Disclaimer: I don't own anything.

The Shelter

"Leave," Marguerite remarked, calmly, the sound of water blasting into the kitchen sink mixing with her words as she came to a stop inside the kitchen. "You tell me to leave after the chandelier and the fire."

His fingers loosely closed over the iron faucet handle sticking out of the wall — actually standing back from the sink as the faucet coughed water over the marble counter to the left, the floor and his boots — Erik turned his gaze back towards the pantry door. The kitchen was dark, the windows he kept closed meaning the only light reaching inside came through the small openings on the shutters. Still, he could see Marguerite. She stood just in front of the open pantry door, the candle she still carried with her making her hair gleam like gold. That vision, however, lasted only a moment. The next, Erik was putting his hands under the water and running them over his hair.

The fire, she had said! He could have laughed, he would have laughed, mirthless and miserable as it would have sounded if trying to hadn't sent him into a coughing fit. There was nothing left to do now other than holding his ribs, claw his fingers around the cold counter and force himself to breathe. To close his eyes, to breathe and to—

"Monsieur?"

Erik turned fast enough that his back hit the sink, the rest — from sending his hand flying to grab whatever it was that was approaching him from his right, to forcing himself to his full height — was instinct and something he regretted the moment he looked down and all that was here with him was Marguerite.

It was just her. And it was how close she sounded that had startled him. It was opening his eyes to see her hand inches away from him that had made him lash out, that even now kept his fingers firmly clawed around her wrist to keep her at bay.

And how hard it was to release her, to simply open his hand and retreat, had nothing, absolutely nothing, on how hard was to stand here trying to get his bearings back. It had even less on how it felt to watch Marguerite under the struggling light coming from the candle she had put over the wooden counter to the side of the sink. Her gaze was shifting between him and her wrist trapped as it was between his fingers. Her eyebrows were drawing together and then arching until that same something that had been on Christine's face when she looked back from the boat filled her eyes.

No.

He wouldn't have it.

He wouldn't have this!

Teeth clenched, Erik pulled himself away from the sink, away from Marguerite. Wide strides taking him passed a row of cabinets, he walked right passed the black cooking stove with its chimney hanging alone on the opposite wall and moved towards the closed door that was now in front of him.

Upon opening it, Erik looked left, then right. The corridor he looked into was about as dark as the kitchen. More so, in fact, considering that candle over the counter and the fact it seemed to have blinded Erik enough to force him to narrow his eyes as he looked at the doors running down the corridor and wood planks that made the floor. It was on the latter that his attention stuck. He was not looking at the floor, though. In fact, a more attentive look would have showed he was looking at this single, glaring pool of black next to what was clearly the front door. An even closer look would have showed Erik's eyebrows pinching before he stepped outside the kitchen.

"The fire," Erik rasped, the door already swinging shut behind him sending Marguerite into a small jog to grab it and immediately follow him as stormed down the corridor. "Do I find Marguerite Giry prone to exaggeration?"

Silence was his answer, one strange enough, Erik pinched his eyebrows, again, and took a glance over his shoulder. What he found was Marguerite walking behind him, having clearly forgotten the candle, and for some reason biting her lower lip.

"What do you think happened?"

Irritation leaving his eyes narrowed, Erik glared.

"Exactly what I wished happened," he tossed behind him, attention back to that pool of black amid the long and thin planks of wood that made the corridor. "It bought me time to flee. It bought me time to get that Vicomte off my back!"

It had bought him time to make Christine hate him, to find out exactly how much. But he wouldn't say that. No. He couldn't say it. It was far too raw. So, he would at least be grateful that none of that was the answer Marguerite was after, that she was still walking behind him and still biting her lower lip—even if he wasn't at all grateful she was rephrasing her question in that same quiet, contemplative tone.

"I meant what had you intended to do with the chandelier?"

Frustration bloomed from his chest. This time, having just managed to reach the middle of the corridor — which left him midway between the kitchen and the front door on the wall to his left — Erik brought himself to a halt and turned. He did so so abruptly, nothing could stop Marguerite from ramming face first into his chest.

"A diversion," he snapped at her or, rather, tried to. With both of them stumbling and him having just reached forward to close one hand over her forearm, catching her, it wasn't nearly as effective as he would wish. And that was without taking into account his voice was little but a rasp. It was definitely without mentioning the way Marguerite's eyes had jumped up and away from his chest and the flush appearing on her face.

She should be afraid.

She wasn't.

And that it confused him wasn't about to stop him from throwing his frustration right at Marguerite's feet.

"It was a diversion," he hissed as he stepped away, fingers releasing her arm and the drenched shirt she was wearing. "And unless those stagehands stumbling around in my theater are about as incompetent at managing a small flame as they are at literally everything else, any 'fire' on the stalls should have gone out like this!"

Erik snapped his fingers between them and that might have been it, that should have been it. That rant of his should have settled all of this. But, rather than doing so, it left Marguerite gazing at him, arms crossed, still a bit flushed, blue eyes running up and down his face like she was studying him.

