Author's note: Emotional outbursts galore in chapter two as spark meets tinder and two people who were never meant to meet again come together.
I can't see Erik being in a particularly healthy state of mind after losing everything. We see him here trying very hard to hold to the choices he made - to desire Christine's happiness more than his own. His success is questionable.
We've seen Christine display incredible bravery. I believe she would need to be brave again when unexpectedly thrust back into the company of an emotionally unstable Erik.
ALW never mentions Erik's name, and since his work is the primary inspiration for this, neither do I.
PLEASE NOTE: this chapter may disturb victims of verbal, psychological, or physical abuse. It may also trigger anyone who is bothered by the expression of suicidal thoughts
I hope you enjoy.
Christine stood, dumb with shock, wide-eyed and blind in the darkness. It was him. The Phantom lived.
"Why?" he snarled, the sudden rage in his voice startling her out of her shock and making her shrink back against the stone of her father's tomb. "Why could you not leave me to my emptiness? Why would you come here, to torture me with your voice -"
"I'm going to be married tomorrow," she said in a rush.
She heard the shuffle of feet as he recoiled from her words.
"...my angel, bound to earth," he whispered.
A moment's silence, and then Christine moved towards him, drawn to the pitiable despair in his voice. He responded like a cornered animal afraid to show its pain, snapping at her before she got too close.
"And why did you not bring your Vicomte with you? Where is your staunch protector now? Let him come with his fine horses and his bright sword before I do you wrong..." The vicious snarl in his voice bled away, leaving a terrible weariness in its wake. "...Let him come. I won't fight him this time. I am where I belong, at last. Let him lay my bones to rest here, and send my soul back to hell."
"Don't," breathed Christine.
"It would be a kindness," he hissed.
Another moment of stillness, and then Christine crept closer still.
"Angel," she whispered.
He echoed her, "Don't."
Christine went still. The Phantom's next breath was ragged, betraying the tears she could not see in the dark. Though she was blind in the night, his face appeared for her there in her mind, twisted by deformity and sadness. It made her chest go tight and brought tears of sympathy to her own eyes.
"...Why did you come, Christine."
She pulled in a breath though the tightness that gripped her chest, and forced the words out.
"To say goodbye."
Silence answered her. She strained her eyes in the darkness, but couldn't see his face.
"...And how did you know where to find me?" he asked at last.
"I didn't... I didn't know you'd be here. I thought... The fire..."
"You thought I was already dead," he finished for her. "Trapped by the hoard in the belly of a burning building. But the Opera house was mine, Christine. Every timber of her. Every passage. She gave me up to freedom and the cool night air before she herself died in that inferno. ...But you didn't know that?"
Christine trembled to hear his voice come closer, hear some of his old surety creep back into it.
"...Were you singing to my ghost, then?"
"...I thought..."
"You thought you'd unburden yourself," he sneered. "Empty yourself of my music, the music of the night, the music I gave you, spill it out into this empty place of death and leave it behind." Christine cowered at the sound of his rising anger, louder and louder with every word. "So you can go and live your life in the sun with Monsieur le Vicomte, waste your voice on the uninspired piffle that other men will pay to hear you sing! And he'll parade you and your stolen voice to the world, the maiden he snatched from the claws of a monster, the beautiful trophy on his arm, while you preen like the greedy little songbird y–"
He faltered. She felt him hesitate, felt the looming presence of him shrink and draw away again, and all the thunder in his voice disappeared as suddenly as it had come.
"...the life... that you deserve. Life in the sun. The life that beauty should have."
Further still he shrank from her, and drew a steeling breath to murmur the last.
"...Goodbye, Christine. I wish you all the joy in your marriage that the dark cannot give."
Christine lurched forward. Her hand flew out towards the source of the voice, and met the sleeve of his coat. Her fingers clutched at the cuff to halt him. He froze in the act of turning away from her and stood, for a moment, her prisoner.
"There was joy," she breathed.
His head turned towards her with the softest whisper of skin brushing cloth.
"There was joy, in the dark. There was rapture. In your music. It was beautiful."
