A/N: Thanks for your reviews! I've finally posted the next chapter; in the last few days I had so many ideas crowding my head, it took awhile before I could arrange them into some presentable format. You get a deeper look into Madeleine and Erik's relationship here, as well as a snapshot of Erik's personality. By the way, don't forget to pay attention to the dates and locations at the start of the chapter; I'll be skipping around, so don't get confused!
"...detached babies, on the other hand, have parents who cannot tolerate physical contact and who punish the child's bids for attention and affection...
"Detached babies learn to stand on their own feet at an early age; they may even become 'compulsively self-relaint'. They are intolerant of closeness and those relationships that they do make are impaired by distrust. When such relationships come to an end their significance is often denied and grief may be delayed or complicated by anger and guilt. The bereaved person tends to withdraw from social relationships on the grounds that it is safer not to fall in love."
-Psychological Trauma: A Developmental Approach by Dora Black
Hmmm...does that description seem to fit a certain masked man we all know and love?
Disclaimer: I do not own anything original to Phantom of the Opera. My humble possessions merely consist of the book, film, soundtrack, and Susan Kay's Phantom.
II. Awakenings
In which a phoenix rises from the ashes
1328 - —ville, near Rouen, France
Sometimes Madeleine wondered why she did not just smother the thing and end her suffering.
She could feel the heat of his intense gaze as she struggled to wash the laundry with some semblance of composure. Surely, by now, she should be accustomed to those cat-like eyes that watched her every move. If she turned around to look, she would only meet two dark abysses that would glow at night solely for her, illuminated by the flames of Purgatory…Don't look…
Her body whirled around on its own accord before her mind could repeat the command. As expected, a black void met her gaze behind the eyeholes of a makeshift mask made of coarse linen. Confronting those eyes and picturing the face behind the mask was enough to make Madeleine's voice tremor as she said, "Boy…"
She had not bothered to baptize him; it had seemed sacrilegious to give a child of the Devil a Christian name. "Boy," she tried again, repeating the appellation with a little more firmness, "why don't you go outside to play while your maman does the laundry, all right?" She did not say, "play with the other children." Since he was able to utter intelligible phrases, the boy had learned that he could not associate with anyone besides his mother. Not that he actually associated with her anyway. Most of the time, it seemed she wanted to forget his existence entirely.
The truth of the matter, my dear Reader: Madeleine was absolutely terrified of her son.
The small head tilted, black orbs regarding her with unusual intelligence. Mild curiosity replaced intensity in those pondering eyes. The boy was seldom allowed to leave the house, especially on a bright, sunny day such as this one. People are out, Madeleine had once explained, and they might see you. The distressed mother wrung the dress she had been laundering for the seventh time—a purely superfluous motion, as the garment, now looking rather worse for wear, had been rendered dry by the third twist. When the boy finally left the cottage, Madeleine released a sigh of relief.
It was not merely his disfigured physique that inspired such terror. True, his face was the embodiment of sin itself, with eyes as the windows to hell, and his thinness made the strength of that tall frame seem all the more unnatural.
In addition, however, there was a brilliant mind contained in that shriveled skull of his—a mind that frightened her with its potential. Numerous little contraptions that he had constructed with his bare hands littered the dirt floor beside his straw bed, including a crude little whistle he had whittled from wood. Once, Madeleine had seen her son examining one of the broken garden tools in the common room. The next day, she spotted the tool lying on the ground, as good as new. But his genius was not the only abnormality. Despite his apparent lankiness—having never fully recovered from malnutrition—the boy moved with an otherworldly grace as if he were constantly dancing to music inaudible to mortal listeners. His movements lured the eye as irresistibly as his voice drew the ear.
O! that voice! What a heavenly sound that poured from those withered lips!
Such ugliness, genius, and beauty united to torment me for the rest of my days, thought Madeleine miserably. As days, months, years passed by without any bond forming between mother and son, Madeleine heard the boy's angelic voice grow colder, more emotionless. Soon, every sound he made was like a beautiful, icy dagger that dug into her heart, until the pain became unbearable. The boy was instructed to remain silent at all times, unless a verbal answer was absolutely necessary. After muting his voice, she likewise cleared away all his inventions and avoided his penetrating look as much as possible. She did not think she would last long under that scrutiny, that stripping of her protective layers as he uncovered her every secret.
Why this suppression of his mind and spirit? Her consciousness had no reply. Sometimes, she would try to attribute it to religion with the excuse, "It is unchristian to allow such evil to flourish." Then, however, the traitorous part of her mind would retort that an ethereal voice, grace, and mind could not be labeled as evil. Her inner voice was promptly silenced, just like her son's.
