A/N: Thanks again for reading and reviewing! In response to a question, I'd say there's still quite a way to go before this story is done. But I hope you enjoy the journey. :-)

Chapter 44 — Hunger

Dear, stubborn friend! How welcome was your balloon letter, but oh, heartbreaking to think it left you so many days ago, and we know nothing since then. J-M and I are like a pair of old gulls here, watching the grey sea and talking endlessly of what you are facing, but to what end? What cowardly, dishonourable warfare M. Bismarck is waging, to starve the city to its knees! Have you food and fuel? Have the girls winter coats? All the talk here is of early frosts and a hard winter to come. Please, Agathe, do write soon.

Madame Giry set aside the anxious note from Monsieur Duchamp's sister, transcribed in some clerk's neatly impersonal hand, and closed her eyes against the urge to read it over again. She could envision the stately old house where it had been written, and hear the wind and waves and the brighter voices of children… Her daughter's laughter, and Christine singing to her father's violin: what a voice, they all said then, for such a wisp of a girl. She had been well taught by Gustave, but that voice had always been hers, silenced by grief for a time, but never broken. How happy it would have made him to see her grown into her gift, using it now to shape her own music! Less certain by far, Madame Giry sighed to herself, what he might have made of his daughter's choice of companionship, or the inadequacy of her guardian — but one could not seek forgiveness from the dead…

At least they had heard finally from the living: the first letter from beyond the walls since all post had been stopped. A pigeon had carried it along with hundreds of others, photographed to a minute size to be enlarged and transcribed again by those entrusted with this one remaining thread to the outside world. There was something frightening about a city reduced to this: pigeons replacing telegraph wires, smoky oil lamps burning instead of gas, obscene caricatures and proclamations plastered over noticeboards that were still crowned with the ornate heading, Spectacles, above the shreds of posters from the last performances.

And still, the theatres remained closed.

This would not do. The afternoons were getting shorter as winter neared and she could ill afford to spend these precious hours at her dressing table. Madame Giry pinned the letter to the side of her mirror to await time for an answer, draped her dressing-gown over the chair back, and went over to the small barre set against the wall. Like the rest of their worn furniture, it was a relic from the Opéra, but it still served its purpose: a quarter of an hour a day was just about sufficient to keep her body from losing all form and function. She gave herself a few silent counts to find her focus, then started on the pliés.

It was a pity they would not at least permit her to resume teaching class, she thought. Keeping the theatres closed with countless artists and stagehands out of a job was cruel enough, but to force dancers out with no means to hold on to what skill they had was simple stupidity. How were they to return to the stage when this madness ended? And how many of them would return at all? Her daughter still practiced at home, but absently and without heart, and Christine had long since returned to her music. It was not fair to expect them to carry on her art when they had their own lives – but it was hard not to fear that, when the theatres opened at last, she would be left standing irrelevant and alone, in a practice hall empty of students, and the dance would end.

She finished her stretches, rinsed her face and dressed again in a hurry, all too aware of the gathering dusk. There was no sense mourning what had not yet come to pass, when there was work to be done. She went to the kitchen to fetch the basketful of freshly laundered linen. Even this was an expensive luxury now, for fuel was short and few laundries could afford to heat enough water to remain open. Another few weeks like this and they would be forced to wash their clothing in the public fountains, like the soldiers encamped along the boulevards. This, in Paris! Madame Giry shook her head as she separated out an armful of bedlinen to take to Meg's room.

She put her shoulder to the door of her daughter's room, and almost tripped at the threshold. Jules' posters from the Opéra still decorated every wall, but above Meg's dresser was something new. Madame Giry felt the linen fall from her arms to the floor, with a noise like the shocked whisper of a crowd.

o o o

Christine sank down onto the creaky piano bench, exhausted and utterly, childishly happy. It had taken several afternoons of painstaking work to tune the reluctant old piano in the dance hall to something approaching true pitch, but it was done, done, done.

"Close enough," Erik agreed, closing the top board. "Would you like to try again?"

"Tomorrow. I think I'm half deaf. And it must be after five, Meg will be finished soon." Christine reached up tiredly and took his hand, rubbing her thumb against the new calluses on his palm and fingers, small leathery bumps that she could not see in the semi-darkness of the theatre, but could hear when he had played the piano. Erik laced his fingers through hers. It was oddly pleasing to think of him working, building something with these hands.

