A/N: Another thanks to everyone reading this, so far, and an extra thank you to those who have reviewed! Your words are greatly appreciated, and have helped to inspire me along the way.

This chapter surprised me with how dark it turned out to be, but then, so has much of this story. I've come to accept that it's destined to vacillate wildly between dry humour and rather morbid seriousness... but I did say it was a SOMBRE comedy, after all! Things will get lighter again - and quite a bit sillier - before you know it.

Also, my apologies for the slow update. It's been a heck of a month, boy, but it's starting to get better...

Chapter Four

To say that he was stunned by this vision, and by the realization of the compromising position in which he now found himself, would be sufficiently insufficient as to seem almost wholly inaccurate. For at the sight of his wife in the doorway, two things happened almost instantaneously to Raoul. First, all of the air expelled slowly from his lungs in a painful wheeze. Second, his body became completely frozen - still half-twisted, palms down and fingers splayed in a gesture of paralytic bafflement.

In that first, precarious, fragile moment - poised like a delicate porcelain egg about to tip over the edge of a jostled shelf - he wanted to speak. He truly did.

He wanted to even manage so much as a stammered attempt to begin to explain, but his lungs refused to draw air again, and he could only stand helplessly as the tearful woman launched herself from her place in the doorway - the metaphorical egg now tumbling toward a marble floor, and Raoul unable to catch it - and prostrate herself at his feet. She began to fervently kiss the edge of his cloak with incoherent murmurs, then grasped him about the knees and wept into the soft black cloth.

"Oh thank God, thank God!" she exclaimed between sobs. "Erik! Oh! I thought I might never see you again, but the good Lord has answered my nightly prayer, and here you are. Alive, alive! I am not too late. Thank the heavens." She clung to Raoul even more tightly then, which he would not have believed possible, and her voice was momentarily silenced by a fresh flood of tears and racking sobs.

Raoul once again attempted an explanation. He managed a wheeze. Christine looked up at him, rapt.

He swallowed, hard, to force the muscles of his throat to cease their silent protest. "Christine," he finally rasped. "You must know... I am not the man you think I am. I-"

A wail erupted from his wife's throat then, easily drowning out his feeble stammering with the volume of its grief.

"It's true! It's the horrible truth. And oh, how I was horrid! I was! I treated you with the terror and loathing with which one cringes from a creeping spider." She grasped handfuls of his cloak as she spoke, pulling herself up higher. Her face was flushed; eyes wide, glossy, and feverish. She stared up into his eyes, grasping at him as though she were hanging from the edge of a precipice.

Raoul could only stare back, silent in his masked horror, as the poisonous words spilled from her lips. "You must hear this now, Erik. You must know this. I love you. I love you, and now it is I who am but a poor dog, ready to die at your feet."

She continued to stare up at him, red lips parted as she drew shaking breaths, her wide blue eyes reflecting yellow in the candlelight. Tear streaks shimmered on her cheeks, and Raoul became aware of the wetness of his own face, tears spilling over and seeping into the black silk of the mask. One escaped to fall and silently splash against Christine's cheek. Raising a hand, now violently trembling, he brushed the tear from her skin. She grasped the hand, cupped it to her cheek, and leaned into it. Her flushed skin felt hot enough to scorch Raoul's fingers, which had been numbed by the coldness of the cellar. Christine closed her eyes, and released a soft sigh. Behind the mask, Raoul smiled sadly as he remembered when such sighs had been for him.

"Christine," he breathed. "Oh Christine, you must listen to me. In your absence... I'm so sorry. Erik died. He died, Christine."

Raoul pulled his hand up, to raise it and untie the mask. This cruel misunderstanding had to end before their suffering was prolonged any further.

But sensing him pull away, she seized his hands with both of hers, and held them so fiercely he thought she might crush the bones.

She placed desperate kisses on the knuckles of each captured hand. "I died without you too. Every day apart from you, I died a little more. Oh God, Erik," she said, her voice dropping to an awed whisper, "You said you would die, but you waited for me. You waited, and now we can both live."

Raoul's voice had left him once more. He could only stare down at her in misery, each word she spoke plucking out another piece of his heart.

"If you had been dead, Erik, how could I be your living bride? I had promised you that much, hadn't I? I came back to stay with you, you see! To stay, forever.

"For I have learned that there is no life for me without you. I have tried, every day, to live the life you freed me to pursue. But don't you see?" She bit her lip, shook her head. "But how could you? The life I am meant to have is the one here, with you. You thought a life away from the light and the world would surely kill me. But I tell you, Erik, it is the other way. The life without you is the one that is surely killing me!"

Raoul would have staggered back at her words if her grip had not prevented him. He stared down at her, his eyes wide, feeling a sting as though he had been struck across the face. Confusion and anger fought within his breast. Without thinking, he found the words leaving his mouth.

"If Erik had been dead, Christine." His voice came out in a low growl, his tone teetering on the edge of barely contained hysteria. "If you had found Erik dead, what then?"

Christine's lips spread into a slow, quivering smile that sent a shudder through Raoul.

