The ravages of time, neglect, and hardship rent it apart.

Javert spent all morning cobbling it back together from disparate pieces. Pliers here, the aid of a needle there. He pricked himself several times, muttering frustrated and sharp cusses under his breath in his empty flat. Large hands fumbled with a gentility and tenderness unbeknownst to him before, and indeed he had not thought himself capable of it, the light and feathery touches of a man cradling delicate crystal.

He did not always value the thing. That was a recent development.

Reminders came to him in billowing echoes.

-What is the meaning of this, Monsieur?

-I mean no offense. It is a reminder of the wonders our small home can produce with so many hard-working hands. I want you to take it. Perhaps it will aid you someday. At the least, I hope you will find in it some pride for your new town, Inspector.

Black beads. The sign of the cross. A rosary, factory sample, beads slightly misshapen but radiant and beautiful with the strife of earnestness and cooperation.

He dropped it into his pocket for the first time then, over ten years ago. Late into the nights he sometimes pulled it out and appraised it with a dour look. He had no particular reason to cast such a vitriolic eye over its slim crevices and sloping lines, aside from the reminder that it came from a man whose mystery he had yet to crack, like the last piece of a puzzle glimmering tauntingly over his head. Certain events happened, and it slipped into a hole between pocket and lining, forgotten.

It haunted Javert through the years. It was his personal all-seeing eye. It rustled when he discovered an obituary belonging to Jean Valjean off the convict ship Orion. It jingled when he spoke to innkeeper Thénardier about an old, respectable grandfather that came to collect a child. Most irritating of all, the wretched thing clinked against his silver snuffbox at him one March night in Paris, when he thought he trounced the old con and his stolen girl in his paws.

Yet he never cast it out. Something else usurped the idea in his head. The hand of fate rubbed the thought out of his mind before he got around to it. He even obtained a new coat once in the interim, switching his old one for summertime use only. The trinket stayed with the summer coat.

They met again at the public hospital, many years later; not as enemies, but as two weary and battered men after one horrific June night. Javert received him as a humble and lowly agent would see his superior. The first visit was tremulous at best, they fought and grappled and verbally sparred, but they did not stop there. Valjean persisted. Javert bore it, being the worse off of the two - physically, at least - recovering from a bout of intense fever, a twisted leg, and a shattered conscience. Or, perhaps, with a stalwart and forgiving mountain at his side, Javert bent, adapted, and came to desire the companionship. Through repeat sessions, they forged a slow, tentative, plodding friendship, if not the beginnings of an understanding. One day, in Jean Valjean's (or old Monsieur Fauchelevent's) presence, Javert deigned to search through all of the effects brought to him from his old flat and discovered his summer coat, still intact, save for a long, tearing slit down the right-hand pocket. A glimmer like the clink of a bell, it captured the sunlight and splayed bright spots across the walls. It dangled there.

-Javert? What is this?

-Nothing. An old coat. You remember this thing. It's bypassed a decade.

-No. Not that. This.

-Let us see. A broken old scrap. Why- Ha! HA!

-…

-Well, don't look at me that way! I realized something, you merciful old fool!

-I beg your pardon?

-It is not once, but twice you spared my life! Double-fold! Ha! Unbelievable! Had I known!

-I don't understand.

-And it is broken now, from the knife-swing. You see, a brute on the street, a gang dandy, thrust his dagger at my hip. It was some months ago, maybe years, I can't say when. I thought it a lucky shot that I got away without a scratch and made the arrest. It turns out it was this junk that spared me, and sacrificed itself in the process. Damn! The beads are scattered everywhere. I will be digging these out of my pockets for a long while. Do you know I once thought it your sole protector? How differently I see now.

Javert wanted to throw it away. It had its day, it was slit at the seams, and it reminded him of a time he wished not to think about. But Valjean stopped him with a gentle hand clasped over his.

-Don't.

-What the devil for?

-It helps you, and this is the thanks you give? Let me have it. I will fix it. These old hands need something to occupy them.

-You are a sentimental ninny. Did playing the mother transform you into one?

-I'll accept that, Javert. So long as you accept my renewed gift when it is complete.

-If it is salvageable.

-I have no doubt.

