Silent as the grave. It was a familiar phrase. but Christine had never quite experienced a silence so complete. The beat of her own traitorous heart was all that there was. She could no longer even hear his breath.
When the Phantom finally moved, it was with infinite care. Fingers slid slowly from her neck to her shoulders, traced down her arms as though to reassure himself of her shape, and then hovered at the edges of her sleeves. Her hands tingled at the closeness, anticipating his touch, but he maintained that sliver of space between them. Christine stared hard into the dark where she thought his face must be. She could not endure another moment of that silence.
"Will you say nothing?" she asked at last, a note of pleading in her voice.
"I am choosing my words," he said, his tone as careful as his touch.
"Have I struck you speechless?" she said with a fragile laugh. "I think Messieurs Andre and Firmin would be pleased to know it's possible..."
"I am not certain how to reply, as I am not certain I have taken your meaning correctly."
"How can there be more than one meaning in what I have said?" she answered shortly.
"There must be, when what leaps to mind is so entirely unexpected."
"Your failure to leap at any inch given you is unexpected. You have been, till now, such an opportunist."
"Are you so impatient?" he asked in a way that made her cheeks burn.
"Do not mock me."
"Mademoiselle, tonight, I would not dare."
Still he did not take hold of Christine's hands, and she clenched them into fists so she wouldn't have to feel the emptiness of them.
"I would hear your answer, Monsieur. If indeed you wish to answer."
"The answer I wish to give would not be composed in words."
She swallowed to ease the sudden dryness of her throat.
"Then why do you hesitate?" she asked, sounding faint even to her own ears.
"...I hesitate," he said in the same careful tone, "because once I begin to answer, I do not trust myself enough to wait on your own reply."
Her next breath was expelled in a huff of disbelief.
"You showed no hesitation in the Opera house. You did not hesitate to snatch me and carry me off when it was against my will."
"Is it now your will that I snatch you and carry you off?"
"Why are we spinning in this pas de deux!" she exclaimed, bowing her head, though the dark already hid her flaming cheeks.
"Christine." His voice was suddenly raw and demanded her full attention. "Answer me now. Is this part of my torment? Is this another penance for my soul? Some test I must pass?"
"No," Christine whispered, half in horror.
She heard him pull a deep breath in, and release it in a slow, measured exhale.
"In the opera house... When I... let you go," he said, seeming to have difficulty with the words, "when I let you, both, go... and you left, with him..." He paused to swallow.
"Yes," she prompted him, not sure he would continue.
"...Do you regret your choice?"
Christine squeezed her eyes closed. Her clenched hands flew to her breast to try and contain its heaving. That beast that she had gone there to slay, the one that she did not wish to see, reared its fearsome head and looked her squarely in the eye.
"Christine... Do you love me?"
She thought her chest would burst. She could not understand how it did not tear itself open on the spot. Her heart thrashed, locked in bloody battle with her conscience, and the pain of it was unbearable. But it was the heart that was striking the death blow, for she heard it howl out the answer to his question. An impossible answer. She could not comprehend how it could be. Because when she asked herself if she still loved Raoul, the answer did not change. She could not understand. But her heart did not require her understanding. It only required that she open her mouth and allow it to answer.
"...You are my Angel of Music," it said. "I have loved you from the moment I first heard you sing."
The words broke over him slowly. Then the Phantom's breath hitched as one waking from a dream. He surged forward, catching her face in his hands, and pressed a kiss to her mouth so ardent that it drew a sound from both of them. His arm locked around her back and pulled her closer against him, impossibly closer, crushing the length of her body against his as he kissed her and kissed her, drawing on her lips as a drowning man draws breath. Somehow, Christine managed to move her arms, freeing them from the press, and they wound around his middle. The fabric of his waistcoat rippled under her fingers as she clutched it, answering his urgency with her own, even though it frightened her. He uttered another desperate sound into the kiss, and it was swallowed in the softness of her lips. The thought fluttered wildly through her head that this was music, too, and she would not have believed until that moment how sure was its power to transport her. There was no cemetery, no hour on the clock, no night. For Christine, the two of them shone like roman candles, blotting everything else from the senses.
