A/N: Fear not, I have not stopped! I'm just in the middle of some high-pressure stuff in RL that requires a lot of completely different research, and sadly I have only one brain. Thank you again for your insightful comments, they make for fascinating reading! Just a reminder: if you'd like an answer, I'm very happy to PM; you just need to be logged in.

Trivia for this chapter: the writer Anatole France, recalling his time in the Garde Nationale during the siege, described the behaviour of his fellow soldiers robbing a bakery something like this: "it was just as well the proprietor was not there — but we were not murderers". An interesting little insight.

Chapter 41 — Our Daily Bread

"Christine, we're home! With bread! God, I'm starving, it smells good in here…"

Meg held the door open for her mother, standing against it while simultaneously peeling off her dusty gloves. Madame Giry nodded her thanks and Meg tossed gloves and hat on the dresser, already halfway down the hall, following the clanking sound she joyfully identified as soup being ladled into a tureen. She could see the steam from the dining room. It seemed like eons since they'd had something hot for supper.

"You know you're raising the standard," — she stopped mid-stride. "—Dangerously."

She heard her mother's footsteps halt.

Christine was carrying the steaming soup tureen, that much was true, but half a pace behind her stood the man Meg could still not think of as Erik Andersson. He was holding a pot stand.

Meg looked helplessly between her friend and her incongruous shadow, standing there in his shirtsleeves with a teatowel tucked into a trouser pocket, his bandage grey with steam and clinging damply to the contours of his face.

So much for a quiet evening at home.

"Madame Giry," he inclined his head with studied politeness, "Mademoiselle."

"Good evening, monsieur. Put the stand over here please, before there is an accident." Madame Giry took the tureen from Christine's unsteady hands, and set it safely on the pot stand Erik placed before her. "This is a surprise."

The cuffs of Christine's sleeves had been rolled up; she tugged them nervously into place. "I, uh, I asked Erik to join us."

"For good?" Meg said, and at once wished she had not. Christine flinched and looked at the table.

"For supper." The dark blush that covered Christine's cheeks spread down to her neck, and even Erik seemed flustered.

He went back to the kitchen, emerging a moment later without the ridiculous towel, but wielding a long silver bread knife, which he put down in the middle of the table. The handle shook when he let it go, striking the tabletop with a quick drunken beat. The Phantom cooking supper, setting the table… Farcical as it might have been, Meg felt her neck prickle with a shadow of the same tension that had dogged their lives at the Opéra, the old weight of unspoken buried secrets. She had not missed it one bit.

Madame Giry broke the silence. "Well. Let us eat while this is hot, since we are being treated to such admirable domesticity."

She put the fresh bread into the empty basket and they took their seats, with somewhat more than usual formality. Meg found herself opposite Christine and Erik, with her mother at the head of the table.

"Perhaps later," Madame Giry continued, as Christine finished serving the soup, "one of you can explain the contents of that vase."

Meg followed the direction of her mother's gaze to the sideboard. Balanced precariously within a thin-necked vase, with a length of black satin ribbon next to it, was an exact replica of one of the Phantom's roses.

Meg whipped her head around to look at Christine, but Christine returned only a tense half-smile that was not at all reassuring. Just then Erik passed her the bread basket, and Meg saw the quick flicker of touch as their hands met. Oh no, she thought. Not again.

Madame Giry saw it too. Meg discovered a keen interest in the porcelain rim of her soup bowl and tried her best to observe nothing beyond the movement of her spoon. If her mother knew of that night Christine was gone…

Nothing further was said about the rose. They ate.

"There was no meat again," said Christine after a while. "I should have gone earlier; there was a crowd waiting at the butcher's by the time I got there. But the doors were shut."

Erik dabbed the napkin against his chin, taking care to avoid the mask; it must have required some practice, Meg thought, to eat without wearing his dinner. "It is the same all around the city. But one may live without meat, for a time."

