Et Velle Et Perficere Chapter 15: To End a War, a phantom of the opera fanfic

Et Velle Et Perficere

Disclaimer: Don't own POTO… but I do own Jeremy, Michael, Sarah and Marcus Christie.

A/N: I know… I'm absolutely bloody terrible. Not only have I not updated this in ages, but, just as I promised updates to be getting back to normal, I find myself faced with a surprise practical exam on Friday that I really have to study for and, therefore, have been unable to find much time to write. But, I promise that I'll never just stop half way through a story with no intention of continuing. I'm too stubborn for that. I'm writing as often as I can manage and I hope to get some more updates posted when I can, but I can't promise how quickly that'll be. I did not even anticipate updating this today but I thought it was about time to get a bloody move on with the story. I apologise if it is a bit rough around the edges.

Please read and review…

Chapter 15: The Quickest Way of Ending a War is to Lose It…

Erik had not left Christine's side once during the whole night for anything more trivial than going to the adjoining toilet. He was still half-sitting, half-lying beside her in, perhaps, a more comfortable position now with blankets over them both when Michael and Sarah came in looking consumed with worry.

They fussed over their beautiful daughter as Erik watched, feeling similarly worried over her. "Has she wakened up yet?" Michael asked him, quietly.

"No… the doctor said that, since she is considerably smaller than me, her body is taking longer to counteract the effects of the drugs."

"And how are you, Erik?"

"I'll be just fine when Christine wakens up," he replied, looking longingly at the face of the beautiful angel beside him.

"Won't we all…" Michael mumbled as he moved towards the still sleeping Jeremy in the bedside chair. His head was slumped against his shoulder in a way that looked rather painful and Michael gently touched his shoulder to waken him up as he moved to half-crouch at his feet so that he was almost level with him. "How are you?" he asked as Jeremy came round.

"I'll be holding my neck at a 45˚ angle for the next few days but I'll live… When did you get here?"

"Just now…"

"Michael," Jeremy said, getting up and dropping his jacket, which he had been using as a blanket, to the chair, unheeded. "I am so sorry… this is all my fau–"

"Don't be ridiculous," Michael cut him off, standing now, too. "This isn't your fault… how can you be expected to look after every single pupil every second of every day…"

"It's my job to do so…"

"Jeremy, it's not solely your responsibility… you played no active role in doing this to them, therefore, you are not to blame… Come on, I bet you need to stretch your legs after a night in that chair… let's go get something to eat," he said, pressing a hand against Jeremy's shoulder to get him to move. "Christine will have more than enough attention from Sarah and Erik, I'm sure… you have earned a break."

"Angel? Oh, thank God," Erik gasped, bringing Christine closer to him as she started to stir for the first time in hours. "I was so scared you wouldn't waken up." Michael and Sarah had gone down to the cafeteria with Jeremy to talk and convince the poor man that it was in no way his fault, leaving Christine in the capable and very willing care of their foster son. They also believed that he would want some time alone with her and, after finding that she was technically alright and unlikely to wake up very quickly, they had allowed him that.

Groggily, she brought a hand to her forehead and moaned, her head throbbing like it never had before. She felt like she was in some sort of fog and absolutely nothing was clear to her. "Erik? Where are we?" Of all things, she knew she could always count on him to be there with her – going through whatever she was going through, merely because he would not stand her being alone as he had been.

"Don't be frightened, Christine… we're in the hospital. But you'll be fine, I promise you." Removing his Angel's hand from her forehead delicately, he brought his up to stroke her temples softly in the hopes of bringing her some comfort.

Spending a moment basking in his soothing massage as the dull pain slowly slipped away from her, she tried to grasp a memory that seemed permanently just beyond her reach. She struggled with her uncooperative mind for several minutes and then gave up, exhausted. "What happened?"

"You don't remember?" he asked, aware of his own absence of memory of the event in question. She shook her head and bit her lip, wondering if she'd be able to open her heavy eyelids anytime soon.

