A/N: We're approaching the end of one journey and the beginning of another. I should let you dear readers know now that this story will be in two parts. This chapter brings the first part to an end cheers. There will be one "Interlude" chapter before we jump right into part two and the home stretch. Thanks for hanging in here this long, many exciting adventures lie ahead. One textual note…I know in Leroux, Raoul's mother died giving birth to him, but this AU changes things around a little bit for the sake of symbolic irony. And on a completely unrelated topic, this chapter makes this story exactly one chapter longer than my other epic! (which was never finished) This is encouraging news…

Chapter 14

Carpe Noctem

Clarice blinked stupidly. Raoul? Here? It wasn't possible. The golden couple must have left ages ago. Surely she had spent several lifetimes in those cellars. She could still feel the darkness clinging to her skin…

She came back to herself in time to see the vicomte step out of the carriage, his face all boyish concern. He held out a hand to her.

"Good heavens, Cassandra. Come inside before you drown."

Clarice looked at his extended fingers and looked past them to Christine's huddled form in the shadows of the carriage. She reached forward and took his hand, it was cold and wet with rain. As she followed him into the cab, she felt as if she were passing through some viscous, sucking substance that she left behind in the rain.

She sat down heavily upon the seat, feeling weariness seizing her limbs. There was stillness but for the dull drumming of raindrops on the thin roof. Flashes of lightning revealed Raoul's outline as he ducked back through the door, the upper half of his body exposed to the night as he spoke to the coachman.

A stab of anxiety made Clarice lift her hand, intending to pull him back from his defenseless position. She lowered it just as quickly. Through her door-shaped window, the shadows of night were still and innocent and the rain continued to beat upon an empty road.

Still, it seemed an eternity before the vicomte ducked back into the cab, closing the door behind him. He had a large blanket in his arms and he passed it to Clarice as the carriage began to move. Raoul had given her the coachman's horse blanket, and she felt bits of straw embedded in the coarse fibers scratch her skin as she rubbed sensation back into her arms. She patted her sodden hair dry and glanced again at Christine.

The young woman had the same lifeless look in her eyes as the day they had returned from her father's grave. Her hands lay empty and still in her lap.

"Cassandra?"

Clarice blinked as she realized that Raoul had been speaking to her. "Hmm?"

"What—what happened to you?"

She blinked several times more as she deciphered his question. Then she looked down at herself. The white shirt was soaked completely through and the outline of her slip was clearly visible through the sodden fabric. She pulled the blanket up until it covered her up past the waist. She could feel the hard edge of the mask pressing against her abdomen. Her hair had come undone from its chignon and fell below her shoulders in wet strings.

"I…I had some trouble crossing the lake and was obliged to change my wardrobe." She looked over again at Christine, searching for any sign of recognition before she realized the unlikelihood of Christine recognizing Erik's clothes from any other set of men's attire. There was nothing immediately unique about his wardrobe except that the items were on the finer side.

But Clarice could feel it. Something more binding than fabric clung to the musty elegance of the fibers. It directed her to turn her head countless times to look back at the Opera Garnier slipping out of sight through the back window.

"And beyond the lake, what did you find?"

Christine shifted. Her eyes came up ever so slightly, and Clarice could see the tightly-suppressed pain behind her mask of indifference.

"Nothing," she quickly said. She eased her still-bleeding hand underneath the blanket. "Whoever he was…was gone long before I got there. The mob found nothing."

Christine turned her face back towards the window and closed her eyes.

Raoul did not press the matter and silence fell as the carriage continued to roll through the dark streets, its wheels splashing through unseen puddles.

"How long can this last?" Clarice looked up, startled, at Raoul's sudden question, not comprehending. He looked down at his hands in his lap. "How—how could I have done such a thing? I promised to keep her safe and instead I…how could I have forced her into such a situation?"

Clarice was about to mention that he had no business talking about Christine as if she weren't even there. Then she realized that such an assumption wasn't too far from the truth.

"You mustn't rest the full blame on yourself, Raoul. He was her Angel of Music, her entire world. She had to leave eventually, and the parting would inevitably have been painful." But it wasn't Erik's fault either. They were all three unwitting pawns of another. A figure lurking unobtrusively in the shadows, anonymous to the world. And for the briefest moment, Clarice felt a rush of pure hatred.

