Erik was pacing the floor of his bedroom. He didn't care to think why. It wasn't as if he were worried. Him? The Opera Ghost? Laughable.
Erik did not laugh, however, when he thought of the number of dangers the tunnels held for an injured, angry young female, wandering aimlessly.
Casting an uneasy glance over his shoulder towards the lake, Erik stuffed his hands into his pockets. There were an awful lot of rats running around in some of the deeper tunnels. Big ones. What if she wandered into the catacombs? Was attacked by them? Tripped on the slime, or fell into….
Damn it. He should have been more level-headed. But how was he supposed to know he'd have to weather some woman's defensive flight of fancy? A woman with no clue where she was going?
A woman whom he had all-but appointed himself responsible for?
A woman whose fate he cared about?
Erik stopped pacing as this thought occurred to him.
A woman whose fate he cared about?
Well, he supposed, yes. He did.
He gazed at the imprint left by Manon's exhausted body in his bed the night before. God in heaven, he hadn't expected that. The last – and only – woman who had sleepy thusly in his bed had been… Christine…
A woman whose fate he cared about?
Erik sat down heavily on the bench in front of his organ, running his hands through his hair for what felt like the hundredth time.
He tried so hard to never think of her name, though her face crossed his mind a thousand times a day.
He tried so hard to ignore the echoes of her voice, though she sang him to sleep every night.
Christine, Christine, Christine…
Would it never end?
His longing for her persisted, try as he might to crush it. It was a dull ache in his heart, a wound that had never quite healed.
Yet he was no fool. He didn't delude himself for a moment that she would return. Without her angel in her head, manipulating her, seducing her, he was simply a puzzling memory.
Christine, Christine, Christine…
The fop had won. The fop always won. The two children together, how fitting. How perfectly..
Erik leaned back against the wall with a groan.
He vacillated between loving and hating Christine…loving her for her innocence, her soul, her beauty…hating her for her childishness, her vanity, her perfection. Two sides of the same coin.
That, he supposed, was the nature of obsession. It was nihilism. It was madness. It was perverse and dichotomous and twisted… yet it was so sweet, inescapable, blissful to let himself go wherever the river of mania swept him.
Erik toyed with his cuff as he gazed unseeingly into space. Somewhere between seeing Christine for the first time and hearing her sing for the first time, he had finally found himself – felt human – yet somewhere between becoming her teacher and trussing the fop to the portcullis, he had lost his mind.
And now he was paying for it with a lifetime of solitude.
Christine, Christine, Christine…
Manon. Manon. Manon. His subconscious mocked him.
Well, she had certainly introduced a new element to his empty shell of a life.
Stubborn as sin, though, Erik thought tiredly, standing up and pacing to his room again. Managing her was practically a full-time occupation.
Erik absently rubbed his unmasked cheek where she had struck him earlier. It hadn't exactly been enough to break his jaw, but he could feel a bruise forming under the tender flesh.
Cheeky thing. She'd hit him squarely, too, convincing him that this was not the first time she had ever hit someone before. He chuckled hollowly. Well, her flare of temper had certainly confirmed his suspicions that she had committed more than steal a load of bread. Did she really think him that simple?
He winced slightly as his traveling fingers pressed his cheekbone.
Why had she reacted so strongly? He pondered uncomfortably. Trivial hurts did not drive well-bred women to attempt – and succeed – to strike a man.
But then, what kind of well-bred woman couldn't read, for Christ's sake? But he was certain that she was no street urchin; she had an innate grace and eloquence which leaned strongly towards sophistication. What was the explanation?
Erik hit the wall with his palm. His hands returned to running through his hair. Why did he care so much?
He shouldn't. He knew that he shouldn't.
He didn't. He knew that he didn't.
Erik's roving fingers touched his cold, hard mask. Suddenly furious, he stood and stormed towards the gilded mirror. He ripped the mask off, forcing himself to face his own grotesqueness.
