December 1883
Two days before Christmas, Antoinette went back to the Opera with an excuse that she forgot her scarf. She thought it was a stupid excuse, since she never forgets anything, but they let her in anyway. She gave a small bottle to the man on the reception, Jean.
"Good day, Jean. I'm sorry you have to be here today."
She could see he was delighted by the small gift.
"It's not a problem, Madame. I enjoy the peace and quiet for a change after all that ruckus we always get this time of year. It's not that bad, really. There's no one here but me and the Opera ghost", he laughed.
"You don't believe all that nonsense, do you? This opera is worse than a sewing circle."
"No Madame, I am a man of science and skepticism", he winked at her playfully.
"Good. I'll just take care of my business and leave."
"Go ahead, Madame."
She went up to her room and locked the door, taking off her gloves and hat.
"Erik, are you there?" she said to the empty room.
No one answered.
"I just came by to give you something. I'll leave it here on my table, but I can't stay here long or someone might come looking for me."
No one answered.
She walked up to the tiny table in the corner of the room, taking out a small package and letting it down with care.
"Here it is. Merry Christmas, Erik. These cookies are a present from me. Please stop stealing sweets from the manager's office. I'm not angry, so you can come out."
No one answered.
"Alright. I'll see you soon. Goodbye."
She stopped before unlocking the door to take a scarf out of her purse and wrap it around her neck. She'd never been caught in a lie, and she had no intention to start now.
As she left, a very thin figure emerged silently from the shadows and grabbed the small package, disappearing swiftly into the dark again.
She left the same way, nodding to the receptionist.
"Merry Christmas, Jean."
"Merry Christmas, Madame. Did you see the Opera Ghost?" he asked playfully.
"Not today. I suppose he wasn't in the mood for talking."
She stepped back into the cold snowy streets, shuddering. Meg was waiting for her back home. She picked up her pace. One cannot leave a child unattended for too long.
December 1885.
Antoinette entered her office, quickly closing the door behind her and locking it. What a long day this was, she thought. Training a ballet corpus was nowhere nearly as hard as all the side work one had to do with it, such as managing all the sides involved without stepping on anyone's toes; the teenage ballerinas she could understand - their temper and emotionality was to be expected, but the older performers' behavior she had some trouble explaining to herself and others.
She went straight to her closet, opening it swiftly to reveal a tall, thin figure sitting on the bottom, concealed in the shadows.
"Hello, Erik."
"Madame."
"You're in my closet."
"Do you mind?"
"No, in fact, after a day like this I'd like to join you in here."
He looked at her with slight confusion, but only for a moment before he moved over slightly, making room for her to sit. She sat quietly next to him, embracing her knees to her chest in a gesture entirely unlike her normal strict, poised self. She noticed his discomfort at having someone else in one of his hiding spaces.
"I apologize for intruding. I was wondering whether or not I should rather leave you alone."
"And what did you decide?" he asked dryly. Antoinette shot him a quick warning glance and he shrugged, "this is your closet. Do as you wish."
They sat in silence for a minute, listening to the noise below.
"Are opera houses usually like this?" He asked.
"Yes."
"That's horrendous. How do you handle it?"
"Apparently, by hiding in my closet with a teenage boy."
"Your taste in company is horrible. And before I was here?" he asked with amusement.
"Before you were here, I was a bit lonelier", she admitted.
He went quiet again, staring straight ahead. Antoinette couldn't see his expression, but she felt it would be better if she let him be for a minute.
"And, I can't help but ask, why are you in my closet to begin with?"
"Same reason as you, because it's quieter. I couldn't think from all the yelling."
Of course, that was not the entire truth; the entire truth would have been that Erik accidentally found himself very close to the stage when the yelling first started and that he also actively disliked yelling so much that someone less proud would have called it fear, or even dread he felt when people raised their voices too close to him. Of course, someone much, much less proud may have even admitted to himself that he went to Antoinette's room because the thought of her calms him down when he's afraid, but Erik's stubborn, eighteen-year-old-trying-to-be-tough heart would have sooner died than admitted it.
"I forgot I had this dress", Antoinette remarked absent-mindedly. "It's been a while since I'd worn it last."
Erik wondered if this was one of those things people say and don't expect a reply – he could never quite figure out when she expected him to continue the conversation, so he mostly erred on the side of caution and kept quiet unless he was sure. He found that most people, judging by Antoinette, talk incredibly often, feeling the need to share things he would never have thought of actually saying out loud. And why would he? He spent over a half of his life without anyone who would listen or care about his inner turmoil, and he had grown used to narrating his own thoughts to himself in his head. The fact that people narrated their own thoughts to others out loud was new and hard to follow.
