He's so still, so quiet, his body limp and heavy in her arms. When she left she didn't realise how ill he was, how close he was coming to the end, even then. And she wonders now, as she presses a kiss to his cool forehead (and another one, and another one) if he knew it then. If he had some sort of premonition of how short his time was. She would have stayed with him, she knew that when she kissed him and surely he must have known that too. Yet he insisted on sending her away. She thought at the time, and in the month since, that he expected that she loves (loved? Or loves? Or does it matter now, here in this room?) Raoul more. But now, cradling Erik as if he were a child, she wonders if maybe he knew his death was coming. (Is coming. Is.)
(She expected to find him at his organ when she arrived, those elegant fingers dancing across the keys. Or to find him lying prostrate on his black couch with his veins full of morphine, a languid drugged smile on his lips, yellow eyes simmering amber, half-closed in some gentle fantasy. Never did she even consider that she might find him like this. How could she have let herself even entertain such a possibility?)
I would like you to marry her as soon as possible.
The words so slow and considered from his lips that night echo in her mind now. He would have had them married in a day, she suspects, eyes stinging, if it were within his power to have done so. He would have married them himself with tears trickling in rivulets down his cheeks if such authority were vested in him. He didn't (doesn't. Still doesn't. She's thinking of him as if he's dead already, even though he's still breathing in her arms, each breath so tired and shallow, and if she rests her hand on his chest she can feel the feeble fluttering of his heart inside) doesn't want her left alone. Wants her to be happy and safe when he's gone.
Let him think that. Let the thought of her being happy be a comfort to him now. She could never be happy without him. If there's anything she's learned over the last long weeks it's that. To not see him, to not hear his voice so soft and yet commanding, power radiating through him…No, she wasn't happy. Though she tried to be, for his sake and for Raoul. It was one thing to not be happy, and yet know he was still living, still breathing, his heart still forcing life through him. It will be another thing now when that comfort is gone.
I won't be able to give you away in the church of course.
The gentle touch of his long fingers holding her hand as he gave it to Raoul has been the ghost that's haunted her since Raoul brought her away – his cold fingers joining their hands, his hot tears falling on them as if unbeknownst to him. She feels them now, still, even as she sees those long fingers lying so limp and lifeless on the sheets. It's surreal, as if she's suddenly stepped into a parallel world where everything is upside down and Erik, dear Erik, poor wonderful Erik, can be losing his grip on life as he lies in her arms. It's not real. It can't be real. (It is real. The weight of the thin wedding band he slipped onto her finger is evidence enough of that. She gave it to him first, as she vowed to love him and to cherish him until death does them part, as if that were decades away instead of hours. (Minutes?) The bitter cruelty twists in her chest and she almost laughs.)
She should have stayed, she knows that now. She should never have let him give her away, should have pulled her hands away from him and fisted them in the lapels of his dress coat and vowed to stay with him then.
Maybe if she had, it wouldn't have come to this. Maybe if she had, he would have minded himself better. Maybe if she had, he would have found the strength to fight his illness.
("Not your fault," he whispered, only hours ago, eyes flicking unseeingly across her face as he lay in her arms. "Not your fault…Coming a long…time. Christine, I have not…been well. Saw it in…the cards." And his lips twitch in a wry smile, right hand reached up and softly cradling her cheek. "Feared I was…dreaming. Might still…be. You are h-here, yes? Expected my h-hand would…glide through. Dissipate. Yet you are…more than mist." His words rising and falling in time with each laboured breath, so exhausting for him. She tried to shush him, tried to get him to conserve his energy, but he kept talking as if he couldn't hear her, his words so slow, such an effort. "My dear, I…pro-profoundly apolo…gise. Such spectacle…unbecoming. Morphine dulled…and hastened…inevitable. Could not…otherwise sleep. Too much…going on. Opium is a…remarkable drug. Must thank Nadir…for it." He swallowed, and let his hand fall from her cheek to rest on top of hers, a feather-light touch.. "So unfortunate, darling. Beads of blood from…needle punctures the…only bloody roses I'll sire. Dear you d-deserve better." He didn't know what he was saying, that much was obvious from such delirious ramblings. Then he came back to himself, or seemed to, and quietly pleaded with her to leave so as not to have to see him like this. She could never have gone. Not now.)
"Oh, Erik. I'm sorry," she whispers, hoping he can still hear her, somehow. "I'm so sorry." The thin, delicate blue veins stand out starkly in his eyelids, his eyes roving slowly under them as he wanders down some dark avenue of memory. She presses a kiss to each closed lid, and hugs him closer, and tries not to think that his breathing is fainter than it was a few minutes ago.
I believe, on such a day, it would be quite permissible to kiss the bride.