"It does not matter right now, my Angel. Let us just concentrate on getting you better first."

After a long silence, she finally managed to open her eyes properly and blinked in perplexed surprise. "I'm confused…"

"It's alright, you are still recovering… Do not try to speak yet. I'll get the doctor." And, with that, he hopped off of the bed, hurrying out of the ward before she'd had the chance to satisfy all of the questions that were floating around in her head.

He returned shortly later with the consultant and Christine's parents in tow, all eager to see her awake. And she sighed as they hurried over to her in a flurry of blurred figures, reminding her that she was not yet well enough to do anything but lie there and be subjected to all this unwanted attention. She still could not remember what she felt she needed to.

"Christine, oh, thank God you are alright!" her father said quickly, grasping her tightly between himself and his wife, so happy was he to find her conscious. Truly, it had been a terribly frightening experience to have received the phone call from Jeremy the night before and then have to rush all the way down to see her at the hospital. Never did he want to see her lying in a hospital bed again.

"You're crowding her," Erik complained, trying to put a little distance between his Christine and her extensive family unit. "Let her recover on her own." He believed he knew his Angel better than anyone, even her own parents, and he could see that they were making her uncomfortable in her newly-awakened state. He prided himself in knowing every little nuance of her spirit and was secretly glad when she smiled up at him in gratitude. Then he pushed his feelings aside and stood back as the doctor examined her, battling with his fears that something somewhere was wrong with her.

A while later, when Christine was finally coherent and filled in on what had happened to her, she was sitting up in the hospital bed with Erik behind her as they just waited to be discharged since she had been found to be alright. Her parents and Jeremy had gone to the cafeteria to get something to eat while Erik and Christine found themselves talking to a couple of policemen, who had been let in to see them. They had been there earlier but now was the first time they had come that the young woman had been lucid enough to question… they would have already questioned the young man but he had refused to leave her side for something so, at the time, unworthy of his attention.

"Do you know who spiked your drink, Miss Daaé?" the first police officer asked.

"No… I… my memory still isn't too clear… I remember, though, that I wasn't alone when I passed out…"

"Do you know who you were with?"

"No… but I know I bumped into someone when I came out of St. Patrick's after being in Jeremy's room… and then I took a drink and I didn't feel right…" she trailed off.

"Who's Jeremy?"

Christine wondered at what point she had started calling him Jeremy and couldn't quite remember. "Jeremy Harper-Matthews – my teacher…"

The two policemen shared a suspicious glance and moved on as one of them wrote the name down for further questioning. "What were you doing in Jeremy's room?"

Erik glared at the policemen as his Angel struggled to remember… "I'm not sure…"

"Do you remember anything else?" She took a moment to think and then shook her head vaguely. They turned their attention towards Erik… "Do you know who spiked your drink, Mr. Phelps-Jones?"

Erik cringed at the name – he hated being called after the people who had supposedly brought him into the world just to abandon him… but unfortunately, he could not change his name yet… and it was the least of his worries. "I… I remember walking towards St. Patrick's… Christine had left with Jeremy a while back and I think I must have been going to see her… but I never made it and I don't recall why…"

"Do you remember actually seeing Jeremy before you passed out?"

"Yes…" Erik said, bringing to mind the blurry figure of a man he had seen just as he blacked out – he was sure it had been Jeremy… "He was standing over Christine in the lift…" he finished, more to himself than anyone else.

The policemen shared another, more dubious, look and wrote a few more reasons down that they should formally interview this Jeremy. They knew that both Christine and Erik had been drugged with the same stuff and in the same way – at the minute, they were looking for just one person… simplest answer and all that. After all, both of them were found on the same floor within yards of each other and had remembered seeing Jeremy Harper-Matthews before passing out. The words 'open and shut' came to the first officer's mind as he flipped his notepad closed and excused them from the room, leaving Erik and Christine blissfully unaware that they had just incriminated a completely innocent man.

