A/N: After many years, I'm back with a one-shot vaguely inspired by Phantom 25. Set at some point during Christine's lessons, after they've met in person but before everything's gone wrong, this is an almost-Christmas tale for JOJ, whose Erik would never, I am sure, get himself into such a pickle.
1
It had been a very ordinary day when it all started. The sun was making a valiant effort to peek through the scudding grey clouds, and in the chill of the afternoon, Erik had agreed to take her for a walk in the park.
There had been ducks, and brave winter blossoms on a few hardy bushes, and Erik had made her laugh. Her scarf – a deliberately neutral blue – had kept her warm, and as the sunlight broke across her face, Christine felt thoroughly at peace with the world.
They were meandering without any real urgency back towards the Opera House when, as they rounded a corner, Erik ceased to speak, and cocked his head on one side.
"What is it?" Christine asked, concerned in spite of herself.
Erik frowned, and indicated the main thoroughfare. "This way."
Christine knew a moment of surprise at his choosing so public a street, but hurried to follow him closely, and soon she could hear what had caught Erik's ear, clearly more sensitive than her own.
A woman was standing in the middle of the pavement, a man's flat cap on the floor before her containing a few coins, singing. A red flower caught the light in her hair.
A small crowd had gathered around her. Erik drew Christine towards the crowd, angling himself into the partial shadow offered by the church, and stopped to listen.
Christine did not know the song, but something in the tune, or perhaps in the singer's performance, dark and entwining, reminded her of the lively, disreputable bars she passed on her way home from the Opera with her eyes firmly fixed on the ground. Beside her, she felt Erik shift, and shake his head slightly in admiration.
"Magnificent voice," he murmured. "Magnificent."
Deep and smoky, her voice was all coffee and dark chocolate, with subtle inflections that made the listener feel as though she was sharing some intimate moment. Her voice held some raw, earthy element that made Christine shiver and pull her cloak more tightly around herself. Watching Erik's obvious appreciation, Christine suddenly felt her own voice thin and reedy, her appearance scrawny and underdeveloped.
The other woman was beautiful, certainly: generously proportioned, and with a confidence in her movements which suggested considerable experience in performing – for men, Christine thought uncharitably, and felt ashamed of herself. The singer tossed back her magnificent mane of russet hair, and met Christine's eye, flashing her a smile which could have meant welcome or triumph. Flushing, Christine looked down and scuffed her feet against the pavement. There was a mark by her right shoe; she rubbed at it with her foot.
Beside her, Erik checked his pocket watch, then sighed and indicated towards the Opera House. "Your call time," he said with some regret. As they walked away, he tossed a handful of coins into the woman's hat. She glanced towards them and winked, tipping her head in a gesture of intimate familiarity. Christine flushed scarlet and began to walk faster, acutely aware of the smile on Erik's face and wondering why she should find it so unsettling.
1
They parted on the Rue Scribe. Christine felt distressed and agitated, and could not understand why; Erik put her skittishness down to performance nerves, and was customarily fulsome in his encouragement. Embarrassed, Christine pulled her cloak around herself and entered the stage door swiftly, hurrying to the privacy of her dressing room.
Once there, she pulled off her outer wrappings and flung them on the floor, kicking off her shoes and sitting down at the dressing table, dislodging a hairbrush and a pot of hairpins, which fell with a tinny crash and scattered across the floor.
"Oh -!"
The sound of her own voice, high and frustrated, brought tears to her eyes, and she shook her head fiercely. Why was she so upset? She seized the brush and began to brush her hair savagely, yanking the curls until her scalp stung.
It had been that encounter in the street, she knew. But why? Why should a street singer, slurring and insinuating her way through a song of dubious morality – she flushed again and began to pin her hair back tightly – have upset her?
Not perhaps the song, whispered a shrewd little voice which sounded surprisingly like Meg Giry's in the back of her head, but Erik's response to it?
