Chapter Text
The candles have all gone out since he's left his lair, and he doesn't have time to light more than a few of them before Christine storms in. She seems upset, and her brief and rare anger turns to terror on the drop of a dime as she ponders the implications of the marriage she's found herself in. She'll come around, eventually. He can wait.
He tells her as much. Turn around and face your fate , he says, and she goes quiet, instinctively fixing the veil on her head like the great actress she was born to be. He takes it as a good sign. A sign of acceptance, maybe.
She tells him something.
"This haunted face holds no horror for me now." she murmurs, but he doesn't hear the rest. He's busy listening to the creak of old wood and stone, the quiet click of a man's shoes, water dripping from his figure after he's so bravely and so stupidly swum across the lake. Irritation sparks in his chest, but blooms quickly into utter delight when he realizes it.
The boy's no fighter. No assassin.
He is no match.
He interrupts whatever Christine was trying to distract him with: "Wait." he grins raising a finger to her lips to silence her, "I think, my dear, we have a guest!"
No sooner has Christine turned around to see where he's pointing than the young viscount reveals himself to them.
She screams his name. Maybe she's come to the same conclusion as Erik has. Poor, merciful Christine pities his fate even before it has come.
He greets the young man: "Sir! This is, indeed, an unparalleled delight!"
He feels his fingers twitch with the urge to be wrapped around the boy's neck. Tightly.
He has to settle for petty taunts, for the time being.
The viscount yells. He doesn't care.
"Christine!! Christine!!"
All the same.
" Let me see her !!"
His voice cracks. Good. He's vulnerable.
"Be my guest!" Erik smiles, and lets his fingers relax. Christine falls from their grip, gasping. Gasping for air.
He's been strangling someone, alright. But not the viscount.
He almost trips when he steps back from her and his hand twitches again, not with murderous intent, but with shame. He steps back. All the way back. To his closet.
He watches the lovers' pathetic little scene and the rage boils in his chest again, like six months ago on the rooftop. His fingers, his sinful fingers, which in their blind rage would have silenced even the most beautiful of voices, brush against the rope. The lasso's made. All he has to do is use it.
And the poor, stupid viscount has made the terrible mistake of turning his back to him. He can't see him.
Christine is curled up into a ball and too short to see over her fiancé's shoulder anyway. She can't see him.
In fact, she only seems to realize he's in danger when he's yanked away from her by the neck, awkwardly, but desperately standing on the tips of his toes, with just enough air to speak and not much more. He claws at the rope, but the noose is tight and he can't see the masterfully tied knot that holds it together. In addition to his certainly exhausting swim across the lake, it ensures he can't escape on his own.
Erik feels a sense of sadistic excitement when he ties the rope far out of either of their reaches.
Jealousy rears its ugly head in with newfound vigour when Christine makes a run for her lover. He stops her in her tracks.
Your love or his life .
That is the bargain, and he will not be swayed. He will win no matter what, and the viscount will lose no matter what. But he is a man of his word, of course. If she lets him die, she may go. If she stays with him, the young man will not be harmed. As long as they're parted. Without another man to sway her to his side, she poses no danger.
Christine cries and pleads; fallen idol and false friend , she calls him, spitting what are surely the most hateful words her angelic voice have ever spoken. And, dear God, they're beginning to work. No matter what he answers, no matter what satisfying, pathetic pleas the dying viscount makes, he can feel each and every one of her words chipping away at him.
Does she truly hate him?
Why?
Why, exactly?
It's not that she has no reason at all to dislike him, but which is the one that pushed her over the edge? Which is the one that made her not dislike him, not fear him, like everyone else, but hate him? Hate him so much that she doesn't fear the consequences of what she says anymore?
He doesn't realize he's been speaking the whole time until the room falls silent and his voice still echoes for a moment, alone, before it drops much like the other two. Christine looks him in the eyes, venom in her stare, no more innocence in those eyes now than in his own, and it frightens him, for a moment. And then her eyes go back to their normal self. Melancholy, innocent, sweet Christine has tears in her eyes again, tears of hate , she swears, but the venom flees her voice with her last desperate cry: "You deceived me!! I gave my mind blindly!!"
The room falls silent. Again. Too silent.
Only the sound of Christine's quiet sobs and his own laboured breaths echoes in the lair. Something is missing. Something isn't right, and Christine realizes it only a second before he does.
She cries out.
