Disclaimer: I don't own POTO, or Corpse Bride. But you get to read this any way, you lucky lot.

What the above said. Just be grateful, please. And hopefully don't get too informed, otherwise it'll all be ruined! (Dramatic sob.)

And there isn't any Sandman in this. Yes, that was the controversial literature mentioned at the end of the last chapter.

All right, so maybe it isn't literature. So hang me.

Acts of injustice done

Between the setting and the rising sun

In history lie like bones, each one.

W.H. Auden The Ascent of F.6

Why Lazarus sighs

The journey back had been terrible. For some insane reason, she had not thought she would be making this journey again. As if, by some miracle, Raoul would rescue her from the devil that carried her back in silky iron chains, who had wrapped her in folds of blood and ferried her to the underworld. But Raoul had been in no state to work miracles, and she was in no state to hope for them any longer.

Not now that he had seen her.

What must he think of me?

As soon as the gondola grated on the shoreline, Christine sprang from her seat among the cushions, without waiting passively for Erik to lift her out as he had done on the past three occasions, and raced towards the stairs that led to where she had left her clothes.

Thank the Lord, I can finally take these things off. As she ran, she began to peel off the horrid, curious gloves; she had grown to hate their feel upon her fervently. As soon as she was able, she would throw the wretched mask into the lake as well. She hated it, she hated it, she hated it all; she hated every stitch of the costume that had so appalled everyone, including Raoul.

Oh, Raoul…

"Changing so soon?" How on earth could he be behind her so quickly? She didn't indulge him by jumping, but kept her back to him as she stripped the other glove off and flung it away. Even out of the corner of her eye, she saw a black hand catch hold of the grey silk and whip it out of sight.

"Do you not like your costume, Christine? I do. It shows that beauty is not just skin deep."

"I will not dress up like a corpse just so that you can indulge in your perverted fantasies, Erik," she shot over her shoulder, as she grabbed hold of the mask and pulled it off.

"My fantasies are probably more tasteful than the ones the boy has about you."

She longed with a fierce, urgent desire to deal him a blow across the face with the mask, to smash what normal teeth he had left and to make him bleed; but she did not quite dare. Instead, she turned slowly – oh, so slowly! – to face him. How had he managed to change his mask? Gone was the sable façade of Mephistopheles; instead the bone whiteness of the half-mask had returned once again. A small smile curled the corner of his mouth.

Oh, how she hated him. How she hated him now.

"Don't you ever dare talk about him like that again." She resisted the idea to smash and shatter the mask against the platform to make her point, and instead set it down with more care than was probably needed.

"Why not? He is only a man, after all – all men have flaws."

"Except you, of course?" she retorted.

"Of course," he replied, blithely. "I am much more than a man now, after all. I have much higher sights than the pleasures of the flesh."

"Really? Then you will excuse me if I ask for the return of my ring. After all, you can get no satisfaction from wearing it around what's left of your fingers." The words came out before she could think.

There was silence between the two. When he spoke, his voice was calm and controlled, but with the slightest hint that the control could soon be lost. "And why would I do that?"

"It's Raoul's, and you know it! You did that just to taunt him, I saw you!"

"Saw what, my dearest?"

"Erik, I saw you. You let him see the ring on purpose when you raised your hand! Of course he'd recognise it – why did you do it? Do you want me to break his heart again and again?"

Oh, what can he be thinking now?

"Perhaps. But it was a foil, of course. The gauntlet thrown. As a master of accomplished torture, I indulge in it whenever I bait my enemies; even the less worthy ones."

The scorn in his voice hit her like a palpable blow, even though it was not directed at her. But she did not care; she couldn't let him get away with that. She couldn't let him insult her beloved, not after what he had done, and she had let him do.

"Why do you hate him so much, Erik?" she snarled, her nerves already rubbed raw by tyranny. "You don't even know him! What has he ever done to you, to make you hate him so?"

"Apart from the obvious?"

"Yes, apart from the obvious – whatever that is!"

