But when Christine awoke that morning, she suddenly had her doubts. She passed by Sorelli's door and kept walking, feeling too shy to bring it up.

She could handle this on her own, she reasoned. There was no need to drag others into her silly nonsense.

The company was about to launch into a rigorous rehearsal schedule, anyway - she wouldn't even be seeing him past their lesson that day for nearly an entire week. The new production had received several bad reviews on opening night, and despite the Vicomte de Chagny telling everyone how wonderful the show was, ticket sales had waned, so the directors wanted to rework a number of scenes. It would be difficult but not impossible, though it would leave Christine with precious little free time, so she and Erik had decided to forgo lessons until she was comfortable with the new staging.

He had chosen a new room for them to have their lesson in, one he said the acoustics would be better in. She found the room, recognizing it by the thin red ribbon he had tied around the doorknob. She turned it and carefully opened the door, peeking inside.

The room was one towards the outside of the building, and as such it had windows on one wall - tall windows covered in lacy curtains that still let the sunlight through. It was slightly dusty inside, one of the many rooms in the opera house that got little, if any, traffic - one of numerous rooms used to store things that weren't being used and hadn't been used in years, but would surely be used again eventually and thus had to be kept somewhere. This particular room seemed to house a large number of filing cabinets and drawers, and she assumed they must all be filled with scripts and sheet music from productions past.

"Alas, I could not manage to drag a piano here for you," he sighed and waved a hand. "A room with lovely acoustics, wasted by the managers who insist on filling it with paperwork. A tragedy, truly."

She smiled a little.

"If they had never wasted it, we might not be enjoying it right now."

He considered this.

"Perhaps you are correct. Perhaps it also time to begin."

Christine began, and was surprised at how much different her voice sounded in the room.

After she warmed up and finished the first two songs from the show and listened to his corrections, Christine stifled a yawn.

"Oh, I'm sorry - I'm not used to standing in the sun for so long, it's making me sleepy," she explained.

"Ah. I thought perhaps I was boring you?" his tone was serious, but she could a hint of a smile underneath.

"No, you could never bore me."

"Hmm, is that so? I believe you thought otherwise that entire month that I wouldn't let you work on anything other than scales."

"Erik!"

She laughed at his joke, and he found himself involuntarily returning the smile. The sunlight poured in from the windows, gently filtered by the lace curtains, illuminating the motes of dust that floated past and highlighting the soft curls of her hair. His heart ached at how perfect, how angelic she looked in the moment, and like a ghost haunting the corners of his mind, the words of the Daroga suddenly came back to him from over a year ago.

Do you love her?

Did he? He had to turn away from her and force his lungs to draw breath.

She was so precious to him. He cherished every moment spent around her. He worried over her wellbeing, indeed he cared far more about her than he cared about himself. He thought he would never tire of hearing her thoughts or opinions or little stories about her day. Was that love?

Erik couldn't say. Love was not a feeling he was used to having for anyone, and certainly no one had ever felt it about him. How was he to know?

He turned to glance back at her. She was still smiling, still looking at him with such kindness and warmth. He managed a meager smile of his own and he cleared his throat.

"Let's work on your third song in the show, shall we?"

She nodded and they resumed the lesson, and though he was mostly able to block the thoughts on the matter from his mind for her lesson, they came crowding back into his brain on his trek back home and lasted far into the evening.

Did he love her? Did he? He briefly considered asking the Daroga his opinion on it, but swiftly shoved that thought down as unacceptable. Erik was not entirely certain how these things worked in actual fact, though he had some idea garnered from books and stories - and he thought, much to his giddiness and mounting horror, that perhaps he did love her.

Did she love him? She couldn't possibly. She overlooked his numerous flaws and graciously chose to forget his many wrongdoings, but that wasn't love... was it? No, surely not. She loved singing, not him. That's why she was here, after all - to learn to sing.

