Okay, guys. Because this site doesn't allow chapter-by-chapter warnings and I don't want to risk losing my work, I am now changing the rating to 'M'. The story is not changing; it will remain what it has always been, and if you were comfortable with it up to this point you will likely continue to remain so. Still, this chapter does contain sexual content (though by no means smut) and it's probable that in later chapters there may be violence, given that I'm dealing with a war and all. If anyone would like a "censored" version of the chapter, drop me an email at the address in my profile, and I'll send you a copy.

For everyone else – I'm sorry about the cliff-hanger in the previous chapter. Hope the early update makes up for it!

Chapter 21 – Ghosts Dissolve By Daylight

Christine lost her footing and fell forward an instant before a huge weight swooped into the space where she had stood. The side of a crate slammed her chest, driving air from her lungs. She stumbled, whirling onto her back, scuttling away from whatever it was. Then her breath returned in a rush, and she gasped.

Something moved; a gust of wind slammed the door, sealing the darkness.

Christine struggled to her knees, then to her feet. Dust made her mouth dry. She felt lightheaded; the pain in her ribs was the only thing pinning her to her body. Erik.

"You're here..." She could not see him, but she heard his intake of breath.

For a time there was no sound but that: his ragged breathing, loud and painful.

Christine searched for a word, a sentence, anything. Why was she here?

"I heard the news," she stumbled. "I needed to know. If you've gone."

She heard a hitch in his breathing, but nothing else. Darkness ate at her eyes. She searched for his face, his eyes, but there was nothing.

"The papers said, the invasion..." Christine's voice fell until it was almost inaudible. "But you're here."

She looked at where she thought he was, aware suddenly of just how stupid, how dangerous it had been to come here. She should have stayed home. She should never have come.

"I'm glad you are well," she said into the blackness. Bits of dust squeaked on her teeth. "I just... needed to know that. I'll go."

She turned back to the door, but his breathing stopped. This new silence was blind, thick. She could not move.

"Liar!" snapped a hard, empty whisper. Behind her.

Christine whipped around, but her eyes picked out nothing; blackness.

"What did you really want?" The voice was right at her ear now. His voice. "Did you think to see where I lived?"

She turned again to the voice; nothing.

"You thought it was a trick, perhaps? Did you! A joke, Christine?" There was a sudden rush of air and his hand clenched on her elbow, fever-hot. "You came to see the Phantom in a hovel in Montmartre, the Phantom working in an office – is that it? The supper wasn't enough for you?" He gripped her arm harder, shaking her. "Go on then! Feast your eyes!"

He wrenched her elbow forward and Christine stumbled after him, up the stairs, higher and higher. "Where," she gasped, "Stop it! Erik!"

He threw open a door at the top of the stairs and Christine found herself released; a moment later white-hot light blazed, dazzling her.

"Here it is! Look around!"

Christine did, her eyes swimming from the light. A moment's confusion resolved into an old room with a sloping ceiling and a single window she had seen from the street, and pale, yellowing wallpaper. It smelled like lamp oil and smoke. Right in front of her was a heavy work-table cluttered with drawings – and there beside it, stood Erik.

He was gripping the chair back with one hand, the other was held out as if to encompass the room, an ugly parody of the way he had shown her his lair. Christine felt her eyes make an inventory of his face, the shadow around his masked eye and the line at the corner of his mouth. His hair was wild over his bandage and his clothes were rumpled; he wore no jacket and one side of his shirt stuck out from under his waistcoat. His chest rose and fell quickly, with each breath. My God, Christine thought. I found him.

"Is your curiosity satisfied, Mademoiselle Daaé?"

He was afraid of her. Christine saw it, and could not look away.

"I heard the news." There was a strength in that truth, mad as it was, she clutched at it. "I needed to know if you've gone."

"Gone."

"Yes. To Sedan, to work."

He laughed. It was a strange, echo-less sound, more like a sob. Then he turned away towards the window, as if he did not want to see her. Between them, the old floorboards made a moon-path, gleaming where they had been polished by too many treading feet, and Christine thought she could cross so easily, like walking on water.

"You believed me, then. You really thought I would go."

His tone mocked her, but Christine refused to hear it. She was vaguely aware of other furniture in the room, an iron bedstead, a chest of drawers, an easel, but she paid these no attention. Defiantly, she looked only at Erik. "Yes."

He gave another bark of laughter. "You trusted I was an architect, working in the daylight, designing buildings?"

Christine glanced at the plans on the work-table, then at the easel that held an unfinished drawing of an apartment block. The plan had a precise, sharpened beauty, almost like his music. She could not doubt it.

