A/N – for Maya, as good luck for the job; and for Lavendar, just because she's lovely.
Hugs to everyone who liked the new choice of title – there are not enough Pimpy fans out there!
Angelic Lawyer: I think the remark about the English novels is the single nicest thing anyone has ever said to me. Thank you :)
Christine Persephone: I hadn't been planning to reintroduce Sarah, but since you asked so nicely – I'll see what I can do :)
The revised chapters are now all up (I think … this new method of uploading scares me.), but nothing dramatic has changed. A more complete overhaul will, I think, come in the summer, when I'll properly alter everything – when, in short, I have time!
Hugs and cookies to everyone who's reviewed – you make my day, every one of you.
* * * * * *
Erik slowly bent down, and from beneath his bed, he drew the dusty, long-untouched case of his violin. Very slowly, his hands shaking slightly, he undid the clasps one by one, and opened the lid.
How strange; the violin nestled in the red velvet of the case's lining looked just as it had the last time he had seen it. Somehow he had expected it to have changed, as he felt he himself had changed. Even more strangely, for the first time in years, he found himself able to look on it without wrenching pain that threatened to tear him in two.
Perhaps he was beginning to heal.
His music had slowly returned to him over the last four years; it had been a painful reconciliation, and had cost him much to overcome the ache that the remembrance of his previous musical efforts had induced. But even so, he had not been able to bring himself to resurrect his violin.
He lifted the instrument into his hands and turned it gently, almost afraid to touch it. The violin had always been symbolic of his relationship with Christine – whilst the piano had been used for rehearsal, through necessity, the violin had always been his instrument of choice for playing to her outside lessons, moments he clung to as evidence that she had wanted to be with him.
As time had worn on, and she and Raoul had become closer, the violin had stayed in its case for longer and longer periods of time until, at last, it was not needed at all.
Erik stroked one long hand sadly along the polished wood. Just as the violin had not changed, nor had he, he supposed, not really. He knew now that his efforts to convince himself that Christine's hold over him had loosened, and then finally evaporated, had been empty as he himself had felt empty; his brittle new self-sufficiency and independence from Christine had disintegrated, slipping through his fingers so that he was no longer quite sure that it had ever been there at all.
He sighed, and replaced the violin carefully in its case without touching the strings.
He heard a small mew at his side, and felt a small soft weight leap up to curl at his side. Smiling in spite of himself, he drew the small cat into his arms and held her close to him, treasuring the soft warmth of her body against his.
"So what do you think, Margot?" he asked tenderly, tipping her chin with one gentle finger. The cat purred delightedly and rubbed her head fiercely against his hand, adoring and possessive.
"You think I'm a fool, don't you?" he continued, a little sadly, stroking the cat's fur back where she had ruffled it in her frantic enthusiasm. Marguerite purred, a reaction that could only be taken for assent.
"I know," he conceded wearily. "It's ridiculous, isn't it? A man of my age … and she still so young." Marguerite rubbed her head against her master's face and settled down to sleep in his arms. Erik was caught off guard, and the rush of emotion that greeted the softness of her nose against the horror that was his face unexpectedly forced him to blink back tears.
"I thought I had forgotten her," he said at last, his voice suddenly unsteady. "I thought … I thought I had begun to be able to live without her." He sighed and drew a hand across Marguerite's head. "This is always the way it was, you know. I would think I was beginning to regain my senses; and then I would hear her voice, or see her smile, and my common sense would just dissolve."
Erik looked down at the little cat nestled in his arms, the closest to human contact he would ever come again.
"You are right, of course," he said softly. "I will not go to her. It could do neither of us any good."
* * *
Erik's resolution lasted far longer than he had expected it to. He had made similar promises to himself before, and had always shamefacedly broken them, finding himself unable to stay away from her.
This time, however, he found the ever-present desire to see her tempered by the agonising memory of her rejection. It was easy to remind himself of the pain that she inevitably brought, and, armed with that memory, it was easier to resist the deeply repressed part of his heart which still ached for her.
