Little Dried Flowers

Disclaimer – I don't own any Phantoms.

Father Julian Bernard had never believed in fate before, but on that day he was no longer sure what he believed in. Or perhaps he'd never been sure in the first place. After the tragedy that had befallen the Destler family, the good but unfortunate people who had practically adopted him after his father's death, supported his studies and donated generously to each of the charities he slaved over, the soup kitchens and the foundling hospital, especially the foundling hospital. He had been so idealistic then, he had wanted to help everyone. He had wanted to help Madeleine, who had once been like a sister to him, he had even considered leaving the church and marrying her if it would have improved the situation, although he was fairly certain that it wouldn't have helped. And most of all he had wanted to help Erik.

But even a glance could show that the man he had encountered the night before was not the haunted yet fascinating child he had once known and tutored. If it wasn't for his eyes he would not have believed it was the same person, or just the one eye to be more accurate. Although he could not see it clearly from behind the mask there was a definite change to it, not the expressive grey of its counterpart but an ordinary blue that seemed dead and unmoving. Had it been damaged somehow or had he lost it completely and replaced it with a false one? The aging priest knew that it was unlikely for the past thirty years to have been pleasant ones for his former pupil if his early childhood was anything to go by. Whatever might have happened to him, well, it didn't bear thinking about. And deep down, past all of his good intentions, Father Bernard knew that he was to blame. That was why he had returned to the house on that gloomy afternoon, ignoring the masked man's threats. He had to set things right.

Instead of the sinister apparition from his past, he was met with the frightened gaze of the girl he had seen arrive with him the day before. He had only caught a glimpse of her then, and she had seemed so small and fragile next to her companion's towering height that he had assumed she was a child. Now as he looked at her properly he supposed that in many ways she was a child, as she looked no older than sixteen. "She is not mine" Erik had said, and those words took on a new meaning as the priest realised that instead of being a ward or foster child like he had assumed, the masked man might have brought her here for reasons that were anything but paternal. Was she here willingly? It seemed that way as both the gate and the back door were unlocked. But those eyes seemed so filled with sorrow and fatigue that he was no longer sure, she was so pale and so thin and so fearful.

"Forgive me for intruding, Mademoiselle." He said, breaking the tense silence. "I'm looking for Monsieur Erik Destler, is he home?" she stared at him for a moment before replying.

"He's working, I'm afraid he doesn't wish to be disturbed. But if you have a message to give him, I could pass it on."

"Oh that won't be necessary. Just tell him I was here and that I will return when he's less busy. My name is Father Bernard by the way."

"Christine." The girl replied and reached for the hand he had offered and shook it. "Would you care to stay for some tea, father?"

His curiosity prevented him from refusing her invitation, and the priest took a seat at the kitchen table and glanced at the two books she had left there while she filled the kettle. One was a novella and the other looked like some sort of diary, perhaps her own, which he was too polite to open.

"I suppose Erik invited you here to discuss his plans for the wedding." The girl said nervously, placing the tea set in front of him. So that was Erik's intention, and he had obviously not told her about him, not that he had expected that he would.

"He never mentioned a wedding. And he didn't invite me." He didn't miss the relieved expression that passed across her face. "I used to know him; it feels like an age ago now. And when I heard the rumours about a masked man buying this house, well I thought a visit was long overdue." Her eyes widened "And what about you? How did you come to know him?"

"I was still a child when I met him. My father had just passed away and he became...a guardian of sorts." She would not look him in the eye when she spoke and Julian couldn't help but suspect that she wasn't telling the whole truth.

"A guardian who is now your fiancé." Her gaze remained focused on the pattern of her cup, which was made of etched glass instead of china, and held in a silver stand with a handle.

"I thought that might have been his intention, but now I'm not so certain." She replied.

"Mademoiselle, if you are in any kind of trouble, I swear I will help in any way I can." The old man whispered hastily. "If he has done anything to hurt you..."

"Father, I assure you he has done nothing of the sort." Christine replied, her eyes widening at what he was implying. "It's not that I don't appreciate your concern but I am in no danger. Erik has been very kind to me, and in the past he helped me when no one else could."

"Helped you? In what way?" he asked, burning with curiosity, but the girl hesitated.

