"Behind every exquisite thing that existed, there was something tragic."

An hour passed. Then two, then three, then ten, and then a day. Erik's hair was a dark thicket from how often he'd run his hands through it.

He'd seen fletrissure scars before, but they weren't often as subtle as Manon's. These punitive marks branded into criminals – prostitutes, often, but also thieves, criminals, and runaways – were often hard to miss. Their marks were a deep, brutal purple or red, the lines bulging and twisted.

Manon's was practically elegant by comparison. Pale and thin-lined, as if great care had taken in its healing. As if whomever had branded her had foregone to rub the chalk into the mark, as was so often done to ensure the mark healed badly.

Its placement on Manon was also unusual. Erik knew that, more often, this mark of criminality and banishment was placed on the shoulder. But there was no mistaking what it was. A cruel thing, done more cruelly for its being burned into so intimate yet noticeable a spot.

It wasn't until halfway through the second day of Manon's recuperation – still unconscious, though her fever had finally broken – that Erik managed to throttle his mind into silence.

He was occupied at last, grinding out pages of music that did not want to be written, when he heard stirring from the direction of the bed. He positively vaulted towards his room, scattering papers which fluttered into the lake like pale birds.

"Manon!"

He yanked open the curtains to reveal a dozy-eyed Manon Moreau, supine but awake. Alive. Awake. Alive. Looking up at him like she hadn't seen him in years.

Something was roaring in his ears. Manon Moreau had not died. She lived. And she was looking at him with an expression which included pleasure.

She gazed at him with pre-dawn eyes, and smiled.

"Hello, Erik."

Manon's head felt like a battered piece of fruit, her hair felt like the pelt of a dead animal, and her side felt as if it had been kicked in by a horse. Yet she felt hot blood in her veins and a growling in her stomach.

Her mind was taking its time to clear. No immediate thoughts came to her to remind her what had happened or why she felt so wretched. Bizarrely, all Manon felt at the moment was an unusual sense of shyness and uncertainty as she looked at the man before her. What was more, this feeling had meshed with an inexplicable joy bubbling up in her chest at the sight of Erik le Phantôm. What the hell? Affection, relief, possessiveness, and gratitude had braided into a mystifying knot in her chest.

Why aren't I afraid of him anymore?

The wary companionship of before had collapsed unexpectedly, dissolved, and regrouped into this new, strange dynamic. He was now Erik, and no Phantom to her.

He was standing at the door, hands at his sides, mask and face expressionless, but with eyes riveted on her. They positively burned, and Manon's stomach swooped with an unexpected pleasure. As he began to walk towards the bedside with measured steps, she sensed an immense energy pent up in him.

Erik reached her, practically vibrating with tension - then collapsed onto the bed beside her like a puppet with its strings cut.

"Good afternoon, my dear."

Her face split into an unexpected grin. He flashed one back instinctively.

"You have been asleep for more than a day with a fever like hellfire," he informed her. He glanced at his feet, then added quietly, "I confess, I am thrilled you made it through."

Her heart twisted. "As am I, believe it or not." Manon expelled a shaky half-breath-half-laugh, then paused. First things first.

"I can't seem to remember what happened…"

Erik hesitated. He opened his mouth and closed it again, looking abruptly uncomfortable. He fiddled with the cuffs of his shirtsleeves.

"What do you recall, Manon?" he essayed. "Your wound had festered and caused a great fever, and further, I had to give you laudanum in order to operate on it. I'd be surprised if you remembered anything but fever dreams."

"I… what?"

Manon racked her brain, alarmed and unnerved at the severity of a situation she'd apparently been insensible to. What else had happened? Had the gendarmes returned?

Erik looked at her, his face revealing a cautious curiosity, but nothing more. She began ranting nervously.

"I remember bathing, and Sorelli's wardrobe, but what after that? We…we talked in the tunnels…and you …you…"

Her eyes scrunched confusedly. Then they flew open, staring at him full in the face.

"You."

