I am ignoring things I need to do in real life. I was doing some little edits on Sum of Earthly Happiness and… this happened. I guess we all end up doing our Erik origin stories sooner or later. More notes at the end, but for now I'll just repeat that I've never read Phantom by Susan Kay and that this is Leroux compliant (expect for one little detail which I will discuss at the end, as well…) There's probably some triggery content here (severe depression, unspecified mental illness, indirect mentions of suicide, and, well, Erik's childhood.) And in addition to that, you'll have to put up with my meandering, unedited, stream-of-consciousness head canon. Enjoy!

He did not come for dinner, even to collect the tray Héloïse would usually make sure was prepared for him. That did not overly concern her. But the evening wore on and she heard no sound either from the piano in the parlor or from the fiddle in his room, and that was curious.

She picked up her prayer book and made her way to the nursery. It had been many a long month since she had read with him, before bed or otherwise. Years ago now he stopped following her finger across the page, murmuring mimicries, and instead would flip a page a read out new words in a too-clear, too-confident voice. He had not even been three years old when he had first done so, his own twiggy finger keeping his place as he said, Gloire à Dieu, au plus haut des cieux.

Héloïse suspected this was no mere repetition of her own words. She left him on the settee, sitting as they had been a few hand spans apart, and brought over her Bible. He had only ever seen the spine. She opened the cover, fingers dancing over the list of names and dates. They stopped over the last entry, the last of three under her own entry and that of her husband—just a date. It stood out, a middle unbracketed by either a name to start or a second date to finish. She felt a pang of conscience, but moved on, turning the pages until she found what she was looking for. She tilted the Bible so he could see, and put a finger under the first word.

Without any further aid, he read. Au commencement Dieu créa les cieux et la terre. It was a little halting, a bit mispronounced, but there was her proof. There was part of her that thought—well, if he is reading the word of God, that can't be bad, can it? But it had been hard to continue sitting next to him after that. She already knew that what she was offering him was a poor substitute for the doting kisses and caresses a mother should give her child, but it felt like the best she had to give. And somehow, he had taken that away from her.

Poor child. Poor Héloïse. They still had their starts and fits of reading together over the years, but they had grown fewer and farther between. He did not need her, she would tell herself. He read more books that she did now.

She hesitated at the door, and steeled her courage. She knocked softly. "Boy?"

There was no reply, and she was torn between concern and relief. She decided that he had fallen asleep. He was like his father in that respect—for days or weeks, Geoffrey would live with little thought for anything beyond his work, food and sleep falling by the wayside. Sometimes there was a building to be erected. Sometimes there was a technique to revolutionize. Sometimes there was just a number to hunt down. No matter what had caught his fancy, he would push himself, body, mind, and soul, to the precipice time and time again. Then all at once, he would go to bed like it was perfectly normal thing to do and awaken to live as an ordinary man for days or weeks. She thought of those as his peaceful days, as opposed to his whirlwinds. Boy, of course, could not quite follow that pattern at the age of seven, but Héloïse thought it likely the day would come.

…Though, she supposed, he would never live as an ordinary man.

Well, if he was sleeping, she would not risk waking him.

It was possible, now that she thought of it, that Boy could end up more like her. She had her own peaceful days, though no whirlwinds. She had mires. Days and weeks that blended together, without taste, texture, or tune. She had been like that for as long as she could remember: maiden delights cast aside because she found the task of washing her face or brushing her hair too onerous to bear. These days, she spent most of her time as a competent enough chatelaine, leaving little to the maid or the cook but basic duties. But then the peace would flee, for no apparent reason, and there was nothing to do but take to her room until the mire receded back to wherever it came from in the first place. What would be better for the child with no hope of living a normal life: his father's driven activity, or his mother's frozen seclusion? It was difficult enough to manage just the two of them.

Things worked well enough when at least one of them was at peace. She could set out clothes and food for Geoffrey when his mind was in the sky. He would brush her glorious titian hair for her, murmuring sweet assurances, when she was cast down.

They had found each other when they were both at peace, and how wonderful that had been.