Bowing her head, she kisses those deformed lips again, so unmoving beneath hers. So unlike the lips she kissed that night he had Raoul trapped in the torture chamber, the lips that moved in time with her own only a few hours ago when their tears mingled and she became his bride. Her husband, such a strange thought. He is not merely Erik now, and she is not merely Christine. They've transcended that here in this deathbed, become something more. A husband and wife, who can never live as such, because any moment now the breath he draws will be his last and it's all too much. Too much. So much she'll implode with the hollowness of getting to have him in her arms for a handful of hours before he's ripped away again to go where she can't follow.
(She kissed his face and his neck and the hollow at his collarbone, every inch of his skin that she could lay her lips to. She breathed words into him, murmurings of love and gentle apologies, reassurances that she's really here and she will be all right. He whimpered beneath her touch and sighed, half-delirious, those once-brilliant burning golden eyes dimmed and misty, his trembling warm, feverish hand trailing up her leg, whispers from cracked and malformed lips. His thin hips shifted underneath her as she paid tribute to his still-living body. I love you, he sighed into her mouth, her fingers stroking the tears away from his cheeks.
He came undone beneath her lips and hands, her name a whimpered novena off his tongue, one night of glorious touch and sensation. He always craved touch, craved the tender intimacy of lying in the arms of another person, and yet could never be granted it by anyone else. She can see that now, even if it took a month away from him for her to realise it. To touch him, to love him (to make love to him) the last gift she could give him, almost a sacrament. And as he lay there, shivers wracking his body afterwards from his fever and her gentle ministrations, she fixed his clothes, re-buttoning and straightening so that even on the verge of death he can maintain his graceful pride, the elegance marked in every line of his being. Their marriage-bed his deathbed. Not the bridal suite he would have given her if he had the chance to.)
In another world, he would have been a prince, a king, a lord looked up to by all, and she his queen. But the quirk of fate that destroyed his face destroyed every chance he had of receiving the glory he deserved. It bred hatred and fear and perverse curiosity about what he hid beneath the mask, the mask at once protecting him from their gaze and ensuring they looked harder. The mask that protected them from his face, both armour and chains.
(She whispers him stories, weaves him a splendid world for to dream about in death. Walks on Bois, arm in arm. His works performed and lauded and adored, her in the title role, him the mysterious conductor. A wedding day, rose petals in her hair, the white dress he designed, their fingers interlinked and his smile glowing from beneath the mask. Children, a son and a daughter – two beautiful children to love their father and his face and whom he tells stories to, and plays the violin for them to sleep without nightmares. Nights spent, just the two of them, curled together in bed, his head on her belly and her hand stroking through his hair, neither speaking simply existing. He takes her dancing, and she sings for him, and pretends to sleep while he dances slowly in the parlour with their baby in his arms. And they are happy, and content, and nothing and nobody can harm them because they have each other. She spins stories until her voice breaks with the force of the tears she's holding back, and reminds her that they are only stories and can never become reality.)
Perhaps I don't want a dead wife in a glass coffin.
The candlelight plays across his pale face, casting shadows and long golden fingers, the sunken cheeks and deep-set eyes, such thin skin waxy pale in these hours. And he's beautiful, so beautiful even now. How could she have failed to see that before? She was blinded with fear, with anxiously mixed up feelings and she overlooked the wonder that was right here in front of her. And for what? To lose him now, like this, when they could have had so much more time.
She's breathless with it, breathless with the weight of how much she loves him, the emptiness of the last month of loving him the way she should love Raoul, breathless with having to go on without him but she will because that's all he asks of her, to be happy and safe. To be a living wife.
Well, he got his living wife. And she's going to get her dead husband, the knowledge an ever-expanding ache in her chest that forces out all air, all feeling, all thoughts other than the fact that she's losing him. She's going to lose him. Wha- Ho- Can such things be? Surely it must be a fantasy. Surely she'll wake up any minute now and the last day will have been one long, horrible nightmare, and he'll smile that gentle smile at her when she tells him about how terribly certain she was that this was the end.
But those lips will never smile again, even if the fierce heat has died out of his skin.
"If you ever find a moment . . . spare a thought for me."
He whispered it in his sleep, after his last seizure, a rasped murmur that has sunk deep into her mind and which she cannot shake. (Think of him. How could she not think of him?) When his writhing body stilled against her, bruises on her wrist from his fingers clenched so tight, she was sure it had killed him, so still and quiet was he when only a moment before he contorted with pain. And somewhere in the midst of that unconsciousness, already half in the next world, he pleaded with her ever so softly to think of him.
"Say you'll share with me one love, one lifetime," she half-sings, voice a whisper, watching her tears fall on his face. "Say the word and I will follow you. Share each day with me, each night, each morning. Say you love me," her voice cracks, and she can't go on, can't stem the flow of tears now. And she doesn't want to. Carefully, ever so carefully, she re-adjusts her grip on him, his head resting against her shoulder, their fingers intertwined. "I love you, Erik." If you take nothing else into the darkness with you, take that, she prays. You were loved by me, and you were not alone. All he ever wanted, to be loved, to be accepted. She can't deny him that now. She can't deny him anything now.
