Slip into the Night readers—chapter 14 is coming! …slowly. Since its so action packed, it has been a lot harder to overcome the daunting blank page with my own expectations so high for the finished product. But, I will finish the chapter as soon as possible.
This idea popped into my head as I was listening to Music of the Night and pictured someone else singing some of the lines… I really tried to portray both sides of Christine through her observations and thoughts—the still-a-child naive side, and the more womanly side, knowing what she wants and finding the strength she did not know she possessed. Christine is a delicate balance, especially after every ordeal she has been through, so I hope you catch the character development! Yes, this is sad. It made me sad writing it, but I hope you also see the beauty in the sadness.
Takes place right as Christine is about to give back the ring. The mob just arrive a little bit sooner.
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There's something beautiful about the sound of a gunshot, as if it were an abrupt pound of a drum awaiting the melee of violins to begin an overture for a powerful opera. There's also something beautiful about blood, the way it's scarlet where it's spread thin and practically black at the source of the wound. Like looking at a rich painting with a symphony streaming in the background.
Crimson webbed along a thin white shirt, a scream sounded, and then I noticed the ring still in my palm, on its way back to his hand… and then the lurking demons tore the beauty to shreds like a flimsy tapestry and clawed out my heart just to stab my abdomen, forcing me to look at my surroundings and realize that the scream came from my own raw throat.
Erik's eyes widened, the small smile he had dazedly given me before standing up by the music box melted, and he looked at his middle in an almost clinical manner, letting his curious fingers catch the blood that streamed in a curtain down into his waistline.
The mob's yells of triumph sounded like the cackles of Hell and I screamed again as Erik's knees buckled, "LEAVE US." Then a pathetic cry, drawn from the most tortured sector of my soul, "Leave us alone."
Something must have been in my face, or maybe they were satisfied with their fatal wound, but I heard a muttered, "opera ghost's whore," and then they retreated with their feet sloshing distantly back through the lake.
Raoul was staring at me in horror, and I then realized that I had not addressed the mob the second time I pleaded to be left alone. His shoulders slumped, but he nodded. There was no time left, no time at all.
The monkey box began to play again and I dizzily whipped my head, grabbing Erik beneath the shoulders and lowering him into my lap on the stone floor as even his knees collapsed under his weight, mine landing in a heap as well, looking anywhere but his eyes. I couldn't see his eyes, couldn't face the blame and betrayal without my last scrap of sanity fleeing.
The ceiling was covered in hand-painted stars, constellations connected by real jewels, the rock surrounding dyed a darker blue. There was even a sun amidst the night. All so, so beautiful. The edge of my vision was soft enough that I had to focus hard on each star to see it without its tails webbing unnaturally across my eyesight. What do I do? What do I do? What do I do?
"Chris…tine…" Gritting my teeth like a soldier preparing for battle, ignoring the warmth seeping over my fingers, I looked down with all of the fear of a child witnessing their dreams die.
"You're bleeding." He reached his long, blood-caked fingers up and ran them through the folds of my wedding dress. I gasped from his gentle touch and also at the state of my dress, the red blood splattering it like thick lace, a warm blanket that lay over both Erik and I.
"It's yours, Erik," I responded brokenly, my breath catching in my throat at the way his every muscle relaxed knowing the blood didn't belong to me. Even as his eyes turned far away he rubbed little circular paths on the inside of my wrist, comforting me when he lay dying. I felt numb, so incredibly numb, yet my shoulders couldn't repress their convulsing sobs, my fingers twitching without bridle. I laced my fingers with his tightly to stop them and brought him closer until no part of me was separate from him aside from my face. He paid back a lopsided smirk.
"If I… had known that you would have held me like this, I would have shot myself… months ago."
He gave a small gasp of a laugh that soon turned into a rattling cough. Was I wrong… had they shot a lung? His breath was gurgling and watery. There was too much blood to tell, his shirt now the color of the flames that had danced on the opera's stage! Then the song, then the mask, then the choice, then the kiss, then...
He was shot.
Erik was dying.
Pearlescent tears streamed down my cheeks and fell silently onto his like a slow rain that mourned as if the world had given it privacy.