"Mr. Harper-Matthews, we'd like to talk to you down at the station…"

"Can't this wait?" he asked, picking out a magazine for Christine in the hospital's shop so that she wouldn't get too bored.

The two police officers stood imposingly, one on each side of him. "I'm afraid, sir, that it can't… You can either leave with us now willingly, or we can put you in handcuffs and forcibly take you to the station… it's your choice."

Jeremy looked at the man, completely confused, "Handcuffs? Why the hell would you put me in handcuffs? What have I done?"

The first officer folded his arms across his chest as Jeremy gave up looking along the shelves. "We have reason to believe you may be involved in the drugging of Erik Phelps-Jones and the drugging and attempted-rape of Christine Daaé…"

"What?"

"Sir, will you come willingly?"

"Yes," Jeremy answered at last, having no intention of being dragged away, restrained. He felt humiliated as they led him outside to the police car and made him sit in the back. "What makes you think that I did it?"

"You have been placed at the scene by both of the victims and you were last to see either of them before they passed out…" the first officer said as his colleague drove towards the police station.

"Let me ask you this then – if I had wanted to rape Christine, why would I have called an ambulance and you bloody lot before I did anything? And why would I have drugged Erik, hmm?" Jeremy was incensed now – he couldn't believe he was being taken to a police station for questioning over the drugging of two people he loved dearly.

"All in due time, Mr. Harper-Matthews…"

"Where do you think he could be?" Christine asked Erik.

"I don't know, sweetheart… he said he'd be right back with your magazine."

"He can't have gotten lost… can he?"

"I would not think so, Angel – the school is bigger than this place and he manages fine there, where they do not have signs and wandering nurses to ask for directions…" Erik said, watching her beautiful face as she looked confused. It was odd to be attracted to someone's confusion… but he found it utterly endearing on her.

"Then where is he?"

"I don't know, my love… but if he's had a heart attack, he's in the best bloody place for it."

Christine gasped and hit him solidly on his arm. "Don't say that… I don't want him to have a heart attack."

"Oh, darling, you are so precious… you cannot give him a heart attack by mentioning it…" he said softly.

"Still, I would prefer it if you did not refer so easily to something life-threatening…"

"You have a very gentle heart, my Christine," he said, kissing just below her ear. "However, I have often thought upon death, and I find it the least of all evils."

"How can you say that? If you were to die, it'd kill me…" she cried, "Don't you want to live… for me?"

"I want to do a lot more than that for you… Forgive me, my love, I did not know the subject would upset you so…"

"Well, it does…" she huffed.

He laughed at her pouting and laughed even more when she shot a glare at him for laughing in the first place… oh, she was adorable. "Mmm, feisty, my little Angel…" he purred into her ear, more in order to make her laugh than anything else as he started nipping lightly at her earlobe, succeeding in his quest. "Let me pay more attention to the act of living, then…" He ran the tip of his tongue all around the grooves of her ear, making her wriggle as it tickled and he laughed again. "Mmm, we must argue more often…" He lifted her upper body off the hospital bed and tilted her head right back, paying the same attention to her lovely neck and the underside of her chin as he revelled in the feeling of her speaking as he did so.

"It was hardly an argument…"

"Well, my love, the quickest way of ending a war is to lose it… and I am not ashamed to admit that I rather like losing if it means tasting you like this…" He felt a sudden attraction towards her shoulder, and so, he sat behind her, resting her upper body against his as he lowered his chin to rest on the shoulder of the black pyjama top she was wearing, where he nuzzled her neck softly. It was by far the furthest they had ever gone, considering she had only just agreed to go out with him the night before but they would both have agreed that it was an amazing sensation as they sat so closely together and she drew her knees up to rest her face against them as he rubbed her other arm up and down. Erik was enjoying it so much, in fact, that he was quite put out to have been disturbed by the sound of footsteps coming into the room.