"A dead husband cannot have a living bride, Erik. Did Aida leave her Radames alone in his tomb? No! She stayed, wed to her true love in death.

"Death no longer frightens me as it once did. Still your hands are so cold..." She held one to her burning cheek. "And still they smell of death..." Oh God, she had just been kissing them! "...but I do not recoil. I cannot bear to let them go. If I could not be your living bride, Erik, I would have made do. It's you I want to be with, you whom I belong with, and I no longer fear the consequences, now. Don't you see? I would have stayed."

"You..."

She cradled her face against the folds of his cloak, whispering, "Safe in your arms, until the flame went out."

Then softly, in a light whisper like a distant echo in the underground chamber, she began to sing, Verdi's notes blossoming into colour as the lines progressed and her voice gained strength.

"Vedi?... Di morte l'angelo radiante a noi s'appressa, Ne adduce eterni gaudii sovra i suoi vanni d'or..."

Raoul could do nothing but stroke her hair with his trembling fingertips as the notes flowed out from her. Never had her voice sounded so hauntingly beautiful. Never before had he so wanted it to stop.

Eventually, it did. The words, summoning the embrace of the angel of death, faded out into a distant, haunted siren's song, the way they had begun.

In the silence that followed the last faint and hovering notes, Raoul stood dizzily looking down at his wife, and heard now only the ragged sound of his own laboured breathing. His body was in a panic that his mind was too fogged to keep up with. He freed one of his hands from where it was twined in the curls of her hair, and held her chin, turning her face directly to his as he continued to pant for breath; gathering his next words took a focused exertion.

"You would be fool enough to die with Erik."

"Yes."

"That is not what you promised Erik."

"It is what I have promised myself," she answered, her gaze and voice unwavering.

Raoul's fingertips tightened, and he had to consciously hold back from hurting her with his grip. "And your husband? What of the man who loves you with his whole heart and being?"

"It is you, Erik, whom I promised first to marry, and in the eyes of God, and in my heart - I know now - it is to you that I am truly wed. And if you still care for me as you once swore that you did, then it is of yourself that you speak."

She then held up her left hand. A gold ring glinted in the faint light. "There is no other."

Earlier that night in their sitting room, Raoul had felt the ring on her finger. His ring? Was it his ring that he assumed she still wore then, or had he felt... this ring, instead? The ring flashing before him now, this thin gold band...

I asked you, dear girl, to place our ring on my poor dead hands... but I asked too much of you...

An anguished growl escaped from Raoul. He pushed Christine away, who fell back from him with a cry, and he turned from her, his shoulders hunching over as he buried his head into his arms. His body was racked with silent sobs which turned into dry heaving as the weight of her heartless words for him fell upon him like heavy blows.

"Erik..." he heard her cry from behind him.

Still turned away from her, he lowered his arms and clenched his fists. He managed to choke out, still shuddering, "You foolish, heartless, ungrateful woman! What of your lawful husband? Have you no care for him? You underestimate the man you married. Do you really think him so careless, so foolish, that he would let you stay down here with a ghost?" His voice rose steadily in volume, and he turned back to see the woman cowering on the ground as he shouted his admonishments. "Your husband loves you enough to die for you. He would come to rescue you. He would take you away by force if he had to. He would never let you throw your life away for a dead man!"

Raoul stopped his shouting and stood, twisted over her, glaring at her in a mixture of horror, despair, and pity.

Christine wiped her tearful, reddened eyes on the sleeve of her dress, and said quietly, "My life without you would be forfeit. And I would only be a burden to Raoul. To love a good man with only part of my heart, while I know he loves me with all of his... The pity is, I love him too much for that. Such a good heart deserves better." Her voice broke as she spoke, and she paused to let a sob escape. She wiped her eyes again, swallowed once, twice, and continued. "I would find a way... If I could not return to you in body, I would in spirit. I would go away from here with him, yes, but later... I would leave him again when his fears were allayed, and find my way to death and back to you."

She buried her face in her palms and whispered, "I know it's not what you wished for me. Please don't be angry with me for telling you the truth in my heart."

She lowered her hands from her eyes and looked at Raoul with such honest resolve that he could not doubt a word she had said. This was not more melodrama-inspired hyperbole. This was... real. He felt his knees give out along with the last vestiges of hope.

He slumped into a black-cloaked heap on the floor before her, and brought to his hands and knees, he could only stare silently into her clear bright eyes - looking to him now with so much hope and love - and know that there was nothing left for him to do.

Raoul de Chagny had been defeated in his quest to save his wife.

He closed his eyes, taking a long moment to offer up a silent prayer, begging the Lord's forgiveness. For all that he had done. For all that he must do.

Opening his eyes, he looked to Christine, and felt some strength return along with this resolve. He crawled to where she waited, tearfully, for her love to forgive her.

Raoul took one of her hands in both of his, squeezing it gently. He smiled shakily behind the mask, and spoke with quiet eagerness. "Let's not talk of these darkest... what-ifs. No one needs to die, Christine. No one has died. Erik is here for you. I'm here, Christine." He slipped his arms around her shaking form, warm against him after so long in the chill of this tomb. "I waited, and I'm here, and I love you."