired, I've been at work too long today. I.. I'll go to bed, and when I awake, this dire dream shall be past." He goes upstairs.
[Dark Room: A dark room, but lighted enough from the light of a single candle to see that the walls are covered with various photographs. As you look at the photographs, you notice that they are all of the same man. Some of them are older than others, and the man is younger in them, but you can tell they are all one person. There is a table in the room, and the candle is on top of it, and a small low bed in one corner.]
Javert puts out the candle, and lies down without even undressing.
The wind swirls up the stairwell. "You are not very courteous, M. Inspector."
Javert gasps and sits half-up. He lies back, and squeezes his eyes shut. "Oh, God! Let this dream end!"
Fantine says quite reasonably, "You might at least take your leave civilly. --Stop now, hush. I am not ready to go away. I have things to say to you."
Javert says, "And I have nothing to say to you! Oh, why won't I wake?"
Fantine flickers closer to the bed. "Don't you? --No, it would not occur to you." A bitter expression shimmers across the pallid face.
Javert sighs and stares up to the ceiling in the darkness. "Then, fine, say what you must say! I listen."
Fantine gives that little half-smile again. "Very well..." Another breeze, from nowhere; now she glimmers in the dark at the foot of the bed, never taking her eyes from him. "I am concerned, monsieur. I am, in fact, concerned."
"Concerned? What should you be concerned with, you're--" Javert does not finish the thought.
Fantine puts up a translucent hand in a hushing gesture even as he breaks off. "I am concerned with how you spend your time, monsieur. Do you even know..." And then she trails off herself, in a curiously ordinary groping for words.
Javert says, "Know...?"
A wavering, a half-dissolving; then she steadies. "Do you remember, monsieur, how I died?" Clearly and distinctly, watching him all the while. You'd think she was enjoying this.
Javert's heart skips a beat at these words. "You.. you were ill. You were a whore and you paid for it... with that disease... with your life."
Fierce gust of wind. Flash of white right up in his face. "No," she says softly. "No. --I was better. Not much. A little. I might have been better still. Only-- Do you remember?"
Javert says, "I-- no... please, spirit, I don't care to remember... please..."
Fantine breathes gently, very gently, "I lost everything in the world. In one minute. I lost my child and my freedom and the only man who had been kind to me, all at once; and so--" She drifts a shade closer. "So I let go. I thought better of it, of course. But then it was too late."
Javert sighs... "So... he was wrong. It was not my fault. You could have made it, you just gave up."
A hiss of air. "Do not you dare to say that to me!" The wind picks up fiercely, flapping the corners of blankets, stray papers, dust. "Do not you dare, monsieur. I could have died alone in a gutter for what you cared. You would have brought me to that and not thought twice."
Javert says, "And why should I have? Because you were a whore that was in some way better or more pristine than all the others? Hah!"
Fantine flickers again, like a guttering candle flame. "You could have. What harm did I ever do you, monsieur? I was an inconvenience. But no, you would have ruined me entirely, only --" Wind swirls. "Do you remember what happened instead?"
Javert says, "Ahh... So it is of your arrest you speak of, whore. You would have gone to prison... it's not so bad, at least it's not the galleys. You would have only been in for 6 months... you could have by then fully recovered your illness. But, no. He came and took you away from me."
One pale fist flies up and then down again, as though to pound the mattress in frustration, only nothing comes of the gesture but another gust of air. "Yes!"
Javert says, "Yes? Of course yes. That's what happened. Why do you exclaim, whore?"
And with that she slaps him, inhumanly quick. Except... nothing connects, naturally; there's only a brief sensation of damp cold.
Javert puts his hand to his cheek and finds a slight condensation of dew on his sideburn. "What was that?"
Fantine looks rather put out. She glares at him, eyes brilliant with fury in the darkness, and her voice is no more than the hiss of winter wind. "You -- You self- righteous -- You killed me and now, now you insult me! If I could drag you down with me, I would show you how it feels --" She flickers perilously, on the verge, it seems for a moment, of going out.
Javert stammers for a second... "I... I did no such thing! You... said yourself you gave up!"
Fantine is for the moment too insubstantial with rage to retort. She glimmers faintly beside the bed, glowering.
Javert, despite himself, curls up in the corner of the bed against the wall, farthest from the spirit.
