It was a lamentable thing that she was her father's daughter. Old Daaé's passed on naiveté ultimately made Erik's fortune. And although he appeared anything but fortunate in the minutes and hours and days that followed, luck was with him. Perhaps he had it by the throat just as he'd held Raoul and, by extension, her.
If she'd never spoken back, if she'd never answered a disembodied voice—
An interrupted train of thought. Nothing more.
"For an instant, you had the elite of Paris in the palm of your fair hand," Erik told her after the barrels of gunpowder had been dumped into the underground lake. "I'd have never chosen a painful death for you."
It was the silence of the after which proved most suffocating. Her choice, she could ignore. Not the silence. It would persist.
"I turned the scorpion, Erik," she said.
"The grasshopper hops jolly high," he muttered, bony fingers drumming an inaudible staccato against his thigh.
"I turned the scorpion," she repeated, hysteria clashing with desperation.
He'd always been a bitter man, his promises dependent on his unstable moods.
"In the palm of your hand," came his near-silent murmur. "There will be no requiem mass. Not for them and not for Erik."
His voice betrayed disbelief and she wondered if he truly thought her capable of—no, not of selfishness for she was selfish indeed as much as anyone desiring peace could be, but of being like him.
For a second, a mere breath, she wished to be such. Erik had achieved so much with bloody hands and blackmail-poisoned words. All her successes were his doing; nothing was hers. Professor Valerius had brought a Swedish country child into respectable society, paving for her a future among gentility, and Erik had molded a chorus girl into the Marguerite all of Paris watched fall.
Gounod's heroine was meant to ascend. How brief her soaring proved.
The Aubusson rug she'd rubbed her knees raw against the night he'd dug her nails into the dead flesh of his face lay like a lifeless, bloated thing. Water from the room of mirrors had ruined the abstract orange sunset. Colorful thread had darkened the same way a drowned man's skin dimmed after being deprived of air for too long. It had been here, on this exact spot, that Erik had proclaimed himself a true Don Juan and cursed her curiosity, unhinged laughter turning to wheezing and ending in combined sobbing.
If Raoul was blue of face and glassy of eyes, she'd go back on her promise. If he'd drowned in the forest of metal or had his heart stopped from the heat before lake water had the chance to clutter his lungs, she would break the glass casing housing Erik's gilded peshkabz and run it down her forearms.
But Raoul coughed and sputtered when carried out. She brushed back his pale, wet hair. Ran a thumb over his upper lip to feel the soft dew of sparse stubble. Lingering, intimate touches he wouldn't recall but she'd cherish.
"The Viscount will lead a good life," came Erik's voice. "His wishes won't be hindered by those of his brother."
There was some meaning to be found behind accented words and heavy breaths. He trembled a little as he spoke, either from exhaustion or sentiment. Those eyes she'd often thought of as yellow, followed her hand and then her fingers as they threaded through Raoul's hair.
"It's unbecoming of one betrothed to throw herself at another man," he said, eerily calm. "You wear my ring, Christine, although it is his proposal you accepted. It matters not now."
"Will you not let me say goodbye?"
"You were to bid him adieu when your sailor boy confessed he'd be departing for the North Pole expedition." A dismissive gesture, a flick of the wrist. "No matter. There's no turning the grasshopper now. The cellars are empty. Erik has no more gunpowder."
He offered the Persian man, Raoul's unfortunate guide, water, holding a glass to his parched lips. His voice—that beautiful voice which at Perros Guirec had sung like a divine presence after The Resurrection of Lazarus hit its last note—spoke a dialect she'd never heard but to which the stranger responded.
"You must leave, my friend," Erik finished in French. "Forget the way down here. Don't ring the bell anymore. The siren will answer if you do, but Erik shall not."
Come! And believe in me! Whoso believes in me shall live! Walk! Whoso hath believed in me shall never die!
She stood, alive, a believer still, and Erik lived too, a Lazarus of flesh and blood. If Lazarus had sung praises to the Lord, Erik had only ever shown such devotion to her. No one should know such love, she thought, twisted into impurity.
The house on the lake fell into silence. Erik had referred to the murky waters as Avernus in his grim humor—and was it not fitting? Those who entered Hades never left; this was the last she saw of the gallant boy who'd fetched her scarf. Christine did not look when the delirious viscount was taken away, his weight shifted upon the poorly recovered Persian's shoulder.
The brass statuettes, now useless parts of the decorum, sat on the mantle and stared. The grasshopper's mouth remained open as if it had been cursed to forever croak Why not me, why not me, Christine? The scorpion's tail seemed sharper than ever in the dimming light of the oil lamp. She wondered briefly, irrationally, if she were to prick her finger would she wither and pass?
She stayed by the Aubusson rug because she could not move and when Erik returned he dropped to his knees before her. His fingers, cold and spider-like, traced circles around her wrists, mindful of the fresh bruises.
"Erik is very tired," he murmured, not quite looking at her. "Must he restrain you again?"
His free hand lifted, hovering a hairbreadth from her forehead where the blood from her unfortunate attempt at leaving life had dried to a crust.
Please don't talk thus, she wanted to scream. There was a method to his madness, but none that she could decipher.
"I will not try to kill myself, Erik," she promised and felt his breath of relief waft against the tip of her nose.
His ghastly face stayed there, too close to her own, and she thought surely he wouldn't kiss her, no, not he who apologized for the cold which seeped even through his gloves, not Erik who was so unaccustomed to mundane touches that even guiding her by the elbow through the Communards' tunnel made his fingers twitch.
"I will not," she repeated when his silence stretched on. The words felt thick upon her tongue. Like curdled milk, awful but difficult to spit out.
She had no strength left to banish the stubborn accent years of living in France hadn't fully annihilated, much less the energy to crush her skull against the stone floor again. Perhaps tomorrow.
"Very well," he said at last.
He looked like he might keel over as he rose, mask absent and wet clothes clinging to his grotesquely thin figure. A draugr, she thought as a shiver racked her spine, a true draugr. An again-walker with a beating heart.
"Forgive me," he said, stopping halfway to his bed chamber where the words to the Dies Irae hung upon the walls still. "I cannot marry you at the Madeleine. I'm afraid I will burn before reaching the altar. Your God has never been kind to me, but I'll oblige him nonetheless for your sake. Not there, however."
She'd never truly believed his wild vows. Erik promised stars only to bestow diamonds; impressive gifts but trinkets compared to the real thing. His gestures were grand, his words greater, and only seldom did the two meet.
The plain gold band stung like a branding iron and perhaps she was cattle indeed, though of a different kind.