The first thing he did the day after Christine first came to visit him was to get a taxi to take him to visit Sorelli's grave.
He dressed in his best and brought irises for her, and when he set them down before her headstone he grinned through the tears in his eyes.
"I've finally met her properly," he whispered, "she's sixteen and she's been through so much but she's even more wonderful than you'd expect."
("You know I'd do anything to spare her any more suffering.")
Christine's Saturday visits quickly became the highlight of his week, and after they got past the initial awkwardness of those first visits she seemed as happy to see him as he was to see her. He asked about her, most of the time, because he was genuinely interested in her and what she was doing in school and what she was reading about for fun (and it amused him that what she was reading for fun were mostly big history books, so they talked about those and he was on firm ground with that), and he also wanted to give her something to think about that wasn't her grief.
When she asked him questions, about Sorelli or about Philippe, he answered them when he could, and when the answer might spoil something of her future he was careful to say either that he couldn't quite remember or that it was something he couldn't talk about, and cited her older self as his reason to stay quiet, so she accepted that.
When her tears came, he made her more tea, and made it hot, and gave her tissues damp with cold water so the tears wouldn't leave her face sore.
One week she brought her copy of Passionate Outsider with her with all her stickie notes in it, and a scrapbook of archived newspaper articles she'd printed out about Noël, and they talked about tuberculosis, and relapses, and the bits that, as far as he was concerned, Horgan had gotten wrong, but something stayed his tongue and kept him from talking about his own illness. Kept him from talking about Newcastle and Jack, and instead he swallowed and whispered, "I think we all knew someone who died from it." It hung in the air a moment longer than he liked, so he cleared his throat and asked her about her violin-playing, and the smile was better on her face than the sadness that had crossed it.
He was used to Christine visiting him for his birthday, but he was not used to her not having travelled through time to do it.
She turned up at his door a little after noon, wrapped in her big coat, the black dye cut out of her hair, blonde curls framing her face, her violin case slung over her shoulder. When he went to make tea for her, she insisted on doing it for him.
"It's your birthday after all," she said, and flashed him a slight grin, and for the first time he got a glimpse of the woman she would grow into, the one who had said that to him so many times when she turned up on that very day, and for a moment his breath caught in his throat.
He swallowed, and managed a smile for her. "I don't want to put you to any trouble."
"What trouble is it just to make tea?"
So she made tea, and they drank it sitting by the fire. And she played him a piece she had composed and it showed real promise, as he told her, and her little smile was pleased. He thought of the day she had played (would play) 'Mo Ghile Mear' down at Brittas Bay and he almost told her of it, this thing that her older self had done, but he swallowed it down so as not to spoil it.
She kissed his cheek before she left, and it warmed something deep inside him
"I'll come to see you after school tomorrow."
He smiled. "I'll look forward to it."
(And he was, and she did.)
It was seventy years, that year, since Philippe had died. He listened to Rachmaninoff on the old record player, and combed back his hair, and brought the bouquet of lilies Anea had picked up for him with him when he went to the graveyard. It was unseasonably warm for early March, one of those days where the promise of summer breaks through the spring, bright and golden so that it feels like the year has skipped ahead to June. His knee was acting up, so he didn't stay long in Glasnevin, but it was good just to be there, to be out of the house and at the grave and feel closer to his brother again.
He wasn't long home when Christine arrived after school. It was a new habit of hers, the occasional week day visit, and he always enjoyed it when she came, but he was tired that day, after his trip and with the emotions of seventy years before feeling oddly fresh and new, so neither of them said much.
She stood a long time, looking at a photo of he and Philippe on top of the mantelpiece. It was taken the summer before—Before, and they were out on the boat. Some local boy had taken it when Philippe showed him how to work the camera, and in the photo they're both grinning, he and his brother, their eyes shaded against the sun.
One of the last times he was on the water, he thinks, looking back.
But he didn't say that, because this Christine didn't know about his aversion towards going near the water, not yet, and he wondered, idly, when it was that she would find out about it.
"Were they happy together?" her voice was soft, and it pulled him out of his wondering, though it took him just a moment to realise that she was referring to Philippe and Sorelli.
"They were." His own voice was little more than a whisper, and her fingers twitched at her side as she nodded.
"Good. I'm glad."
Sometimes it was hard to think that this was not the Christine he had known so long. That it was her, but not yet, that she was growing into his dear friend, getting there, but she was a work in progress, in a way.
Strange, really, to think that he might have had any hand in how she turned out, when she had been his friend for so long before they met truly, properly, in time.
(A privilege, to have touched her life in any way.)
