"Erik, where are you now?" I demanded softly as I glanced into his room and found him missing from his bed for the third time that day. He was healing of the infection in his lungs surprisingly quickly – which led him to constantly push his returning strength. Twice, I'd found him collapsed in the hall, obviously having pushed himself too far. I listened and heard the silvered notes of the old piano I'd bought upon securing the place for my own use whenever I was trapped aboveground for one reason or another. Gritting my teeth, I headed irately towards the music, feeling myself soften as it played on and allowing it to take me into its flowing embrace as it flooded forth from my son's skilled fingers. The melody was new, I noticed, and increasingly complex. He would have some trouble putting this one to the old organ down below, but I had the utmost faith in his abilities, which I had lovingly nurtured since the first day he had shown an aptitude for music – just after Maurissa had scarred him.

Shoving away the unwelcome thoughts – they came to mind more and more lately – I leaned against the doorway, watching critically as his graceful hands, quivering against the ivory keys, barely made a difficult arpeggio. He paused to note something down on parchment he had brought along for just that purpose, and I realized with some dismay that he'd been here all day. I had gone out that late that morning, with a firm rejoinder to him to stay where he was and had thought that after our last argument about it not two hours previously, that he would stay put.

"Were you planning on getting any sleep today at all?" I inquired after allowing him to finish his notations. He had learned early on that he was never to interrupt me while I was working, and I always extended the same courtesy to him if I could.

"Not until I finish this cadenza," he responded in a voice only slightly hoarse from illness.

For a moment, I forgot that he had spoken aloud and moved to the piano eagerly. He wrote vocal music so rarely that any time he did was a true treat. His skill with ranges and vocal techniques very nearly challenged my own, although he would never have the voice I possessed. Though that was simply for lack of trying. He had the potential, I knew, to out-sing any person on this earth – if he would only try. As it was, he rarely sang unless I forced him to run through vocal exercises with me. He felt that he could never match up to me and so did not try. "What ranges have you written in?"

I saw his smug smile, almost hidden by his hand as he reached up to turn the half-finished page from my sight, as was his right. "Soprano chorus begins with a haunting vocalization that a male chorale of first tenors and contrasting second baritones will join, and four measures in, the leading coloratura begins her solo… She isn't joined by the male lead until the second page, thirty measures in, where he comes across the stage with her ring on his palm, begging her forgiveness, as he's just told her in the last scene that he was responsible for her lover's death, out of jealousy."

I was somewhat taken aback. "You've written a story line to the music? Very rare, my son, for you."

He smiled sweetly. "I thought you would like it, some substance and meaning to the music." He turned and I was glad to see that the strain of his illness was at last passing from his features.

"There is always meaning to music, Erik. Always." I smiled and caressed his unscarred cheek gently. "Will you allow me to hear the male's solo?"

"I was hoping you would ask for that… Something's not right, I'm not hearing what I want in it."

We had often asked each other's opinions of music we were either writing or simply playing for pleasure, and I enjoyed the times where our separate opinions and knowledge had sparked lively debates. I enjoyed even more the collaboration that often took place when we wrote and played for each other. I nodded to him and, after a moment's pause, he slipped into one of his favorite warm-ups instead of the new piece. I chuckled, amused, as I had evidently taught him too well that one was never to sing with a cold voice. I warmed up obediently, missing his soaring tenor but knowing that his throat and lungs were still too sore to allow him to join me.

As he moved into the dark opening chords and played the haunting soprano line, I felt myself shudder and draw back to a time when I had felt soared through the grief-stricken mind of a young chorus girl and had taught her to utilize her true voice… In return, she had taught me how to love. Love was a painful emotion; voracious and insatiable, it ate away at everything that you were until you had to capitulate to its endless demands and give more to it – and yet, what you received in compensation seemed to dwarf the significance of any of the hurt to less than nothing.

To some, the affair with my Angel had been just that; a lecherous, deformed man seducing a young woman grateful for his aid into his heart and his lair of shadows.

But to me, it was the heaven I had forsaken sixty years ago on the night of my birth.

I returned my attention to the music at hand, singing the tenor's line with more emotion, perhaps, than the piece warranted, and when I saw Erik's fingers were slowing in rapture over the keys, I stopped his hands and simply sang, adding a subtle variation in key right as I did so. He snapped alive immediately. "Give me that!" he demanded. "That, what you just sang! That's what I was looking for!" His voice cracked and he coughed, frantically searching for the quill and paper he'd dropped in his excitement. I smiled and took the pages from him, neatly penning in the corrected score with one hand while I held him steady with the other. He wasn't breathing so heavily now, I noticed, and the congestion was nearly gone from his lungs. We would be able to return soon, perhaps even tomorrow.

A particularly harsh cough shook him and he choked for several seconds as I held him there, but he spat nothing, which was a vast improvement over the last few weeks. "Are you all right?" I tendered him the cup he'd had resting on the small stool beside the piano bench and he sipped slowly, grimacing at the slightly metallic taste of warm water. But the coughing fits were fewer and further between now, only coming on him when he spoke for extended periods of time – which I had only just allowed him to do, knowing that his mind-speech was far more draining than not speaking. He was healing, and I allowed myself to relax as I had not done in days. There had been times, late in the nights when I had held him close through fevered dreams and choking bouts that left him so breathless afterward that he more often than not blacked out from the lack of oxygen. I had stayed by him at one point for three nights running, not once leaving his side while he slept, to make sure that his breathing did not stop.

But he was strong. And he was my son.

I drew him close to me now as he set the cup aside, making more of a face at the taste in his mouth than out of any pain. His breathing had almost slowed to a regular rate when I pulled him against my chest and for a moment, he nestled there as he had done as a young boy, safe and secure against the warmth of my body. I smiled down at him and he closed his eyes in contentment, sighing faintly.

We lay against each other, my back resting against the piano and he laying against my body, for several minutes, simply letting our love and security for one another be the only companions in the silence. At last, I spoke. "Before you go to sleep tonight, gather your things… it's time we went home."

He opened his eyes and the light shining through them teased a smile in response on to my features. "Truly?" He had been longing to return home for days now, ever since the fever had broken and the illness had begun to abate.

"Yes, truly. Come, though, I want you rested for the walk back. You've been very ill."

He made a face at me that was only slightly diminished in ferocity by the happiness in his eyes and I laughed, gently pulling him to his feet and giving him a knowing look when his lower body, stiff from remaining in one position all day, refused to hold his weight at first and he staggered. He pulled another expressive face at me and I chuckled deeply, winding my arm around his shoulder and gently aiding him from the room, my left hand easily and neatly gathering the drying scores up from the piano.

He left my side as feeling returned to his lower limbs, and moved to the doorway. I had turned my back to organize his notes when I heard the sound of him falling heavily against the doorframe. Whirling, I lunged to his side, catching him before he could fall and dropping the sheets – still in their neat pile – lightly on to a table by the door. My hands flickered across his brow and cheeks, testing for fever where I knew there was none… but he was much too pale. His pulse was beating with the erratic cadence of one who has been very badly frightened, but I could see nor hear anything that would panic him so. "Erik, what is it?"

His breathing laboured by fear rather than illness, he responded at great length, and so softly I could barely hear him. "Did you ever take M-Maurissa here?"

What an odd question. I searched his features but found no clue as to why he'd asked such an odd thing. "No, she stayed down below with me. I didn't go above save inside the Opera during the time I was with her. Why do you ask?"

"Because she's standing right there…" He lifted his right hand and pointed it shakily down the hall which led to our bedrooms.

I slowly raised my head.