MADAME O.G.

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Chapter 4: Vows

They were silent too long, Christine thought, traveling back through the corridors. Surely he knew that she would have heard of his letters? Mme. Giry seemed to know him – surely he knew that she could have gotten information from that source! The silence was so chilling because it was so atypical. Always her interactions with the Phantom had taken place with song, whether beautiful or terrible or both at once.

"I had much rather be the page boy," she said, quietly, "For Carlotta will not suffer me to take the lead. It will take more influence than you have with these new managers to arrange such a change."

She spoke just as they arrived in his chambers, and quickly regretted it. He turned to her, his face composed. "You think I have not the influence to make the change? Perhaps not now. But you must not undervalue yourself, Christine. Your voice inspires me. It is more than Carlotta's has ever done."

"Say you will not do anything too terrible! Say it! Mme. Giry -"

"Yes, what did Mme. Giry say?"

Those words pulled her up short. "She knows all about you," Christine said slowly. "She is the one who told me the roses were from you. She is the one who told me what was in those letters you sent, and she also told me not to cross you – not to see Raoul!"

Erik paced back to his organ, up the steps and behind the flickering flames of his ever-burning candelabras, then down once more. "I must teach them that this is my opera-house," he said, half to himself. "I cannot, surely you see that I cannot, allow them to go on as it is! M. Lefevre knew that I was to be obeyed. I ask nothing that is not easily within their power, nothing unreasonable."

Were I the manager of the Opera Populaire, I would think that paying a salary to a ghost was unreasonable, Christine thought. She did not voice it. "But no-one will be hurt when you teach them that. Promise me! Promise me, Erik!" She strode to his side as she spoke, put her hands on his arms, his shoulders. Perhaps, were she more experienced, she would have consciously realized that her closeness was the strongest possible incentive she could give him to fulfill her wishes. She did not realize this, and looked up at his half-face and half-mask all innocence.

"I cannot promise you that."

Quickly, ever so quickly, he moved to cover up that statement. "I use machineries for my tricks. I am only a man. I can do no more than Progress allows me to do. Gears and levers and pulleys fail, sometimes. I can make no promise!"

"Then do it without machines," she said, adamant, moving her hands up to his face once more. She took care to keep them well away from his mask. Though he tried to hide it, this time she definitely noticed that he followed her hand, starved for touch, almost like a cat butting its head against its owner. It was subtler than that, of course, and he would never have admitted it (she knew that much, however little she did know about the Phantom). It was not really endearing in a man whom she felt certain was dangerous, very dangerous – but perhaps it softened her a little.

He took a deep, noticeable breath. "I will not harm any one of my own choice. If an accident happens, I will try to stop it. That is the most I can promise you, Christine. But you will have the part."

It was, perhaps, really the best he could do, she decided. "Thank you," she said, and found that it was not difficult to smile in gratitude.

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When he was playing his organ, when he was composing his Don Juan Triumphant, there was nothing else in the world that mattered, Erik felt. Not even Christine Daaé! That was a thought he relished. She had too much power over him. He had sworn, once, that no one would have him on a leash like a dog, no one would tell him to do this or that or the other –

His thoughts subsided into nothingness as he raised his hands to the keyboard once more, threw himself into a particularly difficult passage that he could not quite make right. There: the minor chord, then the major scale that would lift the audience's hearts, played with the violins first and then an awesome blend of the deepest instruments that would showcase the final duet. Aminta's soprano voice would flutter over the highest notes there, alone in its heights. Don Juan would fade into the accompaniment. Then what would make it his triumph? Aminta's joy, yes, but what of the sometime-hero?

He had huge chunks of the central pieces to work out yet, the ballets, a few rough places, but without the end he could not finish them. Sitting at the now-silent organ, the Phantom could not create, could not complete his music, not even with Christine all unknowingly singing Aminta's part as a warm-up, not even with such a glorious voice to inspire him. And she would never be cast in that role, when the opera was finished, if she was not prima donna – and she would never become prima donna while La Carlotta strutted the stage – but she had tied his hands near entirely!

"What are you writing? I recognize it somehow," came the very girl's voice behind him, startling him. He betrayed nothing, except perhaps in the form of a sharp indrawn breath.

"It is my life's work," he said, not turning to face her. It was becoming more difficult to do so. He never knew when she would ask him to remove his mask, or remove it for him. Without it he felt all too exposed, both figuratively and literally. He could hardly bear to look at his own face, the skin sagging and red, his eye goggling without its lashes, patches of skin rough and flaking. He did not know what it betrayed. He could control the rest, but that too-wide eye: what could someone read in it? If they could stand its sight. "When it is finished and performed, I shall walk deeper into the catacombs beneath the city than man has ever gone. Then I shall die."

This time it was her gasp that gave her away, audible only because of her closeness. Slowly she knelt beside his bench, her hands trailing along its edges to rest, folded, near his thigh. He could feel their warmth, smell her scent, a simple concoction of rosewater. Usually he did not allow himself to dwell on it, to notice it even, because for one so often alone it was too heady to be borne. He was irritable, then, and careless, and let himself do so.

"I hope you will not finish it soon," she said.

He laughed, bitterly, feeling the sound come from his gut. "You do not need to be polite with me. I know what you would wish to happen, though you put a brave face towards your fate. I am not so blind." He adored her in the word's fullest sense, as choirs sing te adoremus in their hymns to God. She had given him enough, too much even, since she had come. More than to possess her, he longed to be possessed, to be filled with the beauty of her song – but it became increasingly clear, as he stared at the ivory keys of his organ and his own long fingers that rested upon them, that this would never happen. She would lie to him, and they would be pretty lies, but he would know the difference between that and true acceptance.

