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Chapter Text

Christine, in shades of cream shadows and ripe strawberries at the cusp of midsummer, slipped through her days in symbols rather than literal meaning, the meadow-sigh of June.

The opera house, as if an enchanted castle ensconced in gilded extravagance, shifted at whim into great transient shapes, a living body, a golden swell of emotion. Standing in the ephemerality of its testimony to sound, it belonged to the latent longing of the heart, a whisper of ardor.

She wandered along the empty stage, wood creaking gently beneath her in welcome to its velvet-lined, fleeting fantasy. The curtains hung heavy in their pigment of scarlet wine, treading unto the ground, veritable grapes hanging low from their vines; falling directly into the mouths of arching men craning their necks to a jouissance of earthly delights.

The hum of silence in the opera lay as still as a glade in August, soft grasses easing gently to the insistent breeze, a soliloquy for a faded solstice. The white dust-sheets draped over the seats across the auditorium made Christine feel as if she were before an itinerant audience of a thousand ghosts, empty spaces for the imagination of a tender dream, the supine soprano gliding her aria through the throng.

She stepped into a sheath of moonlight, a slip of white pooling in one long, insistent beam onto the floor, her eyes a net for silver longings and an intangible veil of stone.

It was the last hour before dawn. The stagehands had long retired already, the ballerina tutus hung up in clutches of plums, a reprieve for an alightment of tulle and tulips.

Christine had stayed late with Meg, celebrating the birthday of one of the dancers, a small lemon cake dusted with sugar leaving specks of sweetness on her lips. They all hovered and giggled, asking Meg for...

"Tell us more stories about The Phantom!"

"He appears only behind the farthest corner of your eyes, disappearing in a single blink—and then he's gone!"

Restless and unfettered, she wandered the opera. A small kingdom of locked doors, silver ceilings, and glimmering glass, bouquets of flowers tumbling their petals over their porcelain tombs, shivering with the vestigial murmur of spring. A captured star blinked back to her beyond a blue-tinged window, a whisper of fading light.

Her grief, rotund with salt, tumbled through the surf, an abandoned swath of sand along the shores of Perros-Guirec, which might as well have been a mausoleum of pink granite for all the difference it made. She remembered walking along its periwinkle shore after they buried her father, pastel swathed in the arms of the English Channel, the final encore of the Atlantides. It had been cloudy that day, with the setting sun peeking below a sliver of horizon unburdened by clouds, glowing blood-orange, a bruise.

Christine draped herself in the gossamer fineries of her sadness, a cloister of whispering seafoam; the cold of a slumping winter chapel, her throat a personal tomb of an errant star.

Her own thoughts, which would have previously frightened her, only glided across the reflection of her interior, a span of cool looking-glass beneath the glow of a chandelier. Emerging during performances, appearing and disappearing  throughout the evening cacophony of shifting scenes, switching places, and traded disguises. As the deafening applause faded along her periphery of her body, an image of herself as debutante before a roaring exaltation came unbidden, cascading roses falling at her feet, white and pink petals intermingling with her morbidity. 

One could be given their flowers, swathed in the plush cascade of their silk fragrance, either along the perimeter of a stage—

Or upon the freshly tilled soil of a grave.

 
***

During those summer months long ago by the swelling roar of the ocean, Christine flitted about the heather like the breath of a shadow, the sea taking on all the blushing colors of the sunset, pale pinks and swollen blues, until receding into the inky indigo of the evening. The moon-rise, platinum and undulant upon the lapping waves, wove a mirage of brilliance shimmering in the black night, salt mingling with the wind in the air, catching in gusts throughout the curls of her hair.

She ran and hid amongst the sloping dunes, those hidden moors with yawning secrets, a glow worm here and there gleaming in gaps between the grasses. Nocturnal moths, restless and bidden by the turn of the moon, flew by in soft whizzes, gently mingling amongst each other, seeking nectar, seeking space. Christine would crouch and observe the ones who looked almost like hummingbirds, their long tongues flitting into flowers, a disguise of nature landing gently upon her frock making her giggle. She was unafraid of them.