How he wanted to protect her, that year. To keep her safe from all those things that were happening, keep that renewed grief from her face when there was the Mass that marked a year since Alex had died. He closed his eyes and tilted his head back as he sat in the church lost in the crowd, as she played her father's violin, and thought of how proud Alex would have been to hear her, thought of how he wouldn't have had the strength to do anything like that at Philippe's first anniversary.
She didn't realise how remarkable she was.
Sometimes, he thinks she still doesn't.
(Erik does, he knows. He sees it in him every time he mentions her name, the different light in Erik's eyes to think of her, and knows that he knows he's found a true treasure.)
It killed him to see her suffer so with all the fuss over The Time Traveler's Wife. The restlessness of it, the way her bottom lip was bitten raw and her arm scratched from constantly picking at it. That was why he added the whiskey to her tea, the day she came to him, to steady her nerves, and when she curled into a ball on the couch with the newspaper, he decided the time had come to take out all those discs with the documentaries and things that her older self had made, all the things with Noël.
He knew she liked Noël, found him fascinating, and he couldn't blame her. Noël was fascinating, and if giving her those discs took her mind off the fuss over that damn film, then he would sit beside her and watch every one of them with her if she wanted him to, and never mind the ache of it in his own chest.
The tears prickled in her eyes as he handed them over, and he smiled at her so she'd know it was fine.
It was fine.
They went out to dinner the day she turned eighteen. He didn't want to impose on the small celebration she and Anea had decided on, but they insisted he join them so he did, and it was a pleasant evening. He hadn't been able to think what to get her as a gift. So many of the things he might have considered were things he knew she liked in her future, but in the end he settled on an original copy of Eva Gore-Booth's Broken Glory from 1918. He found it in a rare books shop, and it struck him as ideal. She liked poetry, and she liked old books, and Sorelli had once played Eva's sister the Countess, so he wrote an inscription on the inside cover, and had it wrapped.
When the evening came, her hands trembled as she opened it, and when she saw what it was she brushed her fingers over it as carefully as if it was the most fragile glass.
Then she hugged him, and it was so unexpected it winded him, just for a moment, before he hugged her back.
He swears he must have been nearly as nervous as she was in the run up to her Leaving Cert exams in June 2010. It was a relief to him that she didn't skip around through time too much, that she was able to sit and focus on her studying, but he knew he wouldn't be able to settle until she had them all done.
There was nothing he dreaded more than the possibility of her travelling in the middle of an exam, but he didn't tell her that in case the very act of telling her made it happen. So when she stopped in with him every afternoon he made her tea and they talked about the paper she had just finished and he refused to entertain the possibility of time pulling her away until every exam was out of the way.
The day she brought him the history paper and told him she'd answered on social change in Ireland in the period 1949-1959 despite not having studied that in school he almost put his head in his hands, but he swallowed and forced himself to smile and told her that he was sure she'd answered it perfectly.
(She had, as it happened. He hadn't doubted her.)
The day she got her results in August he was sitting in the car with Anea while she was in the school picking them up, and it was all he could do to sit still. Then she came rushing out and she was crying and he feared the worst and opened the car door to be ready to get out and assure her she'd done her best and they'd sort everything out, but before he could move she threw herself in and hugged him.
"I did it I did it I did it…" and then she reached across him to hug Anea and he took the sheet of results and examined them.
Top marks, in all seven subjects.
When his own tears came, he did nothing to stop them.
He was partial to Trinity, of course, having done his own degrees and spent his career there, but he'd been to UCD a few times for conferences and he liked it well enough. That she chose to do her undergrad there took him aback a bit, especially considering that Alex himself was a Trinity man and he'd assumed she'd make the same choice. Then she told him that she was saving Trinity for her PhD, and he decided that maybe she'd made the best choice after all.
There were two times, that winter, that he saw her in a terrible state. The first was when she had just gotten back from 1939, visiting Sorelli in the hospital for the first time, and when she turned up at his door in tears and threw herself into his arms, he hugged her and didn't ask where she had been, just waited for her to tell him herself. And when she did, he sat her down and gave her a finger of whiskey in a glass, and made her drink it slow to steady herself.
"It was an awful place," she said, and he squeezed her hand, and nodded.
"I know."
The second was Christmas Day.
She and Anea had invited him to Christmas dinner, the third one since they had met properly, so he got a taxi to their house and brought a bottle of wine with him. He'd given Anea the gifts he'd gotten them the evening before, when she came to tell him Christine had travelled and she wasn't sure she'd be back in time for Christmas dinner but they'd go ahead with it anyway. And he was wondering if she'd be back or not, when Anea opened the door to him.
