A/N: Ugh, I've done it again, haven't I? Promised a timely update? Many apologies, musical season is now over and while that makes me somewhat sad, I'll (hopefully) have more time to write. I'm currently balancing five different stories and it's driving me batty.
"We have a new opera to prepare for," Madame Giry briskly said, snapping the uncomfortable eye contact between Juliet and Gaston. "We will be performing Carmen. A run-through will be held in ten minutes in the piano room." She thumped her walking stick twice on the floor and the crowd instantly dispersed.
"Is your voice as beautiful as you?" a smooth, oil-slick voice wound its way into Juliet's ear. She jumped and turned to see Gaston standing behind her. His light brown hair was slicked back neatly and his fancy, opulent clothing hung perfectly straight on his frame.
"I suppose you'll find out soon enough," she answered, turning to leave, but Gaston caught her arm.
"Pardon my intrusiveness," he said in a voice that threatened intrusiveness in every syllable, "but I noticed bruising on your throat. Are you all right?" Juliet managed to tamp down a shock that ran through her with an electric current.
"I'm fine, it was an accident," she said briskly. "Excuse me, monsieur." She attempted to brush past him.
"Gaston," he corrected her, "and it looks like a hand. So how—" Juliet was mercifully spared from having to answer by Meg.
"Julie?" she called. "Come on!" Gaston dropped her arm and Juliet rushed off.
"Thank you," she murmured in her friend's ear.
"Something about him frightens me," Meg replied. "I can't place my finger on it, but," she shuddered, "try to stay as far away from him as you can." Juliet wished she could take this advice to heart.
"That may be a bit of a task, considering he's the leading man," said Juliet. Meg nodded sadly.
The run-through was a nerve-wracking experience. She was forced to be seated by Gaston, who sat far too close to her. By the end, she was practically sitting in Meg's lap. He had a fine voice with a flexible range, but an unsettling aura poured off of him and made Juliet quite nervous.
"That will do for today," the vocal director said. "You may be dismissed."
"I'm starved," Meg exclaimed passionately. "There's a little cafe down the street that sells pastries that are to die for."
Juliet felt her own stomach growl. "That would be nice," she agreed.
"Would anyone mind if I joined to lovely ladies?" A mental cringe rippled through Juliet. Yes, she thought, but there was no escaping it and saying no without seeming impolite.
"Okay," said Meg hesitantly. Gaston held out his arms for the two girls to take and it was with great reluctance that Juliet slipped her arm through one of his outstretched ones.
The walk to the cafe was mercifully short and soon Juliet was breathing in the scent of warm, fresh pastries.
"You'll have to pardon me," Gaston's face was a perfectly insincere shade of embarrassed. "I've only recently moved to Paris and I haven't been here yet. What would you recommend?"
"Um, these are nice," Juliet pointed out her favorite almond bun.
"Why don't we just order three of those?" suggested Meg, rummaging around in her bag for her coin purse.
"No, please, let me pay for it," Gaston said, pulling the correct amount of money out of his pocket and placing their order to the counter attendant.
"Merci, monsieur," said Meg, walking over to take a seat at one of the little, wooden tables. Gaston rushed to pull out two chairs for the girls before taking a third for himself.
"Call me Gaston, please," he repeated his earlier plea. Juliet tried to finish her pastry as quickly as she could without appearing rude, as the conversation was the very definition of awkward. As soon as someone would speak, silence would be right on the heels of the sound, swallowing it with a gulp.
"Well, this has been lovely," Juliet blatantly lied, "but I really should get going."
"So should I," Meg said, getting to her feet and arranging her skirts.
"Let me walk you," offered Gaston. The girls shared a fraction of a look, each begging the other to decline.
"That won't be necessary," said Juliet, picking up her bag. "Thank you for the offer, though. And the pastries," she added.
Gaston laughed. "And she even has a lovely sense of humor! Farewell, mademoiselles." He kissed each of their hands and Juliet made note to thoroughly wash hers later."
They just couldn't get out of the shop fast enough. "What a nightmare!" Meg groaned. "That was horrible, I thought he was going to ravish you right then and there on the table!" Juliet buried her face in her palms, feeling her face turn a vibrant shade of crimson.
"Don't say that," she moaned. "I'm trying to get the after-image of those eyes out of my head."
"If he weren't so strange, I might even say he was handsome," said Meg thoughtfully.
"I might, but I can't move past the fact that his eyes are burning holes in me every time he looks at me. I'll look like a moth-eaten carpet soon!" she joked.
When they got back to the Opera House, Juliet headed for her new dressing room, which also doubled as her room during performance season.
OoOoOoOoOoOoOoOoOoOo
Slowly, Erik's eyelids fluttered open. He struggled to recall what exactly had happened. A pounding in his head and a strange feeling in the pit of his stomach reminded that he'd accidentally overdosed on morphine.
