A/N: Thank you, lovely readers, for being here! It was a pleasure to read all the speculations after the last chapter and I look forward to hearing what you think of this one.

Trivia for this chapter: Bastion 12 really was where Degas served during the siege. Altogether there were 94 bastions around the perimeter of the city wall, which were manned by the Garde Nationale volunteers. For this purpose the city was divided into sectors, like giant pie slices, and men from each sector were appointed to the corresponding section of the wall.

Chapter 45 — Shapes and Shadows

Meg spent the evening drawing. She did it out in the open, with pens and ink and paper spread out over the cleared dining table, cross-hatching with stubborn single-minded concentration. Her mother stood motionless at her shoulder and watched the rapid, jerky movements of the pen, never making a single comment. Christine felt an intruder between them. She would have liked to escape to the parlour, to scoot her legs up into the corner of the divan and do her mending in solitude, but there was already a lamp lit here and good oil was too precious to waste on a whim. She might need it herself another night, to work on her music. So she remained at the table, sewing buttons onto her winter coat, with only the ceaseless swish-swish of Meg's pen and her own needle marking the time. The coat was good thick wool, dyed a beautiful deep blue, but even with the buttons moved to their limit there was no disguising that it had been made to fit a child's shape: too narrow in the hip and bust, too short at the waist. A new coat had been less than a wish that morning; now, without even Meg's job, this one would simply have to serve.

She had seen Meg draw before, of course she had. But the odd sketch doodled in the margins of a newspaper or on the obverse of a receipt had in no way prepared her for what Meg did now. This was more like her dancing, the seemingly effortless performance that could come only with tremendous hidden work. She must have been been doing this for a long time, Christine thought, longer than even Madame Giry seemed to have suspected. All those evenings when they had run out of ink… Christine stabbed the needle into the edge of a buttonhole, more forcefully than she had intended. Caught up in her music, she had once again lost track of her friend's life.

After a while she got up and went to put the kettle on for tea, then resumed her sewing. Neither Meg nor Madame Giry looked up at her passage; only the curtains moved lightly, revealing the black mirror of early nightfall. Was it as dark upon the ramparts now as in the middle of the city, Christine wondered uneasily — dark enough to hide a man's shadow and leave only his voice? Outside the studio, after the artist's brusque dismissal, she had seen indignation flare in Erik's eyes, and then worse, a kind of joy of the chase... Then he was gone. Christine could not imagine by what means he intended to persuade Monsieur de Gas, if indeed that was his aim. She tried to turn her thoughts from the dreadful guesswork.

Meg's pen stopped, but she had only reached out to refill the inkwell. Madame Giry caught a falling lock of her hair before it could mar the drawing, and Meg looked up at her briefly. Madame Giry gave a tiny nod towards the paper, and Meg returned to it with a new will, as though something in that minute gesture had given her wings.

"She is pleased with you," Christine whispered, too low for them to hear. She went to pour the tea. It was unjust, that she could never see her own father's eyes at the sound of her music, and could not even recall her mother's. The only one who might have remembered was Raoul, but Raoul would applaud her no matter the music, he could not know… And even her childish hope that her song might be heard from heaven lay buried with the bloodstained dream of the Angel of Music. But that was hardly the fault of Meg or Madame Giry. Christine picked up the tray and went back to the table.

"There." Meg dropped the pen she had been holding onto a piece of blotting paper, and held up the sheet.

Christine did not know how she kept hold of the tray.

The crisp inked lines looked nothing like the flowing colours of her father's Opéra posters, and yet the echo was unmistakably there: Giselle, the same Giselle he had once drawn, only watched from behind in a dizzying reversal of perspective. Christine glanced at Madame Giry: she was looking at herself. The central figure was hardly more than a black silhouette backlit by blinding footlights: a lone dancer downstage, no longer young, demonstrating to a gaggle of hastily sketched girls the ghostly, pleading mime of protection: let me save him, her arms say, let me keep him safe. And behind her, unseen, the girls mimicking it each in their own way: some bored, some mocking, a handful chatting, one or two honestly trying… A whole rehearsal and a whole lifetime in that one sketched scene.

"Tea," Christine said, too loud and too clear. The cups and spoons jangled on the tray as she set it down, but nobody seemed to mind.

She took up her sewing kit and her mended coat, and slipped away to her room.

