Molière? No, too dense. Dante? Perhaps. It was simple enough, though a tad dismal…
Erik rifled through his shelves, searching for a more challenging text to try with Manon. She'd worked her way through the handful of elementary pieces he'd started her on – had mastered them ravenously, in fact – and was now getting a bit cocky. She needed something to stump her.
Erik drummed his fingers on his lips, smiling slightly. His stance was relaxed as he perused the shelves. She was an impressively quick learner. This was fortunate, for, skilled teacher though he was, he was not a patient one. And it was true that it was early days yet, but reading and writing seemed to be arenas well-suited to Manon's stubbornness. When applied to intellectual challenges, the trait which was so maddening in conversation gained a more virtuous hue of tenacity.
But it wouldn't do to let her know that. Already she was using her fledgling skills to dryly tease in ever-more creative ways, to his surprise and amusement. With the confidence that only comes from newly-discovered aptitude (not to mention her increasing strength) Manon was blooming, settling into her skin and his home.
If the simple success of her wound healing had given Erik satisfaction, her increasing spirit was positively gratifying.
"Are you picking a book for us to read, or writing one?"
Manon came up beside him, arms crossed, evidently tired of waiting for him to choose the reading material.
She cocked an eyebrow as she glanced at the two books he'd been considering, still held in his hands midair. "Oh dear, I see what's the matter. Having trouble reading the titles, eh? Well, not to worry, young one. I'll help you."
With a sigh of infinite patience, she grabbed a book at random from a shelf above her head and handed it to him matter-of-factly. "There. That wasn't so hard. Surely we can manage this one."
Erik looked down at the book she had given him. He read the title and choked. One Thousand and One Nights.
"Oh, I've no doubt we could, chérie," his grin widened darkly as his eyes flickered down to her lips. Manon's feigned hauteur faltered and she glanced down nervously at her random choice. He returned his eyes slyly to hers.
"But it's a tad…advanced, my dear. Perhaps at a later date." He hefted the two he held, about to offer her the Dante.
Suddenly neither held any appeal, particularly when stacked against her racy oriental pick.
"Enough." Erik tossed them aside. "We'll be spelling in our sleep if we keep this up." He braced his hands on his hips and surveyed her. "How is your side feeling?"
Manon straightened and raised her arms above her head in imitation of a stretch he had taught her to loosen the scar tissue and ease her muscles. She stretched them upwards nearly to their fullest extent.
"Nearly there. These bookish weeks have done me good." She spoke confidently, yet she lowered her arms quickly to lean against the bookcase as the tender flesh protested. Erik steadied her, grasping her shoulders.
"Clearly," he remarked dryly, not moving his hands. Yet it was true that she was walking with ease these days…
"Alright then. Get your boots. We're going to stretch our legs."
"'Scrap metal'?" Manon was asking incredulously. "'Scrap metal'? Why on earth would two men in the junk business buy an opera?"
Erik turned towards her with a look that could have leveled cities.
"Precisely!" he thundered, "I swear, they ran the thing so badly that I wondered that they weren't too busy sizing up the gilt for its price per kilo to worry about little things like music or artistry or…"
He trailed off as Manon laughed. "'Sizing up the gilt'? Bien sûr. If by 'gilt' you mean 'which dancing tart to bed next…"
He smirked, infinitely gratified, offering his hand to her as they navigated the stairway from the balcony to the mezzanine.
"You capture it perfectly, my dear. It was like living in a henhouse. Two puffed up roosters, strutting around idiotically, falling upon anything that looked twice at them."
Manon and Erik were in the main foyer of the Opera Populaire, making their way along the dusty and charred landings and walkways. They had wended their way through the atrium, the grand salon, and were now making their way up the stairs towards the first loge level towards the theater.
Erik, who walked these halls regularly, found that he was enjoying himself. He'd discovered that Manon's knowledge of opera production was non-existent, and had taken it upon himself to educate her. For her part, she matched his enthusiasm for lecture with a ferocious curiosity so incessant that even when her comments touched a nerve, they were followed by more questions so quickly that Erik didn't have time to be annoyed.
He'd passed the tarnished statues, peeling paint, and scorched archways hundreds of times, but had ceased to pay attention to most of it. His attention was so often inward, and he knew this place so, so very well that he realized he'd never truly examined it.
Seeing it all through Manon's eyes was forcing him to. Her eyes drank in every sculpture, frieze, painting, and embellishment as if she'd never seen anything like them, but sometimes gave disarming assessments.
"Who is that one?" she indicated a bust of an austere composer.
"Lully."
"Was he any good?"
"If you like unimaginative baroque melodrama."
"No flair for the dramatic yourself?"
"Very amusing, Mademoiselle Moreau."
They had reached the doorway into the theater, which he pushed and held open so that she could enter. She walked ahead a few paces, but it was difficult to see.
Watery light filtered through patches in the burned rafters, illuminating the dust in its beams, and falling weakly on the shapes beyond. Manon could just make out the magnificent theater, the hazy twilight revealing the half-seen edges of statuary looming from the ceiling, the dark recesses of carved boxes, the silent army of velvet seats, and the ominously beautiful sight of the empty, destroyed stage. It had the same ghoulish beauty of a graveyard at dusk.