* * *
It was a hot day in August, and Erik was bent over a frustratingly disorganised shuffle of papers on his desk. Much though he adored Marguerite, her effect on his paperwork irritated him to such an extent that he had seriously considered purchasing a lock for the study door.
But then, where would he be without the occasional caress of a wet nose against his hand as he worked? In the absence of she who would always be his Muse, Marguerite was the next best alternative, and her presence in the study had soothed his frustrated artistic side to such an extent that he had largely managed to break the habit of destroying unfinished work with which he was not happy on the spur of the moment, a practice which had often given him cause for bitter regret once the creative furore had left him.
Erik paused and looked up from the unfinished symphony before him to wipe the thin film of perspiration that had gathered his brow. It was entirely too hot to work; the heat had already forced him to remove his mask through sheer discomfort of the fabric rubbing on his skin, and although he knew the door was securely bolted – having checked before finally removing the mask – he remained uncomfortable and edgy about working with his face uncovered, and found himself reaching to the mask at intervals to reassure himself it was still within easy reach. It was funny, really: before Christine, he had thought nothing of spending days unmasked, even without checking the entrances to his underground haven. But now … somehow now he could ill bear the recollections that removing his mask inevitably brought, however hastily he tried to suppress them, and had even taken to sleeping with his face covered.
Erik sighed and brushed the score to one side, frustrated at his lack of success, and scooped Marguerite into his arms.
"I think I need a break, little one," he murmured, tracing patterns in her fur with his index finger. "Perhaps a holiday …" An image of him and his cat taking the sun in Spain made him smile in spite of himself.
There came a knock at the door, and Erik glanced at the clock on the mantelpiece with a frown. Nadir was early. For a moment, he considered leaving his old friend out on the doorstep to worry himself into a frenzy over Erik's absence, but on reflection, when the alternative was an infuriatingly uncooperative scale of minor chords in D minor, Nadir's occasionally overprotective company did not seem such an unwelcome prospect.
He rose and slipped the mask back on, still clasping Marguerite in his arms, and opened the door.
The sight that greeted him dried his voice in his throat and sent a sudden spell of dizziness over him, so intense that for a moment he thought he might faint.
Christine bit her lip and tried to smile. The truth was that she was intensely nervous, and Erik's expression of obvious shock and a flicker of something she feared might be displeasure in his eyes had stolen what remained of her resolve.
He was holding a small ginger cat in his arms, she realised; as she watched, he dropped it to the carpet and shooed it into the house.
"I …" she began, flushing hotly, casting desperately around for something to say. Nothing she had planned sounded quite right now. "What a beautiful cat."
She saw Erik relax infinitesimally and knew that she had found the key; be it his music or a waif kitten, she had known that the key to penetrating Erik's inner fortress was something he treasured as he once had her.
What she would do once she was inside, she had no idea.
"Thank you," he managed. His heart, which he was quite sure had stopped with a thud at his first glimpse of her, appeared to have restarted, and was now racing with painful urgency. "I … forgive me, do come in …"
Erik glanced around the flat as she accepted the invitation, momentarily regretting the mess of papers he had left strewn over his desk and the architectural plans and unfinished music covering the guest armchair.
Christine stood shyly by a small mahogany table, also scattered with sheets covered with music notation, registering an unexpected feeling of coming home. Small and airy as the flat was, it was undoubtedly Erik's; everything from the piano, which took up at least half of this front room, to the immense numbers of books she could see lining the walls of the next room through a door to her left, all infused with the unobtrusive but encompassing scent of sandalwood and candle wax, reminded her of him.
The man himself stood behind her, his mind in utter turmoil that he prayed desperately would not show through the mask. Seeing her glance around, he swept an armful of papers out of the guest armchair and gestured for her to sit.
He himself remained standing, unable to unbend to her quite enough to allow himself to sit, and took advantage of his armful of music to give himself a moment to gather his composure as he arranged it on the piano.