Words tumbled from her lips that she didn't mean to say, and flowed into a torrent beyond her control. "That's why. That's why I came here. I can't. I can't live, in the sun, with your music in my head, in my heart, where I can't let it out, where no one will understand. I can't bear another sympathetic embrace for the horrors I endured, can't feign revulsion for it all, when in my heart it feels like I betrayed –"
Her voice cut off before she could utter the word 'angel' again. They both knew he was no angel. Her fingers quivered on his sleeve. With glacial slowness, the Phantom turned to face her again. Her grip weakened, allowing his arm the freedom to move, and it slid beneath her touch until she felt his long fingers brushing hers.
"...My teacher," she whispered. The word felt inadequate. But they both let it lie.
"Your lover spoke the truth," said the Phantom softly. He let out the next breath in a stilted laugh. "He has many flaws, your Vicomte, but dishonesty is one of mine and not his. Your choice was a lie. You chose to stay with me to save him." He laughed again, a terrible, broken sound. "I may as well have thrown the noose around my own neck when I offered you such a choice. You would have withered there, in the dark, if I had kept you by force."
"To leave you alone in the dark was too cruel," Christine sobbed softly.
"Don't you listen to what the papers say?" he said, his voice half mocking. "It was a monster you left there. Your pity is wasted on the suffering of a heartless monster – "
"You are a monster!" she spat through her tears, making him jolt like she had struck him a physical blow. Her hands moved again to clutch at both his sleeves as though she would grapple with him, fling him to the ground, dash him against the stone herself for all the terrible things he'd done. "You are a monster. Don't ever pretend to yourself that you are not. And don't you dare try to pretend to me. Once, you suffered unjustly, shunned by a cruel world for a fault that you could not help. When I learned that, I wept. I could have wept forever for what was done to you then. To think of what you might have been if you had known even a little mercy then! But now – you've earned the world's ire, and mine, too. Buquet, and poor Piangi – Raoul, too, if you had had your way. And how many more, Monsieur, that I don't know about? How many succumbed to your pitiless traps, how many have you strangled with these hands?"
She tightened her grip and thrust his arms up between them, accusing him with his own hands as if the blood on them was still fresh. As if it weren't too dark to see it. He stumbled back a step, but offered her no other resistance, and she cried out in anger at him for his betrayal.
"How can these be the same hands that brought such beauty into the world? how can they be both the instruments of death and of such rapturous music? How can heaven and hell work together through one man? Who are you, if you are not my angel?"
Christine crumpled, bowing her head under the weight of her confusion, and sobbed in earnest. With slow gentleness, the Phantom unfettered himself from her grasp. He wrapped his arms around her, expecting every moment to be pushed away. And when she did not resist, he pulled her close into the uncertain embrace of someone who hardly knew how to offer human comfort.
"Christine," he whispered wretchedly. "Oh, Christine. My Christine. I am... I am all of that, but I am your Angel, too. I am remade by you, Christine. Your power over me is complete. At your command, I would become whatever you desire."
"I have no power over you," she cried ruefully.
"You command my very soul, Christine. You rule my heart. The music within me lives for your voice alone. Without you, I have nothing. I am nothing. A ghost in truth. I haunt this place like a shadow. I wait for death here, like the cadaver I appear to be. Christine..." His arms tightened around her with a hint of their old covetousness. "Christine, give me my death. Please. Before you are married, take the pistol that is hidden in your cloak, and free me. For if you do not..." The Phantom trembled for a moment, battling with himself, before he pushed her away to hold her at arm's length. "If you do not, I'm not sure I can keep myself from you. Christine, save us both, and pull the trigger. End your nightmare for good, and go to your knight, le Vicomte, so he can give you the life that will let you blossom."
"Stop," she breathed, resisting his push.
"I am only so strong, Christine," he warned her with a hiss.
"Then let me be the strength you need," she said.
His hands spasmed. But then he pushed her away again with a groan.
"Why do you torture me still?"
"Because this living hell is one of your own making," she said sternly. "I will be your tormentor. I will bring you pain, if I must, for as long as I must, if it means that I can save you from the eternal fires that wait for you. If what you say is true, and I have that power, then I will command you. Be the angel, and not the demon. Nurture the power of creation that you have. Never use these hands –" she pried them from her arms and held them, upturned, in her own, "– to bring death to anyone ever again. Use them instead to create – do your penance that way, for the rest of your natural days."
