A/N: Part six of six. The final twist in the tale. After this, I'm changing the description to include the words "Dark" and "complete"

The Fiddler's Daughter

By Catsitta

.6.

.

A middle-aged man adjusted the violin resting against his neck with a scowl, his yellow eyes narrowed with consternation. The finicky instrument was impossible to tune in the winter. As his long fingers plucked agitatedly across the rivets and strings, he failed to notice the arrival of another person until she cleared her throat. He glanced up to see a pair of blue eyes staring at him, their owner smiling sadly.

"Abigale…I was not expecting you," he said after watching the woman for a long while. "Your youngest was born nary more than a fortnight ago. Shouldn't you be with her?"

"I couldn't possibly leave you alone on this day Gustave."

"Why not, the others did easily enough."

With a sigh, Abigale approached Gustave and laid a hand on his shoulder. The lace-gloved appendage looked so dainty and frail against the starkness of his suit jacket. However, all Gustave could think about was how inappropriate the lace was for the thick of winter. There was snow on the ground for God's sake! Lowering the violin to his side, he glared at the woman beside him.

"You look so much like Father when you do that."

Gustave grimaced, "Of course I do. With these eyes how could I look like anyone else but Father?"

"I mean the frowning," Abigale said. "He was always frowning at one thing or another."

"You mean he was sneering. If he wasn't sneering, he was yelling."

"Gustave…"

"Don't," he held his hand up to quiet his sister. "The man was a right bastard and you know it. I wish Mother never met him. She deserved better than him."

"You shouldn't speak ill of the dead," Abigale warned, her hand leaving his shoulder as she approached the gravestones they stood near. From the arrangement twisted into her hair, she withdrew a flower, a blood-red rose, and placed it on the frozen soil. "Remember, also, that if Father and Mother never met, none of us would have been born. Mother always said she was happiest when she held her children."

Gustave grunted and began to fiddle with the violin again. It used to belong to his grandfather, his namesake Gustav Daaé, and the pesky thing made him want to pull out his hair on a good day. After a few minutes, a crystalline whine pierced the frozen air. He would lose himself in music. That was always better than losing himself in the past. Thinking about his parents always left him in a somber mood, and not because they both had passed.

No, it was because theirs was a love not meant to be and Gustave was the only one who saw it. He sheltered his siblings from the dark truth and carried his parents' secret on his soul. They all simply thought of Erik as a father, one whom they loved and whom showed his affection through strict discipline. Gustave knew the truth. He knew that he and his three siblings were meant to be more. He knew that Mother cried in her sleep as she mourned the imperfect children Erik stole away.

His mother was blind; an affliction which occurred when she was sixteen due to fever and Father took whole-hearted advantage of it. He manipulated her into becoming completely dependent on him. He tricked her into thinking that what they had was love. He kept her pregnant for the sake of compliance and attachment. Gustave knew this and there was nothing he could do.

As he poured his soul into the music, Gustave tried to push away all thoughts of little Elizabeth, who after a string of illnesses was stricken incapable of speech and prone to seizing fits, and of newborn Charles, whose poor lungs doomed him to a shortened life from the start but whose malformed jaw destined him to be taken too soon. Gustave had been five when he caught Erik smothering his two-year-old sister and sixteen when Charles vanished from his crib after Gustave succumbed to the basic need of sleep after a weeklong vigil at the cradle's side. Between those two losses and at least three miscarriages, Mother had been left a broken woman. True, she loved her living children, but she never completely healed, and how could she with a husband like Erik?

Tears crept down his cheeks as he recalled the death of his parents.

Some might think it a romantic tale: a monstrously disfigured man finding love in the arms of a blind woman. But that was not the whole story. Christine Daaé hadn't always been blind. She was once a rising star. Erik had been her mentor until he decided to make her his wife. The man he called Father was obsessed with, not in love with Mother. If he had loved her, he would have given her freedom, allowed her to become the Diva she was destined to be instead of stealing her away into his labyrinth of night to be at the mercy of his jealousies. If he had loved her, completely and fully, Erik would have loved his children as extensions of his beloved wife.

When Mother died from cancer when she was little more than thirty-five, Father did not mourn, he did not seek solace in his grieving. No, the selfish bastard hung himself in the same room Mother died and let his offspring find them both dead the next morning! There was no consideration for how it would affect the children. He did not care for the life sired by his loins. He thought only of himself and allowed obsession to consume him until it destroyed everything good in his life.

Mother loved him. She confessed it took her years to love him as a man after Erik broke her trust and shattered her illusions of a fathering guardian. Dependence, denial and devotion turned into a sickening parody of romance. Gustave wished he could have throttled his Father countless times when Mother told her story, her unfocused blue-eyes wet with tears, of how fear turned to love but how that love often felt precariously close to hate. Erik never beat his wife, thank God for small mercies, but why would he need to when she needed him to breathe?

