A/N: I know! I know! It's a terrible habit of mine. Be kind. Be patient. Like I said, if you will leave this phic because you're so pissed, review it with 'STB' and I'll write you and 'spill the beans'. It'll make it less interesting, but if it will keep you reading, it's a sacrifice I'll make.

Darcimkire mentioned that she didn't think Erik would die from "bruises and wounds". Let me clarify. The three gashes along Erik's chest are from a dagger. Because this is from the POV of Christine, we don't really get to see the actual fight. I picture it went something along the lines of Jacques stabbed Erik and then pulled the knife downward (or upward. Either way). They're not scratch marks, they are stab wounds, and apparently fatal ones at that. Also, we don't know how long Erik had been bleeding before he managed to make it back to the lair, he could have been stumbling around the catacombs for a while.

Anywho, that's my little explanation. Please don't hate me.

Chapter Four

For the first time since being harshly from the bed, I forced myself to move my eyes from the man leaning over Erik to my angel's face. His lips were tinted blue and his face was bone white. People had said he looked like a living corpse before. How wrong they were! I looked desperately for any sign of a rise and fall from his chest, for fresh crimson stain against the bandages that would show his heart was still forcing blood through his veins, but there was nothing. He was perfectly still.

There was a piercing scream that made me want to cover my ears. It took my mind a few moments to register that it was coming from my own lips. There was no slap to my face, no attempt to even silence me. On the contrary, it seemed as though they were all thoroughly enjoying the sound of my tortured heart shattering into an infinite number of pieces as I felt myself literally die inside. The restraining hands did not hold me up as I fell to the ground like a discarded piece of rag and huddled there whimpering.

I was so lost in my own agony that I did not hear the ensuing conversation.

"Well, it looks like Jacques managed to get a few good shots in before he died. Pity, I wanted to kill the beast myself. How many men have been lost to this freak?" I faintly recognized the authoritative tone as the man that had hit me. Though the answering voice I had not heard before.

"Thirty-six, that we know of, commander. But there are still seven men unaccounted for."

"Look, you cowards!" the commander bellowed to his men. "Your 'ghost' that you are all so terrified of is no more than a man with a hideous face."

The commander observed the bandages I had wrapped carefully over Erik's stab wounds and he poked and prodded him, feeling for a pulse and inspecting the damage. He came and knelt before me.

Grabbing my chin he lifted my face to look at his wretched face. I knew tear stains still covered my cheeks, and I hadn't washed off the blood, not thinking, and it had matted in my hair. I must have only been a few shades darker than Erik's complexion, with purple shadows still under my eyes, it was a wonder he could even recognize I was human, the pathetic sounds forcing themselves from my trembling lips were hardly coherent. I refused to look him in the eyes, I kept my gaze turned away, my face still contorted in agony.

"I must commend you on your skills as a nurse. I think, perhaps, that we have a job that would be suited to your . . . abilities," he said as his eyes glanced over places they had no business going. I shuddered until his lustful, probing look.

He stood and turned to his men. "Take what's of worth, burn the rest . . . and throw the body in the lake."

I screamed again, but it didn't matter. I made a vain attempt to reach for Erik, trying to shield him with my body from the disgrace they wanted to inflict upon him further. Would they not grant him peace even in death? I was caught easily by one of the men and hauled closely to him. I watched horrifically as they dragged Erik from his death bed. My legs would no longer support my slight weight and the soldier was forced to sling me over his shoulder like a limp stage prop and carry me out.

Darkness started creeping into my mind and I was willingly giving in. The last thing I heard as my mind shut down was the sound of Erik's body being tossed into the water and the high-fives and words of congratulations being exchanged.

I awoke some time later to frantic, gentle shaking and whispered female voices. I fought to stay in the darkness of my mind, but could not force myself to return to the peace of blissful unawareness.

When I opened my eyes and they finally adjusted to the dark room I found myself in, I saw three worried faces looking into my own.

"Where am I?" I managed to say, trying – and failing – to not let the panic in my voice show through. I still wasn't completely sure that I was not dreaming. I looked around at the stone walls of the small room. There were three blankets spread on the floor that matched the one I realized I was also laying on. The dark green material was course and scratched at the skin on my bare arms.

