A/N: Aaand here we are at last. The chapter I imagined when I first decided to write this story. Quite an emotional moment for me.
Trivia: The lyrics used here are mine, and the tale is very loosely based on Scandinavian folklore. The title of the chapter itself comes from a Leonard Cohen song, "I'm Your Man".
Please remember to tell me what you think (and yes, LittleJohnFan, I get the reference!).
Chapter 60 — Here I Stand
It was true, Christine thought, there was magic in the darkness. With no light to reveal the battered piano, Marie's hesitant introduction flowed into the theatre from everywhere at once, like the start of an underground river finding its way between rock and bone and fragments of seashells, droplet by droplet, until at last the rivulets of sound ran together and the broken chords merged into a single dissonant whole.
Marie released the pedal — slowly, the way they had practiced it. The sound faded, leaving only its echo behind, trembling in the pause, begging for resolution. Begging for song.
Alone downstage, Christine took a first tentative breath. The air was cold enough to sting her throat, smokey from the burning lamps — chapel air, scented with childhood's brightest memory. There it was: a stone wall weeping with an angel's voice, and a child eager to believe.
Angel of Music, why do you cry? I will sing for you, so you don't cry anymore.
Her breath hitched in her throat; the pause stretched. The smallest sounds of anxious movement came from the pitch-dark wings behind her, where Madame Giry and Meg and Pierre Ballard were crowding closer, wondering perhaps if she was all right.
Let me sing for you, she pleaded with the memory of her father, and of her lost Angel of Music, and every ghost she had ever loved. Her whole body was trembling, resonating with music that demanded to be born. Hear me.
The audience, unseen, became a single hungry presence, a many-headed creature lit here and there by a lamp in the dark hall. They were waiting to hear what she might do. In spite of the darkness and the cold, shivering in their blankets and scarves, they had come. And Erik… Erik might fear her music almost as much as his own, and but he was here. He had to be here. Somewhere in this theatre, hiding from her and from himself, he too was waiting to hear what Christine Daaé might do.
She had one chance, only one chance to be heard.
Christine exhaled and gathered herself to try again, and felt a moment's sharp panic: what if no sound came? What if her voice abandoned her again?
Christine, a whisper rose from the house — or was it only the swish of blankets and coats, a brush of air? Christine Daaé...
You are Christine Daaé, spoke the imagined Erik from her old dream, drawing her back from the piano until his breath touched the nape of her neck. You are Christine Daaé, and one day they will breathe your name as reverently as they do Beethoven's.
But here in Montmartre, a stone's throw from the ring of Prussian guns, what did that matter? Even Beethoven's name meant nothing except that it was German. It was only music that could still be ageless and nameless, beyond siege and war.
Christine stepped forward until her hips came up against the edge of the unseen table that had been placed there before her. It was time.
She struck a match, groping blindly for the candlestick — and there was a sudden, hot light. Voices cried out. The wick blackened, glowed red, and burned. Christine's eyes watered; the world swam; she could see nothing of the theatre or the stage — but she could hear more clearly than ever, and she could sing.
Nothing and nobody could take her voice away again. It was hers.
The song began.
Hear me, she sang, and it was her father's violin sounding the start of another of his stories, drawing her away from her childish games, calling her to sit with him by the fire. Voice and violin, and his voice again, soft and bemused, as though he too listened to a story told to him by the music itself. Listen, the violin beckoned, and you may hear my tale…
Bathed in the candle's flame, Christine raised her voice to encompass the theatre, and set to her own music, the story lived again.
In the darkest North, where winter is endless,
And fire dies before it is born,
There, in a cave deep in the mountains
Lived a wild young girl
A wild young girl,
Wilder than the mountain,
Wilder than the grey-bearded sea,
She was a daughter of the seafolk
Born a season too soon
The seafolk bear their calves in summer
In the gentler waves of the South
But the witch-girl was a winter child
And born to live alone
The mountain streams that feed the sea
Begin deep in the earth
And to the witch-girl who was their sister
They gave their most precious secrets
Of gemstones and gold
Of gemstones and gold she had plenty
But her soul belonged to the sea,
And one night when a longboat came on the river
She thought, it has come for me
She walked to them gladly, gladly
Her arms flung open wide:
A sea creature, terrible, ghastly
Coming for them in the night
...Coming for her in the night.
The candle sputtered then burned cleanly again, lighting its own smoke and a sprinkling of dust motes that glittering in the updraught. Christine watched its heart, the place where the flame burnt so hot it became invisible. She took up the candle and raised it higher, holding it closer, until its heat touched her face. The true story ought to have continued with the hero's sword, and the wild girl's dying curse, and the gemstones crushing the fingers and throats of those who plundered them, in retribution for their sister's death. She bypassed it all, letting it go. What she wanted came next:
Listen, the voices of the air are singing!
