A/N: Hello, my lovely readers! I hope you had a wonderful Valentine's Day! I'm sorry that it has been so long since I've written anything—life has been rather chaotic— but here's this kinda long entry for the Valentine's Day writing contest, so I hope that makes up for some of it. I actually tried really hard to keep this one in the cannon universe, too. ANYWAY, please feel free to leave a review, as the they are greatly appreciated. Thanks for reading!
Disclaimer: I do not own The Phantom of the Opera, nor any of the characters within it.
"Angel, what is it like to love another?"
Silence.
Christine sat on the floor in front of her mirror, gazing up at her own reflected face for lack of another visual point to which she could connect the voice. Idly, she began to finger the hem of her old frock, wondering why it was taking her angel so long to reply to her question. Generally, he responded to her immediately when she asked a question, for which she was grateful because she could not see him. If she had been able to, she might have been able to tell if he were thinking or had not heard, but given the present situation, she was left in the dark. She furrowed her brow at her reflection, wondering if he could see her, if he was perhaps just on the other side of the mirror, perhaps in some sort of alternate, heavenly dimension. She had often wondered about that. She frowned and her reflection frowned back, looking equal parts unhappy and confused.
"Angel..?" She asked again, hardly more than a whisper.
Suddenly, he spoke again, his voice ringing out over all the walls of her small dressing room, making it sound like he was speaking from all around her, when in truth, he was nowhere. Nowhere and everywhere.
"Why do you ask me that, Christine?"
She sighed, wrapping herself in that smooth, velvet tone, curling into its promised embrace, letting it wash over her once more in its soft crescendos and decrescendos. Relief flooded over her and she did not have time to think about his words, about what he was asking, about the subtle tremble in his voice.
"Christine." He spoke and she listened, roused once more by the power in his voice. "Why did you ask me that?"
She swallowed, a sudden rush of shame coming over her, although she was not sure what wrong she had committed by asking him such a simple question. Yet she could tell he was displeased in some way, and she hated to displease him more than anything.
"I only thought that you would know, since you are an Angel, and God made angels to love and protect His creation. I am sorry, I only thought you might be able to… tell me what it is like. To love, I mean. But I am sorry. I did not mean to offend you, Angel."
He was silent for another long moment, leaving Christine in uneasy silence until he spoke again. "I do know what it is like to love, yes."
His words felt raw somehow, hanging in the air, adding to the space between them. He spoke in such a soft, uncertain voice, the likes of sorts she had never heard him use before. Nor, she thought, had she ever heard him express any sort of affection towards anyone before, other than the fond titles he sometimes gave her when he was especially happy with her progress. Never before had she heard him speaking of loving another, and it felt somehow intimate to hear him express such feelings now, to hear such human emotions being expressed by an angel.
Christine was able to count to ten before he spoke again. "Whether I can explain it to you, petite ange, is more difficult to tell, I fear. I do not believe I have ever before tried to explain love and my explanation might be a bit… Unsatisfactory. I daresay others—your friends, perhaps—can offer you a far better explanation than I am able to. It would serve you better, I think, to ask them, if you truly wish to know."
"Oh, I can't ask them, Angel!" She said, wincing even at the idea of how that conversation would go. "They will laugh at me and tell me I am a child, and far too caught up in the girlish idea of love and romance. And my cheeks will burn for shame and I shall tell them I no longer wish to know and that I was only curious. But then, they shall tell me all the same, chiming in at different times, telling me of the most scandalous parts of love. And that is not what I wish to know, Angel!" She closed her eyes, watching the scene as it played out in her head, horrible and embarrassing.
"What is it you wish to know then, Christine?"
Her face aflame, both from the scene she had imagined so clearly seconds earlier and from what she was about to ask, Christine began to pick at her dress again, hiding her face from the mirror. "I wish… I wish to know about what pure love is like. I wish to know about the happiest sorts of love, and the most timid, and healing. The sorts that people write and sing about. The sort of love that is beautiful and wonderful and is the dream of every person, before their hearts become too callous and skeptical to deny it."
"Pure love…" His voice trailed away into nothingness, leaving her vulnerable to the silence again. He sounded sad and she wondering if he had fallen in love with a mortal woman who was now long dead. Or if he had fallen in love with a woman who the Lord had commanded him to not, thus making their love an unattainable thing—sad to remember yet beautiful to behold.
"Why so much talk of love?"
"Well," she began, leaving her thoughts on his past alone for now. Perhaps something to return to later. "Because it is… Do you not know what day it is, Angel?" She asked, remembering that the voice with whom she was talking was a member of the heavenly hosts and should, therefore, know the holiday. It was, after all, one having to do with a saint.