"There! See? Had you forgotten?!" he berated, standing practically flush to the glass. His unkind fingers prodded roughly at the uneven flesh and bone.
"And what would she say to this, eh, you fool?" Erik demanded of his reflection. His eyes turned unseeing, so weary of the deformity before him that he could hardly breathe.
He stared at himself for a moment, his eyes and his heart so very empty.
He sighed, leaning heavily against the mirror, bracing himself with his forearms and resting his forehead against his balled fists. Just what was he trying to prove to himself? That he hadn't grown to care for Manon in some small way? For her wit, her cynicism that matched his own, her stubbornness?
…Or was he trying to prove something deeper and far more insidious? That he was beyond such caring, for anyone? That the caring he had once lavished had been broken beyond repair?
Erik's wall clock chimed suddenly, snapping him out of his trance – once, twice, three times…. Erik lost count. Suddenly he was fully alert. How long ago had it been since he had left Manon in the tunnels? One hour? Two? More?
The sinister beginnings of worry began to gnaw at the edges of his brain .
"Damn, damn, damn…"
He would find her. He would go back into the tunnels and look for her exhausted, belligerent form and bring her back here where she would be safe. How could he have been so irresponsible? He had let blind rage drive her – injured, unknowing, and angry – to the idiotic quest of finding her way – where? Out? Into a pit? He knew perfectly well that there was no way to his grotto without a boat.
Erik's eyes snapped open. Making up his mind in an instant, he pressed swiftly away from the mirror – only to stop dead.
Something white was floating in his lake.
Erik watched it for a moment in the mirror's reflection, horrified and transfixed.
It drifted towards him slowly, grotesquely, a pale and ghostly petal in a murky lake of green and black…
There, floating in the water, was Manon.
He leapt into the grotto with a strange, dreamlike deafness in his ears. He threw aside chairs, books, anything in his path as he hurtled towards Manon's lifeless form. Oblivious to his boat, he stripped his shoes and shirt off as he dove into the lake and swam towards her.
Grabbing her pale arm, he dragged it across his shoulders as he swam crookedly, heavily back to shore. She did not feel warm. She did not feel alive.
Erik found himself praying suddenly to a God who didn't exist.
Please, please. I can't have lost her…oh God, Manon, please…
His feet hit bottom as he reached the edge of the lake and hoisted her dripping body into his arms. She draped against him but was ice cold, her face bloodless, waxen. All Erik looked at as he stumbled towards his room was her pale features. A few freckles he'd never noticed before stood out against their pallid background.
"Manon! Manon, Manon…" he pleaded absently with her as he laid her gently out on the bed.
Her sopping dark hair streamed onto the pillow as he pushed a few strands off her face. His own body soaked the bed even more, but he didn't care. He checked her pulse, fingers pressing to her wrists and, finding nothing, leapt frantically to her neck where he was unspeakably relieved to find it – though faintly.
How had she wound up in the water? How much had she swallowed? Leaning down quickly, he breathed gently into her mouth.
His palms found her sternum and pressed down hard.
Breathe. Breathe.
Suddenly she spasmed, coughing up a stream of lakewater onto his bed. Erik sent up a prayer to that same non-existent God.
Yet Manon was still unconscious. Though she was now breathing faintly, she was deathly cold.
Without hesitation, she was hefted into Erik's arms and he briskly rubbed her back, her shoulders, her arms with his hands.
How could he let this happen? Erik was beyond caring that he was becoming completely undone over Manon. Yet as he pressed her head into the crook of his neck, he paused for a moment in his frantic attempts to warm her…. and he just held her for a moment – tightly, briefly, irrelevantly, irresponsibly…
A cold trickle of water suddenly streamed close to his groin and snapped him back to his senses.
He realized that the only way that Manon's frigid body was going to gain any heat was if he gave it some of his own.
Almost laughing at the intense irony of the situation – the unrealistic intimacy of such a situation for he, Erik, to find himself in! – he guided her body down onto the bed. As he did so, though, he paused and frowned.
