I beg your forgiveness for my horrendous absence, faithful readers! School is school, and therefore it is determined to derail me from some of the more important tasks in life …

like writing …

or sleep for that matter...

Yet I shall continue ever onward with my epic novel (laughs at herself), and with the aid of your loyal reviews I shall overcome the evil monster that is my education!

OK, enough of the flowery speeches. I am very sorry, and to prove it I baked CHEESECAKE!

Eat, forgive, and review.

That is all.

From childhood's hour I have not been
As others were; I have not seen
As others saw; I could not bring
My passions from a common spring.
From the same source I have not taken
My sorrow; I could not awaken
My heart to joy at the same tone;
And all I loved, I loved alone.

-'Alone', Edgar Allen Poe

Chapter Fifty Eight: All I Loved, P.2

Leah

She sang like an angel.

I had never been so proud in all my life, and a warm, almost maternal affection bubbled quietly inside me as my little Tina sang Margarita's final note. But when she fainted shortly thereafter, my sisterly congratulations and praise quickly flitted out of my mind, replaced by concern and irritation that grew with every hurried step I took as I trundled my way up to the room that was her's for the first time.

When I arrived, she was closeted in the much coveted dressing room with the doctor of the house, and not a word had been issued since the door had last closed behind a still unconscious singer.

Prayers for Tina's wellbeing were muttered as easily as curses the nearer I drew to her side, for I was not the only one who sought out news of Christine Daae tonight.

Dozens of new devotees had been born the moment my once unassuming little friend had taken her place on the stage. Men and women both -though the former were more prevalent by far- had come to inquire about their newest diva.

The ravenous hordes of well wishers and admirers were only held at bay Tina's short, stout little maid, Ingrid. The practical, no-nonsense woman fended off the overzealous bourgeois with nothing more than a cold blue, Swedish stare and the sheer force of her impregnable will. Yet even this could not deter the clamor of the patrons and their guests.

Voices called out to have their questions answered, and were quite confused when the information they desired was denied to them. The milling throng seemed to feel that once she had sung upon the stage, her life was no longer hers alone, but that they were entitled to a share of it as well.

Had I not been so very focused on attending Tina, I would have taken the chance to silently mock the foolishness of the upper class that I had belonged to so many long years ago. Did these idiots really have so little to do that they insisted on meddling in the lives of others? And why in the name of all sacred things had I ever wanted to emulate such people?

Yet these thoughts could have been another's for all that they truly affected me.

I cared little at the moment for the public sentiment, wishing only to find a way to her side. I surveyed the crowd outside her door with utter dismay. They were crammed into the tiny hall like peaches and syrup in a tin can.

How was I to reach my friend?

But just as I steeled myself to shove my way through the useless flock of jackdaws, a young man brushed past me and cleared a path in the wilderness of satin skirts and tailcoats. I only had half a breath to recognize Philippe's little brother (Had it been Robert … Raymond, perhaps? …I had never had much of a head for names), before my window of opportunity was nearly gone.

Rushing after him in a most unladylike fashion, I hitched my well worn, serviceable black skirts up -nearly to my ankles!- and slipped into the dressing room just as Ingrid slammed the door behind me.

The indignant outsiders raised their voices ever higher, apparently demanding the same rights to see 'La Daae' as the two who had just been admitted. Their empty-headed nonsense was only put to an end when a distinctly accented command was issued in broken, unmanageable French and rapid Yiddish.

From the little of the language that Tina and Beth had managed to teach me, I was certainly glad that I was on the other side of the heavily paneled mahogany wall.

Even I blushed at a few of her curses and threats, though I was certainly no stranger to the course language of the stables and the cellars. I would wager a week's wages that not even Pierre, Joseph's most foul mouthed stable hand, knew some of those phrases.

Despite all of Madame Valerius's most valiant efforts for the cause, Ingrid never really had learned to recognize authority as a servant should have.

Tina once speculated that it was because her father had not paid attention to such things while he lived that the portly maid had never bothered to realize that she was not simply a member of the Daae family.