"Yes," she said. "I believed you."

His back jerked angrily, as from a touch. "You credulous little fool. Before, you thought me an angel."

"Perhaps... And you thought yourself a ghost."

"I am a ghost." He sounded far away.

"No. I can see you."

He whipped around; his face was ugly, sneering. "Is that what you're here for, Christine? To see me? Don't you know," his voice twisted, "what happens to respectable girls who go sneaking through Montmartre at night? Who come into a monster's house, alone?"

Christine realised she had bitten the inside of her cheek; she fought to unclamp her teeth, to speak. "The papers said there was fighting... In the East."

"Yes," Erik gave her a nasty smirk, "one might expect fighting, during a war. You thought to join the resistance, perhaps? If that's the case, I'm certain the Montmartre comm—"

"I don't want you to go."

The words snapped inside her, a lock breaking. Something terrible lay beyond that door, but the sheer relief Christine felt overwhelmed her – it didn't matter now. Nothing mattered.

The sneering lines disappeared from Erik's face, leaving it taut, expressionless. The open window behind him made a black frame: a strange motionless portrait in the too-bright room.

Christine smiled, and that smile hurt deeper than any wound. She had found him. It was not enough.

Erik watched as she came forward, past the chair, stepping over the shining moon-path towards him. His eyes darkened in warning when she was a pace away. "Christine..."

She stretched out her hand and held her palm to his cheek. It was not a caress; she pressed down hard, learning the strange texture of his skin: coarse stubble beneath her palm, smooth under her fingertips. Where her finger lay against the hairline at his temple, she could feel his pulse. He was here, not gone away. Here.

"Christine..." he said again, as she moved her hand down to his throat. The sound made a low vibration there, as if she was holding his voice in her hand. The voice she had loved so blindly.

He tensed when she tightened her fingers on his neck awkwardly, but did not pull away. Under her skin, under his skin, his blood ran faster, and Christine knew then she could hurt him still, the way he hurt her. But she did not want to...

With a sudden, swift move, Erik grabbed her hand and flung it aside. "Leave," he said hoarsely. "Leave, now."

His eyes were enraged and terrified, twin mirrors reflecting the light. Christine cradled her wrist in her other hand, but did not retreat from him.

"I tried that. It didn't work."

"I let you go, Christine!" he hissed. "I allowed you to leave, do you understand that?"

"But first, you locked the door."

"What?"

She smiled at him, dismally. He understood, and she could see him fighting it, willing it to not be so, as if the past could be escaped. "You locked the door. That night, in the dressing-room. Meg told me, and Madame Giry. I never even knew I was trapped."

She raised her hand to his cheek again; his skin was alive with tension and it was difficult, very difficult to remember the Phantom. She stepped closer, lacing her fingers into Erik's hair. The sensation was so dangerous – and she wanted this so badly, to feel his living hair, not the wig.

"I can't leave..." Christine spoke past the lump in her throat. "And I don't want you to go."

She stretched up tentatively and put her lips against his.

For an agonising moment nothing happened, he was solid and immovable against her and she thought it was over; he would turn away. Then, so slowly that Christine almost believed she imagined it, she felt his mouth open a little, to let her inside.

It was a shock to taste him suddenly, to find him open. In a flash of fear Christine knew what he was doing: they had poured a cup of poison and she had given him a sip, but this next draught was hers. She had no choice; she pulled him against her fiercely, drinking deep, entering his mouth, unable to hold back when she felt the sound he made. He remembered her; he wanted this, he had to want this – and then his tongue flicked past hers, into her, and Christine felt him grip her shoulders and knew at last that she was not alone.

She had never kissed him in the light before, it was so strange that Christine wanted to open her eyes, to see what he looked like now, but she could not stop. Erik raised his hands to her back, and she clutched at the back of his neck, at his head. The bandage was a rough, unfamiliar thing there; Christine tugged at it, needing again the Opéra cellars and the window of her room, but the mask was bound tight. She turned her head, her chin rasping against the damp skin beneath his mouth.

"Erik... Take it off."

Everything stopped. Christine opened her eyes and saw that Erik had not moved; he had merely gone very still, like a predator threatened.

"What for, Christine? Shall I let you pity the monster? Would you like that?"

He was so close that between them they made their own small darkness, an island of shadow in the unfamiliar lighted room. Christine moved away, and said:

"I want to see you... As you are."

Erik looked at her in their shadowed space as if he could not believe it, as if he would grab her head and kiss her again with the mask. Then a deep line cut between his brows, and Christine knew he fought a silent battle within him now, against himself.

