A/N: I'm back! You didn't think that was the end, did you? A bit of background trivia: the grande sortie is in full swing here, and despite the hardship due to poor planning and freezing weather, some territory to the north had actually been won back; the French were holding a village called Epinay. Bonus trivia: The title refers to a famous minimalist piano piece by Arvo Pärt, and translates as "mirror(s) in the mirror".

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Chapter 68 — Spiegel im Spiegel

We shall have music, Christine had declared, but Erik could not bring himself to refute it. He was a married man! For better or worse, for richer or poorer, whether or not he had any right to such a rescue, Christine was now his wife. He carried in his pocket the proof of it, neither forged nor bought but genuine, signed by Christine herself and by Madame Giry and even by the Vicomte. Signed willingly, openly! It was real. He could hardly breathe for the air overfilling his lungs, and all the surgeons of the world and all the freakshows and wars and threats of conscription could not pierce his incredible lightness.

Through the ceremony and the interminable wait afterward for Chagny's return, Christine had stood beside him. His wife. Christine Andersson. She had signed that name, although her pen had stumbled over it, and now she was his and his alone and he wanted to sing.

No. He did not. He was married and safe, and he wanted nothing more, could want nothing more — he was filled to the brim with the fierce joy of having. Not wanting. Having.

News of their unexpected wedding had travelled through Montmartre at the speed of gossip, and by the time the two of them ventured out onto the steps of the mairie, a crowd of some few hundred had already gathered to gawp. Women and old men most of them, poor and ragged — surely not the audience his Christine deserved at her wedding, but she shone before them as though lit from within. Erik could not help stealing covert glances at her as he took her hand to lead her down the steps, marvelling at the soft curls that peeked out under her shawl, at the tip of her cold-reddened nose, at the plane of her shoulders made angular by her coat. Not a dream. He had never dared to dream such a thing.

Christine smiled at them all and thanked them, and Erik was gratified to see the admiration in their faces and hear the whispers as they entered the crowd. There was no pushing; people moved aside respectfully, slapping their children's hands for pointing, but doing the same when they thought they could no longer be seen. Our angel of music returned, they said, and look, look, the freeshooter too! You see, they nudged one another, what'd I tell you, didn't I say they're sending freeshooters through here and out to Épinay; mind my word the rest'll come through tonight.

One or two of the men held out their arms as Erik passed, and he found himself shaking strangers' hands and being slapped on the shoulder. "Sortie's going well, eh," they said, taking this triumphant procession for a prelude to a battle he knew nothing about. He clasped their callused hands and spoke some words or other, but all he could hear was Christine.

"How's it about a song then?" someone called from the back of the crowd, and other voices took up the cry: "Christine Daaé! A song for victory!"

She did not sing, but Erik's heart did. He could scarcely restrain it. It was a good thing Christine's arm was still linked with his, for he felt as if he might at any moment rise into the air — or break into song, and that would be worse by far. Music was absinthe in his blood trying to lure him back to madness, but he had a name and a wife and a place in the world. Music had no claim on him.

"No going back," he said to Christine, and she glanced behind, seeing the crowd closing on the steps of the mairie, turning the gathering into a rally.

"Let's go on," she agreed.

He hardly knew how long it took to reach the store in rue Fontenelle, blessedly free of Louise's presence, or how he managed to find his key and guide his bride — no, his wife, his wife! — inside and up the dimly lit stairs to what had been his room. She followed him unhesitatingly, never questioning that they had no home, no shelter, nothing but this. It seemed so funny that it made his eyes water: here he was, a homeless architect. Homeless, but married!

"First thing tomorrow I shall find us a place to live," he promised, putting his shoulder to the creaky old door to shove it open and flicking aside a stray sheet of Jean's signwriting out of the way as he locked it again behind Christine. The room was unchanged since he had last seen it: a jumble of compasses and paper on the table, an unmade bed, blotchy yellow wallpaper. The long absence had made its inadequacies all the more glaring.