"Does Monsieur Gandon mind that you are not at the workshop?"

Erik snorted derisively. "Jean has an unpaid assistant of greater calibre than his enterprise deserves. I daresay he can manage adequately for a few hours. Besides," his tone darkened with self-mockery, and he withdrew his hand, "he may be glad of some time without his tenant's disreputable company. Your coat, Christine."

"Thank you." Christine stood to shrug into it and began to do up the buttons, while Erik collected his own coat and hat from beside the piano. Something was bothering him, but she could not tell what it might be. Perhaps it was only the strain of enduring hour after hour of not-quite-tuned harmonics. Her own head was still humming like a bell.

"Your company is not so very disreputable, you know. Although now you've taken up with a dancing girl…"

Erik turned aside from her clumsy attempt at humour, putting on his hat with his face averted. When the brim caught on his bandage, Christine saw his shoulders hunch.

"You're still in pain," she said quietly. "Your face…"

He turned back to her too readily, his expression ugly with triumph, as though he had been waiting for this. "I'm handsome as ever, Christine. Your own Prince Charming."

Taken aback, Christine froze, coat half-buttoned. "Stop it. Please."

"Would you like to see it?"

"No."

"And why not! A woman has the right to admire the face of her suitor, does she not?"

"Stop it!" Christine snapped, stepping from the bench to come toward him, but it was too late. With a savage gesture, Erik snatched the bandage from his head, and Christine cried out in alarm.

She knew she looked appalled and that Erik saw it, that he had expected it, and there was nothing she could do. She stared, defiantly. His forehead and cheek bore patches of chafed, unhealed flesh, crusted and raw where the bandage had ripped away scabs. Christine felt ill, thinking he must have been wearing it day and night.

"Erik… How long has it been like this?"

Erik looked away, unwilling to meet her eyes. His hat dropped from his hand, loud against the boards of the stage, and rolled on the floor. The echo of the outburst slowly died away among the shadows.

At length he raised one hand to cover the scars, and muttered, "Forgive me. That was unfair."

"Yes. It is." Christine felt a helpless rage rising within her, at the prison to which he could not help returning even when the doors were thrown open. A scant few minutes ago he had been by her side, her harmony, the two of them guiding the piano to their music. She should have seen it coming.

The fingers of Erik's other hand worked convulsively at the bandage, bunching the soiled linen against his hip. Christine longed to take the thing from him and thrust it aside, far out of his reach.

Cautiously, she clasped his wrist and lowered his hand away from his face.

"Let me see."

Erik grimaced and Christine steeled herself, but he did not refuse. She put her hands lightly under his clenched jaw and coaxed him to turn to look at her. His pulse throbbed crazily under the blade of her hand, and hers matched it now, beat for beat, as she traced lines on his good cheek, mirroring the damage on the other side.

"It will heal. If you let it."

"You are unduly fond of freaks, Mademoiselle Daaé," he murmured, without moving away.

"And you are unduly fond of playing one." Christine brushed the very edge of his scars, as gently as she could. "It is only blisters, such as dancers have after weeks of rehearsal. But not even Blanche would be fool enough to go day and night en pointe just to keep the illusion of flight. Erik, this is madness. You have to stop."

"I meant only to spare you… Christine, no." He shuddered when she refused to move her hand, but she drew him closer and put her cheek against his unbroken one, skin to skin, wary of causing pain. It was an awkward closeness, but so much better than being made a spectator for his struggle. She moved past his temple, to his ear.

"You are mine now, and it is I who look at your face. I meant what I said that night, do you remember? I want to see you as you are. All of it, Erik, not just the part you choose to show the world. All of it."

She felt him raise his arms to enfold her, uncertainly. Even now, she could feel the tension in his body and knew he could not believe her, but she tightened the embrace and let her eyes close, feeling his hair brush against her eyelids, nose, mouth, trying to think of nothing more than this.

"Christine…" Erik touched the back of her neck, the tiny island of exposed skin there, and Christine could only sob, in relief and the flood of dark, pulsing pleasure. She drew back enough to catch his mouth, and kissed him hard, heedless of scars and anger and pain. The sounds he made were chaotic and urgent, and in this as in music, Christine knew he could not hide. He was hers; she knew his taste now, the depth of him, the hidden tug of scars on the inside of his cheek that was as familiar as the timbre of his voice when he joined it to hers. She knew the things he had learned about her lips, the path within her mouth, the way her own breathing quickened and fluttered like wings.

