"This way."
The hand that held her wrist accelerated so suddenly that Christine wondered at it not being pulled right off her arm. An undignified noise to her left made it known to her that the Doctor was experiencing a similar sensation. Just as she got her feet under her at an appropriate rate of footfalls, the Phantom turned and she went wide. Still he refused to let go, dragging her along at that frightful pace to outdistance the danger. Her heart pounded so loud that she scarcely heard the following order:
"Jump."
Her heart sprang straight into her throat and blocked a scream when he launched into the air, presumably taking them both with him. Still air and complete dark were her only companions, surrounding and suffocating her. Time cruelly elongated itself in this moment of dreadful suspense, torturing her with the prolonging of her own terror. The hand was slipping away.
She hit the cliff from the waist down and the air was thrust out of her, feet dangling, arms sliding uselessly.
Fingers lashed around her elbow and pulled taut, halting her in midair as her own hand curled around her Angel's arm.
With a second support under her other shoulder she was lifted up as if borne on wings, but once her soles touched the floor she was whisked away once more. Despite her all-encompassing fear she found herself looking behind them at their pursuant. Her wide eyes caught the awful beast freeze-frame in midspring, impossible jaws gaping and elastic paws stretching beyond believability to reach the edge and the prey it sought.
All at once there were two consecutive sudden slamming sounds, and the nightmare image was replaced with her own. Furrowing her brows at herself, she soon deduced that she was in her own dressing room, facing her mirror. Somewhere in her peripheral vision the reflection of the Doctor was busy observing this new place and looking befuddled. The Phantom stood motionless against the mirror they had just entered through, fingers and ear delicately laid against it as if to detect the slightest tremor or imbalance. The others held their breath.
With a slight exhalation, he drew back from it, apparently satisfied.
"There's no other way to get into this room, I checked," he said. At the Phantom's statement, the Doctor incredulously looked from the dressing room door to him. He blinked. "oh. Except for that one."
"Well, then!" exclaimed the Doctor. Christine jumped at his sudden volume, while the Phantom did nothing save turn towards him. "I've succeeded in finding my beastie, and my ghost, funny enough that they weren't the same thing for once, if you'll pardon me, my good Phantom. Now we just need to catch it and send it home!"
The Phantom nodded wordlessly, moving to follow the Doctor, who already had a foot out the door. But one glance at Christine and he was bound in place as if chained. She was shaking, very slightly, so discreetly that she may have only been shaking on the inside. Her lungs expanded but collapsed too fast, accelerating to a pace it couldn't control like a runaway train. She felt like she was melting, her very being so shaken that every atom was coming apart from its neighbors. All this he knew before he understood the fact that he knew.
"Christine, breathe." he commanded in a low soft voice. She swallowed and somehow gathered enough air to speak, in fragments at least.
"I-" She sniffed loudly, trying to repress the sobbing that had started against her will. "I just go-t-scared, that's-that's all. …I'm-fine."
"That doesn't matter. Just breathe." At her first attempt to follow his instruction her lungs balked and expelled their contents too soon, beginning all over the frantic and irregular pattern.
"Come on," he repeated, a hint of ominous displeasure in his tone. This time she managed a whole breath and a half before breaking down again.
"Control your body!" snapped the Angel. By this time the Doctor had noticed that nobody had followed him, and by now had poked his head back inside the doorframe and decided against indignantly inquiring how they hadn't even noticed he was gone. "What, you're telling me that you can belt out Othello above all the other chorus members but you won't breathe properly for your music teacher without a crowd to egg you on? Musicianship must always come before performance! Breathe, Christine!"
Slightly cross at him for being cross with her, Christine did the opposite for a moment. She held her breath for an uncountable moment, as if trying to suffocate the panicking rate of respiration within her. Her Phantom's gaze burned on her face where it reached.
A legato breath poured out of her, followed by a similarly smooth inhalation.
"Very good," praised her Angel, grinning back at her beaming face. "That wasn't so hard, was it? If you could breathe just then, what's to stop you from an adequate lungful for the last eight bars of Faust? Now that I know you can do it, I won't permit you sneaking a breath right before the last note!"
Christine laughed at his mock threat, the noise pealing in the small room like a bell choir. The Doctor was smiling too, even as he and the adoring Phantom drew out of the room. Without even thinking about it she followed suit, and before Christine could even comprehend what she'd done the Phantom whirled on her with fire in his eyes.
"Just what do you think you're doing, young lady?" he demanded, standing between her and the Doctor like a guard dog who didn't growl and was all the more imposing for it.
"Following you," she responded shortly, bringing her eyes back up to his after having cast hers down to avoid them. Seeing his unchanged face she added a supplement to her answer in an attempt to make it more appealing. "and the Doctor."
"Why?" he asked concisely, not a muscle moving save the ones that moved his mouth.
"To catch the alien," answered the Doctor for her, his face-reading proved true by the nod she gave in confirmation. "Why else?"
"Absolutely not." the Angel commanded, not even having to look at the Doctor.
"But you must let me go!" she protested, all at once passionate. The Phantom's jaw clenched. "With that thing running around loose in the Opera Populaire and no one the wiser, who knows who could get hurt? Think of what could happen!"
