Chapter Text
Prologue
The Deal
It feels like one of her nightmares. The air hangs heavy with smoke and sorrow and every flame reflects twice, once of the shiny surface of the underground lake, once in the swimming of Christine’s eyes. She stands in the cursed wedding dress, crumpled now and torn at the hem from where she stumbled on a sconce from the shock of seeing Raoul at the gates of this underground hell. She feels like the veil is still covering her, smothering her every breath that comes ragged and panicked through her.
Erik’s voice echoes like it’s carved into the very stone of this place, headless of her desperation leaving her with every gasp.
“Make your choice!”
Behind him, Raoul thrashes against the ropes that bite into his neck, his hands, blood running down his pale arms. His shirt is soaked, his face mirroring her own terror, his voice hoarse and turning croaked from pleading, but still he tries.
“Christine, don’t listen to him! He’ll destroy you…”
She presses her hands uselessly to her ears, she cannot help it.
She can’t.
She can’t breathe.
A mask lies discarded at her feet like a prophecy fulfilled. She has seen his face, all of it and she couldn’t look away. And then she forced the whole world to see and now he cannot let her go.
In her panic, in her mad pressing of her hands against her ears in futile attempt to hide from the world, to force herself to wake up, wake up, wake up, to escape from this nightmare, she sinks to her knees, hitting the cold stone floor. She cannot block the voices out, no matter how hard she tries, so instead, she buries her face in her hands.
Her breath comes in sharp bursts still and her voice, when it finally comes, is not a song. Maybe never a song again.
“Just stop…”
Neither of them do.
“Christine, don’t be afraid...”
“Make your choice!”
“We can leave…”
“Say you’ll share with me one love, one lifetime…”
“Or he dies!”
“ENOUGH!”
She doesn’t even know how she has the strength for it, the scream just rips from her throat, scraping it raw and the lair suddenly goes still.
Christine lefts her head. Her eyes, wide and glassy, fix on the Phantom. Her voice trembles, her whole being trembles. She doesn’t know how she is still standing.
“You want my choice? You want my soul?”
The silk of the dress catches in the candlelight and the tremor in her bones slowly subsides. Not in strength, but in surrender.
She turns, not physically, not to Raoul or to Erik, but inward, into herself, into the tight, cold coil of grief and guilt and the nauseating rush of uncertainty.
If I leave, Raoul dies. If I stay…what becomes of me?
She knows she would never, never let Raoul die. She couldn’t bear the thought of it, she would never be able to forgive herself. But how can she, how cane she…
A voice, hers maybe or not, who can tell, whispers inside her:
You already left yourself behind long ago.
Deep in her heart, she knows she is alone in this. In a last, desperate attempt, before the panic suffocated her, she had done the only things she could do, sing to the Angel of Music, the memory of her father, begging someone, anyone, to help her. But her father was gone and it was her own fault for not wanting to accept that. Madam Giry had let her run into the arms of the Phantom and it was her own fault she had thought herself protect by her. Raoul was dying on the altar of her choices and it was her fault, always her fault. And the Angel of Music had turned into one of vengeance and murder and again, it was herself only that she could blame. There was truly no one who could save her, for it seems she had never known how to save herself.
So she turns to Erik and speaks, the only words that can make this right.
“I will marry you”
Her voice is so hollow she fears for a moment he won’t hear it, but the silence that follows shatters the world, makes it hold its breath.
“Let Raoul go”, she continues, barely above a murmur. The trembling has returned to her voice. “Let him live. And I…I will stay”
The words cost her everything, which isn’t much for a girl who has nothing but her own stupid innocence to offer. But in the wake of them, something darker flowers and grows like vines in her veins.
Erik stars at her like she’s a vision conjured too vividly to be real. A trembling hand rises to his mouth, his terrible eyes, wet and wide, locked to hers.
“You mean it”, he says, voice cracking like porcelain. “You mean it”
Christine nods, once.
Then, Raoul’s voice breaks in panic.
“No! No, Christine, don’t do this! You don’t have to…Christine…he’s manipulating you, he’ll kill you, please!”
“Let him go”, she says to Erik, cutting over Raoul’s pleading. Her voice sounds dead in her own ears. It scares her, but her everything is already trembling with such profound terror that it is hard to notice. “Please. Let him go. That’s what you said”
Erik moves like a man dazed, floating, haunted. He touches the lasso, makes them shift and cut and then slither loose.