"It was no small flame," she finally spoke, her voice remarkably serene. "And I'm not exaggerating, Monsieur. You can hear the fire engines going by even now."

Erik might have bristled. Not at Marguerite, mind you. But at himself. What was he doing standing in the middle of the corridor, straining his ears, and actually paying attention to—?!

His back went straighter.

All it took was a moment, one moment more for the sound of bells and hooves coming from the street to wash any doubt from in his mind. A last suspicious glance being given to Marguerite, Erik looked around, attention flying right over her head and slipping down the corridor and the white walls.

The space around him was unfamiliar. The entire house was. The only thing in it that had ever gotten the chance to find a place in his mind the corridor where they stood and its doors, doors he had never cared to open, to look behind, to find out what they hid. In fact, he couldn't begin to guess which point of the city any windows would point to. Still, between the door waiting alone on the wall perpendicular to the one holding the front door or the two door just a meter or two in front of him, Erik picked the nearest of the latter.

Pushing it open, he found himself stepping into a large room, some sort of living room he gathered. Not that it mattered. Erik cared little for the wood-panel walls or the detailed frame around the ceiling and the chandelier, he cared less for the white sheets covering what seemed to be a fireplace or the mirror in the wall over it. What mattered were the large doors and the terrace they lead to and, closing his fingers over the door knob, unlocking them, he knew at least one thing.

He had chosen which side of the house to try to catch a glimpse of the Opera's rooftops correctly.

The terrace door had opened to an elegant if narrow balcony with a cast iron handrail. On the other side of the street, a four-storey building with ample windows rose and, above it, some rooftops away, the Opera House's dome—its dome and the columns of gray smoke coming from it, twisting and curling against the dawning sky.

It was a vision that justified the heaviness of smoke in the air, that more than justified looking back inside the house to find Marguerite had followed him to the empty living room and now stood near the covered fireplace, attention firmly on him. Her expression was not that innocent and curious expression that Christine had worn while coming down from the chamber back in the grotto months ago, but something that was contemplative and careful and that he might have thought he imagined—

"How did this happen?"

—if it wasn't there even after his question.

"The dome over the stalls broke," Marguerite clarified. "It sent the chandelier crashing into the side of the stage, half of it fell into the orchestra pit."

What?

"What?"

Marguerite's attention moved outside for the first time, focusing on the columns of smoke twisting and curling over the long row of black-tiled rooftops on the other side of the street.

"When I left the fire was running all over us," she continued, the cold breeze rushing from outside, the same one blowing passed Erik and freezing him to the bones, making her rub her arms. "We got the horses out, and the costumes and some of the props. But the workshops on the top floors, the dormitories—no one could get there in time."

Erik's attention returned to the rooftops for a moment, then it came back inside, going to stare blindly at the hand that still held the doorknob even as Marguerite continued.

"The Opera was my home," she said, the soft click of the terrace door Erik had just closed echoing on the empty living room alongside her words. "Where do you intend I go?"

Where—?

Erik closed his eyes.

Elsewhere, he could have said. Anywhere. Somewhere other than here. But he couldn't find the energy anymore. He couldn't find the heart. So the truth, the truth Christine had made clear not so long, that would do.

"You don't want to be around me," Erik spoke, making his way back, to where Marguerite stood and in front of whom he stopped. "If you have any sense you won't."

Meg pulled her arms closer to her chest, hands closing tight over her elbows.

"And if I don't have any sense?"

Had Erik had time to do has he wished — to walk passed Marguerite and back into the corridor — he might have stumbled at her words. Standing in front of the large fireplace, the soft breeze coming down the chimney making the sheet covering it move softly against his legs, Erik felt his shoulders stiffening instead.

"Then, you want something."

And there was only one thing Marguerite could be here for.

Only one.

"I heard you sing today," she said.

Music.

"I was backstage, I didn't get to see the performance, but—"

Marguerite closed her eyes like she could still hear it, like somehow the song still remained.

"It was wonderful," she whispered. "And Christine—"

She opened her eyes, a hopeful gleam leaving them brighter than they already were.

"That was you," she said. "You taught her."

A moment of silence, of gazing not at him but at the carefully cut strips of wood that made the floor, and Marguerite pressed her lips together, bringing her attention back up to him.

"Would you teach me?"

A new blast of wind came down the chimney. Again, the white fabric covering it whipped against Erik's legs. As vacant as his gaze had just grew, Erik's lips had just curled, his expression more a pained grimace than a bitter smile.

He had made this mistake once before.

"No," he said, exhausted. "It's over. I'm done with it. With all of it."

And with that he walked away from Marguerite, away from the empty fireplace and the undulating sheet covering it. Footsteps echoing off the walls, he walked all the way back to the dark corridor and that piece of black fabric lying on the floor, the one he had been aiming for since the beginning.

What that was, was a cape, even if the heavy fabric his fingers had just touched felt more like a memory. A painful one. One he wished he could leave behind alongside the rapier that clamored to the floor the moment he pulled the cape up, that he wished he could get rid of with the same ease with which he put the cape into Marguerite's hands and stepped away from her.

"Go to your mother, little Giry," he whispered. "She must be worried."