He was too lean and sharp for traditional handsomeness, a figure draw in black ink on white paper. But she was a peculiar not-quite-beauty herself, with her red hair and too-light hazel eyes. She liked the unexpected harmony of his Guernésiais dialect playing off her own Cotentinais. He was enamored on her music. He, with his stacks of diagrams and formulas that he played with as easily as a child with blocks, would listen, enraptured. She would blush and tease him that love was deaf as well as blind. He would kiss her cheek, would hold up her shaky staff paper next to one of his own sheets filled with arcane numbers and angles, and whisper, it is one and the same, and it is magnificent.

Her parents had no qualms with the match. His particular branch of the Mauger family had been something to speak of in the years before the Terror. They had lost much in removing to the Îles d'la Manche, but they had kept their lives. That was before Geoffrey's time and past glories meant nothing to him. His mind was an inheritance beyond estimation, and his dexterous fingers worth more than a storehouse of jewels. He had come to Cherbourg alone, and there won masonry contract after contract, enough money to keep a simple wife in nice style.

Pax Nuptias, she would think with only a touch irony. Monsieur and Madame Mauger, the storm cloud and the quicksand, at rest together. They settled in Rouen, where there was much work for a master mason of Geoffrey's caliber, and they were content. She had always thought it was a favor from heaven that she had Geoffrey had found one another at such a time. If their temperaments had been misaligned that fateful summer, they would have missed out on so much. But as the years wore on, she wondered if it was less of a blessing and more of a test.

Together, they traversed the first storms—the first sinks. Héloïse did not think she could come to love Geoffrey more than she had on their wedding day, but there was a particular thrill to those first hours after the whirl of Geoffrey's mind would calm and she would realize He has returned to me. Love grew. And when she would come out of her darkness, and cry and despair over what she had put him through, he would merely hold her and say, It is worth it, to see your sunflower face again. How could she not love him still more?

Then they wrote in the first name under their own in the family Bible.

Éric.

Éric, who was so beautiful, so sweet-tempered. They were more often than not at peace together with Éric. When childhood illness took him, as it took so many children, Héloïse found that she was mired down with no one to pull her out, and that Geoffrey was flying away with no one to hold him down.

He found his peace before she did, after fitting a beautiful brink house together in inhuman time. He brought her a sunflower, setting the vase near her, and traced the spiral of the seeds. Look, Héloïse, it's the Fibonnoci sequence. It's it magnificent? They wrote the second date next to Éric's name, and so finished his story.

Élisabeth came next, but they didn't even have the few years with her that had already seemed too short with Éric. Again, they flew and fell apart. Eventually they found themselves.

But since Boy… Héloïse could not recall a time when they had both found their footing at the same time. She had already felt like a ghost at the end of the last pregnancy, and then after the birth—

She had heard his cries distantly, as if they were coming from another room. There was no desire to reach out for him, to clutch him to her breast. She had thought of Élisabeth vaguely. She had not been able to resist holding her cold little blue body, knowing that it would be the only chance she had. But this time? The mire had already claimed her before she had even seen her son's face. And what a face!

The midwife had been grim, but she did her duty. When Héloïse could not nurse, they took the baby away to make sure he was fed. They brought him back, and tried to rest him on her bare chest. Héloïse let him fall, not quite intentionally, but unable to stop it. She was so terribly tired. The second time they tried to put him in her arms, she saw. Élisabeth came to mind again. Too small, so cold, without so much as a single breath in her, but her face a perfect picture of future beauty. Then she thought of Éric, quiet and contented even in those first moments, with his luminous child-blue eyes. She could not find any resemblance to her angels in this, their wailing brother with a half-finished face and full-grown lungs.

The weeks dragged on. Someone fed him, changed him. Héloïse wasn't sure who. Geoffrey had taken one look at him, and the next thing she knew he had thrown himself into a massive project she could barely understand.