The drooping cemetery crosses sulked in their granite, their iron enclosure an entryway for spirits, the korrigan playing amongst the headstones like fox cubs in spring, abandoned bouquets sinking into the earth to join their departed. A hoot of an owl crooned through the hum of the crickets, their song a symphony interwoven with the tide, filling in the open crests of the land. 

Her imagination, aided by the fantastical tales of her father, aided her solitary wanderings, a procession of delight and small secrets hidden beneath the stones, waiting to be discovered, spirits and fairies playing a game she often stumbled into by chance, the images appearing and disappearing in succession both delightful and full of surprise. She could hear the call or laughter of one of them perhaps, their voices hiding behind the crickets, the moths, an arbor of roses.

She often ran beneath their blooming arches, the wind tumbling their petals all about her, imagining she was entering into a different world; a hidden garden with a château made of marble like a mirage tucked between the flush of woods, still pools of lotuses waving in the cusp of liquid light. The fairies would whisper secrets into her braided mane, sing a song that was carried only by the robin tucked beneath its down, a migration of melody.

One evening beneath a waning crescent moon, she wandered into the graveyard, the buzz of insects lulling the end of summer, a soft coolness in the air announcing the impending vestige of warmth, of sun. 

The ossuary of the church wall towered above her, dismembered skeletons like clutches of yew-berries, faded and unfeeling.

She had followed a moth, flitting about the breeze, until it landed upon a cross.

Upon the soft swath of its back, in the nexus of its body, a pale skull peered back up at her.

Christine, sensing the turn of an omen, a shroud of becoming from some other place beyond the hours that had alighted inside of her body, stumbled and bolted out of the cemetery.

***

When the voice arrived, it was as if the dense fog of her sadness dissipated into the early light of a resplendent spring.

Every morning was another foray into the splendor of harmony, melody, a kaleidoscope of brimming sound. At times, she could almost feel the presence of her father's spirit, sudden liquid memories of nights in the glow of his violin threatening to spill over her vision in tears. No longer out of sadness, but of simple happiness.

Angel of Music!

It was known that angels could be demanding, magisterial; tasked with the ordain of God, they could not always be kind and doting.

Christine acquiesced to every demand, every strict correction, every restriction. Her voice floated high beyond her, above and beyond the roof of the opera house, notes of a honeyed sublime merging somewhere in the alcove of her throat, breast full of warmth, a veritable sylph of the western wind, the embodiment of air.

With her eyes closed, hands folded atop one another upon her breast, she sustained one long, clear note, crystalline, the voice of her angel entering her parted lips, divinity becoming her, glowing in possession of a holy spirit, her heart a dove.

Christine became a sigh.

Chapter Text

Every time Erik ascended the dizzying stairs towards the mirror in Christine’s dressing room, it was as if his withered, corroded soul was rising from the depths of his forgotten catacomb into a fulfilled promise.

Perched upon her seat before the vanity lay his little mourning dove, ankles crossed and revealing the smallest slip of white stocking, her dark, rich hair gently curling about her face like the wisp of a cloud, eyes tipped low into her full eyelashes.

His blood throbbed. He blinked, once, twice—oh, Christine.

It was almost amusing, how his life which had depended so much on bestowing illusion onto others, had now led him to experience this cruel, first turn of it against himself.

If Erik were like any other man, he would have taken his morning tea gazing out the window towards his garden, content and pleased with viewing the menagerie of tittering sparrows, finches, and robins. But the currents of his life had bestowed upon him this facsimile, and beyond it, he gazed into the swooping sigh of a dove, all the more beautiful in the summer glade of her unawareness. 

Instead, he was afflicted with this unbearable longing, this desire which rendered him empty of thought, empty of everything, except a shaking, irrevocable shame.

Christine’s absent gaze fixed upon the evening star of a veiled absence, and he could see the reflection of her body from the large mirror behind her, peeking into the glass of her vanity.

Mirrors upon mirrors. A lifetime haunted by reflections, of glass, of molten sand from a churning silver sea.

All mirrors were unspeakably ancient.

So was love.

***

Erik had given up. But it seemed that life with all of its most enduring surprises, had not yet given up on him, had a new cruelty reserved for him.