A shred of memory had come slinking back to her. Manon glanced at him, and – ah – there. Guilt had flickered across the visible half of his face before his expression smoothed and became as impassive as the cold porcelain shielding the rest of him.

The images swam hazily together in her mind's eye. The flinging of remarks. The flinging of the lantern. His taunts. Her hand gestures. For a moment, she felt the same rising indignation – anger was so effortless, so soothing in the face of uncertainty - but as she glanced again at his face, she saw a shadow of anxiety edging into his expression, and her anger withered at once.

"We had a conversation, didn't we," she said, her tone made it clear that she recalled the exact nature of this conversation.

Erik paused, evidently pleased at her calmness, seemingly suspicious that reproach was imminent.

"Ah, yes. You then opted to search for the exit, er, unaccompanied."

Manon did not fail to notice the contrition which colored these words. She felt an unexpected rush of fondness. Swatting it away, she continued to grope for the next pieces of the story.

"And?"

He leapt eagerly back into the narrative as it skipped tidily past the scene of their altercation. "Your wound, Manon, was violently infected when I found you. In the lake," he elaborated in response to her bewildered look. "I found you floating in the lake, over an hour after you left. I can only assume that the infection began to peak then. It's likely that the fever overtook you and you wound up unconscious in the water.

"We are enormously lucky," he concluded as he leaned back and began to unbutton and roll his sleeves up his forearms, "that you were still alive when you floated my way."

He continued to watch her steadily as he pushed his sleeves up his arms and shifted to sit on a stool nearby, dragging it close to her and leaning forward with his elbows on his knees. That smirk was back.

"You put up one hell of a fight, my dear."

Manon smiled before she could stop herself.

"I owe you my thanks, Erik," she blurted. She felt nervous at the naked candor of her statement, but wanted to push on. "I am beginning to lose count of the number of times that you saved my life. Although," she teased suddenly, "since I have met you, the number of incidents in which my life needs saving has indeed become suspiciously frequent."

He barked a laugh, spreading his arms grandly and swinging his booted feet onto the bed. "But mademoiselle, it gives me so much to do! And to think that when you are properly healed, I shall have no more excuses to first sabotage, then rescue you. A dreary prospect."

Manon huffed a laugh, but sobered quickly, returning to her previous thread before she lost the nerve. Her heart thumped nervously.

"As you may have guessed, I have few resources and fewer friends…but whatever your reasons for taking me in, your home has been a safer place to stay than I have ever been in, and–"

But Erik leaned forward suddenly to grasp her arm, causing the words to die in her throat.

Their gazes locked and a smolder rekindled in his eyes.

"Ma chérie," he intoned, his voice deepening,

"Friends, resources, unhealed wound or no…for the time being, you are here to stay."

Manon stared at him and nodded slowly. A shiver bloomed over her skin at the menace and promise of his words.

In the days that followed, Erik and Manon fell into a comfortable routine.

Manon's healing wound was a much more stable and upward affair. She was able to walk with considerably more strength than she had had the previous week. True, Erik had reprised his scooping-up routing more times than Manon would have cared to admit, ("Perhaps you would care to dine on the floor as well, mademoiselle? You certainly seem to enjoy the view from here…"), but she was now managing to limp effectively from the bed to his study. She was also spending longer periods of time awake. Erik was still firmly banishing her from wakefulness the moment the wall clock struck 8, and refusing to acknowledge her existence earlier than 8 the following morning, but there was no denying that the rest was helping. Her pale coloring had lost its sallow edge, becoming luminous. Her eyes had become brighter, and her bearing more relaxed and fluid.

Erik himself had taken to sleeping on the chaise in his library. His traitorous body protested at this, eager to repeat the night of entwinement with Manon. He crushed this impulse ruthlessly – the last thing he needed was another mutiny, especially as Manon had moved on from the convenient fever which had enabled it before.

