Some birds are not meant to be caged, that's all. Their feathers are too bright, their songs too sweet and wild. So you let them go, or when you open the cage to feed them they somehow fly out past you. And the part of you that knows it was wrong to imprison them in the first place rejoices, but still, the place where you live is that much more drab and empty for their departure."
-Stephen King
Christine Daae did not glance behind. She simply ran.. She ran after him, her tortured angel of music. She followed a haunting and long crimson trail that her lantern found on the darkened path. The scarlet mark of blood, the metallic smell of it wafted through her nostrils as she stumbled along the corridor. The echoing sound of her steps accompanied her, as did the light of the wavering flame she held in front, as it crafted orange webs of strangely dim light against the cavern walls. Wet, mossy stones caused her boots to slip, and her vision blurred. Still, Christine continued on in a crazed, hungering need to find him. For who was she without him, and his music?
Their music.
Erik. Her Erik.
He had deserted her, left her dreadfully alone in what could only be described as a black cavern, a shadowed labyrinth of which she could not navigate, walls dripping with a fetid moisture in a time signature and rhythm of their own. He'd been bleeding and delirious as he'd abandoned her. And she would forgive him for his desertion. She would always forgive him for any transgression. But never for his music. For it must be a sin, his music, for how else could it be explained, the magic pulse of ecstasy it drove into her every cell? She would not forgive what that beautiful amalgamation of notes always did to her. The impossibly sweet and seductive desire and agony of it all.
He was a man, not an angel, had never been an angel.
Only to her. . .but a genius in every manner of skill or craft. And he was hers. His mellifluous voice had always called to her from the deep abyss of her unacknowledged longings. Was it wrong to love him to such a degree, to follow his magnificent voice with such wanton abandon? His music was desirous and bewitching. Even now in her peril, it caused a blush to careen across her flesh as she remembered every moment of their final scene in his opera, Don Juan Triumphant. Her Catholic upbringing stood in abject defiance to her actions and her feelings, but she would not beg redemption for the emotional onslaught his symphony of utter pain and fragile beauty had wrought upon her. Her maestro's music was REAL Visceral. It was an entity she could and would seek for the remainder of her entire life in order to grasp it, to grasp him once again.
For Christine, there was only him, only Erik. He existed as the sublime finality of her course, her thrilling destination. She sought him as one discovering a new world with fresh and open, imploring eyes. Christine now realized he was indeed her compass, had always been her North, South, East, and West. His music was the thrilling, absolute needle pointing towards him, towards her home. Erik was her home. She would find him. Alive or dead. But she would not entertain the former possibility. Not yet. For he and music were one, and she wished to meld into them both for eternity.
If she could not hold him once more, she would grasp his music. . .Christine would catch the glimpse of a memory, a tremulous haunt of melody in the moments of quietude she predicted for her loneliness, as she stumbled through the ebony blankness. The shadows wrapped around her and covered the stone walls with so many taunting memories of him. She would never give up searching for him, always seeking the magical glide of his fingers as they wove through the air. And mostly, his darkly tender and magnificent soul, its presence so luminous and real as the strangely comforting mist of an arriving afternoon storm.
The loss of her love as soon as she had claimed him as her own had broken her. Christine and her Erik now existed in the shards of an equal misery, born of shattered souls. Two twin hearts demolished amongst the fragments of that sacred Glass Lotus. The blood from his shoulder had left a deep crimson trail he could not avoid. They, the vengeful gendarmes, would find him, perhaps. They might even capture him. But, Christine knew that he would sacrifice anything to keep her safe. For Erik could not bring her into his never-ending race of his survival and his quest for the absolution of his sins. Erik had chosen, in his own way, to absolve her of his crimes, and the decisions he'd made that would haunt him. He would not bring her into that abyss. She thought, and hoped that had been the reason why he had abandoned her. For no other answer would be bearable.
Christine stumbled forward, losing her balance, as the soles of her shoes skidded across the slick stone. The lantern clattered to the floor, and flickered, sputtering with the disastrous possibility that it may cease to burn. She began to panic, her heart thumping against her breast like a tightly-pulled snare drum.
Suddenly, the terrifying sounds of quickly approaching footsteps, many of them, and the clanking of metal echoed throughout the dark expanse. Christine scooted across the dirty floor, reaching for the lantern and hiding it behind the folds of her dress, as she huddled against the curved, moist tunnel wall.
