Sainbainu! Yes, I am finally back from Mongolia! My word, but Mongolia is such a beautiful place; we all had such a good time, even though on the horse riding part of the trip some of us got chafed in places I'd rather not talk about. Ahem. At least no one fell off their horse, or got sick from drinking the water (even though quite a few people got sick as dogs on vodka, which I personally think served them right, especially when they had to clean out the tents that they were sick in the night before by hand) or caught bubonic plague from a marmot. That would just have been humiliating.

So, we are under the earth once again. Christine and Erik are still where we left them i.e. snuggling each other. Oh, the possibilities.

'She is a sensible little thing, and she never wants anything it isn't safe to give her,' he said.

Then he went with Sara into her little sitting-room, and they bade each other good-bye. Sara sat on his knee and held the lapels of his coat in her small hands, and looked long and hard at his face.

'Are you learning me by heart, little Sara?' he said, stroking her hair.

'No,' she answered, 'I know you by heart. You are inside my heart.' And they put their arms around each other, and kissed as if they would never let each other go.

A Little Princess, by Frances Hodgson Burnett.

By heart

Christine's little heart beat was fluttering like that of a bird. Given what he thought of her at the moment, he would not be surprised if snow white wings had unfolded from her shoulders, and closed about him. Certainly he was holding an angel, a creature from heaven, tight in his embrace…

And she suffers me to hold her.

If it were possible for him to adore Christine even more, as he looked into her large brown eyes, on a level with his own, startled but not afraid, it was now.

It was glorious. He felt almost as if he were alive again.

He pulled her even closer – gently, oh so gently, he did not wish fear to come into those mesmerising eyes - until the back of her neck was cushioned on the pillows, and he rested at her side, on his side, looking down onto her face as she gazed wide-eyed up at him, his arm still around her waist. It was how he had always dreamed of such a coupling; not embracing his bride as he had his mother, but in a far different way from the night when he had not been a corpse, but had held a dead body in his arms.

And now it was the other way around.

"How do you feel?" she asked, tentatively but clearly unaware of the thoughts that were going on behind his masks of both porcelain and flesh.

"Far better than I did before," came his honest reply. He could not remember feeling as happy as this for a long, long time. All the time Christine had been with him, it could not compare to this…simply holding her in his arms, not restraining her from escape or carrying her unconscious form, but feeling her lie in his embrace with her knowledge and unspoken consent.

"Oh. I…I am glad." His angel ploughed on, after the adorable hesitation that showed so plainly on her face. "What were you thinking about? It must have been terrible, for you to behave in such a way."

The pain in his still heart had been healed by the warmth of her in his arms, and so he hardly cringed internally as he spoke the truth. "My mother. I was relieving in my mind the last time I saw her. How she died in my arms."

She darted a nervous glance around her, no doubt noticing the similarities between the various scenarios, before remembering herself and letting her sympathy show. "I am sorry. I shouldn't have asked-"

"It does not matter." He didn't want her distressed, not now, when they were so comfortable. He let his fingers spread out slowly over her sweet flesh, feeling the warmth of her back through the cloth of her dress.

"Erik?" Her voice halted the progression of his hand at once. Was she annoyed? But no, there was no irritation in her voice, only that potentially fatal curiosity that he had come to know so well by now.

"Yes?" He resigned himself to whatever she would ask. Nothing was too great.

"What happened to you after your mother was taken away?"

Except perhaps that.

"Christine, my life is not exactly the most savoury of topics-"

"I don't care." Christine's hand came to rest, quite by accident it seemed, against his waistcoat, but it was enough to send a rush of heat and pleasure through him. "Erik, I want to know."

Tell her, part of his mind prompted. Let her be satisfied, let her glut her curiosity.

Tell her? Tell her what he had done, what he had been?

Her reaction can be no worse than to what you are now.

He slipped his own large hand around hers, as he sighed. "Very well. But be warned; it is possible you will think even less of me after this than you do now."

His beloved made no reply, but he was almost too captivated by the crease of her forehead as she frowned. But already his disgust at that name was coming back, making the saliva rise at the back of his mouth.

"After…they took my mother away, theythought that they could buy me off. They thought to take the blood from my mouth by filling it with sickly sweetness instead. It just made it all the more bitter."

"What did they do?"

"Everyone in the village expected that I would be turned out of our house to starve in the streets. They were probablylooking forward to watching me do it. But instead, I was aided by an anonymous patron. I was sent to school in Paris, and then when I was old enough to the School of Fine Arts itself. They gave me an education fit for a prince, I'll give them that. I was always talented, even when I was a peasant in the village, but my skills were honed and polished to perfection. Apparently I was one of the best students the school ever had; many of them said I was the best. When I left, I finally found out who my mysterious benefactors were, I found out who it was that had saved me from starvation, had given me another chance for life – if you could call it that."

