a/n: Another repost, just little shorts I wrote eight or nine years ago. They're Leroux-ish, canon-ish, but mostly for my own amusement. For those familiar with A Stroll on Sunday, this is definitely that Erik. Enjoy!

For when would you, my lord, or you, or you,

have found the ground of study's excellence

without the beauty of a woman's face?

From women's eyes this doctrine I derive;

They are the ground, the books, the academes.

- Love's Labour's Lost

Italy, 1847

Some monsters were born of monsters. Other, of mothers. Some mothers were monsters, of course, but Erik chose not to dwell on that particular point.

His own mother—most assuredly mother, not monster—was little more than a fantasy creature to him, belonging to a world of Romantic ruins and Medieval accents. It was a world Erik had no quarter in. What few memories he did have of the place, of her, attested to that fact. He had the distant impression that they had even called him by some other name, though he could never quite remember what it had been.

No matter. That name—that world—that woman—were all so very far in the past. Erik was now a monster-boy on the verge of monster-manhood, and he had no need for muddled memories of a missing mother or the world she came from. Did he? No, he certainly did not.

It was, in fact, very surprising to him when that old fairyland decided to intrude upon him on that oddly chill spring day. It was a day that had seemed much too rooted in pitiless reality to be conquered by something as pastoral as the memory of a woman's face. It was a day when Erik had taken his jokes too far and found himself fleeing in carnival mask.

(How could anyone be mad at a man—boy—man dress for Carnival in Venice? At least, how could anyone be mad enough to incite a mob? The Italians, Erik decided primly, were simply given over to dramatics. One needed only witness a performance of a traveling theater troupe to be so convinced.

Still, it was prudent to recall that so many of those little passion-plays involved comically harsh comeuppance for the evil tricksters. Erik doubted that he would find the resulting humor much to his taste, if that bit of fiction was brought to life.)

He had vanished inside a church, not because he had any faith in sanctuary, but because shadows had never failed him and these gothic monstrosities were always full of them.

It was in a shadow that he saw her, and in a stained glass gloom that he remembered. A fresco of the Madonna—with Child—played hide-and-seek in an alcove, looking ever so serene in her lonely, forgotten corner of the world.

She had been like that, Erik recalled, his mother-monster-mother from pixilated Normandy. She had been so very like that, so frighteningly like that, so much so that Erik tried to discount the notion as a trick of plaster and soul-weariness. But the image was irreparably branded on his eyes, in his mind, and it struck true in his heart. He saw her now, that face that would have seduced and confounded any Renaissance master. High cheeks and deep eyes, pale, pale skin and titian hair, perpetual melancholy and a well-worried rosary.

He thought, too, of soft tender touches—not as a memory unto themselves, but rather a memory of something once possessed and then lost. He remembered slender white hands and piano keys and a funny old ostrich egg and those perpetual rosaries. Morning and evening, days melting into years, her fingers ghosting over the decades.

And then there was that one memory: her hands on the piano, and then Erik's own, mimicking the motions he had seen her make a hundred times before. What a sound that had been! What a magical thing, to know that his own hands could coax melody from wood and string and ivory as she could. But more than that—that other sound. After she had watched him at the instrument she had whispered, over and over again: "It's a gift of God. Oh, God, let it be Your gift."

How could he have forgotten that voice? How could he have forgotten that face?

Erik stayed in that little nook for untold hours, unable to look away from the Madonna that might as well have been his mother. He wondered what she would have thought of that idea. He had the vague idea that she would have been displeased, but how could one be displeased to be compared with something so beautiful, so lovingly crafted?

(There was something else, some memory shut up with that other-name of his, and it had a suggestion of hellfire and holy water and tears beyond measure. Erik ignored it.)

One of the priests found him eventually, and shooed him away. He drifted out into the dawn-lit city, and lost himself as much as a free man might. He remembered and forgot, forgot and remembered by turns.

She must have died, Erik decided. He could not quite recall, but that must have been the case. His father—the mason-magician who fitted stone together as lesser men did wood—was long gone, he knew. But the beautiful widow he had left, with her divine serenity cracking with something like fear and something like anguish? She must be gone, as well.

Poor Mother, Erik thought. Poor Mama, looking like Mary and the world expecting a new Christ-child to fit in her arms, and ending up with me instead.

Perhaps he would return one day, though the idea made Erik suddenly uneasy. He could pay his respects at her grave, and maybe find out what that old name of his had been, and perhaps see if anyone still had that ostrich egg. He had so loved it, in those days with his monster-mother.