"I want you to tell me about Erik."
Christine Daaé's face remains palely impassive, her eyes blank. It's as if she's schooled herself into not betraying her sentiments, and it is more than a little unsettling to see her hiding her feelings like this, when not so long ago those feelings were written as plain as day in every line of her being.
Nadir sighs and fingers the chain of his new watch. (A faint pang in his heart at the memory of the old one, threaded through Erik's still fingers. He stole it so often it may as well have been his own. It is only right that he have it now, forever entwined with his fingers alongside the plain necklace that she must have left with him. How oddly appropriate, that something from each of them should lie with him forever.) The woman across from him is a far cry from the Mademoiselle Daaé who rushed into that subterranean house with a frantic gleam in her eye not even a month ago. Her hands sit still in her lap, wrapped around the cup that Darius brought her – hot tea, with lemon. He knew who his caller was of course, the moment that Darius said that there was a young woman here to see him. In truth, there is no other young woman who would care to pay him a visit. The hours shut away in that room with Erik have changed her immeasurably, and it flickers briefly in his mind to wonder what the Vicomte must think of this transformation.
"What do you want to know about Erik?"
I fancy you knew him much better than me, at the last. The words are on the tip of his tongue and he bites them back. A glance of pain fleets across her impassive eyes, as if she's heard his unspoken thought, and she swallows, lips twisting.
Her dress is of the darkest blue, black down the bodice and intricate embroidery. While the blue accentuates the natural colour of her eyes, it highlights the very whiteness of her skin, the faint creases which her concealer doesn't quite hide, the marks of the trauma of what she's been through. His heart twists for her and the black ribbon in her hair. Mourning colours, a voice whispers, deep in his mind. Of course she's wearing mourning colours.
"You were his friend. You knew him longer than anyone. I want to know everything."
Everything. Such a simple word, and yet it betrays so much.
There is so much that he could tell her, but so much of it she would find abhorrent and whatever Erik may have been in his life Nadir can't find it in himself to reveal such things to this young woman. The torture chamber, the khanum's whims, the little slavegirl, the display with the coffin, the end of Suleiman Khan, leader of the Babi dissidents. She's been through quite enough without any of that.
He sips at his glass of wine and sighs, composing himself before speaking so as to avoid disturbing her unduly. "I fear much of what I could tell you would be unsuitable to your ears."
Her eyes flash fire, and she sits straighter in her chair, chin high. "He told me about the murders, if that's what you're getting at. I know all about those. Everything else…"
Nadir must confess to being taken aback by her words. He didn't expect Erik would have burdened her with such knowledge, but then he shouldn't be surprised. Erik always was unpredictable. He'd have had some reason.
"I want to know what he was like." Her voice falters for a moment, lips trembling, and she looks down at the cup she's still holding. "Surely you can understand why I need to know." The quiet plea in those words makes his eyes burn. "There are so many questions that I want answers to. How did you meet him? Did he keep a cat? Did he invent things in Persia? Did he play his music to the shah's court? What were his magic tricks like? Why did they poison him? What happened to drive him away? Did he take his tea with lemon even then? There are so many little things and big things about him that I…I just want to know. I know so little and now he's…" She stops, swallowing, and raises her gaze to meet his again, tears glittering in her eyes. "I need to know, Monsieur."
A friend. She said the same thing about him when she sat at Erik's bedside and asked him to stand as their witness before God, the tears trickling from Erik's eyes as if he couldn't believe the vision holding his hand. You've been a friend to him. It didn't seem that way but yes, he was Erik's friend and Erik was his friend and Allah but he misses him so much, a hollowness in his chest where something undefinable has been ripped away. It hits him afresh every morning when he wakes, the pressing, aching knowledge that Erik is dead and there's nothing that he can do about it except miss him.
And she misses him too. It is plain to see now that her mask of untouchable calmness has fallen away. She misses him perhaps even more than Nadir does and she's taking her tea the way he did and asking about him in order to get closer to him, and if Nadir could give her Erik back, even for an hour, he rather thinks he would.
Yes, she deserves to know. She deserves to know everything that he can tell her.
"Nadir. Please, call me Nadir."
If he was a friend to Erik, there's no reason why he can't be a friend to her too. Erik would want her to have a friend outside of the Vicomte. And where must young de Chagny think his fiancée is now? It doesn't seem right to ask, to remind her that as much as she loves and misses Erik there's another man whom she also loves and who loves her.
She nods, and smiles sadly. "Thank you, Nadir."
It won't be easy to tell her about how gentle Erik was with Reza. It won't be easy to tell her any of it, even if he censors out the less-than-savoury bits, and downplays Erik's fits of depression, the demons in his mind that drove him to hashish and opium and then morphine. Though he suspects she knows about those demons already. But yet he must tell her. It is, in a way, a duty to impart those stories of Erik to her, to give her something of his to hold onto other than her own memories of the man. She deserves to know about him.
He tops up his wine glass and sits deeper into his chair, the new watch chain still strange between his fingers.
"We met in his tent at the Grand Fair in Nijny-Novgorod…"