Alright, here's the second half! Thanks for reading, and if you enjoyed the story please considering taking the time to leave a review. :)

A New Way Home

part two

When Christine awoke it was dark, the park cold and deserted. There was no sound except for the fussing of the baby, whose fidgeting had caused Christine to stir. She had only intended to close her eyes for a moment, to let the cool spring breeze caress her face and run its fingers through her golden hair, but the quiet hum of the air and the warm sun on her skin had sent her into a slumber as readily as any of her Papa's lullabies ever had.

The early spring thaw had retreated with the setting sun, and glittering frost laced the edges of the lake, sparkling like so many flecks of crushed diamond in the moonlight—shattered crystals from a broken chandelier. The grass, which had earlier been so smooth and supple against her bare toes, was now hard and cold—as were her feet themselves, and she struggled clumsily to force them back into her boots. The green blades crackled beneath her numb feet as she stumbled to her feet and settled her child in the safe cocoon of the pram; Christine felt a rush of guilt and fear as she noticed the way he shivered. "Shh, it'll be alright," she insisted, tasting blood as her dry lips split slightly at the words. She struggled to remove her own thin shawl and added it to the collection of ragged blankets that already filled the buggy.

Shivering, Christine looked around the park once more; it was completely devoid of any other soul, and even the ducks had long since made their way to wherever it was they called home. The park wasn't entirely empty, though: her eyes had been caught by a flash of white moonlight reflecting on the far side of the lake, where a single swan floated lazily across the surface. She admired the eerily fantastic sight for a moment, and then knelt to finish lacing her boots. Her head shot back up with a start as she heard several melancholy notes suddenly burst through the still night, echoing across the lake. Her eyes scanned the wide expanse of water in search of the swan, which had surely been the source of the plaintive noise, but the beautiful creature had vanished. Christine shivered again, recalling a tale she had once been told regarding the singing of swans...

She at first impulsively thought to go home, so they could warm themselves in front of the fireplace—but was forced to discard the idea as she recalled that they no longer had a home. Suddenly, for the first time in her long travail, she felt afraid: not worried, or anxious, but truly frightened. She had no idea what to do. One thing was for certain, however: she didn't want to remain in the park, with its eerie shadows and dying swans.

The shadows only continued to follow them as they left the park, creeping past in the corners of Christine's vision, matching her step-for-step as she propelled the pram quickly but aimlessly through the sleeping city. Each shade that trailed her footsteps was dark and unfamiliar, compelling her to further hasten her pace out of fear of what might lurk within the blackness, slowing only when she felt the tell-tale roughness in her throat that always preceded a coughing fit. She thought of a hundred frantic plans in those minutes, and summarily discarded each one just as quickly as it had occurred to her. A flicker of regret at rejecting the Persian man's offer of assistance wavered in her mind. Perhaps she could track down him down again; maybe he would know of some family in need of a housekeeper? But no, he had said he'd only just returned to the city after a long absence, so it was unlikely he'd have such information—and anyway, she had no idea where to even begin to look for him. She felt ashamed of her stubborn pride in refusing his help earlier. Her newly-asserted sense of self-sufficiency would do her and her child little good if they froze to death in the streets, or worse. It was small comfort to know that she had at least prevented one more person from being pulled into her tragedy.

She'd pushed the buggy another frantic several blocks before Christine finally accepted that she didn't know where they were even headed. In a way, it was oddly freeing to know that there wasn't anywhere in particular that they had to go, but Christine had never had the wanderer's spirit of her father, and longed for a safe harbour even as she unwillingly revelled in the strange liberty of their new situation—and Paris wasn't home to the abundance of warm haylofts that had sheltered her as a child. At a loss, she paused for a moment, halfway between two cross-streets, and looked down at her baby, who had awakened, though he no longer cried, having found satisfactory warmth with the addition of Christine's shawl. He looked up at her with the wide blue eyes that could have been hers or Raoul's, seeming just as curious and puzzled about their intended destination as she. Smiling, Christine reached into the buggy, brushing her hand softly along the side of his face, and over his soft blond hair. "Well," she laughed distractedly, her voice pitched in fear despite her best efforts to hide it, "where would you like to go, darling?" The baby just giggled, as happy to have his mother's attention as his namesake would once have been. She began to walk again.

