A/N: Thank you to my reviewers la vampire susan, EDV, and Laetitia du Chatelet. (Laetitia: I think we have some of the same taste in music. It's great to meet another headbanger on FF.)
As always, I do not own the characters of Christine, Erik/Phantom, Meg, Raoul or Nadir.
Chapter Fourteen – Friday, May 13, 2011
Trees, fields, telephone poles. The occasional cottage.
The sights that greeted Erik from the rear passenger window of the tour bus blurred together into a smear of brown and green. Unrestrained by the heavy traffic of the city, the tour bus was speeding over English county roads, making good time on their journey into the northeast of the country. The band was en route to a ruined castle a few kilometres outside of Alnwick that the label's creative team had chosen for the album's photo and video shoot. The van with the photographer, videographer, costumer, hair stylist, and makeup artist had left earlier that day.
As per his policy, Erik had refused to participate in the photo shoot, choosing instead to supervise the process and direct the designer on which shots to use in their promotional materials. The band would be spending three days on location, and, in addition to shooting still photos, they would begin filming the music video for "An angel for a ghost." Erik had given instructions for the video to incorporate a masquerade ball in which he would make a cameo – dressed as Red Death.
Christine, angel that she was, had fallen asleep in the seat beside him. She'd confessed that, while their first four gigs had been exhilarating, the performances had left her exhausted. Erik, pleased that she'd chosen to sit with him, hadn't complained when his travel companion had begun to snore.
The other band members had made themselves comfortable on the bus' bench seats. Richard, at the label's insistence, was joining them on the trip. Smartphone in one hand and a shot list in the other, he was at the front of the bus, giving directions to the driver and catching up on his email, sharing items of interest with the band by shouting down the length of the bus.
"Did you lot read the last blog post on ?" Richard asked.
"No, what'd it say?" Nadir asked, his voice gritty with impatience. The guitarist was known for his dislike of travelling in the bus.
"Sublime, magnificent," Richard declared. "A return to greatness for The Fifth Cellar; Don Juan Triumphant is poised to become the heavy metal album of the decade."
The last comment appealed to Erik. Happy, he turned to watch Christine. Her snoring had subsided, but she was still asleep. Her hair was tied back in a loose braid. Mussed by sleep, tendrils of brown and purple hair had worked free from the knot. Her face was relaxed, peaceful; a stark contrast to the fierce mask she wore onstage.
Since their first performance, she'd had supper with him once more, this time in the sanctuary of his townhouse. Away from the eyes of the public, he'd been more at ease, talking more of his childhood in France and his work as an architect. Christine, in turn, had revealed more. A strict and overbearing father, the pain of losing her mother as a young child, her struggle to come into her own as an adult. Later in the meal, they'd switched to French, a first language for both of them, although their accents and colloquialisms were different.
He hadn't touched her that night. She'd stood close to him after he took her home, looking up at him with hesitant green eyes. Did she want a kiss? From him? His mother had hated to touch him, instructing him to wear a mask from an early age. He'd had surgeries to try to correct the deformity, but each operation only increased the damage. Years later, when he'd dated Carmen, she'd pretended not to notice the mask, sweetly telling him that she'd find him attractive with or without the covering. After discovering her in a compromising position with Andrew, he'd ended the relationship, glad he hadn't revealed his face to the singer.
Watching Christine now, he wanted to touch her. A piece of stray hair had fallen across her face and was now brushing across her nose, dancing over her lips in time to her breathing. If she'd been awake, she might have been bothered by it, he reasoned. He glanced around the bus, making sure that the other band members were asleep or looking elsewhere. Satisfied that he had privacy, he reached down to Christine's face to tuck the offending strand of hair behind her ear. Her skin was soft and flushed with the warmth of sleep. She didn't stir, but he saw the corner of her mouth rise into a half-smile.
After a six-hour drive, the tour bus stopped at their hotel in Alnwick. The group checked in to their rooms and re-boarded the bus to make the twenty-minute drive to Dunstanburgh Castle, one of the largest fortifications in northeast England. The castle, built in the fourteenth century for Thomas, Earl of Lancaster, had been heavily damaged by cannon fire during the War of the Roses in the fifteenth century and its ruins had been left standing on a crag overlooking the sea.
The castle was a two-and-a-half kilometre walk from the parking lot. The crew had brought their van to the castle gates, unloaded, then driven back to the lot to park. Christine, excited at seeing the castle, had insisted on hiking along the road to the castle keep and, like a naughty toddler, had run ahead of the others. The pathway ran along the edge of a bluff that separated the land from the ocean. The air was thick with the smell of saltwater.
"Erik!" Richard called from several paces back. The band manager, who had put on some weight in the last three years, was huffing to catch up with the composer. "The director's just sent along the latest draft of the storyboard for the video. There've been some changes."
"Changes?" Erik repeated, stopping to let the older man catch up with him.
"Yes, the director, can't get his name right – Swedish fellow – has asked to have Christine saved by Andrew at the end up the video. He didn't seem to think, with your costume and all, that you'd make a convincing hero."
Erik opened and closed his mouth, swallowing his first angry reply before speaking, "Who gave the director authority to change the storyboard that I'd approved?"
"The marketing department," Richard answered.
"Idiots, the lot of them." What did marketers know about music? This was to be their fourth music video, and the first to include both Erik and Christine. Erik had written and conceptualized their previous three videos, hiring an amateur director who would follow his directions and giving explicit instructions to the post-production crew. The label's marketing department had chosen to bring in a well-known Swedish director, a slight that frustrated Erik.
"What would you like me to do?"
"Nothing," Erik said. "Nothing for now. I'll wait until filming starts and then I'll have a word with this director."