"How long?" Meg wondered, curious despite herself. "Longer than Lent?"

"I have never performed the experiment, mademoiselle. But we may soon find out."

Christine looked thoughtful. "Meg, remember Blanche, from the Variétés? She used to say she never ate meat at all, but she seemed healthy enough."

"Oh that. She also said she never let a man—" Meg coughed, catching her mother's expression, and searched desperately for a way to finish. "That is… Blanche liked to talk."

"Even so," Christine insisted, "I wonder if it is possible to live on nothing but greens and such. I've read about people in India who go for years without meat. Or bread."

Meg widened her eyes in mock horror and clutched at her remaining bread protectively, making Christine grin.

"This is very good," Madame Giry said neutrally, as she set down her spoon in her empty bowl. She looked down the table at Erik. "A hidden talent, monsieur?"

"Not at all," he said. "The recipe was Christine's; I merely followed directions."

"Oh? Now that is indeed a new talent."

To Meg's surprise, Erik looked distinctly pleased at this, as though Madame Giry had praised a true accomplishment. One corner of Christine's mouth lifted wryly:

"You are a very able student. Although there is some doubt about the teacher; this is about the pinnacle of my culinary skill."

Meg finished her bread and set her napkin aside, as the clock in the parlour chimed in warning. In another half hour the bells would be ringing curfew.

"The curfew," Madame Giry sighed wearily. "It is like being in the dormitories again."

"Except we did not actually go to bed then," Meg pointed out.

Erik stood up. "I should be going. No, there is no need to get up, I will see myself out. This was," — he made a slight bow at their small gathering, "— a pleasure. I do apologise for the intrusion."

"You know you are welcome here," Madame Giry said seriously. "But it would be best if you did not visit Christine alone."

He acknowledged the rebuke. Meg felt that familiar tension again, secrets. It struck her suddenly that for all she knew, he could have been here all afternoon.

"I will see you to the door," Christine said quickly, countering his refusal with a determined look. She got up and brought his jacket from the kitchen, then followed him out. Meg jumped up from her seat and went after her, Madame Giry following close behind.

At the door, Erik put on his hat and gloves and paused, waiting, but Christine did not open the door. She fidgeted with the edge of her sleeve.

Then she tossed her head, stepped closer and kissed his bare cheek. "Good night."

Meg tried not to stare.

For an instant Erik looked as startled as she. He touched his cheek where Christine's lips had been, near his mouth. Then he straightened up formidably, removed his hat, and looked directly at Madame Giry:

"Madame… I would ask your permission to court Mademoiselle Daaé."

Madame Giry was silent. In the limelight of her gaze, Christine glanced at her would-be suitor and back again at Madame Giry and Meg, steady and a little fierce, apparently undaunted. So this is it, Meg thought dismally. The rose in the other room made perfect sense.

Finally, Madame Giry said, "You ask for what is not mine to withhold. It appears you have Christine's permission."

Christine nodded, and now Meg saw that her confidence was not as deep as it seemed. She looked too brave to be happy.

"The curfew," Meg reminded them.

"Yes," Christine said, and Erik touched her shoulder briefly, put on his hat, and was gone. The door lock clicked into place.

Christine turned and stood with her back to the door, alone. She looked foreign, like that day long ago when Madame Giry first brought her to the Opéra, apprehensive and very young.

She was so much older and smarter, Meg thought in dismay, almost eighteen now - and yet this pain was still there in her eyes, and seemed to be there to stay.

"What on earth are you doing," she said, unable to hold back the tears of frustration, looking from Christine to her mother, both of them caught in this trap. "Maman, why didn't you say something!"

Madame Giry moved her head very slightly, "Meg…"

"Don't," Meg interrupted, "it is folly, you know it is! He brought you nothing but years of suffering and secrets and hiding, you and Christine both. All the times you helped him… He does something to Christine with his voice, you know it, you've seen it, but you say nothing, you just let her bear it! Maybe he's truly a genius, I do not know and it makes no difference at all, because it does not give him the right to destroy other people. It does not."

