Disclaimer: I do not own the song "Remember When It Rained" by Josh Groban or POTO, only the storyline and the unaffiliated characters.

Note I - Symbolism.

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Lee

Awakening

Erik

"Wash away the thoughts inside

that keep my mind away from you."

Her dark eyes dwelt on his, her voice echoing in the musical plash of rain against the window. The hesitant whisper of his name hours previous. A question she had not had the courage to voice in the end. A wide-eyed wondering she had not been bold enough to answer.

"Erik,"

The wind drove a sudden sheet of water against the window, the flare of lightening illuminating every drop, turning them into living beacons before the sky was plunged into darkness once more. He heard his name, her voice, in the sigh of water over glass.

Why are you doing this to yourself, Erik? Have you no control? He felt a rush of hopeless anger thrash against him.

It could not last, but subsided into a cold resignation. Erik listened to the torrent of rain, taking a strange peace in the violence of the storm outside. As though it took his darkness for its own.

"No more love and no more pride.

And thoughts are all I have to do."

You gave up love long ago, Erik. You remember why.

Yes, he remembered Maya, but Christine was not Maya. Maya had raised those walls around him. Christine had transcended them. Maya had reached out and deepened the scars. Christine had reached out to heal them.

What makes you think this would be any different if, by some miracle, she accepted you? his logic retorted, unmoved by sentimentality. How could you be sure that the past wouldn't repeat itself? How could you even contemplate telling her in the first place? What would she think of you? Think of that, if you can't convince yourself of anything else.

You've sacrificed your pride, try to salvage some self-control!

You have nothing else. He had nothing but these thoughts. Nothing but these half-imagined, half-hoping illusions his heart tried to delude him with. He was nothing to her but an angel, a platonic, spiritual comfort. Remote, abstracted. Intangible and untouchable. There was no earthly bond to be forged between them. There was no hope for normalcy in the near-impossible event of something between them, no hope for blessed simplicity.

As a man, there were gaping chasms between them, the barriers of past and flesh. As her Angel, love was an impossibility. One did not have human desire or affection for an Angel.

Angels can't be loved.

Christine

She stood in a grove caught between winter and spring. Weak sunlight shone down on her in uncertain rays. Milky green and ecru grasses thrust themselves through half-melted snows. Trees surrounded her, stretching half-clad arms to the pale sky in the oppressive silence, casting odd, blue-grey shadows on the ground that reached out to touch her and snake their way up her skin. Branches barely budding were hung with drifts of white, the life in them frozen before it had even been warmed. The scant warmth of the sun was further chilled by the snow-laden breeze, sharp with the scent of ice.

A glint of brightness caught her eye; drawn to it, she crossed the snow-field to find her own reflection staring back at her, eyes anxious, questioning, their darkness stark contrast to the paleness of her skin.

She started as another appeared in the mirror behind her.

Raoul watched her over her shoulder, eyes finding hers in the mirror. They seemed imbued by the colors of the grove, pale green and yellow gleaming, as though she looked into some half-melted, moss-cloaked spring.

She did not turn. She felt herself shaking, saw her breath cloud before her, coming in short, unsteady bursts.

Christine closed her eyes. When she opened them again, she found she could not look away. She stared, transfixed as her features wavered in her reflection. Helpless fascination and numb horror held her fast as her face rippled and melded into a new shape that was her own and not her own. She looked at a semblance of herself, a girl with dark, coppery hair and eyes, pale skin. A distorted reflection as though she looked at herself in broken water. A girl who smiled laughingly though Christine could feel no such expression on her face.

She watched as Raoul slid a hand along the ivory curve between neck and shoulder, her heart beating wildly, like a bird throwing itself against the bars of a cage. His head lowered, following the line of his hand with his lips. Christine shuddered at the surety of the motion as his arms went around the girl. The quiet intensity of his downcast eyes made her blood hum in her ears. Who was the girl in the mirror- why did she seem so familiar and yet so strange?