"I told you that he took care of me after my father died. But it was so much more than that. I had cared for him for over three years, watching him waste away as the sickness slowly destroyed any trace of him. And when he couldn't go on any more, I felt as though I had died too. My body was going through the motions of living, but inside there was only nothingness."

Father Bernard looked at the strange child with surprise; he had truly not expected her to reveal something so personal to her. Granted his position in the village meant that a lot of people came to him for advice, but he had known most of them for over thirty years now, performing their wedding ceremonies and baptizing their children, he had been there for each landmark of their lives. This girl was a stranger, travelling with a terribly scarred man, both on the inside and out. But if she was telling the truth and Erik truly had helped her through such a trauma then perhaps there was still hope that his child prodigy had not been lost to the cruelties of the world.

"Tell me, does he still sing? he asked.

"I was eighteen when I met Christine's father Gustave Daae. By that time I was Prima Ballerina at the opera house and he came in to audition with the man who would eventually become my husband. He was Swedish but had somehow acquired a rich sponsor to support his studies at the conservatoire in Paris. They were both very talented and were immediately hired for the positions of first and second violin. When my husband began courting me he introduced us properly and the three of us became inseparable. That was truly one of the happiest times in my life; the disfigured boy from the carnival was all but a memory and it truly felt as though the world was at our feet. We were young, talented and mixing with some of the most important people in the music world. It was as though nothing could stop us.

However it all came to an end one summer, Gustave received word that his parents had both died during a typhoid outbreak and decided to return to Uppsala to arrange their funeral and settle their affairs. My husband and I decided to rush our wedding plans a little so he could be there for the ceremony. Not that he was the biggest supporter of religious institutions, mind, but he stood by us as the best man and made some rather boisterous speeches.

As the years passed we kept a correspondence. He had decided to stay in Sweden and for a while he made a living as a private music teacher. That was how he met his wife. She was a pupil of his, from a fairly well to do family, and before long they ran away together much to the dismay of her parents. They lived together in a kind of common law marriage for a year or so, but they made it official after Christine was born. I believe that was more at his in-laws insistence. They were deeply religious and Gustave hated organised religion. He thought that people should be free to do or believe in whatever they wanted as long as they didn't hurt anyone. And while I suppose he did believe in God in his own way, he also believed in goblins and giants.

Well some years later, both my husband and his wife died no more than a few months apart. He arranged to return to Paris, as turned out his in laws blamed him for their daughter's death as she died giving birth to their second child. And they also wanted Christine, claiming that his profession and lifestyle made him unfit to raise a child. A completely ridiculous claim, because he loved that child more than anything else in the world."

The ballet mistress took a final sip of her drink and looked up at the police officer.

"After he returned to Paris with his daughter, we began an affair of sorts. It seemed logical enough at the time. We had known each other for a long time, we both had daughters who were about the same age and we were both grieving, feeling the need to fill that hole that the sadness left behind. It worked for a little while, but there were always too many memories for it to feel entirely right. And then his health began to decline and things took a turn for the worse.

One of the more notable things about consumption is that it takes a long time to finally kill you. So during that time we were able to put his affairs in order. I agreed to take care of Christine and ensured her a place in the ballet school. They seemed to cope with it incredibly well, and Christine was always the dutiful nurse. They spent many months by the sea, hoping that he would improve with the change of air, but it only helped for a while. He relapsed shortly after they returned. The Gustave asked me something very strange. He asked me if it was all right to do something bad when you knew it would help someone you love. My thoughts immediately went back to that boy I rescued, I hadn't thought about him in years but suddenly the memory was right there as if it had happened only yesterday, almost like a premonition. He then went on to ask me to...end his life, if the pain became too much. I was horrified at the suggestion and we argued, for what seemed like the whole night. I was shocked that he would even contemplate such a thing, so of course I refused.

A few weeks later he was dead, and the daughter he left behind was so devastated that, well it doesn't even bare thinking about."

Mifroid looked up from his notes and peered at her over his reading spectacles.

"Madame, are you trying to tell me that this man would ask such a thing of his own child?"

"I don't know, Monsieur. Truth be told, I didn't want to know. But her grief was so consuming, so complete, that I couldn't help but wonder. I'm sure anyone who's endured the death of a loved one must feel like the world is ending, but for Christine, it was like her soul had been taken out. Like only her body was alive. And then He came."

