A Mother's Love

By Kryss LaBryn

A/N: This was inspired by a poll some time ago (I don't remember where now) which asked, if I remember correctly, "Whose fault was it?" Was it Erik's fault? Raoul's? Christine's?

Was it the Daroga's (after all, he might have simply gone to the police)? Mme Giry's? Erik's mother's?

Well, in the end, Erik must be accountable for Erik's actions, however much his history might make them understandable. But the question of Erik's mother...

See, the thing is, aside from Kay, we never see his mother for ourselves. In Leroux we only hear a brief, sad tale from the Daroga, as related to him by Erik; in the musical, we only hear a few lines in passing from Erik. We never see her ourselves. And he ran away as a child...

So did she, in fact, view her child with such horror? Or was he remembering her actions with a child's understanding?

In any case, the poll raised an interesting question (and plot bunny) for me, which I here attempted to answer. Enjoy! And please, read and review! :-)

"And how are you feeling today, dear?" Anne asked, hugging her friend carefully past her swollen belly.

"I'm fine, Anne. And don't worry! I won't break," Béatrice laughed.

"But I do worry," Anne protested, guiding Béatrice to the nearby sofa and sinking gracefully down beside her. "A first child is always… worrying, and you're still so thin!"

Béatrice leaned back against the cushions with a groan. "I certainly don't feel thin!"

"But you are," Anne insisted, casting a worried eye over the thickening figure before her. "You've gained weight, yes, and that is all to the good; but you still seem barely half-way along, when you're expecting any day now!"

"Yes, I know; and I can't wait!" Béatrice retorted, wiggling to a more comfortable position. "I don't know how much bigger you want me to get. I can barely reach my feet as it is."

"Whenever I'm pregnant, I can't even see them," Anne replied, a bit primly. "Honestly, I think the baby may be a bit small."

"Then the birth will be that much easier," grinned Béatrice. "Will you still come?"

"For the birth? Of course. Lucie will come and tend to the children for as long as we need. Don't worry; I'll be here." She smiled reassuringly. "It certainly agrees with you, at least, expecting," she added, taking in her friend's air of glowing health. "I've never seen you look better. Or happier!"

"Well, that is most likely because I am happy," smiled Béatrice, struggling to her feet. "Come, let me show you the nursery. It's finally ready."

"Oh, yes!" Anne sprang to her feet and clapped. "Tell me, did you find quite the perfect picture to go with the room?"

"I did indeed! Just wait until you see it."

Béatrice was halfway up the stairs when she stopped and groaned, clutching her belly. But a moment later, she straightened again, a puzzled look on her face.

"Are you all right?" Anne took her arm, concerned.

"I—I think so," Béatrice replied, slowly; "That was… certainly odd…"

"What happened?"

"It was a pain, a great pain, but only for a moment. It quite took my breath away, but I'm fine now. Come on, let me show you the nursery."

Anne oohed and aahed most appreciatively over the charming little room, and happily tried the rocking chair set in the patch of sun. She leapt up at once, though, when Béatrice doubled over again.

"No, no; I'm fine," Béatrice waved her away before Anne reached her. "It was just that odd pain again."

Anne regarded her friend steadily for a moment before taking her arm. "Come with me," she said firmly; "You're going to lie down."

"Don't be silly. It was just a little pain. It's completely gone now."

"Humour me, please, Béatrice. Come and change into your nightgown, do your business, and climb into bed. I'll have Cécile bring up a little something for you to eat."

"But what on earth for?" protested Béatrice, even as she obeyed.

"Because," laughed Anne, "Unless I very much miss my guess, it's time!"

As it ended up, Anne, experienced mother that she was, was indeed quite correct. The pangs came harder and harder and closer and closer, until Béatrice couldn't tell where one ended and the next began. The midwife was sent for while Anne rubbed her back and kept her warm, and plied her with water and broth at every opportunity, and Béatrice groaned and writhed in pain. At last—finally—the urge to push came down upon her, and grunting with effort and pain that was too great even for screaming, Béatrice pushed and pushed until that moment of exhausted ecstasy when she felt the wet little body finally slide out in a rush of fluids.