By the time Ingrid's language had startled the crème de la crème into some semblance of hushed politeness, my attention was fixed elsewhere.

Tina's plump cheeks had lost their customary rosy hue, and she fidgeted in her unconscious state, but that was not what had drawn my eye. The young man from before was now looming over her in a disturbingly familiar manner, his debonair top hat clutched to his chest as he continued to stare at her.

I had had quite enough of this! First the gut wrenching business with the 'ghost', and now a rouge admirer who had avoided Ingrid's formidable arsenal with a streak of luck? Perhaps God sought to teach me patience with these masculine problems, but I was not in the mood to be instructed.

And who did this little pipsqueak of a boy think he was?

Did he really think that I would defend Tina from a crazed hermit, yet fail to foil his little plans?

I had vowed long ago that I would never allow Tina to suffer the pain of being used by a man as I had, and I was not about to break that oath just yet!

Already quite peevish from the recent nerve grinding events of the evening and incited by memories of the past that still littered my heart like fresh wounds, I failed to recall who the boy was and began to upbraid him for his unseemly conduct.

"Monsieur," I snapped with ice on my breath as I drew near the divan where she lay. "Just what do you think that you are doing here?

The boy seemed startled by the mere sound of my voice, much less the tone I had taken. And well that he should!

Had he had any sense in that pretty little chestnut head of his, he would have bolted immediately. It was the voice I used to keep the youngest dancers in line when I was burdened with teaching them, due to their former instructor's recent marriage.

It was a voice that could stop a charging bull in its tracks at twenty paces, a tone that should have frozen the skin he stood in.

But all that it received on that fatal night was a wide eyed stare and a slightly gaping mouth.

I would have beaten him out of the door with a verbal lashing on my tongue, had it not been for Tina's pained groan and the hiss to be silent that issued out from under the doctor's bushy white beard.

The old man applied a warm cloth to Tina's head as she grumbled several times in her mockery of sleep, and both the boy and I forgot our would be spat as we held our breaths.

For what seemed an eternity, the gnarled physician patiently waved smelling salts under her nose. Then with another unhappy grunt, Tina's eyes fluttered open and began to focus on the first thing in sight.

The boy.

When she finally regained seemed to see him, she gave the strangest little jump, and quickly glanced about for others in the room. Seeing the doctor and myself, she seemed to calm a bit and smiled warmly at us both.

I would not grudge her that jump. How else would any decent girl react upon waking to see a strange man in her dressing room?

Yet the seemingly natural question that next whispered from her lips would someday shake the Garnier to its very foundations.

"Monsieur…"

Something distant in her voice was pained and full of sorrow.

Why was she looking at him that way, as though he was the last raft floating away from a sinking ship? If I hadn't known better, I would have thought her on the verge of tears!

"Monsieur, who are you?" She managed to stutter out at last.

Now it was his turn to be startled, but he hid it well as he bent to kiss her gloved hand. It was quite polite, but something about him said that there was more in his head than thoughts of her glove. I did not trust him.

"I am the little boy who went into the sea to rescue your scarf." He said simply, emphasizing each word as though he spoke to an infant.

Though the child kept a serious face about him, it was such an absurd answer that I nearly began to laugh on the spot.

Apparently Tina felt the same, for she laughed aloud, and the doctor and I both had a chuckle as well. Perhaps the boy had been so dazzled by her performance that he lost his wits somewhere in the theater proper. I was about to advise him to return and collect them as he turned more and more red.

He stiffly asked to speak with her privately, (Privately! What Gall!) but she soon dismissed both men from the room with an uncharacteristic edge to her sweet disposition.

It was surprising to hear her speak so rudely, but it was a greater surprise to see her slump down upon the divan once they had gone.

"Oh Leah," she whimpered like a lost puppy, "What am I to do?"

I gingerly took a seat next to her and cradled her sobbing form as she began to cry in earnest.

"What is the matter, hermanita? Who was that boy?"

My questions were merely punctuated by wails that were becoming ominously louder. I would have to quiet her soon, or the entire house would hear this racket!