They spoke of the old rosary no more, and it was one of the last they spoke at all. Valjean took his time digging out the bits and pieces, tucked the remnants into an envelope, and placed it snugly in his coat with a sad, soft smile. He grew more tired every day.

That was months ago.

The envelope returned to Javert with the very same fragments, untouched by human skill. His own name was scrawled across the front in jagged script. The messenger-boy informed him that it was discovered in a dead old man's pocket, closest to his breast.

Such was how the news came to him. It was no wonder; the adopted woman and her husband knew nothing of his existence, as far as he understood.

The echoes receded with the tides. His wooden heart cracked and seeped its sap.

Now Javert clad himself completely in black, crepe wrapped around the base of his hat. Even his cane was jet black. He stood alone beside a cheap grave in the Pere-Lachaise cemetery, fingering the freshly-patched trinket stuck deep in his pocket. He gazed, unseeing. His thumb traced the molded metal. Cheap material, resplendent and warm nonetheless. He did what he could, however he could. He was like a pallid specter, hovering over a ghost.

"The hours I wasted. But you were right," Javert muttered. He was in conversation with an invisible presence, known only to himself. "It was salvageable. Now I give this to you. It is my renewal. After all." He bent over the stone, scrawled with no more than a pencil inscription, and hung the mended rosary at its pointed top. "It is…" He hesitated. "Unnecessary. Not for my protection anymore. And you could use an eye, where you've gone."

With the aid of his cane, he bowed low, hat held over his heart, and silently offered what he fashioned to be a prayer. He heaved a heavy sigh, patted the top of the gravestone almost fondly, and ambled slowly away.

"Wait!"

A woman's voice. Javert twisted, surprised.

"Wait, Monsieur!" called a beautiful blonde woman, bearing an arm full of flowers. She laid them atop the lonely grave and regarded Javert with wet eyes. "I beg you not to slight us like you've done for so long. Please, come to my home for dinner tonight. My husband and I are glad to welcome a friend of Father's. He had so few!"

"Madame-" Javert fumbled, grasped for what he recalled of this girl through secondhand conversation. He realized he still held his hat over his breast and rushed to thrust it back on his head. He grimaced, tired. "Madame la Baronne Pontmercy, we are strangers. I would not dare."

"Oh, hush push, not strangers at all! We have heard so much about you, and we haven't even met! It is rude of you not to come visit us all sooner! I won't give you the choice. You must come tonight, to Number 7, Rue de Filles-du-Calvaire."

"About I?" A frown. "I know the address."

"Why, yes, Father told us much of you, Monsieur Javert, in the letters he left. That's who you are, isn't it?"

"Letters! What could he possibly write about a –" Javert glanced at Cosette and swallowed his cuss. "About an old acquaintance?"

"That you gave him plenty of help, for a start. And hope. You got him out on his walks, and kept him active for as long as he could. It has been so long since I'd seen him! The doctor, he told us he was..." She wrung her hands. "Come with me, Monsieur, please. You will find friends with us."

Cosette smiled sweetly through her tear-rimmed eyes. Javert stared back at her.

"I think there is something else you need to know, about how important it was to Father that you are here with us," she resumed abruptly in a burst. "For hours, he would go on about how he would fix it, fix it, he has to fix it. But then he would look up to God, and smile peacefully, and say in a voice that I don't think he knows he said aloud, 'Tomorrow. No, I don't need to tomorrow. He will mend it. Then I can remember and take pride in this wonder, made by hard-working and well-meaning hands.' I thought he was lost to us, but then in his letters, and the envelope addressed to you, in his pocket…" She trailed off with a flutter of her fingers. She shook her head.

"Do you know what he was talking about? Monsieur?"

Javert did not hear. He was staring at the rosary intently. Cosette hesitated.

"Monsieur?"

"I will join you for supper tonight after all." Javert abruptly drew a journal from his pocket, penciled in his name and address, tore out the card and handed it to Cosette. He tipped his hat and held a bow. "I am free at eight. I am sorry, I can come no sooner. Until then."

Javert left the girl to mourn. It was an odd thing; the bleeding in his heart had stopped and transformed, and gave it a patch.

It struck him numbly that he was feeling something beyond anger and sorrow.

Only a weak shimmer. But something.