"I do not," he said. "I fear you shall have to remind me. I am not very good with dates and holidays of little note often slip past me, you see."
She smiled and looked back into the mirror, hoping he could see her from wherever he was. "It is Saint Valentine's Day, Angel!"
"Ah, yes. Of course." She heard a soft chuckle resonate around her. "The patron saint of love. I should have guessed."
But her Angel's laugh had not sounded happy. It had been the sort of chuckle one gives a child, when they do something remarkably stupid yet somehow still endearing. Or a teacher gives a student who has answered a question quite wrongly, and yet the teacher finds humor in their answer and chuckles before giving the student a swift reprimand. Christine felt a blush creep to her cheeks, knowing that she was the student—the child—and he was the teacher, laughing at her stupidity, although for which reasons, she knew not.
When she stayed silent, her mouth stilled by embarrassment and shame, her Angel spoke again, this time his voice without a trace of humor: "Do you still wish to learn of pure love, petite ange? If you do, I shall tell you what I am able to—although I fear human emotions are rather… difficult for me to explain in full depth. But I shall tell what I know nonetheless—the beauty of it, the wonder in it, the healing that springs from it." He paused. "Do you still wish to know?"
"I do." She said in a meek voice, quavering and soft. "If you please, Angel. As a Valentine's gift?"
She glanced up at her reflection, studying the girl in front of her. For that is what she was, a mere girl. A girl who had never experienced love before, who had never tasted passion or desire or adoration before—not for a man. She had loved her mother and her father but they were dead, and though she observed the memories of them with a nostalgic sense of love, it was not the same. She knew nothing of romantic love, but she wished to more than anything. Her soul craved to understand what it could be like to love another. And perhaps it was just a child-like desire to be understood and accepted, and a sense of curiosity about this thing she had heard so much about, but she needed to know. She had laid awake at night many times, thinking, in that safe shadow of darkness, about what it might be like to be loved and to love someone. What sort of sensations she would feel, what sorts of happiness, of pleasure, of healing, of wonder, of contentment. It sounded so very beautiful within her own head, this notion of love, this human paradise. But her thoughts were not reality—this she knew—and she wished to know of that true reality which was unattainable to her at present.
"As a gift, I shall tell you. Love," her Angel began, and Christine opened her eyes, her heart pounding in anticipation, "Is the most beautiful thing the word can offer, dear child. Love is, as they say, the need which presides in all humans. For, all must love and be loved, all have that need built into them—some stronger than others—yet all have it. It is what unites humanity. Love is what holds the strongest grip over humankind. It is what brings the most happiness and causes the most despair. It is the most universally, yet the most individually, understood thing. It is a rather strange thing, don't you think, Christine?"
"Yes," she murmured, not wanting him to stop talking. She wanted to hear the beautiful voice again, sweeping around her, carrying her away to distant lands of words and wisdom. She wanted to lose herself in that voice for eternity.
"You already know what love is, of course. I suppose I need not explain it to you." He paused and Christine imagined her Angel, somewhere, smiling a fair, golden smile. "You want to know the experiences, the feelings, I suppose. Hmm…" He trailed off. Then, "Love is rather like wings. It lifts you off the ground; you are above the world, nothing matters to you except that feeling within your heart, that feeling within your very soul. It gives you this sort of… light and airy feeling that starts in your heart—somewhere within your chest—and then flows through your veins, travelling to the rest of your body, and it overwhelms you. But it is a good sort of overwhelming; you know there is something else controlling you, something bigger than you, something more powerful, and this knowledge brings a sense of peace with it. It floods your body, your senses, expelling all doubt, all fear, all shame. When you are in love, you are only in love—there is nothing else that exists then, nothing but love and the feeling sweeping through you. Do you understand what I mean, Christine?
She nodded. "I… I can picture it, yes. I can almost sense it."
"Good." Christine smiled at the small word of praise. "It is like if you are very cold, and you drink something hot. You can feel it run through you for a moment, feel the heat spreading out inside your stomach, expelling the heat for a few seconds. That, Christine, is what love is like, if you can picture that."
"I can, Angel," she said and she could. She could feel the heat trickling through her stomach, her veins, beneath her skin.
