A/N: It occurred to me, after a loverly reviewer (as all reviewers are) that it may seem like the story ended there, it doesn't! So I'm posting the next chapter now in hopes that you don't leave me. There's still a bunch more, actually. Well, maybe not a bunch, I'd say we're just now on the downward slope of the story but our darling Christine still has some more to go through before we can let her be at peace. Now is where we can have some more fun again, as you'll very soon see.

Chapter Eleven

I was aware of voices first. One at first then several more joined in. Their words were jumbled and distant, as though I was listening to them from under water. I paused in my thinking. Wasn't I still under water? I tried to move my fingers or toes, but there was no movement. I tried to feel anything. I felt a slight pressure against my back, but nothing more. I tried desperately to understand the words being spoken around me, but they didn't make any sense. Not like they were speaking another language, because I knew I should recognize the consonants and vowels. They were familiar, but I couldn't make the way they flowed together make sense. It hurt my brain to think, so I gave up and let my mind wander again.

The next time the voices came back I fought them. I wanted to go back to the blackness. It was comforting there, but there was something forcing me to wake up. It was a strange smell that made my brain real. Again the words came back, but they made no more sense then they had before.

"The smelling salts are bringing her around. I think she'll be okay. She just needs some more time. Heaven knows what the girl's been through." The voice was a deep timbre, but older, hoarse with age. I didn't recognize it. Someone patted my hand as it lay still by my side and I realized for the first time that I had all my senses back, not just smell. I could feel the quilt wrapped around me, comforting and warm. Once the peppermint of the smelling salts cleared I could smell bread rising not far away, causing my mouth to water and I hear a fire crackling close by.

I was suddenly torn between opening my eyes and seeing if what my other senses picked up on looked as good as it seemed, or let sleep take me again, showing me odd things in my dreams that made about as much sense as the rest of what was going on. I settled for the familiar and allowed myself to fall back into sleep, knowing it wouldn't last much longer.

I could feel eyes watching me. That must have been what ultimately woke me up. I was no longer tired and knew I couldn't escape to the world of unknowing again. I slowly opened my eyes, afraid of what I might find, but there was nothing but the pair of curious blue-green eyes that I automatically focused on. I looked back with matching curiosity. The beautiful eyes belonged to a very young girl with a roundish face and very fair skin, framed by tight, black curls. She was a beautiful child. As soon as she must have seen the recognition of another human in my eyes she smiled at me, her two front teeth missing.

I didn't smile back. I couldn't seem to remember how to. We watched each other silently for a long moment, locked in each other's gaze. Finally, without word the girl jumped down from where she had been perched - in a chair next to the small bed I occupied - and skipped out of the room. My eyes followed her, wondering if I had done something to offend her.

I looked around the room, surveying for at least something that might tell me where I was. There was a window close to the head of the bed, but the only thing I could see out of it was the pure white of softly falling snow. There was a fireplace on the opposite end of the wall, the flames barely flickering in the glowing coals. The was a small rocking chair next to my bed with a few scattered items laying next to it. A mirror, a worn doll and a faded pink blanket.

The little girl came back a short while later, her brow wrinkled in concentration, carefully carrying a bowl that was teeming with an off-white colored liquid mush. She took each step with slow precision, making sure not to spill a single drop. In between her remaining teeth, she clenched the very end of a spoon.

The smell of the soup drifted ahead of her, filling the room with the aroma. My stomach growled loudly in reaction. The girl set the bowl down on the wooden floor when she finally reached me. As soon as the spoon was out of her mouth, her grin was back. She laid the spoon in the soup and reached both her arms out to me. I couldn't understand what she was wanting until she gently took my hands in hers and tried to pull me upward.

I helped as much as I could but my muscles felt like rubber, not wanting to agree, but soon enough I was sitting up, my back against the cold wall. The girl took the blue and white checkered quilt that had fallen off my shoulders and wrapped it around me again, tucking the corners around my back as much as she possibly could. I had a feeling of being an over-sized doll,but I was grateful.

When she seemed confident that I wasn't going to fall over, she bent to pick up the bowl and spoon and knelt on the bed, facing me. She dipped a spoonful of the mucky soup and carefully blew on it, causing tiny ripples. There was only a little steam coming off the bowl, but apparently enough to cause the girl to be cautious.