"The Phantom, or the man who you believe was the boy you rescued."

"Like I said, monsieur, he never let me see him. But I heard his voice, and there was no mistaking it. It had broken certainly, but there was still that strange, enchanting quality that had sparked off all those ghost stories so many years ago. Well you heard it for yourself."

"I certainly did. I've never claimed to know much about music, Madame, but that voice was something truly different."

"He never told me his name, or where he'd been all those years. He offered me an impressive sum of money to take care of his mail. Not only his messages to the opera house staff but his other correspondence which I would pick up from a post office box and leave in a secret compartment in box five. And don't look so excited, monsieur. He never used his real name, only the pseudonym O.G. And believe me I tried to get in touch with his accountant but to no avail."

"If he was using a false name then he probably has several other false identities. So somehow I doubt tracking down his bank account will offer us much help. If he has a brain at, which he does, then he will have closed the account before the incident even took place."

"What do you mean?"

"Consider this, Madame. This man supposedly lived below the opera house for a number of years, yet the only belongings we found down there were a discarded costume, a mannequin in effigy of Mlle Daae, and several full length mirrors which hid the openings to more passageways. Now the original theory they were throwing around was that his lair was further away from the lake and located somewhere within the labyrinth of tunnels. But what if the cavern by the lake was his home? Who would live in an empty cavern? Well what if it wasn't empty until a short while ago. What if he'd been planning this disappearance for longer than we supposed and taken his things to a new location. If we find the location, we will surely find him and Mlle Daae."

"But how, Monsieur?"

"That is something we still need to find the answer to."

He had anticipated blood, and that anticipation was still running through his veins. It was all a little too much to handle. She must have sensed what he was planning, that was the only explanation. So she had come with him quietly like a good little martyr. He had thought that she would hurt him again by going along with the boy's plan, unmasking him to the world, exposing his weakness. The thought brought back uncomfortable memories. But she hadn't, and she didn't want him killed or so she had said. He couldn't help but feel hopeful at that, even though hope was foolish.

She had reached out to him and once more he had lashed out like a wounded animal. Perhaps not as violently as before, when his mask was in place he could at least rein in his anger a little and control himself. But he wasn't below the cellars anymore; she was only a room away, only a wall separated them as they slept. It was almost unbearable, knowing she was so close. He had tried to control himself, control his cravings. He had stayed clean for her before, for nearly five years in fact, and he would damn well do it again. But how could he do so when she was bound to notice something was wrong. He had planned on stopping the day before but that damned priest had appeared out of nowhere and thrown him off guard and before he knew it he had thrown the man out and retreated upstairs with a spike in his vein. How very pathetic. He should not have let things get this far, but he had been so despondent, so convinced that he had lost her forever had gone back to his old, sinful habits. He had used any means to escape the pain he felt and it had lead to some disastrous decisions. The killings, the violence, the madness. How could she possibly love him when he was keeping her here with unspoken threats? How could she feel anything other than fear?

He had to go to her, if she hadn't already run away. Tell her everything and face the music, then take her back to the boy. Then he would take everything in the drawer of the music box, from the little dried flowers to the morphine solution, and then he would stagger into the miles of open sand and wait for the sea to return and wash over him, for he truly did not deserve to live after what he'd done.

But when he spied her from the hallway when he finally emerged from his hiding place and skulked downstairs, he knew that he would not be able to do the honourable thing. She was at the table reading surrounded by a spotless kitchen with the smell of cooking permeating the air. She hadn't left him. She hadn't run away. That strange warm feeling returned but he quickly ignored it. She hadn't left because she was too afraid to leave, and she hadn't made dinner out of kindness but because he had neglected her all day. Then his eyes fell on what she was reading and felt that it was imperative that he make his presence known.

The rest of the conversation with Father Bernard had been unusually pleasant. She had asked him how he had come to know her strange companion, but the older man would only tell her that he was a friend of the family and that it wasn't his place to say anything more. When they had finished their tea he had told her that he would return the day after and the perhaps the three of them could have dinner together. She hadn't felt proud of herself, omitting the truth and from a priest no less. But it probably wasn't a good idea to tell the man that Erik had been haunting an opera house for the past five years and in the police's eyes, had abducted her. She washed up the tea set, and to her delight she found that the sink had warm running water, which made the task a lot more pleasant for while the range had heated the kitchen rather nicely, there was still a slight wintery chill from outside.