"She's a bit out of sorts," she said as she took the wine and gestured him to the couch, and he wracked his brain to think when Christine might have come back from but couldn't settle on a likely possibility aside from maybe 1939 again.
She was quiet, all right, when Anea insisted they not lift a finger to help her lay out dinner, and there was something distant in her eyes, so when she sat beside him on the couch, he asked her what was on her mind, in case it was something best put into words. He didn't expect her to ask him what he remembered of New Year's Eve 1942, and it took him just a moment to reach back through the years to that long-ago night.
Then it struck him, a blonde-haired girl and a kiss.
Christine.
No wonder she was feeling out of sorts. He was out of sorts just to remember it.
So he told her, first, that it had blurred into other New Year's, and then he decided to let her know he did remember and it didn't matter at all, and when he quoted Sorelli ("a very clever lady once told me it is best not to dwell on the fingerprints left by that girl in our pasts") he saw the relief that crossed her face.
"Me?"
And he felt his grin widen. "Sorelli." And he remembered the night he had confessed to Sorelli, that he had once kissed Christine, long ago, and how she brushed it off as not mattering, and when Christine leaned into him, there on the couch that Christmas Day, he knew she understood that sometimes, what happened in the past was better off forgotten.
That she met a boy named Nollaig, a law student, he did not expect. He seemed a nice enough boy from what she told him, and he was happy that she was happy, something brighter in her eyes that he had not seen before, but he couldn't help wondering what it was that would happen to bring things to an end.
Her future self had never mentioned a Nollaig.
He might have been an old man, but so help him if that boy hurt Christine he'd have words with him.
If he met him, he'd tell him as much.
But he never got the chance. It was only six weeks later that Anea rang him with the news Nollaig was dead. Just collapsed, dead.
How he hung the phone up and it didn't just slip from his fingers he will never understand.
That Christine should have to bury a boy she was coming to love—
He thought of Jack. Thought of Jack, and kissing him for the last time before his surgery. Thought of Jack, and Noël coming to tell him he was dead. Thought of Jack, and the tears burned in his eyes, and he wished—how he wished she didn't have to go through that too.
All he could do was hold her hand through the funeral and it didn't feel like half enough.
She sat there stoic and pale between he and Anea, and he wished he could take that look from her eyes.
She should never have had to suffer through anything like that. Certainly not at her age, only eighteen.
Fuck.
Only eighteen, and to have to deal with that?
He was eleven years older when Jack died and he hardly survived it.
All through that spring she was quiet, different, and his heart ached and he wanted to tell her, so many times, that he understood, that she didn't have to suffer alone because he had been there and she could tell him anything and he would understand, but the words wouldn't come and all he could do was make her tea and squeeze her hand and hug her when the tears came.
If he could only find a way to put Jack into words and let her know that he knew—
The unnatural cruelty of it.
It was May when Alex came.
Alex, come forward from the day before he died, tired and grey.
When Christine turned up at his door with Alex at her side, he almost fainted clean away, but he steadied himself by gripping the door handle and gesturing them in.
"Raoul," she said, and she sounded happier than at any time since before Nollaig died, "I want you to meet my dad, Alex Daaé." And Alex gave him a look that said she didn't know that they knew each other already so he knew he had to play along, so he shook Alex's hand and said it was wonderful to meet him.
Christine slipped into the library, because Alex said he'd like to talk to him alone a few minutes, and his smile was gentle, and when she was gone Alex turned to him and Raoul couldn't contain himself a moment longer.
He hugged him tight, and swallowed.
"How?"
And Alex laughed into his ear. "Time travel, my dear Professor."
Raoul stepped back and brushed away the tears that burned his eyes. "I know that but how—how—" His knees buckled, and Alex's hand on his arm led him to his armchair.
"It'll happen a few times," Alex said softly, taking his hand and squeezing it. "It's all already happened for me, but it'll happen a few more times for you."
"I didn't think any of us would see you again." His voice cracked. He should have thought of it, he should have, he's dealt with this time travelling business longer than anyone, he should have known.
"I know. And it's not ideal, but it's better than nothing."
His laugh sounded half-hysterical even to his own ears. "Damn right it is." How ridiculous, him sitting there talking to a man three years dead yet perfectly alive in his living room. As if the whole world had tilted. Was this how Christine felt every time she came into the past and met him? Met Sorelli?
Christ. To be dealing with that the whole time.
He pushed the thought away, and swallowed. "I'm glad you could come," he whispered, feeling a little steadier, and Alex squeezed his hand again.
"So am I," he whispered. "So am I."