A small, simple drabble set during Erik and Christine's reunion in the hotel Phantasma; their thoughts during "beneath a moonless sky". Please read, review and enjoy.
Disclaimer: I own nothing.
CONSONANCE
Consonance: A musical term meaning a simultaneous sounding of tones that produces a feeling of rest. A feeling that there is no further need for resolution; Harmony.
She wasn't at all as he remembered.
He remembered a girl; a bright, impressionable child full of wonder and curiosity. She had been so keen to please everyone and far too eager to love him. In her heart burned a fire so fierce she might've razed the Opera Populaire to the ground if she so willed it. After all, she need only ask and he'd have set the rafters ablaze himself.
That girl was gone, replaced by a woman who, before him now, was but that last dying ember, for the fire had long ago exhausted its flames.
He turns from her, unable to behold the regret and the agony swelling in her eyes. He hates himself to know that he had caused it.
Finally, she speaks to him after what seemed an eternity – though it certainly had been already. A decade had passed between now and that dark night in a shadowed corner of Paris. To be true, the second he'd left her and every moment thereafter, it felt as though time itself had stopped. As if all that there was to the world; to the filling of moments had suddenly disappeared and gone deaf.
Silent and voiceless. After all, his music had no voice without her. She was his muse and she'd been lost to him for an eternity.
"How dare you come invade my life!" Christine accused across the expanse of the hotel suite. By the precedence of her words and the conviction behind them, Erik knew she half meant it. How dare he, indeed.
"Oh Christine," breathed Erik. He recalls that long ago night in the hopes that she'd remember how it was she who came to him. It had been only weeks prior that he'd let her flee with her Viscount fiancé, breaking her chains with a freedom to live in the light. Yet somehow, despite the news of his apparent death, she'd sought him out. She joined him in the dark with the intention to remain there, to forsake the life she would've had in the light.
She made a choice and with the significant change in her countenance, he knows that she remembers. Her eyes close and she recalls how they felt together, as one without the hindrance of their bashful, frightful inhibitions. Just he and she alone, raw and bare to the shrouded mask of night.
Alas, they shared in only one night, for he too had made a choice. The choice that saw him fleeing from both her and France the next morning. "One final disappearing act for the magician," scoffed Christine. What small measure of nostalgia she felt was now overcast with sorrow. She had given him everything and he'd thrown it all to the wind.
She tells him of that first year and how she often yearned to write him; to tell him of all that which he'd left her. She couldn't of course, she didn't know where he'd gone. Instead, she dared to hope that he might've done the same. He certainly could have written her something, anything. He learns of how she woke soon before dawn each morning, wary that Raoul might wake to find a letter from the infamous Opera Ghost. A letter addressed to his wife.
He never did write her and eventually, she relented with that false hope and stopped waiting for the letter that had apparently never been sent.
In afterthought, perhaps he should've written her a letter. If only to know that she was well and that her life was as bright and fruitful as she deserved. When he learned of her early retirement however, he'd been angry - too angry to do much of anything but lament in regret. If only he'd remained in France; if only he'd recognised her bravery in choosing him. If only he'd shown her the same in kind.
If only...
Then, upon discovering her presence in New York, he decided that he simply had to see her. If only to have her sing for him one last time - to give flight to his song once more.
But she wasn't at all what he'd been expecting. She was older, more refined and stoic. The innocent tenderness of a girl had been eclipsed by disenchantment toward life only a woman could know. It seemed that, without music, she too felt the oppressive vice of eternity.
She missed it.
And as such, despite the bitterness and the cold, hardened exterior, she was still Christine - his bride in the dark; the mother of his child; his Angel of music.