"You shall have a proper house, I swear it, not this cell. Does it offend you?" He saw suddenly that it must, and an unpleasant panicky sensation began to build somewhere in his gullet. "Christine, you must tell me if it offends you and we will leave at once — right now, if you like."

Christine brushed his fretting aside. "Look," she said in wonder, spotting a small pail by the stove half-filled with — "coal! Coal, Erik. And it's so warm in here. Like summer."

She was right, Erik realised. The room had been heated; the pot-bellied stove by the wall still giving off a steady warmth. Coal, here? Impossible; it could not be found in the city at any price. He approached the stove cautiously. One of Louise's saucepans rested near the stovepipe, venting tendrils of steam from beneath its dented lid. Barley soup. For a moment he wondered if the Gandons could have taken in a new lodger in his absence or if this was some elaborate trap, but on top of the coal scuttle lay a scrawled note in Louise's uneven handwriting:

"For the newlyweds. Good for you. Finally a decent man under our roof. You get warm but don't dilly-dally too long; got to keep them Prussians running now. Louise."

Christine pushed her shawl back from her hair. Her cheeks were glowing pink with more than the warmth of the room. "A wedding present! She did hear our news then. I thought we might find her here; I wonder where she is gone?"

Erik shrugged. "To steal more coal, like as not. What does it matter? She will return to question us, and this place will be the worse for it. Christine, we cannot stay here. We must not. You see that it is unsuitable; it was folly to bring you here at all. We are married now!" He tried to control his breathing. The muscles in his calves were starting to twitch; he needed to pace. "I have certain duties, responsibilities, things that a husband must provide for his wife."

Christine put one cool finger to his lips. "Stop. No more."

"I don't understand."

"It can wait."

"What can wait?"

"Everything."

She cupped his half-face in both her hands and kissed him recklessly, and it was like the first time, like every time. The war whirled around them, the walls were groaning under the strain, but in the very centre of the maelstrom was Christine. The urgency of her kiss made his head spin; he was in the lake again and this was it — an awakening from some terrible masquerade into the reality of her bliss. She pulled him to her and nudged his mouth open and he felt, tasted, the truth of everything she offered. She wanted this; that was the most devastating discovery, she wanted this too, like him, like her, like this, together…

"Marry me," he begged, and she kissed him, and laughed, and laid her hand to his cheek as his mask unravelled forgotten onto the floor.

"But you're already married," she protested, before her voice softened again, "As, I think, am I…" She seemed scarcely to believe it herself.

"Let me see your ring, Christine."

She held it up obediently, and he grasped her ringed finger and drew it deep into his mouth. The gold band was smooth and hard, cooler on his tongue than her skin, it could not be denied. Christine gasped and let him release it, but the moment she was free she began to unbutton his coat with quick, determined fingers.

"Marry me," she said as though answering a challenge, and he had never felt more in love.

He lost all sense of time. Christine was with him in this madness as he stripped her bare of every shred of decency, plunging with her into a place where there were only the two of them, two notes in a single blazing chord. He was not gentle as he kissed her shoulder, her ribs, the curve of her belly, her hip; he knew it, but he wanted all that she was and some wild fury made him kiss right to the burning centre of her. She cried out as a bird calls, so beautiful a sound that he needed it again, over and over, discovering yet new ways to make her give voice to a need that he, only he, could fulfill.

There was daylight afterwards, filtering vaguely through dusty glass, and the cold draught from the window ruffling pages of newspaper on the table as the room around them slowly cooled. The last of the precious coals were burning down to embers, hissing and popping in the stove.

They dozed, midway between sleep and caress. In the daylight ghosts dissolved to nothing, and for a little while he dreamed he was healed, and worthy, and whole.