"Nonsense," she said aloud, twisting her hair into a thick rope and stabbing in pins almost at random. Simply because Erik had praised another woman's voice?
Now that she came to think of it, Christine could not recall Erik's ever having praised a voice apart from hers, except in the most grudging terms. "Not as bad as the last," had been his judgement on the new head tenor, a man who had been widely received as the greatest new operatic talent in a generation.
To hear such honest admiration in his voice for another woman was deeply unsettling. Christine had always assumed, with the thoughtless selfishness of a child to whom it has never occurred that a beloved parent has other interests, that she was Erik's sole foray into the world of tuition. What if – she went cold at the thought, and stabbed a hairpin home with such force that she winced with pain – what if Erik wanted other students? If her voice was no longer enough to satisfy him?
Christine stared at her face in the mirror, pale and trembling. Her fear of the performance had passed away like mist on the breeze, replaced by a far more troubling feeling gnawing in her heart.
She and Erik had never discussed other singers except in the briefest terms, and always in reference to her own voice. What did it mean if he was beginning to wish for more variety in his tuition, and why should she care so much?
1
It was not unusual, in those days, for Nadir and Erik to attend the opera together. Nadir would mock the implausibility of the plots, the weight of the leading ladies, and the dissimilarity of apparent sets of identical twins, and Erik would dismiss him as a Philistine and a cultural vandal.
It had been around Christmastime that Erik had begun to be unavailable. For several months, Nadir's best detective work yielded no results; until the announcement that a chorus girl named Christine Daaé was to take over the leading roles with immediate effect and the Opera House exploded into an inferno of gossip. Several months on, and Nadir had had enough of waiting for his recalcitrant friend to come to him.
It was dark inside the box. The red velvet curtains were drawn almost entirely across, only the slightest chink allowing in the light of the stage. In a high-backed chair a figure sat shrouded in shadows, perfectly still.
Above the sound of the chorus a soprano's voice rose, fragile and pure. A shudder ran through the figure's body.
Nadir stepped forward, but before he could speak, the shape raised one finger.
"Disturb me while she is singing, daroga, and your life will be abruptly and painfully foreshortened."
Nadir heeded the warning, and stood in silence watching the back of his friend's head. Erik did not appear to be breathing. Already leaning forward in his chair, he seemed to bend towards the sound as though towards the sun until, as the aria seemed to come to a dramatic climax, and Christine's voice faded into a reverent hush before the applause rose, he shivered and sank back into his chair.
A moment passed. Erik shook his head, as if to clear it, and turned away from the stage towards his old friend.
"Well?"
"It's true, then," Nadir remarked. A raised eyebrow was the only response he received, and he resolved to break Erik's impassivity through fair means or foul. "They say that the ghost is sleeping with one of the chorus girls, and that she is rewarded with leading roles."
Erik moved so quickly that Nadir had barely time to breathe before he found himself against the wall, held by hands that felt like stone vicious around his neck and terrible eyes like the fires of Hellinches from his own.
"Who is spreading these lies?" he snarled. "They should cherish the opportunity to peddle their slanders while they still have a tongue with which to speak!"
Black spots were pressing at the sides of Nadir's vision. "It's not true, then?" he choked.
To his astonishment, the crushing pressure around his throat lifted. He raised a hand to feel his neck, and watched as Erik retreated to the side of the box from which the stage could be seen. With thin fingers, he drew the curtain back, just a little, and beckoned.
"Daroga, come here."
Warily, Nadir joined him and looked through the curtain at the stage.
"Which one is she?"
A sound of frustration emitted from his friend. "Really, daroga, your powers of observation have deteriorated miserably since our halcyon days of service in the court of the Shadow of God." He nodded towards the stage. "In the white dress."
"Dark hair?"
A nod of assent. It did not escape Nadir's notice that, for the second time that evening, Erik appeared to be holding his breath.
Nadir watched the girl Erik had identified as the now-notorious Christine Daaé for a few moments. She was pretty, certainly: her face seemed all big dark eyes and clouds of hair, and she had an ethereal quality which he could well imagine would appeal to his friend's taste for the mythical.
