Work Text:
(Written for the 2020 PotO "13 Nights of Halloween" Advent Calendar)
Erik brushed his thumb over the bruised knuckles of his bride. "Erik hopes his wife can forgive him," he murmured, keeping his eyes shamefully away from hers. "He did not mean for her velvet hands to become so soiled."
He had listened to her sobs for hours, the mournfully beating against the oak boards while she begged to be returned home. She was at home, and that was what Erik intended to teach her. His mask lay where it had fallen, on the floor of the salon...right beside the grand organ. Christine had dropped it there, her fingers too weakened by fear after lifting it – forcefully, and without thought – from his face. That. That act. It is what bound her to him now, for now she held his secrets; and all of Erik's secrets stayed there, with him, under the dirt.
Erik was silent while he washed and bandaged her fingertips, where blood oozed from under pried-off fingernails. He dared to gaze up at her, but Christine still refused to return his acknowledgement. Her eyes, still damp, stared at the wall to her right. Her lips were set in a hard line, but every so often their corners would start to sink into a scowl. Erik adjusted them when he noticed it happening.
Christine had tried to plead her innocence, tried to claim she hadn't meant to upset him so; but was unable to deny what she had done. When she had learned that her fate was to be entombed underground with him for all eternity, she made her ultimate mistake: she had tried to run.
Ah, but alas, Erik was fast as he was cunning.
"I knew you would calm down eventually, my love," Erik said with a small smile. He dried her cheekbones with a handkerchief, and she only slightly fell away from his touch. "You may despise your Erik right now, but you'll come to learn how kind he can be. All he asks in return is your understanding."
Christine said nothing, only let her head hang.
His ego deflated, Erik stood to his full height with a sigh. "Very well. Erik sees you still need help with that dreadful posture of yours."
Grabbing a fistful of her tawny hair, Erik removed the two small sewing needles he'd inserted vertically along the back of her neck. He replaced them swift as he could with a pair of larger, more sturdy pieces of metal. He stood back, wiping the red from his hands as he critiqued his work.
Christine faced him now, her head erect as her spine – which, of course, had already seen its fair share of reinforcement. The scars were invisible if Erik positioned her to sit against the back of the armchair. That was the only way he could keep the illusion going. The framework of wires holding her spine upright and her limbs sturdy was too bulky to close her bodice around.
After a moment of consideration, Erik pulled an extra thin wire through Christine's left eyelid. He secured the string to her brow, prompting the eye to open a centimeter further. Always a stickler for symmetry, he repeated the process with the right eye.
Two small tide-pools of blue stared back at him now, wide but not awake. They were no longer damp. The air and heat from the fireplace were drying them. They were ever so slightly beginning to shrivel and shrink like prunes.
Erik slowly bent at the waist and dusted a kiss over her cold, clammy forehead. "If only Christine could have learned to accept her Erik sooner," he said, voice dripping with sadness. "But, she took far too long. Tsk tsk, all her screaming used up much of her precious air."
A room away, in the corner of a closet, was a large trunk. Its lid lay open like a dark maw, the silk lining torn – clawed away by fingernails.
"Not to worry," Erik continued. "Erik will provide what she needs. Tomorrow, he will craft her beautiful eyes anew from the finest ivory. Their excellence shall never fade, and neither shall she."
Erik placed a towel over Christine's silent chest and took her cheek in the cup of his palm. He held a pair of sewing scissors in the opposite hand. "Erik shall preserve his living bride," he said, bringing the tips of the blades to the corner of her right eye. He began to apply steady pressure, wriggling the scissors behind the dried eyeball.
"She shall forever be living, if Erik has any say in the matter."