It was nearing six in the evening, and since there was no movement from upstairs she decided to start dinner herself finding herself quite hungry for what felt like the first time in months. It was only fair, since he had made dinner the night before and brought her breakfast in bed. It was strange how he had picked up on her loss of weight almost immediately when no one else had even noticed. Perhaps it was because they hadn't seen each other in so long; the change would have appeared more drastic. And perhaps Raoul thought that all ladies pushed their food around on their plate without eating it, the ones she had met were certainly like that. Now that she thought about it, Erik seemed a little thin as well, or perhaps haggard was a better word. He was still tall and imposing like she remembered, but there was something different, something weary about him that she didn't like. It reminded her of how her father had looked when he had begun to get worse. Was he ill as well?

Once the soup was simmering away on the hob she turned back to the notebook she had been distracted from. It was filled from cover to cover with notes and drawings. It wasn't a diary exactly, it gave no dates or details about what he had been doing personally, but they seemed to cover a journey from the Russian empire to Manchuria then back westwards again to Northern India, if what she remembered from her geography lessons was correct. She would have to find an atlas or a globe somewhere to be entirely sure and even then some of the place names were unlike any she'd ever heard before. Unsurprisingly, the main subject the notes covered was music. He must have meticulously studied every local custom and folksong for there were literally pages and pages of notes and diagrams and sheet music along with descriptions of the rhythm patterns, what instruments were used, what they were made of and the singing techniques they used.

She was so thoroughly engrossed in the text that she did not notice him enter the kitchen at first. His shadow darkened her page and startled her.

"I see you've found my field notes." He said bluntly.

"Field notes? I'm sorry, was I not supposed to read them?"

"On the contrary I was planning on using them for our lessons before..." he paused and she felt the guilt eat away at her once again. He had been right when he had said she still had much to learn, and she had just abandoned him. But if music had brought them together then perhaps it could be the force that reconciled them.

"I was wondering perhaps if you would continue teaching me." He asked tentatively "That is if you want to."

"I'd be happy to, if you're sure." If she had looked away in the brief second then she would have missed the slight hint of a smile that played across his face. She decided she liked it; it made him look less tired.

"Of course I'm sure. Just think of it, creative freedom, no constraints for time." The thought made her a lot more excited than she had been expecting and she realised it had been months since she had received his guidance.

"But you would not be performing in public. Does that bother you?" he asked. Was that guilt she saw in his eyes?

"I know this might sound ungrateful, but I'm actually quite relieved." She replied "I felt that I had to be successful, for father, it was what he always wanted for me. And for you as well, after all you had taught me so much it seemed a shame to let all that training go to waste. I love music and I love to sing, but..."

"You didn't like the attention it brought you."

"No."

"I didn't like it either." He agreed after a tense pause.

"Pardon?"

"What I mean to say is, I don't like the thought of others hearing you sing." He repeated "I thought you wanted to perform, so I encouraged you. But I'm greedy and selfish and I knew that if I had my way I would keep your voice all to myself."

The intensity of his words frightened her. He had said something similar the first time she'd seen him face to masked face, something about her serving his music. Could she truly assist such genius, or would she crumble under the pressure. No her father had been a genius, Erik was something else entirely. And even with her upbringing, where she had practically learned to sight read before her father had taught her the alphabet, she felt completely out of her depth.

"I'm sorry, I shouldn't have said that." He said, not meeting her gaze and she decided to avoid the subject.

"Perhaps we should have dinner, and then you can tell me about Asia."

A/N – Hi everyone, sorry it's taken me so long to update. And sorry that its so short. I'll try and be quicker with the next chapter (try being the key word here). I've bumped this story up to an M rating to be on the safe side with the drug references. It's not that graphic but it might get that way in future chapters. Yes I really like studying 19th century drugs, it's a very weird area of interest but yeah, I just find it interesting. Anyway I hope you enjoyed the chapter and as always reviews are exchanged for inappropriate amounts of love.

Love Sho x