~ By littlelonghairedoutlaw
She’d suspected he was ill for some time, but That Night, the night she tries not to remember, confirmed it for her. Raoul and the Persian trapped in the wall of her room, and the bell rang to summon the siren. She watched as Erik went out, hardly daring to breathe, and had bitten her lip almost through by the time he returned, gasping and clutching his side, soaking wet, blood on his lips. He collapsed into a chair and never looked at her, never spoke, only hacked up his own blood. She poured brandy and pressed the glass into his hand, but he was coughing too hard to sip it, and those coughs were the sort that had haunted her dreams for four years and more.
Consumption.
The gripping fear that came over her that he might die and she would be trapped here forever, forced to listen as Raoul and the Persian died inside the wall and she could do nothing to reach them, was terrible. But he did not die. And when he retrieved Raoul and the Persian from the flooded chamber, and she tended to them, she could hear his choking cough from his room, and it came to her that perhaps that is why he sleeps in a coffin.
It is a year ago, now. A year since that night, a year since he set her free with Raoul, and her heart twists to remember how frail he was at the end of things, sitting in his chair with his head in his hands, her promise to return to him upon his death still fresh on her tongue.
The summons came two weeks ago. The telegram from the Persian, ERIK GRAVELY ILL STOP HAEMORRHAGES STOP PLEASE COME STOP, signed Kazem and she did not know the name Kazem because Erik had always called him that meddling Daroga, but there was only one man it could be.
Raoul squeezed her hand when she told him, and insisted on accompanying her. “I will not let you go back alone,” he whispered, blue eyes blazing, and she leaned into him and whispered, “I never for a moment thought you would.”
It is another Persian who meets them at the train, one she also saw around the opera house a handful of times, a dour man in a heavy coat who nods at her and shakes Raoul’s hand, and when they are in the coach and moving through the streets of Paris he introduces himself as Darius.
“Erik is alive,” and the pronouncement is dire, “but his time is very short.”
“The message said he suffered a haemorrhage.” Raoul’s hand is steadying wrapped around hers, sitting in her lap.
Darius nods. “He suffered a second, more severe one since.”
It is all she can do to keep her face impassive. It does not seem so very long since her father’s time, too, was growing short, and his lungs were bleeding every night. She leans a little closer into Raoul, and reminds herself to breathe, slow steady breaths. Her father is dead, her father has been dead for so very long, and Erik, too, is dying now, and there is nothing she can do to stop that (does she want to stop it?). She can only be here, like she promised she would be.
“You are still a wanted man, Monsieur.” Darius’ voice is low, and beside her Raoul lets out a shaky breath. “But they have stopped looking for you.”
It was the reason she didn’t want Raoul to come back with her, although she knew he would. After what happened to his brother—how could she risk someone recognising him? Someone deciding to bring up the old scandal? True, he does not look so much like the Vicomte he was a year ago. His hair is longer, curling just beneath his ears, his moustache has become a beard, his skin has taken on a faint tan. It might be enough, all together, to leave him unrecognisable, especially when his clothes are of a simpler cut than what he once wore.
How she hopes it is enough.
The journey is at once too long and too short. Any visit to see Erik would always be too soon, but time distorts on the road, through the crowd and the traffic, and almost before she realizes it, they are pulling up in front of a house, on what she thinks is the Rue de Rivoli. She’d heard it said that this is where the Persian lives, and the look that Darius gives them confirms it. “Kazem insisted on his coming here, several months ago. The damp was making his condition worse.”
Of course the little house on the lake would never suit Erik with his lungs getting worse, but something about Darius’ gaze makes her wonder if there might not be more to it than that.
She doesn’t ask. When she left with Raoul, she surrendered her right to know.
The coach door swings open, and Darius steps down first. His hand is warm when he reaches back in and she grasps it, and in a moment she, too, is on solid ground and Raoul is beside her, steadying her. It is a bright summer’s day, the glare almost blinding, and something tugs inside of her. Erik is dying and it is a bright day. Why should it be a bright day?
It was a bright day when her father died too.
She swallows against the tightness in her throat.
The house is dark inside, shadowed with heavy drapes and low lighting, the hallway narrow. Her breath catches, and she grips Raoul’s hand tighter. For a moment, one terrible moment, it is as if she is underground again, as if she is going to visit Erik in the house on the lake, then the hallway coalesces, gold and red strands shining in the carpet, threads of green and blue in the walls and it is different, so very different to that house, and the low lighting makes the colours shine iridescent.
“They’re upstairs,” Darius whispers, and the hush of his voice carries all the solemnity of why they’re here. “Kazem refuses to leave him for long.”
He leads the way, and the echo of their steps is too loud in the stillness of the house. Raoul’s breaths are soft and steadying in her ear, her heart pounding as they climb the stairs and he rubs his thumb over the back of her hand, his touch gentle. They reach the landing, and in the sudden quiet without their footsteps she can hear the ragged breaths from behind the closed door in front of them.
“He’s not wearing his mask.”
