A/N: Thank you for the reviews and faves - you guys are wonderful! :)
Chapter XXV
.
The little boy by the lake materialized in the entrance. He broke into a wide smile upon seeing her sitting up and aware.
Momentarily startled, Christine stared back at the dark haired child. She instinctively pulled the sheet higher though she now saw he was younger than she first thought and could be no more than six.
"Hello," she said cautiously. "You must be Jacques."
He turned on his heel and darted away.
"Wait!" she called in frustration leaning toward where he disappeared. The action did not help minimize her lightheadedness and she clutched one hand to the mattress.
Why was it the children ran from her?
Within less time than it took to gather her wits, the boy returned, again smiling…
…and leading the Phantom by the hand.
Christine's eyes widened. Unblinking, she could only gape. The sight of her formidable abductor quietly led by a small child - who showed no terror to be with the masked man who towered over him a considerable distance - stunned her beyond all power of thought and robbed her of any attempt at speech.
The Phantom looked at her a breathless moment, for he'd stolen her ability to exhale too, then turned toward the boy, bending his knees and gracefully lowering his great height so the child could see his face. "Go play with your soldiers." He spoke low, so that Christine could barely hear, enunciating each word in command.
The boy nodded, swung another enthusiastic smile her way, and disappeared.
The Phantom rose and faced Christine. For a moment they only stared at one another, his expression inscrutable, her eyes wary.
Again he was dressed for leisure, wearing only shirtsleeves and trousers, as appeared to be his custom when inhabiting his home. An unbelted robe of black velvet carelessly hung from wide shoulders and swirled about his frame as his cloak had done. Rather than serve to conceal, it also pronounced his masculinity, almost an entity unto itself, a living, breathing presence in the room. The knowledge that it was his room made the awkwardness that much more intense.
"How do you feel?"
She gave a little shrug. "Is he…" A strange tightness in her throat made the words difficult to force out. "…is he your son?"
Her nerves were almost frayed by the time he finally answered.
"In a sense."
In a sense? What the hell was that supposed to mean? She frowned at him.
"I take care of him."
"And the girl?" The clipped words were out before she could restrain them.
His brow shot up, his lips twisting in a wry smile. "I take care of her too."
Recalling Meg's lively recounting of the Phantom's nocturnal exploits in vacant corridors, she pressed her lips together, deciding she would rather not know what that entailed and glanced down at the sheet covering her barely clothed body. Again she was reminded of her own prickly situation.
"Why did you bring me to your bed?"
"You do not remember?"
"If I remembered, I would not ask." She could only recall snatches of bizarre moments that seemed like one long, twisting nightmare. "And…" She swallowed hard. "Where is my uniform?"
"I burned it."
"You WHAT?" Her eyes flew as wide as they would go.
He steadily advanced toward her. She shrank back against the headboard with the same slow measure though she wasn't completely sure that it was only fright that should cause her heart to skip so strangely within her breast.
"I. Burned it."
"You're serious," she whispered in disbelief. "You really did burn it."
"Yes."
She blinked rapidly, trying to think. "You - you had no right! I - you …" Flustered in the face of his disturbing equanimity, she groped for words. "Why did you remove it to begin with? What reason could you have possibly had ..."
The blood rushed from her face and horror seized her heart.
"My God! You didn't …"
His eyes and mouth narrowed in disgust. "No, I did not. You suffered from a high fever. Jolene tended you."
Jolene. The girl. The petite girl who looked as if a strong wind might blow her to the other side of the cavern…
Christine vaguely remembered Jolene's small hands and birdlike wrists with skinny arms. Christine was strong but it had taken her and Berta both to help Elizabeth out of her gown when she was in labor. Barely conscious, she had been a dead weight.
"Jolene removed my outfit. She must possess the strength of ten men." She would have had to roll her over to reach the tiny buttons on the skirt and removing it would have been no easy maneuver. Nor could she imagine that pulling the chemise over her head would have given less trouble.
His lips twitched at her gross exaggeration. "She is not weak."
"You do not actually expect me to believe -"
"If it will cease your tiresome dramatics, yes, I removed your clothing. It was necessary. You were burning with fever, and Jolene needed to sponge your body down with water."
Her face bloomed with heat at his forthright words in so intimate a setting. He did not appear the least bit daunted. She looked away from him, at a sudden loss for words.
