Disclaimer: I do not own POTO, only the storyline and unaffiliated characters.

Thank you for all of the fantastic reviews and have a happy holiday.

Lee

Adamantine

Christine

Her heart beat steadily, her skin still flushed with the late sunlight as she made her way up the stairs. Warm content, a pleasant, mild weariness after an evening jog.

The blast of the air conditioning was a welcome, as it ruffled her hair and brushed along her skin. Christine unlocked the door, expecting to hear the familiar sounds of the piano, perhaps a voice raised in song, clarion, as it wound through the apartment.

Nothing. Christine shed her shoes and made her way further into the house, uneasy in the sudden stillness of the air. Shadows lay like a winter shroud through the hallway, a strange heaviness. "Erik?" she called.

There was no answer. Her nerves hummed, she forced herself to relax. It's probably nothing, Christine. Maybe he's asleep.

Christine's head whipped around at a faint sound, something like a hiss of pain, the merest thread of a sound. She went deeper into the apartment, inexplicably drawn, an odd sense of surreality upon her. It was as though some watching presence held itself in stillness, motionless, breathless as it waited.

The door to Erik's room stood partway open, a break in the smooth line of the wall as she walked toward it.

Christine hesitated on the threshold. She had never entered here before. She did not know what lay beyond. Her resolution wavered.

A soft, sharp intake of breath decided her. She stepped over the threshold, the door opening soundlessly before her. Christine felt her breath catch and freeze.

She did not notice the room. She did not notice the darkness.

All she saw was the knife in his hand and the blood on his wrist, a red flowering against his skin like a rivulet of some bloodied waters, some slaughter-wreaked sea. Her heart turned over, throat closing. Her thoughts were a disbelieving echo, desiring nothing more than to deny what was before her, but unable to refute the evidence of her eyes. Erik- how could you? How could you?

Why?

"Erik?" Her voice came out an incredulous whisper, a pale and powerless reflection of the chaos within her. It was only the merest outskirts of the dark tempest within.

His head whipped up. She saw the blaze of self-loathing in his over-bright eyes, turned molten blue and pale. She saw that look freeze over into ice, the blue crystalline and somehow bleached, the depth of color diffused into clear brilliance like a winter sky. Into the remote shadows he had retreated to once before, the distant, intangible world he fled to to escape reality. From that place she had drawn him back with her song...

...Only to find this. To find that she had not helped or healed him at all. That she had done nothing and his darkness still remained.

She found herself beside him, grabbing the knife that gleamed with his red blood from his nerveless fingers, casting it aside. He seemed in shock, unable to react to the sudden intrusion and unwilling to acknowledge her transgression. Christine found herself pulling him, more by force of the adrenaline, the hot fear, that pulsed through her, than anything else, down the hall to the medicine cabinet in the kitchen. Numbly, almost childlike, he allowed her to. The fading sunlight filled the apartment with whispering shadows, a strangely darkening world. A red sunset painted a wash of bloodied light over the walls and their skin, a living flame licking at them. It pounded through her mind like an echo of her own fears.

He had not spoken. Had not given any kind of answer. It seemed that he could not quite credit the reality, sought to escape it still, as she took his wrist, the beaded blood smearing over her fingers like a ghastly blush as she spread the antiseptic. Her hands shook as they brushed the rough ridges of old scars. Her stomach churned at the sight, a physical jolt going through her body at the sight, a terrible fear and melancholy. How could someone do this to themself?

Her hands shook as she wrapped his wrist in gauze, her insides tightening at the crisscross of older cuts. "How could you do this to yourself, Erik- why!" Christine's voice rushed out of her, uncontrollable, tumbling like water falling over a cliff, ricocheting over rock, but inevitable and fast-flowing nonetheless. "Why did you do this, Erik; why did you hurt yourself!" Her fingers tightened on his, she saw him flinch, eyes looking blankly into nothingness. Inside of her, all was a roaring chaos, a deadly howling of wind and storm that left ruin in its wake. How could I not have noticed this? Have I been that self-centered? Darkness rushed through her mind, a cold fear. How long has this been going on? Her spirit cried out in the face of his self-inflicted scars. That the man who had so often cared for her had hurt himself thus. The man who had tried to heal her scars had inflicted them upon himself.

Why didn't you let me help you? Why this, Erik, why?

"Why, Erik?" her voice broke. She was dimly aware that she was shaking. God, but this terrified her. How deeply had his darkness taken hold of him? How far did the hurt go? Why couldn't she seem to get through to him? What if she couldn't help him- what if he never answered her? What if he-

Why, in God's name, won't you talk to me, Erik? What pain are you trying to purge? Christine grabbed his shoulders. "Talk to me, Erik! What's wrong?" Don't hide from me! For the love of God, Erik. "Please-!"

