Surpriiiiiise!


He woke to a blue-grey dawn on the edge of a beautiful dream, to an unfamiliar room and the familiar yearning tug in his chest for Christine.

Christine, who in his dream had come to him swathed in moonlight, had stood behind him silent and watchful but had fled at the sound of her name on his lips.

Christine, only a few walls separating them, knees scraped, frightened and tired. And he, in a position he could never have expected—could it have been mere hours ago that Madame Giry had come to his door and begged his help, hours ago that Christine had been insensible on the floor and then a flurry of anger and resentment and sorrow?

Hours ago, that she had disappeared again and his mind had been transported to those other times she had run from him. In his fear, he had gone after her…

L'angelo si accosta, bacia, e vi bacia la morte. Corpo di moribonda è il corpo mio.

Something jumped, deep in his memory. It was from an opera, he knew this...

There was a squeak of floorboards in the hall, and he shot to his feet, instinctively moving to straighten his jacket before remembering he'd shucked it last night to use as a pillow. Long fingers fiddled anxiously with his cufflinks but the woman who appeared in the doorway was not Christine.

"Monsieur," Meg Giry said, chin high, the image of her mother.

He nodded, feeling every inch of the makeshift linen mask rasp against his face. The flimsy thing only added to his visceral discomfort.

God, he needed to leave this house, to leave her behind as he'd promised… but that was becoming harder and harder to do with every passing moment, with every heartbeat a clamouring reminder of her proximity.

"I have something of yours," the girl said without preamble, dark eyes glinting with apprehension. "And I have conditions, if you want it back."

He stiffened. "What could you possibly have that belongs to me?"

Her brows drew together as if in defiance, and she disappeared back into the hall for a moment before returning with something wrapped in a towel.

A flick of her wrist and the towel fell away, and there in her small brown fist was his half-mask.

The sight of it drove the air from his lungs and set off a melody in his head, of pounding organ and descending semitones.

"How did you get this?" he demanded.

She ignored the question. "Christine didn't sleep last night," she said. "She made a good show of it, for my sake, but I knew she wasn't sleeping. She's hardly slept in weeks."

His hands fisted at his sides. "And what of it?"

"She has been through too much. And too much of her pain has been caused by you." Her eyes hardened, and she held up the mask, knuckles white from clutching it hard. "So you're going to fix this for her—I don't care how, but you will, or else I swear I'll throw this thing in the Seine."

"You overestimate my attachment to it," he said. "I can easily procure another."

She looked at his face, and then her baleful gaze swept down to the rest of him, and she said, "You don't fool me. Maman used to tell the most fantastical stories of you, to make me behave, but I was never scared. I wanted to be like you, to know the bones of the opera house like they were my own."

She grimaced, and the hand holding the mask aloft dropped to her side. "I don't know what you are, or what you want, but my mother brought you here for a reason. You—you love Christine, don't you?"

She was waiting for an answer, and he groped in the dark for his voice.

"Yes," he rasped.

A stiff nod, the barest drop of her shoulders. "So do I. And if you love her half as much as I do, you want to see her safe. Can I trust you?"

He was dizzy, his lungs void of air, and this diminutive slip of a girl stared at his face with such steely determination that he was powerless to deny her.

His mouth shaped the words, and he spoke them into being: "Trust me."

He was alone again, the white mask glowering at him from the sofa. He had not touched it, had backed away when Meg Giry had held it out for him to take, and she had left it there and gone. The subtle blush-bloom of pink along the cheekbone, the rakish curl of brow, the porcelain-pale veneer: it was in remarkable condition, and he marvelled again at the quiet audacity of the girl. Where and how had it come into her possession?

One step forward, and another and another until his knees met the edge of the sofa. With shaking hand he palmed the mask, the other hand tearing away the linen wound around his head, and a thorny frisson ran him through when it was properly seated on his face.

The Phantom once more.

"I never thought I'd see that again."

He whirled around: Christine, barefoot, wrapped in a dressing gown, hair beautifully sleep-mussed. Eyes wide.

"I assumed—when you came, last night, I thought—well, you were uncovered…"

"Yes," he said, a beat too late, after the air between them had grown stale, "yes, I had… left it behind." That night.

He offered no explanation for the mask's sudden reappearance. If the Giry girl had kept this secret from her friend, he would not spoil it.

Christine's eyes flicked about the room as though she was observing it for the first time, and her gaze would periodically return to him, and oh, he felt naked without his jacket, his hat, but there was the mask now, at least, though it was a small comfort.

The silence boomed and crashed, a thousand branch-beats of the air, interminable radio static.

She was the one to break it. "Thank you," she said, brows drawn together as though each syllable pained her.