She was trapped, in a way she never had been before. She longed for sleep, but it never came. She would strike a key on the piano, and the sound would fall flat. He would cry, and she would stay wherever she was, unmoved and unmoving. She could not even think of what to call him. His christening was put off again and again. Geoffrey, in a rare moment when he touched down, was the one who called him Boy. They both knew it was not a proper proper name, though Geoffrey insisted that some people were so called. Héloïse knew she was basically calling her son garçon, as if he was a servant whose name did not matter. But the foreign word dampened the sting of guilt she felt over that.

They had always meant to come up with something better, but never had. How could they, when they were never quite together anymore?

Héloïse returned the prayer book to its place on her bedside table and went into the parlor. Perhaps Boy would come down when she started playing. Sometimes he would watch from the stairs as her fingers danced over the piano keys. She didn't mind.

Well, she had learned how not to mind. She could not bear to think of that day, so long ago now, when she had minded. He was so young, just able to sit himself up without help, and the hired nurse had left him in the parlor with Héloïse while she played. He had seemed entranced by the music. He had her eyes, she realized, that hazel that was too bright, and the beginnings of Geoffrey's hair, that was too black falling across the white and blue of his skin. She felt his eyes on her, and she was not sure who she hated more—herself, or the child.

"Are you a demon sent to torment me?" she asked. "What could I have possible done to deserve that?"

He said nothing in reply—of course, he said nothing in reply! But he blinked those great uncanny eyes of his, those eyes stuck in that face that was as ageless as death itself, and terrified her.

Again, it was Geoffrey who had pulled off the impossible while she was so desolate. She never quite knew how or why, but he must have sensed the dark, dark turn her mind had taken. Who could know what might have happened if he had not come into her then, holding and rocking her like a child—while their child sat out of reach, his cries silenced and eyes blinking as if dazed. (She knew, and she hated herself.)

The years trickled on. She did what she could. She taught Boy to read, at least by accident. She kept him clothed and fed. She would have tended to him, if he had ever fallen ill. But he never did, and she wondered if he did not want to test the limits of her motherly concern. She sewed him little coverings for his poor face, soft, comfortable disguises. He wore them without complaint.

Geoffrey was almost always awhirl in activity: on construction sites, in his workshop. He left trails of paper wherever he went, the palaces he built in his mind that were too large to stay there. Boy would look at these papers, sometimes tracing the sketches, sometimes mouthing the words and numbers. One day, he wrote out some papers of his own. He was left handed—of course, he was left handed. Héloïse bestirred herself to some measure of maternal dignity, and tied his left hand behind his back until he learned to use his right. He adapted. When Geoffrey saw the papers, a light came into his face that Héloïse had not seen for a long time. It went away when he actually looked at Boy, but suddenly Héloïse started finding Geoffrey's books laying around the house where Boy could reach them. These were the luxuries Geoffrey bought, now that she did not care about going to the dressmaker and no one heeded what they served at dinner. Worn out copies of Pascal's treatises. Visari's Lives, in both Italian and French. Fine little books with ancient Greek names stamped on their covers—Boy loved Archimedes dressed in red leather.

And then, there was music.

He never stopped watching her. Oh, in general Boy seemed to keep as much distance from Héloïse as she did from him, but the more she played, the closer he would come. They would sit on the extreme ends of the piano bench, Héloïse reaching far to get to the lower octaves. And then one day, just like he had started reading the Gloria without her help, he reached up and touched the keys.

She had been working through Beethoven's 32 sonata—the sheet music had been a little gift left for her from one of Geoffrey's peaceful moods that she had missed— and was pleased that she had gotten through both movements with relative ease. She stretched her hands, was about to rise, but ended up frozen in place.

Somehow, he knew to start at the beginning of the Arietta. His fingers were not strong enough, his hands not large enough, but they touched all of the right keys in good time. She could hear him humming underneath his breath, his ear unerring. He was not looking at the sheet music. He was too short to see it well enough, anyway.

"Oh, God," she breathed. "It's a gift. Oh God, is it your gift?"

She stopped him before he got to the third variation, terrified that he might be able to fly his fingers through that as well as he had the first two.