She had foolishly left the window open and the room was bitterly cold. She went to close it, but instead only stood, alone and shivering, trying not to think of what Erik might be doing, might have already done, in the tangle of dark streets or on the ramparts… She should have stopped him, should have called out.

Erik. Monsieur Erik Andersson. Had she forgotten so soon the Opera Ghost's threats and demands and "accidents"? Had she reshaped him once again into what she needed, discarding the parts of the truth that she could not bear to see? It was not so long ago that the Phantom had thought to advance her career with the spiteful, vicious pranks that would now forever cling to her own name and her father's, tainting even Raoul with the blood that had come at the end… Oh, but she did not want to think of it. She had to think of it.

Was she creating Erik the way she had once created the Angel?

Christine prodded her soul with the question, merciless because she suspected the answer. She had taken him into her life now, opening to him the long-guarded corners of her soul, sharing her own music. She liked his touch; her skin tightened at the thought of a kiss, and more than a kiss… Deep in her heart was the memory of him wrapping his shirt over her bare skin, a fantasy of making love.

Once, she'd had the strength to hold up to him the mirror of his hatred and show him the distortion in his soul. Once, when he had wept at the destruction of his own making, she had been strong enough to walk away.

Was she still? If this new dream came apart, would she be able to let go?

Christine slammed the windowpane shut. From her dresser drawer, she pulled out the picture of her father and studied it for a long time, turning the frame to the pale moonlight from the window. The dead paper of the portrait could not change the line of his mouth, the shape of his brows. If he knew of his daughter's fear, it was in a place beyond her reach.

o o o

Square-shouldered silhouettes of men in Garde Nationale greatcoatsappeared more and more regularly the closer Erik came to the periphery of the city: at first only the occasional glint of a rifle stock here and there, then clumps of men of all ages meeting outside bars and at doorways or walking along together, their breath fogging the air. As his eyes began to pick them out more readily, Erik realised they were all following the same routes, heading for the eastern bastions to relieve the previous watch. There was something unsettling in this living river draining the city of men, rivulets joining into a single stream. More unsettling still was the feeling that he was walking with them, becoming one of the multitude.

He had hoped to intercept Meg's ill-mannered artist before the man could go too far, but keeping him in view among the dozens identically attired guards, in the dark, proved an exercise in frustration. Twice he thought he had him, only to discover at the next crossroads that it was the wrong man. Erik grit his teeth. The whole thing was degenerating into a comedy chase that had not even the excuse of humour to temper its lunacy, when he had left Christine unaccompanied to make her own way home with Meg through the grim cold streets. But he would find the man now, even if he had to track him to the damned ramparts.

The streets became wider and there, in the distance, loomed the wall: massive and endless against the deep indigo sky. The houses here looked abandoned, windows boarded up, doors missing. Only a few determined filles in dresses far too daring and flimsy for this weather were standing about, blowing on half-frozen fingers in between calling out to the passing men. A few called back; one or two swerved from their path and vanished into a doorway. Erik caught sight of de Gas again, before he vanished in the midst of another group. He cursed his luck; the further he went, the greater the confluence of men and the more difficult to have a private word.

At last he saw their immediate destination: several tents had been pitched in an empty square, and officers milled about them, attempting to marshal the arriving National Guard volunteers into something resembling an army unit. From the surrounding streets, more guards emerged: tall men and short, fat and red-nosed or thin and bespectacled, boys scarcely old enough to hold a rifle and old white-bearded grandsires, as unmilitary a gathering as any Erik could have imagined. De Gas took a place among them, hefting his rifle.

"Bastion 12!" an officer was calling out, riding up and down the ragged line on an ostentatious white charger. "We are marching for bastion 12 now! Anyone seen Gérard? Where the hell are your officers? You gentlemen, here. Present arms!"

Rifles went up at every angle. One was dropped noisily, much to the mounted officer's disgust, and collected again amid snorts of stifled laughter from the ranked men. The officer rounded of them:

"You think this is a joke? You are here to do your sacred duty before yourselves and your country, and you find it funny that one of your own number doesn't know how to hold his weapon, let alone fire it? Let me tell you, when we launch a sortie, you will need to know that you can rely on the man next to you, whoever he may be. It will be serious then, deadly serious."

