Alex Daaé comes to see him one morning.
He's always liked Alex. It was 1947, he thinks, when they first met, and that time Alex was coming from 1998. And he was mostly there to see Christine, of course, but it felt like the oddest possible thing in the world to meet the man. And that was before he knew he was dead in the time that Christine herself was coming from. How much stranger must it have been for her, to go seventy years into the past and meet her father who was dead in her time and hadn't been born in the time she'd found herself in? Terribly strange, he imagines.
It hasn't happened yet, he doesn't think, for her. If it had he thinks she would have told him. She usually tells him, now, when she runs into some past version of him, and even when she doesn't. He always enjoys it, seeing his younger self through her eyes, hearing about the world that time has left behind.
But Alex comes to see him, and knowing that it will be the last time he sees Alex cuts something deep inside. Before this he's always been able to tell himself that in all likelihood they'll meet again. That the man will come forward to see Christine and they'll get to have a cup of tea and a chat. Even after the wedding last year, knowing that his life could now be measured in months, he still expected that he would see Alex again, and so he has.
This time, he knows it's the last time.
And Alex knows it too. He can see it in his eyes after he stumbles down the stairs (and that was the first sign, that Alex had come to see him this time and not Christine. When he heard the thud he thought it was her, until he realised it was a slightly heavier step, and then he knew). Alex didn't expect to find him so old, and when he gives the date as 5 March 2017, he sees the realisation dawn in Alex's eyes.
So he pushes himself out of his chair, and straightens up, and insists on making tea, even when Alex tries to persuade him to let him do it instead.
He still has it in him to these things, to act a little younger, just for a while.
Alex, as it happens, has come forward from 2006, his blond hair streaked grey. When he was younger he looked very like Christine, always wore his hair slightly long, and even the grey hair is very like some of the older Christines that Raoul has known.
It's not right, really, that he should have lived such a long life, when Alex died at thirty-nine. At thirty-nine he was busy falling off that damn ladder and landing himself in hospital with his broken leg while Noël and Darius were protesting the Cuban missiles.
Frightening to think of it like that.
(What gave him the right to live all these decades when he had no family, no daughter, and never would have? Why could Alex not have lived instead and spared Christine that grief?)
(What, and why, the questions that have haunted his life, and it's best not to think of them, now.)
He doesn't mention the unfairness of it to Alex, of course, just makes him tea and takes a packet of chocolate digestives out of the cupboard. Alex always likes the chocolate digestives and that's something too he passed on to Christine.
"You don't have to go to such trouble," Alex says, the hint of a smile playing around the corner of his mouth, and Raoul shrugs.
"I don't have many opportunities left."
A slight flicker, a downturned lip, and then, "How long have you known?"
The answer comes easily, familiar now, comfortable. "Twenty-four years." And as Alex blinks, and looks from the tea back up to him, he shrugs again. "How long have you known and not told Christine that you're going to die?"
Alex winces, a flicker of pain across his face, and his voice is soft as he whispers, "Nine years. It wasn't long after she first went into the past."
Raoul nods, and smiles wryly. "We've both been keeping secrets."
("Thank you for being there for her when I couldn't." "I wouldn't have had it any other way.")
The first time he met Alex Daaé in what Christine calls linear time was 1988. Alex was nineteen, a student in his module on Irish Nineteenth-Century Politics, one of twenty. Raoul had known him for decades by then, the older version of him who might turn up once every couple of years having been cast back from his own time. The first morning he walked into the hall, he saw this blond boy with his hair growing down to his shoulders, and something about him seemed familiar but he couldn't place why.
It was when he went around the room, asking everyone their names, and that familiar-not familiar face said, "Alexander Daaé," that he realised who was here before him.
Christine's father.
The shock of it left him lightheaded and he had to sit down.
Alex, of course, didn't know him because he hadn't met him yet, in the past or the future. For a moment Raoul's brain completely blanked on what he was supposed to be talking about. He started rambling about Parnell and how the British tried to slander his name, and knew they'd all be calling him eccentric by the end of the class, but it was the first thing he could think of and he needed to get his thoughts in order.
Christine's father, his student.
Only he wasn't her father yet, and wouldn't be for years to come.
It struck him for the first time that he didn't know when Christine would be born, and he decided against asking her the next time she came. She probably wouldn't tell him anyway.
Alex only missed a handful of classes that semester, with the excuse that he was ill, but Raoul didn't mind. How could he, when he knew the boy was travelling through time and it wasn't by choice? Such trouble he had keeping it secret that he knew, because that would only lead to questions, and he didn't think Christine's father would appreciate it too much if he found out about his future daughter from one of his lecturers. So he kept quiet, and when Alex walked in late one day and said how he was delayed by his car breaking down, Raoul just waved him to his seat, even knowing that neither he nor Christine had ever driven a day in their lives.
How he managed to survive those twelve weeks he will never understand.
("Thank you for all you've done for me, too." "I only wish I could have done more.")
It was only afterwards, only early in the next year, that he mentioned it to Christine that her father had been one of his students. He didn't know if she knew or not, didn't know if her father had ever mentioned it to her (didn't know at the time how young she had been when her father died), and this Christine was as old as him, in her sixties too, but she smiled when he told her, and said it was nice to know.