Of course he’s not. The mask always made it harder for him to breathe, and with his condition as serious as it is—
She has seen his face in her dreams almost every night for the last year. Seeing it truly before her again can hardly be more difficult than that, when he is before her every morning when she opens her eyes, when it is only when she sees Raoul sleeping peacefully beside her that the memory of Erik fades into the background. He has been a ghost haunting her the last year, even while he still lives.
Maybe in death he can finally free her of himself.
She squeezes Raoul’s hand, and lets it go, nodding at Darius.
He knocks on the door, and at a faint “come in” in a strong accent, opens it. The heady smell of incense drifts to her first, the room suffused with soft candlelight. She swallows a breath, and steps inside.
It is the Persian — Kazem — she sees first, sitting beside the bed. He turns to face her, and his face is drawn and haggard, mouth tight and eyes bloodshot even as he gives her a very faint smile.
But it is to Erik that her eyes are drawn, Erik whose hand — always so strong and elegant, and even after all that happened, she can admit that — is skeletal and limp in Kazem’s. The sheets are pulled up to his chin, a heavy brocade quilt on top, and his face, always so pale, is tinged yellow, the hollow where his nose ought to be a dark gap, his eyes more sunken than ever. He is gaunter than she remembers, his lips thinner, and for all that he has always looked like death, it is the first time he truly looks like he’s dying.
Her heart twists.
She should run, should run while she still can, before he can get a grip on her, before she will have to grieve him. But her feet are rooted to the floor, and Kazem sent for her, please come, Kazem thought she should be here, Kazem who went with Raoul to rescue her that night, who has taken care of Erik, who has been crying and is looking at her with such grief in his eyes already and the grief is more than that of a friend, more than that of an old enemy and her heart twists for him too.
“He was asking for you.” His voice is hoarse, and it’s all she needs to hear.
She goes to the other side of the bed, and settles in a chair across from Kazem, and wraps her fingers gently, carefully, around Erik’s, sitting so still beside him.
He doesn’t wake, but he is breathing, and for now that is enough.
***
It is hours before he wakes, and she watches the slight shiftings of his face, the slow moving of his eyes beneath their lids, his barely parted lips. Kazem tells her, softly, about the haemorrhages, how the second one came mere days after the first, when he was already so weak, and he could not afford to lose that blood, that lung capacity. How the doctor has been in attendance, and given him morphine for the pain and codeine for the cough to try and keep him from bursting anything else in his lungs.
And Kazem tells her about how Erik has been, outside of his illness. How he stubbornly refused to leave the house on the lake until his chest couldn’t bear it a moment longer, how he composed when he was well enough and how he had just finished a fantastic piece, for violin and piano and a soprano’s voice, just before the first haemorrhage, and her heart lurches because if he composed it for a soprano then surely she must have been on his mind, must have haunted him as he has haunted her.
So much of his music was solely for instrumentation.
Tears well in her eyes, and she bites her lip to keep them at bay.
Several times his fingers stir in hers, and she thinks he might wake, but they still again and she kisses them, a gentle press of her lips to his fingertips, that will never be strong enough to make music again.
Raoul sits beside her for a little while, not speaking, but when he rises to leave she does not ask him to stay. She cannot do that to him, cannot do it to Erik.
Darius brings them tea, flavoured with lemon like how Erik made it for her once, and a bowl of broth for Erik, but it grows cold sitting beside the bed, and eventually he returns and takes it away, and none of them speak. To speak would be to shatter the solemnity of the room, and there are no words that are not dust in her throat.
It is nightfall when Erik wakes at last, nightfall when his fingers tighten in hers and a faint whimper comes from his throat. Kazem whispers to him, words she can’t understand in his native language, and strokes back the thin strands of his hair, and it is enough to soothe Erik, enough to settle his whimpers. His eyes flutter, and open, and those gold eyes that she’s remembered so well are shining with tears, with pain.
She shouldn’t be here, she’ll only make it worse, only upset him, and she’s about to say as much, about to take her leave and come back later, or tomorrow, when he might be more settled, when she catches her name among those hushed words of Kazem’s, and slowly, painfully, Erik turns his head, and pins her with his gaze.
His lips part, and it’s all she can do to smile at him.
“You…came.” His voice is terrible, hoarse with gravel and rattling in his throat. It is so very far from the voice she remembers, the one she, dare she admit it, loved, and her throat tightens so much she can barely answer.
“You asked for me.”
“Didn’t think…you’d come.” He swallows, his eyes closing, and from the side of her eye she sees Kazem rise, and release Erik’s hand, and he slips from the room.
It is the first time she has been alone with him, since the night she kissed his forehead.
“Of course I did.”
He is silent a long time, his grip surprisingly strong in hers, and she lets him be. He is too weak for much talking, she knows that, and there are things she might say but they all weigh ashen on her tongue, unnatural shapes when he is dying, when he can say so little to her anymore, when his voice is not his own. She lets him rest, lets him collect himself, and just when she thinks exhaustion and weakness might claim him again, he whispers, fainter than before, “I loved you.”
Loved. Once, but not anymore. And she can understand how it happened. It is written large in Kazem’s face, every time he looks at Erik.