The light glinted off the ring on the little finger of his left hand, and he hastily slipped it from his finger and dropped it into his pocket. Save the humiliating moment at her house that day, it had never left his hand since she had returned it to him: he had found himself unable to part with it, and hated himself for the weakness. It would not do to let her know that he still treasured that one inadequate symbol of their relationship more than anything in the world.
Erik heard her shift uncomfortably and knew that he could put off the first awkward moment of conversation no longer. He turned to face her, holding his hands very still in an effort to keep her from seeing him tremble.
His first words – or perhaps more the tone in which he delivered them – took Christine aback.
"You must forgive my discourtesy upon receiving you," he said, quite earnestly. "I must confess I had not expected to see you here. I … still cannot for the life of me imagine how you managed to obtain this address."
She laughed with sheer relief that he had not ordered her out directly, passing a hand through her hair in a charmingly nervous gesture.
"I wrote to Nadir."
Erik stood very still, struck to the heart by this blinding new revelation, silent for a long time.
"You have been in touch with Nadir?" he inquired at last, forcing his fingers to move over the piano and shuffle a sheaf of music in an immense effort to regain his composure.
Christine nodded in assent. "Yes ... he wrote to me a short while after ..." there was an infinitesimal pause, "after Raoul died to offer his condolences, and I wrote to him when I returned to France." She smiled fondly. "He's really rather nice, under all that prickly foreignness. He took me out to dinner the other day … I think perhaps he's a bit lonely, all alone in Paris. Did you know he was once married?"
Erik nodded automatically. "Yes ..." he murmured unthinkingly, still unable to react to the revelation that Nadir - his friend, the only person he had been able to find it in his heart to trust since Christine - had been writing to Christine, meeting her, taking her out to dinner ...
Christine, oblivious as ever, had continued talking. "Yes, in Persia, he told me; it's terribly sad. Such a nice man."
Erik did not reply. He sat down slowly, aware that his hands were shaking badly now, and infuriated at his inability to prevent himself from betraying his inner agitation. He had been a fool ever to think that he might be ready to see her again without distress: he would never be ready.
Christine, slightly unnerved by his silence, shifted in her chair and looked around for the cat, hoping it would prove a talking point again. But it let her down; the cat had disappeared into the book room, and was nowhere to be seen.
"How long have you been in Paris?" Erik asked at last, settling for banality in the hope that it would help him recover his shattered poise.
"Ever since ..." she broke off, and Erik, foreseeing her answer, cursed himself for not realising before. Christine had closed her eyes, and was biting her lip as she fumbled for a handkerchief. Silently Erik rose and handed her one, hearing her barely audible gratitude as if from a distance.
For a time there was silence in the room as Christine, screwing up her eyes, fought to contain herself.
At last she sat up and smiled weakly.
"About four years now," she amended.
Erik looked up at her. "I am very sorry," he said, very softly.
In that moment, faced with such unexpected compassion from the man from whom she least deserved it, Christine knew that she was going to cry. She pressed his handkerchief to her face, squeezing her eyes shut, fighting the prickle of tears behind her eyes and the ache in her throat.
She did not see the concern in Erik's eyes, mingled with guilt and grief that, even now, he could say nothing that did not result in her pain.
Christine sat with her eyes closed for a long time, fighting to control herself.
"Here."
She opened her eyes to see Erik offering her a cup of tea. She took it gratefully, closing her hands around the cup to draw out its warmth.
"It's Russian, I'm afraid … had I been expecting you, I would have obtained something a little more to your taste," he said in hesitant apology.
Christine took a sip of the tea and smiled. The truth was that she had actually come to drink Russian tea quite regularly after Raoul's passing; like the scent of sandalwood and Gounod's Faust, it would always hold irrevocable connections in her mind to the man she had thought lost to her forever, and it had comforted her to drink it, and remember.
She sipped at the tea, feeling Erik's eyes on her even as she looked down into her cup.
"You must forgive my coming here," she said at last, looking up to look Erik in the face. "It must seem very strange. It's just that …" she passed a hand unconsciously through her hair. "It's just that I've missed you, ever since – well –" she went scarlet as she realised the hole she had managed to talk herself into.
