Author's Note: Probably my most favorite chapter yet. Will it be yours?


Handful of Snow


The back of Erik's property was much like the front in regards to the shading trees that covered most of it, though with enough spacing in-between that it did not look cluttered. Deimos, Phobos, and César wandered about the snowy pasture freely.

César was Erik's oldest companion to whom he promised the that his days would end in his care. At age eighteen, the Lipizzaner Erik long ago stole from the opera was still rather spry and trustworthy. He was also the one to carry Christine upon his back the first time he brought her down through the cellars.

Everything she touched was an invaluable treasure best handled with care. The boy held no exclusion from this; he was the most treasured of all. Even if feelings of affection were ultimately unreciprocated. Such was life.

Erik needed a retreat. Breakfast became a most stressful affair. It brought back memories of his childhood, if it even was definable as such.

He rubbed his hand up and down César's face when the stallion came up to him with a small nicker. After a moment of mutual greetings and a few kind words, Erik swung up onto his back and they set off towards the trail leading to the creek that ran along the back of his property where the horses would often go to linger to graze or get a drink. It was a short distance away from his home, ideal for a moment alone without leaving house and stable completely out of sight.

Those first few years with his mother before he ran away, Erik could not recall ever dining with her. Not even on his cursed birthdays. No, he ate alone in the dining room with his only friend, Sasha, sitting there beside him watching him with interest in his activities only a dog could muster.

It was painfully lonely in that hour where he sat more than he ate. It never tasted good anyway. Merely a bland plate with mashed root vegetables or haricot verts with a cut of meat that often came minimally cooked to the point of whatever unfortunate creature it once was, continued to bleed on his plate and churn his stomach. He always gave Sasha whatever he failed to bring himself to eat, which was most of it.

Thus, whatever he cooked, he painstakingly made sure it was worth eating, and that his guests did not have to eat in isolation as he had done for most of his life.

There were however, a few exceptions to that rule. He ate before his Romani keepers in youth, dined regularly with Giovanni in Italy when the old man welcomed him into home and to his table with open arms. During his trip with Nadir to Persia, he shared many meals with him and the servants at dawn and dusk—later followed by court dinners with the Shah and his little underlings. Except for Giovanni, and occasionally Nadir, there was no talking on his end. He was merely there, and little more.

Erik brought César to a halt by water's edge, where he slipped off his side and began strolling along thick snow along the bank. The creek was approximately twenty feet wide and six feet deep. It fed into the Seine from a fresh water spring like many others throughout the Parisian countryside.

The Italian Master Mason was the only person who ever really spoke to him on a variety of subjects. Even at the dinner table, where they always took meals together when work schedules permitted it.

Erik drew in a deep breath through his nostrils, and brought his hands to the leather of his mask and pressed them firmly against it as he slowly let his breath escape his lungs. During this, he leaned back against an old juniper tree, one of many that covered his property in shadow with the aid of the heaths.

Charles wanted normalcy. Perhaps he even craved it. Not that he could blame boy, not in the least. But normalcy? That was not something Erik knew, not when his only true references were in books and scant memories in the all too brief life with Giovanni. He could not carry on a simple normal conversation at the table with his son! A child that might as well be a stranger he passed on the street. The boy he did not know because of the cruel fate in which God continuously dealt him.

He squeezed his eyes shut beneath his mask and hands, desperate to stop the tears that the tingle of moisture flushing into his lower lids foretold. The effort was as useless as cupping water in his fingers, as the tears seeped through the thin cracks and spilled down his cheeks. How could the inadequacies he felt throughout his life double yet again? Double into this unbearably heavy burden weighing down his soul with the weight of a full harvest moon large and low in the sky.

"You should not have left him with me!" he suddenly screamed with throaty weight in his tone, hands falling from his face to hug himself. "Christine..." he whispered in a sob. "Christine, I cannot do this... How can I be what I never had?" he rocked himself nod and dropped his head, trying to reign in his emotions. "You should have left him with Meg, his aunts, not me...never me. I was never meant to be a father."

His shivered at the memory of her hand sliding down his arm with loving affection, a wisp of a smile on her transparent lips as she sat before him... She was a translucent angel in the very same position she had been in that night just before they fell into each other's arms. Her wavy honey tresses falling over her shoulder, smelling of sweet honey almond.