He punished himself with the fervor of a desolate penitent, willing himself to gaze into the ugly banality of his disfigurement, the creases of skin, the sallowness of parchment, the pale husk of a wasp’s nest.

He was nothing more than an ambulant corpse. A memento mori of a life that had ultimately amounted to nothing, the ides of melancholy coming to haunt the deepest crevice of his heart, a dormant longing emerging from its stupor like Lazarus still swathed in his death-shroud. 

Christine would never love him. Would never willingly give herself to a walking dead man, an unpleasant man, a man with vices, a man with a sorrow like a rotted, black piece of stone fruit lodged somewhere in his chest cavity. 

His little mourning dove preened and cooed before him, pale swaths of skin like silk, damascena soft, so terribly soft. 

She was so, so sincerely beautiful. She balanced upon a fragility of grief, the sway of a willow. The ribbon of sadness that ran through her spirit, her voice, only heightened her beauty, was what drove the knife in deeper into his heart. Her lips, blushing in his fantasy of her favor, a single look that could impart all the meaning of a lady’s handkerchief shyly given at midnight, still stained with rose-water and her tears.

My little flower. 

***

Only once did Erik allow his lust to almost get the better of him.

He could barely stand it, one evening when Christine’s dresser was absent, and she was left with the task herself.

His slow, uncertain breath fogged the mirror, one arm supporting himself, his fist clenched.

She shed every strip of clothing with the grace of spring, falling about her like satin, slowly revealing more and more skin; a shoulder, the slender curve of her waist, the nape of her neck, her legs -

If that was not enough to stoke the flame of his desire, she began humming, whispering, a soft song to herself. Her voice only augmented what her body spoke of in simple sincerity—that she was the sweetest creature he had the singular misfortune to ever stumble upon.

Enraptured, agonized—his hand dipped low, gripping his arousal, a reminder of his living body, of his desire.

He didn’t have the heart to allow himself to venture beneath his waistband, pawing pathetically at the tent in his trousers, transfixed, in equal proportion rigid and painful.

***

The evening he revealed himself to her rose almost like an omen, an orange moon hanging low over the horizon. Her pretty face stained with hot, embarrassed tears, after a disastrous rehearsal; still so repentant even in her anger. 

Carlotta was not incorrect. A limping, chirping sparrow—that is what his little dove often struck him as, a doleful blue violet whispering back into the veil, wishing for guidance, wishing to be swathed in sweet, sincere love, a sunflower at the peak of summer.

How Erik longed to drink every single one of her tears, to take them into his lips, the only sacrament he would ever need.

The reverence Christine expressed in her prostration disarmed him, stunned him into silence. The humility embodied in the turn of her legs beneath her skirts was the shadow of a doe, the dip of her swan’s neck a suggestion for a kiss. The tremulous motion of her small hands as she laid them above the curve of her breast, a jewel of sincerity; a single teardrop fell upon them, as if it were a seal.

She took his breath away. 

He throbbed. 

Chapter Text

For those few months of blissful mornings, Christine felt as if she were walking on clouds. Glistening as she was in her awe, she floated upon a fulfilled dream, glowing in the beauty of an arrived divinity. The fog of grief had suddenly lifted, her sheer shock in the face of such a miraculous apparition stunning her into joy. The opera had once again shifted, taking form into a great house of worship, a place where the angels trod and roamed. With a renewed reverence, she bowed and ducked her head as she entered the shrouded space of her dressing room, her voice now an instrument of piety. It flitted, it trilled, it rode over the boundary of a black pool, barely skimming the surface. She harmonized with the beauty of his sound, feeling him enter her throat and imbue it with golden light, a vibration of such immensity it stunned her into a pure transcendence. Christine was the swallow in the evening, dipping low into the horizon.

With renewed devotion, she carried her rosary tucked away on her person, offering prayers of thanks in gratitude—for her father, for the Holy Spirit, for The Angel of Music. Living in France, she had adopted the Catholic rosary; a silver one made of real rose petals, rolling them under her fingers, a string of a thousand whispers. 

