damned_institute | Day 27: Sun Room (4th Shift)

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Day 27: Sun Room (4th Shift)

Momo's mind was turning over all the possibilities surrounding this "field trip" to the surrounding town when she settled down in the corner of the Sun Room away from the Arts & Crafts room. She curled her legs underneath her as she waited for Shouko-san to find her. The shinigami had no idea what she looked like, so she kept an eye on all those entering the room.

It was still very cold, or at least she was cold, and the momentary thought of getting her coat from her own room passed through her mind amidst the field trip thoughts. She pushed it away and decided to deal with it being as cold as it was since she'd already been late to one meeting today and didn't want to start making it a habit.

As she waited, she pondered the next day's possibilities. Maybe, just maybe, once away from the institute the shinigami will have access to their full reiatsu. And if not, maybe they'll have a better idea of how they are being limited so much. Maybe Aizen would be able to find her then. He'd save her... right? Right?

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"I should think it was speculation. I doubt he'd actually have been able to find information about either of them that we hadn't already unearthed." Not that he'd bothered to inquire further about Fantine's past. In retrospect, perhaps he should have. It might have explained quite a lot of things.

He gestured briefly at the bulletin board, not looking up from his book. "See for yourself. In all likelihood, we'll be exploring more of the second floor; if not, we'll try and find the entrance to the basement."

"All right, sounds good to me. Have you heard from anyone who's gone down there?" Trevelyan tried to peer over at Javert's book surreptitiously. It had been a while since he'd read it. Maybe he should ask to borrow it when Javert finished.

Better just to let him read and discover that Alec had been telling the truth the whole time.

Javert shook his head. "I'd heard someone had managed to reach the basement, but I don't know who it was or how they got there. Someone on the bulletin board posted a message about it this morning, but as far as I know, it hasn't received a response."

He stood, setting the book aside and heading to the bulletin board in question. Still no response there - but this "Dairine Callahan" girl had responded -

Javert suddenly went very, very still.

When Javert went off to the bulletin board, Trevelyan had sauntered off after him. Nosy? Well, yeah. He was a professional spy, after all. Had been. Had been. It's in the past.

He wondered what Javert could have read to make him freeze like that. Then he read the note, taking care to decipher the crossed-out part, and understood.

"My, my. So I'm not the only one who knows," he said quietly, more to himself than to Javert. "And apparently I'm not the only one with a severe lack of tact."

Javert stared unseeingly at the board, hands clenching involuntarily into fists. For the first time since his arrival here, he was at a total loss as to what to do. He attempted to write a response - no such luck. Javert was not the sort of person to whom nothing came easily to mind, but somehow it came nonetheless.

He didn't even know how to feel about this. If Mlle. Callahan knew about his suicide - and to what else could she have been referring? - then surely she knew about everything else as well. And perhaps that was for the best. He wasn't going to hide his past. Nothing had changed. The only reason he hadn't tried to kill himself again was that he would be abandoning his efforts to rescue the patients here - and that would be abominably selfish - and Javert was not a selfish man by nature. That - and Valjean wasn't here, and there was no need to face up to what he had done (but that reason didn't count, and Javert kept on hearing you're just trying to run away in his head, and he couldn't say it wasn't true).

Nothing had changed - right?

He was tempted to say "You knew?" But that was a stupid question - surely it was all in the book he'd left lying on the couch behind him.

Instead he settled for meeting Trevelyan's gaze and saying quietly, "Do you know what she means about 'a different version'?"

"I have an inkling," he admitted. That must have been disquieting for Javert, more so than Trevelyan's cryptic little hints had been. If he could compare it to any of his recent experiences, he would have to pick chatting with Thursday over lunch. She'd seemed convinced that he was from a film, but mercifully she hadn't mentioned his death. (If he had died at all and this wasn't just a British ploy, which was admittedly becoming less and less likely.)

How strange. Javert must have thought that the shame of his suicide was private. Trevelyan wondered how many other people knew.

Taking one of his own pens, he scrawled on an addendum to the girl's note, two words. All right, he could have been a complete prick and poked fun at Javert for it, but his sense of self-assurance was slowly spiraling away. It wasn't too unlikely that he could be fictitious himself, could it? Unless Thursday was crazy. Then Javert would be a fictional character within another work of fiction, and that would just be, for lack of a better word, insane.

Javert returned to his seat on the couch, his movements almost automatic. He pointedly ignored the book lying innocently beside him and merely stared out into space for a moment before exhaling slowly and burying his head in his hands.

"All right," he said wearily. "What's this inkling of yours?"

Alec could have danced around the topic for hours, dropping hints here, a clue there, keeping Javert in the dark for as long as he cared to. As much fun as that would be, it wouldn't make proper sense. If he told Javert, quietly, calmly, the Inspector - former Inspector - might have a reason to trust him at least a little more. He figured he owed Javert at least some measure of directness.