She felt as though she'd been walking for hours, her breath trailing in little frozen clouds behind her—and had begun to wonder if she'd at last forgotten the once familiar way—when she finally crossed the last intervening block and found herself at the edge of the Rue Scribe. She hadn't been anywhere near the Opera House since, well... but now, she had nowhere else to go, so why not go there? Yet she didn't approach the concealed entrance, rather remaining at the corner of the street: there was no question of trying to sneak back into Erik's house—or whatever was left of it—as she had lost her key long ago. Even if she could get past the gate, there would still be the many traps and tripwires to contend with, which, though easy enough for Erik to navigate, would be nearly impossible for a woman with a baby at her breast. Anyway—and her heart clenched painfully at this thought—there was always the chance that no one had ever found the house by the lake...that the Persian had never returned to give him a proper burial...that Erik might still lay where he fell in some dark corridor, or maybe he had managed to crawl back to the house, and... Christine shook her head to rid it of the morbid spiral of imagination it had begun to descend into. She couldn't go back down there.

She began to wonder why she had thought it a good idea to go to the Opera at all—when it only increased her misery and her child's chances of catching a chill—at a time that she should be finding someplace warm for them to sleep. Already the gaps between her own fits of shivering had vanished entirely; worse, the baby's shivering had returned, despite the best efforts of her shawl. She had already wasted an entire day on dawdling; she couldn't afford to continue it into the early hours of morning as well.

Truthfully, deep within her heart she knew very well what the reason for her stalling was. She had known this day would come, and was loathe to accept it even now that it had: this was the day that she would have to sell the violin. The tears that had been steadily gathering in her eyes as she looked toward the great building overflowed their boundaries and streamed down her pale cheeks as she finally admitted it to herself. She felt horrid, unfit to even be a mother, for endangering her child out of her attachment to the instrument, but it was her only tangible connection to not only her father, but to Erik as well. Her Papa's actual violin, of course, lay alongside him in the ancient cemetery at Perros-Guirec; but this one had once sounded so very similar that it had once fooled even Christine's discerning ear. She had blindly grasped at the instrument as though it was a life-preserver when her blood-stained suitor had come to 'liberate' her from the house by the lake, refusing to leave it in the cellars, and shrieking that it was her father's when Raoul at last tried to pry her fingers from the finely shaped wood. Months ago, when she had finally been forced to sell Erik's ring—his final gift to her, and her last shred of protection from the glares of the righteous—she had consoled herself with the knowledge that she would at least still have the violin; now that she would lose it, too, she knew she would mourn it like a lost love. But it was a fine instrument—Erik wouldn't have owned it if it wasn't—and its sale would earn her enough money to stay off the streets just a little longer, that one last chance to find a job and provide properly for her son.

Still, she couldn't yet quite force her feet in the direction of the pawnbroker's shop that she was sure she could recall being nearby, not when she was so very close to the building that had once meant so much to her. She gazed up at the grand edifice, imagining that she could almost see Apollo's outstretched arms beckoning her home with a welcoming embrace. Here the pavements were impeccably-kept and clean, a well-maintained lamppost shining at every street corner, lest the fashionable patrons of the Opera should have to take more than three steps in the dark (in fact, the only place that remained hidden in the shadows was the stretch of wall which she knew held the gate, and she wondered, not for the first time, if Erik had planned it that way on purpose). The extra lights were put to good use in the narrow streets that wrapped around the Opera, most of the moonlight being obscured by the great building itself. If things had gone better, she might have pushed her baby's pram down these streets during the daylight, her arm linked with that of her handsome husband.

"This is the Opera," she whispered to the sleeping baby, her voice shaking from the violence of her shivering, hoping he would understand her words, and have beautiful dreams, as she once had, "Someday we'll go there together, and I'll sing for you."