She looked up nervously to meet Erik's eyes. He met her eyes, his expression stoical.
"We both know how things have happened between us, Christine," he said tiredly. "I myself would have imagined there was more than enough reason in our past to make further encounters undesirable; but you of course know best."
"Is it only the bad that you remember?" she asked, stung by the edge of bitterness in his voice. "Do you not remember that there was once a time when we enjoyed being together?"
Erik's mind moved unbidden back to a softly-lit montage of life under the Opera, times that even now he could not quite bear to think of for fear that the grief for her loss would undo him. When he closed his eyes, he could still hear the sound of her laughter musical across the dinner table, set with a single rose; still see the occasional sojourn to a nearby park, moonlight glinting off the snow that blanketed the ground; and a hundred memories a thousand times more precious: days when they had sung together, or he had played for her; the wordless devotion in her eyes still warmed him in those lonely nights when he lay wretched and sleepless, unable to forget.
Yes, by God, he remembered. And in remembering, it was all he could do not to weep for that which he had lost; that which could never be regained.
Christine, watching him, recognised the slight softening of his manner and the infinitesimal easing of tension in his shoulders, and knew a moment of breathless relief. He had not allowed the time they had shared together to fade into the back of his memory.
"You do remember," she said, very quietly.
His answer, when it came, was so soft as to be almost inaudible. "Yes …"
Christine closed her eyes and breathed a silent sigh of relief.
*
When she left his house an hour later, Erik sat alone in the sitting room. They had talked for what seemed like hours, and he found himself trembling in the aftershock of such an unexpected encounter.
Somehow – he was not quite sure how – they had made arrangements for her to come again, in two days' time, on the promise of a singing lesson. He felt utterly bewildered; from what he had gathered from their conversation, she had not kept up her singing even as a hobby, and her suddenly earnest desire to resurrect her voice and – perhaps, dared he hope? – her career had taken him aback. The prospect of melding his voice with hers again was indescribable – after all these years, to be granted a second chance.
He leaned his aching head forward to rest on the back of his chair. However vehemently he might deny it to Nadir, he could no longer deny himself the truth: he knew now that he still loved her, and any pretext that would allow him to share her air and hear her voice again would suffice.
*
Back in her own home in the Rue de , Christine laid her head against the back of the sofa and breathed deeply for what seemed like the first time in hours. Her own request for a singing lesson had surprised even her with its audacity; but, she reasoned, it had always been through music that they had best understood each other, and she had missed her singing, more than she had expected to.
Erik's manner had surprised her: she had not expected such kindness. She knew, deep in her heart, that she did not deserve it, and an insistent little voice prodded at the corner of her mind, insinuatingly questioning why he had forgiven her so easily.
Could it be …?
She shook her head fiercely. Unfair, to attempt to divine his motives when she was not yet even sure of her own.
She sighed and pressed her hand against her cheek. All she knew was that for the first time since Raoul's death, she felt animated at the prospect of society, and that the man whose rejection she had feared above all else had forgiven her.
What harm could come of it?
* * *
"Can you imagine what I felt when she arrived out of the blue on my doorstep? And then to learn that you have been in correspondence with her these four years!" Erik passed a hand furiously through his hair.
"I cannot understand you," he said at last, struggling to contain himself. "You, who have spent the last four years urging me to purge her from my mind! To see her again, after all this time, at your doing …"
Feeling that he was veering a little too close to betraying the inner turmoil that had raged within him since he had first recognised Christine in the street, Erik allowed his anger at Nadir to regain the upper hand.
"And to give her my address! How could you be so unthinking?"
Nadir could only gape at the irrationality of a man who could rage so at the reappearance of the woman whom he had spent the last four years longing to see.
"I thought that you would want to see her," he said quietly. "If I was wrong, please believe me when I say how sorry I am."
Erik made a violent gesture of frustration and lapsed into brooding silence, and Nadir thought with a faint tinge of sadness how much more comfortable Erik seemed berating Nadir for his betrayal than admitting anything resembling emotion.