There was a sudden moment of activity while she lay back, utterly worn out, against the sweat-sodden pillows, uncaring or a moment of anything beyond the blissful end of the pain. But shortly she reached out. "Please, please, let me see," she breathed.

"Oh, Béatrice," said Anne in an odd kind of voice. "I—I don't… I'm sorry, I'm so sorry, but… Oh, I said it was too small, didn't I?" And she burst into tears.

"Stillborn?" breathed Béatrice, her heart stopping in a moment of sheer terror as her worst fears were realized. "No, no, it can't be; no; he was kicking this morning! No, he can't be dead!" She sobbed aloud in despair. "Please, let me see him! Let me hold him!"

"No, no," the midwife said soothingly, "It's easiest to forget if you don't. Just rest now, and I'll take care of—"

A weak cry interrupted her. "See!" cried Béatrice in triumph. "See! I knew he was still alive. He's a boy, yes? I knew it! Give him to me! Let me see him!" She struggled to sit up, reaching for her baby.

But instead of placing her child within her arms, the midwife backed off a step while Anne wrung her hands, a look of anguish on her face. "Béatrice," she pleaded, "Let her take him. Really, it's for the best…"

Béatrice felt a surge of emotion the likes of which she had never experienced. In that moment, had she a pistol to hand, she would have happily shot them both for keeping her from her child. "Give him to me," she ordered, and perhaps something of what she was feeling was reflected in her face, for with a mutter the midwife hastily thrust the little body at her. "Here," she said, "And remember—I wanted to make it easy on you!"

The tiny body struggled weakly as Béatrice carefully lifted the babe to cradle him in her arms. "A blanket—quick," she ordered softly. "He's cold."

Anne quickly spread a blanket over her lap, the soft white one they had put aside especially for this moment, and Béatrice gently laid him on it. A boy, indeed, she noted, as she carefully enfolded him in its comforting folds. Baring her breast she brought the little face near.

The midwife stared a moment in stunned disbelief, sharing an uncomprehending glance with Anne, then busied herself tidying up the tools of her trade. "Well, congratulations on the birth of your son, I suppose," she said shortly. "I'll send around with my bill in the morning."

"That will be fine," muttered Béatrice, distracted with the unexpected difficulty of steering the little head. "Thank you for your help."

"Don't thank me," replied the midwife, and stumped from the room. She closed the door gently, though.

"No—Come here—drat it! Why won't he feed?" she asked Anne helplessly.

Anne looked down at her friend, and at her baby. She had seen children born small and thin before, even sickly, but this one… she didn't think he would survive. He looked dead already, with his eyes sunken in, and his nose… She gave herself a shake. Béatrice had wanted this child more than anything in the world, and she would stick by her friend, she supposed, no matter what. Really, who else did she have?

"Look, you have to guide him to it," she said finally, stepping forward. "Hold the back of his head with your other hand, that's right… now hold your breast in this one—that's it. That's right. Now tickle his… uh, his lip with it…"

The little lipless mouth suddenly gaped wide, and with Anne's help, the nipple was thrust inside. "Ah," Anne breathed. "There you go. He's got a good latch now. Good."

Béatrice nursed him a while in silence, gently stroking along his brow, his cheek. "Anne," she said finally, hesitantly, "There's something wrong, isn't there?"

Anne sighed and pulled a stool closer. "Yes," she said finally, as she sat.

"Perhaps he'll grow out of it?" The pleading in her friend's eyes was almost too much for Anne to bear.

"Perhaps," she replied. They sat like that for some time, in silence, watching as the tiny mouth slowed its urgent sucking, slacked, and finally popped loose as he sank into slumber.

"What will you tell Émile?" Anne asked the next morning. "You know he'll want to see the child, and when he does…"

"I don't know," Béatrice confessed. "I know he loves me, and he wanted the baby too, but… I don't know."

