A/N: Part five of six.
This chapter is a slightly different flavor than the rest, but still dark.
The Fiddler's Daughter
By Catsitta
.5.
"What are you doing?"
"Shush, it is late and you must be terribly uncomfortable in this dress."
"I-I don't need help. Stop that!"
"If you did not need help, why are you attempting to sleep whilst wearing it?"
"Please stop."
"We are alone, the candles are out. Do not forget that we are now husband and wife."
"ERIK STOP!"
The hands which were unbuttoning the back of Christine's wedding dress stilled and she began to gulp down wet, panicked breaths. It was true, she was not able to escape her gown, but only because she was too tired to wrestle with the buttons and ties. Sleeping in a corset, especially one as tight as the dress required, was ill advised, but unavoidable without help.
"Do not call me Erik," her Angel growled as he returned to attacking at the buttons, this time with more force. She felt one rip in his no longer gentle hands. "Call me anything but that. Angel is preferred, but I will settle for Maestro or Husband…my wife. Yes, my wife. My beautiful, living wife."
Lips pressed beneath her left ear. Odd, misshapen lips that were puffy and dry. Breath ticked Christine's neck. One hand slipped through the open back of her dress to stroke between her shoulder blades. Unable to handle the way he made her heart pound and throat tighten, Christine began to struggle. She did not want this. Why was he doing this? Marriage was bad enough, but for him to attempt consummation…it was too much. She wanted everything to go back to the way it was before Henry kissed her.
Erik would be once again her beloved maestro, a man who she accepted as the Angel of Music. Buquet would be alive; Raoul would be but a childhood memory, and all would be innocent again. There would be no violence, no murder, and no forced marriage.
"Please stop," Christine begged.
"You are a good girl, Christine. Good girls do as their husbands tell them. Good girls—."
"Bad men force their wives into consummating a marriage she never wanted!" Christine said. "Leave me alone, Monsieur. You hurt me enough by forcing me to marry you. Please don't…do things to me."
Those hands once again ceased their wandering as he said in a child-like voice, "I would never force my love onto my living wife, she would die if I did." As if he was suddenly broken from a trance, Erik shoved away from the bed and stumbled towards the door. She heard him open it then slam it shut, muttering manically to himself. "Erik is a bad man. Erik doesn't deserve a living wife. No monster deserves such beauty. Oh, he thought Christine loved him. No one can love Erik. She loves the Angel of Music and the fop but loathes Erik. Stupid, selfish Erik! How dare he try to touch Christine as if he were a human. She spurns him. Denys him the joys of the flesh. Because she is a good girl and Erik is a monster…"
His voice trailed off into silence.
Christine felt a few tears creep down her cheeks.
As expected, music filled the air, obliterating the silence with chaotic chords, searing Christine to the core with his agony. The Angel of Music, cruel in his passions, had returned, reminding Christine that Erik was more than a mere, mortal man. He was a genius with a broken mind, a blackened heart and a voice which could bring all of heaven's angel to their knees.
.
.
A fortnight passed. Christine was certain it had been two weeks since Erik married her based on meals and her monthly. She was unable to confirm it since her unwanted husband vanished after pounding his misery onto the pipe organ. Christine knew Erik was around given the state of the cupboards and the violent music which permeated the labyrinth when she was abed. Twice she attempted to confront him, but the door to her room was locked whenever the tell-tale whine of the violin or rumble of the pipe organ invaded her mind.
Erik wanted to play Angel of Music.
Christine wanted freedom.
Two weeks were enough to bolster her crumbed confidence and rile her temper. She was no longer a little girl. She would no longer be pacified by music or cowed by his threats.
Christine stood by the organ, clenched her fists and began to sing. Poorly. When her squawking garnered no attention, she smashed her palms against the keyboard, filling the room with hideous noise. Frustrated tears pricked at her eyes, but she banished them with a swipe of a hand and began to shriek insults and threats.
"Coward! Why won't you come out of hiding?" Christine wailed, reaching for the nearest instrument she could lift with one hand. A finely crafted Viola found its neck caught in her steely grasp. "Show yourself or I'll break all of your precious instruments. I'll rip up your music and throw your books in the lake…"
She was met with infuriating silence.
