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She’d felt out the contours of that hollow thing he called his heart well before they’d first met; knowing it pulled at her in a consuming need to fill her mind and be filled by the emanations of her heart, wanting to wick up each note she sung for the sake that it was breath that once dwelt in her lungs, thirsty gasping in the sweet wine of her oblivion until she at last awakened to his bitter fascination and the tannins kicked in at last, and her awareness dripped from her fingers and pulled at her ankles, beautiful weighty chains of richness that had been absolutely unasked for.
The weight of those chains, as she was half-carried down into the bowels of the opera house, felt like drowning: being whisked out in the dark tide, stolen away like Persephone from her mother’s glade—but Christine could not remember her mother, and a dead woman could not rally the crowd left in stunned stupor above to ride to her rescue, so instead she would trust in Meg and presume that a sister-by-heart would do just as well as a mother-by-blood—and pray to a less heathen god that she would not be forced to eat of the Phantom’s pomegranate and remain chained to the man’s starving heart.
When she closed her eyes, Christine could trace the shape of his coffin as it was lowered into the ground, for all that there was no body in the grave she purchased for him with the last of her pay from the opera house, (for she would not sing again for all the coin in Paris, not without him there) and her hand would flutter up to press at her breast, the golden delicate chain that held an unused engagement ring pressing and digging into the skin of her chest.