A/N – Believe it or not, the last chapter was supposed to end with cuteness and fluff … I'm still not quite sure why I changed it. Huge hugs and lots of thanks to Julie (to whom I owe the phrase "it is always darkest before the dawn"), Jenna, Stephanie and everyone else who put up with my whinging about this chapter, and to Riene for beta-reading it for me and giving me the final kick to post it. Love you all :)
I have vague memories of writing snippets of this chapter in History lessons, which shows me just how long it's been since I last posted: I'm sorry! Blame exams, blame work, blame my muse for having gone into hiding in a remote cave somewhere in Siberia … blame my inherent incapability to update within a reasonable time scale. Even now it's not what I hoped it would be: it's still too choppy and too wordy – I do know that – but I decided it was better to get this sticky chapter out the way so that we can get on to the fun chapters yet to come. It will get better … I promise.
Happy Christmas, all :)
Christine took a step back, still clutching the mask in one limp hand.
"Erik –"
He was on his feet, advancing towards her. "Give me –" A choked sound escaped him, and she saw his eyes close in agony as his free hand clutched at his chest.
"Erik!" She took a step towards him, reaching out to him in alarm. "I'm sorry …"
His face twisted in anguish, and he reached out desperately for the mask.
Terrified, Christine timidly held out the mask and he snatched it, turning away from her to secure it.
"Get out," he whispered, still facing away from her.
Distressed, she reached out to him again. "Erik, please …"
"Get out!" His voice suddenly thunderous with rage. As he turned to look at her, his face once again an expressionless façade of porcelain, the expression in his eyes frightened her beyond endurance – oh, how could she have forgotten! This was just how he had looked five years ago … she could still see Raoul gasping for breath in the cruelty of Erik's noose.
"Erik, you're frightening me …"
"Go!" She almost thought she heard the catch of tears in his voice, but the ire in his eyes was enough to make her lose her nerve.
She gave a sob, and turned and fled.
Years of savage abuse at the hands of mankind had endowed Erik with instincts more feral than those conditioned by civilisation. Now, like a wounded animal going to ground, his only desire was to curl up and hide, immerse himself in darkness so deep as to conceal himself from the cruel eyes of the world forever.
He clutched at the mask with fingers that shook and fumbled in his distress, and, after several unsuccessful attempts that drove him almost wild with panic and frustration, fastened the straps once more around his head. The relief of feeling his greatest shame safely concealed again was immediate but insufficient to quiet the raging torrent of pain searing through him.
Erik collapsed onto the couch, tightness tensing his chest and shoulders again.
He could not think, could not breathe … the very thought of what she had done made him convulse, horrified, agonised, betrayed … he could not bear to think of it. Unbidden, the memory of the first time swelled inside him, and he curled in on himself, his hands fisted against his chest, his eyes screwed shut, desperately trying to suppress the pain.
One word resounded through the horror: why?
How could she?
She knew … she had always known …
Nausea rose in his throat. The very thought of her looking at him … it made him ill to think of it. He curled convulsively around himself, fisting his body into a foetal coil, desperation battling despair, the pain swelling, twisting within him, exploding down his spine, his own image burned onto the insides of his eyelids even as he squeezed them shut so tightly that his face ached.
He was always aware of the mask with her, terribly, achingly, acutely aware every moment that he was with her that he was … disgusting … barely human. Of course he knew.
When he was on his own, he could almost forget. When Marguerite applied her warm rough tongue to his cheek to wake him on the rare occasions he was able to cling on to sleep for longer than the span of a nightmare; when inspiration burst and blazed within him; when he was alone … he could sometimes forget.
But with her … with her, every moment was a terrible consciousness of his inferiority, his inadequacy … the fact that he did not deserve her in the slightest measure; and, worst of all, that he could never grow to deserve her. Because he was his failure: he was not deficient in something like understanding or education – something that he could have changed – but in his very self.
Barely human …
He had learned, by long and painful experience, that it was easier to hurt somebody quickly, before they could hurt him first. Christine was the only person to whom he found himself consistently unable to apply this rule. And – as life had always taught him to expect – the result was pain beyond imagining.
He shuddered convulsively against the cushions of the couch and asked himself, for the hundredth time, why he continued to love her so hopelessly in spite of everything. In a lifetime of rejection and abuse, no one had ever hurt him as intensely as the elfin soprano to whom he remained incapable of closing his heart; and he hated her as he had never hated anybody else.
And yet he could not release her. His love was not what it had been five years ago: the innocent joy and uncertainty of first love had been strangled and constrained by betrayal, self-hatred, and devastating loneliness: a pure red rose deformed and bent under the weight of bullying, bruising weeds. The purest emotion he had ever felt was now tainted with cynicism born of bitter experience; and, he realised as he pressed his face into the cushions of the couch, he was no longer young or naïve enough to foresee a happy ending for them.