For so many years she struggled alone—she buried her father, she buried her dear Mama Valerius. She had acclimated to a solitude of empty rooms, empty evenings, empty sheets. She loved dear Meg, and Madame Giry did her best to look after her in the miasma of the opera house, but she always felt unmoored and alone, even and especially in the golden grandeur of the sparkling foyer. She drifted amongst the throng, a tuft of dandelion seed on the wind, unmoved by the lavishing attention of the season’s ticket holders. The glow of the lights felt stifling, the attentions thinly veiled and beneath pristine gloves concealing wandering hands. Many girls disappeared with a doting man, here and there—into the towering maze of stairs, the long occluded halls holding the sighs of bodies, black shadows of coats and tails capturing the open flounce of tulle, puffs of thin fabric parting open like a curtain in the breeze. As much as it would have benefited her, Christine never left with a potential patron. They fluttered, they circled like vultures in the high-noon about the corps, plucking plums still half-unripe. Not many were interested her in particular, anyways—her reputation for emotional vacancy preceded her, and her eyes betrayed the grief that hung above her shoulders like a shroud. A pallor of the heart, did not induce much of a thrill to anyone.

The angels had finally come around. And he carried her away—he carried her spirit away, her heart, far away into another life, another day. The most incredible feelings washed over her during those elysian mornings, a warmth reaching her spirit that thawed the primrose, the galanthus, coaxed them from her long-wintered breast, the budding burst of a new song.  She could close her eyes and feel herself drift away, her interior a beautiful swath of pastels; shades of jade, of late march, pink peeking shyly past a sudden height of sound, a smile in her heart. A horizon widened—a love opened.

Christine did not think too deeply how she melted at his praise, body flushed with happiness, soft words of love overflowing through her. As demanding as her angel was, he was also in equal parts kind, unfalteringly so—

“My dearest Christine, what sweet beauty shall we draw forth from your lips today?”

“Darling child, even Lazarus would rouse from his tomb to behold you.”

She would bow low at his every praise, ever-eager to exercise her humility, her virtue of grace. The Lord had deemed her worthy, had listened to the interjections of her father, who dutifully intervened for her even in the next life, whose love extended to her beyond this world, beyond the ether. 

Her voice, as if in a forge, sharpened—it glistened, it ringed with all the clarity of a bell hung taught in her throat, her register reaching higher, higher still—

Boundaries dissolved. The voice of her angel entered her fully, a trickling stream of gold and shimmering light overflowing her senses, rapture of happiness! 

Happiness! At last, a parcel of joy!

Her apartment felt less cold, less gray—her walks back home no longer felt empty, no longer ached in open loneliness. A quiet, blue shade of soft beauty overcame her life, gas lamps glowing low with warmth and a promise for a better day. 

Christine had not felt this loved in years. It was sincere, it was holy.

On that fateful day on the shores of Perros-Guirec, she had faced the sea, the setting sun streaming through whatever remained of her raw heart, half-buried with her father in the still-warm, freshly tilled soil of his final resting place on earth. 

She dropped her finest piece of gold jewelry—a beautiful ring, belonging to her mother, into the cold waters of the surf, her bare feet lapped by the salt, by the moaning tides.

An offering, an earthly toll.

Please, please let a miracle visit her—please let the angels take pity, please allow her the grace of the miraculous to sustain her faith in love.

***

After one particular lesson, Erik was left speechless.

The first time he had heard her, such vehicle of resplendent purity of sound that she was, he had finally woken to the promise of emotion that lay within him.

If it was only initial obsession that he had felt before, it had now morphed into a torrential longing of complete desire.

Her every feature imbued him with yearning; her body was cut from the figure of the graces, her eyes pools of shining light from the far reaches of the world, moments of speech where her Swedish tongue peeked behind her gilded French, her soft laughter and sighs.

As the months went on, his heart pounded as he led her like a doe in the woods through a incremental familiarity of his desire; acclimating her, easing her trust as he projected his voice into her throat and elongated those moments where she faded in soft bliss.

He sung to her often afterwards, innocent lamentations of love, a shadow of possession.

