The lake was calm.

The steamy mist funneling along the shore. It was quiet with the distant buzzing accord of the pounding of an organ echoing throughout the underground layer. Peaceful even, very much in contrast to the man beside it.

Erik was kneeling alongside the lake, pondering about everything that had happened in the last four months, ever since that night he brought Christine to his home, that surreal night where he was no longer an angel to her, but a man. Breathing, living, flesh and blood that is not celestial in any way, unlike the heavenly being she once assumed he was. No, a man who lived for her, burned for her and loved her with every breath in his body and every note in his scores. She seemed to have forgiven him though, for not being a real angel. Her eyes held such adoration and utter disbelief that he was actually there. Her look brought hope to his feeble life that night, she made him believe his lonely days were at an end for once.

Hope.

What a treacherous thing that is. It feeds you until you are intoxicated with it's trust until it snatches your dreams away wickedly leaving you in despair wondering how you could have even been so stupid to let something as illusive as hope into your heart.

Erik sighed, dismissing his self loathing for a day at least to prepare for what is to come. Those foolish managers and that impudent vicomte have been planning against him during the performance of his Don Juan Triumphant. Worst of all, the main actor in their little ploy was Christine.

She would betray him again tonight.

After everything he has done for her, she would betray him again. All because of this…this thing he calls a face. If only he wasn't deformed. Surely then he would have her, take her out to operas, lavish her in the finest materials, make her the most envious woman in all of France and be the most envious man to haveher beside him.

But no. The vicomte, he spat in his mind, is the one who is engaged to her, to his angel. The one who would treasure each day with her, make love to her, share the rest of his life with leaving poor, unhappy Erik alone.

Erik sighed. He didn't mean to try to kill the boy in front of Christine today, he just could not control the rage that surged through him when the vicomte came. He had the tendency to come disrupt him and Christine whenever they were having a moment together. If only he hadn't come and ruin his grasp on her at the moment, Christine would of definitely obeyed and come to him, he smirked. I still have power over her He acknowledged, Her soul is still mine. Now all that was left was to win over her heart…which he surely did with trying to kill her fiancé, he quipped dryly to himself. But tonight he would make her his. He would make her beg for him to love her, to take her, she would open up to him with arms - and legs, he smirked, wiped open. Tonight, the flames would at last consume them and she would love him, she would be his forever. Don Juan will triumph.

Oh Christine, his mind sighed. I love you. God, how he loved her. His very soul died the night of her betrayal, wanting to die of heartache right there, his very reason to live was lost. Christine had gone. Why did you betray me?, His mind reeled. Why? Why do you have to be my every waken thought, in every of my dreams? Why must your beautiful voice haunt me? Why can't you love me in return and stop this anguish you have ignited in me?

She was scared of him.

He knew this, ever since she was a child, he felt a connection to her, he could feel her feelings and was able to entwine their emotions and sadness together by music, their akin mother. She was his soul mate. The only one for him and she knew this, she just can not let this sink into her yet. She knew she was his. It just needed some convincing on his behalf to make her acknowledge the fact that the stupid boy was trying to demolish.

He needs her to love him. She is the only one who can make his song take flight, to erase the pain he has known of life. She was like him, abandoned by the world in that retrospect, alone and empty, having no one to share their life or time with. That was his pull towards the small girl crying over her father in the chapel. She called for him that night, asking for her angel to stop her emptiness.

Tonight he would do the same. He would sing to her of his passions and repressed desire for her, his untamed love that he has kept for so long inside and make her come to his mercy. He would beg of her to listen to him, to understand, to love him not as her angel, but as a man, for himself. To want him.

For she was the only one who ever did.

No one would listen, he sang quietly, No one but her, heard as the outcast hears…

Little did he know, she was.