Erik kept to the cover of a wagon while a headcount was taken, his eyes on the artist's back. He did not like where this was leading; this battalion was evidently foregathering to march for the ramparts and approaching de Gas in the middle of the march was not a comfortable prospect. The officer rode on in his search for the unit's still-absent commander, and Erik made a decision.

He walked brazenly out of the shadows and went straight for his mark.

"A word with you, monsieur!"

De Gas turned at this declaration, as did half a dozen others from the sorry line-up. Conversations broke off; faces turned towards him. Erik ignored them.

"Erik Andersson," he introduced himself curtly. The artist raised an elegant hand to his kepi and started to reply in kind, but Erik silenced him with an impatient hand. "I know who you are. I would have a word with you, about the Giry girl you so summarily dismissed earlier this evening."

De Gas looked at him with interest, without the least sign of remorse. "And you are?..."

"A friend of her family. And a fellow artist." Erik could feel the other men staring, but he had only enough patience to deal with this one. Any moment now the officer would be back, they would be ordered to move out, and the moment would be gone.

"I say, haven't we met before?" De Gas looked puzzled, just long enough for Erik to wonder in a wave of cold sweat whether this former Opéra patron might have attended its scandalous final performance — but de Gas went on: "I thought I recognised you! Café du Suède with Choury, wasn't it, the night they ran the Ems dispatch in Le Soir."

"That may be so," Erik dismissed this. "But I need an answer about Mademoiselle Giry, if you please."

The artist looked genuinely baffled. "Forgive me, but what is your question?"

"You must know she is a dancer out of work, and reliant on your art for employment. Are you a man of honour? Would you have her starve, for the temerity to have made a few scribbles of her own?"

At this, de Gas' prominent eyes bulged: "Scribbles? Scribbles, you call it, and you claim to be an artist! The child has been scribbling since the cradle, I believe, but if what I saw today is any indication, she may yet put a few of us other scribblers to—"

"Fall in! Let's move it, gentlemen, quick march! Move out!"

Erik started at the command; the other onlookers returned to their positions. De Gas thrust out a hand earnestly and clasped Erik's as if to extract a promise.

"Tell Mademoiselle Giry she is expected after lunch tomorrow, as usual. And she is not to be late!"

The uneven lines of half-trained soldiers straggled out in the direction of the ramparts, a few throwing curious looks over their shoulders. Erik began to retreat towards the safety of the nearest street, but stopped when he felt the gaze of a nearby officer upon him.

"Interesting," Henri Guyon said, in the same infuriatingly amused tone Erik recalled from the chance meeting in Chagny's ambulance tent. He moved the packet of documents he was holding and offered Erik his hand. "It is not often we get a white knight here, fighting for his lady's honour. It was charming to see, monsieur, you fairly brightened my evening. This Mademoiselle Giry must be an extraordinary creature."

"And you must be an extraordinary simpleton," Erik snapped, barely managing to restrain himself from simply pushing past. "Mademoiselle Giry has nothing to do with it. Excuse me."

o o o

Madame Giry sat on the edge of Meg's bed and stroked her hair as she had not done since her daughter was a tiny girl, waiting for her to sleep. Meg's shoulders still shuddered every now and then, racked at last with the bitter tears of loss, and the impossibility of return. The disappointment would pass, Madame Giry thought, and other chances would come for her art to grow — God only knew, there were artists enough in Paris. If only this accursed imprisonment of two million souls would come to an end, and life and art were permitted to resume their course.

She found her eyes returning again to the portrait above Meg's dresser. Its edges were frayed, as though it had been kept too long between the pages of a book, but the drawing was clear and frighteningly simple: a rough likeness of Helena Weiss making ready for the stage, halfway through applying greasepaint to conceal a scratched cheek and swollen eye, and scrawled before her, reversed as on the surface of a mirror, the ugly word "spy". Looking at the drawing was like finding herself behind that dressing-room mirror, privy suddenly to the girl's fear and responsible for the betrayal in her too-heavily painted eyes. There was a searing intimacy to the moment that caught the viewer unprepared, and thrust before them the face of this so-called spy.

Jules had never dared draw anything like this; this was another's school entirely. And if this Monsieur de Gas truly saw nothing more than a mockery of his own work in the fragments that filled the sketchbook Meg had shown her, then, Madame Giry thought, he was as blind as she herself had been.

This was no mere pastime for a girl happy to earn a few sous by donning her gauze skirt and staring soulfully into nothing, selling one art into slavery to another. She should have known her daughter better than that. Meg had been learning, for months now, and however unintended the lesson, the teacher had been Monsieur de Gas.

