A/N: A note that this chapter does include reference to maternal death.

He collected all the tributes to her in all the newspapers, and has them still. When he could find the words, he sat down and wrote his own tribute to her, he who was the one in their time who knew her longest, knew her best. Of course he had to write something for her, so he took a short sabbatical from his weekly newspaper column, and had that published instead.

Finding words to write about her was one of the hardest things he ever had to do, but he did it. Wrote about her, and all that she was to him. How she was the best sister he could have asked for, and the dearest person in the world to him, all about the things she did, and thought, and fought for, and how she took her grief over his brother and turned it into art, on the screen and on the stage, and how he was never less than proud of her.

The things he could say, and so much more that he had to leave out.

He must have drafted it ten times, to get it just right.

His favourite, of all the hundreds of others, was the one Noël wrote, sincere, and quiet, and in that quiet sincerity it was worth ten times more than those others overflowing with praise.

Before writing his own, searching through the newspapers to collect those others, he found the death notice that stalled his heart.

A woman he had never met, but a name as familiar to him as his own.

Daaé.

DAAÉ, Sylvia (25 April) (née Hughes)…after a short illness at…beloved wife of Alexander (Alex) and mother of baby Christine…

Baby Christine.

Baby Christine.

He gasped on the first breath he drew.

Christine's mother died, and she was only three days old.

(His own mother, unbidden in his memory, a ghost all of his life, dead when he was a day old.)

(Philippe's funeral, and the blonde girl looking as grief-stricken as he felt, her hand in his. Christine could have passed for his sister, both of them sixteen, mirrors of each other.)

He didn't know the woman, had never met her, Christine had never mentioned her to him only that she was dead, never even spoke her name that he could remember.

This was why. She, too, deprived at such a young age like he had been. She, too, with a mother who could never have been a mother, never knowing what it was that she had lost.

That they would be so connected—

And he didn't know the woman, but he knew Alex in and out of time, and he knew Christine, and he couldn't in good conscience know of her death, of her funeral, and not attend.

Sorelli would have gone too, if she were not gone already.

Only four days after he wore his best suit to her funeral, he put it on again.

The church was full, to be expected really. Funerals of young people who ought to be alive always seem to be the busiest.

(He's wonders, idly now, how big his own funeral will be, with him so long retired, so long on his own, half-forgotten by the world, maybe. A quiet affair, he thinks, and it might be better that way.)

He slipped in at the back, no room for him to sit, hardly room to see the altar with the crowd, and he stood back against the wall, safely hidden.

The heat, the incense, the priest's voice, were enough to make him feel disjointed, make him feel as if he were watching all this from outside of himself.

A man, who must have been somewhere around his age, did the first reading. A relation of some description, he assumed. (Fabian Valerius, he would later learn, a man he never got to meet, but would have liked to.)

(For the first time, he realized he didn't know what Christine had in the way of family. He hoped she had more than him.)

It was a woman who did the second reading, her voice steady, and gentle, and that gentleness washed through him, made his chest ache to think of Sorelli and how she should be there standing beside him, would have been, if things had been right.

(Would not have had to be, if the world were fair.)

(And of course he didn't know it then, but that woman, Anea Valerius, has become one of his dearest friends, too.)

The Gospel reading was about Lazarus. They always seem to like that one at funerals and it always sits heavy in his chest to hear it, when there is a coffin in front of an altar, when just to stop time and go back, just for a few days, is all he or anyone can ache to do, and the thought of resurrection is as intangible as the breeze.

A cruel sort of reading, at a time like that.

He closed his eyes against the tears, swallowed hard.

The eulogy, quiet, softly spoken. Sylvia Daaé, so tragically taken away at the age of twenty-four, a new mother, a young nurse. How she lived to help others, how she loved music, how she had been so looking forward to becoming a mother. How she had been married in this very church, only a year earlier. Some words about Alex, but Raoul couldn't hear them with the buzzing in his ears, that old deafness acting up on his left side, and then the priest was saying to pray for baby Christine, still in hospital, small and premature, and the sweat was beading cold on Raoul's skin, and he would have left then, would have stepped outside to get some air and not to intrude on these other people's grief when his own grief was enough to knock the air from his lungs, would have left if he did not feel a slim hand slide into his, and squeeze his fingers.

He blinked his eyes open, his vision sticky and half-blurred from the tears, and looked down at Christine, Christine come back into the past, from forty years in the future, to see her mother's funeral.

He squeezed her hand back, and she leaned into him, and he knew, then, that he would stay, knew that this must be why he had seen the notice in the paper, time's reason for it, that he would be there in time for her.