The pain made him want to choke, as he looked down at her. "Can you imagine it, Christine? Can you imagine knowing that the people, the family, whom you have hated for so long, your loathing festering inside you, never finding an opportunity to be released; the ones who took everything in your world from you…are also the ones to whom you now owe everything anew? Can you imagine it, my angel?"

Her head shook, her curls falling further over his arm. "I can't," she murmured, and he was bourn on the sorrow in her voice like a feather on the breeze. "I truly can't. I hope that I will never know."

"I hope so as well…well, they told me the truth, about who had helped me to survive, who had given me my precious teaching. I was furious beyond measure, but it didn't show, I didn't dare let it. I knew that they were the only hope I had of seeing my mother again, if she wasn't already dead, and if I angered them there was no hope at all. So I behaved. I was gratefulness itself. I thanked them and praised them so much it made me sick to my stomach." His mind burned at the thought of the humiliation he endured."I thought that they would never accept it, that they would be suspicious; but they lapped it all up like stupid pampered cats licking up milk. They never seemed to think that I would hate them for taking her from me. They were surprised when they learned that I wanted to see her – as if I should have forgotten her! But, nevertheless, they took me to see her."

There was silence upon the bed, until he was tired of it and broke it. "You know what happened next."

He felt her nod, even though he wasn't watching her face, for fear it would remind him of it, again.

"I think…after that, I went a little mad, for a time. Certainly I ran away, from France, from Europe…and I ended up in Persia."

"Persia? What on earth were you doing there?"

"Supposedly plying my trade as an architect; and at first that was enough for the Shah-in-Shah, the sultan of those parts. But then I made the mistake of helping him to realise that he could use my talents to indulge in his favourite pastimes."

"What do you mean?"

A wide eyed, silently screaming woman, with blood running down from her temples-

A man's face, fixed in an expression of pure terror, his eyes seeming to look beyond him-

A little girl, surely no older than five, her eyes squeezed tightly shut; a trickle of blood running down from her nose-

Faces, long since done to death, calling out to him from the river, as they had always done; as they would always do, even when in his first transport of joy he had brought Christine to his home, and she had been terrified by their shadows. How would she react now?

"Killings, Christine," and he felt her stiffen in his arms, though thankfully she did not pull away. "Both the Shah and his little sultana had a perverse pleasure for watching people die in…" His teeth ground out the word. "…amusing ways. Prisoners pulled up from the dungeons, vagrants, sometimes orphans that nobody wanted…the orphans were the worst, little children who'd done nothing, nothing! They loved to watch them die. Sometimes I thought it was the only thing which made them aroused enough to couple."

"And you…" came the soft words, that cut into his fevered mind like soft scissors.

"I aided them in their desire." May I be forgiven by whatever power is left in this world. "I did my best to make the deaths as painless, as quick as I could. That was how I came to develop the Punjab lasso to my hand. It is often used in the Far East; weighted, so that when it slips around the neck and pulls tight, the neck breaks very quickly." He snapped his fingers, more for effect than anything else. Childish, really. "I thought, or rather hoped, that would soon be the end of it, that they would tire of such executions, set me to designing the palace the Shah wanted once again. But they brought out more targets for me! For practice, they said!" His arm tightened around Christine's waist, and might have further had she not gasped, making him berate himself for his clumsiness. "And when…when I tried to get out of it, I offered to show the little sultana how to use the lasso, and she agreed, and I heard later on she used it to kill at least a dozen of her ladies in waiting, maybe more! I did that, Christine. All of those people; they died because of me, and quite often at my hands."

Not even the feel of both her hands upon his chest, sending more warmth through him, could stop him now. This was a plea for help, which had been squashed for eons. "But even then it wasn't over! The Shah latched onto the idea of a chamber of mirrors that I'd designed for his wretched palace, and he made me modify it into a torture chamber. Despite all I could do, I had to watch as wretch after poor wretch perished in there, either from the heat that came from the walls or from the noose that the Shah's sadistic little wench so very thoughtfully hung from the ceiling. All my talent, all my skill, and all those two wanted was to watch me snapping people's necks or cooking them alive, or driving them to take their own lives. They were monsters. I hated them!"

"Then why didn't you leave?" his angel asked, intruding into his rant. He did his best to calm himself, as he thought of how to phrase his answer.

"I longed to. But where could I go, with what I was, what I had become? I had no home to speak of. I had always been set apart by this," and here his right hand came up to touch the chill of the mask, and gesture to what lay beneath it, "and how I had been treated because of it when I was a child, but now I lived with the knowledge that I was a murderer several times over as well. And the first death I had caused made me as much a monster as those two in the first place. For a long time, I slid into apathy. It seemed there was no way out."

"But you escaped," Christine persisted.