Erik had withdrawn into himself utterly, lapsing into that state of brooding reticence which Nadir uncomfortably recognised as dangerous. They completed the chess match in all but silence, despite Nadir's occasional efforts to lighten the mood with attempts to be funny that fell as flat as a pancake.
At last, Erik rose and gathered his cloak up. Nadir caught at his arm, realising his mistake only as Erik flinched instinctively at the unexpected contact.
"Forgive me," he said earnestly. "You must believe me when I say I believed I was acting for the best."
Erik stared at him for a moment, aloof and imposing, and then nodded slowly, the rigidity of his form relaxing for a moment.
"I am not angry with you," he said wearily. "You were not to know."
"Erik …" Nadir hesitated, then gathered his courage, "did you not want to see her again? I had thought …"
"You think too much, my friend," Erik said shortly, and although his tone was even, Nadir recognised the warning that flashed in his dark eyes.
They stood silently for a moment, then Erik withdrew from Nadir's hand and moved towards the door.
"Another match next week, Erik?" Nadir called after him.
Erik glanced up and raised one eyebrow theatrically. "I do believe your compulsion to surrender your money to me is becoming a habit, Nadir," he said, his dark eyes displaying something that could almost be humour. "I'm not altogether sure I should not refuse to play you again and save you from yourself."
Nadir smiled, relieved to see his friend's good humour restored. Erik tipped his hat ironically to the daroga, and drawing it down low over his eyes, strode away down the street.
Nadir went back inside and closed the door beside him, thinking deeply. He was beginning to feel a slight prick of doubt that he had done the right thing in allowing Christine to follow Erik again. He had been sure that he was justified; but now, looking upon the violence of Erik's reaction, he was no longer so sure.
If Nadir had been asked two or three years ago to reveal Erik's location to Christine Daaé, he would have laughed: at that time, he had seen Christine as nothing more than the agent of Erik's anguish for the past two years, and Nadir's loyalty to his friend had dictated an instant dislike for the fickle young woman whose vacillations had caused so much pain to one so dear to Nadir as Erik had become.
But upon Christine's return to Paris, a correspondence had sprung up between them, so unexpectedly that Nadir hardly knew how it had begun. Loyalty to Erik, and fear of the violence of his friend's reaction should he learn that his former pupil was back in Paris, had made him heartily unwilling to enter into correspondence with the woman he still distrusted and whom he could not forgive for the injury she had caused his dearest friend.
And yet somehow, the short courtesy replies to Christine's letters had developed into something more. The sympathy he felt for one who, like himself, had lost an obviously beloved spouse gave him his first insight into the better parts of Christine, and slowly, as their correspondence grew, he came to understand her better; now, almost three years on, he was very fond of her indeed.
Oh, he was not in love with her; – his friendship for Erik could never permit such an absolute betrayal – but suddenly he could understand why Erik still treasured her memory after all these years.
When Christine's request came for Erik's direction, Nadir had hesitated. But Christine's insistence, and her recital of what had occurred between them that day in July – leaving Nadir disappointed but unsurprised that Erik had not told him of it himself – had finally managed to win him over.
Nadir had seen Christine grow and mature in the days since her husband's death; and the fondness with which she had always spoken of Erik, coupled with her new-found strength, had led Nadir to believe that she might now be capable of returning Erik's love for her.
Not that he could ever have explained this to Erik, of course.
* * *
As Erik and Christine began to spend more time together, and slowly, ever so slowly, began to rebuild their relationship, Erik found himself falling in love with her all over again. She was still everything that had originally led him to care for her; solicitous, caring, utterly and quite unconsciously sweet, but no longer a frightened child scrambling for a crevice in a cruel world. From the time of her father's death, she had known tragedy, and she had survived it; and she was stronger for the experience.
For the past three years, he had firmly told himself that he was clinging to a memory, to a woman he no longer knew. It isn't possible to love someone you haven't seen for four years, he had repeatedly told himself, furious at his continued weakness. She is a different woman.
But denial was no longer a viable option; he had been right, she had changed, she was a different woman.
And he loved her all the better for it.
