Author's Note: Thank you all for the reviews, and to those who expressed their opinions on Gustave, it has been decided that he will not Make an appearance in this fic(At least in any Time Warp/supernatural fashion.) Though, that is not say there isn't going to some short of spin-off/alt of this Alternate Reality at some point. Gotta work on the Alt of Diary first you know *snicker*
Now... as the title suggests...
Rekindling Summertime
The tomato bisque was delicious. It slid easily down her throat and calmed the nausea stemming from hunger. Rather, hunger and nerves. Erik's dinner invitation, Raoul's… persistence, a general loss of how to even proceed with the evening. Christine was not the only one unsure on just how to proceed beyond awkwardness. The dance around his admitted interest in her, and Christine chronic habit of second guessing everything was a thorn that was bound to pain someone's side.
Then, after the rocky start, conversation began to just flow with relative ease. Erik was both honest and evasive with her questions. Two questions he avoided answering with little explanation. Did the scars or deformity hurt? He shifted the conversation away easily and they were long past that question by the time she realized that he never answered her.
Was the evasion a sign that some part of his face brought physical pain or discomfort?
The second question was more obvious. Christine's traitorous stomach growled out its demand and Erik leapt at the chance to avoid answering. But then, she already knew that answer. Instead of confirmation by oration, it came by his action. That apparent avoidance to fetch soup was the answer.
Her.
She was the prominent source of inspiration.
It had to be her? It made the most sense. Until Erik said otherwise, she could not help but believe it with a growing sense of guilt and a bit of pity that he deemed her worthy to be a muse to his art. Were there not better choices? Someone who is of more comparable intellect than her?
That mask flashed across her mind's eye as a startling reminder. Erik lacked better options. He lacked any options beyond a dumb little chit who fell so willingly and blindly to an illusion. Yes, he might have broken the spell and his reasoning for the misleading was understandable, but that did not ease the hurt of it.
It was by her own wish that Christine lay on the bed of the Louis Phillippe room, where each piece of worn mahogany furniture was polished to a near glossy shine. The bed was pressed against a wall with a single nightstand. A chest of drawers occupied the opposite wall with a dressing table and chair beside it, the mirror covered by a sheet but at least present.
The walls were rather plain, plastered smooth with a creamy off-white paint of warm tones. While it was otherwise plain beyond the demask bedspread and a few items suited mild feminine needs like creams then combs, ribbons, and a brush to tame her hair. Erik even provided well fitted attire for her such as a few nightgowns and wrappers made of silk with lace fringe. It was luxurious against her skin.
Erik offered to escort her back to the Girys, but Christine found herself wanting the interlude away from the world above. Between the frigid temperatures with snowfall and Raoul among other admirers likely still seeking her attention, Erik's home and company was suddenly an escape. It was only her first real performance, her debut, and already she met so many patrons and potential suitors that it made her head spin. Getting to her dressing room was a chore, and even there did not bring a reprieve after she thought it would give her a moment to collect her thoughts. Until Raoul invited himself in without even knock.
Not that Erik knocked, but he had not entered the dressing room either apart from the gift of Swedish flowers and his trademark rose. But he lingered behind a mirror. As strange as it was, the mirror an invasive looking glass for him to spy on her life, it was different from Raoul intruding upon her space. The mirror was a barrier between her room, and Erik's domain.
Christine stared at up at the low vaulted ceiling, the stone work still visible with ribbed supports springing from each corner and joined at the peak in the center. The masonry was flawless, as far as her untrained eye could see. Music climbed the narrow gentle curve of the spiral staircase and floated down the short wall way that led to her room, Erik's locked room, and the plumbed washroom between them.
How Erik managed plumbing in his home below the opera went beyond her. Then again, much of Erik's home in its fine coziness left her baffled to its mere existence. How he managed it, Christine could only imagine. In truth, she was not sure she wanted to know. The architecture he showed her of those palaces were stunning, why would his home be anything else?
His music, the tinkering at a piano downstairs lulled her eyes shut as it seeped through her wooden door. Soft, warm, inviting her to sleep in simple contentment. It was beautiful and soothing, swirling around her mind and spirit in a snug blanket of safety. It only took her a moment to realize Erik was playing that serenade from the roof, and Christine allowed herself to feel it as it sent a pleasant shiver of goosebumps across her skin. She savored each sensation as the song instructed.
Even as sleep claimed her, the strange new feelings his music inspired was exciting.
~x ~x ~X~ x~ x~
Rehearsals came and went without incident. Much of the principal cast and the bulk of their chorus friends were still out with ill-stomachs or choosing to rest their voices after the rigors of losing the contents of those bellies, even when it became just dry heaves. While Christine was certain Erik was the cause of the ailment, their absence made her life and the lives of Norris and Alison easier. At least for now when the sources of discord, convalesced.
Every understudy from the debut of Il Muto brought a group of patrons in to observe their brief rehearsal. It was a brief run-through of everything so that M. Reyer and directors could give a few adjustments and constructive comments to fine tune the coming performance that evening. Of the observing patrons, Christine's admirers were the greatest among them.
After meeting the opera's biggest donors alongside the managers, at their insistence, Christine nearly made it to her dressing room for a rest. At least until her name was called out with her elbow being caught by a firm hand.
"Christine," Raoul spoke her name breathlessly as he reached her. "Where did you go last night? You just vanished."
Christine was pliant as he turned her to face him, feeling the heat rise to her cheeks. "As I was trying to tell you, I had another engagement to attend."
"Another engagement?"
"Well yes, I was not about to cancel just because you came to my door."
"With whom?"
Erik's name very nearly crossed her lips before she caught herself, thankfully. "…I really don't see how that is your concern, Monsieur. It is not as though we have even spoken in nearly ten years," she pulled her arm from his hand.