Not even eight o'clock and he was rendered speechless for the second time. She noticed, perhaps, because she flushed slightly and shifted on her feet and elaborated: "You helped me—saved me—yesterday."

Anything for you, he almost said.

I love you, he could not say.

"Samir Ayari," he said instead.

"I'm sorry?"

He stalled a moment, trying to trace this unexpected train of thought back to its origin. "An old friend," he said, "Monsieur Samir Ayari." Yes, this might work: might keep Christine safe, might satisfy his tenuous agreement with Meg Giry. Would not absolve him in her eyes, but then, nothing possibly could. "Retired now, but his particular skillset might prove valuable—"

"Valuable to what?" she asked, brows still puckered in confusion.

"Your safety is paramount," he said, conscious of but powerless against the undercurrent of desperation that laced his words. "I need"—he cleared his throat—"you must be safe."

"Safe," she echoed, rolling the word around in her mouth as though searching its taste. Her lips twisted in contempt. "After last night, that word has lost meaning to me."

"It will never happen again," he said, the pronouncement falling from his lips like an oath.

Her eyes burned a path across his face, then dropped, her mouth flattening into a line. She nodded once, slightly, and backed out of the room until he was alone again. The impression of her, standing only feet away, was seared into his retinas.

What a thing he had done… what damage he had wrought! Her spirit, the light in her eyes—he had once thought it inextinguishable, but her hollow-eyed stare was undeniably a product of his schemes and manipulations. When once the tension between them had thrilled, it now sat leaden in his stomach.

He had known that Don Juan Triumphant would change things between them irrevocably, had anticipated it: she, his muse, willing and curious and inventive; and he, doting and whole, finally, for the first time. In retrospect, his plans had been animated by little more than a child's fantasy.

And they had come perilously close to destroying her.

After it all, the thought of what his madness had bred would make his head pound and his chest tighten, and drive him almost to the brink of something dark and desperate, and so he would suppress it. Drown himself in music and fantasies. Languish like some twisted Romantic hero. But shame twisted restless in his gut, and he knew he could not hope to evade it much longer.


This was all so familiar, the sudden death of a man and surrounding it, music and mystery and him. But her life couldn't possibly fall further apart after last night, which seemed even in the lucid light of day to have been the worst of her nights…

And this man who was not a man, at the centre of it all. He, all wrapped up in and inseparable from her trauma, although this time not the architect of it. How to conceive of him now? She could hardly put her mind to him at all without that heart-twisting combination of anger and longing.

She was looking through the closet for something to wear, shuffling through brightly coloured frocks, but she saw only frightening vignettes from last night: the moment that man had stepped into the light, stealing her breath; falling to the ground, blood dripping stickily to her fingers; the Phantom, cradling her in his arms.

Most of all, the other man's dying and dead face, teeth bared and eyes empty. Soulless.

The feeling was all at once that it had not happened, could not possibly have happened, and that it was somehow still happening and would never stop, and she would be frozen and immobile on the precipice of her memory.

She had woken this morning from a shallow sleep, every muscle in her body urging her up, to stand and go to the living room, to him, to do… what? Cry, scream, hurt. Kiss.

She had closed her eyes again at that thought, squeezed them shut against the memory of that night, still so vivid, him trembling against her.

Finally, she had gone to him, more from the desire to wipe her mind clean than anything else, and he did not rage, and she did not cry or scream or hurt him or kiss him. He had stared at her, watched her closely like she would dissipate at any moment.

She had been struck anew by how strange he looked in the world outside the opera house, stranger still illuminated by daylight. Daylight, in his estimation cold and unfeeling, somehow seemed to move around him sluggishly and shade his features, as though there was something in him that naturally repelled it.

She was left with impressions, vivid in her mind whenever she tore her eyes away: the cut of his cheekbone, the sweep of dark eyelashes, the restless fingers. The curve of his mouth. That had been enough to send her fleeing.

After she had left him in the parlour, Christine had gone to fetch the Girys. Now, some bare minutes later, they were the four of them assembled in a strange configuration in which the three women had arranged themselves in a tight semicircle near the door, and he stood tense across the room, as though he was to be the subject of an interrogation.

"Christine has informed me of your intent to make contact with a… prior associate," Madame Giry said.

He nodded stiffly. "He has many resources at his disposal, which I intend to make use of to investigate this threat."

His eyes fell to Christine, for the briefest of moments, and heat flared unbidden to her cheeks.

Smoothing a hand over his jacket, he shifted his gaze to Madame Giry. When next he spoke, it was stiff and formal, as though he had erected some mental barrier. "I thank you for your hospitality, Madame. Rest assured that I will do everything in my power to ensure Christine's safety. And… you will not hear from me again."

