"And I'll use you as a makeshift gauge,

Of how much to give and how much to take.

And I've moved further than I thought I could

But I missed you more than I thought I would

And I'll use you as a warning sign

That if you talk enough sense then you'll lose your mind

And I found love where it wasn't supposed to be

Right in front of me.

Talk some sense to me."

- "I Found"- Amber Run

With the scent of his own blood invading his senses, Erik knew that all of this music and romance, all of this love, had only been a dream he'd never meant to capture. He must flee. Flee for her safety, for the preservation of their love, for what the future might one day hold for the both of them. For how else could he protect her, if not to leave?

He knew that there were moments that existed before the inevitable arrival of pain. When one makes all those improbable and sometimes, impossible decisions to negate the repercussions of their previous choices in an effort to subdue the onslaught of physical and emotional agony. A justification of sorts. A balance, a trade? A weighing of what trouble might be easiest to carry?

Sometimes, we all live and survive in the place where that scale wobbles. Erik had always existed on that sad, deserted plane.

Was it a safe place? He could not be sure, but the truth of it is was that it was a space lived in and populated by his soul as a tangible entity. A desperate country where he did not wish to travel.

Erik, like so many other humans, sought out those seconds between life and burial, as if the infinitesimal seconds of agony and realization might tell him more about the human he was. He yearned for everything he loved in the times of his most supreme wretchedness. The longing for complete understanding lived in him then. It festered, and survived to claw upon his mortality and reason.

Erik would sing to the rafters to find her there, sitting with him and his agony. But, as thin as he was, he had never been a weak man. He was a man of genius, and of accomplishment. He held an otherworldly capacity for violence, and an anger he wished to erase. But his soul harbored an infinite amount of love and hope.

That great lighthouse in the dark.

Hope.

He focused upon that now, as his eyes rolled back, as his head nodded, and his reason waivered. He'd survived far worse than a shoulder wound, but he was a bit older now. It was becoming more difficult to weather each storm of physical abuse. Physical pain was so much less of the beast than the metaphorical rending open of a heart, of the space sanctified and reserved for a brutality of unfettered emotion.

"I will die of love," Erik murmured, "I will die of the madness of it." For every moment his eyelids shut and his head lulled to the side, his mind held the image of his Christine. Walking through the shadow of his soul. Gone. Her voice a banshee's wail calling to him. Almost real. Tangible.

He had almost entertained the idea of carving out a life for them, well, at least a semblance of one. A porcelain miniature, something fragile and breakable but aspiring to be real. As tangible and delicate as the Glass Lotus that lived in their minds, his and Christine's.

"Erik?!"

He heard the faint, frantic call of her voice then, and it roused him awake. The gossamer haunt of it, the golden coil of sound enrapturing his demented brain. He felt her voice calling his name deep in the flinching marrow of his bones.

And he did not know what to think of it.

He'd never been loved, never been accepted. Never realized how to manage affection or tenderness, the intricacies of love, and how to know if it was what he felt and received was real. For, surely, of all the skills he had mastered, love was the one that remained elusive.

Erik, the so-called Livng Corpse, had never held it in his hands. This Love.

Just as the Glass Lotus remained a fragile, unattainable, unconquerable thing, so was the love that he had been offered. The blood may have been flowing freely from his wound, but he knew how to deal with that, the concrete and visceral reality of it. It was something he could see, touch. He knew not how to be cared for, how to be wanted, how to be desired. . .how to hold the impossibly sacred flower of a love freely given to him. He questioned it. He hated the fact that it was the one thing that could not best him in a battle.

Love. Compassion. They made him a fool. He could not control love, nor the semblance of it.

Erik allowed the blood to flow a little more as he staunched the wound and gathered his lanky legs beneath him in an effort to stand.

Love, what an ephemeral, fleeting dream. . .had he caught that butterfly in Christine's kiss? Had it been a trap? His reason warred against his heart. Erik had memorized the melody of pain and cruelty, and as beautiful as Christine's voice was, it was a song she knew not how to sing. One he knew not how to hear, for its tenderness was a wall he could not yet breach.

