Alright, so this idea popped into my head since a modern AU has always been my favorite open-ended plot to work with when it comes to E/C, and I couldn't get it out without committing it to type. That being said, it's my first piece that I've posted in a very long time, and I'm basically putting it out here as a test of my skills while I get back into the hang of writing. I tried to format it in a way that's easier on the eyes to read, as I personally deplore skimming through long paragraphs.

The idea behind it is that Erik refinishes instruments in his spare time and conducts other more profitable endeavors from the reclusive residence of his home. Christine is a bit ambiguous, but since I'm intending for this to be a potentially multi-shot piece, there'll be much more of her and maybe even her perspective in future additions. Erik just comes so much more naturally for me when writing, while she's a character that I adore: and I think that's why I fear depicting her in a way that feels less than she deserves.

This is also inspired based on a vast extensive myriad of conversations with tumblr user primadonned, particularly where Christine is due, so credit where credit is due for character headcanons!

I appreciate reviews, signal boosts, favorites, follows, etc immensely! Let me know what you think.

Contretemps: An awkward clash.


The process of hand-finishing a piano is tedious work, of which many an expert would snub in favor of an en mass spraying technique that is far more expedient.

But he has never been one for the sub par solutions, particularly when it comes to the artistic nature of his craft.

Perhaps instrument refinishing isn't the most glorious profession, indeed a hard sell for someone like him, who would be astounding audiences with his talents and redefining a myriad of entities in their application were it not for specific circumstances well beyond controlling.

This is the niche he has settled into after years of adversity throughout his youth, and if it is the sole method of which he might inspire attention under the same context as his person, and not anonymously, then it is one he must adhere himself to with the precision and resilience of a specialist.

He cannot allow his thoughts, once he has reached a state of focus beyond the seeming dimension of physical being and the movements of his hands, to unravel their moorings and drift toward grandiose ambitions. Not when he has always belonged fettered to the realm of possibility.

Late nights spent in the after hours of the theater's operation amidst a location that attracts little attention, particularly on the evenings of shows when he can file through the hallways and down the steps without more than the rare interloper as witness, have passed with only the scraping of sandpaper and the steady strokes of the gloss he's now applying, alternated in the finishing process for several rotations of swapping tools and intermittently stalking about the room to stretch his tight and rigid muscles.

This won't be the end of the process. Once the surface is so polished that one's reflection can be glimpsed in its lustre, the tint of its shade just right, he will successively proceed to tune and repair the compounded defections before the piano is worthy of gilded practice rooms, rather than the abandoned vaults of the building's basement that attract only cobwebs and abide by an annual staff's inspection.

He lifts his wrist to wipe away the sheen of perspiration at his chin, debating the next phase of the project.

The interruption of footsteps truncates all concentration, his thoughts clambering to an abrupt halt.

So long as they aren't necessitated within any short span of time, this establishment has always contacted him for repairs. They know of the perfectionist streak he carries, the stubbornness upon which he won't relent, the peculiar hours he keeps to and the solitude he requires if it is quality they entail. He prides himself on the artistic temperament he maintains in all areas, including what amounts to a technical pursuit.

Therefore it is beyond rankling, beyond incensing, that they have allowed someone to interfere with conditions he has come to expect.

He conspires to whirl around and catch this officious soul in the act of almost disrupting him, when the rapid trod of sneakers scuffs the doorway and a soft breath does him in. They're already halfway across the room, and he's lost the shot before deciding on its prudence.

A woman's voice interrupts the burgeoning obscenities poised at the cusp of his exclamation. She's noticed the angular frame stooped aside, stripped to his waistcoat, facing opposite the line of her vision. "I'm so sorry, I didn't know anyone was in here! I just needed to, uhm—I forgot that I left my libretto in here. In this room."

He's careful to remain where he is, in the shadows that secret perilous intricacies, taut bones and tangled, roping veins that combine to complete a most unnerving picture. He longs to pull down his shirtsleeves.

"It's fine," he supplies at last, with the apprehensive sensation that something crucial has been forfeited.

"I really didn't know anyone came here." Every syllable sounds uneasy, and he can't say that he blames her for it.

Exempting, necessarily, how blatantly obvious it is that she hasn't considered the dangers of wandering alone in a dark basement late at night. Pitiably naive, that.

His query rises gingerly from the expansive penumbra of his shoulder-line."What libretto has made itself so very forgettable?"

"Tristan und Isolde. A classic, but it's alright. The German is enough to keep any performer on their toes"

He scoffs, well in time. "If one is unused to singing in German."

"Mm, yeah. It's pretty melodramatic, too. Forbidden love, and all."

He tries not to let the passion seep too unabashedly into his retort. "It is an opera. They're supposed to involve those themes, or I daresay any work that masquerades as one would be a monumental disappointment to its peers and predecessors. The audiences that attend them seek dramaturgy in all its histrionic splendor, engendering the impression that modernized renditions are laughably inadequate in comparison. Wagner was a genius of compositions and libretto alike, and remains a testament to the former glory of his art."

"You're probably right."

