A/N: At last, a chapter starring the much-neglected Raoul de Chagny as we find out exactly what has been going through his mind this past month. Brownie points to those who catch the nod to Mandy the O's "An Eternity of This" (stop it, Cat, I can see you rolling your eyes all the way across the pond).
Chapter 21
Ultimata
Raoul de Chagny stood uncomfortably in his brother's dim, elegant study, turning the brim of his hat in his hands. From behind the desk, his brother looked at him with affected indulgence. A muscle twitched once in a hard jaw.
"Sit down, Raoul."
The younger man gave a great sigh. "Philippe, what is this about?"
"Sit down. Our butler tells me that you have not been sleeping well."
Raoul bristled, dropping the useless top hat on a nearby chaise, leaving sweat stains on the dark leather. "They have no need to be concerned over my welfare. I am performing all of my duties perfectly, none of our acquaintances have noticed a single—"
"You know very well what this is about. You can't expect that no one in this household would notice."
Raoul stiffened. "I have no idea what you are referring to."
His brother's glare felt as if it were bruising his spine. "I have never insulted your intelligence, Raoul. Lend me the same courtesy."
"I sleep on a sofa outside her door! You know that. And if you have permitted people to think any different—"
"I can do nothing about what other people think. Use your head, damn it; how could it look any other way?"
"But you know."
Philippe gave a great, suffering sigh. "Yes, brother, I know you too well to suspect you. I do not doubt your virtue." Raoul stood a bit taller, proud to have pleased him. "But," he continued. "That does not mean that I can allow this to continue."
Raoul had been lowering himself into the chair and now stood up furiously. "You cannot allow me!" he roared with reckless abandon. "I am twenty-one years old—"
"And you are my dependant. I am responsible for your livelihood and for your behavior. And I cannot have—"
"I can buy my own property under my own name. I am sure that Christine and I could live quite comfortably on our own, away from the hypocrisy and inconsideration that I see—"
"What has gotten into you?"
"—here. Last week…I discovered our cook wearing one of those atrocious half-masks from the Opera House, I nearly fired him on the spot. If Christine had seen him…"
Philippe half-stood from his chair, supporting his thin legs with a hand upon an armrest. His pale face flaming and collecting in two bright spots of color. "I will not let you abandon our family," he said firmly.
Something seemed to be unraveling inside of Raoul, all the things that he had not said and could not say and was too heartbroken or angry to say for so long had built up within him like a great inferno and now he could not control himself. "What family? There is only you, brother, and I am your dependant, as you have put so succinctly. I'm sure that Christine and I could live quite comfortably on our own away from your charitable care—"
"I will not allow my only brother to become a social outcast for the sake of a painted opera diva!"
Raoul stiffened. He had never struck his brother before, but he could see himself doing so now without regret. White-hot sparks began to dance before his eyes. Of all the hateful things he could have said!
Philippe suddenly began coughing, the sounds hard and pained as he doubled over the desk, placing a hand on the top to steady himself. Raoul watched him gasping for breath, the lines on his once-handsome face deeper and prominent than ever before. He looked as if he had suddenly aged twenty years.
The anger drained out of him as fast as it had come and he stepped forward to help Philippe into his chair. His brother did not deserve his anger. No one that he loved deserved his anger, yet he seemed unable to cause them anything but pain.
The Comte looked up at him in undisguised surprise. Then he smiled wanly as his trembling sides sank into the cushion. "I apologize for what I said, but I shall not take it back. She is not the sister-in-law I would have chosen."
Raoul blinked in surprise. "What?"
He reached forward, wincing as he moved his shoulder, and laid a rough and weathered hand over Raoul's. "Marry her, Raoul. End this life of secrecy and shame. I will not promise to welcome her with open arms, but I will be as civil and courteous as befits my brother's wife."
"Philippe…"
His brother withdrew his hand and began rooting around the depths of his jacket pocket for a vial of laudanum he always kept about his person. "You have one month, Raoul, then I will be forced to turn the girl out. Do not disappoint me." The cold detachment returned to his voice as the laudanum did its soothing work.
"It's not so easy…"
"Of course it is. You love her. That's more than most of us can say about our choices. Be thankful for it."
Raoul shook his handsome head. He would never understand.
It was not so easy…Christine had not been talkative after returning from the dinner with the Fells. Had he expected differently? She had not spoken a word during dinner either. She had smiled at Raoul as he helped her out of his carriage and kissed him on the cheek before retiring to her cottage.
His first impulse was to follow her. He would have to tell her eventually of the arrangements he had made with Dr. Fell for her treatment. He would have to explain himself and beg her forgiveness at the same time. Not for the first time, Raoul wondered if he had made the right decision. He turned dejectedly away from the cottage and walked back up to the house.
