A/N: Forgive any typos - I'm posting this quick before Hurricane Ophelia gets bad here. Originally written for eriks-fedora on Tumblr.
"More tea?" The Darog— Mohammed's voice is soft, low, and Christine nods. He pours the tea (lemon, the same as—the same as he took), and adds a spoonful of honey, stirring it in before he passes it back over to her. She wraps her fingers around the cup gratefully. Two cups of tea, and she has still not managed to rid her fingers of the icy chill that lingers in her bones.
They do not talk about what has brought them here, tonight. It is a topic best avoided, if she does not wish to cry, and by the look of Mohammed he might start crying too if they address it.
A funeral. The funeral of a man who, as far as the world is concerned, never existed.
He—Erik, Erik had already dug the grave himself. He had carried his coffin out, the one that she knows he used to sleep in, and set it into the grave, and then lay down inside of it himself. That was how they found him, silent and cold inside of his coffin in the grave he had dug.
(She hopes it was quick, hopes he was not lying there lingering for too long before—before he slipped away.)
She climbed down into it, and eased his ring onto his stiff finger. Then, for a long moment, she stood over him, unsure of what to say but feeling as if she should say something. But no words would come, not a single one, and she could feel time slipping by, stirring the hairs on the back of her neck, so she swallowed a breath, and braced herself, and bent down and pressed her lips, gently, to his cheek.
(She can still feel his chill on her lips. The tea has not managed to wash it away.)
"How is Raoul?" Mohammed's question draws her back, to the tea and his kind eyes.
"Well. We—We have decided that it is best he lay low for a time. He did not wish to stay with Mamma, he wanted to come back with me to—for that. But I talked him out of it. Paris is too dangerous for him now." There was not a chance she was going to let him put himself in danger again on her account, and when she told him that she would be a hundred times worse off if he got himself arrested, he agreed to stay behind.
"I had a similar conversation with Erik once." The words seem to catch him off guard, and his eyes grow sad. Christine's heart twists, and she remembers all at once the fact that he was Erik's friend so very long ago.
It was he who spoke, as they buried Erik, when all words failed her. And he spoke in his language, in words she could not understand, but with the tears that dripped from his eyes she was certain that they meant a great deal.
"It is just very difficult to believe that he is gone." Mohammed's voice is hoarse, and Christine reaches across the table, lays her hand gently on his.
"I know." And she does, she does, but the words are not enough, cannot do justice to all the feelings aching inside of her, and what they are she cannot tell, they are all too complicated and she is not certain she could ever begin to explain them.
Mohammed sighs, as if he understands, and gently turns her hand over so that he is holding hers, and they sip their tea in the quiet of the house, the words left unspoken between them all that there needs to be.