"I am, which is exactly why my decision stands!" thundered the Phantom, seeming to grow taller and darker as did his tone and volume. "You are not to follow the Doctor and I on this excursion. In fact, you should have been onstage a quarter hour ago. I won't make you go on now if the shame appalls you, but I will require you to either stay here or go home."
"Phantom," To the Doctor's hand on his shoulder the Phantom only turned his head to look him in the eye. Though the Phantom's eyes sparked like a severed wire the Doctor's gaze was not deterred.
"What did you see, when you last met me?" he asked, voice down a level from the slightly strident one he'd used to gain his initial attention. The Phantom's face changed without moving, and the change frightened him that looked upon it. "What could possibly have happened to make you so paranoid of me? What did I do to you?"
The Phantom was still still. Desperate for a clue the Doctor looked at Christine, at her porcelain visage of curious innocence. She glowed like a moon, one of the perfectly colored ones that reflects the vigor of the sun in a shade that breaks hearts. Dread.
"No, no, Phantom, what did I do to you?"
Turning towards the Phantom again, what the Doctor saw magnified the awful empty apprehension growing in his core. The face behind the mask had changed even more. A thousand emotions that the Doctor longed to recognize roiled in that face like a developing hurricane, all without a single fiber moved. Those eyes spoke everything and nothing, black prophecies howled as if by the wind, and then they turned to Christine.
He had that sad look in his eye again.
"Fine," he murmured clearly, the word so quiet and unexpected that for a moment Christine and the Doctor questioned that they had heard it. "The safest place for Christine to be is with me, so if she must follow you to be there...so be it."
Daring one last look at her, the Angel soundlessly went out the door as if he were a ghost.
"Doctor, are you dangerous?"
The Doctor smiled a wry smile at Christine's question, feeling the heat of the Phantom's glare on the back of his head like a sniper scope.
"Most people seem to think so, yes," he replied, rather too modestly as he walked along the dark halls. "And as for the ones that don't, they end up thinking so anyway, much like your friend here!"
"Erik."
They came to a set of stairs, but the Phantom pushed in front of the Doctor, holding up a hand for them to stop.
"What's that supposed to mean?" the Doctor asked the Angel eventually, slightly impatiently as he sensed no need for the caution exercised by the Phantom.
"It's my name," replied the Phantom, letting his hand down as if the condition of the stairs pleased him. "You may as well know it, as my ruse is through with. I have you to thank for that, Doctor."
"What ruse?" inquired the Doctor sarcastically, following the newly-named Erik down the stairs. "You didn't really think he was an angel, did you, Christine?"
At the poignant question, Christine paused at the head of the stairs, watching the masked man descend the stairs out of her view.
"I don't know what I think anymore." she replied sadly.
She truly didn't. The Doctor wasn't at all the average if extravagant human she'd thought him, and she wondered if she would ever really know who he was. Despite his wisdom and courtesy, her Angel regarded him as if he were a stray dog found in the street whom a child was begging to keep: with bare tolerance that would shatter the moment threat was perceived. Her Angel, the Phantom. Two half-real entities that had always been completely different in her understanding were now one and the same under the light of truth. Sometimes the way the Phantom acted cemented his claim that he was the Angel of Music, and sometimes it only fed the whisper in her mind that he was a complete stranger who had somehow taken advantage of her. Then there was the thing she'd seen, that they had all seen, which would haunt her nightmares for weeks-she could still scarcely believe it was a real creature. In the space of an hour she had gotten herself into a situation that defied everything she thought she'd known about her world. Christine Daae wished that she would wake up from this dream at any moment and return to reality.
Whereas once the Doctor had shown empathy, he now failed to recognize any of Christine's thoughts and followed the Phantom.
"Remind me where you're taking us?" asked the Doctor, more to give himself an excuse to ignore Christine's status than anything. Likewise, the Phantom replied in a perfunctory fashion.
"Somewhere safe." he responded vaguely.
"You seem to be obsessed with safety," he observed, his tone making it clear that that was not intended as a compliment. The Phantom stopped to give him a look.
"You're here. So is Christine. Use your head."
The Doctor had never been spoken so sarcastically to by anyone except for River Song.
The Phantom kept walking, and after a brief period of stunned silence the Doctor ran after him.
"The way you carry on about me I must have either destroyed your home planet or made you do it!" snapped the Doctor, beginning to anger because this intriguing being was snubbing him. Usually he was the intriguing being, and he never snubbed anyone that wasn't Mickey, so by what right was this Erik bloke too good for him?
"You know me so well, Doctor," snided the Phantom, showing teeth with the force of his satire. Christine had still not gone down the stairs. "Because I care about a single soul in this place! If you caught me on a good day, you wouldn't even have to make me do it!"
"Don't you dare!" snarled the Doctor, pinning Erik to the wall with a hand on his shoulder. Christine began to walk away. "You have no idea what you're talking about! I do! Gallifrey is gone, and it's my fault!"
"All fun and games!" yelled Erik, volume rising as did his temper. Christine couldn't hear him. "Not so great when it's your own life, your own home, is it? You're so high and mighty, must've hurt when you finally fell!"
"High and mighty?" echoed the Doctor in outrage, now with both hands on the Phantom as if he were about to throw him into the other wall. Christine was about to die. "Who's high and mighty? You pretended to be an angel! What's higher than that?"
Erik opened his mouth in a fit of rage, closed it in a pall of horror.
"Christine."