A/N: Apologies in advance for any possible typos in this chapter. I injured some fingers today, and wasn't able to give it the usual proper edit.

It was Mamma who got them bound in leather. Before that, she told him, they were bundles of sheets of paper, each composition tied with string to keep it together. But she got them bound, and then when the time came she picked a few of the best pieces out and had them performed.

He gently opens the cover of the top book in the stack, and reveals the music within. The staff paper is hand-lined, though he knows from looking before that some of it was bought, the lines stamped on. But these ones, these ones must have been so time-consuming, and there are hundreds and hundreds of pages like them. Such careful work, how long must it have taken?

His fingers lightly trace the notes. Most of the pieces are instrumental, for organ or violin though occasionally for other instruments too, including the piano. Someday he will go through, and take the pieces for organ and try to re-work them to fit the piano. But it is the violin music he has always been drawn. The sweet, sad, aching of the violin music.

Tears prickle his eyes, and he blinks them away hard. It would not do to cry over the staff paper, not after all of this time, all of these years. But the very thought, that his father wrote this music without ever thinking he would have a son to someday play it too—it tightens Konstin's throat, and his fingers tremble on the page.

"Oh, Papa," he whispers, his voice thick, "oh, Papa."

Mamma's fingers are soft as they smooth back his hair, and he leans into her touch, sighing. Dimly he can see her, her face framed with her golden hair, and it makes her look so pretty, as if she were an angel. "Oh, Konstin," she whispers as his eyes slip closed, her lips brushing softly against his forehead, "Oh my precious little boy."

Through the darkness he feels a hand, wrapping around his own and pulling. It is a struggle to get his legs under him, knees buckling, the mud weighing him down, and overhead he hears the screech of a shell but it is not here, is falling over someone else, is blowing up someone else, and faintly he sees as if he is there the spatter of mud and blood and he chokes on the bile in his throat, that hand pulling him, and his feet scramble, find purchase in the wall of mud, and the next thing he is over the top, and the brightness stings his eyes, waters them, and the lines and lines of barbed wire half-submerged in mud are blurred but they don't matter and the shells don't matter because Antoine's mud-streaked face is before him, eyes watering too and lips trembling and then Antoine's arms are wrapping around him, pulling him close, and his heart lurches as Antoine whispers, his voice hoarse in his ear, "thank God you're alive. Thank God."

Raoul does not often travel down below the opera with her, and it is rarer that he visits Erik's grave with her. But tonight Christine is grateful for him, grateful for the way his arms wrap around her waist, grateful for the way he cradles her head to his chest, grateful for the way he kisses her hair and sways gently with her.

(He stayed away, for a long time even tonight, and she lay on the cold ground, listening to the sound of her own breathing, trying not to think of her boy so far away, trying only to think of Erik, of how he would hold her or she would him, but Konstin kept creeping back into her thoughts and making it so hard to breathe, until Raoul finally joined her, and wrapping his hands around hers pulled her to her feet.)

She does not cry. She is so wrung out she has nothing left to cry, and the thought of Konstin having developed an infection is simply one more awful thing, one more twisting terrible thing in her stomach that makes her ache all the more. So the tears stay at bay of their own accord as she stands there by the grave of her first husband in the arms of her second, and they do not speak, not for a long time, her heart steadying just by the fact of being here, of being this close to Erik.

The silence stretches between them, stretches on for a long time, the soft beating of their hearts all that she can hear until, eventually, Raoul whispers, "Erik is with him, Christine, I know he is. He's watching over him." And the thought of Erik, sitting with the son he never met, being there to comforttohim when she cannot, is the thought that makes tears prickle her eyes.

He keeps his eyes tightly screwed shut, unable to bear the sight of the nurse tending to Konstin. She is sponging down his stitches, opening up each of his bandages as she works, and the sharp edge of the smell of disinfectant makes Antoine feel nauseous. It is so overpowering it masks any stench from Konstin's wounds, and though she gave Konstin more morphine before she started, he still whimpers as she works, and those pained whimpers and the sloshing of her disinfectant solution are all the sound that reaches Antoine's ears.

He tries to focus on other things, tries to think of things outside of this room, but it is as if this room has become the whole world, as if everything out there has simply dropped away, ceased to exist. Even when Marguerite visited earlier, and told him that she's had a telegram from Guillaume and he is home safe, there was only the barest flicker of relief in Antoine's heart at the news his twin is well, as if Guillaume is not his twin, is the twin of another Antoine, somewhere else, who is not wounded in hospital and bound to listen to his lover's fevered murmurs. What does anything else matter, when there is only this? When there is only Konstin in pain and him, unable to help him at all?

Tears trickle from the corners of his eyes, but he does not lift his hand to wipe them away, pain twisting too deeply in his chest. What do his tears matter now?

