"What do you mean he's not dead?" he demanded. "We read it in the paper." She'd cried for three days afterwards, and he'd alternately comforted her and asked himself why she'd left with him in the first place if the death of another man, a man who'd as much as promised he'd die without her, left her unable to eat or sleep.
Raoul—Comte de Chagny now, though it hadn't mattered these last few years, not until he'd come back—sat across from the old man in the flat on the Rue de Rivoli. He didn't remember the name of the ancient servant who served him tea from a chipped kettle with roses on it, despite the samovar in the corner. He did remember the man bringing them a set of pistols older than either of them.
"Thank you, Darius," the older man across from him murmured. It had only been a few years, but those years had worn on the man known as the Persian, or perhaps they'd merely caught up with him. Though his eyes were still bright and disconcertingly green, his face was lined and the figure seated in the armchair seemed a pale shadow of the hale figure he'd presented to Raoul as a guide into the underworld. But Raoul was not the man who'd followed him, either.
"I do not recommend seeking him out a second time," the Persian said.
"Still protecting him?" Raoul asked bitterly, the memory of the foreigner's refusal to condemn Erik outright sharp and tangy, like the wet earth at her grave.
The was a pause, and then the Persian said, "He does not need me to protect him. He never did. But... there is little enough to protect, anymore. He did not kill her. Let it go, monsieur."
"You know I cannot," he said.
The man shrugged, the gesture emphasizing the gauntness of his frame, and Raoul suddenly wondered if it was not frailty—for he was really not that old—but his increased resemblance to Erik that was disturbing him. "I cannot go with you this time."
"I don't need you to."
"I know," the old man said. Raoul thought his expression held mostly pity, but he didn't know if it was for him or for Erik. Knowing him, it was quite likely both. "Show him mercy, if you can."
*
He did not carry a pistol at the level of his eyes when he went down, but in his pocket. He did have a lamp, but he kept it at a comfortable level. The new management had eyed him askance when he'd dropped some hint about the Opera Ghost, and seemed mostly interested in whether the new Comte's decided eccentricity might influence how much money he might inject into the enterprise. So he thought the usual safeguards might not be necessary, though he did not for a moment assume that meant it would be easy. Despite his protestations that he would not lead him, the Persian had instructed him in the path back to Erik's house. He had thought the journey etched onto his memory, but now that he was following the directions through unfamiliar tunnels Raoul realized that his memories were useless. His heightened senses had latched onto needless detail and spun it into a fantasy that he'd been of utterly sound mind. That he could trust his recollection. But shadows and cobwebs were the opposite of constant. He wondered if he'd find anything he'd recognize, or if Erik himself would prove as transient.
Part of the journey, of course, would be different. He would not go back via the torture chamber. Not because of the dreams that woke him, sweating as if still trapped in that equatorial heat, but because he only knew the exit that led down into the cellar, and while there was surely a door, he could not rely upon himself to find it. He'd been undone by that room before, driven mad with a ferocity that had brought him face to face with his own susceptibility to suggestion. The other route, the one that had killed his brother, held no more charm for him, but of the two it was the more sure.
And perhaps Erik was no longer watching so carefully.
There was no boat, but that proved a small obstacle as there appeared to be a very narrow ledge leading around the lake. He felt his way, taking far longer than rowing would have and trusting more than once that the ledge continued below the water's surface. Mere hours before, he'd endured the unsubtle and incredulous exchange of gazes between the managers, and here he was enveloped in blue fairy-light so powerfully diffused that he'd left his lantern on the shore, freeing his hands.
He knew Christine had come this way, too. Not via the ledge, of course, but he remembered her story and the mysterious figure rowing her across the lake. He'd thought her imagination running wild, at the time. At best, he'd told himself, she had succumbed to the tales of her childhood and was unconsciously putting herself in the middle of one. Despite what had happened subsequently, he recalled a story her father had told about a maiden being taken by a great white bear, a beast who became a prince, his frightening exterior merely a shell. And even if they both knew Raoul was the prince, part of him suspected part of her had hoped otherwise.
It made for a better story, after all.
Then, on the roof under the stars, they had created their own fairy world and dreamed impossible things. Eternal love. Escape. As if it were all that simple. As if any part of the Opera house had been safe! He'd been as foolish as she, and now he thought if he looked around towards the lake he'd see them, her pale face aglow with dancing blue lights, his figure dark and inhuman and bent to his task. He did not look around, but moved forward doggedly, his own pale face in shadow.
"You might as well have swum, for all the splashing about you're doing."