Her sopping dress, he concluded reluctantly, was not helping matters.
After passing an uneasy glance over her face, Erik moved his hands to her bodice and gently began flicking open the buttons, one at a time, and slid the garment over her shoulders, past her arms, down the slope of her waist and hips and legs until he could toss it onto the floor.
Studiously keeping his eyes on the most innocent parts of her body he could manage, feeling like a voyeur, Erik swallowed the rather large lump that had formed in his throat.
Gathering Manon's body to him, Erik aligned their bodies so that he was touching every part of her that he could, letting out a faint gasp at both the chill of her skin, and, guiltily, at the sensation of her bare skin meeting his bare chest.
An extremely tense minute passed.
Erik lay rigid, his throat tight and his eyes shut tighter.
A second passed, and then another.
Slowly, he opened his eyes.
His gaze found Manon's left shoulder. It was pale and smooth, intersected by the wide strap of her wet shift, plastered to her skin.
His left arm was pressed to the bed, wrapped around her right side… his inquisitive right arm, however, lifted from her waist and touched the top of this shoulder – as lightly as if he were brushing off a piece of dust – and caressed it gently.
He watched his hand move, fascinated, as if it were no longer a part of him and were moving on its own.
Her skin felt cold even to his touch, but it was soft as he trailed his fingers over it. Hm. Nothing burst into flames, no one leapt out to condemn him. His hand became bolder. It trailed slowly down her arm, his half-open eyes guiltily following the movement of his fingers. They paused over a thin, raised scar that striped over her inner forearm like a silvery blade of grass. His fingers lingered there a moment, siding over it a few times before continuing to her thin wrist, the back of her hand (which bore more faint scars, he noticed with a pause and a frown) and down her long fingers.
He had reached her hip… and after resting there for an instant, his fingers seemed to come to their senses and returned to him as he brought his arm quickly back up and wrapped it decisively around Manon's frigid body once more, settling back in. Erik blinked several times to clear his head, glancing towards his hand accusingly as it now rested innocently.
Ridiculous thing. What did it think it was doing, anyway? Sneaking caresses which clearly held no medicinal value?
Erik was busy with mentally berating it when suddenly, his leg committed mutiny as well.
The damned thing, it had slunk its way closer to Manon and nestled itself between her own legs, so that now they were twined together like crossed fingers.
His leg looked quite cozy snuggled up with Manon's like that. Erik cast it a dirty look.
What? It seemed to ask him innocently.
You know damned well what.
Oh, tosh, you prudish old hack, it loftily rejoined. I'm not going to sit here and let the girl freeze. If you were worth half your salt as a physician, you'd know how effective this will be in warming her up.
Erik shook his head, completely nonplussed. Had he just been bested by his own leg? He knew perfectly well how well doing this would warm her up. Him, too. And that was the last thing he wanted to dwell on.
Before any other parts of him mutinied (he could sense his left arm intrigued by the prospect), Erik took the upper hand. He gathered Manon a bit more closely, as if to prove to his pioneering body exactly who was boss around here.
Erik took a deep breath and exhaled it, slowly and completely.
Manon's heart thumped beneath his hand, steady and quiet and more calming than anything on earth.
God, this was nice.
Just for one moment, Erik listened to his damnable body's instincts and allowed himself to imagine.
He imagined that his arms weren't just wrapped around Manon purely for the sake of her survival...
The candles in the room had half burned out, the light dim, their bodies warming, and the buzz of panic gradually lulling.
The growing sense of hazy peace lured Erik to a stolen sort of place... a leap between the ticks of a clock, which allowed him a moment of secret, of invisible, of perfect freedom where he could forget himself. He let himself forget the fact that he hadn't checked her wound yet, that the cold of the lake may have harmed her, that the all-too-frequent furrow between Manon's brow was smoothed….
Instead, he imagined them in a different context, in a different world, their bodies aligned in a different way entirely…he imagined them wrapped in each others arms warm, sated…..as lovers.