Transparent hands clench and unclench convulsively. Finally, in a thread of a voice, "You left me nothing. Nothing at all. I--" Breath seems to leave her, or what passes for breath. Then, more strongly: "You insist on being right. Don't you?"
Javert looks oddly at the spirit, raising an eyebrow as though he thinks this may be a trick question. "Yes." he says slowly.
A gasp that might be ghostly laughter. "And so sure of yourself... So sure... No one is always right, monsieur. No one."
Javert says, "I try..."
Fantine shoots back, "I tried too, monsieur. I tried. Oh, God, I tried! But when I failed, I admitted it."
Javert says, "I have not failed!"
Another gust. "I am here to tell you your failures. Not to torment you," she goes on in the tone of a being attempting to convince itself, "but so you may correct them."
Javert says, "You will tell me these so called failures. I will show you I HAVE NOT FAILED!"
Fantine shimmers as though the very force of his voice takes something out of her.
Javert says, "You faded a minute, spirit. For a second I believed you had seen your error in saying that I had failed."
Fantine dims, then brightens again. "I died, monsieur. I died in terror and in pain. That was your doing."
Javert says, "As I have said before, it was not my doing at all. And had you lived, you would have lived the same way you died, in terror and in pain. You had been living as such, and it would have continued."
Severe flicker; then she recovers. "Let that pass..." And then, less faintly: "Let that pass. I am beyond your reparation in any case. My daughter, monsieur..."
Javert mumbles, "La petite alouette." Then speaks up, "Yes? what of her? She got away with the bloody con, I haven't seen her since."
Fantine stares at him for a moment, dimming. A strange expression crosses her face; but no shadow-tears well up. She struggles for speech. "She..." Fingers clench. "My child lives in hiding, monsieur, because of you. A girl sixteen years old, who should be free to go where she likes and do what she likes-- She never did any wrong, monsieur," and the old pleading note enters her voice for the first time since her appearance.
Javert lets a low growl escape his throat. "And what, precisely, would you have me do? Give up? Like you gave up on life all those years ago?"
A gust knocks the candleholder over with a thunk. "I-- !!" A perceptible waver, a moment's silence. "They are hiding from you, monsieur, because you will not let them live their lives in peace--"
Javert says, "She - alouette - I have no concern about. That she is with him I cannot help. That he keeps her there, penned up like a creature, I cannot help. What I can help is my pursuit of Jean Valjean. And that I will not - I can not - end, without his or my end coming first."
Fantine swirls across the room from him with a puff of wind, as a living woman might flounce away in exasperation. "There is no reasoning with you. You are either heartless or mad."
Javert lets his head droop against the wall, and he turns his eyes from the spirit, almost inaudibly, he comments, "Perhaps both."
Fantine echoes in a thready whisper, "Perhaps both." She seems to fray around the edges, dissolve a little.
A glistening of moisture forms in one of his eyes, and drops, unknown to any living soul, a little jewel of sympathy, a little sparkle of heartache, come and gone in an instant, lost to the world.
Javert says, "Now, spirit, you have told me what you wanted to, I assume? Or... is there more?"
Perhaps she sees that sparkle; perhaps not; she gives no sign. She studies him, with that uncanny gaze, for a long moment in silence. "No...." A mere rush of breath, weary and faint.
Javert says, "Spirit."
Fantine inclines her head faintly.
Javert says, "You have inquired much of me tonight."
A little lift of the chin. "Yes."
Javert says, "Might I inquire of you..."
Again, briefly, "Yes?"
Javert says, "What is it like... over there, I mean."
Fantine turns away, fading rapidly to a bare flicker. Prolonged silence. Then, out of that flicker, a thin wisp of a voice, in a succession of sighs: "Cold. Hard. Lonely. Long."
Javert shivers terribly.
Fantine looks back at him in anguished silence, with a kind of desperate melancholy, fraying at the edges again.
"I-- I never did mean for it to happen like that, Fantine. Really, I didn't..." Javert uses the woman's name for the first time, and it almost seems to pain him.
The eyes widen. She pauses for a moment, seems to reassemble a little. Then she bends her head without a word, the light that isn't there gleaming on her hair; and with a pale shimmer and a rush of air, is gone.