So hello. This is my first Opera fanfic. I've pulled from Kay's work in reference to Erik because I found it easier, to be honest. I'm not so talented so as to be able to just slip into his weird, spidery goodness from Leroux.I've also aged Christine a tad because following Leroux and Kay; Christine is like 2 and he's like 100. And I'm not brave enough a writer to be cool with that. So I hope this story somewhat takes flight.

Nadir opened the door of the underground lair to the sound of a melodious tune, riddled with emotions he could not place.

With music coursing through the walls and filling the emptiness around him, it seemed as if the opera house itself was a ghost.

Three long years since Christine, Raoul and Nadir had taken flight. Three long years and the music had yet to change. It would appear, Nadir found as he rounded a corner to the source of the music, that life had moved on without the Phantom – finding him exactly where he had left him…three long years ago.

"Erik?" Nadir called softly, then more loudly until at last he realised Erik had probably heard him but wanted to finish his tune first. Nadir smirked; the man hadn't changed at all…the monster, though? Nadir wasn't so sure though he had yet to hear of any stories.

"Daroga." Erik's familiar voice wafted over from the organ, pulling him from his reverie, the music having long since stopped though its presence still rang in the small corners of the house.

"I hadn't expected to see you so soon." he told Nadir ironically, "Or at all…"

A long, slender hand reached out for a beautifully calved, porcelain mask that lay atop his organ. He placed it upon his face and rose gently, turning to Nadir to reveal to him this smoke and mirror face – laced with melancholia. Captivating with its permanent sadness.

Nadir could not recall having ever seen it before. Post-departure, he concluded.

"You are still the same." Nadir answered him dryly when their eyes finally met.

"No." Erik said evenly, drifting from his organ with a spectral grace to pour Nadir a glass of whiskey. Upon offering it to him and having it declined, he continued, "No, I'm a very different man."

He drank a very small sip of his oaky whiskey before placing it atop a small wooden table and forgetting about it. He was still deathly thin but this new mask of his, it gave way to a vulnerability Erik had never used to allow in the past. Now it had a certain appeal, providing a certain charm to compliment his confidence and ghostly presence.

"Well," Nadir dropped his shoulders, "...you look well. The mask suits you, for lack of a better word."

Erik scoffed. "All masks suit the ghost."

Nadir raised his hands as if to put Erik in a frame and the skeleton of the man gazed back with his hands behind his back, puzzled, no doubt, as Nadir squinted at him.

"But this one. This is one is good."

"Ah," Erik waved his hand carelessly, "I made it after you all left. The last, lonely friend. Where did you go? You never said."

Nadir sighed,

"Back to Persia, back to Europe…back and back again."

"Is your soul at ease?" Erik asked curiously.

"It wonders." Nadir shrugged, "It is not whole. It hasn't been whole for quite some time now."

"Many years." Erik muttered thoughtfully, cocking his head as he turned a way to run a long, thin finger across his keys, "Neither has mine."

With that, both men met in the middle. A mutual understanding flickered between them and Nadir felt himself relax as Erik sat himself back down at the organ, flexing his fingers across many, many keys before he gently began to play once more, note by note.

A tune most fitting to the gentle upset that had settled over Nadir.

The events of the Paris Opera House haunted him still. The torture chamber; Bouquet's death; the Count De Chagny; his brother, the Viscomt; his love, Christine; Erik's dark and desperate rampage right up until it crumbled down around him. He was pleading for mercy and redemption at Nadir's feet not long after Christine and the Viscomt had fled. He had loved wholly then.

Nadir had never truly been able to shake the despairing pity or its ghosts, so he had left.

In fact, the sole reason for his return was duly for the fact that the past had come to find him. Christine and Raoul had found what little peace they could whilst Nadir and Erik had been left to wallow in the wake of it, never having found their own. Least of all Erik.

"I met them again, Erik." Nadir heard himself say quietly, "The Viscomte and…(his wife…) Miss Daae. I met them about a year after they'd left. In Sweden. Who would have thought?"