Speaking of which, he was starting to feel the all-too familiar feeling of withdrawal. He slid out of the bed and made his way over to the drawer in the desk like there was a magnet pulling him toward it.
When he pulled it open, however, it was empty. Erik knew that he hadn't been anywhere near running low, let alone, well, out.
Where was it?" Erik started rummaging through the other drawers with a madly increasing sense of urgency. When he came up empty, he began tearing through the other drawers in his room, Those didn't yield his stash either.
He began to get seriously desperate and looked in all of the most illogical places. Under the bed, behind the dressers, in the armoire, if it existed, Erik probably looked there.
Where was... Juliet! Erik cursed his slowness. There was only one person, well, in reality there were two, but Erik seriously doubted that Daroga possessed the capabilities to do such a thing. So there was only one person who could have taken it. And her name was Juliet Leroux.
When her soft footsteps approached his door, he flung it open and momentarily relished the look of surprise that crossed the newly appointed prima donna's face. "Where is it?" he growled, narrowly keeping his temper in check.
"Hello, Erik," Juliet said cheerfully even though he could see her hand quivering uncertainly, ignoring the evidently enraged Opera Ghost confronting her. "How are you?... Fine? Oh, good. I'm wonderful, thank you for asking!" She blabbered on, holding a one-sided conversation in a bright tone that he knew she was using purely to irk him.
It was working. "Where. Is. It," his voice lowered to the pitch he usually reserved for bothering Firmin and Andre and he grasped her shoulders tightly.
It didn't appear to perturb her overly much. "Where is what?" she asked. "Because 'it' could refer to any number of things... mon dieu, what happened in here?" She seemed to see the newly-wrought havoc in the room for the first time and her mouth fell open in shock.
"You know exactly what I"m talking about," he snarled.
Her composure was beginning to slip, he noted with satisfaction. "Evidently not. Could you please elaborate, and while you're at it, let me go so I can make the room look like a bit less of a disaster zone." Juliet attempted to wriggle from his iron clad grasp, but it wasn't working overly well.
"The morphine," Erik stressed the last word, hanging on to the last shreds of his composure by his fingertips.
"Oh, that." Juliet's face immediately lost most of it's certainty. "Well, you see, it looked an awful lot like trash and I may have thrown it away," she said, still pushing some confidence into her voice.
Erik regained control over his jaw just in time to save it from crashing to the floor. "You what?" he roared.
Her confidence was all but gone now. "I threw it away," she repeated quietly. "It almost killed you!" she exclaimed, as if that would make it understandable.
"That's not the point!" Erik shouted, releasing her shoulders and striding across the room to keep both of them safe.
"What is the point then, pray tell?" Juliet's voice dropped to a deceptive calm.
"I need it!" Erik's voice struggled vainly to keep a note of pleading out.
Juliet's face took on a look of incredulity, all traces of fright mostly gone. "So, what you're saying is that you need something that is ruining your life?"
Immediately, Erik was on the defensive. It was most certainly not ruining his life. "If it's the only thing keeping me sane, I'm not sure how that's ruining my life."
"Your sanity is much different than mine then, because mine doesn't entail life passing me by in a drug-induced haze," Juliet said stiffly.
"Look, you have no idea what I've been through—" Erik began, but the angry young soprano sliced across his words, mercilessly cutting through them with a sharp snap.
"Don't you dare play the 'no one knows the trouble I've seen' card. That's the weak option," Juliet said, and Erik was shocked to se that tears were shining brightly in her eyes. "Do you have a real reason?" she asked.
A sudden silence was all that could be heard from Erik. His mind raced to find an answer, growing angrier with every passing second. He didn't have one. "I don't know when the idea that I needed saving from myself popped into that pretty little head of yours, but it can leave right now because you're wrong. I don't need saving. But you will in a moment if you don't leave. My life is mine to run and I don't need a ballet rat to look after me like some child's nanny," he snapped. "Oh, you might've been named prima donna but you will never be—" he caught himself at the last minute, but the damage was done. A single tear slipped down Juliet's cheek, but when she spoke her voice was steady and ice cold.
"As good as Christine?" she finished his thought. "Thank you. You and everyone else seem to think so." She strode over to the door with faux-confident steps.
"You may want to rethink your statement," Juliet offered him a parting comment. "You might be the infamous Opera Ghost, but no one is immune to the symptoms of withdrawal." The door swung shut in a tense silence.
Erik sat down heavily on the edge of his bed and dropped his head into his hands. A soft nudge to his elbow prompted him to look down at Ayesha, who had resurfaced from her hiding place during the argument.
If it was at all possible, the look on her whiskered face was a combination of I-told-you-so and pity.
"Oh for God's sake, not you too," Erik growled. "Whose side are you on anyway?" Ayesha let out an irate yowl that said, get over yourself as plainly as if the cat had spoken aloud and jumped into Erik's lap.
