As the days past, and Christine watched over her patient, her thoughts wandered through dark passages. Her past, her thoughts throughout the war, her concerns over her current situation.
"The Phantom" wasn't the only one hiding secrets.
Perhaps not secrets as dangerous or important as those harbored by her disfigured ward, but secrets nonetheless. While she and Erik were restricted from telling one another much of each other, due to Erik's line of work, she had spoken about her fiancé. But sitting in the chair next to Erik's cot, she realized that she had withheld a very important aspect of her life…
…And the consequences of her terminated engagement to Raoul de Chagny.
She had told Erik that she had become a medic because she wanted to save lives, and she knew it would honor the memory of her beloved. However, she realized, or admitted to herself, that that was not entirely the case.
When news had come of Raoul's death, Christine had lost almost everything. Her fiancé, her best friend, her future…all she had was an ailing guardian who could hardly recognize her anymore. Everything was slipping from her fingers.
She had neglected to tell Erik of her poverty stricken childhood, and of her father. Before she met Raoul, she and her father were penniless, and at times homeless, until the Valerius' had come into her life, and soon after Raoul. Christine remember her childhood days as an ascension from hell to heaven, from poverty and destruction to happiness and creation…but it had not lasted long. Soon, her father was struck with the flu, and her kind but melancholy Papa wasted away before Christine's young eyes. She had aged by the time he finally died, no longer a child in mind, but a somber adult. Not long after her father's death, the elderly man who had taken Christine and her father under his wing, Professor Valerius, passed away also. And finally, her last family member began to waste away too, but in mind, instead of body. She felt that Raoul was her lifeline, her one happiness left in life, despite the strife their class difference created.
But then, he was snatched from her as well. Christine felt as if she was made of death from head to foot, that it wasn't a young lady who had loved so few so fiercely, but a corpse who had loved and adored the living….
She had lied to Erik when she said she wished to send sons back to their mothers, husbands back to their wives…
She had chosen to be a front line medic to die.
Christine closed her eyes, ashamed of her cowardice. She had told herself from the beginning that she wished to be of service, to help, but now sitting awake while Erik slept, she realized she had chosen one of the most dangerous positions for a young nurse to take because she had wanted to join Raoul in death as soon as possible.
She wondered now, what Erik would think of her if he knew. She wondered why she cared about this former spy's opinion. She was simply his nurse until the war was over.
The thought terrified her.
Christine hardly knew the man lying asleep, face destroyed by shrapnel. She was not allowed to know him well, and yet she felt like she'd known him for much longer. All of the sudden, the thought of being separated from someone she ridiculously thought of as a friend was unbearable. She was never going to see him again after the war, and the thought of her existence after this was miserable. She would work at a hospital, or some other establishment, and care for Mama Valerius until…
Why? Why had Christine finally found solace in a destroyed man she could never know anything about?
Suddenly she gasped. Two emaciated hands had quietly brushed the tears that had recklessly creeped out her eyes in a movement eerily familiar to her.
She realized that while on the French side, her seemingly gentle patient was a fierce killer. Did she want to know of his past horrors?