The moment seemed to stretch on in a tense silence that made him shiver in spite of the room's warmth. Below him, she trembled in echo, her tiny gasps of breath arousing an irritatingly carnal response in him.

"Oh, angel, I will do whatever you ask of me! Please, do not leave… you can never leave me… I would surely not survive."

She dropped to her knees and he knew he was lost, that no matter how she feared his departure from her life, he would surely cling to her with an even greater ferocity for as long as she deigned to allow him. She whispered fervently between her clasped fingers, the erratic prayer forcing him to hold his breath, for he feared missing a single syllable. She vowed undying loyalty, she promised to cleave only to him, and she did so with all the solemnity and breathless excitement of a wedding vow. Then she drove the final nail into the coffin of his resolve.

"Take me!"

"Take my soul, for it is of no use without you! I have no need of my humanity."

Oh, Christine. She knew not what she asked. She knew not who she asked such things of, or the torturous accuracy with which she had chosen her words. The things she said, the promises she made, the gifts she asked for... how could she know that they were the very things that caused him to tremble and quake with the same blushing fever that wracked her small frame?

"I shall do anything you ask, anything at all. Just… do not leave me. Do not leave me to torment and this horrible solitude."

With those words, he became a man condemned for all eternity. His fingers loosened their grip on the railing, falling away soundlessly to hang limply by his sides. What she asked of him... what she pleaded for... it was madness. Funny how often that word came to the front of his mind in regard to Miss Christine Daae.

Take me. How he'd shuddered when she'd spoken those words aloud, the electric and unfamiliar tingle running down his spine. He backed away from the edge, unable to stare down at her while she begged for him to carry her away from this world, to descend with him into the deep darkness where she would never be found. Safe, cradled, captive. Erik asked himself if he could do as she asked, and how long she would stay enraptured of her surroundings. How long she would stay quiet and obedient before the horror set in. How long she could remain blissfully happy in his presence before he found she'd hung herself with her bed linens... or opened the veins beneath her pristine skin. He'd seen enough death caused by his existence, he couldn't bear to be the cause of hers. His own death he had been willing to accept without question. He wrestled with death regularly, both from his careening, dangerous pursuit of some semblance of normalcy as well as the near suicidal level of chemical comfort he provided himself. But to know he extinguished the flame from that girl... to know that her young life was snuffed out because of his doing was something he found absolutely reprehensible.

He made his way down the small stair that stood at the back of the platform, a mixture of relief and regret washing over him once she had slipped from his view. The control for the gas lamps that flooded her chamber with the harsh and unrelenting glow lived at the base, and he turned it slowly, allowing them to dim gently before guttering out. The sudden, intense onset of dark would no doubt frighten her, so he sang as he did so, an old lullaby in an eastern tongue he'd learned during his years in the older, darker, more superstitious parts of the Slavic world. He knew the song well, the story of how the dark is not to be feared for the virtuous of heart... he had no intention of harming her.

The rounded room would now be blanketed in the inky darkness, the only light the dim pale glow of the moon through a distant skylight. It bathed her in its luminescence, but left the rest of her surroundings in shadow. Waiting until she turned to gaze at her own reflection, he slipped into the room through the doorway just beyond her range of vision. He needed to be close, without her knowing.

This was as close as he dared.

Even though twenty-five steps still spanned the distance between them, farther than they had stood apart when he'd hidden behind her dressing room mirror, the feeling of standing with nothing separating them but the still air affected him deeply. It was as if he could feel the warm pulse of her heart in the quiet room, feel the way she reacted to the sound of his song. She turned again, as if trying to follow the path of his words, stepping forward into that spill of moonlight.

And all of time stood still.

Erik became momentarily drunk in the sudden awareness of his surroundings. He could hear the light rustle of her skirts, loud as thunder. Every speck of dust that floated up around her in that beam of light seemed frozen in air, awaiting his critical inspection.

Yet, even though everything around him was now intensely existing in a realm of crystal clarity, all he could really see, feel, sense was her. He'd been so wrong about the way she smelled. Instead of the powdery perfumes of the chorus he'd encountered any number of times, Christine smelled of warm spring air and thick fields of wildflowers. She smelled exotic and alluring and rapturous. As she stood there, her wide eyes searching the dark, her lips parted slightly, her skin and hair aglow, he felt it again - the great unraveling within. The song died within him, for his mouth had gone dry, his tongue thick and heavy, unwieldy.