Raoul stared at her for her moment, sea green eyes denoting his near loss for words as his hand fell limply to his side. "I am sorry for that."
"Are you? Just as I suppose you are sorry for not even noticing me here when you've visited the opera this past week, or not responding to the letters I've sent you seen we've parted."
"Letters?" he asked with brows knitted together in earnest confusion, though his subsequent question was more of a demand. "What letters?"
Feeling a bit of spite now, Christine spoke with a bit of sharpness in her otherwise dulcet manner, "Obviously, they were hardly anything of note for you forget them so readily." She turned to continue on her way to her dressing room, though she barely made it more than three steps before he caught her again, her hand this time. This was softer than the initial one upon her arm.
"Christine, I'm sorry," he reiterated. "I can't explain what might have happened to your letters, because I certainly would have replied to any one you sent me. My mother never was fond of our friendship, perhaps she took them before I had a chance to see them. As for this last week…I cannot say why I did not recognize you. Perhaps it's merely the fact my mind has been so occupied with trivial things since my return to Paris that I simply did not recognize you. You said yourself it has been nearly been ten years, and you have grown so much since we last met. It took last night for me to realize that seraphim on the stage was you. How could anyone forget your voice, Christine? It brought back all our wonderful memories by the sea."
Pangs of guilt began tearing at Christine's resolve. It was true. Raoul's mother and grandmother were ever quite warm to her, even in that lovely summer. Her presence in the company of the de Chagny's youngest son was only tolerated. Perhaps the single reprieve was her father's fame from concerts across Europe that made the fraternizing tolerable. Although family titles no longer bore the weight they did pre-revolution, those powerful families still carried the archaic ideals of what their titles and names once were. Much of Paris and wealthier parts of France were slow to accept change.
To the elders of the de Chagny family, she was a peasant by those old standards. It was by that ideal that her childhood friendship with Raoul was looked down upon. While grandfathered honorifics meant little in present times, social class still reigned as those titles would only die out with the bloodline.
A near decade was a long time indeed. When they last met, Christine barely eleven and much had changed since then. How could she expect him to recognize her in the change from the bright-eyed girl with a wild imagination to sullen woman who still liked to play pretend in front of a crowd? Only now, the power in her voice allowed her to come to the limelight with rigorous regimen of training Erik had put her through.
"I suppose that is…fair," Christine woefully relented. "It has… been years, and your mother was often sour at my presence."
Raoul slid up to her, bringing her fingers to his lips with lingering and sweet kiss upon the knuckles of each hand. "Then, if you are free now, allow me to take you to lunch so I may make up for the hurt I've caused you, Christine. I would hate for you to feel so ill-willed towards me."
She melted further, a small smile stretching out across her features. "I could no more harbor such feelings of ill than I could of hate. It is simply not in my nature."
"That is a relief to hear, Christine," Raoul responded with an ever so charming smile that squinted his eyes. "Come, let us be on our way then!"
"Oh, I really should change first," Christine said, pulling toward her dressing room.
"Non-sense, you already look beautiful. I would be loath to risk you disappearing again," Raoul insisted.
As much as it was a compliment, something in his voice unsettled her, but Christine brushed it aside. "My cloak then, it is quite cold outside…" Not that she even stepped a foot outside the Palais Garnier since yesterday afternoon. She prayed it was still snowing.
"Oh…yes, yes of course," Raoul agreed after a pause, and followed her to the dressing room. His hand never relinquishing hers until they were inside and the door still open.
Christine stepped over to her vanity for just long enough to collect her brush and ran it through the underside of her hair for a few strokes. The stage lighting always gave her a terrible sweat from the heat, and having strands of loose chocolate waves sticking to her neck was never comfortable.
Once the hair from free from her neck, Christine ran the brush over the top of her hair from the base of her neck down, for good measure.
"I would almost think you're stalling," Raoul said warmly as he wandered towards the vanity as well.
"Oh no," Christine dismissed lightly as she set the brush down and crossed the room to collect her cloak. "That was for my sanity. It gets very warm on the stage, even for a rehearsal."
"Is that so?" he asked idly as he looked at the various floral gifts that had given to her from last night. His eyes studied on the odd arrangement that was unlike the rest. "Seems like someone forgot what a proper gift of flowers should look like for a such a fine singer as yourself."
Christine looked over to him as she busied herself with adjusting her cloak, and saw him eying the vase of Swedish flowers with his jaw set and brow furrowed.
"You should receive nothing short of roses and lilies. Anything less seems an insult."
"I don't think so," she murmured. "It is actually very thoughtful. They remind me of home and my mother's garden…a memory had faded from my mind in the years since… but the smell of them, is it like a key to a forgotten door."
Raoul looked up to her, confused. "Pardon?"
"Those flowers are Swedish varieties, Raoul," she said with a smile toward the vase. "Very similar to what my mother planted around our home before she died. They are a comfort to me, like singing and dancing with her in a field of cornflowers while Papa played." Such a wonderful memory of dancing in a field of pale blue, her mother's brunette hair catching sunlight and the breeze as they skipped in a circle in joyous melody as Papa's bow gave them music.
It was a memory nearly forgotten, just flashes and imagery across her mind's eye. It rooted deeper in her thoughts now; the door had a name again. The flowers were the key to unlock that treasured memory.
"Who in your life would be so thoughtful as to gift you such flowers, Christine?"
Christine tore her eyes from the maroon Nigritella Nigra and purplish-blue bellflowers, unsure if she dared mention L'Chantseur and risk an insinuation. "A very dear friend," she answered and made for the door.
Raoul did not press the issue as he followed Christine out, casting a glance back to the flowers and the lone rose in a place of reverence on the vanity with a small frown.