"No!" he cried out in a choked sob as a surge of panic flooded. His palms flew up to press against his eyes and block out the ghostly visage of her before him. "No! Erik cannot remember this! He cannot handle this! He should never have touched his Christine! No, no, no, Erik should never have burdened her with his child!"

Stress brought forth his mental afflictions where he could not refer to himself in the first person, no matter how are he tried to stop it the few times he was conscious of it. It revealed his unbalanced faculties like no other emotion save for anger.

"Erik does not deserve him now! Why Christine? Why...?" he spoke the last with little more volume than a whisper. He remained beneath the juniper, laid out on his forearms and knees in centimeters of snow, face wet beneath the leather that hid him from the world, and his son.

For several minutes, he continued crying, quieter now as he tried to control his pathetic weakness for emotional outbursts and shut his mind from himself. Even in the effort to void all thought in search for sanity, the question still echoed through his mind. Why. Why did Christine wish leave the boy with him and not someone more...qualified?

'Because you are his kin,' a sexless voice answered him.

Erik shook his head to it, not wanting to listen at that moment.

Minutes ticked away, allowing Erik's tears to stop, his breathing to even out from ragged gasps, and the shaking in his muscles to steady.

'You need him.'

"No," he whimpered weakly. "Erik will only hurt him as he has done with all that he loves."

'Charles is strong.'

Erik shook his head again, and the voice never spoke no further.


~x ~x ~X~ x~ x~


Erik sat in the shadow of the juniper tree, resting against its trunk with his jacket and trousers growing frost the longer he remained. He sat as still as a gargoyle on Notre Dame with a blank stare at the creek where light shimmered on the steady ripples.

The emotional outburst of ninety minutes prior long ebbed away into a dull and passive state of mind that was for the better. Nothing he saw registered in his mind. Nothing he heard drew his attention, only the bliss of nothing but peaceful quiet.

Until a stick snapped under a crunch of snow.

Sound and reality rushed back in a storm in which Erik leapt out of blissful ignorance with his heart beating against his ribcage. In his start, Erik brought his hands to his ears for only a moment to muffle the sound of his heart pounding and the rush of blood traveling through his veins accompanied by the steady trickle of water over a few rocks along the shore, birds singing in surrounding trees, and frozen branches swaying in the breeze. He saw and identified everything in his immediate field of vision with such startling clarity and a rush of many thoughts at once.

He cringed and had to close his eyes to block it out with his hands pressing over his sensitive ears. This was sensory overload at its peak when he realized the gentle breeze in the air brushing the little hairs on his forearms and neck, chilling his skin and his proverbial soul. These sensations happened all at once in a span of three seconds.

"Did I frighten you?" Charles asked from Phoe's bareback not far from him.

Erik shook his head. This is why we do not shut down, for we cannot handle waking! The thought was true enough, but he needed a moment of not thinking. Perhaps this was not the best of locations to practice that.

"No..." he spoke a moment later, slowly opening his eyes, prepared to see and feel again. He ran a long-fingered hand over his wig in a slow stroke. "No... It is not...you." His hand reached the back of his head where it stopped. He floated it out from his skull two centimeters, fingers splayed and tense while pulling it to the side of his head. There, he hit himself with the heel of his palm right above his right ear with a satisfactory muffled thump.

Thoughts quieted themselves again.

"Ah... That is much better..." Erik muttered with a little smile and Charles only stared, his jaw a little slack.

"You just hit yourself."

"Yes."

"How is that better?"

Erik shook his head with a dismissive wave of his hand. "That is...complicated. The more important question is why you are here? You who has come to despise my presence as of late." He looked up and over to the boy as Phoe gave a bored stomp of his front right hoof. The subsequent swish of his tail to ward away imaginary flies sounded like a wet bristled hard brush performing a single pass over a filthy tiled floor.

"I'm sorry…"

"Do not say things you do not mean," Erik snapped. "I have no patience for it and heard enough lies for three lifetimes."

"I was looking for you, because I am sorry. I haven't been…myself…" began Charles in earnest, "and I got worried. You've been gone for two hours."