"She looks like she could do with a good meal," he remarked, stepping hastily away from the thin hands clenched in the velvet curtain.
Somewhat unexpectedly, Erik laughed. "There you and I agree, daroga. She is far too thin." His voice hardened. "And yet, having seen her, I am certain you now see the absurdity of your foul insinuation."
"The suggestion that you might take a pretty girl to bed hardly constitutes a personal insult, my friend," Nadir said gently.
Erik drew himself up to his full height. Nadir forced himself not to retreat. However well he knew that Erik's aggression was born out of a lifetime's unhappiness and inexperience, it would take a brave man to face him unarmed and unafraid.
His voice, when it came, held echoes of the torture chamber at Mazenderan. "Enough. You have not, I assume, come here merely to bait me. Either sit and watch the opera like a civilised human being, or leave and allow me so to do."
Sighing at his friend's inflexibility, Nadir sat down in one of the plush red velvet chairs and applied himself to the opera.
As the dying chords trailed away into the silence and rapturous applause began, Nadir was surprised to see Erik sigh and brush a hand across the surface of his mask. He could not avoid noticing that when Christine Daaé came forward for her curtain call, looking distinctly overwhelmed by the entire experience, she looked up at the box with a beseeching expression which mingled hope with fear.
Erik nodded once, slowly, and the girl's face broke into a beaming smile.
Nadir felt that he would never forget that smile, or the expression on Erik's half-shadowed face as he watched her take her bows with a step that seemed more like dancing.
1
Erik did not meet Christine after the performance, opting for a token bouquet with a non-committal note. Instead, he retreated home, down into the darkness, extinguishing the lights as he did so. In the dark he could be invisible, remove himself from the light of the world, disconnect himself altogether from the vicious cruelty of mankind.
Why had he not realised how they would interpret his championing Christine's career? That appalling suggestion – even though every cell in his body had constricted at, oh, the mere thought of it –
He shook his head savagely. It was obscene. Wrong.
His foot caught on an uneven patch of ground, and he scraped his hand catching at the rough surface of the wall. In the darkness he could not see the blood.
She was so young, and so fragile. If even the insinuation reached her ears that he might expect – impossible – never – how could she ever bear his presence again?
His own depravity he could no longer doubt. She was young enough to be his daughter, entirely pure, and still he wanted her, terribly. That she would never return his affection he had always known, and would learn to accept, but if others were to pour their poison in her ears, the quiet companionship they had forged would surely be at an end.
He wiped the blood from his hand and stared, unseeing, into the darkness.
1
Christine stared at the small bouquet on her dressing table. Even his note – "As ever" – bespoke indifference. Why had he not come to her? Was he disappointed? Still thinking of the woman in the street?
A rush of hot feeling ran through Christine, and she began to take down her hair rapidly. She would not be replaced!
As her hair fell around her shoulders, it became increasingly clear to Christine that there was only one solution. If dark and sensuous was what Erik admired in a voice, Christine would simply have to learn to sing that way herself. Christine removed the final hairpin from her chignon and nodded determinedly. She would go again to watch the street singer who had so caught Erik's eye, and incorporate that performance into her own.
1
Wrapped and muffled in heavy cloak and scarf, Christine left the Opera House the next afternoon looking like a fugitive.
She had not missed the flash of hurt in Erik's eyes when she had excused herself from tea before their lesson, but that could not be helped. He would be happy when she arrived at her lesson with her newly-developed voice.
Christine drew her muffler closer around her face and stepped into the shadow of the church. She watched closely, determinedly ignoring the prickles of discomfort that trembled through her.
Everything about her spoke of the animal, the sensual. From her shoulders, plump and just hinting at softer flesh below her well-cut dress to the triumphant way she tossed back her beautiful hair, the notes of dark insinuation which wove their way enticingly through her voice as she sang of love, she held such great vitality that it was impossible to watch her without responding. Christine suspected she could sing about cabbages and produce the same discomfiting, sensual effect.
