A/N: I've seen this concept a couple times, but hopefully mine is an original enough take on it. Rated T for now, may go up to M in later chapters. I'll change it if/when I get there. It will be an E/C story despite copious amounts of Raoul in the couple chapters. Hope you enjoy!

Christine clutched the crisp linen sheet closer to her, using it as a barricade between her and the world. Beside her bed, Raoul stood guard, his warm hand smoothing through her usually soft curls, now damp and ragged after their shared ordeal at the underground lake. Their ordeal with him.

She caught Raoul staring at the tattered sleeve of the elaborate wedding dress she was still wearing and swallowed tensely. She hadn't had the strength to undress yet. Unbarring herself and her body before the night… no, even in private Christine kept her clothes on, wedding dress or not. Raoul had seemed to understand when she'd explained it to him. At least she thought he had.

If only this wretched night would end already.

"Madame Giry will be back with the tea soon enough," Raoul whispered gently, bringing her attention back to him. "Then you will sleep and this nightmare will be behind you. Behind both of us."

"I'll sleep," she repeated. "And the nightmare will be over?" Christine let out a short laugh that quickly wrenched itself into a sob. "Sleep is where the nightmares always begin!"

"Sssh! Hush now," Raoul said, wrapping his arms around her. She stiffened and then slowly relaxed as he began to lazily stroke her back. "I can't promise that it will be immediate. Tomorrow may seem just as dark as tonight, but time mends all wounds in the end."

Christine let him comfort her until Madame Giry finally arrived with the tea. If she had her own personal thoughts about all the things that had transpired that day, she wasn't sharing them. The older woman simply smiled softly as Christine thanked her for the tea and then left again with barely a word.

Sitting in the silence with the warmth of the beverage beginning to pool in her belly, Christine finally began to drift off to sleep. She clutched at Raoul's sleeve as her eyelids started to droop.

"Raoul?"

"Yes, Christine?"

A dozen questions ran through her mind. About the two of them. About the future. All her worries and fears and words on the tip of her tongue quickly jumbled together and slipped from her grasp. She smiled sleepily instead.

"Say you love me," she managed weakly.

He smiled back and leaned over to leave a light, chaste kiss on her forehead.

"You know I do."

The floor was hard and cold beneath her. She curled up tightened, trying to preserve the pitiful amount of warmth she had. Her nose twitched as a familiar salty tang drifted across and curled in against her nostrils. Far in the distance a gull squawked.

Christine sat up with a start, short auburn curls tumbling in front of her face. She shoved them aside, disturbingly noting their length as she did.

This wasn't right.

There was wood everywhere, the floors, the walls, slanting together to meet the narrow ceiling. An attic. Christine was in an attic. Had been sleeping in this attic. But she wasn't in an attic. She was in her bed at Madame Giry's. She remembered that. She remembered closing her eyes as she pressed down against her soft, feather bed, rolling the taste of lemon around in her mouth as she drifted off, a pleasant lingering tartness from the tea.

She had most definitely been in Madame Giry's apartment.

However... this was also most definitely not Madame Giry's apartment.

Stumbling to her feet, her breath threatening to spiral out of control, Christine made her way to a pair of shuttered windows, placed unusually high, at the end of the attic. Her fingers struggled briefly with the latch before throwing them open. Only mildly prepared, she staggered back several steps as she was buffeted by a fresh gale of frigid sea air.

Her mind spinning, Christine felt as through she might actually faint from the insanity of it all when she spotted a familiar shoreline on the coast.

There. Three large, grey stones creating a fanciful precipice above the water. And across to their right, a miniature bay of sea glass and crabs. She used to climb that precipice as a child, used to position herself on its edge and fancy herself as the ruler of all that lay below. She remembered how on rainy days she'd venture to the attic of the cottage she and her father had been renting, how she'd prop herself up at its window and gaze out upon the sea, following the waves back and back into eternity.

Here. At this window.

Christine slammed the shutters shut, as if no longer seeing haunts from her childhood would cause them to vanish.

