Here we go... hope everyone finds this chapter both realistic and enjoyable to read.

Chapter 4. April 1887. The day after Erik abducted Christine (continued).

She was in time, and he was not dead! Look there, he moved and breathed, and his familiar yellow eyes were looking at her! Christine flung herself at her maestro, kneeled beside him, and seized both his hands in hers, dragging them down from where he'd had them pressed tightly to the sides of his head. He was blinking at her, apparently speechless, his jaw slack. She didn't think she'd ever seen him look quite so shocked.

His skin was cold, but his fingers jerked spasmodically in her grasp. There was awareness in his eyes, a pulse beat in his neck. He was alive.

"Erik! Oh, I'm so glad, I was so frightened, I thought I might not be in time! But I am, it's all right, you're all right!"

He said nothing, but merely went on staring at her. He looked as though he were incapable of doing anything else just at present. Christine squeezed his fingers tightly and said urgently, "Erik, it's me. I'm here."

He made a small strangled noise, licked his thin lips, and then finally spoke, in an uncharacteristically raspy voice. "So it has finally happened."

"What has?"

"Erik has gone completely mad."

Now it was her turn to blink at him. "What?"

He groaned painfully, and turned his head miserably away from her. "You are not real. Go away and stop torturing Erik."

She was taken aback, but then shook his arm. "No, Erik, no, I'm really here. I came back. I promise, I am real."

"No, Christine is not real," he said despairingly. "You can not be. Go away."

"No, I won't!" she snapped. "And…and I'll prove it to you that I'm real!" She let go of his arm, grabbed his chin and forcibly turned his head, and kissed him.

He jerked reflexively away, but she held on. It was like the first time, and not like it. This time Raoul was not a factor, and she was not doing it with part of her brain caught up with the need to save his life – and that of all the other people in the Opera House. She was feeling pity for Erik and frantic joy that he was alive, not impotent hatred and burning resentment at his forcing of her hand. He was crumpled on the floor in front of her, shattered, beaten, not towering above her laughing like a demon and glorying in her helpless capitulation.

But that same frenetic heat leaped from him to her, or perhaps from her to him. Just as before, she could not tell and did not care. The same strange, warm tingle started in her lips, and spread swiftly to the rest of her body. She felt the same unanticipated desire to press her whole self against him, and the same inexplicable reluctance to stop kissing him. The misshapen feel of his upper lip had not mattered before, and neither had the chill of his hands, as they might have been expected to; and they did not deter her now. But this time they were something to rejoice in, not just be indifferent to. They meant Erik, and he was here, and alive. She had not been too late.

As he had done before, Erik had frozen in place, unable to move or to kiss her back at first. And as before, his mouth slowly, gradually relaxed under hers, and eventually began to respond. Tentatively and clumsily, but that was to be expected with poor Erik, who had never done this before tonight, and his fearful, uncertain return of her affection was just as heart wrenching as it had been the first time. And once again it became unimaginable to do anything that might hurt him any more.

Finally he drew away, only to stare at her once more, astonishment and confusion on his twisted features. With an incoherent cry she threw herself against him, sobbing in relief at feeling him solid and real against her. As they had before when she embraced him, his arms hovered about her for an instant, not sure what to do with this unfamiliar sensation. Then they came around her back, hard and nearly bruising in their fervour. Being held by Erik's long thin arms was…different from when Raoul had hugged her.

He pressed his face hard against her hair and shook like a leaf. It was only when she finally stopped weeping and raised her head to look at him that she realised he'd been crying as well. Tears streaked his hideous face, and he was struggling for breath. She hunted automatically for a handkerchief, but did not find any; she'd never thought to put one in the pocket of the wedding dress. Erik slapped feebly at his own pockets until he came across one, and, chivalrously, handed it to her first. She mopped her cheeks, then handed the square of fabric back to him, and looked down as he blew his nose, not sure if he would want her to see whatever difference there might be between the way a normal man might have performed such a basic task, and the way poor Erik was forced to.

When she felt his hand on her cheek, she looked up again, and nearly quailed before the depth of emotion in his eyes. Crumpling the handkerchief in one hand, he traced her features over and over again with the other, as if he still wasn't sure she was real. She closed her eyes and inclined her head toward his hand, thrilled to feel its characteristic cold touch. He was alive.

She heard him draw a deep, rattling breath, and opened her eyes automatically. He had ceased looking at her, and was sitting there with his head hanging. Christine reached out to him again, and put her hand on his arm – and blinked. Her hand was resting on the thin fabric of a shirt sleeve, not the wool of a coat. Why was he in his shirt-sleeves? He'd had a coat on when she left. She looked him up and down, and thought how strange it was to see him like this. He seemed smaller, somehow, and much more…human. A man. Then, over his shoulder, she saw the scattered pages of music on the floor. She'd momentarily registered it as she flew to him, but then forgotten it.