“I know.” Not, I loved you, though it is true, to a point, because she did when she thought him an angel and for a time when she knew him a man, but to admit it now, like this, would be the worst act of cruelty.
He swallows, and sighs. “Can you…forgive me?”
Forgive me for all I did. Forgive me for lying to you. Forgive me for loving you no longer. So many things he might ask her to forgive him for, so many things to absolve him of, but she is not a priest and this is not a sacred confessional and no matter how she wants to forgive him, there are things that he did that are beyond her forgiveness.
“For almost everything,” she whispers, “but not for what you did to Comte Philippe.” She can never forgive him for taking Raoul’s brother from him, for taking Raoul’s life from him by making him a wanted man. The grief that lives still in her husband’s eyes is beyond anything that she can ever forgive Erik for.
Erik’s lips twitch slightly. “More than…I deserve.”
His fingers tighten in hers, and he tenses, a low whine slipping from his throat, but in a moment the spasm passes and he gasps, coughs, blood trickling from the corner of his mouth, rattling in his throat. She slips her arm under his neck to raise him so he doesn’t choke, and dabs the blood away, holding his hand tighter until the coughing stops and he lies heavy against her, his head on her shoulder. For long minutes there is only the sound of his breathing, too loud in the dim light of the room, his forehead hot and clammy against her neck, and she prays that he’ll go back to sleep, prays that he’ll speak no more and let his lungs rest, but her prayers are in vain because when he has, at last, regained himself he murmurs, “Your young man…treats you well?”
“All the time.”
“I‘m glad.” He swallows. “I know I have…no right…to ask but,” he stops, and for a moment she thinks this is it, thinks he will say no more and simply slip away from her, but his voice is fainter than a moment before when he continues. “Will you…sing? At the end?”
Sing. Of course she can sing. Of course this is what he wanted her here for. “For as long as you want me to.”
The smile that twists his lips, is the realest, softest one she has ever seen him wear.
***
It is not long until he slips back into unconsciousness, and she kisses his forehead and hopes the pain is at bay. Kazem resumes his vigil, and she leaves them in privacy, not wanting to intrude at such a difficult time. Darius surrenders his room to her and Raoul, and when she protests at taking his bed he just gives them a sad smile.
“I might be called on at any time.”
They sleep little, that night. Even a floor away from him they hear it every time Erik coughs, and they are both too full of their own thoughts for sleep to take. Instead they lie in each other’s arms, and doze a little, and whisper in the sacred sanctity of the darkness, of how Raoul went to visit his brother’s grave, and she holds him tighter as he cries; and how she thinks Erik truly is sorry for what he did, and he kisses her and strokes her hair, and when, at last, sleep comes for them, it is short-lived.
Dawn has barely broken, when they are awoken by the choking, gagging cough from upstairs. A third haemorrhage, all the worse for how gravely ill Erik already is. And as Darius runs for the doctor, and Raoul brings water and towels, Christine and Kazem support Erik between them, dab the blood from his lips and mop the sweat from his brow, and keep him warm as he shivers, cold to the bone with fever. They whisper to him to keep his eyes open, and squeeze his hands, and there are tears trickling down Kazem’s cheeks even as Christine is hollow and empty inside.
How to sing, at such a time as this?
Unconsciousness claims him at last, and the bleeding, but there is so little blood left in him to lose. The doctor administers morphine and codeine, and his pronouncement is grave as they nestle Erik among fresh linens, and hold his hands, and Kazem whispers prayers and pleas in his own language, and Christine knows that among those words she cannot understand, are his promises of love.
It is shortly after that Erik’s breathing begins to fail, pauses between each exhale and inhale, and she knows it is almost time, knows he will never wake again.
Raoul sits beside her, and holds her hand as she sings, and Darius is steadying behind Kazem. And as Erik’s breaths grow shallower and shallower, she sings every soft song she knows, every sweet aria, and every half-broken Swedish lullaby she remembers, that she sings to Raoul every night he wakes sweating, dreaming of drowning.
And when, at last, Erik’s breath stutters, and he doesn’t take another, and Raoul, fingers pressed into his wrist, meets her eyes and shakes his head, she looks away as Kazem kisses Erik’s face, and lays his head on his silent chest, and cries.
***
They bury him beneath the opera house, beneath the temple of music he’d loved so well, because there is no where else he would be happier. She sings, her arm around Kazem, as Raoul and Darius cover over the box that holds Erik.
She sleeps easier, that night, than she has in more than a year.
No nightmares come for Raoul.
They stay a week, and a week becomes two, becomes finally three, but there is no way, now, to clear Raoul’s name (though he pays a visit to his sisters, and they welcome him with open arms and promise him that they never believed what it was said he had done), and finally they leave, bound once more for Norway.
The night before they take the train, Kazem presents them with a trunk full of Erik’s compositions. “He asked me to give them to you,” and his smile is heavy with grief.
And with the promise that they will take good care of the compositions, and will write, and with an invitation for him and Darius to come visit whenever he feels ready, they leave Paris for the last time, on a bright summer’s day.
And for the first time in more years than she can remember, for the first time since her father died, Christine’s heart is light.