She would go her way, and he would do as he always had: he would survive and endure.
The prospect of another twenty years without her was as bleak as a wilderness devastated by snow and ice; but better an empty white wasteland than the fiery hell of her presence.
Erik continued to lie motionless on the couch long after his heart had ceased hammering wildly in his ears, and when, some time later, Marguerite leapt lightly up to investigate his unusual inactivity, he accommodated her within his arms without opening his eyes.
What Erik had forgotten that night as he lay sleepless with heat burning behind his too-dry eyes was something that he recalled Giovanni having once told him.
"It is always darkest before the dawn."
Nadir was Christine's first port of call that afternoon: she arrived on his doorstep in tears, and found very little comfort in him. His initial concern, and the kindness that went with it, vanished as soon as Christine managed to sob her way through her story; and, furious, he sent her away directly, ignoring her pleas that he should carry a letter from her to Erik.
Nadir was almost less angry with Christine than himself. He could not suppress the feeling that this new manifestation of Christine's insatiable curiosity was his fault: he had been so sure that he was right in bringing her back into Erik's life! But old patterns of betrayal and insensitivity were emerging, and Nadir did not know whether his friend was strong enough to bear the blows of Christine's thoughtlessness again.
He was gathering his coat into his arms and preparing to go to his friend when he became aware of Darius's silent presence in the doorway.
"Tell me," he said.
Darius inclined his head, acknowledging the permission to speak. "There is comfort to be found in friendship and the concern of one who is a friend in times of sorrow."
Nadir, knowing that there was more to come, did not speak.
"But true solace comes only from discovering one's own strength. In being permitted to grieve without the constraint of a social visit." He paused. "The magician has always felt it a cause of shame to admit pain."
Nadir wondered, not for the first time, how his servant, who had never abandoned his instinctive distrust of Erik, could know him quite so well. He was right, of course: there was nothing Erik would hate more than to feel himself in receipt of his friend's pity. For many years now, Nadir had found it easier to pretend that he did not see the vulnerable heart concealed behind the Phantom of the Opera's polished façade; and only allowing Erik to hide the immediate tempest of grief could preserve that pretence.
"Tomorrow?" he asked.
Darius inclined his head once more. "I think that tomorrow he is more likely to find himself appreciative of company."
It was not without apprehension that Nadir approached Erik's flat the next day: for all the years that he had known his friend, Erik remained unpredictable and prone to unexpected displays of temper which never failed to unnerve him.
His anxiety seemed ill-founded, however: Erik opened the door to him with courtesy, if not enthusiasm, and went about the routine process of making tea without comment.
Nadir's first tentative comments about the weather and the treacherous journey the snow had provided were met with a polite lack of enthusiasm which lent him courage to broach the true purpose of his visit.
His mention of Christine's name brought the first sign of any other reaction than apathy from Erik: his eyes lit with warning fire which Nadir recognised instantly as dangerous, and he raised a hand abruptly to halt his friend.
"Since you have evidently been the recipient of a visit from my guest of yesterday, and have consequently already heard a relation of the result of her visit, you will forgive my not wishing to add my interpretation of events to hers." Bitterness faintly smeared his words. "No doubt she has told her tale admirably."
Erik put his teacup down roughly on the table, heedless of the delicate china, and rose to extinguish the samovar.
"If you have come here to encourage me to forgive her, you might be well advised to save your breath. I am not in humour to hear you extol her virtues."
Nadir shook his head, relieved that Erik did not seem angry. "I haven't come to list her merits. You know them yourself to the letter."
Erik laughed shortly and inclined his head in wry acknowledgment.
"But I would remind you of the good that has come about between you," Nadir continued. "I would ask you what it is that drives you to strike her from your life. Wounded pride is hardly –"
"Wounded pride!"
"– hardly reason enough to give her up," Nadir went on doggedly. "She really does regret it. And Erik –" he paused, wondering whether he dared continue. "– she is still very young. Young enough to be forgiven for her mistakes …"
Erik made an angry sound and gestured with violent dismissal.
"This is one mistake that she has made too many times." He crossed the room and lifted Marguerite into his arms, tracing delicate patterns on the soft fur of her head. "I can still hear her screaming, you know. When I close my eyes – when I try to sleep – whenever there is silence … all I can hear is her screaming. Six years have passed since the first time she saw my face, and still I cannot forget … blot out … the sound of that screaming." He was silent, and Nadir saw his brow crease into familiar lines of pain, his eyes closing. He dropped Marguerite abruptly, and spoke. "I am tired with discussing this." His tone brooked no argument.
