A/N: I'm baaaack! First, I just have to say that the support in this phandom is AMAZING! I'm so glad to be a part of it, and for all the wonderful friends I've made while writing for this community! In the months since I last updated I have created a Tumblr account. You can find me over there as jamiepage19. Swing by and say "hi." I'd love to chat.

As always, please let me know what you think! Thanks, everyone!

~Jamie

Chapter 10

I staggered back as though she had just delivered a slap to my masked cheek. She may as well have, for all the force behind her words.

She straightened up, her courage growing by the second as I attempted to grapple with the sudden shift in our dynamic. She quietly folded her arms across her chest again, a smug smile of satisfaction settling over her delicate features.

"I see I've made my point," she said, her eyes flashing triumphantly. For once, I didn't have the upper hand, and somehow, she knew it.

Who was this woman? I had grown quite accustomed to people capitulating to my demands when I chose to exercise my power. Even the Daroga, with his quiet albeit constant meddling in my affairs, had never dared question my logic or said anything that openly contradicted me.

And yet, this tiny wisp of a woman had the audacity to challenge me by blatantly calling my bluff. It was something that I was altogether unused to, and as such, I was at a complete loss as to how to respond.

"Listen," she ventured, taking advantage of my stunned silence, "I'm not one of those people who usually believes in Fate, but c'mon. Think about it. All of those people coming in and out of the cellars over the past hundred years, and no one else spotted it and grabbed it before I did? Then after I pick it up and put it on, you suddenly appear in my house and I can see and talk to you when no one else has been able to do that? I don't think that's a coincidence."

"Has it ever occurred to you that it had simply been buried in lake sediment and the constant tour traffic eventually brought it back to the surface?" I countered caustically.

"Maybe." She brushed off my tone as carelessly as she might flick drops of water from her coat. Arms still crossed, she shifted her weight from one foot to the other. "Or maybe I'd have a better understanding of the whole situation if I knew how the ring had been buried there in the first place."

Such an innocent, unassuming question, one that she had asked on several occasions now. Every time she brought it up, I had managed to cleverly create a diversion so that I would not be forced to answer her. She did not know what she asked of me. She couldn't possibly know that I had been carefully avoiding those memories for the better part of a century.

My eyes lingered on the open doorway through which Christine had just exited, her figure quickly enveloped by the darkness that surrounded the underground lake. I could not remain there, for I was afraid that the gentle lapping sounds of the Vicomte rowing her across the lake would surely rend me in two.

I retreated to the parlor, where the massive pipe organ waited to comfort me. Music had always been there when everyone else had turned away. I lunged for the keyboard, channeling all my sorrow into song. An awful sound accompanied the first few chords. It reverberated around the room, bouncing off the walls, and as it ricocheted back to my ears, I realized with grim dismay that there wasn't anything wrong with the organ, as I had first suspected. No, the sounds were coming from me.

I immediately stopped playing, my hands trembling as they hovered above the keys. Curling them to my chest, I surrendered to my grief, rocking back and forth as her name repeatedly fell from my lips in a broken whisper.

Christine! Oh, Christine! This was not how it was supposed to end.

An unexpected movement behind me caught my attention. I leapt off the piano bench and spun around, ready to kill whomever dared to interrupt and spy on such a private moment of anguish.

My angel stood in the doorway, fresh tears coursing down her pale cheeks, marring her otherwise perfect visage. A quick glance over her shoulder told me she was alone. Where was the boy? My heart, which had been so close to shattering only moments before, suddenly surged with renewed hope.

"Christine," I whispered hoarsely. "You came back."

Cautiously, I took a step toward her and extended my hand.

"I-I can't—" she stammered, eyeing my outstretched hand.

"Shh…." Advancing slowly, I walked toward her until I was close enough to rest my palms on her arms, just below each of her shoulders. "Don't cry, Christine. You know what that does to me. You know it breaks my heart to see your tears."

I moved to tenderly wipe one of the glistening teardrops from her cheek with my thumb.

"N-no!" Christine cried, wrenching herself out of my grasp. "I can't… I can't keep this!"

She seized my right hand and pushed something into my palm. Confused, I glanced down. The gold ring sparkled in the low candlelight, shiny and vibrant against the black leather of my glove.

"I can't come back. I-I won't!" She shook her head resolutely, her brown curls bouncing with the slight movement. "I need to put all this behind me. I'm sorry, Erik."

"Erik?"

I blinked, shaking the last vestiges of the memory from my vision.

"What the hell just happened?" she asked.

This was all too much. I didn't want to dredge up my past. Especially with a strange woman I barely knew. At that moment, all I wanted was to be anywhere else.

XXX

"Wait! Don't go!"

One moment he was standing right in front of me and then the next thing I knew, he was gone.

He had gotten this strange, smoldering look in his eyes right before a violent tremor swept through the kitchen. It seemed to emanate from where he was standing and spread out from there, shaking the appliances on the table and rattling the cupboard doors against the cabinets.

He obviously knew something—something that might even shed some light on our current dilemma, but for some reason he was unwilling to share.