He immediately straightened them, though remained sitting behind her as he found it a position he quite liked, having her resting against his chest like that – even with completely innocent intentions.

"Where have you been?" Christine asked Jeremy as he trudged back into the room, a solemn look upon his face. "I sent you for a magazine and you didn't come back for five hours… without my magazine, I see…"

Jeremy didn't know what to say… he didn't exactly want to tell Erik and Christine that he'd almost been arrested for what had happened to them. In truth, the police had let him go due to lack of sufficient evidence to detain him and had dropped him off at the hospital a few minutes ago, warning him that they might need to speak to him again in the near future. He was not looking forward to that… but first he had to deal with the situation at hand…

"Sorry, love, I didn't mean to take so long but something came up and I couldn't get out of it…" He paused, waiting to see if they would question him further but they did not… their manners were much better than he had given them credit for, perhaps. "So, anyway, Mr. and Mrs. Blue Eyes… how's the marriage going?"

"As well as can be expected when both husband and wife are drugged and end up in hospital the night of the wedding…" Christine sighed.

"Quite…" Jeremy agreed. "Can I get you anything? Something to eat…?"

"God, no… we wouldn't see you for dust," Christine laughed, leaning back against Erik and smiling happily that Jeremy was back now.

"I'll miss you," Jeremy told Christine as they stood beside her parents' car. She and Erik had just been discharged from the hospital and Michael and Sarah were going to take them home to Croft Manor until the situation had been resolved and the culprits caught.

"It'll hopefully only be for a few days…" she said back. "I just… If I went back to Garron Tower now, I don't think I'd feel safe… not being able to remember anything about it or who did it… I need to feel safe, Jeremy. Something much worse could have happened to me…"

"I know, Blue Eyes… but it won't stop me missing the pair of you…" he smiled. "Which reminds me… are you going to tell your parents about you and Erik?"

"We discussed it while you absconded earlier… Erik thinks we should wait until we're ready to tell them… if it lasts that long, I suppose… you won't tell them, will you?"

"No, Blue Eyes… it's your place to decide when you're ready to tell them… my friendship with your father will not overshadow my friendship with you – I shan't play devil's advocate between you. Now, come on…" he said, helping her into the back of the car as Michael, Sarah and Erik came towards them from the hospital. "I expect a phone-call everyday until you return, do you hear me?"

"Yes, Father…" she laughed.

"Do you need a lift?" Michael asked Jeremy.

"Hmm…" He hadn't thought about that… "I don't have my car because I came in the ambulance… but I don't want to make Erik and Christine uncomfortable by taking them back there."

"We have to go back sometime, Jeremy," Christine said, moving into the middle seat in the back so that he could sit down next to them.

As Jeremy got in, Erik couldn't help feeling thankful that Christine was now squeezing against him so enticingly. Their proximity meant that he could smell her gorgeous hair and could almost rest his head atop hers. It was a delicious feeling being so near an angel…

"What the hell are we supposed to do?" Raoul hissed at Carlotta on Monday morning, just after she had gotten in on the bus. He had pulled her round the side of the chapel to discuss the whole drugging incident since he hadn't seen her since that night.

"Will you calm down… they don't know that it was us… they don't even really suspect us…"

"How can you know that?"

"What are you worrying about? Christine and Erik are out of hospital now – if either one of them had remembered anything, don't you think the police would have arrested us by now?" she said calmly.

"But don't you even care that we got them in hospital in the first place? It was your fault, in fact – you said that it wouldn't knock them out – you lied…" he accused.

"Don't you try to blame this on me, Raoul de Chagny – if you say anything I'll drop you in it… I didn't hold a gun to your head and make you give it to her so you're as much to blame as I am. Besides," Carlotta said, a grin spreading across her face. "Guess who I heard was arrested for it yesterday…"

Raoul was indignant. "This isn't a game, Carlotta…"

"No? Then why do we seem to be winning…?" she laughed. "Anyway… it was Harper-Matthews who was arrested for drugging Erik and Christine and for attempted rape…" She smiled wickedly and Raoul felt sick.

