Author's Note: Apparently the good writing vibes from everyone worked well, the ideas I had for two chapters suddenly became four, and ironically, the next chapter(14) was written before this one. This Chapter and the following three were brought to you by two Full Days of writing while listening to hours of Lionel Yu(piano music). Edited to more Lionel Yu and the soundtrack from the Orville.
Thank you for the continued support, MarilynKC, your constant support does help me stay motivated.
Ponder the Reason
It had been a long day. A very long day where breakfast was trying, the afternoon elating then tormenting, and evening filled in apprehension. So many overwhelming social interactions of various emotional weights left Erik feeling utterly sapped of mental stamina. Interacting with humanity always was a chore. It was easier around certain souls, certainly, but no less draining.
Erik enjoyed playing, even when the hairs from a lifetime of prudence lifted on his neck. Charles's voice when he laughed was music on Erik's ears. He wanted more of it, all the time. It reminded him of Christine also the sound of it was completely different, more like his own.
Then… then that boy's intelligence proved…trying.
Contractions were a forbidden concept in his adolescence. What little Erik revealed of his youth was true. Erik's mind largely operated in the third person, although he knew it was an imperfect thought pattern. He was a thing, an object, monster, creature… his birthname as unpleasant as his face. As much as his mother loathed him, she was strict in his learning of manners and etiquette. She tried to break him of drawing and writing with his left hand with lashing the inner wrist of that hand.
If he spoke out of turn or with a contraction, she struck the inner wrist of his right hand, forgetting again that it was not the hand he favored. Decades on, a mere thought of it still brought the stinging pain of the reed coming down and breaking tender flesh.
Erik was ready for the day to be over, but life was never that simple. Not for him. Never for him.
Instead, there stood one of the Inspectors he encountered on the road just yesterday, in his small stable and chilled to the bone. However, this Michael Carriére hid it well, Erik saw the minor tremble that rippled through the man every few moments. Although Erik always strived to be a suitable host to and guest he might have, as few and far in-between as they were, he was not yet willing to provide the other with more comfort than that of the stable's stone walls and sturdy wooden doors to block out the windchill.
"You knew you would be followed," Carriére commented plainly.
"I would be a fool to think otherwise."
"Perhaps, though many are not quite so aware."
"I am not like them," bit Erik as he turned on his heel back toward Carriére as after igniting a lamp for the Inspector's sake, while he in turn, side stepped elegantly towards a shadowy corner he preferred for numerous reasons. Most of which were to eliminate the other quickly, if necessary.
Carriére watched him wearily with ugly bruising already forming on his throat from being ensnared by the Punjab lasso. Those light blues eyes spotted the rope behind Erik at led up to the rafters, where a load of haybales was raised high to lower the chance of vermin nesting in the yellowed straw. In his foresight, Carriére stepped out from under its shadow. "You most certainly are not."
"You are more observant than most."
"It helps when you like to keep breathing."
"Most of humanity wants to keep breathing, yet are not mindful enough to take the simplest precautions to prolong their longevity." There were other ways to kill him as needed of course, but the sudden drop of weight upon the Inspector's head would have been the quickest. The mess? Mild. In the grander scheme of it at least.
"True enough," Carriére glanced towards the haybales again. "Though most of humanity does not have someone aiming to kill them."
"That could be debated," Erik said dryly.
"We would be here all night if that were the case."
"Indeed. Yet, I have no patience for such trivialities."
"Neither do I," the Inspector agreed. "So, I will get right to matter at hand. You are this Lon LeRoi who brought her body to the mortuary. You also dispatched those men who pursued them. But what I find most curious is that Christine and Charles de Chagny fled their Chateau and managed to wander nearly all the way here from such a distance. There are other homes, towns, villages between their home and yours that she could have stopped and gotten help. Why is that?"
"Your guess is as good as mine, Monsieur."
"Is it though? You knew her."
Erik gave an aloof shrug. "I encountered a woman and child four nights ago who begged for my aid. Who would I be as a gentleman if I were to deny such a request?"
"You killed her pursuers, most of them with their own weapons. Seven of them."
"Did I? Curious to manage such a feat. Something more suiting to a man of your age rather than an old thing like me."
"You do not move as though you are plagued by arthritis."
"Pain becomes numb when it all you have ever known, on both planes. One merely learns to just exist with it and let it become static in the back of the mind."
Carriére's eyes narrowed with critical thought but did not press that statement further. "What happened at the creek? Why did she die? I could only glean part of the scene from what was left."