And that infuriated me.

"God damn it! You can't just disappear every time I ask something that you don't want to answer!" I shouted to the empty kitchen, stomping my foot in frustration. "We're never going to get anywhere if you keep doing that!"

The air around me stilled and everything had gone quiet.

I was too tired and overwhelmed with everything that had just happened to want to push him any farther. He'd won. For now.

"Whatever," I growled, swiping the light off as I stormed my way out of the kitchen. "I'm going to bed."

XXX

I'm not sure what pissed me off more: that I'd been shown-up by a ghost or that I'd wasted a whole pot of coffee. Probably the latter. That shit was expensive.

As for Erik, I steadfastly refused to play into his game. If he wanted to act like a petulant child and avoid the situation, that was fine by me. I wasn't going to force him to talk by needling him with questions if I knew I wasn't going to get anywhere.

And so, I was hardly surprised when I got up Sunday morning and the house was completely silent. I went about my business with quiet determination. An hour passed. Then two. By mid-afternoon I had done my laundry and picked up the tree limbs that had been scattered about the yard during the storm earlier that week. Then I worked on laying some more tile down on my countertop until the shadows chased the sun away and my body grew heavy with fatigue from all that I had put it through that day. All the while the house felt perfectly normal and comfortable. There was no indication at all that a temperamental spirit lurked within its walls.

Unfortunately, his continued silence wasn't going to make our strange predicament go away. We could ignore each other all we wanted but doing so wasn't going to fix things. And since I wasn't keen on putting up with his mood swings and violent outbursts the rest of my life, I was most likely going to have to piece this puzzle together on my own.

So, the next day I took a detour on my way home from work and swung by Walmart, where I picked up a giant pad of poster paper, a set of markers, and some packing tape. When I got home, I brought all the supplies into the dining room-slash-office, dumped them on the floor by the wall, and went to make myself something for dinner. Five minutes later I returned with a ham and cheese sandwich and a tall glass of ice water.

Setting the plate down on the lid of my laptop, I picked up the pad of paper and ripped out a blank page. Then I grabbed the tape and walked over to the large empty wall in front of me. After I'd secured the page to the wall, I repeated the process three more times until I had created a large square. Pausing to take a bite out of my sandwich, I stood there for a moment and contemplated my next move.

Still chewing, I reached over and grabbed the black marker from the package. Uncapping it, I wrote "facts" on the left side and underlined it. Then, on the right side, I wrote "theories" and underlined that.

All right. I had the basics. That was a good start. Now, what did I know?

Well, the Phantom of the Opera was real. I added that to the "facts" column. I also knew that Erik had given the ring to Christine, and that, according to the book, she was supposed to come back and bury it with him. I wrote those both of those facts down, too.

I stopped. If Christine had come back and fulfilled her promise, wouldn't that have potentially given Erik the reason he needed to pass on? What unfinished business would have compelled him to stay?

Frowning, I tapped the edge of marker against my bottom lip. What if she hadn't come back? That might have caused him to linger in this world. I hurried and scribbled that down on "theories" side.

"I don't know…." I pondered to myself. "If she never came back, then how did the ring get back to the opera house?"

Something wasn't adding up.

I thought back to Saturday night and Erik's annoying habit of disappearing whenever I tried to delve deeper into his life. Although he wasn't really all that pleasant to be around to begin with, it seemed like he got especially prickly when I specifically mentioned Christine and the ring together. My eyes wandered over to the theory side of the paper. What if…what if she not only refused to come back, but had refused to take the ring from him in the first place? I circled my earlier theory and then added "refused to take ring" to the list.

Then again, maybe she did take it, but it slipped from her hands or skirts as she was leaving. That was believable. After all, I had originally thought that someone had lost it during a tour of the cellars.

I let out an aggravated sigh and wrote those ideas down as well. The shitty part of all this was that I really had no way of knowing what was going through Christine's head at the time. All I could do was speculate. I didn't even know if what was written in the book had actually transpired or if the author was just embellishing some of the details to make the story more entertaining. And until Erik felt like telling me the truth, I was left to come up with my own explanations.

"You know," I grumbled out loud, "you could make this a whole lot easier if you'd just come out and talk to me like an adult."

And of course, the only answer I got was silence.

XXX

The next two weeks passed by uneventfully. By the end of the second week I was starting to wonder if Erik actually ad called my bluff and returned to the opera house. Maybe Danica had been wrong about the whole being trapped here thing and he could really leave whenever he wanted. Maybe once he found out the ring wasn't coming off my finger, he'd decided there was no point in sticking around. I couldn't say I blamed him; it's not like we were friends. Hell, we barely tolerated each other. At least this way he wouldn't bug me during the months it would take me to save the money needed to fly back to Paris. I just hoped that did the trick and I would be rid of both him and the ring once I got there.

I had just finished grocery shopping one night after work and was one my way to shut the front door after stashing dozens of frozen TV dinners into the freezer when a flash of black teased the corner of my peripheral vision.