The afternoon declined lazily towards an early wintery dusk. At some point they got up and found the food that was the remainder of this strange wedding gift, and ate together as travelling lovers at the edge of the world, sharing the single bowl and spoon that he had not taken with him when he had moved his things. Christine had found the empty jewellery pouch on the shelf then, and asked after the ring, the ring that had been hers. He did not lie, he could not lie. He had forgotten how.

"The price of marriage," he admitted, dropping his gaze, and touched the plain circlet on her slender finger. "And this."

She touched it too, and looked for a long time at the empty pouch. Then she smiled and, removing her ring, replaced it and the pouch on the shelf. "That's that then," she said, and just like that, the heavy cloak of shame dropped from his shoulders and he could breathe again.

"Come back to bed," he said, and she did.

o o o

How quiet the afternoon seemed after the furore of the morning. Christine stretched herself into the warmth of the bed, from the tips of her fingers to her toes, and a shiver ran down her skin as her leg brushed against Erik's thigh. He moaned and half-stirred as his chest rose and fell in a sharp sob, but remained asleep, his eyes closed to slits, his head tilted back sharply in the last of the fading light. Careful not to disturb him, she shifted her weight to one side until she could sit up under the tent of his coat that he had drawn up around them.

Erik. Erik Andersson, architect… The Opera Ghost. How peculiar these words sounded in her mind, like something from her father's old tales.

Her husband.

Christine cringed inwardly at the new word and veered away from the matching one — wife — as he breathed beside her. In all their stolen moments together she had so rarely had the luxury of watching him sleep, and she took pleasure in it now: a secret pleasure because he did not know she watched him, and yet it was permitted to her as his… yes, wife. His wife.

Even in sleep, Erik's muscles were not fully relaxed but remained taut under his skin, making of his nakedness a movement, as if he struggled to remain exposed to her gaze. Afternoon light softened the contours of the marred side of his face into shadows where regular features could not quite be placed, deepening into the scarring around his ear and around the side of his head and neck. She yearned to touch him there, to trail her fingers down the tendon in his neck to his collarbone and his chest, between the parted curtain of his ribcage and down to his belly — human, all of him, no different from her — but she would not risk waking him now. There was a war outside the walls, but he was here with her, safe, asleep, not knowing she watched over him. It made her feel at peace.

Gradually she became aware that her mind was filling the silence with echoes of music. It took a moment to identify the slight, willowy stem of the melody she herself had created earlier that morning, growing through a thunderous orchestra. As though the recognition itself gave power to the music, it intensified until it became an ache too powerful to resist. With a sigh of regret, she wriggled out from under the warm coat-blanket, shrugged into her own coat, and quietly padded over to the work-table where Erik's paper and ink mingled with what must have been Jean's remaining signwriting instruments that had not been moved from here.

She tucked her bare legs under her on the chair, folding her coat-tails under her knees, then took a sheet of paper, ruled a stave across it, and set about trying to corral the wayward notes in her imagination into orderly rows that could become a song. Nothing more complex than a song, she decided; only a melody with a soaring vocal line floating above a velvety dark accompaniment of strings.

The room became cool, then cold. The light faded to blue, then violet, then silver grey. After a while her legs cramped up, and her stomach rumbled in the search for something more than the thin soup she and Erik had shared too long ago, and she had to stop.

It was evening, she realised as she set down the pen, nearer night than day now. How many hours ago had she and Erik stood in the mairie together? How long since she had seen him all alone in Doctor Swinburne's antiseptic tent? Behind her, the heavy shape of his coat was a dark hill on the bed.

Without knowing why she wanted it, Christine took down the jewellery pouch from the shelf over the table and shook her ring out of it into her palm. It was heavy for such a small object, and her finger felt strange without it. She slipped it on. It felt right, like home. She thought of Erik nipping her skin around it, the smooth heat of his mouth and the pressure drawing her skin to his, and it made her shudder with a thrill that she almost did not want to admit.