Why, when she entered the room, had he been crouched grimacing on the floor, half under the piano? Its bench lay on its side, in amongst the piles of paper, the musical staves red against the white of the pages. She turned her head from side to side, looking at the room. The place was a shambles, utterly unlike what it had been when she left a little while earlier. Tables and chairs overturned, books and scores lying in heaps, shattered porcelain from a figurine, rugs in disarray. There had been a cut-glass water pitcher on one small side table; the table was upside down and there were shards of glass everywhere, glinting in the Oriental carpet that was in that spot, and the painted tray the pitcher had been on was lying upside down and dented a little way away. Many of his small knick-knacks were in a thousand pieces. The clock and most of the other ornaments that had been on the mantel were now strewn on the hearth, and the fire irons were knocked over. A lampshade was resting a few feet away from her, a jagged crack in its pretty stained glass. And his music thrown all over the floor. All this was very unlike her fastidious Erik.

"Erik…were you trying to kill yourself with disorder?" She made a sound which was half a laugh and half a sob.

"No!" he retorted, clearly offended. "Erik went completely mad when he heard Christine, and upset nearly his entire house trying to escape the sound of her voice."

"Why?"

"Because Erik thought he was finally losing his mind and about to fall into Hell both."

He was still speaking of himself in the third person. That was his habit when feeling overwrought or especially cynical, for some reason, but he was worse than usual just now. Usually he vacillated between using the first and the third person, sometimes even within the same sentence, but he sounded even more unhinged than he had before and it was worrying her. He went on, "So he dropped his poison and the glass shattered, and then he did not have time to take another one before Christine called to him again and he destroyed his house trying to get away from the sound."

Her mouth fell open. "You were going to take poison?" The rest of his words belatedly caught up with her, and she abruptly forgot about grammar and gasped, "And – wait, you were already holding it when you heard me? My God, Erik!"

"Erik had the stopper out, Christine. Ten more seconds, and you would have been rid of Erik forever."

"Don't you talk like that!" she cried. "Don't! Oh…you were that close! I didn't know you had poison here too!"

"Yes. Erik knows many ways of dealing death. He is an expert at it. He had a store of poisons which he brought back with him from the Orient. One never knows when such things may come in handy, and it is helpful to have – "

"You mean you have more?!" Furious, Christine set her jaw, glared, and demanded shrilly, "Where are they?"

Erik recoiled visibly from her demeanour, and said tentatively, "In…in Erik's bedroom, in a little wood box…"

She leapt clumsily to her feet, tripping over the wretched dress again, and dashed into the hallway and into his bedroom. Ignoring the mess that was in that room too, she glanced hastily around, saw the wooden box with its spare poisons still tucked snugly inside, and bent to snatch it up. Back she raced to the parlour, where Erik was sitting with his mouth open, looking at her as though he'd never seen anything quite like her before. She fumbled with the little vials, her sweaty fingers slipping on them, got a few out, and dashed them violently into the empty fireplace. The sound of shattering glass filled the underground house.

Erik, who had stretched out a hand impotently when she drew back her arm, exclaimed, "Christine!"

She ignored him, panting with anger and revulsion, and flung another handful to their doom.

"Christine, stop that!" He struggled upright, hissing with pain, and reached out for her. Hastily she hurled the last of them away, and, raising both arms, dashed the box to the floor. Glass flew up in a sparkling cloud and then descended into the ashes, and she stamped on the box so that its lid came off.

"Christine!" He had seized her arm, but too late.

"What?" she snapped, putting her other fist on her hip and scowling. He shook her, looking daggers at her right back.

"What is the matter with you? Those were valuable! Do you realise how difficult it will be to get any of them here in France?"

"I don't care!" she retorted, stamping her foot. "I don't care! I'm not going to have you committing suicide, and I'm not going to have you using those on anybody else, and I'm not going to have you frightening me like that anymore, and…and... and that's all there is to it! And you are, are…just awful. How could you?"

Christine covered her face with her free hand. She considered crying, but then realised that she had spent most of the last twenty-four hours crying and she was sick of it. With the poisons now gone, her headache reasserted itself; she hadn't felt it for a few minutes. Her stomach churned, and she started to sit down again, too tired and ill to remain standing, but Erik pulled her back up and said reprovingly, "Do not sit down on the floor, Christine, when there is a couch right here. You are very foolish tonight."

"I'm not foolish," she said petulantly, jerking her head to one side and ignoring his offer of the couch. "I'm not. You are horrid."

"Yes, Erik is. Christine should not have stopped him from killing himself and saving the world a great deal of trouble."

"I didn't – " A sob threatened again, and she fought it back. When she realised he was waiting for her to continue, she said thickly, "I didn't want…I couldn't bear…" Feeling like an incoherent idiot, she looked up at him, and saw that there was a thin line of blood trickling down one of his sunken cheeks.