Raoul swallowed and his Adam's apple moved behind the angry red welt across his throat. "Painful, but not murderous. Cassandra," he pleaded, "I don't know what to do. I have every reason to hate the Phantom. And I do…I curse his name, but not for the reasons that I would like."

His jaw went rigid as he turned despairing eyes toward the silent girl sitting across from them. His voice was hushed. "Look at her, those are no tears of hate. Or fear. I cried those same tears when my mother drew her last breath. How can you hate someone who leaves when one needs them the most?" He fell silent, his eyes unfocused. And then he blinked a few times and shook himself, as if he were waking from a trance. "Forgive me, I don't know what I'm saying. Pay me no mind."

"Raoul." Clarice waited as he turned to face her. "You say that you don't know what to do. Look…the woman you love is crying from grief. What do you think you should do?"

The vicomte looked. He dropped his eyes and shifted uncomfortably. Then he took a deep breath and half-stood, crossing the narrow length of the cab to sit beside Christine. Ever so slowly, he placed his hands on her shoulders, gently, as if she might break.

"Christine…" he said, clumsily, nervously, like a boy holding a girl for the first time. She leaned ever so slightly against him and he put his arm around her, smoothing her hair with one hand. "Shh," he said as her shoulders began to tremble, "I'm here," he murmured as he wiped the tears from her cheeks.

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The black carriage pulled up before the wrought-iron gates of the de Londres estate. The figure of a woman descended from it, shaking her head and pushing away the arm of a young man who attempted to assist her.

Every bit the Duchesse de Londres, Clarice Starling stepped from the carriage with as much dignity as a sodden aristocrat wearing a set of purloined men's eveningwear could manage. In the rain her hair was soaked again in no time.

She turned to speak with the young man; she spoke for a long time, shaking her head determinedly. Then she stepped back as the carriage pulled away with a wave of water. When they were gone, her shoulders, which she had previously held up so carefully, fell to her sides as she shivered from more than cold.

Turning to the gates, she fumbled for her key with clumsy fingers and the gates rattled like metallic bones in her grasp. Looking up at the nearest window on the house, she saw a flash of candlelight but when she blinked it was gone.

"Heavens above! What has happened to you, madam?" Mariana ran towards her employer with a towel, taking in her ragged appearance and sodden clothes with astonishment. She did not expect the Duchess to pull back from her roughly.

"Is the Duke home?"

"Ye-es, I believe so—"

"Good. In that case, please go to your room," she said. "I will be fine, Mariana," she added, her eyes softening at the maid's stricken expression. She considered the other woman for a moment: her round face and bright, childlike eyes. Mariana was one of their most faithful servants, having been with them since they had first arrived in Paris. She deserved better than them. Clarice drew herself abruptly upright and strode off without looking back.

The main hallway of the Fell mansion was tastefully lit with candles that illuminated the portraits of fictional ancestors lining either side of the corridor; they burned at just the right height to produce a healthy glow while avoiding overexposure. The walls and furniture scattered at regular intervals along the corridor were in colors of dark wood and burnished gold. It was an image of perfect elegance…like a museum, a place to observe but never live in.

Clarice strode through the corridor, leaving dark water stains on the carpet with every step. She hesitated for the briefest instant before the door at the end, and then she reached for the knob and pushed the door open without knocking.

Hannibal Lecter was playing Chopin's Fantasie Impromptu upon the piano and did not miss a beat as he heard the door suddenly open and his wife storm into the study, closing the door behind her. He reached the end of the first fast tempo section and languidly eased into the slower, more lyric, middle section. Her voice came from behind him, low and dangerously calm.

"I hope you're happy now."

He continued playing. Her voice grew louder as she came closer. "Did you even care, at the beginning, what could happen? Are you truly still the man you were seven years ago?"

His right hand played through a weeping diminished scale as he finally spoke. "How can you blame me? It was not I who pursued the Phantom in his own cellars like some overzealous detective, Clarice. I can hear the water dripping from your clothes…did you fall into the lake?"