The lack of enthusiasm in return for his effort gives him pause. "Is it a habit of yours, to frequent the bowels of theaters at ungodly hours?" He attempts not to sound as mocking as all that.

Part of him is at least moderately curious as to why she has so far strayed from the comfort of nearby others, to pass words with a beast in the dungeons: or in a more common denotation, a disgruntled instrument factotum.

He hears what he imagines to be her moving towards the outdated bureau at the far end of the room, the zipper of a bag and the shuffle of papers.

"Yes, well...It won't be any longer." she announces, with clandestine effect.

Auspiciously, mademoiselle.

"Uh, thanks for understanding!" she interjects upon his ruminations. "Have a good evening."

White-toed high tops and striped socks flit across his periphery, followed by the rustling fabric of a skirt, and just as swiftly the spritely apparition has absconded.

Again immersing himself in the work at hand after the distraction does not take but a moment altogether, although he's humming the prelude of the aforementioned composition, and he thinks it's been at least twenty minutes before a voice startles him out of it, followed by the thwack of his head against the underside of the keyboard's edge.

Pain resonates in the spot, and he backs up on his heels stinging, the bench of the piano scraping against concrete.

"Oh my god. I'm so, so sorry. Are you okay?" The same intruder as before, emitting modulations of apparent and genuine concern.

"Fine. Bloody fantastic. What is it you now require?" he demands gruffly, rubbing at his skull.

"I-I left my purse, I'm so—" an audibly shaky, wavering curtail of voice that melts the bitterness lodged in his chest, leaving the pound of anxiety in its place—"Are you bleeding? You hit your head. Hard."

She steps closer.

Damn her; damn the meddlesome parties that think it their charitable duty to intercede, and only end up pitching themselves disastrously towards a Pandora's box of complications that never fail to upset the most consistent of standards!

"Please, don't concern yourself...Your bag is over there, you'd better fetch it and leave." His voice crackles, a hissed breath that seems to weave through shards of serrated glass.

"But this was my fault!" she sounds exasperated. "Let me help you."

"I would sincerely prefer not to receive aid, thank you."

The wound, if there is any, will be found under his wig. An ichorous seepage of heat does seem to trickle faintly against his scalp, but it is nothing alarming in any case, and cannot be enough to warrant the intervention threatening to shatter his dignity.

It would require a devastating amount of exposure to attend, and inevitably lead to other discoveries.

An indecorous groan. "Hej, you don't have to be this rude. Just let me see—"

When he's so convicted of registering the hand she moves towards his tense, unyielding shoulder that he can feel its warmth through his sleeve, he shoots to his feet, a thin spire tall and aloft. They stand frozen as statues rooted to their respected positions. His eyes blink open, hers are already latched to his face.

"Oh."

He has witnessed this reaction before.

Seen for himself a hundred times over how others are spellbound by the silk chords of his timbre, lulled by its golden threads into false complacency corrupted with an edge of the uncanny, then stunned to silence when they catch sight of him; an atrous specter, comprised all of awkward angles and juxtaposed realities.

She is lovely.

Spiraling chocolate rivulets frame the oval of her face, rendering her something reminiscent of an old-time portrait. Sharp eyebrows, peach skin peppered with the smallest specks, florid-hued cheeks that have gone ashen since he's turned around; full lips set in a near-pout, and the most dazzling, dark pair of eyes he's ever seen.

In another life, he might have flirted with her—might have been bold enough to respond with his witty arsenal of repertoire, if he were younger and generally pleasant and on the opposite spectrum of the erroneous.

But he is much too old, and gawkish and has been abhorrently uncouth thus far, and her eyes widened immediately when she caught sight of the mask.

Really, she shouldn't be expected to help it—the way her mouth tugs at a grimace and she tries to conceal it all beneath a veneer of affability. His discernment can penetrate through this sheer and filmy gauze with ease. He cannot help but admire how she employs it, with grace that is nearly seamless.

How manifestly obvious it is that her composure only extends so far as the creases of her smile: one that is clearly false, at that—false as the prosthetic plastered against his face and all the unruly contours that finagle themselves beneath it, evidenced in awkward ridges and raised skin and cavernous recesses that cause the covering to droop with the twitch at his cheek which is nigh inscrutable.

No matter how full and encompassing the respective integument is, it can never be enough.

Nausea turns his stomach and his mouth goes dry, leaden tongue hovering at the roof of it as he tries to form a coherent response to what has gone so far unspoken. Every beat that passes makes it that much harder to vocalize a single intonation.

Her lilt—clearly foreign—shatters the empty air instead. "Oh! I forgot to introduce myself."

Forgetful one, isn't she?

She tells him her name, and it's like the Red Sea has parted, the voice of a divine phenomena bequeathing to him his long-awaited deliverance.

She extends a hand with an extremely minute give of hesitation just before it is offered his way.

He beholds the gesture while detached from the cue at present. The air is alive with their breaths and nothing more for a time that feels much longer than it is.

