Thanks so much to my reviewers! It means alot to me that there are people enjoying this story.
Please note: The years in which the movie is set (1870-1871) were full of massive political upheaval in France that would have essentially made the story impossible. While I have striven to keep many details period correct, I have chucked politics and war right out the window in the interest of the story.
Meg's restlessness drove Erik and her mother. He withdrew more money and they moved from the inn to a furnished flat. It was plain but respectable, and they even hired a girl to do the cleaning and a bit of cooking. Giry passed Erik off as her brother. He was satisfied with that. It was a good enough description of their strange relationship, and having to call him Uncle would cure Meg of any romantic notions. He had no confidence in his personal charms, but he knew that Meg had read far too many novels. Giry gave him her maiden name, Renouille. He had never had a surname before. He rather liked it.
Giry seemed beaten somehow by their adventure and was content to sit in the parlor. Erik was so unused to company that he too remained home most days. Meg quickly found work at a day school as a dancing teacher. Erik brooded a great deal. He continued to mull over all of the mistakes he had made, all of the ways in which his selfishness had ruined everything he had touched. He remembered the sensation of Piangi struggling under his hands, and Erik vowed that he had taken his last life. He has always thought of killing as a necessity, stemming from that first death at the carnival. Surely that had not been murder. Grenalle was a base monster—Erik's life had been full of not only humiliation and starvation but also of pain. Grenalle had regularly whipped Erik like a dog, had beaten him unconscious for no reason that the boy could ever determine. Beyond that were worse abuses—dark, horrid things that he had no words for and only glimpses of memories. He did not try to suss these out. His grip on sanity felt tenuous enough.
Besides, none of this made up for Piangi. Buquet he had meant to scare, not kill, but he had never once thought of a nonlethal means of replacing the tenor. Now he thought of dozens, from blows to the head to any number of drugs. At the time, Erik had felt like Achilles, bent on slaughtering the entire world until no one was left but him and Christine. All thought had been on his desire, his music, the fulfillment of all his dreams of the past three years. He had been entirely insane. He sat bolt upright in his chair, and a chill ran through him. Not once had he considered what Christine had wanted. Every waking minute he had burned with love for her, but that love gave no thought to her happiness. Perhaps he was the "devil's child" after all. Certainly he was a wretch. Even she, the object of all his adoration, had been someone to be bullied and manipulated.
And then she had kissed him. Erik could pinpoint that as the moment of his rebirth into sanity. "God give me courage to show you that you are not alone," she had said, and the touch of her lips had blown the world apart. His first kiss, and almost certainly his last, but it taught him all that he had never known of passion. It taught him all the ways in which he had been wrong about love. She would have stayed. This realization was what made him let her go. Knowing that she would have sacrificed her life for him was enough. Still, it would've been easier if he had found a way to not survive the fire.
He longed to be able to talk to Christine about it and to thank her. He watched for the banns to be posted in the papers. Perhaps, once she was married, one short letter would be safe. But days turned to weeks, and no announcement was made.