"Show me," she asked, and waited for what seemed like an eternity before Erik took her hand and guided it to a tiny knot just above the nape of his neck.

"There." His voice was so low that Christine heard it with her spine. The disturbing pressure of his hand on hers was almost enough to make her want to keep still, to let him hide from her if he so chose. That snapped her out of it.

Erik sank down on the chair to let her reach and turned away, and Christine untied the linen and unwound it, revealing strip by strip the ruined side of his head, the scars made angrier by the chafing of the cloth against them.

"Don't touch it!"

His skin felt hot and inflamed there, but when he jerked from her touch, Christine did not think it was from pain. He took up the rest of the bandage, with the padding that had gone over his cheek and brow, and threw it to the table in disgust.

"Well?" he demanded, staring into the tabletop. "Is it pretty?"

Christine hesitated a moment, then reached over to his shoulder, drawing him back towards her. Before he could pull away, she kissed that side of his head. It was a clumsy, misjudged kiss, but Erik froze at the contact. More certainly now, Christine traced his reddened scars with her lips, then with the tip of her tongue. He gasped when she did it and it gave her a dark pleasure to hear him make those sounds, to feel him respond when she followed the ridges from above his ear to his brow, around his eye, to his cheek. When she thought nobody had ever touched him, kissed him, she felt a curious tightness in her belly; it made her half-mad, powerful.

"No," Erik moved her around to the other side, pulling her almost roughly to straddle him, trying to turn his head away. "Don't – Christine..."

She shook her head, refusing to stop, until Erik drew his hand up along her leg and suddenly Christine could not move; he had frozen her as she had him, by the lightest touch on her body. She realised she was sitting above him, a bizarre position that almost reminded her of ballet, full plié, but this was new, perversely exciting. Skirts bunched up between them as Erik moved his hand above her knee, past her stocking, then hesitatingly to her bare thigh. Christine heard a sound, 'ahh' and then felt herself making it. Erik slid his fingers against her skin, under the edge of the stocking, as if it too was some kind of mask.

"Show me," he said, and his voice hurt her – but his eyes beseeched her with a deep, desperate hunger.

They were frantic after that; Christine felt her hands shaking madly as she untied Erik's cravat, opened his waistcoat, his shirt, trying to find him under all the impossible layers, impatient for him to unbutton her dress and loosen her corset, cursing laces and frills. She wanted only to be with him then, to see, to touch, to taste, to know what he felt like. It was not right, but there was no other way for her anymore; she had become lost long ago and now she had grown too wild, too different ever to go home.

In the bed, under the thin blanket, Christine was aware of his warm scent on the pillow – it surrounded her as Erik planted feather-light kisses on forehead, her cheek, her throat, her collarbone, as though he thought her a delusion or a dream. When his lips brushed against a nipple, she caught a sharp, violent breath. Erik stopped and Christine became painfully aware that there was no more contact between them, and then she could not stand it. Erik made a sound of shock when she buried her hands in his hair, and she guided him back to her, shy and wanton and terrified.

"I'm here," she said. "I'm here..."

"Christine..." Erik muttered against her skin, the name like a spell to bind her to him, to keep her, and Christine squirmed at this new caress of sound. "Christine, Christine, Christine..." he repeated, and her own name in his voice seemed to wind a coil inside her, tighter and tighter until she was aware of every light touch, of the accidental bump of his hip against hers, of the slight tremor of his body as he moved up. His hair brushed her mouth, and Christine rose under it to kiss his throat, to memorise the taste of his skin. He tasted like tears and smoke, the slow melt of a candle weeping – and Christine wished she could quench that bitterness and hide it from him, make him whole. She tried what he had done to her, her tongue darting out over his chest, the light hair there, until she found the spot and Erik made a low, stifled sound that lanced through her body, urging her on.

They were too rough, too impatient to experiment, drowning too fast to think about anything but the moment: the unknown sensation of lips on skin, of kisses that broke into something harder, more painful, the burning strangeness of being touched. It was not pleasure Christine felt when Erik pressed up against her and she opened to him, it was more like need, a painful longing that did not diminish with the pain but only sought more, enough to be filled.

Erik raised her over him roughly, his hands hard on her hips, and at last Christine felt the pain yield, and something dark, beautiful transformed Erik's eyes. She looked down at him, wanting to remember this, the gaslight white-hot on every curve of his face, on his swollen mouth, on the scars and the shadow of stubble on one cheek.