"Oh God," I moaned, burying my face in his neck as spasms took me victim, crying harder when I heard how faint his heartbeat was against my temple. It felt like my heart was attempting to smash through my chest. His free hand slowly reached up and wove itself into my hair, and I felt a strange sensation of home. I sniffed my nose and felt my lips tremble against the skin below his jaw. Being in his arms felt like home. Not the memory of home, like in Raoul's, but a home that had been waiting for me with a dying fireplace, its embers waiting to be fanned, its hearth waiting for the light and warmth to penetrate the air.
The smell of metallic was overpowering, tearing me from my reverie, and I was brought back to the horrific present. The aroma was blinding, a terrified gag closing off my breath, and I winced harshly at the sight that met me as I reluctantly rose from Erik's embrace to keep him comfortable. My limbs would not cooperate, but I managed to push myself into a better position with my feeble fists against the stone ground.
His eyes… I remembered not wanting to look there, but of course, there was nowhere else I was looking but into those ocean blue eyes, the turbulent waves calming as his energy seeped away. The cruel world who had killed his childhood, who had never tried to understand or accept, was now gripping the thread that was his life and letting the entire fabric of his existence slowly unravel… and, then they pulled mine as well—I pulled mine as well—when I realized I had done exactly the same, betraying him and pushing away what I claimed not to comprehend. But, holding him in my shaking arms, I felt older, wiser than I had been in the past months, and I felt who he was and who he wished to be. And we were the same.
Erik looked up towards the stars on the ceiling, his gaze turning again inwards. I avidly watched the lines of his face turn pensive, the wistful look dropping to one of resignation. Oh, his eyes were like books! I saw him as a little boy, his first few days beneath the opera house. He painted the stars because they were dream-like, a canvas of scenery for his stage, and then added the sun because he wished he could feel its warmth. Then the little boy, completely void of love, even shunned by daylight, crawled into the darkest corner he could find and cried with only the solace of an echoing cavern.
I cried with the little boy as he morphed back into a grown man each shade my vision cleared, his slowed breathing like music. His vivid blue eyes were dulling, the insane vitality that had been with him this whole fateful night draining with his blood and ripping open the artery of innocence in the face of Death. Erik took his eyes from the painted sun and turned back to my face, holding such love, remorse, and forgiveness in his every bare feature that I stopped crying, instead lamenting through heavy breaths, his slight smile the way I imagined he would look at me as I walked into our parlor and interrupted his compositions at the glossy shadows of his piano.
"You are the sun, Christine… always my only light."
I returned his gaze and was overcome like a punch to the gut as the past wreaked images across my vision, repeating my words with as much emotion as I could muster, "I'm sorry. I'm so, so sorry."
His strong upper body began to rely more fully on my tiny weight, and I sorely shifted my legs beneath him, my world cracking like glass before my filmy eyes. Blood began to stain his tongue dark and I knew there was no time. No time to tell him what I wished to, to tell him all that I had pushed away and now ceaselessly groped for, to get back every moment I had spent trying to hate him.
So, between my agonized hiccups, I sung. Well, tried to. The pressure was burning like fire on my diaphragm, so the words came out in prolonged whispers.
"Close your eyes, and surrender to your lightest dreams,"
Tears streamed from the corners of his eyes like rain down a windowpane, almost as if they were a release, and he closed his eyes as spasms shook his shoulders. Even in impending death, his movements were somehow elegant. "Thank you," he breathed raggedly in between, forcing smoothness into his voice, "for giving me my… only happiness."
"Purge your thoughts of the world you knew before,"
My throat began to violently close, and I prayed silently to God to let me finish. My stomach ached from his weight, but I ignored the painful digging and drew Erik closer, his umber hair mixing with my chestnut curls. He appeared to concentrate, as if he were actually trying to simply send off his haunted childhood by willing it.
"Angel…" I ignored him, the name sounding too final. I was not ready. I was not ready!
"Close your eyes, let your spirit start to soar." The last note broke as his eyes roamed to a stop in the middle distance, right between my brows, a small stream of blood crawling down the side of his chin, his last melodious breath brushing my cheek since I had managed to sing the last line quietly in his ear. The pain grew blinding and I choked again, the breaths harder to take in, harder to push out.