The voice was unmistakable, as was the surge of anger in response, but what surprised Raoul was the odd, thrilling fear it inspired. He looked up wildly to see he'd come almost to where the ledge widened into a sort of landing, a quite ordinary door made absurd by its very presence five floors underground. It was open, warm light spilling from inside only to stop quite short as if the bluish darkness without were pushing back. He stood silhouetted, taller than Raoul remembered.
"Well, come in. If you're here to kill Erik, I'd prefer it be done in the parlor. One never knows when the weather will turn." Erik turned, and Raoul was affronted at the man's assumption he posed no threat. But he followed, straightening his jacket and taking a deep breath as he paused on the threshold, the light sufficiently bright to require a pause as his eyes adjusted.
When the door closed behind him, he looked around but Erik was already halfway down the hall. Raoul hurried to catch up as Erik paused, his masked face beckoning blankly before disappearing into the aforementioned room. By the time Raoul had reached the doorway, Erik was ensconced in a familiar armchair, his head cocked like an owl. The two great holes where his eyes ought to be followed Raoul's progress. His soaked shoes were leaving dark water stains on the intricate rug.
"You've had at least three chances to shoot me," Erik said, and Raoul was surprised by the faint amusement he detected. Insane, he recalled. He could not recall humor. "But as your pistol remains in your pocket, I presume you came for some other reason, unfathomable as it is."
"You ought to be dead already," Raoul said, finally finding his voice. The room overwhelmed him; it could have been anyone's room. Well, not his own, either in the poverty of self-imposed exile or his other life as scion of an old family with enough money to show tasteful restraint. The bric-a-brac filled every available space, and while individual pieces were interesting in and of themselves—he was certain many came from foreign climes he could only imagine, and could possibly take their places in relatively respectable museums—the clutter of them lacked all sense. And the layer of dust over everything suggested nothing had been moved for quite some time. He imagined the blood seeping into the dust, dulled instantly into a sort of mud. Or would Erik's blood be dust, too?
The spare figure in the chair shrugged, one hand raised, palm-up, in a gesture of casual dismissal. "That's as may be. But you knew Erik lived, or you would not have brought a gun at all. I suppose the daroga told you, the little busybody. No matter. Here I am, after all. Not very threatening, am I, anymore? No match for you, in any event. But if you aren't going to kill me, I rather wish you'd leave. Any lording over me you might wish to do is useless and uncivilized, and the statute of limitations has, I believe, run out. Unless you think I've done something in the meantime, which, my dear boy, bodes ill for your marriage as I've not the faintest idea where she is..."
"She's dead," Raoul said flatly. His words stirred the stale air of the room, but Erik went even more still, his body shrinking before Raoul's eyes. Suddenly Erik seemed shabby, like the room around him, an unkempt relic of something that had only ever existed in his imagination to begin with. When Erik raised his eyes now, Raoul could see them, empty still but human behind the mask. He hadn't meant to say it like this. He'd run through the scene so many times: the recriminations, the exact angle of the gun, Erik's astonished expression when he realized the boy was going to get the better of him. "She died three months ago. Her last... She made me promise to find you and tell you. She must have known you weren't dead." He shifted uncomfortably, wishing to block out Erik's reaction but unable to close his eyes lest he see too clearly the wasted, grey face of his wife, bright blue eyes imploring him in this last request. In the midst of his grief he'd been unable to entirely ignore his anger that emhe/em had been on her mind even then. She had not forgotten, no matter what he did. He had not been able to create a world where Erik did not exist. Or one in which she lived.
"Dead," Erik echoed, and the walls seemed to sigh with him.
Raoul turned away, the hollow despair in the other man's voice catching him unexpectedly in the very place his own longing resided. As if Erik had given his wordless pain voice in that one syllable. Raoul hated him for it.
"You didn't know?" he asked, not turning around.
"How should I?" Erik said, still sounding stricken. "I no longer venture above, and few come to tell Erik the news. This is the only news that concerns me, now. How did... No, I do not wish to know. I wish to remember her as she was. Tell me; were you happy?" The voice was wistful and sing-songy now, and Raoul drew out the gun, the steel warm from his pocket in the cool air of the cellar room. "I told her to be happy," Erik continued as if he did not notice. "I told her her young man had best see to it, or he would answer to Erik."
"Very happy," Raoul said tightly, and turned, the gun trembling once before he stopped it and aimed it steadily at Erik's head.