When Christine finally left the shadow of the church to make her way back to the Opera House for her evening lesson, she felt strangely excited. She had watched carefully, and felt as confident as she ever would that she could replicate elements of the singer's performance in her own.
She imagined Erik's surprise and pleasure at her new skill, and smiled.
1
Erik was still trying to put down his distress when she arrived, a little late and a little out of breath. The thought flashed through his mind like lightning before a storm that she might have been with the Vicomte, and it was all he could do not to howl.
"You're late," he said curtly, shuffling the music on the piano as though it were more absorbing than the mist of rain clinging to her curls or the scent of outdoors she had brought into the house with her.
"Forgive me," she whispered, discarding her damp cloak onto the sofa and shaking her head in a movement faintly reminiscent of a puppy. Frowning, Erik picked the cloak up to hang it out properly – and, oh, the warmth of her body still clinging to it almost undid him. It was all he could do not to bury his face in it and absorb her warmth, her fragrance into all the dark corners of his soul.
Agitated though he was, it could not escape his notice that Christine was not herself. She seemed nervous, and almost giddy with excitement: she had forgotten her copy of the score, and dropped the spare he offered her on the floor, splashing pages across the carpet.
"Are you well?" he asked.
She nodded, her eyes unnaturally bright. "I have been looking forward to this."
Beneath the sleeves of his jacket, his fingers traced old scar tissue. He dug his nails into the palms of his hands, deep enough to leave indentations when he forced himself to unclench his fists and sit at the piano. Her voice would soothe him as it always did: that glorious purity, the hint of fragility in the top register, sunlight made sound would surely cleanse him, free him of the agitation brought on by Nadir's appalling, impossible insinuation.
Her first notes came as an unpleasant surprise.
"No, no!" He could not restrain himself from bringing down his fist with a discordant clash of notes. "Stand properly. How on earth do you expect to manage even your warm-up exercises if you slouch like that?"
The wounded expression in her eyes cut him deeply, and he turned back to the piano, taking refuge in the well-worn, impassive role of tutor. "Again. Without the vibrato, this time."
As the lesson progressed, Erik's frustration grew until it was a living thing between them. Christine persisted with her curiously altered posture, looking rather like a broken doll, and her tone was slurred, far from her customary precise accuracy. The clarity and purity he so loved were entirely absent: she was beginning to sound almost like a nightclub singer in one of Paris's less reputable quarters.
Erik pressed his temples, where his head was beginning to ache, and closed the piano lid. "I think we should take a break."
Christine nodded. Her eyes were still curiously bright, and her smile, wider than normal – and was she wearing lipstick? – seemed fixed to show her teeth. The effect was alarming. As he rose from the piano, she tossed her hair so violently that he started away from her.
He retreated to the kitchen, pressing his head against the cool surface of a cabinet to stave off what was promising to become a monumental headache.
He closed his eyes. Her voice was changed so unpleasantly that he could almost believe that the calumnies Nadir had implied had marred her, stained her enchanting purity with the mark of Cain until it emerged through slurred pitches and poorly-accented vowels in her voice. Impossible, superstitious nonsense, and yet, and yet ... Echoes of the past ghosted past his head, jeering, hissed threats, veiled violence.
He shook his head, hard, filled a glass with water for her and returned to the living room. She was standing by the piano, studying the score with an intensity that showed in her furrowed brow. She looked like herself again as she lifted her head with a smile that felt like the sunrise: unbearably young and innocent.
Then she adopted the same curiously broken posture, and lifted her chin as though to sing. Erik's composure broke.
"Enough."
She drew her score to her chest in a nervously defensive gesture, her brow furrowed with confusion. She opened her mouth as if to speak, but Erik could not bear to hear that wonderful voice so contorted again.