It was not so new, this marriage. This is what she had known and not known, a secret she had kept from herself because it was too precious to risk bringing out into the light. She had made a promise long ago, in the freezing water of the lake when she had kissed him for the first time and the shock of it had pierced her belly. It was a promise to a man who did not yet exist — who might never exist, strangled as he was by the murderous mask that had overgrown his soul like a scar — but whose face she held between her hands in that whirlwind of anger and stone, when she had pledged to become his wife.

No going back now; nor did she want to go back. There was no freedom like a promise fulfilled, and the lightness of her heart spilled out as the best music she had ever written.

She blew on the ink to set it and went to awaken her husband.

o o o

"Erik?"

"Hmm…" He stirred and opened his eyes to the agreeable spectacle of Christine kneeling next to him on the narrow bed, outlined in moonlight and unselfconscious as a nymph. She watched him come to himself, piecing together the day's events.

"It's evening." His voice came out sounding gravelly with disuse.

"Yes, past curfew. You have a bit of sleep in your eye." She raised her hand with the wedding ring to run her thumb along the edge of his eye socket, pausing ever so briefly where the flesh was warped. "Hold still."

His heart thundered and he did not know by what miracle he retained consciousness. His wife. He was in bed with his wife, who was casually removing a mote from his eye just as though nothing remarkable had happened.

"There," she said in satisfaction, and her voice hitched as her hand fluttered over his chest, and lower.

He was reasonably certain that he made sounds no husband should make when his new wife chooses to inspect him, but nothing they had done before had prepared him for this. Christine pushed the coat off him, exposing his legs, his feet. He had never felt so closely studied, or so utterly powerless to move. This was worse than a fairground. At least at the fairground he had been a freak. His teeth started to chatter.

Had she changed her mind? Did she regret too late making so great a sacrifice?

"Are you…" He had meant to say 'displeased', but what emerged was, "unhappy?"

Christine shook her head slowly, and her eyes were dark, darker than all their shared past. "I wrote something new. A song."

A small movement of her head made him look down and there in her hand was a sheet of his draughting paper. Across it, like a necklace of fiery jewels, twined a melody that he heard as clearly as though she had sung it for him.

He looked up at her when it ended and saw the rest of the song there, a question he could not acknowledge.

"For us," Christine muttered, just as he had known it was. She was biting her lip, making it puffy. "Sing with me, Erik."

He was a coward, because he kissed her instead, and sat up. The watch he finally located in the pocket of his discarded waistcoat was miraculously still going. "It's after eight! Christine, I have nothing here, not even a crust of bread."

"I do." Christine reached for her own coat and took off a layer of paper from what turned out to be a large chunk of the bread that he himself had fetched for her that very morning. It was lopsided and squashed and full of bran, but smelled savoury enough to rouse in him a frightful, animal hunger.

"We can't live like this," he said sharply. He hated it with a sudden blast of rage: this room, this poor man's grey bread, this gypsy life on the fringe of a roaring war. He was no longer hungry.

"You have it, Christine. I need to make some drawings."

She watched him pull on his shirt. "What drawings?"

"Plans. For a house."

He fastened his cravat and masked himself as best he could with the day's unclean bandage, shuddering at the touch of it on his skin. He crossed to the work table in two strides and swept the entire top clean with a swipe of his elbow. Sketches and instruments scattered noisily to the floor, leaving behind a bare ink-stained surface. He rescued an inkwell and pen, and grabbed a relatively clean sheet of the good paper he had not touched since Sedan.

"Erik."

Christine stood behind him; he felt her warmth but did not turn around. Pencil first, he decided, setting the pen to one side. "Eat, Christine. I need to work." He rummaged on the shelf for a pen-knife to sharpen the pencil.

"I hope Madame Giry and Meg got back all right. Raoul too."

Two storeys? Three would be better, more balanced. Three then. And a stables, they would need stables for their horses, and a garden room with tall narrow windows facing south — no, south-east, and a grand salon of course, and a library overlooking the garden…

A piece of bread appeared at the side of his drawing, but he took no notice of it. On paper, their proper residence was taking shape.