He looked down at her suddenly at the word, eyes seeming to focus and sharpen, brilliant. And cold. She heard the shudder of his breath before he spoke, felt him tense under her hands. Christine found that she couldn't- wouldn't let go. And when he did speak, his voice was perfectly controlled. A complete match to the complete chill in his sky colored eyes. "I thought, when you first came here, that I asked you to respect my privacy, Miss Daae."

She noted the use of her surname, an attempt to force a distance between them, and disregarded it. "I don't think privacy has any part in this conversation, Erik." she retorted, not releasing him.

He raised an eyebrow coolly, the beautiful voice melodic, apparently ignorant to the way her hands were taut and shaking. "No? Perhaps you wish to know everything, then? To uncover every secret you can find? Pandora would have had an apt pupil in you." His voice breathed scorn, lashing out at her with cold contempt.

"You forget," Christine hoped that her voice was steadier than her pulse, "that Pandora also released Hope into the world."

She had seen his eyes warm with care, brilliant with music, distant with memories, but never this. Now they flared with hot anger, disdaining pride. Contempt, for what he considered her naive reply." Are you really this childish, Miss Daae?"

The words sparked an anger Christine did not know she had. Her hand moved of its own volition-

-to strike the exposed left side of his face.

Christine froze as her eyes followed the descent of the white half-mask, a bird shot out of the sky and now dead in descent to the cold earth. It clattered to the floor to lay in a streak of crinsomed light. Her mind went still, the panicked ripples subsiding into a cold stillness.

Then she looked up again- into blazing eyes in which she saw an endless betrayal that wrenched her heart. Erik-

She turned cold. Erik, I didn't-

His right hand flew up to his face, cutting off her brief glimpse. She was immobilized as his voice lashed out at her, beautiful and terrible. "Damn you." he hissed.

The softness of his voice cut her more than if he had shouted at her. Words that shook with hopeless anger and helpless pain. Cold dread shivered her, she wavered in the face of that beautiful, broken voice. The full implications of her unintended betrayal struck her.

No- Oh no-

"Erik, I didn't mean to-!" she reached out to him as he backed away from her and faded into the ruddied shadows. His eyes glowed with all his words had not said, and everything that his tone had. Her breath caught. There was more in that in that look- something more than had touched the surface of her comprehension. Erik. She started after him.

But he was gone.

Erik

The look on her face! The shock that transformed her features into a blank statue as his mask hit the floor and cold reality had come upon him as it lay in the red light.

His heart fell with it.

It looked almost sinister, but what its removal had revealed was infinitely worse. What the smooth and perfect surface had covered lay bared in all its horror and tragedy. And she looked, wide-eyed and wordless, upon the true face of the man she had tried to save.

He stared at her for a long moment, wordless. His hand now covered that mockery of a face that was the right side of his features.

But it was too late. She had seen. And now she looked at him in pure astonishment, her already pale skin whitening. An odd shiver passed through him at the sudden, deathlike translucence of her skin, the bright gleam of- fear- in her eyes.

What else but fear, as she saw the reality behind the mask?

Acid ate away at him, a sharp thrust like a knife through him. Sparking a burning flame, an wildfire that threatened to become a holocaust. The fire seared him, the smoke choking him.

"Damn you." he forced out. Damn your curiosity. Damn you for acting like you cared. Damn you for making me care what you think of me.

For making me trust you. He retreated from her, the cold and the dark all around him, a roaring tempest in his ears. How could she do that? Why had she done that?

Why, Christine?

Why?

Why had she deliberately torn the mask from his face?

He heard her voice behind him. "Erik-"

He forced himself to close off the sound, willing himself to ignore whatever else she had said. Had she not broken his faith, abused his trust and torn his last defenses from him?

The door was locked behind him now, as his hands moved over the piano keys with a life of their own. A life of darkness, of burning anger and betrayal. Rejection. The requiem of a life of lonely solitude. A lament for the look in her eyes as she saw his face. For the loss of what could never have been his. His hopes fell around him in flames, laying bare the charred skeletons of broken dreams. Delusions shattered like a splintered mirror, a mirror that reflected still the hopeless love, burning still. A love not even this stark disillusion could destroy.

No. The greatest tragedy in this lay not in what she had seen- but what he still felt. Impossibly, helplessly, he loved her still.

The dream of the sea and the shore descended upon him once more, a mockery of what could never be. It taunted him with her mahogany eyes, lit with warmth and tenderness, the body so trusting against his. A mane of auburn against his throat and skin pale as alabaster, soft as silk. Slender fingers that caressed his skin with loving surety. Eyes that glowed on his like moonlight on the sea. Like Venus emerged from the waves, Astraea descended from the heavens. It scorned him with the genuine concern on her face, the care of a young woman who saw past the flesh. A love completely beyond his reach. A mortal angel that could never be his.