Erik could not love Christine Daaé - or rather, he did love her, but he knew that he should not be allowed to love her. It was a relationship doomed before it even started, there was no way it could ever work out even if she did love him in return.

She was so young, for one thing, and he was... not. He wasn't certain how old he was exactly, but he had a feeling that she'd more than likely be a widow before she was even out of her forties. She should be with someone her own age, someone she could go through her entire life with, someone who could build a future with her.

Practical thoughts aside, he was her mentor. She trusted him with so much of herself, trusted that he would look out for what was best for her and her career. In a position of such power, of authority, there were any number of vile ways he could take advantage of the situation - take advantage of her - and the thought of doing that made him feel sick to his stomach.

He might look the part of the monster, but that was a role he would never play. Christine would never learn of his feelings towards her, not if he could help it - it simply wouldn't be fair to her otherwise. He would protect her from his own beastly self, his own hideous longings. She may have mistakenly continued to regard him as an Angel, but the truth was that she was the angel, and as such she deserved only the very best things in life - and there was no possible stretch of the imagination that could ever include the affections of a disfigured old man in that list.

He determined to carry on as though nothing had changed - a determination that was unfortunately challenged at their very next lesson a mere week later, and he was horribly dismayed and disgusted to find out just how deep his wickedness ran.

From a scientific viewpoint, perhaps one could point to any number of factors that might have contributed - maybe it was the new costume that she hadn't had time to change out of, and the way one could see her nearly bare legs almost up to her knees or the way the neckline plunged far lower than any of her previous costumes had. Perhaps it was the way her cheeks were rosy and her breathing hard from the way she had run off the stage in order to be on time for the lesson, a condition that unfortunately only accentuated just how tightly her corset was drawn and just how low the neckline really was.

But Erik was loath to let any of the blame rest on poor Christine - he knew that the fault lay not with her or her costume but entirely with himself and his own awful thoughts, with how he had been obsessing over her and the idea of being in love the whole past week, and that that was why he was suddenly faced with a mortifying problem he had thought he'd left behind with his youth.

"I'm sorry I'm late, Erik, rehearsals ran long," she told him as she caught her breath, leaning up against the door she had just closed and locked. "I came as soon as I could, I thought they would never let us leave! But I'm ready now."

She looked at him expectantly, and he tried his very best to keep his gaze on her face and not parts lower.

Her smile faded as she took in the ashy color and strange expression of his face.

"Erik, are you alright? You look like you're going to be sick," she fretted, and took a step closer.

He desperately wished he was wearing his cape so that he could cover himself with it. Instead he quickly turned and awkwardly sat at the piano, crossing his legs. He hoped she hadn't noticed, and prayed she didn't come any closer.

"I am quite fine, Christine," he said tightly.

He grabbed the sheet music off the top of the piano and placed it over his lap for good measure, pretending to study it while he cursed his wicked body's betrayal.

Erik missed many things about being younger. He missed how he hadn't seemed to need so much sleep, he missed the way his knees didn't crack when bent too deeply, he missed how his back had never ached after walking for a long distance, but he had never missed this. He bitterly regretted that out of all the bygone things that had escaped him over the years, this was what insisted on coming back.

"We'll go over your songs from rehearsal, but I wanted to try a new one today as well," he aimed for an airy tone and missed by a long shot.

Christine furrowed her brow as she watched him awkwardly perched on the bench, not entirely convinced that he wasn't ill in some way.

She suddenly remembered something.

"Ah, Erik - I'm- I'm actually not quite ready for my lesson, I'm sorry," she bit her lip, unsure of how to word it. "Would you give me just a moment to- to step aside and fix my costume?"

He looked up from the staves, momentarily confused.

She ran a hand down the front of her bodice.

"I'm afraid I shan't be able to breath properly," she explained in a squeak of a voice - she had felt the laces digging into her the entire time she had been singing on stage, yet she hadn't been able to find a spare moment to fix it. She didn't mind not singing her best during a dress rehearsal, but she wanted to be at her absolute best for her lesson.