Somewhere, a clock struck the hour, but Christine found it too difficult to keep count of the chimes. Regardless, this undeniable mark of the passage of time was finally enough to compel her numb feet forward, and slowly, as if she was afraid to break the fragile silence that followed the sounding of the bells, she rolled the baby carriage from the pavement and towards the opposite curb, in the direction she felt the shop lay. Once more she was confronted with the dilemma of manoeuvring the pram onto a steep curb, the task's difficulty increased immensely by the frigid numbness that had overwhelmed her limbs. Her fingers fumbled clumsily with the handle as she struggled to remember how she had managed the task so easily so many times before. Finally Christine managed to get two of the wheels shifted up and was working on the third, when, after having been perpetually on its last legs, the buggy finally decided to give up the ghost entirely. The stressed axle snapped, one of the rear wheels she had been battling rolling off into the gutter, the underside of the buggy grinding roughly against the edge of the curb with a sickening crunch that hit Christine like a punch to the stomach, sending her heart into her throat.

She didn't need to look—didn't want to look—to know that the violin would never be played again—and what pawnbroker would pay for a violin that cannot be played? The horrible splintering noise was punctuated by the weak keening cries of her child, terrified awake by the racket and sudden lurch. Ignoring him for the moment in her shock, Christine reached underneath the newly-lopsided baby carriage, only to have her final shred of tentative hope ripped apart as her hand came away with the splintered peg box of the once beautiful instrument, the rest of its mangled body following after, dangling from the a sole unbroken string. Christine let the tangled mess of wood and metal fall from her hand with a clatter that only increased the baby's faint wails.

With a mechanical calm, she scooped her son up from the carriage, not bothering to gather the mass of blankets along with him, not even making any attempt to shush him as he continued his plaintive whimpers. Walking out of the circle of lamplight that was a glaring accusatory spotlight on this last cataclysm in the tragedy of her life, she stumbled back along the Rue Scribe on legs she had long since lost the feeling in, running her hands vainly along the shadowed wall in search of the gate—until she discovered the patch of ill-matching brickwork, a now-sealed archway that had once held a door to a different world. She couldn't put into words the sorrow she felt when as she beheld that blank brick wall-perhaps she had hoped to make her way back to the house tonight, after all; she couldn't quite remember anymore. She wondered when the gate had been blocked off—if the masons had even investigated where the strange passage led before covering it—but it hardly mattered. There was no sign of an entrance now, and nothing except her word to say that one had ever even existed. She might have imagined it all, though she could still smell the tang of iron that the key had always left on her hand when she turned it in the lock.

The brick was rough and cold against her back as she let her body slide down the wall, pricking tiny holes and pulling at the loose threads in the thin, dingy fabric of her dress. For once, she couldn't summon the faith or strength to recite her comforting old platitude. It would never be alright, and she knew it now with a certainty, no matter how much she had tried to convince herself otherwise. Even the baby seemed to sense his mother's resignation, and had stopped crying. Closing her eyes, she sighed deeply, begging God, her father, Erik, her Mama, Raoul, her son, to forgive her for her damnable weakness.

She couldn't have said how long she sat there; it might have been minutes, or hours, or indeed, days, had the continued darkness not told her otherwise. She remembered being grateful that her shivering had finally stopped, at least.

"Christine...?" a soft whisper on the breeze; a dream. But, again: "Christine...?" She looked up with difficulty, her neck painful and stiff, searching for the source of the voice.

"Christine...?" a bit louder, a bit closer.

She finally saw it: a dark shape sheltering in the shadow of a pillar a distance farther down the Rue Scribe, its face lost in the shadow of a broad-brimmed felt hat. "Who...?" she whispered, her voice cracking, bewildered as to who it was that would recognize her in such a state—maybe the Persian man? The figure shifted slightly, and she caught a glint of reflection: the twin fires of a pair of yellow eyes glowing eerily in the darkness beneath the hat. "Erik...?" she breathed.

Though her senses mumblingly goaded her to stand, to run toward the spectre and grasp the edge of his cloak to discover if what she saw was really true, she found that her body had become paralysed, too heavy and sluggish to respond to her impulse to pursue the shade. Though she found she could still move her eyes, she kept them fixed on her shadowy companion. It couldn't possibly be...But, no, it had to be, for now he was stepping more fully into the light, tilting his hat back to bare the full expanse of his singular face: there he stood, as though he'd never been gone. "Erik!" she cried, though she was still unable to move.