Raoul falls forward, coughing, gasping, but doesn’t rise. He stares at her, sodden and stunned, lake water and blood on his face.
“Christine…what are you doing….”
Erik is already stepping closer.
The rope falls with a splash, Raoul stumbles forward, coughing water or his own pathetic feelings, his arms limp from the tension. But the idiot drags himself upright, soaking wet and wild with panic like a kicked dog.
“Christine…come with me…he’s not going to let you…Christine”
He’s moving toward her, fast, like can still undo it all with enough desperation, with his stupid soft love and beautiful face. But Erik is faster.
“She made her choice”
He seizes Raoul by the collar, the soaked fabric squelching under his fingers. Raoul shouts, fists flying, but of they are weak, slippery, unbalanced. Erik drags him easily back toward the boat.
“You liar! You said she could choose!”
“And she did”
The boat rocks as Erik throws Raoul in with a violent splash. His hands are shaking, not from exertion, but from something deeper, more fragile. He looks back once, toward Christine, who hasn’t move, then takes up the pole and begins to steer the boat away.
Raoul’s scrams echo through the stone, raw and pleading.
“Christine! Don’t do this! Christine! No!”
The boat disappears into the darkness.
And Christine is alone.
The flames still flicker, but the heat does not reach her. She is cold and everything feels empty. The silence seems to be devouring her and she finds it hard to care. All the shadows, all the nightmares she had tried to keep at bay no longer hold out. They all seem to be reaching, wrapping her in a darkness of her own making, one that she cannot escape, will never escape. She doesn’t scream, doesn’t cry out, but her legs fold under her as though her strings have been cut, pretty little marionette of the Phantom finally cut down, knees hitting the cold, damp stone once more. Her dress pools around her like a funeral shroud, the veil she took down what feels like hours ago lying close to her feet.
She tries to tell herself to breathe.
To take one breath, then two, but the air tastes like ash.
She is shaking so hard she thinks she might throw up from the sheer force of it.
But slowly, the numbness creeps in like mist, coating her limbs, her chest, her face, until it’s almost a comfort, almost a kindness.
She rises on unsteady feet, stomach lurching, but she tells herself she feels nothing.
The bed waits in the corner of her vision, stark against the gloom, too ornate, too soft, too ready.
She stares at it as the panic flood through her and she thinks she might be sick all over the sheets.
But then she stumbles forward, like in a dream or a nightmare. Her fingers clutch the swan carved into the wood like it might hold her upright and then she flings herself onto it, not with grace but desperation, face pressed to the pillow, arms curled around her chest like they might keep her from falling apart.
And at last…
She cries.
No sobs, no wails, just the quiet keening sound of someone trying to cry, trying feel, trying to wake up inside her own body, trying to feel anything in this endless emptiness that is swallowing her whole. Tears soak into the sheets. In the distance she can still hear Raoul screaming her name, somewhere across the underground.
But she doesn’t move.
The boat rocks beneath him, steady as a heartbeat, which is inaccurate when his own is currently beating out of his chest.
He steers it forward, hands tight around the pole. His arms ache with restraint. His chest with something else.
Raoul is still shouting, bound by his hands and feet, screaming raw, half-choked curses with water and fury.
“You bastard! You think this is love?! You think she chose you?! She was terrified! She…you killed her!”
Erik doesn’t answer, he cannot, because he already knows. He felt it in the stillness, the way she fell to her knees like a marionette the moment she thought he couldn’t see anymore, the way she wouldn’t look at either of them when she said the words.
I will marry you.
He’d imagined this moment a thousand times, had dreamed her voice pledging herself to him, of tears in her eyes, not from grief, but adoration, gratitude, maybe even longing.
But not like this, not with her trembling like a broken doll in a bloodless dress, not with the boy’s voice screaming behind him like a conscience he can’t drown.
You promised her the world, a nasty voice whispered in his mind. And you stole everything from her when she offered you mercy.
The torchlight grows dim behind him and Raoul’s voice finally falters into silence, throat too raw to scream. He collapses into a wet, shaking heap on the floor of the boat, pathetic tears running down his cheeks.
He’s crying, Erik realizes somewhat confused. It makes him angry, the weakness of this man, sobbing into his palms like a lost boy whose heart was breaking and the shards lodging in his throat. Angry, because he knows, behind him in his lair is another lost girl crying over what fate has just done to her, what he has just made her do.
