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Prompt: 6. Curiosity (~listen to your heart cry)
His hands were ice, frigid and frozen, and his eyes were a ferocious amber-gold behind the mask, and Christine Daae was terrified out of her wits, because those eyes were no longer behind the mask.
His hands, long, unlovely artist / musician / architect / assassin hands, covered his face, and her own covered her eyes, pressing, as though to crush the image of that Face out of her mind. His sobs were heartbroken, the collapse of his hopes and dreams and love shattering his heart, and her own were terrified, reconciling the Angel with the monster. They sat before his grand organ, her on her knees as though in supplication before him, and he curled up, protecting himself from her piercing eyes, the horrified expression he expected her to be wearing.
Except there was no horrified expression, no scream, no terror and no fear. There was disgust, horror, repulsion, like looking upon a dead body lying in the grave, but she was done with fear. Fear had died with her father.
And all she saw before her was a broken creature, destroyed because of her cruelty. She edged closer to him, to Erik, and whispered down to him. "Monsieur? Please stop crying."
Her voice bit through the miasma of grief around him, and he managed to stop for a second, as though waiting for her to speak again. But the sobs surged up anew, and he buried himself inside his misery again.
She petted his hair gently, then frantically, mussing and stroking the thin strands between her bony fingers. "Don't cry," she murmured in the darkness. "Erik, don't cry. It doesn't matter. I don't care. It's just a face. It's just your face. I don't care. Please don't cry."
The Face stopped its weeping, looked up at her, saw the quiver in her eyes and the shake of her hands and believed the beauty of her voice. She nearly fainted at the sight of its ugliness, but she kept her body and voice still. Only her eyes betrayed her as his rested on her, only her hands betrayed her as she shivered when she touched his icy own. She tangled her limbs around him, pressing her warm body to his. Propriety be damned, he was an insane, hideous murderer, and affairs could not really be any more improper than this. And if the worse thing she did in her life was offer comfort to a man she was fairly certain had never known any before…
Well. If that made her a terrible person, she didn't mind.
She let her heart beat against his, offered her handkerchief to dry his eyes – she didn't think she could quite bear to touch the Face quite yet. But he made no move to touch it and with something like mental recoil she touched the cloth to his face, wiping it free of tears, ensuring her hands did not touch his skin. Then she drew him back down to her, wrapped her arms further around him, and listened when he began to talk, of Mother and Russia and Persia and gypsies and fear and death and pain and a little sultana and fear.
He sat there, drawn into her arms, warmed by her tenderness, talking of the old terrors and the ancient torments for a long, long time.
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