Very softly, dreading the reply, Anne asked, "Will he let you keep it?"

"I don't know," Béatrice replied, just as softly. After a moment, though, she straightened. "He can't stop me, though. This is the son God has seen fit to bless us with, and who am I to go against the will of God? Besides," she added, the defiance softening, "I'm his mother. He's my baby. My child. I would never give him up."

"He might—he might not live, you know," Anne pointed out.

"I don't see why he shouldn't," Béatrice replied stiffly. "He's breathing fine, he's nursing fine now; everything seems to be working just as it should. Surely mere ugliness won't kill him!"

"Do you think he's ugly, then?" Anne asked, curious.

"Ugly? Well… yes, I suppose so. I know that mothers always find their children beautiful no matter how ugly—"

"No, not always," laughed Anne.

"—But I do love him anyways. Look at his hands! So tiny, but look how long and fine his fingers are already. He has the hands of an artist, or a musician…" She smiled as the tiny fingers grabbed hers tightly.

"Yes, he does have lovely hands, at least." Anne smiled at the pair. After a moment she added, "When will Émile be home?"

"Oh, he's not due back from England for another month," said Béatrice. "It's wretched timing, of course, but the wage was so high…" She sighed. "It's just as well, I suppose. If—if he doesn't make it, then—then he'll never need to know. And if he does—which he will—then he'll be that much stronger, and perhaps Émile won't mind too very much. It will give me more time to think of what to tell him, at least. And I can send some letters and, oh, I don't know, I suppose begin to hint at things so it isn't such a shock when he does come home, although that's a wretched thing to do to him when he's so far from us."

The letters were duly sent—preceded by a telegram announcing the birth of his son—but all too soon, Béatrice thought, although her heart had ached for his return, Émile stood in the parlour, staring in silence down at his son.

"So that's the lad, then, eh?" he said finally. "Poor wee mite." He paused for a long time. "Have you got a name for him? I mean, you must have been calling him something for all this time."

"Well, of course if you don't like it we can change it, but I thought, well, 'Erik' was nice."

He nodded. "Yes, that'll be fine. Your father would be—well."

"I know," Béatrice said, a bit sadly. "But Erik is—would have been—his first grandchild, and…Well, you know."

Émile nodded. "Well, he's healthy, anyways, and that's the main thing, right?" And Béatrice could hardly hear the false note to his heartiness.

Erik was almost one and nearly walking when he got sick. Émile thought that it was most likely just a cold, but with the difficulty he had breathing, Béatrice was worried enough that Émile finally simply called in the doctor.

"Well, the good news is that this is just a cold," the doctor said, unhooking his stethoscope. He reached into his bag, removed a cloth and a bottle, doused the one with the other, and vigorously cleaned the round flat plate of the listening device.

"Are—are you quite sure, doctor?"

"Oh, yes. There's no congestion in his lungs and he isn't coughing. No, it's just a cold. You have to understand," he added, "That when present, the external nose acts as a sort of constrictor for the flow of mucosa, which regulates the draining of the sinuses. Without this structure, the sinuses drain freely and, I must admit, rather copiously; but it isn't harmful. Just keep him propped up as you have been for the next week or so until it clears up."

"Thank you, doctor!" exclaimed Béatrice with a deep sigh of relief. "You've no idea how worries I was that something was really wrong!"

"Well, as to that…" The doctor sighed, wiping his hands with the cloth and replacing it and the bottle in his bag. He snapped it shut, and then sighed again. "I'm afraid there is."

"But—what do you mean?" Béatrice looked anxiously at her husband before moving to reclaim Erik from the table upon which the doctor had examined him.

"No—no, don't touch him," said the doctor, restraining her. "You mustn't touch him again."

"But why not?" she cried, lunging again for her child.

"No!" he grappled with her for a moment before Émile came up behind and helped the doctor force her back into the chair.

"Listen, just listen to him for a moment!" Émile hissed into her ear.

