Chapter 3

On sleepless roads the sleepless go. –Jimmy Eat World

A/N: Okay, back to Christine and the baby. Thank you so much to all my reviewers! I love you and please keep at it.

"Oh Raoul…" Christine moaned from where she lay crumpled at the base of the stairs, a strange puddle of fluid pooling beneath her. "What will become of your heir now?"

Summoning her strength, she lifted herself from the floor and rushed out of the front doors, heading to the only place she could call home― the Opéra Populaire. If Christine hadn't been in her current situation, she would have been completely exhilarated by leaving. She was finally doing what she had dreamed of for the last year.

She staggered down the streets, her face a bloody mess, her arms and torso very bruised. She was unrecognizable unless you were extremely close to her and could see her blue eyes, which were currently clouded with pain and slight insanity. Thankfully, it was growing dark by the time she left the property (the winter days were so short, it seemed), and her cloak covered most of her injuries.

A terrible pain seized her lower abdomen. Was this a contraction? Christine could feel a dull panic residing within her. Was she about to have a miscarriage? What if she gave birth right here on the street? Why was she still not at the opera house?

After about another quarter hour of stumbling along as her abdomen continued to twinge, she reached a large iron grate on the Rue Scribe side of a large, heavily ornamented building. She wrenched it open and fell through the large hole it left, slamming the grate behind her.

The Opéra Populaire was once a grand, beautiful building. While it still looked like it may once have been beautiful, it was quite dilapidated. After a large fire which had practically gutted the building, use had been discontinued. There was now another larger, grander opera house on the other side of Paris. The bowels of the opera house, however, had not been touched by the fire. Everything that had once been there still remained.

Christine picked her way through corridors and tunnels until, at last, she came to a very old-looking gondola which, miraculously, was still intact. She felt the ground along the shore near the boat and finally found a pole to push the boat with.

She pushed for some time, blind in the darkness, praying that her memory was not tricking her. It was not. She finally came to a shoreline, where it looked like there had once been a house of some sort.

Christine clambered from the boat, the contractions growing ever stronger and closer together.

"Erik!" she called. "Erik, are you here?"

No one replied.

Collapsing from exhaustion, she fainted.


Christine came to sharply fifteen minutes later, though it felt like an eternity.

She cried out as she felt the baby begin to move from her. The rest of the birth came as instinct, and soon a newborn child was laid before her, covered in blood and fluids. It was terribly mangled from her fall down the stairs, and had taken on a slightly bluish hue. It was unmistakably stillborn. Grabbing a sharp rock, she cut the umbilical cord, and clutched her child to her breast.

"Shhh…it's okay," she crooned, oblivious to the fact that the child in her arms was lifeless. "I'm here."


Erik soundlessly turned down the Rue Scribe and opened a large grate in the Opéra Populaire's side. He descended a flight of stairs, not noticing the fresh blood lining the staircase. He came to where his gondola should normally reside―

But it was gone.

Cursing, Erik jumped into the water. It only came to about his waste. He slowly made his way towards his old home, taking note of which things had been plundered since his departure.

After a short time of wading, he came to the shore.

There was someone curled up there.

Slowly, he approached, presuming the person to be dead. He nearly had a heart attack when the figure shot upright.

They had long brown hair matted with blood, and a bloody, tearstained face. Their eyes rolled with delirium and clutched a mangled, clearly dead child to themselves.

"Don't come any closer. Don't come near my child."

Erik stopped dead in his tracks. There was something very familiar about this broken girl.