He grit his teeth and waved her away. This girl would be the death of him, he knew it.

She quickly walked to the back of the room, behind a large piece of stage scenery, and once she was certain she was out of view she began to tug at her corset laces, letting them loosen as much as was possible in that particular dress. She reminded herself to tell whoever helped her dress next time to not pull them so tightly. She felt a little embarrassed to have to do this so close to Erik, but quick changes backstage were nothing new to her - modesty was in short supply when one was a performer. Still, she regretted that she hadn't had time to loosen them before her lesson.

Erik shifted uncomfortably on the bench, tapping his restless fingers on the piano and trying to hum to himself - anything to try to cover up the sound of what he knew for a fact was Christine undressing in the same room as him, the sound of fabric rustling and laces sliding, and he tried to swallow against the lump in his throat.

Finally she appeared again after only a few long, torturous moments.

"I apologize for the interruption," she said. "I am quite certain I am ready now."

He gave a brief nod.

"Begin," the words came out a little harsher than he intended, and he launched into playing the piano with a heavy hand.

Christine blinked, and began to sing through her warm ups.

To his immense relief, by the time she had finished with her warm up exercises the need to keep his legs crossed had faded. He paused a moment, trying to decide if he wanted her to work on the new piece first or if they should go ahead with what she had been singing in the show - and in that moment of silence Christine piped up with a question that had been in her mind the entire time she was warming up.

"Speaking of breathing properly," she began. "I was rather hoping we could over what you were talking about the other day. It was quite interesting, but I'm afraid I've forgotten parts of it... Could you show me again about where I'm supposed to be breathing from?"

Erik turned and looked at her incredulously. Poor Christine, a portrait of innocence, staring at her tutor with absolutely no idea what kind of a letch he was. But he couldn't leave her question unanswered, either.

"You must be careful to not keep your breathing too high," he said shortly. "You should feel it from your back."

Her brow furrowed.

"Where on my back?"

He stood and grabbed the sheet music to carry with him, just in case it would need to be strategically placed once more.

Christine closed her eyes as he made his way behind her. Her plan had worked. This was it. This was the moment of truth. There was nothing untoward about it, it was practically scientific when it came right down to it - she would finally know for sure if it had been a one-time thing only or something more. Her shoulders tensed in anticipation, her mouth felt dry-

"From down here," came Erik's clipped voice behind her.

She squeezed her hands together, ready to feel him touch her, and then- and then-

And then Christine opened her eyes at the contact, confused, her lips parting in surprise.

She turned to look at Erik, who was swiftly moving back to the piano bench. He had touched her, but not in the way she had been expecting.

She looked with dismay at what he held in one hand - a few pages of the sheet music rolled up tightly. He had gently swatted at the area on her back in question - where she had expected to feel his lithe fingers, she had only received a tap with the tube of papers, and she was highly disappointed.

"I do hope you'll remember this time, I won't be going over this again."

Her question had been asked with all the innocence in the world, and it was only light of his newly discovered despicable feelings towards her that he realized that in one of their previous lessons he had touched her. He truly hadn't thought anything of it at the time, but now...

Now even the most well-intentioned of reasons to touch her seemed to take on a sinister new meaning.

He had only just come to terms with loving her, he did not know how to cope with the thought that he desired her as well. For any other man, it might be seen as a normal occurrence, it would be expected if desire and love went hand-in-hand together, it could be an understandable reaction as an expression of the love he felt for her - but Erik was not a normal man, and never would be anything close. For Erik, it could only be seen as something shameful, something that branded him as the terrible beast he knew he was, and he hated it. Hated that he felt those things for her, hated that his face kept him from being able to live a normal life and be a normal man, hated that he knew deep in his soul that Christine could never return any sort of feeling for him.

He was dimly aware that he had told her to start with the songs from the show. His fingers found the correct keys by muscle memory alone and he was barely even listening to how she was singing - his mind was too consumed with self-loathing.

