[ SECRET POST #2867 ]

[case]

⌈ Secret Post #2867 ⌋

Warning: Some secrets are NOT worksafe and may contain SPOILERS.

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Notes:

Secrets Left to Post: 04 pages, 088 secrets from Secret Submission Post #410.
Secrets Not Posted: [ 0 - broken links ], [ 0 - not!secrets ], [ 0 - not!fandom ], [ 0 - too big ], [ 0 - repeat ], [ 1 - random image ].
Current Secret Submissions Post: here.
Suggestions, comments, and concerns should go here.

Comments

[(Anonymous)]

Could be worse. You could be Javert. There are so many points, in the book particularly, where watching Javert think was like watching my own brain in a mirror and, well, look where that got him.

There's this bit at the end of the book, when Javert and Valjean are bringing Marius home from the barricade, and Javert has been visibly in a sort of fugue state ever since Valjean fell out of the sewer and back into his life barely hours after escaping him, and Javert stands at the door and tells the porter that they brought back a man's son, he's dead (while Valjean is shaking his head desperately in the background, because he told Javert that Marius wasn't dead but Javert isn't registering shit right now), and that there will be a funeral tomorrow, it will cause a commotion. Hugo says it, Javert's brain, on complete autopilot because he's not well right now, is basically pulling stuff out of mental drawers, and went from 'dead kid' to 'barricade' to 'funeral', because commotion/upheaval/carnival/funeral are in the same drawer in his head. It's just ... He's standing there, floundering and with no idea what he's doing because the world has been caving in on him, and is standing on someone's doorstep with what he apparently thinks is a body, and he's talking about funerals and street commotions because his brain is on autopilot and manually defaults onto the mechanics of policing to get him through the moment. He walks away from Valjean, and he goes to a station and writes out some last thoughts for the improvement of the police in light of his own emotional upheaval, and then he kills himself. You can actually feel, through his whole last moments, how there's this great big space in his head where nothing fits anymore and how he's desperately and mechanically and with an odd sort of grace trying to fill in old habits around it, and it's failing, and he knows it, and then he kills himself.

There have been bits of my life where that sequence, those last few hours of this fictional man, have had so much resonance for me. When something you thought was certain and immutable goes away, and there's this empty space left that your whole world/self collapses into, and you keep trying to shove the remnants of old habits and old skills into the breach, but it's not going to work, because the certain thing was too much of who you were and the stuff that's left isn't big enough on its own. When you know, you know, that it turns out you're too rigid and mechanical a personality to make this change.

And, I mean, apparently I'm actually a fair bit more durable and adaptable than Javert turned out to be, because I've actually survived that twice now, but still. Sometimes you see a thing in a character, sometimes a not-so-good thing, and it just ... you know it so well. You understand that thing so perfectly.

Though, for your sake, I hope you prove as much more durable than Grantaire as I proved more durable than Javert. The life, and most especially death, of a Victor Hugo character usually isn't something to look forward to.

[(Anonymous)]

I am so sorry you've been through this, anon. Though I have to tell you, this is beautifully written.

And Javert is my favorite.