"Why do people yell so often here?" he asked. Antoinette thought about a good way to put it.
"To get things to go their way, I suppose?"
"It doesn't really work, I've noticed, when it comes to you."
"I'm not easily scared", she smiled sharply in the dark. "by fools banging their pots and pans demanding to be heard. I know where I draw the line, and they know it too. The rest is just a scene we all make to prove a point."
"What is the point, in this case? I didn't quite catch that."
"I suppose the point is that we all care about this performance, maybe a little too much, and feel like giving in to others' ideas of what it should look like seems like giving away a piece of yourself", she said, suddenly tired. "If I was being honest. But we can pretend for a minute that they're all fools and I'm the only one right."
"Hm." Erik, not caring about nuances of interpersonal conflict, honestly believed she was always right and they were all fools, but decided to err on the side of caution again.
"And I stand by what I said. The ballerinas need more resting time or they will snap. Nobody profits if they get injured and can't dance properly. Or if they get sick of it and don't care anymore."
"Do people normally get sick of it when they do something they like?" he asked. "Is it just a ballet thing?"
"Not just a ballet thing. Everyone gets tired. Don't you?"
"Not like that."
"Really?"
"I don't feel it at all until it becomes too much. Yesterday I played until my fingers cramped and I had to wrap my hand in a scarf and wait for it to move again. Then I played some more."
"You should definitely practice moderation."
"If I really tried, I would probably practice moderation until I felt it was perfect and then I would go insane and die."
"Die of moderation?"
"Don't underestimate me."
"Well, no, most people are not like that", she said, shifting a bit in the cramped space. "There's nothing wrong with resting and doing something else. It's not the end of the world if something isn't perfect. When I gave you that violin, it was supposed to bring you joy, not stress."
"It does bring me joy. So much of it that it stresses me out", he said. "I don't know how to explain it. It makes me more real somehow when I play. When I stop, I feel like I'm fading away again."
She blinked. "Fading away?"
"Like... a ghost. Thoughts start to curl again. I forget what I am, or where I am. But when I pick up the violin, I remember that I'm a musician. So it has to be perfect", he said, feeling his cheeks get very hot suddenly, "I want to be a real musician. I want to be the best. Nobody who hears me will be able to say I'm not real. Or not... human. " Realizing what he said, he felt a strange sense of shame wash over him. "Not that anyone will ever hear me."
Antoinette made a conscious effort not to stare at him at this admission, reminding herself he hated it. Instead, she wrapped one arm lightly around his shoulders, moving slowly so as not to scare him. "My dear boy, there is nobody in this world who would dare deny that you are human, musician or not. If anyone does, you can send them to me, and you've seen today what I do to people who cross me."
He was suddenly very thankful for the near-blackness of the closet space, not daring to move or make a sound. They remained sitting in silence until Antoinette snapped out of it, exclaiming loudly she still has to go pick up her daughter before going home.
"I'll see you again tomorrow, dear. Try not to ruin your fingers for my sanity's sake."
"I'll try, madame. Goodbye."
She shot him another quick glance before leaving. "Erik, sometimes I think you're the sanest person in this opera."
"Madame, if that were true, the place would have burned down already."
December 1888.
"Erik, you're in my closet", Antoinette said opening the door. Every time she found him in her closet, she said the same thing, and every time he gave her a different snarky reply. It had become sort of a tradition in the past five years they'd known each other.
"Am I, really?" he looked around in mock surprise. "Pardon me; I was certain this was Champs-Élysées."
She smiled. "Aren't you in a good mood today?"
"I have something to tell you", Erik smiled. "My house is finished."
"Oh, lovely!" She beamed up. "Will you show it to me?"
"Follow me", he whispered mischievously as he snuck silently out of the room. Antoinette followed, trusting that he had checked if anyone was left on their floor before moving so openly in the hallways. Erik hurried down the hall and opened an innocent looking storage door at the end.
"In here."
"Is this another one? I thought it was just a storage room", she remarked, slightly confused.
"Oh, it was until recently. I added this", he said, pushing an almost invisible loose brick in the wall. The opposite wall moved with a quiet hiss and he leaned on it to push it further. "It connects to the tunnels. I only had to tear down one thin wall to connect them; I think it may have been intended for this at some point. Either way, you can now get to me from your own floor directly", he said, pointing proudly at the entrance. Antoinette lifted up her skirt a little and stepped into the small storage room, leaning to look into the dark tunnels. She felt cold air on her face from down below, but couldn't see anything. It always shocked her when she entered the tunnels – how cold and damp it was down in the catacombs, and how guilty she felt that he had to spend his days down there.