He turned her head to his. The mirror-girl's lips parted.

Christine's mind flashed to the photo on the mantel.

Dawn-!

Christine sat bolt upright as a crackling roar resounded through the room. She shivered, staring into the shadows. What was that? What's the matter with me? What was that dream?

She felt herself shaking, a cold numbness trickling through her. Am I going crazy?

The reality of her dream-world shook her. It had seemed so vivid, so clear. It had seemed almost truth, a strange bending and rippling of reality that reflected a warped image of the tangible world. So strangely lucid, so frighteningly convincing. Christine buried her head in hands that trembled. Dream had become reality for a moment, and in the darkness of the night, with the rain and the lightening surrounding her, the two seemed to meld and mold, inseparable. She felt herself descending into something that threatened to consume her. Filling her eyes, her lungs, seeping into her mind with frightening inevitability. Smothering her spirit like smoke, threatening to overwhelm her, to choke the last rays of light with its darkness.

Oh God...

It was the faint brush of music that drew her back as she began to sink into those shadowy depths, music encircling her and pulling her back towards light and sanity. Back to where the margins of the real and the surreal were clear and comprehensible.

Christine slipped from the bed.

Erik

"Remember when it rained.

I felt the ground and looked up high and called

your name."

"Angel..."

Erik flinched at the sound, a product of his own imagination and no reality as the word was defined. The innocence and reverence with which she had breathed that name, an incredulous awe. Her autumnal eyes, wide and wondering, yet unseeing. Glowing with the intensity of renewed hope, a thankful reverie. Unable to look through the veil of the half-conscious mind and see the reality within the shadows.

"Angel..."

The soft remembrance of her voice reverberated through him, brushing him with wings of fire, brightly blazing before fading to embers. Why did you call for an Angel, Christine? Why did you trap us both with false hopes and dreams that night?

And yet he could not blame her, for he had been the one to answer her. As much as he longed to lash out at something for his lapse, his newfound vulnerability, it could not be her. He could not defile her with his thoughts of angered injustice.

Not her.

"Remember when it rained.

In the darkness I remain."

What would you think, Christine, if you knew the truth of your dark Angel? What would you think of your Angel of Music then?

All of the times he had cloaked himself in shadow to be able to comfort her. The masquerade of a spiritual incarnation that alleviated her pain was both blessing and curse. It had bound him, inescabely, irrevocably, to the shadowed world of her dreaming mind. It had bound him to the unspoken secrets of the night, where truth could be masked with darkness. It had bound him to protect her, to love her from the shadows.

Would it ever be possible to unmask himself? Simply let the moonlight strike his face with cold, unflinching reality? Would it ever be possible to transgress or break the facade, to emerge from the shadows?

To disillusion her? That would be cruel.

Would it not be more cruel to give her false comfort? whispered a remote part of him, the part most removed from the self.

Has she anything else? he answered it. Will I break whatever slender hope she clings to?

Would he deepen the lament in her dark eyes?

"Tears of hope run down my skin.

Tears for you that will not dry."

Is it her hopes you're afraid of breaking, Erik, or your own? In whatever twisted dream, do you still hope? Is it for her sake or for yours that you will not release what allows you to comfort her, to be so close to her?

Erik could not answer. Breathless, his mind held itself still. Around him the rain beat down with a ferocity that was oddly contrasted with the eerie calm he held in his mind. A calm that might shatter as the sky was split by lightning, at the passing of a single moment.

He looked down and caught the reflection of the white mask in the glossy ebony of the piano. Ironically, appropriately, it was the first thing to come into focus, the living side of his face hovering in haze before becoming steadily visible. Bright eyes looked back at him, indefinable things coursing through them with fevered intensity. Things that did not long remain, but flowed like rain over stone to slide away into oblivion.

His eyes lingered on the still mask, cold and lifeless. Why do you cling to hope, Erik?

"They magnify the one within.

And let the outside slowly die."