"Here! I think I've found the girl! Over here!" The voice which yelled approached ever closer as the moments crept by in a slow-motion agony.
Her lantern flickered out. The shuffling of boots against slippery, damp rock.
There were hands upon her, lifting her roughly. Not two hands, but four, two on each of her trembling arms. Instinctually, she struggled against their grasp, writhing and yelling. Christine felt herself being dragged across the dampened stone floor, could hear the murmurings of men behind her, the clanking of their swords by their sides as they walked and dragged her along.
"Mademoiselle Daae, I presume?" The voice was unfamiliar and harsh, snide in tone, even and cold. The voice of a predatory captor finding victory in the hunt for his prey.
Christine felt herself falling then, a grayness fogging her already limited vision. Her head lolled forward and exhaustion caused her to shiver violently before she drooped forward, unconscious in the arms of her handlers.
"Lotte, wake up, please." The Vicomte de Chagny spoke in hurried nervousness, his too warm gloved hand grazing under the young soprano's chin and tilting it upward. Slowly coming back to the conscious world, Christine Daae blinked and attempted to focus on the voice and the breath wafting over her face. It was in that moment that her eyes fully opened and found her former fiancé staring at her with concern and what she could determine was a slight sense of fear he unsuccessfully attempted to conceal from her. His handsome features still gleamed; the bright and twinkling eyes, the golden locks, and the finely-chiseled cheekbones. His gallant manners and winsome handsomeness meant so very little to her now. Once, his features had charmed her, even beguiled her, created a life in her mind, a daydream that she thought she must seek. An empty life of pageantry. Raoul and the life he had once promised to her were now a meaningless mirage of sorts, a dream far too pristine for her tastes and her needs.
For what was true beauty, unless it existed as something salvaged from the abyss of misery? Something created from the tears of raw emotion, sacrifice, and music? Christine inhaled deeply and met his eyes.
"Raoul," she muttered hazily and moved to sit up in the chair in which she had found herself, her clouded pupils adjusting to the vibrant lamplight of the room. "Where am I? Where have you brought me? Where have your gendarmes taken me?!" As she glanced upon her surroundings, she took in paper clippings pinned to the walls, maps, and notebooks, a couple of desks in opposite corners of the stark room. In the background, uniformed men stood guard in stoic silence by the only door leading out of the mildewed, clustered space.
She had been startled awake at the prefecture de police, a nearly soured and battered fruit, her sweetness drained by malice, the juices of her ripened love sucked out by violence. Trapped and very much under scrutiny. Christine's blood began to rush and her heartbeat raced like a wire of electricity shooting through her pulse points. Captured, and separated from Erik! Was he alive? Had they found him? Her misery quickly began to suffocate her, the room seeming to collapse, as her mouth ran dry and her ears began to ring. But, her anger made her strong. It always had done so, or so her Father had said on many an occasion. But she would not think of Papa now. She must be strong and brave. She must remember the woman she had chosen to become only hours ago.
Had it really been only a matter of hours since she had made her choice? A choice to flourish in music, desire, and an otherworldly insane love? She had chosen to denyi the promise of a quaint and safe existence in the arms of a husband who never ignited a fire within her soul, a kind man who would make her forget the artist she was, the human who existed outside of him and his nobility and social constructs. But, Christine would never forget her music, her Angel, her Erik.
How could there ever be anyone but Erik?
Christine seethed and attempted to find her voice, her stability.
"Why have you brought me here? I have nothing to say to you or to any of these men!" Christine struggled to rise from the wooden chair, but her feet would not obey, and her questionable balance would not support her as the Vicomte gently pushed her back into her seated position.
"It's okay, Christine. You're safe! We're here to protect you." Raoul cajoled and attempted to caress her quivering palms. Christine quickly withdrew both her hands, hiding them in the soiled and tattered cloth folds of her gown, recoiling from his touch as if his fingers were the fangs of a snapping viper.
He had always been the snake along her path, the thrilling entirety of it. . .the handsome distraction. He'd never truly heard the music. The music was the TRUTH of all things.
She fought to make words form from the sand-coursed drought of her throat- for how many hours had she been without water, without Him? "To protect me?," she gasped in dry sobs, her eyes welling up with tears she could not cry. Her exhausted body would not allow it. The Glass Lotus began to form a tremulous and fragile crystal cave in the now empty cavern of her magnificent throat.