He returned to the couch and looked at his unlikely ally, the very image of a man defeated. He was suddenly quite glad that Javert was sitting down.

"I can't believe I'm telling you this, since it was never my intention to," he said slowly. "But since you asked, I might as well. You know the theatre, right? Of course you do. In my day and age, there's a trend to adapt books into stage plays. And not just into plays, into musical theatre. It's somewhat like opera, but less heavy. I hope you can see where I'm going with this." Just give him what he needs to know, and no more. He is fragile - don't break him.

The words didn't register in his mind for a moment, more out of shock than anything else. Of all the possibilities that had crossed his mind - most of them involving another book that was less well-written than M. Hugo's (though how that was even possible was mind-boggling, given the man's propensity for going off on pointlessly philosophical tangents) - Javert certainly hadn't considered this one.

An opera. Or something very like it. About him - no, not about him. Almost certainly about Valjean. Oh, God. Javert was hardly an excitable person by any stretch of the imagination, and he was thankful that he probably wouldn't have to worry about going into hysterics (no doubt Gisquet would have, he thought, darkly amused by the idea), but the idea of his life - or at least part of it - as an opera was, to say, the least, disturbing.

And yet, at the same time, he couldn't help but find it deeply entertaining.

"Let me guess," he said, chuckling despite himself (but it wasn't hysteria. Not yet). "I have a deeply moving duet with Valjean."

Say no. Oh God, if he says yes I might as well inquire about the location of the nearest river. Not that he'd know. Say no, say no, say no...

Javert was chuckling. Not a good sign. Trevelyan had heard that sort of insanity-tinged laughter before, and it never portended good things going on in the laughee's psyche. He'd let out that sort of laugh once or twice - shell-shock tended to do incredible things to a double-O. They always bounced back, though. God knew he'd made that noise while recovering in the hospital from his burns whenever Ourumov asked him anything. Hahaha...of course I'm not all right, you idiot, I'm missing half my goddamn skin, he'd replied in slurred Russian, his speech difficult to manage.

Javert's question brought him back to the present. "Well..." he said, taking a deep breath. "Not deep nor moving by any stretch of the imagination." He tried to remember. The only time he'd ever seen it was when he was still working for MI-6. One of his last missions. He was rooting out a mole in the West End...dammit, the present, the present! Javert deserved an answer, even if he wasn't going to like it. "If memory serves, it was...just after Fantine had died, and you and Valjean - this you and Valjean - were swearing various oaths, you to get Valjean, Valjean to care for Cosette."

Come on, keep it together, Javert. You're quite possibly my only real ally in this place, and if you go off the deep end in the psychological sense, I'm screwed.

Javert was silent for a few minutes. For a moment it looked as if he didn't plan on saying anything else, but at last he muttered, "How overly sentimental. As if I'd have waited to swear an oath to get him when he was already in the damned room."

A pause. "Then again, I didn't expect much more with opera."

His voice still held that slight hysterical edge, but at least the normal note of dryness had returned to it. "So," he said almost briskly, looking up. "Tell me more about this 'musical.'"

Javert was coping. Good sign. How much longer he would last, though, was entirely up in the air, especially since he claimed he wanted to know more.

"Well, you know. Storytelling before logic." Personally, Alec had turned off his logic - that made this whole situation much easier to deal with.

He took a deep breath. Right, then. "Well, much like the book you're reading, it focuses more on Valjean and the students than you. It also portrays you in a much more antagonistic light. You're not as much of an arse as the musical would have people think, believe it or not."

"No surprise there," said Javert. God, but this was surreal. He supposed he would be perfectly fine as long as he didn't think too hard about it. "I imagine it would be dreadfully boring if the tale were portrayed from my point of view. There are only so many melodramatic solos one can sing about paperwork before it all starts growing old."

He quirked an eyebrow at the second bit, though. "I'm - an arse in the musical?"

Trevelyan chuckled. At least Javert still had his rather dry sense of humor. Then again, if that went down the tubes, that was as good a danger sign as any. At Javert's question, he shrugged. "Almost as much as I am. Don't worry, in person you're much more of an upstanding citizen than I am, and much less of a prick. So, if nothing else, you can consider yourself morally superior to me and attitudinally superior to your rather musical counterpart."

And, because he was Alec, he added, "Well, only the second one sometimes."

Javert snorted. "I suppose it isn't a proper opera without clearly defined villain-victim roles."

He paused for a moment. "What was that the girl - Mlle. Callahan - said about stars, anyway? A song, I take it - but why the hell would I be singing about them?"

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Day 27: Sun Room (4th Shift)

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