There is absolutely nothing you can do to cleave your old life away, to forget it, when there is noone that remembers your pain and follows you.

The voices in his mind rang out solidly, unable to be silenced.

"Erik? Where are you?!" The desperate wail of HER voice resounded through the cavernous darkness. He shivered, roused by her siren's call. He rose frantically, his lean legs unsteady beneath him. His limbs felt tired and loose and his knees folded inwards upon each other, like wet strings of thread clumped and sodden together. But, he would get to her. His Christine. Erik pressed a large cool palm to the damp wet stone and attempted to right his long body. Moving forward, towards the call of her voice was an arduous and painful mission, as his wounded shoulder screamed and bled with each faltering step.

"Christine," he gasped, hoping she could follow the sound of his singular voice as he staggered in the direction of her own. Erik's mismatched eyes, so accustomed to the darkness, were a blessing then, as he held no torch or lantern to guide his way though the tunnels, as was his memory of the labyrinthine passages he had claimed as his own for many years now. He could hear the shuffling of her boots against the hard, molding stone, his hearing acute as that of a bat. She was approaching, he knew, and the realization of being reunited with her urged his aching body and stricken mind forward.

"Erik!" Christine shrieked, her voice so very near, only a length of startled breathes away from his unmasked face, "I hear you, Erik. I'm coming to you!"

And then, she was upon him, her tiny arms flinging about his waist as his body collapsed against her small frame. He trembled at the onslaught of her tender, possessive touch, awestruck and unaccustomed to the fever dream of his body being wanted and sought out by another.

Erik heaved her name upon a labored breath and rested his head upon her narrow shoulder, "Christine, your boy, he shot me. . ."

"I know, darling, I know. ." Christine's fingers searched for the sight of his wound in the blackness that ensconced them, her hands gentle but hurried. When her palms found the warmth of his blood, the very stark and dangerous reality of her lover's suffering, she lost the breathe that would sustain her.

This was too real, too much. She would not lose him now, when she had finally, finally realized she wanted him as her own. As her partner, her husband. Christine placed her hand upon his wound and examined it. When she removed her hand from his tortured flesh, the coating of warm, fresh blood upon it almost undid her. She held in a gasp and wiped the blood on the fabric of her dress, with no regard for the costume."You are losing too much blood, Erik. The clothe you placed upon it will not stop the bleeding. I need to get you somewhere safe. . .but I don't know how. I don't know where." She sobbed violently, a bloodied hand reaching to her mouth to cover the sound of her cries. "Tell me what to do, Erik, please tell me what to do to help you!"

"Christine, I need you to calm down. We must be very quiet, my sweet girl. Your Erik will not die. He will not leave you. Never." Erik, again attempted to find his footing and grabbed Christine gently but firmly by her narrow shoulders. "We have to go, for as far as we can, for as long as we can, but I must tell you something, Christine. . ." Each word had been pulled from him with shaking breaths.

"Not now, tell me when we are safe, Erik!" The tiny soprano helped him walk, draping his lanky arm across her back and guiding him forward. "There's no time for that now. Quiet, you said. Move forward, you said." And they pushed on. "Erik, you are hurt. Let's stop. Does it burn, the wound?"

The sounds of gunshot and the shuffling of the feet of so many soldiers smoldered inside his eardrums. He was going mad, was he not? And his mother's cold, unforgiving voice rang in his mind. . .

"Erik, please darling. . . the bullet, where is it? Is it burning you?" Christine's voice echoed in his mind. His vision blurred, and he could not find focus. In his delirium, the comforting words Christine spoke transformed into the tragic notes of his mother's vile melody, his love's tenderness fading into the fog of his injured mind. Only his mother existed in his fever dream of pain. Her dark hair, the curls, her anger that had arisen any moment he'd even dared to speak or ask something of her.

He could still feel the burn of that kettle against his face, feel its scorch even now, so many years after her tirade.