"Very good. Now, you get these sorts of feeling with this rush of love, wonderfully strange feelings that make you want to soar above the clouds, weightless for a few moments of perfect happiness. A smile comes to your face and you cannot seem to contain it, no matter what you do. It is always there, threatening, like that rush of love boiling beneath your skin, constant and begging to be known. At first, anyway." His voice took on a note of sorrow at that and Christine wished she could have reached out to her Angel and taken him in her arms.
"Naturally," he continued, and she stopped her daydream, intent on listening to him once more. "You feel very drawn to the one you love. You want to be near them, to cradle them in your arms, to memorize them, to know their thoughts and wishes and desires, to feel their hand pressed into yours, to make them laugh, to help them to understand the same sort of joy you feel from them—you want to share it with them. You want to be near to them, so near that there is nothing separating the two of you, you want to kiss them, to hear them speak your name in their lovely voice, to be able to comfort them whenever anything is amiss, to take on all their burdens just to see them smile. You would die to bring them happiness, Christine. Oh, you would do anything for them. It is a feeling unlike any other."
She sighed, imagining this feeling, this love so powerful it could make her want to do such things.
"It feels like bliss at first, these first moments of being in love. You think about how happy you could make the other person you love so dearly, how wonderful your lives could be together—and it is bliss. There will never be such a beautiful daydream as that one, full of hope and joy. That is a thing to be treasured, dear Christine, that first innocent dream of love. Keep it in your memory forever, petite ange, and never forget what it felt like that day, the sensations running through you."
When he said nothing more, she said, "I will not forget. I will remember it forever, Angel, I promise."
"Good," he said, and his voice sounded tired, again tainted with a note of sorrow and Christine felt pity well up in her. Whatever love he had known, she knew, had not ended well and perhaps, the only good thing he remember of it now was that first dream.
"That, I fear, is all I can tell you of love, my dear, for it is all I know. But remember this: to love another is a gift from God, whether it ends in heartbreak or happiness. It is the most beautiful thing you can experience here on earth, regardless of what comes of those feelings." He stopped and she heard him take a deep breath, as if he were about to say more, but the words never came.
"Thank you, Angel, for telling me. I will remember all you have said, and when I... When I do fall in love, I will look back on the wisdom you have given me."
He stayed silent, although it almost sounded as if somewhere, someone was crying. Perhaps one of the younger ballerinas. The sound was already faded as she tried to focus on it and she wondered if she had truly heard it at all.
After a long of stretch of silence, she realized he must have departed and went his way, onto wherever else he might go. She knew little of his angelic whereabouts. With a hint of sadness in her, she rose to leave the dressing room, to go back to where Mama Valerius was waiting for her. She was quite later for supper; it must have been some time past seven. Mama would be wondering where she was and supper would be getting cold by now, sitting on the wooden table, all the steam leaking off of the food.
Suddenly, her Angel spoke again, his voice echoing off the walls, startling her to such a degree that she jumped and let out a sharp yelp.
"Christine!" There was an urgency in his voice now, something she had never heard before, a desperate demand for her to listen to whatever it was he had to say. And yet, he did not sound angry, nor even sad. There was another emotion at play, although which one, she was uncertain and the likes of which she was uncertain she had ever heard in another's voice before.
"Oh, Angel! You startled me!" She said, almost laughing at her own reaction. She was sure she must have looked quite ridiculous from wherever he was watching, jumping about in fear, nearly tripping over her own feet. "You must forgive me, I thought you had left, you see, or I never would have—"
"Christine." He said again, his voice softer now, yet still that same desperation, almost as if he were begging her to do something. Her brow furrowed and she whipped around, looking into the mirror at her own confused face.
"Christine…. You must know…. I…. I…."
He stopped and she could hear his breathing, labored and thick, in a way she had never heard it before. She took a step closer to the mirror. "What is it, Angel?"
"I…." He stopped again and Christine had the sudden thought that her angel might very well be dying. Then, "Forgive me, Christine." His words were rushed, curt, unemotional. "I must be going. That is all I meant to say. Have a lovely Valentine's Day. I must be going."
And with that, he was gone, leaving Christine once more in confused silence, alone again on the Day of Love.
"Angel?" Christine said in a soft voice, hardly daring to break the thick silence around her.
The sound of even her quiet voice echoed off of the walls of the stony house, and she heard from all around her an ever-fading chorus of 'Angel.' Considering how far she was underground, Christine wondered if the echoes would ever stop, or if they would continue to bounce off the walls of the opera house forever, hardly anything more than a ghost. She shivered.
"Christine." His voice came from beside her, no longer separated by the barrier of glass that had been between them for so long, the barrier of earth and heaven—for he was no longer an Angel and she no longer his trusting, obedient follower. There was just a man, now, and a woman—nothing separating them, nothing dividing them. Just two hearts beating beneath a fragile covering of flesh and bone.
