It had all been one gigantic mistake—
Her screams followed Erik out from the posh bathroom and straight to the sideboard in the drawing room, from whence he plucked an unopened bottle of rhum vieux, the contents within promising the sweet sunshine of Martinique. It had been a gift from Charles Garnier himself—a congratulatory token from when the old opera house on Rue Le Peletier caught fire and burn to the ground. From the moment the foundation was laid, construction on the new building had met multiple stop-gaps, only to be suspended in complete limbo during the Prussian invasion and by the Commune shortly after. Even after the army had snuffed out the communards and their sympathizers, there still remained a certain hostility towards the nearly-done theater. The Second Empire had been an embarrassment on multiple fronts, and was Palais Garnier not originally intended to be a shrine to it?
Or so the line of thinking went, for the mooncalves and cynics who could scarcely appreciate something much bigger than themselves.
Both Erik and Garnier felt so helpless, so maddened, so blue-balled by President MacMahon and his clique of tight-fisted ministers in the months that followed, they perhaps might as well have resorted to arson themselves, had the new lighting installed in the Salle Le Peletier not taken care of the old theater several months later. On a pleasant a Wednesday evening, the supposedly innovative gaslight system had decided on the President's behalf and let the building burn for more than a day, until it was nothing but a burnt-out skeleton. And then—only then—did the government see the impetus of completing Garnier's Erik walked into his unassuming, cramped office in Montparnasse the next Friday, he found the bottle of spirits sitting on his desk with a note folded underneath it.
To the Third Empire and all her subjects. May the sun never set on her. C.G.
For all of his limitations, Charles had an absolutely wicked sense of humor.
There were moments Erik wanted to tell him how he spent their violent hiatus devising a comfortable home for himself in the very foundations of the Opera. He liked to imagine the poor architect would have laughed and raised a glass.
He lifted his drink in the air and cried out—
To the gem of the Third Empire! Le palais Erik!
But there was no laughter, nor any sunlit windows.
It was only Erik, lying on his back in a boat, staring at the filaments of light that managed to punch the darkness of the underground lake. He had been charmed by the effect, several years ago, when he first made this hellhole his final nest. The weak moonlight made everything glow ever so slightly, if you were there at the right time of night, the literal tonnes of concrete above it filtering out any street noise. A fairy palace, and he its Oberon. Christine, his Titania, and likewise panting in lust over an ass of a man.
He roared madly at his own joke and, as was his practice earlier that evening, nipped at the rhum directly from the bottle. The sound of his mirth bounced across the massive cistern, refracted by the vaulted ceiling, and settled sweetly around his ears.
His was truly a beautiful voice, he had to admit.
He wondered if Christine was still screaming.
He supposed it at least meant she was alive, and not a dream.
#
After managing to row himself back to the entrance of his joke of a home, a surprisingly difficult affair on account of his imbibing, it took Erik longer than usual to find the hidden entrance. The somewhat lighter bottle he cradled in one arm like a babe, the other groping blindly in the near darkness for the counterweight that would allow him purchase. The sofa by the fire never felt so enticing as it did then, and by the time he had succeeded in entering his home, he was more than eager to peel off his gloves and the spare mask he had found after fleeing Christine's bathroom earlier.
Christine.
Had he been so besotted from drink that he could forget her? Forget the water trailing down her breasts, the inhuman mixture of terror and half-abated lust on her face when she realized the monster staring down at her? Forget how she curled around herself, wailing, splashing, telling him to leave immediately lest she dash her head on bathtub faucet.
Familiar shame settled upon Erik's shoulders, and he slouched against the wall of the small vestibule that led into the parlor. He had done the poor girl so many dishonors over the last several months, but never one that felt so disgusting, nor so pleasurable. As innocent as Erik was in certain respects, one did not cart around a resume like his without witnessing debauchery of all sorts firsthand—she was certainly not the first woman he'd seen in the throes of her own pleasure, nor was it even the first time he had seen Christine so denuded.
His warm palms on glass. The only time they ever felt warm, really. Her hair cascading down her shoulders, eyes staring intently into her looking glass. He remembered watching her, his heart a turbine, wondering if she knew how lovely she was even in the mere act of waiting for her costumer, with her diaphanous skin and nipples like roses.
He had told himself such indulgences could not become a pastime.
Hélas! It was one of the few things he had ever failed at. His side of the mirror was a network fingerprints, a testament to where his hands wished to pet his pretty girl. And fail the monster did—for all the fantasy of having Christine to himself, the only good it brought was his darling hiding from him in his own house and an almost painfully stiff prick.