Christine shifted on her feet as she sang. All she could see of Erik was his back as he played accompaniment. It was the same music he'd played dozens of times, the same tune, the same melody, but there was something different to it this time, something dark, and it made her feel uncomfortable. She wished he'd just look at her, just once. He was acting so unlike himself, it worried her.

He hit a sour note and stopped, blinking down at the piano. It had surprised him out of his cloud of negative emotions, but only for a moment. Should he keep going or start over? He couldn't even remember how far into the song he had been.

"Erik-"

"From the top," he nearly growled.

She lowered her eyes to the floor and started over.

She went through the rest of her songs with no correction from him, and while part of her was pleased about that, she also feared that perhaps he found so much of it wrong that he simply didn't have time to correct it all - the new opening night was only a few days away, after all.

They reached the end of her last song in the upcoming show and Christine watched, confused, as he placed the cover over the keys and gathered his sheet music once more, preparing to leave.

"I thought you had a new piece you wanted me to work on?"

"I think you have quite enough to work on, don't you?" he snapped as he rose from the piano bench, and Christine took a step backwards.

Erik never snapped at her, except for that time they had been fighting.

"Are you mad at me?" she finally asked in a small voice, stopping him from leaving through the secret exit.

He had been about to leave without even saying goodbye, and it stung.

He froze, turning back to look at her. His poor Christine, standing there and wringing her hands, looking so hurt by how he had acted. He hadn't realized that his hatred towards himself had inadvertently hurt her, too. He certainly hadn't meant for that happen. His mind scrambled for an apology that would make sense, one that didn't consist solely of Erik is a wretched excuse of a man, and in the attempt to do so while comforting and reassuring her, he didn't even notice a certain word that slipped out.

"Oh, Christine- Christine, no. I could never be mad at you, sweet. I just- there's a lot on my mind at the moment, that's all. You didn't do anything wrong. I'm sorry."

She nodded a little, still a bit hurt, but believing him due to his mournful tone.

"Are you sure you're alright, Erik?"

"I'm-" he looked away.

"I will be fine, Christine," he said softly.

"Is there anything I can help you with?" she offered, uncertain that he was telling the truth about being okay.

He smiled sadly.

"No, that's alright. You're so kind to ask, though, but I'm afraid there's nothing to be done."

"Are you sick?"

He gave a mirthless little laugh.

"In a way."

She feared he was about to leave again, but he merely hesitated in the secret doorway.

He had let his own pathetic problems interfere with her lesson, and he swore to himself that he would never let that happen again.

"Your voice was excellent tonight, Christine. We'll hold off on working on any new pieces until after this re-staging business settles down. You should feel quite confident going into the next show. I want you to get plenty of rest between now and then - you have nothing to worry about in regards to your voice, you'll do quite fine. I'll be watching the performance, and we can talk about it the day after, okay?"

"Okay," she nodded, then adding- "Thank you."

"Get some rest, Christine," he said kindly as he left.

She still fretted over it to herself as she made her way back to her dressing room to change into her normal dress. Was he ill somehow? It always worried her so much when someone was sick, ever since her papa had never recovered. It didn't matter if it was only a sniffle or light fever - she knew how quickly something seemingly minor could turn into something serious.

She didn't want Erik to be sick. He didn't deserve to suffer any more than he already had. She replayed his last words to her over and over, straining to remember if anything about him had seemed off or telling of an impending or lingering illness. She worried over his health for so long that it wasn't until after she had changed and was leaving her dressing room that she remembered what he had called her.

I could never be mad at you, sweet

Sweet. He called her sweet.

Christine was not a young woman who lacked in affectionate friends. She was used to being called pet names, used to having a number of people who loved her and cared for her and was used to hearing them tell her so.

So when she thought of Erik calling her sweet, she simply couldn't account for the way her cheeks turned pink and she felt a peculiar warmth radiating through her.

It was the final straw. She needed to talk to Sorelli.