Erik approached her silently from behind. She turned to look at him, nervous for the first time that afternoon, suddenly reluctant to speak and break the silence of a sanctuary. Of his devastation.
He stood behind her quietly, surveying the same scene as she. But after a moment he offered her his arm.
"If you'll follow me, mademoiselle."
Manon took his arm without speaking, but found herself giving it the gentlest of squeezes as she did.
They proceeded along the aisle, picking their way among broken seats.
Without acknowledging the crackling air or the heady weight of history pervading the room, he continued to describe to her the theater's design.
"The shape of the room is intentionally curved – see how it flares slightly at the wings. This enables the acoustics to flow smoothly from front to back. Prevents dissonance for the orchestra seating, but still engages the balconies."
"Don't the draperies muffle it?" Manon gestured towards the scorched velvet curtains that lined the doorways, the stage, the boxes.
"Not so. They helped to keep the sound warm, and prevent echoes. Incidentally," he continued staunchly, speaking over the question she was about to interrupt with, "they also muffled the incessant outside chatter of patrons, ushers, curious young women…"
"Ha, ha. Very amusing, Monsieur le Phantôme."
Manon ran a hand along the curved balustrade, absentmindedly fingering the carving, tracing the outline of a fleur-de-lis with a thumb.
"Do the walls truly guide the sound? Even of a single instrument, a single voice?" She dragged her fingers as she continued down the narrow aisle that followed the long row of boxes, leaving him behind.
"Indeed, chérie," Erik spoke softly, throwing his voice so that it caressed her ear and snaked its way around her throat, a delicate, sinuous whisper.
His impulse was immediately gratified by an instant tilt of her head, a shiver, before she glanced back sharply at him.
Manon's dark eyes narrowed as they met his, perhaps detecting the reckless glint that had appeared there when they had entered the theater. Her gaze raked him head to foot.
"Do it again."
A secret smirk began to form beneath his mask.
"Where would you have me?" he murmured from her other side now, breathing menace and promise into the words.
Another shiver.
"Here? Or here? Or here…" his voice now dangling silkily from directly behind her.
"Enough!"
Manon was looking at him with a mixture of astonishment and suspicion. Her gaze was searching and appraising.
Erik's heart beat fast, soothed by adrenaline and the reclaiming of power, made secure again after her appellation, "Monsieur le Phantôme" in view of that great stage had nearly brought him to his knees. Yet a part of him wondered if he had gone too far – had frightened or repelled her in his panic.
"Some walls," she concluded at last, giving him one final sweep of her eyes before turning to continue along the boxes.
The frisson that had blossomed under Manon's skin was still sparking slightly as she reached the end of the row. She had never experienced anything like it before and was surprised to realize that it had as much thrilled as repulsed her. More so, even. Much, in fact, as he himself did.
He joined her at the end of the row of boxes, and they both stopped.
"Is this where…"
"It is."
Manon examined the space more closely, but could find no evidence of their violent struggle. Somehow she had expected to see something, yet what could there have been? The theater, at least, had forgotten what had happened. And so, nearly, had she.
"A far cry from now, eh?"
When Erik did not immediately reply, Manon glanced at him.
She saw that his eyes were distant, their gold flecks dim, as he stared fixedly from Box Five onto the stage.
Manon remembered the stories. Of course she did. Yet, in their surreal interlude of the past few weeks, she hadn't thought much about the tales of the Opera Ghost, the stories of his terrorizing the Opéra Populaire owners and inhabitants. Certainly, she's known – who in Paris hadn't heard about the terrible and spectacular chandelier crash, the raging fire, the thrilling flight of the deformed genius with the young soprano darling? Somehow, these stories seemed too sensational to be true. Now they seemed too far removed from the quiet, intense, darkly humorous man she spent her days with.
Yet – no. Some of it she had glimpsed, Some she could believe of him. The music he played, so beautifully and desperately, awoke a feeling in her like the look he had in his eyes right now, and she felt sure that he was imagining Christine Daaé, the woman he had loved enough to destroy his whole world when he couldn't have her.
Was he imagining her, the innocent beauty Manon had heard she was, singing on that stage? Singing for him? The wave of jealousy that suddenly swept over her was so acute that Manon lost her breath for a moment, totally unprepared.
It surged through her gut and locked its claws there with a tenacity that shocked and embarrassed her. Who was she to envy the angelic virtues of this ingénue? How on earth should she have earned the right to jealousy? She, an illiterate, homeless waif, with no other distinction than to have found herself bemusedly under the wing of this man, like a stray dog who can hardly believe his good fortune and knows he must be turned away soon enough.
And, if for no other reason, virtue was last on her list of attributes. In any case, Christine had fled to the gilded life of a vicomtesse, full of precisely the same attitudes of entitlement and self-importance Manon had hated. Alright for some. Let Christine have her nobility.
How different we two women must be, Manon thought, if she sought what I fled.
Manon peered tentatively at this man she did not own.
"…Erik?"
He came out of his reverie by degrees, turning his head slowly and dragging away his beautiful eyes last, finally settling a gaze on her that was so remote as to be heartbreaking.
"Yes…yes, a far cry…"
She could see that he had gone far away indeed, gone inside himself to a place she could not hope to touch.
"Shall we?"
The arm he offered was cool, distant and polite. Confused to feel her heart aching, Manon took it, and they began the slow descent back underground.