Erik folded his hands like the wings of a bird, the skin stretched over bony knuckles defying the strength Raoul knew they held. "Like a fairy tale," he continued, his voice too calm. "She always did like them. So did you, she told me. What was it like, living one?"
Now it was Raoul's voice that trembled. "Ask yourself. You should know as well as any, in your castle here. The story ends when the villain is defeated. No one ever talks about how short happy ever after actually is." He'd delivered Christine's message, and was poised to deliver his own, but something stopped him; something he could not understand but thought he should.
"Yes, yes. You should both live to old age in a far off kingdom, and Erik should be dead, his grave unmarked. Perhaps the daroga should live, to tell the tale, but the rest of us should fade into obscurity and preferably no one should believe him. Would you like that, monsieur le comte? I could make it real for you. I could for her, anyway. Once upon a time. The way those stories begin. But you would only cry when you awoke, for losing her again." Erik's voice was soft, brushing Raoul's ears as if he was already telling the story, and he was reminded suddenly of the voice in Christine's dressing room, quiet and mellifluous and utterly commanding. But its command was subtle—you wanted to obey.
Maybe he could regroup, Raoul thought. Maybe he could still have his say, and emthen/em shoot him.
"It's a faulty talent, anyway," Erik said after a pause. "Merely illusion. Once removed, nothing remains to fool the mind. When I spoke, she could forget. But she would always remember again, and you always had her eyes."
"And her heart," Raoul said. "She was not blinded by my looks even when she was deaf to any voice but yours."
"You may be right," Erik allowed. "But you're handsome enough to turn a girl's head, I think, once they notice you. Oh, I'm sure you have other qualities, very important. Loyalty, chivalry, a dashing uniform and all the rest."
"You think I'm very simple, don't you?" he said quietly, looking steadily at Erik and feeling fairly confident that his fear did not show. "You think you can look at me and tell all you need to know."
"You speak to me of appearances?" Erik asked coolly. " As if your perceptions of me are any more nuanced."
"She spoke of you," Raoul said, after a short pause in which he had resolved not to say anything to that effect.
"With great affection, I am sure," Erik said dryly, but his mood altered almost instantly, his head drooping. "No, that dishonors her. She would not speak ill of anyone." He looked up, as if to confirm that.
It was at this moment that Raoul began to think that something was very wrong. And that thing was that they were no longer rivals; somehow, he could no longer hate him for loving her. Now that she was gone beyond his reach. Raoul wanted nothing to do with Erik, but at least "murderous" was an emotion he could live with, where Erik was concerned.
He didn't feel like killing this man. The feeling had not arrived all at once, but the realization had. His reluctance had been building up, over time. And now he wondered if he'd ever really intended to.
"Did she say anything else?" Erik asked finally, breaking in on his thoughts. Raoul turned, stepping away as if to examine some trinket on an end table. And then he examined it. It was some sort of rock or mineral, smooth planes competing with jagged edges in a way he could not determine was intended by Man or Nature. The gun rested at his side, all but forgotten.
"You'd like that, wouldn't you?" Raoul said bitterly. "Something pat and easily memorized, absolving you of guilt. A deathbed aria. You've already written yours, haven't you? All ready, laid out on your piano, though no one will ever play it."
"It's a mass."
"What?"
"Not an aria," Erik clarified, as if more annoyed by Raoul's ignorance than the comment itself. "One must while away the hours, after all."
"The hours you're not extorting money or preying upon women, you mean."
Raoul could almost feel Erik's spread hands, palms upward, behind him. "Erik did what he had to do. You judge me by what you see as a man born of privilege, who had everything handed to him—even if he had no parents. You look at a man who had lived through decades of torture before you were even born and think, 'I would have done differently.' Can you know that, monsieur le comte? Have you never been blinded by love, by revenge, by anything?"
His fists clenched at his sides—one around the pistol—Raoul turned again, his brow furrowed in anger. "That doesn't excuse you," he said. "Or your actions. There are other unfortunates, others who didn't turn to underhanded means of gaining what they thought the world owed them. With a pretty face, could you yourself excuse your actions?"
"I wouldn't have to," Erik said loftily. "For I would not have needed to operate outside the bounds of society to be afforded what every man considers his due."
"Twenty thousand francs a month and your own ingénue?"
"A emchance/em," Erik snarled, as power swirled around him again as easily as if he'd donned a cloak. But it was lost on Raoul now, who had nothing more to lose.
"You were born with superior intellect and aptitude," Raoul said flatly, taking a step closer. "It sounds to me like you had it."