A little brother. A tiny little brother. Even though he knew his mother was expecting, of course he knew that, he did not expect to get a little brother.

The little boy snuffles in his sleep, the weight of him light on Konstin's chest. He was crying, and Raoul was talking to the doctor, and Mamma was resting, so Konstin gently lifted him out of his crib, and lay down with him on the sofa, settling the baby to lie on his chest, head over his heart. Mamma told him, before, back when Anja was tiny, that when he was a baby it used to settle him to lie on her chest and listen to her heart.

"A baby gets used to listening to a heartbeat, you see, before they are born," she said, and her words came back to him as he held his tiny brother, and sure enough listening to Konstin's heart soothed the baby's crying into whimpers, and then into sleep.

He does not have a name yet. He is two days old, and still he has no name. "We'll wait until your mother is stronger," Raoul had said, his voice hoarse and tears shining in his eyes, "and then let her decide."

Wait until she is stronger. Even now, two days later, the words make Konstin's heart lurch. There was a haemorrhage, he knows, a terrible, awful haemorrhage afterwards, and she lost a lot of blood, which is why the doctor comes every few hours, checking up on her and making certain it does not start again.

If it starts again—

Konstin's blood runs cold, like ice water through his veins, and he pushes the thought away, curls his arm tighter around the baby on his chest. It will not start again. It will not. It cannot. It is not allowed to, and besides, Mamma said herself that she would be all right.

It was hours before he was allowed to see her, even after the haemorrhage had been stopped, and when he was let into the room, his knees were weak and he knelt beside the bed, and laid his head on her shoulder with tears spilling from his eyes, unable to bear the sight of her white face, and the blue tinge to her pale lips, and she whispered, as she wrapped an arm around his shoulders and pulled him close to her, that she would be all right, "I will, Konstin, I will, I promise."

The baby stirs, draws Konstin back out of the memory and makes him realise that there are tears damp on his cheeks again. He wipes them away roughly, and the baby whimpers, then settles. It would not do to cry while holding the baby. It would not do.

Is she abandoning them? Abandoning Konstin by being unable to bear seeing him in such a state? Abandoning Antoine by being unable to reassure him because she cannot bear to see Konstin? Abandoning Dupuis by being unable to bring herself to sit with him, to take his hand and squeeze it and tell him a thousand times that he will be well? (A thousand times though the very words feel like a lie when she thinks of how pallid he is, of the flush across his cheeks and the threadiness of his pulse and the way he whimpers with fever. She never thought she would be thankful for someone to have a spinal injury, but if it keeps him from being in pain...)

"I thought you would be with your cousin." The soft voice of the curé, Dumas, stirs Marguerite from her thoughts, and she looks up to find him settling onto the bench next to her. He raises an eyebrow at her. "Or, if not with your cousin and brother, then the Capitaine that you seem so troubled over."

What can she tell him? That she is too anxious to sit with them, with any of them? That the thought of seeing them now makes her want to vomit, makes cold sweat break out on her skin and her heart pound? That she has abandoned them, left them, aches to run away, run as far away as she can and not have to think about this, any of this? That she longs to just forget that any of this has happened? How peaceful it would be, to forget. How easy, to not have to know, to just be able to breathe.

"I—" she opens her mouth, but cannot find an answer for him, all the words too hollow, every one of them a lie, of one sort or another. And she cannot lie, not to a priest. It would be blasphemous to lie to a priest.

It takes him a moment, but then his eyes widen and a knowing look crosses his face. Slowly, he reaches out, and curls his fingers around hers, squeezing them gently. "I understand." He swallows, nodding to himself, and her breath catches in her throat waiting for what he will say. Is he going to tell her off? Call her a coward, unable to face her duty? Will he berate her? Give her three rosaries as penance? He can surely feel her beads wrapped between her fingers. "I understand that your cousin is gravely ill, as is the Capitaine."

It is not a question, and she nods, her throat too tight to speak with hearing those words spoken in his soft voice. Gravely ill. And though his eyes are kind the words pierce her heart, a sharp, shooting pain.

"At such times," he continues, as if she did answer him, as if she is able to speak, "at such times of—of great personal disturbance, the Church can be a tremendous comfort, and often great solace may be found in turning to God." He stops, but it is not the sort of silence that words are meant to fill, and she waits, her heart pounding, for what he is going to say. "But in your case, I do not think you are turning to God for solace, but for guidance. And as his messenger, I feel I need to tell you that I think you need to visit your cousin, and the Capitaine. Whatever about it being your duty, but for your own sake. I do not think you will be easy in yourself unless you spend time with them. I may not be a man of medicine, but I do know that a great deal of difficulty lies ahead, for both of them. And if—if the worst were to happen, and you were not able to face seeing them, either of them, I think it will cause you a great deal of turmoil to have to live with that. You may be a great comfort to them, if you were there, but I think you need to be there to be a comfort to yourself." He falls silent, and tears prickle Marguerite's eyes, his words circling in her brain.