"You're in what used to be a storehouse," a tender voice explained. "Now it's the make-shift hospital for the commune. You were brought here nearly an hour ago. We were afraid that you would not wake up."

I sat up and it felt as though my head had split in two. I gasped and put a hand to my forehead.

"Yes, I suspect that will hurt for a while," a woman who looked to be in her forties commented. "They dropped you rather harshly."

"Who are you?" I asked, fighting a wave of dizziness.

"I am Patrice," the woman replied. "And this is Marie and my daughter, Isabella," she said, gesturing towards the two other women. "You are fortunate to be here."

"Fortunate?" I echoed. "How is it fortunate that I am here?" I asked as I continued to observe my surroundings. I could hardly believe that this could ever be a good place to find one's self in.

"As I said, this is the hospital; there is a building not far from here that they keep the other women in. The women they . . . they use for their pleasure," Patrice said as a strangled sob caught in her throat.

"That is where my sister is," the one that Patrice had called Isabella said sadly. "Mama used to be a nurse, so they thought she would be helpful to take care of their wounded men. She convinced them that she couldn't do it on her own and needed my sister and I to help, but they only allowed me to come and took Riena to the other building." She turned away to hide the tears in her eyes.

I looked more closely at Isabella. She was somewhat plain with dark eyes and tousled brown hair that fell haphazardly around her pale, angular face. She reminded me of a chorus girl that used to stay in Meg's and I's dormitory. There was a childlike quality to her voice in the way that she almost seemed to babble. Marie had the dark eyes as well, but dirty blond hair that was cut short so it lay against her shoulders. Her face bore a hint of natural roundness to it, making me think that under normal circumstances, she had probably been slightly more curvaceous, but in an attractive way.

"I'm nineteen," Isabella said, apparently try to make conversation, a strange thought given the circumstances. I couldn't understand why she was staring at me so strangely and blathering. "Marie is twenty-three, the same age as Riena, my sister. How old are you?"

"Seventeen," I said, feeling decidedly younger. The thought of my age made me remember my birthday and I began to convulse with sobs.

Patrice shook her head sadly and wrapped her arms around my shoulders. "What is your name, dear?"

I thought for a moment, not an easy thing to accomplish with your brain swirling around in an abyss of pain. I struggled for an answer. I didn't even know who I could trust. Could it be that these women were a trap to try to see if I was worth anything?

"Who is your father?" she asked instead.

The puzzled expression I gave Patrice must have shown what an odd question I found that to be for she found the need to rephrase.

"What home were you taken from?" She must have assumed I was a serving girl of some kind, but it still wasn't making sense in my mind.

"I have lived in the Opera Populaire since I was only seven. Both of my parents died long ago," I replied, unsure of why she was asking such a strange question. If she was trying to distract me from my grief it was only working mildly.

The three woman exchanged glances at each other and Patrice turned to me with a pitied expression on her face. "Dear child, no one has lived there for nearly four months. It has been used by the commune since."

"I know. I lived under it. In the fifth cellar with . . ." I suddenly found it hard to continue as the night's events caught up with me. My throat constricted and before the sobs overtook me, I managed to finish the sentence. ". . . with Erik."

Patrice wrapped her arms tighter around me and let me cry into her shoulder as Marie and Isabella each put a hand on my arm to comfort me.

"Your husband?"

I'm not sure who asked, I was too busy trying to control my sobbing. I shook my head.

"No, my . . . my fiancé," I said, as the word rolled strangely off my tongue. I had never really thought of Erik as my fiancé, but he had given me a ring and I had promised to stay with him, so it meant the same . . . didn't it?

Any other circumstances and I am sure that saying I lived with my fiancé would have caused an uproar of protests of how improper it was, but the old ways were gone and now, such a trivial thing did not seem to matter.

They let me cry for a while longer and when I had finally calmed myself enough to only allow for a few tears to still stream down my face. I wanted to tell them everything. Despite the fact I knew little more than their names, I found myself wanting to pour my heart out to them. All I told them was what I felt safe the commune would already know. That to keep me safe Erik had hidden me in the fifth cellar. I felt safe to tell them Erik's name since no one outside Madame Giry and Meg would know who Erik was. Everyone else just knew him by his various villainous names.

"So it was your fiancé that kept killing their men," Marie said, speaking for the first time with a hint of an Irish accent. "I had begun to wonder if it was indeed a ghost. I heard the men speak of it. They said those who were killed did not even see him. Only a very small handful of men caught a glimpse of him. They say he moved as a shadow."