OoOoOoOoOoOoOoOoOo
"That rude, arrogant, stuffed shirt of a—ugh!" Juliet shrieked into her pillow, feeling hot tears in the corners of her eyes. She was in what she had named the Peacock room due to the iridescent blue bedclothes. She admonished herself for allowing Erik's words to get to her, but they had stung like bee stings.
See if he gets any help from me when he's throwing up and his temperature is through the roof, she thought savagely, getting up and preparing to leave.
When she reached the passageways, she bumped into Nadir for the second time that day.
"Good evening, mademoiselle," Nadir swept into a bow. When he came back up, his brow crinkled. "Pardon my asking, but is something the matter?"
Juliet could still feel the heat high in her cheeks and knew that her mouth must be setting in a firm line. "Hello, Monsieur Nadir," she said. "Yes, I suppose so."
"What happened?" he asked as though he knew the answer already.
"While Erik was sleeping I disposed of his morphine supply and he found out," she said, drawing a heartfelt wince from Nadir.
"Mademoiselle, that was both very brave and very stupid," he said, looking at her with concern. "He didn't hurt you, did he?"
She paused. "Not physically, no," she said, running a hand through her hair, "but he has quite the barbed tongue."
Nadir nodded in agreement. "I should have mentioned that, I'm sorry."
Juliet marginally raised her shoulder. "What's done is done," she said. "I've got to get going, but please do me a favor. Don't give Erik any more morphine, no matter how he pleads with you or threatens you."
"You're in for a very difficult few weeks," warned Nadir. "I wish you the best of luck, mademoiselle." They bade each other goodbye and Juliet made her way back to her room.
By the time she got back, it was quite late and she was exhausted. Her eyes felt sandy and heavy as she shimmied into her red flannel nightgown and washed her face.
That night, her sleep was deep and mercifully dreamless.
OoOoOoOoOoOoOoOoOo
Erik paced in tight circles around his room. Why was she so stubborn? It was absolutely none of her business, she just had to stick her nose into absolutely everything, didn't she?
He groaned in frustration and sat down on his bed. Now would have been the perfect time to Punjab somebody. Really, any irritating worker at the Opera House would do. Unfortunately, his hands were shaking so badly he doubted his aim would be any good.
He stood up and left the dark room, making his way over to the stable. His wonderful, handsome black stallion, Caesar, pranced in place in his stall, whickering softly. The horse was a high-spirited animal who needed quite a bit of exercise.
"Hello, Caesar," Erik murmured, letting himself into the stall and scratching behind the stallion's ears affectionately. Caesar nuzzled Erik's chest searching for his favorite treat, sugar cubes. Chuckling, he pulled two cubes from his pocket and placed them in the palm of his hand. Caesar's velvety lips picked up the sugary treat and a faint crunching sound could be heard briefly.
"I'm sorry, I haven't got any more," he said, patting the horse's neck as he searched the rest of Erik's pockets. He reached up onto the tack shelf and pulled his dark leather saddle down to put it on his horse. He needed some fresh air. Maybe that would get rid of his pounding headache.
Taking the reins in his clammy hands, Erik led Caesar above ground and got on his back. He longed, as did his horse, to run through the dark streets of Paris at an all-out gallop until they appeared to be no more than a dark shadow, but it would attract far too much attention. So, they walked and occasionally trotted. The cool breeze slightly diminished the pounding cadence between Erik's ears for a time, at least.
About thirty minutes later, without any warning Erik's body flashed alternately hot and cold and a pain like a hot knife blade sliced through his head repeatedly in sickening waves. Growling and hissing with pain, Erik led Caesar over to a bunch of bushes off the road, slid off his back, and was promptly and violently sick.
When he finished, he straightened up laboriously as his back seemed to have locked up and dabbed at the corners of his mouth of his mouth with the handkerchief he kept in his breast pocket.
"Monsieur, are you all right?" a man's voice materialized out of the darkness. In the very faint light from the gas lamps, all Erik could make out was a medium sized figure with electric blue eyes that seemed to defy the poor lighting.
Erik tamped down another wave of nausea. "Thank you for your concern, monsieur, I'm fine. I think my dinner may have had a disagreement with my stomach." He made an effort to keep his tone light and airy, but he was horrified that someone had, firstly, seen him retch all over the bush like a drunkard, and secondly, someone had seen him in the first place. He drew the hood of his cloak further over his face and prayed the darkness would hide the mask on his face.
"Where did you eat?" the man inquired. "I'm a recent dweller of Paris and I'll have to take note not to eat there."
Erik froze. He had expected the man to keep moving, not stay and chat. "Erm, a little tavern a few blocks from here," he lied, his forehead uncomfortably hot and damp. "I don't recall the name."
"Okay," he said, tipping his hat, "I hope your stomach trouble clears up!" Erik waved in return, getting back on Caesar with great difficulty. His muscles had stiffened.
Once he had gotten back and placed Caesar back in his stall, Erik collapsed into bed.
A/N: I will try my hardest to post the next chapter sooner, as I should have more time to do so.
Review? :)