She lifted the spoon towards my face. When I did not respond, she sighed without a trace of impatience and cupped my chin with her other hand and opened my mouth for me. She placed the spoon against my tongue and I could feel the heat that she had been worried about. She closed my mouth without removing the spoon and pushed against my forehead, causing my head to tilt backwards slightly. The liquid sloshed down the back of my throat as she gently pulled the spoon from my mouth. I could feel exactly where the soup was as it slid down my dry throat and sloshed into my welcoming stomach. I fancied I could even feel it rolling and churning inside of me, warming me a little from the inside out. My body reacted to this intrusion of nourishment and growled again for more food.

I was curious why I couldn't even do such a simple act as feeing myself, but I was strangely not worried. The girl continued to feed me such until I figured out the simple movement of closing and opening my own mouth, though it took a great more amount of effort than it should have. The patient child continued this for almost an hour, wiping at my chin with the corner of her dress. It wasn't as though her dress was not stained enough already, but I still felt badly that she should further ruin it. It looked as though it had once been white, but was now yellowed and covered in small blotches of various sizes and shapes. The bowl was not even half way empty when the girl slowly got off the bed and sat in her rocking chair, finishing the rest of it herself while I still leaned against the wall, feeling rather contended, my stomach happily digesting its delicious contents.

The girl showed me her tattered fabric doll, missing an eye and nearly all her brown hair. There were also several places I could see that her meager stuffing was trying to escape, but as I watched the girl hug the doll tightly to her chest, I could easily see that it was a very precious possession to her.

The girl pointed to her dilapidated doll and with a meaningful look at me said, "Ally."

I was caught off guard by the sound of the girl's voice. It was very high, higher than a normal child's, though that could have been that because I hadn't been around children in so long that it just seemed to be abnormally so. It was a beautiful little voice, the little that I heard of it. It was - I struggled to think of the correct word - pure.

Then the girl pointed to herself and said "Helen."

I gave a very small smile, the feeling was extremely odd, like my muscles hadn't practiced the movement enough for it to feel normal.

Then Helen pointed her little finger at my chest. For a moment I had thought she had already named me and was going to tell me, but then I realized that she was waiting for me to speak. I tried to force the word out, but it burned in my throat. It took several attempts before I could finally croak out the name, "Christine."

I didn't stop to think this time about using a different name. It felt wrong to lie to the child anyway. And what did I care if something bad happened now? The fighting was over, as far as I knew. Hopefully I would be able to go somewhere far away and start a new life, somewhere in the country, with few neighbors that would mind their own lives and let mine remain my own mystery.

The girl watched me for another long moment, patiently waiting until all the emotions were done playing across my face and she knew intuitively it was okay to ask another question.

"What happened?" The girls voice was so filled with compassion that I resisted the urge to tell her everything about my life. Instead I just said, "Commune."

She seemed to understand what I meant. "Me too," she said with a small sigh. "And Ally." For a moment I thought I upset her, but she finally nodded to some thought in her head and touched my face gently. The single word she uttered brought unexpected tears to my eyes. "Safe."

She helped me lay back down carefully and tucked her doll in next to me. She leaned over to kiss my forehead, repeated the gesture with the doll and then left the room. I didn't see her the rest of the night and it left me to think about things. The pain in my chest was replaced by a dull ache as I thought about my life up until that point. My heart had seem to compartmentalize all the different events all the way back from before my father's death to my escape from the commune. I knew that if I kept them safely tucked away, they couldn't hurt me more than just a persistent throbbing. Throbbing I could deal with. I just had to be careful to not let any unwanted emotions out without putting up barriers around myself so I could deal with them each individually. I could do that. I was certain of it.

I breathed a small sigh of relief. Somehow, being in the water had frozen my pain into manageable chunks and gave me a chance to start again. I knew the pain wasn't never going to be completely gone, but it felt more like a bad dream, nagging at the back of my mind, but not ruling my life.

I hoped that little Helen had been right and that I was safe here. Safe from the outside world and safe from myself. I had been given a chance to start again, and I swore to myself that I would not waste the opportunity.

A/N: Isn't she just a sweetheart? Anywho, thought you might enjoy a little trivia tidbit on this story. Through many many revisions of this story, I decided to change Christine's name, but I struggled with what to name her. I decided to name her Helen because Helen of Troy is mentioned in Faust which is Erik's favorite opera. But I just didn't like and fought with it the whole time. I wrote a few chapters after this one and left it alone for a couple months and came back and decided that I really liked the name Elyssa. So I changed all the references of Christine as Helen to Christine as Elyssa. But as I was editing and doing some few more revisions on this chapter, I realized that I had completely forgotten that I had named the little girl Elyssa. Oops. So anyway, there was another name change with the same names. I think I like it better this way. What do you think?