A/N: And we're now well and truly under siege. Thank you so much for taking the time to review, and especially to share your musings about the way things are developing for all the characters - I'm not at all averse to Spark notes!

Chapter 40 - Dreams of Heaven and Earth

There was this to be said for manual labour: it certainly took one's mind off dinner invitations. If Erik was certain of anything, it was that he was not to be trusted with such social niceties; the dangerous fiasco at the Variétés was proof enough of that. And yet, Christine's new music tugged at him like a chain. A day became days; a week, two weeks, three. He laboured as a dumb beast, bending all his thoughts to the task of converting the ramshackle storage space behind the Gandons' store to a usable workshop. He had meant at first to limit himself to drawing up the plans and leave the carpentry to Jean, but it soon became apparent that Jean's skill with saw and hammer did not extend much past putting up placards, and Erik threw on a builder's smock and picked up the tools himself. With Jean for assistant, they set about replacing the side door with a large window to admit light onto the broad clear wall opposite, and installing a new pulley rig that permitted signs to be placed at different working heights and angles.

It was hardly a serious project, but the exertion could at least send him into a nightly stupor of exhaustion, and Erik worked mercilessly to earn it. It was almost enough to dislodge from his mind the pull of Christine's unfinished music, her voice – more mature, more resonant, stronger than it had ever been – almost enough to forget her searching eyes demanding a reckoning. It is not what you are, she had said. It is what you choose.

He did not want to choose. There were no choices left. They were trapped in a stone bubble, a locked theatre full of guns, waiting, waiting, waiting for the signal... Soon enough this intermission must give way to the final act. He had seen the inferno before. He had walked through it again in Bazeilles. He could not forget it, or pretend that his choices or Christine's could make the slightest difference now. He was the Phantom, who had forced Christine to make her choice when none was possible. And he was Erik Andersson the architect, whose only choice was between one window or two. But somewhere underneath he was just a ruined man who desperately wished for what he could never deserve. And he did wish for it. For her music. For her.

The devil take it all. If he was to be condemned without right of appeal, without time to earn his pardon, then so be it. He was not going to wait here meekly for the inferno.

Erik gathered his plastering trowels and dropped the lot in the water bucket, then wiped his hands on a rag and threw that in too. Jean glanced at him in surprise from where he was adjusting the new window frame, swinging the open pane back and forth. Outside the window was only the corner of the fence, but above that, the sky was a piercing autumnal blue that promised a clear evening ahead - as long as the war did not come.

Erik yanked the cloth that had kept the dust from his mouth down to his neck. "This wall needs to dry out before we continue. Enough for today."

Jean said something in assent but Erik did not stop to listen. There was no time to lose. He needed a bath, a shave, and something more presentable to wear than a workblouse coated from hem to collar in brown plaster dust.

The tub and water butt had been removed to the kitchen while they worked on the outbuilding, which meant he had no choice but carry the hot water upstairs and then empty the heavy tub, bucket by bucket, until it could be brought down again. The whole process was medieval, unbearably tedious, and Erik had ample leisure to curse his own stupidity in causing it. Somehow he had wound up with yet another construction project at a time when the only things being built were fortifications. Every park and square had been divested of living trees for defence, and the tents of the Garde Mobiles were pitched where children had played. The Bois de Boulogne and the Bois de Vincennes had disappeared into a landscape of mud dotted with tree stumps, and from the heights of Montmartre a searchlight cast a grim electric light over the no-man's-land of the razed suburbs. For a little while, he had been part of this city, this glittering bauble of light, and it was with some surprise that Erik discovered he pitied it. Poor pretty Paris, shorn of her greenery, deprived of her diamond streetlights, dark and plain and ugly in her bare military skin. But its suffering would not last long: Erik remembered well the sound of the Prussian cannons, the boom and shudder of the fireworks of death.

The thought made him hurry. The bath was barely over ankle deep but it would do. He scrubbed furiously and sluiced himself clean, again and again, gasping and half-drowning. He combed his dripping hair, then found a razor and scraped away every last speck of beard, using a tiny mirror he kept well hidden with his shaving things, until he was fit to be seen. Dressing too seemed to take forever. Buttons must have been invented by men with too much time on their hands, and even the bandage on his scars was determined to resist his clumsy fingers.