His gaze remained fixed on her.
"The bruises. How did you get them?"
His question came low and soft, forced as if he did not wish to ask it, but a slight ring of steel edged his tone as if he was determined to obtain an answer.
Her heart skipped a beat in dread recollection, but she evaded the brief memory and looked up at him through narrowed eyes.
"I was thrown against a wall of rock."
"To save you from a worse fate, yes, I recall it well. I speak of the old bruises. The ones … elsewhere."
Her face heated with mortification. He admitted to removing her clothing; he would have seen the remnants of bruises above her shift.
"I fell."
She lowered her gaze …
…would tell him nothing.
The ensuing silence made her fidget …
… anxious … breathless …
What could he possibly be thinking to remain silent for so long?
"Were you attacked?"
She winced at his harsh, blunt words. Unexpected…intrusive and demanding, like their master.
Too frail of mind and body, this time with nowhere to run to escape the horrific memory that still haunted fitful slumber - and now returned in the awareness of day with a force that blinded and mocked any further attempts at desperate evasion - she relived the pain of Henri's brutal hands and revolting mouth violating her in places where only her lover's hands and lips had been …
Her dead lover. His body riddled with bullets. He could not protect her then, could not protect her now. Never again could make her world right … Erik had deprived her. Henri had despoiled her. The blithe girl who had been Christine would never again be whole. She might as well be dead, left as nothing but a fragile shell…to crumble and escape back into the eternal void of blessed emptiness….
The Phantom quietly swore. In an instant, her face had gone from flushed and rosy with indignation to pale as parchment with despair. The change came so swift and sudden, it left him stunned. Her body began visibly to tremble. Without seeming to realize she did so, she brought the sheet tightly around herself and softly began to rock back and forth while her large, haunted eyes stared vacantly ahead at the cave wall.
Dear God! Had she been …
He squeezed his hands into fists until the nails bit flesh and forced himself to remain distant, motionless.
"Mademoiselle."
She did not look at him…
Her large eyes slowly lowered to the sheet covering her knees as if she were in a trance.
"Mademoiselle Daaé!"
Her breathing grew labored…
Her eyes widened with horror as she seemed to relive some terrifying experience, then they glassed over, vacant, as she drew deeply into herself.
"Christine…"
x
The quiet sound of her name rolling off his tongue wafted over her, soft and gentle, a silken breeze flowing through the cracks of her beleaguered mind, brushing against her wounded heart.
She stopped rocking. Grew very still. Blinked...
He spoke her name again, this time a tremulous whisper. Softly it shook her, pulling her back. With a sluggish lift of her head she looked up, past the impenetrable black mask and into steady golden eyes. Eyes that no longer seemed cold and distant but glowed with furious concern. The tremors came more strongly. Tears clouded her vision.
"He hurt me," she said in a whisper-soft childlike voice, words she'd never been able to utter. Silent and slow, the tears streamed down her face. "Why did he hurt me like that?"
The Phantom viciously swore a second time. In a few long strides he was sitting on the bed and pulling her close. She pressed her cheek against his warm, solid chest. The sheet fell between them but it failed to matter. His arms felt secure around her body, his hands firm against her back as he held her protectively to him …
And Christine clung to this man.
God, it made no sense! But then nothing did or ever had. Exactly as what occurred on the first night in his caverns, when he rescued her from sudden darkness, Christine again found safety in her abductor's embrace. She clung to his shirt, then his shoulders as her trembling increased and weeping came in earnest. Deep weeping she felt powerless to control and did not wish to try.
All the tears she cried in England had sprung from immediate horror and pain. These tears she now shed - of anger, of regret, of guilt and heart crushing anguish - had festered inside for years, building up behind a dam of forced restraint with each tragic occurrence. Now they raked through her soul as they burst from the very depths of their prison.
Henri had abused her body, but the loss of Erik had destroyed every facet of her being. She was no longer sure for which adversity she cried most, or even which man she had spoken of – Erik had hurt her too, by leaving. No one had been able to help her release all the pain that stemmed from his death. Not Berta. Not Raoul. Not Arabella. The hollow, chill ache was always there as a reminder of her eternal emptiness. But here, in the arms of this merciless Phantom who had abducted her and kept her his captive – at last she was able to release those deepest layers of her greatest sorrow and again find warmth …
Which made no sense at all.