The dreaded Phantom of the Opera quailed at the words of the girl before him, no longer a girl at all but an agent of heaven cloaked in human flesh.
"I am beyond your salvation," he gasped.
"You are mine to command," she reminded him.
"Would you condemn me to life without you? That is only a different kind of hell."
"Promise me," she demanded. "If you love me, as you've said you do, then promise me."
"Merciless siren!" he cried, wrenching his hands out of her grasp to grab and shake her. "What is it you would have me live for in this empty world? You took everything that I had to give. You would pin me to the rock, your Prometheus, and eat the heart out of me every day! And deny me what little shreds of vengeance I can take. Release me, damn you! Release me from the chains you've bound me in. You gave me life, and then stole it away, but left me still breathing to feel the loss of it. Damn you!"
Christine lacked the power over her body to keep it from shaking. But she held her chin high in the face of his fury, and her voice remained strong and clear.
"It is your turn to choose," she said. "Speak your promise to me, or reveal your lie before heaven. Your promise, if you truly love me. If you do not, then damn you, and damn myself, too, for ever believing you capable of anything but horror. I would deserve whatever fate I met at your hands, then. So promise me. Or else punish the sin of a bride who flees her fiancé on the eve of her wedding for the sake of regretting you!"
He held her still, pinioned in the strength of his grip, but his head was bowed in shame. She could hear each low, ragged breath as the war between heaven and hell played itself out within him. Hesitantly, unsure if he'd let her, she lifted her hands to his face. He didn't pull away. But the touch drew a soft whine of anguish from his throat. She almost gasped at the feel of the pitted flesh beneath the fingers of her left hand. Of course, he had left his mask in the opera house. He wore none but the dark this time. Her fingers smoothed over both the whole and the marred flesh, unflinching, until her palms rested against his cheeks. Her finger tips brushed over the trails of shed tears, traced up over the pain-pinched brow, and caressed the clenched line of his jaw with pleading tenderness.
"...Promise me," she begged him softly.
Fresh tears fell to wet her hands, and he shuddered like a tower struck by cannonade.
"I promise," he answered finally.
"Say it to me. All of it."
"I promise you, Christine, that I will never use these hands to take another life, or to create anything that will take life. I promise to live out my natural days. And to spend them in the creation of beauty, so long as I can. I promise you, my angel, on all that is sacred."
Christine bent her head to rest her brow against his. Tears of joy and relief streamed freely down her face.
"Thank you," she whispered.
He called out softly in return, desperate for her to believe it, "Christine, I love you."
Her breath hiccuped in a quiet sob and the hands on his face trembled.
He lifted his own hand to cover the one that touched his left cheek, holding it cherishingly against the unmarred side of his face. The human side. Then his other hand plucked hers from the ruin of his deformity, and he turned to press a tremulous kiss against her palm.
The next sob that escaped her throat wasn't quiet. Nor the one after that. In moments, she was reduced to weeping like a terrified child. It seemed to wash over her all at once – how close she had just felt to her own destruction, how frightening it was to be in the power of this man – how deeply she longed for his approval and love.
The Phantom released one of her hands to wrap his arm around her and pull her against him. He didn't murmur soft comforts into her hair the way Raoul would have. And he didn't stroke soothingly over her back as she remembered her father doing when she was a child. By comparison, the Phantom's embrace was almost austere. But he was steady, and warm, and he held her until the storm had passed and she rested quietly against his breast. Christine was suddenly reminded of a beast standing sentry. Like a wolfhound guarding its squalling pups. As the flood of tears receded, so did her fear, and she almost laughed at the thought that nothing in the world would dare harm her while this terror was standing guard.
Receding tears calmed into stillness. And in the stillness, the moment came for either one of them to pull away. It came, and it lingered, and then uncertainly it passed. Such a strange, unexpected embrace in the dark. She felt the beat of his heart beneath her cheek flutter with the awareness of her closeness. He felt the quick thrum of her pulse beneath the fingers that still held her wrist.
Time seemed to freeze as they each listened to the music of the other's beating heart. And when he spoke, pressed against him as she was, she could feel his voice as much as hear it.
"...What would you command of me next, angel?"
Christine closed her eyes, dispelling even the illusion of sight, and concentrated on the sound and feel of his breath, his heart, his voice.
"...Sing," she said. "Sing for me."