"I'll add some sort of light source later, if I can, but you may have to bring a candle for now", he said, slightly embarrassed. "I'll lead. Be careful, I've set alarms here and over there", he pointed at some invisible points on the floor. "Just in case anyone stumbles upon this. I can't have people wandering around here." He stepped into the tunnel, waiting for her to light a candle and follow him. Antoinette held it high above her, inspecting the walls for signs of structural weaknesses – or, to be fair, poisonous mold. It seemed safe enough.
"What happens when you trigger the alarm?" she asked as he pointed at more of the traps, repeating that she has to remember them all.
"Depends on the trap."
"I won't like this, will I?"
He tried to shrug casually, but she saw that the comment got to him. "The ones close to the surface will simply sound the alarm in my house, and create some kind of barrier to prevent the person from continuing further."
"And?"
"And the ones on the deeper levels", he said quickly, "will incapacitate the person in some way, usually with blunt force. The idea is that they faint and I can carry them up before they wake up. They're not lethal."
"No?" Antoinette said with the voice she usually used when she knew someone was lying to her. She perfected that voice in the past two decades; it could be really unnerving to the faint-hearted.
"One of them can be. But only if you really, really persist", he said, growing more upset. "Listen, if someone does get to the fifth underground level, and keeps pushing further against warning and without my permission, I can only assume they're after me. And in that case, I'd really, really hate for them to find me."
"That's a fair compromise, I suppose", she said. "I'm glad you decided to listen to me."
"It's for your sake, too. You won't be hurt no matter what, if you need to get to me", he said earnestly. They walked carefully through the corridors, all the way to the very bottom. "There's another one here. We're almost down."
Fifth underground level was very, very cold, Antoinette noticed, and pitch-black. That is, until they turned around a corner and she suddenly saw it.
The underground lake was illuminated by the warm faint light of oil lamps, and close to the shore was a tiny, but absolutely functional, house. It was made from materials left over from various Opera projects and the construction of the building itself – but brought together so carefully that she would not have guessed it if she wasn't an accomplice in stealing those same materials.
Erik grinned. "What do you think?"
"It looks beautiful", she breathed. "Show me inside."
He walked ahead of her with a noticeable skip in his step, opening the door. "Be my guest, Madame Giry", he beamed proudly.
"Oh, monsieur, you're so kind", she winked. Seeing him like this was one of the proudest moments of her life – if someone had told her that the skinny boy who couldn't speak would be inviting her for tea in his own house five years later, she would never have believed them.
The interior was small, divided into several rooms, he explained – sleeping room, bathroom, living room and study. There was no point in having a kitchen since cooking so low underground was too tricky, and it was simpler to just grab leftovers from the staff kitchen when the cooks went home (Antoinette was fairly sure that he actually simply forgot to include it, seeing as he never really learned how to cook or even eat regularly, for that matter, but decided to keep quiet). The bedroom had a small bed and closet and not much else, but the living room and study were so intricately decorated that she couldn't help but smile. There was a small sitting couch and coffee table, and a working desk in the study, and bookshelves on every wall. He built them all himself, he explained. There were drawings and paintings – some stolen from above, some his own; endless books on music, sheet paper, several instruments, sculptures, memorabilia stolen from sets of his favorite plays, mechanisms and music boxes that he built himself. Erik had become something of a magpie, collecting pretty things that reminded him of happy days, and they were all here – some sweet, some eerie, some dramatically sad. It would have been a strange place for someone with a more down-to-earth view of the world and interior design, but to Erik, it must have been like having a perfect, cozy nest just for himself.
"This is all so beautiful", she said for the third time as he showed her around.
He was still beaming. "Yes. And it's mine. And you can come anytime you want, but nobody else can find me." He gestured for her to sit. "I've actually made tea for you, if you want to stay."
"Oh, absolutely", she sat down. "I'd also like to hear where you got that statue over there, because I'm fairly certain we had a very similar one disappear a few years ago".
December 1893.
Bewildered and panicked, Antoinette climbed back into her room and closed the door behind her. She felt her heart beating in her throat as she leaned her back on the door and sighed deeply. It took her a few seconds to compose herself again after all that had happened.
He was gone. They didn't find him.
She was almost certain she would see her own - child, no, he was hardly a child anymore - she would see him imprisoned, chained or simply killed by the mob. She paced around the room nervously, trying to think. This was impossible. He had to go somewhere. She had to find him. She couldn't just leave him like this.
She opened the door to her closet, acting more on some stupid, desperate hope than any other reason.
He was sitting at the bottom, half-covered in darkness, with his face bare and his mask in his hands. He didn't move or look at her at all when she opened the room, staring straight ahead; his eyes were two empty, bottomless pits.
