The simple explanation, or, at least, as simple as an answer one could distill from such madness: Erik clung to her because he was clinging to very idea of life itself. The moment he coiled those gnarled and bone-licked hands of his into the threads of her skirt, like he was clinging to a rope, was the moment he had finally wrapped Christine's soul around his own, too.

It was not love that moved her, nor fear, nor was it pity that flooded her body with a queer warm trembling. As she held Erik in her arms, stroking the strange serrated edges of his spine, bending over to kiss the pale morass of his forehead, Christine was overcome by the simple notion of Erik's mortality. He was no longer a living corpse come to punish the world; in that moment, she saw him for what he was: alive and closer to death than he would ever admit, as fully capable of being gone and tossed into the ground as anyone else.

They had sat in tender stalemate for what might have been minutes or hours. A lifetime. For all Christine knew in her exhaustion, she was born into this world to the dying hiss of the fire, to the heaviness of Erik's poor head in her lap. In the stillness of the sitting room, she felt every single step of cold Scandinavia beneath her feet, every fleck of salt in the English Channel chapping her lips.

"Holding you," he whispered, his voice hoarse and half-muffled by the silk of her wedding gown, "It is… oh, mock me if you must, but it is holding moonlight itself, my dear girl."

Her hand paused in its ministrations. For a moment, it was all the young woman could do not to laugh at the poor creature curled up against her. She remembered Papa speaking in his own nonsense, laughing from under the blankets about women she never knew, conversing with the wallpaper like it was an old friend in a tavern back in Uppsala.

"Oh, Annika," he'd said, kissing his daughter's hand, slick and stinking from one of Mama Valerius's useless poultices. "You will forgive me someday, when I've joined you in paradise. How we will laugh about all of this, my sweet pea."

Christine supposed that all men talked like children when they encountered death. Some might be lucky enough to only notice it brush against their shoulders, to sense it move on without taking them with it—to merely soil themselves and sleep in cold fear for the rest of their lives, instead of resigning themselves to the earth. It was the sort of experience that made them better husbands and fathers, that made them meek and humble.

Papa had been humble enough, and he still was dead come the morning.

But here, now—Erik was oozing gentleness, and the pulse that throbbed visibly in his long neck echoed the beating of her heart. He was white as birch bark, ugly as a lie, but alive and contrite.

"I am blessed by Diana," he murmured aimlessly, staring into the same fire. "It is just as the poets always said."

In such nonsense, Christine felt her true power. Erik had never known love or earnest admiration—she was sure of it in the same way she was sure of her own right hand. But he had known control, robed himself in its armor, and as such control ebbed into nothingness during those long seconds, this small knowledge rolled into her hands as smoothly as a rubber ball. She felt the muscles of his upper body ripple and tense, as if he were shifting upwards to look her in the face.

"We cannot marry," he said, black and yellow eyes glassy as marbles. "Christine. We cannot."

It was as though the wretch had slapped her, so swiftly did the air leave her lungs. Christine thought of Raoul and his easy laughter, his casual disregard for the roles assigned to them by fate, how fecklessly he had asserted himself into her own private matters. The swollen lump on her head began to throb.

"Erik," she stammered, unable to meet his gaze, though not for fear of his hideousness. "You do not mean that." He blinked at her through a wash of tears and reached a dark hand up to stroke her cheek. "Erik. You do not."

He chuckled, exhaustion rippling off of his prone form.

"I could scarce keep the moon itself locked down here, no matter how hard I tried, no matter how much I loved her," he replied sadly, fussing with a curl by her left ear. "No. We must not marry."

Surely, the monster—always so astute, so devoted to detail—noticed the wild flare of her nostrils, the waxing sliver of whites in her eyes, the iron stance of her usually soft jaw. Surely he noticed the way her little hand tightened in his thinning dark hair, the way it pulled his head back to touch the sofa cushions, the force enough to set his scalp tingling.

"I will marry you, Erik," she murmured, regretting her words with every syllable that passed through her lips, yet unable to stop herself. It seemed as if every flutter of his heart urged her into madness. "As long as you promise that the Vicomte is left alive and well, I will have little left to ask for in this life." The cold truth of her words shocked them both into silence.

"You are a good woman," he sighed, amidst a fresh wave of tears. "I am not a man of promises. But Christine says she must marry, and so marry she will."

#

It was only upon later reflection—after the Vicomte was plucked from the Commune dungeons and taken back to the surface, along with the kind stranger who had tried to help him—that Christine understood the weight of what she had chosen for all of them. A fortnight had come and gone since she'd committed herself to the monster's upbringing, a job that had been as surprisingly easy as it was sexless. Those first few days—of endless letter writing, of saying her few goodbyes to the Christine she had been before—made her feel less like a prisoner and more like a secretary. There was tedium in marriage, to say nothing of a marriage where the groom left the bride to her own devices for most of her waking hours, who could scarcely touch his wife without collapsing into himself.