She turned to Christine. "You were free. For a while, you really were, Christine. Why can't we just let him go?"

"It is not so simple," Madame Giry said softly, her face taut with sorrow. "You cannot turn your back on the past."

"The past. Why is it always the past? What about now? Maybe we're all going to be eating rats by next month, if the Prussians don't turn the city to rubble."

"Maybe the month after, the rats will be eating us." Christine clasped her hands to the sides of her skirt in a hard grip. "It is not a spell, Meg. I swear it. There is no fairy tale, and I know you think I cannot judge it, but please, trust me. I know what he has done. It repels me. But what he has done and what he is doing, what he is… It is not the same thing. He is…" She sought the words helplessly. "He hears the music too, the same music. It was always that way, all the time that he… That we sang. I made him, Meg, as much as he made me. Or maybe it is all an illusion, but I cannot fight it, I do not want to fight it. You are right, we are surrounded and who knows what will be next month. Perhaps nothing at all. I don't want to go to my grave thinking of the things I should have said."

"Come here, both of you," Madame Giry said, and put an arm around each of them, as she used to do long ago when they were frightened. Meg did not want to be soothed like a child, but the embrace was her mother's, familiar and safe, and it was hard to hold on to her anger. Her mother stroked her hair back from her forehead, tenderly. "If the Prussians had wanted to turn us to rubble, they would have done it by now. This is a different sort of production, with a different rhythm. One way or another, it must eventually end, and we shall see what comes then. The world will still be here."

"Could we not do this just as well without all the roses?" Meg wanted to smile but could not quite bring herself to make light of it. "Maman, you told me yourself things might have been different had you been free to leave the Opéra..."

Meg felt her mother's shoulders rise and fall in acceptance. "You might never have met Christine then, and we would not be here. It is a dance, each step growing into the next, all as one. I have wished, more times than you might guess, that I had never seen that broken child, that I had not managed to keep his secrets… Or that I might have been wiser and had never tried. But it is as Christine said. I made him also. We all make each other. And we must live with our creations."

"That is what Monsieur de Gas says too," Meg sighed, "when he is forced to sell one of his works. He says he will buy them all back one day, even the failures."

Madame Giry glanced down at her. "You have great respect for him."

"Yes," Meg said. "He is able to see things, the way they are."

Christine freed herself gently from Madame Giry's embrace and smoothed her skirts. Her cheeks were glistening but she seemed happier somehow, more at ease with herself. "I am not signing away my soul, you know. It's only a rose."

"You're impossible," Meg said in defeat. "Your choice of suitors, Mademoiselle Daaé, is as dubious as your skills in the kitchen."

"Now wait a minute, that was perfectly good soup! And what are you implying about Raoul…"

"All right, mesdemoiselles, there are dishes to be done."

Madame Giry waved them away in fond exasperation, and Meg did not protest. Christine seemed glad to busy herself with the necessary evening chores, and Meg joined her. It was all simple enough, for the most part.

"Do you love him?" she blurted out, when they were done scrubbing the counter and putting away the pots. Christine started at her voice and Meg realised she had been lost in thought. "Do you love him," she repeated, louder.

Christine looked at her from under a tangle of messy curls, a dripping rag in one hand and a brush in the other. It was not exactly the look of a romantic heroine. "I don't know what that means," Christine said slowly. For a moment Meg thought she was clowning around, playing the foreigner, but Christine went on, "I loved my father. I love Raoul. Your mother. Even you, occasionally."

"Hey!"

Christine smiled, crookedly. "I think your mother loves him more than I ever could, like one of your Monsieur de Gas's failed paintings… Like a masterpiece she pulled from the fire, damaged beyond repair."

"But you?"

Christine dropped the rag in the sink and dried her reddened hands. "I don't know. It's like looking in the mirror, sometimes. Like closing my eyes. He is always there."