Every ounce of pent up fear, anger and frustration exploded in a scream as Christine gripped the priceless Viola in both hands, lifted it above her head and smashed it into a million splinters. She screamed again, half-sobbing and reached for another instrument, a bassoon. The double-reed instrument met a similar fate to the Viola as Christine swung it around like a battle-axe, bashing it against a Cello, a music stand and the side of the pipe organ. Next she grabbed any papers within reach and flung them heedlessly around the room, making it snow Erik's handwritten original pieces.
Christine pulled at her hair in frustration before running for the door to Erik's underground abode. She pulled on the handle, expecting it to be locked as it usually was, but found it open. Christine did not linger to wonder at her luck, instead she bolted into the scarcely lit dark, skirts held aloft as she ran, and nearly tripped into the lake in her haste. Erik's boat was nowhere in sight, which meant she would have to swim.
Without removing her shoes or any of the numerous layers of cloth, she waded into the lake. It was not deep water. At the most it rose to Christine's shoulders as she floundered towards the portcullis. Once she passed the raised iron gate, she could follow the water to the tunnels and towards freedom. She would navigate those dark passages and escape from Erik's neglectful grip.
Christine shuffled towards freedom.
As the water retreated to rest beneath her knees, something gripped her ankle and pulled her under. Christine fell to her knees with a cry, her wrists aching as she caught herself against the rocky bottom of the lake. As she attempted to rise, she was pulled backwards, deeper into the water. Christine thrashed, desperate to escape, but she could not break free. She was pulled beneath the surface, cutting off air to her compressed lungs. Bubbles frothed around her mouth as she fought to hold her breath. Had the lake gotten deeper?
She reached towards the surface, fingers clawing at the water separating her from needed air. Christine watched the water ripple and churn above her, reacting to her struggles, but deeper and deeper she kept being pulled. Her will to fight faded with every heartbeat and slowly, darkness started to close in.
…Down.
Christine closed her eyes.
…Down.
Every instinct warred with itself, to breathe or not.
…Down.
To suffocate or to drown.
.
.
"BREATHE!"
Christine breathed.
.
.
"Stupid girl. Christine is a stupid girl. Stupid. Stupid. Stupid. Christine could have died. Then Erik would have a corpse bride instead of a living wife and Erik cannot live without a living wife. If Christine dies then Erik would have no reason to live. He would crawl into Christine's coffin and kill himself. Yes, so he could be with his wife. The wife he loves so much."
Cold hands, the hands of a corpse stroked Christine's face. She groaned and attempted to open her eyes. Every inch of her body hurt.
"Christine is freezing," Erik muttered as he cradled Christine to his chest, rocking her back-and-forth as if she were a fussing infant. "Heat. Christine needs heat. Oh but Erik's world is so cold."
She was no longer clad in her dress, or any clothes for that matter. Her nude body was swaddled in countless blankets as Erik held her, clearly upset, possibly even frightened. He generally only rocked when distressed, too overwhelmed by his emotions to do more than stare at the wall and babble endlessly.
Her musings were interrupted by a violent series of coughs erupting from her lungs. Christine gasped as she regained her breath and attempted to wriggle away from Erik. She was not cold, she was hot. Too hot. She needed to escape the blankets and put on a nightgown, something breezy and cool. Erik was smothering her.
"Christine is flushed…fever…Please no. God, have some mercy for poor, ugly Erik! Do not take away the only good thing he has left."
As she wriggled free of some of the blankets and the cool air kissed her, Christine no longer felt swelteringly hot. Instead, she felt a chill deeper than her bones. Bile rolled in her gut and clung to her throat, filling Christine's dry mouth with bitterness. Shivering uncontrollably, she huddled back into the blankets, wondering how long it would be before she would be warm again.
Erik muttered under his breath before lying Christine down on the bed as if she were an antique porcelain doll. He left the room, leaving her to cope with the ever changing fits of overheating and chills, claiming he needed to fetch her medicine. Erik was no doctor. He was abandoning her! Christine mewled in distress when the minutes drew long, her head filled with thoughts of dying alone in a half-lit room underground.
She felt his shadow drape over the bed and sighed in relief.
"I'm sorry 'bout your instruments…"
"Pardon?"
Christine attempted to sit up, "I broke them."
"Material things can be replaced, mon petite," Erik said as he sat on the edge of the bed and pressed the edge of a glass against her lips. "Now drink."
Warmth oozed down into her stomach as she swallowed the potion, stealing away the awful chill. With a grateful smile, Christine gazed up at her worried Angel.