Frantically, yet with all of the gentleness of an earnest lover, I kissed his lips, still soft and warm. He was just as stagnant as when I had first brought my lips to his only minutes ago, though this time he would not kiss back, would not put his hand softly on the small of my back. He wouldn't! He would not, he would not, he would not.
Erik was dead.
Again and again I pushed my lips to his, screaming in frustration when no breath tickled mine, when no mist circled us or magic flowed through our bodies like it should in every fairytale. And Erik was dead.
I had lost the love I never had the chance to experience, the love I had thrown away, the love he had needed, the love that would've kept his heart beating if only I had known it sooner.
"I love you," I moaned in a ceaseless mantra, his eyes remaining glassy regardless, his chest remaining still.
A step sounded near my head, and I turned viciously, seeing Raoul against the wall fleetingly through my blurred vision, tears streaking his face and streaking mine, before stars began to blacken my sight and knives seared up my back. His lips moved, but I heard nothing. Was it my name?
Just as the beauty was broken, so was the numbness after I turned from Erik, pain in its stead like a fireplace's poker digging into my torso with white heat.
Warmth. I looked down at my stomach and watched blood pour more openly from the way I had twisted myself to look behind me. It was my blood on my fingers. A shrieking buzz of a sound emanated in my ears, and white edged my vision as I searched for the wound and felt a small piece of metal, the brightness blinding and swallowing my eyesight as I applied pressure from my finger. The bullet had gone through his back… and into me.
My strength vanished as every last ounce of adrenaline gave up its furious struggle, and I grappled onto the sweet numbness that was again overtaking me, the pain too unbearable to stay for long, lying down next to Erik on the stone floor. My name was screamed again, breaking slightly past the cotton in my ears, but the music of a thousand violins surrounding a piano was louder.
My left hand met a band of gold, and I slid it closer to my side with a determined grunt, lifting it up in front of my blackening eyes. The candles made the ring glow, so I moved it in the air until it encompassed the sun on the ceiling and cast rays in my eyesight, smiling against the taste of metal and notifying myself that I would show Erik later. Giddily, I slipped the ring on my bloodied finger and twined my right hand with Erik's left.
Suddenly, he vanished.
I frowned at his foolish games and followed the sound of his voice through a lit hallway with billowing curtains until I met a wooden doorframe. Golden light of candles spilled onto my white dress like an embrace as I peered in. He was composing, the music growing and coming from the mouths of angels. Erik, glowing and exuberating power, looked up and grinned to himself, closing his eyes and pretending not to have seen me, letting his fingers continue their dance on the most brilliant ivory keys. The ring on his left hand sparkled when it caught the light from a window.
Everything slowed—my breathing, my heartbeat, time… but, I did not mind. There was only bliss and the sense of soaring as I glided to his side.
"I'm home," I whispered in wonder, a prodigious sense of peace befalling me like a lace veil.
Black curtains descended lethargically until they covered the sight before me, the dark bled to white, and then white dimmed so that I could see the most vivid ocean eyes as they flicked opened and drew me willingly in.
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Readers: If you read this when I first posted it, you would have seen that I was considering extending the ending and making this chapter just a dream. A big thanks to ARoseTiedWithLove for helping me analyze the ending and come to my final conclusion! I've decided to leave it resolved, with you, the readers, deciding how exactly you interpret the feel of the ending. The tone of star-crossed lovers is exactly what I planned, so for those wishing for a happy ending, think... is this one not still happy in its own way? :)
Also, I know it may seem strange that Christine did not know she had been shot until after Erik died, but I actually did research this! A spritz of fact, a dash of creative liberty for dramatics, and a load of the power of all-consuming love… If anyone requires an explanation, I will be happy to explain why certain sensations were felt and not. Christine does recount feeling pain in her abdomen many times, but loops it with her devastation over the dying Phantom and not actual physical pain.
I need to read something really happy after writing this. Or write something really happy. Have a beautiful night phriends, and let me know what you thought!