Christine's angrily red and watering eyes finally focused on the men surrounding her. The surreal nature of their closeness suffocated her, as she felt their hot, maddened breaths coast across her cheeks. The grotesque scene o was only completed with the very real presence of Raoul, Vicomte de Chagny, her erstwhile former fiancé' kneeling like a penitent at her feet. His supplication was the visage of a lie. Raoul held no remorse. He had removed his rival. The expressions on the other men's faces, even that on the features of her forgotten fiancé- spoke of guilt and shame And bewilderment. For how could this simple girl turn the Opera on its head? Cause the music of Paris to fall at her feet? Just an ordinary young chorine with the voice of an angel, but with the clandestine tutelage of the greatest musician in the world. . .how had the two of them uprooted the pristine and closely guarded hallucination of nobility and beauty in that palace dedicated to society's concept of what music should be? How had they created, within their own two perfect voices, a place of unrivaled and unapologetic emotion? Forced every patron and attendee to actually FEEL the power of music and what it could reveal about one's self?
The catalyst had always existed as their shared obsession with music, and the dangerous chemistry that breathed so sensuously between them. A thirst forever unquenched.
"Mademoiselle Daae, I dearly hate to interrupt this quarrel, I find it rather entertaining. I realize you are in a sensitive state of affairs, but could you please offer me your attention and tell me where your masked lover has gone?"
The voice of the unfamiliar man struck her from her reverie once more. It was a callous voice, wrought of impatience and an urgent sense of civility.
Christine straightened her back, squared her shoulders, and lifted her tear-soiled chin. "I have no masked lover, sir." She stared at her thinly-mustachioed interrogator with a coldness she had never claimed until this moment. All her thoughts sought the urgency of finding Erik. "No lover, but a breathing and living fiancé!" Her eyes became icefall as they met with the unfamiliar face. "Please go," she muttered, "The Vicomte and I must speak."
The stranger left without an acknowledgement or word, gently shutting the door behind him, as to leave Raoul and Christine, his prisoner, alone.
The Vicomte de Chagny butted in abruptly, as soon as the door had been closed, seizing his opportunity and grabbing Christine's shoulders and shaking her, as if to rouse her from a sleepless dream, a hallucination of her own making. "Darling, look at me, look me in the eyes, as I tell you what has been done! Let me tell you of the fate of your Opera Ghost!"
Christine's wide eyes were shallow pools of unforgiving desolation, and they refused to grant any recognition to the words and touch of the man before her. The young man that had run into the salty waters of Perros to fetch a scarf, knelt at her chair as a desperate apparition, begging something of her. But what was it that he asked in his humility? For the words in her soul, if she brought them to mouth, would only serve as a viper's unrelenting, unforgiving bitterness in response.
She struggled to offer him sparse and very dry words, but she must know, she had to know. "Raoul, where is he? What have you and your men done to my Erik?" After raising the question, she stared directly into his eyes, not allowing of any peace or forgiveness. "I must know," she inhaled deeply, sucking in the salty remains of too many tears. "Please, please tell me." Christine clamped his hand in both of her own with a ferocious beseeching.
The tears and pleading were all but lost on the Vicomte, so bitter was he after she had shamed him and their engagement on the largest stage in Paris, perhaps the grandest stage on Earth. "You wish to know what has happened to him? To your monster?" He scoffed and turned his gaze from her, tearing his hands from her grasp, as if her touch reeked of blood and disgust.
Perhaps, it did.
Christine stalled at his abrupt release, his callousness came off as sharp and eager to carve into her. She felt in the air between them. "No monster," she muttered under her breath. "Please," she gulped down, gathering her courage. "Raoul, I am sorry, sorry for everything. Can you tell me where he is?" Christine's eyes sought those of the Vicomte's with an intense pleading, a search for answers she hoped he would offer to her, despite his bitterness. A part of her still trusted in the fact the he loved her, that he had always been her friend. The rich boy that had floundered in the sea to retrieve her scarf. The young man that had kissed her and promised a future of love and marriage to her on that rooftop so many evenings past.. Though, she did not wish for that promise now, surely his loyalty and admiration bore some merit. Did it not?
"I need to know, Raoul!"