A turbulence of feeling swept through him as he held her, his anger and vengeance toward the wretched Vicomte building with every tear she shed upon his neck…his horror at what must have happened to her intensifying with every desperate clutch of her small hands upon his shoulders…his iron wall of defense he had built for four damned solid years pummeled against with every heartrending sob and vulnerable gasp near his ear.
This was a mistake. God, he knew it was a mistake. Not even one week in her company and that protective wall threatened to be blown to oblivion! He could not let her affect him – he was indifferent to her, damn it – he would not again give her opportunity to destroy him with her sweet lips and false tongue. But with her soft curves pressed so close, her body warm and clothed in nothing but her damp shift, his heart was not the only part of his body so strongly affected. He cursed the tightening in his loins and the heat singeing his blood.
His mind played unwitting host to memory, to other occasions that haunted and coerced. Of the tortured nights and provocative dreams of being one with her, impossible to eliminate - in slumber the mind vulnerable to desire and mocking all attempts at apathy. Dreams were phantasmal, snippets of bright illusion that faded away to dark loneliness once again. But this, this was all too real, a sensual weapon to undo every one of his carefully contrived plans…
God, to feel her in his arms again, to feel her holding him. It was bliss and it was hell but surely it was the closest he would ever come to heaven.
He was a fool not to pull away from the torture she innocently inflicted but could not find it within himself to abandon Christine in this broken state, when she so greatly needed someone to hold her. He knew anyone would fill that spot, if someone else were available - since it was the villain who once drugged and abducted her and the beast she so strongly despised that she now clung to with such desperation.
Despite all better judgment he tightened his arms around her slight form and buried his face in her hair as she continued to drench his chest with her tears. She was so damned fragile. He did not wish for the details of what happened – did not think he could bear to hear such foul words uttered – that would surely shatter every hard won obstacle of resistance. But God how he wanted to rekindle her spirit! To see the enthusiastic sparkle that once had been a permanent fixture in her lively eyes, all of it absent since her arrival to the opera house. He smoothed his hand down the back of her head and the riotous curls that still felt like long springy coils of raw silk…
Damn it! NO! This was not part of the plan, and he reminded himself as he had so many times since she'd come here why such a plan was necessary.
Christine felt the Phantom tense and begin to pull away. Nervously she tightened her hold, drawing her arms up around his neck. In her present state of emptied mind and weakened body she felt more anxious to be without his company than for him to be near. She wanted him near. He felt … safe, perhaps the most bizarre paradox of this entire experience.
"Please, monsieur," she whispered hoarsely over little hiccups of sobs, "will you sing to me?"
Her meek, quiet words startled him into immobility. Her warm breath and the innocent brush of her lips against his neck as she spoke them aroused his blood. He fought the powerful urge to draw her onto his lap and taste deeply of those trembling lips until she begged him for something far different than music...
Clenching his jaw, he forced concentration to her plea, finding it ironic that he commanded the same from her, to sing, one of the very reasons she was kept his prisoner. His music might be the only method to put an end to this present madness. With his voice, he had learned to manipulate emotion. After Persia, he swore never to do so again.
Tonight only, he would break that vow.
He began to sing, his voice low and hypnotic, soothing Christine with what sounded like a French lullaby. Her frantic grip on his shoulders slackened, her lids growing heavy and slipping closed as he crooned to her in a rich, beautiful voice that belonged soaring through a realm of clouds and sky, not buried deep within caves of outer darkness…where no angel belonged…perhaps not even a phantom in angel's disguise…
Christine vaguely felt him lower her to his bed, now cocooned in such a warm, trusting peace all consuming fears and anxieties melted away. Slipping further into the oblivion of quiet slumber, her lips tilted in a faint smile.
Overwhelmed by the entire occurrence, the Phantom moved from her and covered her with the bedding. His emotions in a turmoil of conflict, he stood and watched her sleep as the minutes made their passage. He dared not dwell on the reason for her emotional collapse, he could not. Secretly he had sworn to make her life a deserved punishment; instead he had given his deceiving little angel one moment's tranquility, but suffered no regret for the temporary lapse.
He frowned and quickly left the bedchamber, escaping to his dark music, the one source essential to reclaim his detachment when all else failed.
xXx