Time was a thin, fragile, ghostly thread that could at any moment be torn apart, and he needed it to stay whole just a little longer. Deep in the city below was Christine, who needed him for her music, and he had been a fool to try to fight it. What could it matter now if he lost the shreds of a man he had so nearly become, dissolving in the madness? Soon enough it would all be over. Christine thought her choices were free, but she was shackled by the same music, the chains of his making. It had been his doing and he would burn for it, soon enough. But if he could not have forgiveness, he could at least have the sin.

He was halfway down the stairs when Jean called from the storeroom below:

"Wait a minute! I have the papers you asked for."

His bespectacled eyes shone with the thrill of finally having some news from the distant outside world. He met Erik at the foot of the stairs, holding up two well thumbed, yellowish sheets of newsprint like rolls of the most precious papyrus.

"Marèchal's youngest crossed the lines with them last night in a Red Cross wagon. Brave child. Her aunt lives in Rouen - these are only two days old. You may keep them, we read them at the meeting this morning."

Erik accepted the papers, grateful and irritated in equal measure. The solid black newsprint pulled him back, the words silencing the pulse of music in his mind. He skimmed the headlines, trying to avoid the rest: "My thanks. No big news then."

"Nothing. Metz is still holding out, but it can't be long now. The Prussians will get their reinforcements."

Erik nodded, unsurprised, and folded the papers into the inner pocket of his jacket. If - when - Marshal Bazaine surrendered the fortress of Metz, it would free the besieging Prussian forces to join the blockade of Paris. They would have more men and all the siege equipment they needed. The noose was tightening, the cannons were coming. It was only a matter of time.

"What are they like, the Prussians?" Jean asked.

Erik shrugged. "They're made of meat. Like all men."

He walked out, feeling Jean's uncertain gaze follow him as he went. Two days ago Metz was still standing; a quick mental calculation assured him that there could not be new cannons at the doorstep just yet. That was something at least, even if meant he must break away again from the music to deliver these thrice-damned papers.

The Vicomte was sitting up in his sickbed when Erik came in, reading a book. He did not look up at Erik's arrival; the tent was busy and medics fussed around the beds of all the groaning, delirious wounded, making Erik only one more figure in a crowd. He hesitated. The place smelled scarlet. There were too many fresh wounds for these to be a motley crop from the ramparts, too much blood. Another failed skirmish, Erik deduced, or what the official papers called an "aggressive reconnaissance". A pointless, ill-equipped punch in the armoured jaw of the Prussians, succeeding only in making work for the surgeons and the priests. A boy's shriek came from a bed to one side, piercingly high, and was silenced with rags.

For a moment Erik was tempted to leave the paper, but something, a new instinct, told him that would be poor form. He snorted, annoyed at himself. What did manners matter now?

Chagny must have heard him then, because he raised his gaze as soon as Erik approached. He did not look well; his eyes were bloodshot and there was a greyish cast to his skin. He watched Erik in wary confusion, the book forgotten in his lap.

"To what do I owe the honour?" he said finally, with a leaden irony Erik had not expected. He seemed to have aged a decade in the scant three weeks since his arrival at the ambulance. Erik wondered if it was the pain or the confinement that was making him haggard.

"Newspapers," Erik informed him curtly, dropping the two sheets onto the open book. "Do not get agitated, there is nobody riding to our rescue."

The Vicomte lifted the top paper to leaf through the one below. "Metz-"

"Is not going to hold out much longer, no."

Chagny gave a nod. He seemed to debate something for a moment, then said, "Thank you for these. It is impossible to get news here."

Erik cast a look around. "I should think you will have no shortage of news from these men, once they are fit to talk."

"Another defeat," Chagny said. "What else can they say? It is plain."

"I am certain they would be delighted to share all the gory details of their valor."

The Vicomte looked around appraisingly, as though seeing the suffering around him for the first time. Then he moved the papers to free the book in his lap, and picked it up again, turning it so that Erik could see the illustration. Against a blue-grey wash of seascape, a minute sailing ship had crested a wave, poised on the cusp of destruction. Beneath the churning waters circled the ghostly forms of sea maidens, hungry for the embrace of drowning men.

Erik touched one of the pale figures. "She is not one of these."

Chagny brushed this aside. "Of course not - she never was, not even as a child. I do not mean Christine. It is only that… The sea is empty, Andersson. There is nobody waiting below."

Erik examined the image again with some distaste, feeling the breath of something cold, like fear. He had not come here equipped with the answers to another man's loss of faith.

"Then let us hope the wind changes. We may yet live."

The Vicomte looked at him with a mixture of incredulity and almost hope. "You believe that?"