Erik ran a hand across his left thigh, and then brought it up to his face, remembering the mask there. He knew well enough that when they had to inevitably look at each other again, the its presence would be the last thing holding their collective sanity together.
For little over a week, he could slink about his house, a bare-faced lord of his kingdom, and Christine would smile in response. Certainly, Erik was not stupid enough to mistake the tightness in her expression, nor the way she always conveniently had a book or piece of embroidery to turn her attention towards when his presence became unbearable. But that brief turn of normalcy had rattled his sense of self-preservation. Self-preservation was the mask. Self-preservation would have been leaving Christine alone entirely, the Angel of Music a sad children's story that belonged to her and no one else.
In her, he had lost the will to live—the will to live as a corpse does.
Which is not at all.
Not in the slightest.
Self-preservation be damned.
Feebly, Erik pushed himself upright off the damask wall and opened the door into the parlor, only to immediately notice Christine was waiting for him on the sofa, trussed up in a thick bathrobe, her hair still damp. The banked fire in the hearth cast the room in a warm glow, but there was little of that coziness in his dearest's expression—her eyes were wide and red from tears, seeming to meet his immediately, as if she had been staring at the front door waiting for him for hours. He thought of Dona Lim again, her wrinkled nose and coarse language, and saw a ghost of it in Christine. If he thought himself too drunk to get hard, it was a fool's game.
"Christine," Erik finally choked out, raising his gloved hands to the mask in a gesture of supplication.
She did not answer him and only continued glaring at him from across the room, her mouth a hard line. The cutglass brandy decanter that usually sat on the sideboard was now upon his coffee table, opened and considerably emptier than when he last left it. As he struggled to articulate his shame, his disgust, his immense love, the current of lust ripping through him, the corner of an opened book next to the brandy caught his eye.
Not just a book.
The room before him smeared into deep reds and browns, the blood in his veins congealed. He had longed for death a hundred times over, but nothing compared to this abject humiliation.
"Erik," said his dove, her voice clipped and ragged from crying. "Erik, is this what you truly think of me?"
There was plausible deniability—after all, there were countless shapely blonde women in the world, and the mademoiselle on the leaves between them was considerably obscured by the penciled curls that ran over her face, revealing only the scantiest sliver of pleasure on her lips. The smooth arm thrown over her eyes, the right hand at her breast, the left one clutching at the suggestion of a duvet—all perfectly natural, perfectly universal, or so he imagined.
The faceless man with his head between the model's legs?
He could have damn well been anyone else. A better, handsome man. One who didn't live underground like a worm, who knew the warmth of someone's company.
Couldn't he have been?
"This is me," Christine said when he made no response, lifting the folio off the table and reversing it so the monster's face was shoved in his own literal filth. With a shaking hand, she flipped to another page, revealing the same woman bent over a piano bench, drawers pooling at her feet, hair falling over her eyes in the fashion of a weeping willow. Her bottom tilted up into the ether of the half-finished drawing, and though she was only rendered in pencil, the artist had managed to create the impression of marks along her flesh. On the woman's left hip was a small discoloration, an endearing Nevis that—
"This is my birthmark, Erik," Christine said, gritting her teeth, her finger jabbing at the stain like a dagger.
His knees nearly buckled out from underneath his corpse of a body. In the face of contempt, words were usually the easiest to wield—you idiot, you wretch, you snooping little hussy—as were weapons. But the latter was out of the question, and the former... well. It took a special kind of stupidity, he supposed, to leave one's vulgarities that easily available.
When the monster first hatched the notion of bringing her down here, he had dreamt of endless music and sweet revelations of love, and not more of the same—the fear, the su spicion, the fighting, the second-guessing. Not his darling marching up to him with a private daydream of her quim shoved in his rotten face.
"What sort of honor is this?" she asked, now inches away. "Tell me, Erik. Where is the honor in—" and she paused momentarily, going as red as an apple. "—in treating me like this? Where is your so-called love for me?"
It had always been something of a hairline trigger for him, people getting that close to his face, masked or otherwise. It rarely bode well for either party, and after a lifetime of such encounters, the action had the power to wind him tight as a spring, just as it did in this moment. But it was her sneering at him, making a mockery of the only saving grace of his life, that truly rankled the beast inside him. Her curled lip, so close to the image of her naked and supine—
"If the incident Erik stumbled upon tonight is of any indication, there is is little need for honor where whores are concerned, my darling" he spat.
The monster didn't even have a second to regret his words, so quickly did Christine's palm strike him across the face, the force hard enough to send his mask askew and shock him into a being of base shame.