She didn't quite know what to say. Should she hug him, cry and say how worried she was something would happen to him? Should she mention how furious she was about all that he's done? Should she even ask how the hell he managed to escape without a trace when the mob was practically at his door already?
"Erik, you're in my closet." The words ran hollow and ridiculous.
"I have nowhere to go", he whispered.
Antoinette cast a nervous glance over her shoulder. Could someone hear them? Probably not. Everyone was still on the ground floor when she left, the police slowly calming the bloodthirsty mob down and sending them home. They would probably not check her twice, as she wasn't causing any problems.
But they might start searching around again when it all clears.
"We need to leave soon, and quietly", she whispered, turning back to him. "It's not safe. Take this cloak and I'll take you out when a path clears." Somehow. They both knew their way around the labyrinthine building better than almost anyone; and the cold weather would allow her to bundle him up in a cloak and scarf without suspicion. The rest would be up to improvisation and luck.
"I have nowhere to go", he repeated.
She didn't know what to say to that. She slowly lowered herself on the closet floor next to him.
"You're going with me. We'll think of something."
He didn't appear to register what she said, still staring blindly ahead of him until he finally broke the silence.
"They found my home. Burned it to the ground. They wanted me dead."
"I'm sorry, dear."
"You were with them", he turned to her. "Did you lead them to me?" She noticed his eyes were red and glistening and wondered if it was because of all the smoke that was down there.
Antoinette's eyes widened with shock. "I was there to stall them, to make them listen to reason. I led them all the way around the catacombs to buy you some time. I was trying to help you! They would have gone down anyway, with or without me! Don't you think it was a better idea to come along and try to keep them under control than let them do whatever?"
He kept silent.
"If you thought I betrayed you, why did you come back to me?" She demanded.
"I have nowhere to go", he repeated again. "I thought I might as well come and ask." He also had nobody else in the entire world to go to. There were really two outcomes to that: either she was still on his side and he was safe coming here, or she betrayed him and would call upon the angry mob to finish him off as soon as she found him here.
Both were equally appealing. If he was to die by her hand, it would have been alright with him.
She sat next to him. "I was trying to help you. As I will help you now."
He turned away from her and stared into the dark again. "But you did show him down there, didn't you?" he said quietly. "De Chagny. He would not have found it by himself."
"Oh. That I did." She paused. "I offered to show him the way, hoping he'd resolve everything before the mob got to you. I made him promise he wouldn't hur- do anything rash before he talked to you. I told him you'd do the right thing, in the end."
She took another long breath before continuing, "It was wrong, what you did on the stage. You... have not been yourself lately. I was afraid. But you still did the right thing, in the end."
She could barely make out that Erik's shoulders were starting to shake in the darkness of the closet. His mask made a soft bump as he dropped it and buried his face in his hands.
"But I love her."
"I know."
"Is this it? The only right thing I did was to release her from me?" during the past few months, Erik had been... completely insane, to be honest, but that was beside the point. He was frightening, and aggressive, and loud. The person currently sobbing quietly on Antoinette's floor was the same teenage boy she met eleven years ago. "Is that what I am, in the end, after all? Is this all I can hope for?"
"You are exactly what I thought you were", she said. After short hesitation, she reached out to put her hand very lightly on his head, stroking his hair slowly like an upset child. "You're a good enough man to not do to others what has been done to you. It was simply not meant to be, and it's nobody's fault. But you're a good man, and you let her go, and I'm proud of you."
"You should have let them have me", he shook his head, trying to calm down.
"If it was me, would you have done that?" She raised her eyebrows.
"No", he sniffed. "I would have torn this place to pieces looking for you, and I'd kill everyone who stood in my way."
"If I found you dead, Erik, I assure you I would have burned down a lot more than this theater", she said quietly, standing up. "We have to go. We'll talk more later, but we're not safe yet."
"Where are we going?"
"Back to the beginning, I suppose", she said, digging through the closet for a big enough cloak for him. "Just you and I, hiding in my apartment."
He stood up slowly, getting carefully out of her way. His movements were strange - quiet, eerie, like when she first found him.
"Here, put this on. Follow my lead and I'll get us out."
He took the cloak and shawl from her hands, putting them on. "Merci, maman", he remarked absentmindedly, looking at some invisible point in the wall.
She decided not to comment on it as they exited the room and walked swiftly through one of the less-known back doors and into the dark, snowy night.
A/N: As you can see, this is something that may or may not have happened, with character details slightly altered. This is actually a part of a longer fic I'm writing, but can be read on its own without confusion - if you liked it, feel free to check out my other story!