The moment stretched uncomfortably until Madame Giry, inclining her head in acquiescence, backed out of the room. Meg was lingering, brows pinched together in concern, and Christine realized she was waiting for her, so as not to leave her alone with him.

A brief and silent argument took place between them, and Meg finally slouched off in defeat, tossing a glare over her shoulder that promised a reprisal.

In truth, she could not say why she had stayed, only knew that this parting, cold and abrupt, sat wrong in her stomach. He had always been fire and passion and temper: it was unnatural, this stillness, this sobriety. She had witnessed it before, after she had returned his mask that first night: a sudden, almost manic shift in emotion.

In a way, her instinct for provocation was a fitting counterpoint.

She edged closer, knowing only that she could not let him leave like this, on these terms. So much of their relationship, she realized, had been dictated by him; if she was never to see him again, she could finally liberate the truths that had been pressing against her lips, the thoughts and dizzying contradictions that had been accumulating ever since he had sent her away.

"You once told me there was a man behind the monster," she said.

All he did was nod, and watch her warily.

"You have done truly monstrous things," she continued, and her gaze dropped from his for a moment before she forced herself to meet his eyes again. "Abhorrent things. But… I don't believe that you are a monster."

"Then you are a fool," he snapped.

"There is goodness still in you," she pressed, and as she said it she found that she believed it. "Or there is space for it, at least. Denying it the chance to grow is what makes you a monster."

A muscle in his jaw jumped, and he turned away, raking an agitated hand through his hair.

"You hanged Buquet," she said, bold and incongruous in the still parlour, "and you laughed."

He jerked to a stop.

"And you murdered Piangi."

"Yes." Barely a whisper.

"What you did to me—"

"Christine, please—"

He was breathing heavily, and his fingers had gone shaking to his cufflinks, rolling and twisting them. One worked its way loose and fell to the floor.

Her eyes stung. She waited.

"What would you have me do?" he said, imploring.

"You can try to atone for it. For all of it. You can show me your remorse, prove to me that you have learned—"

"Believe me, there is nothing I do not regret—"

She laughed, and he wrenched back as though the sound had glanced across him like a whip. "Regret is not the same." He grasped fruitlessly for words, and her brows knit together in disbelief. "Tell me that you feel guilt," she said, "or—or contrition, anything—"

"You want my guilt?" he rasped, pounding a fist over his heart. "My contrition? Take it, then, all of it, because it consumes me!"

This was the crux of it, she realized: his nascent sense of self, of morality, which she had unintentionally and so carelessly fed, forcing him to confront his malefactions.

"I can't bear it for you," she said, "and I won't. This burden, this anguish: you caused it." Squaring her shoulders with a confidence she did not feel, she said, "I won't be held captive anymore, not by your guilt and not by your desires."

She had never been so bold to him, not even in those final aching moments underground when she had released a year's worth of anger and betrayal and heartbreak, and even then he had been too far gone, too enraged and frantic to hear her.

Here it was just the two of them, bathed in the reticent sunlight of early morning, the blood roaring in her ears but everything else so quiet.

He had stilled at her words, though his chest rose and fell in staccato bursts. She could not read his expression—she had never learned how—and he loomed over her, inscrutable but for his eyes, which roiled with some nameless emotion.

Finally, he spoke: "Then, let me do this, Christine—I will not seek absolution from you, but let me do this, and you will never see me again. I swear it."

That was what she wanted: to be free of him, of the influence and the intoxication of him. Without him, she could learn to be whole. The part of her heart that beat for him, that spread his music through her body like blood, she would tear it out and heal herself. She would.

Why, then, did the thought of him, gone from her life forever, make her chest constrict?

She nodded, and his mouth tightened at the tacit confirmation. "How do I know I can trust you?"

He spread his palms. "Do you have a choice?"

Ironic, that he spoke of choice… If life was a series of choices made, had she ever truly lived? What decisions had she made for herself? The men in her life had ruled it for her, moved her like a chess piece across a board of their own making, obfuscating and changing the rules when it suited them. Her father, her angel, her employers, even. And Raoul.

She had studied music to keep a piece of her father alive. She had been thrust into the spotlight prematurely. She had given her soul for music, whatever sense of self she had garnered eroded, and she had entrusted her heart to a man with the best intentions. It was all broken now, irreparably, and still she could not make sense of what she had been left with. A thread, hopelessly gnarled, that she could not untangle, that she feared might snap if she worked at it too hard.

But if this was the hand that fate had dealt her, should she not play it?


I really fought with myself over Christine's characterization in this chapter, but then I reminded myself that she has hella PTSD so I stand by it. Drop me a line and let me know your thoughts! I'll do my best to update again before four months have gone by. ;)