A/N: A reupload of an old drabble that I took down a while back for editing. Figured it was high time to post it up again. Pre-'Beneath a Moonless Sky'!

Moonlight

"Get out."

Acid, vitriolic hiss, all scorched air that comes out through animal teeth, but she isn't surprised by that so much as by the bare face that snarls back at her. Maskless, the bleached parchment skin of him glowing silver in the slanting moonlight through the ratty-curtained windows. She looks past him, to the bedroll that lays on the grime-thick floor with his meagre belongings—violin case, carpet bag, a single empty bottle of brandy. Base, no sheets of silk or cushions of velvet or organ of brass.

Spectre reduced to shade, a lingering memory more than a presence.

But when she faces him again, there is the infernal glow to his eyes, and she remembers that title, those whispers of Phantom, the Phantom, the power in him even as it is reduced to the barest flicker. He is there, beneath the torn shells of silk and wool that hang haphazard on his frame, even if they have lost the poise and intimidating grace that they represented once upon a time.

"Get out." Frustrated by her silence, a threat that isn't a threat just yet, and she knows she must be doing well because he wouldn't have warned her a second time if she wasn't. She uses the knowledge to bore deep, to stare into the depths of those flaring eyes and take a step forward.

"You were supposed to be dead."

He hides a wince, she can tell by the minute twitch of sharp cheek. She knows what he takes from the words, knows he grips to the first sliver of cold knife-edge, and she doesn't correct his thought, not yet.

"Yes. I was." Get out.

"Then how?"

The silence stings. His posture is prey-animal, bristle and shrink, fire and fear. Pitiable in his state, she wants all of a sudden to comfort him, but lifting her hand is a mistake because he grabs her wrist, squeezes it to just the border of painful.

She grits her teeth but doesn't back down.

"Does it matter? The how?" Get out. Every word laced with it, a command and a plea and a contradiction by the way his grip on her wrist loosens, by the way it all seems to snap to his awareness, like the creature part of him disappears and he sees their hands beside each other in earnest. Awe, as though it is the first time. Wonder in the tiny sweep of thumb over the heel of her hand.

When he lifts his eyes back to her, there is human in the compounding recognition of them, the same once candlelit and five stories deep. He didn't believe she was here. How many times has he told her to leave before she came? How many times has he grabbed her wrist only to find air?

How many times has her voice told him that he was supposed to be dead?

Reverent, her name lifts from him, the venom gone, thick smoke in its place. He lets go of her wrist, but she only turns her hand into his, twines their fingers together, lets him see the contrast of them, looks at the contrast herself. Latent strength, in this hand that doesn't quite hold hers in return, bloodstained and infinitely tender.

"Why are you here?" It is a quiet desperation that she recognizes, Christine, I love you. He repeats the question, and the sense of miracle in his voice at his being allowed to ask it prickles on the back of her neck.

"You were—They said you were dead." He says nothing, reacts in no way to the catch of the words, only waits stone-still for her to find more of them. "I needed to see that you weren't."

"Why?" A breath of a thing that she doesn't have an answer for. Why indeed? She brings his hand closer, kisses his knuckle to put the question from his mind, and it works because he doesn't speak it again, only shudders like a freezing man and says her name once more.

It sounds something sweet, something weary in the dark water of his voice, something hopeful and hopeless at once, a prayer to a god he doesn't believe in. A different way of hearing it, a tugging that compels her to lift her other hand to his gnarled, twisted cheek. Something mortal again, weak in the way he turns into it, corner of mouth to inside of wrist, not daring to press proper but as close as he can get. Phantom, the Phantom, spectre to shade to man. Her name again, fluttering like paper wingbeats to her pulse, and it is her turn to shudder, to whisper.

"You never told me your name." Does he have one? Angel, Don Juan, Phantom. He must have something real, but she questions the notion when his eyes grow even more distant, as though trying to call upon some long unsummoned memory. His mouth opens, closes, opens again.

"Erik."

Erik. She tests it, tastes it, foreign and familiar all at once. Metallic, smooth with a keen point, like licking up the flat of a knife to the tip. It suits him almost too well, but she doesn't say as much, only says the name again, a little more surely. A hard breath leaves him, puffing over her skin, and there is a tremor to the hand that is still lifted between them, interlocked with hers.

It nearly stops her heart, the way he draws closer, freezing man seeking warmth and she is happy to give it, her own skin feverish with the hand that eclipses hers to press it closer to the birth-ruin of his face. A sigh and a nuzzle, desperate bid for proximity and this she gives too in a sweep of thumb beneath the ridge of his cheekbone, in her own inching forward. Perhaps the darkness of the moon stealing into half-hiding is what fully mellows the storm of his bearing, perhaps it is the echo of shared breath between them, but when they close the distance, chest-to-chest, his body feels no more unyielding than a dissipating cirrus.

"Why?" he asks again, more rumble in his chest than word. "Why are you here?"

"I had to know," she replies, more mist from her throat than statement.

"Why?" She says his name again, tests it again, stop asking, but though he trembles, he asks her again, bows his head deeper into her palm. She untwines her hand from his, feels the silent protest in his body before she cups his other cheek.

"Stop asking," aloud this time, and before he can defy her, she stops his mouth with her own.

A reflection of a time before, candlelit and five cellars deep, but a hazy one, heartbeat pounding steady in lack of thought rather than tripping in a whirring too many. Grip of fingers, claws, shock and question but a different kind in the asper dim. She can taste the new 'why' mingling with the hours'-old brandy on his lips, says nothing, only pulls away to see glassy eyes wide, half-bloated lips parted without a single sign of breath.

And like then, she pulls him in a second time, like then, doesn't know why. Unlike then, arms wind to surround her, quaking rigid. Unlike then, the mouth beneath hers presses back.

The moon disappears.