"What am I to tell her?"
Erik glanced up and, for the first time, looked Nadir in the eyes. "You may tell her whatever you like." His voice wavered, so momentarily that Nadir was not even quite sure that he had really heard it. "It is a matter of supreme indifference to me."
Christine had never had a talent for taking advice. Nadir's advice that she should count her blessings and allow Erik to recuperate in his own time was no exception: desperate to make amends and regain Erik's good opinion, she returned several times to his flat to hammer with an ever-increasing sense of futility on the unyielding door and utter pleading supplications to its blank face. If Erik was there – and she did not doubt that he was – he did not reveal himself.
Had Christine turned back to gaze despairingly at the door like a pre-Raphaelite heroine from an unlikely novel, she might have seen the door open just a crack to allow a shadowed form to pass silently out of the flat and follow her at a discreet distance along the street.
Even in anger, Erik could not bring himself to suffer her to walk home alone.
He missed her fiercely in her absence. He had hoped that it might be easier to let her go this time, having spent so much time apart from her; but he soon discovered the pain just as fresh and the loneliness just as acute as when she had first left the Opera Populaire.
But in spite of the pain of being without her, he remained angry. It was an empty anger, one that left an aching hollow in his chest and consumed vast quantities of energy without providing light; but it was enough.
For the first time, he did not make excuses for her. He was accustomed to reason away her mistakes – her youth and inexperience had long spared her his wrath – but this time he did not. He simply could not understand her: no reason he could think of seemed sufficient to explain her willing infliction of the horror of his face upon herself; and in this utter incomprehension he found a knot of hard tightness to which he could cling in order to allow him to preserve his resentment.
The weakness that inevitably followed his illness plagued him over the next few weeks. Ordinarily, he could shake off the spells of fatigue and residual pain through sheer willpower, but now his strength seemed to have deserted him; and he began to feel his age as never before.
His physical condition was not aided by Nadir, who paid Erik countless tiring visits whose sole purpose seemed to be to raise the spectre of Christine in his friend's mind. At last Erik, exasperated and pained by constant subtle reminders of his former protégé, informed his only friend that until he could keep a judicious tongue in his head he would be wise to stay away, and Nadir resignedly capitulated, privately feeling that Erik's utter repression of everything he had ever felt for Christine could be no healthier than the violent expressions of that feeling which the Opera Populaire had suffered six years previously.
And so the time wore on: three long, lonely weeks in which Erik's cold façade masked bitter loneliness and crippling despair, and Christine, amid all of her friends, felt more alone than she had in years. Nadir, helpless between them, saw the growing sadness of each, and knew intense frustration at Erik's stubbornness which seemed destined to prevent them from finding happiness.
As the days wore on, he found that Christine was beginning to cling to him, visiting him daily; he suspected that the charm of his company stemmed mainly from the possibility he presented of discussion about Erik. Conversely, Erik was becoming withdrawn, aloof and unapproachable, unwelcoming when Nadir visited and, as time went on, frequently failing to answer the door at all. Christine found comfort in allowing Nadir's kindness to soothe her wounds; Erik in concealing his own entirely.
It was a cool day in early November when all of that changed.
Erik awoke out of the shallow, nervous sleep that provided his only rest these days to the sound of knocking at the door. At first he assumed his visitor was Nadir and rose unenthusiastically to let him in; but the voice that subsequently followed the knocks soon disabused him of that misapprehension and sent him shrinking back into a darker corner of the room.
"Erik, please! Please, please open the door and talk to me; I know you're in there!"
Christine pulled her hand back through her hair in mute frustration at the futility of the exercise and looked around with some ill-defined hope of a miracle.
"Erik … I'm going to put something through the letterbox. Will you read it?"
There was silence from within, but she almost thought she heard something that might have been movement towards the door. Christine sighed and took out the letter she had received earlier that morning, slipping it through the letterbox. She took a deep breath and waited.
Erik thought with a grimace that there was some obscene parody of their first days together in it: a mirror, a front door, there was really very little difference. One afforded him a sight of her which the other did not, of course …
The letter eased through the letterbox and fell soundlessly to the carpet like a falling leaf. He stared at it for a moment, paralysed; the thought came to him that he should throw it on the fire without opening it. What value could further words of hers hold?
He had resolved himself, and bent to pick it up; and as he did so, he realised that the name on the envelope was not his, but hers.
His brow furrowed, and his resolution dissolved. Frowning, he slipped his finger under the flap, noticing that it had already been opened, and withdrew the letter.