Bitterness curved his lips, a self-disgust at the frailty of all his walls. So weak as to let a single young woman slip through them and kindle a hope that would never be fulfilled, but burn steadily in torturous remembrance, a candle in the shrine of unfufilled dreams, the incense it gave revealing nothing but illusion.

Angels don't have hopes, Erik; why are you allowing yourself to feel this way? That's all you can ever be to her, why do you dare to imagine something else? Do you think, in the light of day, so unmasked, that she could find anything for you? Do you think you would still be able to comfort her? Do you think that she could embrace as mortal what she clung to as immortal?

His hands tensed on the keys before he forced them to relax. Where is your control, where is your pride? Do you abandon them in pursuit of something less than a dream?

What is hope but an illusion? Pride, self-control, those are real things, Erik. Those are what kept you alive. Those are what kept you strong. Would you tell her; would you cast them aside for a delusion?

For a love never to be requited?

Christine

The rain beat steadily over the skylights, casting flowing patterns down the walls and over her skin, as though she stood inside some fantastical waterfall.

She glanced at the clock on her dresser as she slipped on a robe, feeling her skin prickle in the chill of the air conditioning.

Blinking numbers greeted her.

Power's out.

The thought failed to hold her as she followed the music that trailed through the halls, swept away by the sounds that resonated within her, kindling a glowing fire as it brushed her psyche. Inevitably drawn, she moved soundlessly down the hall, the beat of the rain and low rumbles of thunder a fading background to the clarion song that enwrapped her.

"Remember when it rained.

I felt the ground and looked up high and called

your name."

Christine paused on the threshold. There was such a depth to that voice, the music of it conveying a sense of loss, hopelessness. The desperation of the unrequited.

Was he thinking of the woman in the photograph? Christine paused to study the tableau, the man deaf to the dark beauty of the music that he created, hearing only the loss and regret, illuminated in a sudden flash of lightening. He did not see her, as she stood and watched and listened. He seemed lost in his own reality, not unlike the ice-realm he had retreated to before. After she had asked him who the woman was. But... this was different.

The glow of the candlelight revealed no photograph before him, the flash of lightning illuminated nothing of the strange woman. Christine did not think he was mourning her.

What then? What secrets laid in the shadows of his spirit? What dark things impelled the lament in that seraphic voice?

What else is he masking?

"Remember when it rained.

In the water I remain.

... running down."

Christine felt an ache grow inside of her, a hollowness that spread outward from her core. It trailed veins of cold longing through her, spreading tendrils and currents of sorrow, regret. It sparked an empathy, the faint glow of compassion, embers flickering in her psyche. As before, she felt something intangible, deep within her, a whisper in the anima. Go. It pressed her. Speak. Sing. Will you leave him alone with his darkness?

She looked at the man at the piano. The blue eyes that blazed into an unseen world; bright eyes that were blinded by the darkness of the music woven around him. A tremor ran through her, heart racing. Her breath shuddered.

Will you do nothing?

"Running down.

Running down..."

Christine felt his song pouring into her, the emotions flowing into her like rain. She closed her eyes. A murmur trailed up her spine at the lament of that voice, soft, so soft. A grief that cascaded over her, grey and cold and endlessly dark.

Will you do nothing?

A brightness rose in her, a flare of something like anger. It burned hot and blazing, searing.

Will you do nothing?

A suffusion, a resolution, pounded through her.

No.

As his voice soared, launching like an eagle streaking heavenward, her voice joined his. Christine felt herself shaken to her core by the entwining of their combined voices, a great and blazing beauty in their song. A thrill of light and heat spread throughout her body, she felt tears springing to her eyes as her spirit trembled in response to the resonating glory. It flamed like the emergence of the sun from an eclipse, flaring hot and bright, a deliverance from darkness. It banished the shadows to be forever forgotten. There was only the light and the music and the sweet ascension. A consecration of their song, a promise that she forged, a wordless vow consummated in brilliant rhapsody.