Erik had done his diligence, for his part: He was quiet. He was gentle. He was attentive and polite and left Christine to her thoughts and her own bed, as if he'd finally realized the extent of his trespasses over the last few months. To her greatest surprise, however, her husband had arranged a series of chaperoned visitations to her old flat on Rue Notre-Dame-des-Victoires. A wedding gift, he'd said, and Christine did not have it in her to say that most grooms didn't give their brides an hour of false liberty as gifts.

"Your Mama Valerius must miss you terribly," Erik said, leaning back in the seat of the hired brougham during that first dreary excursion, shaking out a copy of The Epoque as if he were waiting for Christine to get her hair fixed, rather than to drag her back below the earth with him. "Don't keep her wondering."

But even Erik's powers could not stop what was meant to transpire, for when she entered the little apartment, Mama was waiting without waiting; her mind was as untethered to this world as Christine now felt bound to it, twiddling her limpid hands amongst the bedclothes and looking beyond the damask walls of her room as the younger woman took her place by the bed. When she'd finally recognized her foster daughter—the girl she'd kissed and petted and comforted like her own child, who was now decades under the soil—the old woman wept.

"Älskling ," she cried softly, her voice burnt and broken. "I had wondered. I had wondered if you were carried off by that young man of yours. Why did you not tell me?"

"Because the Vicomte has left me, Mama," Christine said, each word echoing in her heart like rocks tossed down a well. "For his expedition, as was his original intention. Don't you remember?"

"Then what has become of our Christine?" Mama had responded. "To leave her nest so swiftly?"

"I am married now," Christine said. It was the first time she had spoken those exact words to anyone, and the finality of this proclamation rocked her as roughly as death might have. She was a woman wed under the authority of no church, of no country—only under the power of a shadow who seemed to exist outside of both.

"Ah, yes," Mama sighed, her milky eyes finally locking onto Christine's. "Your angel."

"He is not an angel, Mama," said Christine, her cheeks flushing with anger: at Erik, for his wretchedness. At herself, for being stupid enough to have once cared for him enough that he might drag her down into his worst habits. At Mama, for encouraging the happy delusion. At the world, for taking every single person she had ever loved, melting her Mama down into a sputtering candle. What did you say, to one dying, when you had seen so much death? "He is only a man."

"Hmm," Mama murmured, the needles that had once been soft hands patting against her quilt. "Is he a good man, then, Christine? That is all that matters."

And here Christine could only just contain the heaving of her little chest—could only choke back the tears that filled her throat like concrete. She thought of the comfortable bedroom. The marble bathtub. The wardrobe ripe with dresses. The hopeful and hideous smile Erik gave her every time they crossed paths in that little house by the lake. "He is good enough to me," she conceded, trying her best to smile and sound sincere. "He gives me music."

When Christine had returned to the brougham an hour later, more miserable than she might have been had Erik simply locked her away from the world. Is he a good man ? The question sat in the pit of her stomach the whole ride home, taunted her as Erik quietly removed her coat and slippers, mocked her as his lanky arms set to lighting the hearth in the drawing room, scorned her while he poured her a glass of sherry before retiring to the morbid fancies of his piano.

It was not lost on Christine that he was trying to be good— but to what end was what vexed her. She remembered putting her heart out in front of the Angel, extending it with shaking limbs as she wailed for her dead father, for the nightmares she still had of his little kindnesses that no longer existed on this Earth. He had listened so terribly well, been so patient and compassionate—to the point that Christine began to wonder if their relationship was a ruse. She remembered her catechism in those little intimate nothings—of how such celestial beings brought wrath and holy fire, and how her angel only offered her comfort and friendship.

And music. It had all started with music, hadn't it?

Strange, how even the simplest recitative now felt like lead on Christine's tongue.

#

Is he a good man?

Every night, as she lay in her own dim lonesomeness, wondering if perhaps Mama had the right of things, Christine inevitably wondered about Raoul. His memory, golden and ripe with laughter, pierced its way through even the quieter, happier moments Erik offered her.

"The Vicomte—" she had started casually, over afternoon tea—a one sided affair where she tried her best to eat while her husband stared at her like eating itself was as alien as love. "He—".

"Is back in Brest, as I've said," Erik snapped sharply, as if he'd been waiting for her to bring the subject up to discussion, so that he might bare his teeth and behave horribly once again. "Fulfilling the duty he has to his commission and his country. Christine must be so proud."

"I only wanted—"

"To know about his well-being." Erik stared down into his lap. "I can imagine. And there it is."

"I was just asking," she conceded sullenly, blinking back tears. "If you are being honest with me, I hardly see the trouble in asking."

He slammed the snifter he'd been twirling between his fingers down before abruptly leaping to his feet, looming above Christine like a column of dark fire. "It is quite rude, you know, to challenge your husband's intentions—especially when you are discussing another man. If you see no trouble in asking, my dear, then I likewise see no harm in reminding you that you are a married woman."