Madame Giry looked down at her child, a child no longer. She was asleep at last, still puffy-eyed and blotchy, and her mouth still set in the same determination. Well. Perhaps Monsieur Duchamp was right; if the mother was stubborn, the daughter must surely learn. But never in all her life, not even at the last curtain call of her Giselle, had she felt more proud.

The breath of air from the hallway disturbed her; she turned around and saw the door move. Christine, up at this hour?

Madame Giry tucked the blanket closer around Meg's shoulders and went out into the dark corridor towards the dining room, flinging on a shawl as she went.

"Ah," she said, when she saw the black shape of a man by the balcony door.

Her hands found the polished edge of the sideboard, keeping her mercifully upright, and she stood between the slashes of cold moonlight upon the floor, waiting for him to close the latch. Why, Madame Giry asked herself wearily. Why now, of all nights?

He looked at her with his half-bandaged face drawn in grey shadows, at once nervous and smug, as though he had done something that pleased him and had come into her house in the middle of the night to seek approbation. She had seen that look many times in another life, when she was still barely older than Meg and he was only—

"Erik." Madame Giry sighed, and farewelled all hope of sleep that night. "What has happened?"

The sound of his own name made him raise his eyes warily, like a stray dog unexpectedly petted, and Madame Giry felt a piercing guilt. She pitied him, yes, but no good had ever come of her pity. He had to be treated as a man; Christine had taught her the truth of that. Even when he stole inside through a balcony door. Especially then.

"Monsieur," she amended. "I trust there is good reason for this. My daughter and Christine returned some hours ago, unaccompanied. They did not seem to know where you might be found."

Chastised, Christine's strange suitor tugged at the edge of his bandage, in a new and anxious habit Madame Giry did not recognise.

"I thought it my duty to have a word with the artist for whom your daughter has been posing. It was too late to return the usual way, but I thought... " He blew out a breath uncomfortably. "I was anxious to know that Christine was safely returned. My apologies for disturbing you."

"We are sufficiently disturbed these days that a little more can hardly matter," Madame Giry said ruefully. "Christine is well, and asleep, as we should all be. Dare I ask the outcome of this word of yours?"

He glanced at the lamp on the table. "May I?"

"Of course." Madame Giry passed him the matches from the sideboard, and Erik lit the lamp again and replaced the chimney. Golden light flickered over the scattered sketches and paper on table, making them seem older than they truly were, like pages from a scrapbook. Erik looked at them with more interest than Madame Giry had expected. He lifted the Giselle drawing carefully, then looked from it to her, as if to compare.

"Meg's work," she confirmed, noticing with amusement the defiance in her own voice, like that of a new mother proud of her infant's ten perfect toes, though she could scarcely claim them as her own accomplishment.

Erik replaced the drawing on the tabletop. "Meg's work. Did your daughter tell you of the loss of her work posing for Monsieur de Gas?"

"She went to sleep weeping for it. She speaks of money, but it is a painful thing, to find yourself exposed to one you admire and lose his regard. She will need time. The money can be found."

"There will be no need for it, madame. Monsieur de Gas is expecting her for her sitting tomorrow at the usual time."

Madame Giry frowned, "I do not understand your humour. Or his. Meg may be young, but her emotions are nothing to trifle with."

"I do not believe that to be his aim. He had no intention of dismissing her; the book he saw appeared to impress him deeply, that is all."

"...That is all. I see."

Madame Giry felt a weight lifted from her heart, a weight she had not realised was there. There were painful lessons one must learn in life and she could not hope to shield Meg from all of them — any of them — but just this once, the knife had been flung away without biting, and she was glad, deeply glad, that her child had been spared. The bitterness of rejection could poison talent; she had seen it happen before.

The drawings, the lamp, the shadows on the walls swam and blurred before her.

"Thank you," she said, smiling through it, and Erik stood before her like the little boy he might have been long before she had met him, absurdly gratified.

Madame Giry went to the dining room doors, removed the brass key from the lock and held it out to him. "There is bedding in the linen cupboard... Get some rest, Erik."

He made no reply and she expected none, but she put the key on the table, a little piece of trust, and left him with the sound of his name like memories in the night, and his shadow upon the squares of lamplight, the shape of a man.