"Hush now, else the entire audience shall hear your blubbering." I tried to calm her as practically as I could, but I knew that the logic sounded cold. It had been so long since I had comforted anyone that I was unsure if I still remembered how.

It took nearly a quarter of the hour for my little sister to take hold of herself once again, and even then I was not sure of how strong her hold truly was. It seemed that the slightest puff of breeze might reanimate her tears and hysterics.

I was beginning to worry about her stability. True, Tina had always been an emotional little girl, but when she returned to the Garnier after her long absence, she had come back to me a proper young lady of society. She was quiet, reserved, even demure and domestic. But the quivering bundle of nerves that sniffled in my arms was neither girl nor lady, and the violence of her emotions startled me.

Could this really be my little Tina?

"There, that's better, no?" I wiped away a final tear from her puffy eyes. "Now tell me, what is the matter?"

She paused, hesitant, but finally gave in to my insistence.

"That was Raoul." She said simply.

The puzzle pieces began to align, and I realized that the young Viscomte and her precious childhood friend were one and the same.

"That was Raoul?"

…

Needless to say, we spent quite some time discussing our relations to the men of Casa de Cheney. I forewarned her of my painful past, and she told the entire romantic tale of her summer love. It was only with the most strenuous of persuasion, however, that she divulged the dark secret of her 'angel' and the hellish ways that he had already meddled in her life.

When I learned of her 'Maestro's' prohibition against love, I was sorely tempted to reveal him for the fraud that he was. Yet deep as my hatred boiled for the man, I would not, -no- I could not shatter Tina's faith. Her faith was her one surety, and to see his cheat in the light would likely break her in two.

It had nothing to do with the pity that I still felt for the man on occasion, and it certainly had nothing to do with the emotions he had once stirred in my heart. Surely it didn't!

No, my only aim was to protect Tina from the pain I had already known. I would be damned if he would injure her as he had me!

"I will catch him and skin him alive if I have to." I silently decided as I left Tina's apartments, not intending to move from the door until she had left this accursed building.

And to think, I had once thought that these cold stone walls held a utopia! What a cruel trick to be trapped in a cage instead, and trapped with a deformed madman no less!

It was only when I heard their conversation that the fortifications around my soul began to tumble down.

His voice appeared suddenly and in all its near hypnotic glory as he professed undying love for 'his angel' over and over again, commanding her with heavenly authority (and a sorrow that I doubted Tina could hear while enraptured elsewize) that she must reciprocate.

"…You must love me!"

He cried, and in that moment I knew that he meant her no harm. No voice, not even one such as the opera ghost possessed, could falsify the all consuming, tender need that I knew to be love.

I ought to have sighed a little sigh of relief, knowing that I should not have to dismember my hermana's faith.

I ought to have been relieved … and yet something indiscernible lurked beneath the still waters of my heart.

If I had not known better, I would have called it envy.

...

Disclaimer: In no way did I intend to imply that Johnny Depp is not a sexy boy. He is very sexy, and is one of the few men on earth who DOES look hot in eyeliner… "But where's the rum?"

Tigger- In no way do I intend for Eric to become sane all of a sudden, but that's not to say that love can't be an eventual cure for SOME of his nutty ness. He is Eric after all. But perhaps having such an unhealthy devotion eats up all his time for talking to himself … or maybe he doesn't think of himself in that weird third extra person thing when he is remembering earlier, less nutty, parts of his life… food for thought. I don't know what to do about my email, but it is misbehaving as of late. I got nothing.

Empress- Don't shoot, I'll keep writing! Leah may not smack him (or maybe she will! GO LEAH!) but there is definitely going to be more plot movement now! Dun dun da!

JPT- Once again, your reviews were one of the bright spots in my day when I received them. I'm so happy that you liked the material, and I have to admit that that chapter was one of my favorites too. Thanks so much. And yes, much foreshadowing. As for the drug, I purposely did not mention it here, and it will not resurface for a while, but when it does… well, you'll see.