He trembled on those few occasions when he allowed his mind to wander back to that night, awash with guilt and pleasure. The sensation of physical intimacy had been shocking, yet his mind roved over the memory incessantly, like a dragon with its hoard. In the evenings, when he had sent Manon to bed (or carried her, if she were being feisty) and he sat alone among his books, contraptions, music, and journals, his mind would lapse, his eyes become unfocused, whatever he was holding slip quietly from his grasp. He would linger over the remembered sensation of her hips aligned with his…his leg slipping between hers…her waist cradled in the crook of his arm…her breath, soft against his throat…

He had never felt that before, never stretched against the warm, soft mystery of the female body. He had dreamed, schemed…had clasped Christine's body briefly to his own, alive with a tremulous thrill… but he'd never just held a woman, slept with one, cradled one so intimately. Learned the sleeping weight and feel and fall of one's legs and arms, the hollows and curves of one's back. God, if only he had been able to do that with his angel…

Yet even as Erik yearned for it, pained over it, dreamt of it …the pieces no longer fit. Christine was no longer so easily interchanged into his memories of closeness with Manon. Manon was too different and too immediate. Too real. His fantasies now about Christine were becoming less acute, less vivid, and suddenly terrifying for the sense that he was losing her. The ecstatic pain with which he had once adored her was dulling infinitesimally, even ebbing. In recent weeks, while it ached in new corners of his soul, this pain had somehow become more of a hum than a roar, more poignant than tragic.

He was no fool; Manon was certainly the reason – but he didn't, couldn't, wouldn't consider how. Exorcising the demon that was his love for Christine would release his angels too – would make him come apart.

Yet he also knew, as deeply and surely as he'd ever known anything, that that prospect of Manon leaving was utterly unacceptable.

But it wasn't often that he let himself think on that so directly. It was too confusing, too alarming, too unknown.

It terrified him.

Instead, for the first time since Manon had arrived in his home, he had begun to play music again.

There came a day when, unthinkingly, as Manon dozed and he adjusted the French horn part of a concerto, that he drifted over to his organ to play it out, straighten the crooked line that didn't feel quite right, and he found himself forgetting about the snagged measure and instead playing on through the rest of the piece. He roamed around it, playing pensively, playing with feeling, experimenting, suddenly and quite naturally able to concentrate with the unthinking clarity of a blank-mind-full-heart which had eluded him since the disaster. Music since that time had been an exercise in pain and violence, in grinding out his soul to an invisible companion, to a world with no audience, to his absolute loneliness. This creative fullness and calmness felt new and fertile and unfamiliar and wonderful…

It was only after several minutes that he looked up and saw Manon, staring at him from the other room. She was wearing the midnight-blue dressing gown and an inscrutable expression. Erik couldn't seem to speak, but was surprised not to feel the rage of sudden vulnerability. He felt a quivering sense of one who is at the edge of a precipice and looks over into the abyss, simultaneously knowing everything and nothing, curiously calm and resigned.

Staring back into Manon's dark eyes, which he could see held no mockery or disdain, Erik gave her a curt nod and left her, suddenly needing to feel the cold certainty of the lake on his skin.

There came a day in their newfound camaraderie that Erik noticed Manon becoming fidgety. Her attention span became shorter. Her questions became longer. She paced and she paced, had even asked if she could swim in the lake (which he had flatly refused), and had now begun poking around his contraptions and knicknacks. One memorable afternoon she had attempted to make their tea herself, heaping spices in pell-mell and burning the milk, emerging with two mugs of unpalatable swill that caused Erik to gag, but caused also an unfamiliar tightening in his chest as he doggedly choked it down that had nothing to do with the bad taste.

In short, Manon was restless. He had assumed she would get to this point; after the rest-intensive days of recuperation, a person could go mad. Especially a person so accustomed to motion and activity as she clearly was.

"Manon," Erik asked casually one day, as he was editing the concerto at his desk. Manon was seated on his chaise, trying her hand at sketching. "Would you like to learn how to read?"

Her pen slowed mid-stroke.

She turned her head towards him infinitesimally, profile facing him, eyes fixed to her mediocre rendition of the grotto. She stayed like that for a long minute, before turning her head, eyes inscrutable, looking him fully in the face.

"Yes."