Just like Geoffrey's papers, music brought them together as much as it pushed them apart. It was too, too much—too wonderful, too horrible.

There were days when they lived like a happy family, but only in passing. Boy would play beautiful music that would set Héloïse humming. She would leave little cakes on trays for Geoffrey and Boy that would be cleared in obvious enjoyment. Geoffrey would make clever toys and vases of flowers appear. Yes, if they never had to see one another, they got on very well.

But those days were few, and they were a poor substitute for the peace and happiness that Héloïse knew could have existed.

Sometimes she would forget. She would call Boy by his dead brother's name from the room over, and would then need to take herself away crying. Who was she crying for? She had to wonder. For all of them, she supposed. For sweet Éric, who never had a chance to grow into the good man he surely would have. For Boy, who she had not even been able to name. For Geoffrey, off fitting ordinary stone into ordinary houses. For herself.

God forgive her, but if only Boy had been the one to perish—not Éric, not Élisabeth. His was the face and his was the body that had not been meant to see the sunlight. But, somehow, that spirit of his could not be contained. It did not matter how many tumbles he took out of tall trees or into creek beds, he never broke a bone. He was already a head taller than any seven year old Héloïse had ever seen. He played, if not as accurately as his mother who had more than twenty years of practice at her fingertips, then still with more soul that she had ever been able to put into composition, even her own. Sometimes it was just too much to face, and Héloïse was as relieved that he would willingly take himself to the nursery as she was glad that he had learned to tie on his own mask.

She wasn't sure what she had been playing, the music forming even as her fingers moved. It was something lighter, kinder than she could usually create these days.

"It sounds like summer." She turned to the parlor's entryway. Geoffrey stood, with sunflowers in his hand. He quirked a smile, and she returned it. He came and sat next to her, and she reveled in the quiet realness of having him so close. It was too much to hope that he would stay, that he would not leave her on his next flight of fancy. She did not have the mind to follow where he flew. And yet…

They spoke quietly of the things they loved. He showed her a new sketch. She played him a new song. The clock struck ten, and Geoffrey glanced across the hall towards the staircase. He did not need to ask.

"He was quiet today," she said. "Didn't even come to pick up his dinner—just like someone else I know." She paused and struck a discordant note by mistake. "I have not seen him since breakfast."

Geoffrey nodded. "I have a book he might like. But it will keep until morning."

There was part of Héloïse that thought, what kind of mother leaves her boy until morning? But she knew her Boy was made of sterner stuff, and could look after himself for the better part of one short day. For now, they were at peace and it was magnificent.

The next day, Geoffrey found her sitting in Boy's room. He collected clutter like all little boys—pretty rocks and bits of twine and spare centimes, besides all of the papers and books that he shared with his parents. The clutter was still there. The books and paper were still there. But not the fiddle case, and not his new coat, and none of his masks, and not the little pile of centimes.

He had not come down for breakfast, either.

And so it ends as abruptly as it began. Talk about rabid plot bunny. Believe it or not, this actually all came out of thinking of Erik's particular talents. I've always figured that Erik's genius lies in some profound, intuitive grasp of mathematics (something I do not have.) And since we know his father was a 'master mason,' I figured there was something inherited there. Casting his mother as musically gifted seemed like a natural next step. But then the question became, if Erik had something so innate in common with his parents, why could they not bridge the gap to have affection for him? I've always hesitated to put Erik in a background where he was profoundly mistreated simply because of his appearance. It seemed very plausible to me that his mother might have suffered severe postpartum depression, inhibiting the natural bonding process that might have otherwise taken place. And then what if it was not a one-off event for her, but a predisposition? And then what if we threw his father onto the opposite end the spectrum? Not horrible people, but people without the tools or knowledge to better cope with their situation. And voila—here's pretty much the unfiltered Antiquarianne creative process.

Last comment: the bit of canon twisting involves Erik's father. In the book, he specifically says that his father never saw him. But there's no reason to think Leroux's Erik is particularly reliable narrator, and the orbit Geoffrey lived around Erik no doubt felt terribly remote.