Christine, Christine. Her name was almost on his lips, the pure, precise syllables hovering, before he stopped himself.

Why?

His heart cried out, bitterness and betrayal threatening to drown him. It was an oblivion he would almost welcome, if only he did not have to see those startled eyes. If only he did not have to see the horror on her face.

Why!

Christine

The mask was warm in her hands as she picked it up gingerly, ruddied in the fading light. Blank, expressionless, emotionless. Inhuman. So utterly unlike what it had concealed. The glimpse of his face she had gotten hovered before her eyes. The twisted, ravaged flesh, a tragedy, a mockery of the dark beauty of the left side of his face. The raised scars, the sunken features, thin skin chapped and almost translucent.

And his eyes.

The depthless pain, the suffering of millennia and multitudes coalesced into a single point of light, in them sparked an answering anguish in her. As though she had stabbed him, plunged a knife into him and twisted. The blue eyes so bright with agony, summer skies turned to stormy seas. Christine felt sick at the raw rejection of those eyes, a plea that this could not be real. That she had not betrayed him in such a way; that she had not broken his trust and spurned all that he had done for her.

Those pleading eyes.

Christine's fingers tightened on the white half-mask. Erik, Erik, I'm so sorry. I didn't mean to, it was a mistake. I wish I hadn't done that.

I didn't mean to do it. I didn't mean to hurt you.

A strange half-smile twisted her lips, though nothing she felt should have produced something so joyful as a smile. It doesn't matter to me, Erik, don't you realize that? After all you've done for me, it doesn't matter.

It never mattered. He had always been there to comfort her, unfailingly, and had asked for nothing in return. He had inspired her voice, made her spirit soar through his music. How many times had she lain sleepless in the night to be eased by his melody? How many times had he held her when the pain grew too much?

How could she care about a malformation of the flesh when the soul behind it transcended any description of beauty she might give? How, after he had sheltered and held her, could she fail to see him as anything other than a man? Her mentor, her anodyne.

The piano resounded through her, shaking her even through the closed door. Christine knocked, made a tentative attempt to open the door.

It was locked.

Anger, a bitter self-hatred pounded through the night, unconquerable as wildfire. Christine heard it, felt it moving through her soul, searing with its burning clarity, leaving a raw and bleeding hopelessness in its wake, as though Eden had been devastated, burnt to barren ash. It did not merely touched her, but held her fast within its shadows, pulling her downward into the darkness of his self-loathing, his great secret.

She hesitated. I can't go in there.

And yet I can't leave things like this. I have to explain- I have to tell him that...

That I'm sorry. That she hadn't meant to break his trust. And that... That it doesn't matter. That his face held no horror for her and that she did not want to watch him descend into darkness anymore.

Christine's hand wavered as she laid down the note in front of the door. Will he listen? Will I be able to help him at all?

Or is there nothing I can do?

No. Christine shook her head. She could salvage this.

She had to.

May we talk?

Christine

She shivered as she left it, unsure even now, pausing to look back at it over her shoulder, a small patch of white in the shadows. What am I doing? What strange chain of events was she setting in motion? Would her tenuous grasp over the situation spiral out of control, a descent into storm and flame? Would she catalyze some kind of destruction, spark a fire that threatened to consume them both?

What would this bring?

Erik

He heard her at the door.

He heard her and ignored her. What could she want? What further damage could she deal him if he allowed her near him once more? What new torment would she have if he let her in?

How could she expect him to answer, how could she expect him to trust her still? Didn't she realize the magnitude of what she had done?

What did she hope to accomplish with her fragile, foolish naiveté?

Eventually, the knocking subsided. And, for some reason, the chasm in him gaped wider at that knowledge. He let the dark music overcome him, erasing, for a time, the reality he was trapped in. Reality ceased for him, fading into intangibility as he immersed himself in the anesthesia of the music. Erik did not know how long his mind lay in surreal numbness. Time had ceased to be of any importance.

Eventually, he paused in his playing. The air in his music room was heavy, smoldering. The darkness after the flames ceased to blaze.

Silence. Complete and utter silence.

She was gone.

He opened the door cautiously, seeing no sign of her. The hall was barren, empty of any presence save his own. A tomb, a passageway to the netherworld. As still as the river Styx, and as impossible for him to cross now.

A flash of white caught his eye. Erik looked down.

Picking up the paper, he scanned it. A flare of anger sparked from the simple words. The arrogance! Did she think that he would come back to her after what she had done?

No.

No. The paper crumpled under his fingers.

She would come to him.