"Does it burn you, my son? Erik? That's the name you gave yourself, correct? For, I gave you none at all." She mocked him and sneered in that could almost be described as joy. "Does it hurt? I hope it sears and scars you, and strangles those sweet songs from your devll's throat. You should have known better than to step outside, to be seen by those young men that taunt me with their cruel notes slipped under the door, that fling shit at our front steps! All those mean notes about your father who left us because of you!."

He cowered deeply into the dusty corner, not caring for the mouse shit and crumbs littering the creaking wooden floor. attempting to make his gaunt frame as small as he possibly could. In that moment, Erik wished to be a speck of dust blown far away and unnoticed in the a gentle wind. Inconsequeintail. Never seen. Never a thought.

But his life was anything but gentle. The heat of the kettle had left him reeling. A child of ten years, or at least he thought as many. He could not tell. His mother had never told him his age. After his father had disappeared and abandoned him to the merciless and aggressive brutality of the woman who had borne him, Erik was not offered a birthday or a celebration of any sort. Not even a walk outside, for fear that he'd be seen, and bring truth to the rumors in the small town about the monster child that lived in Madeliene Carriere's attic.

The woman stared at him again with a ferial nature only seen in the glances of predatory animals in the midst of a hunt. Even at his young age, Erik sensed it, the hatred, the need for violence in her eyes.

"Please, please, Maman, don't hurt me! I'll go back upstairs! I'll hide myself away." Erik's slight form quaked in the terror of what further pain she might inflict upon him. "Noone will ever see me, I promise!" The child shielded his masked face with pale, skeletal fingers, so abnormally long for a child, his tears hidden under cold palms and the soiled, sodden cloth beneath them.

'"Even if you hide away, I shall never be rid of you. My little corpse, my fucking abomination!" His beautiful mother slammed the kettle down on the kitchen table and released it from her grasp. It was an unacknowledged mercy for the child. "Do you think you're smarter than the rest of us? The townspeople, the guests I have that you only hear and never see? Smarter than me?!" She hovered over him, and leaned forward, her mouth glistening with angry spittle.

She whispered in his ear in a terrifying manner. "Do you think I do not hear word of the angel's voice singing in the chapel in the midnight hours? That I do not hear the rumors of the deformed little boy that races across the town at all hours of the night?"

Erik backed further into the kitchen corner as she railed at him, the woman who had given him life.

And what a life it was. . .

His shrieking mother was upon him then, gripping his tortured face in her hands, the rotten clothe of the mask she'd haphazardly cut-out and forced upon his features weaving between her delicate, deadly fingers as she shoved his ugly head to meet her own. Her hands dug torture and deception into the mottled recesses of his flesh as she shook him by the narrow bones of his chin.

"If I burn you once more, I will make you uglier. I could cover your entire miserable body with burns, and huge seeping welts to match your terrible devil''s skull. You know, you look as if you'd been born half-decayed. I could make your scrawny bones match the rest of you, you putrid thing!"

"Maman, there is nothing more you can do to hurt me, to scar me, to make me more of a victim to you. What have I done to you, mother, but simply exist? You might as well grab that kettle again and place it upon my back, you wicked bitch. "

And, Madeliene took the child up on his challenge, gripping him by the collar and yanking him with a vicious eagerness to inflict further harm upon her son. Erik's eyes widened in terror as she once more brought the hot kettle to his flesh. . .

Erik screamed at the agony of the searing heat shoved into the thin,papery flesh of his back, the molten heat of metal hitting his spine, and the agony of its touch sucking upon his bones like a hungry leech. His mother's final words to him left more of a scar than any inflicted wound ever could.

"I wish I could forget you, my simpering, disgusting child. But you are my greatest shame!."

And now, Christine Daae's greatest shame.

Erik endured the memory, and struggled to make sense of his current reality. Burned. Damned. Hated. Abandoned. A soul left to fend for himself as a child. And now, as a man in middle age. He was surely still alone, would always be alone.