Erik maintained eye contact, though he wanted to look just about anywhere else as the frog of emotion threated to well in his throat in an unforgiving amount of phlegm seemed to cling to his vocal cords. Flexing the fingers of his left hand, he swallowed back the worst of the sudden muck that threatened his voice. He had shut the image of her from his mind, even as the flare of panic he had felt then sparked a fire in his chest. "I cannot say precisely what had happened prior to our encounter. However, I do know that the dead horse you saw, paid her no favors. When they shot the horse, it had fallen on her and trapped her in the creek."
"Her leg."
"Precisely. That alone should not have killed her, but it likely worsened whatever abuse they put upon her," Erik answered through gritted teeth, hands now curling to fist. "They abused the boy as well, but not to the same level as they did to her. She died come morning, despite my efforts to the contrary."
"You knew what you were doing in protecting her and tending those wounds," Carriére spoke softly and with empathy.
"Do not start that," Erik snapped.
The Inspector's brows frows and his jaw slack, "Pardon?"
"That. Your feigned empathy in effort to set me at ease."
"That is not my intent—"
"Lies," Erik spat the word in a growl now.
Carriére's mouth clamped shut for a moment, brow raising a bit as he studied Erik a moment. "You are right that I was…am trying to set you at ease. But I do assure you, Monsieur, my empathy for all of this is genuine. Whether you chose to believe me or not."
Erik did believe him in that statement, even if it did nothing to quell the flames in his spirit at the moment. "Then speak to the point and logic, and not by appeasement."
"As you wish," Carriére granted with a nod, letting a tense silence fall over them for long moments before pressing on with his incessant questions.
"You knew her."
"That is subjective."
"Why else would she come out here but to look for you."
"I can assure you Monsieur, she has no want of me. Our encounter was happenstance. Had I not been traveling myself; we would not have crossed paths."
"I disagree."
"What do you know, boy? You can follow a few tracks through ramble, let your bias lead you to my door, and then what?"
Carriére shook his head. "It was not bias that made me follow you, it was instinct. A feeling if you will. You played your part well on the road but, when that instinct starts calling, I've learned its best to listen as you have. It served you well, hasn't it?"
"Instinct and experience are entirely different aspects."
"Yet one still helps inform the other."
"With bias."
"Then you are just as bias with your supposed history with others. Always getting accused of things you are and are not guilty of, all your life – because some affliction lies behind your mask?"
Erik stiffened a bit though tilted his head none the less.
"Yes, I've deduced that you are deformed. Such hostility and disdain for your fellow man because you hardly feel like a part of humanity. If you were injured or scarred at some point in life, you would not be so bitter and paranoid."
"Here I thought you wanted to keep your heart beating a while longer," Erik bit in warning.
Carriére was unphased by the threat. "I do, however I detest bullshit and games as much you do in this instance. Would it not serve us better, and her, if you cooperated?"
"I am being cooperative," Erik growled. "You are still alive and I have not assailed you again, yet."
"You are feigning collaboration. You know things about her and the situation, and I have means to investigate this more deeply. Even more freely in this case. Would you rather inform my efforts, or continue to throw obstacles in my way, Monsieur? Do you want to be blamed for lives you did not take? I've no interest in tossing you into a cage for killing those men in the forest."
"I am not in habit of trusting lawmen. Most of whom are often so narrow minded that they fail truths that lay before them."
"I aim to better than that."
"I see that."
"Yet, you are being difficult."
"Old habits die hard, Inspector."
"Which will not help her, or the boy. It's not as though you are in a position to tend to everything yourself. Unless you plan to leave the boy alone again, or did you somehow have him hidden in that cart yesterday?"
Erik dipped his chin forward. It was fair point, though that did not mean he liked it anymore. It would be simpler to kill this man than to work with him. However, leaving Charles alone unguarded for extended periods was not an option either. Thus, in this case, Erik relented. For Christine. "Very well. Regardless of what you may believe, I do not have the faintest idea why she would come out this way."
"But you knew her."
Erik set his jaw. "Yes, a long time ago."
"At the Garnier?"
Now Erik's eyes narrowed upon. "Perhaps."
Carriére gave a small smile. "You were my first case."
It was not a stretch really. With the scandal of a decade long gone between a budding star and a masked villain, how could this perceptive Inspector not piece it together in some way. Not a surprise for him to reach that conclusion. However, no less annoying.
"Did not find much, did you?"
"But at least now I better understand why."
"An assumption, Inspector."
"Why would she seek you out? Which is what it appears to me, even if you disagree."
Because I fathered her son… but Erik was not about to disclose that delicate detail to anyone else. Not yet at least. "I do not know. She had made it clear to me that I was not to be a presence in her life any longer, which is a wish I granted. The name on this property is not a name that she would have recognized."