Erik brought the kiss to a slow end, so gradual that Christine could not tell when they had stopped moving. He tugged at her lower lip lightly, one final note into the silence before they drew apart again.

"We have to go." His pupils were pools of fire in the lamplight, the blistered scars glistening shadows upon shadows, painful to see.

"In a moment," Christine agreed.

He glanced at the bundle of stained linen between their feet, then picked it up with distaste. "I have clean bandages back at the store. It is not far out of the way."

"Here," Christine pulled off her neckscarf, a pretty scrap of white silk that she was fond of. "You can't put that thing back on. This will do."

He fingered the fine fabric. "I can't. It will be ruined."

"All right then," she said seriously. "It is not far. Let us go, as you are."

"Do not mock me."

"I am not mocking you. Your room is not half a block away. Nobody will see; and if they do, they will notice only a woman and a man with an injured face. Do not tell me there is never a brawl in these streets, or an accident upon the ramparts, or another skirmish."

"And I thought I was mad."

Christine passed him the scarf wordlessly, and he draped it over one side of his head, and secured the hat over it. The old bandage he stuffed into his pocket.

They checked the theatre for any stray signs of their presence as they were now accustomed to doing, moved the boxes back to their places, and turned out the lights.

In the momentary darkness, the white line of daylight between the doors shone like a silver sword.

"Christine..." Erik's voice was little more than a sigh at her shoulder.

"Hmm?"

"Be very quiet now. We have been followed. There is somebody in the foyer."

A jolt of fear sparked in her chest; Christine listened. He was right; a man's heavy booted tread sounded just beyond the doors.

"The side exit," she suggested, and felt him concur. They hastened back towards the stage and a wedge of light split the darkness as Erik opened the side door.

They were fortunate: a moment behind them, Christine heard the clatter of the foyer doors swinging open, but by then they were safely outside.

Christine blinked; impossibly, it was still daylight, although dusk was already gathering in the doorways and under awnings. Erik looked along the shabby, nearly deserted street, but there was nobody in sight.

"We had best not linger, whoever it is will be back here in a minute. This way."

They walked steadily towards the Gandons' store, downhill. A minute passed, and then another, but they were not followed. Beside her, Erik had become again the elegant gentleman, the illusion so complete that Christine herself could almost believe they had never been in the dark theatre, alone.

Outside the store, she breathed in relief. "We're here."

Louise Gandon sat behind the front counter, frowning over a lurid copy of something titled Le Combat. The headline demanded closure of all private butchers, universal rations… Behind her, the store was a dark cavern in which Christine could just about see the stacked outlines of empty crates. Louise put aside the paper, directing her frown at the two of them:

"Ah, the man who will not fight. And you again, mam'zelle."

Christine bowed her head a little, hoping her embarrassment was not too obvious. "Good afternoon, madame."

Erik pulled out his key, with a wary glance at Louise. "Go inside, Christine. I will be right back."

Louise admitted them into the store, with less than a willing welcome, and Erik disappeared upstairs. In the dim interior, Christine could smell plaster dust and fresh paint from the workshop at the back, and the faint lingering scent of brewed coffee. It was curiously comforting. She gave Louise a tentative smile, in thanks for the refuge, and Louise sighed and gestured at an upturned crate beside her. Christine sat cautiously, moving her skirts aside.

"Well, my songbird? What do they say in the city then?"

"What about, madame?"

Louise shifted in her chair uncomfortably. "Enough of that 'madame' nonsense, you're not in your Opéra here. Name's Louise, and that's what you may call me."

"Louise," Christine corrected herself. "I know very little, I'm afraid. There was some fighting last week, but you must know that already."

"Indeed I do. Trifling nonsense that, a sop to keep us quiet."

"There were wounded," Christine objected, recalling too vividly the screaming men carried into Raoul's tent, and the surgeon with arms red to the elbow.

"Ruddy waste, that. We're sitting here chewing our black bread, bunch of pigs in a pen ready for the butchering, when we could burst right through those gates in a blow like one of them locomotives at full steam. Half a million rifles, girl, that's what we have! But they won't let us out, not us."

Christine frowned. "The Prussians?"