"You ... clearly have other things on your mind today." The cold wind of loss yet to come howled through his mind, and he shook his head savagely. "There is no point in your coming here to sing if you have opted not follow the most basic of precepts."
Christine flinched. Erik was perpetually strict about her voice, but never was he so straightforwardly critical. Never had she seen him so disappointed: the visible side of his face was so pale it was hard to distinguish his skin from the unyielding surface of the mask.
The terrible fear that had been lurking at the back of her mind extended cold tendrils across her face. Could it be that Erik did not appreciate the efforts she had made to improve her voice independently?
He had turned away from her, closing the piano lid.
"I cannot listen to you slur your way through Faust any more." He closed the score with a dull thud that rang with finality.
Such was Christine's horror and shame that tears seemed the only response, but her eyes remained dry. If she had incorporated the elements of the other singer's voice and still she could not please him, then it really must all be over, and the void of her life without him that yawned before her was shocking in its unexpectedness.
She heard herself speaking as though from a long way off. "I'm sorry ..."
He set the score down on the piano. "What are you trying to do?"
"I was trying to sound like -" she stopped abruptly, flushing a deep red. She pressed her hand to her cheeks and retreated, wrapping her arms around herself in an unconsciously defensive gesture.
He had raised one eyebrow, and looked formidable. Christine suddenly felt very young and very small. She scuffed at the carpet with her foot, too embarrassed to speak, afraid to meet his eyes and see the scorn she was sure she would find there.
"Like ...?" His voice gave nothing away.
"I wanted to sound like the girl by the church," she said at last in a rush. She bowed her head, embarrassed beyond calm, her cheeks flaming.
He was silent for a long time. When she finally looked up at him, she saw the visible side of his face creased with what on any other man's face she would have called bewilderment.
"The girl by the church?" he echoed, frowning, as though trying to bring the incident to mind.
"By St. Cecilia's," she whispered.
His face cleared. "Ah! La figlia con i fiori!"
"What?"
"With the flowers. Songs to make a sailor blush." He frowned again, confusion returning. "Why would you want to sound like her?"
"Because you admired her!" Christine found her voice, and all the tension and distress of the previous two days spilled out of her. "You never say anything nice about other people's voices, and you admired her so much – we were almost late for my call time because you were so absorbed in her!" Aware that her voice was becoming shrill, she stopped abruptly, pressing a hand to her throat.
"Are you jealous?" he asked with sudden comprehension.
Christine was suddenly, terribly afraid she might cry. She heard Erik sigh, and looked up to see him gesture towards the sofa. His voice came gentle, without the hint of mockery she had dreaded. "Please. Sit."
She did so, staring at her hands.
"I do not know what to say to you," he said at last. "This is ... unexpected." He sighed, and pressed his fingers again to his temple; Christine recognised the signs of an incipient headache and knew a moment of concern before her embarrassment returned and she stared down at her hands again.
"Have I ever told you about the first time I heard you sing?"
Christine shook her head, mute with misery and shame. Unable to look up, she felt Erik sigh beside her and lean back.
"It is hard," he began slowly, "to describe the effect it had on me. I thought I was having a stroke."
Christine was momentarily astonished beyond her misery. Erik was still speaking, looking half into the middle distance as though recalling some moment indescribably precious to him.
"You were with the little Giry. She was goading you, trying to persuade you to make the most of the empty stage, and you didn't want to sing. All I could hear was her voice, like a cat's claws down a slate roof, ordering you to sing ..." - Christine choked back laughter in spite of herself - "and then you did."
He broke off, and shook his head as though the wonder remained yet fresh.
"When I first heard you sing, I had not interacted with the human race for many years. I was out of practice with emotion ... and when I heard your voice, I felt ..." He broke off, seeming lost for words, and shook his head with a self-deprecating little shrug. "I felt. It had been so long."
Christine was speechless. Never before had he spoken in this way; never had she heard such genuine feeling from him on any other subject than music. His voice, velvet and harmony, seemed made for such revelations. She fought the urge to weep.