He hated being there, hated being a part of this thing that had no place for him, but for her sake, Christine, he'd do it again if he had to.

He wrapped his arm around her waist, and drew her close.

He's always hated funerals.

There was the shaking of the hands, after everything was finished, and Christine slipped outside, whispering that it would be too weird for her, but he joined the queue, and in that slow procession to the top of the church, he thought of many things, but mostly he thought how strange it was, that the first time they met each other in any way was at Philippe's funeral all those years ago, and he didn't know who this blonde girl was (how could he have?) who looked as devastated as he felt, but he's always remembered the feel of her hand in his.

That their positions were so very close to reversed…

(The thought of her as a newborn baby sick in hospital frightened him then even knowing that she would live and grow up and be well, and it unsteadies him now to remember it.)

Alexander Daaé, this young man of twenty-three, grief-stricken and pale, gaunt, looking as if he hadn't slept in a week, his eyes so blue, rimmed red from his tears.

He nodded dumbly, and swallowed, as Raoul shook his hand, and whispered that he was sorry, and he wished he could say so much more, but words failed him there, and he swallowed, and shook the hands of the other two people who were beside Alex, the man and woman who had done the readings (the two Valeriuses), and then he walked outside to sign his name in the book, and to find Christine.

Not for the first time that week, he ached for a cigarette.

Ached for a whole box of them.

Had Sorelli known? Known that within days of being born Christine would be motherless?

Surely she couldn't have. Surely, if she had, she would have mentioned it.

Christine wanted to join the procession to the graveyard, so they did. Out of place he might have felt, but she shouldn't have had to be alone and anonymous in that crowd when it was her own mother, when she had more right to be there than most of them.

He never had the chance to go to his mother's funeral, has never had any memory of his father's. That she could be at her mother's—

Leaving her alone would be wrong, just wrong.

(When everyone was gone, he hugged her close, and her tears were damp soaking into his shirt, but he wouldn't let her go for the world.)

They went for a long walk, neither saying anything, and every so often she would squeeze his fingers, as if to remind herself that he was still there, and he would squeeze hers back, a silent affirmation of, I'm not leaving you.

He never felt so old, until that day, under the weight of their griefs, different and intertwined. Sorelli, eight days dead (so long, so short), Sylvia, five days dead (a woman never known by either of them, really, but how she marked their lives). He wondered what she was like, wondered how much of her is in Christine, wondered what she would think of the amazing woman her daughter grew into.

He wished he could meet her, just to talk to her, just once.

("You didn't have to stay with me," Christine's voice soft, the evening closing in.

"I wouldn't be anywhere else," he whispered, and smiled.)

Eventually they made it home, and he made tea. Neither of them had any appetite to eat (he hadn't eaten much of anything at all since Sorelli died, not able to stomach the thought of it), but he made sandwiches anyway for them to pick at, and her smile was faint.

"You're too good to me," she whispered, "you've always been."

He shook his head, and covered her hand with his. "Never."

She swallowed. "Do you still have that chartreuse? That you bought for—when you were going to see Sorelli?"

The chartreuse. He'd given the cake to Harry, because he couldn't stand to look at it, but he still had the chartreuse, and with everything that had happened he'd almost forgotten about it.

"I do."

"Can we—I want to drink a toast."

"Anything you want."

He got up, and found the bottle, and set down two shot glasses on the table. She opened it, and filled them with a steady hand.

Six toasts, drunk in half-measures, to keep it from going to their heads, the chartreuse biting their throats.

The first to Sorelli, and the second to Sylvia. The two lives gone for the world.

The third to Alex, and the tears were damp in Christine's eyes.

The fourth to the Valeriuses. ("They were like grandparents to me," she whispered. "Fabian died when I was five, but Anea—Anea only died a few years ago. They took in my father, after his parents were killed in a crash.")

The fifth to her, and a tear trickled down her cheek as he proposed it. ("The most remarkable woman," he whispered.)

The sixth to him, and he swallowed against the lump in his throat as she smiled. ("My dearest friend.")

("She was weakened from tuberculosis," he breathed. "She had recovered, but in those days recovery was often only temporary, and having me was just too much and she—she died the next day. It was Philippe that had to organise the funeral. Our father, he—he just couldn't get his head around it.")

("It was an embolism," she whispered. "Stopped her heart during the labour and they had to deliver me by a section. When they—when they got it started again, her brain was too damaged." She swallowed, and he brushed the tears from her cheeks. "I've always wondered, if I had been normal, if she would have lived.")

(Both of them, that night, remembering, and they held each other in the darkness.)