"Oh, Erik! You're bleeding!"

He put a hand to his face, took it away and glanced at it, and said dismissively, "A bit of glass must have flown up. Not to worry, Christine, Erik is all over bruises anyway from his ridiculous rampage through his house." He raised one arm and gazed balefully at the large rent in the elbow of his shirt sleeve. "Erik was certainly far more foolish than Christine." He turned slightly, looking around at the disaster area which had been his parlour, and she saw that he had split one shoulder seam of his waistcoat. Then he turned back to her, and added, shrugging, "This little cut does not matter a bit – and it will hardly make him any more ugly."

"I'm – sorry," she whispered, not exactly sure what she was apologizing for but doing it anyway. She raised her own hand and touched the cut experimentally; he was right, it was nothing. But then he suddenly covered her hand with his, holding it pressed against his face, and his eyes were alight with emotion. Something like a shiver ran down her arm and grew from there, warming and spreading out till her body felt as though it were glowing just as much as his eyes were. Deliberately not thinking about what she was doing, she pulled his head down and shoved her mouth to his again.

It was easier to not be thinking. He sighed into her mouth. His lips opened, very slightly, against hers. Her limbs felt weak – was it with fatigue? – and a strange languor stole over her, tantalizing her with an enthralling promise of…what? With the previous kisses, she had been unequivocally in control, leading him along with her experience of kissing; even though she had only ever kissed Raoul, she certainly had more knowledge of the business than Erik. But he was the tiniest bit bolder now, just a tiny bit, and she felt…excited. How odd. Their hands slid apart. Hers went up around his neck, and his cupped her cheek ever so lightly, like the caress of a butterfly. The hairs on the back of her neck stood up. His other hand stole cautiously onto her waist, and she wondered whether he would wrap his arm around her, but he did not seem to have the daring to do so, and she grew impatient. That urge to touch more of him was back, but now she could give in to it. She leaned heavily against him, till their bodies pressed together from chest to knees. And then he did hold her more tightly. Time stopped, briefly.

But one can not go without breath forever, even with highly trained lungs, and eventually their lips parted. They stayed leaning against each other, eyes shut, their mouths only millimetres apart, both of them breathing hard. Finally Erik whispered, "You're real. You came back…to me." Then she felt a deep, subterranean quiver run through him. He drew away a bit, peeling their bodies apart, and it was as if he were shrinking abruptly back into himself, after an impulsive and glorious burst out of his shell.

Christine opened her eyes. Braver now, she raised them to his again. They were still burning, so brightly that his deformity faded into the background, because all that mattered was the way he was looking at her, and that he kept on doing so. "I couldn't not come back," she whispered back. She wanted to be touching him still, and so she wrapped her hand around his. He started to raise them – perhaps to kiss her hand? – but suddenly frowned, and turned her hand over, looking at the swollen knuckles and broken nails.

"Oh," she said, embarrassed. "I – I fought Raoul off."

His expression darkened drastically, and she realised what he must be thinking.

"No, no," she continued hurriedly. "He didn't – he wasn't – not that. He only wanted to keep me from going back; he thought I had gone temporarily mad. I…he…I think he was only trying to do what he thought was right."

"No doubt," said Erik disdainfully. "The boy can, at least, be trusted for that. I can not say I fault him for wanting to keep you as far away from me as he could. I gave you to him because I knew he would keep you safe."

Relieved at his return to reasonably sensible speech, Christine put her hand hesitantly on his cheek, and saw the fine tremor that ran through him at her touch. "I don't want to be far away from you," she breathed.

She glimpsed the sudden light flare again in his golden eyes, and it swiftly became too intense for her to bear. She glanced down, and said, stammering horribly and feeling ridiculous, "I-I came b-back because I realised that – and because-because I was stricken with such horror at the thought of what you were g-going t-to do, that I thought I would die of it. I got away from Raoul as soon as I could, and I…I ran back."

"Where is he now?" Erik questioned, his voice suddenly alert.

"Don't worry," said Christine, hiccupping, "He's on the other side of the door to the Rue Scribe. I locked it; he'll never get through. We don't have to fear any sudden appearances from him." The sheer bizarreness of the situation silenced her then; a few days ago, she could easily have had the exact same conversation with Raoul, about Erik.

Erik seemed not to notice her confusion, but instead he drew her a few steps away to sit on the couch. It was a relief to do so, and she sighed vaguely as he raised one hand to twine his fingers in her disordered hair. He gazed at it, watching his long bones entangled with her curls. Both of them were quiet, and Christine cast about mentally for something to say. Everything she could think of seemed unbearably stupid.

Finally Erik murmured, "What does your return mean, Christine?"

Startled, she said, "It means I want – " She stopped, fearing to speak the words, and tried to use a euphemism instead. "It – it means I've made up my mind."

O-O-O O-O-O