"If I have made you feel that your voice is not enough, that it is not sufficient, then I am to blame. Nothing could be more beautiful. Nothing has ever given me such -" He stopped abruptly, the haunted look back in his eyes. "No one could ever doubt the quality of your voice," he amended.
Christine's eyes filled with tears. How could she ever have doubted the loyalty of this man? This deeply flawed, terribly human man whose fidelity had outlasted the guise of an angel, the fears of a child and the advent of suitors in their droves, whose commitment to her voice had never faltered – she could not imagine how she had ever doubted him.
"Thank you," she whispered. On impulse, she reached forward and squeezed his hand. A choked gasp escaped him, and he rose swiftly, withdrawing his hand from hers.
She laughed in spite of herself, and wiped her eyes with the back of her hand.
A moment at the piano, the abandoned score lifted needlessly back into his hands, and he was back in control of himself, the monochrome lines of his clothing austere against the rich background of the room.
"I ask your forgiveness," he said quietly, his face impassive but with a flicker of something Christine could not identify behind the eyes. "I have hurt you through my thoughtlessness."
"No." Christine shook her head, smiling through her tears. "I was absurd. You are certainly at liberty to admire other voices, and I shall simply have to strive to ensure you do not become bored with my tuition."
Erik laughed out loud, a glorious sound, and the room felt lighter. "I do not imagine that a possibility."
1
Much later, after Christine had left, Erik sat alone on the piano bench, absently fingering scales and thinking. He was still trembling from the extraordinary scene earlier: to think that Christine could have been jealous of his attention. It was unthinkable, and yet it was true. She had wept for him.
The fear in his heart, a kind of sick churning, had been terrible. Nadir's insinuation that the entire Opera House assumed her his mistress had left him sick with horror, but Christine seemed blissfully unaware of any such rumour, and there had been no fear in her demeanour. He felt purified, as though her trust and her faith in him had cleansed him from the inside out.
That she should have felt jealousy because of him! It had been all he could do not to weep, not to fall to his knees and confess everything he had ever hidden from her, to swear his love and beg for hers. But she had touched him, and it had been the cut of the whip and the sting of the antiseptic in one.
Perhaps it was not love. Not yet. But she had touched him, and perhaps, one day, under the winter sun which shone on against all odds, there might be more.
1
It was several weeks later that Erik proposed an outdoor sojourn and Christine, surprised but pleased by his willingness to brave the daylight, acceded readily. The air was still chilly, and under Erik's stern guidance, Christine finally emerged into the watery sunlight wrapped in layer upon layer of thick fabric.
The streets of Paris were full of early Christmas shoppers, and, although Christine could feel Erik's unease in the concealing tilt of his head and his preference for shadowed shopfronts, the walk was pleasant and invigorating. Christine, who had decided to knit Meg a scarf for Christmas, purchased some soft pink wool, and Erik had insisted on replacing her worn-out mittens with a splendid pair of thick gloves. The air was warm with spices and mulled wine, and Christine had played with a little dog which had worried her ankles.
They were walking down a cobbled shopping street when Christine heard it. Hardly thinking, she caught at Erik's hand, ignored his instinctive flinch, and tugged him towards the source of the sound.
It was the singer of last month, outside the same church. She wore seasonal holly in her glorious hair, and was singing a popular Christmas carol to the evident enjoyment of the crowd gathered around her.
Christine could sense Erik watching her closely, and she tugged lightly at his hand.
"Come on. Let's get a better spot to watch."
They stood together in the sunlight for quite some time, until at last Erik checked his watch.
"You have a dress fitting," he reminded her softly.
Christine sighed, and nodded reluctantly. As Erik guided her gently through the crowd, she realised that she had not released his hand. Two pairs of gloves between their palms, and she would have sworn she could feel his pulse.
As they passed the singer, she caught Christine's eye and, with a toss of that beautiful hair, winked.
Christine smiled, and walked with Erik towards the Palais Garnier.