There was a great pause then, as they stared at one another, eyes blazing as they met, pupil to pupil, and lips clenched. Raoul's gaze searched her own for meaning, for compassion, and even for a guilt that he knew she had not cultivated.
To him, she was shameless. Her betrayal, unforgivable.
"Christine, my dear girl, You are that ungrateful little wanderer with whom I shared songs and dark stories from a drunken pauper's one from whom I recovered a scarf from the cresting waves of the sea. And finally, the one that treated me as a bauble on her arm, only to betray me." Raoul paused again with an angry silence, before delivering his final line with a grandiose and haunting sneer. "I regret to tell you that your lover is dead. I finished him with my own hands, Little Lotte." The Vicomte took a deep breath and stopped a moment, as if savoring an unknown victory., finding and relishing the words he chose to bestow upon her. "I stuck my hands in his rotted flesh and I finished him off with another bullet, as he wept your name in that sewer. The only place he ever belonged."
Christine Daae turned in her chair and quickly wretched upon the floor. It was all a putrid, yellow bile, for she had not taken the time before the show to place any food into her stomach, such was her absolute distress.
"Would you care for a handkerchief, mademoiselle, or a bit of water," the Vicomte asked so snidely, with a hint of bitter satisfaction in his voice. "I'd rather thought that kissing that monster would have brought about your vomiting, but apparently I was mistaken." Raoul flippantly removed the pocket swatch from his coat pocket and fanned it before her with heartless glee.
He seemed satisfied. Victorious. His face the absolute image of one who did not deserve to win, but would boast about the circumstances in his favor, regardless of how they came about.
Christine shook her head violently, not daring to look up at him as she keeled over, hacking violently. She fell out of the chair, her palms sustaining her before her head could hit the floor. The wood was slick with the liquid of her bile, her eyes drenched in salty tears, dampened hair falling over in her face in all directions.
The very picture of broken misery.
But after the initial shock lessened and her heaving ceased, Christine's strength returned. The image of her Erik returned, for she could not believe him dead. He was far too strong for that. Far too brilliant and agile, too resilient, to be dealt a death's hand from a frivolous and spoiled young dandy. Christine wiped at her face with the back of her already soiled hand, and sat up on her knees, staring up at her former fiance with a renewed bravery, one wrought of new found hatred and boundless bravery.
"My dear Vicomte," she snarled, not caring if her lips dripped with bile and spittle, "if you say, in all your fucking bravado, that Erik is dead, that you have killed him," she paused then and came to standing, once again proud and strong.
Raoul could only watch her as he returned the pocket swatch to his coat and stepped two paces away from her as she descended on him, baring her teeth.
"You small man, hiding behind your family, your good looks, and your finances, if you have truly killed Erik and placed your hands in his blood, show me his body, show me the sewer where you left him to die. Because, by God, I will leave you there to rot, as well!" Christine Daae reacher for his hands, gripping them madly, examining his perfectly manicured nails, bringing them to her nose and inhaling their scent, as she searched for any trace of HIM.. "I do not see his blood beneath your fingers. I do not smell the waters of that sewer upon them. I do not believe you. Show him to me! Show me!"
Raoul, Vicomte de Chagny, could only stare at her as he wrenched his hands away, his body made frigid by a strange kind of fear he had never experienced until that moment, when the only woman he had every genuinely loved turned on him in a distinct and utter hatred, as clear and unforgiving as the image in a mirror.
The courage of Christine Daae had shaken him.
She was glad of it, and smiled at him in her utter madness, tears mixing with saliva and anger, as the moisture of her anguish coursed down her cherubic features.
"Take me to my Erik."
Christine would never believe him dead, until she had seen proof. His siren song still signaled her.
She would find him and his song. Christine would touch her Erik. Alive or dead.
"Take me to him."
The Vicomte de Chagny recoiled as if he had been shot. He could not provide the truth she sought. He had failed her. He would always fail her.
The Glass Lotus reopened its petals and grew, unfed by water, but nourished by tears and blood. The colors of its blooms now ran crimson. Vibrant and unafraid, beautiful to the world. It would blossom for Christine forever, until she found him. Always. Blossom. Just as Erik had told her in regards to her voice. It would forever ring, as long as she sought the gift of it. The brightness of its stunning guidance of his music would always be that lighthouse in the dark that she would never cease to chase. Always clear and shining right before her eyes, even In the distance.
A golden beacon in the evening that she almost, just almost could touch.