"And I used it as I could," Erik said. "You would never understand. Why are you here, Chagny? To finish what your kind started? To remind me why I secluded myself here in the first place?"
"Not very effectively," Raoul pointed out.
"No," Erik agreed. "That... was a mistake. Christine was not meant to happen." That curious aura drained away, but some air of mystery lingered like a shroud.
Raoul snorted. "And you fought gallantly against it, I'm certain."
"What would you know about it?" Erik said. "I knew my chances were slim. I knew my love was impossible. But one does not admit such things when one is in it." Raoul suddenly thought of the rooftop again, and his jealousy. Before he'd seen Erik. Before he knew the true extent of his monstrosity and only knew there was a madman after his Christine. "And you won, in the end," he sighed. "It was you she chose, and she was right, I suppose. She loved you, for whatever reason; I cannot deny that. And she was happy..."
Raoul laughed now, and the sound pierced the dusty closeness of the room and caused Erik's head to jerk up to meet his eyes.
"Happy?" he repeated. The hint of hysteria in his own voice dismayed him; he had wanted to appear as superior in his grief as he was in everything else that did not involve music. "If that was what you wanted, you would never have let her hear your voice. There was not a day your shadow did not stretch between us. That she did not recall your memory, by some word or look. I should kill you for what you did to her—what you left for me." He gestured, and the weight in his hand made him glance down at it, surprised to see the gun there.
"Why haven't you?" came Erik's voice, but Raoul didn't look up. Why hadn't he? It was loaded. No one would know. And what was more, he had cause. No one argued against ridding the world of vermin.
"I don't know." But he did. And he'd just explained, or near enough.
"You look a bit like her, you know. Even now. If I'd bothered to think of you, I might have expected you to fill out some. Your hair is longer; I shouldn't have expected it to curl at all." Erik rose, leaning precipitously in Raoul's direction as the younger man fell back slightly, the gun raised. "Don't worry. I won't hurt you. There's very little point, now."
"There's little point in not hurting me," Raoul said, frowning. Erik's abrupt subject changes were difficult to fathom, when the subjects themselves made so little sense. The man was studying him now, and it made Raoul uncomfortable. Perhaps more so because he did believe that Erik did not plan to hurt him. It was almost as if Erik were looking at him for the first time, and for all he knew, that was true. He'd had no eyes for anything but Christine.
"No," Erik agreed, peering down at him from his superior height. "But I don't especially feel like it. I know you loved her; I know you did not kill her. And I don't mind if you kill me. Whatever else, Erik is no fiend for sport."
It did occur to Raoul that but for the last sentence, he might have spoken those words. So he focused on that. "You have your reasons for your horrible deeds, you mean?"
"Oh, yes. Reasons are easy enough to find, if you're clever. I don't expect you to understand." Erik glanced dismissively at the gun, as one might a snake that, at second glance, is not the poisonous variety at all.
"What do you expect?" Raoul asked suddenly. "You're the storyteller, right? She told me. So tell me what happens next. How does it end?"
"Erik dies at last, alone and unmourned. You... you grieve and either join the army and get yourself killed or meet another enchanting lady, fall in love, and marry her. Don't be insulted; it is the way of men."
"Men who aren't you," Raoul said with a touch of disbelief. He was insulted. But he also knew it was a cliché to shout he'd never love again. If he'd learned anything, it was that he could neither control nor predict the future.
Erik shrugged and sat back down, though his body did not so much sink into the chair as perch on its surface. "Erik is finished. He would have died years ago, but for..." He shrugged again.
"You were waiting. To see if she'd come back. If she'd change her mind."
The man in the chair looked up. "Perhaps," he said slowly, as if considering this option for the first time. "I did not come after you. I did not contact her. Nor have I made a nuisance of myself up above. What difference did it make, if I waited?"
It was pathetic, was what difference it made to Raoul—it was pathetic in a way he could understand, and could not condemn as monstrous. It just was. Without thinking, he sank onto the only nearby surface not covered in trinkets. It happened to be the pouffe at Erik's feet. He had to look up to see Erik's face, a waxy jaw working beneath the smooth black surface of the mask. He did not wish to see what lay beneath it, but he no longer shuddered at the thought of it. The gun dropped to the floor, making no sound in the unworn pile of the carpet.
"She sat there," Erik said after a moment, his voice once again the rich, dreamlike, concoction Raoul had noted made one wish to obey if it meant listening a little longer. "I would tell her stories—pretty stories, that wouldn't take the color from her cheeks. Stories like her father used to tell."