Erik created a canvas of sound, took her into spaces of great beauty; he drew her through a meadow of fantasy, painting pictures of illusion. She lay beneath him, prostrate, receptive, bending beneath his voice. She opened like a flower, as if she could only be found hiding amongst them, her lilting sighs high and whining at his every touch. His hands glided along her body, capturing her waist, the curve of her hip, her neck—it was with great satisfaction that he saw the flesh of her unconcealed arms prickling with goosebumps. She shivered, she keened, her voice whimpering and piercing in equal measures. 

He could lay small suggestions, a smattering of desire about her if he wished—she was as open and trusting as a fawn. Her growing dependency thrilled him, ran through the nexus of his need, his lust spilling over himself at night by simply imagining her clinging to him, rendered completely helpless, shivering in open-mouthed pleasure. 

He could conceal her beneath the earth with him; gently blossoming under his guidance, her voice could fill the caverns with echoing wonder, far away from the glaring cruelty of the world, together, always together. 

***

If there was a time where his longing to be as anyone else gripped the open, festering wound of his body, it was now.

Christine never stayed for long like the others in the foyer of the corps de ballet, always bowing out early, avoiding lingering gazes disguised as veneers for further intimacy. 

He wouldn’t be like these other men, per se, gluttons for fleshly delights; none of them appreciated the beauty of the music, or even the art form of the curving dances. For all his disinterest, even he could recognize the skill and prestige of La Sorelli, whose likeness to a willow was not at all undeserving. 

No, he would be different. Earnest, sincere in his proposition, devoted to her beauty, rather than simply gorging upon it like some starved beast. He would have taken extra care to groom himself the night he intended to make his introduction, immaculate and without error. His arm would wind about her waist, firm and steady, a brougham at the Rue Scribe at the ready to take them away to his apartments, the complete gentleman that he was unconcerned with nothing but her voice, offering her his spare room if she so wished to remain the night with him. He would pay for her rent, meet with her every Sunday outside her church after mass, his devout little dove unwilling to miss her time of worship, naturally. They’d spend the entire afternoon together, strolling in leisure, her head leaning against his shoulder as they strode linked together.  

She would become prima donna. 

He would marry her. 

Chapter Text

Erik knew he could never be a normal man. Wandering through the world like a shadow of a fallen star, he became a reflection of all the hideous and odious things. 

He thought it was fitting that he could at least have this.

He procured everything he needed: a wig, a real one made of human hair, a rich brown mane, washed and curled and set. A mannequin from a forgotten opera. Rouge, perfume of violets, rosewater to douse her face with. A wedding dress he had made-to-order with finest peau de soie, the color of woven nacre, a cascade of tulle and petticoats of thinnest silk. A veil of pure Alençon lace. Pleats, ribbon trims, a pouf of gathered cloud, trickles of sewn pearls like droplets of milk, of tears. Meters of fabric all gathered and forming her empty silhouette of tolling bells, a shroud of love.

He trembled as he assembled her. Her wig sprayed and doused with rosewater, cold, lifeless cheeks and lips dabbed with rouge. Erik dressed the doll with all the gentleness he could muster, his gloved hands shaking. He spritzed the gown with perfume, the violet scent appearing and disappearing about him, blinking and shivering.

He couldn’t bear to have his skin touch her. 

***

Erik’s obsession began to leak into his mornings with Christine, barely even lessons anymore. He threw his voice into her body, into her throat, coaxing her more and more open, slipping inside her longer, deeper, helping her arch higher. If he were a dancer he would be dipping her low, his arms sustaining her, her figure barely floating off the ground, his hands gripping the small of her back. Fingers splayed against her warm body; curls trailing the floor like the wisps of a willow upon the water of a shore. Images of her leaning back in a boat with her head bent over the side came to him unbidden, her hair a train of longing ripples behind them along the waves, like fingers skimming upon his heart. 

Her eyes closed, fluttered, her pretty pink mouth resonant with sound, dripped into him.

Christine's voice sustained his fantasies, her sweet tonality imbuing life into the figure of the doll, her obsequious murmurs, the sound of her smile, a small laugh.

He kept pushing—more, more, more—clearer, her body becoming almost an afterthought as she curved her throat into the shape of an O, climbing, shoulders slouching loose, hands raised with palms facing open, in supplication, in question.