It was Sunday and the servants had been given the day off and only silence greeted him as he entered the mansion. The halls he had walked through every day as a child were drenched in shadow and unfamiliar, and he walked through them quickly, trying not to look at the portraits on either side. He had the strange notion that they were moving. He breathed a sigh of relief as he entered the warm glow of the pantry.
Throwing open the cupboards, his hands closed around the first thing they found, a bottle of red wine. He spent a fruitless five minutes attempting to open it, his fingers fumbling with the unfamiliar cork. The grandfather clock against the wall creaked as the weights inside shifted.
"Allow me."
Raoul started, barely kept the bottle from slipping out of his hand, and looked up to see the Duchess de Londres standing in the doorway. "Clarice…" he said, flabbergasted, and then looked down to see his hands wound protectively around the wine.
He set the bottle down immediately, the glass bottom clinking against the walnut-stained countertop. "This isn't what it looks like, I mean, I don't…I wasn't…"
Clarice smiled humorlessly. "Do not worry, Raoul, you hardly looked like you had extensive experience in the matter." She walked towards him, her heels clicking like a soldier's on the parquet floor.
Raoul didn't know whether to be sullen or relieved as Clarice picked up the bottle, applying pressure to the cork at an angle and deftly twisting it out with perfectly rehearsed motions. Something about her wasn't quite right. It stroked his mind with maddeningly uncertainty as he attempted to figure out what it was.
"I apologize if I startled you," the Duchess said. "Such was not my intention. However, there was no one to answer the door when I knocked, and, finding I unlocked, I let myself in. You truly should be more cautious."
"I apologize…" Raoul said off-handedly, still battling with his curiosity. He placed a glass on the counter and watched as Clarice poured it a quarter-full of crimson liquid. Then, as a second thought, she filled the rest of the glass with water from a pitcher. The liquid faded into a rosy pink. A few droplets of water splashed onto her velvet sleeve, and the Duchess brushed them away with a sniff.
In an instant, Raoul knew what it was that troubled him so. The Duchess's movements were stiff and her face drawn with seriousness. She reminded him in that instant, of Philippe, of his unbending formality, his sheen of propriety.
There was a reason Raoul associated with the Fells more often than any other noble family. It was the same reason that his other acquaintances regarded them with guarded disdain. It was no secret that the Fells had bought their way into nobility. This was not uncommon and would not have been frowned upon had they not chosen to consistently reject invitations to the most popular parties in town. Or to frequently leave dinners early if they found the conversation dull. Although they were perfectly respectable people at first meeting, the first impression hardly lasted long.
The Duchess…Clarice, especially, was always a popular subject of gossip among the noblewomen. Raoul had not seen her initial arrival at the Opera House, but he knew every detail about how she had rolled up her sleeves and removed her suffocating sunbonnet. In the middle of the summer! How dare she?
Raoul would nod and smile at the outraged gossipers and watch as they sniffed in their offense. They would grow to become like Philippe, bearing their societal burdens in silence and blowing their troubles away in clouds of cigar smoke. A noble was blessed from birth; he never had cause to complain.
Now as Raoul watched as the Duchess sniffing at the moisture staining her sleeve, her back ramrod-straight and her eyes distant, he felt something inside him shrinking away.
The Duchess handed him his glass of diluted wine. She spoke suddenly and without preamble. "Do you intend to stand by your decision to commit Mademoiselle Daae to my husband's care?"
"Is there a reason I should not?"
She seemed to hesitate, and her next words were stilted and pained. "I spoke with him tonight after you had left. We both agreed that Christine's condition is easily remedied, in a way that would require no treatment and no potential embarrassment." She looked up to see Raoul looking pointedly at her. "You must know what ails Christine. She has been alone all her life, and she is alone again now. Whenever she allowed herself to love another, they left her and broke her heart. Her father died when she was but a child and Erik—" She stopped, her face stricken.
"Erik?"
"Please monsieur, no one must know what I have said," she said hoarsely.
"The Phantom has a name?" His voice rose as a strange emotion surged through his veins. "You knew all along and you said nothing!"
"Yes, Raoul, I knew, but only after…after there was nothing that could be done."
He stared at her with utter disbelief as he brought the glass to his lips at last.
The Duchess' face was calm once more, though affected with great sadness. "Erik is dead," she said.
Raoul's lips froze against the rim and he swallowed painfully. Even diluted, the wine burned his throat on its way down. He wiped his mouth as if he had just been sick. "How…how do you know?"
"That night, when your carriage picked me up from outside the Opera House. I told you that…I could not find him. I lied. I…I saw blood upon the floor of his home and I saw his body floating upon the surface of the lake. I came back the day after when I was alone and I buried him."