"You're trapped."

"Maybe. But sometimes I think… It's only a trap if you don't want to be there. And if you do, it isn't a trap. It's a choice."

"Well, I don't want to leave this city," Meg objected reasonably. "I like it here, or I did, before the war. But I'm still trapped."

"That's different."

"Why?"

"For one thing," Christine said, "they have cannons."

o o o

Erik felt he flew through the deserted nighttime city, barely skimming the paving stones, his heart full of Christine and trembling with wonder so immense that it had become a living thing trapped in his chest, beating its wings in time with his footsteps. To be loved! To be granted Christine's laugh and her touch, to be permitted to share her evening, guided by her quick delicate hands in the simple daily tasks that were life itself - the impossible thrill of the mundane, chopping onions and peeling carrots while standing side by side, thigh to thigh, both of them aware of the other as in a new dance. To kiss her and taste their cooking upon her tongue. To be treated as one of them, part of the pattern made by Madame Giry and her daughter and Christine. Above all, to have the right now to court her, to call himself hers. To be allowed to see her again tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow.

To kiss her again.

He slipped off one glove, put his hand in his pocket and slid his little finger into the circle of Christine's ring. It fit. He brought it out for one furtive moment, a tiny black star, and hid it away again.

The peal of the curfew bells rose in perfect counterpoint to his thoughts, echoed from buildings and paving stones in great overlapping waves of sound that were, finally, a sobering reminder of time. This was the deep, solemn voice of the besieged city itself, so unlike the songs of its silenced theatres and the bawdier tunes of the music halls. Erik paused to listen to the last bells die away, then resumed walking, the tread of his boots unnaturally loud in the empty streets.

He left behind the barely lit boulevards and began the ascent through the even darker lanes of Montmartre. The evening was chilly but not yet cold, and Erik relished the feel of air in his lungs. Despite the late hour nobody would be arrested here; the local National Guard battalions guarded their territory from the police more fiercely even than from the Prussians, and it would have taken a foolish policeman indeed to venture here at night. It was a kind of liberty, a promise of reprieve.

The houses pressed closer here, but far above the silhouetted rooftops, the sky was a violet infinity of stars.

"That's a pretty bit of sparkle you got," said a thick voice from the shadows.

For a mad instant Erik thought the speaker meant the stars.

He looked down. Half a dozen spectral figures separated from the denser blackness of the façade in front of him, abruptly becoming only human. Footsteps at his back assured him he had been followed at least since he had turned into this street.

He stopped, biting back a curse. Fool. To have allowed himself to be trapped with such ease! His fist clenched on the sharp edges of Christine's diamond. There could be no doubt of it, they had seen the ring. The street was as narrow as a well, steep, and entirely dead; not a single lighted window above him. Only the stars.

The man who had spoken loafed closer, the others ranging behind him. They were young, Erik saw, all pimples and feathery moustaches, but their faces wore identical expressions of stony indifference, and the eyes of those he could see were cold.

"Ah," he said softly. "My mob."

The leader, a broad-shouldered young man in a guard's oilskin cloak, barred his way, standing with his feet planted apart, ready for the prey to run.

"The ring," the man jerked his head sharply at Erik's pocket. "And whatever else you got. Money."

Erik remained motionless.

One of the figures moved; a young woman dressed in a workman's smock and trousers. Erik shifted his weight slightly to the balls of his feet, listening for the snick of a knife being bared, but none came. She scowled and sniffed loudly, in what seemed a misguided effort to seem tougher:

"You took that ring off some girl, we take it off you. Fair's fair."

"Fair's fair," agreed the leader. "Let's get on with it, m'sieur, it's only money, all right? Don't be stupid. We all got to eat and you look like you've had yours. So go on, share nicely and we all go away. We're not murderers."

Erik raised his masked face, hating this, hating them, hating the cold diamond-hard truth, unbreakable. We're not murderers.