The smile fled as soon as she saw his face.
Buquet's voice filled her aching head.
'His face can barely be called a face, it is a skull with eyes more like it. Skin like yellowed parchment covers bone and he instead of a nose, there is a hole where one should be. And his eyes, two yellow stars plucked from the night sky, glow like demon eyes in the dark…'
In his desperation to rescue her, Erik lost the impressive guise of ghostly gentleman and apparently had yet to notice his mask-less state. He really was a horror to witness. A true atrocity. How could God make a human being look so dead while clearly alive? Without the impassive mask and dapper suit, Erik resembled a skeleton with skin with a few thickened areas of muscle on his chest, shoulders and thighs—Christine could see the outline of every rib and vertebra and his stomach was hollowed instead of flat or full. He was so pale, his skin almost translucent, revealing every bulging blue vein and bearing a jaundiced tint. Then there was his face. His misshapen mockery of a face.
His bottom lip was the only familiar feature, swollen and distorted beneath a twisted upper lip. He possessed a nose, or at least the collapsed remnants one. It wasn't a gaping pit in the middle of his face, instead it was a slightly raised protrusion with a flap of thin skin covering it and two slits resembling nostrils. Above the ruined nose were two hollow sockets with yellow stars gleaming within them, his skull-tight skin emphasizing the void depths. And above those familiar stars was a waterlogged wig resting at a precarious angle atop Erik's wisp-covered head.
"Christine?" Erik said as he took note of Christine's intense gaze. Those yellow stars widened and he hesitantly touched the askew wig and an exposed cheek. As soon as his fingertips brushed bare skin, Erik splayed an open hand over his mockery of a face and turned away, howling in agony. "No! Christine was never supposed to see Erik's loathsome face. She can never love Erik now! She will fear him, despise him…oh what misery!" She watched as he dropped the ground, both hands covering his face and began to rock to-and-fro. "Christine will never stay. She will leave Erik for the fop and his golden beauty, and Erik will die! Why! Why must this face ruin everything? It taints all Erik dares to love. He kills everything he touches because the world has decreed him incapable of anything else. He is a monster. A hideous gargoyle desperately seeking the beauty God denied him! Seeking the love a horrified mother denied him. Seeking…desperate…Oh, Christine."
He wailed again and began to scratch at his deformed visage as if it were a mask he could remove with enough effort. Yellowed nails bit into thin, fragile skin and scored deep rivets into pallid flesh.
Like any mortal man would, Erik bled red.
The blood seeped and gushed, pulsing into his spidery hands like water from a fountain. His horrifying face, which roiled her stomach at first glance, was now a mutilated disaster. No longer did he look dead; Erik instead looked as if he were freshly mauled and on the brink of dying. He kept ripping at his face until he could gain no purchase with his blood-clotted nail on slickened skin.
Unable to comprehend or handle the shock, Christine lost control of her stomach and vomited onto the sheepskin rug, opposite of the bed where Erik knelt. Then she began to cough. And cough. It was difficult to breathe and she was cold. So cold. Helpless, Christine huddled in the blankets, her whimpers lost beneath the agonized wails of a fallen angel.
Somewhere in the distance, a violin began to play, beckoning the fiddler's daughter to close her eyes and sing soprano until all the pain faded away.
.
.
"You cannot leave. I won't let you. Christine will stay with Erik forever! Fear can turn to love, and you will someday forget my face. We will be happy. Christine will want for nothing."
.
.
"W-where am I? W-why is it so dark? Why can't I see?"
.
.
"Now you can never leave me."
.
.
No, she could not leave. To leave would mean facing the big, bright world above without sight. To leave would mean pity and failure. To leave…it was an impossible dream. Christine idly wondered how long it had been since the fever consumed all rationality and stolen away her senses. In moments of bitterness, she questioned if this was a mechanism of Erik's part, a means of control, a way of keeping her from seeing him unmasked. However, it was too late. She had seen him and his horrible visage. Her last memories that of him bleeding, painting red the yellowed parchment he called skin.
"Wife?"
Christine turned to face the sound of Erik's voice. The living corpse insisted on calling her wife and little else. He did not yell or handle her roughly when she regarded him mutely, refusing to speak, much less sing. His trapped little song bird had lost its will to sing. Her soul was a broken thing, shattered by Erik's forceful hand and negligence. He had not left her since that day where she took ill. Christine often wished he would. At least then she would have privacy, some time to discover and regain a sense of self.