As the mechanisms of his mind turn at last, creaking their rusted gears into motion, he recalls himself and turns over his shoulder, raises his hands with the palms spread wide for her to see the sap-like residue that coats the blue latex gloves and seeps into the eddies between his fingers, containing unsightly digits that look like hoary ash underneath, just like the rest of him.

Her gaze oscillates from them to the mold affixed to his face, to his eyes, and back again. It is dizzying to keep up with their movements, futilty to try.

Comprehension, blessedly, dawns. "Right. Well, it's a wonder to meet you…" Her eyebrows furrow, forming endearing crinkles at her forehead. "What did you say your name was?"

He hasn't told her his name.

Lips part as he meets her expectant stare even though he towers above her, a beacon radiating insecurity, stymied by social gestures that he's witnessed but experienced himself only a handful of times, never quite like this.

This is something altogether more extraordinary.

He can't help but sense that his world has shifted on its foundations when the name slips through his lips, startlingly unimpeded.

Her head tilts aside, and she looks at him like it's easier than it was before. "Erik. Do you attend the theater often?"

"Only to enhance inoperative pianos," he replies, "...and receive grave injuries."

Oh, her laugh is something utterly intoxicating, short-lived as it is, which is sufficient for a twist of pleasure to wind up in his core tight as a spool when it surprises him. His very insides are liquefied; his entrails and possibly his vital organs muddled to mush by its beguiling chime. The state of his internal health is of microscopic concern when all he wants is to hear it again.

"No," he confesses, prodding the edge of one glove, "no, I haven't been a patron of the theater for quite some time. But the word of the night crews and late-night stragglers have it that the current production is less than superb, as they've been patternly in recent years. I am apparently not missing a great deal."

The lines of her face come alive, as though she's apprising every visible inch of him, and his stomach drops farther with the pert lift of her jaw, one hand finding the curves of her hips. "Is it a habit of yours to believe everything you hear?"

He swallows, throat bobbing against pallid sinew. "When it is lucrative, or when it makes little difference if one teeters off the brink they're set upon. I haven't discovered for myself anything otherwise, so it is by all accounts merely an observation." His voice is rough at the edges, increasingly out of breath: how exhausting it is to play at palaver when one is unused to talking extensively!

The set of her narrowed stare is maddening.

"I'm a part of the current production, you know," she elaborates. "It's not good for artistic rapport to hear unfounded negativity."

Tristan und Isolde. He should have known, and saved himself the remorse now flooding his veins.

"My apologies."

He wonders if she observes the hands hanging at his sides; wringing fingers with static to vent the tension that coils his wiry frame and threatens to spark forth, stemming from his hands like an outlet.

"If you're interested in developing your own opinion, you should see one of the performances," she says. Her lip raises conspiratorially, and he notes her gnawing at it. Nervously, perhaps? "There are three this week. I could even get you tickets."

The skepticism must somehow show on his face, the chin that meets his chest and the stiffness that has replaced the fluid dexterity of his former focus.

"Oh, for the love of-" the impatient note in her tone ceases, as she comes alight with an improved understanding, superseding irritation as easily as if she's donned a new mask of her own. Her delicate fingers sew themselves together. "I would be happy to get them for you. God knows you need to see reason, and that means it's the least thing I could do. For your head."

"Ah." His eyes flit about her diminutive form. He can predictably refuse, as he should. She doesn't owe him this (he would have hit his head eventually anyways, or so he tells himself) and it can hardly help the potential throbbing of it to listen to an opera subsiding just above the tier of an amateur one. He could get tickets himself if he wanted.

How doesn't the proposition sound weak to her ears?

He muses over whether this really matters to her in any case.

"Will you be here? Tomorrow night, I could bring them then. I just have to talk to the stage manager, but there's no worries there. I'm the only cast member that hasn't invited any family to—"

"You're insisting." His lips purse tight, a mannerism that crosses his mien whenever he's been undermined.

"I am."

He huffs his relent, pointing a spindly forefinger to his halted work on the instrument. "Presuming that I am not hospitalized, I will be finishing this piano by Thursday."

"Great." She smiles, and if he doubted his attraction to the enticements of before, he can no longer deny the hold it has over him now.

Dread eclipses anticipation, to know as she backs away (offering a 'see you soon!' of all absurd utterances) that everything has changed within the span of moments; that it conceivably always could have and it's waited until now, only for him to witness the alteration helplessly through a crystal clear lens, stark and unequivocal.

He never thought to ask what part of the ensemble she plays, or discuss the vagaries of the plot, the music which he knows by heart, and the libretto that was so imperative for her to retrieve that she interrupted a boorish stranger twice.

There's no telling what her level of talent or musicality might be, but the chance of finding out invokes hope in his chest, alate on wings long tethered to the ground by stale prospects.

Considering the mahogany grand waiting tucked away in this abandoned alcove that no longer seems so isolated, the nascent opportunity that just retreated down the hall and up the stairs, and the dichotomy of his emergence from the undertow, the welt on his head is reduced to nothing but an occupational hazard.

He stands in the door frame long after Christine Daaé is gone, left to burn the midnight oil on his own.

And just how lonely he's been has never seemed so resonant before.