After what may have been a minute, or an hour, the mortal need for breath at last demanded its due. The kiss broke, but they allowed only enough space between them for the passage of air. Their ears were full of the sound of their own panting breath, and they each listened raptly, needing no other sound in the world. At least until Christine regained enough breath to speak.
"I love you," she cried softly, drawing another rapturous sigh from the man in her arms. "I love you. Even as I hate you. The things you've done. All that you've ruined. I hate you for it. But I love you, too. And I cannot stop it, no matter how much I try."
"Christine!" Her name trembled on his lips, barely escaping his heart-choked throat. "Christine, I –" The words he wanted scattered and fled him, refusing to come, owing no obeisance to him who had never called on them before. "Please," he gasped. He had never begged forgiveness from anyone, and didn't know the way of it. Words failed him. But song never had. He may not have the words, but he had the music for what he felt. If only he could wrest control of his instrument from the riot of emotion in his breast. Christine's attention sharpened when he loosened his throat with a hasty swallow, and forced his lungs to work by pulling air in deeply, again more deeply still. With the power he possessed, he transfigured that mundane air in his lungs to music, and the strains of it filled the air with its perfect remorse.
"Contesssa, perdono. Perdono, perdono...!"
Even the howling certainty of Christine's love took pause to consider the answer. Count Almaviva had been asking forgiveness for his unfaithfulness. The Opera Ghost asked forgiveness for lies, extortion, betrayal – for murder. Could such forgiveness be given? Could it stand there in the same place as Countess Almaviva's? Should forgiveness be granted to someone who denied it to others, to someone too resentful to pardon the unkindness shown to him in the past? Long, the aching moment of judgement stretched. She feared suddenly that she had never sung the part, and may not recall the words or hit the notes correctly, and so realized what her answer was.
Christine's lungs expanded in the circle of his arms.
"Più docile io sono," she sang, "e dico di sì."
Sweet notes of absolution twined around him. When her hand reached up to cup his cheek, she found his head thrown back in ecstasy, his face turned up to the moonless sky as if the sound came straight to him from heaven. When the moment came, he drew breath with her, and his voice wound with hers through the exultant refrain. The words came, though she had never sung them for anyone before, words of acceptance and joy. The beauty of the scene had imprinted itself on her mind long before she had known even one word of Italian, and now the words and notes flowed through her effortlessly as though they had just been waiting there, in her memory, for that moment. Her high notes pierced the dark. Each one sent a shudder through her partner, but he did not fail to rejoin the song on his cues. They lacked the rest of the ensemble, the orchestra, an audience, but none of it mattered. None of it diminished the beauty of their melody.
As the last repetition quivered on the air and died away, he bent his head to kiss her once more, and for another age they were lost in that sweet press of mouths, oblivious to everything but each other. When they broke apart again at last, gasping for breath, he spoke.
"I will be yours, forever, Christine. Everything I do will be for you. Every thought, every breath, shall be yours. Such music I will write for you, Christine. Such music, that the heavens will weep, and send flights of Seraphim to reclaim you. But I shall do battle with all the armies of heaven and earth to stay by your side, my Christine!"
She laughed breathlessly.
"Do battle with the angels?" she chided him, "why, when they would only need to hear you sing with me to accept you into their ranks."
Any laugh she had ever heard him utter before had been born of bitterness. But the one that burst from him then was born of joy, and her heart broke at the beauty of it.
The music (FFN won't let me give proper links, so replace DOT with . ):
Le Nozze di Figaro (The Marriage of Figaro) by Mozart, Act 4, "Contessa, Perdono" ( youtuDOTbe/t2yrDWEoCpc )
"Contessa Perdono" is, for me, one of the most glorious pieces of music in all of opera, and I love it with all my heart.