If only Raoul had known how the lies tumbled out of her mouth like water! If only he had known the desperate purpose behind her tale, he would not have gone as pale as a mourner. His body would not have rocked with someone he couldn't tell if it were sadness or triumph.
"Why did you—"
"He died before the mob ever reached his house, I trust I don't need tell you what that means…Christine did not need to know. She does not need to know now. Let her know as painlessly as possible. Place an announcement inside the newspaper, perhaps."
"Why are you telling me this?"
Her eyes were hard. "Do you truly need to ask? You do not conceal your desires well, Raoul. You love her and have always loved her. But you saw her make a choice in the cellars that night that you believed you could never reverse. That is foolish, Raoul. Please, do not let her be alone for the rest of her life; you are all that she has now."
"I don't understand."
"Do you see Christine as a problem?"
The shock and offense was plain in his tone. "No!"
"Then stop treating her like one. Marry her, Raoul. Be her shelter and light and everything else that you once promised."
He swayed against the countertop, pressing his back against the solid wood for support. "It's not so easy…"
"No doctor can do for Christine what you can, Raoul." Her voice was growing in intensity, tinged with nervousness and guilt.
Raoul, shaking his head in grief, did not notice. "But I have done this to her. With my thoughtlessness and my desire for vengeance, I have hurt her as deeply as Erik has. Perhaps a doctor could—"
"Not my husband!"
She fell suddenly silent, her face going even whiter. Raoul stared in open-mouthed shock as a storm of raging emotion played across her features. It lasted a mere second. Unlike himself, the Duchess was quite skilled at manipulating her emotions. The storm faded from her face as easily as if she had drawn a shade. Raoul wondered if he had imagined everything.
"What I mean is," Clarice said, the stiff indifference back in her voice, "my husband is accustomed to dealing with patients with serious maladies. I do not believe that Christine requires that sort of care, it would be best if she did not stay."
The edge of the countertop was digging painfully into Raoul's back, but he did not move. He could not find the strength to move. Everything he had been told washed through his mind like a bitter wave. He could only think that just outside of the mansion, Christine slept, blissfully unaware that half of her world had just crumbled. He swallowed painfully. How would he ever tell her? He who had been largely responsible for everything that had occurred?
Clarice watched the young man before her, his head bowed beneath an invisible burden, with a newfound dawning respect. The boy had been forced to grow up so fast, with nothing to save him from the cold, unfeeling existence of his brother other than the fond memories of those years by the sea with a young angel. Yet he had resisted.
He would be strong enough now. He had to be. Only he could save Christine now. Erik might as well have been dead. And her husband was planning…she did not want to think it. Neither did she want to think of how the road to hell had always been paved with good intentions.
Raoul emerged from the memory as if he were surfacing from deep water. For the first time, he thought of his former rival. He thought of …Erik. And he understood for the first time the deep and unbearable pain the Phantom must have felt, to want someone as much as life itself and yet to be denied. Perhaps for a foolish reason…his own cowardice could not be so different from Erik's. He wondered what Erik would have done now had he lived.
At that very moment, Erik was not, surprisingly, thinking of Christine at all. For the past three days his life had been remarkably predictable. This day was no different. As the night spread its fingers of dusk over a rosy sunset, Erik sat alone inside his room with the drapes pulled firmly over the windows to the outside world.
He saw nothing before him but his left arm lying upon the table, the fingers curled limply around the simple porcelain tea vessel.
Several minutes after he had finished its contents, the wave of anger at his stupidity had hit him hard. But several anxious hours later when the contents of the drink proved itself to be nothing more than a soothing concoction of chamomile, he had taken the cup in his hand, smiling at his own foolishness.
The vessel fit almost perfectly in the crook of his fingers. He had placed the cup back atop the table and used his right hand to curl the limp fingers of his left hand around the cup. The world outside ceased to exist as he continued bending and unbending his fingers around the white porcelain, rubbing sensation into the cold, waxen appendages. Holding his fingers around the cup, he lifted both hands high in an imaginary toast.
He moved only once, to close the drapes when the brightness of the afternoon sun once again became too bright for his eyes.
He imagined that each of his fingers were stiff with fatigue. He imagined himself wincing in pain as he moved each one, the creaking joints complaining as they began to function once again. He imagined them shivering from the coldness of the weak blood moving sluggishly towards his nails. He imagined the bones melting from the heat of the hot liquid the vessel had once held. He imagined anything in the world to shake off the awful sensation of nothingness in his paralyzed limb. He had always been able make anything happen if he really wanted to. This time should be no different.
Downstairs, Clarice happily accepted the soft bundle of folded cloth from the young woman at the front door. "Thank you, Genevieve," she said. The woman curtseyed and smiled brightly as her customer looked over the shirts with approval. "He will be most pleased."
Clarice climbed the stairs slowly and when she reached Erik's door, her hands were too full to knock. Turning the handle quickly, she let herself into the room just in time to hear Erik shout loudly in pain.