"Dearest, please remember, my name is Erik and I must insist you call me by it, now that you have seen me for what I truly am. I am no longer your angel, child."
She nodded and looked up at him, at the mask that did little to hide the adoration in his eyes. She could see it—see it in the way he watched her movements, the tenderness in his eyes, the way he furrowed his brow in concentration as she spoke, careful not to miss a single word. She could hear it, too, in the way he spoke to her, the words he used, the tone, the soft 'my dears' added into practically every sentence.
She took a deep breath and began to speak before she even knew what it was she was saying, the words spilling off her lips too fast for her to take back, to rethink that question that had been on the tip of her tongue since she had met him face-to-face a few, short hours ago, that had dominated her thoughts so very often. Whether it was a moment of sheer abandonment, or the moment fate intervened, twining the two of them together, she did not know. But even so, regardless of the reasons behind it, she was suddenly asking him a question she never would have dared asked him—nor any other man—under regular circumstances:
"When you were talking to me, the other day— Saint Valentine's Day, it must have been— and when you told me about love, when you spoke of all the feelings love can fill you with—was that… Was that because of me? Is that what you feel towards me?"
He was silent, staring at her with eyes too wide to be calm and his posture far too straight to be relaxed. And Christine, realizing what she had done, was utterly horrified. She wished she could melt into the ground of that strange house on the lake and simply disappear, slipping away from the horror of what she had just said and escaping to a place where she would never have to see Erik again. Never again see that cold, white mask that did so little to hide his affection, those adoring eyes, that small smile when she spoke his name…
Then, she heard a very soft, very hesitant voice through her haze of embarrassment.
"Yes."
"Pardon?" She heard herself saying, although she had heard him—although she knew exactly what he had said.
"Yes." He said again, this time stronger, bolder. "That is what I feel towards you. And you are the only person I have ever… ever felt such things for, petite ange. You are who causes the heat to run through my veins, who causes my very heart to keep beating, who brings me happiness in this cruel world. I would do anything for, Christine—anything. You are the only one for me, I fear, and the only one there ever will be. I… I love you dearly, tenderly, and without a doubt."
After all of that, her pulse pounding in her ears, her cheeks bright with embarrassment, all she could bring herself to say was, "Oh."
He sank to his knees in front of her, his hands fluttering over the skirt of her dress, never touching. "I was going to tell you earlier—when I told you about love, about the feelings you inspire within me—but the words simply would not come. I am sorry for it, if it frightens you, my darling. Truly, I am. But it is the truth! I love you so very much, Christine, more than I ever thought possible to love another. My very core burns with love for you. Oh, forgive me for it!" He stopped, breathing heavily, his eyes searching hers for some sort of answer, some sort of acceptance or reciprocation.
"No. No, you mustn't apologize, Erik. Not for love," she managed at last. She could not bear the thought of Erik apologizing for something as beautiful and as pure as the love which he had described to her.
"Thank you," he murmured, bowing his head, as if in prayer, his shoulders rising and falling as he breathed.
"Perhaps," she started, her words faltering and uncertain but honest. "Perhaps, in time, I can… I can feel the same for you as you feel for me now. Perhaps… I can grow to…" she blushed. "…Can grow to love you, too."
"Truly, Christine?" He looked at her, his entire being trembling with hope. "Could you truly love such a creature as myself? Do you believe you could?"
A tiny smile crept onto her lips and she nodded. "I believe… I believe that I could… in time."
She so wanted that thing which he had described to her earlier—that beautiful love—to be hers. She was so ready to feel such wonderful feelings within her, to treasure and be treasured by another. And, truly, she could already see a future forming between the two of them—a happy, bright thing—where he would take her hand and she would take his and their fingertips would curl together. Then, he would smile down at her and she would say without the slightest hesitation, "I love you." And he would say it back, and follow the words with a kiss to her forehead, sending warmth running through her body. She could see it already: the nights they would spend by the fireside, her head on his shoulder; the kisses that they would share, the gentle touch of lips-on-lips; the mornings they would awake, wrapped in each other's arms, sleepy and content; the life they would share. And they would be so very happy together, and so very in love.
She nodded again, her smile growing. "Yes. I believe I can."
A/N: Thank you all so much for reading! I hope you enjoyed this!
Oh, and if any of you are interested in reading more fanfic, please check out Child of Dream's phantom works, as well. She would appreciate it a lot!
That's all!