"Yet, she still came this way."
"Many things can happen in a panic when your life is as stake, Inspector. One does not often think clearly at those moments. Given your profession, you should know that. Unless, you are rather incompetent, despite initial pretense."
"I am well aware, Monsieur. As such, I am not one to leave such possibility to complete chance either. Perhaps it was total happenstance. Perhaps she learned of your whereabouts at an earlier date, and it was her subconscious that brought her and the boy out here. I am inclined to believe the latter."
This again. Why was this man so stuck on the notion that she would want to find him at all? "She would have little reason to seek me out, Inspector."
"Little reason," Carriére repeated thoughtfully after a pause.
Erik repressed the grimace. This was why he did not socialize well with others over such troublesome affairs. In an effort to shift the focus from the truth of Charles's heritage, which was likely Christine's partial reasoning, or her husband wanting to keep track of him. "I am familiar to her, and was something of her protector before everything…went out of hand at the Garnier. Her husband was dead by the time they fled, and if she somehow learned of my whereabouts — On a subconscious level, she was likely seeking refuge in the interim, even if I was a black stain on her life."
"You loved her."
"Irrelevant."
Carriére shook his head. "Not to the investigation."
"In your opinion."
"I need to get into her head, Monsieur. I need to get into Raoul de Chagny's head, so I can get into the mind of whoever wanted them dead. Right now, I think those men you dispatched were but hired help. I have to find who would have the means to hire so many and keep his or her hands clean of this blood trail. I also get the impression that you will not let me both speak to that boy and let me leave from here alive."
Erik inclined his head in an affirmative to that. There was little chance he would allow such an interaction yet. If ever.
"I would be well within my rights to force the issue, and bring reinforcements here to speak with him," Carriére began.
Erik's eyes darted to Carriére as a dark cloud started to descend upon his vision, until the Inspector raised his hands in a disarming manner.
"However, I think I saw enough today between you two to be assured that he feels comfortable with you. He would not be laughing and playing in the snow with someone he fears."
The fingers of Erik's hand relaxed from the fist they curled into from the potential threat. Regardless, Erik sensed he coming question.
"How is the boy?"
Erik knew the true question behind the one spoken and his jaw clenched from his own internal woe of the matter rather than anger. "He is…managing. He has yet to speak of what he had witnessed."
Carriére head bobbed once with a single nod, eyes briefly down cast before collecting himself a moment and straightened. "Did Christine tell you anything before she died that could help us find out who is behind this?"
A long and heavy sigh came and went with a deep rise and fall of his chest. "She… did not know who attacked them. She mentioned that Comte Philibert owed a debt, which was passed on to Comte Philippe, then…then Raoul," oh it pained him to utter that boy's name, "and now that debt is on Charles."
"What was the debt?"
"They would not tell the de Chagnys this supposed debt, which is curious when it something they wanted paid in full."
"That does not make any sense," Carriére muttered as he brushed his hand over his light brown hair.
"Agreed."
"Why bring up a debt when they were just going to kill them anyway? What is the point of even mentioning it if they would not say what it was…" the Inspector began pacing as he vocalized these questions rhetorically.
Erik craned his head to the side and watched the man move back and forth in though as he pondered those questions. Questions that Erik had been asking himself several times over the past four days.
"Why not just kill them outright? It was never the intent to have the debt paid…" Carriére continued under his breath with a glance to Erik. "You're sure that is what she said."
"Beyond measure."
Carriére's hand fell over his face, hand cupping over his mouth just below his nose. The pacing stopped but the mind was still working at a vigorous pace.
What was it like to have a nose? A bump of cartilage extending beyond the bone to create a proper and pleasing airway that others could look upon without disgust.
"That boy is the key," Carriére commented to him.
Blinking out of his thoughts, Erik's eyes settled on the Inspector again. "He is," he agreed, but did not relent to the silent ask.
Carriére gave a single nod although he appeared to deflate with an exhale. "I better return before search parties are sent for me come morning. I will… keep your home here a secret, if only to protect the boy. But I do ask for your name."
It took a long moment for Erik to consider the Inspector's words before relenting. It would likely only be a matter of time before he would learn of it anyway. It was a fair guess his name came out during the loose investigation into the Opera Ghost. Persistent bastard. If they did go to the Daroga, that thorn would certainly give it up in seconds of conversation if he had not already "Speak nothing of where we are, and only that the boy lives to your comrades. If my name or the boy's status appears in any paper, I will find you, then the boy and I will vanish."
"You have my word."
With a slow nod, believing him, he permitted his name. "I am Erik."