The two of them made a strange music in that moment, a cacophony of her choked breathing and his pathetic bleeting as he stumbled away from her, blindly groping at his mask.
"I'm—he—Erik is sorry," he moaned, curling into himself as if he had been punched in the stomach and not slapped by a woman who barely reached his collarbone. "His darling does not deserve such slander, no, no, no, she does not—"
His mewling seemed to have fixed Christine in a ramrod straight stance, her back nearly against the door to her room. If it had taken months to mold her voice into pure perfection, his denigration of her, both spoken and drawn, seemed to have changed her into a new creature in only minutes.
"I wish," she started, chest heaving, her face a wreath of flame, "I wish I had known this was what you wanted from me the whole time."
Erik raised his head, scare believing what she had just said, terrified of the words that were to come.
"I wish I had known this what you wanted," she repeated after taking a deep, labored breath, "because I would have gladly given it you if meant being left in peace afterwards." What? "I would rather that than suffer anymore of your supposed love for me."
It was instinctual, or so he said to himself, the way he nearly leapt across the room to throw his gloved hands out against the wall, trapping her between them with the artlessness of a hungry animal. To meddle in his affairs was one thing—he had been careless and sloppy and only had himself to blame—but to doubt his love her. I have warned her, I have warned her, I have warned her.
She never wavered, her hands still in fists at her sides, her nostrils flared angrily. But he caught the widening of her eyes and the way she subtly moved back as far as the door blocking her way would allow. The way her stare flickered to the grotesque sinew of his exposed forearms. She was terrified.
Good. Let her be.
He pressed his face up against her's, the false nose of his mask just a whisper from Christine's cutely snubbed one.
"If Christine thinks," he hissed, his voice low, "for one little second in her little life that Erik—that I only want her for that cunt of hers, then she is a bigger fool than any of us could have imagined." Her mouth gaped slightly, and the shape it made spurred on the feral marrow of his core. "He wants her cunt, oh yes, he does, Christine. He dreams about it day and night, would gladly cut off his monstrous hands to run his tongue over it until she forgot his hideousness. He wants to put his lips, bloated, fetid things though they are, on her breasts and suckle from her until she is limp in his arms. He wants to fill her so deeply with his filthy, worthless seed that his Christine constantly feels him running out of her, haunting her, staining her. And that includes that little prissy asshole of hers, oh yes. To fill his Christine so much with himself until he has given away all that is left of him. To let her hold every piece of him in her hands, day and night, until he forgets himself entirely. Until she owns him entirely."
The color across Christine's face deepened with each word, and her pupils contracted until they were nothing but pin pricks. The scandal was written plainly across her face, and yet Erik still felt as if he had only revealed the smallest crumb of his want for her.
"It is love that does that," he said, closing the small space between them until his bottom lip rested just near her left ear. "Love of the most exquisite kind." His forearms now bore most of his weight against her door, and surely he was close enough that the dove could feel the evidence of his words. But they remained in silence like that for seconds—hours. It was only when he pushed himself upright, too drunk and exhausted from his confession, that he noticed her expression.
Christine's golden brows furrowed, and her eyes were clear, despite the spirits he could smell on her breath at that proximity. Would her cunt taste that sweet, he wondered. He had truly thought her a poor actress, however lovely her voice was, but this look confused him utterly—there was that hot contempt, the ghost of a sneer, but also a sort of wonder that he hadn't seen since their first lessons together several months ago.
"I wonder what that love would feel like," she said after a moment, her voice rife with condescension.
The monster's heart nearly stopped there.
"You mock me," he responded, eyes boring into hers, desperately trying to discern her meaning. Instead of confirming his fears, however, she only raised her chin and continued to stare at him evenly.
Before Erik even realized what he was doing, his left hand shot out and found shelter between the opening of her dressing gown. It was not braveness that made him act so boldly, no, not at all—if he were brave, he would have approached and wooed her as any normal man would have. It was cowardice, an admittance that he was nothing more a puppet on a string, a hungry, useless worm desperate for sustenance.
If he was shocked when he discovered her lack of underthings, let alone a nightshirt, it was nothing compared to the heat and utter dampness he could feel even through the thin leather of his gloves. Christine's right hand rose to his chest, and he braced himself for another assault—but all she did was push against him and lower her head chin to her chest, torn up in conflict he couldn't pretend to understand. When he clumsily slid his index finger along the fat lip of her sex, she practically yelped.
The memory of all the suppressed lust, of all his dead dreams, burned hotly inside of him, all of the misery in his insultingly long life was clotting quickly.
It's her mistake, not mine.
Surely.