Erik doesn’t turn around, he cannot bear to look at the face of what he’s done.
His fingers clench around the pole and he realizes he is shaking still.
He thinks, no he knows, this is what he wanted, what he planned, every trap, every whisper in the walls, all of it leading here and it worked. She is his, she chose him.
So why does it feel like his body is full of broken glass?
Why does the ache in his chest feel so much like loss?
They reach the far bank and Erik throws down the pole. He kicks Raoul out of the boat, then starts hauling him down a corridor, blood smearing on the stone.
“She’ll never love you”, he croaks.
Erik, yet again, doesn’t reply. He doesn’t need to. This, he also already knows.
When he finally disposes Raoul outside the Opera, watching him vanish into the night that still smells like burning, he doesn’t breathe any easier. The boy leaves with a desperation in his eyes that shows a fury Erik knows will lead him to the crossroad of murder and moving on and he is not sure which way the boy will go.
He supposes it doesn’t matter.
He checks that the Opera is not burning down to the point of no return, checks that they still have a home, a stage, to come back to before finally, alone at last, satisfied as much as he can be, he turns back. Toward her, his bride, his ruin.
He gets back to the boat and lets it drift silently back across the lake, every ripple making the silence roar louder.
When the boat finally arrives at the underground lair once again, Erik steps out carefully, cloak trailing behind him like a shadow that won’t let go. He’s drenched in silence and queer anticipation. No music greets him, no whisper of fabric across stone. The candles still flicker accusingly in their sconces, the room feels hollow, like a stage after the curtain falls.
Christine is not waiting for him.
His boots echo as he steps closer. He expects, dreads, some antics to be hurled at him, the sharp rise of her voice, the crack of grief in the air, but nothing comes.
He rounds the corner to the bed and stops.
She’s there.
Not gone, not escaped, because how could she?
But she’s not present, either.
She’s asleep. Or more accurately: collapsed.
Christine lies across the bed, still dressed in the ruined wedding gown, the satin bunched around her like sea foam around a corpse. Her cheek is pressed in the pillow, flushed from the salt of her tears. One hand clutches at the blanket, fisted like she needed something, anything, to hold onto. The veil still lies crumpled where she had taken it off. Her curls are tangled around her face, her eyes closed but there is no peace in her expression, only stillness.
She had cried herself to sleep, never making it under the blankets.
Erik doesn’t move, he cannot, once again, as he stares, breath shallow, as if any sound might wake her and yet a part of him aches to shake her, to demand something. A word. A scream. Even a curse would do. Anything to tell him what he’s done is real. But there’s nothing, just this, this unbearable, unspeakable silence, the weight of what has been done.
She’d cried herself to sleep in the bed he’d built for them, the one he dreamed of lying her down on as he slowly peeled away her dress. The one that is now stained with her tears.
He lowers himself slowly onto the velvet bench across from the bed. His body feels brittle, untrustworthy, like if he breathes too deeply, he’ll fall apart.
So he sits and watches and doesn’t touch her.
Because for the first time, truly the first time, he understands.
This is not triumph. This is not love. This is a girl who gave him her life to save another.
And fell asleep trying not to feel it.
The lake is still when she wakes up, no music stirs the air, just the gentle lap of water against stone and the faint drip, drip, drip of some hidden leak echoing through the lair.
Christine wakes slowly, as if her body doesn’t want to realize her from the sweet oblivion of sleep just yet. Her limbs ache, her eyes burn and for one brief, merciful moment, she doesn’t remember where she is or why she is so, so cold. Then, she breathes in and the air is damp and heavy with wax and the scent of roses and she remembers everything. She blinks against the low light, lashes still wet and salty, her throat dry, her head pounds like she’s had too much wine. She shifts slightly, sitting up and the crinkle of wrinkled fabric reminds her of the wedding dress she is currently wearing.
She closes her eyes again to keep from falling apart, balling her hands into fists to keep them from shaking.
When she opens them, she pushes herself up fully and sits on the edge of the bed like a marionette relearning movement after it cut its own strings. Her hands are pale against the red velvet sheets, her shoulders and collarbone bare. Too late she realizes she isn’t alone done here, whipping her face around, half-panicked already with the prospect of him sitting somewhere in this room, behind her on the bed…
But Erik isn’t there and she lets out a relieved breath.
