A/N: Wow. It has now been a year since I first published on this site and got into the Les Mis fandom. Hard to believe. In any event, here's a story that's been lurking around in my head for quite a while—my thanks to Citizeness Feuilly for helping me develop it.

This is what you get, Jérôme Bahorel, he told himself as he awkwardly knelt beside a wooden pew in the back of the church and then sat down, trying to look like he belonged there. This is what you get for gambling while drunk and not keeping your wits about you. Not just a hangover or a bit of lost money. Oh, no. You just had to try to humiliate Lemonnier, that son of the devil, and here you are. Sitting in Mass on a cold Friday morning with an injunction against doing anything disruptive. Very pleased, Lemonnier is. Pretentious idiot who won on a lucky draw, forcing you to take the consequences of your absurd dare.

He looked around the small church that he'd wandered into. It was as full as it'd likely get on a Friday, even if it was the beginning of Lent…why did he still remember these things, anyway? Lent and all that. Self-denial, certainly not for him.

The mass began. And it was just as boring as he'd guessed it would be. The priest looked rather ridiculous, his double chin quavering as he sang. (A high mass? On a Friday? But least he could amuse himself by forming the derogatory comments that he'd later relay to the others.) The Latin droned on, and he watched the congregation to know when to kneel and when to rise, all the time smirking over his insulting analogies and puns—quite clever, they were.

And somehow, listening to the Latin was helping his long-disregarded knowledge of the language—he was understanding most of it without trying, without even paying attention. By the time they reached a Scripture reading, Old Testament he guessed, Bahorel was startled to realize that it almost sounded like French: "Why have we fasted, and you see it not? Why have we humbled ourselves, and you have taken no knowledge of it?"

"BEHOLD!" No, that was French; there was no doubt, a French voice that shook the church. He turned in his seat to see a young man in the very back row on the opposite side of the aisle, standing tall with a fire in his eyes.

"In the day of your fast," he called out, "you seek your own pleasure, and oppress all your workers! Behold, you fast only to quarrel and fight, and to hit with a wicked fist—fasting like yours, this day, will not make your voice to be heard on high!"

The priest, turning red, was continuing on in Latin, struggling to keep his composure. The young man stepped out into the aisle, keeping up his impassioned recitation, fierce indignation with a hint of mockery on his face.

"Is this the fast I choose, a day for a man to humble himself? Is it to bow down his head, like a reed, and to spread sackcloth and ashes under him?" His nimble, active hands flew up to trace a cross on his forehead—Ash Wednesday, just past; even Bahorel caught that. "Will you call this a fast, and a day acceptable to the Lord?"

A pregnant pause, and then his volume rose, though Bahorel would not have supposed it possible from someone so thin and small:

"Is this not the fast I choose:

To loose the bonds of wickedness,

To undo the straps of the yoke,

To let the oppressed go free

And to break every yoke?"

He was reaching into one of the pews and picking up a child of perhaps a year, a poor child, hardly clothed, as without interruption he rolled the words off his tongue and turned them at once into poetry and into a deadly indictment.

"Is it not to share your bread with the hungry

And bring the homeless poor into your house—"

And now the young man was at the altar, face to face with the bewildered and frightened priest. He held up the child to be seen.

"When you see the naked,

To cover him,

And not to hide yourself from your—own—flesh?"

After a dark glare at the priest, he settled the child on his hip and turned to face the congregation. His voice softened, and a luminous smile came over his face. "Then shall your light break forth like the dawn," he told them, "and your healing shall spring up speedily; your righteousness shall go before you and the glory of the Lord shall be your rearguard. Then you shall call, and the Lord will answer; you shall cry, and he will say, 'Here I am.' If you take away the yoke from your midst—" and he was staring down the priest once more, "the pointing of the finger, and speaking wickedness, if you pour yourself out for the hungry and satisfy the desire of the afflicted—"

The priest at last found his tongue, and interrupted. "Young son of the devil!"

A mocking smile came to the lips of the young man, as he set down the toddler he'd been holding and beckoned for the mother to come and get him. "Speak for yourself, monsieur, if you please. Did not Christ say of the Pharisees, the religious leaders who oppressed their people, that they were sons of the devil?"

The priest started, but not at the Scriptures turned on him—he was staring at the woman who quickly and demurely hurried up to fetch her son. The young prophet (that was all Bahorel could think of to call him) caught him paling, and nodded gravely. "Is this not the fast I choose," he repeated in a quiet voice, which nevertheless carried through the church, "not to hide yourself from your own flesh?"

The priest, utterly enraged, rushed at him, fists doubled up, half tripping on his robe. The young prophet brought up a fist of his own, and with one solid blow (Bahorel nodded appreciatively at the ease of it) knocked the priest to the ground, unconscious. With a shake of his head, half scornful and half pitying, he turned back to the stunned congregation and picked up his recitation.

"If you pour yourself out for the hungry

And satisfy the desire of the afflicted,

Then shall your light rise in darkness

And your gloom be as the noonday.

And the Lord will guide you

Continually."

He stepped back into the aisle, and the crowd jumped to its feet and erupted with noise—anger, joy, Bahorel couldn't tell. All he could tell was that he liked this young man, and said young man seemed about to get crushed. He pushed his way through, grabbed the fragile little prophet's arm (for he did seem fragile, now that he was silent and his eyes no longer burned with that strange flame) and escorted him safely out and away, into a quiet alley.

"Who are you?" Bahorel asked the young man (more of a boy, actually, he realized with a start)who was now sitting down against the wall to catch his breath. Somehow, he'd not have been surprised to have heard an answer of "a reincarnated prophet Isaiah" or "a forerunner of the Apocalypse." But the boy just smiled shyly, blushing a bit.

"Jehan Prouvaire. I'm sixteen…a student at the Conservatoire. Flutist. Who are you?—and thank you. Ever so much. Don't think I'd ever have gotten out of there on my own."

Bahorel shrugged it off as he sat down as well. "Jérôme Bahorel. And eh, it's nothing. Got to say, I'd've liked to have given the blow you got in! Irksome, idiotic priest."

"Worse than that," Prouvaire replied. "Corrupt, oppressive, and hypocritical. You saw the baby, right? and the woman who came up to get him? I've talked to her before, yesterday actually. A prostitute, scratching out a living, hardly thinking about making a life. He…frequents her, has for a long while, and she swears that's his son. He's not even decent to her, either. See, he came just when I finished talking with her yesterday, and I spied for a bit. Saw him beat her. And when I wandered into church this morning and saw it was him, holding Mass, and that text! Couldn't contain myself."

"And you shouldn't have." Bahorel clapped him on the back and got to his feet. "Come, have you breakfasted? I know a place, not a block from here—I'll treat, out of admiration for your deeds of valor. I was sworn not to make any sort of fuss, but this was more than worth the droning Latin!"

The blushing smile came back as Prouvaire nodded and stood. "I'd be honored to join you, Monsieur Bahorel."

"Oh pfft," Bahorel replied eloquently, "just Bahorel. Man to man."

"Bahorel, then." They started off down the street together, and Prouvaire looked up at him curiously. "Are you anti-clerical, Bahorel, or are you…anti-oppression?"

Bahorel grinned. "Both, and proud of it." Proud, too, of the brave little blushing prophet at his side—and proud (oh, very proud!) of the story he'd have to tell Lemonnier when next they met. For he'd won out on that gamble, he was already certain—a pleasant little administration of justice, and a new friend at that, whom he led into the café to enjoy a very un-Lenten breakfast.

All Scripture quotations from Isaiah 58, ESV. Used by permission.