"Prussians! Screw the Prussians, Trochu and his army lot. Have you a brain behind those dreaming eyes? It's not the Prussians keep us back. It's our own generals, the whole damn lot of them. All they do is turn their officers to keeping us in line, and tell our men they want more drilling."

"But what of the relief armies that Monsieur Gambetta is raising? Would it not be best to wait?"

"Wait?" Louise's already ruddy complexion turned almost puce, and Christine feared she might at any moment blow off steam like the trains she had mentioned.

"Empire!" she spat, "You and the likes of you, coddled little puppets swallowing shit like it was chocolate in gold paper, waiting for a saviour from God. Well, you keep praying then, but I tell you, there's people in this city tired of bending the knee. You tell that to your city friends."

Christine lowered her eyes, thinking of Raoul and the other officers in their sparse military tent, waiting, waiting, locked in their own too-comfortable frustration, not so different after all… She was saved from having to reply by Erik's return.

He descended the stairs two at a time, his face neatly bandaged again, and Christine felt a warmth spread through her at his approach, as if an answering flame inside her flared stronger. She rose from her seat.

"Shall we go?"

Erik held out her scarf, undamaged, and Christine let him put it around her neck and fold it under her coat collar. His fingertips lingered warm on her skin, long enough that she felt her cheeks burn, aware of Louise watching them.

"My thanks," Erik said to Louise, touching his hat-brim in her direction as she huffed in response, and in another moment they were outside.

Christine glanced at the sky anxiously, deep blue striped with gold and scarlet. It was later than she had thought. "We must hurry; Meg will have finished by now. Monsieur De Gas is on night duty, he'll be due on the ramparts after sundown."

They walked as fast as could be managed without drawing undue attention, mercifully still heading downhill. Even so, it was full dark by the time they reached the studio. The gas streetlights were dead; instead, only a few sputtering oil lamps brightened the street corners.

"Meg!" Christine cried, turning the last corner at a run. Meg turned and smiled; she was standing by the side door of Monsieur De Gas's house, talking to a middle-aged woman who must have been a servant come outside to keep her company. The woman held a lantern in one hand and the folds of her shawl in the other, huddling without a coat in the growing chill. At the sight of them approaching, she said something to Meg and ducked gratefully back into the house, taking the lantern with her.

"I'm so sorry we're late." Christine tried to catch her breath as Erik came up behind her. She was deeply grateful Meg had not been left to stand here alone in the gloomy street.

"What on earth have you been doing? It's after six." Meg glanced up at Erik and amended hastily, "Never mind. Let's go home, maman will be beside herself."

Just then the door opened again, and a dark-haired man in a National Guard's greatcoat and kepi came out, a rifle slung over his shoulder.

"Monsieur De Gas," Meg said, stepping out of his way.

He turned towards her and only then seemed to identify her; Christine realised one of his eyes was weak. "Good grief! Are you still here?"

Christine felt Erik tense, as if he thought to retreat into the shadows. It took her a moment to grasp it; of course, Monsieur De Gas had been a regular at the Opéra.

"We are just heading home," Meg assured him.

"Hm." He cast an artist's disconcerting look over Christine and Erik, lingering on his bandage, before returning to Meg.

"Don't go catching a chill now, I have three pieces to finish. Here," he reached into his knapsack and took out a wrapped parcel; bread and a few slivers of smoked meat, Christine saw on the open side. "Victorine packed enough to feed a battalion, I don't need to carry all that."

Meg hesitated, but he simply placed the parcel into her hands and released it. Meg caught it before it could fall.

"Monsieur, wait!" The servant, Victorine, opened the door again. "You left your sketchbook and pens behind."

She passed him a thin dog-eared notebook and a leather pen case, and shut the door.

Meg made an odd noise, almost pain, and Christine looked at her in surprise. Her face had gone white.

Monsieur De Gas opened the book, and turned a page, then another, looking bemused. "This is not mine."

"No," Meg said, her lips barely moving. "It's mine."

He did not raise his eyes from the page, or show any sign that he heard. For what seemed like minutes, they stood there, waiting.

At length, he closed the book and put it together with the pen case into Meg's nerveless arms, on top of the food parcel.

Then he simply walked away.

Meg clasped the bundle to her chest, looking after him like a dancer told she was not needed in this ballet after all.

"Meg?" Christine asked after a moment. "What is it?"

"I think… I just lost my job."

Without another word, Erik stepped away from Christine, and followed after him.