She acted as if Father sustained her soul with his music and called him Angel. A murdering, temperamental brute that used fear to control his family and manipulate them all into thinking it was love was far from an angel. As beautiful as his creations were, Erik was not heaven sent. If anything, he was a demon plucked from hell.

With a violent tremble, Gustave dropped the bow and stared up at the grey sky. Today was the anniversary of their parent's deaths.

"Gustave…do you remember the lullaby Mother and Father used to sing together?"

Blearily, he blinked at his sister, whom was watching him with their mother's eyes. Gustave shivered and nodded with understanding. With trembling hands he picked the bow up and began to coax the simple melody from the strings, as his namesake did before him, and together, the two siblings began to sing. They were the children of the Angel of Music and his Swedish Soprano, music ran thick in their blood. Heaven had no choice but to listen to the mournful appeal of two nephilim as their souls cried out.

Somewhere, beyond the realm of reality, betwixt the lines of truth and fantasy, in a place not quite heaven and not quite hell, their appeal was echoed. A genius cursed to live without a face and a simple daughter of a fiddler, had found their peace in the haunting melody taking wing.

In music, their legacy remained.

.

.

.

What is morality? Some would say it varies by culture, that there are discrepancies between class and creed due to the constraints and expectations of society. Others would claim there is an overreaching branch of rightness, of cosmic good. Yet there are even others who would dispute the differences between rightness and morality, between moral and just. If you were to ask almost any urchin from the streets, be he a king or beggar, he would claim there to be morality. After all, humans are notorious for their love of boxes, of neat little labels. It goes against the grit of human nature to accept that which does not fit the norm. There must be a name for it, even if it is as simple as good or evil, right or wrong, just or immoral.

I, for one, am not constrained by the shackles of petty humanity. The normal is but an illusion. Morality does not exist. Same as time. Humans need to label, to chart and control. If it cannot be written or numbered or calculated, it pricks the instinct to fight or flee. Like rapid dogs, beastly and frothing at the mouth, humans destroy all that they cannot understand in a fit of blind fury and fetid fear. I am different. I understand. I see that which no one else can see. I know that there are no things good nor evil, right or wrong, that morality is a man-made concept created to control. A system of guilt and reward. The humans feel good when they believe they do what is right and the guilt diverts them from what society claims is wrong.

Some may think of me as a madman, or a deviant at the very least. To claim to be beyond humanity when clothed in mortal flesh…What heresy! I believe in no God, in no divine creator. If He existed, no creature would be cursed as I, forced to live in a state of Truth whilst bound to the Earth in a hideous shell. Humans are animals, vindictive and fearful. If He existed, He never would have placed me upon the planet, to languish in the chaos of Knowing, as if I had swallowed a whole tree's worth of the biblical fruit of knowledge before my birth.

No one else Knows as I do. The Truth made me wise…made me different. Humans knew not what to think of an ugly genius in their midst. If only that were the extent. If I were merely ugly, Death would have long ago since claimed my weak heart and determined my fateful decay. If I were merely a genius, then the Truth would have eluded me, and I would have lived a doubtlessly charmed life…beautiful and shallow. And if I were merely an ugly genius, then I would have long ago resigned myself to the end of my beloved lasso and been done with the hellishness of this illusion known as life.

I am more.

I Know. I See. I Feel.

Some may call it madness, but I am quite sane. Quite aware. My choices are made without consideration to what is right or wrong, good or evil. Morality is but a concept. Death, however, is real. Survival is substantial. I did what I must to live, having long ago abandoned the chains of normality. It is why I took her, Christine, my little songbird…my beloved living wife. Society dictates that a good man would release a woman into the arms of another more capable of providing for her, or caring for her needs, of loving her. In contrast, society claims a bad man would do the opposite, would hold her against her will despite freedom being what she needs.

I took no heed of rightness or wrongness when I claimed Christine as my own, for eternity. She was mine from the instant I heard her sing as a child. As the years passed, I loved her. I desired her. She invoked passion in a heart grown cold from the Truth. From Knowing. She brought light into the darkness of my mind, she made clear the Truths. Without her, I was lost to the Knowledge in my head. Knowledge I could never escape.

Then I thought I would lose her. Those were precarious moments. Should she have died, I would have followed within the next beat of my heart. But I could not let her die. No, never. She was mine. Always mine.

A good man would have freed Christine after the first brush with disaster. She was innocent, undeserving of grief and sadness. A bad man would have killed her when she tried to defy him, dared to break his rules.

I caged the songbird I adored. I watched her flounder and wither before my eyes when she thought she had her freedom, unaware that I kept her wings clipped just enough to prevent her from flying away. I watched her suffering continue when I surrounded her with iron bars. It hurt me to see my beloved dying, thus I did what I needed to bring her back to me, to life.