He wanted her. The intensity of the feeling devoured him painfully from within, nearly causing him to lose his footing on the otherwise stable ground. But wasn't that what she wanted? Wasn't it what she had said? She gave herself willingly. She'd uttered the words, she prayed for this. Take me. And in the great underbelly of this world within a world he'd helped forge, he could do just that. He could take her bodily to his world below. He could take her mind, that much was evident. She gave it so willingly, so blindly, when he spoke. And her soul... that she had offered up, that she had promised. With time, with careful suggestion and the right artful words, he could coax from her that final gift. He could quietly will her into submission. Trembling and breathless, she would eventually allow him to divest her of that which she held most sacred, giving him the only true release he'd ever known.

No. Erik forced himself to breathe, to take in silent gulps of air until his body unclenched from its prurient rigor. No, not like this. She belongs here. If you take her she will never know the heights she could climb to. She will never know the adoration of the stage. She will never achieve all she asks of you. You will destroy her. Like you have destroyed so many before.

His eyes blinked, the tears he wasn't aware he had shed slipping down his face. He realized he'd left her alone in the silence and the dark too long.

"Christine," he said the word in a venerating whisper, fearful his voice would be too thick with the desire that still clung to him. "We begin with warm up. You are always to warm up before singing..."

Later, in the bleak darkness of his bedchamber, he replayed the entirety of the lesson over and over in his head. The way she'd responded to his coaching as if it were the thing most natural to her. The paralyzing fear tinged with previously unknown ecstasy when she'd unwittingly drawn too near. He'd kept her just tantalizingly out of reach but close enough to make him feel off-balance for nearly three hours until his own fatigue got the better of him. With whispered promises of returning to her the following night, he backed out of the room and deftly returned the flood of light to the chamber, knowing the effect would befuddle her enough for him to slip away undetected.

Despite his exhaustion, sleep would not come. The racing of his blood and the frenzy of his mind kept him awake long past when the dawn broke through the windows several floors above. When he did at last slip into a troubled slumber, his dreams were full of high cliffs, dangerous precipices and churning waters. All the time he could hear the hint of her voice on the wind, telling him to plunge. Telling him he could finally rest in the depths below.

He awoke disoriented, and realized with a jolt that he'd slept through most of the day.

This cycle continued for nearly a month. He stayed with her until she was too weary to continue, standing in the darkness of rehearsal space six, hanging on her every word, adoring her with every inch of himself, even as his eyes devoured her shape in the slip of light that single transom allowed. His days were lost to restless sleep, and his nights to heaven in the intimate yet separate moments with her, and the hellish hours after she departed, where he found himself locked away in his prison of a bedroom, contending with the relentless, insistent, unyielding agony he found her mere presence provoked.

And time slipped past.

Until this night, the night when the moon at last returned to the same full state it had blessed them with the first evening they met here. Erik found himself listening in uncompromised awe to her progress. When she stopped, the last notes of the aria drifting away, he stayed silent for a long moment before saying the words he feared as much as he had anticipated.

"You are ready."

Tomorrow night was the premiere of Faust, with the role of Marguerite stolen by the tedious and plodding Italian soprano the managers had dredged up from some Sicilian sewer. He'd cringed when he heard another role had been given to that horrid cow of a woman. Who would believe Faust would sell his soul for the love of something that looked like a painted nightmare? And her appearance was only half of the horror, for the woman boasted a terrible tuba of a voice, loud and abrasive and insulting, assaulting the senses with all the charm and appeal of blunt force trauma from a forging hammer. She pummeled the senses into submission, leaving you feeling beaten and bruised and violated after.

It would never do.

"You must be backstage at quarter to six, no later. The lead is ill, gravely ill. As is her understudy. I will make the arrangements."

He heard the beginnings of protest from her circle of moonlight. Unable to bear her pleading, her fears, her need for comfort, he departed immediately, turning the lights up and disappearing. She would be left to sort out her own emotions.

Erik, after all, had some business to attend to with the cast.