"You are..." She was afraid he would say 'mine' or 'beautiful', but he said only "Christine!" – and then Christine felt her body give way and she fell, over him, with him, spiralling down into the void.

He clung to her, moving, a strange swaying in which Christine heard fragments of words she could not understand; then he cried out against her and she held him, shuddering, lost.

They lay tangled in the narrow bed, breathing together, two survivors of a shipwreck thrown out into the light. There was a heaviness in Christine's bones that made her feel she had really struggled against an ocean, against a current that would tug her away. Gradually, she became aware of herself again, then of Erik. He lay motionless next to her, as if he was not there at all. Only the faint movement of a curl of her hair, where it fell against his face, gave him away.

She was afraid to speak. Erik stirred slightly and moved away; Christine felt a sudden coldness where his hip had touched her leg, and now there was nothing. The sheet was coarse and sticky under her sensitised skin, and she tried not to wonder if there was blood, if the pain she had felt had meant she was broken. She did not feel broken. She felt numb, as though another's soul had possessed her body, and now she had her body back but could not recall how it worked.

"Christine..." Erik's voice startled her. He did not move, but when Christine met his eyes, she saw an infinite pain there, beyond tears. "Why did you have to come here? I told you to leave."

Christine forgot the mess of the bed and the bright light above them that made everything too real, too palpable. She raised her hand and touched his face, the only side she could see, the scarred side. He did not shrink from her touch, but neither did he welcome it. His skin was smooth as warped candles, and cold.

"Erik, tell me something..."

"What?"

"Anything," she said, moving her hand away, conscious of a sudden shyness. She had touched him, possessed him, allowed him inside her, thinking that was all she needed. But lying here with him, she ached with a painful, impossible desire for him to stretch out his arm and embrace her to him, to sing to her, to tell her the things he thought about.

"What was your mother's name?" she asked, and saw by the twist of his mouth that he did not want to tell her, that he wished she would go. Christine thought she might cry.

"I don't know," Erik said after a long, long silence. There was no hardness in his voice, only a kind of muted note that made Christine remember the Moonlight Sonata, the three rising notes, trembling. "I suppose she had a name like all women. I called her Mother, before she sold me." He paused again, and then added grudgingly, "She could sing. I remember that."

"And your father?"

Erik shrugged. "I'm sure he was nothing like yours."

"I don't remember my mother," Christine said thoughtfully. "But I remember when she died. My father locked himself in his room, and would not come out. I remember that door, every crevice on it. I scratched at it with my nails, when he wouldn't let me in. He never did. A fat woman who lived next door heard me, and she dragged me to her house, screaming all the way. My father heard that, and came outside, and he never left me again. Well – until... But he could not help that."

Erik gave her a long, half-distant look, as though he was studying the shape of her face. Then he surprised her by asking, "Do you remember Sweden?"

Christine nodded. "A little. Sometimes I don't know if it's Sweden I remember or some other place we travelled to. I remember the trains mostly, and the inns. We got to stay at good hotels now and then, but I liked the inns better. I'd climb up on a table and sing. Father frowned at it, but I loved to stand above all the grown-ups, singing..." Christine shook her head slightly. "I imagined I was on stage with him."

"I travelled too," Erik said. "With the gypsies." Christine caught his eyes, but there was almost no bitterness in them. "I remember nothing of it, except the cages. They put the other freaks into my cage when the caravan moved, to save space: a girl with a beard, an old man with sooty skin and a smile carved into his mouth. None of them talked to me – Paolo, the keeper, told them I was cursed and they'd catch my deformity."

"They would not talk to you?" Christine asked, aghast.

Erik's mouth drew into a tight line. "I did not encourage it, you understand. I did not want to talk to freaks either. It's bad enough having this face; I hardly needed to catch a deformed mouth into the bargain."

He gave her a crooked smile, and Christine did not know if he wanted her to join his mockery of his own past, or if he was saying this to hurt himself, and her. She reached up and touched her fingers to his lips gingerly, outlining his mouth. He covered her hand with his, and Christine feared he would push her away. Instead, he said, "It is too bright here. The lights..."

Christine felt him move across the blanket, over her, standing up. She averted her eyes, sensing instinctively that he wanted privacy, that she should not look at him now. Then the lights went out and it was completely dark again. Christine moved aside as Erik returned to bed, and this time she felt something had changed in him. He slid under the covers behind her and Christine felt soft, dry fabric on her burning shoulder: his shirt. He put it on her, tucking up the sleeves awkwardly, and then raised his arm to gather her close, breathing into her hair – small shallow breaths that somehow comforted her. Christine curled up inside him, and pretended they were happy.