She looks into the emptiness of the room and for one mad second, she fears she has lost her mind, because she wants to laugh. That this is her life now, the one thing she always feared, the one thing she tried and failed to tell Raoul would happen if she sang again. The thought of Raoul does make her realize one small, bitter laugh, a nasty substitute for a sob. Her voice sounds foreign to her, hollow and amused in a way she knew she never was. As if it’s spoken by someone else, a girl watching herself for the sidelines, politely clapping at the performance.
Slowly, she gets up and her body immediately protests. She almost doubles over from the nausea hitting her, the tremors in her bones still remembering last night, but she makes it to the mirror in the corner, looking at herself for the first time since the decision. Her hair hangs in messy curls around her face, cheeks are streaked with salt and sleep and the dress clings awkwardly where it’s been crushed and sweat-soaked.
She looks, she thinks, like a bride the morning after a wedding where the groom might have been the devil. How perfectly adequate.
Her hands still shake, but she pushes her hair out of her face, takes a deep breath and tries to lift her chin.
He’ll see me like this, she thinks to herself and the mirror, trying to converse with her reflection. And he’ll think I have broken. That I wept myself into silence and submission like I always do.
She continues rubbing the salt from her cheeks, smoothing the dress, but it doesn’t help, she still looks like a girl who has reached for the stars and saw herself fall into the gutter.
I am not broken!, she tries to tell herself. She doesn’t believe it, not really. She is not the hero of this story. Raoul was or could have been, if she had only been strong enough to let him die for her. Or her father, maybe, if he had only remembered how to teach his daughter how to safeguard her soul when she strove for artistic brilliance. But they are gone, all of them and all she has now is herself, a frightened girl with red-rimmed eyes and shaking hands. It shall have to be enough.
She thinks about delaying the first meeting, but she knows it’s rather useless, better to face it than to worry herself sick and stupid, so she opens the door and steps out.
He’s there, of course he is, sitting at the organ as if he never left. The music is quiet, his fingers hover over the keys but barely press them. Then, he looks up, mask catching the candlelight and she sees it, the way he takes in her appearance and flinches. The crushed dress, the swollen eyes, the way she stands there, shaking, as if her joints don’t quite belong to her anymore. She tries not to flinch back and instead meets his gaze, trying not to look soft or kind. She looks like a kitten backed into a corner discovering that it might be able to bite.
“I’ll need another dress”, are the first things that tumble out of her mouth, again with that foreign, hollow voice that mercifully doesn’t shake.
“And a bath”, she adds, because she desperately wants to run and hide somewhere and the bathroom seems like a reasonable option. If I have to stay here, she thinks to herself, I shall not do it drenched in my own tears.
He just stares at her.
“Christine…”
“I asked for a bath”, she says, sharper now, almost…angry. Oh, she is so terribly, terribly angry and it makes her want to cry. But she cannot cry here, she cannot, because she knows it will all crumble then and she cannot do that again, go back to that emptiness of last night’s despair.
He rises immediately, because what else is he supposed to do? He has chosen to make her his bride and if he wanted her obedience, her softness, her voice, he might as well follow her commands, too.
The bathroom is carved in silence, like the entire underground lair. It’s half-natural, half-designed, in a queer marriage of stone and man. Candlelight flickers across damp stone and the deep basin half sunk into the floor. She heated up the water with the small fire until steam gently curled around her like breath.
She now sits in the bathtub, knees drawn to her chest, the wedding dress abandoned on the floor where she carelessly tossed it. Her hair floats around her like seaweed, skin slowly pinking from heat, tears or both. The silence is not kind, it hums like a hungry shadow waiting for her to break again, to feed the quiet with her salt and hopelessness. She leans her head on her knees and exhales, simply breathing for a moment. The water caresses her collarbones, her chest. She watches the ripples of it and thinks of nothing.
And then…everything crashes back in.
You said yes. You chose him. You let Raoul go. You stayed. And now you’re here and you will never leave.
A sob punches out of her, then another. She curls forward, arms wrapped around her legs, her face presses to her knees and she weeps. Not like last night, no longer stunned or silent, but guttural, raw, gasping grief and panic spilling out of her. Her body shakes, her ribs ache, she doesn’t know if she’s mourning the decision she made or the what she’s to become. All she knows is that she is crying so hard she sees black spots whenever she tries to open her eyes, so hard that it feels like her lungs are full of bones.