How ancient they are, how soft
Where once they blazed like trumpets
Heralding the birth of this world.
Listen! Can you still hear them?
The children of monsters are gone,
And long gone are their slayers:
Blood becomes water,
Flesh turns to stone;
But their voices, their voices still linger
There, on the edge of the world:
The song is all that remains
When everything else is done
Our song is all that remains of us,
When everything else is done.
The song ended, and the music faded slowly into memory. The piano sobbed once under Marie's hands, and was still.
Nothing. The candle was warm in Christine's grasp, and it bled a sudden tear of hot wax over her knuckles. She flinched, but did not let go. Nobody spoke; there was no applause; the dark theatre remained perfectly silent. She might have thought the people had all left, save that the lamps scattered around the hall still flickered and jittered. Even in the wings, nobody stirred.
She blew out the candle and replaced it in its holder. Bright circles filled her vision.
Then, with no warning at all, the world went white.
"Lights!" shouted someone, and the theatre burst into life. "Lights. Lights!"
The gas had been switched on, seemingly everywhere at once, though Christine realised a moment later that it was only the effect of being so long deprived of full white light. Pierre Ballard stood beaming by one row of gas-jets, like a magician with his lighting rod, and several others, Marie's mother and brothers among them, were busy lighting the opposite aisle.
"Do it again!" came a woman's cry from the back, "Another song!"
"Again! More!"
And loudly from a cluster of underfed, cheerfully drunk students, still in their kepis and slacking off from guard duty — "Marry me! No, not him, me!" The would-be suitors were elbowed and shushed by their friends before their demands could become too improper, and but it was only banter. "You're beautiful!" the first called, laughing, before being yanked by his scarf back into their midst.
Christine blinked, trying to clear her head. Everywhere were people: so many people! More than she had expected, more even than had been packed into the hall for Erik's hearing. In their outdoor clothing they looked not like a theatre audience but like the crowd that had watched those first great balloons take flight into the piercing blue of the autumn sky. They were laughing, crying, calling something.
Her name. They were calling her name.
"Christine Daaé!" came from the wings also, and Christine caught sight of Meg climbing on a chair to be seen over the others who had been backstage. She had raised her arm in triumph, just as though she intended to lead them in a Marseillaise, "Christine Daaé!" Marie had run to join them, and was at once lifted high into the air on a dozen shoulders. "And our Marie!"
There was in all the cacophony a little space in the audience that seemed devoid of sound, and Christine felt her eyes drawn to that spot.
She turned, slowly, toward it.
Erik sat ramrod-straight in a chair by the side door, among a hundred similar chairs occupied by a hundred strangers. In his plain black coat, hat and scarf, he might have been invisible, save that most of the other men here, even the wounded, had abandoned civilian clothing for the uniform and kepis of the Garde Nationale. Even so, there was nothing out of the ordinary in his appearance.
And yet he could not have looked more different. He did not pretend to applaud or cheer with the others, and what little of his face was exposed between bandage and scarf was impassive as the statues in the Angels' Garden. Only his eyes burned — with that same fierce, desperate longing which Christine recognised at once as the mirror to her own.
Never looking away, Erik laid his ungloved hands before him and opened them to her, one then the other, palm up. His hands were empty, bare. No roses, no marriage documents, no rings. He came to her with nothing. Only himself.
Yes, Christine shaped the word finally, when she could move. She held Erik's unwavering, fearful gaze, and could not let go. I accept.
A movement under the stage startled her, and she glanced down to find Madame Giry and Raoul, and Meg behind them. They were heading for the narrow steps that led up one side of the stage, Raoul pale and gripping his crutches with too transparent an effort to hide the pain, but all of them looking so thrilled that Christine wanted only to embrace them, and laugh, and weep in relief.
"You are your father's daughter," Madame Giry told her, kissing her cheek. "That was Gustave's gift also, to make them listen."
Christine pressed her own cheek to Madame Giry's in gratitude, feeling the skin grow damp, and did not know which of them these tears had sprung from. What would her father have made of this? She tried to picture him here, playing the violin the way he used to do in the inns when they travelled — but his face in her mind's eye kept losing focus, blurring into the photograph she had seen too many times. The song is all that remains...
When next she looked back to the seat by the door, Erik was no longer there.
Christine's heart thudded. She could not help her fingers reaching out to where he had been, but the empty chair was already being taken by a stranger, a woman with a baby at the breast, who slid into it gratefully, fumbling with her clothing as she arranged the infant over her. Another moment and she might have always sat there. Erik was gone, and the world closed over the gap.
A wave of disappointment washed over Christine — and then, unexpectedly, receded.