Even dying, his thoughts were for her future. How he must have loved her. How it must have killed him to think that she would leave without telling him, without saying so much as goodbye. No wonder his words were such poison, his voice so cruel after he brought the chandelier down. She deserved every bit of his bitterness. Abandoned by everyone else, of course it must have felt as if she was grinding a knife ever deeper into him when he thought she would abandon him too.
Do you know how to make tea?
If making tea could save him she'd make all of the tea in the world.
A spasm runs through his body, the twitching of his fingers where they rest on the sheets interlaced with Christine's disturbing Ayesha lying beside him. He trembles, long legs shifting, mouth open, gasping for breath. Christine hugs him tighter, his forehead heavy against her neck. She kisses him and whispers soft words between kisses, not knowing what she's saying but knowing that she has to say something. She loves him. He needs to know that. He needs to know it's all right to go. She'll be all right. She loves him. Did she say that? Did she tell him enough when he was conscious to hear her? Did he feel it in her lips? She knows he loves her, she should have seen it sooner, she should have returned to him faster. She loves him. She's sorry for hurting him, sorry for the tears that coursed down his cheeks as he gave her to Raoul. She's sorry. She loves him. She's sorry.
He whimpers, a low whimper deep in his throat and stills, the trembling ebbing away, blood on his lips, his body suddenly so much heavier in her arms. A whimper and it's over.
Softly, she untangles their fingers and presses her hand to his chest, slipping it in under his shirt, his skin clammy beneath her palm, then gently seeks out the pulse in his neck. But the fluttering is gone, and her stomach lurches as if she's fallen off the edge of the world. (She knew it. She knew it before she checked. But knowing it and confirming it to herself are two very different things, and one is infinitely worse than the other.)
The candlelight glints off the wedding band on her finger as she wipes the blood from his lips and kisses him, one last time. (I believe it is customary…for the groom to give it…to his bride.) It's so hard to breathe, her throat so achingly tight and the air suddenly so cold as she eases him down to the bed, smoothing his hair and the creases from his shirt, buttoning his waistcoat and his dress coat. (Only he would die in his dress clothes, so particular right to the end. It's almost funny.) A single tear splashes on each of his hands as she takes them in hers and kisses each knuckle of each skeletal finger, an anointment before she folds those beloved limp hands over his heart.
For a long moment, she looks down at him, at this body laid out on the bed, who was once an opera ghost and an angel of music, names he hasn't worn for her since he became Erik. He stalked a masquerade as Red Death, surrounded by paper faces and he didn't try to hide but they didn't find him anyway. (Tonight we shall attend the masked ball at the Opera together.) He anticipated every wish she could have when he prepared this very room for her. (In your room you will find a selection of theatrical costumes.) He told her of a white rose who fell in love with a nightingale, a forbidden love that gave birth to the most beautiful flower of all. (Night after night the nightingale came to beg for divine love, but though the rose trembled at the sound of his voice, her petals remained closed to him. She, Christine, she remained closed to him, so afraid of the tangled mess of feelings weaving their way around her heart. And by the time she overcame herself it was too late for him. It is too late. Why could she not have had the strength before? How she ached to reach out and touch him, to trace her fingers under his mask, to trace them along that skull-like face in a sacred exploration, to seek out those lips.)
Tenderly, hesitantly, she reaches out and lightly trails her fingers over his eyelids and down those sunken cheeks, his skin still warm beneath her fingertips, the nauseous chill her own. They slip over his lips, and cup his sharp chin, as if she could hurt him now. (Why won't he stir? Why won't he wake up? Why won't he blink his eyes open? Oh, God, Why? How did she let this happen?) A vast, barren landscape opens up inside, as if placed there by an artist's hand, consuming everything, every ounce of what she knows, what she feels, aside from the unutterable fact that he is dead. He is dead. How can Erik be dead?
Slowly, she lies down beside him, resting their faces cheek-to-cheek, her lips at his ear, and she whispers, her voice so low that she sounds like him and it aches to say it, cuts her deep and yet speak she must, must use his own term for her because it is true both ways, "Sleep well, my dear. I love you."
And in this room of flickering candlelight, his body limp in her arms and oh so still, she wishes that she could die, too. That she could will her heart to stop and her lungs to fail, so that she may always lie like this, beside him, wrapped together for an eternity. But death is not so simple as that, and he wished for her to live a happy life.
Here, far from every human gaze, in your arms I wished to die.
Tears prick her eyes, and she nuzzles into him, tightening her arms around him as if it could fill the yawning chasm inside her chest. And softly, she begins to sing.