And then, just as suddenly as it started, she stops. Like a flame that burns itself out.
She takes a few moments to breathe through the coughs, wipes at the tears and snot on her face, tries to calm her beating heart. Then, she lifts her head from her knees, straightens her spine. She is still blinking through the salt, her cheeks shining with the tears, her mouth still parting from how hard she is still panting. But something in her changes.
For the first time in months, maybe years, Christine Daaé has time to think, really think. She hadn’t realized how much energy she had spent on being afraid, on jumping at her own shadow, on her own grief and confusion. How she had clung to kindness and naiveté like a wailing child at her mother’s hand, just to realize that all the time she been clutching at a hungry beast, ready to devour her whole.
It wasn’t her fault, though she didn’t know that yet. Her father had always told her that she must be good. Smile when the world spit at their feet. Be grateful when rich nobles let them sleep in the hay when they had rooms to spare that were to fine for their calloused fingers. Be devoted to the Angel of Music, singing for him even when his tempers followed her into her dreams. But it hadn’t been enough. She had stood in goodness, smiled in devotion and had been forced to her knees. She realized, now, that if she ever wanted to rise again, she must choose a different path for herself, no matter how scared she was.
The bathwater laps softly at her chest, unaware of her shifting.
“He wants me to love him”, she whispers to herself. Her voice is hoarse, thoughtful. “He wants…affection. Obedience. Beauty. A bride”
She laughs, short and bitter.
“What if he gets none of those?”
She dips her hands beneath the surface, watches the water break and seal again. From the corner of her eyes, she sees a pair of shears lying by the table. For a brief, terrible second, she entertains the thoughts. To end it all. It would only take a small slash, maybe two. She had seen ballerinas do it before, desperate little things who had believed in love and loyalty and ended up dead and forgotten, an unmarked stone in a dark churchyard. Surely it wouldn’t hurt much. She could leave it all behind, maybe find her father in heaven. Maybe become shadow and music, a tale of another sad girl eaten alive by this insatiable world of men. Oh, how it would hurt him, finding her, dark blood on pale skin, gone from him at last.
But as quickly as the thought had came, as quickly did it vanish. Because deep inside of her, Christine knows she doesn’t want to die. She isn’t ready. She has spent her life afraid of so much and now that her fears of capture had come true, now that she had been abducted by the very teacher she used to adore, dragged to his lair to become his bride, she found that she still wanted to live. She wants to roar at herself for letting it come to this. Why couldn’t you be more brave? Why couldn’t you be smarter? Why couldn’t you save yourself? Why? The angrier she gets, the brighter the embers in her glow. She wants to live, she wants to do it right this time.
Her hands curl into fits beneath the surface. The fire inside her, the one she had taken care to smolder all these years, glimmers something like desperation, something like hope.
“Or…what if he thinks he does?”
The mirror across the chamber reflects back a stranger, eyes haunted and red, hair dripping down like a siren. She looks like someone mad enough to be capable of anything. Maybe even surviving.
I always played kind, innocent, helpless and all it did was get me here, she thinks, lifting one hand, watching the droplets fall like blood. Her gaze catches on the darkening bruise forming around her wrist, the shape of his hand dragging her down here coloring her skin blue.
Her mouth sets and she decides she will have to play at something else now. Maybe something feral, something strategic, something unreadable. She doesn’t know if it will work and what exactly it working would entail. Would he want her more for it? Less?
She presses her palms flat to the water, then submerges her face, just for a moment and lets the silence take her whole.
In the stillness of the water, she imagines leaving behind the girl she had been, drowning her kindness, the wonder, the beautiful and simple innocence of the child that looked at a man in a mask and saw softness where there was hunger, a girl who reached out to the world and never expected it to strike back. She imagines her sinking to the bottom of the bathtub, leaving her in the darkness, in the quiet and softness of the water.
Goodbye, she whispers in her thoughts and hopes that the child finds peace.
When she surfaces, the woman who rises is no longer the girl who said I will marry you out of desperation. She’s the one who will live long enough to regret it, or undo it, or weaponize it.
When she leaves the warmth of the bathtub, she tries to imagine her steps to be sure, with new resolve, silent on the stone floor. She wraps herself in a towel, hair dripping down her spine and catches sight of the shears on the vanity again. A mad thought strikes her and instead of pushing it away like she has always done, she acts on it, quickly, before she can think better of it.