"I was trying to fix what you had started!"

His fingers fell still over the keys, although he still did not turn to look at her. He could sense her terrible anger radiating from her like waves of pain. Lovely. "Did it ever occur to you were not needed? That what I—as you allege—started was nothing more than an acceleration to an inevitable conclusion?"

Clarice walked to the left side of the piano, following his eyes. She was amazed at how he could avoid looking at her without ever turning his head. "That night of the masked ball, you remember…you told Raoul that Christine had gone home…although you knew otherwise. You knew that she would meet Erik, you knew it. And you knew the terrible consequences if she were to return to him. And yet you allowed it; you encouraged it. Why?"

"Because she had a choice to make. And she had to avoid any distractions."

"And the man who loves her is a distraction?"

"How quickly you jump to conclusions. I was under the impression that—"

"You—what could you know? You've not been to the Opera since then and—"

"Is that my fault? I thought you were doing a fine job on your own and had no need for my assistance."

Clarice opened her mouth. She closed it again. Oh that infuriating man…

Hannibal Lecter turned to face her, and Clarice looked into his visage. She admired the way his rigid cheeks and unblinking eyes masked his emotions far more effectively than the mask currently pressing against her bosom ever could.

Her voice was barely a hiss and thick with disgust. "I said it before and I say it again now, because not a single thing has changed. It's always been a game for you, hasn't it? Your decision is always right, and you manipulate others to play it out, no matter what might happen to them."

"Well, I would say if that were true—you would already be dead, Clarice."

A slight bit of color drained from her cheeks, but her voice remained steady. "Even if you were right. Even if Christine merely needed some encouragement to make her realize her true feelings, it did not have to come to this. They nearly died, Hannibal, all three of them. And their blood would have been on your head. But that—." But that would not trouble a murderer. She did not say it, but she knew he understood.

"You give me too much credit, my dear," he said in a low growl. "I hardly asked them to try and kill each other."

"You could have stopped it and you didn't. You know Erik far better than you're letting on, Hannibal. You knew what he would do. You knew from our very first day at the Opera."

"And supposing I did." He seemed ready to say more but hesitated. He turned suddenly in his seat and pointed at the score upon the music stand. "Do you see this piece? It is Chopin's Fantasie Impromptu, a piece not printed until after his death."

"I'm in no mood for riddles, Hannibal."

"You seem to understand nothing else. Chopin refused to publish this piece. He felt it was too different and too radical for the time. He commanded that it be destroyed after his death. This piece survived only because his friend disobeyed his command and printed it. He saw the beauty in what the composer feared to reveal, and the beauty lived on because his friend did what Chopin could not."

"A person's life is hardly comparable to a piece of music."

"Considering your vast amount of musical knowledge, I am inclined to disagree. What do you have hidden there?"

Clarice's heart jerked in her chest and she looked down…to see the pieces of parchment protruding from her waistband. "Oh these…these are all that I was able to save."

Hannibal took them in his hand and arranged the slightly-damp pages casually upon the music stand over the Chopin. "These are concept pages for an opera. Although it is no opera that I have seen before…"

"Don Juan Triumphant?"

Hannibal's lips curled up in a smile. "Is that what he named it? He always did have a sense of humor." He touched the ivory piano keys lightly, his eyes skimming over the musical bars.

"You see, musical pieces are generally written in a certain key. There are a set number of sharps and flats, a limit to the accidentals…" his fingers moved effortlessly over the piano, his voice now as soothing and detached as a teacher's, "…so the chords sound comforting and 'right'. This…masterwork, is written in no single key, but a conglomeration of everything music has to offer; it is music stripped down to its raw power. It shows no mercy for the listener, beautiful scales are combined and grate the senses when layered together in polytonality. Recapitulations of the main theme are never the same, and there is no sense of finality, no sense of release when it is over. The conclusion leaves you torn and empty inside; this is no happy creation."