Erik shrugged. "I believe nothing. But I intend to find out how this ends."

o o o

Christine crumpled up another sheet of ruled paper and tossed the ball onto a growing pile atop the piano. Enough. She conceded defeat. She was tired, empty of songs, sick of the ugly masquerade of uniforms and horses and gun-carriages that had taken over the city. Her heart ached for the days when she could rest her mind from the cacophony of the Opéra simply by lighting a candle in the dark, kneeling alone with the voice that sang only for her, only with her.

Of late, her days had taken on a grinding monotony that was somehow far more exhausting than the most demanding of rehearsals. There was the ambulance, and Raoul's painfully slow recovery and his growing frustration that made it so hard to leave him, and harder still to return. There was the cemetery, and the markets and the shops and the queues and the arguments about who had been waiting longest… Then the return home with some tiny hard-won piece of meat, about whose origins it was best not to enquire, and whatever sundry vegetables it had been possible to buy. It was fortunate that Meg was still doing her sittings, because without at least that small income, their situation might have been pitiable, but even so, it was difficult enough. The only entertainment to be had was Madame Giry's unruffled acceptance of the day's catch, as she called it, and the increasingly ridiculous dishes Meg dreamed up while they dined on this unexciting reality. But even the stories Madame Giry told, of her time as a ballerina and the old days at the Opéra, could not fill the void that deepened in Christine's soul.

She had been so sure, when her voice had been restored to her, that it would all be well, that somehow her unlocked music must bring with it liberation for herself, for everyone around her - if not victory, then at least release. But in truth, nothing had changed in the intervening weeks except for the worse. The Prussians were still there. The means of communication with the world had thinned to a trickle and finally stopped. And, angry as it made her to think of it, the music she had shared with Erik had changed nothing at all. He was invisible somewhere, hiding or waiting. Or simply living a life of his own, just as Madame Giry had always told her he must. For a little while it had seemed like a simple, ordinary thing, that he might sleep in her home, eat at her table, sit beside her at the piano. She should have expected no more than this, but it hurt, more deeply than she wanted to admit.

She was Christine Daaé, the daughter of a gifted violinist, and the sole heir to his song. She owed it to her father and to herself to finish what she had started with such blind optimism, and what had now become more burden than liberty. Her music was lost in the noise of the soldiers encamped around the Tuileries, the official and terribly important telegrams relayed back and forth across the besieged city, the reading of strident proclamations, the daily search for food. She wished for the smallest share of Madame Giry's equanimity, but she had not her grace.

Christine closed her music book, leaving it on the piano rest, and stood up, stretching cramped muscles. It had grown dark without her noticing; the clock on the mantelpiece warned that Madame Giry would be home soon, hopefully with bread, and Meg too would by now be on the omnibus back. Christine sighed and squared her shoulders. Time to get to work, or they would all be going to bed hungry.

She turned up the gas as far as it would go, but it made little difference to the twilight in the apartment. The whole city was down to half pressure to save fuel, and even the streetlights had been reduced to faint globes of red, barely lighting their own shades. The dining room was eerie in its shadowy half-light, and Christine hurried past the empty table towards the kitchen.

The table was not empty. At the corner, near her customary dining place, lay a single rose.

For a second, Christine could not breathe, and then the air came all in a rush, hitching in her throat, choking her with the scent of the past. She did not dare touch the flower, but even in the poor light she could see the black ribbon tied around its long stem, and the petals the colour of old blood.

"Erik!" she called loudly, hearing the shrill note of panic in her voice. She wished she could turn the lights to their full brightness.

"Erik!"

Her heart was hammering hard enough that her entire body shook with the beat. She ran to the balcony door; there was nobody behind the curtain, nobody in the kitchen, nobody in the parlour she had just come from.

No. She was wrong. There was somebody in the parlour. She stopped with her hand on the door.

Erik stepped away from where he had stood at the side of the piano, holding one of her crumpled music pages. He glanced down at it, then opened his hand and let the paper drop to the floor. A trickle of cold sweat ran like a teardrop between Christine's shoulderblades.

"Erik." She could not raise her voice now. "Have you lost your mind?"

He seemed to consider this. "Not yet."

Christine looked behind her to where the rose still lay on the table. Its fragrance was overpowering, confusing her thoughts.

"It is astonishingly difficult to find flowers in this city," Erik said conversationally, following the direction of her gaze. "I had to get this one from an undertaker."