She smiles when the first curl falls. Then another and another. She cuts without ceremony, with precision, just with purpose she doesn’t quite understand. When her hair tickles her collarbone and falls no further down her back, when her curls look jagged and free, when every lock on the floor feels like a chain served, she stops and surveys what she has done, raking her fingers through what’s left. Part of it sticks to her face, but she is grinning.
Messy suits me, she thinks. There was no need to look soft, pliable, innocent, no more need to be seen as a lovely face, as someone unthreatening and loveable.
She dries herself, slowly, with care and pretends it’s not to make her time in the bathroom alone last longer. She then crosses the room to where a plain, modest dress waits folded. It’s a soft blue, innocent, practical, boring. She slips it on and tries not to be unsettled by how perfectly it fits her, just how her wedding dress fitted her so, so perfectly.
Instead, she looks down and tries to decide what her old self would think of the dress.
“It’s pretty. Sweet”
She sighs and tears the skirt.
Just one sharp rip, up the side, to the thigh. A scandalous flash of leg every time she walks. For a moment, she panics a little, at the idea of being too tempting, of asking for what she is so afraid of receiving, but she knows its just her mind trying to grasp for control in what she cannot. No matter how sweet, how proper she dressed, he still dragged her down to marry and devour her. Surely, it will hardly make this any more true now that she has changed her girlish propriety for playful reveal. Maybe it will make her walk proudly, without apology, even though no one taught her how to.
She leaves the top button on the collar open, her throat and collarbone exposed.
“There”
She looks at her reflection in the mirror again.
And for the first time in what feels like a lifetime, she approves of what she sees. It’s not the polite prettiness she has worn her whole life, not the soft soprano of the past weeks. This version of her smiles with too much teeth, watches through hollowed eyes framed with messy curls, skin kissed pink by heat. She looks like she imagined the mythical women from the stories her father used to tell her must look likes, not the ones who got carried of and married in the end, but the ones who stayed wild and free. Maybe if she looks like one of them, she too can become a wild and free thing once more, a girl who owns her own life and dares anyone to stop her.
She finds that she would like that to be true more than she ever thought she would.
“Hello, Christine”, she whispers, touching the reflection of her own hand in the mirror like an anchor. “I shall try to carry us through this, I promise”
A knock and she almost jumps out of her skin. Her heart beats fast in her chest and it takes her whole willpower to keep the panic at bay.
Erik’s voice carries deceptively soft through the stone.
“Breakfast is ready, Christine”
He lays the breakfast out carefully, too carefully. The bread is still warm. He doesn’t remember how long it took to bake. The eggs are soft-boiled, exactly four minutes, as if the correct degree of runnyness could absolve him from his crimes. The tea, loos leaf, hand-selected, rare, steeps in the finest porcelain cup he owns.
Every motion is quiet, controlled. His hands don’t shake, but his mind is chaos.
She’s still here. She didn’t run. She could have tried, while I was gone. But she stayed. She slept. She bathed.
He pictures her in the water, instantly regrets it as his blood rises high and low in all the wrong directions.
Did she cry again? Did she drown herself? Did she stare into the dark and think about what I am, what I’ve done and finally hate me enough to slit my throat in my sleep?
He sets the napkin beside her plate, stares at the curve of the silver spoon, the way it catches the candlelight.
She’s not speaking. She hasn’t screamed. She hasn’t sung. There is a silence inside her and it’s louder than any aria.
He breathes, he cannot take this any longer.
So he calls her to breakfast. When she doesn’t answer, he goes back to pacing at the kitchen table.
Maybe she’s gone after all. Maybe this is punishment. Maybe I dreamed her acceptance, her surrender, her promise to stay. Maybe I’m…
But then she steps into the room and his world goes still.
It is her and it is not. Her hair is shorter, cut to the collarbone, wild and curling like defiance. Her dress is torn, scandalously high, her collar gapes just slightly. Her cheeks glow with something that looks like purpose instead of terror. She looks like his ruin. She looks glorious.
He forgets how to breathe.
Her eyes meet his, calm, unreadable, so different then before. Not shy, not kind, but also not angry. Just resolved like he has never seen her before. And she smiles, which is what baffles him most. She smiles at him but with a smile that has nothing to do with him, a smile that seems to be for herself.