"Christine... What has happened to you?" he finally said softly, calmly, moving slowly toward her and blending once more with the shadows that filled the expanse between the street-lamp and the place she crouched. Christine thought perhaps she was too stunned at his reappearance to be offended at his pitying words—or maybe it was the way that the shadow's eyes glowed with solace rather than the patronizing sorrow that she'd seen in those of the Persian.

"Many things," she said simply.

She was totally overwhelmed for a moment, as visions of the past year, and the life that had led to it, spun through her mind, making her dizzy, and she doubled over, reflexively bracing herself for the coughing fit that she was certain the sudden turmoil would trigger; but for once her cough was blessedly absent. Taking this as a hopeful sign, she took several slow, shallow, and equally painless breaths, and straightened once more to face Erik, but he had vanished. She twisted around, searching frantically for the familiar dark figure, but he was gone.

Gathering her sleeping baby more tightly to herself, she tried to push herself up, using the wall behind her for leverage, but without any success. "Erik!" she cried into the darkness, now fearing for her sanity as well as her health. Just when she had almost accepted that his appearance had been merely some cruel mirage of her mind, she felt the ghost of a touch at the top of her head, the soft caress of a hand brushing across her golden curls, as gentle as the wind had earlier. She gasped and turned her head, finding herself looking straight into the cat-like eyes of the Opera Ghost as he knelt beside her.

"Oh, Erik," she whispered, barely audibly, her voice quivering with unshed tears, "is it really you?"

"Who else?" he said, and as she stared at his bare skull-like face she knew the truth of his words. Gently, almost without touching her, he twined his long fingers around her elbow and helped her to her feet. How extraordinary, she thought, that his guiding presence made it that much easier to stand. "Where is your vicomte, Christine?" Erik said after a moment, a quiet sadness taking the place of the bitterness and hatred that had used to colour his voice whenever he spoke of Raoul. "He promised that he would take care of you." Christine closed her eyes.

"Raoul is gone," she said quietly, waiting for the customary tide of shame and regret that always rushed over her when she thought of him, of what had happened between them, but it never came; instead, a different feeling overwhelmed her: one of true forgiveness, infinitely more heartfelt and real than anything she had previously felt—but this was not Raoul's forgiveness: "And it's not my fault," she finished, tears of relief prickling at her eyes. Erik simply nodded in reply, seemingly satisfied with the answer. They began to walk. Somewhere along the way, his hand slid down her arm to grasp her hand in his own; it was much warmer than she remembered it, and the contact chased the lingering chill from her bones. Together they made their way toward the street, to the curb where the ruined remnants of the pram and violin still lay.

"Your violin..." Christine gestured toward the splinters of wood protruding from the underside of the buggy. An apology died in her throat as she realized how little it truly mattered. What need had she for it anymore, after all, now that Erik was with her once more?

Erik smiled knowingly, showing that he hadn't lost any of his skill at perceiving her thoughts. She smiled back broadly, feeling better than she had in months. She wanted to say a hundred things to him—to apologize for her voice; to beg his forgiveness for what Raoul had done; to ask where he had been all this time—but for some reason none of these things seemed important anymore. Her baby began to burble happily against her shoulder, seemingly intent on reminding his mother of his presence, and Christine shifted to better show the infant to Erik, without even a pause to worry what he might think of the presence of Raoul's child in her arms.

"He looks just like his mother," Erik said, continuing to smile as he let his tiny namesake grasp one of his thin fingers in his tiny fist. "Come," he said, turning and leading Christine and her baby once more in the direction of the brick wall that had once been a gate.

"Erik?" Christine asked. Her feet stalled as she was hit with a sudden inexplicable spasm of fear. He met her clear blue eyes with his own golden ones, and she felt immensely comforted. But still, she couldn't stop herself from giving her question voice: "Where are we going?" He seemed to consider for the briefest of moments, before smiling softly again.

"Home, Christine," Erik said, as he led the way through the gate on the Rue Scribe side of the Opera Garnier. "I've been waiting to take you home."