His lips parted in a sneer, showing white teeth along yellow. "He is a de Chagny. All that family are pure poison."

"And how would you know?" I've had enough. Even as she spoke, she turned to flounce up the stairs to her clothes.

Between breath and breath Erik had closed the gap between them and his arms were tight around her, like bars of iron, crushing her to him. She was forced up against his chest, her body arched against his, her head craned up to his eyes by one of his hands, caught in her hair.

This would be much more bearable if he actually had a heartbeat, she thought, even as she struggled in fury. "Let go of me at once!"

"No. For once, you're going to listen to what I have to say, instead of running away. Do you remember I told you about my mother?"

She scowled, letting the ugliness in her mind loose. "Of course. How could I forget?"

"But what do you remember?"

"She loved you, despite your face. She was…schizophrenic. You were separated, and she was put in an asylum. You saw her once, years later. She died soon after. What of it?" she added challengingly; yet she hid her sudden trepidation. Why had Erik suddenly brought up this subject again, when it obviously was so painful to him?

The sneer was now the smile of a fallen angel. "What if I told you, that the ones who had her put into that self same asylum, where she suffered so much that I prayed for her death…were the de Chagny's?"

It took a moment for his word's to make sense. When they did, she could hardly speak. "It isn't true."

"You think I would lie about this, my angel? It is true. You know I tell no lie."

Her head moved without any thought, whether in acquiesce or denial she knew not.

"Well, believe what you will. We lived on land that belonged to them. What they said was law in our village. They deemed her a danger to society, her eccentricities a growing threat. They judged her, and they found her wanting. So they shut her away. They do that to anyone they don't want or can't use, you know."

His hand came from her hair, to clasp her chin so that she could not help but look up at him and be transfixed by his golden gaze, much as she longed desperately to.

"When I finally saw her again, she was half-starved, whimpering at light, hardly able to speak; cowering away from contact like a beaten child, lost in her own nightmares. She had been abused, Christine, in ways that I would not care to relate lest your delicate ears are harmed. And it was your beloved Raoul's family who put her there, who delivered her into a hell from which she could not be released."

"So you hate them, because they drove your mother to her grave?" All the rage had drained from her now, to be replaced with sorrow. She hadn't known, she hadn't known…

If it was possible to hold her tighter yet to him, then he did so. She could hardly breathe, yet all thoughts of breathing had fled; looking into his yellow eyes, she seemed to see far more than death in form, but death in soul. She felt her own mind shrink away, yet she could not move.

"Now, Christine," he hissed, drawing her closer, fatally closer, guiding her face up towards his own as he bent forward, "now I will tell you a secret that not even Nadir knows." His hand under her chin pulled her head forward gently, irresistibly, to his lips; past his lips. What could she do but obey? His lips brushed her ear, and the feel of them shivered through her.

"I killed her," came his sibilant murmur, his hand at the small of her back to hold her tightly to him, so that her rapidly quickening heartbeat shuddered through both of them. "I killed my mother. My beautiful mother. I killed her, Christine. She was the one I loved more than anything in the whole world, in all my life; and I killed her."

"No," she whispered. Her voice came from some far away, distant plain; the creak of a closing door on a mausoleum, the snapping shut of a coffin lid. "Oh no. No, Erik. No."

"I crept into the asylum at night," he went on, ignoring her voice, his eyes now looking through her, beyond her. "It was easy. A child could have done it. Getting into one of those places is far easier than getting out. I found her locked in her room – in her cell. I fed her the poison I had brought with me. I knew all about poisons by then. I watched her die before me. The wardens never knew the difference. They thought that she had died in her sleep. That fate should have been hers. But she was left to wither away in a cell, like an animal – an animal in a cage. There was nothing left in her, nothing at all. It was like releasing a dog that begged to die. Better that, than to die mortified."