She lost herself in the melody, basking in radiant reverie. Her body felt alight, her soul pressing against her skin, emotions amplified until she was consumed by them, a purity that raced through her, bathing her in seraphic wonder.

Then, all too soon, it faded, the glow diminishing with the descent of their voices, the energy fading to a low vibration. He was looking at her in astonished wonder; the longing in his incandescent eyes swaying her, her spirit quivering under the bright summer gaze as a harp trembled under the harper's hand.

Longing? she thought dazedly, mind still dazzled by the melody. She felt caught in that fathomless gaze, warm and bright, unable and unwilling to look away.

The voice deep within her murmured.

Erik

There was darkness all around him, a cloak of shadow that closed him off from reality. Numbed the truth and the anguish of the world. He felt himself caught up in it, tossed as though he was held in the currents of a rushing river.

If angels dwelt in Heaven, Erik certainly was not there.

No. More like an Angel in Hell.

Even as his voice ascended, Erik was frozen, in thrall to a vain hope.

Until a new voice joined his.

A wave of shock rocked him, flooding his senses with a world that was both real and fantastical. Brilliance surpassed the shadows, an efflorescing light infusing and suffusing him with radiance. A flame leapt through him at the sound, a keen resplendence that arose in perfect surety, an ascension of beauty that was at once both terrifying and exhilarating. A purity in their combined voices as they spiraled heavenward. A connection that bridged the chasm his failing pride and isolation had torn.

Erik shivered as the sound flowed through him. What had brought her, what had caused this... this...?

Thoughts were soon lost in the wonder of the music, swept away before the sound of sanctity, an intangible fusing of the psyche, a wild rhythm that linked soul to soul in sublime glory. His blood quickened, breath falling short. Here was Paradise.

And, as suddenly as it had risen, in perfect synchrony, it descended, fading to a whisper.

She looked back at him with dark, endless eyes, wide and wondering. They shone with unadulterated purity, a mahogany luminescence more brilliant than moonlight. Her hair tumbled around a face still glowing with the remnants of the music like a cascade of dark flame.

"I couldn't sleep." Her voice was soft, almost reverent, the last strains of resonant glory in it. Her whisper stirred the nameless currents in the air. "May I..?"

"Of course." His voice was equally quiet, as though he feared to break the lingering connection. Lightning lit the room with its stark flash then receded with a roll of thunder.

The rain fell softly down as she stepped over the threshold.

Christine

A melody, simple and soothing, wove through her mind. Christine stirred. Half rising, she propped herself up on her elbow.

Pale light, the first hint of dawn, crept over the room. A faint, silvery gleam. Clouded, opalescent, as it brushed the wings of night. The rain had slackened to a light misting, dove-grey, calming. Christine looked over from where she sat on the divan to the man at the piano. The tranquility of sleep was still upon her, she watched him with half-open eyes. He seemed so calm, relaxed, the left side of his face in quiet reflection. Christine smiled.

He glanced over at her. The sky colored eyes were warm, with the harmony and the music of the sea in them. They were at peace, clear and incandescent.

Beautiful.

"You're awake. You've been asleep for the better part of an hour."

"Have I?" she asked, voice a quiet wondering, not really expecting an answer. She sat up, the soft currents in the air stirring dreamlike, winding around her. Her spirit was like a still, sun-warmed pool, a great calm and serenity in its unruffled waters. And yet beneath the unwavering surface, there was a latency, a flowering unseen. It trailed through the air, through the music, through her.

Her eyes half-closed as another wave overtook her, somnolence washing over her in a serene tide, slow rhythm. She gazed over at him, feeling dreams descending on her once more. "Will you be here when... if..." she trailed off, having refrained from asking what she had intended. Will you keep playing?

He seemed to understand the unspoken question, his hands gliding smoothly over the glossy keys, echoing the falling rain. "Yes." he answered softly. His eyes dropped from hers; she felt the urge to go to him, to reach out to him, but sleep was irresistible, impossible to deny.

She saw him glance up once, with eyes as warm as summer, before she fell into dreams.