Dear Madame la Vicomtesse,
Having discussed the matter with M. Firmin, and after your kind visit of last week, I am delighted to inform you that we would indeed be very happy to welcome you back to the Opera Populaire. Our next major production will be La Boheme, opening in September; rehearsals will begin in several weeks' time.
There followed some six lines of nonsense about rehearsal and salary; he inferred from Andre's following words that she had requested that only a small part should be hers "because of your long period of vocal inactivity".
Erik could not have defined the moment in which his hand moved to open the door for Christine: all he knew was that as soon as the door gave way to her lovely face, his anger dissolved and his heart melted. It was inevitable that he should forgive her: however she might hurt him, he would never be able to stop loving her; his forgiveness was hers as surely as he himself was.
"Oh, Christine," he murmured. "Why didn't you tell me?"
She looked up at him, her eyes shining with tears. "I wanted it to be a surprise," she whispered.
Erik saw Christine reach for her handkerchief, and was not surprised when she appeared unable to find it. He produced one and held it out to her. She accepted it, and they stood motionless for a moment, suspended in time, and then Christine gave a sob and crossed the distance between them in a rush. So suddenly that he was not quite sure how it had come about, she was in his arms, and she was sobbing against him, her face buried in his chest.
"Christine …"
Cautiously, he lifted one hand to stroke her hair, unable to summon sufficient courage to give in to the desire to return her embrace.
"Shh …" He stroked her hair back gently, smoothing his fingers across her curls. "It's all right."
Christine raised her tear-stained face to look him in the eyes, speaking fast, her voice still uneven with tears. "I'm sorry … I'm so sorry …" She dissolved into tears again and buried her face in his shirt.
Christine felt him shudder against her as she pressed closer into his arms, and was forcibly reminded of the day she had kissed him. His reaction had been markedly similar: the tremor of unexpected emotion succeeded by tension across the shoulders and hesitation as his arms came slowly around her. She closed her eyes as guilt poured through her: whether a kiss or something as simple as an embrace, physical contact always startled and discomfited him by virtue of its unfamiliarity; how could he bear such excruciating isolation?
She knew what he would say if she were to ask him.
"It is weak and silly to say you cannot bear what it is your fate to be required to bear," with the slight smile at the corner of his mouth that told her he expected her to recognise the quotation. She had always admired his stoicism, and frequently wondered how he could bear to endure her constant unreliability: she wished she could be as brave as he himself was.
And when he gently disentangled himself from her clutching embrace and guided her into the flat, one arm tentatively around her waist, she almost cried with relief as she sank into the guest armchair.
She gazed around at the room, which was far too tidy – Erik's usual confusion of sheet music and artwork entirely absent – and felt that she had come home after a long absence.
She saw him lean forward in his chair to speak, and pre-empted him.
"You must forgive me," she began earnestly, sweeping her hair back anxiously from her face. "I have missed you so … and the thought that you would not forgive me …" She stopped abruptly, at a loss. Her prepared speech had gone quite out of her head, and the single raised eyebrow that was her only indication of the expression on Erik's face did nothing but fluster her further.
"I'm so sorry. It was such a … terrible thing of me to do … and … I just …" She shook her head. "I'm talking such nonsense. I wanted to know if I would still be …" her voice trailed off.
He finished the sentence for her. "Repulsed?"
She looked up into his eyes, startled, but there was no malice there. His eyes were sad; but kind. And again she was reminded of his dual natures; how could someone so given to violence, so corrupted by evil be so kind to her, forgive such innumerable betrayals and countless disappointments?
"Afraid."
He nodded slowly, and there was an aching silence.
"I am almost afraid to ask the result of this little experiment," he remarked at last with forced lightness.
Christine thought of that day, remembered her bare glimpse of Erik's face; and shook her head slowly.
"No," she replied softly. "No … I wasn't afraid."
The faintest flickering of doubt showed in his eyes; but he smiled the rather lopsided smile Christine recognised as forced, and only her desire to avoid distressing him further when he seemed willing to let the subject rest prevented her from pursuing it further as he stood and made the suggestion of tea.
This was the moment most easily defined as their reconciliation: from then on there were no recriminations and no anger between them. But inevitably their relationship was not what it had been: although Erik had forgiven her the injury, the wounds were longer in healing than he had anticipated. Christine could not help but notice his growing and undeniable paranoia about the mask: he kept that side of his face turned away from her as much as he could, and she could feel the tension that spread across his shoulders if she now stood beside him while he sat at the piano.
Christine wished she possessed the courage to ask him to take it off once and for all.
But this apart, they were soon comfortable together again: in company together, he was gentle and she was happy, and they came together with tender affection made all the more precious by the knowledge of its fragility.
