Thanks again for all the reviews guys, please pleasekeep them coming, it's ever so much better than "writing into the void"! But I'm sure you all know that already.

Today's trivia, thanks to Ianthe and Mominator: (1) the story referred to in the title of Chapter 4 is by Hans Christian Andersen, and it's exactly the kind of "dark story of the North" that I think Christine and her father would have read; and (2) I have no idea why Christine's tombstone was in English, or why it identified her as Countess de Chagny. Perhaps they thought this is the correct translation of Vicomtesse. Or maybe Raoul was cheap and it didn't fit on the puny little headstone he got for her. ;)

Note: Since this update is a direct continuation of the previous chapter, for the sake of emotional continuity I'd recommend reading the end the last chapter before starting on this one.

Chapter 7 – "...And speaks my name"

She did not scream. Erik knew this because her lips were white and closed; the dark window was scarcely an arm's reach away and he saw every feature, every line of her face drawn by the faint orange glow of the windows opposite. She had not moved, only her eyes went huge in her delicate, perfect face. What screamed was the silence, a rising, roaring, terrible crescendo in his ears.

He wanted to fall.

"Christine..." he heard himself say.

The word sent a shock through her face, like a stone breaking through water.

"You," she whispered. Then she looked down.

The lasso lay below, coiled in the shadow. Erik wondered if she saw it as clearly as he did. He looked back to the window.

Christine was not there.

For a dizzying instant Erik thought he had imagined her, but then there was a swish of dark curls and her face – and something black and solid was hurtling through the air.

He caught it.

Instinctively, he looked down at his closed hand, and saw that the object he held was a candlestick. A cold, heavy, brass candlestick. Which Christine had just thrown at his head.

"My thanks, mademoiselle," he said, because he had to say something. "Perhaps you could now oblige me with candles?"

He looked back at her and the words died. Christine's entire face and body radiated hatred. It struck him like a lasso: her shoulders, her bare arms, every muscle and sinew were tense with coiled rage.

"You wish to kill me?" He had meant it as a question, but it was not one.

There was not a trace of fear in her eyes. Instead, as Erik watched, something was born from the coils of anger and sparked in them, a dark flash like diamonds or betrayal.

"Should I not be the one to ask you that?" And then bitterly, "Angel."

She meant the lasso on the ground. For an insane moment Erik wanted to throw the candlestick back, to shatter the open windowpane and escape with her, with his Christine, down the wall and away, while the chaos erupted behind them.

Again.

He could not do it again. There was nowhere to run.

He clenched his jaw. "Do not call me 'angel'."

"Would you rather be called murderer?"

"No." He felt a kind of rage come back into him, a rage at himself, at the night. "My name is Erik."

He saw her disbelief, her anger – and something else. The death of kindness, a resignation.

"My name is Erik," he repeated, striving to keep his voice low. "That man," he glanced at the rope on the ground, "is dead. I threw him away."

"I see him before me," Christine said quietly. "I had thought him dead, but he is here. A masked man all in black, from his cloak to his soul, who murders at will."

"My name is Erik." The words came in a harsh whisper. "Christine! I did not come here to harm you!"

She looked back at him, impassive and silent.

With one hand, the other still clutching her candlestick, he ripped off the cloak. It fell, fluttering like a torn stage curtain, down to the ground. Christine followed its descent with her eyes.

When she looked back, Erik caught her gaze. Then, with a vicious sharp movement that made Christine flinch, he ripped the mask from his own face.

"My name is Erik."

He relished her shock.

He crushed the useless linen of the mask in his fist. It took all his self-control not to slap that hand up to his face, not to hide the nakedness of his deformity. He clenched his fist harder, letting her look at his face. Willing her to see.

"Say my name, Christine."

"No."

"Say it!"

"I want it back."

Erik stared at her, the words not making sense.

Christine put out her hand. "That candlestick, Erik. I want it back."

He felt his lips part involuntarily. The name she had spoken remained in the air between them; he breathed it, in and out.

Christine's hand closed hard over his, and the candlestick was gone. Then she was back through the window and he could only see a trace of her, like a ghost in her white night-dress, long hair curling wild over her shoulders and her eyes reflecting the night: black firelight.

Erik stepped on the parapet as though he could fly, and went after her through the dark window.

Inside, the space was tiny. There was an unmade bed and a dressing table by the window; the metallic glint of a key suggested a wardrobe in a corner behind them. There were no mirrors.

Christine was standing at the dresser, clutching the top of it, white-knuckled. Erik gripped her wrist and pressed the linen mask up into her opened palm.

She turned to him, holding it up to see. A triangle of cloth, with an empty eye socket. Her mouth twisted, she made as if to dart to the window to throw it out, but Erik caught her by the elbows.

"Leave it."

He tried to relax his hold. She was not wearing a corset beneath that shift. He did his best not to watch her chest rise and fall, the soft curve of her waist under the sheer fabric outlined against the window. He was going mad.

Christine jerked herself free of him, and held up the mask in both hands, her fingers through the eyehole.

The she scrunched the fabric in her fists and ripped.

Erik hissed in a breath, baring his teeth. Enraged pain snarled through him, he made a grab for Christine's arm, but she dropped the pieces to the floor and flew into him, full-force. Her slight body slammed against his chest like a bird smashing itself on a window.