Erik had heard her music. He needed to hear it. He came here to sit in the midst of a crowd, among the very people who had been at his hearing. She did not want to think what it must have cost him, to follow her here: this was not what he wanted, not at all like the dream he had woven of ordinary middle-class bliss; this was music and theatre and life on the margins of the normal world. Monsieur Andersson, architect, did not want any part of this.
But Erik did. Wanted it and struggled against it, and wanted it still.
He was returning, she realised. He was returning to her — despite himself.
"Christine?" Meg said beside her, touching her arm. "What is it?"
Christine shook herself. She tried for an apologetic smile. "Just thinking. I can hardly believe all those people stayed despite the dark. I half thought Marie and I would be playing to an empty theatre. You and your mother worked a miracle back there with the lights."
"I did nothing; it was all maman."
Christine turned to thank Madame Giry, but she was already heading offstage to talk to Marie and her mother. Christine glanced around. "Where did Raoul go?"
"Here." Raoul balanced against the prop table, where the candle had melted to a shapeless mound of wax over its holder. With Christine's help, he managed to get his good leg under him and adjusted his weight on the crutches until he could stand alone. "You were magnificent, Lotte. Your voice, that music; all of it."
"Thank you…"
"But it is a sad song you chose. I remember that story — the demon-girl, the warriors… Your father told it well." He shuddered, as though dislodging the last fragments of the past. "You did not like it much, as a child."
"No," Christine admitted. "I was too young then. It frightened me."
"It frightens me now," said Meg. "And yet I want to hear it again."
"I suppose that's why Father liked to tell it."
Raoul reached into his pocket and brought out a small brown-paper bag. "Here; something for you," he glanced at Meg, including her courteously, "both of you. It isn't much. I would have brought flowers if I could find any."
"Oh!" Christine exclaimed in delight, opening the bag. "Sugared almonds! Like we used to have in Perros… Wherever did you get these?"
Raoul grinned, "I went for a walk in the city this morning and stumbled on a confiserie that was still open." He raised a crutch, "And I do mean stumbled. But it was worth it. Go on, try them."
Christine offered the bag to Meg and then took one herself. Raoul was right, they were just the same as the treats they once shared as children: sweet and spiced and almond-bitter, and with the taste came again all those memories of listening to her father tell them his tales. She closed her eyes for a moment, to better keep safe all that was still hers.
"Christine Daaé," Raoul said, and shook his head slightly, almost incredulously, studying her as though what he looked at did not quite answer to the image of her in his mind — as though it was greater than what he remembered. "I cannot even pretend to understand you. But I am very glad to know you."
Christine smiled and responded with a small, gracious curtsey, as she would have done at the Opéra. "And I likewise." She took his hand when he released a crutch to help her rise, and squeezed his fingers. "Will you stay to the end?"
Before Raoul could answer, Marie ran in from the wings, fairly cannoning into the three of them, joyous and flushed red as the velvet kerchief in her hair. She cast one look over Raoul and Meg and then dismissed them completely.
"Well?" she cried to Christine. "When are we doing the rest?" She jabbed a thumb in the direction she had come from, "Madame Giry doesn't know how much longer we'll have the lights. Let's get on with it!"
By way of apology, Christine held the bag of sweets for her, and waited while the girl took her share. Marie did not eat them but wrapped them into her pocket carefully, for her brothers. "Well?" she said again, dusting the sugar from her hands on the sides of her skirt.
"You're right," Christine said, "we had better get them back to their seats."
"I'll help," Meg promised. And the show went on.
The evening lengthened far beyond what Christine had anticipated, the mood of the audience becoming ever rowdier and more excited, the people intoxicated as much by this brief respite from grim reality as by the music and the endless bottles of wine.
Christine sang faithfully, until she had sung every song twice over, but it was not long before lighter fare was needed. Pierre Ballard took over the piano from Marie. Under his practiced hands, the music grew at once livelier and simpler, familiar playful tunes everyone could dance along to, and the party began. Chairs were pushed unceremoniously to the edges of the hall, couples swirled and kicked and flirted, children whooped, babies wailed, and for a time it seemed the war had ceased to exist. It was theatre in the best and truest sense of it, a vibrant shared illusion that existed only here, in this moment.
Christine let them be. She perched on the edge of an upturned soapbox to one side of the stage, hidden from view by the fringe of the raised stage curtain, and watched the carousel of dancers below. Madame Giry has been right, there was quite a party from the Variétés, all of them red-cheeked and dancing, even the ever-harassed Camille Michaud. She noticed too the elegant and too-smartly dressed figure of Henri Guyon as he slipped in by the side door and looked around, no doubt searching for Meg. He found her at last among the tipsy students and, beaming, squeezed through the crowd towards her. Halfway there he was stopped by Jean Gandon, of all people, and Christine watched curiously as they exchanged a few a quiet words, until Raoul came over to join them. The theatre, even one such as this, was ever a strange place, she thought, a melting pot where the poorest dressed as kings to entertain nobility, and the wealthiest of the nobility paid homage to singers and dancers and actors born into families of no name. The world and its laws remained outside.
