A/N: Just clearing out the cobwebs.
Paper and Ink
It is my final chapter, now.
I feel paper thin. Every hour, the ticking of the clock rips more of me away, and soon, there will be nothing left. I can sense my story is coming to a close, for the denouement has occurred and there is nowhere to go from here.
I can feel my carefully constructed world coming apart at the binding. The haunted words of a thousand unhappy love stories ring their symbolism in my ears, and each tear in the pages of my shredded heart throw their callous and superfluous sentiments into the wind, for they were never meant to belong to someone like me.
All of the darkness within myself that had found empathy and understanding in the endless, reclusive black beneath the Opéra was now utterly alone, and I was left bare to relive and reread my sins in the saga of an eternity bereaved of light.
There is no more music. I can't bear it, and my fingers lack the strength to play. The only music that I have left is the melody of her last words to me, the staccato beats of her tears hitting the floor, and the rhythmic assault on my senses that were her soft footsteps as she left me. It is all transcribed in my mind, but it does not break an iota of the silence. I can see the elegant black lines of ink clearly but I dare not give it a voice. To sing it would make it real.
I am sealed off from everything. When I pressed my quill to the parchment so many years ago, I was designing myself a tomb. No sound from above reaches me. No sunlight, no air, no reason to cling to life. My tomb is perfect and ornate and beautiful as I can never be. But it is a tomb nonetheless. I will have no eulogy save for the lapping of water against the banks of my lake, and no epitaph. The Opéra is my mausoleum, my house is my casket, and the mask is the bouquet of roses atop my burial shroud which will follow me into hell. I wrote my own end into the stone with the ink of blood and sweat and ignorance of my own mortality.
Notes and letters will be my only legacy. I will be nothing but legend someday, a superstition. Nothing but a shadow. I've wasted so much of my life and yet accomplished so much. But what will it matter? I've lost the only thing that ever made it matter, and no one will ever see beyond the letters, "O.G." I have been reduced to the phantom I claimed to be, and by my own handwriting.
When Christine left, she wrote the last of my narrative and slammed the cover. Perhaps she took a page with her when she left, and that is why I feel such incompleteness, but I do not know. It was God's hand which wrote her into my ghost story, but her hand which wrote herself out. Like a stage direction, she exited my sick farce, and did not linger to see the curtain fall. That right is reserved for the main character, I suppose.
Someday, I may be fortunate enough to be reborn, to have a different ending to my tale, and with a better main character. Perhaps I will be more than just a monster, gothic in nature and grotesque in visage. Perhaps someone else will try to understand, to find whatever exists behind my twisted soul. Perhaps when that day comes, I will be more than an opera house and a few black edged notes. 《Le Fantôme de l'Opéra》seems a poor excuse for a story, but perhaps... in the right hands... there could be redemption.
For now, though, the edges of my manuscript are beginning to blacken with flame, and soon, I will be nothing but ash. It is alright. I was brittle anyway.
To the world, I will be a dead superstition. To the world, I exist only in paper and ink, and it is now time to return to the shelf. The end of the ghost's love story has come at last, and the Époque will have a new headline to publish very soon.
But someday, someone will blow off the dust and open me up, and I will finally breathe the night air once more.