After one sparkling, glittering, high of sound, she staggered almost, her knees buckling beneath her, slumping into the vanity chair behind her.

She gasped for breath, air filling her, and she made a small sound of fear.

“Christine—you are like the taught string of the harps of angels, golden and divine.”

Her hair curled in soft ringlets about her face, small wisps of baby hair tucked beneath her forehead, chin tipped low. Her hands were shaking.

“…Angel of Music.” She whispered. “I…”

Christine paused. Erik pressed his hand against the glass.

Her voice trembled. “I fear that…what I may confess is a sin.” 

“Nothing could ever be farther from your lips, my child.” He murmured, his heart skipping a beat. “Tell your Angel...your Angel loves you."

He practically shook as she steadied herself, tongue appearing only momentarily to wet her lips, glistening softly in the low gas light.

“I am frightened.” She whispered. “I am frightened by your blessing. I barely recognize myself anymore. Please, forgive me.”

Erik steadied the sharp moment of panic which gripped him; instead he soothed her, the ghost of his hand passing over her curls, reassuring her, lulling her into a soft daze. Christine, drawn into a twilight of awareness, was slowly eased into calm once again. It had become easier, to draw her into half-consciousness, her body an echo for his voice. She was so delicate, so responsive.

He would draw back, only slightly. 

She was soon to be ready for her debut.

  ***

Sunday morning drooped gray through her sheer curtains, a bell tolling in the distance a ringing of iron. A flock of pigeons swooped outside, their small bodies peppering dark shadows across the floor.

Christine stirred, sighing. Allowing herself a small luxury of a few minutes extra in bed, she slowly rose, drawing the curtains open, small droplets of rain peppering the glass.

She washed, changing into her chemise for Sundays, the cotton of her nightgown slipping away in a soft white afterthought. She never minded the cold water in the basin; lord knows she had washed with colder, those days long ago on those pilgrimages with her father in the Breton countryside.

Sometimes flashing moments came to her mind's eye, especially now as she was surrounded and cosseted by Parisian stone. She remembered dappled afternoon sun across the easy slopes, a procession of worshippers led along by the sound of a violin, winding down the hills and farmland, an apple tree here and there providing an easy burst of sweetness that soothed those journeys. The sun would sometimes set and glow in marigold bursts of light as they wound up another hill, the breath of the land and the far ocean swelling into her horizon. She closed her eyes, and remembered the smell, of soil and greenery.

As she walked towards the cathedral, apple in hand, she gently held the memory of those days, feeling as if she had arrived at the end of a long journey alone.

She always sat in the back pews, slowly sounding out the French rites, gloved hand beating her chest in turn with the others in the congregation. She always lit candles for her father and her Mamma Valerius, hoping and praying for their providence.

Christine had began to light one for the Angel of Music, hoping her reverence would reach him, another form of repentance.

She spoke with the priest. She confided her fears, her rosary winding soft circles in her hands as she dutifully listened, eased once more. 

Her fears were silly, she thought, bouquet of day-old white carnations in hand as she wandered slowly towards the Saint-Vincent cemetery. 

“How could I fear an angel so gentle, but fair and true?”

The butcher’s paper crinkled beneath her hands, as she set it upon the modest cross upon the grave of her dear Mamma.

It had been eight months since her passing. A quiet affair, she had slowly begun to unravel, one foot already crossed over the threshold to the next life.

Christine had held her hand right until the end. Had given her last kiss on earth.

“Mamma, I wish you were here.” 

A single tear dripped. The wound still ached tender, ached fresh. Christine gripped her hands.

“The Angel of Music is still here with me. I’m sure you’ve already spoken, and know all about his lessons. Please tell my father that his blessing has come true for me.”

A few raindrops fell. The headstones, slouching into moss, became dappled with moisture, a light drizzle overcoming the early afternoon.

As Christine wandered back towards her apartments, unbothered by the shower, a carriage slowed besides her. 

“Christine? Christine Daaé?”

She jumped, startled, as a blonde head peeked out of the window, and the carriage stopped.

“Pardon me mademoiselle, but are you Christine Daaé?”