He let his memory come vividly to life as he recounted his tale. Erik never stopped playing but the sudden jerk of his head at the mention of young Miss Daae's name told Nadir that he was listening intently.

"The Viscomte has grown – he's got broader shoulders. Specks of grey are coming out in his beard now, you'd laugh at the difference. Christine sang like the angel you taught her to be on the night I met them. Her voice reminded me of you. You'd taught her well, my friend."

Erik smiled gently behind his mask but said nothing – all Nadir got was a quiet nod.

"It was that night, in fact," Nadir continued, "that I decided I ought to come back and find you. There had been enough time to heal, by then. Or so I thought. She -" there came a slight pause in the music, "sends her regards."

Erik stiffened but continued to play. Nadir could see how the thought of receiving any kind of 'regard' from anyone was baffling. To be fair, Nadir could understand how, despite his actions and understanding of their stifling nature, Erik might come to expect a little more than a sending of regards – especially from the woman whom he had been prepared to lay down his life and throw caution to the wind for. But the fairness continued, Nadir had not finished,

"She said it with heart, Erik. So much heart…I think she might have meant something I lack the understanding to ascertain. Perhaps you do?"

But Erik made no move to explain if he did. As Nadir gazed at the slender back of the Phantom, a sudden pain took a hold of his heart.

"The Viscomte caught an illness while on an expedition to the North Pole. He has been very sick…" he told Erik softly, aware of how he looked up abruptly but didn't look at him. How the music stopped almost instantly and left an eerie echo while his fingers remained in a splayed position, almost in a caress.

"Coughing sickness…" he explained, "He caught a cold and it never left. Before long, blood started spotting his handkerchiefs. After one of the most spectacular nights I have been to in a long while, he collapsed upon the stairs outside of the stage doors while waiting for Mademoiselle Daae."

Erik had now gone completely still, his hands resting in his lap with an impeccably straight posture with a tailcoat that hung languorously over the edge of the seat. A barrier.

"And?" he enquired coolly.

"Well we took him to a hospital – the best of them all."

Erik slowly turned,

"And?"

"They tried and tried, Erik. It was a long night." The Persian felt his shoulders sag and his head droop at the heavy memory; Christine clutching him with such desperation that it cast her back to the days of a child, "He died – I imagine he'd had the sickness for a long time before I came to find his bloodied handkerchiefs all over the place. Wasting away in front of us and no one dared to see."

Erik was quiet a moment. He appeared to be shaking, his hands curling in and out of fists before he took to the organ once again, slowly but determinedly.

"Foolish boy!" he growled.

"Erik! The man is dead – have some empathy!"

Erik stopped playing abruptly and rose in fury, such was his presence and power that Nadir still trembled to behold his might.

"I charged that boy with Christine Daae's life after giving my soul to the Devil to let her go. Now he went off and died and she's alone, Daroga!" then Erik settled, seating himself down once more, the rage visibly leaving his body, "Pity; here I wait so patiently for death and yet it takes the best of us."

Nadir took a shaky breath in,

"Perhaps it is for a good reason. The funeral is to be held in Sweden but having met here at the Opera House, it was the Viscomte's dying wish that she sing here once more. Another surprise."

Erik had gone deathly silent and very, very still. The music had stopped, leaving a hollow echo in the room.

"Erik?" Nadir enquired carefully.

"Suppose he thought me dead…" the ghost whispered into the darkness.

Nadir nodded,
"Perhaps. This Opera House is also just as beautiful with or without you in it. I believe you were the furthest thing from his thoughts when he requested she do this. He might very well be rolling in his grave now."

"Christine is coming back?" Erik asked to clarify, turning to Nadir without having heard a word. Nadir nodded only once, eyeing Erik up cautiously.

"I might have let the news regarding the Viscomte quietly slip away and Christine along with it if only it hadn't concerned her return to the Palais Garnier. It would hardly have been my concern or my business but now that this development has been made clear you and her are now both in my charge." Nadir sighed, "Three long, long years and I come back to what I was trying to leave behind."