Wounded and frantic, Erik's mind rattled and he could not testify between the present and the past. What hands were vicious and which were kind? He felt the soft, but vigorous movement of delicate fingers across his face, moving in concern, in worry. Where was he? What sort of man had he become? Who cared for him? Still?

The hands that cradled his distorted features were gentle, too caring, a lie, just like his mother's hands when she wished for him to vanish. A LIE. Or maybe it was a stark truth wrought by his hideousness. He was alive. He was not a child, but yet, he still felt abandoned. The woman that now clutched at him could only be a deceiver, just as his mother had been. He wished to pry her poisonous fingers from his body, but she was relentless, persistent. For how could any woman come at him with a touch of compassion or love? It was unthinkable.

It did not matter whose hands touched him, for they would always belong to the hands of a captor. Such was the truth of the life he suffered.

"Christine, please stop, let me go." With an unearthly strength and a true delirium, he shoved her away,plying her fingers from his head roughly, the whole force of his body pushing her gentle frame away from him. Christine's small spine hit the stone wall of the tunnel as he moved her. Erik's mind warped the reassurance and comfort he had wished to offer her, contorting her kindness and love into a vile lie. For he knew nothing else. The world had always despised and rejected him. She could be no different, would not be. . .his addled brain would harbor no other truth than that which he had suffered for the entirety of his miserable existence.

Scorn. Shame. Rebuke. Horror. Disgust. All that he had every experienced.

"Did you enjoy trapping the monster? Are you leading the beast to his captor right now?" He gasped and attempted to struggle forward. "How does it make you feel, my love," he spat with a bitter venom, blood flinging on her form as he rounded on her. "How does it feel, Christine, to have your monster at your mercy? Or do you wish to seduce me into your bed and let your lover stab a knife through my back as you open your legs to me?" Erik snarled at her and grabbed at her skirts, ripping the lace from the bottom tier of her gown. He took the black lace to his mouth and spit upon it, before wrapping it around his shoulder to add another layer to his blood-soaked bandage.

"You whore, with your angel's face and your sweet voice. . .shall I strangle the life out of you now before you end me? Tell me,my little Delilah," he growled at her, "what will it be? Our shared fate?"

Christine choked back a horrible sob, aghast with Erik's torment and misery. "Erik! None of this was a lie! None of it! Please!" The young woman struggled forward to catch up with him, her eyes floundering through the ebony dimness of the tunnels.

"You vile, deceitful child! How am I to believe anything you say to me? Your wretched boy is waiting for me, isn't he? Isn't he?!" Erik lurched forward and made to grip his impossibly large palm around her tiny swallow's throat, but the utter terror and unabashed love in her eyes caused him to pause. There was something honest and extremely tender there in the depths of her eyes. . .but he would not allow it. Simply a mirage. It must be. For love would never exist on the plane of his disfigured reality.

"Erik," She pleaded, her voice growing hoarse and ever more sorrowful, "None of this, none of what you are saying is true! I love you!" She grabbed for him desperately, her tiny, shaking white fingers quivering like branches in an onslaught of cold wind, shooting out to grasp the ends of his sleeves. Erik quickly and soundlessly flinched away, reflexes firing, deft as a feline.

"I love you! Please, let me help. I will keep you safe! I love you, I love you!" Christine's arms were a blank haven, a destroyed shelter. She was broken. Her Erik had always existed as a wandering treasure, something to be sought in the waves, fragile, dangerous, singular, dangerous to the touch, unreal. But once one held him in heir fingers, the very nerves, in the palms of their hands. He Was Beautiful. Stunning.

The Glass Lotus. Erik was her fragile, strong thing. Her soul. The other part of herself from which she could not separate herself

His wicked soul. A loving woman, desperate and beseeching.

The muddy, damp cavern ground beneath her tiny, booted feet caused Christine to shuffle and lose her balance. She fell to her knees in her efforts to reach out to him, but he was far too quick, even in his bloodied, weakened state.

Erik turned to look at her as he stumbled away, in search of his own safety, his heart wrenching at the sight of her misery. But how could he trust her? How could he be sure of the truth of her feelings when he had very nearly been slain at her whim upon the stage of the Garnier?