"I did, eventually." Feelings of pride began to glow in him again, though he was careful not to look at her face. "Something snapped inside me. I destroyed everything I'd made in that dreadful country before I took my leave; I smashed that accursed chamber, and I set fire to the palace I'd designed." Only now did he look at her face, and quickly went on, "There was no one in it. It was only half finished. But if the Shah and the Sultana had been inside, I confess it would not have weighed too heavily upon my conscience."

There was silence again, before her beloved voice asked once more, "And what happened then?"

"I forget." The pointed briefness in his voice was too harsh, and so with some effort a smile rose to his lips. "Why all these questions, my angel? Does it please you to know that I truly am a monster? That the hands that hold you are those of a foul killer?"

Despite the bitterness of the words, the sadness that welled within him once more escaped without control. Why did I speak? Now she will hate me even more.

Fool.

But she looked up, not away from him, and he was once more enthralled by her chocolate gaze as she watched him with all seriousness.

"I look at your hands," she said softly, "and I see not the hands of a murderer. I see the hands of an artist. A genius. A man wronged by the world, by life. I see hands that sought not to kill, but only to release others from the suffering that wicked people condemned them to. You are not a monster, Erik, no matter what you may say or think about yourself. A monster would not show such grief at what he had done."

He had thought his love for her could no longer be exceeded. But he had been so, so wrong.

"Now that you have reminded me, have I thanked you at all for recalling me from the catatonic state I was in?"

At once her lovely eyes were no longer serious but wide with surprise. "What? What do you mean?" Her hands flexed unconsciously, the feeling of her fingers moving against him was delightful beyond measure.

"I was taught as a child that it is very rude not to give thanks for a service rendered." He leant forward, over, and as he did so he was not sure whether her little hands attempted to push him away or to pull him closer. Christine's eyes were fever bright, and her sweet lips were so close-

"Erik!"

He froze, several very bad words circulating through his head, drowning out Nadir's disembodied voice. He stared down at Christine, his face only inches from hers, and she stared up at him, her hands entwined in his waistcoat, both of them motionless, like two bizarre statues.

"Erik!" Nadir sounded rather desperate now.

Of all the times…

He pulled away from her, too quickly, pulling his left arm out of its socket; only very swift action on his part saved Christine from being left lying on a dismembered body part.

Nadir, he thought savagely, as he stamped out of the bedroom, not daring to look back at his angel, holding his arm at the shoulder and manipulating it back into place, this had better be worthwhile.

He reached the nearest mirror, and gave its surface a quick flick with his hand. "Nadir? I am here. Speak."

Nadir's face at once swam into sight. "Erik? Why didn't you answer at once?"

"I had better things to do. Make this quick, Daroga."

"Erik, I want you to come here. Now."

The abruptness of Nadir's command made him blink. What?...

"What are you waffling on about, Nadir?"

"I want you," Nadir repeated, blandly, his dark face irritatingly calm, "to come here. To the Necropolis. There is something I have to tell you."

"Could this not wait-"

"No." Nadir's voice was unnaturally cold, even for the irritating manner he had taken on in the last while. "It can't. I shall be waiting, Erik." His face faded before he had a chance to say anymore.

He stared at the mirror, half in a mind to summon up Nadir again in his home and demand an explanation, before dismissing it with a sigh. Nadir could be such a mysterious little fart when he wanted to be.

"Will you go?"

He turned to see Christine standing at the top of the stairs, her curls only mildly ruffled, her head on one side and watching him with unblinking eyes. Dammit. Why did she have to be watching?

"It doesn't seem as if I have much choice, do I?" he retorted, looking to somewhere other than her gaze and rubbing his shoulder. Replacing his arm had felt unnaturally uncomfortable, and still did so.

"Then may I come with you?"

"Why?"

"Do I need a reason? I wish to see Ayesha again. Is that reason enough for you?"

Unexplainably, Christine was more appealing than ever when she was annoyed, at least to him. This weakness he had for he was inconvenient at times.

Only at times, though.

Nadir drew back from the mirror in his library.

There. Soon it will begin and end.

He hated himself for doing this, but what choice did he have? This must be done.

Forgive me. I did not mean to betray you. But it was the only thing that could be done.

A little more from Susan Kay and Leroux canon combined, because after all, who doesn't love hearing about all the things they get up to in Persia? Blood and guts and stuff galore. Susan Kay is a GENIUS.

Oh yeah, and Leroux's good too.

Told you there'd be snuggling. And also arm-losing. That bit was from the film. Emily's a sweet lass, but really, bits dropping off all the time is not the best way to attract a husband.

I'll get the next chapter up as soon as I can – it's inspired by one of my favourite parts of the film!

Reviews for the half-Irish seamstress!

(Also sorry for the slightly chaotic layout - I couldn't get my line thing to work. Just imagine a little line thing seperating Nadir's angsting from the stuff in the lair, how's about that?)