Madeleine's subconscious knew the answer. It knew that she was wrestling with her sense of right and wrong. It knew that she was trying to eliminate any reason she might have to keep the boy alive.
--
A little shadow made its way to a thicket not far from the cottage from which it had exited. The three-year-old boy crept quietly through the undergrowth. Silence was something he had mastered to appease the woman he was supposed to call Maman. For some reason, that woman could not stand any sound he made; she grew visibly upset and quickly shushed him if he so much as opened his mouth.
He reached a clearing, immediately padding over to a large tree with huge roots protruding from the ground. Nestling into the shrubbery that grew between two roots, the boy closed his eyes in near contentment. Whenever he was permitted to go outside, he almost always came here, where he could feel something akin to warmth and safety…
Frowning, the child tried to recall where he had first experienced those familiar sensations. The two tree roots surrounded him on both sides like cradling arms. Well, certainly the woman called Maman could not have brought on such feelings. She could hardly bear to touch him, always keeping at a distance and recoiling on contact as if she had been scalded. No, Maman never would have wrapped her skinny limbs around him like he had seen other mothers do in the village.
Not that the boy minded, of course. Roots were probably much more comfortable than her arms anyway.
--
A few months later, Madeleine wanted to laugh at herself for lingering so much on thoughts of her son's death. Fate always had the upper hand, and this time it used that cruel hand to turn the tables against the mother's favor.
Madeleine Destler was dying.
She knew something was wrong when she found she could no longer pick up the shovel to tend to her vegetable garden. During a visit to the only doctor in —ville, she learned that her health had been steadily deteriorating since the end of the famine. "You haven't been taking care of yourself," admonished the good doctor. "Your body was suffering from malnutrition, and yet after the famine you didn't try to restore your health. Start getting more rest and increasing your food intake."
On the contrary, Madeleine did not try to improve her condition. She knew she had thinned over the years, but she did nothing to stop it, and continued eating less and less. Those who saw her (though indeed, almost no one did these days) would have commented that she seemed to have lost the will to live. In fact, with the death of her husband, the famine, and the hardships of raising her child, her body was unable to cope with the stress. Before long, she was permanently bedridden, forcing her son to provide her daily medication, meals, and drink. Even those proceedings ceased when she lost the strength to ingest anything.
Her son was present at her deathbed, she being too weak to wave him away. The boy openly stared at her with an odd expression in his eyes. It was not a look of fear, grief, loathing, or even anger. Instead, it was one of morbid fascination as he watched the life fade from her hazel eyes, her thin chest rise and fall one final time, the rose fade from her cheeks. The picture dimly reminded him of the rosy dawn lighting up the cloudy morning sky, except in reverse.
It was the most beautiful phenomenon he had ever seen.
--
Since —ville was only a small peasant village, its funerals were never very grand. Should you ask what part of the service made the greatest impression on the participants, they, being pious Christians, would probably say that the sermon was particularly moving.
Ah, yes, the sermon. It was delivered in the fashion of most funeral sermons, its lessons stale and trite. The priest lectured that grief for the deceased was natural if expressed in moderation. One should mourn in private but wear a brave expression in public.
Had anyone at the funeral noticed Madeleine's young son hiding in the dark shadow of a tree by the churchyard, perhaps they would have praised his exceptionally "brave expression."
Or, more likely, they would have commented on his lack of expression altogether.
The boy's dark eyes were cold, freezing any unlikely tears before they could course down his sunken cheeks. The dirty cloth that covered his face further masked any emotion he might have felt. What's that, dear Reader? What if you had asked him what was most memorable about the service?
Well, you may be certain that he remembered nothing about the monotonous sermon, nor how they washed and dressed his Maman's dead body, nor how they thrice shoveled dirt over the grave, as was the custom. All his awareness left him in the beginning of the ceremony, during the mass.
He had hovered by the massive church doors out of habit; Maman had once told him that a creature like him did not belong in a holy edifice. But his location had not hindered his hearing.
Dies iræ! dies illa
Solvet sæclum in favilla
Teste David cum Sibylla!
When the boy heard the multitude of voices sing the requiem, accompanied by the sublime notes of a majestic pipe organ, he felt his soul rise in ecstasy.
Day of wrath! O day of mourning!
See fulfilled the prophet's warning
Heaven and earth in ashes burning!
The silence that had weighed down his spirit all these years was shattered.
On the same day that Madeleine Destler took her last breath, her son discovered what it meant to feel alive.