FicWad

Javert was cold. Chilled to the bone. Not knowing where he was, he looked about---and saw squalor.
Filthy, wretched, rat-infested squalor. "Home." He thought. The only home he'd known until he was
nine years old. "It is hardly possible." He mused, but a glance at his own body told him he was
roughly that age now. He lay on what he supposed, no, remembered, was intended as a bed. A dirty
old blanket beneath him, with another rolled under his head as a pillow. He tried to rise, but was
stopped by a terrible pain in his chest. He coughed. At the sound, a shabbily attired, dark haired
woman with curiously steel blue eyes entered the room. Coughing herself, she removed her shawl and
covered Javert with it. He shivered. Noticing this, the woman lay close and held him, offering him
what little warmth she had.

Javert watched, as the boy became drowsy in his mother's arms. Somehow, he'd become detached
from the scene and was now a mere observer---unseen by the shadows of his memory. When the child
was asleep, the woman kissed him gently and left him there. It was the last time Javert had ever seen
this woman. She never came back. He never forgot, never forgave. Even when he later learned that
she'd been beaten to death by an unhappy customer (a misread fortune, or had she not satisfied
him?)...a recently escaped convict as it happened...while on her way home, he'd never cried.
Numbness had settled over his being
from the moment he woke up alone the next morning. As he grew up, he turned to the law for his
salvation. It was the only way to spare himself from his parents' fate. His father, not that it mattered
much, had died soon after in prison, and Javert was raised by whomever would have him. It was a
tragic fate for one so young. Strange---Javert had never felt that way before. So many feelings he'd
never felt before...but now it was over. He would be gone soon. Death had waited long enough.
Javert felt drawn toward a faint light that would soon envelop his very soul.