She was hurt by his words, and he did not understand why. He could see it in her face, in the moue on her lips, in the sudden glassiness of her eyes; the reason for it, though, was beyond him. If he could comfort her! If he could take them back! She spoke. "Do you misjudge me so much?"

"There is no fault in your feelings, mademoiselle," he said, returning his eyes to the unfinished score before him. "Were I in your place, I would no doubt feel the same. I have been told so often enough."

"Not by me!"

"I deceived you. I came to you as the Angel of Music, used your father's memory most despicably. You hate my tricks, say I am not to use them to convince MM. André and Firmin to cast you as Comtesse, and yet they are what convinced you that I was no villain! My need for you overtakes my weak will, so I build my pretty fantasies and to convince you that they are real I lie. I lie, and your feelings are no more than the fruits of those lies, whatever you may believe!"

He could not see Christine's expression and did not want to. To cause such pain to her was madness, but he spoke only the truth; she had to learn it, or be sorrier in future, when she had foolishly done some foolish thing to bind herself to him. He could not decide which he wanted more, her forever or her to run away and never return to the man she so obviously considered a dangerous lunatic. He could never decide; that was the reason he could never end their lessons.

"Erik," she said, making his breath catch in his throat. There were few people that had ever used his name, fewer still who had ever spoken it with no hint of torment in their tone. She was one. His intellect rejected her pity, but on another level he could not help but accept it and rejoice in it. It was so welcome after so long with no civil words at all that he could not possibly reject it. "Tell me who made you this way."

Jarred by the unexpected question, he was silent.

"Is there no one, no one person? I know nothing of you, yet you know my life, my father, the traveling fairs I sang at – all my secrets. But something convinced you, once, that no matter how beautifully you sang and played and painted," (ah, he realized, she had seen his miniatures; he had not intended that, but then they were laid out for any one to notice) "all this was useless without a perfect face. I would like to know what it was."

He did not intend to answer, did not want to answer, did not want to describe his mother's helpless horror at her deformed infant and the depredations of his traveling fairs, the way Mme. Giry had helped him, the way he learned the ways of the world. It came spilling out nonetheless. He did not cry, did not even turn on the bench to face Christine. He only spoke into the organ's pipes and Don Juan Triumphant's score, slowly retrieving memories he had long ago tossed into the rubbish bin.

When he was finished, he thought perhaps she would go, satisfied. She stood. But rather than leave she sat next to him on the bench, her legs on its opposite side, near-forcing him to look at her merely by her proximity. She was warm; she was sweet; she was alive. Here she did not want anything of him. Just as her pain had been foreign to him, so was this. Why did she choose to torture herself?

"You did not deserve it," she said, "but you must know that not all people are like them." Her hands on his face again, soothing, one on the unblemished left cheek and the other at the back of his neck. He could not think of anything else, having already let himself luxuriate in her presence. His eyes slipped closed, although he knew what would come next: her nails prying at the spirit glue that held his mask, removing it. Then she would disappear, repulsed by the ugliness and unable to remain but still somehow seeking it out, just as she had each time before: off to her book or her supper or some other thing where she could ignore his deformity.

The nails did come, but she did not leave. Hardly daring to move, Erik opened his eyes once more. She was looking at him, unflinching.

Grief struck him, irrational and unstoppable. Deep sobs came from the same place his laughter had originated, wrecking his self control, destroying his stony façade. And miraculously, as slowly as though she were frightened of being rebuffed, Christine raised her arms to cradle his head as he cried on her shoulder. She spoke as she did so, but he could not tell what she was saying, if it mattered at all. Forgetting himself, he reached out to encircle her in one arm, holding onto her like a little boy holds a stuffed animal.

The tears subsided nearly as quickly as they came, chased away by the ministrations of her fingers at his temples, chased away by her presence. He tried to compose himself to speak, to apologize, but the words would not come. Though once he might have fancied himself an eloquent man, though cloistered away from intelligent discourse, now he could think of nothing to say but bitter, sarcastic quips. He would not see that pain in her face again – would not!

She must have sensed his thoughts, though she could not see his face. "Shhh," she said, the mindless sound one makes to silence a baby. Her hands played across his shoulders, the back of his neck, though now he only shook with released emotion rather than crying. "Shhh," and pressed her lips to his left temple. "The past is gone," she said, whispering in his ear.

The frisson that danced down his spine was surely not intended by Christine; surely she was trying to be kind, not inflammatory, with her kiss. But all the same – "I do not know if I believe you fully, now," he said, as formally as he could, "but if you went on... perhaps you know your motives best."

He regretted it as she stood, smiled at him with what could not be counterfeit pleasure. She had nearly draped herself across his lap. It was a different kind of intimacy than she had initiated before, an intimacy that could not be overlooked or brushed aside as standing too close could, as her feather-touches on his face when she took of his mask could. When she said "I do," he saw in his mind's eye the wedding gown he had saved for her. Now he was not keeping it for irony's sake, he thought.

END CHAPTER 4

Notes: I probably ought to mention that none of the belongs to me, right? The characters and setting of this story are the property of (I imagine) the Leroux estate, Andrew Lloyd Webber, and the film company that made the movie. It's not being sold for profit, and no copyright infringement is intended.