"No. But I am."

They stared in confusion, just long enough. Quick as a snake, Erik ripped aside his bandage, folded it back on itself as the white linen unravelled, and twisted it hard. The man's dirty neck was caught in a loop, a seemingly harmless thing; he blinked incomprehension a moment before Erik tugged at the noose.

That sound. The horrific sound of a throat begging for air took Erik at once to the final night in Bazeilles, in what used to be Bazeilles. The Bavarians in their plumed helmets. The snipers and the wounded men whose eyes had bulged just like this, and who died staring at the Ghost. There was no time for his victim to scream; the others scattered, with no loyalty in the face of this unmasked monster, leaving their former leader alone.

Erik's wrist was shaking; the boy in his grip ceased fighting as his cloak slid to the ground - and it was a boy, Erik realised, younger even than be had thought, now his shoulders were no longer broadened by the cloak.

He opened his fist. The boy fell back, hard on his spine, the back of his skull striking the paving stones with a dull crack. He was still breathing. For that, Erik was suddenly, immensely grateful.

"Get up!" Erik said hoarsely. The blood hummed in his temples and his vision threatened to blur. His bare face, exposed to the air, burned with an icy agony, as though he had been flayed. "Get up!"

The boy lay on the ground, breathing, his eyes white and wild and stupid. The bandage rope around his neck was slack, but he did not seem to notice.

Reaching into his pocket, Erik dragged out the contents: a handful of coins, two bills. The change from Christine's rose. He dropped the money onto the boy's heaving chest. A few of the coins rolled away, skittering brightly across the footpath, exactly like the coins tossed by the freakshow visitors in another life. The Devil's Child scowled up at him, all teeth and fear, a small and nasty animal brought to bay. Then he made a dive for the coins.

Erik snatched up the ruined bandage, rolling it up over his hand, and ran, with nothing more than the ring in his pocket to bind him to sanity, with his bare deformity branding him for what he knew he was, unchanged and unchangeable.

When at last he was back in rue Fontenelle, he stood for a long time in the dark passageway at the side of the shuttered store, in the cold limbo between street and house, trying to tie the bandage. It was hopeless. The rope refused to reform into a mask, or be had forgotten the trick of it. His scars hurt badly, and he pressed the exposed side of his head to the cool brick wall and looked up at the stars. They blinked back, distant and impartial, a thousand times brighter in the absence of street lights.

Forgive me, he wanted to say, but there was nobody to ask.

Upstairs, under the locked door of his room, he found a folded letter. It was only a terse note, requesting the company of M. Andersson at his earliest convenience, if he was of a mind to learn some news. The nature of the news remained a mystery. The signature, in steady aristocratic hand, read "Chagny".

Christine's suitor… Oh God, Erik realised, he was now Christine's suitor. He, the Devil's Child, with his rope and his twisted rage, with hands schooled to the habit of blood; he, who only this afternoon had taken Christine in his arms and sat at her side and asked for her favour. Courtship was another man's role, and he had taken his place.

What could he give Christine, in this encircled city that was struggling for breath?

The note lay in the pool of yellow lamplight on the tabletop, next to his crumpled bandage, reminding him silently of all that he was not, and of all the obligations he had taken upon himself in assuming a role not his own. The Vicomte and his news… What this could be, Erik neither guessed not cared, but he would have to go and find out. The certainty of it had the curious effect of giving shape to the following morning, and Erik felt his pulse slowing gradually, in acceptance.

He put Chagny's letter up on the shelf over the table, and pulled out Christine's ring. Fearfully, he pushed it again onto the little finger of his left hand, the gold circlet snug and surprisingly heavy under his knuckle, branding him with Christine's mark. He looked at it there, unbreakable, and thought of the stars. In his heart was music, a requiem for the Devil's Child.

He could do this. He was not the freakshow child, any more than he was a ghost or an angel. He was Erik.