"You'll be polite?" Richard asked, as if checking the behaviour of a small child.
"I'm always polite; a characteristic you Brits can't always claim."
It was Richard's turn to open and shut his mouth in frustration. He'd managed The Fifth Cellar for the past three years and the outgoing manager had warned him about the band's difficult composer. Pay his salary on time and never question his creative decisions, he'd been told.
Ahead of them, Christine had stopped, and was staring with wonder at the ruins of Dunstanburgh Castle. The twin towers of the gatehouse keep loomed above the roadway. In the fourteenth century, the towers would have stood four storeys tall and lookouts would have been able to see an enemy's approach, by land or sea, from miles away. Today, the upper levels of the towers had been destroyed by cannon fire. Loose stones had been carried away from the site and used to build nearby houses and estates.
"I forget sometimes that Canada is such a young country," she said, speaking to Erik, but keeping her eyes on the gatehouse. "Our oldest cities were built in the 1600s. But this – this was standing hundreds of years before the French and English began to explore North America."
"I've always been impressed by what our ancestors were able to build without modern cranes and machinery," Erik admitted, his architect's eye mapping out the towers' support skeleton.
"Let's go inside," Christine suggested, pulling gently on Erik's arm. "I want to see more."
"Ladies first," he said, gesturing to the wide archway.
Christine strode into the castle keep, her eyes raking up and down the walls as she tried to imagine what the stronghold would have looked like when it was first built. The creative team was already inside, beginning to set up the lights and change curtains for the afternoon photo shoot. Crates and boxes of equipment were scattered about the entrance hall, looking anachronistic against the rough-hewn stone walls and broken stone floor.
The photographer was walking around the hall with a piece of chalk in hand, marking places on the floor where he wanted band members to stand and checking the light that came through the arched stone windows. Seeing Erik and Christine, he waved hello and pointed them to the costumer. Erik hung back, declining to participate in the shoot.
Christine, excited to participate in her first photo shoot, jogged over to the costume change area. The wardrobe coordinator, a woman in her late twenties with dyed black hair and heavy eye makeup, pointed out Christine's trunk and asked the singer to change behind a curtain in the next room. Elated as only an ingénue could be, Christine wheeled her suitcase away into the next room to change into her first ensemble.
Erik found a folding chair leaning against a crate and carried it to the far side of the castle keep, near the courtyard entrance. He unfolded the chair and sat, watching the crew members finish setting up the last of the equipment. Although it hadn't been his choice, Erik had to admit that the crumbling castle was an ideal place to take the band's promotional pictures and shoot the first scenes of their next music video. Inside the castle, the windows and door way brought light into the keep, piercing through the heavy shadows cast by the thick stone walls. The building's decay was equally evident inside the castle, and weeds and grass had started to grow through the cracks in the stone foundation. Outside, the long view of the sea and the steep cliff surrounded by acres of sun-bleached grass juxtaposed to form a dramatic and striking landscape.
The photographer was beginning to take the first photos of Michael and Edward, who were both dressed in monochromatic grey shirts, black jackets, and black jeans with heavy metal chains dangling from the belt loops. The man gingerly picked his way through the cables snaking across the floor, taking a mix of head and full-body shots.
Christine emerged from the change room wearing a strapless, floor-length burgundy dress and full make-up. Erik tried to keep himself from staring. She was stunning. The hair stylist had taken her hair out of the braid and left it down in soft waves that cascaded over her shoulders, ending at the base of her ribcage. When her turn came, the photographer began taking solo shots of the singer, using different angles and – for one set – bringing a fan to blow her hair across her face. The shoot lasted several hours and Christine changed outfits four times, sometimes appearing with the band, but often photographed alone.
For the last round of photos, the photographer paired Christine with Andrew, asking the two to stand close together and suggesting a variety of romantic poses. For one photo, Christine was posed falling into Andrew's arms, as if he was rescuing her. In another photo, Andrew was draped with chains and Christine pretended to yank Andrew towards him. In between takes, Andrew would whisper to Christine and casually touch her arm. Erik found himself gritting his teeth as Andrew's fingers brushed against Christine's cheek while he was fixing a piece of her hair that had fallen forward. He had touched that cheek, just hours before. A gentle touch that Erik had chanced giving. Andrew's touches were casual, and the handsome singer took for granted that the soprano would not flinch from him.
The injustice of the situation as mocking; in the four years they'd worked together, Andrew had had "relations" with at least a hundred girls, all of them beautiful. Years ago, Erik had had a short, fleeting relationship with Carmen. In the months since Christine had joined the band, he'd cultivated a sort of friendship between himself and the soprano and, later, he'd hoped – dreamed – to bring the friendship to a romantic status. In just two hours in front of the camera, Andrew had enjoyed more contact with Christine than Erik had had in two months. Lucky bastard.
Christine was now wearing a pair of tight black pleather pants, knee high black boots and the purple corset she'd worn on stage during their first show. The photographer had asked Christine to stand in front of Andrew, with one hand on her scalp, fingers tangled into her hair. In between photos, Erik caught the frontman's eyes dart downward, glancing at Christine's bottom.
"We're done here!" Erik yelled, yanking the nearest power cord out of its socket. Immediately, the photographer's lamps went out, casting Christine and Andrew in temporary darkness.
"What the hell?" the photographer bellowed. "I didn't order –"
Richard hurried over to the photographer, sending him a look to suggest quiet. Other crew members, tired from a day of travelling, setting up, and working, took Erik's cue and began to pack up the set. They would finish the photo and video shoot tomorrow.
Reviews & feedback are welcome. \m/