From here, he looked more like a man than Raoul had ever thought, and yet like something more. Something primal and obvious and hidden from sight. "They weren't all pretty," he said softly. "The stories. She liked all kinds."
"Yes. I suppose she would have. As stories."
"I liked stories, too," Raoul said, frowning.
"Of course you did. You both did. Stories—those kinds of stories—aren't ambiguous. There's Good and Evil, and there are cues so you're certain which is which."
"She never thought you evil. And she always felt sorry for..." He trailed off, having no appropriate ending to the sentence. Christine had felt sorry for everyone; witches, beasts, stepmothers. None of which really described Erik. How Erik must have seemed to her, the mysterious voice behind her wall. Even if he was the villain, why could the villain not be sorry for what he was? Who was to say he wasn't cursed himself? It wasn't gullibility that had led Christine here, but optimism. Erik was wrong.
And Christine, in her way, had been right. The monster had redeemed himself—even if it didn't erase the evil he'd done. It was too bad things had gone so far, that Erik had asked for so much, Raoul thought bitterly. But Christine without the gentle nature that had allowed Erik to prey upon it would not have been the Christine he loved. He could still blame Erik for that.
"Pity," Erik was saying. "I didn't want her pity."
"That's not what I meant. She felt everything so strongly. It didn't feel like pity. Not to her. And not, I think, to you... Or you wouldn't have let us go." It suddenly seemed very important to make Erik understand. Not for his sake, but for Christine's.
"You pity me, I think," Erik said. "A little." His head was cocked, his blank expression absurd next to the richness of that voice.
"I do," Raoul said.
"Then tell me about her."
Raoul did. He started with their meeting, the scarf, the two almost-orphans, the forced separation after a summer of what could not yet be called young love, but was tiptoeing around it. As he told it, he recalled what Erik had called his life—a fairy tale—and it occurred to him that the story he was telling, while true in its way, was far too neat. He'd written them into boxes, with a wise man, a maiden in distress, a castle and a talisman in the form of the red scarf. Even now, his grief and attempted revenge were meant to conform to some comforting narrative. One he didn't believe anymore, because now that he understood it the spell was broken. Christine wasn't a helpless damsel, he'd not always acted entirely honorably, and Erik himself, despite his immense potential for villainy, had refused to conform at the last minute.
Maybe that was another reason he hated Erik. He hadn't let him win.
"It's a good story," Erik said softly, when it seemed Raoul would speak no more. "And you tell it well. Does it comfort you?"
Raoul thought about that. "Not particularly," he said. "Not yet. But talking about her does. And maybe it will. Someday."
"You and she weren't really unhappy, were you? After? Even if she did think of me, sometimes..."
He heard that note of wistfulness again that tugged at him, but it didn't make him angry this time. "No. We—she was happy, I think. What made her sad was that she couldn't make everyone happy."
"I would not have made her happy," Erik said matter-of-factly. Raoul could not disagree, but part of him wondered if she might have been happier, split in two. "I know that, now. You are of a kind. You belonged together."
Maybe she hadn't died because of Erik, Raoul thought, but because she'd no longer had him in her life. He didn't think things worked that way—not anymore. But Erik was wrong again, and Christine had needed Erik, or something like him. He wasn't about to suggest that they ought to have moved in together. He wasn't even going to tell Erik of his suspicions. But it cowed him, this revelation. Not only by itself, but in how he was calmly sitting here, his head against the arm of Erik's chair, the gun between them on the floor, thinking Erik was, while still a monster, not quite the monster he'd thought. Christine had taught him that, but he hadn't learned it until now.
"What will you do?" Raoul asked, not looking up.
"It doesn't matter," Erik said softly. Raoul felt something brush his hair. He did not move away. Christine had wanted him to say goodbye, and if he could not give voice to the things he was thinking, the least he could do was not interrupt whatever it was Erik was thinking now. "You came here to kill Erik, and instead you told me a story. That's Christine, you know. She's kept her promise, and so have you. And so have I." Erik's hand stilled, landing briefly atop his head, and Raoul's eyes drifted shut. "Thank you."
Later, Raoul had difficulty recalling his journey back to the surface. He dimly remembered Erik saying they would not meet again, and believing it while simultaneously feeling relieved. Sometimes, in that place between sleep and wakefulness, he would hear snatches of melody he could not place that reminded him of emerging into the sunlight once more, blinking and confused as if waking up from a drugged sleep, no gun weighing down his pocket. It troubled him, and sometimes he would attempt to force his memory. But most of the time he decided that there were worse places to end a story, and then he would think of Christine and smile.