With newfound strength, Christine runs towards him, again, no, past him; when he tries to stop her, she pulls her arm away with more violent zeal than he has ever wished to see on her: she shoves past him with a high-pitched scream, and freezes in her tracks a breath away from her fiancé.
Breath.
A breath away, if he were breathing.
But the viscount has gone still, with no more protestations or struggles; his arms hang loosely, one at his side, the other stuck by three fingers in the noose he's uselessly tried to free himself from. Christine's hands tremble, inches from him, inches away from the rope. Not that she could undo it. She is unarmed and the knot is too complicated for anyone but one of Erik's background to undo. But her hands, the beautiful, small hands of a star, cannot find it in themselves to taint their purity with the stench of sin and violence that hangs heavy around the dying viscount.
Dying.
Dying .
Not dead .
Dying .
She realizes it too, when she finally finds the courage to brush his hair away from his livid face. Her fingers bristle. She gasps.
A breath.
She's found breath.
Her fury returns. Angelic fury, that thrives only in love, protection, good . She nearly throws herself on the first sharp thing she can find, she hacks furiously away at the rope that holds her fiancé, but she doesn't have the right tools: she's only tugging at the rope, tightening it. Hers is desperation, pure and simple and illogical, and she doesn't stop, and if she doesn't stop, he has no more than a minute to live.
Erik's fingers brush against a candlestick. It's not sharp in the slightest. But rope is merely dried weeds, when it comes to it. Kindle. And kindle is consumed by the fire it was meant for.
Without a word, he walks over to them as fast as he can manage without blowing the candle out, shielding the weak little flame of hope with his calloused hand.
Hope really is that fragile.
But he protects it, nonetheless, and it's strange.
He grabs Christine's arm, less forcefully: "Stop. That's only tightening the rope." he points out, almost mechanically, and she drops the shard of dull metal like it could explode in her hands at any moment.
She looks him in the eyes again, and there is no anger at all this time, not even righteous fury. Only a silent, yet desperate cry for help.
The flame devours the rope in seconds. The vicomte falls, dead weight, but not a dead man, into his fiancée's waiting arms.
She cries, again, lifts his chin to help him get whatever air he can get, whispers his name, over and over, and, when Erik kneels next to them, she whispers a tearful thank you .
Erik's fingers move again, mechanically, though the beat of his heart is all but clockwork, speedy and irregular as it is now, and it stops for a moment when he accidentally touches the viscount's skin. It's warm, like a living body. Like Christine's. But the pulse he feels beneath it is nothing like hers: it's the slow and struggling pulse of a body that is fighting for its life.
And Erik has never felt something so disturbing. He presses his fingertips a little deeper into the skin, and he feels faint for a moment.
Living bodies are one thing.
Dead bodies are another.
And that is that, and he's never questioned it before, not since his hands have felt both the warm flesh of the living and the cold stiff bodies of the dead.
There is an in-between, he realizes. The line is not a clean cut. There are moments, he sees it now, when the dying body clings to life. There are slow, terrifying moments of fluctuation, completely out of man's control, where life and death dance merrily around the maypole of the human soul, and one is as likely to fall as the other.
That, he thinks to himself, is the true terror of death.
His fingers work through the knot with practiced ease, and he slips it away from the boy's neck with what he might call care if he didn't know any better.
But he does.
He bites his ruined cheek, repressing the sting of jealousy he feels when Christine's rosy lips brush against the bluish, starved lips of the viscount. It's no more than a brush, and as chaste as it can be, but it's more than his lips will ever see. She seems to sense his unease when he shifts slightly to stand up, and she grasps his sleeve to stop him.
He stops.
Christine smiles. It's a tearful, tired smile, but it's genuine, and it's for him . It's for him, not the Angel of Music, it's for Erik, and that smile is worth more than he can say.
But she doesn't stop there. While one arm holds her unconscious fiancé safe in her lap, the other wraps gently around Erik's shoulders, and she pulls him towards her.
He doesn't know what to do.
He finds himself frozen. How would he move? Forward? Returning the undeserved embrace? Backwards? Refusing the comfort they both desperately need at that moment?
He doesn't move. He merely hangs his head so that it can fit in the crook of her neck. She tightens her hold just a little. Encouragingly.
More fearful than he's ever felt, he puts one arm around her, too.
But it's the other arm that surprises him.
Almost unconsciously, it falls to Raoul's shoulder and he can feel it again. Slow pulse, struggling breath.
