Chapter title: Stirrings of a Memory
In hindsight, wandering alone around a newly remodeled building that was meant to hold a thousand people probably wasn't the brightest thing Raoul had ever done. But he could almost convince himself that as he silently treaded his way through the Opera House he would suddenly stumble upon Christine sitting in a bright corner somewhere. Up she'd jump and, laughing at her little game of hide and seek, she'd congratulate him on finding her.
But Raoul hadn't stumbled upon her, and he hadn't stumbled upon any of his missing memories. All he found was an excessive amount of dust, lazy carpenters and, finally, the stage. If there was any place that Raoul might have remembered something the stage was the most likely place. He'd stood almost in the center of the stage and sensed… something. He felt like the floor was about to give out from underneath him. And he felt like eyes were on him. The sensation had him beating a hasty retreat, toward a set of stairs he'd seen in the half-light of the workers lamps.
And then there had been the Box, Box Five, and just the thought of those words together sent a flash of red through his mind, quick as lightning but significantly less illuminating. He'd stopped and stared at the door for a moment, concentrating while his eye traced the outline of the small five carved into the door, trying to coax the feeling back. A minute passed, then two, but the feeling refused to return; Raoul sighed and rolled his shoulders back.
"Right then," he muttered to himself, "obviously standing in the hallway is not going to jog my memory and I've never been daft enough to stare at a door for several minutes without walking in." And he did so.
Twenty minutes later the managers found him, still there, standing in Box Five, staring at the back of the chair with a rather peculiar expression on his face. The two men exchanged a look before Firmin quietly cleared his throat. Raoul blinked and came back to himself and with a sigh, turned to look at them.
"Monsieur de Chagny, we don't wish to intrude but…"
"We wanted to know if you'd like to visit her old room."
He did.
When he walked inside her room the managers didn't follow, maybe they'd decided he needed to be alone, or maybe they had duties, it might have been that they just did not want to enter the room of a dead woman. Whatever the reason, Raoul found himself alone in a dark, smoke scented room, with furniture scattered around covered in white cloth.
A bit like his mind actually, he could see the vaguest outlines but nothing clear enough to clearly tell what it was. He walked through the small room, yanking off a sheet here, pulling a drape up there, hoping that the next cloth lifted would lift the fog in his mind with it. It wasn't long before all the furniture was bare and Raoul was sinking down on the bed as he glared around the room. Everything in the room was uncovered and yet none of it had brought back the slightest recollection. He sighed again and let his head sink down into his hands.
And then he sneezed.
And coughed.
And then he realized that he'd just plopped down onto half of the wraps he'd thrown carelessly on the bed, and they were dusty.
Sniffling he got up and walked over to the large window covered by one of those infernal pieces of muslin, not even stopping to consider for a minute how Christine had managed a room with a view of the city with her lowly position in the corps de ballet. So it came as a complete shock when he pulled the cloth off and found, instead of a window, the shiny surface of a mirror.
He stumbled back a step as images assaulted his mind. A raging fire, a woman screaming, and a low voice whispering, "Your hand at the level of your eyes." He felt his foot twisting in a cloth left carelessly on the floor but did nothing to stop his fall in his fear that doing so might draw his concentration away from the images in his mind. The last impression he saw, before his head hit the floor, was of a strange half-mask which somehow managed to glare at him.
Author Note: Ya know why this chapter was so long in coming out? Because it's crap, and the whole story is slow and I'm not gonna write another chapter unless I can think of a way to do something about it! At least get them kissing or talking or anything that will maybe make this a bit faster. Thank you to anyone who is still reading and does take the time to review, and thanks again to my awesome cool beta, the ever helpful (and gorgeous) Alchemy Hael, who made a lot of changes with me so drop a line if you notice a spot where our edits overlapped and got a bit freaky.