It was then she remembered her hatred of him, wishing she had clawed off even more of his wretched skin while she'd had the chance. Wishing she had never been so stupid as to see his pulse and feel a moment of pity.

When Mama Valerius died the following month, as abrupt and ridiculous and awful as everything else that had come to pass in that short period of time, she was shaken back into her anger—made to remember why she'd slept with a letter opener under her pillow the first time her husband dragged her below the earth. For while she wept bitterly over the only woman who tried to fill the lifelong void left behind by her dead mother, Erik seemed to treat the whole ordeal as a pleasant exercise in normality.

The image would remain forever burned into Christine's brain—Erik trying his best to keep his eyes downcast and somber as they stepped out into the April rain, the kindly warden letting his prisoner out into that poor excuse for daylight. Her miserable, in a mourning dress that cost more than anything she'd ever worn in her life. Him in his false nose and coattails, clinging to her arm like he'd won her at her at a carnival.

"They are together now, your Mama Valerius and her professor," Erik had murmured warmly as she stared into the open earth, each word tinged with unmissable pride over his attempts of loving banality. It was a blessing that Christine had the excuse of her tears, for she could not bear to look him in the face, to see the smile she practically felt in his voice. All that desire for normality, his pleasure in reaping averageness from her suffering. It was as if nothing had changed between them.

When they'd returned from the funeral, drenched and exhausted, Erik peeled off her cloak with a tenderness that only served to perturb Christine further, before busying himself with fussing about the sitting-room.

"Sit, my dear," he insisted, opening his arms up as the logs in the fireplace began to crackle and spit. "Let me warm you."

"I am warm enough," she spat without thinking, before stomping off to her bedroom and her tears. Papa, her Mama Valerius—the image of them lying in their beds and ready for something that would remain forever more lovely and important than Christine could ever hope to be—Erik, with his face that looked as dead as they were. The Vicomte, for whom she'd never gotten to say as much as goodbye, who had likely joined the dead in that terrible and sure realm that was dominated by her new husband like Pluto himself.

A week passed. Erik had said nothing of her rejection, the memory of which made Christine feel a shame as slow and creeping as a runner vine. Indeed, it seemed his only acknowledgement of her distaste had been to make himself all the more scarce. The lonely meals brought her no comfort. The freedom to pluck away at the piano uninterrupted left her feeling tired and unskilled and human.

It was on such a day that Christine found herself sitting at her writing desk in the parlor in complete despair, trying to find the words to convince herself that she no longer cared about her poor mama, nor the sun-dappled young man whom the monster had practically frogmarched back to Brest. The young woman had told herself all was as it should be—Mama was with the god she longed for, the ghost of a husband whose memory had kissed her to sleep each night for the last ten years, the laughter of the small babe whose sticky kisses meant more than any affection a poor, stupid country girl might have shown her across time. Raoul was born for the sea, and he would return to it as easily and as gracefully as an eel.

Yet, still, she often found herself sitting idle, scratching out desperate, incoherent notes to the young man: It breaks me to know you are dead. Whether in body or spirit, whether by ice, whether by my husband's own hand—

"Christine?"

She turned in the little chair, terrified Erik could see straight into her anguish, stiff as dry wood.

"Have I ever told you," Erik murmured, eyes downcast while pondering a memo she'd just dashed off to Mama Valerius's solicitor, "how lovely your penmanship is?"

"I'm sorry?"

"You write as neatly as any well-bred woman in Paris," he said. "And yet none are half so pretty or as clever as my little pagan Christine." He folded the missive and stuffed it in his breast pocket, along with the remaining correspondence she'd finished earlier that morning, and brushed a heavy thumb across her left shoulder. "I'll return shortly. You really ought to finish that letter, you know."

The magnitude of his insult only hit Christine after he'd left—all of them did. His hisses and horrible oaths as he scraped her fingernails across his face, the raucous laughter that mocked her as she wailed and bled against her bedroom walls. She sat in white-hot anger for the rest of the afternoon, too angry to plunk at the piano, too depressed to even think of reading. When the front door slid into the recesses of the parlor wall, Christine was ready to leap at him and rip what remained of his face clean off its rotten foundation.

"Christine," Erik said, looking more grotesque than she'd ever seen him—the strange line of demarcation between his prosthetic nose and the yellowed skin he could never hope to match. If he noticed her anger, he made little sign of it. "Would you care to take a ride with me?"

"I don't feel like going out," she scowled, folding her arms across her chest and trying her best to look content while sitting next to a pile of laundry. The musty passages of the Garnier's undercarriage and midnight streets of Paris were a comfort to her, but not one worthy of giving the boor any satisfaction.

He laughed and grabbed her hand, covering it in small kisses that burned like mosquito bites.

"Not even to your new home?"

The young woman thought it impossible to hate him more. For though Christine spent the last month aching for sunshine, gasping for something as simple as a casual afternoon walk, it came at the expense of the heaviest burden to be saddled onto her heart yet—that Erik loved her enough to leave the darkness for good.

Thank you for reading. Comments, as always, are appreciated.