Work Text:
She startles awake, with the distinct impression of being alone in the bedroom. A quick check with her hand to her left confirms that she’s been that way for a while. Donning her dressing gown and slippers, she forgoes turning on the lights and goes on a personal hunt.
Her quarry is easily found in the music room. Barefoot, dressed in simple white shirt and black trousers, sitting on the bench, half-slouched on the music shelf with his head resting on his arm and his mask removed, Erik plunks away at the keys of the grand piano distractedly.
Monotonously.
Tediously.
The legendary Phantom of the Opera, bane of Paris’ Palais Garnier management, the man who terrorized orchestra, ballerinas and stagehands alike, musical genius beyond compare, is obsessively hitting the same key over and over and over again.
Christine, leaning on the doorjamb, observes him silently for a little while then speaks before the repetitive notes become nerve-wracking. “Someone has hit a snag.”
Erik straightens and turns his head so fast; Christine thinks it’s a miracle he doesn’t snap his neck. A quicksilver thought robs her of a heartbeat or two. Nature played a grim trick on Erik, robbing him of half of his face, but the other side, the one she is looking at now, is so devastatingly handsome that she has trouble hiding her attraction.
“I haven’t.” He’s annoyed even at the mere suggestion, “I’m just – looking for my muse. Did I wake you?”
“Oh? And here I thought you left her all alone in bed.”
The way his expression rapidly shifts from vexed to thoughtful and finally to mortified makes her burst out laughing. “I didn’t! I mean – I didn’t mean to! I just -” He shakes his head. “For the first time in my life I finally know what happiness and love are. I have you. I have Gustave. All my dreams have come true. I should be able to write something that reflects that and not the same old self-loathing, dramatic, introspective music.” He contemplates the keyboard and his own hands in frustration.
Christine is touched by his need to express his newfound feelings through music again. She knows how the inability to truly compose in the ten years before their reunion heavily weighed on his soul and understands that this is all part of the process to become a better man.
A wicked idea enters her mind. She comes closer to the grand piano and asks, “So you want to write something light but moving?”
“Yes.”
If he hears the rustle of clothes and shifting of skin against varnished wood, he doesn’t give any indication. Christine continues her line of enquiry: “Carefree, exhilarating and - exciting?”
Erik scrunches his eyebrows together at the tone of the last word and finally looks up. The sight of his wife lying on the closed piano lid, clad in her flimsy nightgown, raised calves crossed at her ankles, her chin on top of her hands, looking at him intensely makes his throat drier than the sands of the Sahara and his mismatched eyes wide as saucers.
He actually gulps.
“Yes.”
“Stirring and intoxicating?”, her voice a bare whisper as she glides on the sleek surface to get nearer.
She bridges the last inches between them and kisses him deeply, then looks straight into his eyes.
Breathless.
“Yes.”
“Play.”
And he does.