I broke her wings.

She hated me for a time. She did not know I had done it…but she suspected. Then I caressed my songbird with song, filled her nest with chicks. She had all that she needed…except freedom.

I suppose she has that now. Ironic. I despise irony. It lays before me in the form of my broken shell of a wife. I captured my beloved, only to have her stolen away by the inevitable. In years, I have decades more in experience than my wife. She was young, too young, to be ripped from me. And now, now the Truth makes my head ache. No more clarity. No more song. Only pain. Only noise.

Christine gave her Angel of Music peace in life.

And he will chase her into death, be it decay or damnation.

I do not believe in God. I do not believe in Good or Evil. I do not believe in morality. I do not believe in miracles. I do not believe in Heaven, or Hell, or Angels.

I believe in the Truth. I believe in what I Know.

Some may call it madness, or selfishness, or even grief.

But I Know that I cannot live without Christine.

fin

A/N: (Aaand, we're at an end. Not what you were expecting, eh? To be honest, it wasn't the end I was expecting when I started The Fiddler's Daughter. In fact, this was supposed to be a haunting romance wrought with darkness that turned into light. I'm a sucker for a happy ending. I like reading them. I like writing them. But…this, I felt, was a more fulfilling end. A more honest end. The relationship between Erik and Christine became too unhealthy for there to be a happily ever after. I watched as their journey spiraled out of control, and into the dark. It is why this tale is not labeled Romance, but Drama alone. Some of my readers might feel I shortchanged them, took you straight past the end and right into the epilogue without prompt. But I could not bring myself to convey the slow decay of the soul in lengthy terms.

But just to clarify any questions, I have a few answers to provide in case you missed them in the text or I left it unstated for artistic purposes.

How old is Erik?

Think fifty to sixty. I lost track of the years in Kay's retelling, but part of the dynamic in Christine and Erik's relationship is a dramatic difference in age. I did not want it to be a normal, acceptable difference, albeit taboo. To put it bluntly: Erik is old. I guess making him in his mid-thirties is a popular means of making the relationship acceptable, especially to modern standards, but I digress…

Why did Nadir and Christine start acting as if Erik was going to hurt everyone after he killed Buquet in defense of Christine?

This reaction is inspired by cannon. Leroux's Christine was readily dramatic, same as ALW's, when it came to deaths. Nadir, an edited version of Kay's, knows Erik from the past as an assassin who is willing to destroy his creations in retaliation to being manipulated and hurt. He knows that Erik has a tender side for animals, but holds little value in human life. As was stated in the story, Erik promised Nadir that he would not hurt/kill anyone when Christine came into his care so that Nadir would not attempt to take Christine away. When he broke that vow, Nadir noticed the return of the heartless "Angel of Doom" would destroy if provoked. Of course, Christine being fifteen, was horribly conflicted by the moral implications of murder and the fact that Erik did it in her defense.

Did Erik purposefully blind Christine?

Yes. I affirmed it in Erik's monologue.

It seems a bit too far out of character for Erik to impregnate Christine on purpose…why?

Control. My Erik is a selfish bastard with an obsession and control issues. He is unstable without a true sense of morality. Yes, he freaks out in a child-like way around Christine, but in his head, he is a rational, thinking man. A brilliant man. But unable to cope with his emotions and his own humanity. He thinks of himself as Other. As a monster instead of a man. How does this relate to the question? Essentially, Erik knows sleeping with Christine and making sure she is pregnant will bind her further to him, make her vulnerable and reliant. He knows it is immoral, according to society norms, but because of his issues doesn't think of his actions as wrong, because he is Other.

How many children?

Five alive, two dead and three miscarried. Gustave is the oldest, followed by Elizabeth (deceased), Abigale, Pierre, Louise, Geoffrey and Charles (deceased). The middle three are not mentioned by name, but I included them here as a fun fact. Also, Gustave's middle name is Erik, much to Erik's displeasure.

Why 'The Fiddler's Daughter'?

This is where I should mention that the original idea for this story started out with Gustave being a famous violinist, married to an equally famous Soprano, who perform for nobleman across Europe, who end up having a musically inclined child…and Erik is actually an Angel. When Gustave was caught in the crossfire of an assassination attempt on one of his patrons during a performance, Erik stole Christine away to fashion her beautiful voice. Erik thinks of and refers to Christine's father as the Fiddler. And said Fiddler produced music which made him suffer sweet agony. Thus he claimed the Fiddler's Daughter in an attempt to reclaim the beautiful music. Somehow, that idea turned into this story, but the title stuck.

.

.

.

Thank you for reading, reviewing and being supportive! Feel free to PM me, or ask questions through reviews. I will do my best to answer them. I loved writing this tale and feedback makes it all worth it. Once again, thank you and…goodnight!