When people address him as the Opera Ghost, he always replies with "No. That's my father."
Or at least, he often imagines he does. He never actually does, never has measured how those words might feel rolling off his tongue. The Opera Ghost, my father. Even with a trace of sarcasm it sounds like something out of a penny dreadful, ludicrously dramatic.
At least when he signs his notes, few though they are, it is as le Fantôme. It's not that he extorts money or something like that, he just makes pointed suggestions for how things might be done better. Of course, some people don't like someone who may or may not be a ghost giving directions on how things should be run. They've tried to find him, have searched high and low for him, but it is terribly difficult to search for someone who is out of costume and in the search party.
Besides, he almost never lets himself be seen in costume. And on the occasions when he does because all ghosts need to permit themselves to be seen sometimes in order to perpetuate the fiction, he raises a haughty brow and whisks away if someone dares to address him by such a title.
Unfortunately, they don't see the raised brow. Not behind the mask.
It is not actually his mask, one must understand it. He was not the maker of the mask and it was not his face that it was moulded to. Be that as it may, the mask fits perfectly. And though he knows the true owner of the mask never had a nose, his own nose fits the hollow of the fake nose perfectly, almost as if it were crafted for somebody who looks disturbingly like him.
He shakes the thoughts from his mind, but they have wormed themselves deep into his bones, and he cannot ignore them. The mask fits him because it was made for someone who looks disturbingly like him, or at least was supposed to and had the same facial structure. If he were another man, he might lend it some supernatural significance. But he, Charles de Chagny, knows the truth, and the weight of it is almost enough to force him to his knees.
In truth, he always knew that there was something amiss. Even as a child he saw the lingering sadness in his mother's eyes, that sadness that intensified as she watched him play his music, and when she cried she said that it was because she was so proud of him, but he knew that if that were the case then she would be happy beneath the tears, wholly happy. And though there was happiness there it was tinged with that same melancholy.
(Some nights he would find her, sitting by the piano, her fingers resting on the keys and never playing, tears trickling down her cheeks. Those nights, he slipped back up to his room, and wondered why his father was not with her.)
His father – he still thinks of him as such, even now that he knows. He is his father, truly, in every way that matters, but some nights, sitting by the broken pipe organ in that house beside the lake, he wonders what he might have been like, had he known.
Sometimes he sees him, sees them, as they might have been, her leaning her head on his shoulder by the fire, or him lying with his head in her lap, or the two of them standing, locked in an embrace. That tall shadow, his face something undefined, but those burning, eyes, that dark hair, those long fingers – fingers that he, Charles, could never have gotten from his supposed father, and yet he has them, and the hair, and stands too tall and too slim to be truly of that blood.
(They flicker at the edges of his vision, her face glowing with happiness, eyes shining looking up into that masked face, and he doesn't think he ever saw her so happy, not really. He pushes them away, wraps his arms tight around himself.)
It was only a few days after he came into his majority that his father sat him down, and told him. And it was a relief, nearly, to know for sure, to have a name that sits neater on his tongue. He gave him a stack of letters, written in a strange slanting hand, signed with a Persian name.
You mother kept up a correspondence with Monsieur Khan after-after everything that happened. I like to think he was a comfort to her when I could not be.
He has read those letters, over and over, sifted through each one for fragments of this man, his heart aching to be closer to him, to know. And when he told his father that he wished to return here, to the Garnier, his father simply nodded and murmured, I imagined you might. Take all of the time you need.
It was easy to set himself up with regular concerts, easy to find a position for himself composing for their pleasure. And when, at last, he got the mechanism on the dressing room mirror to work he almost collapsed, then and there, but he collected himself and journeyed down.
(When he found the parlour in dusty disarray, the fragments of music manuscript on the floor, he did weep, tracing each note as if it might resurrect the man who wrote them, the woman who inspired them.)
He cleaned the house and put it in order, hoarded each little thing – scraps of paper, empty morphine bottle, dusty hypodermics – and the suits he found were perfectly tailored though they were a good two decades out of fashion, the shirts of the finest material, and the thought came to him that to be a ghost it helps to look at least a little old-fashioned. They fit him as if it were him that they had been made for, and he stood before the mirror, tall and elegant in black and wondered what his mother might think to see him now. Would it be a comfort to her that her son has come into what ought to always have been his? Or would it torment her that he has hidden himself away?
(Did it make it easier for her, at the end, to slip away when she knew it would reunite her with him, Charles' father that is and isn't his father?)
It is temporary, he tells himself. Only temporary. He will leave, someday, and return to his father and continue on in a normal life, but there is that other father, that ghost in every shadow, and what he would not give to be able to sit him down and call him Papa and talk to him, just talk to him, as if he might understand this pain that aches deep inside his heart, pleading with him to do something, anything, to get back to that other time where he could know him, terrible though he may have been but he has no doubt that he loved his mother deeply and would he love him? Would he care for Charles at all? Would he be proud of what his son has become?
Erik. He weighs the name, learns the feel of it, the click, holds it close as if it were something sacred, his very blood racing for it. Erik. Why did his mother not name him Erik? Was it too painful for her, to have to face that name every day when it was someone other than him? Is that why he carries this name that sounds so English and rolls so softly in French?
(He knows the truth of that one, at least. The difficulty of his birth is something that he has known for a long time.)
He takes the mask off, runs his hand through his hair so that a lock of it drapes itself over his forehead. No. He could never be an Erik, not now that he knows. He is too different, can only ever be too different and even a phantom is a pretence, one that he thought might bring him comfort but weighs a burden instead. The sharp ache stabs inside of his chest and he swallows, straightens himself in the mirror. He is no Erik, wears his title as a mask, but he is Charles who composes sonatas and nocturnes and requiems and more and sits on a stage a famous man when his father, his true father, his blood father who made him tall and dark when he should have been small and blond and a Navy man, when his father never could, and perhaps that is the justice that he needs, perhaps that is the justice that Erik – twenty-three years dead, a mystery almost unfathomable - deserves.
And when they ask him, someday, about his father, he will nod and say I had two. One was a Vicomte, and one was a ghost.