“Yes, monsieur.” 

The door opened, the young man smiling warmly. 

“Forgive me, but Christine—do you remember the little boy who fetched your red scarf out of the sea?”

Christine blinked, and suddenly his features all coalesced into her memory alongside the seashore.

“Raoul?”

The rain began to pick up harder.

“Would you care to join me?” He smiled, offering his hand. “If you’re comfortable, of course.”

She took it, as she clambered inside.

***

He had filled his coffin with a wedding bouquet of white lilies, their soft scent a fragrance of crushed powder, heavy and heady. In the middle, he had laid the doll.

It stared back up blankly at him, swaddled in silks and satin, mouth forever drawn so-slightly open in a sigh.

The silence of his home vibrated into his chest cavity, the dark curtains above him still and unmoving.

He brushed a curl away from the face of the doll, trailing a finger along the lace. 

Gazing into its face, resplendent in his bed, he felt as if the longings he carried slowly unearthed themselves in a succession of notes, one after another, a simple melody lilting into sharp images.

A blue house with large windows by the sitting room, a white curtain hung and open with the breeze. Her voice lingered behind the curve of hallways, inside open rooms, cerulean sky so stark behind the glass. An unmade bed, a real, proper bed made of wood, with Christine dozing in it languidly on a Sunday afternoon. Christine standing below a doorway, holding Ayesha as she set her back inside while greeting him back home, dusk settling in between them. There was an arbor of roses full and plush in the garden, and they stood below it, as he embraced, embraced, and kissed—

Tears dripped low unto the smooth cheeks of the doll.

If it were Christine, in the flesh…she would rise from the confines of the coffin, flushed with color and living, a living thing, clutching a bouquet to her chest, eyes brimming with happiness, sparkling with it.

“I do, Erik.”

He shook with an emotion he could not name—a coalescing of lost futures, lost pasts, a fleeting present, a desperation—

He ripped the doll out from the coffin in one sudden movement, the absurdity of it all awakening him to anger, harsh and dry laughter escaping from his throat as he dragged it all the way into the chamber of mirrors, an illusion broken and giving way to another one.

Erik set the doll at the base of the iron tree, turned around, and shut the door behind him.

Chapter Text

Meeting with Raoul had been a welcome memory, a serendipity without announcement.

The Sunday rain washed along the shoreline of her memory, an immersion into a camera obscura of the past, of faded salt, the taste of algae, a burst of red in the bottle-green sea. It poured heavily by the time the carriage stopped in front of her apartments, the interior of the coupe awash with serendipity and good will, their smiles genuine.

She heard her father’s violin again along the distant shoreline of lavender heather, the sloping moon against the small frame of their cottage sighing back into the bosom of the ocean, solitary crepuscules of light in service to the night, the evening blinking out like a candle, a life like a charred wick.

She drank deep from the shadow of an almost peaceful emotion.

***

It was as if a daydream became a reality beneath her skin, a low voice in the periphery of her mind, a suspension between waking and soft sleep, her body so pleasantly still, yet thrumming with sensation.

It was difficult to remember after her lessons, exactly what possessed her—exactly what the sensations, or the words softly spoken to her were. Her memories stained the canvas of her recollection Iike vague impressions, a smattering of a sunrise, a low valley in the dawn of a soft summer morning. A whisper of silk sliding across her breast, breath deep and heavy within her chest. She rose from the divan after she came back to, disoriented, prior doubts or fears long dissipated like a burning mirage or a miracle. She held the daze in her body, somehow feeling both embodied and disembodied at once, following the motions of her routine like moving through a gossamer veil of a dream, blurry to any pressing thoughts, pleasantly and warmly empty. 

Christine felt as if her thoughts, her body, were far away in some distant pasture, the sun warming her skin, her heart beating in time to a different rhythm, a voice as soothing as water trickling inside her. 

The frenzied shock in her encounters with The Angel of Music had mellowed, a new phase of devotion slowly dripping like honey into her heart, completion now a familiar, rather than, an unfulfilled dream. She could hear it herself—her voice, her breath, her body—she was reaching different heights, tonality of colors, clarity, the pitch of a church bell on a Sunday morning, the symphony of migrating birds in the spring, down of passerine and pastel. Her movement, her air, it flowed like the breeze through her, a body tuning tighter to her blessing; her throat arching like her back, swaying with sound, with grief, with love, octaves of fantastical melodies disappearing around her.