With his right hand, Hannibal lazily picked out an echoing whole-tone melody. Abruptly, his left hand began a brutal, pounding bass accompaniment, making the ivory keys of the piano hum and scream in their dance. Clarice stared, mouth half-open, as her husband seemed to come to life for the first time in nearly a year. Just as soon as it had begun, the torrent of music stopped. He sighed as he laid a reverent hand over the sheets of music before him. "Nor should it be a happy piece."

It was the most emotion Clarice had heard in his voice for many months…But he was speaking to the music, not to her.

He did not look at her as he leaned back upon his bench, inclining his head towards the glass doors that led from the study into the gardens behind the house. "Come in, my friend, your presence has long ceased to be a secret."

Clarice whirled around. She saw a shadow detach itself from the dark night. The gigantic bay window swung open soundlessly before its approach and the growl of thunder and pounding rain could be heard until the window closed once again.

Even though they were shut off from the storm, Clarice felt the ambient temperature in the room drop by several degrees. Soaked in rainwater and with his chin tucked against his throat, the visitor still remained a charged and imposing presence. The tension between the two silent men, though not apparently hostile, was so thick that she felt as if she were suffocating.

Then Hannibal stood up from the piano bench in one fluid motion. His maroon eyes flared in recognition and a smile of mixed familiarity and suspicion floated across his features.

"Erik. I was wondering when you would pay us a visit."

"Hannibal Lecter." Erik dipped his head slightly in mock deference, even as his eyes darkened. "Or do you still prefer Arthur Fell?"

Hannibal took one step forward. Erik remained immobile. "No, Erik," he said. "I believe you earned the right to my true name many years ago. I apologize for my deception, but I assure you it was necessary."

Erik stiffened, and then he began to laugh. "You…would apologize for deception…to me. Forgive me, Hannibal, but words quite…fail me…" his laughter turned into a ragged cough and he leaned against the wall, wheezing and bringing a hand to his throat.

Clarice made as if to move towards him, stopping when Erik took a step back to press himself closer to the wall. Hannibal stood still. "What has brought you to this, my friend?" His voice was quiet and verging upon sorrow.

Erik coughed once more. "The love of a woman…my friend," and at this his eyes darted from Hannibal to Clarice in one quick motion, his expression unreadable. He laughed shortly. "The love of a woman…" Then he took a step away from the wall and fell to the carpet face-first.

Hannibal and Clarice looked at each other.

"Does he know?" she asked softly.

"About us? I assume the man has read his papers, otherwise he would not even know of me."

"That is no answer." She saw him turn his face away, his eyes stone once more. "Not quite the triumphant result you were expecting, my dear doctor?" He said nothing. "Very well. I will see to our guest since you seem incapable of showing common courtesy." And before Hannibal could protest she lifted Erik in her arms, her legs trembling only slightly from his weight. He was surprisingly light for his tall frame. She turned and walked out the door, shutting it behind her with a resounding snap.

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Erik awoke and opened his eyes to a burning lamp inches away from his face. He blinked away the sudden brightness and raised himself upon his elbows, discovering at the same time that he was lying upon a bed.

His sudden discomfort increased tenfold when his eyes focused enough to reveal the Duchess sitting in a chair on the other side of the room, looking at him intently. After registering his return to consciousness, her eyes returned to the book in her lap.

Erik bit back the question that first sprang to his lips and asked instead, "How long have I been out?"

"About an hour." She looked up from her book at last to see him looking at her pointedly. "I believe you suffered a chill from standing out in the rain for so long, but I don't believe it's serious."

He sighed and shifted himself to sit upon the edge of the bed. "Pity."

Clarice glared at him. "I also took the liberty of giving you something for your illness."

Erik saw the syringe next to the lamp sitting on the top of a dresser beside the bed and registered the fact that the pounding in his head had eased to a pleasant numbness. "You don't give up, do you?" No response. "I thought that Hannibal was a doctor," he continued. "Shouldn't this be his job?" The glare increased in intensity and Erik regretted his ill-timed remark.

"Unless your preternatural observational skills were damaged when you hit your head in the cellars, you would notice that our relationship is not exactly at its best," she said sarcastically. "He would have been quite content leaving you on that floor forever. I do not know your previous history with Dr. Lecter, but it doesn't seem like you parted on the best of terms."