He takes a step back without realizing, as if the sun just looked directly at him and dared him not to burn.
“You cut your hair”, he says stupidly.
“I did”
“The dress…”
“I made it mine”
He swallows, his tongue is heavy with everything he wants to say.
“You look…”
He wants to say beautiful, always so beautiful.
He wants to say terrifying, how can someone so soft look so terrifying?
She moves past him with a grace that borders on mocking, barefoot on the stone and takes her seat at the table.
She pours herself tea with hands that barely shake, starts eating as if there is no panic living in her chest.
For the first time, Erik wonders what he has brought upon himself.
She eats in silence, partly because every word that comes out of her mouth has to be perfect and right now, she is too focused on calming her trembling bones and racing heart.
She sips her tea, cuts the bread with slow, deliberate care, hoping that her movements look precise, clean, as if she’s performing domesticity in front of a king she might one day assassinate. She hopes he doesn’t see the desperation in each lift of her hand, the panic barely kept at bay by the clink of her tea.
Erik sits across from her, silent, twitching, already unraveling. He doesn’t look at her directly, doesn’t see her feet fidget under her dress, doesn’t see the way she flexes her hands under the table to stop their shaking.
She smiles, not truly, not the soft thing he would remember from the rooftop or the chapel or the stage, but she tries to smile like it’s a knife or a warning, tries to smile so he sees it.
She doesn’t speak until the silence has stretched long enough to taste like tension, until the words feel confident enough on her tongue.
“I would like to negotiate the conditions of our marriage’”
She says it almost cheerful, swallowing the urge to say please. When he freezes, she finds herself reaching for the butter in an attempt to keep calm, measured.
Then, she startles when he laughs.
It’s low, bitter and cruel.
“Negotiate?”, he repeats, incredulous. “Why, Christine…I don’t believe there’s anything left to negotiate. You agreed to marry me”
She looks up at him, eyes glittering, not backing down even though everything in her screams to just cover, to just avert her gaze and hope that if he takes pity on her, it won’t hurt too badly.
“Well. It seems like you’re out of your favorite bargaining chip”, she says instead.
He stiffens and she feels the shift in his mood.
“Don’t be naive”, he says. His voice darkens. “Don’t test my patience”
He is barely holding back now.
“I’ll find that boy again and end him if you change your mind”
For a flick, just one, she finds herself paling at the image of Raoul, dripping wet, cord around is throat, choking on his love for her. Her breath catches but she forces herself to straighten, to steady. Her voice comes out colder when she continues.
“You really want a wife who looks at you with hate? With pity?”
He flinches at the last word and she sees it. He hadn’t expected it, she thinks, hadn’t expected her to know him so well to know where to press to hurt. Hadn’t expected her to pay attention to the shape of his heart the way he had to hers.
“This is my life now. The rest of my life”, she says, each word heavy, a pleading note climbing into the sentence despite her trying. “And I don’t intend to spend it beside a man I despise”
The air changes. He should lash out, should scream, should remind her whose name she’ll carry, whose ring will adorn her.
But something in him roots him in this moment, something old and soft and unwanted. He watches her, watches this girl, this woman with ragged hair and defiant, shaking shoulders, who speaks like a queen wearing shackles, who dares to meet his gaze and not look away.
What is she doing? What game is this?
Then, horribly, her voice softens, not with surrender, but with something worse. Hope.
“Please”, she says. “Give me time to learn to love you”
His world stops. She doesn’t look at him now, she stares at the table instead, her hands trembling slightly on the teacup.
“One month”, she says. “Let me try”
He stares at her as if she has just reached into his chest and ripped out his heart. He is afraid to breathe.
“This is ridiculous”, he says, too fast, too hoarse. “You’ll never love me. The boy was right. You…”
“Let me try”, she repeats and her voice, God, her voice, it cracks.
He feels like he’s falling.
“If not”, she says quietly, “I will still marry you. With hate in my heart. But give me time and who knows what will come of it”
He wants to laugh again to make it hurt less. He wants to break something. She’s mocking him, playing some game, he knows this.
Still…that flicker in her voice. The threadbare fragility in the plea.
And the part of him that has never been loved, the part that wrote music instead of love letters, that built chandeliers instead of bridges, that part kneels before her. Even if he doesn’t show it. Even if he looks up slowly and says nothing.
Even if all he can offer her is a single, brittle nod.