She faded into different states of feeling, glowing warm, a low ember somewhere beneath her skin.

The weeks progressed—she had grown attuned to herself in ways unknown before, entered into a different rhythm, blood beating beneath her swath of translucent emotion. Her memory began to trouble her more frequently, her brow furrowed as she tried to remember exactly how she ended her lessons with her dearest Angel, her guardian of sound and voice. Christine would come to after a while in silence after their lessons, the clock suggesting different hours, going through her motions as if she were still in the haze of a reverie. She touched up her hair in the vanity, a recognition of herself in its reflection an afterthought, curls gathered up into her mess of pins, cheeks flushed with a soft, smattering blush, a rose bonbon of pink. The mirror almost seemed to house the glittering sky of a forgotten evening on the last day of spring, gas lamps glowing gently into the pastel blue dream of periwinkle clouds and constellations, navy wisps of moisture suspended about her face, the soft, yellow glow enveloping her within the room of hushed, velvet drapery.

She felt out of focus—like a plein air painting of a landscape, oils diluting pigment, her lips flushed Venetian red, currants like a crushed tube of paint. Sometimes she realized, with no great feeling, that she had drooled slightly in her reprieve of sleep, patting her chin dry idly with a handkerchief. She didn’t think too carefully as to why; the extra rest she felt in her body only brought her greater relief. She had not slept so well in so long.

Some days, she would weep, her sorrow dredging up from deep within her body like an exhumation, her eyes swollen and puffy, tears streaming across her face in thick streams. An absence yawned across her, gripping her with a color blacker than a forgotten shroud, her grief an embroidery of sparkling tears. 

The Angel, so kind, his voice so low, would gently murmur and lead her to lay down upon the chaise before the mirror.

“Darling child, your father is no longer with you, but I am.” 

He would recite strange stories to her, parables and fables, of distant places in far antiquity, of remote islands and crumbling marble, of cunning gods and fickle mortals. She listened intently, taking in every word as if it could be embossed upon her heart, silver glinting across her chest, gold-flecked chambers filling with a gentle, quiet love. Her refuge, her unwavering shore—those early mornings, tucked away in the far corners of the opera, the taste of violet pastilles crushing into sugar powder on her tongue as she listened, her tin gently clicking shut beneath her gloves, a puff of purple dust smattering her fingertips. 

“I would offer you some, if I could, Angel.”

He would only chuckle in response. 

Christine began to linger more often in her dressing room after the evenings of rehearsal, none so as disastrous as that one, miraculous night of such an apparition; she hummed, sighed, and sang softly to herself as she freshened up within, taking a cool cloth from her basin perfumed with orange blossom water, a bottle that was left anonymously upon her vanity to wash herself with. Its gentle scent soothed her, imbued wayward strands of her hair with whispers of a pistachio spring, folding into her skin, of pale fallen petals strewn below her, their shadows falling upon her face. Its scent was so strong—much stronger than any she had encountered before, on her Mama Valerius’s vanity—and she lost herself in it. She made sure to lock the door, always, immediately turning to unbutton her corset cover before her mirror, as she passed the cloth about her clavicle; and then, unable to resist its enveloping, beautiful scent, undressed completely, imbuing her skin with the breath of their white flesh, citrus-kissed, neroli cream. 

One day she sat before the large mirror, gazing at herself, her body and its gentle, sloping curves; her curls to her waist, thick and undulating, her legs thin but shapely, breasts small but round. She passed the cloth about her face, her nipples puckering into dusky rose peaks from the cold, her stockings the only article of clothing she had not stripped herself of, blue ribbons tied into simple bows above her knees. It was such a deep, sensorial delight, a pleasure of scent and beauty, that she truly allowed her imagination to wander, to luxuriate in her quiet space, moments of stillness within the urgency of her days. 

In those moments, the grief could abide, a fleeting dip of air, a swath of orange blossoms framing her body.