With a visible effort Béatrice composed herself, although her eyes still sparked fire and she perched on the edge of her seat. "Why must I not touch my child?" she asked stiffly.

"Because," the doctor replied heavily, "He has leprosy."

"Oh, no!" she sneered, disbelieving, "No, that is really too much. You are quite mistaken."

"Have you ever seen leprosy?" he shot back. "Have you had so much contact with lepers, that you are an expert on them?"

"No," she returned, "I have not. I have never had any contact with lepers! It is utterly impossible."

"There is no other explanation for his symptoms," the doctor insisted. "Look at him! The sunken eyes, the missing lips and nose, the emaciation…"

Erik started to cry. Béatrice rose to go to him. The doctor stepped in her way; but she, staring coldly at him, said sharply, "Get out of my way. My child needs me."

He paused for a moment, then stepped aside. Swiftly she scooped the little boy up, cradling him close and kissing his little naked head. She glared at the doctor. "I would think you would have a better bedside manner than to upset your patient like this." She turned to take him upstairs to his room, but paused. "I don't know why he—I don't know why. But he was born like this. This isn't leprosy, and I will not refrain from touching my child!" With a last angry glare she was gone, although she could hear the doctor and her husband talking in low murmurs for quite some time while she sat in the rocking chair, rocking and soothing her little boy.

"But it can't be leprosy!" she pleaded with Émile. "Look—look at his fingers; look at his toes! Lepers lose them before anything else, everyone knows that! And he was born like this; he hasn't gotten a lick worse in a whole year! It isn't leprosy!"

Émile sighed deeply, rubbing his hand over his head. "Look, Béatrice, you know I want what's best for Erik, same as you. But I want what's best for you, too! I don't hate him, but I'm not willing to risk losing you just so you can coddle the boy!"

"Coddle— Émile, he's still just a baby! He'll die if I don't love him!"

"I'm not telling you to not love him; just stop touching him! Stop letting him breathe on you!"

Béatrice took a deep breath, fighting back tears, well aware that this fight must be won rationally if it was to be won at all. "Émile, please. He's slept beside me every night for a year. I've nursed him, changed him, held him—surely, surely if it was leprosy, if it were anything contagious, surely I too would have caught it by now! And I haven't, have I? I'm fine! And so is he! Whatever it is—sometimes these things just happen, Émile. He isn't sick."

Émile stood a while in thought, head bent. Finally he looked up. "No," he said. "No, you may be right; but I can't risk it. I won't risk it, Béatrice. I'm telling you now: Either you obey the doctor's instructions or I will leave him at the orphanage."

"No!" Béatrice cried, but the hands that pulled her child from her arms, while gentle, were implacable.

"Here, Erik, dear," said Béatrice, fighting back tears as she carefully arranged the hood across his head. "Let me help. There. Can you see now?"

Golden eyes regarded her distrustfully from the shadow of the eye holes. "I can see," he said finally.

"Good, that's good." Her fingers lightly flew over his clothes, straightening, smoothing. She couldn't meet his eyes.

"I have to keep this on all the time now?" he asked.

"Yes, dear, I'm afraid so."

"So you and Papa don't get sick."

"That's what the doctor said, yes," Béatrice sighed.

"So it stops the germs, then."

"Yes, it's supposed to."

"Does that mean," he swallowed and shifted uncomfortably. "Does that mean that you can kiss me now?"

Béatrice squeezed her eyes shut against the sudden rush of tears. "Oh, my love, I can't," she said. "Please don't ask me that." She couldn't bear the thought of losing him; she couldn't bear the thought of her son knowing that his father would give him away.

"Mére?" Erik asked plaintively. "Can I have a hug? Just one? Please?"

Béatrice shook her head, the tears falling harder and harder.

Erik changed. He had always been a quiet child; but now he became sullen and disobedient, quarrelling loudly with her and breaking things on purpose when he wasn't ignoring her completely. He withdrew completely into himself, and Béatrice thought that if he had been just a little younger when the doctor made his diagnosis he might have died, at that.