I nodded my head. That was definitely Erik. How strange it was to talk of him in the past tense. It didn't seem real. He was Erik. The Phantom of the Opera. He couldn't die. He was too strong. It couldn't be real. I collapsed again into Patrice's arms and wept until I fell asleep.

It felt like a very short time later that I awoke to a man's voice telling us to get ready for incoming injured. I rose quickly, still unsure what was happening. Patrice nodded her head to a bowl of something on the ground that I only discovered to be food because of the other three woman eating bowls of the same thing as though it were the most delectable thing on earth. I shook my head.

"I'm not very hungry," I said

Isabella looked at me with hopeful eyes.

"You may have it if you wish," I said with a nod and she took mine and scooped some of the gray mush into Patrice and Marie's bowls before finishing the rest.

Patrice was talking through mouthfuls of food. "I tried to clean the blood off your face as much as possible, but we're going to have to do something with your hair."

I touched a hand to my face absently, finally realizing why Isabella had looked at me so oddly. My hair was definitely not high on my list of things I cared about at that moment.

As soon as the woman were done, we left to hurry down a flight of stairs that led from the small room that we were apparently supposed to live in into a large room. I had never seen a room so big. If you took out all the walls of the Opera Populair, the floor space would be about half of what I was seeing. There were rows and rows of small cots with white sheets and the same dark green blankets that lined nearly the entire floor. About a quarter of the beds were occupied and two women were wondering between them, checking on the men before moving along. Isabella was doing her best to explain everything over her shoulder at me as we hurried along.

"They bring in the wounded men and put them on the cots. We just got in a whole batch of supplies, but don't use too many of them or we will run out. If you don't know what to do, yell for mama and she will help you."

I glanced around to be sure no soldiers were listening before I spoke.

"Why don't you let them die?"

Isabella turned to fix me with a look of pure shock. She lowered her voice to a matching whisper. "Because if too many men die, that house that they put the other women in will start to look like heaven compared to the hell they will put you through."

I nodded my head dumbly in understanding. In other words, if they die, you'll wish you were dead.

Patricia led us to a room off in a corner of the massive storehouse/hospital. It had been transformed into a washroom with basins lining the walls, the water didn't look very clean, but apparently that didn't matter. The three women bent over to scrub their hands, though no soap was present. There were a pair of scissors resting on a shelf with some other fairly dull looking utensils. I picked them up and without letting myself think about it, raised them to my head and began hacking away at my once beautiful hair.

The three women stared at me in shock, but I didn't care. I cut it until it was nearly at my scalp. I was sure I looked like a boy now.

"Well I hadn't quite meant that you needed to cut it that short," Patricia said, looking anxiously at the shears in my hand. I found a stray lock of hair that I had missed and with one quick snap it fell to my feet with the rest of my hair. I looked at it detachedly. I supposed it could have been a metaphor for cutting away the last thing that made me Christine. I didn't want to be Christine anymore. I didn't want to be anything.

"Dear?" Patrice's voice was soothing. She was trying to distract me, probably afraid of what I would do with the scissors. "What do you want us to call you?" I noticed that she hadn't actually asked for my name. She probably assumed that I was trying to be safe and I appreciated that somewhere in the back of my mind, but I couldn't register it very well.

"Elyssa," I said with a dead voice, thinking of my first triumph at the opera. Erik's cunning had born a way for me to break from the role of chorus girl and erupt as Paris' new promising talent. It had been in the role of Elyssa that I had found the strength to see my own potential. I hid myself in her and she had shown me a bright new world where all that Erik had promised me could come true.

I had to force myself to once again hide and call on a strength not my own to live through what trials lay before me. I could not survive as Christine. I would lock her away somewhere deep in my heart where it did not hurt so much.

I placed the rusted instrument of my hair's destruction back on the shelf and stepped out of the pile of my brown locks and shed the skin of the shy, unsure girl and became the strong, independent woman who would live my life for me. Christine was dead now. Elyssa would rule in her stead. Perhaps one day I would return as a more wise, worldly Christine, but that day would be another turning point far from now. For as long as I was to carry out my sentence as a nurse for the enemy, I would not reveal to anyone my true identity.