That night Erik's sleep was plagued by dreams. Vague, restless, dreams that flickered with half-felt sensations and desires that slipped away like water through cupped hands as he tried to peer closer.

He woke and dozed repeatedly and finally rose after what felt like only moments of sleep. He rose to a ravenous night that seemed intent on devouring him. It was deep night still – it was easier to tell from up here in the theater. To his shame, Erik had fled, both of them desperate to get away from one another to examine their feelings. He had left Manon in the grotto bedchamber along with her secrets and her kiss and her dark dark eyes and had sought refuge, perversely, in Box 5, where he'd slept his fitful hours stretched out on the plush carpet.

But there was no rest to be had here. He rose with a groan, settling his cloak over his shoulders, and left the box. He prowled the loge corridors, noticing anew the friezes and statues and a hundred other maddening echoes of Manon's doe-eyed appreciation of his opera. He walked faster, trying to outpace something that was impossible to evade.

Since striding the corridors was doing nothing to quiet his crackling nerves, in desperation Erik took to the flies, hauling his body over and under and around the beams and ropes. Panting and perspiring, he discarded his shirt, pushing himself harder in an attempt to exhaust himself.

But it was useless. Soon enough, Erik found himself tracing the halls of the cellars, winding his way back to the cavern with his blood roaring in his ears.

When his boat slid to shore he tethered it carelessly and leapt onto the bank, intending to pound at his organ until his fingertips bled. But as soon as he took one step, he saw Manon.

She was pacing like a caged tiger, her inky blue robe billowing and snapping behind her, her damp chemise still beneath it. Erik stared at her as she noticed him and stopped. He was sharply aware of a sudden airlessness. All at once the cavernous grotto was stifling, his mask prickling, and his distress acute.

"Air." It was a croak. It was all he could manage. Manon stared at him, not having moved a muscle since she'd seen him.

"On the roof. I'm going to the roof." His mouth and brain had finally begun to engage and communicate with one another. "Are you coming?"

She spun around without a word and disappeared into the bedchamber. In the time it took for him to find his warmer cloak in the study she had returned, dressed hastily in charcoal wool, unlaced boots, and a hooded cloak.

They departed in a silence far louder than the companionable quiet they had become accustomed to. It crackled and mocked and filled the air like a fog, reverberating off surfaces, pooling in gaps, keeping him acutely aware of Manon's precise position and movements with a blind man's sense. Erik focused on sucking as much air into his lungs as he could manage as he poled the boat. This was intolerable.

They emerged again in the dancers' quarters where Manon had originally been housed. Erik had finally managed to muscle his senses under control, and swallowed thickly before he finally spoke.

"There are many ways of reaching the roof from throughout the building. Each of four corner staircases lead to a common loft, from which a single door opens to the roof."

They had reached the largest of these, rising in a vertical spiral amid the backstage hive of stairways, trottoirs, and sub levels. They began to ascend, the exertion a relief. Manon had made a noise of acknowledgment but still hadn't spoken.

Where before he couldn't have ground out a sentence if his life had depended on it, Erik now found himself unable to stop from filling the silence like a deranged tour guide. How was this any better than the silence?

"This was the route most often used by maintenance staff, although they rarely had need to. With the exception of periodic upkeep of the gilding, Garnier's clever roof and gutterwork design obviated the need for much routine care."

"A private terrace for you then," Manon said, breaking her silence for the first time, "how luxurious in central Paris."

Erik laughed mechanically; the sound of it had a tinge of the hysterical to his ears. His lips settled into a grim line as he resolved to shut up. His world as tilting on its axes and his control was dissolving. He wanted to clutch her and hit her and kiss her and scream at her and cherish her. He was, in short, in love, torn between his needs to know all her secrets and to tell her all his and to leave and forget all he'd seen.

They emerged, finally, onto the roof.

Both Erik and Manon stood for a moment, gulping greedily the sharp night air. It flooded in a welcome rush into Manon's eyes and ears and belly. The night had the silent, hanging-in-the balance quality of the deep pre-dawn. Stars burned with frigid clarity and nothing stirred in the silent streets below.

Manon walked towards the ramparts, putting distance between herself and the waves of tension churning between her and Erik. Her hand floated up to clasp the arm of a gilded angel, caressing it mindlessly as she stared into the dark, dwelling inescapably on Erik's arms around her in the lake; on the dizzying release of unburdened secrets; on the residual fear of those still untold. On the incredible sensation of his lips on hers, firm and supple and shocked.

Manon was unmoored. His mercurial affect, at once cold and humorous and distant and attentive, had ensnared her and had left her nerves sparking and frayed.

"Why did you bring me here, Erik?"

She stared into the streets before her but was ferociously attuned to his nearness as he paced slowly up behind her.

"Our walks were becoming repetitive."

"You know what I am asking."

"Do I?"

Manon whirled to face him, much closer than she had imagined. He loomed less than an arm's length from her, his expression forbidding, accentuated by the stark elegance of his mask.

Again, she was curious in an objective sort of way to notice that her mouth seemed to be making all the decisions for her, and she listened with a terrified relish as she plowed forth –

"You've been a ghost for three years, Erik. Even those who knew you existed presumed you dead. Yet you and I drink tea and go for walks and read together. Why?"

His expression grew, if possible, even more forbidding. Her mouth appeared not to notice.

"This was a place you brought Christine!"

The tone of accusation hung in the air like a jury's verdict.

Erik didn't move. Manon, filled with adrenaline and fear and a painfully full heart, was becoming reckless. Why was she so upset? Why had he heard her tale in the lake with such calm acceptance? Why was he standing so close? Yet she closed the gap between them and, for the first time with full awareness, reached out to touch him.

His expression in that moment flickered from forbidding to hopelessly lost, and even as she saw a kind of ecstatic agony sweep over his features her hands found this chest and gripped his lapel like a lifeline.

As if her touch had ignited a heap of dry tinder, Erik exploded, passionate rage erupting from him.

"AND IF I DID?" he bellowed, wrenching back from her grasp. "What business is it of yours! I should not love and weep and hate as much as any man?"

She erupted in kind.

"And why shouldn't you, you arrogant prick?!"

"Why indeed! Ask the world, mademoiselle!"

Her eyes narrowed. "You mean ask Christine?"

Erik swooped dangerously over her, crackling with fury. "You could never be Christine," he hissed with despair and contempt.

Manon shrieked, rearing at him like a harpy. "I don't want to be Christine! That bitch left you!"

His response was a wordless roar of terrifying anguish and power. It ended and he gasped for breath, wrenching out painfully, "What in hell could you possibly know of it."

"I know she turned her back on you. I know you built a world around her, wrote her music to make angels weep and whores blush, yet here you remain, alone but for an ill-tempered fugitive." Manon's throat was becoming strained, her words spilling at a higher pitch than normal and with no control. She felt she was coming apart at the seams and, in this moment, hadn't a speck of insight to understand it.

"She CHOSE me! Did you know that, Manon? Does the cruel, repugnant world know that? She chose me, and I turned her away! I set them free! I, beast and all!" He gesticulated wildly, at himself, at his mask, at the world, and Manon felt herself grow yet colder even as she felt her heart break.

"And that is her redemption? She chose you, 'beast and all'? Her martyr's cross was that she chose for herself a musical genius?" Sarcasm warred with incredulity, yet both bounced uselessly off Erik's impenetrable anger.

"She chose a monster!

"She chose a man!"

And, moving faster than she knew she could, Manon snatched off his mask.