This wasn't happening. It was a dream, a nightmare of her childhood long since past. Her childhood…

Christine reached a hand up and grasped the nearest available curl. Her hair was shorter and lighter than it'd become in her later years. She thrust out her hand in front of her and stared at its shorter fingers. Faint freckles coated its back and the top of her wrist, extending sporadically down her main arm. She opened her mouth and felt the small gap between her teeth, a gap that a younger Meg had incessantly teased her about until her teeth had mercifully grown into it.

Dream or not, Christine was a child again.

A faint groan echoed across the attic. Christine whipped around, heart now thrashing ruthlessly against her chest. She wasn't alone.

Her eyes darted to either side of her, frantically searching for something she could defense herself with. Nothing.

Logically, Christine knew that she should be fine. If this was all just some terrible dream, then she was in no danger. Even if she was stabbed to death by some deranged attic stalker, she would simply wake up again. That was how dreams, even terrible ones, functioned. And, if by some divine or supernatural power, she was truly revisiting her own past, she hardly remembered her father ever letting deranged attic stalkers past their doorstep.

Logically, she knew all of this. But nothing about this situation was logical.

"Who are you!" she finally spat out. "Stay back!"

"Christine?"

She hesitated, the voice horribly familiar.

A young boy slowly stretched out, distancing himself from a small, shadowy nook in the wall. He yawned, soft golden hair tousled about his face, and groggily sat up. Still blinking the sleep from his eyes, he shivered and then turned to where Christine was frozen against the wall.

"Did you open the shutters?" he asked with a frown. "You know how sharp the wind's been these past couple days."

Christine stared at him, taking in the familiar shape of his face, the tenderness of his eyes. Those unmistakable blue eyes…

"Raoul?"

Her overwhelming confusion and terror must've been apparent, not that she'd been hiding it. The young version of Raoul regarded her with an odd, pensive gaze.

"Christine? What's wrong?"

"You're… I…" The words scattered from her mind even as she scrambled to clutch onto them. Where to even begin? That she wasn't really here? That she'd been mentally transported to the past? If this even was the past. She was still not convinced that this wasn't all just some horrible dream that God in his mysterious ways refused to wake her from. "You don't remember?" she managed weakly, clinging to the faint hope that perhaps she wasn't alone in this after all.

"Remember what?" he replied with no sense of hidden/lies behind his tone.

"I…" Her mind still scrambled for words. For anything. "I… No. I must be dreaming. I must…"

He wouldn't stop staring at her, his boyish face painfully attentive. He thought he was being comforting, reaching out to her by maintaining eye contact and a cautious, hesitant smile, but it was only tossing her thoughts into more of a storm. Panic seized her heart. She couldn't stand it. Raoul wasn't a boy! He was a grown man of twenty-three!

She turned away, gripping the edges of the shutters until her fingers turned white. As the pain started to lance through them, she closed her eyes and rested her head slowly on the cold wood. With growing dread, she tried to remember a time that she'd had a dream with so much physical detail. Her stomach turned as she realized she couldn't.

"Christine," she heard Raoul say again, his voice much higher than it had any right being. "You don't look well."

She heard the creak of the oak boards beneath his feet as he took a step closer. She kept her back to him, flinching when he made to touch her shoulder. The hand quickly retreated.

"Christine…" he repeated.

Involuntarily she remembered the night on the opera roof. It'd been a bitterly cold winter's night, the wind piercing her cheeks, freezing her tears to her lashes. Overwhelmed by darkness, he'd called to her in the same comforting tones. He called to her, and so had the wind...

No.

No. That was then, not now. There was no sense on dwelling on the past. But, an annoying voice in her head prompted, what if this was the past? Was she instead dwelling on things not yet happened?

She shuddered, sobs threatening to break through her fragile enough composure. Once they began she knew she wouldn't be able to stop them.

"Christine… do you want me to fetch your father?"

She froze, the rogue sob suddenly swallowed awkwardly back into her stomach. The world seemed to tilt.

"My father?" Her gripped loosened. Her hands tingled as the flow of blood began to return. One hand left the shutters completely, dangling uncertainly at her side as she slowly turned back around. Raoul looked most definitely worried now, but she barely saw him. "My father is…"

Dead? Alive? Oh, if this was indeed some endless nightmare, then God in all his magnificence was just too cruel.