Erik changed, and changing, changed Béatrice. The happiness she had found in her son had turned into a personal hell, seeing him suffer, unable to help him. Unable to even comfort him.

Béatrice changed, withdrawing into her own pain, and withdrawing from the husband who had inflicted it upon her, however well-meaning his intentions. And he changed too; becoming a harder man, if not crueller.

Their family was locked into its own orbit, constantly circling but never quite touching, falling past each other at dizzying speeds only to miss, turn, and miss again. Pain separated them; pain held them together. Pain encompassed their entire universe.

Béatrice had thought that things couldn't possibly get any worse, that she was buried too deep in despair to feel any additional pain. But she was wrong.

The only thing that hurt worse than having her son there and be unable to touch him, as it turned out, was to be unable to touch him because he wasn't there.

For when he was ten, Erik ran away.

And Émile, seeing the woman he had once loved now nothing more than a pale shadow staring blankly into space, heartache drawn tight around her like an almost-visible cloak, began to finally realize the full impact of his insistence that they follow the doctor's orders, of the quarantine he had forced upon his family. Trying to make up for it, he tried to find his son again, searching fruitlessly down avenue after avenue of investigation, following a trail that grew colder and colder. And still Béatrice waned, until he was afraid he'd lose her too.

When she quietly announced her decision to withdraw to the nearby Abbey, a year after Erik's disappearance, he felt something akin to relief. He had tried to save her, and in so doing had doomed her to despair; he had failed to save her from her despair. He had failed, both as a father and a husband; perhaps with Christ she could finally find some comfort.

He drove her to the abbey himself, their small conveyance clattering over the cobblestones of the little town, and after leaving her with the Abbess and giving her a last, chaste kiss goodbye, he drove away, with some vague idea of tracking the doctor down again echoing around what had once been his heart. Neither of them looked back.

Béatrice, now Sister Marie, fulfilled her duties to the last iota, but, the Abbess noted, with a singular lack of heart. Her heart, indeed, seemed to be broken in the truest sense of the word; a quiet, not of peace, but of resignation seemed to fill her. The Abbess, who was not an unkind woman, hoped sincerely that the poor woman could find some comfort and peace within the walls of that sheltering place, and did her best to counsel her charge; but when she, after another year or so, became ill, and quietly slipped into death, her beloved son's name on her lips, the good Abbess was not surprised.

Fin.

A/N: This one has actually been languishing on my hard drive for a while. I don't know why I didn't publish it sooner; I think I thought the second half had far too much "tell" instead of "show" in it and I wanted to show more of what happened to his parents instead of just telling you all about it. But I never did manage to figure out how to do it and then I sort of forgot about it. Still, I think it kind of works here. Sort of? Or is this a rule that should never be broken by lesser mortals (they did an amazing scene, very powerful, in the TV show "Due South" once, in which not only is the entire scene just Fraser (the Mountie) telling his friend what happened, you don't even see his face. Seriously. He's shot almost entirely from his back (well, okay, you can see his reflection over his shoulder. But still). And he still pulls it off. That is because Paul Gross is actually an amazing actor as well as being cute). But I digress...

So I found this one while I was trying to find my notes for another one that I want to work on, couldn't remember what it was, looked at it, and said, "Well, why not?" So here it is. I suspect you may not hear from me for a while now because, if all goes well, I am going to be working on this multi-chaptered thing, and I actually don't start posting chapters these days until it's all done, because if I don't then (a) I can't go back and do revisions and (b) if it gets abandoned (as often happens, for various reasons) I leave all of you hanging. And I don't like to do that!

So please, let me know what you think of this one (inorite? Erik's mother actually loved him? Heresy! XD). Does it work? Should I come back at some point and do heavy revisions? I think I sort of lost interest once Erik was out of the picture but that really isn't a good excuse. And if you want to see an amazing violation of "show, don't tell," then go to YouTube and see video "watch?v=szcdsbltGys".

And please, read and review! :-)