"Christine," spoke a voice behind her, low and quiet, and yet carrying clearly through all the music and laughter. "Christine…"
Her heart leapt at it; knew it at once and intimately, down to every minute variation of pitch. Knew it and craved it. She realised she had been for waiting it, had been expecting this very moment.
Only she had not known it would hurt this much.
"Christine Daaé…"
Christine clenched her hands in her lap and squeezed her eyes shut. He doesn't want this life, she thought in the dark behind her eyelids, in the shadow of the revelry below. He wants to be free.
What she said was, "Come here."
She felt him hesitate, consider perhaps what it meant, this simple invitation. Then the floor sprang lightly to his steps as he walked around the box she sat on, and stopped in front of her. He said nothing more, nor did he touch her, but she felt his nearness in a way that went beyond warmth and breath. It was as though she held a thread to him, invisible and unbreakable.
With an effort, Christine opened her eyes, and found she and Erik were face to face.
He was on his knees upon the stage as if he had grown straight through it, straight-backed, with his black coat puddling around his legs. His face was bandaged white in a stark diagonal from forehead to chin, his shirt collar buttoned high under his chin, his hat hiding his hair — and Christine discovered she wanted to rip it all away. There were too many layers to his armour, and just at this moment she had none.
The music changed to a frantic cancan beat; the dancers below cheered.
"You live." She made it a simple statement, unadorned.
He cast his eyes down as though she had chastised him. It felt like minutes before he finally spoke, looking still at the floor between them, so that his face was entirely concealed from her view. "You asked me to meet you at the stage door, but… I could bear it no longer, Christine. I demanded too much. I had grown proud again; I forgot what I was."
She waited, her heart breaking quietly. Erik sank down onto his knees and fingered the hem of her dress, simple and black as it was, then raised his eyes to her in a question. "No costumes."
"No. Costumes aren't permitted now. And it was only a concert."
Erik brought the fabric to his lips and kissed it, quick and light, before drawing back to kneel again.
"Please," Christine grasped his wrists to tug at the sleeves of his coat, "You mustn't do this! Please get up."
He tilted his face up incredulously, catching the light. "Then you forgive me?"
"No," Christine said. Erik flinched, but she went on, "There is nothing to forgive."
"You don't understand. I was wrong."
"You were right," Christine contradicted him adamantly. "You are a man like any other. It is good you should want a wife, and a home and… peace. It is the right thing."
Erik's puzzlement was almost comic, but Christine's chest felt like all air was being squeezed from her lungs; it hurt to breathe.
"I forgot what I am," Erik repeated doggedly, clinging to the line he must have told himself too many times in his self-imposed exile. "I forgot—"
"You forgot what I am," Christine finished for him. "But I'm a musician, Erik. A singer, maybe a composer, if I can keep working. I was born to this," she spread her arms to encompass the heaving theatre. "I can't let it go. I don't know how to be anything else."
Erik shook his head impatiently. "No—"
"Yes! And you know it just as well as I do." Christine tried to lower her voice, "I am what I've always been, ever since I can remember. My father's daughter. His only child."
"Christine Daaé."
Christine nodded. She could not stand it; her hands went to touch him, his half-masked cheeks, his jaw, his mouth. Erik shivered and moved closer seemingly without volition, putting himself in her hands; painfully, heart-searingly desperate for the feel of skin touching skin. When her thumb grazed his lower lip, he made the strangest noise in the back of his throat, halfway between a gasp and very low rumble, like she imagined a lion's purr must sound.
He caught her hands and kept them and he rose to his feet, bringing Christine up with him. Then he leaned closer, breaking all limits of propriety, and his voice filled her ears with magic that could not be denied.
"If this is where you belong," that voice said, "why are you hiding here, on the edges?"
To that Christine had no answer, but Erik seemed not to expect one. His arms encircled her without touching so much as the fabric of her dress, yet holding her all the same. He looked directly at her, and his eyes in the gaslight were wide and dark and flecked with gold.
"Mademoiselle Daaé," he asked in a formal tone that was at odds with the intimacy of his arms around her waist, "may I have this dance?"
Christine thought she had misheard. Surely he did not mean the jumping, feverish cancan to which the people were moving below. "Dance?"
Erik took her hands, one then the other, and laced his fingers through hers. "Not here."