His moan ripped her soul and heart in two, in one brutal sob. "She was my mother, Christine. It was all I could do. It was the only thing I could do. I loved her, and I killed her-"

Abruptly, he shoved her harshly away from him; still supported by phantom limbs she stumbled backwards, tripped, fell over her voluminous skirts and landed hard on the floor, with the breath knocked out of her and one elbow screaming at her from where it had hit the floor.

Oh, Erik…I'm so sorry…

She looked up from the ground, heart hammering, to meet Erik's eyes, now delirious with rage, his teeth, fangs, bared, as if to tear out her throat. In the midst of her mind-numbing fear, she recalled the first time she had mentioned Raoul's name, and his reaction.

Now, finally, she understood.

I'm so sorry.

"You say Raoul's heart will break, Christine? Well, mine has already been broken by his family, years ago, and my mind, and my soul too! They took everything from me, Christine. Everything. Do you understand that?"

"Erik," she forced herself to speak, but at once he cut in sourly, his voice stinging like a cut, slicing through her ears. "No, I see you don't understand. Very well, I'll make it simpler for you." He bent forward, his bony knee hitting the sand with a dull thud, his cloak falling over her, covering her legs, his face on a level with hers, his right arm circling about her waist to lift her up off the ground. She would not let herself look away, even so. To do so would be a treachery.

"I hate the de Chagny's for what they did to me. I hate them for what they did to my mother, and for what they drove me to do so that she might know the peace she so rightly deserved, and which God would not grant her. There are other reasons, which you do not need to know." He paused, and for at least three of her panting breaths he did nothing. He was so close, she could see the stray hairs on the side of his face that moved in the breeze of her exhalations. Then, he startled her by going on.

"But most of all, Christine, deep within my hatred for them, it is not them that I hate. No, it is true. I do not hate them."

He reached out his bare hand, and his fingers brushed her face. She was so cold, so devoid of feeling, she hardly paid heed to the rasp of bone. Instinctively she leant towards it, so that his palm cupped her cheek, what was left of his thumb touched her lips. She could feel where the flesh ended, and the bone began. All the time her eyes never left his, inviting him to say more.

And he did; so softly and full of self-loathing as to make her sing out her sorrow in weeping.

"I hate what they made me into."

And cut. A move along in the plot was in order, I felt, because we can't have Christine go on feeling sorry for herself all the time, because that just makes us want to use a cute little alien to suck out her moping little brain through her pink shell-like ear and replace it with one that is more inclined to do something about the situation – like either kill Erik or kiss him. Not that the former would have much effect, if you think about it.

The brain-sucking thing probably wouldn't work either, because I have yet to encounter any alien that can get a brain out through an ear all in one piece.

And I have new angst for Erik in his past! If I'm not careful, I'm going to make a Gary-Stu out of him (Heaven help us so that such a terrible Apocalypse shall not be reached!) Now perhaps you can see why he's a bit messed up. All right, more than a bit messed up.

If you think that I might be a bit overboard on the stuff about the mental hospital, remember that this is the nineteenth century – they've only just stopped allowing civilians in to watch the lunatics and laugh at them, as if they were some sort of sideshow. There's one thing to be said for the Puritans; they took good care of the mentally ill, a sentiment which was lost for the next century or so. At any rate, even at this stage in proceedings the wardens were still putting the patients in straight-jackets or chaining them to beds to keep them quiet. Admittedly these hospitals were few and far between – in the Bethlem Medical Hostpital, for example, where I did some work experience in the archives last year, they looked after their patients very well, and didn't use straight-jackets or leather mittens manacled onto the hands to prevent the patient from scratching their face at least after 1850 or so. But, since this is an AU, and I'm not sure exactly when it's taking place – the nineteenth century is basically all the same to me, defined only by the corsets and the crinolines – let us say this hospital is the sort which made Mr. Rochester prefer to lock his wife in the attic.

So, yes. Review, and perhaps I shall give you one more chapter before I really have to sign off for a while. And…perhaps…it shall be a flashback?

Oh yes, and I'll be a satisfied little half- Irish seamstress if you do?