The little hairs on the back of my neck stood on end and I froze, suddenly very aware of the feeling of dread that had settled into the pit of my stomach. Taking a step backward, I twisted around and slowly peeked through the doorway of the formal dining room. The Phantom was standing in front of the wall, his hands clasped loosely behind his back as he gazed at the sheets of paper I'd taped up there.

"You came back," I stated flatly.

He angled his head to the side at the sound of my voice but said nothing.

I entered the room, inching my way closer to where he stood. "I haven't seen or heard from you in a while. I was starting to think you were gone for good."

The hard line of his lower jaw tightened as he returned his focus back to the wall.

His continued reticence was making me antsy.

I followed his gaze, blushing slightly as I realized he was reading everything I'd written down. "You're probably wondering what all this is. Well, I had to do something," I blurted before I could think better of it. "You haven't exactly been willing to help me."

"You're very perceptive."

"Yeah, no shit. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure that out when you disappear the minute I start talking about something you don't like."

He glanced at me then, his amber eyes flickering briefly with amusement, before he motioned back to the wall with his head. "I meant what you wrote here."

"Oh."

Way to go, Chris. He comes back and may have even been willing to talk to you, and you have to go and screw it up by insulting him. Nice job. Don't ever try hostage negotiation, okay? You'd suck at it.

"I was just guessing," I hastily explained, scrambling to salvage the moment. "Why? How close am I to the truth?"

"Closer than you know."

His words lingered heavily in the air between us. Several seconds passed by while I waited for him to elaborate, but it seemed that he had said all he was going to say.

Once again, frustration overrode every other logical emotion and boiled to the surface.

"Are you always this cryptic?" I snapped.

"Are you always this intrusive?"

"Stop answering my question with a question! God! If avoiding a topic was a contest, you'd take first fucking place. I know what you're doing and it's not going to work."

"You do not know anything," he snarled. "Because if you did, then you would know that I am not a man who likes to be trifled with."

I blinked in surprise, heat flaring to my face. "Is that supposed to be a threat?"

You're poking a bear, Christine, my inner voice cautioned. Back off and walk away.

Unfortunately, my temper was a lot stronger than my common sense.

"All I've wanted to do this entire time is help you, and you have the nerve to threaten me?" I raged.

"I never asked for your help," he said, a low note of warning creeping into his voice. "I had thought I made that clear the other night."

"Ugh! You know what? I don't care anymore!" I cried, throwing my hands up in the air. "Playing therapist to a guy who's been dead for a hundred and forty years wasn't on my list of shit to do today. So, either tell me what happened or don't. But if you choose not to, then you're not gonna skulk around here feeling sorry for yourself and making my life a living hell because of it! Do you understand? So, make a goddamn choice!"

There was a heartbeat of silence, and then, at the exact same moment he shot me a look of pure venom, a gust of wind tore through the dining room, ripping three of the papers off the wall. The computer desk next to me wobbled and tipped over, sending my laptop spinning across the hardwood floor on its lid just as the window closest to us shattered into a million pieces.

I yelped and crouched into a ball, covering my face with my arms.

After what felt like a lifetime but was really only seconds, I lowered my arms and raised my head to survey the damage.

I was prepared for the gaping window and the tiny chunks of glass all over the floor, but I was not expecting the Phantom's reaction. Erik, obviously forgetting that objects could go right through him, had positioned himself over me, using his body to shield me from the shards of flying glass.

He straightened up and I stood up slowly, both of us turning to take in the scene of devastation around us.

He'd broken things before: the candle, the tile, all of the lightbulbs in the front room. But I'd always assumed he'd done it on purpose to scare me away from the subject at hand. However, this time his actions told a different story. It may have just been a knee-jerk reaction to him, but he'd been trying to protect me nonetheless. Which meant he had been just as surprised about what happened as I was.

"Did you mean to do that?" I asked stupidly, for lack of anything better to say.

"No," he replied in a whisper, that golden gaze of his still trained on the sunlight now streaming in through the wide-open window. "I've never been able to do anything like this before…before now."

My eyes drifted back to the wall, where the paper with the words "refused to take ring" circled on it still remained taped to the decorative cherry wood wainscot.

At that moment I felt like the world's biggest asshole. I should have realized it sooner. All the clues where there. Maybe I already knew, but needed to hear it from him, anyway. So instead, I had stubbornly trudged along in my crusade for the truth, carelessly disregarding his feelings because I'd been so selfishly wrapped up with how his presence was impacting me.

"Erik?" I said hesitantly. I'd said his name in my mind dozens of times but saying it out loud still felt odd. "I think I owe you an apology."

His head swiveled toward me and his eyes narrowed in confusion, as though he couldn't quite understand what I'd just said. For a moment I was afraid he was going to disappear again, and this awful game of cat and mouse would start all over, going on indefinitely until I lost my mind. But he merely stared at me, his body tense as his curiosity waged war with his instinctive need to flee. And as I stood among the ruined remains of my formal dining room, a strange sensation settled over me.

I wanted him to trust me.