Erik was still blank, still without words or movement. Then suddenly, like lightening – quicker even, he was on Nadir.

Holding him by the scruff of his collar, Erik all but lifted Nadir from off the ground, his voice laced with utter venom,

"What have you done?! How could you let her!? What good would it do to bring her back here to me? Have you no sense, you Persian fool?! HAVE YOU ANY IDEA HOW DIFFICULT IT WAS TO LET THAT WOMAN GO?!"

Nadir, clutching at Erik's hands, straining for freedom; gasped between words,

"It's not about you! It's not even about her! Erik, please let me go!"

And the Ghost did so. He watched Nadir slink away from him, legs unsure of themselves as they retreated.

"But you did nothing to dissuade her." Erik was fuming.

"Do you so badly not want to see her again, Erik? Are you that ashamed?"

"No!" Erik spat. The truth was far more rickety.

"Well, you should be, you arrogant bastard!" Nadir answered just as coarsely, "If it wasn't for you none of this would have happened! You should be wearing your guilt on your God-forsaken sleeve!"

"You think I don't?"

"Do you?"

"I regret everything, Daroga. I do." Erik sat back down, he seemed exhausted. Having the past rear its ugly head was just as soul-destroying for him as it was for Nadir. The Persian could see that much but Erik had a strangeness about him that never went away. Nadir, in all his years of knowing him and all the years' post-Erik where he had the time to think and try to understand, the Frenchman was still an enigma and still refused to look himself in the eye. An eternal mix of regret and utter triumph. Nadir knew that he would repeat everything he did simply because it was the sort of man Erik was. He sensed Erik knew that too. Therein lay the problem.

At last!

Nadir took cautious steps towards Erik, his hands raised,

"You don't have to meet her. You don't have to do a thing. She's here in memory of her husband, to sing an aria and then to go home once and for all."

"That's hardly satisfying."

Or not!

Nadir threw his hands into the air, exasperated and growing irritable.

"Do what you will, then! Wallow in your self-pity and self-doubt. Mademoiselle Daae arrives in three days."

With that, as if they had only been apart for three days, Nadir stormed off leaving Erik to do as was suggested. Wallow in his self-doubt and pity.

He opened the piano cover up to begin to play but hesitated.

Curtly and without warning, he slammed his fists down onto the ivory keys letting loose a foul and ferocious sound. He screamed loudly in its wake before he quietly began to weep.

OOOooooOOOOoooOOO

Nadir heard the crash of the keys, it made him stop and look back across the lake in momentary dismay. Soon that feeling turned into an aching sadness. So Erik still loved the young Soprano. Loved her, perhaps, far more than the Viscomte.

Poor Christine; loved too much by a monster, loved not enough by a husband…

But who was he to judge? Nadir didn't know what Christine and Raoul's relationship was like in the slightest. His death had affected Christine badly, he could see that but the young woman barely shed a tear. Perhaps she'd run out or used them all up on the sorrow she held for that ghost that sang in her head still.

Three days, he thought as he made his way up into the light of day outside of the opera house. What madness lay ahead, he wondered as he gazed out over the city.

The past was such a fickle thing and Erik was relentless. Christine would be at her most vulnerable now.

With that, things came together in Nadir's mind. He had intended to simply watch from afar. That might not be enough. He would have to be in the thick of it this time.

OoOOOOoOOO

Far below the tenement halls of the opera house, Erik sat with his chin resting upon steepled fingers, staring at a very old drawing of Christine Daae he had done the first night he had heard her sing.

0oOoooOOoooooO

Across a very narrow sea, in Sweden, a carriage was bumbling its way down through Europe towards France where Miss Daae would board a vessel that would carry her to Cherbourg. There she would board a train which would get her to Paris. Then she'd get a carriage once more and would arrive at a hotel not far from the Palais Garnier.

She sighed heavily. People thought she hadn't been crying and this was testament to how much she loved Raoul. Or…rather, how much she didn't.

Both were incorrect. She cried more than one could ever have imagined.

You like? By the way - Reviews give me life. Please review. Writing this is fun but I like your thoughts.