(He's almost told this younger Christine, too, of linear time, but every time he's tried the words have caught in his throat, so maybe it is that she isn't supposed to know yet, and he hates that they haven't been able to talk about him properly.)
It was fifty years, that year, since Philippe's death. Half a century since his life was robbed from him. Put like that, in years, it seemed so much longer.
Raoul wondered, briefly, if he should have organised a Mass for him. It would be the expected thing to do, but without even mentioning it to Sorelli he decided against it. Philippe had been moving away from the Church when he died, and if he had lived and seen everything that happened since, that transformation would surely have been completed. Organising a Mass for him would seem dishonest.
He took the day off from work instead, and so did Sorelli. Together they went to the graveyard, in their traditional way, and brought a bouquet of lilies and another of irises. And they stood there a long time, holding each other's hands, and not saying much at all.
What would Philippe think, if he could have seen them? Both of them, aged inconceivably from how he had known them, Sorelli after taking up using a cane because the cold of the winter had caused the old ache in her leg to play up. In his darkest dreams, would he ever have imagined what happened?
They went home together, and looked at old photographs of him, and lit every candle in the house. Then they lay down on the old bed still in Philippe's room, that Christine sometimes stayed in when she came, and whispered, quietly, of their last memories of him, so fragile after so many years.
("He kissed me and told me he'd see me tomorrow." "I got a letter from him that morning. He was making arrangements for the Easter holidays, when I would be off school." A slight laugh. "We were going to go sailing.")
("I knew from the very start that you were the dearest person in the world to him." "I knew from the moment he introduced us that you were different to the others he'd brought home.")
Between the two of them, it was the best way, really, to mark it.
At the end of the semester, right before the summer holidays, they named him the new head of the History Department.
He'd applied for it, interviewed for it, but he didn't really think he'd get it. True he had forty years of publications and research and conferences to his name, but he'd never taught anywhere other than Trinity, aside from a semester or two at Queens at different times. It didn't feel like there was anything really to set him apart, and he'd set himself up that he'd probably lecture on for another few years and be content with that.
The day they phoned him to tell him the news, he almost laughed when he was still on the line. When he hung up, he scratched the back of his hand, to be sure he could feel it, be sure it was real. And when that stung beneath his nails and his heart was pounding, he knew then that it was no dream.
He dreamed up, and restrained the urge to yell so as not to disturb anyone else in the building, then went outside and ran the length of the courtyard.
Looking back, he's sure it added to the rumours of his eccentricity. Students, groups of friends, couples all gathered under the trees each side, talking, laughing in the grass, and him racing past. They must have thought he'd finally lost it, but all he knew was that he had to run, he had to move, he was head of department and his heart was racing and he had to do something.
He raced back to his office, took the steps two at a time, and collapsed into his chair. And in the breathless laughter he poured himself whiskey from the bottle under his desk, and rang Sorelli.
(She must have heard the breathlessness, because the first thing she asked was, "what's wrong?" and he laughed and said "nothing, nothing at all, but I'm after getting the best news…" She shrieked the shriek that he couldn't when he told her, and he laughed louder than he had ever laughed in his office, not caring who heard him in the rooms either side.)
There was only one man to ask to take his official photograph.
Harry.
Harry made the trip down from Belfast specially for it, and Raoul put on his academic gown, his glasses, fixed himself into his chair with his book on Casement in his lap, doing his best to look stern when it was all he could do to keep from grinning. Not proper, to have the head of department grinning in his official photograph, but how could he help himself? Him, head of department, and Harry photographing him. Restraining himself from grinning was the most difficult thing to ask him to do.
("I know it's hard but you just have to sit still, Raoul." "I'm doing my best!")
The final product is perfect. Him in his scarlet gown edged with the yellow silk, sitting back in his chair with his legs crossed, glasses perched on the end of his nose, the book open in his hand. The lightness of his hair adds to the sternness, its flyaway style adding a touch of eccentricity. The best official photograph he ever had taken, and when he told Harry that, Harry winked.
"You know I do my best work when it comes to you."
Harry stayed for a visit after taking the photograph, and told Sheila he'd gained a new commission. It wasn't quite a lie, because for the week he stayed with Raoul they went through Jack's old poems, and his photographs, and assembled the best of them into a collection.
He'd been published in journals when he was alive, had exhibitions of his photography, but he didn't live long enough to have a published collection. The journals were obsolete, the exhibitions long forgotten, and it felt wrong to have these pieces of his art and not put them into the world somehow for people to see, to know how brilliant he had been.
So they set themselves the task, and chose what they would include in a collection of his writing, of his photos. Jack, the one who brought them together as friends, and as lovers, and then as friends again. Only right, that they should honour him together, and they talked about him as they went through it all, remembered him and how he had been, and Harry laughed to find some old photographs of himself that Jack had taken before he was ill, artistic platinotypes of him by the water, one with him nude, sprawled on his back, beautiful in the light of the sun, forty years younger. Raoul offered to let him keep them if he wanted, but Harry shook his head.
"He gave them to you, and anyway, I'm fairly sure I have my own copies tucked away somewhere."
Raoul couldn't find words to write a preface for the little collection, the grief still too close after all of the years, but Harry did, and wrote a tribute to their dear lost companion.
It was Raoul who found the publisher, a limited run. But it put Jack's name into the papers, and he would have loved that, if he could have known.