"Have I now?" the reply became light and idle as if there were a sigh waiting to appear but it never did. Erik slipped a hand into his pocket, withdrawing an old silver pocket watch, and flipped it open for proper examination discover it was thirty minutes before midday. "I suppose it has," his tone never changed.

Charles picked his right leg up and swung it over the equines neck to slide off Phoe's left flank, closest to Erik. The motion was graceful enough for Erik to find a bit admirable, especially when the soft landing highlighted the practiced dismount. Of course, it was not a technically proper dismount since the leg did not swing around to pass over the rear. "Just when were you going to come back?"

"Forgive me. I failed to realize I was accountable to you," Erik crooned with a drip of sarcasm.

Charles crossed his arms much like Christine did whenever she felt either put off or perturbed, perhaps both in this instance. "Then don't expect me to be accountable to you."

"That would prove be your undoing," came the retort while Erik set his eyes back to watch, tracing his finger across the hands, the glass pane lost long ago with its previous owner, Giovanni. He could not recall how many times he repaired the little keepsake after it became water logged, or replaced various corroded components through the years. It remained a good watch to suffer his many abuses.

However, he possessed a better one developed by Alcide Droz & Sons and manufactured by the West End Watch Company in 1886. He favored it because the watch they called L'Impermeable was the first style of pocket watches that was waterproof. Well, water resistant as it would succumb to the liquid if it remained submersed long enough... At least it was easier to revive to working order after it drowned. Easier than Giovanni's gift anyway.

Unbeknownst to Erik, Charles crouched down in the snow and began sweeping a small pile into his hands.

Erik's attention was on the watch with another pang of melancholy. It was a verge fusee piece of fine champlevé silver made by William Liptrot in 1752. On the outer ring in its face, numbers marked every increment of five minutes from five to sixty, with the inner ring listing the hour in Roman numerals. It was elegant, simple. Erik often wondered if it was a gift from the master mason's own father, but he knew it was unlikely he would ever find out. Not that it particularly mattered.

A mildly icy ball of white flew into Erik's right shoulder, splattering in a small spray of frozen powder that jerked him from hyper-focused reverie. It took his mind longer than it should have to switch from thinking of a timepiece to the fact the boy just threw a ball of snow at him. Much of it still attached in a most disorderly fashion.

Perturbed, Erik cast Charles a rather dark glance while cocking his head to the side while he vanished the watch into a pocket. "I beg your pardon, little Vicomte?" he asked with an edge creeping into his voice again.

Charles was grinning as he threw another.

Erik's hand shot up and caught it, although it disintegrated in his palm. "Charles," he said with growing sharpness.

The boy stooped over an began forming another ball in mittened fingers, his eyes bright and the grin never faded.

"Charles de Chagny," Erik snapped and rose to his feet.

Charles straightened, unbothered by Erik's increasing sour tone and continued to work the snow in his hands. "Snowball fight."

Erik shifted his head tilt to the other side.

"You know, snowball fight," came the bright answer that did nothing to explain the reasoning. "Playing!" Charles added when the prior statement did not seem to land.

"Playing," Erik repeated, perplexed.

"Yes, playing. Got to play with friends and Ma—" he paused at the likely mention of his deceased parents. Charles cleared his throat. "We would play all the time when it snowed and had many great battles."

Erik studied him a moment, feeling the anger of just a minute ago melt away like the snow around them in sunlight. Then, he looked towards an untouched patch of white powdered ice beside him. There were few times he could recall seeing young children laughing and shrieking as they threw those balls of snow, or just handfuls of it at each other.

"Haven't you ever had a snowball fight?"

"No… I never had the luxury."

Charles furrowed his brow and pursed his lips. "Why not?"

Image of iron bars and a jeering crowd march across his mind's eye in the most unwelcomed fashion.

Erik glanced to the boy warily, he summoned the breath to answer but hesitated for want of proper wording. "My peers have rarely been fond of my company, no matter the age."

"Oh," Charles said as his face fell, suddenly feeling guilty as he looked at the snowball in his hands. "I'm sorry, I didn't kno—"

A snowball landed square on his chest.

Charles's attention snapped back to the masked man in black who stood out in stark contrast to the world of white. A new projectile actively being created in gloved hands. The grin returned.