The bundle dropped to the floor with a soft thump as Clarice started in concern. The man looked quickly at her, anger, guilt, and embarrassment all present in his expression. "Erik…" she noticed that his cheeks were red from exertion, drops of perspiration visible upon his malformed brow. "Are you, are you alright?"
"Do I appear to be in intense pain?" he managed through clenched teeth. When she did not respond, he turned furiously back to his task, his right hand in a death's grip around his left hand holding the teacup. "As well that I should. For I am. My fingers scream as they are forced to live again. They do not remember the music they once played, only the lives they took. It is fitting then that they should refuse to take back their own lives."
He stood up abruptly, coming towards Clarice with great strides, who backed away slightly against the door. She had not seen this fire in his eyes in so long…
The fingers of his left hand dangled limply at his side, like those of a broken puppet. She was looking at them calmly, with no pity in her eyes. And he knew this, and he hated her then for her damnable calm, for her seeming acceptance of his fate.
"Who said anything about acceptance?"
Erik flinched, unnerved that she could have read his thoughts so easily. She laughed humorlessly, picking up the set of folded shirts from the ground and pushing them into his arms. "I know you too well to treat you as a common patient, Erik. I will not attempt to dissuade you."
He deposited the bundle of cloth onto an empty sofa. "And yet you still believe it is…impossible."
"I have seen too much of life to believe that so easily." Her eyes grew solemn and serious. "But I shall not lie, Erik, your wound is horrific and it is…extremely unlikely."
He scoffed. "I shall toast your pessimism with a cup of chamomile when the day comes. I can afford to wait."
"You can only wait one month at most."
His eyes narrowed in suspicion. "How do you mean? What happens after that?"
"Then…" he could see her attempting to swallow the words, but some unseen force pushed the words out of her mouth. "Then the Vicomte de Chagny will make Christine Daae his bride."
Erik was very still for a very long time. When he spoke again, his words were trembling with affected indifference. "I fail to see how my getting well has anything to do with that happy occasion."
"She…she thinks you are dead, Erik. Raoul will have told her."
"And why would he think that?"
Clarice closed her eyes. "Because I told him." Her eyes were tightly shut and she could not see him freeze. She could not see every vestige of color drain from his face. Nor did she want to.
"Is this a lie, Madame? Or do the lies lie in everything you have ever said to me in the past?"
"Erik, I…" Her eyes flew open as she felt him seize her left shoulder with bruising force.
"Is this why you have accepted me so willingly into your home? So that I would be conveniently out of the way? So that you could play matchmaker for the more deserving!"
She pushed away at him violently. He did not release his grip. "You were as good as dead, Erik! You proved it that night when you shrank once again behind that pitiful mask. You could think of nothing but your loss. You could not have helped Christine if my husband had chosen to…change her. I could not have helped her. What else was I to do but push her into the arms of her last protector?"
"And yet you trust your husband implicitly now!"
"Because he's changed, Erik! Because…because I was wrong. I did not believe in him and I did not believe…in you, Erik. I did not believe that good could still exist inside a soul twisted beyond repair—"
"You married him."
"And I was under no delusion that he would abandon his ways. Merely that he would not involve me. That he would not attempt to change me. It was a twisted and perfect union of angel and demon. This changed when I believed he would treat Christine…Christine who had become so close as to nearly become a part of me. And you as well, Erik…yes, you as well. When he went after you…" She gave a frustrated sigh. "All I did was make a damnable mess of things."
Erik felt the haze of blind fury slowly fading away. He did not realize that the fingers of his right hand were still digging into her shoulder until he felt her smooth hands pulling them away.
"I shall say one thing. There is certainly nothing wrong with the strength of your other arm."
He took a step back. "What do believe that I can do? I am a pitiful creature of darkness wanted dead by half of Paris."
Her fingers closed around the rim of the teacup and she slid it towards him on the table. "Prove that you can change that. Prove that you are not the man you once were." She smiled wryly. "It shouldn't be too hard. For I can avow that you are not."
He turned the teacup round and round in the fingers of his right hand. Anger still remained in his face, but it was grudgingly giving way to the unavoidable hunger and excitement. He had never been a man to turn down a challenge. And yet… "Am I to understand that you are using me to clean up your mess?"
The corners of her mouth twitched in a way that reminded him unnervingly of himself. "If you have any complaints, do let me know."
He was silent. "Christine…do you mean to say that she…"
"I'd rather that you found out for yourself."
His lips trembled with the weight of all the things he wished to say, but in the end he was silent. He watched instead his fingers bending and unbending around the teacup.
"Oh, by the way, Erik." He looked up at her and she smiled broadly. "When the time comes…I prefer spiced cinnamon over chamomile."