The young woman, Christine Daae, became a soiled martyr, an abandoned saint made to bow down in the darkness, the echo of her tears an endless symphony against the stone walls. She had nothing now. Grief was an endless verse of sad memories she hoped not to retrace or navigate. The one melody she no longer wished to sing. But sorrowful moments were her brutal reality. Deaths in Christine's short life were relived experiences, unable to be captured in the lens of her once innocent eyes The mourners, the survivors, had always managed these interludes, and did not shed their tears, But she owned them, those seconds of living and sorrow. They belonged to her. The moments in which she realized that she and everyone she cherished were simply human and flawed.

Her ethereal dark prince most of all. And if he deserted her now, if he fled and died, his still warm blood on her body, it would serve as another abandonment, another death to her.

Erik turned his wretched head and looked at his love one final time. "Never find me again. You have never known me, Christine."

He wept and clouded his eyes over the distorted half of his face. Stumbling still, he waved a great white outspread palm before her, a silent message for her not to follow. "I strongly doubt, my love,that anyone will truly know me before i die. And that time, darling, may come sooner than I had expected." Her Erik was leaving her, forsaken when she had finally, finally offered up her heart to him. He already held her voice in his long, beautiful fingers. For what more could he take from her? Her soul?

"Erik, you're not yourself, love. I'm here, but we must go, and go together. . ." Christine stammered helplessly as he began to move away from her in frantic, jangled steps. "You're not thinking correctly. I'm here, we can escape together. I will keep you safe!" She pled for him to wait for her, to let her tend to the crimson pouring of his blood, her knees scraping against the hard stone as she scooted ever closer to him, blindly reaching for his clothing in an effort to make him stay. "Let me hep you! You've lost far too much blood. I need to staunch the wound, and then we can flee. Together. Only together!"

But, Christine's cries rang in vain, as her Erik, her damaged and beautiful Angel of Music, her would-be husband, scrambled to his feet, clothes and shoes soaked in his own blood. He rounded his damaged head to her before he fled.

"Christine, never doubt my love for you, and that is why I must go. I will not have a prison sentence for you. I will not see myself, assassin of Mazanderan, hung by the very rope I have wielded on so many! Go, and leave me!" He made a movement in the air to staunch her approach, his beautiful fingers splayed wide, palms out towards her, in an effort to stop her from following him. "Please, go," his voice was desperate, but it softened. "Christine, I love you," the voice whispered to her in agony, and an utterly devastating sweetness. "I cannot hand to you an invitation to my disastrous fate…"

But, the young woman still reached for him, still wept for him to remain at her side, so that she could tend to his wounds and find a sanctuary for them, for him to recover in peace. But his mismatched eyes refused her, they would no beg a question of staying, of waiting, of going.

Erik, her Erik, disappeared into the darkness of the dank tunnels. A shadow that never existed. A figure made of her own dreams of an Angel of Music, of a man with a marred face that would make her his wife. He was still unattainable. A ghost in a mirror. A voice in the walls. A trembling hand that sought her own but would never truly be hers.

As her Erik fled from her, Christine could swear she heard the soles of his feet crunch upon the fragile shards of the beautiful Glass Lotus they had created together.

Now destroyed.

"Erik,' Christine shrieked desperately into the blackness, scrambling to her feet on the damp, slippery cobblestone, the shock of his departure lifting after the handful of moments that had taken her to process his exit.

His goodbye. Possibly, his death. It was then, that Christine Daae took after him, madly in search of the looming black shadow she called her own. She would not lose him now, she would not let him die alone.

She would not let him die. Her heart would not allow such a transgression, such a defeat.

And so, Christine Daae tore off her sodden shoes and ran, the echoes of the gendarmes coming ever closer in the tunnels, her lover careening farther from her grasp. The Glass Lotus would be rebuilt, shard by shattering shard., just as she would rebuild and heal her Erik. She would not let him die. Not alone.

He would not die. Her Erik would live, and she would exist by his side.

Chrstine Daae ran.