Instead he treated her like some glass doll, too precious to allow alone. He sang to her and played beautiful music until Christine succumbed to exhaustion. As if she were a child again, Erik put her to bed each evening and made certain she ate. All food tasted of dust and the plush comfort of the feather bed was like sleeping on nails, but she did little to protest. He had done it. He had consumed her. No more freedom for the soprano who once thought him an angel. His selfish obsession, the things he called love, was all that sustained her.
Erik forced her to keep breathing.
To keep walking.
To keep living.
On occasion, she heard explosive arguments the tunnels. Erik intercepted any trespassers and turned them around. When she first realized that she would never hear Nadir's rough voice again, nor Madame Giry's or Meg's…Christine wept. She wept for days. And when Raoul came to mind, she lost her voice. The solitude which once cradled her now suffocated. She was not a little girl with her Angel of Music, passing the endless night with music and lessons. No, she was a woman. A grown woman made a wife too young, all ambition ripped away by a madman's selfishness.
"Wife, I have a gift."
It was enough to make Christine want to laugh hysterically. She was a wife with a hideous, unwanted husband who kept her prisoner in his dark domain, and here he was offering a present. Not that his appearance mattered all too much. The mask was his face as far as she was concerned. But his insanity, his cruelty, it made him ugly. Too ugly to withstand any longer. She knew his temper and knew now that he was unafraid to strike her, to punish her with abandonment. He twisted her mind and played with her emotions, manipulated her into compliance.
"Christine, mon petite, will you not smile for your husband?" Erik bid, his voice child-like. "If you smile, you can have it." First he asks for a smile, next he will be asking for kisses. Christine knew how Erik's mind worked, thus she remained impassive. "Oh, please smile. It has been too long. Erik had done everything he can to make Christine happy. He treats her kind, never raises his voice, brings her beautiful things. Erik is being good, so good to his lovely wife…why won't she smile for him?"
Silence ensued. Then a sigh and a shuffle of paper. Christine felt the air shift as Erik moved to stand behind her and began to pluck the pins from her hair. Once the locks were free, he played with them, as a lover might, before quickly tying the curls up with a length of fabric. A ribbon. Erik's gift was another ribbon.
"You look lovely," he said.
Christine dropped her eyes and remained silent.
"Would Christine like to sing?" Erik asked, his fingers toying absently with the ends of her hair. "No? Erik loves it when Christine sings, it makes him feel human." Spindly hands shakily stroked her curls before falling across the skin of her neck. He was not wearing gloves. His flesh was cool. "Wife…Erik loves his wife. He would do anything to make her happy…"
As the quiet grew thick, he shuddered.
"How about we go to bed? The hour is drawing late."
Without protest, Christine allowed her unwanted husband, her fallen Angel of Music, to guide her to her feet into the bedroom. Whispered caresses followed as Erik adoringly undressed her and eased Christine into a long nightgown. His touches lingered longer every night. She knew he was fighting temptation. He was a man, after all, her husband.
"What must I do to regain your love, Christine?"
When she yet again said nothing, he laid her on the sheets and tucked her in. His cool body joined her a short while later.
Unsurprisingly, Erik pressed a kiss against Christine's throat, his spidery hands daring to trace in the dark what he was reluctant to touch in the light. She knew what he desired. She knew what would one day come. She also knew, that she would not resist.
Erik had won.
.
.
"Erik."
"Is something the matter? Are you unwell? Do you need something? It has been too long since I last heard your voice. Say something else, even if it is that accursed, awful name."
"M-my monthly…"
"Your...? Ah, yes. Do not fret my dear, it is the natural course of things."
"What do you mean?"
A hand splayed upon Christine's stomach as Erik pulled her flush against him. She was uncertain whether the contact was something to be reviled or reveled in.
"I promised you long ago to give you all that you need, that your every desire would be met as long as you were sworn to me. Given that you speak now after such an extended silence heartens me. I made the right choice. I have given you what you need to be happy."
"Erik, stop speaking in riddles."
"A family, Christine. We will have together what you forsook music for when you almost accepted that fop's proposal."
"No."
"We shall be together for eternity, no mortal able to tear us asunder."
-tbc-
A/N: Almost done. And I have a feeling, based on reviews, that my plans for the story differed quite a bit from what some of my readers had in mind. Heh. Thank you for reading, and as always, please review!