But not dead , and not even dying anymore. Merely unconscious.
Life.
There is life thrumming under his fingers, and it is because of him. That heart he feels is still beating, and those lungs are still pumping, and those nasty bruises on his neck will heal in due time, and it's on him .
Erik knows well what it is to take a life. And, God, it's euphoric. The power that allows him to destroy a machine as complex, as perfect as the human body, with such ease; it runs through him in waves when the machine finally collapses in a heap on the ground, when the hundreds of thousands of simple mechanisms that form the human body all stop.
But he didn't know, until this point, what it was to save a life.
He feels… worse. Better. Worse. Better. He feels an unreasonable attachment to the thready pulse under his fingertips, which makes no sense. He has never had, does not have, and will not have, an ounce of affection for the vicomte.
But maybe it's not the man himself that invoked his rage earlier. Maybe it was what he represented, both for him and Christine. It's not the man that he hates, because they hardly know each other. It's the jealousy of stolen love, because he knows that better than anyone.
The man at their feet is one of those people Erik has observed from the pit, or from behind a curtain, or from the hole in the wall behind Box Five. One of those strong-headed people that makes him wonder if, were things different, they may be friends.
No , he determines, glancing at Raoul's bloated neck, not in this life or the next, if he gets a say in it .
But he has no time to reflect on that any further.
There is a distant pitter-patter, like a drum, Erik would say, but he knows better. Those aren't drums. They're footsteps, angry footsteps, the steps of a mob.
He knows it.
Christine certainly knows it, because her grip tightens a bit, and, though she pulls away, her hand remains fisted on his shoulder; still, she asks: "What was that?"
"Bad news." murmurs Erik, "You must go. Take the boat. Go now, don't let them find you!"
"You-"
"I will leave through other means. Go!" he bellows, and she shrinks under his voice.
To her credit, Christine tries. She slips a hand under Raoul's shoulders and the other reluctantly leaves Erik's to go under his knees. But her grip, shaky from exhaustion and fear, fails. He's heavier than her by far, and her dress doesn't allow her to get up and move, not with such added weight. So Christine wraps her arms around his chest and drags him instead.
Her determination is admirable but, if she has to drag him all the way to the boat and row dead weight across the lake all by herself, she will never make it out in time.
Hesitantly, Erik reaches out.
All it takes is one more heartbeat from the life he saved and his mind is made up.
Christine looks uneasy when he lifts the viscount off the ground, like she's afraid he'll change his mind on a whim and throw him in the lake, and he can't say it doesn't sting a bit, but he knows he's given her good reason to fear his rage.
But no, he lays him in the boat almost gently, helps her climb in, and rows as fast as he can. He realizes a bit too late that his mask still lays on the ground of the lair. Then again, he thinks to himself, if they find the mask they might take it for granted that he vanished and the mob may disperse once their anger has blown off. Maybe. It's not like he intends on spending any more time within their reach than he has to.
The lake is not still. It rumbles with the mob's heavy steps, it thumps to the rhythm of their chants: " Track down this murderer! " they shout.
He is, isn't he? A murderer. A murderer who'd be halfway across Paris by now if it weren't for a brave soprano and an injured viscount.
He finds that he doesn't mind.
What he does mind, he realizes when he catches himself glancing at Raoul's face, which is slowly returning to its original color, is that the boy missed that part. The last thing he is likely to remember when he wakes is the rope digging into his neck, his fiancée's terrified face, and Erik's booming voice giving her a lose/lose ultimatum.
Oh, God .
Erik will not throw him off the boat, but he might fling himself off if the first thing he sees when he wakes up is his decaying face. Provided he has the energy for that.
He almost swerves the boat into a rock with his momentary panic, then decides that Christine can and will stop her currently very weak fiancé from doing anything stupid. Which (alas, poor boy) is not an insignificant possibility.
The sounds of the mob fade.
Christine sighs in relief.
"Thank you." she says, again, and he struggles to find an answer.
He settles for: "I suppose this is goodbye."
She stares pensively at the water.
"Will you leave the opera?" she finally asks, and he nods.
"I can't stay here anymore." he mumbles, "Or else this mob will not be the last."
She nods back.
"I…" she whispers, "I don't… do you have a name? I've only called you angel until now."
"I have a name."
"May I call you by that name?"
"You may."
"What is it?"
He hesitates.
"Erik."
"Erik?"
"Yes."