...if the worst were to happen.

...a comfort to yourself.

What if Konstin were to die? If his heart were simply to stop and she were not there? What if Dupuis—Edouard—what if Edouard were to stop breathing? Her stomach churns, and she swallows down the bile that burns her throat.

The very thought of them—

Her lungs constrict, constrict so tight she cannot breathe, her heart pounding hard and she gasps, lungs burning for air, tears prickling her eyes and she tries to fight them, tries to keep them at bay because it is undignified to cry, undignified to weep when they are still breathing, both of them and Antoine too, but she can't help it, can't, and the tears spill, wet on her cheeks, and the curé's arms are wrapping around her, pulling her close, his hand patting her back and the tears keep coming, keep spilling, and he rocks her, and distantly she hears him murmur Latin into her ear, the Salve Regina, and she gasps, and leans her head on his shoulder, and lets his words wash over her.

"You've become a very fine musician, Konstin," Sorelli smiles at him, her voice low beneath the music of the string quartet in order to be heard, and though it is supposed to be him leading her across the ballroom, it is really her leading him. "I swear you've improved even since I heard you three months ago. Absolutely exquisite. I promise I will not tell your mother but," and there is a twinkle in her eye, "is there a special someone inspiring you?"

In spite of all his best efforts, Konstin feels a warm flush burn his neck and spread across his cheeks. A special someone? Certainly none of the girls at the Conservatoire or of the ballet are special enough to inspire him, but Antoine— no he must not let his eyes drift to Antoine where he is dancing with a young lady of another aristocratic family, and it would not do to make eyes at him while dancing with his mother and Antoine does not even know and ahhh the twisting feelings in his chest that make it difficult to breathe are going to make him giddy and he fights to keep his voice steady as he says, "No, no one special."

The dance fades, Sorelli slipping from his hands, and he is so tired, so tired, too tired to open his eyes, and there are arms carrying him, warm arms, safe arms, carrying him and a heart beating steady beneath his ears, and the arms are laying him down, and he is too tired to open his eyes, even when a warm hand smooths his hair back, a blanket draping heavy over him and Darius' voice is soft as it says, "sleep well, young Konstin, sleep well."

And his eyes are flickering open, flickering open to bright light that burns them, makes them sting and water, and dimly he sees the impression of a face he does not know, hears a voice that murmurs a question that seems only a jumble of words and he cannot decipher them, cannot— and the air is so cold, so cold as he shivers, pain throbbing deep in his leg, searing in his stomach, and a hand wrapped around his own is gentle and he manages to look down, sees long white fingers and a black sleeve, all that is clear to his sight, and his eyes follow the trail of that sleeve, up to where it meets a shoulder, and a high collar framing the neck, and the face, when he finds it, has no nose, looks like a skull, gold-hazel eyes soft and twisted lips smiling kindly at him, but though the face looks like a skull there is no fear in his heart, and he sighs, breathes a faint, "Papa," before the world is lost to him again and he is falling, falling, falling.

She needs to finish the scarf, needs to finish it. If she finishes the scarf he'll be well. She just needs to finish the scarf.

The clicking of the knitting needles obliterate every other thought, obliterate the snoring of Raoul sleeping beside her, obliterate the memory of Capitaine de Courcy coming with his hat in his hand because he "wanted to know if there was any news", obliterate the thought of Anja's own knitting, obliterate Émile's insistence on going to work, obliterate the mental image of Konstin, lying still and silent and pale, wrapped in bandages.

No, she cannot think of him like that. She needs to think of him as he was the last time he was home on leave, so tall and proud playing his violin, his eyes closed as he swayed with the flow of the music.

And he was so like Erik. The thought was one she could not fight, not even then and it caused a flicker of pain in her heart that faded quickly, but it comes back to her now, the way he stood just the same as his father. Is it true what Raoul said? That Erik is watching over Konstin? She hopes it is, hopes he is there. It would be a comfort to Konstin, to think that he might be there.

She swallows, her throat tight, and tries to push the thoughts away. It is the scarf that matters. So long as she finishes the scarf, all will be well.

It becomes harder and harder for Antoine to sleep, harder and harder to escape what is happening to Konstin. As day turns to night and night wears on, he lies there watching every move that the young nurse (whom he has heard addressed alternately as Amélie and Montpellier by other nurses who have been in and out, though none of them have been Marguerite) who is stationed with Konstin makes. She tends to his fever, draping damp clothes over his forehead and throat, and she checks his bandages and every so often loosens them to clean his stitches, and she makes notes of his pulse and his blood pressure and the sight of her fingers pressing into Konstin's wrist never fails to make Antoine's heart clench.