He could not breathe; his control was gone, he was powerless against her questing hands, her demanding angry hands that grabbed his face, his head, without regard for the pain.

She had spread her palms out against his cheeks, the ruined and the human, her fingers following at once both the scar where his right eyebrow should have been and the normal line of his left brow, then spreading out to his temples, his nose, his ears, uncovering his secrets for herself, fingers and nails, painting him in blood in her mind.

He caught fistfuls of her hair, trying to make her stop, flailing for purchase in the tangle of curls, drowning without air. Christine was drowning him, holding his head underwater, it was like falling into another lake with a distant, unreachable, burning shore.

She pulled his head down, and then he could not help it, he was forcing her mouth open to do to her what she had done to him in the depths of the Opéra: opening her with his tongue, inside her, against the hot smooth flesh of her mouth. Claiming her for his own, only his, his Christine.

He thought he wanted her to stop, to tear herself away from his mouth and tear him apart, to repel the corruption of his soul with the purity of hers – but she would not save him. Worse, she demanded more, she would not shudder even when he tasted her kiss, mingled tea and the scent of nightflowers, and she was encouraging him, not pushing him away but driving her own small hot tongue against him, exploring him within just as her hands roamed through his hair and his scars.

The supple heat of her body pressed to his was scrambling his thoughts, his will. He could not see how to fight it, it was like water, like rage, the harder he struggled the stronger was the pull of the current, dragging him down below. He had tried so hard to block this out, to forget the heat of her flesh and the pressure of her hands guiding him to her, and – God, he had to stop her, before she was lost, before he destroyed her and himself and the world...

"Christine!"

He wrenched her away from him and held her out on outstretched arms, his body pounding with agony at the loss of her warmth.

"Christine..." he said again. And with superhuman strength, finally spoke her name: "Christine de Chagny."

She was doll-like in his grip, delicate spun glass which he was crushing in his fists. She made no move to resist, but only stared up at him in defiance, with her mouth blood-red and her lashes wet and heavy and dark. Waves of heat from her body touched his skin through his sweat-soaked shirt, shooting fire to his belly. He forced his hands away from her, stepped back.

Christine remained where she was, standing a little awkwardly, with her shoulders stiffly forward as though prepared for someone to wring her hands behind her – but her face was raised up to him.

"Erik," she said.

He bent down and grabbed the two pieces of fabric off the floor, the broken mask.

Christine made a move to take them, but he whirled angrily, thrusting her aside.

He leapt to the window, through it to take hold of the balcony railing, over it and down the wall in two swift catlike jumps. He landed on the rope, picked it up with one hand and the cloak with the other and ran from the courtyard, from the darkness, from his heart.

He sat, wrapped in his cloak, in the back of the cab as it trundled quickly towards Montmartre, with the hood pulled forward over his face as far as it would go. His teeth were chattering. The cab turned into rue Marcadet and Erik saw through the grimy glass a line of fire over the silent Montmartre cemetery. It was either the rising sun or the start of another, thunderous, riot.

o o o

Christine climbed into her bed, into the corner where it met the wall. She pulled her knees up to her chin and wrapped her arms around, holding herself together.

She tried squeezing her eyes shut. It changed nothing, instead it drew the pictures clearer in her mind: a masked man, an unmasked man, a face in the shadows... Raoul's ring, her anger, a ghost on the balcony. A man inside. Hands in her hair and her own mouth welcoming his, spinning her out of herself. These scenes somehow flowed together, overlaying a confusion of old memories of the ballet: Madame Giry dragging her and Meg away from the Foyer de la Danse where the older girls practiced, glimpses of a rich man's flushed face and a dancer's searching, snaking hands on the back of his neck. She remembered Madame Giry's fury, the way she threw Meg and her down on the divan in her room and told them they were never, never to go in there outside practice hours, never, did they understand? They did not, but they nodded enthusiastically, terrified more by her fury than by the cause for it.

And now she knew. She was just like those girls, there was nothing precious or special about her. She had been blinded by the mask, perhaps, by the voice, by the loathing and grief and need in his eyes, so that she had not seen herself until it was too late. She could name the thing in her soul now. It was not love. It was only desire.

Only desire.

It was all right, she thought wretchedly, curling over her legs, pressing her chin to her knees. It was all right. She would call on Raoul tomorrow and ask his forgiveness, she would take his ring. She loved him, the feelings that had confused her and shamed her were nothing but desire, and she was stronger than that. She could kill the ghost.

But he was not a ghost. His name was Erik. Only a man named Erik, who did something to her soul that made it bleed.

She bit the skin of her knees through the night-dress, anything to stop her mouth from giving her away, anything to hurt. Then she felt cold air on the back of her neck and realised the shift was torn there, ripped like Erik's mask. Erik had ripped it. She had let him.

Christine dragged the night-dress over her head, covering herself with her blanket, then reached over to the drawer of her dresser to pull out the sewing box. She lit a candle. When her eyes adjusted to the light, she forced herself to thread a needle and set to mending the shift.

She made the stitches small and careful, focusing all her mind on the task. Nobody could see this, nobody would know. She was safe. It would be all right. Besides, she could not expect Madame Giry to mend her clothes and they had still not hired a maid. So she would do it herself. It was time to grow up.