Erik stood suddenly. "We parted? He was the one that vanished from the face of the earth. It was pure luck that I even found out what happened to him."

"And what did happen to him?" Clarice had risen from her seat as well; the book lay closed and forgotten on the chair.

Erik looked at her steadily, his gaze fraught with suspicion. "He spent eight years in a U.S. prison before escaping in '73. He was not heard of for seven more years. Then he murdered an Italian policeman and fled back to America. The sources don't agree about what happened then. One of their men ended up dead, Lecter vanished, and the detective assigned to track him down disappeared at the same time." He paused, watching her every expression. "Would you consider that accurate…Madame la Duchesse?"

She was silent for a long time. And then she took several steps forward until they were only standing a few feet apart. "My name is Clarice Starling," she said. "I was a former special agent in the Pinkerton Detective Agency, an organization assigned to track down the most notorious killers in America. I am now missing, presumably dead by Dr. Lecter's hand. The Londres estate and the Fell aristocracy exist only on paper."

Erik blinked his bright eyes and let her wait. Then he leaned forward in a small courteous bow. "Fondest greetings."

Something in her face shifted and she suddenly looked younger, some of the tension in her cheeks smoothed away. She walked over to a door on the side of the room and opened it. "In that case, let us see what one fugitive can offer another."

Erik followed her through the door. "What do you—?" He stopped. They were in a wide room with a low ceiling. It was lit with a single lamp that threw flickering shadows upon the dark wooden walls and there were musical instruments everywhere. A harpsichord sat next to what looked like a small family of stringed instruments. Viola and violin-shaped cases rested against a cello and enormous double bass. He could see a great black grand piano sitting in a corner like a hibernating bear and a knobbed shape next to it that he recognized as a harp. A massive wooden desk with a large armchair stood in the middle of the room. "What…?"

Clarice ran her hand over the smooth surface of the piano. "Hannibal bought all of these within a month after escaping. I can only imagine his joy, after eight years in a dungeon with the screams of the damned as his only music. But he doesn't have much use for them anymore. He doesn't have much use for anything at all now…" she stopped talking, realizing that she was saying too much. She sniffed. "Suffice it to say, he would not disapprove."

Erik shook his head. "I can't possibly—"

"And where else do you expect to go? These two rooms are yours, Erik, for as long as you choose to stay. There is only one condition."

"Of course. What would you ask of me?" He stiffened imperceptibly. "My voice? My devotion? My soul?"

Clarice bit her lip and reminded herself that the man had been through much tonight. "Nothing so crude. Hannibal and I have come to enjoy our privacy here in Paris. We would be most upset if anything happened to disturb it."

His eyes traveled over her stony face. He sighed mightily, his shoulders falling. "Madam…who would I tell?"

Her gaze softened. She nodded curtly. And quickly, before she lost her nerve, she muttered, "I am very sorry, Erik. More than you know." Then before he could respond. "Good night." She turned and shut the door rapidly behind her. The closing door snuffed out the flame in the lamp.

Erik stood silently in the room, his eyes already adjusting to the familiar blackness. He heard the steady rain beating against the windows. Christine was somewhere out there, safe from the rain and the darkness.

"Good night…" he whispered. He picked out the familiar outline of a chair and eased himself into it. "I will go gentle into that good night."

Burying his face in his hands, he realized suddenly that he was without his mask. This was the first time Hannibal had ever seen him without his mask.

He must have truly lost it if he could have nearly forgotten such a thing. But in this house where even greater secrets lived—his face was hardly the most surprising thing. He idly wondered what had happened to his mask. Shattered underneath the feet of the mob, no doubt—shards of white porcelain scattered in the ruins of his home.

He had gone from darkness to darkness again.

His head came up suddenly, staring at the closed door. Getting to his feet slowly, he walked over and took up the lamp next to the door. Bringing it back to the desk, he set it on top. The flame grew slowly, as if sensing his reluctance, but it burned. Erik sat down in the armchair next to the flame and closed his eyes. He listened to his breathing, feeling the pace of it slowing and quieting as the whirlpool of emotions began finally to settle in his mind.

He would never sleep below ground again.

END PART I