It all fell into place like some brilliant, clockwork dream. One by one, his carefully laid "accidents" befell her, drawing her closer, ever closer to where he laid in wait. Like the autumnal sacrificial sheep, driven blindly over the cliff, his quarry continued her plunging path until she at last was safely inside the dressing room at the uppermost end of the north hall. The door closed behind her, she threw herself into the nearest chair in exhaustion.

Erik nearly wept with happiness.

Quiet, waiting, anxious, he watched her curl herself into an artful little ball, arms looping around her knees, shoulders arching forward. Even in this most primal of poses she possessed her unearthly unconscious grace. She shimmered in this dank, dark room every bit as much as she did when bathed in warm light on the stage. He wished for a moment he had thought to bring with him pencil and paper, wanting to commit the vision in permanent record.

So caught up was he in the delicate lines of her form that it didn't at first register that she was sobbing. Not until she raised her face, wiping distractedly at the tears that coursed down her cheeks, did his admiration turn to a strange, desperate need to soothe her. Never before had he wanted anything the way he wanted to stop the endless stream of tears from continuing to run.

He could never touch her, he'd learned years ago that his touch was the opposite of what a woman would ever consider comforting. His very presence was usually enough to turn a melancholy set of tears into full screaming hysteria. He looked desperately about the room, feeling the rising frustration of his own impotence in the insurmountable path of her destructive crying. No, he couldn't physically care for her, not in the way she needed.

Instead, he hummed quietly, tiny delicate notes that resonated in her room, seeming to charge the air with his unseen presence. Her head raised, her neck extended, the last of her tears cascaded down. Too shocked to cry, too full of disbelief, she looked about the room and the way that expression of curiosity transformed her features caused his breath to die in his throat, choking off the sound completely.

Her face turned toward him, and he stared into eyes that forever altered him, creating a tiny fingerling crack in the great stone wall he had built around his heart, the wall he steadfastly maintained through his all his years of solitude. He sank in the knowledge of that heartwrenching instant, the dizzying realization gripping him. Those eyes held power he'd never dreamed imaginable: the power to make him capable of amazing, impossible things... and, conversely, the power to rip his soul from his body and leave nothing but a great vacuum inside. Within those eyes dwelled the power to destroy him completely. He knew then that even once time and distance had ravaged the memory of her face, blurring her features and distorting her memory completely, those eyes would haunt him with a burning permanency. Two liquid brown pools, poisonous and dangerous and alluring. Pulling him closer to the edge, luring him with their siren song of blissful catatonia.

Asking him to drown.

Again the heavy eyelids closed, fighting back the second wave of tears. He had gone too far. In his urge to calm her, he had somehow turned a key that unlocked within her a door best shut tightly. Her fists clenched, her mouth dropping open in a wide "o" of pain and she slipped from his control, driven by some internal demon that threatened the horizon of madness.

From Christine Daae's perfect mouth came a cry of such horror and desperation, such a swan song of aching, unending torment that it chilled the blood in his veins. For a delirious moment he came close to losing consciousness, feeling as if his circulatory system had failed him and refused to operate in its normal direction. Stubbornly, it fought him until the sweet, arresting sound of her fevered whisper brought him back from the very brink.

"I miss you, Papa, I need you. There is… nothing without you. I'm trying so hard, but I need more than this." Her voice was pleading, her eyes beseeching in the darkness for a sense of hope. "Send me the angel of music… he mustn't be a lie… he can't be… he's the only hope I have in the world…."

She folded back into herself, his wilting flower of despair and longing. She was lost and alone, desperate and searching. She needed above all else the protection of a guardian, someone strong and able to lift her above the stinking muck this profession would again and again try to force her down into. She needed to be cradled... protected.

For a long, silent moment, there was only the sound of her sobs and the deafening echo of his heart thundering in his ears.

Erik could never be the man to save her, this much he knew to be true. His would never be the shoulder she rested her head upon when the world became too much to bear. His would never be the hand she took in the dark, when she was frightened. He would never be whom she returned home to every evening, nor the first thing she reached for when waking at daybreak. That dream he would never realize.

But that wasn't what she asked for, was it? It wasn't what she begged for, prayed for, craved with such intensity that it nearly made him tremble to hear the words.

She wanted an angel. And he had played that part before, hadn't he... as well as the other side? He'd been the angel of doom, the angel of death, the son of the devil, and even - in whispered superstition they believed never reached his ears - the devil himself.

Once, when he was a young man still touched with some semblance of green innocence, he had been the last vestige of hope for a small, sick child. And, at the end of that child's life, he had been the saving grace that ferried him into sweet oblivion.

Angel.

The words left his lips almost without thought, unfurling the first line "Caro nome che il mio cor," wrapping the notes in soft, rich Italian, "festi primo palpitar."

With consumate care he used the strange acoustic properties of the small corridor behind the mirror as an amplifier, filling the room with the sound of his voice, "le delizie dell'amor, mi dêi sempre rammentar..."

Planting the seeds with his lyrics, alternating innocent and commanding, "col pensiero il mio desir, a te ognora volerà..."

So fixated on her response, that he didn't take time to consider the meaning behind the song he had chosen so blindly.

"E pur l' ultimo sospir..."

No thought for the words he'd chosen to ensconce her in.

Sweet name, you who made my heart
throb for the first time,
you must always remind me
the pleasures of love...

My desire will fly to you
on the wings of thought
and my last breath
will be yours, my beloved.

When the last note quietly died away, he felt the incredible tension in the room. Like a gossamer string stretched too tight and plucked into painful reverberations, it hung heavy in the air.

This sword of Damocles he'd breathed into existence.

What have I done?