"Attempted rape! Mr. Harper-Matthews? He was arrested…? I mean, my God, is he still there?"

"Who cares?" she shrugged.

"You're insane… He's been arrested for something we did and you don't even care… Jeremy Harper-Matthews is no more of a nonce than Windsor Castle is a dodgy little backstreet brothel – you know he'd never touch her like that… certainly not try to rape her… this is serious – they're like father and daughter – can you imagine what this'll do to their relationship… not to mention his reputation…" Raoul hissed out of utter fury.

"Oh, lighten up – they probably won't charge him…"

"Oh my God," he said, shaking his head in disbelief, "I'm talking to a psychopath…"

"You just remember that… it's the only thing keeping your head above water."

"If you happen to find my will to live over there, do bring it over," Christine grumbled from her place on the bed in her room. Her parents and Erik had insisted that she stay in bed for a few days after she had almost fainted when she had gotten out of the car at home.

"I have never heard anybody complain so bloody much about getting a few days off school before…" Erik said, setting a tray with her lunch on it in front of her as he sat down beside her.

"I'd rather be at school than stuck here in bed… you don't know what it's like."

"Stop your whingeing and eat your food, Angel… when you get back, you'll wish you were here, again."

Christine was going to say something back when she was interrupted by the sound of the phone ringing. "Hello?"

"Hey, Christine, it's Raoul… How are you?"

"Oh, hi, Raoul… What can I say? – I've been better…" she said, holding back her laughter as Erik snorted at the sound of his name.

"Of course, of course… Listen, I just wanted speak to you… make sure you were alright. I won't keep you… I just… I heard about Mr. Harper-Matthews…"

"You heard what exactly about Mr. Harper-Matthews?" she asked, sharing a confused look with Erik.

"About him being arrested…"

"Arrested? When? What for?"

"Yesterday… for drugging the two of you… and for your… attempted rape…" he said, uncomfortably.

Christine was suddenly aware that that was where he had disappeared to the day before and she felt guilty for having teased him. "He never said…" she whispered. "I know it was not him… He would never do such a thing…"

"I know…" Raoul agreed. "Look, I've kept you long enough… you should concentrate on getting yourself well… you'll feel better once you've rested."

You'll feel better once you've rested… You'll feel better once you've rested…

What did that remind her so vaguely of?

She was shocked, dropping the phone and looking at Erik in panic, she started to breathe shallowly.

"Christine, my darling, what is it? What's wrong?" Erik asked hastily.

"Oh, my God…"

"Christine, Christine, please… what is it?" He removed the phone from her lap and placed his hands upon her shoulders. "Michael," he shouted at the top of his lungs as she continued to breathe irregularly. "Michael, come quickly."

Michael ran into the room several seconds later, panicking himself at the state his daughter appeared to be in. "Breathe deeply, Christine… Christine, slow down… darling, I'm here… shh…" he said, stroking her upper arms to try to calm her down.

It was a few minutes until her breathing returned to normal enough that she could speak and she took some seconds more to compose herself. She looked down at the spilt breakfast all over her bedcovers and sighed as she pushed them away from herself. "Daddy, it was Raoul… who spiked my drink… I remember now – he said something that reminded me… it was Raoul. Daddy, it was Raoul," she cried.

"Raoul? You're sure?" Michael asked, sceptically.

"It was him, Daddy… I know it was."

"I'll take care of it…" he said as he left to phone the policeman in charge of the investigation.

"It was that toff… that bloody spiv who did this to you?" Erik asked, livid. "I'll break his bloody neck…"

And he would, of that he would make sure…

I'm sorry that the end was so rushed… I just do not have time to fix it as yet. I thought it better to update than not at all, though. Please, review, pester and inspire, lovely reviewers.