The strangest thing was that he did not try to project his voice in the way the rose had made her anticipate. Nor was he dressed as anything more sinister than a gentleman come to call on a friend, although his stiff posture and gallows humour contrasted oddly with the casual ease of his tone. Christine found herself caught off guard, baffled. There was almost nothing in him of the Phantom, of the Opéra, yet he had brought her the rose…

Erik waited, less than a silhouette of himself.

"You were gone," she said. "Now this again?"

"This?" He discarded the casual tone. With one hand he tapped the edge of the piano: "This is what you wanted! You spoke of choices, Christine. And here is yours, is it not? The music, the theatre. You mean to escape from the world."

"No."

"Yes. But you can't run from what is coming, I have learned that much. It is a delusion, a lie for an orphaned child who dreams of heaven. Music will not save us. There is no heaven."

Christine came forward, deeper into the parlour.

"Step into the light," she told him, nodding at the lamp beside the armchair. "Over there. Where I can see you."

Against her expectations, Erik moved in the direction she asked. The lamp gave off sufficient light to sketch him clearly, chiaroscuro in black and orange, from his mask to his clothes. His face was clean-shaven again, his suit neat and even fashionable, all of it irrelevant.

He looked past her, uncomfortable under her stare.

Christine toed at her broken, crumpled music on the rug, then picked it up and crushed the paper in her hand.

Without warning, she threw it aside.

"You think I wanted this, this - charade? You as the Phantom, me trembling at the mystery?" She advanced towards him. "You are wrong. Completely wrong."

She did not trust herself to say anything more. Her voice was threatening to break.

Erik retrieved the paper from the floor. He unfolded it carefully as he stood, smoothing it out, and read the fragment, his thumb tracing the edge of the sheet, back and forth. Christine followed it. At length he put it back on top of the piano, resting his fingers over it. Then he let go.

"You do not need me, Christine. This is… beautiful."

"You do not need me either. You have your life now. All that it takes."

He looked at her like she had said something shocking. Christine held his gaze.

Slowly, as though expecting retribution for every movement, Erik lowered himself to sit at the corner of the bench, facing the piano. The space next to him was wide and empty. Christine hesitated. Then gingerly, she sat down too, gathering her skirts out of the way. The lid was open; Erik touched a black key with one finger, too lightly to draw a sound. Then he half-turned towards her, cupped his hand to the side of her jaw, and kissed her.

Christine gasped and opened her mouth to breathe, instinctively seeking air - finding more than air, the sudden wave of him inside her, bitter hot on her tongue. Erik cried out in surprise, as though she had opened a trapdoor beneath him, but Christine could find nothing to hold onto for safety, no possible resistance, and they were falling together, without wings. She pushed against the barricade of his chest, elbows awkward and sharp, sliding against the piano keys with the clash of dissonant chords. Erik's heartbeat was too fast, juddering with every chord, but he did not let go.

"Wh… What is…"

Christine felt him trying to speak but they were melded together, and the sound could not dissect the air they breathed. Erik gave up and caught fistfuls of her curls, planted hard kisses over her cheeks, her forehead, before returning to her mouth, drinking her voice. Christine gave it freely - she was as mute as he, but it did not matter in the least; she had waited too long to be gentle. Her hands found his back, his neck, five nails drawing a stave down his spine, dotting notes upon it.

"What is it... you want?" Erik managed finally, breaking each word against her lips.

Christine pulled back to rest her forehead against his, against the line of his mask. She had forgotten it was there but it did not matter, not now. What did she want…

"I don't know," she said. She sat back, little by little becoming herself. "But… I would like a chance to find out."

Erik's lips quirked in a way that was shy and somehow boyish. He moved back to kiss her but Christine stopped him reluctantly. "No, wait. Everyone will be back soon. Meg and Madame Giry. I must make dinner."

"Let me help."

Christine looked at him in surprise. "Can you cook?"

"I don't know," he shrugged, and echoed her own words, "Shall we find out?"

Christine laughed, and Erik seemed to drink in the sound with his whole body, as though it was water spilling onto parched soil. On a whim, Christine reached up and touched his bare cheekbone, drawing a line to his mouth. He stilled as she explored his lips and moved lower, over his chin, past his collar, to the hollow of his throat. There she paused, over the beating pulse.

"I may be an orphaned child," she said quietly, "and I do not know if there is a heaven. But I think music can save. If you want it to."

Erik made no reply, but Christine saw it in his eyes, a wish so ancient it had grown hard and bitter with longing.

"You cannot eat music," he said, too lightly. "Tell me what to do."

Christine looked over her shoulder towards the dining room, where in the dark she knew the rose still rested on the table.

"You could start by finding a vase for that flower."