She smiles softly: "It's a nice name."
He feels his heart stutter: "Thank you, Christine."
They fall silent again.
Then she speaks, and it's no more than a whisper.
"I don't hate you, Erik."
He doesn't turn around: "Excuse me?"
"I don't hate you." she repeats, "I might have. But I don't. You saved us. If you had-" she pauses, lacking the courage to speak the word she fears, but the way her hand tightens a bit in Raoult's shirt, where his heart is, tells him all he needs to know.
"If I had…" he encourages.
"I wouldn't have forgiven you."
It's clear and final, and completely serious. Erik nods pensively. Then, something comes to mind.
"Which means you-"
"It means I forgive you." she says.
It catches him by surprise.
"What?"
"Because you've paid your debts." she clarifies, or tries to, because it's no clearer to him now than it was before. If anything, he's more confused.
"I don't- I- I don't understand…" he stutters.
She looks down.
"You hurt me." she says, "When you scared me on purpose to keep me obedient, when you lied to me, when you kidnapped me. But you showed me the strength of music, you let me sing, really sing, and it was the greatest joy I had felt in ten years."
He doesn't know why it surprises him. He's seen how she changes when she sings, how happy she is, how she finds shelter in music. But he didn't think she would be grateful to him for that.
"You worked hard." he compromises.
"And Raoul…" she continues, and he winces, "...I… hope he will understand. I was angry with you. If you had…" she pauses, once again unable to speak those two little words, "...I don't know what I would've done. Even if I'd stopped you, there was no guarantee we'd be able to escape the mob. I… I know how out of control they can get."
She shivers. Whether from cold or fear, he doesn't know. Maybe both. "I want him to be safe." she whispers, and it's so quiet that the sound of the waves hitting the boat almost drowns it out, but it rings clear as a bell in his mind.
"They won't find you there." he assures her, "And they won't find me anywhere."
"Good." she murmurs.
They make it across the lake. Raoul doesn't wake up. Together, they carry him through the tunnels.
Just beyond the mirror, she pauses: "Wait!"
"Mh?"
She looks at the floor, timidly: "I just… now that… Erik, are we on good terms?"
He's not quite sure of his answer: "I suppose we are."
"I just… do you think we'll see each other again? If anything, just to…" her eyes fall to Raoul, and she smiles: "I don't know. He'll come around, if I know him at all."
There is one question on Erik's mind. It has been on his mind ever since his murderous rage subsided. He dares not ask it, initially.
But he knows it'll be a long time before they see each other again, if at all. So he asks her.
"Do you love him?"
It's quiet, and almost timid, and it seems to surprise her. Her jaw hangs open for a moment, then she bites her lip.
The yes on her face is clear as crystal, even when she averts her eyes.
It's painful. He can't deny it. But it's better than the alternative, because if she didn't love him, then going with him would make all three of them unhappy, instead of just one. It's the lesser evil. And it hurts too much for a lesser evil.
Either way it goes, he has to lose.
"I understand." he forces himself to say, and Christine smiles almost apologetically. It's a smile, though; beneath the regret lies relief and pure, sweet love. But it's not for him.
He recalls something that Raoul had said in the graveyard.
You can't win her love by making her your prisoner .
How ironic, then. They did agree on something after all. The songbird's tune turns melancholy when it echoes from the bars of a cage.
And, though the songbird flies, the song remains, and he knows then where his shelter lies.
Music has never abandoned him. It never will.
But he's not ready to let go of his muse. Not entirely.
"Christine." he says, and she turns anxious eyes upon him, "I need you to promise something."
He recalls the look of pure desperation in her eyes as her lover hanged, and knows she will agree no matter what, but he needs to hear it.
"Promise me," he murmurs, "never to stop singing. And promise me, should you one day hear of the Phantom's demise, that you will show me as much mercy in death as you have in life. Bury me."
Christine's eyes are shining with unshed tears. She nods, sincerely, and he knows she will keep the promise.
"And one last promise."
"Yes?" her voice cracks.
"Promise me I will hear you sing again."
She nods again, and a tear falls: "I promise. I promise." she repeats, "I will- I will sing for you again. Whenever that may be. You have my word."
He takes her free hand, and Raoul's.
"Then you have my blessing."
They disappear through the mirror with a silent goodbye .
Back to the light they go, where they belong.
Erik knows that outside, dawn is breaking.
The night flees.
The music of the night is over now.