As Konstin murmurs, she talks to him in a soft voice, speaking soothing words, and a tendril of jealousy twists in Antoine's stomach, because he should be the one sitting beside Konstin, he should be the one whispering to him softly and holding his hand and settling his whimpers. Not her, not this nurse they've never met before, but him. It is his right, is his duty, and when Konstin falls silent and Antoine can hear, can truly hear how shallow his breaths are, tears spring to his eyes, stinging hot, and he knows, he knows that the silence is not the silence of hope but the silence of exhaustion, and the only reason he is not still shifting in the bed is because he has grown so weak.

He needs to go to him. Needs to be there, and he tries to move, tries to swing his legs down so his feet will touch the floor but the moment he leans to the side there is a sharp tugging pain beneath his ribs and he gasps, sweat breaking out on his forehead, and the nurse's hands (when did she move? he never saw her move) are pushing him back down, back down into the bed, pulling the covers up to his chin.

"You need to rest," she whispers, her lips creased with worry and he is still gasping trying to catch his breath, trying to fight the pain still stabbing him in waves, "you need to rest or you will only make yourself more ill and you will be no good to him then."

She disappears, and he tilts his head, his breaths still coming hard as he tries to find her, and there she is consulting a chart, before she withdraws a small bottle and a hypodermic from her pocket, and an icy chill passes over Antoine's skin.

No! He cannot have more morphine! More morphine will make him sleep and he cannot sleep now because what if Konstin dies while he's asleep? What if he wakes and finds him gone and some stranger lying in that bed?

The nurse is saying something, something he cannot understand but which cannot matter because she doesn't understand. How could she understand? He needs to be awake! He needs to be! And he needs to go to Konstin, needs to take his hand and make him promise to live, needs to order him to be all right but Konstin never listens when he orders him and if he did listen he would not be lying here now, would be safe behind the lines after coming out of the trenches and he, Antoine, would not need to worry about him and if he could take Konstin's hand, could take it and squeeze it he would promise him that he will love him forever, and that alone, that alone would surely be enough to make him fight harder.

The stinging pinch of the needle breaks Antoine's thoughts, and the nurse's face swims before him, her lips moving though the words are disjointed coming to his ears. "I promise I'll wake you if there's any change in him. I promise." And it's on the tip of his tongue to ask her about Konstin's Saint Anthony, about the ring, but sleep is pulling heavy at his eyelids, the sleep he has been fighting for so long, and between one heartbeat and another he loses the thread of the thought.

He is distantly aware of fingers at his throat, of murmured Latin, but for a moment there is only Konstin's grey face, and then there is nothing more.

It is the shifting of a tiny body next to his that wakes him, and Konstin blinks his eyes open. The room is dark, early morning light filtering in through the blinds, and he groans.

"Sorry." The voice next to him is soft, and he shifts, looks down to find Anja nestling in beside him, her blonde curls loose. "I didn't mean to wake you, 'stin," she whispers, but the whisper is loud, and he sighs.

"It's all right, Anja." She was asleep when he arrived home, and Nadir said that she'd been waiting up but had dozed off on the sofa.

"She's very excited for you to come home," he said, his eyes twinkling and a smile faintly curving his lips. "A year is a long time for a little girl like her." More than a year, of touring and travelling and living with Antoine, and he comes home to find his three year old sister a girl of five, and his baby brother a talkative two year old who woke when Mamma looked in on him and when he heard "Kon" was here insisted on seeing him, and then was struck with shyness to see the older brother he could not remember.

"Nadir said you were in 'sha. Was it very hot? Did you see any snakes? Were there elephants? Did you bring me a present?" Anja's voice breaks back into his thoughts. So many questions from someone so small, and he's barely awake. He swallows, his eyes slipping closed again.

"I brought you some ribbons. I'll give them to you later." And a nice doll, and some colourful toys. Later after he gets some more sleep.

"Yay! Can I stay in here?"

"If you promise to be quiet. I'm very tired."

"All right. And 'stin?"

"Yes?"

"I missed you."

A/N: This is a chapter that I'm not wholly happy with, but considering the afore-mentioned injured fingers there's not much I can do about that. As for the next chapter, I do have it planned out and hopefully the fingers won't keep me away from it too long. I write the first draft of all of these on my phone, which is easier to type on with one hand than the laptop, but for the editing together the laptop is best and that's where the problem is coming in at the moment.

Anyway, enough of my injured ramblings! Please do leave a review. It would cheer me up now more than ever.

Up next: Marguerite overstrains herself, works up some courage, and has a revelation. Christine turns to prayer, and wonders. Antoine breaks down.