Raoul started to turn as if to go, but Christine reached out, grasping his sleeve and dragged him slightly back to her. Startled at her sudden forwardness, she paused, letting her mind work through its bewilderment. The feel of the cloth as she ran it back and forth between her chilled fingers, warming them, cemented her further to this dream, this reality.

She shook her head. "No," she finally said, slowly dropping his sleeve and politely clasping her hands in front of her. "I'll-" A shaky breath rattled around her throat; she swallowed it back down. "I'll go with you. I just… I just had a bad nightmare."

Or perhaps she was still in one.

Raoul's face softened as he gave her a sympathetic smile. "Perhaps we tell each other too many dark stories up here after all," he said, glancing around the old room.

Dark stories indeed. She followed his gaze, taking in every timber beam and cobweb. They'd used to tell each other so many, most ending in the most terrible, gruesome ways they could imagine, which - she remembered - was quite a lot. Her father would join them some time, breaking up the grotesque monotony of werewolves and witches. And he would place his own stories and songs in their heads. Tales of lost love, of unsurpassable beauty, of night's symphonies, of the Angel…

Her angel-

Christine paled again. He'd been clutching onto her hands as part of his desperate, last farewell. She remembered the soft brush of his lips against the tops of her hands mingled with the damp warmth of his tears. He'd been crying. She'd been crying. Meg had even cried a little too, after the four of them had all managed to make it back to Madame Giry's. Possibly the one only with dry eyes that night had been Raoul, not that she blamed him for the exception.

And now… Oh. For heaven's sake, she didn't even know when now was.

Raoul softly cleared his throat and Christine jolted to awareness. He was staring at her again, worry etched into his face. The similarities between the boy now in front of her and the man who had comforted her as she'd drifted off to sleep were unquestionable.

She shook her head again and forced herself to finally take a step forward, stepping away from the shutters, away from the madness.

"It was just a little fright, Raoul. That's all, " Christine said, feeling as if she was trying to convince herself more than him.

Raoul held out his hand, and - after a final bit of hesitation - she took it, allowing him to lead her across the bare attic and down the steep staircase at the end.

Once in the main house, surrounded by the relics of her childhood, Christine found it difficult to breathe again. A crude doll of twigs, ribbon, and cloth that her six-year-old self had made father as a birthday gift lay propped against a small bookcase. As they passed the door to the dining room, Christine caught sight of the small burn mark on the table cloth from where she'd accidentally knocked over a candle during one particularly vigorous bout of storytelling. A ceramic sculpture with a nostalgic chip here. A frilly sweater fraying around the cuffs casually tossed over a sparely carved chair there.

This couldn't be a dream. She was drowning in the detail of it all.

After what seemed like an eternity, Raoul led her to the main sitting room. The fire roared from its dominion in the hearth, licking their faces with its warmth as they stepped through the doorway. A large, green armchair had been positioned to face it, its back to them. A pair of feet were visible from beneath it, as well as an elbow carelessly lounging against its right arm. Even as she stared - this moment, a thousand moments, frozen in her mind - the figure shifted slightly. From a distant corner of her mind she heard the page of a book being flipped, a hearty laugh from years and years ago.

Her head spun with thoughts of everything and nothing.

And suddenly she realized she was crying. The sound broke her out of the everywhere and into the present. Raoul's hand was on her arm again, he voice as soothing as ever, but it didn't matter. Nothing mattered compared to the sight, to the feeling of her heart ready to burst as her father - her one and only father - stood from his chair, noticed her distress, and immediately swooped down before her.

He tried to comfort her as best as he always had, but it only made her cry harder. It was all just too much: his strong arms as he wrapped her to him, his soft fingers as they combed gently through her hair, his gentle voice as he whispered soothing assurances in her hair.

Oh God. His voice!

Throwing her own arms around him, she smashed up against his neck, babbling incoherently something. Anything. Her mouth had detached itself from her control. Hands pressed against his back, she somehow clutched him even tighter. Christine rested her head against his chest and felt his pulse steady and strong and alive.

If this was indeed a dream, let it be a fantasy she never awoke from.